Some great reviews coming in for ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ the first new Thunderstick album in over 30 years. Here is a selection of what has been said so far:
Knac.com Pure Rock:“And what an album it is. As the first album with new THUNDERSTICK material in thirty years, its ten tracks literally burst with ideas.”
Read full review here
Sea of Tranquility:“Considering it’s been over thirty years since we’ve heard new material from this outfit, the band are locked and loaded here on Something Wicked This Way Comes, their blend of melodic metal, hard rock, and a touch of punk gives songs such as Dark Night Black Light.”
Read full review here
Eternal Terror:“Hats off to Thunderstick (the drummer) and his cohorts for managing to craft a wonderfully organic and raw record that perfectly captures the mood of the old days and yet sounds sharp…
First noticed playing with a developing Iron Maiden in the seventies then moving to Samson (being instrumental in finding a very youthful Bruce Dickinson) Barry Graham Purkis became the figurehead of the newly emerging NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) scene. This was done by creating an alter ego Thunderstick, a masked persona known not only for his wild style of playing his drums but doing so from inside a cage and terrorizing audiences. He went on to form his own highly theatrical band in the eighties. Fronted by a female rock ’n’ roll wildchild Thunderstickthe band was a perfect ‘Beauty and the Beast’ combination, playing live and recording for five years until it folded in 1987.
Never to be seen again until now……
Thunderstick is back with a brand new studio album which remains true to the band’s original ‘classic rock’ style: ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’
Thunderstick: “This is an album that is befitting of the Thunderstick of another era, but screams relevance for today.”
“The whole thing came about because of the tragic death of our former vocalist Jodee Valentine at just 55. Jodee’s passing hit me really hard and I wanted to do something in her memory. There are some songs that we were playing live first time around that had never been released, coupled with some new tracks that have been written purely for this album. A new line up. A new album. A new era.”
Scheduled for release at the end of July 2017 this is the classic Thunderstick band format of female vocalist, two guitars, bass and drums and the first Thunderstick album of new material in over three decades.
Musicians on the album are: Thunderstick (drums), Martin Shellard (guitars), Dave Kandy Kilford (guitars), Rex Thunderbolt (bass) and Lucie V (vocals).
‘The music and politics of Rock Against Racism, 2 Tone and Red Wedge’
For someone like me who has long had a burning passion for both music and a range of progressive causes ‘Walls Come Tumbling Down’ was an interesting read. It is written as an ‘oral history’ which means that you don’t necessarily want to read it continuously for hours on end, given it is just one long succession of quotes from key players rather than being wrapped up into an overarching narrative and analysis. Nevertheless, it is an absolutely fascinating read. It covers the period from the late 70s to around 1990 with insights into the Rock Against Racism movement, the bands brought together under the 2 Tone label and finally the Red Wedge initiative which worked to try and build support for Labour in the run-up 1987 General Election.
In terms of how well popular music and political activism can mix the main message I came away with from this book is that it can be a great force for change on particular issues at particular moments in time (Rock Against Racism, Free Nelson Mandela) but it all starts to get a bit complicated and a bit messy when you try and combine it with party politics and a long-term programme (Red Wedge). There are real parallels here with John Harris’s ‘The Last Party’ which covers Britpop’s flirtation with New Labour a decade later.
When I was a teenager getting seriously into rock and metal in the early 80s I was lucky enough to see some of the biggest acts around: AC/DC, Sabbath, Quo, Ozzy etc. One band I never got to see, however, was Rainbow and one guitar wizard I never got to see (in any formation) was Ritchie Blackmore. For some inexplicable reason (and I am normally really on the ball with this) I failed to get myself a ticket when Blackmore revived the Rainbow name and announced a tentative return to rock ‘ n’ roll last year. So when a further tour was announced this year I made absolutely sure I was going to be there this time.
The evening was going to be made even more special when I found out the support act would be Sweet, who I have been following for as long as I’ve been following Rainbow. Unlike Rainbow, I have seen The Sweet many times before over the past twenty-odd years – but usually in small rock venues or provincial theatres, never in an arena with a 15,000 strong crowd. In some ways, both Rainbow and The Sweet summed up the music of the mid 70s: the albums-based rock was brilliant and the singles-based pop was brilliant, too. Perfection!
Tonight would give Andy Scott and co the chance to rekindle their relationship with many older rock fans as well as hopefully winning over some newer fans, too. ‘Hellraiser’, ‘Teenage Rampage’, ‘Blockbuster’, ‘Ballroom Blitz’ et al all go down an absolute storm. My only complaint was that the set was heavily weighted towards the old hits, with little time for the harder-edged album-oriented rock of which the band have an impressive, if less well-known, back catalogue. However, we did get stunning versions of ‘Set Me Free’ and ‘Love Is Like Oxygen’ and hopefully Andy Scott’s continuing version of The Sweet has a good few more fans after tonight.
“I’m playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order,” Eric Morecambe once famously said. No-one in their right mind could ever accuse guitar god, Ritchie Blackmore, of that. But funnily enough I was reminded of the old Morecambe & Wise gag when I was thinking about Ritchie Blackmore’s set-list at Birmingham tonight. Pretty much all of the songs that I very much hoped he’d play were in there – but the set order seemed to be in random shuffle mode with little attempt at any sort of thematic approach. We jumped from the polished commercial rock of Joe Lynn Turner-era Rainbow, to Coverdale-era Deep Purple, to the infectious pop-rock of Graham Bonnet, to the heavy prog-tinged majesty of Dio-era Rainbow and so on and so on. I suppose the main message was: “I have been involved with creating some amazing music in different bands with different vocalists and different styles – and whichever order you put them in they are all amazing…” Which is true!
After years away from doing gigs of this type and making albums like this Blackmore’s stunning guitar skills have not dimmed. Never guilty of being flashy for the sake of being flashy or of putting technical prowess ahead of creating beautiful melody, there is an elegance about his playing that is a joy to see live. Ronnie Romero, too, I thought was a good choice of vocalist. Of all the iconic vocalists Blackmore has worked with over the years, Romero probably sounds closest to Joe Lynn Turner in style, but he handled all of the material well from Gillan through to Coverdale, Dio, Bonnet and Turner. Towards the end a keyboard solo seemed to go on forever but that is a minor quibble. At the age of 51, the teenage rock fan in me has finally got see Ritchie Blackmore live on stage and has finally got to attend a Rainbow gig. He is happy.
Set-list – Sweet:
Action
Hellraiser
The Six Teens
Set Me Free
Teenage Rampage
Wig Wam Bam / Little Willy
Love Is Like Oxygen
Fox On The Run
Blockbuster
Ballroom Blitz
Spotlight Kid
I Surrender
Mistreated
Since You Been Gone
Man on the Silver Mountain
Soldier of Fortune
Perfect Strangers
Difficult to Cure
All Night Long
Child in Time
Stargazer
Long Live Rock ‘n’ Roll
Lazy
Catch the Rainbow
Black Night
Carry On… Jon
Burn
Smoke on the Water
I was raving about the Rolling Stones exhibition last year, saying they have utterly rewritten the template for what a successful rock memorabilia exhibition should look like and set a new global standard. So when a Pink Floyd exhibition was announced at the V&A I was expecting something really creative. Surely, an arty band like Floyd, and one that has always loved spectacle and grand statements, wouldn’t allow themselves to be outdone by the Stones?
The Pink Floyd exhibition is meticulously curated and a fascinating insight into the band’s history but for the most part I found it very, very traditional. Whereas, the Stones went for breathtaking recreations of their squalid Edith Grove flat, of the studio where many Jagger/Richards classics were laid down and of the very private world of the Stones’ backstage area, Floyd have gone for things displayed neatly in glass cases in chronological order. Don’t get me wrong I loved seeing these items but an exact recreation of the interior of the UFO Club in 1967 or a mock-up of the studio where Dark Side Of The Moon was recorded there was none.
Towards the end of the tour we did get some 3D installations of images from The Wall and Battersea Power Station – and the room devoted to the sculpture from the Division Bell album cover was particularly poignant. Overall, however, while I felt with The Stones I was being taken on a very personal journey through the life of the band, with Pink Floyd I never really felt much more than a visitor to a museum looking at some artefacts, albeit very, very interesting ones.
This review was originally published by Get Ready To Rockhere
The time is definitely right for a NWOBHM (New Wave Of British Heavy Metal) revival and it is great to see a good number of bands from that late 70s/early 80s era recording and touring once again, even ones that have not been active for a good number of years. The original line-up of Rock Goddess (Jody Turner guitar/vocals, Julie Turner – drums and Tracey Lamb – bass) reformed in 2013 but, over thirty years after they recorded their last album they have just released a great new EP. The lead track ‘It’s More Than Rock and Roll’ is a perfect slice of NWOBHM at its finest: the heavy riffing influenced by the original generation of hard rock albums, combined with the accessible sing-along choruses of the glam rock singles era and the down-to-earth streetwise attitude of punk – all the essential ingredients of the NWOBHM movement that gave hard rock the shot in the arm it needed.
And three decades on the three women still put on a great live show with bags of energy and some irresistible rock ‘n’ roll tunes. Gigs at London’s newly spruced-up Borderline off Charing Cross Road tend to start and finish pretty early as the place transforms itself into a nightclub once live bands have left the stage. With no support act the place was looking a bit empty when I first walked in thirty minutes before the band were due on stage. Tinged with a certain amount of nostalgia and also fired up from hearing the new EP I really wanted the band to have a good crowd for this gig but I needn’t have worried. The place rapidly filled up and was positively pulsating by the time the band came on. Old crowd favourites like ‘Satisfied Then Crucified’, ‘Heavy Metal Rock ‘n’ Roll’ combined with songs from the new EP, the aforementioned ‘It’s More Than Rock and Roll’, along with two other great tracks: ‘Back Off’ and ‘We’re All Metal’. The latter turned into a brilliantly raucous audience sing-along with Jody Turner stepping out into the crowd to get everyone bellowing along with her.
In what was a very male-dominated world, Rock Goddess were a band that showed real promise when they started out and sadly, they disappeared far, far too soon. Three decades on it is great to see them back – even if all-women metal bands appear to be almost as rare today as when Rock Goddess cut their first single.
Set-list:
1. Satisfied Then Crucified
2. Two Wrongs
3. Back Off
4. Take Your Love Away
5. Bite
6. To Be Betrayed
7. You’ve Got Fire
8. Back To You
9. This Time
10. Heartache
11. It’s More Than Rock and Roll
12. Flying
13. The Love Lingers Still
14. Make My Night
15. Drive
16. This Is The Day
17 God Be With You
18. Heavy Metal Rock ‘n’ Roll
19. We’re All Metal
– Encore –
20. My Angel
21. Love Is A Bitch
This review is also published on the Get Ready To Rock website here
For a band that have still only managed to release two albums (and one of those pretty underwhelming), whose singer is hardly renowned for having the strongest vocals in the world, and whose members spent the majority of the past twenty-five years ignoring one another and doing other things the Stone Roses sure know how to fill Wembley Stadium and others like it. Why? The answer is simple: they made one of the greatest albums of the late 80s, some would say of all time. Track after track on Stone Roses, the bands paint-splattered, lemon-garnished, debut album, are absolute classics to be played, sung-along to and celebrated again and again and again.
Combining jangly sixties-esque guitars, rhythms of the emerging dance scene and some youthful rock ‘n’ roll swagger and applying it all to some really well-written memorable songs the Stone Roses were an absolute breath of fresh air for guitar rock in the late 80s. Indeed, the band’s first album makes up most of the band’s set-list tonight, with ten of the album’s eleven tracks making it into the set. A small handful of songs from their “difficult second album” make it to the set as well as a handful of early singles like the lovely ‘Sally Cinnamon’ and last year’s new single ‘All For One’ (their first in twenty years) which captures the mood in the stadium tonight and has clearly become a firm crowd sing-along.
However, from the moment they first walk on stage to play ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ to the last climatic strains of “I Am The Resurrection’ the whole show is pretty much a celebration of that unforgettable and seemingly unrepeatable debut album. Timeless classics like ‘Waterfall’, ‘Made Of Stone’ (up there with The Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’ for memorable rolling bass lines in my view), ‘She Bangs The Drums’ and ‘This Is The One’ all become glorious communal sing-alongs.
Ian Bown, John Squire, Mani and Reni pulled off a brilliant show tonight and there is rightly a huge amount of love for the Stone Roses in Wembley stadium tonight.
I’ve been to quite a few big Wembley Arena/Wembley stadium gigs over the years and as the crowds make their way along the overcrowded walkway to the even more overcrowded tube station it’s common for fair bit of of communal singing to break out. Tonight, unusually, it isn’t a song from the headliners that rings out from the crowds but rather Oasis’s ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’. London has certainly been battered and bruised these past few weeks and perhaps needed a bit of Manc-flavoured love and solidarity sending its way. It got it tonight.
Setlist:
I Wanna Be Adored
Elephant Stone
Sally Cinnamon
Mersey Paradise
(Song for My) Sugar Spun Sister
Where Angels Play
Shoot You Down
Waterfall
Don’t Stop
Begging You
Elizabeth My Dear
Fools Gold
All for One
Love Spreads
Made of Stone
She Bangs the Drums
Breaking into Heaven
This Is the One
I Am the Resurrection
This review was also published by the Hastings Independent on 7/7/17
For those who tend to overlook the White Rock Theatre for offering little more than a constant diet of musicals, panto and the sort of saccharine golden oldies shows your nan would go to see, tonight demonstrates why they offer more than that. Tonight the brash excitement and explosive anthems of The Jam came to town. The band may have split forever in 1982 and Paul Weller may not have shown much interest in revisiting his Jam-era back catalogue in his solo career. However, for the past decade bass-player Bruce Foxton along with guitarist/vocalist Russell Hastings have been touring as From The Jam.
The whole evening has a distinct flavour of the late 70s mod revival to it. Fellow Mod travellers, Secret Affair, are the support act. While no-one can really pretend they wrote the most epoch-defining songs of the era their soul-infused pop-rock is well received and the energy levels really go up when they end the set with their hit ‘My World’ along with a spirited cover of ‘I Don’t Need No Doctor.’
With From The Jam, however, the energy levels are palpable as soon as Foxton, Hastings and co. take the stage. The classics come fast and furious: ‘In The City’, ‘The Modern World’, ‘Down In The Tube Station At Midnight’, ‘That’s Entertainment’ and, of course, ‘Going Underground’. In both looks and vocal delivery, Russell Hastings is not a million miles away from Paul Weller. It’s very much not, however, one of those weird tribute shows where band members start play-acting the roles of former personnel. Hastings has a charisma and stage presence in his own right. Foxton is as awesome a bass-player as ever and contributes occasional lead vocals as well, just as he did back in the days of The Jam. With superb drums and keyboards they are a tight and impressive foursome on stage. They certainly know how to work the crowd.
“We are, we are, we are the Mods” chanted the audience for what seemed like forever after the band left the White Rock stage to deafening applause. After perhaps the longest break I’d ever recorded between a band leaving the stage and returning for an encore, the guys are back with ‘A Town Called Malice’, ‘Saturday’s Kids’ and ‘Eton Rifles’. It’s a brilliant end to the evening.
A superb and much-cherished band, Bruce Foxton can be enormously proud of the part he played in The Jam. No-one can blame him for wanting to celebrate the band’s legacy in this way and the audience reaction from the absolutely packed-out White Rock shows there is still much love out there for the band’s music. So there should be.
This review is also published on the Get Ready To Rock website here
Folk-rock pioneers Fairport Convention have never been a band to shy away from celebrating their own legacy. When they decided to split in 1979 they held a big outdoor farewell gig in Cropredy, Oxfordshire that proved so successful they decided to stage it again each year, evolving into the big three-day festival we know today. Thirtieth, fortieth and forty-fifth anniversaries of the band have all been celebrated with emotional reunions of surviving ex-members and a similarly nostalgic trip down memory lane is scheduled for Cropredy this August.
An anniversary concert in north London, not far from where the band performed their first ever gig fifty years ago to the day, drips with symbolism. However, unlike the lavish reunions of the past, tonight was scheduled to be a fairly ordinary gig half-way through the band’s spring tour, albeit one that coincided with an extraordinary anniversary. For a band that has done more anniversary performances than many acts have done albums I was beginning to wonder what, if anything, would make tonight’s gig that bit more special than many of the other admittedly excellent performances I’d seen from this band.
The answer lay in the rapturous and sustained applause the band receive as they walk on stage tonight, even before they play a single note. The spontaneous wave of love and and affection is palpable and tonight was clearly going to be as much about the audience as about the band. Performing a mixture of songs from their new album 50:50@50 and older staples, original member Simon Nicol (joined 1967) together with “newbies” Dave Pegg (joined 1969), Ric Sanders (joined 1985), Chris Leslie (joined 1996) and Gerry Conway (joined 1998) provide a nice overview of different eras of the band. From the late 60s classic Sandy Denny/Richard Thompson era the unforgettable ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ is an obvious highlight. While from the mid 80s, when Fairport became a working, touring band again, Ralph McTell’s ‘Hiring Fair’ is another genuine highlight of tonight’s set.
A couple of “surprise” moments are when Pentangle’s Jacqui McShee joins the band on stage to sing ‘The Lady of Carlisle’ the track for which she provides guest vocals on the current album; and when Sally Barker (who reprised a number of Sandy Denny songs when she toured with the surviving members of Denny’s post-Fairport outfit Fotheringay a couple of years ago) lovingly recreates the magic of Denny’s ‘Rising For The Moon’.
‘Matty Groves’ and ‘Meet On The Ledge’ are two songs the band could never get away without performing and for many years now have been the traditional climax to any Fairport gig. After an energetic ‘Matty Groves’ the band are serenaded with a spontaneous audience rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ when they come back on for an encore. As tonight seemed as much about celebrating the longevity of the Fairport audience as celebrating the longevity of the band, this seems an especially nice touch and makes the ensuing sing-along to ‘Meet On The Ledge’ all the more poignant. Happy 50th Fairport!
This interview was originally published by the Get Ready To Rock Website here
Some bands, regardless of how big they they are, what size venue they are playing or how many albums they have released just manage to grab you straight away with hard, punchy, instantly memorable rock tunes. When I wandered into Hastings’ historic rock pub, The Carlisle, with an old friend last summer I was immediately taken with the band who came on stage a few minutes later – Diggeth.
It’s all down to the “acoustic guitar test” claims guitarist and lead singer, Harald: “Everything we write we always have a criteria. We must be able to play it on an acoustic guitar. That’s the test. Because it is very easy to write all kinds of guitar riffs and string them together and on electric guitar everything sounds big. But we always do the test, grab an acoustic guitar and sing into it. Is there a song?”
Diggeth are Harald te Grotenhuis (guitar/vocals), Alco Emaus (bass) and Casper Bongers (drums) and are a metal three-piece from the eastern side of the Netherlands. I catch up with the band in after a sound-check prior to a return to the Carlisle stage later that evening as part of a UK tour.
The songs
Citing influences like AC/DC, Metallica and Lynyrd Skynyrd, songs like ‘Kings of the Underworld’ and ‘See You In Hell’ (from the band’s last album) have all the hallmarks of classic metal anthems and stand up well alongside those of much better-known bands.
They explain a bit more about the process behind them.
Harald “We jam a lot together. We are really a jamming band. I guess like the classic bands did. It’s not that difficult to come up with all kinds of intricate guitar riffs but the thing is to write something you can sing over. My wife is my best critic. Sometimes I play her a song and sometimes she says to me well it’s still in my head after a day or two and sometimes she says nah I’ve completely forgot about it. Sometimes we come together and write something on the spot. Sometimes it’s something I’ve worked on for days or weeks.
Casper: “We spend a lot of time jamming together with the three of us getting the sound, the bass, the whole dynamic.”
Alco: “We have a certain frame that we work in and we have a certain sound. That’s the starting point.”
Harald: “We always try to keep it as simple as we can. We’ve played in bands before and we were always gluing stuff together you know, riffing: A riff, B riff, C and here we’re gonna do a break but that to me is like a puzzle. If you listen to a classic band like the Beatles or the Stones or Creedence Clearwater Revival they have memorable songs. It’s the same thing with playing a guitar solo. You can play a lot of notes and do all kinds of techniques and it’s amazing if you can do that. But to me the best is if you can play a melody that sticks in your head. So that if you are on your bicycle to work tomorrow morning and you whistle that melody that’s the thing for me.”
Alco: “In a three-piece band the drums and the bass have to be tight, all together. So Harald can do his singing and when he plays a solo we go to the back of the sound a little bit but we still provide solid bass and drums.”
Harald: “What I like about it is sometimes I come up with stuff and as soon as he starts playing the bass to it and the drums come in nine times out of ten we have already started to simplify it. OK I came up with something and it’s already too much – bring it back to something that is memorable and sticks. There are many bands that play music and you have to listen a couple of times before you get it and we sometimes do that, too, but I also like it something that grabs you.”
Casper: “When the first note is like woah!”
The Band
Diggeth has been around since 2004 but Harald and Alco have been playing together in bands even before that, for around 17/18 years now. Casper, a couple of decades younger than the other two, is the new boy in Diggeth. Becoming a member two years ago was something of a dream come true for him.
Casper: “I first saw Diggeth when I was 13 and I was like wow! What the fuck is this? I was so excited. I had been playing drums and at home in the basement with the drum-kit. I would put on the first LP and play along with it. And I went to every show with my neighbour in my home town and one time, one new year’s day I think, they asked they asked me to join them for a jam in the studio, just for fun. Then about five years later I was with the band as a stand in drummer. Twenty songs and one week to learn them…”
Alco: “We recorded our last album ‘Kings of the Underworld’ and we got a lot of gigs lined up to promote the album -big ones, small ones and some festivals. But then our drummer decided to quit. We asked Casper to help us out and after two or three shows he joined us officially.”
Harald: ”With a three-piece band everything just has to be right, especially the drums and the bass. It gives me as guitarist and singer a freedom to do all kinds of stuff. It has to be spot on. Since we have had Caspar in the band it’s given us a lot of energy. It’s like wow things are taking off. We are playing a lot more gigs. We have just finished the basic tracks for our next albums. We have recorded ten new songs. We built our own studio last year. That gives us a lot of freedom. And now all of a sudden there are labels and bookers that are interested.”
Alco: “We are getting noticed.”
The shows
This is the band’s second tour in the UK, following an initial series of gigs last summer where I first encountered them
Harald: “We played our first gig [of this tour] on Thursday in London and there were people in but they we in the corners and we said OK let’s see what happens when we start to play people were like woah what’s happening and all of a sudden there were all the people in front of us. Everyone was paying attention.”
Alco: “We try to make a show of it.”
Harald: “The people who gave us feedback afterwards were like ‘wow there is something happening between the three of you – it’s good music but it’s also great to watch’ and I think that’s the biggest complement you can get as a band.”
Casper: “Obviously being a rock fan and a metal fan I feel very humbled to be able to come to England with Diggeth and play. All those famous bands that originated here it’s like wow we’re in England.”
Alco: “I never imagined when I was young that at 40 I would be in England, playing with a band playing the music that I love to play. Yesterday someone told us that the place we at in Reading Motorhead had played here and Iron Maiden. And we were like are you kidding me? Amazing.”
Harald: “If someone would have told me thirty years ago that in thirty years you will be playing in England and you will be playing clubs were like Iron Maiden had played I would have gone insane probably.”
The band’s third (as yet untitled) album will be released later this year.
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