Tabla de contenidos para Issue 19 en Planet Rock

Credit where it’s due, the argument positing 1980 as the greatest year in rock history originated with noted heavy metal historian Paul Elliott, and has been passionately, and drunkenly, debated in bars, on tour buses and in backstage areas across the world more times than I care to remember. I was 10 in 1980, still listening to Showaddywaddy to be honest, but my esteemed colleague Mark Blake was in the thick of the action, as returning legends and hungry NWOBHM upstarts turned metal into a global religion. After reading through this issue and digging out the albums that made it so special, we defy anyone to stake a claim for a more thrilling and important 12 months. Sadly, our excitement in preparing PR19 took a huge hit with the heartbreaking…

PLANET ROCK’S own awards, The Rocks, returns in February, and we want you to decide the winners. An antidote to traditional music industry awards shows, in which rock music is so often overlooked and ignored, The Rocks is entirely voted by fans, and we’re inviting you to cast your votes now at planetrock.com. Voting is open in eight different categories: you can see the nominated artists for each award on this page. The Darkness lead the way with four nominations, while Rival Sons, Airbourne and Phil Campbell have each scored three nominations. In addition to the seven categories listed, we have the much-coveted Best New Band accolade, which is an open vote, which means you can vote for any emerging artist who’s stolen your heart over the past 12 months.…

“AFTER Night Ranger made our Man In Motion album in 1988 it seemed like everyone in the band was going in different directions. I remember playing one show in Philadelphia in February ’89, and the vibe just wasn’t there. Afterwards I said, You know what, I’m done. Everybody go do what you want to do. I’m out. Five days later I got a phone call from John Kalodner, Geffen’s A&R guru, saying he had [former Styx guitarist/vocalist] Tommy Shaw and Ted Nugent working on some music in New York and thought it might be a good idea for me to check it out. He flew me to New York, I arrived at Tommy’s brownstone on the Upper West Side, and we wrote half the first Damn Yankees album that same…

Iron Maiden never visited Ireland in the ’80s – we always wondered whether it was because Bruce Dickinson was scared to inflame tensions with his customary waving of the Union Jack during The Trooper while on-stage in Belfast or Dublin – and so news of a first Maiden live album caused much excitement among the small knot of metalheads in my form in 1985. When my wage packet from Dunnes finally offered up sufficient funds, I headed to Makin’ Tracks in Belfast city centre to get my mitts on the double cassette. Once inserted into the family Amstrad stereo tape deck, Maiden’s masterpiece blew my 15-year-old mind. Pretty sure I can still recall Bruce’s song intros and the extended crowd-baiting during Running Free word-for-word. I’ve seen Maiden many times since,…

HOLDING THEIR BREATH, hearts pounding, the members of Jethro Tull struggled to remain hidden. Trying to evade the cops after a riot at their show in Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, the group were hiding under blankets in the rear of a station wagon. The police wanted to arrest the upstart Brits after they’d swerved a road block earlier and ignored their order not to perform. The station wagon slowed to a halt and armed officers from the Denver PD beamed their flashlights through its windows. “I remember whispering, Keep still, keep still,” says Tull bandleader Ian Anderson. Jethro Tull’s new drummer, Barriemore Barlow, was on the receiving end of the whisper. The 15,000-seater Red Rocks was his second Tull show, but Barlow was more used to playing clubs in his…

CURRENTLY ON THE road in America with British Lion, ahead of the resumption of Iron Maiden’s epic Legacy Of The Beast tour (which in May and returns to the UK in June) Steve Harris is starting 2020 with a bang. “I’ll put my feet up when they carry me out in a coffin!” laughs the 63-year-old East Londoner, now a resident of the Bahamas. “I love what I do, and so I want to take all the opportunities that I can, while I still can.” British Lion’s classy second album, The Burning, released in January and reviewed in PR18, bears the influence of Harris’ lifelong love of ’70s hard rock and prog, as do his My Planet Rocks selections. “At school, I never cared whether anyone thought what I listened…

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ENTRIES IN BEFORE APRIL 16, 2020 How to enter Got a pen? Good. Now fill in the answers in the grid opposite and whack over this page – or a photocopy – by snail mail to Planet Rock Magazine, RMF Crossword, Academic House, 24-28 Oval Road, London NW1 7DJ Terms and conditions One entry per person. Entries must be received before April 16, 2020 or will not be valid. The winners will be selected at random. Competition promoted by Bauer Consumer Media Limited t/a Planet Rock (“Planet Rock”). Planet Rock’s choice of winners is final and no correspondence will be entered into in this regard. The winners will be notified by email seven days after the competition ends. Entrants must be over 18, resident in the UK and not be…

Lynn Curlee, Black Sabbath Heaven And Hell cover artist, became a gallery artist In the early 1970s, and later added author/illustrator to his resume. His latest book The Great Nijinsky – God Of Dance, is available from Amazon. George Chin has been photographing bands since 1979 and founded IconicPix to license his extensive archive and those of other photographers including George Bodnar (deceased). Specialising in rock and heavy metal bands. www.iconcpix.com Samuel Mills, aka Defame, who illustrates The Cadillac Three on page 98 is based in Long Beach, California. Specialising in horror and sci-fi, Defame creates horrific and brutal artwork by hand for bands and brands. Go to www.defameart.com to see more of his work. Cathi Unsworth is Planet Rock’s sub-editor and the author of six pop-cutural crime fiction novels.…

BRITISH ALBUM The Darkness – Easter Is Cancelled Wayward Sons – The Truth Ain’t What It Used To Be Down ’n’ Outz – This Is How We Roll Phil Campbell – Old Lions Still Roar ELO – From Out Of Nowhere The Who – Who Magnum – The Serpent Rings Status Quo – Backbone The Wildhearts – Renaissance Men WORLDWIDE SOLO ARTIST Slash Beth Hart Bruce Springsteen Joanne Shaw Taylor Samantha Fish Joe Bonamassa Neil Young Kenny Wayne Shepherd Kris Barras BRITISH BAND Thunder The Darkness Wayward Sons Muse Magnum Def Leppard Phil Campbell & The Bastard Sons The Cult ELO The Who Those Damn Crows Uriah Heep BRITISH SINGLE Planet Rock Allstars – You’re The Voice The Darkness – Rock’n’Roll Deserves To Die Phil Campbell – These Old Boots…

PAUL ANTHONY The best thing I’ve heard recently: An advance copy of the new FM album, Synchronised. Just off the back of their BIG 30 Tour with Gun and Dan Reed Network, the boys already have this one in the can. It’s FM doing what they do best, playing pure, unadulterated AOR/melodic rock. The best thing I’ve seen recently: The Irishman on Netflix. Directed by Martin Scorsese, and starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, it tells the story of Frank Sheeran, who recounts his time as a hitman for a crime syndicate. My favourite memory from 1980: Having seen Thin Lizzy with Dave Flett and Midge Ure at Bingley Hall in Stafford in December ’79 I returned to this iconic venue on Tuesday, May 13, 1980 to…

The world needs a villain Any band, any movie, has to have a protagonist and an antagonist. When I started in rock’n’roll we didn’t have a dark lord. The Doors’ Jim Morrison was the closest we had to one, so I created a character with the make-up and shocking jokes. Some people didn’t get it. [1970s-era moral crusader] Mary Whitehouse wanted us banned! We sent her flowers every day because we were thinking, “Thank you, you’ve helped us sell out Wembley and get to Number 1 in the charts.” Competition is healthy In this business, it’s important to be competitive. We went from being a garage band to being the best garage band in Arizona. Then we went to LA, where the competition was much harder and that made us…

MICHAEL SCHENKER BORN January 10, 1955, Sarstedt, West Germany OCCUPATION Guitarist YEARS ACTIVE 1970-Present ASSOCIATED ACTS UFO Scorpions Michael Schenker Group McAuley Schenker Group Michael Schenker’s Temple Of Rock Michael Schenker Fest Contraband IN January, Michael Schenker received an eMail out-of-the-blue from a stranger, offering to reunite him with a historical artefact long considered lost, the skeleton of a guitar hand-crafted by Schenker as a teenager. “it’s unbelievable!” Schenker exclaims. “at school, when i was 14, we had a workshop class, and i decided to build a guitar. the body was triangular, so it looks basically like a flying v. i’d never seen a flying v at that age, but i must have had a premonition that a guitar looking like that would be important in my life.” important, too,…

THE ALMIGHTY were one of Britain’s biggest and best-loved rock bands in the ’90s, chalking up eight Top 40 singles, and four Top 40 albums after rising to national consciousness with their gritty debut album Blood, Fire & Love. These days, frontman Ricky Warwick can be found leading Black Star Riders and Thin Lizzy, but it was in The Almighty that he learned all his important life lessons. Planet Rock walks him down memory lane… Who was the young Ricky Warwick? A day dreamer. I was born on a small farm, so I think that was the future that was mapped out for me, but I never wanted to be a farmer, I wanted to be a football player, until I was about 14, and discovered music and girls and…

AS GEEZER BUTLER REMEMBERS IT… …THE DAY BLACK SABBATH FINALLY RAN OUT OF PATIENCE with Ozzy Osbourne was when he and Tony Iommi arrived at their Los Angeles rehearsal studio in the spring of 1979 to find the singer lying unconscious in a puddle of his own piss. There could hardly have been a more brutally apt visual metaphor for Sabbath’s current malaise. Iommi, Butler, Osbourne and drummer Bill Ward had come to view the title of their most recent album, 1978’s Never Say Die!, as a sick joke: deep down, they knew their band was already fucked. When the quartet attended the album’s launch party in London, they were embarrassed to hear Bob Marley’s Exodus album playing over the house PA, and humiliated further when it became obvious that…

I REMEMBER BEING EXCITED when I heard we were going to be playing this new one-day rock festival. We didn’t know what to expect, so there was a certain amount of trepidation. No one had ever staged a festival at Donington Park, and no one had ever booked an exclusively hard rock and metal bill, so it was something of an unknown quantity. But we knew from the start that it was a massive thing for us to get on the show; a chance for us to play to people who’d maybe heard us on the radio but hadn’t seen us live yet. Everyone wanted to be on that bill, but the promoter [Paul Loasby] had worked on our Wheels Of Steel tour earlier that year, and he knew we…

1 Roger Waters ventured outside Pink Floyd in 1970 to compose a soundtrack for The Body, a documentary about human biology, with sometime Floyd collaborator Ron Geesin. Our Song features recordings of Geesin’s farts and Waters (above) doing ‘armpit squeaks’. 2 Originally credited to the three band members, The Barbarian, the opening track on Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s debut album, is a reworking of Béla Bartók’s 1911 piano piece Allegro Barbaro. When the late composer’s wife got in contact, she was initially told to “Fuck off”, before Keith Emerson sheepishly confessed to his cheeky steal. 3 The rivalry between ELP and Jethro Tull could get silly. In 1972, when Tull walked into Tokyo’s Hilton Hotel and saw ELP checking in, Ian Anderson insisted the promoters book his band rooms elsewhere.…

WHO: Kiss WHERE: Tarrant County Convention Center, Fort Worth, Texas WHEN: August 11, 1976 My first gig was Kiss with Bob Seger and Artful Dodger. I was a wee, small lad, about a month shy of my 12th birthday. My dad had never been to a rock show, and he bought a roll of tickets for us: him, me, my brothers, and their friends. Following Artful Dodger and Bob Seger it was, “You wanted the best…”, etc. And, of course, what you think happened next, did. Party anthems set to fire-breathing, smoking guitars, blood-spitting, Destroyer-era black-and-silver costumes and platforms, glitter, make-up, Gene’s tongue, Paul’s self-absorption, explosions, pyro. It was the greatest thing I’d seen and heard in my life. My tastes have changed, but it was one helluva PAWTY! About…

DATE OF BIRTH: 1979 WHEN RETIRED: 1983 WHERE FOUND: York, North Yorkshire “I did every stitch on this myself,” says Chris Wright. “I remember skulking around the shops to buy embroidery thread without being spotted by anyone I knew! When I went to uni in ’83 I left it in my parents’ shed and only retrieved it about 12 years ago when they moved. It was a mouldy blob of wet material, but it came up great after five or six washes.” Don’t be shy. Raid that wardrobe, cellar or loft and email us a photo of your old colours to appear in the next issue of Planet Rock. Contact: mail@planetrock.com.…

1 DOCTOR DOCTOR (on Phenomenon, by UFO, 1974) The song which introduced Schenker to most British rock fans began life as an instrumental. “I think it’s probably about sex, but I never really listen to lyrics,” the guitarist confessed. 2 ROCK BOTTOM (on Phenomenon, by UFO, 1974) “Seventeen, a nature’s queen, know what I mean,” Phil Mogg leers on another highlight from Schenker’s debut album with UFO. The guitarist’s liquid solo announced the arrival of a major new talent. 3 HIGH FLYER (on Force It, by UFO, 1975) With its sweet Baroque intro and gorgeous sustained notes solo, this is ‘The Blonde Bomber’ at his most lyrical and restrained. Every Iron Maiden and Metallica power ballad started life here. 4 TRY ME (on Lights Out, by UFO, 1977) Another killer…

Wild & Wonderful (on Blood, Fire & Love, 1989) “I’ve found something new and I’m fuckin’ lovin’ it,” roars Warwick, living his best life on this audience favourite. Free ‘N’ Easy (on Soul Destruction, 1991) The band’s first Top 40 single, The Cult and Motorhead sharing a Harley en route to the Bulldog Bash. Jonestown Mind (on Crank, 1994) A sneering punk-metal attack on the ‘sheeple’, featuring backing vocals from Warwick’s best mucker, Therapy? frontman Andy Cairns. Do You Understand (on Just Add Life, 1996) The quartet’s final major label single finds Ricky Warwick paying homage to his teenage hero Jake Burns, with a biting punk tune that could have been lifted from SLF’s Go For It album.…

IN OCTOBER 1979… …CREEM, AMERICA’S ONLY ROCK MAGAZINE, according to its bold strapline, posed the question “Is heavy metal dead?” alongside pictures of Aerosmith, Kiss and other supposedly deceased artists looking remarkably chipper. I only know this because I saw it on the internet recently. I was 14 at the time, and Creem’s doomy death notice didn’t make it as far as my Northwest London Comprehensive. Here, in the UK, heavy metal was very much alive and well, thank you. Particularly behind a prefab classroom (known as ‘The Hut’), where its devotees gathered most break times to peruse music weekly Sounds and debate the pros and cons of Rush’s Hemispheres versus A Farewell To Kings. “Fuck’s sake, Steve! Everyone knows Xanadu is their greatest song…”, etc, continued ad nauseum until…

“The South can rise again with a band who mean business…” BY JAMES MCNAIR THE CADILLAC THREE Country Fuzz BIG MACHINE THOUGH FEW would begrudge the venerable Lynyrd Skynyrd their must-see headline slot at the Ramblin’ Man festival this July, retooling Southern rock for the first decades of the 21st century has largely been a somewhat younger dude’s game. Atlanta, Georgia’s Blackberry Smoke and Nashville, Tennessee’s The Cadillac Three are among those who have shown that The South can rise again, and in a climate recently tarnished by Kid Rock’s rather suspect rant about Oprah Winfrey, they’ve been a very welcome alternative. Listening to The Cadillac Three’s latest, you might even assert that they’re now doing as much to promote the Deep South as tourist boards from Little Rock to…