A foot-stomping, hard-rocking piece of jugband blues, punctuated by Fish’s cigar-box rocking slide guitar, the coloured lights filtering through her bobbing, Monroe-inspired coiffure. Félix Rabin - photo by Robert Sutton Islington Assembly Hall found itself completely sold out for this gig by popular Kansas City blues babe Samantha Fish. Her opening act on this tour..
Jake Shimabukuro – Trio (MUSIC THEORIES RECORDINGS/Mascot)
Exponents of prog ukulele are thin on the ground... There are some instruments that seem to lend themselves to certain types of music – you know, electric guitars and drumkits were made for rock’n’roll, while it’s difficult to imagine an orchestra without a violin section. Other instruments are rare in certain circles; hard rock harpists..
Additional material from Caroline Battenburg
Sweet – Islington Assembly Hall, 18/12/2019
Andy Scott swaps his red Strat for a gold one which he plays with an (empty) baked bean can for some reason... When I was a kid in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, one of the upsides of catching some flu bug was getting to bunk off school, and another was special radio privileges...
Roger Dean
I can’t honestly say I had a conversation with Syd Barrett. We had a few shots at it, but it really didn’t work... “I have often said, I wish Relayer wasn’t called Relayer, I wish it was called Gates of Delirium,” muses the artist Roger Dean, sitting at a huge wooden table in a large..
Wolf Jaw – The Heart Won’t Listen (Listenable Records)
Wolf Jaw may be a new name, but the Midlands power trio started life as the Bad Flowers, bringing out an EP under that name in 2016 and a debut album, Starting Gun, in January 2018. Based in Cannock, Staffordshire, the home town of Deep Purple's Glenn Hughes and no more than a stone’s throw..
Imperial Jade – On The Rise (Listenable Records)
If you were expecting some kind of Euro-rock hybrid, with a hint of flamenco or paella-heavy lyrical content, think again... Imperial Jade are a Spanish hard rock band who released their debut album in 2015, and whose second album On The Rise was originally released in Spain only. Fortunately for the world at large, On..
Marcel Kunkel – 4th Labyrinth
Well, it’s better than a slap in the face with a wet fish! Oh, for the good old days, when drummers were the bane of the band – time-consuming, notoriously unreliable and dreadfully hard to come by. In an unthinkable about-face, I have had a couple of bands in recent times tell me it’s regular..
Jan Akkerman
It sounds maybe a little bit outlandish, but it’s just the octatonic scale... All serious beard-stroking musos have their favourite gripes about accomplished musicians selling out to crass commercialism. Some cite Rod Stewart, swapping his rock’n’roll roots for the Atlantic Crossing era of international superstardom; others point at Blackmore’s Rainbow or Def Leppard giving up..
Voyager – Colours In The Sun (Season Of Mist)
… ostensibly a gentle, tuneful track backed with twinkly keyboards, but try tapping your foot to it – there is an extra beat every second bar, putting the song into an overall 9/8 or some such. Aussie prog metal outfit Voyager return with this, their 7th album, and they bring everything to the party for..
Collateral/Little Red Kings – Leo’s Red Lion, Gravesend, 04/10/19
Another storming gig went down at the Red Lion on my home patch tonight, starting with excellent Norwich rockers Little Red Kings, who are neither Kings nor red as far as I could see, and mostly not all that little either. First highlight of the night was their melodic pop rocker These Days, with its..