Category Archives: Rock

Rockin’ Jimmy & The Brothers Of The Night (1982)

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In this day and age, it’s weirdly reassuring to recommend an album which resolutely refuses to appear on streaming platforms or even CD.

So, at the time of writing, it has always ever been just a 1982 vinyl release for Rockin’ Jimmy & The Brothers Of The Night (widely available on Discogs).

Fronted by bespectacled Rockin’ Jimmy Byfield, they were a Tulsa-based bar band with country, blues and R’n’B influences, prowling similar territory as late Little Feat, JJ Cale, mid-‘70s Eric Clapton (who covered Byfield’s ‘Little Rachel’ on There’s One In Every Crowd), early Dire Straits, late-‘70s Ry Cooder and even ZZ Top at their most laidback.

Championed by Alexis Korner on his fabled Radio 1 show, Rockin’ Jimmy’s second and final album was one of the first ‘rock’ albums your correspondent remembers enjoying. It appeared on the small but influential, Notting Hill-based Sonet Records. Based around Byfield’s pleasant voice and Chuck DeWalt’s fat beats, the band eschewed distorted guitars and blues/rock cliches in favour of catchy, melodic songs and neat ensemble work.

The album’s beautifully recorded, with no concessions to early 1980s production (thanks to Brit helmer Peter Nicholls, best known for his work with Joe Cocker and Leon Russell). ‘Rockin’ All Nite’, ‘Angel Eyes’ and ‘It’s A Mystery’ have staying power. The rest of the album hasn’t dated much either.

Sadly the band split after this second record, but they did apparently tour a little until the end of 1982, as this clip attests, and may still occasionally play around Tulsa (correct?). The cover’s quite cool too – which meeting of which ‘brotherhood’ is Byfield about to attend? The shadow knows…

Van Halen @ Monsters Of Rock, Donington Park: 40 Years On

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40 years ago this month, Van Halen were the penultimate act at Monsters Of Rock, Castle Donington, part of what is generally considered the greatest ever bill at the illustrious rock festival.

And now some sizzling side-of-stage footage from Saturday 18 August 1984 has emerged (but sadly has been removed from YouTube as of March 2025…), shot by Ross Halfin, showing the first iteration of the band at their commercial peak (they would break up in acrimony shortly after, and this was their last ever British concert).

The sound is not brilliant and some fans have complained about the setlist and length of both the Van Halen brothers’ solos, but it’s instructive and exciting to see exactly what goes down backstage/onstage.

Lee Roth is a superb master of ceremonies, singing well, dancing his tail off and firing off some amusing bits of banter: ‘Don’t stick your tongue out at me unless you’re gonna use it… If you wanna throw something at me, I’m gonna come down there and f*ck your girlfriend!’ etc. etc.

Though the footage starts off with Lee Roth and Alex Van Halen sharing a laugh (in a recent Classic Rock piece about the gig, Halfin claims the former was ‘stoned’ throughout), tensions among the band were high and nobody present was very surprised when they went their separate ways shortly after.

But it’s quite a thrill to get such a close-up view of such a legendary gig. The tempos are brisk but everything has VH’s inimitable swing and swagger.

Peter Gabriel: i/o

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Despite his reputation as a sonic groundbreaker and technological wiz, Peter Gabriel arguably hasn’t done anything much good on record since 1992, even as his live shows gain popularity.

1986’s So was of course the huge pop breakthrough, and that album has been the template for his subsequent, rather predictable solo career – he generally switches between atmospheric ballads a la ‘Mercy Street’ or ‘Don’t Give Up, ‘dark’, vaguely industrial rock tracks, and ‘funky’ one-chord grooves with poppy hooks and emotional lyrics, typified by ‘Sledgehammer’.

i/o is his first album of new material since 2002 and sadly it cannot reverse the trend, despite Gabriel’s always excellent, ageless vocals. It mostly meanders by in a fog of ugly snare drums, dry guitars and keyboards (some by Eno), digital treatments/loops pitched somewhere around 1998, and not much air at all. It seems the multi-layered triumphs of ‘Lead A Normal Life’ and ‘Family Snapshot’ are long gone.

Elsewhere Tony Levin’s bass and stick parts are prominent but they can’t produce anything as immediate and catchy as ‘Sledgehammer’. ‘Four Kinds Of Horses’ sums up the problem – a fairly uninteresting half-time groove underpins a fairly uninteresting vocal melody, while a rather irritating piano loop burbles away in the background. It never should have left the rehearsal room and many other (mostly overlong) tracks replicate that formula.

But Gabriel does deliver a pretty good, harmonically-rich ballad – ‘Playing For Time’ – which some other reviewers have very generously compared to Randy Newman’s best work. It’s this album’s ‘Washing Of The Water’.

In conclusion, the main problem with i/o is that it sounds exactly like you think it will. Maybe Gabriel is working with the wrong people, maybe the wrong software. Maybe he needs to get back to recording ‘as live’, embedded in a really good five-piece band. Paging Bob Ezrin, Larry Fast, Robert Fripp and/or Hugh Padgham…

(postscript: I’ve recently invested in the definitive 2007 CD remaster of Genesis’s Lamb Lies Down On Broadway – it sounds absolutely fantastic and I feel 18 again…)

Yngwie J Malmsteen: Rising Force 40 Years On

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When movingtheriver started playing guitar and buying muso magazines in the late 1980s, the name Yngwie J Malmsteen seemed to inspire awe throughout the whole ‘scene’.

But there was no way you could just happen upon Malmsteen’s music in the UK unless you listened to ‘The Friday Rock Show’ with Tommy Vance.

Then my interest was piqued again when It Bites’ Francis Dunnery mentioned him in a Guitarist magazine interview from October 1989. Almost immediately after that I found Malmsteen’s debut solo album Rising Force – released 40 years ago this month – in a bargain bin at the Richmond Our Price.

You could make an argument that the Swede – born Lars Lannerback! – was THE rock guitarist of the 1980s, having as much of an impact as Eddie Van Halen did five years before. Rising Force was a perfect bridge between the UK, Genesis and Yes albums I was investigating and the heavier influences coming in from Steve Vai and Van Halen.

But, as with any freaky guitar virtuoso, the main issue was finding the right musical context. Rising Force has its duff songs (though always with brilliant guitar playing) but delivers two of the most stunning instrumentals in rock history, ‘Black Star’ and ‘Icarus Dream Suite Op.4’. And to think he was just 20 when he recorded them.

With Malmsteen’s scalloped Strat and nods to Paganini, Bach, Albinoni and Mozart, he achieved (and achieves) a remarkable control of vibrato, both via fingers and whammy bar – demonstrating possibly influences from Allan Holdsworth and Al Di Meola at this early stage – and superb tone, plus a mastery of those baroque passing chords.

I saw Yngwie live once at The Marquee on Charing Cross Road on 11 June 1994. It was thrilling seeing him at such close quarters but I kept wanting the singer to shut up. Eventually said vocalist got into a spat with someone at the front and smashed the mic stand down on his head.

Yngwie then set his Strat alight, kicked it to pieces and chucked the neck towards the sound desk, just missing my head and landing about 15 feet away. The venue was evacuated, and as we chatted nervously outside, a laughing kid ran past brandishing the smoking neck. Wonder where it/he is now.

I no longer have the CD of Rising Force for some reason – wish I had held onto it because the album is not on any streaming platforms at the time of writing. Malmsteen’s career continues at great pace – he’s just played two gigs in London and done a great interview with Rick Beato.

And for those who like reaction videos, The Daily Doug has put together a neat musical analysis of ‘Icarus Dream Suite’ here.

John Lennon/Yoko Ono: Milk and Honey @ 40

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Milk and Honey – planned as the followup to Double Fantasy long before John Lennon’s death on 8 December 1980 – was finally released 40 years ago this weekend, on 27 January 1984.

I believe it was the second vinyl album owned by movingtheriver – the first was The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour soundtrack.

Polydor did John and Yoko proud, with striking front/back photos and a gatefold sleeve complete with Ono’s liner notes, Lennon’s ‘Grow Old With Me’ lyrics and some Robert/Elizabeth Barrett Browning poetry.

But Milk and Honey was somewhat of a commercial disappointment, reaching #3 in the UK and just #11 in the US. And it seems one of the least remembered Lennon-related albums these days. Why? Listening again after a few years this weekend was a pleasurable experience, with a few exceptions, and the breadth of musical styles (reggae, calypso, new-wave, piano balladry, rock’n’roll) is impressive.

Six John solo tracks recorded during and before the Double Fantasy sessions made it onto the album. They’re all pretty good, a few classic, mostly tougher than the previous material. John sounds on great form. His spoken-word moments and count-ins are amusing and he’s frequently heard ‘coaching’ the band (and studio staff) through the songs, Prince-style, with various instructions: ‘Boogie!’, ‘Hold it down’, ‘Groove!’, ‘All right, you can get out now’ etc.

The Lennon tracks also showcase a great band playing pretty much live in the studio. John plays lots of guitar – in that famous Jann Wenner interview, he said ‘I can make a guitar speak’, and you can hear it here. Drummer Andy Newmark lays off the hi-hat most of the time, letting the rhythm guitars fill in the top end.

Three UK singles were released from the album, with diminishing returns: ‘Nobody Told Me’ got to #6, ‘Borrowed Time’ (studio sessions reveal that John used an interesting reference source for the song) #32 and ‘I’m Stepping Out’ #88.

Yoko recorded her tracks during 1982 and 1983, mostly with a very good NYC rhythm section (Neil Jason on bass, Yogi Horton on drums), and they range from the intriguing to extremely corny. ‘Don’t Be Scared’ possibly influenced David Bowie, particularly the title track of Tonight, recorded three months after Milk and Honey was released:

Yoko also enlisted some ‘remix engineers’ who apparently added a lot of post-production effects to John’s vocals, the drums and guitars (she had fallen out with Double Fantasy producer Jack Douglas over unpaid royalties and refused to credit him on the album).

Revisiting Milk and Honey was certainly a bittersweet experience, but it’s an easy album to recommend, and it only makes you miss John all the more. The dunderheaded/ill-informed contemporary critical reactions are explored in this very good video:

Nik Kershaw: Wouldn’t It Be Good @ 40

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Bristol-born, Ipswich-raised Nik Kershaw had a spiffing 1984 – no other solo artist spent more time on the UK singles charts during the year.

‘Wouldn’t It Be Good’, released 40 years ago this weekend (on the same day as Echo & The Bunnymen’s ‘The Killing Moon’) and reaching #4, was his second single – ‘I Won’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ initially flopped in September 1983.

‘Wouldn’t It Be Good’ was predominantly recorded at Sarm East studios on Osborn Street, Aldgate (don’t look for it – it’s not there any more). Peter Collins produced soon after helming Musical Youth’s ‘Pass The Dutchie’ and Tracy Ullman’s solo output (he later worked with Rush, Alice Cooper and Queensryche). The song’s original title was ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ – Collins demanded a better word than ‘nice’.

It’s a great single, the beginning of movingtheriver’s love affair with Kershaw’s music, and its ominous lyrics have the slight whiff of ‘In The Air Tonight’ about them, as well as a subtle social conscience. I also always liked the weird emphases he placed on some words/syllables – ‘You must be JOKING/You don’t know A thing about it/You got no probLEM‘ etc…

I distinctly remember watching him perform the song on ‘Top Of The Pops’ for the first time – who was this tramp on telly, with the snood and fingerless gloves? My parents liked the track too, which was a bit disarming.

The song’s overdriven guitars were layered/overdubbed, Brian May-style (best heard on the 12” remix), and their major-seventh chords create some strange timbres. Its structure is seriously weird too – the second chorus comes right at the end, after a lengthy guitar/horn solo. The delayed gratification is clever and totally outside the norm.

The video was directed by Storm Thorgersen, mostly filmed in a large, disused building opposite Buckingham Palace, apart from a bit at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in Cambridge. An extremely odd cover version features on the ‘Pretty In Pink’ movie soundtrack. Nik fluffed the words at Live Aid but hardly anyone noticed.

Happy birthday to another classic single from 1984.

Big Country: ‘Wonderland’ Kicks Off One Of The Greatest Ever Pop Years

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Big Country kicked off 1984 – one of the greatest ever pop years – with their between-album, standalone A-side ‘Wonderland’. It reached #8, their second most successful single in the UK.

Also 40 years ago this week, Radio 1 DJ Mike Read ‘banned’ Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ and the Second British Invasion was sweeping the States, led by Eurythmics, Duran Duran, Culture Club, A Flock Of Seagulls and The Police (a remarkable Hot 100 chart of April 1984 featured 40% British acts).

Meanwhile, Big Music of a distinctly Celtic hue was sweeping the UK: The Waterboys, Simple Minds, U2, Echo & The Bunnymen and Big Country. They made ‘elemental’ music, as the cliché goes, with lots of space and lyrics about wars, work, glaciers, mountains, seas and skies.

You could make the case that Big Country were the best musicians of the lot (see the live clip below). And they had an extraordinary run of singles success between 1983 and 1986 – after their debut (‘Harvest Home’) missed the top 40, all the next ten reached the top 30. They also made some serious inroads into the US market.

Tommy Vance liked ‘Wonderland’, reviewing it in Kerrang! magazine thus: ‘Should be heard by anyone who likes fine music. I’m a real fan of Steve Lillywhite’s productions and he’s done a superb job here. The guitar sound is good and the drumming superb.’ Indeedy.

Ver Country’s second album Steeltown (sans ‘Wonderland’) emerged in October 1984 and went to #1 in the UK. Cool times.

PS. RIP the terrific Annie Nightingale.

Little Feat: Let It Roll 35 Years On

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If memory serves I was given the cassette of Little Feat’s Let It Roll for my 16th birthday.

I loved their cocktail of blues, acid-rock, funk, fusion, country, Cajun and Tex-Mex. And they – along with Steely Dan – seemed to represent everything exciting and glamorous about America to me, also introducing exotic-sounding place names like Georgia, Atlanta (!), Tupelo and Juarez.

A burgeoning drummer, I also particularly dug their skinsman Richie Hayward who belongs in the same bracket of 1970s groovemasters as James Gadson, Jeff Porcaro, Jim Keltner, Jim Gordon, Earl Young, Bernard Purdie et al.

I was excited to listen to Let It Roll – which recently turned 35 – after many years, so I looked for my old cassette. Gone. I must have got rid of it years ago. Why? All shall become clear…

Recorded at The Complex, the LA studio owned by EW&F’s Maurice White, it was the band’s comeback album, their first since the death of chief singer/songwriter/slide guitarist Lowell George in 1979.

Of course the absence of George is palpable. Despite new vocalist Craig Fuller’s vague similarity to George in both vocal and slide guitar departments, the days of lyrics like: ‘Onomatopoetry symmetry in motion/They heard about that girl across the ocean’ (‘Down Below The Borderline’) or ‘Heard you got an infection/Just before your lewd rejection’ (‘The Fan’) were long gone.

(According to Hayward, George’s musical influence was also palpable, regularly suggesting fill ideas and rhythms, and frequently telling the drummer that he played too many notes!) Fuller also brings more of a country influence to the band, and there’s less of the ‘white boy got the whoo-whoos!’ (Van Dyke Parks’ analysis of George’s vocal style).

But most of all Let It Roll is inconsistent both song and sound-wise. The good stuff first: opener ‘Hate To Lose Your Lovin’ is a passable pastiche of the classic Feat sound, Second-Line meets funky country, while ‘Cajun Girl’ and the title track are very catchy. ‘Business As Usual’ has a few intriguing harmonic moves and riffs.

Elsewhere there’s too much rather bland AOR, Bruce Hornsby and Steve Winwood apparently the touchstones. Most of the band’s kinks have been ironed out, though Hayward still sounds fantastic, inspired by his new drum hero Manu Katche. Let It Roll could have used some decent mastering too – the volume levels are all over the place.

Surprisingly, the album didn’t chart in the UK but was a very good seller in the US, making #36 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earning a gold disc (they followed it up with 1990’s Representing The Mambo, which I confess I’ve still never heard).

They played a triumphant gig at London’s Town & Country Club in December 1988 though, with special guest Bonnie Raitt on guitar and vocals, and I’m not sure why I wasn’t there. I had to wait until 11 September 2000 to see this brilliant band at the same venue. And, despite the loss of George, Hayward and guitarist Paul Barrere, they’re still an occasional live entity.

(If you’re not acquainted with the band, try Little Feat in their pomp on Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, The Last Record Album or Time Loves A Hero).

Mark Stewart (1960-2023)

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‘I think a paranoid is someone who’s in possession of all the facts.’ Mark Stewart, 1996

In another terrible year for musician deaths, one of 2023’s most surprising and least welcome was the passing of post-punk pioneer Mark Stewart in April, of undisclosed causes.

Indeed it is almost uncanny, considering how full of life he seemed onstage last year during On-U Sound Records’ 40th anniversary rave-up at London’s Forum. And the fact that 2022 also saw one of his best ever collaborations, with KK Null.

His music and friendship helped pave the way for his Bristol mates Tricky, Gary Clail and Massive Attack, and his influence is detectable in such acts as Sleaford Mods and LCD Soundsystem.

I saw Mark live five or six times. His presentation was sometimes hilarious, sometimes disturbing, always thrilling. He would shamble onstage, often with a shopping bag of beers in tow, before exploding into action, a man with a lot on his mind. The fact that he was often playing with one of the slickest/funkiest American rhythm sections in history (Skip McDonald/Doug Wimbish/Keith LeBlanc) was a brilliant dichotomy.

He was interested in everything from the Dead Sea Scrolls to CIA Mind Control to the Gemstone Files and Operation Gladio. His thing was information – who controls it and how/why they conceal it.

The teenage, beanpole, 6’6” Mark – resplendent in zoot suit and brothel creepers – was a regular sight at clubs and gigs in mid-1970s Bristol as part of the Funk Army. After his first band The Pop Group split up, he pursued mad mash-ups of sound, sometimes using Walkmans to create his collages, plundering scary ‘50s sci-fi voices and even TV ads.

He gave good album title: Learning To Cope With Cowardice. As The Veneer Of Democracy Starts To Fade. He was never interested in slick, ‘funky’ beats – even his ‘band’ album, 1990’s Metatron, with Wimbish, McDonald and LeBlanc, is distinctly uneasy listening.

By 1996’s Control Data, the music world had finally caught up with him, the album’s mix of techno, dub and house more commercial than usual. But the extraordinary ‘Simulacra’, ‘Red Zone’ and ‘Digital Justice’ to this day sound unlike anything else. This trend continued through his occasional records of the noughties, particularly the excellent Edit (2009).

His vocals were generally low in the mix. You had to strain to hear his lyrics. Why? He claimed it was the influence of dub and funk. ‘So it’s not like making a f**king speech’, he told Simon Reynolds. But his words were often brilliant, as funny and peculiar as Mark E Smith or Morrissey. Check out ‘The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum’, ‘Low Life, High Places’ or The Pop Group’s ‘Citizen Zombie’ (You’ve got that brainwashed look of an alien abductee/Maybe your mind has been wiped clean’).

Mark also made a lot of impact writing for other acts – Tackhead, Gary Clail, Living Colour (‘Sacred Ground’), Audio Active (‘Happy Shopper’). But I’ll always remember him passing the time of day with my brother in the audience immediately after the Forum gig last April. He always said his fans were just as interesting as the musicians onstage – another legacy of punk.

Farewell to a brilliant one-off.

Then Jerico: Now That’s What I Call…Not Bad

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Of course it was just teenage aggro/jealousy, but my schoolmates and I were always a bit suspicious of those late-‘80s pop acts who were much fancied by our female friends: Morten Harket, Richard Marx, Jason Donovan, the Goss brothers, Marti Pellow, Nathan out of Brother Beyond, those blokes from Big Fun.

But Mark Shaw of Then Jerico was probably their favourite, instantly putting his band’s music into the dumper, even though we probably all had a soft spot for their 1987 hit ‘The Motive’.

Listening back now on a good system, it’s a superb-sounding single – impactful, clean and shiny, with great instrument separation. It typified late-1980s British pop/rock helmed by excellent producers who had learnt their trade in the golden age of commercial recording studios, people like Tim Palmer, Rhett Davies, Peter Henderson, Andy Richards, Jon Kelly, Rick Nowels, Mike Shipley, Bruce Lampcov, Peter Collins, Julian Mendelsohn, Gary Langan et al.

Of course Trevor Horn was an overarching influence, representing the gold standard. It Bites’ Francis Dunnery mocked ‘Big Area’ (see below) producer Langan (collaborator with Horn on Yes’s 90215, Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock and FGTH) in a 2021 interview for PROG magazine: ‘Everyone who had ever walked past Horn was given a record to produce. I think Trevor’s milkman produced Then Jerico and had a hit!’

Yes, there was a fair amount of turd-polishing but these producers inspired the late-1980s rock comeback, generating hits for Breathe, Fuzzbox, Cutting Crew, Paul Young, Love & Money, Deacon Blue, Killing Joke, All About Eve, The Mission.

And Then Jerico. Maybe they were actually pretty good. Their best songs – ‘Sugar Box’, ‘The Motive’, ‘Big Area’ – marry a sort of U2/Simple Minds/Tears For Fears ‘thing’ with Shaw’s tremulous vocals to strirring effect, something akin to the sound of falling in love. When any of them come onto ‘Forgotten 80s’, it’s impossible to turn off. Though one is still slightly reticent about checking out a whole album in one sitting.

And guess what – Shaw has reformed the band, and they’re touring extensively this year. And he has rather a juicy/chequered recent past to tell of too.