Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs!
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Slash a wayward photographer clearly Live At The Roxy EAGLE ROCK modelled on the late, great Ray STUFFBOOKS & DVDs 2014 show with Myles Palmer. Hotten himself cuts Kennedy & The Conspirators. a curiously detached figure, as Live At The Roxy if he’s observing events through is one of three a gauzy lens. shows Slash An odd book, then, but played in weirdly compelling all the same. September 2014 And certainly a step up from on Hollywood’s Letrasetting Krusher’s headlines. Sunset Strip, a mini tour that ■■■■■■■■■■ also took in the Troubadour and Geoff Barton the Whiskey A Go Go. This set features material from Slash’s That’s solo albums, including Ghost, Entertainment: with a couple of Guns N’ Roses’ Rick Buckler more possessive numbers – My Life In – Sweet Child O’ Mine and You The Jam Could Be Mine – as sweeteners. Rick Buckler OMNIBUS PRESS Like AC/DC or Lemmy, Drummer’s chronicle of life Slash is a force of rock’n’roll alongside Weller and Foxton. nature, a silent on-stage With his Daltrey- presence not unlike wrestling’s like good looks, The Undertaker. Kennedy is Rick Buckler could a capable vocalist (and no mean be mistaken for guitarist) but genially aware the frontman of he’s second fiddle here. The Jam, rather Dennis Dunaway: a lot more to Alice than just The whole gig feels good- than the glumly reticent Weller. being his bass player. natured, intimate and perhaps Certainly, his role in the group, too much of a testimony to just laying down the drum patterns what well-policed, detoxified for tracks like Funeral Pyre, Snakes! Guillotines! affairs gigs are these days. should not be underrated. He There’s no smoking and no comes across in this memoir Electric Chairs! smokin’; no real sense of the as a genial, unpretentious, if at My Adventures In The Alice Cooper Group down and dirty, or electric times prosaic character. Racy dangerous, or kicking over of rock’n’roll revelations are thin on Dennis Dunaway And Chris Hodenfield the stacks. Not Slash’s fault, of the ground: The Jam didn’t really course, but Live At The Roxy feels do drugs, their paths didn’t cross OMNIBUS closer to a recital than a riot. with other bands, though The inside story of the early days of Alice Cooper, ■■■■■■■■■■ Buckler once met Boy George David Stubbs (“we just talked”), doing TOTP told by Vincent’s close friend and bandmate. wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. My Life And The Money matters loom large; Beautiful Music their meagre first advance, the ou could be forgiven for thinking Anyway, the meat of the matter is this: Jon Hotten JONATHAN CAPE £2,000 he put down on his that Dennis Dunaway was just crazy, preposterous, theatre of the absurd, California dreaming. first house, while his dismay Y Alice Cooper’s bassist for a few proto-goth, prog-psych, beer-addled It only seems five at Weller breaking up The Jam years, but you’d be wrong. In many ways, lunatics somehow contrive to ride dead- minutes ago that is largely down to the fact that it was Dennis who conceptualised the chicken-greased wheels to humungous, Jon Hotten they were about to earn some monster that Alice Cooper became. worldwide, megabucks rock stardom. undertook work real dosh. Prior to their 1975 dissolution, Alice Enjoy ‘cubic fun’ along the way. Collide experience at It’s unlikely the group will Cooper was a quintet fronted by vocalist with brick wall. Kerrang! magazine reunite – Weller and Buckler Vincent Furnier, and the Alice character So what went wrong? Overwork, as the art editor’s ‘lackey boy’, haven’t spoken since 1983. Vince ultimately chose to inhabit was a overindulgence, overambition. The usual but his timing was perfect. But there’s no bitterness here. construct of the five members of that suspects. Where the Cooper divorce was These were the over-the-top ■■■■■■■■■■ original band. Dennis, meanwhile, especially acrimonious was that it could 1980s and Kerrang!’s pages were David Stubbs was at Vince/Alice’s side from the very be construed as, at best, a betrayal, and full of the big-haired, big- beginning. They ran together on their high at worst, wholesale identity theft. The mouthed likes of Mötley Crüe, Andrew school track team and discovered Dali fiercely loyal Coopers stuck with Alice Poison, Van Halen… Slave Raider, Matheson together in an art class under Mrs Sloan, through tough times, but then he bailed, even. A fertile hunting ground Sick On You EBURY PUBLISHING the unsung educator who introduced essentially smothering whatever collective for any budding rock journo Rock’n’roll at its disastrous them to the music of Bob Dylan and the legacy the band might have acquired for worth his salt. best. artistic truism that ‘When everything is themselves with his own enduring and Set in Los Angeles in 1988, My Whatever the likes of Rocky Life And The Beautiful Music is an would have you believe, no one screaming, nothing is sceaming.’ Take substantial individual celebrity. off-kilter, part-autobiographical loves a winner. It’s the tales of that, modern metal producers. There could be huge bitterness within account of the hedonistic grand ambitions gone massively, Ultimately, Dennis and Vince were these pages, but there isn’t any. Long Hollywood rock scene of the hilariously to shit that have close, from the very genesis of their before Dennis and Alice were rock stars, time. Hotten, who broke the us rooting for the poor sucker mutual musical aspirations, and while the they were friends, and it’d take a good deal legendary Nikki Sixx/Matthew telling them. rest of the band were to fine-tune various more than a one-sided business decision Trippe doppelgänger story (see Andrew Matheson formed aspects of Alice Cooper’s trademark of 40 years ago to alter that. A killer tale, p54), uses this as a springboard proto-punks The Hollywood shtick, it was Dennis, a surrealistic thrillingly told. Love it to death. for all kinds of surreal musings. Brats in London in 1971, armed DENNIS DUNAWAY visionary if ever there was one, who ■■■■■■■■■■ Mysterious female characters with a rock’n’roll manifesto customarily had the vocalist’s ear. Ian Fortnam – Iris, Brenna, Lana – flit in and The Clash must’ve been eyeing out of the narrative, as does up, an eye-popping wardrobe, 104 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM 91dfef07-4460-4aa1-be72-452d094bbe96.indd 104 6/4/2015 10:38:24 AM unlimited youthful arrogance Their unlikely rise and appeal and a genuinely exciting vision. is examined here, chiefly What follows is a whirlwind through Jeremy Cunningham, of terrible decisions, squalor, their crimson-locked bassist violent crowds, an indifferent and creative controller, as he music industry, itchy nether gathers the threads of the band’s infections and plenty of scattered archive. bickering. And it’s brilliant. With his nervous cackle It helps that Matheson is echoing throughout, a first-class storyteller, bringing Cunningham and co – including the rock scene of the day his proud, scene-stealing gruesomely to life and gleefully parents – begin as Waterboys recounting his own callow youth wannabes. Or, more specifically, with a mixture of disdain and McDermott’s Two Hours admiration. Someone needs to wannabes, who needle the make a film of this immediately. British music press just by ■■■■■■■■■■ their very existence and lead to Emma Johnston Cunningham sending the NME a turd in a box after another Tarja Turunen particularly snide review. Luna Park Ride EARMUSIC With the zeitgeist on Ex-Nightwish soprano’s live their side, they achieved a recordings from 2011. consecutive run of seven gold The music albums and a Glasto headline industry may be – all despite the usual band struggling, but tensions, desperate addictions there’s a thin and calling Michael Eavis a cunt. line between A good story, well told – maximising respect is due all round. revenue from an act and taking ■■■■■■■■■■ advantage of loyal fans. This live Jo Kendall album features a performance from Tarja’s 2011 world tour – The Who you may well know it as it’s the Live At Shea Stadium 1982 soundtrack to the DVD footage EAGLE ROCK previously sold to you in the Shepherd’s Bush premium-priced ‘media edition’ entertainment from the of her 2012 live album Act I. decade that style overlooked. That DVD, whose content is Daltrey does his also included here, was ‘filmed mic-flinging by fans’ – a pretty transparent acrobatics in a way of getting cheap content, shiny Le Bon suit. and when a fair amount of it Townshend’s is out of focus and shot from windmills are dodgy angles, you may prefer to inhibited by striped balloon stick to fan videos on YouTube. pants. Watching The Who The CD of ‘bonus’ material decked out in the trappings of might be of slightly more a New Romantic scene they had interest to Nightwish/Tarja precious little affinity with at completists, but does your Shea Stadium in 1982, average punter need new live supporting their 10th album, It’s versions of In For A Kill or I Walk Hard, is disconcerting; they’re Alone when they’re spirited a band painfully out of time. enough as ever, but barely any They knew it too – this was the different from live material first of many farewell tours – but that’s already available? only the synth-funk chant of ■■■■■■■■■■ Eminence Front and Entwhistle’s Johnny Sharp Genesis-y Dangerous sound dated. Like hashish and Bruce The Levellers Forsyth, the eternal whip-crack A Curious Life DANDY FILMS of Pinball Wizard, Who Are You Stirring stuff from the folk- (dedicated to “all the people in punk front line.