If ever see the day when all innocence is gone/Then what have we become

Wednesday 12 November - recorded at Walton Castle in Somerset and both released on the same day, Thunder has finally delivered the goods with their part 3 of 3 EP, The Joy Of Six, and their ninth studio album, Bang! The album consists of 12 tracks:

1. On The Radio - opens the album with a typical heavy Thunder riff and lyrics digging at the two-faced nature of the music business, talk about biting the hand that feeds...


2. Stormwater - is a Zep style (think Celebration Day) musing on Hurricane Katrina ploughing through New Orleans.


3. Carol Ann - is the morning after the night before when a guy wakes up after a one-night stand to find a woman's number on the back of his hand, and he can't remember what happened. "are you a babe, or do you look like a man?"


4. Retribution - is a languid, jazzy lament of lost love.


5. Candy Man - a classic Thunder stomp in the style of The Rolling Stones. Plenty of na-na-na's and a sing-along-a-chorus. Fantastic guitar work by the boy Morley.


6. Have Mercy - a bluesy, banjo-led, slide-guitar number with a sprinkling of voodoo harmonica. This could be the new single from The Answer or some other contemporary southern-fried rock outfit.


7. Watching Over You - is a power ballad, could be Aerosmith or Bon Jovi.


8. Miracle Man - is a powerful rocking song with lyrics akin to Genesis's Jesus He Knows Me, but way heavier. I can just see the fans singing along to this one.


9. Turn Left At California - the band go acoustic for this traveller's tale. More banjo and harmonica. Quite why he's heading for the borderline we never find out. This is probably the most 'country' track on the album.


10. Love Sucks - The first notes are pure Guns 'n' Roses, epic wailing Slash-style guitar work. It also features great harmonising vocals, a funky bass line, fantastic guitar work, and great keyboards from Ben Matthews. A stand out track.


11. One Bullet - is an acoustic rebuke of society's spiralling apathy to gun crime and the general loss of innocence among our children, "Now he's wrapping his fist 'round a gun/And somebody dies".


12. Honey - Back to classic Thunder hard rock for the closing track which is about chucking his woman out of his life, "So take your Prada and your Jimmy Choo's/That warpaint that covers your lines/Dumb magazines, you can stick them all/Right where the sun never shines". So, not bitter then?

Yes, there are still shades of 1990 here but Thunder continue to evolve their sound and songs and once more prove to be at the forefront of classic British rock. I highly recommend buying this album.

Wanted to die this morning when I opened up my eyes/Exploding head, on top of my bed

Friday 7 November - first stop, The Duchess to take a punt on three bands that we haven't heard of before. Leading the charge tonight was York heavy metal band, With One Last Breath. They cranked up with an ominous rumble of bass and an ear-splitting scream that sent my two colleagues scrambling for the ear-plugs. These guys are loud, these guys are heavy! For the slower bits think Deftones. For the faster stuff, think Trivium or Dragonforce. I couldn't hear a word but they made fantastic noise. WOLB are a 4 piece consisting of; Sam Graves (lead vocals/guitars), Jake Holmes (bass/vocals), Joe Graves (guitars/vocals), and Chris Bowling (drum). We particularly liked the bass player's style. I would definitely see these guys again. So a pretty good start to the evening.

Unfortunately, they proved a hard act to follow. Next up were another York band, The Bitter Image, another four piece consisting of; Dom Wells (lead vocals/guitar), Jonny Wells (guitar/vocals), Jim Buck (bass/vocals), and Dom Smith (drums). I'm hard put to describe their sound, kinda of heavy rock but a bit more melodic. The drumming was excellent; the guitar playing was competent but not up to the standard set by WOLB. Overall I was disappointed.

The final act came from Ireland. In Case of Fire were the winners of the MTV Spanking New For 2008 and have been touring with 30 Seconds to Mars, Queens Of The Stone Age, and Funeral For A Friend. They've also played with Ash and Biffy Clyro. ICOF are a power trio and the line up is; Steven Robinson (vocals/guitar), Mark Williamson (bass), and Colin Robinson (drums). For three young folk they make a huge noise. The vocals seemed rather muddy though and the songs were mostly short, about 3-4 minutes, and lacked the complexity and richness that WOLB had shown. They were better than the Bitter Image but failed to surpass the performance of WOLB.

As it was still early when we emerged from The Duchess, we sauntered over to The Roman Bath to catch the second half of the performance by Yorkshire covers band Left Hand Drive (sorry couldn't find a BeBoFaceSpace link). LHD are three blokes, lead guitar and vocals, a bass player, and a drummer. Sadly, by this time the beer was flowing freely, but here is what I can remember of them playing: Bad Company (Can't Get Enough), Cream (Crossroads), Then Lizzy (Whiskey In The Jar), Muddy Waters (Hoochie Coochie Man) Jimi Hendrix (Hey Joe), Bo Diddley (Who Do You Love), Fleetwood Mac (Black Magic Woman). The lead guitar/vocalist was extremely good and I would definitely like to see a full performance.

One bullet, one gun, one dead but we all bleed some

Friday 31 October - and I started off in Ye Olde Starre Inn in York for my tea and to meet up with a few folk from work. I was a pleasant enough start to the evening but I had to break off near nine o'clock to get to The Roman Bath where two of us were going to watch Raw Gallagher, a Rory Gallagher tribute band playing only his music, the blues, rock, slide and acoustic from the early days of Taste, through to the 70's and 80's, up to his final work.

Now I have a pretty wide knowledge of music in general and like to think that I can talk reasonable coherently about most artists, but I've never heard any of the work of the Irish blues/rock guitarist, Rory Gallagher.

I have to confess that I didn't recognise a single song that the band played, but hey, they played them all really well and I thoroughly enjoyed the show. I did manage to blag the set-list so here is what they played; Messin' With The Kid, Bullfrog Blues, Moonchild, Walk On Hot Coals, A Million Miles Away, Shadow Play, Bad penny, Laundromat, Follow Me, Continental Op, I Aint No Saint, Tattoo'd Lady, Crest Of A Wave, Philby, For The Last Time, Shin Kicker, Calling Card, Used To Be, In Your town, Secret Agent, Sinner Boy, and a medley of Fuel To The Fire/Toredown/What In The World/I Take What I Want.

Raw Gallagher are a 3 piece band from South Yorkshire comprising Steve White on lead guitar and main vocals, Ron Villers on bass, and John Moloney on drums. Their website seems to have vaporised so I can't give you a link, but I do highly recommend watching them.

Saturday 1 November - and we are off to Fibbers for the first time in a long while. Since we were last here the place has been refurbished, well the bar counter has been replaced and there are some bar stools, and some of the art work has come down, and there is screen over the stage showing forthcoming gigs, and only one beer on tap, Tetley's (I don't count Guinness as a beer). It's a bit dire actually. Still first band up were 98 Pages and crikey they were good. I can't find a MyFace page. Rooted in Blues, their raw sound is certainly a welcome blast of fresh air. They're a 3 piece, lead guitar, bass and drums. Imagine Jack White on lead and bass and a decent drummer. Wow. Very good and I highly recommended that you check out this band.

The headline act were Black Diamond Heavies who are straight out of Nashville, Tennessee and sound like a freight train derailing. John Wesley Myers on vocals and keyboards, and Van Campbell on drums produce a punk-country/voodoo/garage blues/gospel revivalist noise. Myers is actually the son of a Baptist preacher, looks like Iggy Pop and plays like John Lord. Van bashes the skins like John Henry Bonham. Mad as a box of frogs. For an encore they trashed their way through Nutbush City Limits. Fantastic stuff.

As the band left the stage and the background music started to pump up, the doors opened allowing a flood of Goths and lederhosen-clad Austrians in for club night. No probs with the Goths (I look like Nosteratu in a bad light myself), but the Austrians were just a tad freaky, and so we legged it across to the centre of town and The Roman Bath in time for a final pint (of decent beer) and the last twenty minutes of Van Hooligan. VH are a Rock covers band from Doncaster, South Yorkshire, who play covers by Van Halen, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Motorhead, Judas Priest, Sabbath, Motley Crue, Scorpions etc. The crowd were very lively and at one point a chap fell through a set of stacked speakers and toppled a lighting rig. Many hands helped to haul everything back into place. Nobody hurt, nothing appeared to be damaged. All a bit of a comic end to the evening.

I wanna run/I want to hide/I wanna tear down the walls/That hold me inside

Saturday 25 October - I've just had a very enjoyable, long weekend. I was visited by an extremely old friend (i.e. I've known him a very long time, not that he's incredibly ancient!) and his wife and three young daughters. They travelled all the way from Portsmouth to York to spend some time with me and my daughters, arriving around tea-time on Friday.

On Saturday we went to my grandson's sixth birthday party in Tadcaster where I had great fun joining in with the children's party games. In the evening my friend and I went out to the Roman Tin Tub to watch Storm, the Huddersfield 4-piece rock covers band. I've reviewed them before and they're very good. From memory we were treated to: Van Halen (Jump), The Jam (Town Called Malice), The Darkness (I Believe In A Thing Called Love), Prince (Purple Rain), The Who (Won't Get Fooled Again), Bryan Adams (Summer of '69), Thin Lizzy (The Boys Are Back In Town), The Undertones (Teenage Kicks), U2 (Where The Streets Have No Name), Wilson Pickett/The Commitments (Mustang Sally), Bon Jovi (Bed of Roses), Buzzcocks (Ever Fallen in Love), Alvin and the Chipmunks? (Let's Do The Time Warp Again), Madness (Baggy Trousers), as well as tracks by Coldplay, The Clash and The Beatles, and a bunch of medley's. There was some audience participation when three ladies were dragged into the band's area and asked to play tamborines and supply backing vocals for Mustang Sally. Sadly, the band suffered a 'Black Lace' moment in performing Let's Do The Time Warp Again, when trying to encourage the audience to come up with rude words. Everyone was curiously shy about swearing into a microphone. Still, the band recovered their credibility enough to receive shouts of 'encore' at the end, and we all went home happy.

On Sunday we trod the tourist trail in York taking in the city walls and the Jorvik Viking Centre. We also indulged in an activity known as geocaching which basically involved using a GPS tracker combined with small clues to locate caches of small items that other geocachers (or whatever the collective noun is) had hidden, usually in places of interest. These items then get moved to other caches in different locations. It's a bit like a treasure hunt. If you want to know more take a look at www.geocaching.com. It's not as nerdy as it sounds and a couple of us have now been sucked in. We did some more geocaching on Monday combined with a little bit of shopping in the city, rounding off the day with a roast dinner plus trimmings. A fantasic time was had by all and it was a bit sad when they departed for home on Tuesday.

Cos when she sang out that melody/I heard a sound like a backstreet symphony

Saturday 18 October - I wasn't out on Friday (family commitments), but instead braved the crowds on Saturday for the return of a great classic rock covers band, Freeway (on SpaceBook), to the Roman Tin Tub. Freeway consist of; Steve Smurthwaite (vocals), Mark Hopwood (guitars), Pete Harwood (guitars), Colin Paterson (bass), and Paul "Gibbo" Gibbons (drums).

I've reviewed them before but this was the first time that I'd seen the band since the untimely demise of their former drummer, Howard Sparnenn. Once more they really produced the goods, kicking off with Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak, and powering on with the likes of; Whitesnake (Slide It In, Crying In The Rain), Black Sabbath (Paranoid), Judas Priest (Breaking The Law), Queen (Tie Your Mother Down), Cream (Crossroads), Thunder (Back Street Symphony), Free (Wishing Well), Bad Co. (Can't Get Enough Of Your Love), a medley of Deep Purple (Hush, Strange Kind Of Woman, Black Night, Woman From Tokyo), more Lizzy (The Boys Are Back In Town, Rosalie), UFO (Doctor, Doctor), Kinks (in the style of Van Halen) (You Really Got Me), and Guns 'n'; Roses (Sweet Child Of Mine).

Pete Harwood has a new band project, Morpheus Rising, and I'd be very interesting in checking them out sometime. Meanwhile, Freeway are back at the Tin Tub on Saturday 29 November, Boxing Day Friday 26 December, and Saturday 17 January.

Cold sweat, hot sweat, fast asleep in the crow’s nest

Friday 10 October - Ah ha, here comes the weekend, and tonight we are off to The Roman Bath to watch The Penetrators. No, not a punk band, rather a classic rock covers band covering songs from the '60s to the '00s. But I recognise these chaps setting up their equipment and the chalk board tells the story, it's The Mojos, again! Apparently one of the members of The Penetrators had a sudden family illness and they had to cancel at the last moment so Dave, Andy, Jon, Phil and Mark stepped up to the... mark (sorry). I wasn't bothered, I really like The Mojos anyway and one of our party was a self-confessed Mojo virgin, so he was in for a great night too.

The Bath got very crowded during the evening and at one point it looked as though we might be crushed when a kebab smelling drunk tried dancing and nearly fell over. Actually, he did fall over later in the evening, falling into the area where the band were playing and narrowly avoiding disaster. We had a brilliant night, with great music and then spent a long while hanging around on the pavement outside, putting the world to rights. I finally crawled into bed at 01:15. Oh my head.

Now. You may be wondering what all this junk is that's started appearing on the right-hand side of my blog. LibraryThing is a social website for recording the books you own. Listal is a similar site covering a variety of media; books, music, movies etc. I'm using these sites to record the books and music that I own. Why? Well, if my house burns down, assuming I'm not in it at the time, I can reconstruct my library and my music collection. Plus it gives friends the opportunity to see what I have in case they want to borrow stuff. Both of these are work-in-progress, I have over 400 CDs, so you'll have to wait a while to see the complete collection. Watch this space.

And the same when autumn comes/Cold air I breathe in my lungs

Wednesday 8 October - OK, I wasn't out last weekend, so I'll treat you instead to a roundup of the platters that have been gracing the decks at Scary Towers. There's a few, so I'm not going to bore you with a track by track review, just a general overview of each.

No particular order but the first one on the pile is Long-View's Mercury with a bonus CD of re-mixes Subversions. We caught Longview (they've dropped the hyphen) at The Duchess on Friday 26 September, and jolly fine they were too. In fact I enjoyed them so much that I didn't buy a CD there and then. I went to t'interweb and ordered their album from (LAYP.COM, re-arrange these letters) where the album was £7.99 but only £4.99 if you purchased it with the bonus re-mix CD. How mad is that? Anyway, the re-mixes are OK, nothing to write home about, but the album itself is absolutely storming. Think very early Coldplay or anthemic Embrace at their peak. Top buy.

On the same night we saw Lecorum, whom we had seen before, I really like these chaps, so much so that I did dip my hand into my wallet to purchase a pre-release version of their Cartoon EP. A piano-led indie rock band, and I mean that in a good way, these are a bit like early Four Day Hombre. Another good purchase.

Now, the fact that Elbow won the Mercury Music prize 2008 came as no surprise to me as I already have their third and forth albums; Leaders of the Free World, and The Seldom Seen Kid. I was looking forward to listening to their first two offerings; Asleep In The Back, and Cast of Thousands. Sadly these didn't live up to Elbow's later work. I don't mean that they're rubbish, far from it, but they lack the rich texturing and sheer lusciousness of the later two. I think I've been spoilt by listening to them out of order.

At the same time as I acquired Elbow, I also got my hands on the Melvins' (A) Senile Animal, a different kettle of kittens altogether! This is the 2006 release from the American sludge metal band that first formed in the 1980s. I quite liked these but feel I will have to invest more time listening to them. They remind me of Tool or Mastadon, or rather, their sound has obviously influenced these bands 'cos the Melvins came first! More listening required.

Let's go back in time now. I've always longed to get my hands on King Crimson's 'observation' In The Court Of The Crimson King, and it finally bubbled to the top of my 'to buy' list. OK, it's pretty old, originally released in 1969. The band roster at this time comprised: Robert Fripp, Ian McDonald, Greg Lake (he left just prior to the album's release), Michael Giles, and Peter Sinfield. This is the2004 24-bit re-master. Frankly, this could have been released yesterday. The most well-known track is 21st Century Schizoid Man, but surprisingly this is the one track that seems at odds with the rest of the album and has aged accordingly. The rest of this brilliant CD consists of some of the finest jazz/rock fusion I've heard in a long time. Highly recommended.

And so to Laura Marling's Alas I Cannot Swim. What, you might ask, possessed me to make such a left-field purchase? I'm very fussy about my solo female singers. Well it came as a sort of recommendation. I'm a great fan of the highly readable Inspector Alan Banks stories of Peter Robinson. For one thing, the action takes place in the fictional town of Eastvale set in North Yorkshire, so there are lots of references to places in York and Leeds that I'm familiar with. Secondly, Robinson's character plays a lot of music as he solves various crimes, and his musical tastes overlaps my own an awful lot. It's pretty spooky. His latest novel, All the Colours of Darkness, references Laura's album. So I bought it. I can be quite impulsive. It's very good, with a quirky sound and great lyrics. But I don't sing/hum along, so it sort of fails on that score.

Next up two more bands that we've seen recently. The Dodos album Visiter is first off this pile. The Dodos are an American indie band, sometimes labelled freak-country, although I seen/heard a few bands that are a lot more freaky than these! Re-creating their live performances, this is, instrumentally, a rather spare work which means that when the electronic guitar is used, you really feel the benefit. It's a mixture of light psychedelia, intelligent pop, and dirty bluegrass. Long's vocals sometimes leave you wanting more but he really pulls it off in the album's closing track, God? with his nervous quivering and strident cries. Good stuff. The second CD from this clutch is an old classic, Alabama 3's Exile On Coldharbour Lane. Well, I say classic, but I'm not really into the acid-house dance scene, although live I enjoyed them immensely. Maybe that was because their music has seeped into my brain over a number of years (Exile was released in 1997), because I was singing along to Ain't Going to Goa, Woke Up This Morning, and Speed of the Sound of Loneliness (a cover of the John Prine classic). Singing along, so it must be good, even though I baulk at admitting it.

My next purchase was inspired by seeing the pocket-sized guitar wizard(ess), Chantel McGregor play For The Love Of God by Steve Vai. Now I like virtuoso guitar playing but have no albums of this guy, so I bought his 1990 album, Passion And Warfare. Basically this album is fourteen guitar instrumental tracks with a bit of chat/lyric here and there. If you like fretwork onanism (and I do), then this album is an essential purchase. I could listen all day to this stuff, if only there were more tissues in this damn box!

Coming more up to date now, Only By The Night by the Kings of Leon plopped through my letter-box in the last few weeks. It's pretty much what we've come to expect from KoL, especially Crawl, Sex On Fire, and Use Somebody, but I was a bit disappointed. Basically they don't seem to have progressed from their earlier work, this is just Because of the Times volume 2. Not a bad thing, but not a great thing either.

And finally, hot off the CD pressing machine comes, Oasis' Dig Out Your Soul. I've heard some withering comments about Oasis recently, and I know that they tread a fine line between pub rock and Beatles pastiche/homage, crikey, John Lennon himself appears on I'm Outta Time. However, it ain't 'alf bad, in fact it's pretty damn good. OK I could witter on endlessly about Oasis finally reaching the Beatles true psychedelic-era sound, but they do it so well that it sells itself. I don't care if it sounds like they recorded it in a haze of hashish and opium, I like it. There's a bit of George Harrison-like guitar work on I'm Outta Time, Dear Prudence at the end of The Turning, but also a bit of The Who in the mix, and even Pink Floyd on the opener, Bag It Up. So stick yer hands in yer pockets and yer fingers in the air for the return of the champs. Buy it.