Singles Club – Septembers second wave

Singles Club – Septembers second wave

Richard Davies & the Dissidents – ‘Echo Road’ (Bucketful Of Brains)  Excellent grower from a really impressive album ‘Echo Road’ builds via a really earthy swirling keyboard and great barroom vocals the song is excellent for dusty road trips but the real gem here is the B Side and the bands take of the classic Lords tune penned by Tony James and Tory Crimes and whilst I have the Lords on a pedestal this is a pretty impressive take on a classic song and well worth checking out.  To be fair whilst you’re at it go the full hog and bag yourself the album ‘Human Traffic’. Great band great songs.

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ReMission International – ‘TOS2020′ (SPV Records) Wayne Hussey and friends release classic Mission ‘Tower Of Strength’ anthem with Proceeds to charities personally chosen by each contributor. There’s nothing not to like about a classic song being reinvented for a bunch of great causes and it features a glittering line up with people like Andy Rourke, Billy Duffy, Budgie, Evi Vine, Gary Numan, James Alexander Graham, Jay Aston, Julianne Regan, Kevin Haskins, Kirk Brandon, Lol Tolhurst, Martin Gore, Michael Aston, Michael Ciravolo, Midge Ure, Miles Hunt, Rachel Goswell, Richard Fortus, Robin Finck, Steve Clarke, Tim Palmer, Trentemøller.

With pre-orders already reaching over 40K its a truly outstanding contribution. Spread the word, share, tweet, post it everywhere to tell others about it. Shout it from the rooftops and tell your friends, tell everyone. The digital bundle contains 5 awesome tracks for just £2.99, it all helps those that need it most and the proceeds will be divided and distributed equally among all the beneficiaries. It’s an awesome song always has been and always will be and now its been put to great use.  Keep up with ReMission International  Website | Mission Facebook | Mission Twitter | Mission Instagram |

Fast Eddy – ‘Game Of Love’ (Spaghetty Town Records) A couple of things struck me about this here single.  One, Ted at Spaghetty Town sure does know quality Rock and Roll. Two, Fast Eddy sure do play quality Rock and Roll. The title track is a strut and swagger down the blvd. It’s as confident and cocksure as anything you’ll hear all year these cats know they have a swag bag full of top tunes and from the great vocals to the big singalong piano-driven middle eight it’s fuckin’ huge sounding and I mean grande canyon huge sounding.  The flip side is another great tune but a little something different.  It’s hard to pigeon hole these guys it’s catchy and radio-friendly but there’s an edge and a tension in a sort of Afghan Whigs way.  The B Side gets it for me but by a whisker.  Check em out Fast Eddy will make a dent – trust me.  Facebook / Instagram

Poison Boys – ‘Mean Queen’ (Hobo Wolfman Records)  Don’t be sneaking out no new 7″ singles without consulting the RPM Singles Club with the news cmon boys that’s just not fair especially when it’s one of our favourite bands from the good ole US of A. From the opening engine roar this is a sleazy slice of punk rock n roll. Its got the Stooges fueling the engine and that guitar break sounds like they’re in the room with me it’s so alive.  Awesome tune (not that I would ever doubt it) and it’s backed by a cover of the Jerry Nolan ‘Take A Chance With Me’ so what’s not to like?  Cool cats that just ooze quality and a single you should most definitely have in your collection and hopefully a sign that an LP is on the way!

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“Mean Queen” is a celebration of bad ass women, queens, and sex workers everywhere. Make a donation to www.swop-chicago.org to support current and former sex workers, who have been hit extra hard since the start of the covid-19 pandemic.

DEAD DIRTY DINOSAURS – ‘Revenge’ (Riot Records) A restrained, slow burner with a raw, loud, and abrasive guitar riff with a chilled vocal its a smolderer that burrows into your ear.  This Brisbane three-piece might be onto something other than having a great band name they can knock together a pretty good noise between them.  I guess the only thing now is I want to hear more. So, if you’d be so kind send over a few other tunes or the album would be nice. But as far as introductions go this is impressive. Facebook / Twitter / Instagram 

 

 

 

 

The Richmond Sluts – ‘Walkin’ Tall’ (Rock Box Records) Always a good day when The Sluts strut into your life with a new earworm. What a cocksure slab of Rock and Roll this is.  It has swagger and that early ’70s Stones strut that a lot of bands attempt but fall short of but not The Richmond Sluts.  They nail this from the solo on the geetah to the reverb-heavy vocal that sounds like too many late nights and cigarettes n whisky.  A real tonic in these tough times. Three and a half minutes of pure unadulterated Rock and Roll good times.  All hail the Richmond Sluts.

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Ben Wood & The Bad Ideas – ‘Black’ (Back2Forward Records) With a rapid steady beat this is a little belter.  A right ray of sunshine.  I was expecting something altogether different but this uptempo ditty came banging out of the speakers and I like it, I like it a lot.

Just when you’re waiting for something along comes a bolt out of the blue and whilst its nothing original its quality.

 

 

Wanted Noise – ‘Go Get’ (self release) San Diego what’s up?  Surf/skate punks have a brand new single for your consumption.  It’s upbeat and in keeping with the whole sound you’d expect from a bunch of young guns into skating and surfing.   Bandcamp

 

Heap – ‘EP’ (Rave On Records)  Who needs Westerberg and The Replacements? OH OK, so that’s a lie but in the absence of such an iconic Rock and Roll band the void is ably filled by the likes of Beach Slang and for a brief period Gaslight Anthem well you can throw Heap into that mix.  Coming across like a latterday Westerberg with all the right roots rock and roll moves and refrains Heap have penned three really strong tunes on this here EP. Its dive bar rock and roll from the heart its got dirt under those fingernails and a book of stories in their hearts -Well worth checking out.

 

 

 

The Jailbirds – ‘Dull My Brain’ (Golden Robot Records) This three-piece mix up some cock rock gang vocals with some big bluesy 80s influenced Hard rock chops.  Guns n Roses or more specifically Slash sound like they were a big influence.

A really confident new track from the Canadian trio will no doubt turn some heads in the classic rock circles.  Check em out here

Smarts – ‘Small World’ (Anti fade)  Australia has consistently been churning out some of the best music for quite some time now and we’re constantly turning up bands on our radar that are impressing us with their releases and Anti Fade are constantly pushing the boundaries with a lot of the cassette releases and the ever helpful Bandcamp platform who it has to be said are championing alternative music and not just beating them as a cash cow we find ourselves with another Melbourne band Smarts and their four-track cassette ‘Small World’ which is somewhere between Devo, Tubeway army and a whole host of punk rock band we love.  Don’t hang about though because the four songs run in at just a hairs breath over four minutes from the opening ‘Smart Man’ and its robotic Numan like mood to the frantic head fuck of ‘Smart World’ to their ‘Golden Arches’ and final hurrah of Devo like ‘Don’t Slap The Hand’  Smarts are smart and you should try some. Here

 

The Wake – ‘Hammer Hall’ (Blaylox Records) Get your Goth on kids this is as dark and Goth like as you could possibly get without actually being a member of the Sisters Of Mercy jammin’ with Robert Smith on a couple of Bauhaus tunes.  ME, I love a bit of Goff and this is really well done and is a really decent track.

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POP CULTURE SCHLOCK at RPM: Exhibit B – Rock On! Annual 1980

POP CULTURE SCHLOCK at RPM: Exhibit B – Rock On! Annual 1980

What’s that musty smell? Ah yes, it’s emanating from the veritable feast of vintage collectables housed in the Pop Culture Schlock archive. For your delectation today I take you back to the Christmas of 1979; a seminal decade of music about to come to an end and give way to the dawn of a more brash, more brazen ten year period…

 

If you were a good, music-loving boy or girl in 1979 and had a.) done well in school, and; b.) not scratched your big brother’s vinyl, then there was a good chance that you’d find the Rock On! Annual 1980 nestled under the Christmas tree in your modest living room.

 

“The Rock What Annual?” I hear you exclaim, and you shouldn’t be embarrassed at your lack of knowledge on this subject because, truth be told, Rock On! magazine was a short-lived, oft-forgotten publication… if you’d ever heard of it at all.

 

Rock On! magazine debuted with an issue cover-dated May 1978. Debbie Harry featured on its cover and the mag – costing a whole 25p – promised a healthy mix of punk, new wave, heavy metal, and prog rock. It kept its promise too as, over the course of seven eclectic issues, Rock On! dished out features and photo spreads on a dizzying cadre of top musical combos; from Status Quo to Sham 69, The Clash to KISS, Rush to The Rezillos. Meat Loaf graced a cover, Ozzy, too, until Issue 7, with Jimmy Pursey as its cover star, and cover-dated November 1978, when Rock On! disappeared from newsagent shelves. The editorial in that final issue wrote of the outrage of cutting off such a desirable publication in its prime but, if anything, Rock On! was a victim of its own blurring of genre lines: readers seemingly wanting specialist publications dedicated to singular strands of the rock ‘n’ roll world rather than this ambitious crossover style.

 

That final editorial, though, did offer some hope for the future; stating that it was the last Rock On! “in its present form”. Fast forward to around a year later and, in the Autumn of 1979, the true final piece of the Rock On! jigsaw arrived in shops and catalogues to complete the punk ‘n’ prog rocking picture.

With a scorching hot live photo of Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott on the cover, Rock On! Annual 1980 (price – £2.00) may well have been jostling for attention on the shelves alongside big-hitting television and film spin-off annuals, but it certainly looked the most badass. It was, the cover screamed, packed with pictures, facts, and quizzes on your favourite rock bands. It did not disappoint.

 

The heady mix of photo spreads and more in-depth features on select bands really did make Rock On! stand out from its competitors, and this annual amps that angle right up to eleven. The first photo spread was a “Tribute to Vocal Power!!!” (yes, with three exclamation marks) and featured cool live action shots of Joe Strummer, Johnny Rotten, Cherie Currie, Pete Townsend, Willy DeVille, Graham Parker, Joan Jett, and Mick Jagger. A good start, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Next up, a photo diary detailing a “hard band” going “soft” as The Stranglers met their devoted fans, followed by a quartet of stinging live shots of “the band the critics love to hate”, Status Quo. Rock On!’s attitude to those Quo critics could be “summed up in two fingers” readers were informed.

 

With barely a pause for breath, a six-page A-Z of Heavy Metal feature detailed the prime acts in the genre, from AC/DC to, erm, Wishbone Ash. A-W, then. A few curious names in this run-down, too: Prism, Quartz, and Mahogany Rush rubbing shoulders with the expected likes of Whitesnake, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and, a firm favourite on the turntable at RPM HQ, Uriah Heep. A “Heads Down Heavy Metal Quiz” followed: a select question being “On Your Feet Or On Your Knees was a double live album for which heavy metal superstars?”

 

A Ten Years of Genesis feature followed, the first in a series of in-depth essays by John Tobler. His similar two-page spread on the history of Queen followed, as did those dedicated to Thin Lizzy, Blue Öyster Cult, Rush, and KISS. The latter, subtitled “Kings of Shock Rock”, wrote of “the forty foot columns of fire that emit from Gene Simmons’ mouth” and, c’mon, if you were eight years old at Xmas 1979 you had every excuse for then falling head over platform heels in love with the idea of the hottest band in the world.

There was a Rock On! reggae report, a fashion guide of sorts where the Quo’s Rick Parfitt spoke of his love of jeans and Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers of his love of raincoats (!), a Hi-Fi buying guide, a feature on sound engineers, a top DJ article covering John Peel and Anne Nightingale, plus one-page specials on Peter Gabriel and Ken Hensley of the Heep.

 

A photo spread of Ian Dury swimming (just your seven shots) padded out the pages, but not before an impressive photo set of live Black Sabbath shots appeared, a Star Cars article featuring Steve Jones, Meat Loaf, Midge Ure, and, ominously, Cozy Powell, a “Cult Heroes” feature detailing the likes of Iggy Pop, Nils Lofgren, Todd Rundgren, Tom Petty, and Bruce Spingsteen, and a “Sex ‘n’ Girls ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll” spread featuring Debbie Harry, Joan Jett, Siouxsie Sioux, Linda Ronstadt, Annie Golden, Poly Styrene, Stevie Nicks, and Rachel Sweet.

 

A “That Was The Year That Was” feature dedicated to 1978 was an obvious leftover from the previous year’s magazine and makes for entertaining if a little sombre reading amongst the other genuinely funny articles. Rock On! was a cool magazine, with its tongue firmly in its cheek and its love of a broad range of music at the forefront of any thinking. Your Uber Rocks, your RPMs are all subconscious descendants of Rock On! magazine.

No annual is complete, however, without a pull-out poster section (even if no kid ever dared pull a poster out of an annual!), and Rock On! Annual 1980 does not disappoint in that department. There are pin-ups of the aforementioned Pursey, Rezillos, Dury, Harry, Clash, and Lynott, plus Bob Geldof, Paul Weller, Freddie Mercury, David Lee Roth, Jon Anderson, Elvis Costello, Paul Stanley, and the Buzzcocks. Great photos too.

 

The Rock On! Annual 1980 may well be an uncommon piece in the average music memorabilia collection, but it is certainly a worthy one. Copies turn up on the secondary market relatively cheaply and, yeah, you should pick one up if you get the chance. The Rock On! staff were most certainly music journalist mavericks, and we’ve all tried to go there, right? Search for this precious, rockin’ tome… or you might never know how Rick Parfitt’s aunt ironed his double denim.

 

Thanks for reading, and for the feedback on my first column on the debut Alice Cooper comic. I’ll be back next month with something suitably archaic that the rock ‘n’ roll world tried to forget. Search for Pop Culture Schlock 365 on Instagram, Twitter & Facebook