A NIGHT TO REMEMBER
With the continued absence of proper gigs, Classic Rock writers reminisce about some of their most memorable gig-going experiences. Cue vivid, nostalgia-soaked memories of Jimmy Page
& Robert Plant, David Bowie, Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers, Europe and more…
EUROPE
Bursa Kültürpark Open Air Theatre, Turkey
June 9, 2015
When you hear ‘rock concert in Turkey’, chances are you think ‘Istanbul’. So it was with curiosity that I joined Europe on this leg of their 2015 tour, on the back of War Of Kings (part of their latterday, de-80sifiying rock renaissance). How much of an appetite would there be for them in this relatively orthodox pocket of northwest Turkey?
In a festival line-up composed of Turkish pop and classical acts, Europe were the sole rock band. The space was packed. The bar sold only popcorn, soft drinks and candyfloss. In the UK you’d expect the audience to consist largely of people who remember the band from the 80s. Here the dominant group was 20-somethings in War Of Kings, AC/DC and Slayer T-shirts, who enthused about Europe, Iron Maiden and Cinderella. For some it was their first gig.
Europe played superbly, but it was the crowd that made this feel special. From the beefy, ‘grown-up classic rock’ new material to classics like Carrie, the response was one of giddy delight – and all without a drop of alcohol in sight.
From the side of the stage, as the opening synths of encore The Final Countdown sounded, I watched Joey Tempest ready himself to stride back out. He looked happier than almost any rock star I’ve ever seen. And as the cheers swelled and confetti cannons exploded, it seemed that that happiness had spread to everyone.
Polly Glass
DAVID BOWIE
Wembley Empire Pool
May 8, 1976
For us teenage space cadets it was exciting enough just visiting London for the first time, and weird sitting three rows from the front of what’s now Wembley Arena. And then a woman’s eyeball was cut open with a razor. Not really. This was Un Chien Andalou, the 1928 Bunuel-Dali surrealist film that served as Bowie’s ‘support act’. The instant it finished, there Bowie was, just yards away in the something more artful than flesh. The Thin White Duke in black and white, spectral yet glowing against a stark, sparse backdrop that made you feel like you’d been dropped into a forest of shadows, punctuated by blinding light, the music bringing the heat.
The Isolar tour primarily promoted Station To Station, and the sheer drama of those train noises and the sinister opening notes as Bowie prowled, a wilfully bloodless enigma, was an out-of-body experience. The train got faster. From Suffragette City to Fame, from Stay to Rebel Rebel, guitarist Carlos Alomar and the Raw Moon band were chucking lightning at us. It would have been a buzz to see Bowie for the first time under any circumstances. To see him being not Ziggy but this chilly Weimar vampire was one magical moment.
Chris Roberts
JOHNNY THUNDERS
& THE HEARTBREAKERS
High Wycombe Nag’s Head
March 3, 1977
For many, The Heartbreakers was their first chance to see two living New York Dolls after Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan’s new band found themselves stranded in London after the ill-fated Anarchy tour.
From those first Roxy club appearances causing
“loony-bin scenes” (their description), Thunders, Nolan, singer-guitarist Walter Lure and bassist Billy Rath towered above the punk hopefuls, playing their self-described “combination of the fifties and eighties rock‘n’roll”, stamped with four disparate personalities that screamed: ‘classic line-up’.
After the recently formed Siouxsie And The Banshees, witnessing The Heartbreakers in a suburban pub loft was unbelievably exciting as they careered through songs slated for L.A.M.F., including Chinese Rocks, Born To Lose, Going Steady and Get Off The Phone, with jaundiced panache, New York street swagger and innate professionalism not yet dissipated by heroin. Thunders gyrating through The Contours’ Do You Love Me a few feet away, sans guitar, remains one of the great visions of rock‘n’roll’s purest essence it’s been my pleasure to witness. “I’ve never been so happy in my life,” he told me later.
On this magical night, Johnny was fronting the greatest rock‘n’roll band in the world.
Kris Needs
THE CRAMPS
London Hammersmith Palais
May 28, 1984
The departure from the band of guitarist Kid Congo Powers and the rescheduling of this tour from January to May didn’t so much create disappointment as generate heightened anticipation. And with the release of Smell Of Female The Cramps were not only back on vinyl, but also countering the bootleggers who’d filled the void during their prolonged absence.
With Powers’s replacement Ike Knox bedded in, The Cramps turned up the heat on an already sweltering night. As six-string dominatrix Poison Ivy coaxed lysergic emanations from her instrument, singer Lux Interior soon went topless and feral, while the soldout audience of punks, rockabillies, goths and in-betweeners responded with a unified frenzy of dancing atypical of a London crowd.
Covering Shorty Long’s Devil With A Blue Dress via Mitch Ryder and delivering a genuinely unhinged reading of the Count Five’s Psychotic Reaction, The Cramps were both history lesson and cathartic release. But it was with their own material that they defined their aesthetic of deviancy and delinquency, not least on the call-to-arms You Got Good Taste and Human Fly’s fuzzed-up schlock-horror.
Unrelentingly thrilling, this is the night The Cramps corrupted a whole new generation into the joys of neat, undiluted primal rock’n’roll.
Julian Marszalek
JIMMY PAGE AND ROBERT PLANT
London Weekend Television Studios
August 25, 1994
The chain of events that conspired to put me in the audience for the this show were unlikely and serendipitous, but it all started when I wrote off my bicycle during a downpour on the Euston Road, and culminated at LWT studios on London’s South Bank, watching an MTV show that was anything but unplugged.
The performance that eventually became the
Unledded album was bewildering in the best possible way. This wasn’t a meek, introverted take on a band’s catalogue. It was a dazzling reinvention of songs from it, throwing in at various points a hurdy gurdy, some banjo, former Cure guitarist Porl Thompson, Indian singer Najma Akhtar (on The Battle Of Evermore), Hossam Ramzy’s Egyptian Ensemble and the London Metropolitan Orchestra. It was vivid, and uproarious, and surprisingly loud.
Led Zeppelin were always Jimmy Page’s band, but for one glorious night they felt like Robert Plant’s; his backing band, his love of North African music embedded in the best moments. And Kashmir was the pinnacle; 12 minutes of mystery and menace, with dazed audience members looking at each other as if to confirm the actuality of their presence. I didn’t get to Zeppelin’s London O2 show 13 years
later, but it can’t have been this good.
Fraser Lewry
THE POLICE
Exeter Routes
December 18, 1978
Exeter was 11 miles away, and we had to wait until Graham Burch had passed his driving test to go there. And we were pretty excited, because not only were the headliners Alberto Y Los Trios Paranoias at their peak (charting with Heads Down No Nonsense Mindless Boogie, from their great Skite album) but also The Police were supporting. They weren’t punk,
particularly, but their three great A&M singles had come out that year (the third, So Lonely, was still hanging around the back end of the charts), and radio and TV presenter Anne Nightingale was a big fan.
My memory of the Police’s set is a blur. They seemed insanely loud (they probably weren’t) and they were incredibly fierce, determined in the short term to win over the audience and in the long term to rule the world. I remember, for some reason, that they played their debut single Fall Out, perhaps because even then it seemed incongruous in a new wave/reggae set. They did all of their singles, and they were great. And after a great set from poet John Dowie and a fantastic headline one from the Albertos, everyone came on stage for the Albertos’ encore, Fuck You, during which Sting played a large placard.
It was my first gig, and remains one of the best I’ve ever seen,
David Quantick
PETER GREEN’S FLEETWOOD MAC
Huddersfield Tehnical College
June 16, 1968
I don’t recall much in the way of proper details, but I really can still remember feeling the buzz of being just feet from the band. I mean, I wasn’t a virgin when it came to proper gigs, having seen The Nice at Leeds Poly and watched, open-mouthed, Keith Emerson rocking and sticking knives into the keys of his Hammond organ (bloody hell!), but there was something so effortlessly cool about Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac (as they were billed then), and especially Peter Green. Thinking about it now, I’m convinced that I must have felt dizzyingly elated when they played songs I had been playing over and over again for weeks previously – Shake Your Moneymaker, My Heart Beat Like A Hammer, The World Keep On Turning, Long Grey Mare – and others that were thrillingly new to me. And Peter Green was easily the second-best guitarist I’d ever heard. One thing I do remember quite clearly is wondering why the other guitarist, Jeremy Spencer, started at least three numbers with the same slide lick, and those songs were pretty much the same tune but with different lyrics. I was learning to play bass, and loved watching John McVie, partly because he was playing stuff that I could play just as well as him (I thought), which wasn’t the case with my other infatuation at the time, Jack Bruce, with Cream, and partly because this guy was on John Mayall’s Beano album!
While memories of that gig are vague, there’s enough to remind me that for me it really was a pivotal experience.
Paul Henderson
QUEENSRŸCHE
London Town & Country Club
November 9, 1988 1988 was a watershed year for progressively tooled heavy metal concept records. Iron Maiden released Seventh Son For A Seventh Son, and at the third attempt Queensrÿche broke through, with their storytelling masterpiece, Operation: Mindcrime.
The Seattle band bowled up at the T&C (now The Forum) and played a set full of power, authority and intent. Many years afterwards, in the pages of Classic Rock, Queensrÿche singer Geoff Tate said this show was a “legendary” moment in the band’s fortunes. They played six songs including Queen Of The Reich and Walk In The Shadows, before riotous scenes greeted I Remember Now, the intro to Operation: Mindcrime. They played a large chunk of that red-hot new album, beginning with Anarchy X and Revolution Calling and heading into the home straight with Breaking The Silence, I Don’t Believe In Love and Eyes Of A Stranger, then an encore of The Lady Wore Black and Take Hold Of The Flame.
Historically speaking, this was the right band, with the right album at exactly the right time, playing to an audience who knew they were witnessing a precious moment in hard rock history.
Dave Ling