Record Store Challenge
Black Star Riders
We give Ricky Warwick and Scott Gorham £50 and take them vinyl shopping. Find out what they bought.
Scott Gorham takes his glasses off so that Classic Rock’s photographer can get some shots of him browsing through the racks in the basement of the record store. But there’s a snag: “I can’t see what records I’m looking at now…” “Don’t worry,” says Ricky Warwick, standing next to him. “Just make sure you’re not browsing through the Gay Techno section.” “You mean the Boys Town section?” I say. “Yeah,” says Gorham. “Like, I thought it said the Boys Are Back In Town section…” The Black Star Riders frontmen crack up laughing. Photos duly taken, Scott retrieves his specs and they go back to browsing.
We’re in Flashback Records, in très chic Islington, North London. Outside it is raining. Down here in the comfortingly musty basement of the store, there is thunder.
“It’s fifty quid total?” an aghast Warwick says, when told the terms of the deal Classic Rock have lain down. “Is it? I thought it was fifty quid each!” He stares balefully at the bundle of vinyl he’s cradling in his arms.
Gorham is equally horror-struck. “You mean the whole thing is fifty? Holy shit! I’m gonna end up with one album and a CD.”
Warwick’s still not having it. “Naw, fifty quid each – that’s what it said in the mail.”
Well, all they’ve given me is fifty, I inform them.
Harrumph. Mutter. Scowl. And that’s just the guy behind the counter.
Warwick shows me a good-quality vinyl copy of Goats Head Soup, the 1973 Rolling Stones album. Hit single: Angie. Hit track: Star Fucker.
“That’s my favourite Stones album,” he says. “It’s not one of the Stones albums people talk about too much, but for me it’s their best. I’m gonna have to put it back,” he sighs. “I’ve got it on CD. I’ve got it on my iTunes…”
Gorham is concentrating: “Hmm… Led Zeppelin against Ella Fitzgerald…”
Fifty-three year-old Warwick says he has recently been “reincarnated as a vinyl guy”.
Shiny black 12-inch records were what he grew up with. “But I ended up giving most of it away. Or I ended up losing bits of my collection moving houses. My kids come in the room now and go: ‘You listening to your dinosaur records again, dad?’”
Gorham is 68, and likes to give the impression that he cares not a jot for whatever technological innovations may have been made in the world of music or indeed on planet Earth in general. “I have no idea what’s going on out here,” he says languidly, smiling.
He does though, presumably, own a record player on which to play the vinyl he is holding? “I do. But it’s in a cardboard box… “Here’s an album I used to love,” he says, holding up Traffic’s 1967 debut album, Mr Fantasy. “This album here we used to listen to almost every fucking day. And you can still listen to it. It doesn’t sound dated at all.”
He holds up a copy of Stevie Wonder’s Live At The Talk Of The Town, from 1970.
“I saw Steve Wonder live once in my life. When he was
still blind,” he adds with a straight face. “You know he’s having implants? There’s a new implant they can put in. You don’t actually see, it’s more images. Like shadows and all that. At least it’s something.”
Gorham’s on a roll. He picks up a Small Faces compilation album. “I love Steve Marriott. He was one of those guys who never really got the recognition he deserved, not internationally, and probably should have. Am I right in thinking that?”
Next he holds up a dusty Led Zeppelin II. “Come on, man. I gotta have that. The first metal band! They introduced it, right?”
He picks up some Frankie Miller. “Remember, Frankie, man?” I do. I worked with him in the late seventies, a nasty drunk. “I used to play tennis with him.” That wouldn’t have been a five-setter presumably? “Well, it was as much as we could get through.” You sure it wasn’t one of those old computer game machines with the black screen and the little white ball?
“No, man, it was proper, bona-fide tennis!”
Warwick shows me a Free compilation. “It would be good to have that one back on vinyl,” he says. “Another one I had and lost somewhere.”
He also owns a copy of All American Alien Boy by Ian Hunter. “Joe Elliott had played me You’re Never Alone With A Schizophrenic, or something like that, and from that I began checking out all Hunter’s solo stuff.”
Warwick was Elliott’s best man at his wedding in 2004. The two of them have also worked together on each other’s albums. Indeed, Elliott was in the frame to produce the Black Star Riders album The Killer Instinct, until Def Leppard’s schedule got in the way. That’s Leppard the huge Thin Lizzy fans. Funny old world, etc, part 194.
“I love Steve Marriott. He never got the recognition he deserved.” Scott Gorham
Gorham is now in the ‘W’ section. “Did you ever meet Johnny Winter?” he asks. “I remember being at the BBC with him and I had no idea that with albinos their eyesight goes really quickly. So he’s playing mom, he’s pouring out the champagne, but he’s got his finger over the lip of the cup. I’m thinking: ‘That’s not very sanitary there, Johnny. You might have been picking your nose or something.’ But it was so he would know when it was time to stop pouring. He was still like, ‘I’m a tough guy, nothing wrong with me.’”
This segues neatly into other tough-guy guitarists Gorham has known.
“Dick Dale, right? He was the guy who if anybody at the gig gave him shit, he would put his guitar down, zip off this bomber jacket, take the guy out to the parking lot, beat the shit out of him, come back, put his guitar back on and fire it up again.”
Eventually the three of us go to the counter to pay, and it comes to £61.94. So I bend the rules and cough up the extra £11.94. Shhh… don’t tell anyone…
We repair to the coffee shop a few doors along and settle ourselves around a couple of tables in the corner at the back.
“The cappuccinos here are really good,” Gorham says.
Warwick orders green tea. “I had a couple of stomach issues and I had to give up caffeine and dairy,” he explains. “I’m all the better for it, but I still miss fifteen coffees a day.” Gorham: “What about cheeseburgers?” Warwick: “I miss cheese.”
“Our generation is the last of the album generation. My kids listen to music all the time, but they skip through all the tracks really, really fast.” ricky WarWick
All of us grew up buying albums. But it’s different now. Are albums still relevant? Gorham: “For me it is. I always say what else you got? Anybody can come up with one song. But what’s the rest of the album like? What are you guys really like? People buying records for the one song, when there’s so much artistic value when you get deeper into this project that you’ve just finished, and put your heart and soul into… I’m definitely an album guy. I will listen to all the tracks. Obviously I’m not gonna like everything that everybody does, but at that point I’ll skip over the tracks. But at least I give it a shot.”
“Our generation is the last of the album generation,” says Warwick. “My kids listen to music all the time, but they skip through all the
tracks really, really fast. But what’s funny is that they always end up going back [in time]. They go: ‘Hey dad, have you heard this band called The Who?’ They’re finding all these great old bands. I just think it’s that the kids now don’t sit still long enough to enjoy an album. When we bought an album, you went home and read the sleeve notes while you were listening to it, and listened to it until the finish. To have to set aside that time now, the kids are too distracted.”
Gorham: “Well, they’re into Fortnite, aren’t they? I would be too if I was their age, because I’m a big videogame guy. I love playing them.”
Warwick laughs. “Yeah, you can kill people, and dance while you’re doing it!” Then he adds, more seriously. “I think if you genuinely are a music lover, no matter what age you are, and you discover vinyl and how good it sounds and that whole experience, I think there’ll still be converts out there. You definitely lose something by digitising music. People say vinyl is selling more now than at any point in the last twenty-five years – so there’s hope.”
Black Star Riders have always gone for the more classic vinyl album approach, usually just 10 or 11 tracks long. Their excellent new album, Another State Of Grace, is the same: just 10 tracks.
“That’s a conscious decision,” says Warwick. “We sequenced it with that in mind. Call us foolish, but we did the album with a side one and a side two in mind. In my mind, side two starts with the
ballad, Why Do You Love Your Guns. We thought that’s what we should kick off side two with. We always do vinyl on our albums anyway. We always do good coloured vinyl, and [their label] Nuclear Blast have been great about that.”
“That way you get the cream of the crop,” Gorham points out. “You can come up with sixteen or seventeen songs, but you know the ten that really should have been there aren’t going to get the attention that they should have gotten.”
Warwick disliked the days of CDs with 14 or 15 tracks on them. “Even back in the days of vinyl, forty-five minutes was still a long time to try and keep your attention,” he says. “I think anything longer than that didn’t work – unless you were completely stoned off your trolley.”
Some of the original Thin Lizzy albums were barely be 30-35 minutes.
“Sorry!” Gorham laughs. “We were never the kind of band that was like: ‘Hey, let’s do this great epic song.” We never really had the long guitar solos. We wanted the one-two punch. Just get in there, get the meat of the song. Let’s get right into it.”
It’s the same with the new Black Star Riders album, as evidenced on their sassy recent single, Ain’t The End Of The World, or the glorious title track. Both sound absolutely momentous, yet barely go past three minutes. The Lizzy DNA is there for all to hear, but BSR have something else going on too now; they’re far more their own musical force.
“Thanks,” says Warwick. “It’s ingrained, yes. Scott’s always gonna have that sound, which is great. Lizzy were the soundtrack of my youth when I was a kid, and that sound and songwriting has always appealed to me. That’s the stuff that I love, from Lizzy to Stiff Little Fingers to Motörhead to AC/DC. It’s all fist-in-the-air but with a pop sensibility to it too.
“I’ve always loved that in songs. A lot of stuff that I listen to, that I get a lot of melodies from, is northern soul. Like Eddie Floyd and Frankie Valli And The Four Seasons, Edwin Starr… The melodies are just amazing. So I like to have a bit of that but bring it into a hard rock song. Something like Testify Or Say Goodbye [from BSR’s last album, Heavy Fire] obviously gives a very big nod to
Motown. Or from the new album, Soldier In The Ghetto is influenced by Curtis Mayfield and Move On Up – that’s what inspired me to write that song. So for us the influences come from all over.”
Gorham nods thoughtfully. “I loved being in Lizzy. But I really love this band where we are right now. If you’d told me ten years ago I’d be sitting here with Ricky right now, in a band with records on the charts… Well, I’m still wondering about that.”
Another State Of Grace is out on September 6 via Nuclear Blast. Black Star Riders tour the U K and Ireland in October.