Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs

★★★ External Combustion BMG. CD/DL/LP

Heartbreaker’s sideproject’s second album.

If there’s something toe-curling about a man in his seventies calling his band The Dirty Knobs, then Mike Campbell – Tom Petty’s sidekick for over 40 years, but late of Fleetwood Mac – surely doesn’t care. Grungy, scuzzy and for all the covert craft of the playing, unashamedly garage, the George Drakoulias-produced

External Combustion is the sound of an older gentleman re-visiting his youth. Guitar solos and fairly late nights (“I didn’t get home ’til way past midnight”) abound, while the very first days of rock’n’roll are evoked on Brigitte Bardot and Ian Hunter adds further grizzle to the frenetic adultery tale Dirty Job: “someone got to do it, it might as well be me”. Lightning Boogie is as unimaginative as its title, but when they calm down on In This Lifetime, they twinkle, while Margo Price brings stately reflection to the brass-tinged centrepiece State Of Mind.