Showing posts with label 5. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 5. Show all posts

Saturday, 7 December 2019

Black Purple - The Inspiration Behind Spinal Tap

Eddy Bamyasi


Black Sabbath's Born Again appeared in 1983 with a disturbing cover that reminded me of the final fade out scene from the terrifying Rosemary’s Baby film.

Departed vocalist Ronnie James Dio was replaced with ex-Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan. Unfortunately despite the anticipation this latest dream team didn’t really mesh, with Gillan’s high pitched frenetic screaming not best suited to the Sabbath sound.

More metal in sound the album was also marred by a rushed and muddy production, however tracks like Zero The Hero with its dirty low down riffing did recall former glories. Ironically Digital Bitch also recalled former glories of… Deep Purple, being pretty much a remake of Highway Star.

The Hawkwind like instrumentals Stonehenge and The Dark showed the Sab’s had (through regular backing member Geoff Nicholls) finally mastered fruitful use of the synthesizer after some amateur attempts on earlier records.

The Born Again episode was also characterised by a farcical tour. Gillan, who could not grasp the lyrics to Sabbath’s back catalogue, struggling to read his script through dry ice surrounded by oversized Stonehenge monoliths and a dancing dwarf. They even took to doing Smoke On The Water for goodness sake — talk about wheels of confusion. You couldn’t make it up and evidently the Spinal Tap script writers didn’t need to!







Tuesday, 2 October 2018

ELO - Their 3rd

Eddy Bamyasi
I was a bit disappointed with this album. I bought it in a fit of nostalgia (ELO being my favourite band in my teenage years) having not heard it for many years. The music sounds dated and is not helped by the mix that to my ears sounds like the drums are a bit muddy and too prominent on many tracks.

Therefore some of the tunes, especially the novelty items like In the Hall of the Mountain King, sound bombastic. The anthemic Dreaming of 4000 is an exciting track and I enjoyed the Dylanesque Everyone's Born to Die (one of the bonus tracks) but really only the sublime Showdown (available elsewhere on some of the excellent Harvest Year compilations) hints at future magnificence. If you want to explore some early period ELO I would go for Eldorado instead.
      

Tragic footnote: Mike Edwards, cellist, the shortest figure on Jeff Lynne's immediate left, suffered the most bizarre and unfortunate rock star death when a runaway hay bale crushed his car on a country road in Devon in September 2010 >>  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-11195393





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