In 2020, live music, along with the rest of the world, went into lockdown. With tours cancelled and no shows to review, Classic Rock asked its writers to reminisce about their most memorable gig-going experiences. Cue vivid, nostalgia-soaked memories of The Beatles, The Doors, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, Ramones, Guns N' Roses, Iron Maiden, The Clash, Black Sabbath, Nirvana and more.
Guns N’ Roses: Dallas Starplex Amphitheater, July 23, 1988
In the moments before Guns N’ Roses went on stage there was a strange atmosphere in the band’s dressing room. Slash, having turned 23 the previous day, was presented with a cake on which it was written in icing: ‘HAPPY FUCKIN’ BIRTHDAY YOU FUCKER’. But amid the boozy celebrations there was tension emanating from Axl Rose, who warmed up by singing to The Needle Lies by Queensrÿche – a thinly veiled warning to the other members of the band.
I had seen Guns N’ Roses four times in 1987, at the Whisky in LA, the Marquee, a half-empty Manchester Apollo and a packed-out Hammersmith Odeon. But at this show in Dallas in 1988, with GN’R opening for their spiritual forebears Aerosmith, and with their debut album Appetite For Destruction about to hit No.1 in the US, they were at their peak. It was the classic line-up, with drummer Steven Adler still a force of nature, and they knocked 20,000 rowdy Texans dead, with an eight-song set beginning with It’s So Easy and ending with Paradise City. Aerosmith were great that night, too. But there was something in the air – a sense of a changing of the guard – and you could feel it. (Words: Paul Elliott)
The Clash: Sheffield Top Rank, January 27, 1980.
There they were: The Clash, at the back of the Top Rank’s barely lit stage, wearing trench coats, collars turned up, grinning like naughty schoolboys, skanking away to support act Mikey Dread’s sliver-tongued toasting. Most of the audience couldn’t see them, but I did because I was at the very front, clinging on to my tour programme, The Armagideon Times, ready to pogo, albeit through hemmed-in necessity rather than artistic statement.
The Clash didn’t look like naughty schoolboys 45 minutes later when Mick Jones cranked out the introduction to set opener Clash City Rockers. Four decades and hundreds of shows later, I’ve never seen anyone who sizzled like the only band that mattered at the absolute peak of their powers. Jones the myth-making rock guitarist; Joe Strummer the charismatic Old Testament prophet of the inner cities; Paul Simonon cooler than cool; and ye gods what a drummer Topper Headon was. They hurtled through their early peaks, most of London Calling, and I couldn’t breathe. Not just because I’d never seen anything so heart-stoppingly thrilling before, but also because the people behind me were ramming me into the stage.
The next day I went to school bruised and, somehow, bloodied. In truth, I’ve never healed. (John Aizelwood)
Black Sabbath: Birmingham NEC, December 4/5, 1997
It was the night heavy metal came home. All four original members of Black Sabbath on the same stage in the city of their birth for the first time in almost 20 years.
Of course, Sabbath had never officially split up, merely trundled along with a rotating line-up of ringers orbiting ever-present guitarist Tony Iommi. The latter had even reunited with Ozzy Osbourne and Geezer Butler for a run of dates under the Black Sabbath banner on the US Ozzfest earlier that year (no Bill Ward that time, proving that with Sabbath some things never change).
But their two shows at the Birmingham NEC at the tail-end of ‘97 were something else. This wasn’t a late-career cash-grab; it was four working-class outsiders who inadvertently forged everything that followed, putting aside years of petty rancour and reaffirming both their musical godhead and their personal friendships.
What did they play? Oh, everything they always played: War Pigs, Iron Man, Paranoid, Black Sabbath itself. Back then they still chucked in some curveballs too, this time in the shape of Electric Funeral, Lord Of This World and an unexpected Spiral Architect. But it was about more than just the music. By the end of the shows on both nights, grown men were visibly weeping. Black Sabbath had come full circle, and with them heavy metal had too. It was, as they say, emotional. (Dave Everley)
Frank Zappa: Brighton Centre, April 16, 1988
Although I was a mere stripling of 18 years, by the time Zappa’s Broadway The Hard Way tour rolled into my adopted University seaside town, I’d notched up a few decent gigs – a clutch of Doningtons, a hat-trick of Hawkwind, a brace of Marillion, and, to my eternal regret, I had an unused ticket for Guns N’ Roses at the Marquee. Zappa, however, was next-level stuff, something that, with all due respect, Magnum at Penyrheol Leisure Centre had ill-prepared me for.
After strolling on stage with a crack 12-piece band, complete with brass section, the drum count-in to set opener Stinkfoot still reverberates in my cerebellum 30-odd years later, 18 being a particularly ripe age for every sort of imprinting. At around the four-minute mark, Zappa picked up his guitar from its stand and received a level of audience approbation previously heard at only Cup Finals.
The band were in playful mood, the customary improvised in-jokes abounded, and even a thrown drink didn’t mar proceedings. Jazzy digressions and covers were the most memorable: the Ike Willis-fronted I Am The Walrus was played with a remarkably straight bat, and a precocious codreggae Stairway To Heaven sparkled as an encore, its guitar solo rendered flashily by the brass section.
The tour collapsed a few months later amid accusations and recriminations, and it was the last time Zappa ever toured. But, as they say, I was there. (Tim Batcup)
Rainbow: London Rainbow, November 13, 1977
The “killer-diller” best night of four, Geoff Barton wrote in Sounds a week after the show. Sometimes you just get lucky…
Every seat in the Rainbow was draped with a paper banner bearing the slogan ‘Long Live Rock’n’Roll’ – the title of the one new song Sounds had primed us to expect in a set that, disappointingly, omitted Stargazer. But when the lights went down, all cares melted in the maelstrom of the frantic Kill The King. On the slower-paced Mistreated, Sixteenth Century Greensleeves and Catch The Rainbow, the changing colours of the rainbow arch spanning the front of the stage added magic. Beneath, Ronnie James Dio mesmerised and Ritchie Blackmore played at the top of his game, frequently unaccompanied, improvising as if possessed.
In truth, Long Live’s raucous singalong was no substitute for Stargazer. But as the painted backcloth of the guitar castle from the first album fell to reveal the rising fist of the second, Man On The Silver Mountain hefted everything to a new level. A burst of Blues, a snatch of Starstruck, and then into the epic set closer Still I’m Sad climaxing around Cozy Powell’s unforgettably bombastic drum solo.
The audience’s rabid reaction throughout had made Blackmore a happy chappie, so he did return to encore, with Do You Close Your Eyes, torturing his Stratocaster to destruction and my teenage self to utter delirium. (Neil Jeffries)
The Replacements: London The Marquee, April 15, 1991
Alternative legends play like champions – and split three months later. The ultimate outsiders, reckless, drunken, shambolic, prone to almost comical self-sabotage, as far as legendary bands go The Replacements were always in a league of their own.
Having fallen apart following their disastrous stint supporting Tom Petty in the US in ‘89, the fact that Paul Westerberg and crew were back on stage in London for two nights was nothing short of miraculous. Right from opener I Will Dare, Westerberg was tuned in to the word-perfect audience’s positive vibes and the good-natured song shout-outs (“If Only You Were Lonely – please!”).
Material from their infamously smoothed-for-radio album Don’t Tell A Soul sounded far ballsier, and then there were the established classics: Valentine, Never Mind, Androgynous, Swingin’ Party. A ragged I’ll Be You had Westerberg cracking up, while Bastards Of Young, IOU and I Don’t Know trod the familiar Replacements thin line between thrilling and disaster. A bit of a genius at delivering melancholic contemplation, Westerberg didn’t disappoint with a superb cover of Deadwood, South Dakota, his voice cracking with emotion. Left Of The Dial, Alex Chilton and a typically messy Hootenanny brought things to a rapturous close.
The fact that it would be a staggering 24 years before they’d play the UK again makes the memory even sweeter. (Essi Berelian)
Radiohead: London Astoria, September 3, 1997
Talk about perfect timing. In 1997, with Radiohead on the crest of their two best albums – The Bends and OK Computer – I befriended a member of the band’s W.A.S.T.E fanclub, who plus-oned me into a secret gig identified only by the queue of miserabilists snaking down Charing Cross Road.
Radiohead killed it. I remember Airbag’s stop-start skitter, still not quite believing my luck. The tear-up at the end of My Iron Lung. The surge of bodies and baking air when those four brittle chords lit the fuse of Just. The release-valve outro of The Bends, Jonny Greenwood tearing at his Telecaster like a psychopath plucking a chicken.
They didn’t need Creep any more, instead throwing us cork-sniffers a couple of cult-hero b-sides, in Talk Show Host and Banana Co. Admittedly, I don’t remember them covering Carly Simon’s flouncy Bond theme Nobody Does It Better – twice – but the internet insists that it happened.
Almost nothing from that night exists now, with the Astoria having been torn down in 2009 to make way for a Crossrail stationery cupboard, and Radiohead heading left-field to make a series of bleep-bloop albums that left me increasingly cold. But on that night they were my own personal storm cloud. (Henry Yates)
Peter Gabriel: London Earls Court, June 28, 1987
If drug addicts spend their whole lives chasing that first high, then I was a theatrical rock junkie from day one. Well, gig two to be honest. But Peter Gabriel’s So tour set so high a bar and loaded me so full of big-gig expectation that it took several years for me to get over the fact that most bands had the gall to just come on stage, pick up guitars and play songs.
On this night, the actual stage came alive – lighting cranes resembling gigantic android angle-poise lamps probed and observed Gabriel from above as he marched through Games Without Frontiers and gibboned through Shock The Monkey. Eventually, as No Self Control reached its maniacal chorus, they attacked, beating him down until he lay cocooned in foetal position for Mercy Street, the lights studying him like alien scientists.
The rest was sheer set-piece spectacle: the airpunching righteousness of Biko; the Afrobeat danceoff with Youssou N’Dour on In Your Eyes; the point during the dark, tribal Lay Your Hands On Me when Gabriel, in crucifix pose, fell backwards into waiting arms and was carried across the audience. And a real moment of legend – as Don’t Give Up reached its tremulous chorus, the spotlight fell on Kate Bush, making one of her precious few live appearances of the 80s for that night only, her voice entirely drowned out by the screaming audience. An unrepeatable rush. (Mark Beaumont)
Ramones: London Rainbow, December 31, 1977
A momentous year, 1977 had over-delivered on its promise. Customarily fuelled on pure adrenaline, we prepared for its final act.
The Rainbow was heaving, the foyer’s fountain was dry but the gent’s toilets were flooded. We padded through piss to our cheap seats, sick with anticipation. A dazzling Rezillos rose to the occasion, before Generation X – too pop for the hard-core – posed hard to muted response.
Then, there they were. The ultimate exemplification of the D-U-M-B punk ideal. The leather-jacketed stormtroopers of the three-chord apocalypse. 1977 had been a year of rapid-fire six-string assaults. Blurred fists pummelling at over-cranked humbuckers. Automatic-weaponry tempos. Angst, amphetamines, fury. But nothing, not even their records, could prepare you for the original Ramones at their peak.
Drilled like a crack military unit, they dispatched 28 songs, including three encores, in 54 minutes. Sometimes there was space between songs for star-jumping Dee Dee to rattle of a “one-two-three-four”, before Johnny brutalised their next selection, sometimes not. Hunched Joey brayed odes to Blitzkreigs and Beaches as Tommy performed miracles behind his kit.
New Year came and went. We haunted the stage door, stayed out all night. Tomorrow? If not the world, at least The Roxy. What a time to be alive. (Ian Fortnam)
Iron Maiden: London Marquee, December 9, 1979
This gig changed everything. It was the night that NWOBHM came into its own, as Maiden’s performance proved they would be a major name as we headed towards the new decade.
The queue for entry snaked all the way up Wardour Street from the early afternoon; a few hundred didn’t get in. Those of us who were fortunate to make it into the packed club knew this was a special occasion.
The atmosphere was ecstatic even for impressive opening band Praying Mantis. But Maiden were on a different level. The walls were steaming as the band raged, roared. Much of the material came from what would be their self-titled debut album, released three months later. Singer Paul Di’Anno was possessed of a monumental devilish spirit. He was so exhausted by the end that he stumbled off the stage and out of the venue and collapsed on a parked car.
Songs like Sanctuary, Prowler and Phantom Of The Opera were tidal waves, and Iron Maiden itself had everyone screaming along while a mask – an early version of Eddie! – attached to the backdrop poured out red smoke.
I still get shivers of excitement when recalling this era-defining event. (Malcolm Dome)
Nirvana: New York Marquee Club, September 28, 1991
I was standing in the balcony at the Marquee, sated, jet-lagged and sweat-soaked. When I arrived in New York a few hours earlier I had no idea that Nirvana, whose Nevermind tour had begun a week earlier, were even on the East Coast.
The set? Don’t ask me to explain. Sweat and long hair and screaming and righteous guitar riffs, venom and anger… it disappeared into a mess of blurred emotion long ago. Doubtless they played Teen Spirit and Lithium. Doubtless I thrashed along with the most crazed of them, head inside bass bins.
The song Nirvana were playing during the encore… was it a song? It surfaced only twice in their live set, and as a demo in ’87… Vendettagainst. It sounded like there was an orchestra of guitars playing, despite the fact Kurt clearly wasn’t holding one as he crowd-surfed the rabid, raving audience. Sound desk trickery? Pre-recorded instruments? Bloody unlikely. Grohl and Novoselic kept up a thunderous beat behind the wail of noise, while Cobain scream/moaned his way across the heads of the audience. A Nirvana song without guitars? Photos exist. Recordings exist. I still can’t believe it happened. Terrifying. (Everett True)
The Jam: London Michael Sobell Sports Centre, December 12, 1981
It’s Christmas. Snow on the ground, Thatcher in power, and the Human League’s Don’t You Want Me at No.1. At an all-ages show, thousands of school-kid mods try to act cool while shivering in the cold. Or is it the prospect of facing the gangs of skinheads rumoured to be massing at Finsbury Park station to pick off stragglers afterwards?
None of it matters during an electrifying 21-song set in which Going Underground, Start! and David Watts are greeted with huge roars – all from a crowd fuelled by nothing stronger than fizzy drinks. The announcement of a new song, a month before its release, is greeted with total silence, but A Town Called Malice sounds incredible. “Bear this in mind!” Paul Weller says sagely before a final When You’re Young triggers one more euphoric teenage rampage.
On the way out, a trestle table full of CND paraphernalia and a huge Christmas tree in the foyer get trashed to mass chants of “We are the mods!” before it’s back to grim North London reality. Down in the Tube station at midnight, ecstasy morphs into terror. Whispers in the shadows. The distant echo of faraway voices boarding faraway trains.
It hits me: this isn’t just music to live your life by. This music is my life. Now that’s entertainment. (Paul Moody)
The Doors: London Roundhouse, September 6 & 7, 1968
There are two scenes from this show that I can still replay in my head any time I want. One: Unknown Soldier. Jim Morrison, in floppy white shirt and indecently low-cut leather trousers, ‘ties’ himself to the microphone stand as Robby Krieger takes aim with his guitar and fires – accompanied by a piercing rim shot from John Densmore. Morrison flies backwards, arms and legs flailing, and tumbles to the floor, invisible to all but the front row. The silence that follows is deafening. It is eventually broken by a high, quivering keyboard note and a low, indistinct mumble from the still invisible Morrison. As the song picks up, Morrison springs up to finish it.
Two: The End. “Turn the light off,” Morrison says as the opening guitar pattern settles in. The single spotlight shrinks until Morrison is visible just from the waist up. He remains motionless. “Turn the fucking light off”. The spotlight shrinks again until it is just framing his face. There’s a clunk as the microphone hits the floor, and Morrison is gone. The spotlight turns off. Morrison returns, and begins: ‘This is the end…’ At the first crescendo the spotlight returns. Morrison drops the microphone again and walks off. The spotlight turns off. The Oedipal saga is performed in darkness apart from a couple of glowing red amplifier lights and daylight peaking through the Roundhouse roof. (Hugh Fielder)
Rammstein: Download Festival, June 16, 2013
After decades spent witnessing hundreds of world-class rock shows, Rammstein’s headline set at Download 2013 should have been just another minor distraction to my jaded, over-saturated senses. But the Teutonic totalitarian porn-metal overlords delivered a fire-breathing, blood-splattered, spunk-spurting carnival of bondage and buggery that took stadium-punk spectacle to a whole new level.
Their stage set, a hellish pageant of flamethrowers, fireworks and erotic torture instruments, looked like Mad Max re-imagined by Hieronymus Bosch. Simultaneously mocking and celebrating centuries of lederhosen-clad German Romanticism, Rammstein left Download in no doubt that Wagner invented heavy metal. In fact he liked it so much he put a Ring on it.
The band’s brawny, Herman Munster-lookalike singer Till Lindemann certainly imbued gloomy power ballads like Sehnsucht and Ohne Dich with Wagnerian high seriousness. Even so, a deep seam of cheerfully grotesque ironic humour ran through this performance, especially the scenes of simulated sodomy between Lindemann and wimpy keyboard player Christian ‘Flake’ Lorenz.
As the show climaxed, Lindemann straddled a giant penis cannon that blasted a jizzard of white foam into the crowd. Subtlety is not Rammstein’s forte. But by gleefully highlighting heavy rock’s latent homofascistic sub-text, this jaw-dropping, eye-opening, arse-widening show was both audaciously bold and hugely enjoyable. After a vigorous BDSM ear-shafting from these burly Berliners, everything else feels disappointingly vanilla. (Stephen Dalton)
The Beatles: London Hammersmith Odeon, January 15, 1965
The ticket was a present from Uncle Pete, received in astonishment on Boxing Day. Three weeks later I sat on the back of his Lambretta scooter and we whizzed down Chiswick High Road. The Odeon was swarming with fans leaving the early show. Inside, the noise was unlike anything I’d ever heard. Girls fainted into the arms of St John’s Ambulance men. Some group called The Yardbirds sauntered on. Pete pointed out Eric Clapton.
After a hiatus, they appeared on stage! We levitated. John, Paul, George and Ringo were dressed as Arctic explorers in search of the yeti, also and performed other variety-show sketches.
Intermission: snack ladies selling Kia-Ora’s and Wall’s ice creams.
Finally, at 9.45 the boys swept on stage and delivered the goods. The 11 songs began with Twist And Shout and ended with Long Tall Sally - battle of the larynxes for John and Paul. Four numbers from Beatles For Sale included a classic Baby’s In Black, the modern I’m A Loser, George’s Everybody’s Trying To Be My Baby (Ringo sang Honey Don’t) and Rock And Roll Music. But the singles! Can’t Buy Me Love and A Hard Day’s Night… they creamed that Odeon. It was the sound and smell of the future. So good to be alive in ’65. (Max Bell)
Elvis Costello: Belfast Ulster Hall, St Patrick’s Day 1978
Anticipation was fever pitch, so an off-school early cider (in the alley behind the venue) was called for. In spring ’78 Elvis’s mighty This Year’s Model album presented him newly boosted by the nerve-jangling brilliance of his very own peerless rock’n’roll trio. Live they went to a next level – fittingly, in a venue just across the road from the Europa, the hotel where, six months earlier, The Clash held court when their Ulster Hall Belfast debut was called off, by the man.
From the sheer local perfection of opener Waiting For The End Of The World to the scary intensity of Night Rallies, bug-eyed Elvis bathed in blue light on a stage that also platformed Ian Paisley’s demagoguery, this show felt like a crazy, impossible victory. What a mad, brilliant band they were too – cranky, militaristic beats, those dizzying unsettling Nieve organ lines. Costello’s Geek That Snarled persona owned the stage, and he had the material to match.
The combined effect of the perfectly targeted lyrical arrowheads, breakneck pace, unrelenting sonic Semtex, took much longer to wear off than the cider. Could Elvis ever be so great again? Could anyone? (Gavin Martin)
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 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 sold-out 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 Technical 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)
These reports originally appeared in issues 276, 277 and 278 of Classic Rock (June, July and August 2020)
