Music Blog

Journey, Manchester Apollo, 5th June 2006

I get the impression from online discussions that many American rock fans don’t consider Journey a serious rock band. They’re known largely for the somewhat cheesy 80s power ballads that got played to death on American FM radio. Worse still, they’re the band your younger sister liked.

In the UK, where they never had a top ten hit, the have none of that baggage. People pay as much attention to their hard rockers as their ballads.

Journey hadn’t played Britain since (I think) 1980, which is perhaps one reason for their relatively low profile over here. Since Steve Perry reportedly disliked playing outside the US, they never toured during their early 80s heyday. Which is why they’re playing the 2700 seat Apollo theatre the night after Bon Jovi (who theoretically appeal to the same sort of audience) headlined the City of Manchester Stadium.

They did, however, have enough fans to sell out the venue in five days. The atmosphere before they hit the stage was electric with anticipation. Could the band still cut it so long after their commercial heyday? What would they be like with new singer Steve Augeri? He sounded impressive on the new “Generations” album, but how would he sound on Steve Perry’s songs?

Journey hit the stage at 7:45pm, very early for a headline band, and dispelled any doubts within minutes. They launched into a storming version of “Separate Ways” leading into two hours of superb hard rock. The band were superbly tight right from the beginning, but also rocked hard, playing one great song after another.

While they played all the big hits, of which there were a great many, they also played a lot of harder-edged album cuts. The setlist included oldies like “Wheel in the Sky”, some new songs from the excellent “Generations”, and virtually the whole of the 1981 “Escape” album, but little from the more lightweight “Raised on Radio” or “Trial by Fire”. I was especially pleased to heard “Mother, Father”, and “Edge of the Blade”.

Steve Augeri didn’t disappoint as a frontman. He sounded more like Steve Perry than Steve Perry, hitting all the high notes perfectly. Drummer Deen Castronovo sang lead on several songs, which threw me for a while because I couldn’t work out where the vocals were coming from when Augeri wasn’t on stage! He’s actually a pretty impressive vocalist in his own right; he was especially good with his powerful rendition of “Mother, Father”. Naturally, Neil Schon played plenty of his amazing shredding jazz-metal guitar, ripping the place up on almost every song.

Overall a superb show, proving the band are still on the top of the game even twenty years after their commercial peak. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another quarter century before we see them over here again.

Queensrÿche, Manchester Academy, 4 June 2006.

Sunday night saw the second of my three concerts in five days. This was Queensrÿche’s Mindcrime II show at the Manchester Academy. They’d played low down the bill at the Monsters of Rock festival on the Saturday, and Sunday’s Manchester gig was their only British headline show.

Queensrÿche are an extreme case of a band peaking early. Their third release, the 1988 concept album, “Operation Mindcrime” is rightly regarded as a masterpiece of progressive metal. The followup, “Empire”, was much more commercial but still packed a punch. After reaching that stage, most bands either hit a lengthy plateau or split up. Queensrÿche did neither. Instead they released a string of mediocre albums culminating in the dismal downtuned alternative rock sludge of “Q2K”. They’d become a pale shadow of their former selves.

Sensing that they’d hit rock bottom, they decided to revisit their past, and release a followup to that classic concept album. “Operation Mindcrime II” picks up the story twenty years later. Musically it’s not a patch on it’s legendary predecessor, although it wasn’t anything like as dire as “Q2K”.

Support was Roadstar, the band formerly know as Hurricane Party. They played a great half hour set of conventional but entertaining 80s-style hair metal. Let’s party like it’s 1987!

When Queensrÿche took the stage, my first reaction was “They look like U2″. Geoff Tate in dark glasses looked like Bono, with bassist Ed Jackson in the hat resembling The Edge, and Michael Wilton looking a bit like Adam Clayton. Only when Geoff removed the dark glasses he then looked like The Office’s David Brent.

For much of the set they were joined by guest vocalist Pamela Moore. She had played the part of hooker-turned-nun Sister Mary on the original album and reprised the role (as a ghost) on the followup. As well as the parts she sang on the records, she added a lot of backing vocals throughout the set. In songs like “Spreading the Disease” and “Operation Mindcrime” itself, she sang many of Geoff Tate’s lines, perhaps an indiction that Tate’s voice doesn’t have the awesome range of 20 years ago.

The Mindcrime II tour was billed as the two albums played back to back. I had some misgivings about this, fearing that the weaker “II” songs would make the second half a bit of an anticlimax. But the 90 minute set meant that they didn’t play the whole of the two albums. They played all of the original “Mindcrime” bar ‘The Mission’, ‘Breaking the Silence’, and the instrumentals, but only half of the weaker sequel. They moved the closing number of the original Mindcrime, ‘Eyes of the Stranger’ to the end of the set, which balanced things out a bit.

The quality was a bit variable. Opener ‘Revolution Calling’ sounded a bit thin, but the energy levels picked up considerably as the set progressed. The high spot was a theatrical version of “Suite Sister Mary”, a reminder that Pamela Moore was trained as an actress before becoming a singer. The hit ‘I Don’t Believe In Love‘ was a pretty powerful version as well.

For encores, they played a couple of numbers from “Empire”, the title track, and a decidedly messy version of ‘Jet City Woman’. Then they annoyed the audience by waiting for ages before turning on the house lights, making us think they were coming back for a third encore, since there were still ten minutes to go before curfew.

I’ve since read a really bad review of their performance at Monsters of Rock the day before. I don’t think they were anything like that bad in Manchester, but it was definitely a case of good rather than great.

Zappa Plays Zappa, 1st July 2006, Apollo Theatre, Manchester

When is a tribute band not a tribute band? When it’s lead by the late bandleader’s son, and includes several members of the original band? Zappa Plays Zappa is such a band.

Frank Zappa’s eldest son Dweezil put together a band including Zappa alumni Stevie Vai and Napoleon Murphy Brock, plus a bunch of young unknowns picked for their chops rather than name recognition, then, in the best tradition of Zappa senior, rehearsed them solidly for three months.

I only discovered Frank Zappa’s music in the 1990s, after he’s stopped touring. I can’t think of anyone else who’s successfully thrown rock, jazz, pop, classical and comedy into a blender in quite the way he did, and I never expected to be able to hear his music performed live. Until now.

The support was a 1973 concert film of Frank himself. As the film ended the eight musicians walked on stage and launched straight into the opening number (which was one of the few in the set I didn’t recognise!)

The setlist covered much of Frank’s lengthy career, but concentrated very heavily on the mid-70s, especially the Apostrophe(‘) and Roxy and Elsewhere albums. Since this is probably my favourite Zappa era, I’m not complaining. They played flawless renditions of favourites like “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black”, “Peaches en Regalia”, “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow”, “Zomby Woof” and “Cosmic Debris”, as well as dazzlingly complex instrumentals like “The Black Page” and “Echidna’s Arf”. No “Dangerous Kitchen”, but with FZ’s vast back catalogue there’s now way they could possibly play everything.

Although it was probably Stevie Vai’s name that helped sell tickets, for my money the star was Napoleon Murphy Brock. He handled pretty much all the lead vocals, not just his own, but a lot originally sung by Frank himself, as well as some mean sax. Dweezil himself has matured into pretty impressive guitar player in his own right. To be honest I preferred his playing to Vai’s, which sounded a bit too clinical for my tastes.

The show was unfortunately marred by equipment problems part-way through, when Dweezil first lost his guitar signal, then got an electric shock of the microphone. “That wasn’t a nine volt battery!”, he exclaimed. It’s a tribute to the skill and showmanship of the band that they kept on playing, slotting in the keyboard and sax driven “Pound for a Brown” which didn’t need Dweezil’s guitar while they tried to fix the problems. They finally bypassed whatever box of tricked had failed and plugged the guitar straight into the amp, for a superb rendition of “Inca Roads”. Then there was a short interval while they checked the electrics for safety, before the band came back and played right through to the curfew without going offstage and coming back for an encore. Dweezil told us that “Sofa” was supposed to have been the end of the set.

The ghost of Frank returned for what was supposed to have been the first encore, as we were treated to archive footage of Frank soloing accompanied by the live band on stage; shades of the recent Frank Sinatra show in London.

A superb show, showing how a great band can still rise above equipment problems and still bring down the house. They head for America next.