I adore music. It is my passion. I use it to soundtrack all that I do. When I travel I am accompanied by music (I am composing this on the 5.05 to London Euston with Beneath a Steel Sky’s “Cleave” keeping me company). At home various Alexa’s pump out albums of both my, and increasingly my children’s, choice. Live shows are my emotional crutch and the landmark dates I use to get myself through the year. Music proliferates my speech, with musical analogies my chosen way of describing things. It is central to who Stewart Lucas is and I would be lost without it.
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We here at Rockflesh.com make a virtue of not talking about other lives outside being writers or photographers. After all you, our discerning readers are interested in the bands we watch as opposed to our relationship woes, job statuses and health struggles. That self-enforced anonymity will mean that you will be unaware that I had a major bicycle accident two and a half years ago involving an articulated lorry and a safety fence that robbed me of a substantial part of my mobility. Pre-September 2022 I was a bit of a pit troll if all told. I liked nothing more than to be stood in a heaving mass of people feeling the swell of the crowd melee around me. I was the one in the middle drinking it all in.
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The band t-shirt is sown into the fabric of our world. It is as an essential component of metal as the riff, the drum solo and casual drug use. It act as a form of cloth based branding, allowing us to identify other members of our tribe, as well as a lucrative income stream independent from record sales. I have hundreds of the buggers and I can trace the evolution of my tastes and my bank balance over the 38 years I have been attending gigs.
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We go again. Damnation’s third instalment in its new Mancunian home is mere weeks away. The excruciating labyrinths of Leeds University seems a lifetime ago and we are ready to be plunged back into the euphoria of extreme metal in an arena setting. Gav, Paul and their underlings in many ways have nothing left to prove. They have shown that Damnation can move to much bigger premises but retain its unique atmosphere and allure.
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So this is the end. After 54 turbulent years Aeroforce One has finally been forced out of the skies and dry docked. Yesterday Aerosmith reluctantly announced their enforced immediate retirement from being a live concern. It wasn't quite meant to conclude this way. There was meant to be a final triumphant victory lap of the planet before they hung up their spurs.
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Our Stewart is so excited about Opeth’s Friday night request slot that rather than cover it in our truncated thirty to watch he has done a whole 666 (our six hundred and sixty six words opinions pieces) about just how over excited he is.
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Always the same, always different. This is how the legendary John Peel used to describe his beloved The Fall. However, it works equally well if we re-purpose it to describe Bloodstock Open Air. You see many components of the festival haven't changed in two decades. Its feeling of geographical familiarity is one of the many reasons that many of us describe it as “home”.
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Currently, you can get a ticket on Ticketmaster for Slipknot’s much anticipated 25th anniversary tour for around £220. That’s not a VIP ticket or a resale one, that is a bog-standard ticket. This is because of a phenomenon known as dynamic pricing. They didn’t begin life at £220. They started at a much more palatable (but still high) £70 but as the “maggots” (who know must all be in middle-aged well paid IT jobs) swarmed over the tickets they steadily increased in value as their scarcity increased.
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Never ones to let an opportunity to be opinionated pass us by, ROCKFLESH is here to give its esteemed opinion on the Download 2024 announcement. The first thing to say is love it or hate it Download sure know how to draw attention to themselves. All publicity is good publicity and even though their lineup is on the weak side (there you know which side of the fence I'll be coming down on) we are still talking about it. They have achieved what they wanted to do, and that was to make a splash and to get all the tongues wagging
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Aside from humanity finding new depths to its innate ability to be horrendous to each other, the other thing that captured our imagination last weekend was Power Trip. It may have happened thousands of miles away, but we still felt compelled to talk about Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Guns n’ Roses, Tool and Metallica sharing the same billing. However, the conversation wasn't about what they played, it was about how much it cost to witness the whole thing.
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Things were remarkably different in the pre-Spotify world. It was remarkably difficult to hear new bands as essentially the only way that you could sample an up-and-coming outfit was to buy their records (or to unscrupulously copy off your mates). We relied on the music press to describe to us what emerging scenes sounded like and the photos that accompanied those testaments could make or break a fledgling beat combo. I fell in love with Kiss not because of their songs but because of the photos that adorned my well-thumbed copies of the Kerrang and Metal Hammer. Paul, Gene, Ace and Chris in full makeup and faux body armour looked to the preteen Stewart like superheroes. They took my breath away and those early images ensured I became a dedicated member of the Kiss Army.
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Can I be honest with you? Why the hell isn't Damnation 2023 sold out? The bill on offer is a smorgasbord of extreme metal crudites that outshines anything they have previously managed to cobble together. And that's before we even talk about its even eviller twin "Night of Salvation”, which is ludicrously stacked with world exclusives destined to make Roadburn weep into its pillow.
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Some festivals start big and just accelerate. Download for instance had Iron Maiden as its first headliner, a statement of intent if there ever was one about the space that it wanted to occupy. Some however build from minuscule begins. The first Bloodstock was unrecognizable from the event we see today. It was held indoors at Derby Assembly Rooms, it lasted just one day, it was headlined by Saxon (at the time as far from their heyday as they could get) and it attracted 700 people. However, it was a spark, a beginning, an opening gambit that has metamorphosed into a mainstay of the UK festival calendar.
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My passion is music. It's my release and it's my obsession. My close friendships are based around music. My downtime is based around music and I met my wife through a Guardian soulmate ad which read "Musical obsessive seeks indie chick for passionate pogoing”. Yet, I'm not sure where this obsession sprung from. My parents were not great muso's and if the radio was on in our house, it was Radio Four. I did not have any great compulsion about musicality passed on to me, it just happened quite randomly and quite organically.
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It spread through the internet like the proverbial dose of salts. “Have you seen what Gojira are charging for merch?”. The French giants, long regarded as a band of the people were caught with their fingers in the tills asking for forty quid for a t-shirt and eighty quid for a hoodie. I think what hurt most and caused the most disdain is that they weren’t a band that we expected this of. Gene Simmons yes but Joe Duplantier?
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If you want a true definition of resilience and durability, then you need to look no further than Blackie Lawless and his horde. They encapsulate completely the idea that a career in rock n’ roll is a marathon as opposed to a sprint. W.A.S.P. have been written off on many occasions, yet each time they have laughed it off, brushed themselves down and come back brighter. Over forty years in (yes 40) from their inception they are now more relevant and more lauded than they have ever been.
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The weekend of the 4th-5th of December will see HRH bring the third chapter of its Viking themed mayhem to Sheffield. ROCKFLESH will be there with our drinking horns (full of very un-Viking rum) and plastic swords. This has led to discussions in ROCKFLESH towers about what actually constitutes Viking Metal. As ROCKFLESH’s resident Nordic and Black Metal obsessive (the two are not un-connected) I have been asked to explain.
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Still 666 words but this time the guys battle it out! What is Sleep Token? Who’s side are you on?
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The music festival has become a quintessential part of the Great British summer. They used to be counterculture enclaves, full of smelly hippies wishing to storm the barricades of the bourgeoisie elite, after of course they had finished spliffs. However, over the last fifteen years they have evolved into an essential component of our way of life (and our economy). Comparable to high profile sports or cultural event such as Wimbledon or the Chelsea Flower Show.
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Like many of you, I am approaching the most bizarre and unwanted anniversary. On Monday, March 15th it will be exactly one year since I last clapped eyes on an in the flesh live band. 365 days before that date I witnessed the majestic Employed to Serve (you can find my review here) at the Academy 3 in Manchester. They were tight, taut and utterly excellent. A youthful cocktail of confidence and rage filled righteousness. Then suddenly the world grounded to a halt. Tours shuddered to a standstill, the cancelled or postponed signs came on one by one and the wheels fell inexplicably off my world.
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