A to Z of Making It, Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Derivative Works, Influenced, Music, My Stories, Unsung Heroes

Angry Anderson: We Can’t Be Beaten – Rose Tattoo, Rock ’n’ Roll & an Australian Icon

We used to sing “We Can’t Be Beaten” after every football game we played.

Every game.

It could have been our first win of the season and we sang it. It could have been another week of an unbeaten run and we sang it.

Win, lose, draw, the song belonged to the ritual. And maybe that is how I will always remember Angry Anderson.

He can’t be beaten. Not really.

He played a bikie in “Housos” who was basically impossible to beat in a fight. He sang “Suddenly,” one of the biggest power ballads to come out of Australian television, and somehow even a song from a completely different universe still sounded like Angry Anderson.

That is the trick with Angry.

You could put him anywhere and he remained Angry Anderson.

Hard rock band. Bikie comedy. Soap-opera power ballad. Mad Max. Rose Tattoo.

It didn’t matter. The voice came with him.

Gary “Angry” Anderson died on 21 September 2026, aged 79, after suffering a cardiac arrest.

And I keep coming back to the music. Because that is where I first knew him.

Before Rose Tattoo, there was Buster Brown.

Buster Brown formed in 1973 and released “Something to Say” the following year.

The drummer was Phil Rudd.

Yes. The same Phil Rudd who would leave and join an early version of AC/DC.

Anderson kept going however Buster Brown ended in 1975, and Anderson would soon become the voice of a band that would define Australian hard rock in a completely different way.

Rose Tattoo.

Peter Wells formed the band in Sydney in 1976 because he wanted something tough. Something built around slide guitar.

The first great statement arrived with “Bad Boy for Love.”

It was written by Ian Rilen, who left to form punk group X before the single was released. Geordie Leach, Anderson’s former Buster Brown bandmate, eventually joined the lineup that recorded most of the debut.

And then there was the production team.

Harry Vanda and George Young.

So when Rose Tattoo arrived in 1978, there was a lineage.

The blues had crossed the Atlantic. British bands absorbed American blues. British rock came to Australia. Australian musicians absorbed all of it.

And then they made it sound like home.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Outlaw

“Rock N Roll Outlaw” sounds like a mission statement.

The blues-rock vocabulary of Britain and America is all over Rose Tattoo, but the important thing is what they do with it.

We talk about the Rolling Stones, Cream, Free, Led Zeppelin. We talk about AC/DC.

But underneath all of that is the original source material: Black American blues musicians like Chuck Berry, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Albert King whose music was absorbed, reinterpreted and fed back into the world through British and Australian rock.

Rose Tattoo didn’t invent the language. They spoke it with an Australian accent.

“Nice Boys” is probably the easiest entry point. If you don’t know the Rose Tattoo version, you may know the Guns N’ Roses version.

“The Butcher and Fast Eddy” is Angry in storyteller mode.

Someone got stabbed. Here is what happened. Next song.

“One of the Boys” has that Status Quo pulse. “Remedy” is AC/DC with the volume turned up. “Bad Boy for Love” is the obvious classic. “T.V.” is twelve-bar blues.

No dissertation required.

“Stuck on You” is the curveball, almost a love song, with a melodic acoustic guitar figure underneath the chorus.

Then “Tramp,” with “Let There Be Rock” energy, and “Astra Wally,” which feels like the offspring of “Tramp” and “T.V.”

Ten songs. No wasted motion. Just get on with it.

The band toured America and Europe, recorded an unreleased album in Los Angeles, and came home. Then, in 1981, “Rock N Roll Outlaw” started charting in Europe.

So they went back. That’s the music business.

Assault & Battery

Three years after the debut came “Assault & Battery”.

This is where my relationship with Rose Tattoo gets interesting.

I don’t think it has the same collection of songs that immediately grab you by the throat. But I think the band is getting better.

Better musicianship. Better lyrics. More ambition.

Start with “Magnum Maid.”

“We’re never gonna catch the criminals / As long as they’re runnin’ the show.”

That is the eternal rock and roll conspiracy theory. The criminals aren’t hiding. They’re running the place.

Then Angry turns the gun into a character. The “Magnum Maid” isn’t just a weapon. She’s salvation. Revenge. The last thing a desperate man has left when every institutional answer has failed.

By the end of the song it feels like you’re lying in the gutter with two bullets left.

No cavalry. No government. No committee. Just the gun and one last decision.

That’s Angry’s world.

When the system doesn’t work, you don’t write a submission.

You reach for the Magnum.

“Sidewalk Sally” takes the opposite approach.

“She knows what she is selling.”

“French or Greek don’t cost much.”

No university degree required. You know exactly what is happening.

Scarred For Life

The third album arrived within a year in 1982

No three-year gap this time.

The opening is a knockout.

“I grew up fast on a working class streets.”

“First thing I learned was life don’t come cheap.”

That’s Angry Anderson in two lines.

Not a victim. Not a hero. A battler.

Somebody who has been punched around by life and decided to punch back.

Then comes “We Can’t Be Beaten.”

And there it is.

The song we used to sing after football. The song that makes the whole thing personal for me.

“If you want to be in my gang…”

That is the invitation. To belonging. Stand with me. We’ll start something. We’ll fight for something. We’ll make some noise.

The song is simple. That’s why it works. And it isn’t really about winning. It’s about refusing to accept defeat as an identity.

“Juice On The Loose” is basically “Bad Boy For Love” with another coat of paint. And again, I like it.

“Branded” is where Rob Riley becomes impossible to ignore. He co-wrote “We Can’t Be Beaten,” “Scarred For Life,” “Branded” and “It’s Gonna Work Itself Out.”

“I’ve had enough and now I’m gonna fight back.”

Again, Angry doesn’t write a self-help book. He writes a chorus.

Then there’s “Revenge.”

The song contains lines about immigrants, religion, unions and government that reflect a particular strain of working-class Australian grievance. Some of the language is explicitly hostile and exclusionary.

You don’t have to pretend otherwise.

But you also don’t need to pretend the song doesn’t exist.

The underlying emotion is easier to recognise than the politics, someone has taken something that belonged to me.

My city. My work. My country. My life. My dignity.

That is the engine underneath the song.

Angry is giving voice to a worldview that is angry about a world changing underneath him.

The problem is that the song doesn’t stop at describing that anger.

It assigns blame. Sometimes the artist is documenting the ugliness. Sometimes the artist is participating in it. Sometimes it’s both.

Southern Stars

Then came another lineup change.

By 1983, Rob Riley, Dallas Royall and Peter Wells had all left.

Anderson and Geordie Leach rebuilt the band again, and “Southern Stars” arrived in 1984.

And this is where I disagree with the people who want every great band to make the same record forever.

I love this change. The blues rock is still there. The boogie is still there. But the choruses are getting bigger. The songwriting is evolving.

It’s not Rose Tattoo abandoning Rose Tattoo.

It’s Rose Tattoo trying to work out what Rose Tattoo sounds like four records into a career.

If you make the first record four times, you haven’t preserved your identity. You’ve preserved your business model.

“Southern Stars” is more AOR without becoming AOR. The guitars still have dirt under their fingernails. But there is more melody. More space. More ambition.

And lyrically, Angry is at his most openly political and philosophical.

“The ghosts of Eureka are calling to me now.”

“I wanna live my life under Southern Stars.”

Anderson described the album as being about the spirit of Eureka and said its patriotism was intended to extend beyond Australia to humanity as a whole.

That’s important because “Southern Stars” is really an album about freedom.

“Let Us Live” strips it back. Let us be what we want to be. Let us go where we want to go. Let us say what we want to say. Let us live our own lives.

Not necessarily left. Not necessarily right. Just leave me alone and let me live.

“Freedom’s Flame” and “Death Or Glory” turn that idea into mythology: tribes rise, soldiers arrive, fires burn, people refuse to surrender.

Again, Angry isn’t writing a policy paper. He’s writing mythology.

And then there’s “You’ve Been Told.”

The riff takes me straight back to that Richie Blackmore school of blues-based hard rock.

But lyrically?

This is Angry enjoying himself.

Women. Bourbon. Drugs. Cigars. Rock and roll.

Just a bloke telling you exactly what he likes.

And finally:

“The Radio Said Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Dead.”

Of course it did. Somebody always says it’s over. And then some idiot plugs in a guitar.

That is the joke.

Rock and roll doesn’t survive because the radio says it should.

It survives because somebody somewhere still needs it.

Suddenly

Anderson went on to play Ironbar Bassey in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and Rose Tattoo eventually gave way to his solo career.

Then came “Suddenly.”

A song that could have destroyed the whole image. Instead it became another Angry Anderson song.

It found a much larger audience when it was used for Scott and Charlene’s wedding on Neighbours, reaching No. 2 in Australia.

The same voice that had spent the previous decade singing about street fights, criminals, revolution and rock and roll was suddenly singing a giant romantic ballad on television.

And it worked. That is Angry.

His 1990 solo album “Blood from Stone” produced “Bound for Glory,” a No. 11 hit.

“Life’s tough / So what? / I’m alive.”

“I’ve been down / Seen hard times / But I survived.”

He could have made an entire career out of that sentence.

Rose Tattoo eventually reunited, and I saw them on the Guns N’ Roses “Use Your Illusion” tour.

They rocked. And I was more than happy to cross Rose Tattoo off my list. The Gunners are a different story. I’ve already written about that.

And that is where my musical journey with Angry ends.

I haven’t listened to the “Pain” and “Blood Brothers” albums from the 2000s.

I will.

And maybe that is the best way to remember Angry Anderson.

As the voice that refused to soften. The little bloke with the enormous presence.

The voice that could sing about a street fight, a revolution, a woman, a working-class battler, a Magnum revolver, Australian freedom or a wedding on Neighbours and somehow still make it sound like Angry Anderson.

He wasn’t supposed to fit neatly. Neither did Rose Tattoo. And that’s probably why they lasted.

We used to sing “We Can’t Be Beaten” after every football game.

I think I understand it differently now. It wasn’t really a song about being unbeatable.

Nobody is.

It’s a song about standing up with your people and deciding that losing isn’t going to define you.

Angry Anderson spent fifty years doing exactly that.

The band changed. The members changed. The sound changed. The country changed. He changed. But he kept getting back on stage.

One more tour. One more record. One more song. One more fight. Until there wasn’t another one.

And now we sing it without him.

We can’t be beaten.

Maybe that’s the point.

A to Z of Making It, Influenced, Music, Unsung Heroes

Audrey Horne – Achilles: The War Inside Us

Audrey Horne have always been something of a contradiction.

Formed in Bergen, Norway, in 2002 by musicians better known for extreme and progressive metal, they deliberately chose another path: classic hard rock built on riffs, melody, swagger and songs that demand to be played loud.

The pedigree was serious from the beginning. Thomas Tofthagen, Tom Cato Visnes, Kjetil Greve, Torkjell “Toschie” Rød, Arve Isdal and Herbrand Larsen brought connections to bands including Sahg, Gorgoroth and Enslaved, but Audrey Horne became their escape route from extremity.

Their 2005 debut, “No Hay Banda”, earned strong reviews and a Norwegian Spellemann Award, while “Le Fol” (2007) pushed them further into the European rock circuit.

Then came the breakthrough. Their self-titled 2010 album was my introduction to the band. I spent three months in Europe back then and overdosed on it.

“Youngblood” (2013), “Pure Heavy” (2014), “Blackout” (2018) and “Devil’s Bells” (2022) progressively sharpened the formula: big guitars, bigger melodies and an increasingly confident identity. They survived lineup changes, relentless touring and a pandemic interruption, emerging as one of Norway’s most dependable modern hard-rock bands.

Now comes “Achilles”, released on September 4, 2026, via Napalm Records. My vinyl and CD just arrived, however streaming filled the gap. I also took liberty to fill a few gaps in my collection, so when ordered “Achilles”, I also purchased “Pure Heavy” and “Youngblood” on vinyl.

Clocking in at 44:15, “Achilles” lands in the sweet spot anyone raised on physical media will remember. Back when the TDK 90-minute cassette was essential equipment, this was the kind of album you could record in full on one side, no flipping the tape halfway through, no songs left behind. Just 44 minutes of Audrey Horne: load it up, press play and let it run.

Audrey Horne’s DNA is unmistakable: Iron Maiden’s twin-guitar attack and grandeur; the swagger of Kiss and Mötley Crüe; the melodic instincts of Thin Lizzy and Europe; and the riff power of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Led Zeppelin. Ozzy Osbourne and Dio appear in the darker edges, Van Halen in the flash, Scorpions in the melodic weight and Deep Purple in the classic-rock muscle. Every so often, the sharper guitar work of the NWOBHM, particularly Diamond Head, creeps through.

Achilles

As soon as the intro riff kicks in, which is the same riff that becomes the chorus, “Can I Play With Madness” comes to mind. The DNA.

“Achilles” is the ultimate symbol of the warrior: almost invincible, terrifyingly capable, driven by honour, rage, pride and revenge.

But his story is also about the price of becoming the weapon everyone needs you to be. He wins glory and loses everything that makes glory worthwhile.

The song turns that mythology inside out. The warrior doesn’t want another battle. He wants a ceasefire. The repeated word starts to sound like someone trying to convince himself there must be another way.

“The blood that we spill to feed the mouth of greed.”

We dress war up as honour, freedom, territory, security, history, the flag, the cause and the enemy.

We build elaborate stories around violence because “somebody benefits from this” doesn’t make for an inspiring recruitment poster.

But blood is still blood, and greed is still greed. The people doing the bleeding are rarely the people deciding how much bleeding is necessary.

Maybe “Achilles” is every person who has spent a lifetime fighting somebody else’s war and finally gets tired. That isn’t weakness. That’s the beginning of the ceasefire.

In the Eye of the Hurricane

The intro and verses bring “Creatures of the Night” by Kiss to mind. The chorus, meanwhile, is pure Scorpions, and a certain song with “Hurricane” in its title.

“Carry on, into the eye of the hurricane.”

Sound familiar? That’s adulthood.

We’re sold the bullshit idea that eventually we arrive at permanent stability. Get the job. Pay off the mortgage. Find the person. Get your shit together. Then you can relax.
Except the hurricane doesn’t give a shit about your five-year plan.

The strange thing about a hurricane is that the most violent thing imaginable has a calm centre: the eye. You don’t defeat the storm by pretending it isn’t happening. You move through it until your feet hit the ground again.

The world throws enough shit at you and eventually you choose: let the storm destroy you, or become something it can’t blow away.
Carry on, not because everything is going to be okay, but because it isn’t.

Vampires

The intro and verse riffs recall “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Iron Maiden, merged with the pulse of “Heaven and Hell” by Black Sabbath and “Holy Diver” by Dio. There’s nothing else to do except bang your head.

“Achilles” was about conflict and “In the Eye of the Hurricane” about surviving chaos. “Vampires” is about the people who feed on you while pretending they aren’t the problem.

“You drank it all.”

Four words. The whole crime.

Some people don’t enter your life to share it. They enter to consume your time, attention, money, ideas, optimism, patience and belief in yourself.

They rarely announce themselves as vampires. They arrive looking like everybody else: friend, lover, boss, colleague, business partner, sometimes even family. They tell you they’re taking care of you while quietly taking everything from you.

That’s why the repeated “liar, liar” matters. The spell has broken. Once you see the vampire, you can’t unsee the teeth.

Make sure you stick around for the solo section with the “woah-oh” vocals. Brilliant.

God Damn Beautiful

This is high-energy AOR melodic rock with a steroid-strength foundation recalling “Just Another Night” by Mick Jagger, plus twin harmonies that bring Thin Lizzy to mind. Bassist Espen Lien also takes the lead vocal.

“Every turn you take is gonna lead you back to where you’ve been.”

That’s the trap. We convince ourselves we’re moving forward because we’re moving: new relationship, new job, new city, new haircut, new version of ourselves.

Look at me! I’m different!

No. You’re just taking the same baggage to a different postcode.
The road isn’t necessarily the problem. The driver is. You can change direction a hundred times and still arrive at the same destination if you haven’t changed what’s steering you.

Relationships expose this particularly well. We leave someone because they’re “the problem,” find somebody else and, six months later, have the same argument with a different face across the table.

Maybe the hardest part of heartbreak isn’t losing the person. It’s recognising the pattern.

Sometimes the person you’re trying to escape isn’t standing beside you. It’s the person in the mirror.

That’s why the chorus feels bittersweet rather than triumphant. She’s still beautiful. He still misses her. He still loves her. But love doesn’t automatically mean you belong together.

Goddamn beautiful. Goddamn painful.

Pretty Little Lies

It starts as a slow rock song, recalling “Sail Away” from Audrey Horne’s 2010 self-titled album.

“God Damn Beautiful” was about losing someone you still love. “Pretty Little Lies” is about knowing you’re causing the damage and continuing anyway.

“Don’t believe a word I say to you, ’cause telling little lies is what I do.”

Now there’s some fucking honesty.

The destructive lies aren’t always enormous. They’re the little ones: “I’m fine.” “It’s nothing.” “Of course I love you.” “Things will change.” “Just give me some time.”

Stack enough of them together and you build an alternate reality.

Sometimes we lie to ourselves. We say we’re staying because we love someone, when perhaps we’re afraid of being alone. We promise things will change when we already know what tomorrow will bring: nothing.

The pièce de résistance is the lead break, a song within a song. If it doesn’t make you play air guitar, check for a pulse.

When the “on and on” chants arrive, the energy rises, followed by violins in the final thirty seconds that push the riffs into “Kashmir” territory.

The only thing I can do is press play again.

Prodrome

A brief instrumental built around a warlike drum pattern and harmony guitars drawn from Audrey Horne’s Thin Lizzy and Maiden influences.

I had to look up what “Prodrome” meant, An early sign or symptom that signals the impending onset of a disease before major or specific symptoms appear.

Like fever, body aches, and tiredness often act as early warnings before a specific infectious illness takes full hold.

Insanity

Now we’re cranking. It feels as though they’ve taken their best track, “This Is War,” and reimagined it for the verses.

“Did I kill a man?”

That isn’t a confession. It’s worse. A confession means you know what you did. This character doesn’t.

Suddenly we’re inside the head of somebody who can’t trust the most basic fact about himself.

Did I do it? Was I there? Was it a dream? Am I the same person I was yesterday?

We construct stories about ourselves and spend our lives defending them: I’m a good person. I’m the victim. I always do the right thing. Then something happens that doesn’t fit the story.

“If there’s a God, tell him to leave me be.”

There’s no grand revelation or comforting answer. Just a man alone in the dark, surrounded by rain, rats and his own thoughts.

That’s where the Iron Maiden influence matters. The song is a prequel to “Hallowed Be Thy Name”.

Maiden’s condemned man is in prison, waiting to be executed. He faces death, questions God and considers what comes next.

“Insanity” belongs earlier in that story, before the cell, before the execution and before certainty.

And then comes the “Back in the Village”, inspired outro. Excellent.

Hell Is Eternity

Bass and drums start the song before an open-string melodic riff kicks in. It’s fast, high-energy and immediately engaging.

“It leaves a mark on me. The kind that you can’t see.”

The invisible stuff is harder to explain. You can walk into a room carrying ten years of pain and nobody knows. You smile, work, make dinner, crack a joke, and something is still eating you alive.

The monster doesn’t need claws or horns. It doesn’t even need to exist outside your head. It just needs access.

“Hell is eternity.”

That’s the real hell. Permanence. Pain is survivable when you believe it ends. Tell someone their suffering has no end and watch what happens to their world.

Six Feet in the Ground

The foundational DNA here comes from “Unmasked” and “Dynasty” era Kiss. “Naked City,” “Sure Know Something” and “Easy as It Seems” all come to mind.

“Monday early morning, I wake up and open up my eyes.”

The alarm goes off and, before your feet hit the floor, you already know how the day will feel. Same shit. Same routine. Same problems. Same person in the mirror.

“Days drag but nothing changes.”

Repetition is the real prison. Pain gives you something to fight. Repetition wears you down. One day becomes a week, a month, a year, and eventually you realise you’ve spent years waiting for change.

“Happiness is a long gone friend by now.”

Happiness used to live here. Now it’s gone. You can function and still feel fucking dead inside. You can show up while feeling six feet underground and everybody else is living on the surface.

“All I need is some time to think it over.”

Except time doesn’t solve everything. Sometimes it simply gives you more time to avoid what you need to confront.

“All I need is a drink to wait it out.”

It doesn’t solve the problem, just makes it quieter for a few hours.

“Most people learn faster when on fire.”

Pain is an excellent teacher. Unfortunately, most of us are terrible students until the exam is already burning.

Running Through the Night

This is fast and furious Iron Maiden. The verses recall “Aces High,” while the introduction feels influenced by the vibe from the “Powerslave” album.

Tony Soprano. That’s where we start. Tony fucking Soprano.
He’s a captain of industry, family man, criminal, violent, terrified, powerful and miserable.

Underneath it all, he’s “just a kid from New Jersey.”

“I’m going crazy and I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

There’s a guy losing his shit and moving forward.

“Right is wrong.”

There’s the problem. Once the rules become negotiable, everybody writes their own version of reality. The criminal is protecting his family. The businessman is playing the game. The politician is doing what has to be done. Everyone has a reason, a story and a version in which they’re the hero.

Nobody wakes up intending to become the villain. They wake up feeling justified.

Running toward something requires a destination. Running away only requires fear.

The repeated “Running through the night” gives us no arrival. Just movement. Again. Again. Again.
Then come the fragments: “Gloria,” “Suicide,” “Chinatown,” “Bring me down.”

Images, places, death, crime, despair, fame and violence mashed together.

And that section from the 2:30 mark?

I was ready to break my desk in half. The tempo change, groove and classic-rock blues are brilliant.

New Star Falling

After the chaos and self-destruction of “Running Through the Night,” this becomes intimate. The character isn’t running anymore. He’s hiding.

“From this place where I hide, stripped from pleasure and pride.”

Whatever version existed before has been reduced to whatever remains when the bullshit disappears.

There’s loneliness throughout the song, the ugly kind, the kind where you can be surrounded by people and still feel completely disconnected.

“As I’m sitting here beside you, I can’t feel you here.”

You can know somebody’s voice, face, habits and coffee order, yet still lose access to them, or they to you.

“If you’re looking for me, look closer and you will see a new star falling.”

A supernova isn’t just beautiful light. It’s destruction. A star reaches the end of itself and explodes; its death becomes its final spectacle.

It sounds like a warning: watch me disappear.

“Tell me how to undo what can’t be undone.”

The heart of the song: regret. You can’t rewind a conversation, unsay a sentence or return to who you were before you knew what you know now.

“Falling from grace, my supernova, lights out I’m falling down.”

The brightest person in the room can still be falling.

The sequencing gives “Achilles” a cinematic psychological arc.

“Achilles” asks why we’re fighting. “In the Eye of the Hurricane” asks how we survive chaos. “Vampires” asks who’s draining us. “God Damn Beautiful” asks what happens when we lose someone. “Pretty Little Lies” asks what damage we cause each other.

“Insanity” asks whether we can trust our own minds. “Hell Is Eternity” asks what happens when we can’t escape them. “Six Feet in the Ground” asks what happens when we have to get out of bed and live with it. “Running Through the Night” asks whether escape is possible, or merely another form of self-destruction. “New Star Falling” asks what remains when the running finally stops.

The album keeps moving inward: from the world outside, to the people around us, to relationships, lies, the mind, despair and identity.

By “New Star Falling,” that identity is burning out like a dying star.

Which brings us back to “Achilles”. He wasn’t invulnerable. His famous weakness was the one place where he could be wounded. Maybe “Achilles” isn’t about finding the strongest part of ourselves. Maybe it’s about discovering where we’re vulnerable, and what happens when that vulnerability becomes the battlefield.

“Achilles” is a great album, and I’m glad I’m a fan of Audrey Horne. I didn’t actually drop dollars on the band until “Blackout” came out. The self-titled album, my introduction to them, was downloaded free through cyber lockers.

Who said piracy doesn’t pay?

That free download turned into a fan, then a buyer, then somebody waiting for the vinyl to arrive. That’s how music gets you. One album slips through the cracks, and years later you’re still pressing play, still hearing the influences, still finding new things to say.

Audrey Horne take Iron Maiden, Kiss, Scorpions, Thin Lizzy, Black Sabbath, Dio, Europe, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Van Halen, Judas Priest, Diamond Head and all the rest, then turn those ingredients into something that belongs to them. “Achilles” sounds familiar without being second-hand, classic without being trapped in the past and modern without sanding off the danger.

That’s the real achievement. The album doesn’t simply remind me why I love hard rock. It reminds me why I became a fan of Audrey Horne in the first place.

A to Z of Making It, Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Derivative Works, Influenced, Music, Unsung Heroes

Bangalore Choir — On Target: They Had Everything Except Time

There are records that arrive at exactly the wrong fucking moment. Bangalore Choir’s “On Target” is another record to add to those lists.

Released by Giant Records in 1992, “On Target” had the voice of a former Accept frontman, two guitarists carrying the DNA of an obscure but excellent 1980s hard-rock band, a rhythm section that had already come through another major-label act, production from Max Norman, and songs connected to people such as Jon Bon Jovi, Aldo Nova and Steve Plunkett.

This was a band assembled from musicians who had already spent years trying to make it.

Because the story of “On Target” isn’t really “here’s another forgotten hair-metal album.”

It’s the story of what happens when talented, experienced musicians get another shot and the world changes just as they’re taking it.

The lineage is the story. Start with David Reece.

Before Bangalore Choir, Reece had already won the musical lottery and discovered that winning the lottery doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve won.

He became the American singer chosen to replace Udo Dirkschneider in Accept and recorded “Eat the Heat” in 1989.

But “Eat the Heat” became controversial, the Accept experiment ended, and Reece returned to Los Angeles.

Instead of giving up, he started again. And Reece didn’t simply recruit random musicians.

He found John Kirk through the Guitar Institute of Technology in Hollywood. Kirk had previously played with Curt Mitchell in Reno band Razormaid. Mitchell joined.

That’s already a hell of a musical family tree. Then came Ian Mayo and Jackie Ramos.

Both had been members of Hericane Alice, the Atlantic Records band that released “Tear the House Down” in 1990.

Bangalore Choir’s management had also managed Hericane Alice, and the opportunity came almost immediately after Hericane Alice had been dropped.

So look at what you’re actually hearing:

David Reece — Accept
Curt Mitchell — Razormaid
John Kirk — Razormaid
Ian Mayo — Hericane Alice
Jackie Ramos — Hericane Alice

It’s absolutely a supergroup of experience.

And, more importantly, these weren’t musicians getting their first taste of the business.

They had already been through it.

The really strange thing about “On Target” is how much machinery was behind it.

Bangalore Choir played only a handful of Los Angeles shows before major-label interest arrived. Reece later recalled via the metalforcesmagazine.com that after around nine shows, the band had offers from labels around the city. Giant Records, distributed through Warner Bros., won the race.

Then Giant brought in Max Norman to produce. His résumé already included Ozzy Osbourne, Megadeth, Lynch Mob, Savatage and others.

The album also had Jon Bon Jovi and Aldo Nova connections on “Doin’ the Dance,” while “Loaded Gun” had Ricky Phillips among its co-writers.

And yet the album didn’t explode.

That’s the great paradox. The band had the musicians. The singer. The songs. The producer. The label. The industry connections. The look.

The timing should have worked. Except the timing didn’t.

And we are back to the seismic moment of 1991–92, when the musical ground underneath hard rock was moving.

Nirvana had detonated. Pearl Jam were exploding. Soundgarden were breaking through.

And then the record industry did what the record industry always does when it discovers something that sells.

It copied it.

The same machine that had saturated the Sunset Strip with interchangeable hair-metal bands now turned toward Seattle. Suddenly everyone wanted flannel, distortion, alienation and authenticity.

MTV changed.

Radio changed.

Labels changed.

The irony is that the industry eventually did to Seattle what it had done to the Sunset Strip: saturate the market with bands trying to reproduce the sound of the bands that broke through, until the movement itself became exhausted.

Bangalore Choir weren’t suddenly bad.

The market had stopped asking for what they were selling.

And that’s the brutal part of making it in music.

Music is a supply and demand economy. Talent isn’t enough. Hard work isn’t enough. Experience isn’t enough. You can spend ten years building something only to discover that the market has moved somewhere else.

Bangalore Choir got their opportunity. They just got it at the end of an era.

“Angel in Black”

And what a way to open the record.

“Angel in Black” immediately tells you what Bangalore Choir are.

Big guitars. Big vocal. Big chorus. Big fucking attitude. It’s melodic hard rock without apologising for the “rock” part.

Reece sounds enormous. There’s swagger and melodic freedom here.

There’s something familiar buried in the main riff too. It reminds me of the riff that comes after the chorus in Alice Cooper’s “Snakebite.”

The song had an interesting history too: it was originally associated with Autograph, with Steve Plunkett credited as its writer along with Jack Conrad. Their demo version was released on an Autograph anthology release.

“Loaded Gun”

An overused song title in the 70s and 80s. However this is the commercial punch.

It’s got some serious songwriting lineage around it. Written by Curtis Cuomo, Harry Paress and Rick Phillips.

Phillips is coming from a pedigree that involves “The Baby’s” and “Bad English”. He’s hardened and been around. Paress already had success writing for Vixen, including “Love Is a Killer.” He would go on to write songs for Fiona, Quiet Riot, Bobby Kimball and Steelhouse Lane. And then there is Curtis Cuomo. His name would later become much more recognisable when he appeared as a co-writer on “Psycho Circus” with Paul Stanley, plus on all the Paul Stanley sung tracks on the “Carnival of Souls” album.

So if “Angel in Black” introduces the band, “Loaded Gun” is the song designed to make the radio understand them.

It’s hooky, muscular and built around the kind of chorus that could have lived comfortably alongside late-80s Bon Jovi, Whitesnake or Def Leppard.

The song was pushed as a single and received trade promotion from Giant Records. The music video has since become a piece of pop-culture trivia because a very young Jared Leto appeared in it.

“If the Good Die Young (We’ll Live Forever)”

It’s one of those songs where the title sounds like something you’ve heard a hundred times, but the band sells it because the melody is stronger than the cliché.

“Doin’ the Dance”

This is one of the album’s most interesting tracks because of the songwriting pedigree.

Jon Bon Jovi and Aldo Nova are involved in the writing.

There’s groove. There’s melody. There’s attitude.

But it’s not their best track. It’s competent, commercial and perfectly engineered for the moment, but compared with “Angel in Black” and “Loaded Gun,” it doesn’t hit with the same force.

“Hold On to You”

The inevitable ballad. Co written by the band with Russell Miller.

The guitars become atmosphere rather than artillery, and the song provides the album with some breathing room.

“All or Nothin’”

This is one of the songs that reveals the band’s confidence.

It was one of the earliest songs written by the developing Bangalore Choir lineup, along with “Slippin’ Away.”

And you can hear that it isn’t trying to impress anybody.

It’s simply a band discovering its identity.

The riff is direct. The chorus is huge. The rhythm section drives rather than decorates.

And Reece attacks the vocal like a man who knows he has something to prove.

Which, frankly, he did.

“Slippin’ Away”

It’s a great piece of melodic rock. And the title is prophetic. Because things just slip away.

Eras. Youth. Relationships. Opportunities. And the musical culture that had created the conditions for Bangalore Choir to exist.

Reece has said via SleazeRoxx that decades later, “Slippin’ Away” remains one of the Bangalore Choir songs audiences know and sing along to.

That’s the ultimate vindication.

The industry may have forgotten the album. The audience didn’t.

It just took them longer to find it.

“She Can’t Stop”

An AOR gem about a lonely girl dancing under neon lights who can’t stop running away.

“Freight Train Rollin’”

This is one of the album’s hardest hitters. A great riff to kick it off.

The title tells you everything.

It’s movement. Momentum. Power. And the song doesn’t mess around.

I love the groove around the verse riffs. The simplicity is deceptive. Getting stuff to sound effortless is difficult.

“Just One Night”

And then the album closes.

“Just One Night” isn’t the biggest song here, and that’s probably why it works as the closer.

After all the swagger, sex, guitars and huge choruses, the record finishes without trying to manufacture some grand finale.

It’s simply another strong melodic hard-rock song.

And then it’s over.

Thirty-eight minutes.

Ten songs.

No filler marathon.

No desperate attempt to prove they’re the next Metallica.

Just a fucking good hard-rock album.

And then reality arrived.

Bangalore Choir had done everything right.

They had paid their dues. They had experienced musicians. They had a respected producer. They had a major-label deal. They had songs. They had management.

And still…

Nothing.

There’s a tendency to look back at bands like Bangalore Choir and think: “These guys just appeared, made an album and disappeared.”

No. That’s completely wrong. The musicians had been grinding for years.

Razormaid had been around since the early 1980s before “First Cutt” arrived in 1987.

Hericane Alice had spent years developing before Atlantic released “Tear the House Down.”

Reece had already gone through the extraordinary experience of joining Accept and recording a major-label album.

Mayo and Ramos had already experienced the major-label dream, and the pain of being dropped.

By the time these musicians stood together as Bangalore Choir, they weren’t beginners.

They were survivors.

You’re listening to musicians who had already learned how fucking hard it was.

And looking at where these five musicians went afterwards only strengthens the argument.

Mayo and Ramos moved into Bad Moon Rising, connecting them to Kal Swan and Doug Aldrich of Lion.

Jerry Best’s parallel Lion/Freak of Nature/Dio story eventually connects the same ecosystem to Mike Tramp, Dio and even Courtney Love.

Reece would go on to Sircle of Silence, Bonfire, Gypsy Rose and his solo work, eventually returning to Bangalore Choir decades later.

Mitchell and Reece would eventually revive Bangalore Choir.

The family tree keeps growing.

Here’s the beautiful part. The album didn’t disappear. It went underground. Collectors found it.

Hard-rock fans rediscovered it. CDs changed hands. People bought it on eBay years after its release.

And eventually a younger generation started hearing it without any of the baggage attached to 1992.

That’s the funny thing about music.

Sometimes the audience you were chasing isn’t the audience that eventually saves you.

“On Target” isn’t a lost masterpiece because it reinvented hard rock.

It’s a lost classic because it executed the genre extraordinarily well at exactly the wrong moment.

The guitars sound enormous. The vocals are killer. The songs are melodic without becoming soft. The production has the pedigree. The musicians had the experience.

And the album has something a lot of technically impressive records don’t: personality.

Could On Target have been a major commercial hard-rock record in 1987, 1988 or even 1989?

Absolutely.

But in 1992?

That’s the tragedy. The machine changed what it wanted.

That’s timing. And sometimes timing is the difference between a band everybody knows and a band people spend 30 years telling other people they should know.

Because Bangalore Choir didn’t miss because they weren’t good enough.

They missed because the target moved.

Classic Songs to Be Discovered, Derivative Works, Influenced, Music

The Lost Art of Melody: Paul Stanley’s Underrated KISS Gems From 1987–1992

Somewhere between 1987 and 1992, Paul Stanley quietly became one of the best melodic hard rock songwriters in the business. Maybe he already was the best.

While thrash bands were chasing aggression and hair bands were drowning in excess, Paul Stanley was still obsessed with choruses. Diehards accused him of selling out, but to the Star Child, how can you sell out when you are doing the same thing you’ve always been doing.

Writing great Choruses.

If you don’t believe me, go back and listen again.

“My Way.”
“King Of Hearts.”
“Heart Of Chrome.”

They’re hidden gems from a period people spent decades dismissing because KISS dared to sound polished during the peak of pop metal.

And that’s always been the crime in rock history… accessibility.

But writing massive melodic hooks is harder than writing heaviness. Everybody can down-tune guitars and write about darkness or about the things that should not be.

Paul Stanley walked a tightrope constantly, trying to write something memorable, without it collapsing into cheese.

“King of Hearts” wasn’t just Paul Stanley writing another song, it was Paul teaming up with Vini Poncia, the architect behind some of KISS’s most polished late-70s and early-80s material. Full disclosure, the 1978 to 1980 era from KISS is huge in Australia. In other words, I’m a fan of this songwriting team.

“She was just 19, but in her eyes she was old enough to know.”

Everyone remembers being young and thinking they had to grow up too fast.

Nineteen is an age of contradiction. You’re legally an adult, emotionally still assembling yourself, and already discovering that life doesn’t care how prepared you are. The lyric is telling us about experience. Some people accumulate years. Others accumulate scars.

“In her eyes” suggests wisdom earned through disappointment, responsibility, and surviving things a person shouldn’t have had to survive.

That’s one of life’s uncomfortable truths: innocence doesn’t disappear because time passes. It disappears because reality arrives early.

“We were caught between two city streets, like a bad dream.”

Cities promise opportunity, but they can also make you anonymous.

This line is describing limbo. Existing in the space between where you are and where you wish you were. You have movement all around you but no direction of your own.

We’ve all lived there at some point, psychologically. Between careers. Between relationships. Between the life we imagined and the one we’re actually living.

The bad dream is the feeling there’s no obvious way out.

“I’m the King of Hearts, livin’ in a fantasy.”

On the surface, it’s a classic arena-rock chorus. But underneath, there’s something more fragile.

The kingdom isn’t power, money, or status. It’s a relationship. His entire identity exists inside an emotional space created by two people.

And then comes the twist:

“Livin’ in a fantasy.”

He knows it isn’t permanent.

Love often feels like borrowing time from reality. For a few hours, or a few years, the chaos outside fades into the background, and the ordinary rules stop applying.

The fantasy is believing you’ve found somewhere the rest of the world can’t reach you.

It’s saying that sometimes love gives you just enough shelter to walk back into the world and face it again.

Give it a spin.

“My Way” paired Paul with Desmond Child and keyboardist Bruce Turgon, and that tells you everything about the song before you even hear it. Child was the master of arena-sized hooks, while Turgon was steeped in the melodic AOR rock world through his work with Lou Gramm, then Shadow King, and eventually Foreigner.

It is a song about defiance, self-determination, and refusing to surrender your identity to outside forces.

It is the anthem of someone who has reached the point where approval is no longer the currency they live by.

“Oh the heat is on / And my back’s against the wall”

Everyone understands this feeling.

Life eventually puts everyone in the same position: the deadline is impossible, the relationship is breaking, the dream feels too far away, the world doesn’t care about your excuses.

“I’m never gonna stop / I’m never gonna give up in the fight”

Every great transformation story has this moment:

The hero gets knocked down.

The world says: “Stay down. Accept your limitations.”

And the hero answers: “No.”

But persistence is misunderstood.

The successful person is rarely the person who feels inspired every day.

They are the person who decided: The fight is against the part of yourself that wants the easy exit.

“I’m gonna talk like I talk, walk like I walk my way”

The real battle is authenticity.

Every day people edit themselves: They soften their opinions. They hide their passions. They become smaller to fit into rooms. They trade truth for acceptance.

And eventually they wake up surrounded by relationships, careers, and identities built around a fake version of themselves.

The problem with trying to make everyone like you is that eventually you become someone you don’t even like.

The cost of authenticity is rejection.

But the cost of pretending is losing yourself.

“I’m never gonna run / I’m never gonna tell myself a lie”

Running away is obvious. But lying to yourself is the more dangerous enemy.

People don’t usually destroy their lives through one massive mistake. They do it through thousands of tiny compromises:

“It’s only temporary.”

“I’ll fix it later.”

“This isn’t really who I am.”

“Everyone else does it.”

Self-deception is the invisible cage.

The hardest person to be honest with is yourself because you already know all your own excuses.

“I’ve got the right to decide”

You cannot control, what people think, whether people approve, whether life is fair, whether you succeed immediately

But you can control your response.

Doing it “my way” is not freedom from consequences. It is accepting ownership of consequences.

That is why these kinds of songs endure. They are not really about winning. They are about refusing to disappear.

And people mocked albums like “Crazy Nights” and “Hot In The Shade” for years because KISS were “trying to sound contemporary.”

Of course they were. That’s what great bands do.

The irony is the same people who trashed those records now worship melodic Scandinavian hard rock bands who built entire careers recycling the exact songwriting formula from these albums.

The DNA is obvious.

And then came “Heart Of Chrome” on “Revenge”, the “serious” KISS album. The heavier record. The darker reinvention. Bob Ezrin back in the fold. Grunge looming over the horizon. Less lipstick. More muscle. More Demon. And Vinnie Vincent.

“Heart of Chrome” brought together Paul Stanley, Vinnie Vincent and Bob Ezrin. It’s a reminder that KISS at their best was never just one personality, it was controlled chaos with a chorus attached.

Yet it still carries Paul Stanley’s melodic fingerprints all over it.

The Chrome shines. It reflects. It looks beautiful. But it’s cold, hard, and incapable of feeling. That’s the accusation running through the entire song.

“Yeah, ‘til the day we met, I was cruisin’, I was doin’ fine.”

Every serious heartbreak costs you something beyond the relationship itself. It changes the way you evaluate people. It teaches you to hesitate where you once trusted. That’s why people don’t simply “get over it.” They become a slightly different version of themselves.

The hardest part isn’t losing someone. It’s losing the person you were before they arrived.

“Everybody knew you used me, but I was just too blind to see.”

Nothing hurts quite like discovering everyone else saw the truth before you did.

More often, betrayal is self-deception. We ignore warning signs because they conflict with the future we’ve already imagined. We defend someone long after the evidence says we shouldn’t.

Embarrassment lingers because it’s public. Heartbreak is private until you realise everyone else watched it unfold in real time.

“You told me lies about all that you feel. I realize now that nothing was real.”

When trust collapses, you don’t just question one conversation. You question every conversation.

Every compliment.

Every promise.

Every memory.

The mind becomes an archaeologist, digging through the ruins looking for evidence of what was genuine and what was performance.

That’s why betrayal has such a long half-life. You’re auditing your own reality.

The relationship ends once. The replay lasts until you’ve built a version of the story that finally makes sense.

“You took everything you could beg, borrow, steal.”

Most people think betrayal is about what someone takes from you.

Money.

Time.

Love.

The deeper theft is confidence.

You begin to question your own judgment. You wonder whether you’ll recognise the next warning sign. You become cautious, not because you’re weak, but because your internal compass has been shaken.

The irony is that the people who betray us rarely carry the consequences as long as the people they betrayed.

“Heart of Chrome” sounds like a revenge song, but beneath it is something far more familiar: the struggle to make sense of betrayal without letting it define you.

The real victory is reaching the point where they no longer occupy your thoughts.

Because that’s the final irony of a “heart of chrome.” Metal can’t feel. But the person carrying the anger still can.

Melody survives generations.

That’s why these deeper cuts still resonate decades later. And honestly, this era deserves reevaluation.

They weren’t just party anthems.
They were songs about ambition, loneliness, survival, aging, heartbreak and identity disguised inside arena-rock choruses.

And maybe that’s the real story of late-80s KISS. Paul Stanley kept writing gigantic melodic songs during a period where rock music slowly forgot how important melody actually was.

My Love Affair With Spotify Is Over

There was a time when Friday meant Release Radar.

I’d open Spotify and there it was: a little digital treasure chest of new music.

Sometimes it was brilliant. Sometimes it was shit. Sometimes it was something I’d never heard of from a band I’d never heard of and suddenly I’d spent the next three weeks listening to their back catalogue.

That was the magic.

Spotify didn’t just give me music. It gave me the possibility of discovering something.

I’m not sure when that disappeared. But my love affair with Spotify is over.

Spotify won.

That’s the funny part.

It has mass acceptance. It’s become infrastructure. Music streaming isn’t some revolutionary new technology anymore. It’s plumbing.

And once something becomes plumbing, you stop asking whether it’s magical. You just turn the tap on. And the water is there.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: What happens when the thing you once loved becomes merely good enough?

Spotify keeps raising prices. The product keeps evolving. There are more features, more data, more playlists, more recommendations, more algorithms and more ways to consume music than ever before.

And yet I’m increasingly convinced that the actual experience of discovering music has become worse. That’s quite an achievement.

We’ve gone from having too little music to having virtually all of it.

And somehow I’m listening to the same records I bought thirty years ago.

The Discover playlist used to be good. Like, really good.

Eight years ago it could occasionally make me stop what I was doing.

“What the fuck is this?”

That’s the best feeling a music service can give you.

Now?

Not so much.

The recommendations increasingly feel like they’ve been generated by somebody who looked at my listening history and decided that the safest possible interpretation of it was the best one.

I listen to Thin Lizzy. Here’s some Thin Lizzy. I listen to Whitesnake. Here’s Whitesnake. I listen to Iron Maiden. Here’s Iron Maiden.

I’ve saved these songs.

So apparently Spotify thinks I want to hear them again tomorrow.

And the day after that. And perhaps in a different playlist on Thursday.

Saving a song does not mean I want to hear it every fucking day. It means I like the song. There is a difference.

The Daily Mixes are probably the perfect example. They’re not really discovery. They’re comfort food. They’re Spotify saying:

“We’ve studied your behaviour and concluded that you’d probably like the things you already like.”

Well, thanks. I knew that. That’s why I saved them.

The whole reason I use a streaming service is because I don’t want to have to manually construct my listening experience every day.

I want to be surprised. I want the obscure album. The forgotten B-side. The guitarist I somehow missed. The band from 1987 that released one great album and disappeared. The song that isn’t popular enough to have been algorithmically blessed.

I want the rabbit hole. And the rabbit hole is where Spotify increasingly feels lost.

Then there’s Release Radar.

This one hurts because Release Radar was once my favourite thing Spotify did.

Every Friday I’d go looking for new music. And now I get:

A new XYZ release from a Hindu Yogi. A new Loverboy release from a young rapper. A new Sykes release from someone who definitely isn’t John Sykes. A new Ratt release that isn’t from Ratt.

Somewhere between the artist, distributor, metadata database, record label and algorithm, something has gone spectacularly fucking wrong.

And I understand how this happens. There are thousands of artists. There are multiple artists with the same names.

There are distributors.

Labels.

Rights holders.

Metadata.

Automated ingestion.

Millions of releases.

It’s complicated.

But that’s the problem.

The system is complicated enough to explain the mistake and still not good enough to prevent it.

And every Friday, instead of opening a treasure chest, I’m checking whether Spotify has accidentally delivered somebody else’s mail.

And the music itself can disappear.

There’s another bizarre problem with the streaming age. We were promised access to everything. And for the most part, we got it.

But streaming isn’t ownership. It’s access. The music is sitting there until somebody decides it shouldn’t be.

Licensing changes. Rights change hands. Distributors disappear. Labels change. Artists change their minds. Regional agreements expire.

Albums appear. Albums disappear. Albums come back. Then disappear again.

Maybe some of the master tapes don’t even exist anymore. Maybe they burned down in one of those mysterious fires that seem to have consumed half the history of recorded music.

But here’s the strange thing: We were told digital music would solve scarcity.

Instead, we’ve created a different kind of scarcity.

The music isn’t necessarily hard to find. It’s hard to know whether it’ll still be there tomorrow.

The cloud looks permanent.

It isn’t.

Here’s where I really started to understand the problem. Ask Spotify for something simple:

“Best emotive guitar solos.”

Go on.

Do it.

You don’t get emotion. You get metadata. You get lists compiled by magazines.

Lists compiled by websites. Lists compiled from other lists. Wikipedia. “The 50 Greatest Guitar Solos Of All Time.”

And there’s the problem.

Spotify knows what an emotive guitar solo is supposed to look like in data. It doesn’t necessarily know what makes one matter.

Because how do you quantify Michael Schenker playing “Try Me”?

How do you quantify David Gilmour playing “Comfortably Numb”?

How do you explain Zakk Wylde on “Angel of Mercy”?

Mick Mars on “Home Sweet Home”?

C.C. DeVille on “Life Goes On”?

John Sykes on “Straight For The Heart”?

Warren DeMartini on “Giving Yourself Away”?

George Lynch on “Alone Again”?

John Petrucci on “Learning To Live”?

Al Pitrelli on “Blue For You”?

Gary Moore on “Empty Rooms”?

Eddie Ojeda on “The Price”?

Vivian Campbell on whatever particular piece of magic he happened to be responsible for that week during his stint with Dio.

Yngwie Malmsteen doing what Yngwie does.

Vinnie Vincent on “I Still Love You.”

Steve Rothery on “Easter.”

Bruce Kulick on “Tears Are Falling.”

Bob Kulick on “The Idol.”

Randy Piper on “Sleeping in the Fire.”

Richie Sambora on “Dry County.”

Dave Meniketti on almost fucking anything.

Adrian Smith on “Stranger in a Strange Land.”

James Hetfield on “Nothing Else Matters.”

Kirk Hammett on the outro to “Bleeding Me.”

Randy Rhoads on “Goodbye To Romance”. There are many others that I can’t think of right now.

These aren’t simply guitar solos. They’re moments. They’re performances. They’re context. They’re tone. They’re restraint. They’re excess. They’re the note that arrives half a second later than you expect.

They’re the bend that hangs in the air. They’re the player knowing when not to play. They’re everything that happens between the notes. Try putting that into a database.

And this is where I don’t buy the lazy argument that Spotify’s engineers are idiots.

They’re not.

They’re probably fucking brilliant.

They’ve built an extraordinary machine. Spotify knows what I’ve listened to. It knows what I’ve skipped. It knows what I’ve saved. It knows what people who listen to the bands I listen to also listen to.

It knows tempo. Genre. Popularity. Release dates. Listening patterns.

It can probably predict with frightening accuracy that if you listen to Judas Priest at 10:47pm on a Wednesday, there’s a statistically meaningful chance you’ll listen to Iron Maiden next.

It’s incredible.

And yet I ask it for an emotive guitar solo and it gives me an SEO list.

That’s the paradox.

The machine understands the data surrounding music extraordinarily well.

I’m not convinced it understands music.

This is where Spotify’s problem becomes everybody’s problem.

We’re increasingly trying to turn taste into data. But taste isn’t simply a collection of preferences.

Taste is memory. Context. Association. Experience. History.

You don’t just like David Gilmour.

Maybe you heard “Comfortably Numb” when you were fifteen.

Maybe you heard it when you were thirty-five.

Maybe the guitar solo reminds you of someone who isn’t in your life anymore.

Maybe you heard Gary Moore’s “Empty Rooms” at exactly the wrong moment in your life and now the opening notes carry twenty years of emotional baggage.

Spotify doesn’t know that.

And it can’t.

Because the emotional meaning of music isn’t contained inside the audio file.

It’s contained inside you.

That’s why two people can listen to the same song and hear completely different things.

And that’s why the idea that an algorithm can eventually know your taste better than you do is worth questioning.

Maybe it can predict your behaviour.

That’s not the same thing.

We lost the obsessive music nerd.

There used to be people who knew music. The guy in the record shop who’d hear you mention Van Halen and say: “You need to hear this.”

The radio DJ who’d play something you’d never heard. The bloke at school who had an album nobody else had. The friend who’d make you a mixtape.

The magazine writer who’d disappear down some obscure musical rabbit hole and drag you along with them.

They were often wrong.

And that’s what made them useful.

Algorithms want evidence.

Humans have hunches.

Humans make mistakes.

Humans have obsessions.

And sometimes an obsession is exactly what you need.

Spotify has become safe. It got too good at being Spotify.

It knows what I like. It knows what people like me like. It knows what songs are popular. It knows what songs are associated with other songs.

It knows what gets skipped. It knows what gets saved. It knows everything except the one thing I’m actually asking: Surprise me.

Not randomly. Not stupidly.

Not with another artist whose name happens to match the artist I’m looking for.

Surprise me intelligently.

Take a risk. Connect two things that don’t obviously belong together.

Tell me why. That’s what a great music obsessive does.

And then there’s YouTube, sitting there with an enormous music catalogue as well.

And YouTube has something Spotify doesn’t have in quite the same way: the internet’s collective memory.

Live performances. Interviews. Bootlegs. Old television appearances. Fan uploads. Rare tracks. Alternate mixes. Gear breakdowns. Concert footage. Someone filming a guitarist playing one obscure solo in 1989.

The ecosystem is chaotic. But chaos has advantages.

Spotify is beautifully organised. YouTube is a fucking junk drawer.

And sometimes the junk drawer is exactly where you find the thing you were looking for.

So what am I actually paying Spotify for?

That’s the question I keep coming back to. Because Spotify isn’t bad. That’s almost the problem. It’s convenient. It works.

The catalogue is enormous. The interface is good. The sound is good. The integration is good. It’s easy. (In saying all of this, I’m currently devouring the Bernie Torme history).

And that’s exactly why I’m frustrated.

I’m paying for convenience and getting increasingly less discovery.

The service is becoming more expensive while the thing I personally valued most about it seems to be deteriorating. Maybe that’s not a universal experience.

Maybe millions of people couldn’t care less about Release Radar.

Maybe most people just want to press play and hear songs they already like.

That’s perfectly rational. But I’m not most people.

And I don’t want Spotify to know me so well that it stops introducing me to things I don’t know.

We’ve never had more music. Millions of albums. Decades of recorded history.

Every obscure corner of rock, metal, jazz, blues, punk, pop, electronic music and everything else sitting inside a phone.

Humanity has created an almost unimaginable archive of sound.

And yet the technological solution to infinite choice seems increasingly to be: Here’s the stuff you’ve already heard.

That’s not discovery. That’s a loop. An echo chamber.

And the larger the database becomes, the more important curation becomes.

Not less.

Because abundance creates its own scarcity.

There is too much music. There are too many releases. Too many artists. Too many playlists. Too much content.

The scarce resource isn’t music anymore.

It’s attention.

And the service that wins isn’t necessarily the one with the most music.

It’s the one that can make me care about something I didn’t know I cared about.

I don’t want better algorithms.

Maybe that’s the wrong conclusion. Maybe I don’t need another algorithm. Maybe I need better curators.

Or weird curators. Or human curators assisted by algorithms.

Let the machines do what they’re brilliant at. Find patterns. Search billions of tracks. Surface connections.

Handle the impossible scale of the catalogue.

But let humans inject the thing machines are still terrible at: taste.

Give me the obsessive metal nerd.

Give me the person who knows every forgotten 1980s hard-rock record.

Give me the person who can tell you which pressing of an album sounds better and why.

Give me someone who has spent thirty years listening to guitar players. Someone who knows why that solo matters.

Maybe the problem is that Spotify stopped feeling like a record shop.

That might be what I’m really missing. The record shop wasn’t efficient. It wasn’t personalized.

It didn’t know my listening history.

It couldn’t calculate my predicted enjoyment of an album.

It didn’t have machine learning.

It had a bloke behind the counter who had listened to 10,000 records and had strong opinions.

And sometimes he’d hand you something and say:

“You’ll hate this.”

Then you’d buy it anyway.

And thirty years later you’d still be listening to it.

That’s discovery.

That’s the thing Spotify used to make me feel.

And somewhere along the way, the algorithm got better and the experience got worse.

So no, Spotify isn’t dead.

Far from it. It’s enormous. It’s successful. It’s going to be around for a very long time.

But my love affair with it is over.

Because Spotify has access to more music than any human being in history.

And somehow, I’m finding myself listening to the same records I bought thirty years ago.

Maybe the problem isn’t that Spotify doesn’t have enough music.

Maybe it has too much.

Maybe the problem is that somewhere inside that enormous machine, nobody knows what makes one fucking note matter.

The Album You Bought Doesn’t Exist

We’ve spent forty years arguing about whether vinyl sounds better than digital.

Wrong argument.

The real question in 2026 is this:

What if your vinyl isn’t even the same album?

That’s exactly what’s happening.

Fans pre-order expensive deluxe editions because they’re told they’re buying the definitive version. The collector’s piece. The premium experience. The one worthy of sitting proudly on the shelf.

Then release day comes. Spotify gets one album. The record spinning on your turntable gets another.

A missing bridge. A different ending. An unfinished mix. An absent guest appearance.

Sometimes an entire song disappears.

For years, vinyl collectors chased first pressings because they believed they sounded better.

Now they’re buying something stranger. They’re buying history.

Every generation has a technological shift that quietly rewrites the rules.

Multitrack recording. The compact disc. MP3s. Streaming. Now it’s vinyl manufacturing.

Not because vinyl suddenly became the dominant format again. Streaming still owns that title. Vinyl is simply the slowest part of a very fast industry.

A record pressing plant doesn’t care that inspiration struck last Tuesday. It wants the finished masters six to eight weeks ago. Meanwhile Spotify is happy to wait until almost the last minute.

That gap has become a creative playground. Artists keep writing. Producers keep tweaking. Guests finally send their vocals.

Someone decides the chorus needs another layer. The ending isn’t working. The bass needs rewriting. The label hears another potential single. By the time the album appears online, it’s evolved.

The vinyl hasn’t.

For the first time in popular music, the physical record is no longer necessarily the finished product.

It’s yesterday’s version. Sort of.

I remember reading an interview with producer Tom Werman explaining how he often created different mixes for radio, television and vinyl.

At first glance, today’s situation feels familiar.

It isn’t.

Werman wasn’t delivering unfinished work. He was tailoring completed songs for different audiences.

Radio demanded impact. Television demanded clarity. Vinyl demanded technical precision. The performance never changed. The destination did.

Today’s vinyl differences exist for a completely different reason.

The destination stayed the same. The journey simply wasn’t finished.

That’s a profound shift.

People love repeating the myth that vinyl can’t handle bass.

Not true. It can. Just not carelessly.

A vinyl record isn’t a computer file. It’s physics carved into plastic.

Every kick drum literally moves a cutting stylus. Every bass guitar creates a groove.

Push those movements too far and you run out of room, or worse, the playback stylus struggles to track the groove.

So mastering engineers become architects. They collapse deep bass into mono. Remove inaudible rumble. Control extreme low frequencies. Adjust dynamics.

Then they apply the RIAA equalisation curve, reducing bass and boosting treble during cutting so your phono preamp can reverse the process during playback.

Nothing is lost.

Everything is engineered.

It’s one of the greatest pieces of analogue problem-solving ever invented.

None of this should surprise hard rock and metal fans. We’ve been collecting different versions our entire lives.

Original UK pressings. Japanese pressings. US pressings. Remasters. Radio edits. 12-inch mixes.

Tom Werman. Mutt Lange. Bob Clearmountain.

These producers understood something that’s becoming relevant again.

Every format has its own language.

A Metallica vinyl pressing doesn’t necessarily sound like its CD counterpart.

Iron Maiden fans debate original EMI cuts versus modern remasters.

Megadeth albums exist in multiple sonic identities.

Def Leppard practically turned alternate mixes into an art form.

But those records shared one important characteristic.

They were finished.

Today’s vinyl sometimes isn’t. That’s new. Here’s the irony.

The very thing frustrating fans today may become the reason collectors treasure these records tomorrow.

Not because they’re rare. Because they’re honest. They preserve the album before the final decisions.

Before the last-minute vocal. Before the rewritten lyric. Before the producer changed his mind.

They’re snapshots of creativity still in motion. Neither is wrong. One simply tells you more about the journey.

For years we’ve treated vinyl as nostalgia.

A warmer sound. A bigger sleeve. A ritual.

Maybe that’s no longer what we’re buying. Maybe vinyl has accidentally become something far more valuable.

A timestamp. An alternate timeline.

Proof that great records aren’t born in a single moment. They’re discovered through revision.

Streaming gives us the destination.

Vinyl increasingly preserves the road that led there.

That’s fascinating. But only if artists tell us.

Collectors don’t mind buying an alternate version. In fact, many would happily pay for it.

What they object to is believing they’re buying the finished novel, only to discover they’ve been sold the author’s penultimate draft.

There’s nothing wrong with alternate versions. Rock music has celebrated them for decades.

There’s everything wrong with pretending they’re the same thing.

Because sometimes the album on your shelf isn’t simply mastered differently.

It’s a different story altogether.

Influenced, Music, My Stories, Unsung Heroes

TesseracT’s Nocturne Isn’t Just a Song. It’s a Question We Still Haven’t Answered.

On Thursday, 23 July 2026, I stood inside the Hordern Pavilion waiting for Karnivool, but if I’m being honest, I was just as excited to finally experience Tesseract live.

I’d heard plenty about them. I’d spent years with “Altered State”. But there are albums that belong in headphones, and there are songs that only reveal themselves when several thousand people are breathing in time with them.

They opened with “Natural Disaster”, and within minutes the room belonged to them. Then the unmistakable opening of “Nocturne” arrived, and everything changed.

For me, it isn’t just one of Tesseract’s finest songs.

It’s one of progressive metal’s defining moments of the last decade.

Because beneath all of that complexity sits a question so uncomfortable that it refuses to let go.

Can we save us from ourselves?

That’s the genius of “Nocturne”.

Most songs give you a villain. Someone to blame. A government. A relationship. A broken society. An enemy lurking somewhere over the horizon.

Tesseract turns the mirror around.

What if the plague isn’t outside?

What if it’s us?

Spend five minutes reading the comments on YouTube or Reddit discussions and you’ll notice something fascinating. Nobody seems to agree on exactly what the song is about, yet almost everyone walks away feeling the same thing.

Some hear climate anxiety. Others hear depression. Some hear a civilisation slowly collapsing under the weight of its own denial. Others hear a deeply personal battle with fear, addiction or grief.

The beauty is that every interpretation works because they’re all connected by one simple truth.

Human beings have an incredible ability to see disaster approaching while convincing ourselves we’ll somehow be the exception.

We postpone difficult conversations. We ignore obvious warning signs.We mistake optimism for action. We call it hope when, sometimes, it’s simply denial wearing better clothes.

“Denial’s an impairment of your fear.”

Most writers would tell you fear creates denial. Tesseract flips the equation.

Denial doesn’t remove fear. It weakens our ability to confront it.

The longer we pretend something isn’t happening, the more power we quietly hand over to it.

“False hope sells lies. I won’t buy.”

Every day we’re offered comforting stories. Everything will be okay. Someone else will fix it. Tomorrow will be different. No changes required.

The easiest thing in the world is to purchase another comforting narrative.

The hardest thing is accepting reality exactly as it is. Because reality is where change begins.

“Only on the brink can we see so clearly.”

History is full of examples. Businesses don’t reinvent themselves when they’re thriving. Remember Kodak, BlackBerry and the recording industry post Napster.

People don’t usually change while life is comfortable. Relationships aren’t repaired until they’re almost over. Perspective has an unfortunate habit of arriving late.

Sometimes we need to stand on the edge before we finally recognise where we’ve been walking all along.

And then there’s the ending.

Four simple words repeated over and over.

“Wake me up.”

By the final repetition it doesn’t even sound like singing anymore.

It sounds like surrender.

Maybe that’s why “Nocturne” has aged so well.

It doesn’t belong to 2013.

It belongs to every generation that believes tomorrow will somehow arrive without requiring anything from today.

Walking out of the Hordern Pavilion, I wasn’t thinking about odd time signatures, guitar tones or vocal ranges.

I was thinking about a single question that had been echoing through the room all night.

Can we save us from ourselves?

The unsettling part is that thirteen years later, it still feels like the most important question anyone is asking.

The Labels Want Songwriters’ Rights, Just Not Songwriters Themselves

The article.

Chaos for Who?

The music industry loves to talk about artists.

It loves to celebrate artists.

It loves to hand out awards, sponsor songwriter camps, run social media campaigns about creativity, and tell the world that music starts with the creator.

Until the creator asks for something back. Then suddenly the language changes.

Now it’s not about art. It’s not about fairness. It’s not about creators. It’s about “chaos.”

The major labels and BMG have petitioned the United States Supreme Court to overturn a ruling that would allow songwriter Cyril Vetter to reclaim worldwide rights to a song he wrote more than sixty years ago.

And their argument is fascinating. Not because it’s convincing. Because it exposes exactly how the industry thinks.

The labels claim that if songwriters can reclaim worldwide copyrights under U.S. termination law, it will create uncertainty, confusion and disruption throughout the music business.

Chaos.

That’s the word.

Chaos.

Funny how the same industry that spent decades telling creators to sign away global rights in perpetuity is suddenly worried about fairness and stability.

The same companies that built billion-dollar catalog empires from contracts signed generations ago now want us to believe they are protecting the music ecosystem.

Protecting whom?

Certainly not the songwriter. The songwriter is the one who created the asset. The songwriter is the one who took the risk. The songwriter is the one whose work still generates value decades later.

Yet when a court finally interprets the law in a way that potentially benefits creators, the industry’s first instinct isn’t celebration.

It’s litigation.

The hypocrisy becomes even more obvious when you look at history.

Labels routinely tell artists that contracts are sacred. Deals are deals. You signed it. Live with it.

Except when the labels don’t like the outcome.

Then contracts, precedents and long-standing interpretations suddenly become flexible.

Then the legal teams arrive. Then the lobbying starts. Then the scare campaign begins.

We’re told the sky will fall. We’re told investment will disappear. We’re told the business will collapse.

We’ve seen this movie before.

Every technological shift was supposedly going to destroy music.

Home taping. CD burning. MP3s. Streaming. TikTok. Now songwriter rights.

The industry’s prediction record on catastrophe is so bad that “chaos” should probably be treated as a marketing term rather than a legal argument.

Because let’s be honest.

If a songwriter reclaiming rights after half a century creates disruption, maybe the disruption isn’t the problem.

Maybe the underlying business model is.

The labels argue that billions of dollars and countless agreements were built around the assumption that foreign rights remain permanently with publishers.

That may be true.

But an industry building its future around assumptions doesn’t magically transform those assumptions into justice.

There was a time when artists couldn’t own masters.

There was a time when musicians signed contracts they barely understood.

There was a time when labels controlled manufacturing, distribution, promotion and access to audiences.

That world is disappearing.

And perhaps what we’re seeing in Vetter v. Resnik isn’t chaos. Perhaps we’re seeing correction.

The most revealing part of this case isn’t the legal argument. It’s the language.

The labels describe the songwriter’s position as a fringe theory. Yet a federal appeals court agreed with it.

Creator groups support it. And the logic is straightforward.

If termination rights exist to give creators a second chance at ownership, why should that second chance stop at a national border?

Why should a songwriter get half the apple?

The answer seems obvious.

Because half the apple is still enough for the labels to keep the other half.

That’s what this fight is really about.

Control.

Not creativity. Not fairness. Not artists.

Control.

The irony is that the music business constantly tells young creators that ownership matters.

Keep your rights. Build your catalog. Think long term. Become an entrepreneur.

Until those same principles start applying to creators whose songs were written decades ago.

Then ownership suddenly becomes dangerous. Then ownership becomes disruptive. Then ownership becomes chaos.

The labels want everyone to believe they’re defending stability.

What they’re actually defending is a system that has benefited them enormously for generations.

A system where rights flow one way. A system where creators are encouraged to surrender ownership but discouraged from reclaiming it. A system where fairness is celebrated in speeches but challenged in court.

If the Supreme Court ultimately hears the case, the decision will affect far more than one song.

It will answer a much bigger question. Who does copyright actually exist to serve?

The corporations that acquired it.

Or the people who created it.

Because if reclaiming your own work after sixty years is considered chaos, perhaps the real chaos was the arrangement that existed before.

Fender Wants Your Guitar Back

Fender has lost its mind.

It thinks it can copyright a shape, and call that “heritage.”

That’s corporate greed, pretending it’s preserving culture.

The Stratocaster body shape is not sacred scripture. It’s a guitar shape that entered the bloodstream of modern music decades ago. Pretending to own the shape now is like claiming ownership of the power chord, the double cutaway, or rock and roll itself.

And somehow this whole mess started with Fender suing an AliExpress seller in Germany.

The seller never showed up.

Fender won by default.

Then, suddenly, that default judgment became the foundation for a wider campaign. Cease-and-desist letters started flying. Builders, retailers and manufacturers of their own guitars using the Stratocaster body shape, found themselves being told that Fender now had legal proof that it owned the Stratocaster body shape.

Not a patent. Not a trademark. A copyright.

And that’s where things start getting ridiculous.

Because this wasn’t simply about stopping counterfeit guitars with fake Fender logos on the headstock. Most musicians understand that. Most builders understand that.

The company reportedly demanded that builders and retailers destroy their existing inventory.

Destroy it. Millions of dollars in manufacturing and research/development.

And then things got even uglier.

Fender allegedly wanted stores and manufacturers to hand over the names and addresses of customers who had already bought guitars with Strat body shapes.

The request?

Have those customers return their guitars so they too could be destroyed.

Read that again.

A billion-dollar corporation wasn’t just trying to stop future sales. It wanted guitars already sitting in people’s homes.

That’s the moment this stopped looking like brand protection and started looking like corporate intimidation.

And nobody likes a bully. Make no mistake, that’s exactly how this looks.

Then comes the inevitable question.

Why now?

The Stratocaster body shape debuted in 1954.

Seventy-plus years later we’re suddenly being told the shape is protected in a way that thousands of builders and guitar tinkerers somehow missed?

Think of EVH tinkering with a Stratocaster body, to come up with his sound and the Frankenstein look. George Lynch playing Charvel and then ESP’s that use the Stratocaster body shape. Hell, Lynch even makes Custom guitars right now utilizing the Strat body shape. Add to that list Kirk Hammett and his ESP guitars and every other guitarist that played a guitar with a Strat body that wasn’t Fender. All of the guitars are illegal according to Fender.

And let’s be honest about who’s making these decisions.

Fender’s CEO, Edward “Bud” Cole, is a Fender lifer. He knows the history. He knows the market. He knows exactly what the Stratocaster means to players.

Which means this isn’t confusion.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth.

Fender is no longer automatically the best guitar in the room. There was a time when the logo alone was enough.

Not anymore.

Today there are boutique builders producing instruments with better fretwork, better neck profiles, tighter quality control and greater consistency than many production-line Fenders.

We feel it immediately as soon as we pick up a guitar and within ten seconds we know.

No legal brief changes that. No cease-and-desist letter changes that.

The PR damage may be even worse.

Because Fender looks like the guy who arrives at the party after midnight, grabs the microphone and starts yelling at everyone.

Nobody likes that guy. Nobody respects that guy. And nobody forgets that guy.

The guitar industry has already lived through this movie. Gibson went after PRS over the single-cut body shape.

The courts ultimately rejected the idea that one company could permanently monopolize a broadly recognized guitar design.

That should have been the lesson.

Instead Fender looked at history and apparently concluded:

Let’s try it ourselves. Only louder.

And the saddest part?

Fender should know better. Its reputation wasn’t built by lawsuits or cease-and-desist letters or by demanding customer lists or threatening independent builders.

It was built by making great guitars.

This entire campaign feels disconnected from players and completely connected to spreadsheets.

That’s how great brands start to decay. Not because competitors catch them. Because they convince themselves that people love the logo more than the product. They don’t.

That’s why this whole thing lands so badly.

It’s petty.

It’s defensive.

It’s short-sighted.

And most importantly, it’s unnecessary.

If Fender wants respect, make better guitars. If Fender wants loyalty, earn it. If Fender wants to remain the standard, stop acting like the standard needs a lawyer.

Because the truth is already out there.

The shape is not the product. The player is.

And if Fender has forgotten that, the damage it’s doing to its own brand may last a lot longer than any body-shape ruling ever will.

Alternate Reality, Music, My Stories

Motley Crue

Back before the internet, rock mythology lived in the gaps. The gaps between announcements and releases. The gaps between rumors and facts. The gaps between what bands said publicly and what was actually happening behind studio doors.

And sometimes those gaps leave behind artifacts.

Like this old UK metal magazine clipping from Kerrang, claiming Mötley Crüe’s next album after “Girls, Girls, Girls” was going to be called “Too Hot To Handle”.

Not a rumor whispered by a fan on Reddit thirty years later. An actual printed story. With a release date. A European tour plan. And a track listing full of songs nobody has ever officially heard.

Now, if you’re under forty, you probably think this means one of two things: Either it was fake or somebody got it wrong.

But that’s because modern audiences don’t understand how information moved in the ‘80s.

Music journalism back then wasn’t journalism in the modern sense. It was half-access, half-chaos, half-propaganda and half-drunk-guy-at-the-bar storytelling. Labels leaked incomplete information. Managers exaggerated. Journalists filled in blanks. Bands changed direction midstream because somebody overdosed, disappeared, got arrested, the label rejected it or the band decided the entire record sucked halfway through recording it.

Especially Mötley Crüe.

Which means this article was likely discussing the project that eventually became “Dr. Feelgood”.

And suddenly the timeline becomes incredibly interesting, because the article mentions a January release schedule.

But “Dr. Feelgood” didn’t come out until August 1989.

So what happened to push the date out?

Nikki Sixx overdose on December 23, 1997. The overdose fundamentally interrupted the momentum of the band. Tours were cancelled. Europe got burned. The machine stalled out.

Maybe “Too Hot To Handle” was the original album title. Maybe those track names were demo titles. Maybe the record was originally intended to be a faster, dirtier continuation of “Girls, Girls, Girls”.
Maybe songs were abandoned after rehab, rewrites and Bob Rock entered the picture.

Because here’s the thing people forget about “Dr. Feelgood”:

That album sounds NOTHING like a band spiraling out of control.

It sounds focused. Massive. Disciplined. Intentional.

Bob Rock basically forced Mötley Crüe to stop behaving like a gang and start behaving like a professional recording act. Vince had to get vocal lessons before he started to record the vocals. The grooves tightened. The hooks became sharper. The production became cinematic. The chaos got filtered into something enormous.

That version of the band did not exist when this article was printed.

And honestly, the album titles themselves tell the story better than anything else.

“Too Hot To Handle” sounds like old Crue. Cartoon sleaze. Sunset Strip excess. Cheap danger.

“Dr. Feelgood” sounds darker. More narcotic. More sinister. Like the party stopped being fun.

One title sounds like a band chasing pleasure. The other sounds like a band trying to survive it.

Does the article prove some lost Mötley Crüe album exists in a vault somewhere.

Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t.

What matters is that this article captures a moment before rehab rewrote the band. Before Bob Rock transformed them.

And maybe that’s what made the pre-internet era better.

Mystery.

You didn’t know everything. You weren’t supposed to. The uncertainty was part of the experience.

Now every demo gets uploaded instantly. Which I love by the way. Every studio update becomes social media content. Every rumor gets “fact checked” within ten minutes by people who confuse searchable information with understanding.

But rock mythology was built on incomplete information.

On possibility.

On strange magazine clippings that make you wonder whether somewhere, buried in a storage locker or sitting on an old cassette tape in Nikki Sixx’s archive, there’s an alternate version of Mötley Crüe history labeled:

“Too Hot To Handle”.

P.S.

The full track listing is as follows:
Side One; “You And Me”, “Dollar In My Pocket”, “Too Hot To Handle”, “Poisonous Dreams”, “Highway To Hell”.

Side Two; “Wake Up”, “Dead Man”, “War Of All Wars”, “LA”, “California Girls” (a jazzed up version of the Beach Boys classic).

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