Music / Reviews
Live Review: Skid Row, Bierkeller
Discovered by Jon Bon Jovi and subsequently banned for life from Wembley Stadium for being rude, New Jersey’s Skid Row had a high old time 25 years ago with their multi-platinum debut album and its chart-topping follow-up. Today, sex god frontman Sebastian Bach is long gone for a Broadway and solo career (not to mention a cameo in the movie version of Rock of Ages and, deliciously, a SpongeBob Squarepants voice work gig), and the band’s 2014 UK tour schedule eschews arenas in favour of such venues as the Welly Club in Hull and Bournemouth’s Old Fire Station. While Skid Row are hardly on skid row, they have downshifted to an adjacent alley. That they’ve survived at all is probably due to the fact that they were always a much heavier proposition than the hair metal acts with whom they shared stages.
So – water-treading metal nostalgiafest or still-relevant elder statesrockers with some lessons to teach young whippersnappers? Well, singer Johnny Solinger has now been in the band five years longer than his predecessor and is more of a meat’n’potatoes metal guy than a flamboyant showman (with attendant ego issues) like Bach. And while it’s fair to say that more mobile phones were being consulted than waved in the air during the newer material, Kings of Demolition and the terrace chorus-driven We Are the Damned slot in comfortably next to the classic stuff.
Riot Act retains its snotty appeal, but their Ramones cover (Psycho Therapy, sung by bassist Rachel Bolan) is a bizarre and unnecessary bid for punk cred, especially alongside the singalong power balladry of I Remember You. Solinger, Bolan and guitarist Dave Sabo each take turns to assure us of our fucking awesomeness for sticking by the band and to sing the praises of all things English, from fish and chips to, erm, Old Speckled Hen. You can’t help wondering what they’ll be saying as this lengthy tour rolls on through Europe. “Hey Switzerland – we love your cuckoo clocks, premium chocolate and studied wartime neutrality,” perhaps.
is needed now More than ever
By a process of elimination, we know exactly what the encore is going to be. Blue-collar anthem Slave to the Grind was one of the heaviest songs to bother the charts until Pantera came along, and still sounds absolutely magnificent. Youth Gone Wild – Skid Row’s My Generation, if you will – now has to be prefaced with the assertion that you’re never to old to, er, go wild, though nobody seems to care. They’ll never trouble the mainstream again, but these hard-rockin’ lifers will always receive a hearty welcome from the faithful.
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