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Review: The Dead Daisies/The Graham Bonnet Band/FM, SWX
If it seems rather unfair that Britain’s finest melodic rock band should have to come on just after 7pm in a venue that’s almost as cold as the air outside, FM take it in their stride and a sizeable crowd has queued to see them.
Opening with the hard-rockin’ title track from 2020’s Synchronized album, they waste no time in cracking out classic after harmony-laden classic: Bad Luck, Killed By Love, Tough It Out, I Belong to the Night and recent single Turn This Car Around.
is needed now More than ever
No UK band has ever come close to them in a genre dominated by Americans. The golden voice of Steve Overland remains FM’s secret weapon, but guitarist Jim Kirkpatrick has really come into his own in recent years as the band’s Neal Schon/Steve Lukather figure. Bristol rock audiences have always loved FM, and the quintet are clearly delighted with the response.
Graham Bonnet was always the unlikeliest looking hard rock star. At a time when those filthy herberts of Motörhead were winning over pimply metalhead teenagers, the clean-cut singer was taking Rainbow into the UK top ten with All Night Long and their cover of Russ Ballard’s Since You Been Gone.
Now fronting his own band, the older and greyer 74-year-old Bonnet still rocks the collar’n’tie and shades look. Reaching those notes is obviously a strain for him, however, and he occasionally looks as though he’s about to burst a blood vessel. Interestingly, he makes no attempt to flog his latest solo material, serving up a set dominated by the Rainbow and Michael Schenker Group classics on which he sang.
Like many stars of his vintage, from Ozzy Osbourne downwards, he’s opted to surround himself with talented younger musicians, which includes providing gainful employment for his bassist partner Beth-Ami Heavenstone. For Brazilian guitarist Conrado Pesinato, it’s an opportunity to live out all his Blackmore/Schenker fantasies, and he proves more than equal to the task.
“I only came here to do my stand-up comedy routine,” jests the frontman at one point in a performance packed with quips and asides. Alas, he manages to lose his way during All Night Long – a remarkable achievement given how often he must have sung it – and has to seek a prompt from Pesinato. Despite all that 1970s feminist opprobrium, the original lyrics remain intact. And it’s great to hear Rainbow’s Lost in Hollywood again after all these years.
Seven or eight years ago, it might have been possible to dismiss The Dead Daisies as a rich man’s hobby band. That said, recruiting musicians of the calibre of former Whitesnake guitarist Doug Aldrich and drummer Brian Tichy (who’s now notched up several stints with the Daisies) was quite a coup for Australian businessman David Lowy.
But everything was kicked up several levels with the arrival of the Voice of Rock himself, the great Glenn Hughes, back in 2019. Originally conceived as a revolving ‘musical collective’, the Daisies now seem to enjoy a relatively settled line-up and, covid notwithstanding, have had a productive couple of years with the Holy Ground and Radiance albums.
Keeping the flag flying for old-school hard rock, they’re actually at their best when they’re at their heaviest on the likes of the title track from Radiance and My Fate, the stand-out from Holy Ground. The extraordinary thing about peace sign-flashing 71-year-old hippy Hughes is that at a time when many of his peers are struggling he still manages to reach those impossible notes without breaking sweat. Naturally, he gets a couple of big showcases for his vocal pyrotechnics, notably Mistreated – a song he first performed in Bristol on stage with Deep Purple at the Hall Formerly Known as Colston nearly 50 years ago. Being part of a band again obviously suits him too, and the Daisies brand of rock keeps him well away from the soul music to which he tends to gravitate when left to his own devices.
Aldrich, who was such an asset to the late Ronnie James Dio’s band, is every inch the open-shirted (even on this freezing evening) guitar hero, while founder Lowy resists any temptation to showboat, contenting himself with rhythm guitar. Tichy, meanwhile, enjoys a convention-defying drum solo that manages to be both inventive and entertaining, bouncing sticks off his drums with such intensity that they occasionally fly high enough to hit the ceiling before he catches them again on the way down and carries on playing.
There’s an end-of-term feel to this show, which is the last date on a lengthy, eventful tour and the band’s final gig of 2022. Along the way, tribute is paid to rock history with their hard rock reworking of CCR’s Fortunate Son and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s Midnight Moses, which has now been adopted as a Daisies anthem. It all ends with a return to Purple for the mighty Burn, with the enthusiastic audience making a game attempt to keep up with the chorus’s sustained note.
All pix by Mike Evans
Read more: Metal & Prog Picks: December 2022
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