What does it sound like?:
This album, originally released in 1978, marked the end of the band’s classic run of albums with the mad axeman Michael Schenker on guitar. It’s now been remastered and reissued as part of a two cd set, the second disc being a contemporaneous live show. The original cd still sounds great – real classic British hard rock – and is augmented by four bonus tracks, two of which are the studio recordings of Mother Mary and This Kid’s which were surreptiously sneaked on to the Strangers in the Night live release, cunningly augmented by crowd noise. The live set included here is a new mix of a gig from Cleveland recorded in October 1978, which has a similar content to Strangers, and indeed parts of this show were apparently used on that album which appears to have been an amalgam of various performances supplemented by numerous studio overdubs, apart from Schenker’s guitar parts which he apparently refused to redo. The band are in top form, wheeling out some of their best material with the likes of Love to Love, Only You Can Rock Me and Natural Thing, and there’s a great end to the show with the run of Doctor Doctor, Lights Out, Rock Bottom, Too Hot To Handle and Shoot Shoot. This is an album that’s been reissued before of course, but it’s still great to hear it again and the storming live set is a real added bonus.
What does it all *mean*?
Although the band had a long career with many fine albums along the way, together with plenty of success in the US, here in the UK at least they never quite seemed able to take that final step up into the very biggest league.
Goes well with…
Admiring Michael Schenker at the peak of his powers – it wouldn’t be until 15 years later that he was to be finally reunited with the band.
Release Date:
22 Nov
Might suit people who like…
Classic British hard rock.
Paging Wheaty to the thread…
Only You Can Rock Me, Bargey! I think they are quite a bit underrated.
I saw them in 78 so they were probably touring this album but I didn’t know their stuff and they left no impression on me at all!
Apart from Only You Can Rock Me this is not a great album.
The following three are excellent and the four before are even better.
We used to call this album Nobsession. Ho Ho.
Decent album by a rock band who had something different though not really sure what.
As Uncle says they released better album…Lights Out for one.