Review: Black Star Riders/Michael Monroe/Phil Campbell and the Bastard Sons, O2 Academy

What do you do after your bigshot band dissolves?  Take early retirement? Stack shelves at Tesco? Uniquely in the annals of rock, former Motörhead guitarist Phil Campbell opted to sire himself a new act. Of course, this must have required considerable foresight and, factually speaking, none of them are actually bastards. One can only imagine the debates chez Campbell: “Can we stop now, Phil?” “No, I still need a drummer.” But, remarkably, the young Campbells grew up mastering different instruments. Vocalist Joel Peters is the only Bastard not to benefit from Campbell DNA.

They kick off with the suitably anthemic We’re the Bastards, which gets everyone singing along from the off, but is only partially correct. They appear to be one Bastard down tonight. In the absence of Todd Campbell, the Welsh Wanker (that’s what it says on his guitar strap, m’lud) has to play all the lead guitar parts himself. Inevitably, there are Motörhead songs. Played a little less frantically than the old band would have done it, Going to Brazil showcases Lem’s mob at their most rock’n’roll. If only any of us knew how to jive. The great Born to Raise Hell gets another big singalong, and Ace of Spades closes the set. A couple of albums in, the Bastards have yet to develop a repertoire of their own that will get them off the bottom of bills like these, though the slow, heavy blues of Dark Days from The Age of Absurdity marks a step in the right direction.

Whippet-thin and in enviable shape, Michael Monroe makes a high-kicking entrance. Before long, he’s punching the air, doing the splits, winding his microphone lead round his neck, clambering up the speakers, bounding onto the crowd barrier and leaping off the drum riser – just as he did with Hanoi Rocks at the Bristol Studio (remember that?) back in 1984. Mr. Monroe is now 60 years old, but continues to channel his inner teenager in the same way that Iggy Pop used to. His well-drilled band includes bassist and fellow Finn Sami Yaffa, which means there’s two-fifths of the classic Hanoi Rocks line-up on stage tonight.

His mission seems to be to cram as many furiously paced three-minute punk-o-metal songs as possible into his allotted slot, and he manages around a dozen, beginning with One Man Gang and taking in the title track from current album I Live Too Fast to Die Young.

Murder the Summer of Love sounds like it could have been lifted from Alice Cooper’s Detroit Stories dark garage rock album, while the melodic Last Train to Tokyo would have been a big hit in any other era. As usual, he’s keen to burnish his punk rock credentials, despite playing almost exclusively to metal audiences these days, with Hammersmith Palais and ’78 (“You can take the boy outta ’78/The style’s gonna change, but the sentiment ain’t”). And the Hanoi Rocks arrangement of CCR’s Up Around the Bend is a joy, as usual. It’s really about time he did another headline show in Bristol.

It’s been a decade since Thin Lizzy found that for legal reasons they couldn’t record new songs under that name and became Black Star Riders instead (though they still go out as Lizzy on anniversary tours, playing only the old stuff). Five albums on, including two UK top 10s, it’s time for that 10th anniversary tour. The career-spanning set underlines how Lizzy-esque their earliest compositions were (Bound For Glory, Finest Hour) and that it’s only relatively recently that they’ve managed to develop an identity of their own.

Classic-era Lizzy guitarist Scott Gorham officially left Black Star Riders in 2021, but he’s back for this tour, alongside original drummer Jimmy DeGrasso, albeit billed as a special guest. That means he doesn’t appear on stage until eight songs in, now looking every inch the distinguished, grey-haired elder statesman of rock. But if Gorham had picked an understudy for his younger self, he couldn’t have done better than Wayward Sons guitarist Sam Wood: same hair, same guitar, and he can sing bit too. Wood is clearly living the dream here and brings plenty of youthful energy to the band, as well as providing some effective guitar whinnying on that unlikely cover of the Osmonds’ atypically hard rockin’ Crazy Horses (a song some of us are old enough to remember from the first time round).

Ricky Warwick, whose career many in this audience have followed since his days with The Almighty, remains the perfect frontman for Black Star Riders, sharing Phil Lynott’s Northern Irish roots but never feeling like he’s fronting a tribute act. A prolific solo songwriter, he’s also responsible for many of the band’s best lyrics, such as the magnificent Soldierstown.

With three guitarists on stage, what’s clearly needed next is . . . another guitarist. Up comes Phil Campbell again for a romp through Don’t Believe a Word – the first of two Lizzy songs played tonight, the other being Jailbreak. A little later, Michael Monroe gets his turn too, joining the band for the rather by-numbers Tonight the Moonlight Let Me Down.

“Isn’t rock’n’roll fucking brilliant?” Warwick remarks at one point. Indeed it is, sir. And Black Star Riders are keeping it alive most satisfactorily.

Read more: Metal & Prog Picks: February 2023