Gilmour Design

I finally finished “No Regrets”, Ace Frehley’s account of his time in KISS, on the District Line this morning. Although it didn’t really spill any particularly surprising beans over its 299 pages – even if it does include a colour photo of what purports to be Rush’s Alex Lifeson with a bag on his head – it was entertaining enough to inspire me to dig out my KISS CDs. No slouches when it came to their release schedule, KISS issued four hit studio albums and a double live LP in a little over two years. Closer examination reveals that these albums, though crammed with classics, were often rarely over 32 or 33 minutes in duration. In the pre-digital age, bands could release albums as short as 28 minutes, but as long as they had around 5 or 6 songs per side, that was enough material to constitute an album. Slayer claimed that there was just as much music on their 1986, 28 minute long “Reign In Blood” opus as any of their other LPs, it’s just by the time they’d come to record this one, the songs were so much faster, resulting in less than half an hour of music. When launched in 1982, did Sony vice-president Norio Ohga’s suggestion to extend the capacity of the compact disc to 74+ minutes in order to accommodate Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, foresee every future album release potentially being essentially a “double length” album? Often, double albums were not fully understood or appreciated upon their initial release (The White Album, Exile On Main Street) as four whole sides of vinyl is quite a lot for a music journalist to take in and absorb on a tight deadline. I think this is one of the drawbacks of the digital age, when at a glance you can see how long each track is and what the overall time is just by slotting the disc into your computer or CD player. Sure, you could see track times sometimes printed on the artwork, more often included on single labels for the benefit of radio programmers and DJs, but you rarely saw the words “beware, this LP is only 34 minutes long” on the back of a record. And here’s my point; did I ever listen to “Rainbow Rising” and say to myself, “those 6 tracks are great, but what I really need is another 40 minutes of filler”? No. Likewise, bands like UFO managed to record a killer LP of classic songs, year in year out, throughout the 1970s. But what if they’d been compelled to come up with closer to 79 minutes per release? I’ve known bands sign deals where they were contractually obliged to supply a master featuring at least 50 minutes of music, and that doesn’t include the obligatory bonus versions and exclusive tracks. Who could listen to such a classic as “A Farewell To Kings” and feel it would be better “value for money” if its 35 minutes were augmented by a further 15 minutes of contractual filler? On the other hand, a 79 minute space to fill could well have inspired a band like Rush (highly prolific through the 1970s) to extend a track like ‘Hemispheres’ beyond its single side of vinyl. Of course, there was another imperative to a shorter running time on vinyl, as the more music on an LP the quieter the pressing was and subsequently a reduction in sound quality; ideally, a 12” vinyl’s running time shouldn’t exceed 22 minutes per side. There’s also another aspect to consider. I don’t want to sound like an analogue geek or nostalgia obsessed curmudgeon, but the sequencing, and what now feels like a ritual of having to flip an LP over, was part of the whole way you experienced an LP. ‘Stairway To Heaven’ belongs at the end of side one of Led Zeppelin IV when experienced on vinyl, not somewhere around the middle of a compact disc. I actually applaud bands for making their new albums around 40 minutes or less. Of course, this only applies to original albums, as I like my reissues to be crammed to the gunwales.

If you’re a KISS fan, the Ace’s book is recommended, but for a more detailed and entertaining insight into the legendary label who’s first signing was KISS’s debut in 1974, I can thoroughly recommend “And Party Every Day: The Inside Story of Casablanca Records” by Larry Harris and Curt Gooch, which I bought in Book Soup on Sunset a couple of years back.

 

 

Big thanks to our friend Chris Kee from Powerplay magazine form having the good taste to review our last show at The Peel, in Kingston.

In 2007 I was asked to give an interview with the “Bruce Dickinson Well Being Network” website.

An e-mail from Hugh Gilmour E-mail, March 2007

Hugh Gilmour is the man behind the artwork for some of Bruce albums through the years and was the man behind the packaging of the 2005 2CD remaster editions. The Wellbeing Network sent a few questions to him out of curiosity of who the man behind these designs. Read the following interview to find out.

BDWBN = The Bruce Dickinson Wellbeing Network

Hugh = Hugh Gilmour

BDWBN: How did you end up working with graphic design? What’s your background? For how long have you been doing it?

Hugh: I discovered heavy metal music around 1980-81 after seeing Motorhead on TV. I found I liked their LP cover artwork too and started copying it into my sketchbooks and stencilling the logos onto my school bag. Through Motorhead, I started looking for other heavy metal bands, and also discovered AC/DC, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden, mainly by buying compilations like Axe Attack [on K-Tel] and listening to Tommy Vance’s BBC Radio 1 Friday Rock Show. Music fans today are spoilt to the point of having TOO MUCH choice. The whole sense of discovery is completely circumvented by the availability of iTunes and the ease with which one can obtain a group’s entire back catalogue AND WITHOUT ANY ARTWORK! It’s something I feel quite strongly about…

Iron Maiden were the first band I had to own EVERYTHING by, including all of the different coloured vinyls and imports. In 1981 or 1982 that wasn’t really a huge amount, though. I had always been good at art, and I guess heavy metal LP sleeves – especially those early Maiden sleeves by Derek Riggs – sort of gave me a voice, so to speak, to express myself artistically. I decided then that I had to design record covers when I grew up, and thinking that no one else would allow me, I bought a guitar, invented my own band (called Death Toll), and started writing songs and designing posters and covers for this invented band. I would have been about 12 years old at the time. I actually took up guitar because I wanted to design record sleeves. I recently found a sketchbook from around this time (c.1982), in which I had compiled “The Best Of Iron Maiden” from their first 3 records, complete with logo, a “bloody” style title, publishing credit dates and a catalogue number. Maybe not normal behaviour for an aspiring 12 year old graphic artist, as I didn’t fully understand what it all meant, but I must have known it was important to have all of this information included.

By my late teens, designing cover artwork for a living didn’t seem totally realistic, partly because album cover art in the 1980s moved away from purely painting to alternative mediums such as photography and computer technology, so I decided to become an illustrator via being a more traditional artist. I did an art foundation course after leaving home, followed by a diploma course in Technical Illustration. I gave that a go for a couple of years, but returned to my studies by doing Illustration combined with Graphic Design at Kingston University [the same art school that both Eric Clapton and Sandy Denny had studied]. I knew the future of graphic design lay with computers, so decided I needed to learn how to use an Apple Mac. I applied for a job at Castle Communications PLC, mainly as a summer job as they needed a “Mac Operator”. I could turn one on and then off again! They offered me a permanent job, so I quit the degree course, and have not looked back since. That was in 1993. Castle Communications PLC at that time had a poor reputation for producing budget releases, and I hope I did my bit to change that perception. They had a great catalogue which included Black Sabbath, Motorhead and Uriah Heep. They would later sign Marillion, WASP, Thunder, Adrian Smith and of course Bruce.

BDWBN: Is working with Bruce any different from other artists?

Hugh: Every artist is different, but Bruce does fully acknowledge how integral the artwork and packaging is to a release, which is the case for many hard rock bands. Credit needs to be given to Bruce’s management team who have an important role in the whole creative process too. Bruce is very enthusiastic, which is important for me when looking for feedback or direction from a client.

BDWBN: Does Bruce give you instruction on what to use, what style, or are you given free hand on how to present the record?

Hugh: There’s no hard or fast rules, as he’s always been happy to consider any ideas or concepts I come up with, but usually they’ll be a unifying theme or concept to the final recording (such as ‘The Chemical Wedding’) where it’s imperative the cover and booklet complement the music. Also, Bruce is a big fan of artists such as William Blake, both as an artist and writer, so Blake has appeared on a couple of releases.

BDWBN: Where do you get your inspiration (please give specific examples as in “on that record I got inspiration from…” and so on).

Hugh: Prior to starting on ‘Accident Of Birth’, I thought it might be cool to use Derek Riggs for the cover design, but I thought they’d never go for it, but then they suggested Derek before I could, so that was quite serendipitous. The whole cover concept was discussed over a couple of pints in Latymers pub in Hammersmith. Likewise, I remember seeing ‘Ghost Of A Flea’ by William Blake in The Tate Gallery when I was a teenager, and I thought it would make a fantastic album cover, as it was such a bizarre and quite ahead of its time image. When Bruce phoned me up to discuss ‘The Chemical Wedding’, I almost knew he was going to suggest using that particular piece of art when he mentioned liking Blake.

BDWBN: Give an example on something you think turned out good. And why?

Hugh: I am really pleased with the whole reissue campaign of expanded albums we did a year or two back [in 2005]. It was great to provide a bit of continuity between the releases. I didn’t work on Bruce’s first two LPs (I was still at college), but it was great to give them a bit of unity with the later releases, such as ‘Skunkworks’ etc. I worked with Bruce prior to working with Maiden, but it has been very important for me to have been involved with them. Some of the work I’ve done for Bruce had very limited exposure, such as the tour shirts I’ve designed. When they found that the ‘Alive In Studio A’ cover did not translate to a t-shirt, they asked me to work with Bruce on coming up with two different designs. One was a sort of Klu Klux Klansman with a camera lens for a face with a guitar coming out of his stomach. That was done using a paintbrush and airbrush with my friend Dylan modeling for the figure. The other design was a “Sacred Cowboy” for which we had John Wayne as the Pope, which you can see Bruce wearing in the artwork for the ‘Scream For Me Brazil’ booklet. I also did some designs for a European tour in 2002 which was based on a World War Two RAF poster of four airmen. I think that looks cool. One particularly rare release that I liked was the ‘Killing Floor’ single, which was released in Japan. I also thought the DVD ‘Anthology’ was a nice package too [you can see the images mentioned by clicking here].

BDWBN: Give an example on something you think turned out not so good and how come?

Hugh: I’m pleased with most of the work I’ve done for Bruce, but the record label didn’t like the original ‘Alive In Studio A’ cover. They said it looked like a bootleg, not realizing that it was not meant to be “The New Bruce Dickinson Album” [which is what they thought they were getting], merely a bit of a stopgap record. I think the vinyl version looks really cool though, if I say so myself. Vinyl always does. The titles were actually thin sheets of lead fed through a very old type writer then scanned into the computer. Now you’d probably do it all in Photoshop, but it wouldn’t have had the same effect.

BDWBN: You are yourself a musician. Choose: Doing design or playing the bass?

Hugh:I play bass in a band called Pig Iron who were privileged enough to have supported Maiden at Hammersmith in 2005; a very special event to raise money for Clive Burr. The first ever gig I attended was Maiden way back in 1983 at the same venue on the World Piece Tour, so it was obviously very special for me. Playing guitar, pretending to be a rock star, or sitting behind an Apple Mac, as I am doing now, are totally different, almost opposing disciplines. I’d like to carry on with both, but I don’t intend to give up designing. And as I said before, I took up the guitar to get into designing record covers. You can hear Pig Iron on www.myspace.com/soundsofcaligula or www.pigironm.info. My artwork can be seen on www.gilmourdesign.co.uk or www.myspace.com/hughgilmour. If Pig Iron get a big hit record maybe I can retire from both.

BDWBN: The Bruce Dickinson Well-being Network really likes trivia. Any interesting anecdote regarding your work with Bruce that you think would interest the visitors to this site?

Hugh: I have been in many privileged situations through working with Bruce. I have flown with Bruce piloting the plane; the first time in his tiny, six-seater plane to an interview in Amsterdam, the last time in a 200-seater airbus going to a gig in Stockholm. Also, when Bruce and Janick came to see Pig Iron (supporting Budgie in 2002), Bruce asked us to play a session on his radio show, including a cover which he’d sing on (we did Deep Purple’s ‘Space Truckin’’ [which is apparently now on Youtube). That was an amazing experience, and the first time that Pig Iron were professionally recorded. I vividly remember closing my eyes and thinking “Bruce Dickinson is singing in my band!” The man is a legend.

Lastly, does anyone have a Japanese copy of the ‘Wrathchild’ bw ‘Ghengis Khan’ seven inch single? I’ll happily trade it for my spare copy of the Japanese ‘Prowler’ 7”.

Thanks to Hugh for finding time to answer these questions for us.

 

Whitesnake’s ‘Box ‘O’ Snakes’ has been made the 8th Best Box Set of 2011 by Germany’s Eclipse magazine.

I’ve written a lot about Black Sabbath. Here’s some more.

The original UK pressing on Vertigo is a relatively straight forward, simple design, but this record certainly has the most alterations and variations in comparison to any other Sabbath LP cover. The original UK pressing has a black sleeve, with “Black Sabbath” in purple, and then “Master Of Reality” embossed below it. The UK edition was housed in “box” style sleeve with a flap at the top, and as if to add some much needed colour, also came with a very nice poster of the band standing in a forest or wood, taken by Keef (who was responsible for photography for the first four Sabbath LPs). An alternative take from this photo session appears on the 1982 picture disc release of Paranoid. Unsurprisingly, few copies survive with posters intact, and can attract high prices when they are included. European versions also featured the same black and purple embossed cover design, but with more conventional sleeves. Original Japanese editions of the LP had the same design, but with the band name and title printed in white on a black background. These variations may have been due to production limitations in different territories, or possibly deliberate decisions made in these countries, but in my opinion it was simply due to misunderstanding or miscommunication between different countries. Now, virtually all design work is produced and supplied on computer, more often than not via an Apple Mac, but up until the early 1990s, designs were supplied to and by record companies as “flat artwork” with instructions for layout and colour added in writing on overlays of tracing paper of clear acetate. As artwork was often the last thing to be produced, after the record was in the can, it was regularly rushed to meet deadlines, then would have to be dispatched across the globe to different territories. Today, when artwork can be supplied on disc or via the internet, created using universally used programs, the room for error is small, and because of emails and the internet, approvals can be instant. This would not have been the case in 1971. In 1973, Black Sabbath’s catalogue moved from Vertigo to the new WWA Records imprint. Evidently, it was still manufactured and produced by Phonogram (who also released Vertigo), as it was common to find old Vertigo sleeves with new WWA pressed vinyl, but with new WWA catalogue numbers stickered over the old Vertigo catalogue numbers. WWA’s Master Of Reality still came with the poster, but the glossy sleeve was no longer embossed necessitating the title to be reproduced as an outline, otherwise it would not be visible. Original Brazilian pressings has the title in orange (and black, purple and orange is not a complimentary mix of tones), and later Brazilian pressings included an even more lurid mix of colours. Other variations include the title in white outline and the whole cover printed in black and purple (in US) and black and blue (in Canada). When I came to design the recent remasters for Universal, it was the non-embossed purple band and title in Purple on a black background we went for. Korean pressings featured the poster photo on the front, and apparently Master Of Reality was also issued as a gatefold sleeve in New Zealand, but I’ve never seen a copy.

I was asked to write something for Tony Iommi’s website, back in 2005. This is what I came up with. The title is, of course, tongue in cheek, and taken from an official Sabbath tour shirt.

BLACK SABBATH RUINED MY LIFE

Confessions of a Black Sabbath fan: Episode One
by Hugh Gilmour

It was my first (and I was praying my last) Glastonbury mudfest when I first saw the words “BLACK SABBATH RUINED MY LIFE” emblazoned on the front of a t-shirt of a passing punter. Sipping lemon cider from a waxed paper cup whilst sitting outside a beer tent, it made me laugh out loud, but also made me wish that the Sabbs were on the bill, as it would have definitely cheered my mud-soaked-self up. I managed to pick up one of those shirts at the following year’s Ozzfest in Milton Keynes. It seemed to sum up so much to me and my life since discovering heavy metal at around the age of eleven, twenty five years ago. Sure, Black Sabbath can’t be held solely responsible for ruining my life, as motörhead, Iron Maiden and Kerrang! magazine must also have some accountability in this. I was once stopped by some female hick in one of Las Vegas’s grimier casinos, and asked “Did they really ruin yer life? They ruined mah life too,” in a drawn out Southern drawl that wasn’t looking for a hint of irony. They may have ruined my life, for without them I might have wanted to look for a “normal” career; in the military (as I grew up near Sandhurst), the police or as a lawyer; but I don’t have a single regret for that ruination. I got into heavy metal as much for their sordidly enticing sleeves of flaming skulls, murderous ghouls, viking warlords and robots spraying fluid at each other on lifts as the music held within. I wanted a part of that, to create that art, and if nobody would let me, I’d form a band so they’d have to let me paint my own LP covers.

In 1980 I loved both Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne with equal meausre, but I have to confess that at the age of eleven I didn’t know that Ozzy had even been in Black Sabbath. I didn’t know that Ronnie James Dio had been in Rainbow either. I loved that first Blizzard Of Ozz album, even if the things I’d heard about the singer from my school friends sounded quite horrific. That riff at the start of ‘I Don’t Know’ just sounded like the …FUTURE! Equally, I loved ‘Heaven And Hell’, with it’s sleeve featuring three suspended angels, smoking and playing cards. And I loved the music. It was heavy, but it was melodic with quiet passages that wouldn’t annoy my mother. I vividly recall hearing their new single, ‘Turn Up The Night’ played on Radio 1′s Top 40 chart run down just before setting off for school one morning, and it just sounded amazing. I went out and bought it on a seven inch picture disc that featured the silhouette of a dancing devil. This is one aspect that today’s young music novice sadly misses; that sense of discovery found by hearing the snatch of a track on the radio, seeing a short clip on Top Of The Pops, or scouring the bargain bins of Our Price for reduced compilation LPs so you could learn more about specific bands and what they sounded like without having to spend all of your pocket money on one LP by a single band only to find it was a complete duffer. Axe Attack Volume Two featured a Black Sabbath song called ‘Die Young’, but confusingly the singer didn’t look or sound like the guy on Axe Attack Volume One, which featured three minutes of the most vital fuzz-pedalled-rock music in the form of ‘Paranoid’. More frustratingly, just when I got a sense of line-ups and chronology, Dio left and was replaced by Ian Gillan from Gillan, and apparently he used to be in a band called Deep Purple that those blokes from Rainbow (them again) used to be in to. Today, a quick browse through the web will give you all the information you need, complete with sound samples or downloads, sent to your computer or to your phone.

My mum bought me a guitar, a Korean Kay electric, managing to make a god awful racket through my record player before it one day stopped working. I also trawled the Record & Tape Exchange in Camden Town for Sabbath LPs every time we visited my grandmother in Chalk Farm, just down the road. I bought a big, black double compilation, as it seemed like value for money, even if I found that dead looking girl holding a cross whilst laying in a coffin a bit too morbid. I detuned my trusty Kay guitar, and strummed along to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Children Of the Grave. How good or bad a sleeve looked was a very big deciding factor in my purchases. I thought Technical Ecstasy looked amazing. I even even appreciated its clean white border, and this was copied into my sketchbook. I bought the self-titled debut LP at Elephant Records in Aldershot, took it home on a dark and gloomy autumn Saturday afternoon, and played it as loud as my hi-fi would allow. My mother genuinely thought there was a thunder storm outside, which alone justified my purchase. There was a spooky girl on the grainy cover. And although it was a relatively simple image, it seemed to hold so much drama and hidden menace.

Years later, after training to become an illustrator, I returned to my studies in the hope of finding a more stable career as a graphic designer. After a year, I was confident enough to turn an Apple Macintosh on and off, but little else, but when I saw an advert in a local paper with a vacancy for a Mac Operator at a record label in nearby Chessington, I figured I had little to lose by applying. It looked like a slightly more appealing summer job than the one I had lined up in Surbiton’s Victoria Wine off license (liquor store). The record label was Castle Communications PLC, a company that specialised in issuing deleted catalogue on the still relatively new compact disc, previously only available on 12” vinyl LP. Castle Communications PLC had shrewdly picked up the supposedly dead catalogues of labels such as Bronze and Pye, and had a knack for presenting classic albums such as Aerosmith’s Toys In The Attic, and make them look as cheap as possible. After a second interview with the company, they offered me a job with five grand more that I had asked for. I quit my degree and have never looked back. Just two months prior to joining Castle Communications PLC, I had finally completed my Black Sabbath collection on compact disc with the purchase of Live At Last, bought for a fiver at Plymouth’s indoor market. Castle Communications PLC controlled the rights to that live album, as well as Black Sabbath’s first six studio albums, from that self titled debut up to 1975′s Sabotage, as well as their attendant compilation albums (another speciality of the company). They looked awful. In all fairness, packaging for CD was still in its infancy. LPs usually had a single sleeve, and maybe an inner bag or lyric sheet, and if you were really lucky, a gatefold sleeve. The scope for how to package CD in their little jewel cases had yet to be realised, and although the music market has always been competitive, it didn’t feel in any way as tight and competitive as it does today. If truth be told, I joined Castle Communications PLC solely because they had Black Sabbath’s catalogue AND it looked awful, but specifically because it looked awful, one day it would have to be re-done more sensitively, restoring the integrity of the original packaging and artwork, and maybe adding extra elements if possible, and I was going to make sure I was there when it happened. Black Sabbath weren’t considered even remotely “cool” in 1993. Their post Ozzy albums had been a mixed bunch from the great to the not so great, but I for one was grateful that one man, Tony Iommi, was insistent on keeping that flame alive during those 16 or 17 Ozzy-less years, making sure that the Black Sabbath name was headlining major venues each year.

So 2005 is something of an anniversary for me, as it was ten years ago that I started work on re-vamping and restoring the artwork to Black Sabbath’s first 15 albums, including lyrics and remastered audio. I insisted they include sleeve notes, as I saw it was important for each album to have some sense of perspective and some sense of history, but when I was told that there was no budget to commission liner notes I just went ahead and wrote them myself, each approved (by fax, in those pre-email days) by the respective managers, and supplemented by photos courtesy of Ross Halfin and Chris Walter. Product managers happily pointed out that I’d probably have been happy to have done it for free (steady!), but I can’t deny that it was a labour of love. It was imperative to me to ensure each was packaged in a way that myself as a fan would want to buy, as we were expecting the punters to go out and buy CDs that they already owned (which included myself). I was incredibly pleased to hear from one of the sales team that several Our Price record stores had complained that the booklets were regularly stolen. Not the CDs themselves; the booklets. I also felt that heavy metal, and Sabbath in particular, were very misunderstood, and a series of compilations CDs and videos featuring skulls, crosses and rosaries, all of which looked more Remembrance Sunday than Prince Of Darkness, did little to dispell that notion. It was important for me to package their compilations in a way that a Joy Division fan might appreciate.

The first Sabbath albums I bought were scratchy, dusty LPs found in the basement of the Camden Record & Tape Exchange, complete with their swirly inner bags, or images of space ships on their Vertigo labels. Those re-issues I worked on back in 1995 are what many kids, in Europe and Japan, at least, are their first experience of these important records, and I was proud to have been a small part of that.

Celebrating a half century of design in posters, flyers and advertising ephemera, The Art of British Rock highlights the UK’s distinct contribution to rock’n’roll graphics. From custom designed posters for provincial ballrooms in the late 50s to the computer-generated images of today, rock music illustration has reflected – and influenced – crucial changes in popular visual art. With classic examples (some unseen for many years) of key styles including pop art, psychedelic illustration, punk ‘do-it-yourself’ and digital imaging, the book documents the stunning visual style of British rock from the era of the Beatles and Rolling Stones to the present-day art of indie guitar bands, cutting-edge soloists and contemporary clubland. Arranged chronologically, The Art of British Rock features more than 350 posters ranging from the work of anonymous artists to internationally acclaimed designers including the Hapshash group in the 60s, Hipgnosis and Barney Bubbles in the 70s, and Malcolm Garrett, Peter Saville and Vaughan Oliver in the 80s and beyond. All are the subject of special features within each chapter. Concluding with the mix of retro and state-of-the-art design that has characterised rock poster illustration in the first decade of the 21st century, this is a unique account of more than 50 years of British rock’n’roll art.

Sons Of Merrick have completed work on their new album, ‘Of English Execution’, which has been slated for a late Spring 2012 release.

London’s Sons Of Merrick in association with Sounds Of Caligula recordings are proud to announce that they have signed with Hydrant Music/EMI Music Japan exclusively for Japan. The first release from this deal will be a new, enhanced edition of Sons Of Merrick’s debut, “Tight Nerves & Suavity”, expanded with no less that 9 exclusive bonus tracks, including the whole of their highly limited, original demo-album, 2007’s “Hip Cracking Spell”. Originally released in Europe by Sounds Of Caligula, “Tight Nerves & Suavity” was described by Kerrang! as “Deliciously heavy… recalls Sabbath or Zep at their most monstrously grandiose and commanding”, where as Metal Hammer reckoned their “deep, dark grooves will be lapped up by disciples of Down, Kyuss and COC””, and by Big Cheese as a “loads of meaty riffing, thundering percussion, and slimy, greasy melodies”. After playing them on his BBC6 radio show, Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson reckoned Sons Of Merrick were, “severely mentally impaired and damaged people making this kind of music… however, it was rather good!” As Hydrant Music is the Japanese home for Rival Sons, Bigelf, Three Inches Of Blood and The Union, the band that Metal Hammer described as dealing in “huge great dirty slabs of southern rock with the lascivious swagger of Mötley Crüe and the true grit of Pantera”, they seem to have found a perfect label for their music to be represented in Japan. Sons Of Merrick are currently putting the finishing touches to their sophomore release, “Of English Execution”, which is being readied for a European release during the first half of 2012. With titles such as ‘Bag of Ants’, ‘Hideously Taloned’ and ‘Bowels of Britain’, “Of English Execution” is shaping up to be a worthy follow up. For more sounds, pics and news of gigs in 2012, go to: www.myspace.com/sonsofmerrick

Luke Morley’s band The Union’s latest album ‘Siren’s Song’ has been listed No3 Best Album of 2011 in Classic Rock’s end of year poll.