No. Not everyone can write a riff or play bass. Heavy music was far from dead. I wonder if these statements were made to try to grab headlines or if they really meant it?
Read on!
Skidding out of riff rat race
By Nick Logan
Skid Row have a nice line in laying it on the line. Pronouncements such as “anyone could write a riff” or “anyone can play bass” crop up like comments on the weather, while stories they tell against themselves of bizarre amateur-run gigs that descend into a shambles have their manager`s face frequently turning a pained white. Honesty of the Irish I suppose, but they`re amiable, talkative lads with their “I tink”s, “in-trickat”s and their self effacing references to “bog rock.”
“We don`t want to be known any more as `the fastest group in the world` and all that,” blurted Skid bassist Brendan `Brush` Shiels when he and drummer Nollaig `Noel` Bridgeman met the NME, denim seats barely getting to rest on the cafe benches before he got a-chattering away.
“We are definitely finished as a heavy band. There are only so many riffs you can play; and anybody can play intricate riffs.”
“Anybody could sit down and write a riff,” put in Noel.
“You could,” took up the bassist, adressing your correspondent. “You could sit down now and write a riff. I mean… even our manager is writing riffs.”
In Brush’s view, assembling a riff-based band would be a piece of cake. You take your one member who can churn out the necessary riffs, outlines the bassist, you pinch your lyrics from any convenient old blues standard and to sing them you get yourself a singer with the high-pitch of a Robert Plant. Simple as that. Though if the singer doesn’t sound like Plant, adds Shiels, who doesn’t sing like Plant, then forget it.
What all this amounts to is that Skid Row is after changing its music. Since the three of them – guitarist Gary Moore completes the line up – came over here from their native Ireland they have accrued for themselves quite a considerable following on the British club circuit.
But in their minds, Skid Row has come a little too close for comfort to getting snarled up in the riff rat-race, so that the critical and to a lesser extent public mudslinging that gets aimed at the stereotyped heavy bands is in danger on splashing unjustly onto them.
“What we have tried, to do is play within a simpler structure, and see what we can achieve within the limitations we set ourselves, keeping it more basic. Because the fact is that anybody can now play intricate, or can play fast. You don’t need the skill to do it.”
Shiels points to the band’s use of roadie Paul Scully as sometime bassist to support his theory. They used him on the “Mar” track on the new album – “We just wanted a simple bass line,” explains Shiels, “and I thought I might be tempted to freak out during the number” – yet up to a few weeks before Scully hadn’t played bass in his life. “Anybody listening wouldn’t know that, because anybody can play bass. As long as you have the rhythm it is simple.
“What we are into now,” adds Shiels, “is songs. Like the Stones’ album is great… straightforward rock… good songs. You cannot be any more basic than that.”
From their own not inconsiderable experience of the club circuit, both Shiels and Bridgeman feel the “heavy thing” has been overplayed to the point where a depression is starting to set in. “There is beginning to be a fall off in the clubs,” the bassist claims, “Too many people jumped on the heavy bandwagon. At most places now there are seven nights a week of heavy bands.”
Again, they both point out, heavy bands are not lasting bands. “The public,” says Noel, “seems to pick its heavy band for six months, then it wants another.”
Of course there’s always the temptation to try for that sort of acclaim, however short-lived, and Skid Row certainly felt that they could be drawn that way on their recent American tour. “We could have been pressurised into it in certain halls, and on the West Coast. Next time we go over there we might not be playing exactly what they want, but we will be more lasting.”
The band’s previously-referred-to second album, titled “34 Hours” after the length of time it took to record, was released by CBS last week.
“I suppose people will expect something similar to the last album,” notes Shiels “and I don’t want them to get the impression it’s a country album. It’s an extension from the last… we are a lot more intricate but in a different and simpler structure. And if they are going for speed it is also faster, whereas although before we used to play very fast unison type riffs we don’t do that here except on one track. If you expect the album to be the same you will be disappointed, if you expect it to be better you won’t.”
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