Live Review: Blind Melon, Milton Keynes Bowl, 29th May, 1993

I like Blind Melon. Their debut album isn't so much about distinctive songs. It's more about a free-flowing vibe; a superior sort of background music, sprinkling a hint of Jane's Addiction, jazz/folk strains, and trippy rock sounds.

Seeing them at a small club prior to this event, they came across dandily enough, but the odds were always stacked against them under the grey leaden skies of this sprawling Bowl, mainly filled by a sea of impatient and fresh-faced G N' R fans.

Lacking the simple dynamic focus of a meat-and-potatoes 'rawk' band, their offbeat eccentricity and subtlety wilted on the big stage and encountered only mass indifference, including mine. The potential's there, although I suggest you listen to them in intimate surroundings. And a reefer would help too!

Mark Liddell
Riff Raff
September, 1993

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!