Album Review, Billy Idol, "Cyberpunk"

Our Bill rides off into the LA sunset and comes a cropper, convalesces with a computer to keep him company and writes an LP influenced by his new found technology. That's what you call setting himself up for a slagging!

But not from me. I found the record strangely interesting. The energy of Shock To The System may provoke memories of White Wedding, but the rest of the material, the relaxaing intro Adam In Chains or especially the atmospheric Neuromancer, are only dated by the fact that they could have been the perfect soundtrack to Bladerunner.

The eastern tinged Shangrila is introduced, "Prepare to be ejected." Well, I hope Bill's grown a thick skin 'cos he may be rejected. Repeated listens prove otherwise.

Grade B

Joe Mackett
Riff Raff
August, 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!