VIDEO REVIEW: QUEENSRYCHE, "BUILDING EMPIRES"

10 years of growth encapsulated in one long-form video. 100 minutes in which to watch Queensryche grow from over made-up glam boys to "heavy metallectual" titans of the first order.

Visions of poodle perms and Geoff Tate's silver eyeshadow during Knight Rider are just cause for activating the fast forward control. However, Going to Get Close to You neatly sets the scene for the bands transition into the realms of serious metaldom.

The Empire video itself is particularly noteworthy, alongside Silent Lucidity, both being products of a marked empathy between the band and director Matt Mahurin. And, though you're lucky to see it at all, Anybody Listening? is a triumph of imagery and presentation.

However, Queensryche are at their very best in the live arena. Six songs recorded during the "Empire Tour" illustrate a frightening level of perfection. Even playing "Unplugged" for MTV the quintet are utterly compelling.

Grade A

Lynn guy

Riff Raff

June 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!