Album Review: Spear of Destiny, "Sod's Law"

According to ancient legend, the Spear of Destiny was the actual spear used to pierce the side of Christ as he hung upon the cross. Since then this blade has possessed incredible powers and has often served as a talisman for some of the most evil men in world history - e.g. Adolf Hitler, George Bush, etc.

"What's all this got to do with rock music?" Quite a lot if you like your music heavy with messianic menace and free from the almost obligatory irony that robs so much British music of emotional purity and intensity.

Sod's Law marks the welcome return of Kirk Brandon after a lengthy period of illness, but spare the sympathy, he doesn't need it. This album has enough good songs on it to balance both bank balance and back catalogue. Worthy of mention: The jaunty, mystical Into the Rising Sun with its lush, Gaelic touches and cock–eyed, summer–in–Siam lyrics.

Also, Black Country Girl, which starts off as a painfully naked ballad but carries it off with such lyrics as:

"Feels like I'm in some country song about drunks, whores, and broken hearts."

Then there's Taking Care of Business, with its cutting funk guitar, and In the City, a tunnel–busking, tears–in–yer–Guinness ballad, and Bull Comes Down, a stomper with its own pair of Doc Martens and a muscular forearm full of tattooed lyrics.

Kirk's voice is still the same thin, reedy, tonsil–less instrument that carries as much venom as passion. It kind of puts you in mind of a poisoned needle, and, just sometimes, when he's jabbing it around in the belly of the beast, you think it's going to snap, adding, if uncomfortably, to the sense of danger and excitement in SOD's music.

Colin Liddell

Riff Raff (unpublished)
Written 1992

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!