Album Review: Alcatrazz, "No Parole From Rock 'n' Roll"

Alcatrazz are like the YARDBIRDS of the 80s, giving a start to YNGWIE and STEVE VAI, with GRAHAM BONNET on vocals. I've always found it funny that Bonnett does his whole James Dean shtick, since the 1950s pompadour look is more common among the punk, new wave, and rockabilly revival scenes rather than big AOR arena hard rock and metal; Bonnett looks like he should be in the STRAY CATS or hanging with ELVIS COSTELLO. The music is some kind of middle ground between big arena AOR rock and progressive metal; it's definitely plenty rippin' and shreddy for the metal kids, but it's also got the big, powerful bluesy arena rock vocals associated with bands who shall not be named. And 70s keyboards. Essentially the album belongs in a no man's land, unable to settle comfortably in either the 70s or the 80s.

Edwin Oslan
Revenge of Riff Raff
17th July, 2021

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!