Live Review: Gun, Wembley Stadium, July 4th 1990

As yet another embarrassing pass at the Mexican wave ripples around Wembley, GUN kick into action. I've only seen Gun in the confines of a sweaty club before, but many people have told me one of their finest hours was the rabble-rousing roasting they gave SIMPLE MINDS in this very stadium.

A few numbers in it's obvious Gun are seriously arena-friendly. Mark Rankin stalks the stage burning intensity, while Baby Stafford just burns calories. None of them are thrown a jot by a set in that would dwarf many a band. New songs mix with album faves but the first real glimmer of acknowledgement comes with "Better Days."

A stonker of a set, the best I've seen Gun! A shame it was largely wasted on a crowd killing time till the main event.

(Note: Gun were support for the ROLLING STONES)

Simon Robinson
Pic: Paul Smith
Riff Raff
July 1990

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!