Video Review: Foreigner, "Feels Like the Very First Time"

While some may consider the prospect of a full-length FOREIGNER video less than enthralling, those who recognise the band as the undisputed Godfathers of AOR (as opposed to bank clerks with guitars!) will find this sixty minute tribute essential viewing.

Surprisingly, there is no mention of new vocalist Johnny Edwards or the band's latest album Unusual Heat. And strangely, the group's last album with singer Lou Gramm Inside Information is also overlooked. Instead Feels Like the Very First Time concentrates on a comprehensive history of Foreigner from their beginning at the tail end of the 1970s up to and including the phenomenally successful 4 and Agent Provocateur albums. Some of the early footage is hilarious with Gramm pulling some real ROBERT PLANT poses, but even now the simple power and quality of songs such as "Cold as Ice" and "Feels Like The First Time" is unquestionable.

Intercut with further live footage of "Hot Blooded," "Urgent," etc. are interview snippets with Gramm and other departed members of the band, including founder member Ian McDonald, all of whom seem happy enough to discuss their time in Foreigner. Praise from BILLY JOEL (with whom guitarist Mick Jones has collaborated on solo projects) lowers the band's credibility rating a little! But for the most part, this is an entertaining and intriguing insight into one of the World's biggest-selling Rock acts.

Chris Miller

Riff Raff
January 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!