ATOMIC ROOSTER '80

In 1970 guitarist and vocalist John DuCann joined Atomic Rooster and he immediately went on tour with the band. When bass player Graham left the band keyboardist Crane refused to replace him and started playing bass lines on the lower part of Hammond organ. To compensate the fact that he couldn't use his left hand to press down chords on the lower manual he created a 'burning' style of playing, often in furious interplay with DuCann. When Carl Palmer left Atomic Rooster to join Keith Emerson and Greg Lake left for supergroup ELP, Rick Parnell shortly replaced him. John and Vincent were not satisfied about his skills and decided to replace him by Paul Hammond, an extremely good drummer from a local band called Farm. The recordings from this CD (with two bonustracks) are from 1980 featuring the line-up John Du Cann (guitar and vocals), Vincent Crane (Hammond C3 organ) and Preston Heyman (drums and percussion) who has worked with Kate Bush, nowadays a familiar face on Prog Archives!

On this album the trio started to develop their harder- edged progressive music with swirling Hammond B3 organ and fiery guitarplay. The interplay between John's guitar and Vince organ is hot and often furious. In fact this powerful sound was very influential, many metal- acts from The Eighties pointed at Atomic Rooster as their main source. The ten songs sound rather straightforward but very energetic and propulsive with elements from Deep Purple (organ and guitar), Led Zeppelin (guitar riffs), Argent (organ), Alice Cooper (vocals) and The Stranglers (vocals and organ). To me Atomic Rooster sounds as an exciting heavy progressive rockband. By the way, in '89 it was all over for Atomic Rooster because of Crane's tragical death, he commited suicide