A Shirt on Sunday: Blue Öyster Cult – 22/2/2019 – Hammersmith Odeon

The shirt celebrates BÖC’s third and possibly best album – ‘Secret Treaties’ – the album where they let Sandy Pearlman & Albert Bouchard really get going on the secret histories mythos which 20-years later became ‘Imaginos’. It’s their most consistently heavy album and there’s not a duff moment on it.

I got to the Odeon (nowadays the Apollo) as The Temperance Movement were starting up. They’re a Black Crowes style band with a singer who reminded me of a young Rod Stewart. They should have been my thing – they certainly had a lot of support in the crowd – but they weren’t. The drummer was pedestrian and the sound was muddy. They weren’t bad; they just didn’t rock my boat.

The Temperance Movement

Arriving on stage to the theme from ‘Game of Thrones’, Blue Öyster Cult continue to rock my boat to the point of capsizing. The best news of the day is that Danny Miranda is now full-time on bass. Kasim Sultan was the last bass player and while a fine jazz-rock player was totally wrong for BÖC. That said, he’d previously annoyed me as bass player for Meat Loaf, so maybe I annoyed him too. Miranda was the bassist on the last two BÖC albums (20 years ago!), and has the right level of attack and bounce in his playing to propel the groove along.

Basically, this is Buck Dharma’s band – he was a founder member, writer of the three big hits and still plays incredible guitar parts. The other almost original member is Eric Bloom on guitars and keyboards, who was the happiest I think I’ve seen him.

Richie Castellano, Eric Bloom, Jules Radino, Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser, Danny Miranda

We only got two songs from ‘Secret Treaties’ but otherwise a good mix of the hits and a couple of lesser known numbers – the best of which was a beautiful rendition of ‘The Vigil’ which sent Miranda spinning gently around the stage. The crowd did a lovely job of singing ‘Burning for You’, but throats were a bit raw for ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’ having just sung ‘Godzilla’ at the tops of our voices.

Unlike their last London gig, no-one broke a guitar string or lost their voice, or got the words wrong or needed bits of the drum-kit replaced. But then they weren’t trying to video this gig, so there’s a lesson in that.

A storming gig from one of my favourite bands.

Videos

Someone in the balcony posted these tracks:

The Vigil

Career of Evil

Harvest Moon