Gotta be good, surely?
To be fair the resulting album started off okay with ‘Restless’ and ‘Teenage Breakdown’ before hitting a wall with ‘Don’t Never Leave Me’ and ‘House of Ecstasy’. Sound familiar? Yes it’s that ‘Don’t Never Leave Me’, of which at least six recordings by Hanoi Rocks exist, the definitive one surely being the version on ‘All Those Wasted Years
, and that ‘House of Ecstasy’ by the Cherrybombz. A glance further down the track listing and you get ‘Devil Calling’, hardly a classic but nevertheless recorded twice by the Kill City Dragons and, having been co-written by Nasty Suicide, also formed part of Cheap and Nasty’s set and made an appearance as a live b-side). Housed between these needless trips down memory lane are three of the album’s weakest tracks, plus a decent enough cover of Van Morrison’s ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ (nb: I was not familiar with the original when I first heard this album and would probably have been far less accepting of the Shooting Gallery version if I had). Surprisingly the album finishes on a bit of a high with ‘Leave Me Alone’ and ‘Dandelion’, but the general laziness that went into the album left me with a pretty foul taste in my mouth (and I never wore lipstick so it wasn’t that).
What I will see in its defence is that it’s a damn sight better than the Michael Monroe / Steve Stevens collaboration, Jerusalem Slim
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