QUIREBOYS MAKE A NIGHT AT THE OPERA LOOK VERY APPETIZING

https://youtu.be/KcutzDBC9aQ?si=h2SwkRjush8oEO27

The economic hard times have caught up with me a bit lately, so I'm been making it a regular habit of visiting JB Hi-Fi at Loganholme in an attempt to hunt down a
few cheap CD`s of artists that I wouldn`t normally be interested in but are worth the risk of blowing a mere five to ten bucks on. 

Dont get me wrong, I really would sooner be a spendthrift but at the moment, with a mortgage and a property I just cant sell for whatever reason, I have to be as mean as cat chit with a moth wallet. 

The band that I`m going to review for you now is a real enigma, as a six piece english band they would have seemed to have the dynamics and musical combustion to be one
of the great hard rock and rhythm and blues bands, certainly they had the right idea. 

But to be brutally honest, on the basis of the two albums I have in front of me that came out at the very end of the 80`s and early 90`s, the Quireboys are probably at best what you`d consider to be the best shithouse band that ever rocked the earth. 

Just something lacking, the DNA between the band members never quite joined. I am not going to list the members of the band, and the reason for that is that I`d only be slagging off the internet or Wikipedia to acquire that information, and I like to write stuff on my websites as independently as I possibly can relying on my own knowledge of the subject at hand. 

The Quireboys should not be mistaken for the pub rock band from Australia by the name of The Choirboys, very different bands indeed, the latter are best known for their classic heavy rocker classic from the
80`s called `Run To Paradise`.

The Quireboys, which are english (or possibly irish), maybe somebody can tell me so because of my self imposed ban to look on the internet for them and find out the easy way, seem to take off American band The Black Crowes more than any other band both in terms of musical direction and fashion sense, going by the unconvincing harmonica laced R&B of the two albums and
the `grunge glam` outfits of the six members on the front cover of the first album `A Little Bit of What You Fancy`.

The lead singer was simply never suited to sing in such a band, he is as weak as water and his very unbluesy rasp would have been much better suited to a myriad amount
of British heavy metal bands other than in The Quireboys.

This sort of second grade, second generation Crowes rock may have always sounded better to the poms than to an Aussie 

or American audience because there always has been a distinct lack of Crowes/Burning Tree like bands over there in the UK who play old fashioned rock`n`roll mixed with harp and some jazzy boogie woogie piano. 

The Quireboys were always simply without peer in Britain, maybe that's why they
managed to hold on to a sizable following over the years despite recording a long list of dud albums. 

The second album on my five buck two CD collection `Bitter Sweet and Twisted` is
simply horrible, it would have to be the worst attempt by any english band I know to be a jazzed up american band that they are not.

I honestly cant pick a song off this album that is worth mentioning, so I wont bother mentioning any of them. The one that I already mentioned, `A Bit Of What You Fancy`, has got a few half decent songs near the beginning, I`ll pay them that much respect. 

`7 O`Clock`, `Man on the Loose` and `Sweet Mary Ann` are by far the most convincing rhythm and blues tunes out of the nearly thirty studio ones covering both CD`s.

There is a live cover of the Rolling Stones underrated `Heartbreaker` tacked onto the end of `A Bit Of What You Fancy`, and fair`s fair, the Quireboys didn`t make a total meal of the song, very lumpy and cumbersome and the production team certainly didn`t cut out a lot of what they probaly should`ve,

but they give the song a decent workout. 

Apart from these 4 songs, maybe six if I was in a good mood, the rest of what the
Quireboys dished up on these two albums would be enough to make you listen to opera instead. 

The problem for the Quireboys in a nutshell is this, they were always a band that were
stuck with a singer who wasn`t suited to the rhythm section behind him, that rhythm section hence was having to always
make up the shortfall in the vocal stakes, meaning that very often instead of showing restraint and being influenced more by skiffle and stuff like the Beatles and the Stones, and slowing down the pace a little, the Quireboys rhythm section probably wrecked many a decent song by attempting to be a heavy metal band. 

Why do you think Led Zeppelin are still touted as being the Gods of Rock. Because they diversified going along and instead of `Whole Lotta Love`, Page/Plant/Jones/
Bonham always had an uncanny way of coming up with surprises like `Black Country Women`. 

And it did help Zeppelin having Robert Plant, who unlike the singer out of the Quireboys could at least sing a bit. I had read about the Quireboys many years ago in a metal magazine, and I can remember the band was completely panned by the music critic in the article.

But I didn`t take any notice at the time of who the band members are or were, and I still dont know now. I just know that I
bought a cheap double album CD of the Quireboys going back a few weeks and I definitely wont be rushing back to order in
any more Quireboys music. At least I got two new frisbees now.