“a very tasty smorgasbord of thick electric-guitar licks with a definite garage-rockabilly vibe and just enough hair-metal in the mix to keep the whole thing appealingly gnarly.”– Business Insider
“Cheap Trick continues to be a model of freakish consistency with We’re All Alright!”
– Paste Magazine
“Combining their trademark power pop with a harder rockier edge…still sounding remarkably youthful…”– Louder Than War
Rock n roll history is littered with iconic combinations of frontmen and lead singers who defined their eras. Jagger and Richards; Tyler and Perry; Osbourne and Iommi; the list goes on. Among those combinations, surely, the team that is Robin Zander and Rick Neilsen must rank pretty highly. They are a band whose sound helped shape the 70s and who, with their Live at Budokan album, revolutionised the way in which live recordings were conceived.
An exhaustive list of the truly great songs Cheap Trick recorded would take up 20 pages on its own, but if you’re the kind of person who wants to hear a band play their greatest hits then this show was tailor made. They played everything from Dream Police, Surrender and I Want You To Want Me to Southern Girls, The Flame, Never Had a Lot to Lose, If You Want My Love and so many others. They played ‘em and played ‘em and played ‘em.
Like you’d expect with a band who’ve been doing it as long as Cheap Trick have, they are a super tight unit. As a touring band it’s become something of a family affair with Neilsen’s son, Dax, joining them on drums and Zander’s son, Robin Taylor Zander, taking up rhythm guitar. Of course, no description of this band and its performance is complete without mentioning Tom Petersson on the iconic twelve string bass, on which he does a spotlit solo which is one of the highlights of the evening.
One of the amazing things about the performance tonight is just how incredibly well Zander’s voice has held up. It is really something else. For a man in his mid 60s both he and his voice are in stellar shape. Neilsen, as is his wont, hams it up for the crowd throwing literally hundreds of picks into the audience throughout the course of the show and giving it everything he has. This really was one of the most satisfying performances of the year. The Enmore is an ideal venue for an Act like this. It’s big enough to feel like you’re a part of something special when an audience really connects with a band the way they did tonight but it’s also small enough that you don’t feel like you’re lost, faceless in a sea of heads.
The headliners were backed up tonight by local dependables Dallas Crane. They do what they’ve always done and they do it well. It’s pretty standard jukebox rock n roll and they do a pretty good job of keeping the audience interested considering how many of them were frothing at the mouth for the main event.
There aren’t going to be a lot of these kinds of shows left. A lot of the older bands are starting to talk seriously about retirement and when they do there will be very few left who remember what it was like to be on stage before sex and drugs and rock n roll needed a consent form and a trigger warning. When that happens, we’re all fucked. So enjoy the party while it lasts because for now, we’re all alright, we’re all alright, we’re all alright, we’re all alright, we’re all alright, we’re all alright.
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