Album review : TORME – The Bernie Torme Archives 1985-93 (5 CDs)

Cherry Red [Release date : 26.07.24]

A second volume of remastered material taken from Bernie Torme’s extraordinary career. He was a guitarist and a songwriter whose personality and positivity affected everyone he worked with. A musician with “lightning in his fingers, mercy in his soul”.

CD1 : Back To Babylon (1985) : the first 3 tracks just explode all over your speakers. The band, primarily Torme and vocalist Phil Lewis (later to join LA Guns) channel all the punk energy they had stored up since the seventies, primed it with hard rock axework and crank up the first 3 tracks – ‘All Around The World’, ‘Star’ and ‘Eyes Of The World’ – into sonic overdrive.

The heavy metal thunder of ‘Arabia’ and the the mesmerising ‘Mystery Train’ close the album on a high.
All this on a minor label. The majors were running scared of hard rock in the mid eighties.

Plus 6 bonus tracks. A very rough but very ready live version of ‘My Baby Loves A Vampire’ lights up a run of 6 bonus tracks tagged on the end.

CD2 : Die Pretty Die Young (1986) : the band’s follow up album sounds liberated. An English (and Irish) Van Halen. Rawer perhaps, but right on the money. Producer John McCoy knew just how to get the best out the band. You can hear it.

Opener, ‘Let It Rock’ is an electrifying slice of melodic hard rock. Add in ‘Ready’ and ‘Killer’, and you hear a band that sounds powerful, invigorated, freed from commercial constraints, even if only for one album.

This CD’s 8 bonus tracks include 3 from the band’s So You Wanna Be A Star EP, recorded in 1986.

CD3 : Official Bootleg (1987) : Recording on a shoestring budget got to them eventually, leading to an inevitable break up with, most notably, Phil Lewis leaving to join LA Guns in the USA.

And so this bootleg, recorded at the London Clarendon, is the last live, widescreen snapshot of a band who had the chops and chemistry to make it, but picked the wrong decade.

CD4 and 5 : Demolition Ball Parts 1 & 2 (1993) : Torme’s subsequent dalliance with Dee Snider’s Desperado in the USA abruptly turned sour, leading to his return to the UK, where he put together Torme 2.0.

In Gary (TNT/Samson) Owens he found another frontman whose voice had the muscle and the melody to match Torme’s blazing, blistering axework.

And yet again, with songs like ‘Spinning Your Wheels’, ‘Action’ and the poppified ‘Ball & Chain’, Torme treats us to a sensory overload of hard hitting rock, full of jagged rock nuggets and spiralling, visceral riffs. The songs are tough, the sound is heavy, but as always with Torme, songcraft takes precedence.

The second CD is loaded up with demos, in their own way illustrating Torme’s underrated skill in putting songs and sounds together.

Gary Owens: “Bernie always brought a lot to the table. People talk about Bernie the guitarist, I think of Bernie the songwriter. His ideas were unique, they had his stamp on them”.

No better epitaph. RIP Bernie. ****1/2

Review by Brian McGowan

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