Cheap Trick
Veteran American genre leaders continue to fuse power and pop with panache.
Has there ever been a lamer genre than power-pop? New wave without the experiment, harmonies without melodies and middle eights without choruses, power-pop always seem to hark back to a time when everyone, not just power-pop’s ageing purveyors, had hair.
Of course, there were exceptions, and one of the few bands to survive this label are America’s Cheap Trick. On material like Surrender, Dream Police and the great hit I Want You To Want Me, Cheap Trick showed that, alone among their contemporaries, they understood how to transmute the 60s stylings of The Beatles to the 70s without sounding like ELO (or indeed ELO Kiddies). Guitarist Rick Nielsen’s slashing power chords merged perfectly with Robin Zander’s keening vocals to create a sound that was both timeless and new. A sound that came to the ears of John Lennon, who used the band on his Double Fantasy album sessions.
Cheap Trick’s first flush of fame was, admittedly, a while ago, but like all great bands they have a knack of brought Cheap Trick back into the limelight in the early 2000s, while last year’s unambiguously titled Christmas album saw them lay out their roots in Christmas song form brilliantly. Like Cleopatra with power chords, Cheap Trick cannot be withered by age, nor does custom stale their infinite variety. They just continue to rock (despite being inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2016, normally the sign of a career’s fatal plunge).
