THE ULTIMATE PLAYLIST OF 2021
ICONS & A-LISTERS
Rock’s big names at their best.
BILLY F GIBBONS
West Coast Junkie
Holed up in Joshua Tree and “mindful of the desert’s implicit mystery” as he wrote parent album Hardware, the Top man takes us for a spin across the dunes with this surf-styled lead single from the album.
LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM
On The Wrong Side
Buckingham reminds us he can do without Fleetwood Mac on this chiming, driving, deceptively bitter solo gem, the chorus of which shares a little escapist DNA with Go Your Own Way. “It’s not a happy song subject matter-wise,” he says, “but it was an ebullient song musically.”
IRON MAIDEN
Death Of The Celts
The first of three 10-minute-plus epics from Senjutsu, Steve Harris’s mist-shrouded marathon can be read as a thematic cousin of 1998’s The Clansman. “I’m not sure what it is with men in skirts,” Bruce Dickinson has said, “but Steve has a thing about it.”
THE WILDHEARTS
Sleepaway
The oft-troubled Ginger has rarely sounded more glass-half-full than on this jangled charger. “Sleepaway is a song of hope, of fighting for improvement in ourselves,” he says. “Locating the area of unhappiness and striving to fix it for the better quality of life.”
CHEAP TRICK
Here’s Looking At You
