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Live review: Buckcherry, Michael Monroe and Rubikon at Kentish Town Forum, London, Saturday, March 7 2026
By STEVE MASCORD
THERE are so things about tonight that don’t fit the narrative about where rock music is right now.
Buckcherry are the hardest-touring band in the genre at the moment and there is, I guess, always a risk of saturation in any city. It’s curious, too, that the last time I saw Buckcherry and Michael Monroe separately in London, the latter was in the bigger room but the former is headlining tonight.
It’s a garden variety Saturday night in North London, a little chilly but still pleasant, dry, lots of late-middle-aged men with some fashionable scenesters and younger party animals sprinkled among the throng. The pub next door is packed and smells of fish and chips but the Forum is not uncomfortably over-populated and it’s one of those nights where the fella next to at the piss trough will strike up a conversation.
In short, there’s understated excitement in the air.
I like almost everything about Boston openers Rubikon except their music. The best way to describe it is Helmet-adjacent desert rock (not sure where the desert is in Massachusetts) and because everyone is in a good mood, they receive a polite response. They all seem like nice enough fellows but I think I’d rather watch them play chess than music.
Michael Monroe’s band – Sami Yaffa on bass, Steve Conte on guitar, Karl Rockfist (Rock fist? C’mon!) on drums and second guitarist Rich Jones perform a hands-in-the-middle bonding ritual in front of the drum riser and then the Monroe gallops on from stage left in a red jumpsuit and explodes.
As we noted in our Monsters Of Rock Cruise review, while the countless frontmen he inspired have soared and crashed in the last 40 years, it’s as if Monroe has been frozen in a cryogenic chamber, only wake-up aged 25 to claim what is rightfully his.
He jumps in the crowd. He does forward rolls, backwards rolls. He plays harmonica. He plays sax. He climbs the balestrades. Somebody buy the lad a cordless mic – the roadie’s full-time job description seems to be untangling him! I can’t think of a frontman from the golden days who is still so mesmerising visually, athletic or just … good. Like, as good as it’s possible to be. Michael Monroe is a sight to behold. Perhaps we, in our dotage, value substance more than we did back than.
And here’s where we were going with that first paragraph: Newer songs like “Ballad Of The Lower East Side”. “Last Train Out of Tokyo” and “Old Kings Road” receive the same recognition level as Hanoi Rocks classics like “I Can’t Get It” and “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams”. There’s no queue for the bathroom when even newer ditties like “Shinola” and “Disconnected” are trotted out. Monroe is playing bigger places, on the back of his body of work from the last 15 years, than he was in those supposed glory days.
The scene is at times riotous as someone who can contort himself in all directions, sing and play multiple instruments gives us absolutely everything. I feared for Buckcherry. How could they follow this?
Until recently I’d not seen an even average show from the neo-hair metallers. But Josh Todd has struggled with his voice the last two times our paths have crossed and when he begins belting out “Lit Up” with what sounds like an AM radio effect on his mic, your reviewer has his concerns.
They prove baseless.
He opens up the larynx soon enough and the band clearly belongs on a bigger stage like this. They eat it up. Todd doesn’t take his voice for granted: he his concentrating hard on his delivery, you can see, even as his snake hips slither around the stage. The number of times I’ve seem Buckcherry is well into the teens and by halfway through this gig, I’ve decided this is the best.
Stevie D’s guitar tone is crushing and Francis Ruiz is as commanding a presence behind the drums as you could wish to see. They rise to the challenge set by Michael – and do it imperiously. What a career they have built for themselves this century, Buckcherry – pulling crowds everywhere while the acts to which they were initially compared flounder. Like Monroe, inheriting the planet (or at least Planet Rock) via persistence and excellence.
And once again, the crowd knows “C’mon”, “Roar Like Thunder”, “Let It Burn” and “Blackout” and sing along. There’s a kid in front of us with Down Syndrome, up against the railing protected by his dad, and my wife later tells me that Josh glanced at him often as he executed a near-perfect performance.
The genre of rock music – or at least this sort of hard rock – may be in one of its final acts. Perhaps the newest generation of bands like Jayler or Eclipse won’t ever attract crowds as big as tonight, just as Buckcherry and Michael Monroe can’t command arenas or stadiums.
But the audience IS renewing. There IS an appetite for new material. The party hasn’t ended because the people who stagger off, dazzled, to Kentish Town tube at the end of tonight’s old school knees-up simply won’t let it.
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