Spike Gray at Motorsport Lounge, Llandudno

Spike Gray at  Motorsport Lounge, Llandudno, Friday, April 1 2022

FOR the last 10 years, we’ve been asking ourselves whether rock was dead. As a force in popular culture, we must now accept it is. Now, perhaps, we have a new question: is rock even possible?

Of course it’s possible to play instruments in a certain way so that the result is recognised as rock music. But in light of the Quireboys’ apparent sacking of singer Spike Gray, we must examine whether it’s possible for rock to be practiced as well as performed at a sustainable commercial level in 2022.

If this announcement had been made in the hours before this gig above a Honda dealership in coastal Wales, it would have made sense. April fool!

But it was at the start of the preceding week that the band and its only remaining original member parted company. “There’s been a few issues over the years and it’s just come to a head,” keyboardist Keith Weir told the Belfast Telegraph.

“It’s just basically come to the point where we’ve just had to go our separate ways. It’s not great. I don’t like it but we have to move on.”

It might seem impertinent to have a stab at what these issues might be but when Spike comes to the mic tonight, he’s got what appears to be a beer to his right, on a stool, and it’s never empty. 

An Evening With Spike is about stories (described from the outset as “lies”) and cover songs from musicians with whom he has previously worked (he claims to not know any Rod Stewart songs, BTW), with good friend Chris Heilmann accompanying on acoustic guitar.

The news of the week is referred to twice. Once, before things kick off when Spike says the venue owner “tried to sell me a Lamborghini … I said ‘don’t you realise I’m now unemployed’. That’s all I’m saying.”

He later turns to the empty stage behind him and jokes “oh, no band”.

Aside from that it’s a pot pouri of shiver-me-timbers yarn-spinning and a cavalcade of acoustic covers like UFO’s “Love To Love” and The Animals’ “House Of The Rising Sun”, finishing with Ralph McTell’s atmospheric “Streets Of London”.

Gray plays up for the video camera, getting the crowd to cheer more loudly and demanding the earlier, subdued response be edited out. He tells us of harassing Bono’s mum on a ‘tax exile express’ flight from Dublin, having a former girlfriend cause $14,000 damage to an American hotel room and hoping Heilmann doesn’t mind that he slept with his former girlfriend … before she shacked up with Queen’s Roger Taylor.

And when he opens his mouth to sing, it’s empyrean. 

But if we go back to the start, I can see why – as a middle aged musician with a mortgage and kids – having him as a bandmate might wear a bit thin. Maybe even more than bit. He tells us – slurring slightly but never less than functional – he’s never been married. Many of his yarns include the phrase “I was drinking quite a lot at the time…”

There is nothing wrong with that, of course. Indeed, as the Quireboys assured us in 2001, “THIS is rock’n’roll”.

But the epoch of talent being an elixir for all other ills is almost over. Even the most mesmeric performer must now live in the same world as the rest of us. A financial firm will happily dispense with a high-grossing stockbroker if he or she does not fit in with their corporate ‘culture’.

In an interview last week with The Guardian, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith was asked if it was possible to be “fun-loving, sleazy rock’n’rollers” in 2022.

“Probably not,” he answered. “You have to be a little more careful. Things have changed. And good, as it should. Change is good.”

Rock’n’roll, to its very sinews, is part of a different age to this one. A careless, unfettered, reckless – occasionally destructive, abusive and malignant – world that is has almost dipped below the western horizon.

Spike Gray is a troubadour, a rambler, a pirate. Classic rock bands are businesses. 

It may be still possible to play rock. But the opportunities to truly rock are fast dwindling. 

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