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Queen’s Roger Taylor to release lockdown album Outsider and play York Barbican

Roger Taylor: New lockdown album, new tour, in the year of the Outsider

QUEEN legend Roger Taylor will play York Barbican on October 5 as the only Yorkshire show of his “modest” 14-date Outsider tour this autumn.

In a “surprise announcement” today, rock drummer Taylor, 71, confirmed he would be on the road from October 2 to 22.

“This is my modest tour,” he says. “I just want it to be lots of fun, very good musically, and I want everybody to enjoy it. I’m really looking forward to it. Will I be playing Queen songs too? Absolutely!”

Taylor’s solo travels will combine new material from his October 1 lockdown album, Outsider, with solo material down the years and an “enthusiastic foray” into the Queen back catalogue.

Taylor made: Queen drummer Roger Taylor’s lockdown solo album, Outsider, set for release on October 1

Prompted by the pandemic pressing the pause button on Queen + Adam Lambert’s UK and European tour until 2022, Taylor has decided to give his first live performances outside Queen in more than two decades.

This autumn’s intimate concerts will “showcase his distinctive percussive, vocal and songwriting talents that have been integral to Queen’s live and recorded output since 1970”. 

Taylor penned such Queen favourites as A Kind of Magic, Radio Ga Ga, I’m In Love With My Car, Sheer Heart Attack and These Are the Days of Our Lives, complemented by five albums under the name of Roger Meddows Taylor: Fun In Space, 1981; Strange Frontier, 1984; Happiness, 1994; Electric Fire, 1998, and Fun On Earth, 2013.

He also made three albums with the band The Cross, releasing Shove It in 1988, Mad, Bad And Dangerous To Know in 1990 and Blue Rock in 1991.

Drum role: Roger Taylor in familiar mode

Over the past decade, Taylor has recorded the occasional solo number, reflecting on his worldview and observations in such songs Journey’s End, Gangsters Are Running and, last year, the aptly named Isolation, written in response to the first lockdown.

Now comes Outsider, the multi-instrumentalist’s first studio set of new material since 2013’s Fun On Earth, much of it penned and recorded during lockdown in a reflective mood. Conveying a sense of seclusion and concern over the passing of time, tellingly he dedicates the album to “all the outsiders, those who feel left on the sidelines”. 

Giving the inside track on recording Outsider in the wake of Isolation, Taylor says: “I’ve had a bit of a creative spurt and suddenly found myself with an album, which was lovely. It was a surprise! I just found myself in the studio and they came out one after the other. It was a pleasure really.” 

Under lockdown conditions, a highly personal project evolved, wherein Outsider’s instrumentation was performed almost entirely by Taylor, with his largely restrained vocals matching the predominantly contemplative ambience, although he did cut loose for a burst of hard-riffing blues-rock and an adrenaline-fuelled re-tread of a classic 1965 novelty song. Wait and see which one, when Outsider surfaces on October 1 on Universal.

Tickets go on pre-sale from 10am on June 8 at shop.emi.com/rogertaylor/.

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Paul Carrack is good and ready for York Barbican gig in 2022 and summer album

Paul Carrack: new single, new tour and 2022 tour

SHEFFIELD soul stalwart Paul Carrack will play York Barbican on February 17 2022 on his 24-date Good And Ready Tour.

Further Yorkshire gigs are in next year’s diary for Hull City Hall on January 22 and a home-city finale on March 19.

Carrack, the golden voice of Ace’s How Long, Squeeze’s Tempted and Mike + The Mechanics’ The Living Years and Over My Shoulder, will release new single You’re Not Alone on Friday (19/2/2021) across all digital platforms via his independent label, Carrack-UK.

The live years before Covid: Paul Carrack at York Barbican in February 2018. Picture: Simon Bartle

His 18th studio set of a 50-year career, One On One, will follow in the summer, on a date yet to be confirmed for his first album since These Days in 2018, a year when he performed at York Barbican on February 16.

The single and album are the results of Carrack heading into his recording studio since the first pandemic lockdown in March 2020. He not only wrote, recorded and produced every song on One On One, but he also played all of the instruments, making his latest work the very definition of a solo record, made when he was very much alone.

Carrack, who will turn 70 on April 22, says of You’re Not Alone: “I’d say the song is self-explanatory, but the sentiment is one of unquestioning commitment and support. I very much hope I get the chance to perform this song live with my band when we get the green light to start touring again, which we all hope will be at some point this year.”

Tickets for his York Barbican show are on sale at £42.75 to £48.35 at yorkbarbican.co.uk; Hull tickets, hulltheatres.co.uk; Sheffield, sheffieldcityhall.co.uk.

“I’d say the song is self-explanatory, but the sentiment is one of unquestioning commitment and support,” says Paul Carrack, introducing his new single, You’re Not Alone
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If you buy only one “rush-released” album for lockdown times, make it…

Spring a surprise: Laura Marling hatched her seventh album earlier than first planned

Laura Marling, Song For Our Daughter (Chrysalis Records/Partisan) ****

LAURA Marling’s style is elegance personified, that distinctive voice flouting over a summery backing.

For this record, the production is more expansive, but never immodestly. This album, her seventh, is written to an imaginary daughter, but not in the crib-style of Jackie Oates’ Lullabies.

Held Down is a frank song about power and relationships, and probably not for pass-the-parcel playlists. The songwriter has described Song For Our Daughter as “a rumination on modern femininity”, and the spaces in between the words leaves plenty of room for interpretation. This is a record to close around you like a hug. It’s not stifling; 36 minutes and you are done.

Most distinctive, and probably the soonest to pall, is Strange Girl, swept along on a Latin riff and a naggingly good chorus. Marling sounds in control, even when singing about the opposite, and Joni Mitchell remains the closest comparison.

You sense Marling stretching out, but nimbly rather than dramatically, astute enough to move forward at a pace her audience can live with. The strong arrangements are tastefully done and beautifully recorded.

If Only The Strong Survives is becalmed, the message is irrefutable: Marling is in this for the long run. No histrionics or Penderecki. Blow By Blow’s stark piano beauty sees the singer chasing a kind of Blue, and was inspired by Paul McCartney. The aura of Leonard Cohen hovers near the opening Alexandra.

Like the wonderful Bedouine, Song For Our Daughter is calming and mellifluous, a summer brook, but dip below the jewelled surface and the temperature soon drops. Hope We Meet Again is particularly effective, this time half spoken, while For You ends happily, the sort of coda that Nilsson might have once conceived.

Review by Paul Rhodes

Only One Question for Laura Marling…

Why did you speed-release Song For Our Daughter in lockdown “ahead of our planned schedule”?


“IN light of the change to all our circumstances, I saw no reason to hold back on something that, at the very least, might entertain, and at its best, provide some sense of union,” says Laura.

“It’s strange to watch the facade of our daily lives dissolve away, leaving only the essentials; those we love and our worry for them.

“An album, stripped of everything that modernity and ownership does to it, is essentially a piece of me, and I’d like for you to have it. I’d like for you, perhaps, to hear a strange story about the fragmentary, nonsensical experience of trauma and an enduring quest to understand what it is to be a woman in this society.

“When I listen back to it now, it makes more sense to me then when I wrote it. My writing, as ever, was months, years, in front of my conscious mind. It was there all along, guiding me gently through the chaos of living. And that, in itself, describes the sentiment of the album – how would I guide my daughter, arm her and prepare her for life and all of its nuance?

“I’m older now, old enough to have a daughter of my own, and I feel acutely the responsibility to defend The Girl. The Girl that might be lost, torn from innocence prematurely or unwittingly fragmented by forces that dominate society. I want to stand behind her and whisper in her ear all the confidences and affirmations I had found so difficult to provide myself. This album is that strange whisper; a little distorted, a little out of sequence, such is life.

“I want you to have it.”