You can trust Louder
Despite the critical hype, hoopla and hosannas showered upon them, 80s country rockers Lone Justice never really broke through to a wide audience, instead leaving singer Maria McKee to find greater success as a solo singer (Show Me Heaven and If Love Is A Red Dress Hang Me In Rags) and songwriter (A Good Heart, a UK No.1 for Feargal Sharkey).
Now, 38 years after they split, the original line-up returns to their roots not just as purveyors of country music, but also as a covers band.
For all of the rollicking and rambling hoedowns – see their reading of George Jones’s Nothing Can Stop My Loving You - and Maria McKee’s heartfelt delivery of You Possess Me, the nagging sense remains that way too much effort has been put into reinterpreting other artists’ material instead of writing their own.
Is another version of Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You really necessary? Does The MC5’s Sister Anne need a country-swing makeover? And the cowpunk stampede through The Undertones’ Teenage Kicks is so incongruous that it needs lassoing.
Julian Marszalek is the former Reviews Editor of The Blues Magazine. He has written about music for Music365, Yahoo! Music, The Quietus, The Guardian, NME and Shindig! among many others. As the Deputy Online News Editor at Xfm he revealed exclusively that Nick Cave’s second novel was on the way. During his two-decade career, he’s interviewed the likes of Keith Richards, Jimmy Page and Ozzy Osbourne, and has been ranted at by John Lydon. He’s also in the select group of music journalists to have actually got on with Lou Reed. Marszalek taught music journalism at Middlesex University and co-ran the genre-fluid Stow Festival in Walthamstow for six years.