Brian Setzer: Rockabilly Riot! All Original

Put your Cat clothes on!

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Billed as the Stray Cats legend’s first straight-ahead rockabilly record in 10 years, Setzer’s new platter boasts a brace of raucous quiff-stiffeners, including first single Let’s Shake, the Mystery Train-fuelled Calamity Jane and the hilarious Cock-A-Doodle-Don’t.

Not to mention Nothing Is A Sure Thing, a brilliant gene-splice of Please Don’t Touch and Cross Of Love from the Cats’ underappreciated 1992 masterpiece Choo Choo Hot Fish. It’s not all breakneck speed, three chords and the truth though. I Should’a Had A V-8 echoes Johnny Horton’s Battle Of New Orleans while Blue Lights, Big City introduces some sweet Don Gibson/Marty Robbins country to the record.

And The Girl With The Blues In Her Eyes, with its achingly beautiful Beatles-esque middle-eight, is hands-down one of the best things Setzer has ever written and performed. This Stray Cat’s strut continues.

Ed Mitchell
Ed Mitchell
Writer

Ed Mitchell was the Editor of The Blues Magazine from 2012-16, and a contributor to Classic Rock and Louder. He died in October 2022, aged 52. A one-time Reviews Editor on Total Guitar magazine from 2003, his guitar-modding column, Ed’s Shed, appeared in print on both sides of the Atlantic (in both Total Guitar and Guitar World magazines), and he wrote stories for Classic Rock and Guitarist. Between them, the websites Louder, MusicRadar and Guitar World host over 400 of his articles – among them interviews with Billy Gibbons, Paul Weller, Brian Setzer, profiles on Roy Buchanan, Duane Allman and Peter Green, a joint interview with Jimmy Page and Jack White, and dozens of guitar reviews – and that’s just the ones that made it online.