Pat Travers Band: Live At The Iridium NYC

Still going for what he knows.

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Pat Travers will never make a better live album than 1979’s Go For What You Know but that hasn’t stopped him trying. He’s now into double figures, and this 2012 show, like many, comes close.

That’s because Travers is essentially a live performer. He rams his calling card down your throat with 70s classics Rock And Roll Susie, Gettin’ Betta, Crash And Burn and Heat In The Street before reminding you that he can still write songs with a couple of tracks from 2009’s Fidelis.

He leads his well-honed band by example, bristling with second guitarist Kirk McKim. Harmonica player Jon Paris guests on a couple of blues songs later on that replace the usual wham-bam finale of Boom Boom (Out Go The Lights) and Snortin’ Whiskey, but hammerheads will probably welcome the change. And it’s good to see the return of 80s gem I La La La Love You./o:p

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Hugh Fielder

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 47 years. Actually 58 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.