music & movies
ROGER TAYLOR Outsider
Queen drummer’s sixth solo album is the first he’s really got right.
Like his Queen bandmates, Roger Taylor has rarely flourished outside the mothership. His band The Cross were hard to bear, and while his clutch of solo albums had their moments, he wisely seemed to save his best work for the group. A peak of sorts came when Nazis 1994 revealed to a startled world who the bad guys in World War II were.
Now comes his latest solo album, ‘Outsider’, and it’s fair to say that expectations could be higher. Perhaps they should have been, for at the age of 72 Taylor has turned in the solo effort of his life by whatever a country mile is.
As ever on his solo records, Taylor plays almost everything himself – drums, of course, but also guitar and most of the keyboards – but he’s in cahoots with Joshua from Terry Jones’s 2015 film of that name. More radically, his rocking 1994 single Foreign Sand is re-cast as a bittersweet ballad, while there’s a spartan, brassy trawl through , on which Taylor growls through a loud-hailer like Mark E Smith as a line-dance caller. Clumsy title aside, is Taylor at his most grizzled and jagged.
