ROGER TAYLOR
Outsider EMI
6/10
Queen drummer’s sixth solo album
His songs were low-points on 1970s Queen albums but by the ’80s Roger Taylor was writing some of the band’s biggest hits (“Radio Ga Ga”, “One Vision”, “Innuendo”, “These Are The Days Of Our Lives”). His sixth solo album has some decent uptempo moments, including the gloriously infantile Led Zep boogie of “More Kicks”, the paranoid blues of “Gangsters Are Running This World” (also revisited as a bombastic thrash rocker) and a gumbo-rock version of “The Clapping Song”. Less compelling are the album’s world-weary ballads, but one old downtempo number, “Foreign Sand”, benefits from a stripped-back acoustic treatment.