Graham Bonnet - Line-Up (1981)

Following a rather swift exit from Rainbow after just one album, vocalist Graham Bonnet rounded-up some of his rock luminary friends to produce a solo album, Line-Up, his third and most successful solo release. Featuring the likes of Cozy Powell, Jon Lord and Micky Moody you’d expect quite a strong album and, to be fair, it’s not bad – albeit it’s not greater than the sum of its parts!

Opening with the hit single from the album, Night Games, Bonnet is in fine form with the track itself occupying Rainbow/Whitesnake territory, unsurprisingly, with a very catchy chorus: the single (written by Ed Hamilton – in fact Bonnet didn’t write any of the tracks here) reached number 6 in the UK chart.

SOS is up next, a powerful riff with a driving verse and Bonnet at full vocal stretch – up in the higher registers where he belongs. Micky Moody also puts in a good turn on guitar on this Russ Ballard-penned number (the man behind Rainbow’s Since You’ve Been Gone), a songwriter that was expert in melodic, powerful and catchy rock.

I’m A Lover slips into a slow, bluesy feel – still very much in a Rainbow tradition – with some good vocals and general instrumentation. However, things then go horribly wrong with Line-Up: a cover of the Ronettes’ Be My Baby! Suddenly the band sound like Showaddywaddy, complete with cheesy sax solo – quite what Bonnet was thinking here is anyone’s guess.

Fortunately, a dirty Moody opening riff to That’s The Way That It Is rescues the album for a fairly run of the mill rock plodder. The next track, Liar, is strong and runs around a keyboard/sequencer pattern and nice Joe Walsh-style guitar play from Moody.

Next-up is a reworking of a lesser-known Chuck Berry number, Anthony Boy. As with Be My Baby, this is not good . . . really, really not good at all and some of Bonnet’s band mates should have talked him out of his rock and roll preoccupation.

Dirty Hand is back on a rock footing but is not particularly dynamic and has an awful keyboard sound bursting through now and again. Fortunately, Night Games’ B-side Out On The Water is up next which is quite a belter, opening with a good Moody riff and an uptempo feel – not enough to make Cozy Powell break sweat, but enough to get the toe tapping! There’s also some trademark Micky Moody slide guitar soloing too, which is always good.

Don’t Stand In The Open moves to really bland late-70’s chart material territory and the closing track, Set Me Free does little to lift the sense of despair that slowly creeps in listening to this album at how such a decent bunch of rock musicians could produce such an inconsistent and, in the main, poor album.

You would think that mixing musicians from Rainbow, Deep Purple and Whitesnake together you’d get a real gem of an album but they seem here to be quite disinterested and merely going through the motions for their mate. Bonnet gives a reasonably strong performance throughout but struggles to lift both the backing band and some of the song choices – you can certainly tell which tracks the band enjoyed and which ones they rather wished they didn’t have to play.

For novelty value worth a listen but far from a classic in any way, shape or form! To be fair, Bonnet wasn’t best pleased with the album as he thought the ‘rock’ had been mixed-out of the tracks by the producer in his absence . . . he wasn’t wrong.

• Graham Bonnet – Vocals
• Micky Moody – Guitar
• Cozy Powell – Drums
• Gary Twigg – Bass
• Jon Lord – Keyboards