FIGHTING TALK

Whipping boys of the UK music press in the 90s, Bush know what an uphill battle feels like. Today they're still fighting, but instead of battling the detractors, they're prioritising improvement.

- Words: Dave Everley

Gavin Rossdale has never been able to tune out the critics. For someone whose holy texts as a youth were the weekly UK music papers of the 70s and 80s, with all their gloriously vicious, vituperative opinions, it stung when his own band, Bush, fell prey to those same barbed pens during the band's dizzying mid-90s rise. Thirty-odd years on, he's still acutely aware that his music will still be scrutinised. Except these days the judgment comes from closer to home.

"My kids play guitar," he says. "So I've got to deliver records that fucking smack people in the face, cos I don't want them and their friends to go: 'Remember when they made those strong early records?'"

Rossdale is talking to Classic Rock via Zoom from Halifax, Nova Scotia on Canada's Eastern seaboard, where Bush are playing later tonight. It took them a 16-hour bus drive to get here, and Rossdale - as unfailingly polite and impressively handsome as he is - has the air of a man who has spent the best part of a day stuck in a tin can on wheels.

But even the Canadian highway system can't dent his enthusiasm for music generally and Bush specifically. The band - Rossdale plus guitarist Chris Traynor, bassist Corey Britz and drummer Nik Hughes - have just released I Beat Loneliness, their tenth album. It continues their great six-album run that stretches back to their reunion in 2010, and before that the four they made during their original incarnation between 1992 and 2003.

I Beat Loneliness is sometimes knotty and obtuse, sometimes stark and emotional. It's undeniably a rock record, but there are electronic touches and stark ballads, with Rossdale's rich, anguished vocal perpetually at the heart of it. It sounds like the work of a band still in forward motion, even after all this time.