“Getting a record contract and having the financial wherewithal was what it took to get this done.” “Without a label we really hadn’t wanted to proceed,” Bloom insists. Three-and-a-half years down the line, Bloom and his guitarist-singer counterpart Donald ‘Buck Dharma’ Roeser both attribute their group’s revitalisation as a creative force to signing a contract with the Italian label Frontiers Records that began with a slew of reissues and archival live releases. And now, against the odds, Blue Öyster Cult have also released one. Thankfully, Daltrey had a change of heart, resulting in last year’s better-than-expected Who album Who.
As recently as mid-2016, when Classic Rock enquired about the possibility, guitarist/frontman Eric Bloom replied: “I’ve no answer to that question, except that I’m open-minded.” When pressed on whether he would like to make a record, he shrugged: “Again, there’s no answer. Roger Daltrey says he won’t record again because he doesn’t want the results stolen. Since then they have hardly seemed anxious to release new music. In stark contrast to the halcyon days of the 1970s and early 80s, when the Big Apple-resident band enjoyed a run of best-selling albums and even a global smash hit single, (Don’t Fear) The Reaper, the new millennium saw them appear to run out of steam.Ĭlassic Rock awarded that last album, 2001’s Curse Of The Hidden Mirror, a mere two stars out of five, and when lukewarm sales prompted their record label to quietly drop them, BOC’s days as a recording act seemed numbered. When Blue Oyster Cult last saw fit to release a studio album, the newly elected US president George W Bush was busy arranging furniture in the White House, Holland had become the first nation to green-light same-sex marriages, and New York was still several months away from the 9/11 terror attacks.