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Twenty five years on, Warrior Soul front man Kory Clarke is as maverick as ever. The band could have reached Metallica levels but you can’t see Clarke hiring shrinks to hold it all together.

Payback’s A Bitch is the latest in a slew of releases with and without the Soul boys. The common thread is Clarke’s attitude: provocative, piercing, maddening but never dull. The first words you hear on the opening riff-driven title track are ‘I’m pissed’. It’s not just a front either; he kicks the formulaic rebels in their plastic nuts on Rock N Roll Genocide.

While there’s plenty of what you might expect, Clarke wouldn’t be Clarke if he wasn’t throwing a few curveballs – the soul pot-pourri of Getting Down To Bizzness, the deep soul balladry of The Last Hand, the radical beats of Hoezone and the closing emotional and personal Meet Me In Las Vegas.

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 47 years. Actually 58 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.