The healing begins - Eagles Of Death Metal at the Olympia, Paris

© Simon Poulter 2016

It was hard to tell whether this was closure or continuement, but we knew why we were there, and they knew why we were there. And, to some extent, we knew why they were there, too. "It's much more than just a show," the Eagles Of Death Metal's Jesse Hughes had emotionally told CNN earlier in the day. "I always lose myself in the music, but I'm going to lose myself in the kids, we're going to get lost in each other."

And so we did. All of us. Not in doom or despair, but the revelry of rock and roll at its most powerful, at its most uplifting and at its most fun. Those might seem trite sentiments but, just like the EODM's music itself, there was nothing pretentious or leaden about their return to Paris last night. It was stripped-back boogie, crashing drums, power chords and fuzz, and charisma by the truckload.

Perhaps, given the security at the door - heavily armed police, first, and then three separate pat-downs before even reaching the Olympia's storied entranceway - 'fun' was not going to figure heavily on the agenda of this potentially sombre of occasions. But the mood was light, rather than grim, the police and their machine pistols stern but not intimidating. And once inside, even the sight of those limping on crutches, still bearing the physical scars of that night last November, provided no more than a reality check that this night was about getting on with what everyone had intended to enjoy in Le Bataclan three months ago.

The mental scars, of course, were less easy to recognise: some said that they had figited nervously with their watches, checking for the 40-minute mark that, three months ago, had changed their lives. A few approached the counsellors that had been brought in to ensure that comfort was there for those who needed it. But - and this will sound corny, and I make no apology if it does - the eventual appearance of the Eagles on stage brought about an overwhelming sense of mutual love and, yes, celebration to the room, even if the reason everyone was there was, without overstressing it, for awful reasons.

Before November 13 last year it's possible that you'd never heard of Eagles Of Death Metal. Despite being in existence, in one form, since 1998, you may have avoided them. You might have been mistaken into thinking they were, indeed, purveyors of death metal, and therefore not your thing. Or, you may have been baffled by the construct of Queens Of The Stone Age's Josh Homme forming a side project with Hughes in the arid heat of California's Palm Desert, Palm Springs' blistering next-door neighbour, just down the road from the Coachella Valley.

Now everyone knows who they are. No rock band in the world would wish to be known for their part in one of the most notorious acts of violence of our time. But it's because they were on stage that evening in the Bataclan, and because they witnessed the same horrors as many of those in the Olympia last night did, that what could have been a dangerously awkward and even premature reunion became such an utter triumph. In fact, it became more than just a show.

As the lights dimmed, it seemed an age before EODM emerged from the wings. I'm sure more than just me wondered whether they would come out at all. However, the warm-up act - the delightfully bluesy Austrian duo White Miles, who'd been the support at the Bataclan in November - had done their job perfectly, and set up the audience.

For the headline act to not appear would have been understandable, but enormously deflating, but we weren't to be disappointed: as Jacques Dutronc's Paris s’éveille played out over the PA, Eagles Of Death Metal took to the stage with a defiant - and clearly tearful - Hughes declaring "Bonsoir Paris, we’re ready for this!". Mostly, we were too.

As Hughes took in great lungfuls of air, there were a few nervous glances exchanged in the crowd. No great surprise, to be honest. By the evening's end, everyone would be joined in euphoric mass communion, one that had only a little to do with November 13, and was largely a celebration of why anyone would get in a band or go and see one to begin with.

© Simon Poulter 2016

They began with I Only Want You, the first track of their debut album, stopping after a minute or two for a moment of silence, a challenging task at the best of times inside a pumped up concert hall. It may have been spontaneous, it may have been not, but if it was meant to be a token reflection of the underlying reason for us all being there, it was momentary punctuation. This was, in the words of Hughes - in his guise as Southern baptist preacher with a guitar - all about putting trust "in the healing power of rock 'n' roll".

"We are having a good time tonight - amen!", he declared, adding "Ain't nobody going to stop us." Hell, yeah. They rattled through the songs - 23 in all - short, sweet, slabs of loud, grungy pop, the kind that Bowie and Bolan made good, even throwing in crowd-pleasing covers like Duran Duran's Save A Prayer. Hughes and Homme may be the focus of attention in EODM, but this is a band's band, all of its parts - the Billy Gibbons lookalike Dave Catching and Eden Galindo on guitars, bassist Matt McJunkins and second drummer Julian Dorio all colluding to create a frenetic two or three hours of foot-numbing fun.

There was precious little pathos, thankfully. The Eagles were there to finish the job that had been so abruptly halted in November. But there were, too, 'moments': a crocheted red-white-and-blue scarf, launched into the crowd by my friend Theresa, made it's way to the front of the crowd and then around Hughes' neck: "I want to identify the maker of that scarf, give them a big cup of cocoa and a big old hug after the show," he declared. Let's hope we can make that happen.

As they enterered the home straight, Hughes disappeared into the upper circle of the Olympia to embrace a wheelchair-bound survivor of the Bataclan. The band continued on stage, running out of songs and seemingly resorting to Catchling trying out some Jimmy Page-like slide riffs. No one minded.

The Olympia - one of the legendary Paris rock venues - was, for the evening, Hughes' own chapel. In television interviews he has allowed his emotions to run raw. For all his audacious shownmanship, Hughes has been seen to channel the entire band's emotion. And as frontman, he did again last night. "Let’s make a deal," he asked at one point. "This is an emotional moment for me so if I fuck this song up, ain’t no one going to get mad at me." They wouldn't. They couldn't. They didn't.

The crowd lapped up favourites like Cherry Cola, I Got a Feelin' (Just Nineteen) and Stuck In The Metal, their take on Stealer's Wheel's Stuck In The Middle With You. After an interval Hughes emerged with a custom-built guitar that had been crowd-funded in memory of the Bataclan victims. Emblazened in the French tricolour, Hughes - on his own - plucked out part of EODM's Bag O'Miracles before explaining that he'd injured a tendon in a finger, perhaps through pent-up stress. That stress became instantly released by him faithfully playing Brown Sugar unaccompanied by the band, not that anyone would notice, given the enthusiastic "woos!" from the crowd.

It was at that point that I realised - perhaps dimwittedly late in the process - that, in EODM, we had everything we'd ever enjoyed about the Rolling Stones themselves, the self-styled "greatest rock and roll band in the world": a unique frontman, outrageous guitar riffs, infectious boogie, total showmanship. If and when the Stones do pack it in, step forward their natural successor.

And at that point, it was possible to feel that the reason we were all there to begin with had disappeared into the background. Three months on, it wasn't too soon, or at least, by the show's end, it didn't feel so. But that's not for me to judge. I wasn't there on November 13. For those that were, I can only stand up and salute their consumate bravery for coming out to see the Eagles Of Death Metal again. And, I can only salute the Eagles Of Death Metal for coming back to Paris to play for them. I am amazed by those who were there last night, just as I have every inch of understanding and sympathy for those who chose not to be.

Healing doesn't come from instantaneous gratification, we know, but from this music fan, who has stood on the sidelines while people close to him have worked their way out of the tragedy, I can say that if anyone was looking for the healing power of rock'n'roll, at the Olympia in Paris last night, they would have found it. I know, I did.

Takin' it easier - Glenn Frey: 1948-2016

© Simon Poulter 2013

There's a common misconception amongst us Brits that our American cousins are bereft of irony. Not so. Jesse Hughes and Josh Homme's creation of the Eagles Of Death Metal proves otherwise.

As at least one legend has it, the Californian band that met the spotlight in the grimmest of circumstances last November arrived at their moniker after Hughes and Homme saw a man in a London bar dancing to The Scorpions' Wind of Change. The man explained that he was frugging to death metal. "No it's not," Homme is said to have replied. "This is like the Eagles of death metal."

That Homme entertained a play on words around one of America's most revered, representative and also sneered-at rock bands demonstrates a delightful, if unexpected, degree of chutzpah. 

To some, the 'original' Eagles are a brand of corporate rock and roll, as familiar as Starbucks or as predictable as a Ford car. Punk, which was very angry about many things, had bands like the Eagles in its sights for this very reason, as well as the post-hippie prevelence for chambray shirts, denim and centre-parted hair.

It should also be noted that punk really erupted in 1976, the year that the Eagles released their biggest selling album, Hotel California, the title track of which remains today their most defining, and itself was a somewhat punkish rejection of the plastic facade that was LA life back then.

Even now, the Eagles generate caustic derision from those of a reactionary bent, agitated by their gentle, unprepossesing country rock and the "peaceful, easy feeling" of their soft harmonies and readiness for narcoleptic FM radio. This, they say, is music "only unadventurous Americans could like".

However, the unexpected death yesterday of the Eagles founder member Glenn Frey triggers reconsideration of one of the most extroardinary periods in the storied history of California's musical timeline.

Whenever I've been asked to name a period that I would have most liked to have lived in, it is never Shakespeare's England (plague, smallpox and syphillis...?), Dickens' London or The Beatles' Liverpool, but the canyons in the Hollwood Hills in the late 1960s. For then, as Barney Hopkins' essential read Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters And Cocaine Cowboys In The L.A. Canyons 1967-1976 details, you had the confluence of rock, country and folk in Laurel Canyon or Malibu Canyon, with the likes of The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Doors and Joni Mitchell hanging out, creating beautiful things.

LA was an incredible hotbed of music, the southern Californian sunshine fertilising what had become a giant campus for songwriters and session players, where everyone knew everyone everyone - CSN&Y, Linda Ronstadt, Gram Parsons, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Poco, Randy Newman, Warren Zeavon and J D Souther. 

Drawn to this world was Detroit-born Frey, who wound up sharing an apartment with Jackson Browne and Souther (forming the syllable-tastic Longbranch Pennywhistle), and moving into a music scene that gravitated around Ronstadt (already working with Don Henley) and West Hollywood's Troubadour club on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Out of this musical minestrone soup came captivating combinations, with one band in particular emerging at its fulcrum: legendary guitar and banjo player Bernie Leadon from the Burritos, bassist Randy Meisner from Poco, seasoned lead guitarist Don Felder, Henley - the boy from a 'one stop light' Texan town - and Frey. 

This original line-up (i.e. before Leadon, Meisner and Felder left and Joe Walsh and Timothy B. Schmit came in) set about their self-titled debut album, though recording took place a long way from LA's blue-eyed beaches, but at London's Olympic Studios under then producer-du-jour Glyn Johns. 

The album process may not have been a happy one for band or producer, but it did at least put them on the map, thanks in no small part to Browne and Frey's domestic arrangement also producing the quintessential Eagles song, Take It Easy, a song that became something of a metaphor for the band's musical outlook, with it's memorable line - represented in the photograph at the top of this page from my Route 66 adventure in 2013 - "Well, I'm a standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and such a fine sight to see. It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowin' down to take a look at me."

Seeing the Eagles for myself, finally, at Madison Square Garden a few months after my Winslow visit, on a tour in which the reformed line-up of Frey, Leadon, Henley, Schmitt and Walsh ran through the band's musical history as part homespun fireside chat, part concert, one thing was clear: for all of Henley's higher profile as an 80s solo star, and Walsh's deserved reputation as one of rock's greatest guitarists, Frey was the architect of the Eagles' broader spectrum.

His voice, heard on Take It Easy and thus the first voice on the first track on the first album by the Eagles, has often been overlooked for its role in shaping the Eagles' sound, as an instrument in its own right. But there it was, 41 years after the world first heard "Well, I'm running down the road tryin' to loosen my load", stronger than ever, and as sublime as ever.

© Simon Poulter 2013

What wasn't quite certain, that November evening in New York, was just how much true love remained across that stage. Until the Eagles re-emerged with the Hell Freezes Over album as part of the unplugged trend, their tenure as one of the biggest bands in the 1970s extended almost exclusively within that term - releasing just six albums between their 1972 debut and their breakup release, The Long Run in 1979.

"It had stopped being fun," Frey told The Independent in 1992. "We no longer trusted each others' instincts," adding that being in a band of competitive talents with all the tour distractions that the era offered up exposed themselves to each other. 

"Like, how we each reacted to the pressure, and how it was hard to cope with it rationally because we'd been living this lifestyle of limos, private jets, first-class hotels and people doing what you told them to. Plus, both Henley and I had developed drug habits, which didn't help matters."

The Eagles' breakup saw all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, enter the 1980s with new solo careers. Henley, like that other drumming singer Phil Collins, joined the realms of MTV-saturated AOR. 

As has often been remarked, actors want to be rock stars (Bruce Willis, Don Johnson) and rock stars have a habit of wanting to become actors (Lennon, Jagger, Bowie, Sting, Collins). And so Frey enjoyed his own place in the zeitgeist, contributing The Heat Is On to the Beverley Hills Cop soundtrack, and having his song Smuggler's Blues turned into an episode of Miami Vice, in which he starred. He also turned up in episodes of Wiseguy (a seminal series for its time) and, later, Jerry Maguire. These, though, can be regarded as distractions.

In the 80s and 90s Frey produced a handful of spotty albums - No Fun Aloud, The Allnighter, Soul Searchin' and Strange Weather, to varying degrees of reception, but nothing ever to scale the same heights as the Eagles in their prime. Their inevitable thaw, and the return to touring wasn't intended to replensish the coffers, but perhaps, vicariously through the encouragement of promoters, it replenished the relationship that remained at the band's core.

Frey and Henley were, though, never the Eagles' Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, or Becker and Fagen. For a start, theirs wasn't a songwriting partnership. One would often sing on songs written by the other in conjunction with other members of the band, but only occasionally would they co-create.

It was their drive that fuelled the original seven-year blizzard of soft-rock - Frey's upper Midwest hardiness and Henley's Texan bluntness leading to both the fabled creative tension as well as the greatest creativity. "I love him and love the records he makes – he's a craftsman – but most of the time I don't like him!" Frey said of Henley in The Independent interview. 

The sentiment was - respectfully, but somewhat tartly - reciprocated by Henley in his statement following Frey's death: "He was like a brother to me; we were family, and like most families, there was some dysfunction. But, the bond we forged 45 years ago was never broken, even during the 14 years that the Eagles were dissolved."

Now, sadly, it has, as rock music mourns the loss of yet another of its sons, one who may not have been one of its biggest points of influence, but certainly remains one of its biggest in terms of legacy.