Streetheart with Helix and Harlequin at Hard Rock Ottawa

Streetheart with Helix and Harlequin at Hard Rock Ottawa
Review and photos by Mark Kelly

Streetheart celebrated its 50th anniversary Saturday night at Hard Rock Live, with Harlequin and Helix rounding out a triple bill that showed just how much ground Canadian rock covered in the late ’70s and ’80s. Harlequin had the melodies, Helix had the heavy riffs, and Streetheart had a knack for putting both into the same song.

Harlequin opened its set with “Superstitious Feeling” and saved three of its best-known songs for the finish.”Thinking of You” and “I Did It for Love” led into “Innocence,” a three-song
stretch that captured the band’s gift for writing choruses that stay with you long after the guitars fade.

Helix brought the heavier side of the bill. The Kitchener band made its name with songs like “Rock You,” the kind of hard rock anthem that turns a chorus into a call-and-response. It was a
different flavour of the same era, built around big riffs and hooks you could shout back.

For Streetheart, the anniversary also put the band’s continuity in focus. Founding members Daryl Gutheil and Ken “Spider” Sinnaeve are still part of the lineup alongside longtime
guitarist Jeff Neill, with Paul McNair now singing the songs first made famous by the late Kenny Shields. The band’s catalogue explains why it made such a fitting headliner. There’s the urgency of “Action,” the melodic pull of “What Kind of Love Is This,” and the way Streetheart made the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb” sound like one of its own. Fifty years on, that range is what makes Streetheart worth revisiting.

Streetheart

Helix

Harlequin