Jon Hotten

Poison’s 1986 debut album Look What The Cat Dragged In is a killer glam metal album. But not everybody loved it

Keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman’s history with Yes goes back to the early 70s – but there have been plenty of bumps along the way

Velvet Revolver’s debut album, Contraband, was released on June 8, 2004. In this classic interview, Slash reveals how one of rock’s greatest modern supergroups got off the ground

Guitar Hero was a worldwide smash hit – and it introduced Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash to a whole new audience

Great White toured with Guns N' Roses, hit the charts, and dissolved in a blur of betrayal and substance abuse. And, just when it couldn’t get worse, they played Rhode Island

Late Magnum guitarist Tony Clarkin created one of the most beloved British rock records of the 1980s in the shape of On A Storyteller’s Night

From big hitters like Journey, Boston and Foreigner to the lesser known lights of AOR, these are the 50 albums that truly sparkle

In this classic 2009 interview, Ronnie James Dio and Tony Iommi look back at resurrecting Black Sabbath’s iconic second line-up under the namd Heaven & Hell

Magnum have never joined rock’s big league, but over the course of 50 years these Brummies have nevertheless produced some of pomp rock’s best albums

Big hair and bad spandex almost killed any credibility metal had in the 1980s. But metal not only survived, it also came back bigger and stronger than ever

Bad Company’s second album, Straight Shooter, was the one that sealed their superstardom

Spooky houses, supergroups and the patronage of Led Zeppelin – how Bad Company became one of Britain’s biggest musical exports in the 70s

How a shy kid from Zanzibar helped propel Queen to superstardom

Glam metal, hair metal – call it what you want. These are five albums that soundtracked the 1980s

How the tragic end of Mother Love Bone and a surfing scientist brought Pearl Jam to life, and an album called Ten

Dee Snider created a Twitterstorm by suggesting that Ronnie James Dio was a great singer but not a great performer – and rock history is filled with other examples

In the years that followed their Live Aid resurrection, Status Quo found themselves more popular than ever, and in 1990 the band held a special event to celebrate. People are still talking about it

By the time they recorded Master Of Puppets, Metallica had outgrown the scene they had single-handedly inspired... but two decades later they would embrace thrash again

Overdoses. Drug smuggling. Doppelgängers. Marriage. Divorce. Fights. Russians. Bryan Adams. Baywatch. Welcome to a year in the life of Mötley Crüe

Members of Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax look back on thrash metal's watershed year

30 million people can’t be wrong: how the Black Album transformed Metallica into metal’s biggest band

Even the best can get it wrong sometimes: here's the worst albums by 10 of rock's greatest bands

Rock is often about more than just the music: it's about The Big Idea, and ambition manifesting itself as The Concept Album

It launched Meat Loaf onto an unsuspecting world. It stayed in the UK charts for eight years and became the biggest selling debut album of all time. It also nearly finished off the singer for good. This is the story of Bat Out Of Hell