On the 30th anniversary of Asia’s groundbreaking debut album, late frontman John Wetton and keyboardist Geoff Downes told Prog about the struggle to maintain their vision and the pressure that came with the LP’s unexpected success in 1982.

“Asia? You framed an Asia poster? How hard did the people at the frame store laugh when you brought this in?” It’s one of the most memorable lines in the 2005 comedy The 40 Year Old Virgin. Steve Carell, playing sexually inexperienced Andy Stitzer, is about to let a prospective girlfriend into his apartment. Seth Rogen, as his buddy Cal, is taking Andy to task over his “un-sexy” collection of video games and action figurines, topped off by the poster that came with Asia’s self- titled debut album.

The image of the mythical sea dragon was instantly recognisable to a generation who’d been teenagers in 1982 and who remembered hearing Asia’s US Top 5 hit Heat Of The Moment on constant rotation that summer. The song also featured in the movie’s soundtrack.

“It was very amusing,” laughs Asia’s keyboard player Geoff Downes 30 years later. “And it helped re-kindle interest. People remembered Heat Of The Moment and that poster. Teenagers, kids, students – they all had it on their bedroom walls. I almost find it scary that something we did back then could end up having such an impact so many years later.”

Asia’s debut represents that fleeting moment when prog rock hijacked the US pop charts. Asia comprised two escapees from Yes, Geoff Downes and guitarist Steve Howe; ex-ELP drummer Carl Palmer and bassist/ vocalist John Wetton, who’d served time in King Crimson, Family, UK and numerous others.

Released in March 1982, Asia’s first was a runaway success, spending nine weeks at Number One in the US. But it happened while the record industry was looking the other way. 1982 was the year Human League’s Don’t You Want Me and Soft Cell’s Tainted Love crossed over to the US charts. Nobody expected refugees from Yes and ELP to make hit records; least of all hit records whose imagery would seep into popular culture and become Hollywood shorthand for a never- ending adolescence.

The roots of Asia could be traced back to the mid-70s. After leaving King Crimson in 74, Wetton put together a new progressive outfit called UK. Their second album, 1979’s Danger Money, tempered its virtuosity with more commercial touches. Wetton’s songwriting was slowly evolving into the streamlined sound of Asia.

“I was even heading in that direction in Crimson with songs like Easy Money and Starless,” said Wetton says now. But the process took time. “I had a Svengali, John Kalodner,” he explains. Kalodner was an A&R executive for the newly formed Geffen Records. “When I presented UK to him he said, ‘You’re close but no cigar’.” When UK split up in 1980, Wetton spent three months in Miami with Wishbone Ash, working on their album Number The Brave “soaking up American radio and writing songs after everyone else went home.”

Back in England, Wetton recorded a low-key solo album Caught In The Crossfire, made up of pop-rock songs in a similar vein to Foreigner and Toto. Kalodner was impressed, but thought Wetton needed a band. For a time, Palmer, keyboard player Rick Wakeman and guitarist Trevor Rabin were mooted. Then, Wetton was introduced to Howe.

“Yes had just imploded at the end of the Drama tour,” explains Downes. “But Steve and I had worked up a good relationship. So I then got a call asking if I wanted to play keyboards on Steve and John’s new songs.”

Downes joined Wetton, Howe and Palmer at London’s Nomis Studios. But Kalodner’s idea for Asia included a lead vocalist. American singer Robert Fleischmann, who’d briefly fronted Journey, joined them in the studio. “But in rehearsals John [Wetton] was leading the field vocally,” says Downes. “So we said ‘No, this is good with the four of us’.” Fleischmann was sent home.

In Downes, Wetton had found the ideal songwriting partner. In 1976, while Yes were crafting the 15-minute epic Awaken on their Going For The One album, Downes had been scraping a living writing advertising jingles. Three years later he was behind The Buggles’ massive hit Video Killed The Radio Star.

“I wasn’t much younger than the rest of them,” he says. “But I was the new kid on the block, and had been involved in a different side of the music business. The others had had their fill of epic pieces. They wanted something more direct.”

What Wetton and Downes also shared was a mutual interest in English church music. “My brother is a choirmaster and church organist,” says Wetton. “That’s the music I grew up on.” “English church music was fundamental to the Asia sound,” adds Downes. “That’s where we got those anthemic chords.”

Asia signed to Geffen, and the album’s recording took place through summer and autumn 1981 at Richard Branson’s Townhouse Studios and Marcus Studios in West London. Geffen had brought in former Queen engineer Mike Stone to produce. Stone had just finished work on Journey’s Escape. “We weren’t exactly the Son Of Journey but in some ways Asia did become a British equivalent,” says Downes.

Crucially, Asia weren’t an obvious musical amalgam of Yes, Crimson and ELP. “If we’d made the album people expected us to make we’d have sold 150,000 records,” says Wetton. “That’s fine, but we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. It was always going to be a more commercial sound. ”

Asked if Howe and Palmer were as committed to Wetton and Downes’ musical vision, Geoff offers a diplomatic: “We had a united front.” “I can only speak for myself, but I was committed,” laughs Wetton. “But... okay, yes, I got shot down many times on that album: ‘Oh, it’s pop. Oh, it’s bubblegum...’”

Out of the creative tension came an album that, as Wetton puts it, “mixed prog stuff with a backbone of great pop-rock songs.” There was fiddly art-rock (Time Again), a tender ballad (Without You) and three hits- in-waiting (Heat Of The Moment, Only Time Will Tell, Sole Survivor). As a nod to the past, Asia commissioned Roger Dean to create the album artwork. “Asia wanted their cover to look as unlike Yes as possible,” Dean said in 2005.

Still, the picture that ended up hanging on the virginal Andy Stitzer’s wall wasn’t to everyone’s liking. “The president of the record company took me to one side and said, ‘Quite honestly, we find the cover a bit dark, the logo is ugly and, frankly, we don’t hear a single,’” laughs Wetton.

Incredibly, Heat Of The Moment – with its churchy keyboards and burnished chorus – was the last song recorded. And, as Wetton admits, “If you’d taken that off the album you could have taken two zeros off the record sales.”

Heat Of The Moment emerged as a single in April, climbing to Number Four on the Billboard pop charts, with the LP hitting Number One in the Billboard Top 100, and 11 in the UK. “In spring ’82, if you turned on the radio or MTV it was Heat Of The Moment,” says Wetton. “Everything else was Human League and A Flock Of Seagulls, and then we came in like a ton of bricks.”

Asia had been booked on a tour of college halls and modest-sized theatres. But as the album and single raced up the charts, they moved to bigger venues. By July, they were selling out the 18,000-seater Dallas Reunion Arena. “Suddenly we were this lauded supergroup – and everyone wanted a ticket,” says Downes. “We were the band of the summer.” Surveying the audience from behind his extensive bank of keyboards, he noticed a significant change since Yes days. “They were a lot younger and there were women,” he chuckles. “The bands we were in before attracted the beards-and-pullovers brigade.”

“Someone did a survey,” adds Wetton. “And it was exactly 50-50 men and women. We had that mass appeal – all ages. We were all in our early 30s, we still looked alright at that stage of the game. We could get away with it.”

The follow-up singles Only Time Will Tell and Sole Survivor achieved similar sales and airplay. “At one point we had six tracks in the Billboard Top 30,” marvels Wetton. “Six solid tracks for AOR radio – fucking amazing. I think only Foreigner came close to that.”

Asia ended 1982 with one of the year’s biggest selling albums. But under pressure from Geffen and their management, they went back to the studio to make the follow-up Alpha, released in August ‘83. It was too quick. Wetton: “The management wanted more of the same – like Die Hard 2.” The first single Don’t Cry was promoted by a video in which the band hammed it up in a pastiche of the recent hit movie Raiders Of The Lost Ark. At one point Howe falls down a cliff and catches fire. (Downes: “I look at it now, and think, ‘Did we really do that?’”)

Initially, the signs were good. Alpha went Top 10 in the UK and US, and Don’t Cry was another US Number One. “It was the fastest selling single to go to Number One in the fucking history of music,” says Wetton. “But two weeks later, when it dropped out, everyone goes, ‘What a shit single!’ And I get the blame.”

In a shock move, Wetton was fired two months later. The problem? “I was drinking a lot,” he sighs. “But ‘rock’n’roll star drinks’ is not headline news... Basically, I didn’t fit into their plans.” Greg Lake was brought in to play a handful of Asia shows including a televised gig at Tokyo’s Budokan in December. “Greg’s a mate. He did his job. But it would be like me joining ELP.”

Wetton returned for 1985’s Astra, but, by then, Howe had walked. The album sold poorly, and Wetton jumped ship. Downes, Wetton and Palmer reunited in 1990 (Wetton: “But without Steve it was not the same”). Downes toured and recorded under the Asia banner with various musicians.

Then, in 2006, the original four reconvened. “We booked a meeting at a hotel in Paddington,” recalls Wetton. “The protagonists – or antagonists – were me and Steve. That’s where the trouble was. Then, as fate would have it, we bumped into each other in the lobby having not seen each other for years. We had a hug and it was all over before we’d even got in the elevator.”

In 2012, XXX became the third Asia album since 2008 to feature the classic line-up. “We still make a good noise,” insists Wetton. “We’re better now than we were in 1982. Back then, a lot of people saw Asia as a Yes spin-off. But that couldn’t be further from it. Asia was a whole different direction – and one that Yes picked up on later. Their album 90125 [in 1983] was much closer to what we had done earlier.”

Nevertheless, that four-million- selling debut album still looms large, even more so since being revived in a Hollywood movie. “Thinking about it now, what we did was so leftfield,” says Geoff Downes. “Somehow, we nipped in and captured the hearts of the American public, and, crucially, a younger generation. Even now, we hear people say, ‘I can still remember what I was doing when I heard that first Asia album.’ It never goes away.”

The world's longest-running weekly music show, Top Of The Pops was never exactly a hotbed of subversion. The TV show's most iconic moments - from David Bowie performing Starman in July 1972 through to Nirvana's November 25, 1991 desecration of Smells Like Teen Spirit - gained infamy precisely because they were such a jolt to the senses on a programme regarded as a national institution.

Which might help explain why being confronted by the sight of a twitching, lairy man with a strip of hair shaved from the centre of his head stomping up and down an abandoned London Underground tunnel waggling his pierced tongue down the camera lens caused such outrage when the British public settled down for tea in front of Auntie Beeb's flagship music show on March 28, 1996.

A record number of complaints followed, and as the song began a three-week residency at the top of the national singles chart, the tabloid press and a number of English MPs expressed alarm at what potential messages this self-professed 'Twisted Firestarter' might be imparting to the nation's youth. As a teaser of what was to come with The Prodigy's third album, it could hardly have been more impactful.

A veteran of the underground rave scene whose healthy distrust of authority and love of punk rock and hardcore hip-hop infused The Prodigy's second album, 1994's Music For The Jilted Generation, Liam Howlett remembers the creation of Firestarter with dancer-turned-vocalist Keith Flint as "a special moment."

"I remember driving back to Essex from London after recording Keith’s vocals and we played that shit over and over again," he recalled in 2018. "We knew it would change things. But we didn’t know it would change to the extent where Keith couldn’t walk down the street or walk into a pub without someone going, ‘Oi! It’s the Firestarter!’ But it gave us more strength to know who we are, and who we didn’t want to be. It gave us something to rebel against again.”

Nowadays, when we tune in to music, carefully manicured algorithms offer up songs which fit our natural rhythms and sit comfortably and seamlessly alongside our tried-and-trusted favourites for a smooth, linear, non-challenging listening experience. When it arrived on June 30, 1997 via XL Recordings, The Fat Of The Land was, in contrast, pure smash and grab. The aural equivalent of a bank heist, it found Liam Howlett pocketing a clutch of influences from the worlds of dance, rock and hip-hop and, aided by a supporting cast of like-minded mavericks, uniting them to create a fierce, confrontational sound that's since been ripped off countless times, but never repeated.

A tour through the album's three singles gives a flavour of its appeal. Each song is thunderously heavy in its own way but all of them bark with the creators' twisted sense of humour. Breathe followed Firestarter to the top of the UK charts in November 1996. This time, Howlett paired Flint on vocals with MC Maxim Reality, whose snaking body paint and fish-eyed contact lenses also gave him the appearance of an entity beamed down from another planet to remind us all how music can transport you to a different place. Backed by Howlett's ominous keyboard strokes, DJ Shadow-esque drum patterns and squeaking samples that repeated like a glitch in the matrix, Breathe freaked out fewer people than its predecessor, while delighting many more. The Prodigy's momentum was building.

The album's third and final single, Smack My Bitch Up, arrived one year later, seemingly intent on pouring petrol on the blaze that Firestarter first kindled. This time, the song and its controversial, Jonas Åkerlund-directed video – which followed a party girl on a gleefully hedonistic night out, shot from the protagonist's point of view – were banned from many TV and radio outlets, with the band eventually forced to declare that the track's title and lyrical refrain were absolutely not advocating violence against women. For by the time it emerged, The Prodigy were no longer an underground dance crew, but bonafide global superstars, with a platform to match, after The Fat Of The Land topped charts in the UK, US, Australia, Germany and a host of other European nations.

Such was the mainstream success of its three singles, that it's easy to forget that The Fat Of The Land is more than just a presentation case for Firestarter, Breathe and Smack My Bitch Up. From the futuristic hip-hop of Diesel Power and the Beastie Boys-sampling Funky Shit to the hypnotic Climbatize and the blistering, album-closing, cover of L7's Fuel My Fire, there is power and passion in every beat.

Fuel My Fire is a fitting conclusion for The Fat Of The Land. L7 vocalist Donita Sparks' lyrics seem to articulate the frustrations Howlett has voiced in interviews down the years: despite the epochal impact that his music has had on the British music scene in particular, The Prodigy often remain tolerated rather than recognised as one-offs, leaving them as at-best misunderstood and at-worst dismissed, possibly because they never even flirted with being part of the establishment.

While Oasis cosied up to New Labour only a couple of years after The Prodigy's Their Law had expressed its contempt for the Criminal Justice Act, Howlett refused be sucked into the machine.

"None of the success ever went to our heads," he insisted. "We weren’t interested in being rock stars, we were totally grounded. We always felt like any of us could have jumped out of the crowd on to the stage. That punk rock thing, without us ever thinking about it being punk rock. We just wanted to keep it real. It’s important for us to stay on a knife edge."

"And if another cunt calls me The Firestarter, I'll stab him in the fucking throat," Keith Flint warned, only half-joking.

The Prodigy's next 'proper' studio album, Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, wouldn’t arrive for another seven years: ripping up the blueprint once more, it relegated the estranged Flint and Maxim to appearances on remixed bonus tracks. The approach was somewhat forced upon Howlett - he and Flint in particular were barely communicating - but it showed once again that The Prodigy were nobody's puppets.

Not that Howlett wanted to disown what came before, for on The Fat Of The Land, the convergence of their creative powers and radical energy did more than start mosh pits at rave gigs: it showed that true originality and subversive thinking can't be suppressed. Anyone looking for music that makes them feel like they belong, could do worse than listen to this still incendiary blast of outsider art.

Hollywood superstar Javier Bardem has revealed that listening to Slipknot, Linkin Park and Bad Omens helped inspire his frighteningly intense performance as vengeance-seeking psychopath Max Cady in the new Apple TV+ remake of Cape Fear.

First screened in cinemas in 1962 with acting legends Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum cast, respectively, in the roles of attorney Sam Bowden and fresh-out-of-prison convicted rapist Max Cady, Cape Fear was remade in 1991 with Martin Scorsese directing and Robert DeNiro turning in a terrifying and unforgettable performance as Cady.

Only a brave or really foolish actor would attempt to out-do De Niro's acting masterclass in the 1991 version of the thriller, but Oscar-winning Spanish star Bardem says that listening to metal helped him get into the appropriate headspace to put his own stamp on the challenging role in the new 10-part Apple TV+ limited series.

"We absolutely went for a metal look, I loved that," the 57-year-old star tells Kerrang!

"I listened to five songs especially," he says. "Two from Linkin Park, Given Up, with the great Chester [Bennington], and Up From The Bottom from the last album, From Zero. I think [Emily Armstrong] is an amazing singer.

"She really brought it back," he continues. “Those two songs really express frustration and the fight for raising up from [one’s] own ashes that [resonates] with Max. And songs by Slipknot, Falling In Reverse, and Bad Omens. I’m so bad with the names of songs, but they were in my head all day long before doing anything and helped put me in the mood."

With that said, Bardem goes on to declare that he'd be listening to metal however his life had turned out.

"It's not that I use the music," he says. "It's that I can't live without it. It's what I listen to: when I drive, when I’m being driven, before I go to sleep... For me, metal is… a way of living."

Earlier this year, in an interview with Metal Hammer, Bardem revealed how Iron Maiden changed his life.

"I put my hand on the Number Of The Beast vinyl and I put it on, then life changed," he recalled. "They have the most amazing lyrics that really convey mostly everything that you can think of – philosophy, religion, politics, war, love, family, friends, metal... I mean, it’s fantastic."

The mid-90s remains the most controversial period of Metallica’s career. The musical shift the San Francisco band took with the Load and Reload albums upset certain sections of their fanbase, though not as much as the fact that the band now sported a brand new look that involved short hair and make-up.

With hindsight, Metallica were simply trying to shake off the clichés of heavy metal – something apparent when they recruited controversial artist Andres Serrano to create the covers for Load and Reload. The former featured an image titled Blood And Semen III, which featured cow’s blood mixed with semen, while the latter’s cover was the self-explanatory Piss And Blood. Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett were big fans of the artist’s work, though James Hetfield was reputedly less impressed.

We asked Serrano how he got involved with the biggest metal band on the planet.

How did Metallica get in touch with you about your art?

“It was Kirk and Lars who asked for the picture for Load. I met with them at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, and we arranged for them to use the image for the album, merchandise and all promotional purposes. I was flattered and honoured they wanted it.”

Why do you think they wanted your artwork?

“Because it spoke to them. They were drawn to it and I’m glad they were, because the image and album was a match made in Heaven.”

Were you familiar with their music?

“I knew their reputation as the greatest heavy metal band ever. It was only later I became familiar with their music.”

Did they ask for those pieces for Load and Reload specifically?

“Yes, they knew what they wanted for both albums.”

Where did the inspiration for the art itself originally come from?

“It was part of a series called ‘Bodily Fluids’. They were photographs intended to look like paintings, using milk, blood, piss and semen.”

How did you get the bovine blood?

“I bought it at the butcher. It would be labelled ‘edible beef blood’ and I would buy a gallon of it whenever I needed it. The blood would darken after a day, so I thought I needed fresh blood to get the bright red. Later, someone told me to put the dark blood in a blender and it would brighten up again.”

What did you think of the Load and Reload records?

“They’re amazing! I was not aware of the evolution Metallica’s sound had taken. But I know they felt there was a connection between the two albums. That’s why they wanted another image from the series for the follow-up album. Related but different. Everything comes from somewhere, and sometimes an audience may not realise there is a connection between one body of work and another but there could be. Only the artist knows for sure.”

What was the reaction, from their fanbase and the band?

“I think the images were a hit. I read a review once where the Load album was named No.1 on a list of best album covers. We know Lars and Kirk were happy with it but James was not. I think James is still fuming!”

In 2021 Van der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill released his first -ever covers album, In Translation. It gave Prog the perfect opportunity to talk about his career and discover what makes him tick.

Maverick. Visionary. Prog’s perennial Renaissance Man. Punk-approved eccentric. After more than 50 years of active service in progressive music, Peter Hammill has earned all these titles and more. Always positioned to the left of the prog mainstream and seemingly impervious to the passing of time and trend, he’s amassed an extraordinary catalogue of music, both as a solo artist (36 studio albums and counting!) and with the legendary Van der Graaf Generator: the band he co-founded in 1967 and that currently exists as a trio, with Hammill alongside Hugh Banton and Guy Evans. By any sane reckoning, he’s one of the most important and influential figures in the history of prog. But what’s less frequently acknowledged is that Peter Hammill’s music, whether solo or with Van der Graaf, sounds like absolutely nothing and nobody else. In fact, it never has.

After a comparatively long gap between solo records, Hammill has assembled his first-ever covers album, In Translation. It’s a highly revealing piece of work: a collection of mostly European songs, including works by Mahler and Rodgers and Hammerstein, translated by the man himself and reimagined with his customary skewed flair. Both a self-evident love letter to Europe and a wide-eyed experiment in dismantling and reconstructing other’s work it sounds entirely unlike anything else one might hear in 2021.

“I’m completely comfortable with that,” he tells Prog. “I’ve never really wanted to join in. I suppose the entire career has really been about trying to do something and getting it slightly, wonkily wrong. When I started writing proper tunes, I guess the subjects of the songs were a little bit out of the ordinary, and I didn’t want to repeat things; so very early on I veered away from verse-chorus-verse-chorus. I can’t explain why, but from a very early stage I was taking a few turns to the left, away from the main drag.”

One of the great joys of Hammill’s music is how relentlessly inventive and unpredictable its creator has been over the last five decades. Having applied his singular vision to everything from tear-jerking ballads to abstract noise, he remains incredibly hard to pin down sonically. Interestingly, Hammill is endearingly unsure where his musical vocabulary comes from. He cites his parents’ love of musicals as an obvious starting point, noting that he grew up hearing West Side Story blaring from the family record player and that “it must have seeped in somewhere.” But the real starting point for his fantastic musical voyage came when Hammill was packed off to boarding school as a child, ended up singing in the choir and had a moment of revelation that set his artistic wheels in motion.

“It was my first actual experience of, ‘This is music – this is great!’” he recalls. “I was a treble, at the junior school, going up to the main school for the Hallelujah Chorus. I’d only known the existence of trebles and altos at that point, so to suddenly be in a stall with basses and tenors, I thought that was absolutely fantastic. That was the first time I got that feeling that, wow, music is fantastic stuff. My voice broke not long after that and there were a couple of years when I wasn’t that involved or interested in music, and then British beat groups happened. I became super-keen on that, and then the blues thing too. I became enthused about the whole thing, but I didn’t think I would be doing it for the rest of my life.”

As it turns out, Hammill has made music for his entire life, although he cheerily admits that his first bona fide musical efforts could easily have stopped his career dead in its tracks. “As a result of the beat groups and finding out about blues, I started to write these desperately poor blues songs, without any of the life experience required!” he says. “I had a harmonica, then eventually I started doing the same thing on guitar. I guess I was 14 or 15. By 16 or 17 I’d started writing some tunes, some of which eventually turned up in the body of work, not with the original lyrics, but the tunes stuck.”

Freed from the blues, Hammill’s next move would prove to be the most important he would ever make. Arriving at Manchester University in the mid-60s, he swiftly joined forces with fellow aspiring musician Chris Judge Smith, and formed Van der Graaf Generator. At that time, the chances of having a successful career as a musician were slim at best, and yet after barely a year, the band were offered a contract by Mercury Records. Sensing an opportunity that may well have not been repeated, Hammill grasped the music biz nettle and set forth on a career he had never really expected to have.

“It was a dreadful contract, of course, but Judge and I decided we’d leave university and carry on and do it. We were super-naïve. But who knows? When I got to university I actually did try to change to a drama course and I wasn’t accepted for that, which was totally fair enough! [Laughs] I was a pretty wonky youth, to be honest. But meeting with Judge and having all that enthusiasm, things just happened onwards from there.”

What might he have been had he not become a musician?

“Well, I do think it would’ve been writing in one way or another. Whether that would have been novels or journalism, I don’t know. One of the ideas on the course I was doing in Manchester, which was Liberal Studies & Science – and how 60s can you possibly be? – was that people would emerge from the course knowing enough about both science and society to get involved in the civil service or decision making or maybe in scientific journalism, to explain things to people. Back then, popular science simply wasn’t a thing. Now there are lots of popular science books, explaining physics and all that kind of thing. Maybe that would’ve been that kind of territory that I’d have gone for.”

This year brings both Hammill’s new solo record and the prospect of a huge and long-awaited Van der Graaf Generator reissue campaign, including a colossal box set and remixed, vinyl editions of the band’s classic albums, the revered Pawn Hearts and Godbluff. Meanwhile, the current Van der Graaf line-up are finally due to play some shows later this year and in 2022, after rescheduling everything for reasons that hardly need explaining again here. There is, it seems, a lot going on, and Hammill’s dual careers continue to flourish, consistently defying the odds. Sustaining one career is pretty impressive, but keeping two significant plates spinning for the best part of 50 years is nothing short of miraculous.

“Initially, while Van der Graaf was going, I thought they were two very different things. They weren’t really in competition,” says Hammill. “Back then, I don’t think any of the others thought they were in competition either. Although it had a connection to Van der Graaf, [Hammill’s 1971 debut solo album] Fool’s Mate was obviously not remotely in Van der Graaf territory, even though the guys were playing on lots of it, along with lots of other people. But it was never a competition with the band and Fool’s Mate was material that the band was never, ever going to do. Then I made Chameleon In The Shadow Of The Night, The Silent Corner And The Empty Stage and In Camera, and those were all when Van der Graaf wasn’t in existence. So there’s always been a clear divide.”

Clear divide or not, there was one moment when Hammill’s solo career and his work with Van der Graaf plainly overlapped. His fifth solo album, 1975’s seminal Nadir’s Big Chance was recorded by the band’s classic line-up of Hammill, Hugh Banton (bass/Hammond), Guy Evans (drums) and David Jackson (saxophone), just after the quartet had made the decision to reform after a three-year hiatus. Musically ahead of its time (and often cited as a proto-punk classic), it set the tone for the Van der Graaf albums that would soon follow, while also pushing Hammill ever further from the mainstream.

“Nadir… is a very specific case. Obviously by the time it was recorded, we knew we were going to be doing Van der Graaf again, and already we knew a lot of the tunes that we were going to be doing,” Hammill explains. “Again, the songs on Nadir… were tunes that were never going to be played by Van der Graaf. And yet, it was the first thing we recorded together having decided to reform and it had a significant influence on the later work. So much of it was done pretty much live, and we did Godbluff and Still Life as a result of that.”

Still going strong after all this time, Hammill’s relationships with Hugh Banton and Guy Evans have been fundamental to both of his careers. As he notes, the bond between the three of them has become even stronger in recent times, not least since they decided to reinvent Van der Graaf Generator as a trio, following the departure of David Jackson from the reunited line-up in 2006.

“It’s been a lifelong thing with Hugh and Guy, yes indeed,” says Hammill. “It’s pretty extraordinary, I think. To have this late flowering of a career is quite odd. To do that and then find ourselves reduced to a trio, but actually needing, for our own validation, to find out whether it could actually work as a trio. Then, when it did work, it just became a necessity to carry on and see what else was possible. It’s pretty bizarre stuff, for chaps in their late 60s. But particularly over the last 10 years, we’ve been incredibly supportive of each other. We’re very different people and we have different interests, but we’re united in the common goal of playing together, doing the right thing and, of course, not compromising.”

It’s a testament to Peter Hammill’s unerring ability to do the unexpected that he is, at 72 years of age, releasing his first ever album of cover versions. In Translation comprises renditions of 10 songs by European and American composers and songwriters, all but three have been translated into English by Hammill himself, and rearranged in such a way that they fit snugly into the freewheeling aesthetic of the singer’s more recent creations. It’s a beautiful, emotionally potent piece of work, but it’s also a very plain and pointed love letter to Europe, recorded as the UK’s relationship with the continent has been irrevocably changed. Hammill admits that part of the motivation behind In Translation has been to pay tribute to Europe, almost in defiance of the prevailing Brexit winds.

“Obviously, as I was doing it, this Brexit cliff has been looming, waiting for us to fall off it,” he says, sounding genuinely incensed. “But having finished the album, I did realise that I wouldn’t be able to translate these songs if I didn’t have an understanding of those cultures. I wouldn’t be able to translate if I hadn’t learned the languages while having this great experience of being a European, travelling around Europe. And yeah, this is a privilege, which is not going to be there for my children and grandchildren. So it’s a love letter to all of that, indeed.”

Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator have an enduring bond with Europe that stretches back to the late 70s. Although relatively well-known at home, it was across the channel that the band would find their most vociferous support base, with Italy proving to be the country that loved Van der Graaf more than any other. For Hammill, those first experiences of travelling through the continent had a profound impact on his worldview.

“It was all a brave new world to us,” he says. “There wasn’t the sense of homogeneity in Europe that there now is. Shops were different. The food was different. There wasn’t even a Vietnamese restaurant on every street. So when you went abroad, you knew you were definitely in a different country. For me and for all of the others, there has always been a sense that we’re privileged to go and work somewhere and to be a part of the life of that particular country and culture temporarily. We all felt it gave you the chance to ask questions, like, ‘Why is that like that?’ or try to understand the culture directly by talking to people.”

Hammill takes a deep breath, audibly exasperated: “You know, it’s been a tremendous privilege to be able to travel, and that’s one of the things that’s so fucking piteous about the whole Brexit thing. It’s clearly the design of this government to deny that view on other cultures, and to be directly anti-culture and anti-European, so that nobody will ever know that there’s a world outside. Right, rant over!”

Another unfortunate side effect of the pandemic has been that Hammill hasn’t been able to make his annual trips to play shows in Japan and, most importantly, Italy. Uniquely among nations, Italy welcomed Van der Graaf Generator as bona fide rock stars when they arrived for the first time in 1972.

“That’s the place where we’ve done most of the touring and had most of the success, yeah. Our tour manager did a fantastic job of preparing the way, along with a couple of journalists and magazines. So that was the setup, and obviously then we had to deliver. We were right for Italy and Italy was right for us at that time. The stars were aligned, basically. Obviously there’s an operatic element to the Italian soul that likes big gestures, and we were capable of big gestures at that time.”

Having been blown away by the reception in Italy, Hammill gradually began to immerse himself in the country and its culture. He notes today that he’s been to Italy virtually every year since that first trip, and that learning the language has been one of the great joys of his life, and not just for the purposes of translating song lyrics.

“I did a solo tour in Italy after Van der Graaf broke up the first time, and if I was going to speak to anyone other than my tour manager, I needed to start learning some Italian,” he recalls. “I’d studied Latin at school and that was useful, and I’d done some French so that was useful too. I began to have some understanding about how the Italians use their hands, which is obviously crucial, and so that’s how I started speaking Italian, in a very basic way. By the time I’d done that, I’d plunged into the swimming pool of language.”

Given that it comprises songs from an assortment of noted and more obscure European songwriters, readers could be forgiven for thinking that In Translation indicates a similarly deep love for European music. But just as his songwriting appeared to emerge from nowhere in the late-60s, so Peter Hammill’s music continues to evolve and mutate without any significant outside musical influence whatsoever.

“When it comes to European music, to be honest, I’ve never been much of a listener to other people’s music,” he says. “Touring around Italy, we’d hear radio and Italian pop music as much as our contemporaries. That’s interesting, because I do think there are some hidden chords that the Italians have that we don’t have access to, and that’s why Italian pop always seems to have a particular character. They stick chords together in a fascinating way. I Who Have Nothing [from In Translation] is a case in point – that’s an Italian tune, bang on, I don’t think it could come from anywhere else. But was it an influence? No, because I didn’t listen to it that much.”

If he listened to lots of other people’s music, does he think his music would come out differently?

“I honestly don’t know. I like making music, really. The stuff I’ve listened to over the last few years has generally been classical, which is outside my territory. If there’s something that’s remotely near my territory, which obviously has become broader and broader over the years, I’d rather be making it than being a recipient of it. That might sound a bit egotistical but that’s just how it is. I get the joy from making it, rather than taking it in from somebody else.”

Standing apart from the crowd can be a hazardous business, but Peter Hammill has somehow always made it look easy. Famously, he was the only major figure from the progressive rock world to be given a free pass by the otherwise unforgiving punk rock scene that exploded in the UK in the late 70s. Nadir’s Big Chance is often cited (somewhat dubiously) as one of the first punk records, Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon was (and is) a fan, and the late, great Mark E Smith of post-punk legends The Fall once asked him to produce his band’s next record, citing Hammill’s 1978 album The Future Now as inspiration. Not surprisingly, Hammill has never much fancied getting a Mohican and takes such things with a pinch of salt, but he does admit that the parallels between his own music and the untutored racket of punk do exist.

“I don’t entirely buy into the idea that Nadir… was the start of punk, but it was important in terms of the Van der Graaf line-up that was coming on, the band of Godbluff and Still Life,” he states. “We were doing complex stuff, more than just three chords, but we were doing it with a degree of aggression. A song like Arrow, it’s all over the place in terms of time signature and so on, but if you strip it down to what it is, it’s really aggressive, with screaming vocals. That’s not that far away from punk, is it? Then there was the Van der Graaf when Mozart [bassist Nic Potter] came back. At that point we were playing for survival, and it was ridiculously aggressive. I think we were pretty much in with the zeitgeist there.”

He’s absolutely right, of course. Listen to Vital, the visceral Van der Graaf live album recorded at the Marquee Club in January ’77, and witness the sound of a brutal and wilfully uncommercial band making a terrifying din that still makes most punk rock records sound like Mantovani. As much as it may be hard to equate the well-spoken, articulate polymath we know and love with the spirit of pogoing and snot, there is undeniable kinship in there somewhere. Perhaps Hammill flourished during the punk era because it was so obvious that, unlike many punk bands, he was an authentic rebel.

A few years later, however, punk was a spent force in the UK and the 80s were in full swing. Most prog bands that had thrived during the genre’s heyday were either pursuing an overtly polished and commercial course or not making music at all. Peter Hammill simply carried on making solo records, eager to explore a new decade’s possibilities. In 1983 he was offered the main support slot on a tour with Marillion, a young band that were stridently recreating the sounds of the early 70s and, somewhat against the commercial grain, building a huge, passionate fanbase in the process. Many artists in Hammill’s position would have taken a pass, preferring not to acknowledge the arrival and potential threat of the new guard, but instead he grabbed the opportunity: to present his music to some new people, and confuse the hell out of them.

“At that time I hadn’t toured around Britain for a long time, so obviously it was an opportunity to get through to people. The Marillion chaps were all really pleasant and everything, but it was a career move to some extent. I was doing it with John Ellis [guitarist who co-founded punk band The Vibrators and has worked with Peter Gabriel among others] and about half of the set would be two guitars and voice, but I also decided that we’d do some of the crazier stuff. So half of it was ordinary-ish tunes like Happy Hour [from 1982’s Enter K] and then the other half was us playing over these cassettes of musique concrète elements. It didn’t go down very well with the bulk of the Marillion audience! [Laughs] There was, however, part of the Marillion audience who obviously went, ‘Hang on, what’s this all about?’ There are loads of people who saw me for the first time on that tour and have followed ever since, which is interesting, I think.”

Could it be fair to say that Hammill derives almost as much satisfaction from confounding people as he does from entertaining them?

“Well, in some ways it was an anti-career move too. There were some nights when there was conspicuous disagreement with the fact that I was sharing a stage with Marillion, from the audience! But it was probably not as extreme as when I was supporting Peter Tosh, in Italy, in a football stadium, unannounced.”

Yes, you read that right. In 1980, Peter Hammill volunteered to act as main support to Peter Tosh, reggae legend and former Wailer, on a tour of football stadia around Italy. Aside from creating one of the most mind-boggling line-ups of all time, the shows proved to be an unexpected success for all concerned, with Hammill apparently relishing the gigs’ confrontational vibe. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine anyone else from our world doing the same.

“At the start of each show there’d be chaos because I’d go on, and half the crowd would be just reggae people and they’d be whistling and shouting me down,” he recalls, cheerily. “Meanwhile, another half of the crowd was bellowing, ‘Don’t you know that’s Peter Hammill?’ So I’d be singing through all these catcalls for 10 minutes, but eventually I’d get through. So that was even more extreme than the Marillion reactions. The Tosh crew really didn’t know what to make of me at first, but eventually it was [credible Jamaican accent] ‘Ah, Neil Diamond, man!’ [Laughs] I figured that was close enough. So I have not been averse to putting myself into adversarial positions sometimes.”

Back in 2021, Hammill finds himself in an enviable position. Although he’s never made a fortune from his music, he’s ticked along consistently for decades, almost entirely self-sufficient and with an unerringly loyal fanbase. In 2003, he survived a heart attack and swiftly returned to action, reuniting Van der Graaf Generator and becoming even more productive as a solo artist. (“It’s remarkable how quickly one’s sense of immortality returns!”)

For the last few years, Hammill has made albums completely alone, building songs from scratch in his home studio and drifting ever further away from musical convention. In fact, he seems to be enjoying the creative process more than ever and taking more leaps of faith too, as showcased via recent collaboration with Swedish art rock collective Isildurs Bane and UK psychedelic prog act The Amorphous Androgynous. With Van der Graaf Generator poised to return to action in the near future, prog’s premier maverick, visionary and eccentric is as busy as ever and thrilled to have done, as he puts it, “whatever the hell I like, for 50 years”. He’s even more excited about what happens next.

“I’ve just started work on a new solo album, so that’s underway now,” he reports. “This is simply what I love doing. I don’t want to presume that I’ll always be able to find songs, because it’s actually still a mysterious process to me. I don’t want to presume that I’ll always find subjects for songs, but right now they’re still coming. Let’s just say that it’s very unlikely that I would be a happy retiree!”

Fatboy Slim, aka Norman Cook, has been obsessed with music since he was a teenager, having falling in love with The Rolling Stones at age 13 via their 1976 album Black And Blue.

Before becoming a global superstar DJ with over 10 million album sales to his name, Cook had already scored UK number one singles with his first two bands, Hull indie-pop quartet The Housemartins, and Brighton-based hip-hop collective Beats International, demonstrating the range and depth of his encyclopedic music knowledge. But no-one comes out of the womb as a music geek, and in a recent appearance on long-running and hugely popular BBC Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs, Cook confessed that, as a kid, he believed that his uncle was a member of The Beatles.

In the late '60s, Dennis Cook actually played in a band called The Fables, who would rehearse in the living room of his mother's house in New Cross, London. When the young Norman Cook visited his nan, he would be allowed to watch The Fables practise - "for me, the most exciting thing ever" - and he recalled sitting in the room one afternoon as the group repeatedly rehearsed covers of Beatles classics Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, and Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.

"A couple of days later, I hear Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da on the radio," Cook tells Desert Island Discs presenter Lauren Laverne, "and I went, Oh, that's my uncle's band! And [friends] said, 'Your uncle's in The Beatles?' I said, Yeah, they rehearse at my nan's house!' I wasn't aware of the concept of a cover version! [Laughs]."

Later in life, Cook would have a genuine connection to The Beatles, when In an unforeseen twist of fate, Paul McCartney became his next-door neighbours in Brighton.

"That was quite bizarre," Cook admits, "He was lovely, but you just can't get over the fact that that's Paul McCartney. It was quite surreal, because we live on the beach, and he would just stroll into my kitchen wearing Speedos. Every time I talked to him I would be humming a Beatles tune in my head, and going, Don't do it out loud!'"

On the show, Cook chose Beatles songs Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End from 1969's Abbey Road as one of his eight permitted Desert Island Discs. He also selected songs by The Clash, Underworld, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, Donna Summer, Taj Mahal, Bobby Charles and The Muppets to soundtrack his stay on this imaginary island.

UK residents can hear the full Desert Island Discs programme here.

The four members of Venezuelan nu metal band Van Der Dijs are among the 1,700 confirmed dead after the north of the country was shaken by two earthquakes on Wednesday (June 23).

According to Venezuelan news site Últimas Noticias, the band members died after their rehearsal space in La Guaira, a state on the country’s northern coast, collapsed in the quakes, which had a magnitude of 7.2 and 7.5 and struck within 39 seconds of each other.

Almost 800 buildings collapsed overall, before a magnitude 4.6 aftermath rocked both La Guaira and the national capital of Caracas on Monday (June 29).

Van Der Dijs consisted of singer Manuel van Der Dijs, guitarist Gabriel Gómez, bassist Xander Hernández and drummer Abraham Foucault. The four’s bodies were discovered by rescue teams in the rubble of the Costamar II building in Tanaguarena, one of the districts most affected by the quakes.

The band formed in 2024 and released their first single, Nemesis, later the same year. They released six further singles, the latest being this year’s 15 Minutos. They were in the middle of a short string of Venezuelan shows, having sold out a gig at the Modern Art Center in La Castellana, Caracas on June 19. They were booked to return to the stage in Punto Fijo on June 27 and Valencia on August 8.

Venezuela is still reeling from the disaster, with tens of thousands missing and millions more lacking sanitation and other necessities as rescue teams continue to search for survivors. A firefighter in Caraballeda told the BBC on Sunday (June 28) that “there aren’t enough hands” to deal with the devastation, “and it is very, very likely that there are still people trapped”.

The Venezuelan government has been criticised for its slow response to the quakes. According to The Guardian, acting president Delcy Rodríguez was heckled by locals while touring one badly hit part of Caracas. “The government isn’t doing anything for the people!” one onlooker reportedly shouted.

The paper also reported that bodies were being taken to a Caracas mortuary on motorcycles, in the backs of cars and on the load beds of pickup trucks.

Venezuela is receiving international aid as it recovers. As of Monday, 24 nations had reportedly sent a combined 521 tons of supplies and more than 2,700 search-and-rescue personnel. The UN says physical repairs will cost 6.7 billion USD, and the US has announced that it is doubling its aid package from 150 million USD to 300 million.

System Of A Down singer Serj Tankian has criticised Israel for recognising the Armenian genocide of 1915 and ’16 as the country continues its military actions in the West Bank and Gaza, which have been described as genocide by a United Nations commission.

In a video statement released via the social media account Vocal Politics, the Armenian-American vocalist says “fuck you” to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, after they acknowledged the Ottoman Empire’s mass killing and deportations of Armenian Christians during World War I.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates that between 664,000 and 1.2 million Armenians died as a result of the Ottomans’ actions between spring 1915 and autumn 1916.

In a statement on Sunday (June 28), Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said Israel had “fulfilled a moral duty by recognising the historical truth, and rejecting attempts to deny it”. The decision still requires ratification by the Israeli parliament.

Tankian takes issue with the timing of the recognition, as Israel had for many years refused to recognise the Armenian genocide. According to French newspaper Le Monde, the country avoided the topic to preserve its political relationship with Turkey.

However, that relationship has soured in recent years, as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan became a vocal critic of Israel’s military engagements with Palestine, which intensified following Palestinian nationalist terrorist group Hamas’ attack on the Nova music festival in October 2023. An estimated 1,200 people died in the attack.

Tankian also accuses the Israeli government of having previously used pro-Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to discourage the US from recognising the Armenian genocide. The US ultimately recognised the genocide in 2021.

The singer says in the video (via The PRP): “For many years, Israel’s government used AIPAC to lobby the US Congress to not recognise the Armenian genocide, to prevent Congress from recognising the Armenian genocide, due to their relationship with Turkey, their intelligence sharing with Turkey, et cetera.

“Today, the Netanyahu cabinet decided to recognise the Armenian genocide of 1915: a genocide that led Hitler thinking that he could do what he could do to the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s.

“The fact that this government is already committing genocide in Gaza and Lebanon decided to recognise the genocide of my grandparents is the worst fucking thing that they could have done to Armenians – by using our history, our genocide, our pain to their political advantage.

“Fuck you.”

Last September, a UN commission found that Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Genocide is defined in the 1948 genocide convention as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

Israel strongly denied that it was committing genocide against Palestinians, calling the findings an “attempt to delegitimise and demonise the state of Israel”.

Then, earlier this month, a UN commission of inquiry accused Israel of deliberately targetting children in Gaza, leading to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Israel denied the allegation, calling it a “libellous sham”.

According to a BBC report on June 23 this year, at least 73,035 people have been killed by Israelis in Gaza since the Nova festival attack, including more than 21,280 children. This is based on data released by the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are seen as reliable by the UN.

The Vocal Politics video is not the first time that Tankian has spoken out against what he sees as modern-day genocide. During System’s headline set at the Sick New World festival in Las Vegas in April, he sang the traditional Armenian prayer Der Voghormia in remembrance of the Armenian genocide’s victims and said onstage, “The problem is that genocide still occurs today, around the world. We have not learned our lesson of people over profits.”

System are currently touring Europe, supported by Queens Of The Stone Age and Acid Bath. The shows kicked off with a 29-song performance at Strawberry Arena in Stockholm, Sweden on Monday (June 29). The band will play at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London on July 13 and 15.

In March 1975, Deep Purple's Ritchie Blackmore appeared on the cover of International Musician & Recording World magazine after conducting a rare interview with American writer/producer/guitarist Jon Tiven.

Hailing Blackmore as "perhaps the world's finest electric guitar player" in the introduction to his interview, Tiven pointed out that the guitarist "does not take well to interviews", `and quoted Blackmore as saying, "I'm a musician, not a politician, and I don't want to influence the minds of our fans." With that said, Blackmore didn't hold back in the interview which followed, especially when sharing his thoughts on a number of his peers.

Strictly speaking, Tiven didn't ask Blackmore for his thoughts on Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton, but Deep Purple's guitarist brought the pair into the conversation when asked, 'What guitarists do you like?'

"I like Jeff [Beck]," Blackmore replied. "He's my favourite guitarist. There are a lot of guitarists around that get overlooked. When you're a guitarist yourself you tend to get so buried in what you're doing. Mike Bloomfield is really good. Steve Howe's always been a very good guitarist. I'm not too struck on Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, I never saw what was in Clapton at all. He's a good singer."

Singing the praises of Beck, who he described as "a very natural guitar player", Blackmore added, "Being a guitarist, I obviously know a lot of tricks of the trade, but whenever I watch Beck I think, How the hell is he doing that?"

In the same interview, Blackmore also saluted the talents of Jimi Hendrix.
"Your head should tell your hands where to go, the hands shouldn't do it all by themselves," he told Tiven. "Hendrix's head must have been very good. I'd say, from listening to his music, because he never repeated himself. That means his hands weren't having the say, he was saying, I want to play this."

The writer also sought out Blackmore's opinion on The Who's Pete Townshend, and was informed, "He's part of The Establishment... you can knock The Establishment but there's not much point."

"There were days in '64 when he inspired me," Blackmore added, "because he was the first one ever to use distortion, it was unheard of in those days, and he did a distortion solo in Anyway Anyhow Anywhere. That was really good, I thought The Who were great when they first came out. Townshend is not so much of a guitarist as an all-round guy — writer, all that."

Somewhat ironically, when asked if he rated any American guitarists, Blackmore name-checked Tommy Bolin, who would actually replace him in Deep Purple before 1975 was over.

Evanescence’s enduring nu metal-era hit Bring Me To Life has surpassed Diamond status in the United States.

The Recording Industry Association Of America (RIAA) now recognises the 2003 single, taken from the Arkansas five-piece’s debut album Fallen, as having gone Platinum 11 times over in the US, meaning it’s sold 11 million units or amassed an equivalent via streaming services. A song or album needs to ship 10 million units or equivalent to go Diamond.

The RIAA previously acknowledged the single as having gone three-times Platinum in 2019. The new recognition marks Evanescence’s second Diamond-seller, following Fallen itself, which received the honour in 2022.

A Platinum certification means an album or single has sold one million units, but streaming statistics are also taken into account. 10 permanent downloads via streaming services equal one physical “sale”. 150 streams of a song also equal a sale.

Released on January 13, 2003, Bring Me To Life was the lead single from Fallen and Evanescence’s first single overall. It topped charts in the UK, Italy, Australia, Chile and Colombia and reached number five on the US Billboard 200. Its popularity was boosted by its presence on the soundtrack to 2003 superhero blockbuster Daredevil, which came out on February 14, 2003: three weeks before Fallen.

In 2022, the music video surpassed one billion views on YouTube, and the song reached one billion streams on Spotify in 2024.

Bring Me To Life featured a vocal duet between frontwoman Amy Lee and guest singer Paul McCoy, of then-Wind-Up Records labelmates 12 Stones. McCoy’s rap section and backing vocals were not originally intended for the song, but were included as a compromise with Wind-Up, who wanted the band to have a full-time male co-vocalist.

Talking to The Forty-Five in 2020, Lee said that she was scared of being “dropped” from Wind-Up for turning the label down. She added that having McCoy on the track was “hard” because “I had to start out [Evanescence’s career] with our first song feeling like I made a sacrifice on my art”.

Evanescence released their sixth album, Sanctuary, via BMG and Columbia on June 5. It was met with positive reviews, including four stars from Metal Hammer. Writer Holly Wright called it “the most vital thing Amy Lee has made in decades”.

The band are currently touring North America and will play at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada tonight (June 30). They’ll hit Europe in September, starting with a run of UK shows from September 8 to 13. See the full list of upcoming dates and get tickets via their website.

Evanescence were the cover stars on Metal Hammer issue 414 last month. Inside, Lee spoke about Sanctuary as well as the band’s two-decade-plus career. Order your copy now and get it delivered to your door.

We've reached that time in the lunar cycle where Peter Gabriel shares his latest single. This time it's the slow-building, jazzy I Belong To The Sky, which comes with artwork from Dutch visual artist Berndnaut Smilde.

As he did with 2023's i/o album, Gabriel is releasing a new track every full moon. I Belong To The Sky is the seventh track he's released ahead of his upcoming album, o\i, which is due out later this year.

“It's another song which has taken a while to grow,” says Gabriel of the new single. “It was a candidate, in some form, for the i/o record, but didn't get finished off, but it was always one of my favourites.

"The starting point of the song was the timpani tom-tom pattern which was inspired by an old film called Jazz On A Summer's Day and also a wonderful drummer called Chico Hamilton. I think he was the pioneer of the use of timpani sticks on the toms and I always loved that sound; calm and hypnotic. It set a really strong mood for me and the song grew up around it.

"I'm a strong believer that reality is more malleable than we imagine and that if you really make strong pictures of something happening, you really affect the chances of it materialising. Visualising… how dreams leave their nest, is the main topic of the song.

"One of the things that the technological revolution is doing is accelerating the time for thoughts to become material things. The time it takes to transform an idea into something material is being radically cut. In the song, the verses have a more dreamlike ‘on your back and look up at the sky‘ feeling and then in the chorus it's about the execution, the materialising.

"For many years now I let the ends run on every song because what often happens, which I found so frustrating, is you get to the end of a song and the band have just really locked in the groove, relaxed and it then all of a sudden, it stops… and the best feeling for a musician is when you're in the pocket, in the groove, and it's all happening around you. Consequently, I now let these endings loose and wonderful things happen.

One of the things I love about this track is that these amazing musicians let themselves loose and really take off - with Manu (Katché) driving. It's just great.”

Speaking of Smilde's Nimbus de Toekomst 1, 2019, which has been used for the single artwork and you can see below, Gabriel says, "I loved this image of the sky,” adds Gabriel. “The cloud brought inside - that mixture of outside and interior worlds. I think that's what the song is all about. This mix between the interior and the exterior and the transition between them. So, I was very happy that we were allowed to use this image."

Further details on the release plans for o\i through Real World will follow.

From Dance On A Volcano to Los Endos, Prog dissects each track on Genesis’ A Trick Of The Tail and rediscovers what made their first album without Peter Gabriel such an essential listen on release in 1976.

‘You’d better start doing it right,’ sings Phil Collins in opening track Dance On A Volcano. The seventh Genesis studio album, A Trick Of The Tail came with a whole bundle of pressure. With Peter Gabriel departed – but not “to go senile in the sticks,” he told the press – Genesis had questions and doubters to answer. Collins assumed they’d go on as a four-piece instrumental band.

“But my idea went out the window pretty much that first day,” he told this writer. “Tony and Mike said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous! We need a singer, because we’re songwriters.’”

Fortunately, although it took them a minute or two to realise it, they had an excellent singer within their ranks. “He had a lovely voice,” said Tony Banks. “He’d obviously done plenty on previous albums. But we weren’t sure he’d want to do it – he was the drummer, after all. And at the time, he didn’t seem to have the gravitas. But he sounded great.”

After many fruitless auditions with Collins teaching the applicants the vocals, it became clear who was the man for the job. “I do remember saying, ‘OK, I will give it a go,’” he recalled, “‘but don’t expect me to put on the costumes.’ Which is funny, as I was the one that had come from an acting background! It wasn’t a conscious decision to not do what Peter did; I just didn’t feel I could pull it off. So I became the ‘guy next door’. That’s what I did: I just stood there and sang.”

“In some ways that helped us,” Mike Rutherford remembered. “You couldn’t carry on Peter’s mystique – I mean, it’s not in Phil’s nature. With his character, lightening things between the longer, darker songs, it helped the balance of the shows.”

It also helped that the album was a completely inspired winner. A Trick Of The Tail is an exquisitely gauged blend of yearning melodies, heavy but not too heavy thumpers, affecting sad ballads and hypnotic soundbeds. The quartet had found all the right answers.

“We were lucky in a way,” recalled Banks. “Despite what people think of it now, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway – quite a difficult double album – sold less than Selling England By The Pound. We were in debt! So we were able now to come out with something more direct. It was a good place to be.”

An album built by strength but revealing frequent tenderness, A Trick Of The Tail is a very good place to be indeed. It’s a dreamlike world in which to immerse yourself, from the opening rumbles and flourishes.

Dance On A Volcano

“It’s a very arresting beginning to an album,” Banks said. “It gets you in there.” It certainly does, all but erupting. The atmosphere and tone of much of the record is established by the determined drama of this colossus, which also makes a cameo reappearance at the album’s finale. There’s no shortage of unpredictable rhythm, channelling Collins’ beloved Weather Report.

He was still razor sharp at the day job, and longtime fans were reassured the new Genesis chapter wasn’t about to take easy options. Yet for all the twisty interplay, the song surges ever forward, its motivations and momentum rich with excitement.

This was the first album to credit individual songwriters rather than the band as a whole, so it’s telling that this opener was a Rutherford-Banks- Collins-Hackett composition: everyone involved, pulling together, keen to not merely steady the ship but to get it going at a rate of knots.

“We’d started writing, and from the first day things just happened,” said Rutherford. “And after two or three weeks we thought, ‘This feels strong, feels good.’ It gave us the confidence to carry on.”

The listener was confident now, too: this Genesis was both accessible and aesthetically intriguing.

Entangled

And nowhere more so than on this, possibly Steve Hackett’s finest contribution to the band. Banks added the chorus, but it “was based on this really beautiful piece Steve had written,” he said. (His synth solo is simultaneously eerie and charming, and seems to change shape second by second.)

Seeing Hackett’s lyrics for the first time – ‘over the rooftops and houses’ – Collins perceived something of a Mary Poppins vibe about them. But its weird science (Freudian slumbers, hypnosis, sinister urges to sleep) also shares some DNA with Here Comes The Supernatural Anaesthetist from The Lamb. It’s a gorgeous reverie, the band resisting temptation to oversell its innate mood, and Collins’ prowess with soft, alluring numbers – as a singer he rarely does too much or too little, always serving the song – gets an early showcase.

Guy Garvey has said Entangled was a big influence on Elbow’s own 2001 breakthrough, Newborn, and that it’s the one Genesis track everybody in his band agrees on. (He’s eulogised it, and Ripples, on his BBC Radio 6 Music radio show.)

Hackett mused: “I’d gone off to do a solo album, Voyage Of The Acolyte, and it’s difficult then to go back and just write the odd bit or odd song. But on A Trick I’d come up with Entangled and got the ball rolling there. It was a happy camp for most of that period. There are some classics on that album.” Its gorgeous, hazy, stoned coda is a pinnacle.

Squonk

In a way it was Squonk that meant Collins had, as they say, passed the audition. The potential Gabriel replacements struggled with it – even the frontrunner – albeit the band were playing it in too high a key. Collins chuckled that it never occurred to them to give the singers a better chance by adapting, and that his bandmate didn’t offer him that courtesy either. “I had to make do.”

Inspired by the thumping drum sound on Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir (“My John Bonham moment,” said Collins), its lyrics were based on a mythical creature as illustrated in the snappily titled 1910 American fantasy- folklore book, Fearsome Creatures Of The Lumberwoods, With A Few Desert And Mountain Beasts; the squonk was apparently easy to hunt because it wept constantly.

The song is a powerful slab of mythology in its own right – even if it does end up, poignantly, as ‘just a pool of tears.’

Mad Man Moon

The relatively unsung masterpiece of the album, Banks’ composition leans into the multipart ‘suite’ format the band were elsewhere moving on from, and its Mellotron magic coaxes forth a mournful majesty. Banks has suggested the reason it gets less attention than some tracks is because they never played it live.

“It’s more, dare I say, a feminine track,” he told Prog. “I was very pleased when I wrote it, especially the verses. The noodling in the middle is quite fun, but if you listen carefully, it’s beyond my playing ability!” That’s a high bar, then.

With its ‘snowflake in June’ and ‘horse not made of sand,’ this is one mysterious aria. When asked about the line describing ‘a muddy pitch in Newcastle’ Banks said with a smile, “I’ve had a few phrases that you shouldn’t use: ‘Into the breadbin’ in All In A Mouse’s Night. ‘Double glazing’ in Domino. You either like those lines sticking out or you don’t. We’ve always been a divisive band, and I’ve always been happy with that.”

Robbery, Assault and Battery

“Coming from our underdog position,” reflected Collins, “when nobody expected much, A Trick was a bright light. Yes, our fans wanted the band to survive – and they preferred that we’d made it work within ourselves.”

This, though, is arguably the weakest link, as it comes across as Collins trying to “do” Gabriel essaying a Cockney-geezer accent. His childhood role as the Artful Dodger at drama school qualified him somewhat, but it’s awkward.

Penned chiefly by Banks, it’s squarely in the tradition of The Battle Of Epping Forest or Get ’Em Out By Friday, but although it has some charm and humour – and was swiftly dropped into their live set – it never quite breaks free of its chains. And between the romantic lushness of the classics either side of it, it’s almost a mood-killer.

Ripples…

Created via Rutherford’s 12-string guitars and some mid-section Rachmaninov-inspired piano from Banks, Ripples… was one of the first songs written with Collins’ voice in mind. Instantly a crowd favourite, with lovely looped guitars from Hackett, its gentle verses and showstopping lighters-in-the-air chorus exhibit the perfect balance of shrewd songcraft and ‘Genesis epic’ DNA. It gave them the confidence to write more ballads.

And if it’s lyrically vaguely in the same zone as The Lamia, with a flavour of fearing age and mortality, they were to nail their courage to the mast and pen actual love songs imminently. “It’s a strong chorus,” said Banks, with customary understatement.

“There’s still an aspect of the musical odyssey there,” pondered Hackett.

A Trick of the Tail

Banks composed the title track, some years earlier, circa Foxtrot. He’d been reading William Golding’s book The Inheritors (his 1955 follow-up to Lord Of The Flies) and began jamming around the rhythm of The Beatles’ Getting Better. He wanted “something lighter and more quirky.”

Revisiting a world of elves, sprites and aliens, and with a now-visible hint of the cautionary tale of exploiting outsiders in The Man Who Fell To Earth (the Nicolas Roeg film starring David Bowie that came out a month later), it’s a song that could only be Genesis – jaunty, catchy, but with an almost shy pride in its accidental grandeur and undeniable pathos.

It flopped as the showcase single, with Collins citing the video, where effects “shrank” him to a miniature man hopping about on the instruments, as the most cringeworthy of his entire career.

Los Endos

A marriage of overture and an end-of-night rock-out (it became an enduring and glorious live finale), Los Endos was a band composition initiated by Collins summoning his Brand X jazz-funk tastes, offering flashes of Santana and Weather Report.

It has since been revealed that its opening began life as part of It’s Yourself, a track cut from the album for length and which emerged later. Reprises of Dance On A Volcano and Squonk are interjected, there are false endings to die for, and over the fade Collins subtly sings, ‘There’s an angel standing in the sun.’ That quote from Supper’s Ready can be read as a final fond farewell and acknowledgement to Gabriel’s role in creating Genesis.

But, now there were four. And as A Trick Of The Tail got a great response from the press, quickly went gold (doubling any previous album’s sales) and paid off most of their debts, it heralded the band’s new beginning.

“I do feel the strain,” Collins once told this writer, “when it’s said so many times that, ‘It all fucked up when he started singing’ – because, really, we all changed. It was a metamorphosis. And I think we got better at knowing when to stop; to say, ‘OK, this song sounds great just like this.’”

Accessible but never predictable, warm but still weird, and beautiful without being bland, the album proved Genesis could thrive after their reshuffle. For all the Gabriel-era genius, they did sound great just like this. They were doing it right.

Anyone walking down Grafton Street in Dublin eight or nine years ago might have been stopped in their tracks by the sight of four long-haired buskers playing traditional-sounding Irish music on acoustic instruments with the energy of a metal band.

“We busked pretty much solely for the first two or three years this band existed,” says Conor ‘Dock’ Dockery, guitarist with The Scratch, the former buskers in question. “We realised we were making more money than we’d ever made in our old band.”

The Scratch’s recently released third album, Pull Like A Dog, captures that raucous unlikely collision of two worlds. The Dublin four-piece – completed by drummer/singer Daniel ‘Lango’ Lang, bassist Cathal McKenna and guitarist Gaz Regan – are the missing link between The Dubliners and Metallica, a bunch of metal kids who hit on what Dockery calls “this weird little sound”.

The Scratch’s roots lay in Red Enemy, a knotty progressive metal band who released a couple of EPs and a self-titled album in the first half of the 2010s before splitting around 2016.

“We just got a bit jaded with that whole scene,” says Dockery, who founded The Scratch with ex-Red Enemy bandmates Lang and guitarist Jordan O’Leary (the latter left in 2024, replaced by Regan). “It felt like it wasn’t really serving us creatively.”

The Scratch was a complete left turn. They were aware of traditional Irish music, but only in so much as it’s ever-present in the background for anyone who grew up in the country.

“We were discovering that whole side of music for the first time,” says Dockery. “It was a craving for something new.”

Those early busking performances, with the band lined up around Lang as he banged on a makeshift box drum, captured The Scratch’s exhilarating energy. Viral videos of them playing on the street during the annual Rory Gallagher Festival in 2017 boosted their profile. “We could tell it was connecting with people in a way that we’d never experienced with the old band,” says Dockery.

Live, they bring the party every time – Dockery recalls the band sparking an unlikely ‘wall of death’ melee at a Belgian festival a couple of years ago. And the three albums they’ve made – the new one plus 2020’s Couldn’t Give A Rats and 2023 follow-up Mind Yourself – bottle their humour and pirate charisma. But there’s a depth of emotion to The Scratch’s music that makes them more than just the soundtrack to sinking 12 pints of Guinness in quick succession.

“We’re not doing this just to be a party band,” says Dockery. “We’re not trying to be cool or mysterious. We’re just trying to be ourselves and create a space for people at our gigs where they can be themselves too.”

Pull Like A Dog is out now via Music For Nations.

Steve Marriott was always going to be a star. By the age of 13 he was playing in bands around his native East London and appearing in the West End production of Oliver!, his hyperactivity an ideal fit for his role as the Artful Dodger. It was a presence he brought to bear on the Small Faces, the band he co-founded with fellow songwriter Ronnie Lane in 1965.

Along with drummer Kenney Jones and organist Ian McLagan, the quartet quickly became totems of the emergent mod culture, assimilating the hard grooves of American R&B and soul into a British vision of sharp suits and laddish bonhomie.

Both Marriott and Lane were unusually gifted songwriters, creating some of the most enduring 60s classics in the shape of Itchycoo Park, All Or Nothing, Tin Soldier and Lazy Sunday. But it was Marriott’s blue-eyed soul voice that set him apart. The Stones, The Who and the Sex Pistols were just a few who acknowledged his influence.

Marriott effectively broke up the Small Faces after a stormy gig in 1968, throwing his guitar to the floor in frustration at what he perceived as the group’s inability to break into more demanding artistic territory. While the others would go on to form The Faces, Marriott co-founded Humble Pie with Peter Frampton, Greg Ridley and Jerry Shirley, and cast off his past glories in favour of a much heavier brand of riff-centric blues rock.

Overshadowed by 70s contemporaries such as Led Zeppelin and The Who, Humble Pie were nonetheless a blistering proposition, especially live. America became their stronghold as the decade progressed, and they crammed in more than 20 US tours in one four-year period.

Humble Pie’s golden era was over by 1975. So, too, was Marriott’s. Divorced, hobbled by debt and with a serious drug and alcohol habit, he made a token attempt at a solo career before ill-fated reunions with both the Small Faces and Humble Pie. His final years saw him return to his roots in the pubs and clubs around London, fronting bands including Packet Of Three and The DTs.

Tragically, Marriott died in a house fire in 1991, having fallen asleep with a lit cigarette. “Though he could be hell to be around, he had a pure heart and I loved him as a brother,” McLagan wrote in his memoir, All The Rage. “He never stopped rocking.”

...and one to avoid

Future ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons was still in his teens when he founded Houston, Texas psych-blues band The Moving Sidewalks, and secured a booking to support The Jimi Hendrix Experience at shows in Fort Worth and Houston in February 1968. The Moving Sidewalks were required to play a 40-minute set each night in their contract, and Gibbons quickly realised that the only way that his band could stretch their set to the required length was by including the two Jimi Hendrix covers they regularly played at gigs, his 1967 singles Foxy Lady and Purple Haze. It's not as if Hendrix would notice, right?

Wrong.

"I'll never forget the opening night, we played Foxy Lady and were going into the intro to Purple Haze, and I happened to look over to the side of the stage, and there in the shadows was Jimi Hendrix with his arms folded, grinning," Gibbons recalled in a later TV interview with US broadcasting legend Dan Rather. "He made a bonded friendship right off the bat."

In a 2021 interview with MOJO magazine, Gibbons picked up the story.

"When we walked off stage, he grabbed me and said, I like you. You've got a lot of nerve. Later, there was quite a bit of panic as we tried to get hotel rooms. We were escorted to the far end of the hallway. But Jimi said, 'Hey, take the room across the way'."

Asked by writer David Fricke what lessons he took from his time with Hendrix, Gibbons noted that the Seattle-born guitarist "was doing things with the electric guitar that had not even been thought of, that it was not designed for."

"I was playing a Stratocaster, another thing that endeared me to him," he recalled. One night, in the hotel, he said, 'Come check this out.' He was taking the spring off the whammy bar, cutting two [coils] off the spring so you could really push the bar down - just dive bomb."

"There was the string-bending - how he got that effect in Foxy Lady - and that powerhouse backing of Mitch Mitchell on drums and Noel Redding on bass. Jimi often said, 'Man, isn't it great? I can go from here to the stratosphere, knowing that l've got a rock-solid wall supporting those excursions. Nobody loses the beat. Nobody loses the sense of where the music is going.' From that, I had Dusty [Hill, late ZZ Top bassist] and Frank [Beard, ZZ Top drummer] doing much the same, offering a rock-solid foundation: going through the changes but hammering the tonic [note]. That lives on today."

In his interview with Dan Rather, Gibbons recalled Hendrix being a "shy" character off-stage, but added, "but when the lights came on, he came aglow. And man, he would set about doing things with that guitar that were just otherworldly."

Gibbons would later tell Classic Rock that the whole experience was "a real mind-bender and eye-opener to say the least."

Watch a clip of the interview with Dan Rather below:

On January 29th, 1967, Jack Bruce came reeling out of Jimi Hendrix’s show at the Saville Theatre in Covent Garden, went home and channelled his shell shock into – arguably – the defining riff of the Sixties, and the song that arguably created the template for heavy metal.

“I don’t think Jack had really taken him in before,” Cream bandmate Eric Clapton told Rolling Stone. “After the gig, he came up with the riff. It was strictly a dedication to Jimi.”

“Pete [lyricist Pete Brown] and I had been working all night trying to come up with some songs,” Bruce said. “I just picked up my double bass and looked out the window and the sun was coming up. And I just started playing the riff of Sunshine Of Your Love.

"And Pete looked out the window and said: ‘It’s getting near dawn,’ and he wrote it down, just like in one of those really cheesy biopics. So we played it, and then Eric came up with that really nice turnaround part: ‘I’ve been waiting so long…’”

For a band brought together by their mutual virtuosity – paying respect to the flashiest guitarist on the London scene – it’s curious that Cream’s most famous moment was little more than a mid-tempo seven-note descending bassline. Yet those seven notes worked their magic, while providing a spine on which Bruce’s bandmates hung some of their career-best playing.

Quoting the melody of Blue Moon, Clapton’s deliciously languid solo found the hotshot guitarist reining in the flash, leaving weeping notes to hang, in the best showcase of his smooth, dark, so-called ‘woman’ tone.

Meanwhile, Ginger Baker pulsed on his toms with an almost hypnotic intensity – although the beat was a sticking point. In later years, Baker would claim he had the idea of emphasising the ‘1’ and ‘3’, but in documentaries, engineer Tom Dowd maintained it was his suggestion. “I said, ‘Have you ever seen an American Western where the Indian beat – the downbeat – is the beat? When they started playing that way, all of the parts came together.”

Bruce sensed that Sunshine Of Your Love could fly: the song had already been endorsed by Otis Redding and Booker T. Jones at Atlantic Studios. The suits were a harder sell, steering Clapton into the frontman role and bemused to be presented with woozy, hippy-ish fare rather than straight-up blues. Atlantic boss Ahmet Ertegun, recalled Bruce in the Classic Albums series, didn’t sugarcoat his verdict: “He called it psychedelic hogwash.”

But the bassist’s vindication was emphatic. Released late in 1967, Sunshine Of Your Love would slow-burn to No.5 in the US, putting Cream into the American super-league and inspiring a generation of future rockers.

"Cream were a big influence on Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne told Classic Rock in 2006. "Listen to NIB [from Sabbath’s debut album] and compare it to Sunshine Of Your Love. The riff to NIB – Da-da-d-dah, dah-dah, da-da-d-dah – oh yeah! – is basically the same. I don’t know if it was a conscious decision at the time, but that’s it."

"Sunshine of Your Love is a desert island classic," said Samy Hagar. "I go back to that song again and again and again.

"That riff is probably the very first heavy metal riff ever," said Zakk Wylde. "That’s my mount riffmore."

"When Sunshine Of Your Love came out, it brought all that soulfulness together with some wonderful jazz influences in a way that wasn't self-conscious at all," mused Rod Argent. You had the wonderful imagery of Jack Bruce, you had Ginger Baker playing a drum part that no other drummer in the world would have played, and you had the wonderful lyricism of Clapton."

And almost a half-century later, when Sunshine Of Your Love was the inevitable encore at the all-star tribute concert for Bruce – who died of liver disease in 2014 – it was hard to imagine a finer sunset.

Alanis Morissette looks back on the phenomenal success of her 1995 album Jagged Little Pill in a new interview conducted for the 'Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso' podcast, and reflects upon the fact that some of the harshest criticism she received at the time came from trail-blazing female artists and music writers who she admired.

"I think I had these fantasies that I would be snuggling up with Annie Lennox, and Joni [Mitchell] would be massaging my feet," the 52-year-old Canadian singer/songwriter jokes. "I just had these fantasies of what it could be like... and it wasn't."

Introduced by lacerating lead single You Oughta Know, an unforgettable takedown of a toxic ex-boyfriend, Jagged Little Pill, Morissette's third album, won five Grammy Awards and has sold north of 33 million copies worldwide, making it one of the biggest-selling albums ever. But the phenomenal success of the record was accompanied by some scathing criticism, with some of the harshest critiques, as Morissette acknowledges, delivered by women she respected, Tori Amos, Sinead O'Connor and Joni Mitchell among them.

In an interview with Details magazine, which Fragoso reads aloud, Mitchell commented, "I'm a musical explorer, and not just a pop songwriter or or an occasional writer of a song or half a song like these other women. Alanis Morissette writes words, someone helps set it to the music, and then she's kind of stylized into the part."

"Yeah,that's a that's a woman who's been baked in patriarchy, projecting it on a fellow woman," Morissette responds. "Happens all the time... What a bummer."

"It's also inaccurate," she adds. "That's the reduction of the patriarchy. A woman can't possibly fill in the blank."

During the interview, Morissette also reveals that no-one at her record label, Maverick, wanted to have You Oughta Know, which featured Red Hot Chili Peppers duo Flea and Dave Navarro, come out as the first single from the record, and she had to fight for its release.

"It wasn't a popular choice," she admits. "With the inner team, nobody wanted You Oughta Know. They were terrified of that song. I remember having thought at the time that I would much rather come out being maybe misinterpreted, maybe reduced, but starting on a note that is intense. And I am here for it. I can explain anger till the cows come home.
"Every woman I knew was pissed, because they were paying attention. How do you not get pissed? You're inside a patriarchal Truman Show woman-hating dome, and then you say to the feminine, 'Have fun in there'."

Watch the interview in full below.

The bassist in the band that evolved into System Of A Down says that he was let go from the lineup for not being “angry enough”.

Talking in the current issue of Metal Hammer, David Hakopyan, who played alongside Tankian and Malakian in Hollywood rockers Soil during the early 90s, likens the expulsion to being “being a kid and your friends ask you to stop coming to the clubhouse”.

“I was asked to leave,” he remembers. “I remember them telling me, ‘You aren’t angry enough, you don’t play angry.’ I was like, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not that angry a person.”’

He adds that he was “sad” over being let go from the fledgling band, which also featured drummer Domingo Laranio, but not bitter. As Soil regrouped and re-branded themselves as System Of A Down, Hakopyan urged fellow bassist and Soil’s unofficial manager Shavo Odadjian to try out for the job. Odadjian would be a member of System from their 1995 founding through to the present day.

“I called Shavo and said, ‘I think you could step in as bass player – you’re incredibly excited about the project as well as just managing it,” recalls Hakopyan. “He thought it was a cool idea.”

As for Laranio, he left at roughly the same time. He tells Hammer that the 1994 San Francisco Valley earthquake, which killed approximately 60 people, “scared the shit” out of his then-pregnant wife and led to them moving to Hawaii.

“She wanted out of L.A.,” he remembers. “I had to prioritise my family. Serj was like, ‘What do I need to do to keep you here? Find you a place to live?’ It wasn’t a matter of not wanting to stay. It was either leave the band or get divorced.”

Soil lasted between eight months and a year (depending on which member you ask) and only played one concert, which took place at a blues club called Fais Do-Do in Mid-City, Los Angeles in 1994. Malakian fell off the stage during the calamitous performance.

Hakopyan says: “Right as we started, I’m holding this big bass chord and I realise, ‘Shit, there’s no guitar!’ I look over, and Daron has fallen off the stage and was on the ground. He had completely lost himself in the intensity of the performance, and hadn’t realised the stage rug ended where it did. He finally climbed back up, and we went straight back in it.”

After disbanding Soil and forming System, the members signed a deal with Rick Rubin’s American Recordings and got the legendary producer to oversee the recording of their 1998 self-titled debut album. System Of A Down topped the US Heatseekers chart and has now been certified two-times Platinum in the United States.

Alongside releases by such peers as Korn, Limp Bizkit and Deftones, System… helped to usher in the nu metal age (even though System did not associate with the term). Their second album, 2001’s Toxicity, catapulted them to even greater success, topping the Billboard 200 before being certified six-times Platinum in the US.

The four-piece, who released three additional albums before splitting in 2006 then reuniting in 2011, are now on the cusp of a European tour. The shows kick off at Strawberry Arena in Stockholm, Sweden on June 29, and the band will play two dates at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London, UK on July 13 and 15. Queens Of The Stone Age and Acid Bath will support.

As well as an interview with Hakopyan and Laranio about the early days of System, the new Hammer features a conversation with Bruce Dickinson and Steve Harris of Iron Maiden as the band prepare to headline their own festival at Knebworth House. Order your copy now and have it delivered directly to your door.

The Who's Pete Townshend believes that his late friend and bandmate Keith Moon once bought dinner in Seattle for a nine-year-old Kurt Cobain.

This intriguing anecdote was relayed second-hand during an interview that Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard conducted with Jesse David Fox, from New York Magazine's online entertainment hub Vulture.

Gibbard shared a conversation that he had with Townshend backstage at the 2006 staging of the Oxegen festival at Punchestown Racecourse in County Kildare, Ireland. On the day, July 8, 2006 to be precise, Gibbard and original Death Cab For Cutie guitarist Chris Walla were hanging out with the legendary guitarist in his trailer, and the American musicians informed Townshend that they were from Seattle, and that they had actually shared some mutual friends, namely the members of Pearl Jam.

"He kinda takes a moment, and goes, 'Yeah, I remember, we were playing in Seattle in the 70s, and we were staying at the Edgewater Inn, and there were all these homeless kids, [living] underneath the viaduct there'," Gibbard says, recalling Townshend's story. "'And Keith Moon, he brings them in to the Edgewater Inn, and he serves them all dinner. And I swear to you that one of those kids was Kurt Cobain'.

"And Walla, and I just look at each other, and we're like, 'What, man?'" Gibbard continues. "And in no world are we gonna correct this guy. There's a couple of other people in the trailer, and they're like, 'Wow!' And Walla and I are, like - exchanging looks - 'We're gonna talk about this when we leave this trailer, right?' And it was amazing.

"And I do believe he believed that," Gibbard concludes. "I was too nervous to correct him. I mean, I don't know how [Cobain] got from Aberdeen [Washington] at 10 years old to Seattle, and under the viaduct. It's possible, I suppose, but unlikely, I'd say."

So could the story actually be true? Well, as Keith Moon passed away on September 7, 1978, and The Who's final Seattle shows with the drummer took place on March 25, 1976, and October 14, 1976, at the city's Seattle Center Coliseum, Kurt Cobain would have been nine years old at the time.

In writer Michael Azerrad's official Nirvana biography Come As You Are, the band's frontman claimed that in 1985, after being forced to vacate his rented apartment in Aberdeen due to falling behind on payments, he spent some time living underneath the North Aberdeen Bridge, which crosses the Wishkah River. This, he told his biographer, inspired the opening lyric of Nevermind classic Something In The Way.

Cobain's story was certainly memorable, but it was also bullshit, as Michael Azerrad later learned, total myth-making on Cobain's part. And if Cobain was lying about living under a bridge in his hometown aged 17, I think we can safely say that there's zero chance that he was living under a bridge in Seattle, 175 kilometres from his home town, at the age of nine.

Like Ben Gibbard though, it's unlikely that we'll ever call out Pete Townshend on this face-to-face.

Doom metal bills don't come bigger than this. Hell, doom gigs don't come much bigger than this: Acid Bath's first-ever UK show in a sold out 2,600-capacity Manchester Academy with homegrown heroes Conan and Green Lung - who'll headline this same venue later this year - in support. It's massive, it's exciting and it's a miracle it's even happening.

When Acid Bath broke up in 1997 following the tragic death of bassist Audie Pitre, they were lucky if they could play to more than 10 people, guitarist Sammy Duet telling Hammer last year that "While we were together, nobody really gave a shit." But in their absence, the fondness grew.

Which brings us to Manchester Academy, on the hottest day of the year, watching the hottest reunion in metal right now. The room's already a furnace when Conan take to the stage, the Liverpudlian brutes issuing some ungodly force that takes New Orleans sludge metal and drags it so far and deep it ends up suffocating under a tonne of lumpen riffs.

Next up are UK doom darlings Green Lung. New tunes Evil In This House and Necropolitan Line have the kind of killer hooks and swaggering riffs that could make them into a real breakout band, while the likes of Mountain Church, Let The Devil In and One For Sorrow are already well-worn anthems.

Before Acid Bath arrive, Black Sabbath's genre-defining eponymous track plays over the PA, and there doesn't seem to be a soul in the house who isn't singing along. It sets a tone, and as the bonus poem tones ominously overhead casting vivid, violent images with just a few lines of apocalyptic poetry. Then all hell breaks loose.

Opening with Tranquilized, the Manchester Academy greets Acid Bath with an orgiastic frenzy as the floor explodes with moshers, dancers and crowdsurfers while cups fly overhead offering sweet - if all too small - relief from the clammy press. This is doom set through a psychedelic prism and enough ecstasy and performance enhancers to get Hugh Heffner bouncing back from the grave.

Even the slow, brutal drag of a song like Bleed Me An Ocean becomes a euphoric sing-along, fans singing along with such fervour you'd think someone was handing out hymn sheets at the door. There's no corny patter, no insistence on "give us a circle". The crowd hardly needs encouragement to lose their minds, and the band play with a brooding intensity befitting their status as long-lost legends, vocalist Dax Riggs channelling Jim Morrison via Jim Jones.

At just over an hour, Acid Bath leave the crowd wanting more - inevitably. Some of their biggest 'hits' - Scream Of The Butterfly, Cassie Eats Cockroaches - are left out. But the mix of bad-trip psych, end-of-life blues and guttural sludge is just too potent not to love, and when the crowd belt out "Dying felt so goddamn good today" from Paegan Love Song, there's a sense of overwhelming gratitude that Acid Bath are even back at all, let alone bigger than ever. Doom metal has never felt so utterly euphoric.

Acid Bath support System Of A Down in the UK on July 13 and July 15.

Acid Bath Manchester Academy Setlist June 25 2026

1. Tranquilized
2. Bleed Me An Ocean
3. Venus Blue
4. The Bones Of Baby Dolls
5. Dead Girl
6. The Mortician's Flame
7. New Death Sensation
8. Graveflower
9. Paegan Love Song
10. The Blue

This week in the World Cup of rock, Parker Barrow romped to victory at the top of the group, while Alex Henry Foster and Beth Hart both went through to the knockout stage. What's more, VAR wasn't required once. So congratulations to all of them.

This week, another eight teams will take to the field, and that's the last laboured football analogy you'll hear from us. Keep hydrated, y'all.

Pieces Of Molly - Alligator

Kiwi rock'n'rollers Pieces Of Molly are back with another single from their upcoming album, and hallelujah. For Alligator is a masterclass in no-fucks-given chaos, careening along in a righteous, headlong rush towards damnation, a trail of spent pistons in its wake, gang vocals giving the chorus a degree of singalong friendliness at odds with the pandemonium elsewhere and an utterly savage guitar solo. A word of caution: the video is not vegetarian-friendly.

Green Lung - Necropolitan Line

Doomy heavy metal Londoners rock the bejeezus out of this rip-roaring cut from their forthcoming album, Necropolitan. One of the punchiest tracks on said record, which promises to offer the most fun you can have in the name of historic cemeteries (seven noted sites in London, to be precise). Plus they look and sound like they’re having a total blast in this artfully, lovably lo-fi video – all swirling psychedelic backdrops and face-melting performances. Nice.

Bad Nerves - Network

Midway through a breakneck year, in which they’ve pogoed between continents at a phenomenal pace – as both headliners and support band – Essex’s finest power-pop punks release their heaviest track yet. Still fast, still furious and now with a darker heart, guitars are newly beefed up and stretched out over three turbocharged minutes, without losing the lightness of touch that made them such a charismatic prospect in the first place.

These Wicked Rivers - Horse To Water

And now for a lovely summery, loose-limbed barrelful of southern rock’n’roll by way of Derby – complete with stylishly granny-chic helpings of paisley, lampshades, bolo ties, serious hats and various other visual accoutrements of the TWR miniverse. Imagine rocking up at a BBQ with Blackberry Smoke, armed with a cooler of beers, at sunset, and you’re in the right space for Horse To Water.

The Meffs - Where Did It All Go Wrong?

Perhaps our favourite slice so far of the Essex punks’ second album, Business (coming out in September), Where Did It All Wrong? rides on a rolling tide of powerful, light-footed drums and buzzsaw guitars. Catchy and appetisingly enraged, with a voice to match – courtesy of peroxide-headed singer/guitarist Lily. Going to one of the Joan Jett & The Blackhearts UK shows this week? Get there early and catch these guys, who’ll be supporting.

Radio Everything - Ignoramus Stupidatus

This came out on one of the hottest days of the year so far, and it offered the sort of bright, zingy boost equal only to a freezerful of Fab lollies. Or some quality time in a supermarket chiller aisle. But yes, the latest tune from Chris Catalyst’s gleefully daft cartoon robot metal side project thing is a banger – light, bright pop rock with the expansiveness and urgency of Devin Townsend and lyrics full of incisive disenchantment at the world today. And what says 'happy summer!' more than that?

Bywater Call - Is This Thing On?

Built on delicate acoustic guitars, percussive beats and cascades of strings punctuated by lead fiddle touches, the Canadian rock n’ soul ensemble’s latest is stripped-back without sacrificing the lushness that seems to imbue all their work. Fancy more of that soulful Americana, with healthy echoes of Tedeschi Trucks Band in its sound and overall spirit? Their new album, Broken Souvenirs, comes out in July.

Return to Dust - Sweet Escape

This year, we've heard a lot of new music from bands whose sound seems almost entirely informed by bands that peaked in the first half of the 1970s, but LA rockers Return To Dust are not among them. Instead, Sweet Escape sounds like it emerged from the Puget Sound murk in the early 90s, with moody Alice in Chains riffing matched by a vocal from Matty Bielawski that could go head-to-head with Layne Staley at his most dramatic. The band's debut headline London show next month is already sold out, and grunge, it would appear, is very much back.

Raised in a musical household, singer-guitarist Nick Harper – son of Roy –soaked up the music and influence of Pentangle from an early age. He tells Prog about the experience.

“I devised a show years ago to celebrate the incredible fortune of being a toddler in the room with acoustic folk legends who’d come round to our flat in northwest London to jam with my dad, Roy.

These incredibly gifted young people were part of a magnificent little pivotal moment in music history in London. I couldn’t help but be influenced by them and play their songs. I named the show 58 Fordwych Rd, and in 2025 I put the recordings I had in the can with new recordings and cashed in with an album.

Bert Jansch and John Renbourn lived a couple of streets away from us, so were around a lot. While they played, I’d look up at this mysterious fog in the ceiling; it looked like God was up there in Heaven. The ‘fog’ was tobacco smoke.

In the 90s I became friends with Bert and supported him at his residency at the [then] 12 Bar Club in Soho. I got to find out what a beautiful, humble man he was and how his focus was music.

He was totally unconcerned with any trappings either side of playing that guitar and doing the gig, portraying those songs the best he could. He had to speak his truth and have his vision confirmed. That was a great inspiration to me; I could never be someone I’m not.

I met Danny Thompson even later through being friends with Jakko Jakszyk, who was Danny’s great friend. We played a couple of shows together – one time I broke a string and went offstage temporarily. Danny stepped up with some genius improvisation, and I wished I could have watched him all night and not had to go back on.

When Pentangle formed, they were a new thing. There was no one else like them and they were all brilliant – the vocals, the interplay.

Politics was in there, such as the feminist angle in Willy O’Winsbury or Let No Man Steal Your Thyme. But the musicianship was so special – truly artful in that totally improvised section on the Jack Orion epic. That’s artists being free, letting themselves go and seeing what comes out, just like Hendrix.

On Valentine’s Day, 1995, Hole taped an Unplugged session for MTV at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. The band’s set-list on the night drew largely from the group’s superb second studio album Live Through This, incorporating three of its four singles - Miss World, Softer, Softest and Doll Parts - and also included a clutch of covers, among them Duran Duran’s Hungry Like The Wolf, Donovan’s Season Of The Witch and The Crystals’ He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss), which Courtney Love introduced on the night as “a really sick song”, and later mockingly described as a “nice feminist anthem.”

Against the express wishes of her bandmates, Love also found space in Hole's set for two songs written by her late husband, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, who had died by suicide the previous spring.

The first of these, Old Age, Nirvana demoed in 1991, before Cobain gifted the song to Love, who recorded it for Hole’s 1993 EP Beautiful Son. The second song, listed as You’ve Got No Right on Hole’s Unplugged album, was actually titled You Know You’re Right, and is significant for being the last song Nirvana ever recorded, Kurt Cobain’s swan song. It would become the centre-piece of a bitter, nasty war of words and a fiercely-contested legal battle between Love and her late husband’s former bandmates Kris Novoselic and Dave Grohl before it finally made its way into the public domain. Grohl would later describe it as "beautiful and disturbing."

"Oh God, it’s hard to listen to,” he admitted in 2017. “It was not a pleasant time for the band. Kurt was unwell… He was in a place we may not have recognised."

Located 10 minutes away from Dave Grohl's former home in Seattle, from the outside, with its red brick walls, arched doorways and slanted red slate roofs, Robert Lang Studios resembles an enchanted castle. Making a three-day booking for Nirvana at the facility for January 28-30, 1994, the group's management hoped that the trio could recapture some of the magic they'd bottled during their highly-focussed In Utero sessions with Steve Albini at Pachyderm Studios in Minnesota 11 months earlier. But the vibe in the Nirvana camp was very different as the new year dawned.

"1994 was a bad year right out of the gate,’ Dave Grohl told this writer in 2009. "Things had changed a lot. Kurt had struggled through a lot of stuff and we were trying to come to terms with being this enormous band, I guess."

The year started with Kurt Cobain on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. In an emotional interview, he addressed the nature of fame, marriage and fatherhood, spoke of his ongoing battle with addiction and discussed the future of his band with disarming honesty. He acknowledged that his drug use had caused schisms in the Nirvana camp and openly shared his belief that the trio were "stuck in a rut", creatively.

That Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic barely batted an eyelid when Cobain failed to show up to the studio on January 28 or 29 tells its own story: Nirvana's rhythm section kept themselves busy by working on some Dave Grohl originals, including a clutch of songs which would eventually appear on the first two Foo Fighters records.

On the afternoon of January 30 Cobain finally dropped by, minus his guitar, and the trio began to knock into shape a song they'd played just once before, with alternate lyrics, on October 23, sandwiched between Smells Like Teen Spirit and All Apologies, as the penultimate song of their regular In Utero set, at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago.

The group tracked one satisfactory take of the song before breaking for dinner, and discussed returning to the studio after their scheduled European arena tour to complete the recording. Ultimately, they would not have the opportunity to do so.

That the surviving members of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain's widow had divergent views in regards to You Know You're Right became apparent in 2001 after Courtney Love filed a suit against Grohl, Novoselic and the group’s record label, the Universal Music Group, in an attempt to wrestle control of Nirvana’s master tapes.

Although both parties were agreed that the song should be released, exactly how You Know You’re Right should appear was a source of contention. While Grohl and Novoselic believed it would be best showcased as part of a Nirvana box set, Love argued that the track should take pride of place on a more commercially enticing single-disc ‘greatest hits’ compilation. "All parties believe," Love's lawsuit stated, "that the recording, which has never before been released, has the potential to be a significant hit."

Protracted arguments over the track's future escalated to the point where, onstage with the Foo Fighters in Ireland in the summer of 2002, Dave Grohl, by reputation 'The Nicest Man In Rock', referred to Love as "an ugly fucking bitch."

"There are times when you’re pissed off," he admitted to this writer two months later. "It’s inevitable that there’ll be days you feel like you want to pop. It happens to the lawyers, it happens to Courtney, and it happens to Krist and I. I’ve been pretty reserved about my feelings towards all of this for years, but it popped out of my mouth a few times. You know, it’s only natural for someone to get to their boiling point."

"But this lawsuit is not the end of the world to me,’ he insisted. "Fortunately I have something now that’s productive and positive."

The dispute ended with a whisper rather than a scream. After months of wrangling - and a hastily shut-down online leak - it was agreed that You Know You’re Right would be included on a single-disc compilation of Nirvana songs, simply titled Nirvana, while Kurt Cobain’s solo acoustic demo of the track would be featured on 2004's expansive With the Lights Out box set.

A 'best of' collection in all but name, Nirvana was released in the United Kingdom on October 28, 2002, and subsequently debuted on the UK album chart at number 1. By coincidence, the album that it displaced at the top of the chart was Foo Fighters’ fourth record, One by One.

In 2017, in an interview with The Guardian, Dave Grohl shared his feelings about the song, which he admitted he hadn't listened to for 10 years.

"You look back on it and you read it through a different lens," he said. "Lyrically, it’s heartbreaking... Musically, there’s something cathartic."

"I don’t think he [Kurt] was comfortable in the place that he was at the time,” Grohl added. “I don’t know if anybody was. But his experience was much different. I used to think it sounded like he was singing the chorus. Now I listen to it and it’s like he’s wailing."

Van der Graaf Generator frontman Peter Hammill has announced that he will release his first new album for five years, Tears In Time, through Esoteric Antenna Records on September 25.

The album is a collection of songs that have been recorded at various locations of his Terra Incognita studio between 1991 and 2026, and is his first since 2021's In Translation album, itself a selection of cover songs, making Tears In Time Hammill's first selection of new material his first in almost a decade, since 2017's From The Trees.

"These songs have been a long time in the gestation and making," Hammill explains. "I’m pleased with the way they’ve worked out. They seem to hang together as a group, even though there’s a wide range of styles represented here. I’ve not stopped yet and I’m very happy that songs still seem to find their way into my hands."

Tears In Time will be available on both vinyl and CD. You can see the new album artwork and tracklisting below.

Pre-order CD.

Pre-order vinyl.

Peter Hammill: Tears In Time
1. For A Rainy Day
2. The Wheels
3. Heavy Weather
4. Angle Of The Curve
5. So Much Water
6. Tabula Rasa
7. Oh The End
8. Red Flags (In The Sunset)
9. You'll Never Know
10. The Half Of It
11. And When He Ran

Nightwish frontwoman Floor Jansen is back with a new solo single called Run.

The song brings the Dutch singer back to her symphonic metal roots, following her detour into pop-rock with her 2023 debut solo album Paragon. It also likely precedes the release of her second album, which is as-yet-unannounced. Listen below.

Jansen comments: “To me, Run is about no longer making yourself smaller to fit into a shape that was never yours. It’s about taking off the mask, trusting your own movement, and daring to be seen that way. Musically, it feels like the start of something heavier and more direct, but still honest, still melodic, still completely me.”

To accompany the release, the singer has announced details of a 2027 European and South American tour. The European leg will kick off on January 14 at Trix in Antwerp, Belgium and wrap up at 013 at Tilburg, Netherlands on February 13. The sole UK date will take place at Electric Brixton in London on January 16.

The South American leg will be a three-show run kicking off at an undisclosed venue in Santiago, Chile on April 22, before continuing through Bangers Open Air festival in São Paulo, Brazil on April 24 and another unknown venue at Buenos Aires, Argentina on April 25.

All dates are available below. Tickets can be bought now via Jansen’s website.

Jansen, who joined Nightwish as a touring vocalist in 2012 before going full-time in 2013, confirmed last year that she has been recording her second solo album, from which Run is likely taken. Talking to Metal Hammer in 2024, she said that one song on the upcoming album dates back to before the birth of her second daughter Lucy in October 2023.

“Nothing is finished yet,” she teased, “but it will come.”

Jansen is continuing her solo career while Nightwish remain on live hiatus. Before the release of the Finnish stars’ latest album, 2024’s Yesterwynde, they confirmed that they will not perform again until the next album cycle kicks off. The reasons for the hiatus have never been fully explained, with the band calling them “personal” in a statement. Jansen hinted to Hammer that the lineup doesn’t currently have the “energy” to tour.

“Everything with Nightwish, we’ve done with 120 percent,” she said, “but if you don’t have the energy to do that, it’s better to take a break. It’s as simple as that. It would be great to play it but…”

As well as hitting the road in 2027, Jansen will tour mainland Europe this summer and play two standalone shows in the Netherlands in October and November. Her next performance will be at the Bospop festival in Weert, Netherlands on July 9.

Floor Jansen 2027 tour dates:

• Jan 14: Antwerp Trix, Belgium
• Jan 15: Paris Le Bataclan, France
• Jan 16: London Electric Brixton, UK
• Jan 22: Pratteln Konzertfabrik Z7, Switzerland
• Jan 27: Prague Roxy, Czech Republic
• Jan 29: Warsaw Progresja, Poland
• Feb 04: Gothenburg Pustervik, Sweden
• Feb 05: Stockholm Berns, Sweden
• Feb 07: Helsinki House of Culture, Finland
• Feb 12: Utrecht Tivoli, Netherlands
• Feb 13: Tilburg 013, Netherlands
• Apr 22: Santiago TBA, Chile
• Apr 24: São Paulo Bangers Open Air, Brazil
• Apr 25: Buenos Aires TBA, Argentina

Metallica donated £20,000 (26,435 USD) to a Cardiff foodbank ahead of their concert at the city’s Principality Stadium on Sunday (June 28).

The California heavy metal titans made the donation via their All Within My Hands foundation, with the BBC estimating that the amount will pay for 9,000 meals for people in need.

Talking to the BBC, Rachel Biggs, CEO of Cardiff Foodbank, says that the foodbank had been appealing for donations through social media beforehand as they were “very worried” and had never seen their “warehouse so empty”.

“We had an email [from Metallica] saying, ‘This isn’t a scam, please get in touch with the foundation,’” she continues. “They said, ‘We are going to donate £20,000 to you.’ It’s an incredible amount of money which will make such a difference and replenish our empty shelves.”

Cardiff Foodbank supports 20,000 people a year and has eight centres across the city. Taylor Swift donated to the foodbank in June 2024, ahead of her own performance at Principality Stadium as part of her blockbuster Eras tour, and her contribution allowed it to buy one-and-a-half articulated lorry’s worth of food.

But, the foodbank says that the Metallica donation is the “largest celebrity donation” it’s ever received.

Biggs, who estimates that Cardiff Foodbank’s running costs this year will total £700,000 (925,075 USD), says that the food donations the foodbank’s received have dropped 27 percent year-on-year. She attributes the decline to the ongoing impact of the UK cost of living crisis.

“The cost of living impacts all of us,” she tells the BBC. “It also impacts our running costs and we know our donors are generous, but we know the cost of living is pinching their pockets too.”

She says that the Metallica donation will be put towards a “bulk order” to replenish stock and predicts that the raised profile that the charity will receive from their contributions will support them for the rest of the year.

“What’s great for us [is] it helps raise the profile and what Metallica are doing is mobilising their fans, mobilising the local community,” she says.

This isn’t the only charitable work that Metallica are doing as they make their way across the UK on the final European leg of their M72 world tour. The band have also partnered with the NHS to promote giving blood. From June 26 to July 3, those who give blood in England may receive a Metallica t-shirt or guitar pick.

Mark Chambers, Director Of Donor Experience for NHS Blood And Transplant, says: “Metallica’s global reach gives us an incredible opportunity to connect with new audiences right across the country. Every donation can save up to three lives, and we urgently need more people to book appointments and become regular donors.

“Right now, we particularly need more O negative, B negative and Ro donors – but every blood type is vital. We’re asking fans to roll up their sleeves and be part of something bigger than the show.”

Metallica played a 16-song set at Principality Stadium, including a cover of local legend Tom Jones’ Delilah from guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Rob Trujillo. The band’s UK tour will conclude with two dates at London Stadium on July 3 and 5.

The shows will be part of Metallica’s No Repeat Weekend format, where they play the same venue with different support acts and totally different setlists. Gojira and Knocked Loose will open night one; Pantera and Avatar night two.

After the UK dates, Metallica’s next live performance will be a residency at Las Vegas multimedia venue the Sphere, which kicks off on October 1.

After last week's epic four-day Amazon Prime Day event, the dust has finally settled on the online shopping giant's first major sale of the year.

There were some neat savings on vinyl and CDs, turntables, rock and metal t-shirts and pop-culture collectables – and while the vast majority of discounts have disappeared, there are still a smattering of bargains to be picked up... if you're quick.

I've highlighted 15 of my favourites below, but I have no knowledge how long these prices will stick around for, so if you see something you like, grab it while you can.

US deals

UK deals

This article featured in the very first issue of Prog. It originated from a Classic Rock Pink Floyd cover story, when Is There Anybody Out There? The Wall Live 1980–81 had been released. Wright was not initially interviewed, and then only a tiny part of a conversation featured in a subsequent issue of the magazine. Prog ran the entire interview in 2009.

Back in 1999 I spoke to Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason for a Classic Rock magazine cover story on The Wall. We were one of two UK publications granted rare access to a band notorious for its dislike of courting the press. Pre-Live 8, the frictions which had split the band, with Waters going solo and unsuccessfully suing Gilmour and Mason for continuing under the Pink Floyd banner, were still all too evident, with recriminations still being bandied about (the delightfully placid Mason aside).

We tried to speak to Richard Wright too, but were told the now late-keyboard player was “somewhere in France”. Given that Wright was famously sacked by Waters during the making of the album, yet still toured with the band on the resultant shows as a hired hand, his views seemed integral. Others, it appears, thought not.

Within days of publication I received a phone call from Wright’s office. “Rick wants to talk to you,” I was told and promptly summoned to his Kensington Mews flat. Initially angry, Wright vented on issues in which he felt he’d been misrepresented and set out his take on the situation. It made for fascinating listening and highlighted what a dysfunctional unit Pink Floyd could be, despite the fact they’d made some of the most ground-breakingly astounding music the rock world has ever heard.

Since then, of course, the foursome of Waters, Gilmour, Mason and Wright finally buried the hatchet and appeared in Hyde Park for 2005’s Live 8, and the sentiments that flowed back in 1999 might no longer represent how band members feel today. Wright’s sad death from cancer in September 2008 has put paid to any faint hopes the quartet would reunite once more.

In the end, space dictated we only run a small news story from the interview. Now you can read all of Wright’s fascinating words…

You say you want to talk to us to put forward your side of the story. What in particular were you unhappy with?

Various issues come up. Namely saying that I sat in the studio not really doing anything, but because I wanted to get producer’s points. In the beginning – how it worked right up until Animals – an album was co-produced by the band. But when Bob Ezrin was brought in for The Wall, I did have reservations about bringing in an outside producer. Not because of a financial thing of losing production points, because I felt that the band was losing one of its strengths, which was that Pink Floyd would fight each other sometimes – not physically, but all hands together, as a group. I think our best work came that way. It was a difficult issue, because by this time I wasn’t getting along with Roger, and with The Wall, Roger had come in with two completed pieces of work. It’s very difficult when you look back, and I think the decision to have an outside producer was the right one, but at the time I felt pretty sure that the Floyd was losing how it used to work. But that was in the beginning. Once I got to know Bob, I thought it was very good that we had him there. If he hadn’t been there, The Wall wouldn’t have been made, as there was much friction going on with the band. All credit to Roger, he came in with a very rough demo, but I do remember sitting there in Britannia Row with David and Bob and Roger and wondering how we could make it better. Now how much input I or Dave put in to improve Roger’s original concept, I don’t know, but the band was there. There was friction between Roger and I. And there had been friction between us during Animals.

When did the friction that would result in your sacking start, do you think?

There was this friction even during The Dark Side Of The Moon, where we the three of us – Dave, Roger and me – were writers. A lot of the concept came from Roger. But we had discussions, arguments, over who should get the share of the credits for songwriting. There was friction with Wish You Were Here. But sometimes it was very good and helped make good records. There has always been friction between me and Roger, right from the beginning. Personality-wise, we just didn’t get on. I can remember the friction when we were still students at Regent Street Polytechnic before the band turned professional. There was this thing between us. But it was a healthy thing. We would not choose to be friends, even at this time, Roger and I. But I could work with him because I could recognise the qualities in the band.

But it was essentially the friction between you and Roger that caused the problems?

I have to say Roger, to his credit, would come up with ‘The Big Idea’. That was his role in the band – sometimes very extreme ideas. And Dave and I provided the music to his ideas. That was how the band worked. Some of his ideas – he wanted sound effects blasting out to cover the music, and Dave and I would refuse. He annoyed me, and I annoyed him, just being the way I am. I’m a more reticent person and so I wouldn’t voice my opinions as strongly as he did. And sometimes that can be interpreted as not having an opinion. But when it came to The Wall, it was no longer a band anyway. But I feel I formed this band for God’s sake! And I helped Roger a hell of a lot because he wasn’t a musician when we started. And so did Dave. As Dave said, he feels it was wrong for me to be thrown out, and the way it should have been sorted out was to sit down and talk it out. From Animals on, maybe even earlier, Roger felt he was the band and that all of us were useful to his idea. It wasn’t like that, but he got that feeling. But I can understand why he got that feeling, because he was the one that pushed us all. Dave and I were more laid-back, sometimes maybe lazy... His was a very important role but it only works with Dave and me working with him. And you can use the success of his solo albums as proof that there was a chemistry between the four. By the time of Animals I had not written anything.

Why was that?

That’s purely a personal thing but I hadn’t come up with anything and I had very little to offer. Dave had little to offer. But I think my keyboard playing is very good. When you get to The Wall and Roger came up with the idea for another album, and at this point I still hadn’t written anything. It always used to be a joke that you saved your best stuff for your solo album and I know that isn’t the case with me!

How do you view your solo albums these days? Roger was rather scathing in the interview [Waters refers to “his awful solo albums” in the original article].

This is Roger. After 18 years maybe he’s changed. Clearly in interviews this anger towards the band carries on after he left, and this belief of how important he was to the band and no one else was is still there. It amazes me that he still has this and that he can’t look back and see that some of his best work was when we were together. Same old Roger. Why did he say that? I think my first solo album [1978’s Wet Dream] considering the circumstances I was in wasn’t great, it was OK. The Zee one (1984’s Identity, recorded with Dee Harris from Fashion, pictured left) was a disaster and he has every right to say so. That was a period in my life when I was lost. But my last one [1996’s Broken China] I am extremely proud of. It wasn’t a commercial success,
but neither was his. He’s saying his last solo album [at the time, 1992’s Amused To Death] was the most brilliant thing on the planet – and that history will show it was a great, great piece of work. This idea that his solo work is great and everybody else’s is terrible is something beyond all that. He needs to say that, I don’t know for what reason. I wasn’t upset by what he said. I expected it. That’s the Roger I know. I thought some of Amused To Death was very, very good and in other parts I don’t like this kind of stuff. And if he’d been working with the Floyd, that was the kind of stuff that wouldn’t have made it onto the album.

When I look back, I think my solo album was about depression and my personal experience of someone else having depression. At the time of The Wall I think I was depressed. For what reasons, possibly divorce, a terrible relationship with my first wife, and I think now I wasn’t offering everything I had because I wasn’t feeling very good within myself. I didn’t know I was in that state, but I’m pretty sure that the others interpreted it as he doesn’t care, he’s not interested – particularly Roger. He made it extremely difficult for me to work. And you can ask Bob Ezrin, I think he had planned to get rid of me for personal reasons rather than musical, so tried to make it as hard as possible. Funnily enough, talking to [Pink Floyd engineer] James Guthrie, who’s very reliable, he said, “Your playing is great”. So what’s going on here?

Somewhere it’s mentioned that I lived in the studio, while they had their families. But actually I was living in the studio and missing my family, my children desperately, because they had to go to school. Whereas theirs were young enough to be with them. I stayed in the studio, and they’d say “Why do you go in to work at night?”. And it was because there were no engineers there, the whole album had been mapped out, and I could go in and do a piano part – and it was very hard if Roger or Bob were there.

But this idea that I was sitting around, wasting my time, is not really fair. But on other hand, I was slightly depressed, maybe really depressed. Since I’ve been talking to a therapist later in my life, I realised I probably was and I didn’t contribute as much as I should.

Everything seems to have come to a head when you all went on holiday, mid-recording, in August 1979 [Waters claims Wright’s reaction to being called back to the studio a week early was “Tell Roger to fuck off”].

We all agreed to have a holiday. Roger had already gone to LA, Dave may have gone there as well, I can’t remember. And then a week before I agreed, it was decided to come together again. And up until this point I had no knowledge this was going on. Now reading this, it was obvious he was planning all this way before I thought he was. Anyway, I had a plan from the manager to come back now and start recording. And my reaction was, “No, he’s been sent to do this, he’s testing me. We’ve all agreed and I had specific time with my children, and there was no indication to me that we were that much behind schedule. Will you come now? No, I’m coming on the agreed date”. But I didn’t tell Roger to fuck off. I wouldn’t say that. And that was the last I heard of it, until I arrived in LA and [manager] Steve O’Rourke said to me, “Roger wants you out of the band".

You’ve since seen each other again though, of course?

Another thing I read in a magazine was that I went to see Roger play live and I came backstage and I’d “had a couple” – which I hadn’t. I felt very awkward, but Jon Carin was a keyboard player for us and Roger said, “You must come”. I didn’t want to. And then in this article, he said I was very friendly to his face but out front I was slagging him off. And this made me very angry. How did he know? Who told him? It’s not true. I was sitting in the front, finding it quite difficult listening to him perform Pink Floyd songs, because I wanted to be up there. When they were playing Comfortably Numb and Wish You Were Here it just wasn’t as good as when the four of us were performing and certainly not as good as the three of us, because Dave’s vocals and guitar playing are so definite.

But when he got to his solo work I could relax. I was quite impressed. I was also quite impressed with him as a performer, because it’s not easy. He had a very small light show. He couldn’t hide behind the lights, like you can in a Pink Floyd show. But he was upfront on stage and I thought his performance was good for his solo stuff, and also his singing. I thought, “My God, he’s really singing well” and I know that Roger had a hell of a time tuning vocals. And I subsequently heard – and he can say whether it’s true or not – that actually his vocals were taped. But at the time I thought, 'These vocals are really in tune and wonderful'. Then I subsequently heard, actually they’re taped and he’s miming a lot of it. One person sitting next to me recognised me and said, “Great, you’re here, are you getting up on stage?” I said, “I don’t think so”. He said, “What do you think of the show?” And I told him that I found it hard to listen to the Pink Floyd stuff but I’m quite impressed with his performance. That’s all I said. That is not slagging him off. I think Roger just made it up.

And I think, “Why do you have to say these things, Roger?” It was difficult for both of us, backstage. I hadn’t seen him for 18, 19 years. I didn’t want to go, but Jon persuaded me, and my wife persuaded me – she didn’t know what happened – and I thought, Why not, We’re grown men now. So I went backstage, shook his hand and said, “How are you?” And we both felt awkward. And that was it. There was no great meaningful conversation. I’m at the point where all this bullshit should stop. I think it’s kind of juvenile now to keep on fighting.

The very fact the pair of you met up suggests some thawing of the relationship?

He’s a very good talker with a very bright mind. I asked Jon Carin, “How is it to work with Roger?” He said, “He’s sweet and kind and very nice to the band”. I believe Eric Clapton playing with him [Clapton featured on Water’s 1984 The Pros And Cons Of Hitch Hiking] must have been a bad time in Eric’s life to go out with Roger Waters. But the fact that half the crowd had come to see Eric Clapton – and Eric would do a solo and the crowd would applaud it, and Roger going backstage, “What the fuck are you doing Eric, this is my show”. That Roger I know about. The sweet, kind Roger that Jon told me about I don’t know. He has a lot of bitterness and anger. I had a lot of bitterness and anger about how I was treated. It was simply this: either leave or I won’t record The Wall. I was in a no-win situation. If he carried out his bluff, financially we were all terrified. Dave and Nick wouldn’t support me. And to this day, I think “What if I’d called his bluff, what would have happened?”. After that I thought and thought. My conclusion was I didn’t like the way the band was going, and the way he was operating, this band wasn’t going to last much longer anyway. But my attitude was “I’m leaving, but I want to finish the recording and do the live shows”. I couldn’t just walk out the door. I know Dave and Nick felt bad about it – but Dave said he would never have asked me to leave.

How on earth did you cope on The Wall tour, as a member of the band, but not a member of the band?

I shut off the whole idea that I was leaving the band. I actually fooled myself that I’d play as well as I could and maybe he’ll admit he was wrong. So I put everything into it. The pictures look like we’re all together. I was in limbo. “I’m going to try and enjoy this show”, that was my feeling. Roger was saying somewhere that we had separate caravans and changing rooms – and we lost it because we were all in our separate places. He wanted it that way. Dave and Nick and I didn’t want it that way. He’d travel in his own car to the gig, different hotels from anyone else. He created the isolation. I can’t say what happened on The Wall movie or The Final Cut.

What do you think of The Final Cut?

I don’t particularly like it. I look on it as a solo album and I think he does too.

What do you make of the allegations that Dave suggested if you were out, why not get rid of Nick Mason too?

I think the feeling is that what Roger really wanted was for him to become the leader with Dave Gilmour as his sidekick playing the guitar. They used other drummers on The Wall – so Roger might have thought he could use session players. I can’t say... I don’t know what Roger was planning. They used to be mates, Nick and Roger...

How did the process of you rejoining Pink Floyd for the Momentary Lapse Of Reason tour work out?

I’d heard Roger had left the band but that Dave and Nick were making a new Pink Floyd record, and I was in Greece. It says in your feature that my second wife went along to Dave. This is quite possible but I went to see Dave and said I would be very interested in getting involved again. I don’t know if my wife went to Dave. I don’t know if Dave and Nick were having a fight with Roger because I came into the middle or end of the recording of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason, but I think it’s interesting – we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. I remember having a meal with them and Steve in a restaurant in Hampstead and I think they wanted to see how I was. I passed the test and I was invited to play on the album and do the tour. That tour for me was probably one of the most enjoyable tours that we’d ever done. I still had this anger about what had happened with Roger and that it would never work again if he was in the band. Everybody has these egos. Dave has said Nick and Rick couldn’t play on that tour. He was pretty bad on the tour. He suggested that he was leading us through and helping us. It wasn’t like that. He came and played on my solo album on one track – and he couldn’t play properly. No criticism of Dave but it was because he hadn’t been on the road. By the time we got through the rehearsals we were playing near to our capabilities. After five or six shows we improved. But we weren’t that bad.

Typically Roger was very critical of A Momentary Lapse Of Reason.

Roger has criticisms of that album which I think are fair – because Dave did bring in a lot of people to help him make the album. It’s not a band album at all.

So where you a full band member when it came to recording The Division Bell?

Full member is partly true. Not in terms of contract. Dave and Nick didn’t want to give away what they’d gained. And it came very close to a point where I wasn’t going to do The Division Bell because I didn’t feel that what we agreed was fair. And interestingly Dave said you have this right to be a member of the band, but when it comes to the nitty gritty wouldn’t give it back, which I think was kind of selfish. Me rejoining the band when they were still fighting Roger helped them, because Roger’s criticism was that it wasn’t Pink Floyd anymore, but by me being there gave them three members again – and two of them were writers.

Musically, I’m a full member again. Contractually, no. Now, if anything happens again, it’s full member or nothing - that’s my attitude. I hope something does happen and everyone else does. I think Dave’s problem is he worked damn hard on Momentary Lapse… and he thinks he felt he took the whole thing on his shoulders and he did. When it came to The Division Bell, he felt he was taking the whole thing on his shoulders and, again, he was, but he didn’t want to delegate, he didn’t want contributions from me. I think he thought, if there was the next Floyd album he’d have a hell of a lot of work to do. But it doesn’t have to be like that. It could be written the way we used to. But I have been lazy and haven’t done enough because I had big changes in my life, although I have quite a bit of material stashed away. We’ve both been lazy. Dave’s reticent about the future but I really do hope we do something again.

How do you feel now about the fact that you were the only member of Floyd to make money from touring The Wall?

I took no pride in the fact that I made money and they didn’t. There are certain purists who don’t think that Pink Floyd is the real band since Syd left, and if you listen to the first two albums and what Syd contributed to it and what we played, sure, after that Pink Floyd changed very very much so. Now, most people’s feeling is that what Pink Floyd is, is what we did after Syd left. My feeling is that as long as I’m on the keyboards and Dave is playing his guitar…

I wish we could have all been great buddies and carried on. Roger’s real problem is he thinks his solo albums are the real Pink Floyd, but no, Roger, they’re not. But I don’t know what goes on inside his head.

If you were to time-warp back to 2001 and tell people that Slipknot will create one of the most vulnerable and evocative ballads in metal, they’d laugh in your face. The Nine rocketed to prominence around the new millennium by being the angriest band of the nu metal takeover: their music was extreme, their live shows anarchic and their appearance deliberately shit-your-pants terrifying. However, continued relevance requires musical evolution – and that’s precisely what the Des Moines renegades underwent as the noughties resumed.

After putting the metal world on notice with their furious debut then doubling down on Iowa (still the angriest album to top the UK charts), Slipknot grew beyond unfettered rage. Members took breaks from the 18-armed wrecking machine in less destructive side-projects and/or got clean from substances. When they regrouped to make 2004’s Vol. 3, they craved acoustic guitars, bigger singalongs and a more colourful emotional palette. That pursuit then reached its apex four years later, with the creation of the band’s softest and most emotionally exposed song: Snuff.

Snuff was controversial at first. When released as the 11th song of Slipknot’s fourth album All Hope Is Gone, reviewers were apprehensive, while fans were either confused or incensed. Many likened its melodic singing and clean guitar tones to Corey Taylor’s hard rock second job Stone Sour. Others, even worse, lambasted the ballad as a sellout move, mocking what were once metal’s rowdiest iconoclasts for lamenting a breakup with lyrics like “It took the death of hope to let you go”.

However, Snuff has since been reappraised as one of Slipknot’s greatest achievements. Its release as a single in 2009, with a cinematic music video directed by percussionist Shawn “Clown” Crahan, broadened the band’s appeal and saw it resonate with anyone who’s felt emotions as universal as heartbreak or self-loathing. In 2023, The Nine were forced to add the ballad to their setlist – such was the intensity of fans demanding to hear it live.

In much the same way Snuff was unusual for Slipknot musically, its songwriting was different to how The Nine normally operated. Late bassist Paul Gray and drummer Joey Jordison were the outfit’s principal composers, especially during the volatile sessions for Vol. 3, but the roots of this song were solely with Corey.

“I get into arguments with fans all the time about this: everybody’s like, ‘Oh, it’s just a leftover Stone Sour song,’” the singer recalled during a 2021 fan Q&A. “No, I wrote that for Slipknot. I didn’t expect them to use it, to be honest, but I wrote it specifically for Slipknot, because it was regarding one of the heaviest times of my life.”

Snuff directly addresses Corey’s emotions at the end of his first marriage, which lasted from 2004 to 2007. “It was one of the heaviest disappointments, one of the heaviest heartbreaks, I’d ever felt,” he said of the split. “It took years to get through, even after moving on and being in different relationships. That haunted me for a long time. It’s one of those things where you knew you weren’t supposed to be together, but there was something there that felt so good. When it’s ripped away from you, you just feel like there’s a hole in your chest.”

The lyrics unpick the complexity of that: ending a relationship where there’s disappointment and hurt yet, also, still affection. “If you love me, let me go,” Corey declares at the start of the second verse, later adding juxtapositions like “You couldn’t hate enough to love” and “Angels lie to keep control”.

Although Corey never expected Slipknot to go for the song, Joey and Paul were hugely impressed by it. Joey secretly recorded a drum track to accompany the frontman’s demo and, when he presented the new package to Corey, the singer burst into tears. Meanwhile, the bassist was an ardent supporter of the tender track to the rest of the band.

“If Paul hadn’t championed that song, I don’t think we would have recorded it,” Corey told Kerrang! in 2018. “But he loved it and saw the potential with it and really wanted us to do it.”

Despite the initial shaky response to Snuff when it was first heard on All Hope Is Gone, its re-examination started as soon as its single release. The song made it to number six on the US Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, a career-best that the band didn’t outdo until 2019’s Unsainted, and number two on the US Mainstream Rock chart. It’s nowadays the second-most-streamed All Hope Is Gone song (behind Psychosocial), while the video currently boasts 163 million YouTube views, which is more than such beloveds as Wait And Bleed and Left Behind.

Beyond cold, hard numbers, Snuff also gained newfound sentimental power following the death of Paul in May 2010, aged 38. The late bassist’s diehard support for the song saw Corey play it to him as a tribute during his solo shows. In this new context, the heartbroken lyrics were reapplied from a breakup to an untimely passing, and videos of Corey getting emotional while singing them went viral in the 2010s, reasserting its emotional impact.

“When Paul passed, the song suddenly became less about the dark side of love and it became about triggering memories of him,” Corey told the BBC Radio 1 Rock Show in 2017. “He loved that song, so it really reminds me of him, especially when I play it live. It’s strange there are a lot of times where I can’t even remember the level of potency that maybe the original emotion had when I recorded it – it just means something different now.”

Today, Snuff remains both a potent tribute and one of metal’s most adored ballads. No, the Slipknot of 2001 could not, and would not, have written something this sensitive and exposing. But that only makes the song a testament to the fact that – beyond playing guitar or having a nice voice – one of the key skills of excellent musicians is personal growth.

Few bands can legitimately lay claim to pioneering an entire new genre, but Korn are one of them. With their self-titled 1994 debut album, the band from Bakersfield, California single-handedly ushered in the nu metal movement which would go onto dominate the rest of the decade and the start of the next one.

But nothing exists in a vacuum, and even trailblazers need inspiration. For the members of Korn, their sound was shaped by a melting pot of metal, hip hop and funk. But there was one classic late 80s alternative metal album that did more than any other to open up the future Korn members’ minds to different styles and sounds.

Speaking to Metal Hammer in 2019, Korn guitarist Brian ‘Head’ Welch looked back on the late 80s – a time when the burgeoning alternative scene was sneaking up behind the all-pervasive glam metal movement. Head admitted that, a few years before he co-founded Korn in 1993, he was still enamoured with late 80s hard rock.

“I didn’t want to let go of Whitesnake and all these bands that had huge guitar parts, because I was a guitarist too and I loved all that stuff,” he confessed.

But there was one album that changed everything for him and his future bandmates. Formed in San Francisco in 1979, Faith No More had cycled through countless members and styles before settling on the post-punk-inspired proto-funk metal style of their self-titled 1985 debut album and 1987’s Introduce Youself. But everything changed when the band replaced singer Chuck Moseley with 20-year-old wunderkind singer Mike Patton in 1989. The first album the new line-up made was 1989’s The Real Thing – a genre-mashing alt-metal classic and the album Head said changed his and his Korn bandmates’ lives.

“All the guys in Korn changed after they heard The Real Thing,” Head told Metal Hammer. “It turned them from being the Mötley Crüe guys into something more alternative. Hearing Faith No More for the first time though, I really felt something. It was darker than other bands you’d hear at the time like Red Hot Chili Peppers, but also had this incredibly cool bass sound that really got me to let go of the old and embrace the new. I caught the vision for where music could go and where we could go later even though it came out long before Korn were a band.

“They didn’t fit in completely with anybody,” he continued. “Sure, they’d got the alternative thing going on, but they’d also got these thrash metal guitars they’d picked up being around the scene with bands like Metallica. That’s what I loved about it – it was guitar focused, but there weren’t too many leads getting in the way.”

Thanks to singles such as early rap-metal anthem Epic and the keyboard propelled From Out Of Nowhere, The Real Thing got Faith No More onto MTV. Along with fellow mavericks Jane’s Addiction, FNM would crack open the door for what would soon be christened ‘alternative rock’, allowing it a way into the mainstream – something that exploded with the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind in 1991.

Korn themselves never hid the influence The Real Thing had on them, taking Faith No More’s funk-inspired grooves and hip hop swagger and putting a darker, more angsty spin on it.

“Even now, if I had to explain what influences go behind what we do in Korn, I’d pick a song like The Real Thing, 100 per cent.” said Head. ‘The way the song starts, with that opening drumbeat and those keys, really reminds me of Blind. And that vocal line! Its perfection, man. All minor music with this bright vocal – ‘I know the feeling/it is the real thing’ is just perfection to me. I’m sad that I’ve never met those guys – I know James [Munky] and Jonathan [Davis, Korn singer] have. We were supposed to go on tour with them before COVID hit and I really hope we actually get to do that some day.”

For Failure, a band that once disappeared for 19 years between albums, a five-year gap should feel insignificant. But new album Location Lost arrives the hard way - shaped by frontman Ken Andrews’ serious back injury, a brush with death and a long road back to full health.

His punishing physical and mental recovery from the injury and subsequent surgery nixed plans to hit the studio in 2024. Upon his eventual return to action, Failure recorded a beautifully diverse album; driving one moment, spaced-out and atmospheric the next. Andrews fills us in on the journey.

How did your injury impact the recording of Location Lost?

I kept thinking we could just push it back a month and I’d be fine by then. It got pushed back until early 2025, and even then I still wasn’t really all there yet mentally. The whole experience really knocked me down a few pegs in realising my own mortality.

How bad did it get?

It was not good. I was hooked up to all the machines and my numbers were not good. At some point I had five doctors in the room trying to figure out what was going wrong. It was a dramatic situation. I don’t know how close I was to popping off. But I do remember, once they stabilised me they wanted to keep me at least one more night to watch me. Later, a nurse came in and said: “You should stay another night or two because you almost died yesterday.”

Did that experience feed into the record?

[The Air’s On Fire] was about waking up in the hospital after the surgery and hallucinating. I’m not talking about being a little fuzzy after you wake up from being under general anaesthesia; this was a form of psychosis. I was in a lot of pain and discomfort and my senses were completely off. I would go from shivering to sweating and feeling like the air was on fire.

Paramore lead singer Hayley Williams guests on the track The Rising Skyline. How did that come about?

It was really cool, and kind of full circle. She had been a fan of the band since she was quite young. I had a chance to work with her much later in Paramore’s career, as a mixer. I sent her three or four songs, and she replied that she was especially tripping out on The Rising Skyline because it was a different kind of ballad for us.

I said she’d be perfect to sing on that song, and she said if I wanted her to sing on it I’d better send it to her quick, because she was wrapping up her solo album, so she had time to take a crack at it. I sent it to her, she did her vocal and sent it right back to me, and that was it.

This summer marks thirty years since Failure’s landmark album Fantastic Planet. Location Lost shows that the band aren’t interested in trading in nostalgia.

We did a Fantastic Planet twenty-five-year tour, so we’re not above doing that stuff, but I think what’s more important to us is making new records that actually excite us artistically. That’s the fun of it for us. The whole goal of the reboot for us was to be able to make music that felt like we were trying to go somewhere new but still retain the band’s identity.

It’s actually not that hard to do something new. It’s easy to go completely off script and end up with a whole different sound. The challenge of trying to keep the band’s identity but actually push it forward is something that’s our main goal. When that’s not there is when the band will probably be done.

Location Lost is out now via Failure/ Arduous/Virgin Music Group.

Definitions

In step: Moving in rhythm. In conformity with one’s environment. In step with the times.

In step: a reference to embarking on the Twelve Steps programme whose tenets include ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable’ and ‘We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.’

In Step. Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble’s last non-posthumous album, released in June 1989.

Six months after In Step came out Vaughan addressed the Aquarius Chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous at the Ritz Hotel in New York and gave them his greatest unscripted message. “I started off my drinking and using career, oh I guess… early 60s, when I was somewhere around seven or eight years old. I grew up in an alcoholic family. My father was an alcoholic, and even though I saw the problems that alcohol caused in our family, I still found it attractive for some reason. I don’t know what that was; I was always a kid who was afraid I was gonna miss something.

“Somewhere along the line, I started trying to find out why my father would go back and continue to drink, even though every time he did I saw what happened, which was, big fights – you know, violence. We were always real scared of him. But he continued to do it anyway. I never… I never did understand what that was, until one day a few years later I realised that I wasn’t doing anything any differently other than making a little bit more money, and I’d added a few drugs to it, you know.

“I guess about seven or eight years old, I started stealing drinks either… well, my parents used to have these, these ‘42’ parties, and quite a few people would come over and they’d be havin’ their Tom Collins or whatever, you know. And when somebody wasn’t looking, I’d take one of the drinks and run to the kitchen, you know, an’ make them a new one. And, refresh their drink, you know. It’s just that I would refresh my memory about what it tasted like a lot of the time. I never really thought that it tasted very good or anything.”

Maybe now we see why Stevie Ray wasn’t on the dime when he came so close to death after playing the Pfalzbau in Ludwigshafen, September 28, on the German leg of his 1986 European tour. Not just him. Bass player Tommy Shannon was lying on a hotel bed sick with his own excessive cocaine and alcohol usage. He recalls how in the adjoining room Stevie was mumbling incoherently and vomiting blood and bile. Staggering to the phone Shannon pleads that an ambulance be called, and Vaughan is rushed to hospital with IVs in both arms. Miraculously he makes some sort of brief recovery, but by the time SRV and Double Trouble arrive in London to play the Hammersmith Palais on October 2, the group and most of the crew are wandering backstage like dead men.

Dr Vernon Bloom, who specialises in helping addicts withdraw – he’s had plenty of practice on Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton – has been contacted via Eric’s people and administered the relevant meds before Vaughan and company take the stage. The show passes without incident – it is neither great nor tragic – but in the gloom, just before he’s called back to encore, Vaughan slips off a gangplank and starts internal haemorrhaging. For the second time in days he is rushed to hospital. If this is a wake-up call, someone forgot to set the alarm.

The day after the Palais gig is Stevie’s birthday. To paraphrase Bo Diddley’s Who Do You Love – he’s got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind. Just 32 and he don’t mind dyin’. Stevie’s habit is ridiculous. He’s snorting a quarter ounce of pure, pharmaceutical Merck flake cocaine a day, and necking a quart of Royal Crown scotch – at least. It doesn’t touch the walls. Dr Bloom discovers his patient’s already ruined septum is so corrupted that he’s taken to dissolving the cocaine in the whisky. X-rays reveal Vaughan’s stomach lining is rotting. Cocaine is crystallising in the man’s intestines. Bloom gives Stevie two weeks to live. Or you can stop right now and delay your death warrant. If you’re very lucky. But hey, it is his birthday. Bloom allows him a small plastic cup of champagne to celebrate and to wash down the Phenobarbital.

Stevie calls his mama Martha in Dallas and breaks down: “Ma, I’m real sick. I need help. I got to come home.” This isn’t great news. Martha’s husband Jimmie Lee Vaughan – Big Jim – is barely a month in his grave having succumbed to Parkinson’s disease, his own alcoholism and a working life spent around asbestos. In any case the tour is cancelled – though the press release only states Vaughan is unwell – and the guitarist flies home to enter the Charter Lane rehab centre in Atlanta, Georgia, while Shannon goes into their Austin facility. Drummer Chris ‘Whipper’ Layton is in marginally better shape, though no stranger to the drug and booze frenzy that has insiders comparing Double Trouble to the Allman Brothers Band at their absolute worst.

Indeed, Vaughan’s performances are so erratic in the period covering the Soul to Soul and Live Alive albums that a second guitarist, Derek O’Brien, is hired to supply some lead work on tour as Stevie’s fingers can’t talk the talk, while keyboards player Reese Wynans – ironically an Allman Brothers accomplice from Florida – joins the madhouse, ostensibly to add his 6 feet 6 inches of muscle to the group before they implode. Long tall Wynans is shocked by their business affairs and the amount of money they waste to line dealer pockets. Double trouble. Everyone seems more anxious to hang around expensive studios playing ping pong and waiting for the main man to arrive bearing goodies than actually playing the blues. “The drugging was so bad I was scared for the man’s health” Reese recalls. “Stevie was so worn down he obviously needed to rest, but it’s hard to stop working when you’re in big debt.”

Flash back to autumn 1986. Stevie Ray calls his wife Lenora (aka Lenny) and soul mate for the past 13 years, but she refuses to visit him in rehab. Turns out she’s been running round town with other men and spending her husband’s money on hard dope. Divorce papers go to and fro. Stevie comes home to find she locked the house, cut off the electricity and taken to hanging with ne’er do wells described by local insiders as “police characters, criminals and the scum of the earth”. And she took the dawg.

If there is solace in Stevie Ray’s collapsing world it arrives when he bumps into a beautiful brunette, a 17-year-old Russian émigré called Janna Lapidus. She finds him sitting head bowed on the steps of Wellington Town Hall in New Zealand where Double Trouble are performing in the spring before his final collapse. A rising star in the modelling industry, Janna goes on tour in Australia with the band, and she does visit Stevie in rehab, and they will become an item. Although she’s young, Janna has a wise head. During his London rehab the pair walk arm in arm in Hyde Park and pledge their allegiance to romance and loyalty, having seen an ageing couple holding hands by the Serpentine. Janna’s name is on In Step alongside the band’s saviour John Hammond. Janna is credited with turning Stevie’s life around.

But Vaughan turns out to have a strong constitution. On November 22 1986 the aborted Live Alive tour recommences and for the first time ever he plays clean and sober at Towson Centre in Maryland, with Bonnie Raitt.

It’s December 1988 when producer Jim Gaines gets the call asking does he want to produce the next SRV album? Based in San Francisco, Gaines’s main client is Carlos Santana, and ole Devadip knows Stevie well – they’ve played together. Plus, Gaines is a guitar guy. Vaughan asks him: “How do you feel about recording me when I’ve got 10 amps goin’ at once? Think you could handle that?” Gaines has trudged through the sludge with Carlos and Ronnie Montrose, who both use six or seven amps in the studio, so he agrees. “Why not? It sounds like a nightmare. Let’s do it.”

Just before Christmas, Double Trouble’s Epic Records man calls Jim and says: “The band wants you to make the new album. Congratulations. You got the job. By the way, I didn’t want you to do it.” Gaines is taken aback but hell, it’s a Texas four-piece blues band, how hard can this really be? “Hard. I was the first person they ever used who wasn’t from the Texas connection,” he says. “It could get tense because I was also the first person to ever tell Stevie: ‘Nope, that’s not good enough. Do it again.’”

On Texas Flood, Couldn’t Stand the Weather and Soul To Soul the band had produced themselves, but while Grammy Awards and critical acclaim ensue, there are many who take the line that Vaughan can’t decide whether to be his heroes Albert King and Jimi Hendrix, or locate his own voice. Modern blues acts are beset by this conundrum – who needs the pastiche when we already got Muddy Waters? But there is a difference: SRV is undoubtedly a genius musician, and when the layers of parody fall away he recalls all the well-known cats, but with a fair measure of the forgotten Lonnie Mack – check him out playing bass on The Doors’ Roadhouse Blues – thrown in for whammy punch.

Gaines and the band decamp to the Power Station in New York City to rehearse, but the producer can’t record a note because there is a god-awful hum in the little room they use that sounds like you’re standing underneath a pylon. Vaughan’s none too happy when Gaines pulls the plug because he’s used this studio before to cut Couldn’t Stand The Weather; it’s also where David Bowie made Let’s Dance, which is smeared all over with Stevie licks and is indeed the album from 1983 that made his name.

“I moved us to Kiva Studios in Memphis and that solved the problem,” says Gaines. “They had a big isolation room and it was great, since the band loved the city and the bosses loved him because he’s a big star. Still had the problem with the amplification though, and I’m known as the man who made him play in a chicken coop. We were getting hum because he’s using a single coil Strat, so I wrapped the room in copper wire to form a conduit and put him inside what looks like a baseball-batting cage. That pulled the interference down 70%. I could live with that.”

Gaines also persuaded the boys they had to embrace the emerging digital technology that enabled him to get round the problem of using eight tracks for one guitar feed. “I was in a panic because pretty soon I’m running out of tracks. We sorted out a 32-track at the Power Station and teamed that with an analogue machine and while everyone then is fearful of digital – Stevie hated it – the tube amps were warm and we didn’t have to use any slaving.”

For the first time SRV and Double Trouble will record without the use of any drink or drugs. Stevie has played with his mentor Bonnie Raitt and discovered that being sober is a blessing for once, and he will go on to deliver some of his finest music since the fucked-up era when he was so majestic on Jennifer Warnes’ classic Leonard Cohen tribute album Famous Blue Raincoat (1987), of which he remembers nothing.

“Considering he almost died in London Stevie was in great shape,” says Jim. “One reason why he chose me was because I’m Mr Squeaky Clean, Mr Hillbilly,” Gaines laughs. “I’ve never done a drug in my life. They were all going through the step programme and attending meetings every night and day. They couldn’t have a drink and smokes man around. Stevie told me: ‘This is the first thing I’ve cut with no chemical enhancement. I’m as nervous as hell.’”

If the days of climbing the walls as withdrawal kicked in were gone, that didn’t mean the sessions were easy. Gaines still had to prove himself to gain entrée in to this tight-knit clan. “I trod with care. I’ve never been a ‘world’s gonna-end’ type and we became friends as the recording progressed. Stevie gave me his trust and laid a lot of his life on me in private moments. I was shocked and privileged to hear that. Stevie told me he wanted to make amends and move forward and In Step and the album he made with brother Jimmie (Family Style) right before he died were his way of removing any bitterness and jealousy from his life and letting it rest.

“When the album was finished he gave me a hug and he wouldn’t let go for minutes. Man, I realised he needed a hug real bad. I learnt a bit about his father, those difficult situations, and I heard how his mother had received that, too. I know how much those boys loved their mom. I treated Stevie and the boys like cousins. I loved ’em, but I couldn’t let them get too much into my life because making an album is business.”

Bro’ Jimmie Vaughan from the Fabulous Thunderbirds hung out during some sessions on In Step, especially when work moved to Los Angeles, and Gaines noticed that maybe the older man was slightly jealous – and certainly in awe of his kid brother, who had achieved such notoriety by playing with Bowie and Nile Rodgers, and especially on Albert King shows, trading white boy licks with AK’s driven Flying V. Stevie was as shy as Jimmie was ebullient. Says Gaines: “He was a small guy but he had very strong hands, and that’s how he could handle those big brass strings he used, especially on the 1959 Fender Strat (actually a 62/63 mongrel SRV called his “first wife” or “Number One”).

The material that became the In Step album impressed the savvy Gaines. It is often described as SRV’s confessional album, but that isn’t the whole truth. Obviously Crossfire, Tightrope and Wall of Denial, with lyrics that refer to being ‘Afraid of my own shadow in the face of grace’ and ‘demons from the garden of white lies’, deal with addiction and redemption, but Stevie didn’t write those words – they were penned by his long-time friend and accomplice, drummer songwriter Doyle Bramhall, who had trodden a similar path and channelled Vaughan’s misery better than he could have done himself. The deeply personal stuff was dispatched first in early January, to get it out the way.

Wrapped around those epic tunes are startling takes on songs by Chester Burnett (Love Me Darlin’), Buddy Guy (Leave My Girl Alone) and Willie Dixon (Let Me Love You Baby) – these situate Vaughan in his natural milieu, less a Hendrix clone and more an old – well 34-year-old – blues man.

In fact Stevie Ray still didn’t feel willing to bare his own lyrical soul, but he made up for that with the gorgeous Travis Walk and the stupendous Riviera Paradise, Gaines’ favourite moment. “I only heard that as a jam in New York, but they had it worked out in Memphis. To set the scene: It was 1am. I turned all the lights way low. Stevie is head down. Tommy and Chris are in the dark. I knew I only had a few minutes of tape on the reel and they start playing, and Holy Shit! It’s magic. As the tape spins it’s so good I have shivers up my spine, but I’m worried we’ll run out. I have to get his attention but he’s got his back to me, so I motion to Chris Layton: ‘CUT CUT’ and then Stevie looks at Chris and they nod. And as the last seconds of tape spool out they end the song and that’s the only take we ever did.”

Gaines finished the album over three months and regards In Step as a success with a proviso. “Stevie hated doing vocals, like really hated that process. I’d have to line him up with Halls cough drops, honey, tea and lemon – anything to get him in the booth. His attitude was: ‘I’m a guitar player who has to sing.’ The other problem I had was when he couldn’t get hold of Janna on the phone. She was in NYC modelling or at the agency or in the apartment she shared with the other girls. They were so young they had a housemother. Stevie would get incredibly nervous if she didn’t pick up. He was so madly in love with her that the sessions would come to a screeching halt and the other guys got pissed off at me! They’d say: ‘Go get him, make him come back’, and I’d say: ‘Dude, he’s in your band, you go and get him.’”

Vaughan also had a tendency to get bored. At those times he’d go into the studio on his own and play Hendrix songs for hours to himself or change the mood with some Buddy Guy or Lonnie Mack tune from his vast repertoire. Gaines would tape some of those moments, surreptitiously, but when he sent the tapes to Epic they got lost, and that infuriates him because: “At those times, you would swear that Hendrix was in the room.”

Sometimes Albert King dropped by or even sat in, which was a problem because he couldn’t be used for contractual reasons and he was apt to throw in some none-too-helpful comments that had to be politely heard and ignored. But he was also a sweet, somewhat distracted guy. One day a call came through from Jon Bon Jovi asking Stevie – and Albert – if they’d like to guest at the hairy rock god’s LA show. King homes in on this request and asks SRV over the playback: “Hey Stevie. These Jim Bon Jovis: are they pretty big?” Learning, yes they are, King’s eyes lit up, but in the event he didn’t go and chose to go and play cards with a lady friend.

Tenor sax man Joe Sublett and trumpeter Darrell Leonard made their debut as the Texicali Horns on In Step. Gaines wanted them to emulate the Oakland East Bay funk and swagger of his beloved Tower of Power horns, but they stuck to their Texan/Oklahoma blues and shuffles instead. Joe and Darrell were tight together, but Joe had known SRV since 1973 when he was playing alongside the great Marc Benno in The Nightcrawlers, then Paul Ray and the Cobras, and thus to Triple Threat and Double Trouble. They’d been roommates off and on, swapping riffs on Bobby Bland and Ray Charles tunes, or shooting the breeze while listening to King Curtis and David ‘Fathead’ Newman albums, or marvelling at the silky musicianship of Lee Allen and Wes Montgomery.

Sublett was aware that his old colleague had been through major changes in the interim, because SRV’s heavy partying went way back to the mid-70s when he and Bramhall raised it high on the hog in Dallas and Austin.

“I saw In Step as a new birth, although he – all of them – were definitely into the AA book and there was a lot of Christian and higher power talk going on, which comes with that territory,” says Joe now. “I figured Stevie had always had some Christian elements, even in the bad craziness and party all night days he had a spiritual interest. I wasn’t too concerned at the mood in the camp, because even when he hadn’t played at his best he was still great, and now suddenly he was even better. We had a lot of discussions in his car between breaks and he off-loaded. Stevie Ray was very enlightened about playing sober, and very scared.”

Sublett didn’t see him when he’d gone through the terrible stages of his withdrawal – he saw a man who was moving into a kind of Band of Gypsys phase. “Funk meets blues. Maybe with a bit of Kenny Burrell jazz thrown in. Stevie was an ear player; he didn’t read charts. But he could learn a riff in a second and instinctively knew the changes and the octaves – all the little flavours.”

Joe was knocked out by what he saw and heard. He’d played on Soul To Soul in 1985, and seen the other side of Stevie; now it was like regular folks. The horn parts were cut in Los Angeles, but with mutual schedules starting to mount up there was little time to reminisce. Double Trouble were itching to get back on the road long before In Step’s June ’89 release, and the Texicali boys were finishing off an album with Bruce Willis, If It Don’t Kill You, It Just Makes You Stronger, so in the event they cut Crossfire, which became a huge radio hit, and Love Me Darlin’ before they hooked up for some West Coast dates with the Trouble, augmenting their section with David Woodford’s baritone.

“It was fun playing the album tracks live because that record was different sonically; more centred. Before there was this thing of having a guitarist who is incredibly loud but are you hearing the rhythm section? Now you could hear Tommy’s bass and it was better balanced. It was about more than Stevie’s virtuosity, and yet his singing is more confident. That was down to Gaines who was an incredible diplomat, who could tell him: ‘Hey look, let’s hear you sing and back off a bit on the guitar.’ He was worthy of respect, whereas another guy might have been met with: ‘Who the hell are you to tell me with my track record, how I should sound?’ Gaines knew the times were changing and it wasn’t enough just to sound like a blues player on the radio – you had to have something else. And Stevie? I guess he figured, hell I might just learn something to my advantage.”

In the old days Stevie and Joe were like young punks, everything was about the music and the guitar and Stevie would say: “Every time I play a solo, it’s like I’m breakin’ outta jail.” On a personal note Sublett recalls SRV’s “huge hands, like Howlin’ Wolf’s big ol’ paws”, and his pleasant nature. “For years he lived in the house he bought for his mom in Dallas. He never owned any big cars and could care less about possessions. The best thing for him was Janna, because he’d had a lot of turbulence in his marriage. I remember his smile, and if there was a hang up in a session he’d have a goofy grin and say: ‘This too shall pass’.

“He was a hilarious guy really, with a rubber face. He liked pulling stupid expressions. He told me he busted his nose seven or eight times falling out of trees or off cars, but he wasn’t just a simple soul. He was very intelligent. I never saw him as the guy in the hat or the badass guitar slinger or the Spaghetti Western character. He was never a hard-arsed mean guy. His only ego trip was that when he played, he would never want to give you less than 100%. He wasn’t trying to be better than you; he was just trying to be his best. If people told him: ‘Hey man, you’re great,” he’d make a joke out of it.”

While SRV had an image – the hats, the Native American silver, the poncho and soft suede Cheyenne warrior boots, even that was no big deal to him. “He had that look which is what people expected of him and he knew they liked to see him dressing up. But he never took himself so seriously. When I first met him I gave him a flat brown hat, because those Stetsons he wore got so funky.”

Darrell Leonard wasn’t one of the inner circle, but he was impressed with the man from the outset. “As a brass player you think, ‘Oh everyone plays guitar. I’ll just emulate what he does.’ It was harder to do that with him. He didn’t show me any clichés. He didn’t play the obvious. He took the language of the black blues guys and turned it into his voice.”

The Texicali boys were overdubbed in LA just before the In Step resumed. In the period after his collapse and before he died Vaughan would play some 300 shows, including The Fire meets The Fury bash with Jeff Beck. Leonard suddenly got the SRV trip. “His connection was all about the audience and letting them know he’d changed. He talked about it directly every night. His thing was: ‘You don’t have be the last person to leave the party.’ He made it a positive. Now there was no party. No pot. No beer. No crazy men out of control with powders and needles. I’d seen all that. Don’t forget Stevie came out of the Austin scene when it was stay up all night. Get high. Repeat. That’s how the blues movement started there. It wasn’t the rinky-dink state capital it is today.”

If Vaughan hadn’t taken that fateful helicopter ride, Leonard believes they’d have worked together again. “He didn’t have any big star vibe. He was regular. I spent one night with him on the bus driving from Northern California to LA for the Greek concert, and he told me about all the shitty stuff. He had hidden depths. But he was cool. I never loaned him money. He never didn’t show up. He was clean and sober. I saw the best SRV possible. I’ve been lucky enough to play with both him and with Duane Allman and I can hear them on the air.”

In early 1990 the Vaughan bothers cut their long-mooted Family Style album that reunited Stevie with Nile Rodgers and some of the cast from Bowie’s Let’s Dance. Rodgers hadn’t wanted him to play on that, telling Bowie: “He’s just an Albert King wannabe.” But Bowie had been knocked out by Double Trouble when they were an unsigned act playing the Montreux jazz festival and told Rodgers: “You’re wrong. He’s a unique artist.”

The producer changed his mind soon afterwards. “He was like a child who was a genius. He was amazed when I sampled his guitar through a Synclavier. ‘What the fuck is that?’ ‘That’s your guitar!’ ‘Holy crap I can play a note and move it from here to here?’ For a person of his virtuosity you never met a more humble person. He wasn’t fake humble. He really was charming and sweet.”

Jimmie Vaughan regarded Family Style as a clean slate for their relationship. “We wanted to do a record that showed everything that we could do on the guitar. The record’s got all of the licks that our favourite guitar players did, plus other stuff. It’s got Albert King, B.B. King, Johnny Watson, T-Bone Walker, Lonnie Mack, Hubert Sumlin and Freddie King. It’s like a short history of who we listened to.”

Yet in many ways it was still like the old days. “One of the first things we cut was Brothers, where we used the same guitar, pulling it out of each other’s hands. People are always asking us questions about what it was like when we were kids, and they probably think that it was just like that, us fighting over the same guitar. So I thought, well, hell, let’s give it to ’em! It was just for fun. And even though it’s the same guitar and the same rig, the tones sound different. The whole project was just fun, and that sort of set the tone.”

Summer of 1990, Double Trouble went on the road with Joe Cocker before their piéce de résistance – two nights with Eric Clapton, Jimmy, Buddy Guy and Robert Cray at Alpine Valley, Wisconsin. After the second show, which climaxed with an encore of Sweet Home Chicago, most of the entourage headed to board four chartered helicopters to take them back to the Windy City and a good night’s rest. Clapton recalls how foggy the early morning of August 27 was.

“I didn’t want to fly at all. I was wiping condensation off the windows and thinking: ‘We’re all gonna die.’” Then they took off and above the weather was clear sky and starlight.”

Vaughan was on a flight with three of Clapton’s crew. In the early hours it was reported they never landed in Chicago. In fact their pilot had taken off and crashed into a ski run on the side of a mountain after 42 seconds. When Jimmie Vaughan went to identify Stevie’s body he had to so by recognising his distinctive silver jewellery.”

Shannon and Layton sat in their hotel room and wept. They’d gone into Stevie’s room hoping he’d be there, but the bed was still made with chocolates on the counterpane and the alarm radio was playing the Eagles’ Peaceful, Easy Feeling.

A strange thing happened at that last gig. Those who knew Stevie said he played with a halo of light around him. His guitar tech Rene Martinez remembered him giving everyone a huge hug and telling them how much he loved them. He had an aura about him, like a premonition.

At Stevie’s funeral the mourners included Stevie Wonder and Dr John, who sang Amazing Grace and Ave Maria while Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Rodgers, Clapton and ZZ Top wept a Texas flood in the Laurel Land Memorial chapel. Stevie’s marble and bronze headstone simply gave his dates, his name and the inscription that says ‘Thank you… For all the love you passed our way.’

Stevie’s AA speech had spoken of commitment and letting go; of his fears and his desire to help others. He was amazed and grateful to be alive since he’d never believed he’d even make it to 21. His final words to the gathering were heartfelt.

“I thank y’all for letting me be here with you. Whether I know what to say about it or not, it means a lot to me, and I thank you, okay?”

He was back on track. He was in step.

“I’m 42 years old, and I’m just discovering a side of myself that’s been a mystery for a long time,” says Daniel Tompkins. The TesseracT vocalist has just announced his new band, Prince Of Failure, a 50/50 collaboration with Chimp Spanner mastermind Paul Ortiz.

Their self-titled debut album, out now via Kscope, finds him addressing his life-long struggles with ADHD, and the pair’s insecurities operating within the music industry.

“I think it’s extremely cathartic as an experience,” Tompkins says of laying it all bare. “This is a very poignant moment of time in my life. Having ADHD isn’t a superpower – but what I can do is turn pain into poetry, and this album does that.”

He continues, “Being diagnosed with ADHD and autistic traits has made me question everything. It’s like growing up with a shadow version of yourself that you can’t see – you just sense it.

“So, the Prince Of Failure is a representation of the insecurity and the ongoing inner turmoil of trying to fit into this world where my ADHD and autistic traits are in conflict with one another.”

The pair are well acquainted, having worked together on 80s synth project Zeta and on Ruins, a heavy reimagining of Tompkins’ first solo album, Castles. “There have been very few times in my career where I’ve clicked with someone like I do with Paul,” he says. “He’s an amazing songwriter. Without him, it’d be like losing an arm.”

The record centres on a love of nu metal, which harks back to the music of their youth, where the story begins. But their prog sensibilities also see them “smashing things together that sound cool.”

“The difference is that the prog isn’t put front and centre – but it’s there in the background,” Ortiz adds. “It adds a little bit of spice and complexity, but it doesn’t make the songs feel uncomfortable. It’s really affirming to have a body of work that we’re both really proud of.”

The project’s timing has a special meaning for Ortiz. “As someone who swings between loving what I do and feeling like I could sell my guitars and never do it again, it’s really affirming to have a body of work that we’re both really proud of,” he explains.

“Working with Dan has pulled me out of a long slump. It’s really amazing.”

Prince Of Failure is on sale now.

The Kinks’ 80s revival, which actually kicked off in the latter half of the 70s, followed several years of concept album indulgence. It began when Ray Davies stopped squinting at the village greens of Albion and embraced the neon glare of American arenas, and Give The People What They Want was the moment the band fully weaponised their legacy, trading music-hall whimsy for slabs of radio-ready arena rock.

The title track was a snarling commentary on media-fed bloodlust that felt decades ahead of its time. Meanwhile, Destroyer cannibalised the iconic riff from 1964's All Day and All of the Night and reintroduced the title character from 1970's Lola. It really shouldn’t have worked, but it did.

Although Ray accounted for 100% of the songwriting credits, brother Dave was the secret weapon, his guitar slashing through the mix with an intensity that suggested the band intended on going toe-to-toe with the new wave kids and power poppers who’d nicked their blueprints.

True to its title, Give The People What They Want was the sound of The Kinks giving the public exactly what they demanded: commercial, radio-friendly arena-bound rock'n'roll. Suddenly, the British Invasion had a sequel.

• Stream on Spotify
• Stream on Apple Music

Every week, Album of the Week Club listens to and discusses the album in question, votes on how good it is, and publishes our findings, with the aim of giving people reliable reviews and the wider rock community the chance to contribute.

Join the group now.

Other albums released in August 1981

• Torch - Carly Simon
• Shot of Love - Bob Dylan
• Tattoo You - The Rolling Stones
• Dark Continent - Wall of Voodoo
• Sleep No More - The Comsat Angels
• Pretenders II - Pretenders
• Scissors Cut - Art Garfunkel
• Fire of Love - The Gun Club
• Brothers of the Road - The Allman Brothers Band
• Maiden Japan - Iron Maiden
• New Traditionalists - Devo
• Short Back 'n' Sides - Ian Hunter
• Time Exposure - Little River Band
• Whitford/St. Holmes - Brad Whitford and Derek St. Holme

What they said...

"Throughout the record, the band kicks up a storm, rocking out with a surprising amount of precision, and although Ray Davies' writing isn't as strong as it was on the group's two previous albums, he has contributed a set of professional hard rock that is distinguished by solid hooks and a clever sense of humour." (AllMusic)

"Hook-laden and hard-rocking, this is the best-crafted Kinks album in over a decade, which means that for someone who's found Ray Davies's world-view increasingly mean-spirited and mush-brained, it's also the biggest turnoff. Back when he was chairing the Village Green Preservation Society, Ray's dotty lyricism put his nostalgia in appealing and appropriate musical perspective; his current clean-cut arena style makes him sound smug and strident, as well it should." (Robert Christgau)

"Ray’s paranoia fires up the band on its first effort of the Ronald Reagan–Margaret Thatcher era. He may have been too old to be a real punk, but this non-concept album about selling out demonstrates he sure had the attitude for it. The spitfest is tempered by one perfect ballad (Better Things) and the most complex portrait of pedophilia ever crooned (Art Lover)." (Blender)

What you said...

Nigel Mawdsley: The UK's record-buying public abandoned The Kinks in the early seventies. Supersonic Rocket Ship from 1972 was the band's last sizeable chart hit before a rerelease of Come Dancing" in 1983.

The Kinks' LP chart positioning was even worse in the UK. Their last stand-alone studio album to reach the charts was Something Else in 1967. (This doesn't take into account the re-release of The Village Green Preservation Society in 2018). But Ray Davies never lost his songwriting ability. Indeed, The Kinks became superstars in the USA from the mid-1970s onwards.

One of the many Kinks' LPs to deservedly hit the Billboard charts was Give The People What They Want, a top 20 smash in 1981.

Give The People What They Want is an amazing rock album from start to finish. The two opening tracks, Around The Dial and the album's title track, state the album's intentions, both great rocking tracks with brilliant lyrics and amazing fretwork from Dave Davies. The superb production really whetted my appetite for more when I first heard it.

The other notable rockers on the album are the punky Add It Up, Back To Front, and the minor US hit single Destroyer. The latter track cleverly intersperses the All Day And All Of The Night riff into the song and really does catch the listener between headbanging and dancing!

Elsewhere on the album, Ray Davies courts controversy with his song Art Lover, with wistful lyrics that should be listened to intently before the listener makes a judgment! Yo-Yo is an amazing song about a problematic relationship with some equally amazing lyrics.

The lyrics to some of Davies' songs on the album dealt with difficult subject matters ahead of their time. A Little Bit Of Abuse is about domestic violence and is very powerful lyrically and musically, whilst Killer's Eyes sees Davies seemingly taking the role of a psychiatrist trying to fathom out why his subject matter became a killer. Better Things" closes the album, a song that saw The Kinks return, albeit with a minor hit, to the UK charts. It deserved better!

Like many of The Kinks' albums from the mid to late seventies and early eighties, Give The People What They Want gets a very rare 10/10!

Zak Browne: I just listened to the whole album for the first time in quite a while. I heard a lot of songs that sound like they could be found on albums by The Replacements. I think Better Things is a great closer, and Predictable and Yo-Yo were my other two favourites. 8/10.

John Davidson: Like many rock fans in the UK, I pretty much ignored everything created by the Kinks after Lola.

This album from 1981 sounds very new wave mixed with American pop-rock. The Knack, XTC, Elvis Costello, The Pretenders, etc., may all have taken inspiration from The Kinks, but this album seems to be a case of the masters aping their apprentices.

On Add it Up, for example, it sounds like Andy Partridge is singing lead for Blondie. Destroyer recycles All Day And All Of The Night and references back to Lola without being quite as good as either of their previous hits.

My first impression was that I wasn't keen, but I think it has enough quirky charm that with more listens, I might be won over. A 6/10 just now, but that might go up.

Greg Schwepe: The story goes that Dave Davies took a razor blade to the speaker in his amplifier so it would rattle and distort more as the volume was increased. And the rest, they say, is history. And if it’s good ol’ distortion and power chords you want, along with a dose of witty and incisive lyrics you’ll pay attention to, then Give The People What They Want does just that.

This was The Kinks' first studio album after the highly successful live album One For The Road. That one got lots of airplay here in the US in my area, and for many (me included), hearing new, recharged, revved-up versions of many of their classics led to an increased interest in new material from an established classic rock band.

The album kicks off with an ode to their favourite DJ in Around The Dial. And the title track after that, um, yes, gives the people what they want. You get the idea. Fun, bouncy, driving rock that has you reaching for the volume knob. It’s radio-friendly 80s Kinks! And it’s like they were saying, “Yeah, we want to be played on the radio again… so here it is.”

Destroyer is a mashup of The Kinks' history. You get a mention of “Lola” in the lyrics and the riff of All Day and All of the Night. Double bonus.

Overall, this is a great collection of songs that ushered in a new era of the band that would result in newfound popularity from exposure on the radio and MTV. They wouldn’t “come dancing” until the follow-up to this one, but this opened the door to a great run of 80s albums. 8 out of 10. I got what I wanted.

Mike Canoe: For the past few years, I have haphazardly tried to find the right Kinks album to suggest to the group. The one with Lola on it? One of the first two albums, even though they were more than 60 years old? Wait, All Day and All of the Night was a non-album single? #@%&!!! Definitely not Preservation Society or Muswell Hillbillies, which were severely lacking in power chords and did not rock.

Give the People What They Want was probably the strongest contender, but, with its 1981 release date, it made me feel like a Johnny-come-lately Kinks fan, which, of course, is exactly what I was because that's the album I came in with, thanks to the brilliantly paranoid Destroyer. The full album holds up well as a rock album and quite possibly their last one, once the nostalgia-fueled Come Dancing changed everything.

It also shows how influential the Kinks were to bands not named Van Halen. A Little Bit of Abuse sounds like the Kinks covering Elvis Costello covering the Kinks. Around the Dial, Back to Front, Killer's Eyes and Add It Up could all be on any number of albums by second-wave UK punk bands. The creepy yet beautifully sad Art Lover makes me think that we'll get to a Stranglers album someday.

Give the People What They Want is fun but still has bite, clever but not too artsy and pretentious about it. And it even has a cameo by Lola.

Philip Qvist: My views about the Kinks: When asked to pick my favourite songs from the year when I was born (1964, yes, I'm that old) then You Really Got Me is my standout track.

I would rate them as one of the most underrated bands from the 60s. There was so much brotherly love between Ray and Dave Davies that they always guaranteed a punch-up or two in the recording studio.

The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society is a masterpiece of an album. That all said, they did come out with some great songs throughout the 60s and early 70s.

I knew their early 70s hit Lola was one of their last big hits until the rather excellent Come Dancing hit the charts in 1983, and I was also aware of their Live 1980 record One For The Road, but what I didn't realise was that they had been releasing more than a few studio albums between those two hits, including this one, Give What The People Want.

I gave it a couple of spins, and while I don't think it quite matches their 60s output, it isn't a half-bad record. Ray Davies' songwriting is still top-notch, brother Dave's lead guitar still rocks out as and when required, while the songs all have that distinct Kinks sound.

The title track, the mash-up of Lola and other tracks that is Destroyer, Yo-Yo and Predictable were my favourite tracks on this record. I don't think the band created new boundaries with Give The People What They Want, but it did prove that The Kinks were still alive and kicking as the 80s began, and that definitely wasn't a bad thing. A 7 from me.

Final score: 7.82 (57 votes cast, total score 446)

Join the Album Of The Week Club on Facebook to join in. The history of rock, one album at a time.

In 1967 Procol Harum emerged from the ashes of a modest Southend beat group to score an all-time best-selling single. But instead of milking A Whiter Shade Of Pale, their debut album wove epic fantasies into a proto-prog classic. We explored the story with the late Gary Brooker in 2012.

When your first single is one of the most lauded in history, there’s a possibility it can overshadow not just your inspired debut album, but your entire subsequent career. Gary Brooker, who co-wrote and sang A Whiter Shade Of Pale for Procol Harum, isn’t one to moan, however.

“I think anybody would be happy to have such a success,” he shrugs. You’d think so, but musicians in comparable situations tend to whine. Brooker’s not having that: “Oh no,” he says. “Suddenly, everything was available. It was only ever a dream to go to America at the beginning of 1967. I would imagine playing in San Francisco, but I didn’t really even know where San Francisco was! But within a few months, there we were. So it opened a lot of doors...”

As did Procol Harum, their first album, which laid some of the foundation stones of what was to become progressive, or symphonic, rock – even though Brooker thinks of it mostly as “modern blues for its time, often with a dark edge.” Recorded after the stratospheric success of A Whiter Shade Of Pale, its original release did not include that one-off smash, and sales suffered. Wasn’t that a strange decision?

“I’d entirely agree with you – today,” says Brooker. “In fact, even a year later, I would have. But the point was, that had sold enormous numbers. I should think that everybody – I’m not exaggerating, everybody – had it. So we felt it would be cheating people to make them buy it again. That was our logic. It made perfect sense at the time.”

Various reissues over the years, and even of-the-time releases in other territories, have had the track-listing meddled with, often including the underrated follow-up single Homburg too; but it’s the band’s original, pure debut album we’ll discuss here. “I have to cast my mind back 44 years,” says Brooker, “but I gave it a listen this morning and I heard a lot in it, considering...”

By ‘considering,’ he means the production. “You have to see through it – it’s disappointing. For some reason, it came out in mono. Which, as stereo had been around for a few years, is hard to believe! One can blame Denny Cordell, the producer, for that. And the four-track machine. So there are limitations, just in the sound of it.

“The guitar solo in Kaleidoscope seems to have got completely lost. When you can hear Robin Trower’s solos they’re absolutely magnificent, ground-breaking. We were live in the studio: he’d be blasting it out, BJ Wilson would be thrashing like an octopus in a bathtub – we were doing things there that people hadn’t done before. So there were high points...”

There certainly were. From the dramatic opening gambit of Conquistador (re-recorded with a symphony orchestra, a hit in ’72 – although Brooker wrote it with The Beach Boys in mind), through the strangely warped rock of Something Following Me and Cerdes (Outside The Gates Of), to the epic instrumental early set-closer Repent Walpurgis, it fuses riffs, bass lines, classical tropes and psychedelic detours, plus surrealist lyrics, into a pulsating, prescient whole.

“It wasn’t typical,” says Brooker. “Neither were we. Where the world was at was ‘smiling beat bands,’ and it certainly didn’t have that atmosphere. Probably just a year before, something like Frank Ifield had been number one. Procol Harum seemed very, very different. That’s how things felt. We were moodier. We were serious about it.”

The album’s genesis was about Brooker and Keith Reid “getting together a bunch of musicians. We had a concept of what we wanted: bluesy guitar, bass and drums, a Hammond organ, then me on piano and singing.” After cutting his teeth as a Southend teenager playing with The Paramounts (seven singles; tours with the Stones and The Beatles), Brooker had ‘retired’ at 21 to become a songwriter. “I’d been bashing around in the van on the road for years. I’d retired from active duty to sit at the piano.”

Introduced to lyricist Reid by producer Guy Stevens, the pair clicked instantly as a creative unit. Demoing their new songs, they realised Brooker was the best man to sing them. They were the core of a new band before they knew it; Brooker’s retirement was short-lived.

With a name suggested by Stevens in honour of a friend’s blue Persian cat (the cat’s name was a misspelling of the Latin phrase for “beyond these things” – Procul Harun), they sought players with influences ranging from Booker T & The MG’s to Dylan to Bach and Tchaikovsky. It took two or three months, but musicians were selected, and the debut single got them off to a flyer.

The album was well under way, but “we decided that it wasn’t quite hitting it,” Brooker recalls. “It wasn’t gelling in certain areas.” So changes were made. “We’d already auditioned a lot of people. Some had turned out to be heroin addicts; all sorts of problems. So I suggested BJ Wilson as drummer and Robin Trower as guitarist, both of whom I’d played with in The Paramounts. Everyone realised they were great. I’d known that anyway, but hadn’t wanted to say, ‘I’ve found the boys, take it or leave it!’”

The line-up was completed with bassist David Knights and Hammond player Matthew Fisher (credited as sole writer of Repent Walpurgis and a man who, along with Brooker, presumably knows something about the minutiae of writing credits after the infamous legal case regarding his contribution to A Whiter Shade Of Pale). They went back into the studio and re-recorded everything. And so a 60s landmark ensued?

“People generalise about ‘the 60s.’ It was 10 years. But ’67 was a landmark... things did change. Like the attitude of young bands creating the music. Was it all long hair, drugs and Carnaby Street? Well, yes, it was! It was part of life in that era.

“What we thought could work became different. The building blocks came from my influences of rock, blues, classical, everything – but when we were asked what ‘sort’ of music it was, we said, ‘Well, it’s our music.’ That was the only answer there was!

“‘Progressive’ rock was a title that was made up a couple of years later. I’m not sure who was the first to be actually called that. But it did involve a lot more movement and thought about the chords and the bass lines. And I think that’s evident from this album.”

Brooker finds if hard to say whether he noticed its influence on others. “We went to America: the album was very big there. They weren’t all that interested in A Whiter Shade Of Pale – they loved these songs. I’ve met musicians over the years who’ve said it really woke them up. If you’ve got somebody who has a different way of doing things and has a big off-the-wall hit, I’m sure others thought: ‘Well, we’ll try doing that!’

“I was putting my classical influences in, little quotes here and there, which strengthened it. On our second album, A Salty Dog, we decided we’d do an 18-minute-long semi-connected suite – ‘the great work,’ we called it. Sound effects; an orchestra. That was very unusual at the time, and after that King Crimson and Yes showed you can do anything...”

Reid’s lyrics were also unusual, displaying a determination to open up doors of perception. People still debate their meaning. Try A Christmas Camel, which offers not only ‘some Arabian sheikh most grand impersonates a hot-dog stand,’ but also ‘some Arabian oil well impersonates a padded cell.’

“Don’t forget I start that one with, ‘My Amazon six-triggered bride…’” Brooker points out. “They were challenging, yes, but that’s what I liked about them. Different, yes; yet I understood all the colours, the images. Everything about them rang a chord with me. I didn’t find it weird. On reflection, how on Earth can you start a song singing about your Amazon six-triggered bride? Or sing, ‘Outside the gates of Cerdes sits the two-pronged unicorn’?

“I wouldn’t say I understood them, in the sense of seeing exactly what was being said, but in Keith’s words there were a lot of references to mysterious women. There’s often a mysterious woman involved.”

Was such material harder to sing than ‘ooh baby baby…’? “The question is not was it difficult, but was it in fact a stroke of genius to be able to sing those things and make them believable? I’m being immodest here, but I made those things sound like: ‘Yeah, here’s a lyric, here’s a song.’

“When Keith gave me Something Following Me, I just thought: ‘Well, it’s the blues.’ This guy’s got a problem, but it’s not that he woke up this morning and his car had gone. It’s just that this guy’s tombstone is following him everywhere and he’s right on the edge. Some of the great minds have pondered over what they mean, these ‘hard to understand’ lyrics – but they’re easy also.”

Robin Trower says he hasn’t heard the album for decades and “never really listens to any bands of the progressive rock genre.” He does recall: “The sessions for that album were relaxed and fun, and the combination of players worked very well, with everyone slotting in easily. I find Keith’s lyrics very hypnotic, and Gary came up with excellent complementary music for them. I don’t think I could bear to listen to it today though, as I know I’d be unhappy with my guitar playing.”

Brooker isn’t. He praises Knight’s bass (“fantastic”), highlights the contrasts (“Mabel was light relief between all the drama”) and says that when Procol Harum play live now, and 20-year-olds call out for She Wandered Through The Garden Fence, a part of him thinks, ‘Oh, it was worth it...’

Just the start of a career that’s been so much more than the bridal train of A Whiter Shade Of Pale, that debut record – a prog dawn – has been praised by everyone from Jimmy Page to Elton John. Paul McCartney would bring the other three Beatles and Pete Townshend to see Procol Harum play.

“They liked what we were doing,” says Brooker. “From the writing point of view, it was a semi-conscious bid to do something that wasn’t being done, and perhaps everybody else picked up on that.”

The godfathers of so much that excelled about British rock in the decade that followed their original 1976 demise – Gillan, Whitesnake, Rainbow, Black Sabbath – perhaps the greatest gift Deep Purple bequeathed the world was to help bring forth the exquisite talent and indomitable spirit of American singer Ronnie James Dio.

Before Ritchie Blackmore worked with Ronnie Dio, the guitarist had envisaged what eventually became the first Rainbow album as little more than a side project; a one-off solo escapade inspired by Purple’s rejection of a new Blackmore piece he titled 16th Century Greensleeves – the kind of stomping pomp-rock hauteur that Purple had once considered their music fortress, but now, in the wake of the white-soul groove Glenn Hughes and David Coverdale were more keen on exploring, was distinctly old hat.

As Blackmore said in 1983: “I left because I’d met up with Ronnie Dio, and he was so easy to work with. He was originally just going to do one track of a solo LP, but we ended up doing the whole LP in three weeks, which I was very excited about.”

Or as Dio would later put it: “I was always a dreamer type of kid. I immersed myself into fantasy situations by reading science fiction and things that would let my imagination run somewhere. I think there’s a tremendous kinship between science fiction and the mythological era, and I applied all of that to my lyrics.”

Well he did after joining up with Blackmore, anyway. Before that, Ronnie Dio occupied a lot of different musical spaces – and times.

The only child of a poor immigrant Italian family, Ronald James Padavona was born in Upstate New York on July 10, 1942 – although for most of his career he insisted he’d been born in 1949. As the newly installed frontman of Rainbow, he may have been ballsy enough to stand in front of thousands and conduct musical lightning, but Dio the fledging rock star didn’t like Rainbow fans knowing he was already 33 by the time he’d been given the opportunity to do so.

Mainly it came down to respect, such a vital component in the self-esteem of Italian-American culture. Ronnie Dio was a man with impeccable manners, generous with his time, funny and kind. Unless you showed him disrespect. He never forgive Ritchie Blackmore for not giving him equal billing in Rainbow.

Still furious years later, he told me how “when we first got together it was agreed the group would be called Ritchie Blackmore And Ronnie James Dio’s Rainbow. But when the first album came out, there it was: ‘Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow’! What was that about?”

Raised as a Roman Catholic, Ronnie James Padavona’s real religion was music. He had already learned to play bass, piano and trumpet long before he knew he could sing, and joined his first band, the Vegas Kings when he was 15.

Showing the same gritty determination to lead by example that would characterise his whole career, he’d soon swapped the bass for a microphone as the group metamorphosed into first Ronnie & The Ramblers and then Ronnie And The Red Caps; hit YouTube and you can still find young Ronnie fly-me-to-the-moon-ing in tux and bow tie.

There was no denying that incredible voice, though. Singing just came naturally. “Unlike learning to play an instrument, it just seemed to be something that was there immediately,” he told me, “a gift”. Playing the trumpet gave him an edge, he recalled. “Partly to do with knowing how to breathe, partly to do with the fact that the trumpet has its own voice, its own way of phrasing.”

By the late 60s he’d also changed his name, after a notorious mafia figure, Johnny Dio, “because it sounded cool”, the band becoming Ronnie Dio And The Prophets. It wasn’t until ’67 and the summer of love that he grew his hair, stopped shaving, started smoking dope and formed his first rock band, the Electric Elves – later shrunk to Elf.

On stage Dio would stand there banging a cowbell, the band pulling out all the stops with covers of Black Dog, War Pigs, Aqualung… or when the mood took them and the audience demanded hits, he’d give them Lennon’s Imagine, The Beatles’ Can’t Buy Me Love… anything to keep the party going and the paid gigs coming in. Until the band began writing their own stuff.

“It was the first band we had which tried to make it with its own original material,” Dio told me. It was also the first time the singer really got noticed, when Elf was signed to a new record label formed by English rock goliaths Deep Purple. Ian Paice and Roger Glover produced Elf’s first, eponymously titled album, and in 1974 they were invited to support Purple on a US tour.

So far, so good. What’s less known is how much closer – in loose-lipped style – Elf were to original good-time Gillan-era Purple than to the kind of medieval metal of Dio-era Rainbow.

“The kind of songs I wrote in Rainbow all had a more Renaissance-style aspect to them,” Ronnie would tell me. “Ritchie and I had always seen Rainbow as being musically a meeting between heavy rock and heavy classical sorts of themes. What I wrote wasn’t poetry, but it was written to say something more than ‘Baby I love you’.”

Listening to tracks like Self Portrait from their 1975 debut Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, you could hardly argue with that. Described by Blackmore as like “a cross between Bach’s Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring and Hendrix’s Manic Depression”, Dio clearly means it when he sings lines like, ‘Paint me a picture of eyes that never see/With flashes of lightning that burn for only me’.

Contrast that, though, with Black Swampy Water, the opening track of the third and final Elf album, Trying To Burn The Sun, released the same year: ‘Uh, back in the wood/Where it’s good/Well I saw me a child/She was wild/Like a lady going all out.’ This was set to a good-timey Stones/Faces barrelhouse groove. It’s a great, fun track, actually, well sung, well played, but about as far from Bach as Turner and his Overdrive.

Yet it was Elf – minus guitarist Steve Edwards – that Blackmore co-opted to play on that first album. Indeed you can hear the Elf steamroller going full pelt on classic Rainbow tracks like Man On The Silver Mountain, and you can hear how much wiser-time soul they injected into the dreamy Catch The Rainbow. But that was Ronnie Dio. Someone who’d learned to roll with the punches and always knew exactly what he was doing.

Doug Thaler was the keyboard player in the Electric Elves from ’67 until a car crash in ’71 that left guitarist Nick Pantas dead and Thaler in hospital for months. He recalls a pre-fame Dio as “someone who was always very driven.

He had been trying for success for a lot of years before he finally got his break with Rainbow. By the time Elf got their deal with the Purple label, Ronnie had already released half a dozen singles on half a dozen labels. He was very frustrated. I think he was worried he’d missed his chance.”

Thaler confirms that it was only after Dio began working with Blackmore that he developed his penchant for writing about there being ‘no sun in the shadow of the wizard’, as he did on Rainbow classics like Stargazer. “He only became a heavy metal guy after he’d spent time touring with Purple and started in with Rainbow. But Ronnie was a great guy. He was one of those people that if he met you in a club he’d remember your name for the rest of his life. He was a great guy to hang out with, a guy’s guy.”

On stage, Dio took the same highly personal approach to building his relationship with the audience.

As he told me: “When I stand on stage and sing, I like to imagine I’m looking into the eyes of every single person in the audience, that I’m singing specifically for them. And when I’m introducing a song, I never shout, I simply speak to them as though we were having a private conversation.

"Partly, it’s because I’ve always hated frontmen that simply shout and leer at an audience, treating them as though they were one big blob. I’ve always thought that was so rude. And mainly it’s because I take what I do very seriously. Don't get me wrong, I like to have fun up there. But I really do mean every word I sing or say. And I want people to know that.”

It was the second Rainbow album, though, Rainbow Rising, that catapulted the band into the annals of rock history. Released in 1976, just weeks after MkIII Purple’s final show in April, and featuring what is now considered the quintessential Rainbow line-up – all Dio’s former Elf sidemen replaced by rock veterans, drummer Cozy Powell, bassist Jimmy Bain and keyboard player Tony Carey – Rainbow Rising set the benchmark by which heavy metal albums would be judged throughout the rest of the 70s.

Certainly it was one of the best albums Dio would ever sing on. “Yeah, I’d agree with that,” he said nonchalantly. Unfortunately, with the line-up fracturing again (neither Bain nor Carey survived the cull) before the recording of a follow-up could begin, the band’s potential was never fully explored.

“It was a shame, but that’s the way Ritchie liked to work, in order to keep things fresh,” Dio told me, straight-faced. Then once the tape recorder was turned off, what “an asshole” Ritchie was.

“People still tell me how surprised they were when I left the band shortly after. The truth is, I was kinda surprised myself,” Dio joked years later. As he confessed: “Ultimately, it was Ritchie’s choice, yes. But it was also mine, in that I knew I couldn’t give him what he wanted.

"The answer lies in what the band did after I left, which was singles like Since You’ve Been Gone. It’s a great song and it was a big hit for them, but it’s not one I would have written or sung with them. It was mainstream pop-rock, and that’s where Ritchie wanted to go. If I’d wanted to go there too, then I’m sure we could have continued working together. But I didn’t.”

The irony: that a straightforward, chorus-heavy rock'n'roll belter like Since You’ve Been Gone would have fitted ‘whoa-yeah-mama’-era Elf like a velvet glove wrapped around an iron fist. Yet another strand of the Deep Purple family circle left to tantalise the ‘What if…’ brigade.

The original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock 249, in May 2018

We’ve all done stuff we’re unhappy with, but when you’re a musician, it usually means it’s heard by thousands or even millions of people – and once it’s out in the world, there’s no taking it back. Here are some of rock and metal’s finest taking a dump on the songs they wrote and wish they hadn’t.

Jonathan Davis (Korn)

“All In The Family [from 1998’s Follow The Leader] is the worst song ever. It’s horrible. We were all drunk in the studio and I was trying to rap. At the time, we were having a good time, but now I just cringe. I’ve got nothing against Fred [Durst, co-vocalist], it just sucks! We were out of our minds drunk! It shouldn’t have made the record.” (via Metal Hammer)

Lemmy

“I’m sick to death of Ace Of Spades now. We didn’t become fossilised after that record, you know, we’ve had quite a few good releases since then. But the fans want to hear it so we still play it every night. For myself, I’ve had enough of that song.” (via White Line Fever)

Kerry King (ex-Slayer)

“There’s a handful of songs in our history that I’m like, ‘Goddamn, I hate that song.’ Like, I fucking despise Desire and I hate Cleanse The Soul.” (via Rolling Stone)

Ronnie James Dio

[On 1983’s Rainbow In The Dark]: “It’s a song I really dislike. When it was finished, I announced to everyone that I was going to take a razor blade and cut the tape up. I went for the razor blade and they went, ‘No, no! Don’t!’ For me it was too poppy for the album [Holy Diver].”

Kurt Cobain (Nirvana)

“I can barely get through [Smells Like] Teen Spirit. I literally want to throw my guitar down and walk away. I can’t pretend to have a good time playing it.” (via Rolling Stone)

James Hetfield (Metallica)

[Before playing Ride The Lightning track Escape in 2012 for the very first time]: “A song that we never wanted to play live, ever, is now on the setlist. You can sing along if you want – it might help! No, don’t do it! Don’t do it, Lars! Are there any other songs left that we haven’t played?”

Robb Flynn (Machine Head)

“There are songs on every record of mine that I don’t like, even The Blackening. Slanderous sucks!” Machine Head’s Robb Flynn (via Metal Hammer)

Chino Moreno

[On Back To School (Mini Maggit)]: “I remember [the record label] sitting me down and pointing out Papa Roach and Linkin Park had sold six million albums while we hadn’t sold a tenth of that. To me, they were saying they wanted some rap-rock, and at the time I was already way over making music like that. My response was no way at first, and then they pointed out the chorus of Pink Maggit was so great, so they asked me to rewrite it as a three-minute song. They kept hounding me about it so I was like ‘Watch this,’ because formulaic songs are so easy to write.”

Shawn “Clown” Crahan

“[All Hope Is Gone is] my least favourite [Slipknot album]: no tension, no pain – just efficiency. Being able to go home, able to sleep, is not good, not for what we do.” (via Google Play)

Amy Lee (Evanscence)

“There have been times where I just hate My Immortal. You listen to your old stuff like, ‘Eurgh!’ I was 19 years old, and I didn’t even know what I was talking about, I was so dramatic! It’s like reading your diary. But I’m over it!” (via Music Week)

Joe Duplantier (Gojira)

[On Flying Whales] “It starts with a super-duper long intro that, honestly, if I’m going to listen to the song, I skip. It’s such a drag! It leads into that main riff, which dictates the tempo of the song. To this day, we don’t understand what’s so special about that riff […] Then the lyrics are like this crazy, mystical bum that lives in a cave and says, ‘Oh, I wanna reach the whales!’… When we play it every night, I’m wondering, ‘What’s up with this song? Why do people want to hear this song?’” (via Metal Hammer)

Paolo Gregoletto (Trivium)

[On The Rising] “What pisses me off about the song is that it kicked off another song [2006’s The Crusade album] that I liked way more, which was Broken One. We were at a weird point and, when we had the song Anthem written for The Crusade, everyone was really excited about the song. I think there was the suggestion of, ‘Hey, let’s have another song like that!’ There really wasn’t a cohesive idea of what the record was going to be.”

Dave Mustaine (Megadeth)

“Probably the dumbest song Megadeth ever did was Crush ’Em… We’d had huge success with our prior album [1997’s Cryptic Writings], big singles and all of that. That had never happened before. So we figured, why not give the label and our management more to work with, since the last one did so well on radio? That was a huge mistake… it didn’t work.” (via Noisecreep)

The early 80s were a time of uncertainty for Don Henley. “I felt tremendous pressure, not to measure up to the success of the Eagles, but simply to write and record without them,” he tells Classic Rock, in an exclusive interview. “Having a solo career was something I’d never considered. I felt unmoored, adrift.”

The Eagles had split in 1980, and all the members began to pursue solo careers. Henley’s debut album, 1982’s I Can’t Stand Still, had been a promising, if tentative, step forward. “I think it was a decent first effort,” he says. “In retrospect, a couple of the songs don’t hold up, but that’s true of all my albums.”

Around the time Henley started to gather material for the follow-up, in 1983, the drum machine was redefining the sound of music. “I had mixed emotions about the new electronic instruments,” he admits. “But Danny [Kortchmar, his post-Eagles collaborator] was knowledgeable about all the modern gear and was keen to incorporate it into our writing and recording process.”

Little did Henley know that a LinnDrum machine, acquired by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, was about to propel his solo career to a new high. On his YouTube channel, Campbell recalled how his first experiments with it inspired the track for Boys Of Summer. “I stayed up all night typing in tambourines and claps and snares. I got a little pattern going, then I came up with that melody line on the keyboard.”

Campbell added guitar and bass, then a week later he played his demo for Tom Petty and producer Jimmy Iovine. But it was rejected as a possible Heartbreakers song for being “too jazzy”. Campbell put the tape on the shelf, and there it might have stayed..

Athough Henley and Campbell have different memories about how they first met, Campbell recalled bringing a cassette of the track to Henley’s house. “We sat at opposite ends of a long table, and he put the cassette on. He didn’t tap his foot or move his head. Just sat there, with his arms folded. He listened all the way through. Ithought he hated it. He goes: ‘Okay, I’ll see what I can do with that.’ And I left.”

Henley says: “People I work with will tell you that I’m not very demonstrative, at least until most of the pieces fall into place. I liked the percussion Mike had created with the machines. I liked the guitar sounds a lot, and the synthesiser lines. All the layers merged into a texture that was really evocative. It just needed a little arranging. Once I’d figured out what went where, the melody and the lyrics began flow pretty quickly.”

The Boys Of Summer was the title of Roger Kahn’s best-selling 1972 book about baseball. But Henley’s reference reached back further. “Even though I am a baseball fan, I had never heard of that book. My inspiration came from the Dylan Thomas poem, which begins: ‘I see the boys of summer in their ruin.’”

Henley’s lyric yearned with a similar ache of lost innocence and youth. Was it written to a specific person? “Some of my songs are, but not that one,” Henley says. “Regardless of the inspiration, or the muse, I try to keep the themes universal. It’s best if songs have an element of ambiguity.”

In the final verse, the memorable line ‘Out on the road today, I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac’ effectively summed up a whole generation and how they’d squandered their hopeful vision.

“It was a gift,” Henley says. “It came from that mysterious place that lyrics sometimes come from. I had been stuck on the bridge section; couldn’t get the words, the melody. One afternoon, I was driving on Interstate 405, somewhere south of Sunset, the cassette of the track blaring through the sound system. I looked to my left and there it was: a 1979 Cadillac Seville with a ‘Deadhead’ sticker on the back. It just struck me as ironic, paradoxical, with a little touch of nostalgia, and it went right into the song.”

Working at Record One Studio in Los Angeles, Henley assembled a band of top musicians, including Kortchmar, Steve Porcaro, and Campbell on guitar. Artists can often grow attached to demos (it’s known as ‘demo-itis’), and Henley came in set on recreating Campbell’s track, with all its quirky, offhand charm.

“Mike’s one of those guys who doesn’t like to do the same thing twice,” Henley says. “And I’m one of those guys who, whenever I’m struck by a piece of music, and am inspired to write lyrics and melody, I want any recreation of that piece of music to be a clone of what moved me in the first place.”

As they revamped the track, they encountered technical glitches – a hiccup with the LinnDrum’s memory, an analogue tape malfunction that required meticulous gluing and pasting – but they finally got it down.

Then Henley decided to change the key. “Danny always pushed me to sing each song in as high a key as I could,” he says. “He believed that more emotion got transmitted that way, that it was more impactful.” So they went back into the studio, trying to recapture that “first-pass magic” again. “Mike was not happy about that, either, but he came through,” Henley says.

Released in October 1984, as the first single from Henley’s second album, Building The Perfect Beast, it took off immediately. It went to No.5 in the US, and was Henley’s biggest single in the UK, making it to No.12. It benefitted from the moody black-and-white video, directed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino. “He was the only video director I worked with who took the time to consult with me about the song,” Henley says. The heavy-rotation clip swept the 1985 MTV Video Music Awards.

For Henley, his signature song remains “one of the best I’ve co-written”.

“The song is almost forty years old now,” he says. “It’s just another reminder that life is short, but it’s very wide.”

In 2001, this writer joined Deftones for two Spanish dates in support of their album, White Pony. As winners of a shiny new Grammy and a busy touring schedule to look forward to, life was good for the Sacramento five-piece. Well, more or less…

“One of the first shows I went to was Depeche Mode, on the Violator tour," says Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno. ”I was only 14, but at that age gigs are overwhelming."

We’re sitting in an ice-cold dressing room in the Polideportivo Anoeta venue in San Sebastián, a city on the coast of Northern Spain. Either the heating is broken or the building is staffed entirely by tauntauns. Shorts were a bad idea.

This evening, Deftones – Stephen Carpenter (guitar), Chi Cheng (bass), Abe Cunningham (drums) and Frank Delgado (turntables) – will play before a few thousand fans on the fourth European date of their Back to School tour. That’s all to come, but right now, the only thing on Moreno’s mind is how Basildon’s most famous sons impacted his life.

"Dave Gahan was bigger than life and captivated the crowd and the way he held himself onstage was mind-blowing,” he continues. "I think I was influenced by his persona – not so much his movement – but the way he made audiences think he was suave and cool at the same time. I want to convey that emotion."

It wasn’t just electro-pop bands that caught the teenage Moreno’s attention. Nosey neighbours may have caught him aping the gladioli-waving, hearing-aid-sporting vocalist Morrissey on the steps of his home.

"I used to hold a broom handle like a microphone stand and sing songs by The Smiths,” he admits. "I did Shoplifters Of The World Unite and other Smiths stuff. I wouldn't actually sing them because I had my headphones on, but I'd pretend I was Morrissey. That's the beauty of being onstage now – I can appreciate what the crowd must feel, because I felt that too.”

Let's go back 24 hours or so. The band have just checked out of their hotel in Madrid and are making their way to their tour bus. It's a short hop to La Riviera, the venue for tonight's show. Capacity: 2,500.

While having a mooch around their plush tour bus, it's easy to see why bands – and our hosts in particular – will kill time with some pot, a few beers and some more pot. There's also a library of films to watch: GI Jane, Mission: Impossible, Days of Thunder and every movie Will Smith has ever made.

"It's always the same shit," says the singer, with a hint of disdain. "Every bus in Europe has the same shit. Will Smith's movies, too. People must think he's cool shit or something. I just cannot stand his shitty movies. I hate them."

"I like them," says Carpenter, pointedly ignoring his friend and taking a drag on his spliff. "Doesn't matter to me anyway."

Moreno doesn't hate everything Will Smith has done. His mood lightens when he talks about Smith's '90s sitcom The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air.

"That was the cool shit," he says. "Carlton was funny. He just wanted to be English so bad. I mean, he wore a necktie."

As we arrive at La Riviera, it begins to rain on the early bird fans who've queued along the driveway since breakfast. Once indoors, the band dump their bags and feast on noodles and chicken satay. It's good stuff and a far cry from the food they'd eat while living hand-to-mouth on tour.

"We used to get a $5 per diem on tour, and I always used to go to this place that you could get a burrito for a buck," says Carpenter. "I'd get two of those and a 40oz bottle of beer and make that last all day. It's all I'd eat. Burrito and beer before the show and a burrito after the show. We did that for a long time. We had it bad."

He pushes the remaining food around on his plate, before adding: "On one tour, all we'd eat were ramen noodles and get headaches from eating them so much."

And how is today's freshly-prepared lunch?

"The food in Europe sucks," he shrugs. "Especially when you've got Mad Cow disease and Foot and Mouth disease. That shit is non-stop. If I have to eat bread, butter or cheese again, I'll go crazy. I can't believe that there's no Taco Bell restaurants in Europe. We'd have Mexican food every day."

Following their meal – which was delicious, actually – the band attend to the first real business of the day: soundcheck.

The scene where Spinal Tap get hopelessly trapped in a maze of Cleveland corridors may as well have been set in this huge building. After getting our bearings, we find our way into the main room, which looks like the set of The Flintstones. The darkened, dome-shaped room is decorated with boulders, palm trees and small fountains, but this moment of spa-like tranquillity is shattered by Carpenter sound-checking his rig.

Before the doors open, Moreno walks off to do the first of many interviews about their latest album White Pony. But first things first, though, as he gets a little marijuana from his guitarist. His first interviewer, a feisty lad from Spanish telly, is quickly placated by the herb's sweet, potent smell.

Along the corridor is Chi Cheng, quietly chatting to a member of their crew about the logistics of tonight's show. He often runs his hands over his cropped hair. In the name of journalism, I needed to know more.

When asked why exactly he cut his long dreadlocks off, he replies quietly: "Personal reasons. I've had long hair longer than most of our fans have been alive. 16 years! I just needed a change."

He waits a moment and grins.

"I cut my hair short because I heard Metallica were auditioning for bass players," he deadpans. "They still didn't give me the gig. And Rage Against The Machine didn't like the way I sang, so no chance there either.”

While the band are on something of a successful streak – picking up a Grammy for 'Best Metal Performance' for Elite – the band are keen to distance themselves from the nu metal label. It's odd, given it's a genre that they helped birth with Korn.

"I knew that both our bands were doing shit that had never been heard before," says Moreno, returning from his Spanish press duties for the day. "You could see it in people's faces when we played shows like that. You'd stare at the crowd and people were in awe of Korn. I certainly felt it the first time we saw them play."

"One of our first shows with them was a club in Los Angeles called The Dragonfly," he remembers. "I never knew what they looked like. We were unloading our gear and me and Steph were arguing outside of the club and I went to throw my skateboard at him as hard as I could. I didn't realise that Jonathan (Davis, Korn frontman) was standing watching us at the time. He said that was his first memory of me. He said, 'I thought you were a mean motherfucker!'."

What were your first impressions of Korn?

"They were so intense, man," he remembers. "I couldn't believe it, because Jonathan was really quiet all day and was just sitting on his own, twisting his dreads. They had a force I can't even begin to describe."

Cheng says that their formative years were especially tough. Long before Deftones experienced their first flush of success, their typical audience would be two men and a dog called Juan.

"Well, Juan supported us from the start and helped sell merchandise," laughs the bassist. "The two guys bothered me a lot, but that dog, man, he was cool. I think the energy that you put into a show should be the same, whether it's in front of that dog or a few thousand people. It should affect you one way or another. If you can make the dog's concert-going experience feel special, then that's what matters."

The influence of Deftones' 1995 Adrenaline debut – together with Korn's self-titled album – runs through the DNA of many new bands today.

"I had an inkling when all these bands starting popping up doing what we were doing, we were onto something," says the bassist. "I take it as a compliment that people dug what we did. I could choose to hate bands who copy what we do, but I choose not to because it's cool. I embrace it.”

Several hours go by and one-by-one, the band begin to change into sports gear. Don’t worry, they’re not about to unveil a new Nike-rock look before their Spanish fans this evening. They’re actually preparing for a quick workout with Mike Heatlie, the short-but-tough personal trainer who has been employed to help keep them fit on this European run of shows. The band do look fitter, but that’s not to say that they’re all ecstatic with their new exercise regimen. Cunningham, for example, has the look of a broken man.

“Mike's been keeping us in shape, but last night he took away our beer," says the drummer. ”So we have five or six cases of beer a night that are remaining unopened. It sucks.”

While his bandmates are put through their paces by their personal trainer, Chino – back in his baggy jeans and a crisp white t-shirt – relaxes and looks back on the band’s early shows in the Sacramento area.

“They were insane,” he smiles. “People didn't get what we were doing, but by the time we'd finished, they dug us, you know what I'm saying? But as for this fitness shit, when I first started singing for the Deftones, I was this 150-pound, wiry bastard who threw himself all over the stage. We're getting older and it's harder to maintain that energy as much, but the attitude is still there, I think.”

“We are feeling more energetic these days,” he adds. "It doesn't come easy, that's all.”

The crew have completed the change over from their support act, Linkin Park, and their tour manager pokes his head around the door and says it's time to play. The stage is a short walk away from their dressing room and they’re already a few bars into opener Engine No. 9 before you can say “cerveza”.

Their set is a carefully curated mix of songs from their three albums, front-loaded with songs that ensure the venue’s barrier security are busy for much of the set: My Own Summer (Shove It), Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away), Around The Fur, and Feiticeira. The pace and power don’t let up until they begin Teenager, a delicate White Pony track which allows Cunningham and Cheng a few minutes to take a breather and crack open a beer.

“This is a chance to get drunk,” gasps Cheng. “Or at least cool down for a minute.”

The show ends with the volatile power of 7 Words, which includes snippets of Weezer’s Say It Ain’t So and Undone – The Sweater Song. By the time the band make their way into their dressing room, Chino looks absolutely spent. They’ve got an overnight drive to San Sebastián, which will take around four to five hours. At least they’ve got somewhere to sleep and a driver, which is a lot more than they had in the past.

“We'd battle to stay awake," laughs Cheng. "The trick was to get as drunk as you could straight after the show, so you wouldn't be able to drive. Everyone just wanted to sleep after we'd played. It's gotten a hell of a lot easier.”

Can I shock you? Deftones aren’t what you’d call morning people. Or lunchtime people. It’s four in the afternoon and the sun is absolutely beating down outside today's venue, the Polideportivo Anoeta. Some of the band have only just got up and have made the vaguest of plans to get moving.

Moreno is sleepy and has no plans to explore the coastal city. He casually reveals that he was the victim of a robbery last night.

“Someone stole my belt – as I was wearing it, too," he says incredulously. "They know I've got a problem keeping my pants up as it is. I had to borrow a belt buckle.”

Carpenter appears from out of nowhere and begins to laugh at his bandmate’s bad luck.

“It happens a lot – the punters keep stealing Chino's clothes,” he chuckles, then pauses with mock seriousness. “That's fucking rude.”

Carpenter laughs.

“I would never go into the crowd and just take someone's shit," counters Moreno. "I understand if they want something of mine as a memento..."

Carpenter laughs some more.

The tension between Moreno and Carpenter is palpable. Their creative friction loomed large in the studio while making White Pony, and they've clearly checked it with their luggage at LAX and brought it all the way to Europe.

In the red corner, and standing at six feet tall in his socks, is Camillo Wong Moreno. Offstage, he appears shy yet laid back. In the blue corner, we have Stephen Carpenter, height unknown. Judging by our recent interactions, he's a man who treats interviews with the enthusiasm of someone cleaning up cat vomit. He also has a confident manner and a sense of humour that could rub certain people up the wrong way (certain people, in this case, who may have been the victim of a belt theft).

“We still fight now," says Moreno. "But man, we used to fight a lot when we first started. Over the silliest shit, too. Once, somebody threw a toilet roll on the stage and I think the idea was for it to unravel mid-air. It didn't do that though. It ended up smacking me right in the middle of the face. It hurt, man. When I came offstage, I was so pissed off, and Stephen was just laughing at me the whole time. I mean, I'd be the same in a similar situation. But he turned his video camera on me and I just went for him.”

As for bassist Cheng, a man who pummels his bass like it was caught breaking into his home, radiates an air of calm offstage. He explains that the band have an easy method when it comes to dealing with intra-band tensions.

“If a grudge is going to escalate, you might as well sock each other out and get it over with," he explains. "But that's not to say if someone's having problems on the road, we'll ignore him. We want that son of a bitch to really hurt so we make it worse for him. Saying that, we're a pretty good support system. We're like brothers.”

Frank Delgado, on the other hand, is quieter than a church mouse. The DJ joined the Deftones full-time after the recording of Around the Fur, and as a result, he’s nowhere near as jaded when it comes to touring.

"From what I've learned, touring can either kill you or you can turn it to your advantage," he offers between drags on a cigarette. "Right now, I'm stuck in-between.”

To stay sane on the road, Delgado is something of a culture vulture and will make a point of seeing the sights in every city they pass through.

“I like to stay fit, too,” he adds. “If I was at home, I'd just be flipping through the channels on TV. But we normally kill time by drinking beer and smoking hash. We've been watching a lot of Ali G, too. He's funny, man.”

Hash consumption is a Deftones' ritual. Carpenter points out that it's merely something to do to pass the time.

“Bands who are on the road do drugs,” he shrugs. "What else is there to do? Sit around and read a book? That's boring.”

"How about getting high and reading a book?" asks Moreno.

“When you get high, you want to go put some music on and go to sleep," Carpenter responds. “Who'd reach for a book? If that sounds bad, don't pay any attention to it, because we like to talk a lot of shit.”

Pre-show, there’s a party-like atmosphere in their dressing room. Cunningham – who’s customised his t-shirt with ‘80s-style scissored side vents – high-fives his bandmates and crew, while treating everyone to 'Faderade' cocktails – that’s Gatorade and vodka, if you’re not into mixology. The dressing room stereo blasts out the anthem Sister Christian by AOR titans Night Ranger. The vibe is immaculate.

“I think people have a misconception about what life on the road is really like," says Cheng over the music and chatter. "But it's the same as any occupational life. You can choose to enjoy it or you can choose to not enjoy it. We do both, at times. And at the moment, we're having an absolute blast.”

Rivers Cuomo was a student at Santa Monica College when the chorus melody for Buddy Holly came to him while walking across campus.

Having moved from Connecticut to Los Angeles with his high school band Avant Garde (who changed their name to Zoom), Cuomo had dreams of becoming a metal star. He had the hair, the chops and the drive, but they failed to attract any interest from the music industry.

After Zoom broke up, he played in a string of bands – Fuzz, The Truth, Sixty Wrong Sausages – and set himself the challenge of writing 50 songs before committing himself fully to another band. Working part-time at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard had a profound influence on his musical tastes, and his head was turned by alternative rock.

There, he started listening to bands like Nirvana, Sonic Youth and the Pixies, and became a huge fan of The Beatles and the Beach Boys. By early 1992, he'd more or less reached his goal of writing 50 songs and formed Weezer; it was inevitable that their sound was potent blend of the bands he'd absorbed while replenishing stock on the shop’s shelves.

Former bassist Matt Sharp is credited with helping steer Cuomo away from using any songs he'd written in Fuzz for his new band, encouraging him instead to focus on the pop hooks that he had a knack for creating.

"I think that’s where Matt’s head was at, at the time,” drummer Patrick Wilson told Rolling Stone. “ ’Yeah, let’s not be grunge. Let’s be more like the Beach Boys. But loud."

While juggling his studies and employment, Cuomo found time to be part of his college choir. There, a friend named Steve Graff loaned him a Korg keyboard which inspired him to write a new wave song for what would become Weezer's debut album.

In the liner notes for his solo release Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo, he was inspired to write Buddy Holly in defence of his choir friend Kyung He, who was made the butt of a joke by his bandmates.

"They were the 'homies dissin' my girl'," he wrote. "I rarely wrote lyrics about tension between me and the guys in the band because I thought it would be awkward for us all to perform those songs together. In this case, though, it didn’t seem like a big deal."

And as for the opening line – 'What's with these homies dissin' my girl? Why do they gotta front?' – Cuomo puts this down to listening to lots of N.W.A., Ice Cube and Public Enemy at the time.

The song's chorus wasn't originally anchored by '50s rock'n'roll star Buddy Holly or American actor Mary Tyler Moore. He'd initially toyed with using the dancing duo Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but struggled with the reference points. It was while walking to class that he scrapped the Fred Astaire reference and replaced it with the late rock'n'roll icon who wore thick black frames, just like Cuomo.

By the following year, the band had signed a deal with Geffen. They travelled to New York City to record their debut with The Cars frontman Ric Ocasek. While in the studio, it became apparent that the Cuomo intended to shelve the "dirgey" song and keep it for Weezer's second album.

Ocasek felt it had a place on their debut. He had fond memories of falling in love with Buddy Holly and The Crickets' 1957 single That'll Be The Day when he was a child, and he was convinced this quirky song was worth committing to tape.

In the book Rivers' Edge: The Weezer Story, Ocasek recalls: "I was like, 'Rivers, we can talk about it. Do it anyway, and if you don't like it when it's done, we won't use it. But I think you should try. You did write it and it is a great song.'"

Sharp remembers the subtle charm offensive led by the producer a little differently.

"Ric said we'd be stupid to leave it off the album. We'd come into the [Electric Lady] studio in the morning and find little pieces of paper with doodles on them: WE WANT BUDDY HOLLY."

He succeeded in getting Cuomo to reconsider his feelings on the song, which was released the following year as a single on September 7 – Buddy Holly's birthday – and changed the path of their career.

The seeds for the iconic video were sown two years prior when Cuomo caught the promo for Nirvana's single In Bloom, directed by Kevin Kerslake. Shot on grainy, black-and-white stock, the fun video parodies 1960s entertainment shows, with the show’s host introducing the band as "thoroughly all right and decent fellas" before they perform the song.

"I was overcome by jealousy and admiration for Kurt Cobain as we watched him crooning in his subtly goofy way with Buddy Holly glasses," wrote Cuomo in a 2020 Riverpedia entry. "My feeling was, 'That’s exactly what I would do if I had thought of it, but for some reason I didn’t!' Ah... Kurt, you’re so awesome, I hate you!”

When it was time to make their own video for Buddy Holly, the band enlisted filmmaker Spike Jonze, who had previously directed the dog-friendly clip for Undone – The Sweater Song earlier that year.

The concept, on paper, was relatively simple. Weezer would play a wholesome in-house band at Arnold's, the 1950s diner in the sitcom Happy Days.

Henry Winkler, the actor who played the show's star, Arthur Fonzarelli aka 'The Fonz', gave his permission for his likeness to be used in the video. Thanks to the miracle of editing, the whole Happy Days gang can be spotted watching Weezer play on the purpose-built Arnold’s set. The band even convinced Al Molinaro to make a cameo as grumpy diner owner Big Al Delvecchio.

"For the most part, it looked really good," Wilson told Rational Alternative Digital. "I think the thing that makes it really come off is the fact that Al is in it."

Remarkably, the video was included as a bonus feature on the Windows 95 installation CD-ROM. The band were initially unaware that the label allowed it to be included in a 'Fun Stuff' folder on an estimated 40 million copies.

“I was furious because at the time I was like, ‘How are they allowed to do this without our permission?’" Wilson told Magnet. “Turns out it was one of the greatest things that could have happened to us. Can you imagine that happening today? It’s like, there’s one video on YouTube, and it’s your video.”

Yet despite the massive surge in popularity, the band's newfound success and perception following the Buddy Holly video led Cuomo to question Weezer's place in the world and felt resentment at having to go on tour.

“I seriously thought we were the next Nirvana,” Cuomo told Rolling Stone. “And I thought the world was going to perceive us that way, like a super important, super powerful, heartbreaking heavy rock band, and as serious artists. That’s how I saw us.”

Despite dropping out of the Guitar Institute of Technology before Weezer's debut was released, the frontman decided he wanted to go back to school to resume his music studies. He enrolled at Harvard to study classical composition, but changed his major to English Literature. Even though he enjoyed a life of relative anonymity there, he quickly realised he wanted to return to the band.

"I remember having a conversation with some other kids and one of them said, ‘So, what are you doing for the summer?’," he told Conan O'Brien. "I was like, ‘Uh, we’re going on tour with No Doubt. I’m in Weezer.' Minds were blown at that moment.”

Doug Goldstein, the former manager of Guns N' Roses, has died, aged 65.

Goldstein began working with the Los Angeles hard rock legends as a tour manager, during the Appetite For Destruction touring cycle, before being promoted to the position of co-manager alongside Alan Niven. After Niven parted company with the band, when Axl Rose reportedly refused to continue working on the Use Your Illusion albums while he remained manager, Goldstein took over the role, steering the group through the Use Your Illusion era, and the original group's splintering.

In 2001, Iron Maiden's former management company Sanctuary purchased Doug Goldstein's Big FD Entertainment, and Merck Mercuriadis took after the group's management. A statement at the time declared that while Axl Rose has not fired Doug Goldstein, the pair were "taking a break from each other."

Goldstein's LinkedIn profile reads: "As a veteran in the music industry, Doug has learned that much of one's success depends on equal parts talent, great management, and building core relationships."

Alan Niven has paid tribute to his former friend, saying "It’s very sad. 65 is not old. I will be lighting a candle for him tonight."

Last year, Alan Niven filed a lawsuit against Guns N' Roses, claiming that they've made "repeated threats" against him in order to halt the publication of his memoir, Sound N' Fury: Rock'N'Roll Stories.

The biography, which Classic Rock described as "like Mickey Spillane stubbing cigarettes out on the hard-boiled corpse of James Ellroy," was originally scheduled to be published in July 2025 but has yet to emerge, amid rumours that lawyers for Axl Rose are trying to block publication.

The book is still available to pre-order on Amazon, now with a publishing date of October 29.

With the release of 72 Seasons, Metallica issued a blunt proclamation that they have absolutely no intention of slowing down - certainly not in their work ethic and especially not in regard to the speed of their music. From the machine gun burst of the title track to the screeching velocity of Lux Æterna and Room Of Mirrors, Metallica gleefully flaunted their ability to unleash sharp, tightly-focused riffs at blazing speeds. That electrifying combination of speed and precision is the very essence of thrash - the genre that they pioneered along with the other members of the Big 4 and bands like Exodus, Testament and Death Angel. With that in mind, we set out to compile Metallica’s ten fastest songs. Which was no simple task.

One of the main issues is that the quality of speed in music is both subjective and objective. Some songs feel supersonic due to the blistering speed of a guitarist churning out triplets with every drum beat, as with the verse section of Spit Out The Bone (starting at 1:09). That song feels like you’re standing in front of a turbofan jet engine right before takeoff. Objectively, however, Spit Out The Bone is fast but its tempo - measured in Beats Per Minute (BPM) - falls well short of other Metallica tracks. Conversely, The Four Horsemen, which can feel like a bit of a mid-temp chugger, is actually one of their empirically fastest songs, clocking in at a breathless 204 BPM. On average, Metallica’s fastest album is Kill ‘Em All, with a median BPM of 159.5, with Master Of Puppets coming a close second at 158.

Compounding the challenge is that there are many sites that provide BPM for most songs but they rarely seem to agree - sometimes the sites differ by a few BPM, while in other cases, the difference is dramatic. Some sites have Master Of Puppets down at a modest 105 BPM when it’s much, much faster. We decided to simply go with a single source - the BPM identified on the sheet music on Songsterr - a user-curated archive of tablature for guitar, bass and drums that includes the tempo for every measure of a song.

Finally, because Metallica songs often include multiple parts with very different tempos, in some cases, we went with an average tempo or with a song’s predominant tempo. This is why relying on a single BPM site doesn’t give the whole story.

Incidentally, the world record for BPM by a drummer is held by Tom Grosset, who earned the title of world’s fastest drummer by hand-drumming at a brain-freezing 1,208 beats in 60 seconds. He beat the former record-holder - Dream Theater’s Mike Mangini - by five strokes.

Here, then, in descending order, are Metallica’s ten fastest tracks:

10. Hardwired (2016) — 178 BPM

Metallica opened 2016’s Hardwired...To Self-Destruct with an absolute belter. Gone was the lurching jock rock posturing of the Black Album and the sonic experimentalism of St. Anger; Metallica had well and truly returned to the biting aggression of their 80s output. Right out of the gate comes the title track, humming in at 185 BPM and holding fast for three breathtaking minutes. In Metal Hammer’s review of Hardwired.., Dom Lawson referred to the track as, “a vicious burst of prime thrash with an irresistible chorus and enough spirit and venom to silence anyone who thought Metallica were too old to nail this stuff anymore.” Years later, it still sounds as good as anything they’ve ever done.

9. Rebel Of Babylon (2011) — 182 BPM (avg)

The closing track of the 2011 EP Beyond Magnetic has only been played live once — at the band’s four-night thirtieth anniversary residency at The Fillmore, in San Francisco. Though it didn’t make the cut for Death Magnetic, it’s a fist-pumping romp with tempos exceeding 200 BPM during some of the verses, while slowing down in several interludes. But even during the solo, the track maintains a feverish tempo, beginning at 176 BPM and getting progressively faster. A deep cut well worth revisiting.

8. St. Anger (2003) — 186 BPM

Spoiler alert: nothing from Lulu makes this list. But from Metallica’s next-most-maligned album comes this absolute scorcher. At 2:37, the band swing into a pummeling cadence that, after ten seconds, enters a whole new temporal realm. This occurs throughout the song — after a couple of interludes for vocals and a breakdown at 3:41, the band push the pedal all the way down. Look beyond the tin can rattle of the snare and you’ve got some of the band’s quickest work to date.

7. Blackened (1988)  — 190 BPM (avg)

One of the band’s fastest tracks is also one of its most complex. Certain sites list the BPM as just under 130, which is baffling, considering that out of the song’s nineteen tempo changes, only two fall below 185 BPM. The majority of the track is played in double time, averaging a skin-peeling 192 BPM. Then there are the track’s multiple time signatures, which flutter between 4/4, 3/4, 5/4 and 7/4 throughout the track. You practically need the janitor from Good Will Hunting to put all of this together. Ironically, though bassist Jason Newsted’s contributions are all but inaudible on the original track (on pretty much the whole album), this is the only song on ...And Justice For All on which he receives a writing credit — for composing the main riff.

6. Dyers Eve (1988) — 194 BPM (avg)

...And Justice For All closes with a venomous screed penned by Hetfield against his parents for leaving him woefully unprepared for the hostile world that awaited him. With its otherworldly, double-bass-driven tempo, it’s hardly surprising that the band didn’t attempt playing the full track live until 2004. Tempos shift at an outrageous pace - at some points hitting 218 BPM - then slowing down into the low-90s before ratcheting back to 195. The majority of the measures hover between 190 and 197. Since then, Dyers Eve has made infrequent appearances in their setlists and when they do play it, Lars leaves out the marauding double bass section, reportedly admitting that it’s ‘too difficult to pull off live. In our recent chat with drummer Jon Dette (ex-Slayer, ex-Testament), he cites the track as the hardest one to play in the entire Metallica catalogue for this very reason. Still, for the listener, it’s pure thrash heaven. Side effects include elevated heart rates, annoyed neighbours and speeding tickets.

5. My Apocalypse (2016) — 196 BPM

The closer to Death Magnetic didn’t just push the band to the limits of endurance with its mach 5 tempo; it also notched the lads a 2009 Grammy award for Best Metal Performance. Not too shabby for the shortest track on the album. This is an example of an already-speedy tempo seemingly revved up faster by the blinding triplets of the rhythm guitar.

4. The Four Horsemen (1983) — 204 BPM

As a matter of taste, metal fans remain split between Metallica’s The Four Horsemen, off of Kill ‘Em All and former Metallica shredder Dave Mustaine’s version, Mechanix, released on Megadeth’s Killing Is My Business...And Business Is Good! (1985). But there’s no doubting that both versions cook and Metallica’s version remains among their fastest, with the majority of the song requiring 204 paint-stripping BPM - obviously not including the Lynyrd Skynyrd-inspired breakdown.

3. Fuel (1997) — 208 BPM

Presumably there aren’t many funeral doom songs about the rush of adrenaline from driving fast, although we’d love to hear one. This track, from Reload, remains a live show mainstay, appearing over five hundred times since its live debut in 1997- and for obvious reasons. Unlike other Metallica tracks, it has a single, searing tempo that never lets up. Unsurprisingly, NASCAR used the track as their official theme song for a few seasons, starting in 2001.

1=. All Within My Hands (2003) — 212 BPM

A tie! Though Metallica are known for kicking off their albums with a show of force, they closed St. Anger with this speed-drenched banger. There are a couple of slower interludes but the vast majority of this track clocks in at a neck-snapping 212 BPM, which is good enough to earn a tie for first place. While the track isn’t exactly their catchiest song, Metallica used its name for their non-profit, which has delivered millions of dollars to various causes across the globe.

1. Master Of Puppets (1986) — 212 BPM

What? Master Of Puppets? With that slow, melodic breakdown in the middle? Yes! Though some BPM sites list its tempo at a glacial 105 BPM, the sheet music fixes the tempo at 212 for most of the track, while some estimates run as high as 220 BPM. One of only two tracks from Master Of Puppets credited to all four band members (James Hetfield, Cliff Burton, Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett), it is the cornerstone of the Metallica canon and recently found a whole new generation of fans when it appeared in a climactic scene in the latest season of Stranger Things. Its nine-minute runtime nearly doubled most of the mainstream rock songs at that time, leading to scarce radio play and yet it remains one of the most beloved and enduring songs in metal history.

Metallica's latest album 72 Seasons is out now. The band headline two nights of Download 2023 next week.

In Piccadilly, London, in 1972, cocky new art-rock types Roxy Music were about to record an album that would become the blueprint for 70s glam. In 2011, guitarist Phil Manzanera told Prog what happened next.

Bryan Ferry nervously brushes back the quiff of hair from his face. Behind him, he hears a preparatory swirl of notes from the sax, and the climactic build of a showbiz-style roll on the snare drum. The guitarist, now finished tuning up, gets everyone’s attention and, after the briefest of pauses, there’s a count-in and it begins.

As the controlled frenzy of the drums erupt and both sax and guitar become demonically entwined, Ferry inches nearer the mic, eyes closed, taking a breath just ahead of his cue. ‘Concrete cold face cased in steel. Stark sharp glass-eyed crack and peel’ he trills over heavy slab-like minor chords. ‘Bright light scream beam brake and squeal. Red white green white neon wheeeeeel.’ The stentorian vibrato in the vocal makes those around take notice. But as the number scrambles to a truncated crescendo, it’s clear that nobody – including Ferry – is especially pleased with the results.

The session is over. The guitarist thanks the singer for his time. His voice was fine but ultimately not right for King Crimson. However, before Ferry leaves the band’s basement rehearsal room, Robert Fripp gives him the telephone number of EG Management, suggesting if Ferry gets his own band together, he should give them a call. Although he doesn’t know it yet, as Ferry steps out onto the Fulham Palace Road, the failed audition will turn out to be the biggest break of his entire career.

For most groups trying to make good the starry-eyed dream of getting signed to a label and eventually recording and releasing an album, you had to get your hands – and much else besides – dirty. Driving the length and breadth of the country’s B roads, humping bass bins into inaccessible venues, playing to indifferent audiences whose only glimmer of enthusiasm is the moment when you announce it’s your last number; all of this, and more, were part of the time-honoured system of paying your dues.

Signing to EG Management (who looked after T-Rex and ELP as well as Crimson), Roxy Music bypassed all that irksome stuff, sweeping onto the scene, apparently fully formed in a haze of pop, pastiche, synthesisers, sequins and Brylcreem in 1972, with only half a dozen gigs under their belt and a debut album that remains a remarkable tour-de-force.

One man who had no doubts whatsoever about Roxy’s future prospects was guitarist Phil Manzanera. “I just knew they were going to be absolutely huge when I first heard them. They were special people. They were all quite stylish and intelligent. I was only about 20 or so and here were these 25-year-olds who all looked so grown up. They’d been to university, they had bank accounts; two of them were teachers; they had a car; they’d got a bank loan to buy a PA! They were really cool people.”

Manzanera famously lost out the first time he auditioned for Roxy in the summer of 1971 to David O’ List, previously a member of The Nice. “If it had been any old Tom, Dick or Harry, I’d have been upset. I’d seen Davey with The Nice at the Royal Albert Hall so I thought, ‘Fair enough.’” Yet when O’ List departed in February 1972 , Manzanera – by then notionally mixing sound for the group – picked up where he left off.

As Roxy Music was released in June 1972 on Island, TRecstasy had vast portions of the nation’s teenage population swooning, and David Bowie was busy unleashing Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. A cursory glance in the direction of Roxy might have suggested they were simply hitching a ride on the coattails of glam rock. Yet both record and band pulled off a how’d-they-do-that conjuring, trick scooping up pop culture references from the past, present, and possible futures, into one unified package that demanded attention and captured the imagination of fans on both sides of the divide between the pop market and progressive scene.

If opening number Re-Make/Re-Model was, as Melody Maker journalist Richard Williams astutely observed, Roxy’s musical manifesto, it was proclaiming that rock’n’roll as we knew it was undergoing a strange and irrevocable transformation.

There’s the knowing post-modern wink that has backing singers intoning a car registration number (‘CPL593A’) in the place where a girl’s name might normally be crooned. Then there’s the hurly-burly blur of continually morphing sax and guitar lines swirling above and below the vocals. Moving quickly, it sounds all above board and ship-shape. Yet listen closely and you might be receiving a transmission from the free-jazz climes of Albert Ayler and Sonny Sharrock.

The track’s coup de grâce was a series of solo statements. Book-ended by Paul Thompson’s thunderous John Bonham-like run-in, in order of appearance we hear Graham Simpson bending the bass into a soulful, jazzy pose; Brian Eno’s outré, atonal caterwauling synth squeal; Andy Mackay’s leery account of Earl Bostic meeting Wagner; Manzanera’s steady-Eddie Cochrane Velvets vamp, and finally, Ferry’s atonal singalong-a-Stockhausen piano party-piece. At the end, this pop culture parade is sucked down the black hole of Eno’s VCS3.

Recorded at Command Studios in Piccadilly in March 1972, the album was produced by Peter Sinfield, himself just recently divorced from King Crimson. Still managed by EG, and having had experience at the mixing desk from In The Court Of The Crimson King (1969) through to Islands (1971), he was viewed as a safe pair of hands to take Roxy out on their first spin.

A former BBC studio, beneath which London’s underground trains could occasionally be heard rumbling, Command’s principal advantage was its cheapness. Accordingly, the album went in the can for £5,000. Given that he’s subsequently recorded in some of the world’s top-flight studios, Manzanera retains a surprising affection for the venue. “It was a big old-fashioned space where orchestras would’ve played. It was very atmospheric and was absolutely perfect for us.”

With Sinfield and engineer Andy Hendriksen ensconced in the control room up a flight of stairs, and the band in the cavernous depths below, the team worked on a set of songs composed largely the previous year by Ferry. Prior to entering the studio, Sinfield and the band had spent three weeks working on the album’s final shape.

Curiously, the songs have a habit of starting off as one thing and then undergoing a startling transformation into something else entirely. Ladytron begins as a languid sci-fi dreamscape, but ends as an exercise in power-chord slash and burn. The country lilt opening If There Is Something rapidly falls away when Mackay’s processed sax solo takes centre stage, and we know we’re not in Kansas anymore. The solo, like all the others on the record, isn’t about instrumental prowess. It’s about the seductive qualities and possibilities of the sound itself, manipulated and mediated by Eno.

Through his electronic alchemy, the sax hovers listlessly over Thompson’s jackhammer beat and mechanistic piano chords. When Ferry’s vocals burst in on the last third of the song with ‘Shake your hair, girl with your ponytail/takes me right back…’ it’s freakish, unsettling, and utterly magnificent. That distinctive warble, which caused heads to turn in Crimson’s rehearsal rooms and far beyond, was never quite as powerful or as singular as here, captured by Sinfield.

Manzanera readily acknowledges that Ferry’s unusual vocal style was something they understood and exploited. “Nobody sounds like Bryan. It’s very distinctive and it comes from nowhere. It couldn’t be any one else in the whole world with this voice. So we were starting with an advantage.”

Though he’d be fired following a drug related breakdown, Graham Simpson’s bass work is frequently adventurous and unorthodox. On tracks like 2HB and Chance Meeting, every part of the fretboard is up for grabs. “He was probably the most accomplished musician among us all at that time,” says Manzanera.

Chance Meeting also contains some of the album’s most haunting guitar. Although his instrument was usually filtered by Eno’s synthesiser, here the space-age sounds are created by more traditional means. “I had a wonderful Gibson 335, which had a hollow body. It just fed back beautifully, and then you could manipulate the note with the tremolo arm and a bit of echo. That’s actually all it is. Now Ladytron; that’s the classic Eno-treated guitar. Terrific stuff.”

The sonic properties of Roxy Music still polarise opinion. Ferry has said he didn’t care for the sound of the vocals. But Manzanera is philosophical about the album’s production values: “On the first one we always said we were inspired amateurs learning how to make a record, so I listen with nostalgia and fondness rather than a critical ear. It was a moment in time captured and I’m very happy to have been part of it. Pete Sinfield did the best job he could, really. But obviously, once you get to For Your Pleasure and Chris Thomas – who’d trained with George Martin – it’s in a different league.”

Yet the exotic, multifaceted soundworlds conjured are due at least in part to Sinfield’s quixotic recording and intuitive response to what was coming into Command’s control room. “It was just the summation of all different individuals putting in their little bits and pieces which then added up to Roxy,” says Manzanera. “You couldn’t have planned it. You couldn’t make it up.”

Reaching Number 10 on its release, Roxy Music catapulted the group from being cultish outsiders and into the mainstream. Though future albums would outsell it, when it came to a forward-thinking, truly progressive fusion of diverse ideas, eclectic style and unnerving bravado, the band would rarely be as challenging or inventive.

Muse frontman Matt Bellamy says the band's stage production for their upcoming arena tour will include a spaceship that costs more than a luxury home in London.

The British rockers are back with new album The Wow! Signal which was released this week.

And after a string of North American dates in comparatively smaller venues, they will perform in arenas around Europe in November and December.

Those arena shows, Bellamy says, will feature a spectacular stage show that is costing the band a pretty penny.

He tells the NME: "Erm, we’re trying to build a spaceship – as you do! The quote came in and it’s more expensive than some of these (London) houses, and that’s saying something around here.

"We’re trying to work with that, build a spaceship, do some new stuff with lasers that’s never been done before, and yeah, it will be a classic. It’s going to be more in the space, sci-fi realm, which I think is cool for us.

"We’re trying to make it (the spaceship) fly. I don’t think it will. That’s the thing that costs more than a house, but it will be something cool, I promise."

On the 'smaller' North American venues they will play in the summer, Bellamy adds: "It’s the only viable summer tour in America that’s outdoors unless you’re at stadium level, which we’re not in the US.

"It’s in between arena and stadium size, but the issue is you can’t do the craziest production. It’ll be a similar production to what we used last summer, but with a few step-ups and a few customisations for this show.

"But when we come back to the UK in November, that’ll be a brand new really cool production."

Classic Rock gave The Wow! Signal a positive review, saying it is "super-focussed, densely layered and stacked with killer tunes."

Muse The Wow! Signal Europa Tour dates 2026

Nov 12: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Nov 13: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Nov 15: London O2, UK
Nov 16: London O2, UK
Nov 18: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Nov 20: Milan Unipol Dome, Italy
Nov 21: Milan Unipol Dome, Italy
Nov 24: Düsseldorf PSD Bank Dome, Germany
Nov 25: Düsseldorf PSD Bank Dome, Germany
Nov 27: Paris La Défense Arena, France
Nov 29: Amsterdam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Nov 30: Amsterdam, Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Dec 03: Montpellier Sud de France Arena, France
Dec 04: Montpellier Sud de France Arena, France
Dec 07: Zurich AG Hallenstadion, Switzerland
Dec 08: Zurich AG Hallenstadion, Zurich, Switzerland

When regarding the decidedly colourful back catalogue of the late Lou Reed, the phrase ‘all of human life is here’ springs to mind. Staged against a uniquely urban backdrop, Reed would habitually pick at the persistent scab of human frailty, shine white light upon darkness and generate searing white heat in the process.

In Reed’s world, emotions were raw. His dramatis personae personified facets of his own complex personality. The darkest desires of his darkest characters – from the sexually transgressive (Venus In Furs) to the purely evil (Rock Minuet) – and the simple sentimentality of the unreconstructed romantic (Coney Island Baby, My House) mirrored Reed’s intrinsic duality.

So who was Lou Reed? Many of his songs formed the core of an unwritten autobiography: from idyllic infancy (Egg Cream) to ruined adolescence (Kill Your Sons) and beyond, Reed’s essence endures in his art. With an accumulated writing style that was one part poet (Delmore Schwartz), one part Tin Pan Alley (Doc Pomus) and one part gossip (Andy Warhol), Reed wrote stories so painfully real that rock’n’roll still bears their scars.

THE GIFT

Eventually appearing on the Velvet Underground’s second album White Light/White Heat, released in 1968, darkly comedic spoken-word short story The Gift dates from ’64. Reed recalled: “I wrote this [in] my last year at Syracuse University, where I was an English major. John Cale suggested we set it to music. We put the story on stereo left and the music on stereo right so you could listen to one or the other or both.”

As the Velvets jam in support, a deadpan Cale recites the macabre tale of what transpired when lovelorn Waldo Jeffers mailed himself to Marsha Bronson inside a large cardboard box. Part-Hitchcock, part-E.C. Comics, the final grisly denouement involves the fateful plunge of a sheet metal cutter that causes ‘little rhythmic arcs of red to pulsate gently in the morning sun’.

I’M WAITING FOR THE MAN

A defining moment in rock’n’roll, Reed’s tale of copping $26 worth of heroin uptown in Harlem on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 125th Street transported the gritty verité style of Nelson Algren and Hubert Selby Jr from the printed page on to vinyl.

The song’s protagonist, most probably Reed himself, feels ‘sick and dirty, more dead than alive’. As he clucks impatiently, conspicuous, out of place, he draws attention (‘Hey white boy, what you doin’ uptown?’), before The Man – his dealer – finally arrives (‘all dressed in black’, with ‘PR shoes and a big straw hat’). So what exactly are ‘PR shoes’? “Puerto Rican fence-climbers” according to Lou. So now you know. And there’s a happy ending. Our hero ultimately gets his fix and we leave him temporarily elated: ‘Feeling good, feeling oh so fine... Until tomorrow, but that’s just some other time.’

PERFECT DAY

Simple, concise, practically perfect in every way. Perfect Day is a succinct précis of idealised love that seasoned Reed-watchers – reluctant to accept that he would ever deliver a romantic ballad without a sneering side of whisky-embittered cynicism – spent decades trying to convince the wider world was actually about heroin use.

“That’s not true,” Lou said unequivocally. “You’re talking to the person who wrote it.” It was actually about the day that Reed proposed to his first wife, Bettye Kronstad, in Central Park, a day which, as Kronstad recalls, was far from perfect. Although Lou had already decided to propose, Bettye had just had a riding accident in the park and was severely traumatised.

Despite this, Lou persisted in delivering his ‘perfect day’, even dragging his fiancée to Tiffany’s to buy a ring against her will. Perfection is clearly in the eye of the beholder. “The key to Perfect Day is the last line,” Lou admitted when we spoke in 2004, “You’re gonna reap what you sow.” The couple divorced in 1973.

BERLIN

When Alice Cooper producer Bob Ezrin met Reed to begin work on his third album, the follow-up to his Bowie-produced breakthrough Transformer, he observed that while Reed’s stories had great beginnings they lacked satisfying conclusions.

Citing the central romantic set-piece of Reed’s self-titled solo debut, Ezrin wanted to know what happened to Berlin’s central protagonists (lovers entwined in its ‘candlelight and Dubonnet on ice’ opening verse, but estranged by its ‘I’m gonna miss you now that you’ve gone’ chorus).

Retrieving Ezrin’s gauntlet, Reed used the ensuing sessions to expand Berlin to a full concept work, a dark song cycle incorporating alcoholism, addiction, spousal abuse, prostitution, depression and, ultimately, suicide. Contemporary US critics railed against Reed’s ‘lousy’ (Creem) ‘disaster’ (Rolling Stone), but subsequent reassessment reveals a uniquely moving collection: a Gothic edifice of exquisite pain and sumptuous misery.

Building through the heartbreaking Caroline Says II (‘You can hit me all you want to, but I don’t love you anymore’), the harrowing The Kids (‘They’re taking her children away’) and the painfully graphic The Bed (‘This is the place where she cut her wrists’) towards Sad Song’sclimactic emotional release, it leaves the listener physically and psychologically drained.

In 2004, Reed likened Berlin to “a Bergman or Kurosawa movie. An intense film noir... Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl.” When I observed that ‘girl slashes wrists’ isn’t normally part of the romantic narrative, he countered simply: “That’s the point.”

STREET HASSLE

Arguably Lou Reed’s magnum opus, Street Hassle combines a pair of monologues over a mesmeric repeated string section figure and an impassioned ‘love has gone away’ coda written in the wake of his tumultuous three-year relationship with trans woman Rachel Humphreys. Street Hassle was the Godfather Of Punk’s first artistic statement subsequent to unintentionally acquiring the title, and he rose to the occasion.

Part one describes Waltzing Matilda’s $80 physical dalliance with a male escort, while part two finds a drug dealer addressing the ‘hassle’ of a particularly incautious client’s girlfriend fatally OD-ing before having the good grace to vacate his premises. ‘When someone turns that blue,’ observes The Man, ‘it’s a universal truth, you just know that bitch will never fuck again.’

“It’s a great monologue,” Reed opined in ’04. “Two monologues, really. The person acting out the first part is one way, the person in part two the polar opposite. They’re not even vaguely of the same species... Based on a real incident, as my things inevitably are.”

Street Hassle channels John Rechy, Tennessee Williams and none-more-noir Raymond Chandler. Its first part echoes Herlihy’s Midnight Cowboy, its second Selby’s Last Exit To Brooklyn and its conclusion (enhanced by an uncredited spoken-word cameo from young pretender Bruce Springsteen) is an uncharacteristically passionate requiem for star-crossed love. Ultimately it’s Reed’s great American novel, condensed to the bone and propelled by a monumental ear-worm riff.

NEW YORK

Ever since Reed led us up to Harlem’s ‘Lexington and 125’ to open our eyes to an unseen alternative reality, his narrative has been grounded in New York City. His songs have described characters unsung elsewhere: the transvestites and hustlers of Walk On The Wild Side, the junkies and speed freaks of Heroin and Sister Ray. But with 1989’s New York album Reed – galvanised by the ever-widening divide between the Empire City’s rich and poor – sealed his position as NYC’s poet laureate with a concept work of rare lyrical brilliance.

Here are astute essays on the inner-city ghetto, the environment, and the gay community’s resilience in the face of the AIDS epidemic, along with serial indictments of an oblivious political elite. Literate, poetic, driven and compelling, New York is Lou Reed’s defining achievement as rock’s greatest storyteller.

The original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock 264, in June 2019

The Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan was the site of one of the most notorious examples of extreme rock ’n’ roll behaviour in history.

The Who drummer Keith Moon had already left a trail of chaos on the road, diving into swimming pools from hotel rooftops and blowing up toilets with cherry bombs, but it was in Flint where his behaviour reached its peak.

Following a large-scale food fight, the evening’s entertainment reached its climax when Moon steered a Lincoln Continental into the hotel’s swimming pool. Or at least that’s what he claimed he did.

Harvey Lisberg [manager, Herman’s Hermits]: Keith was bonkers. He had two personalities – one was wild and insane, and the other was a superb musician.

Peter Cavanaugh [DJ, WTAC Radio, Flint, Michigan]: I was at the show with a bunch of listeners, some of our DJs and some Detroit radio people who had come up. The Who just destroyed the stage. Everybody was blown away. After the show we went to The Holiday Inn.

Barry Whitwam [drummer, Herman’s Hermits]: It all started very innocently. It was Keith’s birthday party, and one or two birthday cakes had been delivered for him.

Keith Moon [speaking in 1972]: The Premier Drum Company had given me a huge birthday cake with, like, five drums stacked up on top of each other.

Barry Whitwam: The whole tour gathered in the dining room to view all the cakes. Everybody was ready for a party. Keith Moon put his plate down on the table and stuck his finger into the cream on top of one of the cakes and casually flicked it at [Hermits bassist] Karl Green who was standing next to him. The cream hit Karl in the face and everybody laughed – apart from Karl, who stuck his finger into the nearest cake and flicked some back into Keith’s face. Within seconds everybody in the room was throwing cake at each other. It only took five minutes to change the room into what looked like the inside of a cake.

Tom Wright [photographer, road manager]: The manager of the hotel comes up to Keith and tells him that this will just not do: “We’re going to have to stop this, right now”.

Keith Moon: As the party degenerated into a slanging match, I picked up the cake – all five tiers – and hurled it at the throng. People started picking up pieces and hurling it about. Everybody was covered with marzipan and icing sugar and fruit cake.

Tom Wright: I knew that wasn’t going to sit well with anybody. I told him [the manager] we’d wind it down and so on, and he left.

Peppy Castro [guitarist, the Blues Magoos]: The swimming pool had tons of broken glass in it from Keith throwing bottles in the pool. I was pissed off because of the damage he was causing.

Keith Moon: Half-a-dozen cars were parked around this swimming pool. I ran out, jumped into the first car I came to, which was a brand new Lincoln Continental. It was parked on a slight hill, and when I took the handbrake off it started to roll, and it smashed straight through this pool-surround fence, and the whole Lincoln Continental went into the swimming pool – with me in it.

Peter Cavanaugh: I was in a room. I heard the ruckus and I went outside, and the first thing I saw was the vehicle in the pool. We’d all had several beers, and some other stuff too, so things can get a little cloudy, but I clearly remember seeing the vehicle in the pool.

Keith Moon: So there I was, sitting in the driver’s seat of a Lincoln Continental, underwater. And the water was pouring in – coming in through the bloody pedal holes in the floorboard, squirting in through the windows. In a startling moment of logic, I said: “Well, I can’t open the doors until the pressure is the same”. It’s amazing how I remembered those things from my physics class. So I’m sitting there, thinking about me situation, as the water creeps up to me nose. When there’s just enough air in the top of the car to take a gulp, I fill up me lungs, throw open the door and go rising to the top of the pool. So I went back to the party, streaming water.

Barry Whitwam: There was no car in the pool, only all the pool tables and chairs, and Keith never came back dripping water.

Tom Wright: At one minute after 12, the hotel manager comes running back and says: “Goddamn it, this sounds more like a revolution than a birthday party…”, and you can’t do this and you can’t do that. He was just about to go into a big deal when Keith picked up what was left of the five-tiered cake and just shoved it into this guy’s face. Everybody in the room just went silent.

Barry Whitwam: Not satisfied with that, Keith went over to Karl Green, ripped Karl’s trouser leg from the pocket down to the knee, and laughed in his face as if to challenge him. So Karl walked up to Keith and pulled his trousers down so hard that the stitching ripped in every seam, and there Keith stood with no trousers. His underpants had been pulled down with his trousers and, to make it worse, he was only wearing a short T-shirt that didn’t do anything to cover his embarrassment.

Everybody thought this was hilarious, apart from the police officer who, up to this point, was supposed to be guarding us from the outside world. When he saw Keith’s private parts, he pulled out his revolver and walked over to Keith to arrest him for breaking the law in Michigan State. The funny thing was that the officer was still pointing his gun at Keith’s manhood.

Keith Moon: I ran. I started to leg it out the door, and I slipped on a piece of marzipan and fell flat on me face and knocked out me tooth.

John Entwistle: He was so pissed, he tripped and fell over and smashed his teeth.

Nancy Lewis [US publicist]: He was so out of it he wasn’t even aware what happened. He had to be rushed to the dentist.

John Entwistle: They operated on him without any anaesthetics, cos he was drunk.

Keith Moon: So he had to rip out what was left of the tooth and put a false one in.

John Entwistle: While we were at the dentist’s, the rest of the tour got extremely drunk and started spraying the car park with fire extinguishers.

Karl Green: We ended up having fights, raids with fire extinguishers, ripping the railings up around the pool and throwing them in, ripping vending machines off the walls to get crisps.

Barry Whitwam: Peter Noone and I decided to help clean off each other’s cake by using fire extinguishers. Little did we know, but the extinguishers had a chemical in the fluid that would remove the paint off cars.

Peter Noone [singer, Herman’s Hermits]: This fire extinguisher takes all the paint off the cars. So there was a big bill.

Barry Whitwam: Keith Moon was credited with most of the damage to the hotel but, in fact, he had very little to do with it.

Barry Whitwam: We were hit with a $25,000 bill for new carpets, wallpaper and ceilings.

Peppy Castro: The stucco ceiling in the restaurant of the Holiday Inn had to be redone because of all the cake that was thrown on it.

Keith Moon: Six of the cars had to have new paint jobs off. We’d also destroyed a piano. Reduced it to kindling. And don’t forget the carpet. And the Lincoln Continental in the bottom of the pool.

Peter Noone: That never happened. He would tell stories. He just forgot what happened.

Roger Daltrey: I saw it. We paid the bill [for the damages]. It was $50,000. It’s vague now, but I just remember the car in the pool. But then I read in the biography that never happened, so maybe I’ve been living someone else’s life, I don’t know.

Barry Whitwam: There’s no way Keith could have driven a car into the pool that evening without me knowing about it.

Peppy Castro: I personally didn’t witness Keith drive a car in the pool. So if it did happen they must have dragged the car out rather fast. I was there

John Entwistle: He never drove a car into the swimming pool. He couldn’t even drive.

This article was originally published in Classic Rock 175, in September 2012.

It was a long time coming, but after several years under wraps, Yes bassist Chris Squire and former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett released A Life Within A Day – the only album they made as Squackett – in 2012. Three years before Squire’s passing, they gave Prog the backstory.

The union of Chris Squire and Steve Hackett has been mentioned in dispatches for almost half a decade. In recent years Squire has guested on Hackett’s solo albums, contributing his distinctive bass guitar to tracks on 2009’s Out Of The Tunnel’s Mouth and last year’s Beyond The Shrouded Horizon. But a full-blown collaboration between the Genesis and Yes legends has taken longer to come to fruition. At one point, Squackett looked like it would become an elusive, mythical beast – until the release of A Life Within A Day.

At just 46 minutes it might seem a modest dividend for the patience invested those awaiting this rare foray from Squire outside Yes and Hackett’s most notable collaboration since GTR (with Yes’ Steve Howe). But never mind the quantity of music on offer – just revel in the quality: A Life Within A Day’s nine tracks both surprise and delight.

While they’ve never until now been in a band together, Squire and Hackett have shared history. “I first started working with Steve in 2006 on my Christmas album [Chris Squire’s Swiss Choir],” he explains. Squire’s original vision was to involve a number of guitarists on different tracks. “I was hoping to get Jeff Beck, Brian May… but everyone was busy.”

His drummer, Jeremy Stacey, suggested asking Hackett. Surprisingly, given their respective track records, Squire and Hackett’s paths had barely crossed. “I haven’t done a lot of things outside of Yes,” acknowledges the bassist. Initially he sent Hackett a couple of the songs destined for Swiss Choir. The guitarist took little persuasion. “I would have worked on anything that Chris had offered me because he’s such an icon,” he says. “When people think of bass sounds, they think of Chris.”

“What Steve did was so good that I immediately asked if he could do the whole album,” says Squire. “After that, I said that I’d be happy to reciprocate with anything he needed me to play or sing on.” As a result, he guested on Hackett’s last two solo albums. They considered writing a musical together, but ultimately settled for the more realistic album solution.

At the time, though, the bassist wasn’t actively seeking an outlet outside Yes. “I was living in London, doing the Christmas album, and Steve and I just developed a relationship.” It was uncomplicated and remarkably free of the titanic clash of egos that can bedevil such projects. “We got on easily and were able to create at a fast pace without feeling any pressure. That’s very valuable and helped move things along really smoothly.”

But A Life Within A Day has had a lengthy gestation, due to the belated return of Yes, the search for a suitable record label and simple geography. “When we started, Chris lived in this country and we were near neighbours,” Hackett recalls. “Suddenly America beckoned, and I had to put the album on hold for a while.” But the interregnum had an upside. “It meant that when we came back to it, it was all the stronger for that gap and there were things that we shifted around.”

Unusually in an age when many records are tracked by solitary musicians sending files to each other, the pair recorded most of the songs together in Hackett’s studio or at his house. “Most of it was done eyeball to eyeball,” he confirms. “I didn’t want to work in splendid isolation.”

He reports the writing sessions were painless. As a starting point he’d suggested that they pooled material, and Squire offered Aliens – which had already been performed live by Yes – while Hackett contributed Stormchaser. “I had three or four songs that I had written ostensibly for a solo project,” says Squire. “But that never happened, which is the story of my life!” In the end he, Hackett and keyboardist Roger King are all credited on each composition, with the tour-de-force title track and another highlight, Tall Ships, written specifically for the album.

Tall Ships came from Squire experimenting with a new bass and playing a sinuous, muscular riff that inspired Hackett. “It sounded like it had some swing to it,” the guitarist recalls. “Ninety nine per cent of people I‘ve worked with can’t remember the wonderful thing they’ve just played. So unless the tapes were running, you’ve had it. But Chris remembered it, and we had the rhythm which runs throughout the whole song. There was the unvarying link which provides the engine to the journey.”

He added a guitar phrase, the lyric and the chorus tune, while Squire provided the verse melody. “It was very easy to write together – a bunch of mates sat round in the living room, chipping in ideas,” Hackett continues. “It was like a giant jigsaw puzzle with three people going, ‘Here’s another piece – does that fit?’ We avoided the downside of composition by committee where people whittle each other down to the bare essentials and often end up with the lowest common denominator. That can be the downside of working with a group.”

The Squackett scenario of avoiding the dilution of ideas and feeding off but also deferring to each other was largely unfamiliar to Hackett as, since 1986’s GTR album with, he’s largely been captain of his own ship with his solo band. “I didn’t mind handing the wheel to Chris and we didn’t have too many moments where we thrashed it out,” he says. “Most of the time it was plain sailing. Occasionally we’d hit a sticky patch, but it seemed as if Chris and I had been working together all our lives.”

He cites the intensely commercial Divided Self as an example: “Chris played wonderfully and transformed it. He doesn’t just play a bass line. It must be his choral background; he comes up with another melody, counterpoint, descant, and makes it swing. He does things naturally that I suspect other bass players dream of. He plays with a guitarist’s sensibility. There‘s that sense of the size of the bass sound, but there’s also that twang and ring, so you can always focus on the bass part. It’s always clear as a bell and it’s not just all about how loud it is in the mix.”

Another striking feature of A Life Within A Day is the significant use of harmony vocals. “Chris and I are both fans of the great harmony bands – The Beatles, The Who, Crosby Stills & Nash,” says Hackett. While vocal harmonies featured prominently in Yes, they were less prevalent in Genesis. “I was often trying to steer it that way with my own stuff. We made them a raison d’être on this album.”

“My voice and Steve’s blend well together,” adds Squire. “That’s something I was surprised about, and the more we worked on harmonies the better they became.” Hackett and former choirboy Squire are responsible for all the vocals on the album, save for an appearance from Amanda Lehmann, a Hackett band regular who supplies some backing vocals, most notably on the smooth-as-silk Can’t Stop The Rain. Hackett thought that the track had an “a Burt Bacharach aspect to the chorus, so I suggested we go the whole hog and make it sound really luxurious and get some girls in. It needed something feminine.”

As the Bacharach reference suggests, A Life Within A Day contains some surprises, but it shouldn’t disappoint fans of Hackett or Squire. Hackett confirms the tempo for much of the album is very laidback, but it’s hugely atmospheric and rich in detail. There are some exceptions – most notably the frenetic middle section of the title track, which should sate the appetites of those wanting the two to cut loose instrumentally.

Any suspicions that the record might be a cynically contrived ‘GeneYes’ product prove wide of the mark. It’s not an album you might expect two such veterans to make, mainly because there was no masterplan. “It happened naturally,” Hackett explains. “We were working on a number of things for each other, and from the very first thing that Chris did on something of mine, I could see he was genuinely enjoying it. His whole body was moving. I realised that I had this top bass player – such a hero to a lot of people – giving it everything. Chris runs on enthusiasm.”

While they didn’t set out to cater to the Yes/Genesis audience, one track comes close. “The Summer Backwards is a nod to all things psychedelic and the 1960s,” reveals Hackett. “Listening to it a few days ago, I came to the conclusion that with two 12-strings and harmonies we’ve got Yes and Genesis, really. But that’s not what I was intending to do at the time.” In fact, The Summer Backwards was originally earmarked for a Hackett solo album before Squire intervened.

They drew on a wide array of reference points. Led Zeppelin influences are most apparent on Stormchaser and the title track. “It’s John Bonham meets Phil Collins meets Jason Bonham meets Jeremy Stacey meets the production values of the 1980s,” laughs Hackett. “Many years ago in Genesis, we were driving around the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, having just driven back from Belgium or Italy with no sleep all night, and Kashmir by Zeppelin came on. We all stopped in our tracks, particularly Peter Gabriel and myself. The drums were enormous. It was Radio Luxembourg so it was probably even more distorted and strange coming to us in mono.

“It was nectar to the ears, a breath of fresh air. I loved the simple, demonic, relentless, mechanical approach to drums that just marched through time itself. It was a huge influence on Phil, Peter and me. Chriss favourite Zep track is Kashmir – surprise, surprise! In a sense it’s the model for something that can be both orchestral but minimal; something that has pauses.

“For years I’ve been trying to deny the fact that I love slow powerful rhythms – I thought they might be a bit soggy for people who want their rock to be fast. Again, I noticed these slow, heavy rhythms crop up on Joe Bonamassa’s stuff, like The Ballad Of John Henry. There’s something about the earthiness of that.

“I’m like a gannet,” adds Hackett. “I don’t have any prejudice against any musical form any more, because I’ve been caught out before.” He doesn’t disagree with the suggestion that he’s a musical contrarian. After all, choosing to exit Genesis in 1977 was a brave move. “I’ve always tried to prove a point,” he admits. “I’ve always wanted to prove people wrong.”

While Squackett is certainly varied, Squire is keen to point out that Yes have always been willing to head off in different musical directions: “I never put limits on Yes. We’ve delved into so many different areas over the years. We were more of a rock band in the 80s, more of a proggy jazz band in the 70s. I’m not afraid of moving in and out of different areas with Yes.”

An album whose longest tracks are under seven minutes might confound anyone expecting prog rock epics. Squire: “There was no conscious effort to go, ‘This is what we’ve done in our various bands, so let’s do something different.’ We just got on with it. If something had turned out to be a 10-minute plus track and we’d liked it, we’d have used it. There were no guidelines.”

As a teenager, Porcupine Tree mainman Steven Wilson was a swift convert to Hackett’s solo material. “When I was discovering the wonderful world of progressive music, one of the first albums I happened across was Steve’s Please Don’t Touch album, which totally blew me away,” Wilson says. “The second side especially remains for me one of the most inspiring 20-minute sequences of music ever recorded, covering everything from beautiful orchestral soul ballads to the dark nihilism of the title track, and all points in between.”

Wilson declares himself a fan of Hackett’s other early solo albums, and also an enthusiast of his more recent work: “It’s been inspiring to hear how Steve’s last few albums have recaptured the very best of that 70s work, but with a modern twist. His music is epic and musically dazzling – but always retains great songwriting and melody at its core.”

While Hackett’s recent solo albums have many merits, Squackett arguably has greater commercial potential. Whether that potential will be fully realised may depend on how much time and effort the musicians put into promoting it. Hackett relishes the opportunity to continue the partnership: “There’s a sense of harmony between us. Nobody was trying to knock anyone down.” But it’s unclear whether Squackett will tour – Squire’s schedule with Yes having nixed a potential opportunity to play at last year’s High Voltage festival in London.

“I would like to think there’s time in the midst of our busy schedules to play live together,” admits Hackett. “But I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep.” He continues to put in plenty of time on the road. “My attitude is that the clock is ticking for me. I love playing live. I do it because I must. I always want to do everything at 100 miles an hour. I think Chris has a more measured approach.”

The timeline of Refused's initial split is an absolute mess.

Just weeks before the release of The Shape of Punk to Come: A Chimerical Bombination in 12 Bursts, the band imploded during a disastrous tour of the United States.

After a handful of sparsely-attended shows, the quartet officially broke up on September 26, 1998, but played their final show on October 5 at a basement venue in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The local police department ended the gig after just a few songs, further compounding the sense of futility felt throughout the Umeå four-piece.

Shortly after their demise, the band – vocalist Dennis Lyxzén, guitarists Kristofer Steen and Jon Brännström, and drummer David Sandström – issued a statement and manifesto via the Burning Heart Records website.

"We will continue to, at every attempt, overthrow the class system, burn museums and to strangle the great lie that we call culture... we will continue to demand revolution here and now, and not in some vague future that all reactionary leftist fundamentalists and reformists are talking about. We want every day and every action to be a manifestation of love, joy, confusion and revolt.

"This is the last that we have to say about it, WE WILL NOT GIVE INTERVIEWS TO STUPID REPORTERS who still haven't [sic] got anything of what we are all about, we will never play together again and we will never try to glorify or celebrate what was. All that we have to say has been said here or in our music/manifestos/lyrics and if that is not enough you are not likely to get it anyway. WE THEREFORE DEMAND THAT EVERY NEWSPAPER BURN ALL THEIR PHOTOS OF REFUSED so that we will no longer be tortured with memories of a time gone by and the mythmaking [sic] that single-minded and incompetent journalism offers us. Instead we need to look forward. We got everything to win and nothing but our boredom to lose."

The Shape of Punk to Come was destined to become one of the most influential and ambitious records in post-hardcore. Almost three decades later, it still sounds truly revolutionary.

While the title of their third album was a nod to Ornette Coleman's similarly groundbreaking 1959 release The Shape of Jazz to Come, Refused drew a line under a stagnating post-hardcore scene. Recorded at Umeå's Tonteknik Bomba Je Studios with producers Eskil Lövström, Andreas Nilsson and Pelle Henricsson, they created an avant-garde masterpiece in 12 movements, bringing in jazz and electronic interludes, cellos and violins to soundtrack frontman Lyxzén's anti-capitalist manifesto.

In the years leading up to their 2012 reunion, the band's profile grew and influenced a new generation of bands and musicians, while spin-off projects like The (International) Noise Conspiracy and TEXT toiled away in the shadow of their former band's legacy.

Dennis Lyxzén recognises the far-reaching influence of The Shape of Punk to Come but notes that the scene it was attempting to rejuvenate did not react kindly to the release.

"People were kind of pissed off when that record came out," Lyxzén told Canadian magazine Exclaim!. "They were like, 'You heathens. If this is the shape of punk to come then I'm quitting punk.' We got a lot of that. When Ornette Coleman's record came out people thought he was an idiot and they wanted to kill him so it's kind of fitting in a way."

Of the entire tracklist, two songs in particular kept the album alive throughout their 14-year hiatus. One was Liberation Frequency; the other was New Noise, whose compelling video was aired regularly on alternative music television channels, while the song was included on the soundtrack for the video game Tony Hawk's Underground.

"To a lot of people, we’re just a rock band," Lyxzén told Revolver. "So obviously, there’s gonna be a lot of people who don’t understand where we’re coming from or don’t understand our political background or our musical background, even. That’s not to put anyone down, but if you discovered New Noise 10 years ago and thought, 'This is a killer song. I like this band', but you have no concept of who we are, you might be offended by the fact that we made a theme record saying capitalism is bad.

"But those are the people we’ve always been, and those are the ideas we’ve always had," he added. "I don’t think that’s as clear-cut to people now as it was in the '90s, because in the '90s we were part of something very specific."

Crazy Town loved New Noise so much they would massacre the song during their shows around the time Butterfly was a massive hit. The very idea that this band who’d become famous by sampling another band – and singing about "new art for real people" – left a bitter taste in Lyxzén's mouth.

"It's horrible; they should be shot," Lyxzén told Exclaim! in 2000, whose writer Stuart Green noted the singer’s remark was uttered “with only a hint of irony”. "Seriously, I hate that band. Did you ever listen to them? I don't like to talk shit about bands, there are more constructive ways to work, but sometimes you just have to say, 'Stop... please stop this.'

"If someone listened to The Shape... and really understood what we were thinking about they wouldn't be in Crazy Town and they wouldn't think The Shape of Punk to Come was to add a DJ to a metal band," he added. "If they really loved Refused, they missed everything that was important about that band."

In recent years, the television and movie industries have cottoned on to the song's volatile power.

It has been featured in the films Crank, Here Comes the Boom and Triangle of Sadness, as well as the TV shows Friday Night Lights and Criminal Minds.

Most recently, the song has become a theme of sorts for The Bear, a tense drama set in a busy Chicago restaurant. The show, which began in 2022, boasts an exemplary soundtrack, but it's the 1998 hardcore classic New Noise which gives the series its most visceral pacing.

"I was watching the Emmys or whatever it was when they constantly played New Noise every time they won an award," Lyxzén told the CBC podcast Q with Tom Power. "I'm like, this is trippy. Seeing Steve Martin on stage listening to New Noise? That's wild.”

For the Umeå quartet, it is wild. It’s a surreal coup for the highlight of an album that some sections of their scene originally detested. But almost three decades on, the song and album retains its raw power.

Refused are fucking dead. Long live Refused.

Musician and composer Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds was released in 1978.

The musical – based on H.G. Wells' 1898 novel of the same name – was mostly recorded in Advision Studios, in Fitzrovia, London the previous year. The story centres around an unnamed person's survival during an alien invasion, and Wayne enlisted the likes of Richard Burton, David Essex, Julie Covington and The Moody Blues' Justin Hayward to bring Wells' apocalyptic vision to life.

Here, the New Yorker details his bond with the late, great Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott and why he thought he'd make the perfect fire-and-brimstone cleric Parson Nathaniel.

"Before we met I was a fan of Thin Lizzy. I loved their work, I loved Phil’s songwriting, and his voice was so distinctive. I approached him because of Thin Lizzy’s Fool’s Gold; he starts it off quite dramatically before singing. I thought: ‘Gosh, he’s got such a great speaking voice, lots of natural drama.’ That’s what triggered my hope that Phil might be interested in appearing on The War Of The Worlds.

"His managers passed the idea on to Phil, who was very keen and he agreed to come into the studio for a demo to give him an idea of what it was all about. He loved it and came on board instantly.

“As far as I know, he hadn’t had any acting experience, but he took direction absolutely beautifully and in good spirit. My dad, who was an actor and singer, did the acting direction, while I produced the music. Phil and my dad got on really well – there were some great outtakes. Once, they were chatting in the studio, then my dad went over to the piano. He played Tea For Two and Phil was on the mic, acting as if he was an MC for a nightclub. It was hilarious!

“Phil was a very physical being. He didn’t hold back performing on Spirit Of Man and his acting. He was very professional. If you have a perception of him as an out-of-control rock’n’roller, that’s not the guy I worked with. He was prepared, he knew the song after the first demo. He was engaged and had a very positive vibe about the production.

"We did a few takes of Phil’s scream [near the start of The Red Weed (Part 2)], because his voice broke on one attempt and he just burst into hysterics! He was into the idea of being the parson and how the character responded to the situation. That’s all you can ask from anyone – to believe they’re giving you all that they’re capable of.

“As much as he was a rock’n’roller, Phil had a very sensitive side. He gave me a signed copy of his book of poetry and prose – Songs For While I’m Away – on the last day. It revealed somebody who had a real soulful being. It’s a tragedy he didn’t go on. I spoke with him in hospital two or three weeks before he passed. He was quite coherent but you could tell the fight had gone out of him. That’s what hit me the most. It was just tragic. So young.

“That book he gave me, you just see the soul of the guy in a different way to that of Thin Lizzy’s persona and their music. You would have to be not only intelligent but soulful to have written that. Compared to his rock persona on stage with Thin Lizzy, it’s as opposite as you can get."

Jeff Wayne was speaking to Alex Burrows. The original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock 249, in May 2018

In 2001, former Creation Records boss Alan McGee had the genius idea of 'introducing Swedish garage rock band The Hives to a British audience by cherry picking the best songs from their two albums on Burning Heart Records - 1997's Barely Legal and 2000's Veni Vidi Vicious, plus 1998's A.K.A. I-D-I-O-T EP - and licensing them for release on what was essentially an early 'greatest hits' record, Your New Favourite Band, on his new record label Poptones.

That same year much-hyped New Yorkers The Strokes released their debut album Is This It, and Detroit'ss The White Stripes released their breakthrough album White Blood Cells. Deciding that this constituted a 'movement' despite the fact that the three bands had no connection whatsoever, Britain's cultural gatekeepers then declared that ROCK IS BACK! and elevated all three acts into the spotlight.

"At the time, getting popular in the UK could happen overnight," recalled The Hives' frontman Pelle Almqvist, "which didn’t really happen anywhere else – in the US you’ve got to tour for four years before anyone even hears you. It was fun to have that happen. Becoming famous overnight was like old-school Frank Sinatra, New York New York, it was awesome! You go on television and everyone sees you.”

In a measure of The Hives new-found popularity, their 2001 single Main Offender, which had failed to trouble chart compilers anywhere in the world when released to promote Veni Vidi Vicious, was then chosen to soundtrack a new cinema advert from up-market lingerie company Agent Provocateur, featuring Australian actress and pop star Kylie Minogue. At the time, thanks to the ubiquity of her UK number one singles Spinning Around and Can't Get You Out Of My Head (a chart topper in no fewer than 40 countries worldwide), Minogue might well have been the most popular celebrity in Britain, and through their association with her, The Hives would acquire a whole new audience.

The advert in question, titled Proof, opened with Minogue, dressed in the pink shop-coat uniform worn by all Agent Provocateur store staff, asserting that the company made "the most erotic lingerie in the world", adding, "And with your help, we can prove it."

Minogue then removes her dress to display her Agent Provocateur lingerie and proceeds to mount a red velvet-encased mechanised rodeo bull. This 'bucking bronco' is then switched on by a posh-looking older lady seated to the right of the frame, and Minogue, true professional that she is, gamely goes along for the ride.

When the machine is switched off, the singer looks into the camera lens and says, "And now for the proof." Dismounting the contraption, she then walks towards the camera, crouches down, and asks, "Would all the men in the audience stand up?" There's seven seconds of silence while Minogue pretends to check out her imaginary audience, and then says, "No? At which point the bull-manipulating upper class lady looks up from her vintage paperback copy of 'romance novel' Take Me! and cackles, "Didn't think you'd be able to!"

And cut.

Ever keen to whip up outrage among the nation's pearl-clutching masses, the UK tabloid newspapers duly reported that the advert had been banned from British TV, even though it wasn't shot for television, meaning that Agent Provocateur got a shit load of free publicity, and The Hives were subsequently 'discovered' by a ton of people using the Shazam app.

Win-win.

In 2009, the Proof advert topped a poll conducted by Digital Cinema Media to find the public's favourite cinema ad, beating iconic ads for Guinness, Bacardi, Carling Black Label, and some products that aren't alcohol.

"Cinema is about engaging and entertaining the audience," commented Fleur Castell, marketing and research controller at Digital Cinema Media, "and this ad pulls off both elements perfectly in a fun and cheeky way."

More importantly, the ad also paved the way for The Hives and Kylie Minogue to hang out.

"We met her while filming Top of the Pops and at the MTV Awards, and she seemed lovely," Pelle Almqvist confirmed.

We await future collaborations with bated breath.