Who would have thought that Robin Trower, the “backroom” guitarist with the stately keyboards-led Procol Harum, would become one of the great blues rock guitarists?

It was the second of his power trio’s superb trilogy of back-to-back albums in the mid-70s that sealed his reputation. Beginning with the stuttering riff of Day Of The Eagle, the album combines urgency with gravitas. ‘A cold wind blows and gods look down in anger on this poor child,’ sings bassist James Dewar as the title track unfolds with a vast, slow momentum, like a planet drifting through the void.

It’s a beautifully balanced, dynamic record filled with quality songs, masterful playing from Trower (Bridge Of Sighs, Too Rolling Stoned) with his overdriven, reverb-drenched, swirling psychedelic sound and Hendrix inflections, plus some outstanding performances (About To Begin, In This Place) from the peerless Dewar.

Bridge Of Sighs peaked at No.7 in the US and remains one of the pillars of Trower's repertoire to this day.

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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.

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Other albums released in April 1974

• Ragged Old Flag - Johnny Cash
• Second Helping - Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Big Fun - Miles Davis
• Carolina County Ball - Elf
• Standing on the Verge of Getting It On - Funkadelic
• Okie - J.J. Cale
• Exotic Birds and Fruit - Procol Harum
• Hamburger Concerto - Focus
• Houston (I'm Comin' to See You) - Glen Campbell
• Positive Vibrations - Ten Years After
• Road Food - The Guess Who
• Secret Treaties - Blue Öyster Cult
• Unconditionally Guaranteed - Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band
• Sweet Fanny Adams - Sweet

What they said...

"At his best, Trower's gauzy sheets of oozing, wistful sound and subtle use of wah-wah combine with Dewar's whisky-soaked soul-drenched vocals to take a song like the wistful ballad "In This Place" into orbit. "Too Rolling Stoned," another highlight and one of the most covered tracks from this album, adds throbbing, subtle funk to the mix, changing tempos midway to a slow, forceful amble on top of which Trower lays his quicksilver guitar."(AllMusic)

"The song ideas are strong, and Dewar’s vocals are impressively sturdy, but ultimately it is Trower’s virtuosic touch, the nuanced tone of his Strat and the intrinsic skill of the 'bends and wobbles' that Robert Fripp so admired on which the success of Bridge Of Sighs rests." (Uncut)

"Throughout you can almost play 'name that Jimi' (try the last third of Too Rolling Stoned, where you can namecheck maybe four passages you've heard somewhere before), but with the raw bluesy voice of bassist James Dewar and Trower's writing the album manages to find its own voice. On the slower About To Begin the guitarist leans more towards Peter Green and a whiff of Carlos Santana's purity of tone." (Elsewhere)

What you said...

Adam Ranger: Such a good choice! As teenagers, my friend and I listened to Trower a lot. We could not understand why he was not talked about in the same terms as Hendrix, Page, etc. Very underrated outside of certain circles.

The Hendrix style is unmistakable at times, especially on Day Of The Eagle and Little Bit Of Sympathy. The power trio format may help that impression.

That said, he is no Hendrix tribute act. He has a wonderful style of his own. I love the way he often avoids obvious guitar licks and builds atmosphere instead (a good example is the title track). But when he lets himself go, it's a joy to listen to.

Special mention to James Dewar's bass and vocals. He has a wonderful voice for this style, low but melodic. Maybe comparisons with Cream are as valid as the Hendrix ones? The cover art always put me in mind of stirred cream.... A brilliant blues rock album that scores highly for me.

Philip Qvist: In the mid 2000s, as established South African radio stations started to shun rock music, record companies started to issue CD compilations of rock music from assorted artists, with a collection of songs from the usual suspects such as Deep Purple, Rainbow, Boston and Kansas. And believe it or not, it was on one of those compilations that I was first introduced to Robin Trower, via a live version of Too Rolling Stoned.

I had never heard of this guitarist and songwriter until then, and it's only after that moment that I started to listen to a couple of his songs, even if they never made it onto my playlist of essential songs.

So listening to Bridge of Sighs this week is my first real introduction to Robin Trower the solo artist, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Too Rolling Stoned, Bridge Of Sighs and Day Of The Eagle are my picks, but in truth there aren't any duds on this record.

Special mentions must go to singer and bass player James Dewar for his soulful singing, and drummer Reg Isidore for maintaining the pace. An 8/10 from me; I'm just glad that I finally got to listen to Bridge Of Sighs (named after a racehorse, I believe, and not the structure in Venice).

Jackie Craig: I bought this when it was first released. Re: the title track, when that riff comes in for the first time it still has the same mesmerising effect on me all these years later; probably more so now that I'm so much older. Day Of The Eagle is a great opener, and in fact the entire album is an absolute feast. 10/10.

John Davidson: Great album. Bridge Of Sighs is a fantastic track, but Too Rolling Stoned is the one I listen to most often.

I recall Trower being criticised for aping Jimi Hendrix, but while I can hear a little of his inspiration on some tracks, it's not overdone. The vocals are another highlight, and the bass and drumming complete the set. It's perhaps not groundbreaking, but it's very accomplished and a thoroughly enjoyable album.

Mark Herrington: My first introduction to Robin Trower was hearing the meaty Victims of the Fury on the radio in 1980, and buying the single. Intrigued, I bought the album, probably his hardest-rocking LP. From there, I was hooked on his bluesy psychedelic style.

Then I picked up a second-hand vinyl copy of Caravan to Midnight for £1, a much more languid, dreamy offering. Gradually, I worked backwards through his albums, until probably his best work, Bridge of Sighs (1974).

Trower excels in his expressive, psychedelic, and soulful bluesy guitar, dovetailing naturally with James Dewar's deep, emotive vocals. I gravitate to his slower, more expressive tracks such as Bridge Of Sighs and In This Place, where every note seems to linger and carry meaning. But I also love the muscular virtuosity on tracks like Too Rolling Stoned.

He is a master at bringing the guitar to life and giving it a voice, underlined by his live performances, where he seems to mouth every note he plays. Overall, probably Trower's finest work.

Mike Canoe: A classic blues-rock album. The title track is still the most amazing and astounding thing here, but the rest of the album is enjoyable too. Much as when we reviewed Twice Removed from Yesterday in the club's second year, I am struck by how bassist and singer James Dewar is the band's not-so-secret weapon. While Robin Trower is deservedly the name above the title, Dewar's gruff but melodious voice complements Trower's playing perfectly. He doesn't overemote or ape other blues singers; he just sings. The overall restraint of the musicianship is impressive, and the songs are songs first and not just showcases for guitar wankery.

Come for the title track, stay for In This Place, Too Rolling Stoned, The Fool and Me, and Lady Love.

Greg Schwepe: If you’re looking for another album to add to your “1970’s Rock Guitar Album Time Capsule” (there is such a thing, right?) before you bury it, look no further than Robin Trower’s Bridge of Sighs to throw in there with a few other good ones. How often have you heard an album called “dated?” Well, this one is. Sounds just like 1974, and meant to be that way!

This has all the hallmarks of a classic 70’s guitar-fest album; the tasteful guitar tones of Robin Trower, the soulful vocals (and bass) of James Dewar, and the grooving drums of Reg Isidore. Ah yes, the Power Trio. It’s been proven many times, you only need three guys to make an awesome racket.

The clarion call of Day Of The Eagle leads off the one-two punch of Sighs. The galloping and repeating riff gets your attention. And then, right at about three minutes in, the tempo slows to a halt, but your attention does not. Trower’s bluesy soloing finishes out the song. They are not the first band to change tempos and time signatures for effect, but they do it with authority.

The title track is next, and Trower’s trilling hammer-on note that fades in changes to a sparse three-four note repeating groove that is spacey, atmospheric, pulsing, and undulating, all at the same time. The layered repeating guitar sections at the end with the blowing wind sound effects make for a trippy end to the song.

I had read in liner notes how some thought Trower was a bit of a “Hendrix Clone.” Yes, he played a Strat through a Marshall, and used many of the same effects (Univibe, Wah-Wah, Leslie) as Jimi, but he had his own style. I think I also read that Trower said that if you’re going to be accused of copying someone, Hendrix wasn’t a bad person to be compared to.

Too Rolling Stoned is another riff-filled monster where Trower’s wah-wah pedal and Univibe get quite the workout. Once again we have a ton of riffs that then hit the brakes at about the 2:45 mark. Dewar’s vocals and the bluesy riffs finish out the rest of the song. Extended guitar solo anyone? Yes indeed. Along with a thumping drumbeat to keep you engaged.

I did a deep dive on Robin Trower’s catalogue several years ago after hearing Bridge of Sighs on the radio after not having heard it in years. While I had certainly heard of Trower before, his music was not a regular staple on the radio where I lived. “Oh yeah, I have got to check him out.” A compilation CD led to purchasing most of his catalogue. Which then turned into another “Wow, what have I been missing?” moment. 9 out of 10 on this one for me. Come for the title track, stay for the rest.

Final score: 8.91 (59 votes cast, total score 526)

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Like all Pete Townshend’s best songs, The Who's My Generation was a thrilling collision of body and brain. The title had highbrow roots, the guitarist inspired by the Generations collection by socialist playwright David Mercer. But the song’s visceral clatter was fuelled by Townshend’s disgust at his well-heeled neighbours in London. Despite the iconic ‘hope I die before I get old’ line, the songwriter later noted, it was wealth and class, more than age, that he despised.

"The line actually came from a time when I was living in a really wealthy district of London, just by accident," Townshend said in 1983. "I didn't really understand quite where I was living at the time. And I was treated very strangely on the street, in an imperious way by a lot of people, and it was that that I didn't like. I didn't like being confronted with money and the class system and power. I didn't like being in a corner shop in Belgravia and some woman in a fur coat pushing me out of the way because she was richer.

"I didn't know how to deal with that. I could've, I suppose, insisted on my rights and not written the song. But I was a fucked-up little kid, and so I wrote the song."

Townshend worked on My Generation during The Who’s Scandinavian summer tour of 1965, but on his return, the original demo proved a torpid thing, “very much inspired by Mose Allison’s Young Man Blues, my vocal casual and confident”.

Management saw the song differently, and pushed for a heavier riff and – after Townshend played them John Lee Hooker’s Stuttering Blues – the vocal tic that went down in history. Roger Daltrey had genuinely stammered as a child, but he was told to emphasise this. “[Manager] Kit Lambert came up and said ‘Stutter the words – it makes it sound like you’re pilled’.”

No doubt, it appealed to the mischief of all concerned that Daltrey was able to let a stammered ‘f’ hang in the air, the listener braced for ‘fuck’ (before the singer resolved the lyric with the less inflammatory ‘fade away’).

Both as a single – and on the Marquee stage, where the song had its first live airing on November 2 – My Generation let all four members shine. There was Daltrey’s rabblerousing vocal. Townshend’s slashed chords. John Entwistle’s rubber-band bass solo (“John was becoming the outstanding bass revolutionary of the day,” noted Townshend, “and I wanted to provide him with a vehicle for his incredible playing”). Keith Moon’s clatterous outro, chasing around the kit in a squall of feedback. Together, they made the heaviest sound in the pop charts of 1965. It also became the band's biggest UK hit – reaching number two in the chart – and denting the Top 100 in the US.

If Townshend felt any guilt at sticking it to the establishment, then shortly before the song’s release, he was reminded why he wrote it in the first place, as his 936 Packard V12 hearse was impounded on the orders of the Queen Mother. “She had to pass it every day and complained that it reminded her of her late husband’s funeral. So I resentfully dedicated My Generation to the Queen Mother…”

The song would influence a generation of up-and-coming rockers, including Alice Cooper, whose all-star Hollywood Vampires – named after the infamous drinking club whose members included Cooper and Keith Moon – play My Generation to this day.

“I think My Generation was maybe the first anthem," Cooper told Classic Rock. "That was the birth of the power chord, right there. And then you saw The Who performing it, and you saw [Pete Townshend] smashing into his amps, and you started going, ‘Is there any end to this British Invasion? I mean, who else is going to come up?’"

From Townshend's power chords to Daltrey's iconic stutter, via Entwhistle's string-breaking solo and Moon's wild, clattering finale, My Generation is one of those rare songs that's a solo tour-de-force for every band member, yet somehow comes together to be even greater than the sum of its virtuostic individual parts.

“Being a mod, I always thought My Generation was a fucking great song, an unbelievable song," said Kenny Jones, Moon's replacement in The Who. "Once a mod, always a mod, y’know? Moony was all over the place. That bit at the end where he goes crazy on the drums? I know – I’ve done it. There are fills that you have to play because the song dictates it."

In a famous scene in series one of Steve Coogan's brilliant TV comedy I'm Alan Partridge, the broadcaster has a business meeting with two Irish television executives (played by Father Ted writers Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan), and attempts to ingratiate himself with the pair by talking up his affection for Irish rock band U2.

"Sunday Bloody Sunday, what a great song," Partridge enthuses. "It really encapsulates the frustration of a Sunday, doesn't it? You wake up in the morning, you've got to read all the Sunday papers, the kids are running round, you've got to mow the lawn, wash the car, and you think, [exasperated] Sunday, bloody Sunday!"

"I really hate to do this to you, Alan," replies Linehan's character Aidan Walsh, "but it's actually a song about..."

"Bloody Sunday is actually about a massacre in Derry in 1972," Mathews' character Paul Tool chips in.

"A massacre?" says Partridge, grimacing. "Ugh. I'm not playing that again."

The joke within the joke here, which Steve Coogan understood as the son of Irish parents, is that U2 themselves were forever stressing the point that their 1983 single, taken their third studio album War, was not about the events of January 30, 1972, when British soldiers from the Parachute Regiment shot 26 unarmed civilians during a protest march in Derry, in the North of Ireland, killing 13 innocent Catholic men, with a fourteenth man dying four months later from his injuries.

When the Dublin quartet first played the song in Belfast, at the Maysfield Leisure Centre on December 20, 1982, frontman Bono explicitly told the mixed-religion audience that the song was "not a rebel song" - traditionally a folk song glorifying the Irish Republican cause, condemning the British presence in Ireland - but rather "a song of hope and a song of disgust".

"It was very emotional," drummer Larry Mullen recalled in a 1983 interview with Rolling Stone magazine. "It’s a very special song, because it’s the first time that we ever really made a statement."

In addition to being inspired by the band's own despair at the continued political and sectarian violence in the North of Ireland during what was euphemistically known as 'The Troubles', the song's lyrics were partially inspired by an argument that their manager Paul McGuinness, himself the son of a a British military serviceman, had in a New York bar with patrons who were pledging support for the paramilitary Irish Republican Army (IRA).

"I don't care who's who – Catholics, Protestants, whatever," Larry Mullen stated in 1983. "You know people are dying every single day through bitterness and hate, and we're saying, Why? What's the point?

"And you can move that into places like El Salvador and other similar situations – people dying. Let's forget the politics, let's stop shooting each other and sit around the table and talk about it... There are a lot of bands taking sides saying politics is crap, etc. Well, so what! The real battle is people dying, that's the real battle."

To avoid being too literal about the conflict in the North Of Ireland - and very possibly to lower their own chances of being targeted by paramilitary forces on either side - U2 opted to delete the song's original opening lyric, which ran 'Don't talk to me about the rights of the IRA, UDA [Ulster Defence Association]', replacing it with the line "I can't believe the news today", a reference to the fact that seemingly every single day broadcasters in Ireland would share further news of unrest and violence in the Six Counties. Elsewhere, in keeping with U2's shared Christian beliefs, the song is peppered with Biblical references, both an underscoring of their commitment to their faith, and a calling out of the hypocrisy of those involved in the conflict claiming to have God on their side, culminating in the lyric "The real battle just began, To claim the victory Jesus won."

In truth, there's a naivety to the song's lyrics: young men in their early 20s who had spent fewer than 20 days in the North of Ireland in their entire lives were never going to have the deepest understanding of the conflict. Years later, Bono would confess that "it was a song whose eloquence lay in its harmonic power rather than its verbal strength." And ahead of the release of War, in his review for NME, Belfast-born music journalist Gavin Martin wrote, "lyrically and musically it reminds me of a slightly superior Stiff Little Fingers, hardly what the world needs right now."

But when the band utilised live performance footage from their triumphant U2 Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky concert film to promote the single, the image of the singer waving a white flag while calling for an end to conflict - demanding the crowd join him in singing "No more!" - was undeniably powerful.

"It was only going to America made us think about Ireland," Bono told NME in 1984. "You just don't think about it until you have people throwing money onstage during Bobby Sands and the whole hunger strike thing. I thought that guy must be so brave, but why? Why be so brave? Why die? There's something not right about this.

"I would like to see a united Ireland, I belive it is an island," he continued. "People then say, 'Do you believe in a cause enough to die for it?' I believe in a cause enough to live for it. These people believe in taking others' lives away. I just can't agree with this whole, 'If you don't agree with me I'll put a gun to your head' vibe. Having had a Protestant father and a Catholic mother I know how grey it is. There are no sides."

Geddy Lee has detailed a spooky encounter that took place on the opening night of Rush's ongoing Fifty Something tour in June.

During an interview with Toronto radio station Q107 to celebrate the trio's first hometown shows in a decade, host Joanne Wilder asks Lee if he'd felt the presence of late Rush drummer Neil Peart on the tour.

"Spooky question!" Lee responds. "Well, it's funny. I'll tell you a little story. After the opening night, we were staying in L.A., and I was texting Al [Alex Lifeson]. We were in the same hotel, but we were texting each other.

"My door to my room was open a crack, and I don't know if you've seen the posters [for Rush's Fifty Something tour] that have two birds on a wire and the one bird is flying away. I looked in front of me, on the floor, and there was a bird on the floor that looked just like that bird in the poster.

"I was kind of shocked. And, you know, I love birds, so I approached it, and it flew by me and flew into my bedroom and sat on the edge of my bed. And when I approached it, it was like it was looking at me, and then it flew out the door. So, I quickly ran to the computer and was texting Al this crazy story that had just happened.

"Now, I'm not a guy who believes in all that mumbo jumbo. But it was a kind of remarkable moment, and as I was texting him, the bird returned and just stuck its head in the doorway, like to give me another nod. And then I said, 'Okay, bye,' and it flew away. It was crazy, crazy."

Wilson, who appears slightly more inclined to believe in all that mumbo jumbo, reacts by saying, "Okay, well I will believe for you. If you don't want to believe, I will believe for you. That was Neil."

Rush's second hometown date at the Scotiabank Arena takes place this evening (August 9), followed by shows on Tuesday and Thursday. Full dates below.

A new documentary about Peart, Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple, will premiere on CBC on September 23. The film includes footage of Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson performing Rush songs with the likes of Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Stewart Copeland (The Police) and Danny Carey (Tool).

Rush: Fifty Something tour 2026

Aug 09: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 11: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 13: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 21: Philadelphia Xfinity Mobile Arena, PA
Aug 23: Philadelphia Xfinity Mobile Arena, PA
Aug 26: Detroit Little Caesars Arena, MI
Aug 28: Detroit Little Caesars Arena, MI
Sep 02: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 04: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 12: Boston TD Garden, MA
Sep 14: Boston TD Garden, MA
Sep 17: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 19: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 23: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Sep 25: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Oct 05: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 07: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 10: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 12: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 15: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 17: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 25: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 27: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 30: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 01: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 05: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 07: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 09: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 11: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 20: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 22: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 25: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Nov 27: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Dec 01: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 03: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 10: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 12: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 15: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC
Dec 17: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC

Rush: Fifty Something tour 2027

Jan 15: Buenos Aires Movistar Arena, Argentina
Jan 22: Curitiba Arena da Baixada, Brazil
Jan 24: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 26: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 30: Rio de Janeiro Estádio Olímpico Nilton Santos. Brazil
Feb 01: Belo Horizonte Estádio Mineirão, Brazil
Feb 04: Brasília Arena BRB Mané Garrincha, Brazil

Feb 19: Paris La Défense Arena, France
Feb 21: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Feb 23: Amstersam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Feb 25: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Feb 28: Cologne Lanxess Arena, Germany
Mar 02: Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
Mar 04: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
Mar 08: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 10: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 12: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 14: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 16: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 18: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 21: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 27: Kraków Arena Kraków, Poland
Mar 30: Milan Unipol Dome, Italy
Apr 01: Basel St. Jakobshalle Basel, Switzerland
Apr 04: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Apr 06: Oslo Unity Arena, Norway
Apr 08: Stockholm Avicii Arena, Sweden
Apr 10: Helsinki Veikkaus Arena, Finland

Find Rush tickets.

The Anchoress’ strikingly-titled single I Had A Baby, Not A Lobotomy was inspired by her experience as a new mother facing the bewildering attitudes of those around her.

After her daughter’s birth five years ago, she heard comments – now immortalised in the song – including: ‘I guess you’ll be retiring now’, ‘You’re getting on, the kid will hate ya,’ and ‘Guess now there won’t be any more tours?’

While Catherina Anne Davies stresses that the lead track from her latest Anchoress album, As We Once Were, humorous rather than a furious or vindictive rant, she admits she found the process of channelling the phrases into art somewhat therapeutic.

“I would jot it down on my phone every time someone would say something to me that pissed me off. Rather than want to throttle them, I would write it down and bite my lip, and it became this litany of comments.

“Some of it was really well meaning, or they thought they were being helpful, so I didn’t want to make people feel bad. The best thing you can do with satire and humour is to try and get people to think again. I always want to do that with a smile on my face.”

When the track went live she knew she’d struck a chord. “My phone has been blowing up, as the kids say, with all sorts of people, including a lot of other musicians and producers who are trying to navigate this shit the whole time.

“They’re all saying a very big, resounding ‘Yes! I feel like this, too!’ And other people are saying, ‘You wouldn’t believe some of the inane shit I’ve had thrown at me – jobs I’ve lost when they found out I had kids.’

“So yeah, it’s resonated in quite a serious way, even though my intention was fairly tongue-in-cheek.”

The song’s parent album is something of a concept set, partly inspired by a family discovery. “I found a lost tape of my grandmother’s voice, talking about her life, which is heard throughout the record,” she explains. That’s the thread that holds it all together.”

Four generations of Davies women are heard on As We Once Were – including her five-year-old daughter, of course. And there are other sounds to be heard that might be considered to come from a past era.

“I was invited to come into Pete Townshend’s studios and use all his vintage synths,” Davies says. “I got to have a whale of the time piloting all these crazy machines.

“It’s made the album very synth-heavy, but it goes to a whole new level from what I’ve done previously, because I’ve never worked on modular synths before.

“It was a real learning curve. On modern synths you can press a pre-saved patch and just play. With these you have to create and shape the sound yourself; and the sound I made that day on that synth, I won’t be able to repeat.

“And that chimes in with what the record is about, which is the impossibility of freezing time and holding onto moments.”

Meanwhile, she’s has launch a podcast called The Milk And The Music, talking to working musicians about their experiences of motherhood. Guests include Lau.ra, Charlotte Hatherley and Gazelle Twin.

Davies hopes it will move beyond storytelling to offer practical solutions. “I’m not a fan of negativity and moaning without some sense of what the solution is,” she explains.

As We Once Were is on sale now.

"Nevermore are one of the greatest, most important bands to ever do it." So says Urne's Joe Nally early on Saturday at Bloodstock and while the prog metal group's profile certainly never reached that of Tool or Rush, they wouldn't be the first band to make a comeback this decade and become bigger than ever.

But they endure a patchy start. Put it down to the controversy around tonight's headliners Slaughter To Prevail, the unyielding heat, or the simple fact that it's been 16 years since Nevermore last played the UK - and before that was Bloodstock in 2007, so they were hardly frequent visitors - but the crowd seems especially sparse for the retooled and revitalised Nevermore.

They won't let that stop them putting on a killer show. New vocalist Berzan Önen - replacing the much missed Warrel Dane, who died in 2017 - has great stage presence and his powerful, histrionic vocal talents are geninely captivating, while the band's unique fusion of extreme metal heft - just listen to that double-bass go, never letting up - old school heavy metal guitars and prog melody means Nevermore still feel genuinely ahead of the curve.

A few songs in, and the crowd thankfully swells to a healthy level as they hit their stride. Drawing from across their discography, the set is an abridged greatest hits with particular emphasis on 2000's phenomenal Dead Heart In A Dead World, thundering as they bust out the likes of Inside Four Walls and Engines Of Hate. Hitting each track with fresh vitality, Nevermore sound more like Hypocrisy or Strapping Young Lad than Queensryche and the sheer force of their sound is tremendous.

There's no major set pieces or production gimmicks, just great tunes and musicians going hell for leather for a hale 60 minutes. The highlight of the set is undoubtedly the gothic, doomy The Heart Collector, a track that somehow manages to bridge Sabbath and Nymphetamine with the Gothenburg sound, colossal in its ambition and brimming with anthemic potential. With more shows like this - and a new album on the way next year - we reckon Nevermore 2.0 might finally give the band the love they so richly deserve.

“I feel like Scotland have just won the World Cup!” says Bleed From Within frontman Scott Kennedy halfway through his band's set. Scott is happy, and so he should be; after all, his band have been grafting for 23 years and have reached a point where they can turn up at the UK’s premier metal festival and be greeted like one of the highlights of the weekend.

Two years ago at Bloodstock, Malevolence subheadlined the Ronnie James Dio stage, blew everyone away and walked off looking like shoe-ins as future headliners. Today, it’s Bleed From Within’s turn to do the very same.

With a back catalogue of seven strong albums and over two decades of hard road work behind them, BFW were never going to let an opportunity like today pass them by, and they are exceptional this afternoon, grasping the chance to stake their claim in an incredible manner. The grooves and propulsion of tracks like Levitate and God Complex sound magnificent, with Scott, rapidly growing into one of metal’s best frontmen, endlessly egging on the crowd, demanding more circle pits and more chaos. He gets his demands met, too, with at least five swirling pits being counted at one point.

The band sound fabulously tight, and the extra elements they add to their sound today with bagpipes players and vocalist Hannah Boulton pepper some glorious new textures to their meaty metallic crunch.

By the time they bid farewell with a superb run through of In Place Of Your Halo, jaws are on the floor and they’ve left headliners Slaughter to Prevail with a mighty high bar to reach. “This,” Scott tells us “is the best show this band has ever played.” It’s hard to disagree.

A John McGinn winner in the World Cup final? Sorry Scott, that sounds like pure fantasy. But Bleed From Within to headline Bloodstock? Well, that seems a much safer bet.

Dimmu Borgir frontman Shagrath remembers queuing up at an ATM in central Oslo when he was recognised by a group of local metalheads. Rather than giving a nod of appreciation, one of them offered a withering put-down: “Oh, are you going to take out some royalties then?”

This wasn’t recently, or even during the band’s initial breakthrough in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Rather, the year was 1994, and the band had only just released their debut seven-inch single, Inn I Evighetens Mørke, (‘Into The Darkness Of Eternity’) amidst a black metal scene still churning in the wake of Mayhem mastermind Euronymous’s murder and an ongoing wave of church burnings across the country.

No one then could have suspected that the makers of this embryonic three-track, keyboard-laden lament would go on to become the best-selling, and subsequently one of the most divisive, black metal bands of all time, but it was clear they were going to have to get used to being called sellouts from the start.

Shagrath (real name Stian Thoresen) had formed Dimmu Borgir with fellow 17-year-olds Kenneth Åkesson (aka Tjodalv) and Sven Atle Kopperud (aka Silenoz) a year earlier in the small town of Jessheim, 30 miles north of Oslo. Shagrath previously led his own teenage black metal band, Fimbulwinter, while his new bandmates had played in short-lived death metal groups before seeing the dark and switching musical allegiance.

“It was exciting times and dangerous times,” says Silenoz now. “When that stuff with the church burnings went down, we heard about people who were starting to wear knives and weapons, so we did the same. But if you were walking down the street in Oslo, the police would just stop you out of nowhere and search you because you were wearing black and fitted a certain description.”

The band initially called themselves Dimmuborgir, after an area of lava fields and rock formations in northern Iceland whose name means ‘dark castles’.

“We wanted a name that suited the darkness and atmosphere of what we were doing,” says Silenoz of the moniker, which was soon split into two words. “I always said later that if we wanted to be more commercial, we would have taken a different name.”

The trio’s initial roles in the band were in flux: all three would play guitar and bass, Shagrath doubled up on drums, while Silenoz did the majority of the vocals with Shagrath occasionally pitching in. But they resolved early on that they were going to focus on the musical and spiritual side of black metal rather than scene politics – sowing the seeds of an ambitious drive that would come to define them later.

Inspired by the likes of Emperor, Enslaved and Gehenna, they realised what they really wanted were some keyboards to add to the dark atmosphere that had emerged from the rehearsals. Silenoz roped in his childhood neighbour, Stian Aarstad, to that end. However, in a precursor of issues to come, getting him properly integrated in the band would prove insurmountable.

“He hardly ever turned up at rehearsals,” says Shagrath. “It was frustrating, creating melodies on keyboard was always as important as the guitar. But getting Stian to do anything was a fucking nightmare.”

Dimmu Borgir recorded their debut album, For All Tid, in 1994 and released it the following year, by which time they’d been joined by bassist Brynjard Tristan. Reflecting the conditions in which it was rehearsed (“It was a freezing cold, damp warehouse and the equipment was really shit, but that’s how you did it then,” is Silenoz’s recollection), its insular if evocative grimness remains a marker point for both a scene in total opposition to the world around it, and a band tentatively embarking on their own path.

The follow-up, Stormblåst, once again featuring Silenoz on vocals, was released a year later. But the band’s lack of experience – combined with their use of an engineer they didn’t gel with – meant Dimmu were reaching the limits of what they could achieve, falling short of their ever-growing ambitions. Where they went next not only dramatically altered the fortunes of Dimmu Borgir, it changed the landscape of black metal itself.

Dimmu might have been frustrated by the discrepancy between their vision and the reality with Stormblåst, but one person who saw the potential was Markus Staiger. The owner of increasingly influential German label Nuclear Blast, he’d been following their progress and was looking to sign black metal bands to the label’s roster.

“We knew we would get flamed for signing to Nuclear Blast,” says Silenoz. “But they had a few other really good bands, so we thought, ‘Why can’t we?’ We still had that underground mentality, but we knew that we just couldn’t go ahead with that kind of behaviour anymore.”

Their debut album for Nuclear Blast was 1997’s Enthrone Darkness Triumphant. Produced by Hypocrisy frontman Peter Tägtgren, it saw Shagrath moving to vocals, replaced on drums by Tjodalv, with Silenoz focusing on guitar. They were joined by new bassist/guitarist Nagash who brought what Shagrath calls a “creative weirdness” that helped broaden Dimmu’s sound.

Drawing on everything from huge-scale classic composers such as Richard Wagner, Antonín Dvořák and fellow Norwegian Edvard Grieg, to the vaulting goth rock of Fields Of The Nephilim, the album introduced a new level of bombast to black metal.

Its sonic scope took Dimmu out of the symphonic shadows of Cradle Of Filth and Emperor, and subsequently became the band’s ornate calling card. Silenoz remembers being told at the time that their label boss, Markus Staiger, had gone apeshit in response to hearing tracks from it for the first time.

“I immediately thought, ‘Oh, he’s pissed off,’” he recalls. “But I was told it was because he thought it was so good, and he put a ton of fucking money into the promotion campaign on that album.”

Enthrone Darkness Triumphant arrived at a time when the black metal scene was in the throes of evolution. Between 1996 and 1997, many of its key bands released transformational albums, including Cradle Of Filth, Emperor, Satyricon, Enslaved, Arcturus and Sigh. Enthrone Darkness Triumphant eclipsed them all, going on to sell upwards of 300,000 copies. But their artistic success didn’t come without some pushback, not least from other musicians.

“I could sense the envy, for the lack of a better word,” says Silenoz. “But it was also mixed with ‘How the fuck did you do this?’, because the sound was so polished compared to what everyone was known to listen to. They thought that probably we had sold our asses for a huge sum of money. That’s when I noticed people starting to make up assumptions about how things were. And in hindsight, that’s when people really started opening their mouths about what they thought.”

Rumours circulated of a rivalry between Dimmu and Cradle Of Filth, with Cradle’s Dani Filth supposedly taking umbrage at the Norwegians stealing his own band’s thunder. Today, Shagrath and Silenoz are adamant that there was no beef.

“We never had any bad blood,” Shagrath says of Cradle, with whom Dimmu had played a handful of shows in Germany just before Enthrone Darkness Triumphant was released. “I remember I was quite impressed how actually professional they were, and they inspired us to sharpen our knives after that tour. Music has never been about competition for me. It’s about being creative and the art aspects of it. There was some piss-taking, but nothing more than that.”

Dani need not have worried. When both bands appeared at the 1997 Dynamo festival, Cradle played the main stage while Dimmu Borgir were stuck on a dedicated black metal stage alongside Satyricon and Dissection. But billing was the least of their worries that day.

“We were on the way to get the boat over,” Shagrath recalls, “and Stian Arstaad calls me saying, ‘Hey, I can’t make it.’ He didn’t get permission from his parents or he was going into the military or something, I don’t know.”

Unwilling to tolerate anything less than total commitment, his bandmates were unimpressed and it marked the end of Stian’s time in the band. Family commitments meant that founding member Tjodalv couldn’t give himself fully to Dimmu’s increased touring schedule, and he left shortly after the band’s next album, 1999’s Spiritual Black Dimensions. It was the start of a long-running drama of hirings and firings that ultimately consolidated Shagrath and Silenoz as the band’s creative core.

Spiritual Black Dimensions saw the introduction of Mustis on keyboards, and ICS Vortex as guest vocalist, later to become a full-time member taking on bass duties too. His impressively sky-razing howl would, for a time, become another signature part of their sound, and if …Dimensions upped the theatricality even further, 2001’s Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia brought in a full orchestra, as well as former Cradle Of Filth drummer Nick Barker and a new lead guitarist, Galder.

Their biggest step into the mainstream consciousness, however, came with 2003’s sweepingly ambitious Death Cult Armageddon, whose imperious second track, Progenies Of The Great Apocalypse, appeared in the trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s acclaimed comic book adaptation, Hellboy.

“That and playing Ozzfest helped catapult us in the States for sure,” says Silenoz. “I was in a cinema with my girlfriend at the time in Texas. The trailer came on, and it was our music. It was like, ‘Fuck, that was a trip!’”

But internal tensions were starting to manifest, and yet more line-up changes followed. By the time of 2007’s concept album, In Sorte Diaboli, Nick Barker had been replaced by Mayhem drummer Hellhammer.

Yet more changes were afoot with the release of 2010’s maximalist mindfuck, Abrahadabra. Gone were the three-word titles, and the stage costumes had been changed from customary black to a winter wonderland white, but most noticeable was the absence of ICS Vortex and Mustis – two members many fans felt were integral to the band’s sound.

“People say, ‘Oh that’s the best era, when Barker, ICS and Mustis were in the band’, but it was a ticking fucking time bomb, and people had no clue what was going on behind the scenes,” says Shagrath. “Sometimes you need to make some changes; you have two options, and that’s to break up the band or move forward, and we chose to move forward.”

Bitter words were exchanged between both parties, though hatchets were buried when Mustis and ICS Vortex joined Dimmu Borgir onstage at 2024’s Inferno festival in Oslo. For Silenoz, there are lessons to be learned on both sides.

“Looking back, maybe everybody involved could have handled it a little bit better,” he says. “We felt like we got attacked. They probably felt that they weren’t heard and seen, so they teamed up against us and we felt we had to retaliate. But there’s been water under the bridge for a few years now, so it turned out to be a fun thing to do, and it was cool for the fans as well.”

Today, Shagrath and Silenoz are the sole remaining founder members of Dimmu Borgir (the next longest-tenured member, Galder, left in 2024 after 24 years).

“In many ways, you forge a bond maybe without even knowing it,” says Silenoz of the evolution of his and Shagrath’s musical partnership. “That carries on into the creative part of things. It all comes down to having something that you really are convinced about, that this is what you’re supposed to do.”

Whether the various personnel changes of the last two decades have impacted on their work rate isn’t clear, but the fact remains that the gap between Dimmu Borgir albums has grown. 2018’s Eonian arrived eight years after Abrahadabra, and the same gap separates the former from Dimmu’s new album, Grand Serpent Rising.

“It has been a very long process,” Shagrath admits. “But a more comfortable one, because we had time to focus on the small details, which is an important thing in Dimmu. We work with the band day and night, five days a week, so there are always things happening behind the scenes that might not be apparent.”

Although Shagrath will talk of creative differences in the painstaking making of albums, and the challenges and frustrations involved in overcoming them, they’re bonded by the mutual respect they still have for each other.

“It’s when we put our heads together that the magic happens,” he says. “You have to swallow some pride sometimes to make each other shine. It’s not easy, but it’s worked for 33 years now, and we’re still friends. The last line-up changes have made us a bit closer also. We communicate better, and right now the vibes of this band are incredible. I haven’t felt that joy for probably over a decade.”

Ask Shagrath and Silenoz what they want Dimmu to be remembered for, and they will both agree that it’s their refusal to compromise, rather than play to expectations, that’s taken them to their rarefied, top-dog status.

“We’ve never been afraid of going into places that other bands wouldn’t dare to go,” says Shagrath. “Hopefully we’ll be remembered for a band that crossed boundaries, and, basically, refused to play ball.”

Grand Serpent Rising is out now via Nuclear Blast. Dimmu Borgir play London's Brixton Academy on October 17.

It’s fair to say that more than a few eyebrows were raised last year when Slaughter to Prevail were announced as Bloodstock headliners. A new name at the top of the bill is always something to celebrate, but there were more than a few grumbles that the Russian/UK deathcore crew were either not big enough or not musically in keeping with the tradition of Bloodstock to truly fit the bill. So STP arrive at the festival very much with plenty to prove and a lot of cynics to win over.

With all of this for context, it’s actually quite impressive how emphatically they ram those doubts back down people’s throats this evening. Because Slaughter to Prevail look every inch the consummate modern metal festival headliner this evening.

The reasons they succeed are simple, yet stunningly effective; firstly, they bring a show, a sense of theatre and an aesthetic that should appeal to all fans of heavy music. There is fire, loads of it, there are explosions, tonnes of them, there are massive party cannons full of streamers going off over the crowd and there are the masks. There are plenty of bands in masks in metal (in case you hadn’t noticed), but STP’s might just look the coolest. Frontman Alex Terrible in particular has an amazing silver skull visage with a moving jaw that makes him look like Skeletor if he was reimagined for a Hellraiser movie. Again, a simple idea, but gnarly as hell in practice.

So they look the part and, luckily, they sound the part too. Any of the objections people have made to Slaughter to Prevail making dumb, simplified, meat-headed metal on record feel completely redundant the second you’re stood in a field and those riffs slam you in the gut. This is pummeling, crushing, groove-laden metal that just feels good to hear live, the likes of Russian Grizzy In America, Babayka and Viking all kicking like a mule and lapped up by the crowd.

Speaking of the crowd, the online suggestions that STP would pull the smallest headline crowd in Bloodstock history are laughably wide of the mark. The field is equally as full as it was for Lamb of God on Friday night, and these people are enjoying every second. When Alex Terrible tells everyone to wave their hands or crouch to do a 'jumpdafuckup', it stretches all the way back past the sound desk. If people were coming here purely out of curiosity or just to see Slaughter to Prevail fail then it would appear that they’ve all been won over.

There’s also the fact that STP treat this show as if it is something truly special to them. Alex speaks with humility to the crowd on more than one occasion, letting them know how nervous he is and how humbled he is to have been asked to headline this festival. It’s a sweet thing to see from a man who has an unbelievable, almost inhuman growl in his repertoire.

If there's one slight concern with their performance, it’s that Slaughter to Prevail could add a bit more dynamism to their music, the Rammstein-esque Behelit standing out as something quite different from the rest of their set. But this is a mere nitpick; with a first showing this strong, you wouldn’t bet against them tweaking things to address that the next time they come round. And, let’s have it right, when they do, they’ll be headlining again.

Motley Crue bassist and main songwriter Nikki Sixx says making full-length albums is a thing of the past.

The glam metal icons' most recent album was 2008's Saints of Los Angeles. And it seems that album – their ninth – could be the last we see from Motley Crue, with Sixx more keen on releasing singles or EPs to fall in line with the way the music business operates in the modern era.

They released the EP Cancelled in 2024, which marked their first release featuring John 5 on guitar after he replaced Mick Mars.

The band will most likely continue with shorter releases in the future, Sixx tells Joann Butler: "Honestly, I know fans don't want to hear this, but I don't believe in making full-length records anymore.

"The amount of work that goes into. it. If you're doing 10 songs on a record, you gotta write 20. And you better hope five of them are stellar.

"It's a lot of lyrics, a lot of notes, a lot of chord changes, a lot of time in the studio, which is all fine. That's what we do. We work hard.

"But what I don't like is that when people hear one song, and you recorded 10 or you recorded 20, and then 10 of them were demos and 10 was an album, they only hear one.

"Radio's changed, streaming is changing and evolving as we go. So I'm really into the idea of lightning strikes, something comes down, I call the guys. I got this song."

He adds: "I love the idea of like we did for The Dirt. We did five songs.

"We did three songs on this EP we just did. So I think we're just gonna keep going, like whenever something comes up, you feel something – heartbreak, joy, rebellion – let's write a song about it, and let's go cut it in the studio."

Motley Crue have lined up an extensive North American tour for next summer.

The Pineapple Thief just announced that 15th album Far And Wide will arrive on October 9, 2026. It follows 2024’s It Leads To This, which came out of a new way of working for leader Bruce Soord and drummer Gavin Harrison. That year the pair, along with bassist Jon Sykes, told Prog about the process.

There’s a slight air of world weariness about The Pineapple Thief. The band have been in Gavin Harrison’s studio, rehearsing for their upcoming tour in support of new album It Leads To This, and there’s the sense that it’s been an elongated, potentially mildly frustrating day of missed cues and occasional bum notes.

“Gavin doesn’t sugar-coat anything,” reveals frontman Bruce Soord, referencing the drummer with a knowing smile. “We play a song, record it, gather around the speakers and listen back. The first time you play it through it’s quite brutal. We have this dynamic where we have an ordered section and a chaos section, but I’m not going to tell you where the chaos section is.

“It’s an interesting dynamic and there’s a lot of patience with one certain member of the band. It’s quite a nice environment because nobody cares if someone says, ‘Don’t do it like that,’ ‘I don’t like that sound,’ or, ‘Actually play it right next time!’ It’s all fine, although that last one generally only comes my way.”

Such comments could be indicative of a band embroiled in disheartening studio friction, but the lack of animosity between the musicians is palpable. It’s merely the kind of jovial, lampooning mentality that relieves stressful situations in any collection of close bandmates. There’s also a transparent desire to ensure that their live presentation is as consummate as their evocative recordings.

It’s startling to consider that this year is The Pineapple Thief’s 25th anniversary, even if there have been drastic changes over that time. “It’s impossible to think of it as one thing,” considers Soord. “It really feels like three separate entities. There was the first entity, which was just me alone in the studio. Then we signed to Kscope and started to do small tours with the band. I think then this current entity started in 2016, when we met Gavin for the Your Wilderness album.

“That’s why it still feels fresh to me – because this is only the fourth proper studio album that we’ve done with this lot.”

The record in question is another captivating release that possesses all the classic Pineapple Thief signatures. Perhaps more guitar-heavy than its predecessor, it was assembled using a different writing style – in recent years the band have digitally exchanged files, but this time Soord and Harrison began writing together in the drummer’s north London home studio.

“I had been so used to working alone,” Soord explains. “I would come up with an idea and then send it to the guys. Gavin would send a drum idea back or chop things up, and I’d think, ‘I’ve a couple of days to faff around with this.’ There was no pressure. It’s hard work when you’re on your own; you think, ‘I’ll make myself a cup of coffee and do it tomorrow!’”

He continues: “We all have our own studios, which is a little bit of a double-edged sword. You can get a bit complacent and, dare I say it myself” – looking at the rest of the band – “a bit lazy. When you’re sat there together in a room, it’s a completely different mindset. It was good and a lot of the songs came out of that session.”

“I think that was the first time we were working in the same room together,” adds Harrison. “Before that it was an internet love affair, sending files backwards and forwards. You do something, but you might not get a response to it for a couple of days, whereas this was in the second – I’d play something and there was instant feedback.”

The combination of guitarist and drummer crafting much of the material together, without the involvement of keyboardist Steve Kitch or bassist Jon Sykes, may seem relatively quirky. While there’s a declared willingness of all four members to convene to write together in the future, Harrison expresses a certain reticence about the idea.

“You can just end up with a half-hour jam in E,” he argues dryly with a smile. “I’ve done it before and it’s very hard – you have three people all trying to contribute harmonically. If it’s just a drummer with a guitarist or keyboard player, then you can change the key, the tonality, the time signature, all on the fly.

“When there are three people all trying to play chords, asking, ‘What’s that? Is that in E and then it’s a D?’ You know, they’re just falling over each other and it’s not an organic process. It usually works best with one harmonics player and a drummer. It’s a bit easier to manoeuvre around each other and dance around, rather than three people all trying to contribute harmonically.”

“I think there are pros and cons,” says Sykes. “It gives you a fresh approach and you’ll get something different to what you’d have if you’d done it on your own. I think there’s also a benefit to the way we always did it, writing separately, because you get a different type of organic progress.

“Quite often we’re not even talking. The communication is through files with music on them. That must give you a different result to when you’re face to face saying, ‘What about this?’ I think it’s probably good to mix it up.”

While the core material is created by the Soord-Harrison partnership, the full band has been essential in shaping the album’s sound. Sykes suggests that The Pineapple Thief now feels more “proper” than in their past. “It definitely feels like more of a band project these days,” he says. “There’ll be a demo base that Bruce will have sent, which might be just a drone sound or something, which gives me a lot of space to develop.

“Usually, I’m responding to what Gavin has done; it does sometimes change the path of a song or might result in a bigger change to one of the sections. We don’t really talk about references or anything like that. There isn’t a steer to say, ‘Make it sound like this.’ You can just do whatever you think sounds right.”

For all the satisfaction over the album’s quality, Soord reveals that its creation was one of the most intense periods he can recall. It was seemingly caused by the combination of a desire to avoid stagnation, along with the challenge of playing some of the more complicated compositions.

“I think it boils down to just trying to better yourself every record,” he says. “I’m not saying it always happens like that; but as an artist, that’s your aim. I pushed myself personally to a higher level. There was a period when the album was coming together when you’re thinking, ‘Right, this is how it’s going to be.’ Then things start to ramp up and everybody wants it to be as good as it could possibly be.

“We’re all pushing each other and we all have ideas as to where we think it should go. Luckily, we’re all pretty much on the same page – but that doesn’t mean there isn’t healthy tension. So it was an intense time getting it finished.

“The good thing about coming to Gavin’s was that I was pushed. There’s one track called Rubicon, where he had a rhythm I hadn’t heard before. I was completely out of my comfort zone, but in a good way. It’s about pushing in every aspect, playing, writing words, and the sound.”

Those familiar with the band’s catalogue will be aware that Harrison’s arrival has altered their music, frequently adding complex, unexpected rhythmic patterns that embellish their sound. As one of the world’s most technically gifted drummers, do the rest of the band ever have to rein him in?

“No, I didn’t have the genital cuffs on!” says Harrison with a smile. “I try to do something unique, play some rhythms you’ve never heard before – things that you couldn’t say, ‘There’s a record just like that with that exact rhythm.’ With music that’s moving into a popular area, you get very limited; everything’s in 4/4 and there’s almost nothing you can do that hasn’t been done before.

“In a more progressive way, you can do things that aren’t technically complicated but you think, ‘I’ve never heard a band play with this rhythm before,’ which at the very least gives us something that’s unique and interesting.”

The carefully crafted musical backdrop is a perfect foil for Soord’s lyrics. Known for introspective tales that reference some of his personal, internal conflicts, the songs on It Leads To This continue his desire to attempt to comprehend the world. “I remember making a conscious decision about what the theme of the record would be,” he recalls.

“It began in the depths of the pandemic, when we started to write the first track, Put It Right. It was a time of reflection because you were forced into this solitary confinement of your house. I was lucky because I had the studio in my garden. So that definitely set the tone; but effectively, I feel it’s a continuation of the theme of the last album, which was basically looking at the world that we live in and thinking: ’What’s going on? How can I make sense of it, as it’s all getting a bit fucked up?’ Then in 2023 you look at it and think, ‘My God, how did it get this bad? This wasn’t in the script.’

That kind of relates to the It Leads To This title, but at the same time, it’s not all negative. It’s a positive message, which is that it’s in our power to change it. Writing about it is a way of dealing with it. It’s tackling it head on. Even now, we’re playing the songs together for the first time as a band, and it feels really good to sing it. It’s a cathartic experience.”

It Leads To This is avaiable via Kscope.

Blue Oyster Cult’s Imaginos is quite probably the longest-gestating album of all time. Its concept – in the loosest sense, the story of an alien race arriving upon Earth in the Middle Ages and shaping human history from that point forward – was developed by erstwhile rock critic Sandy Pearlman when he was still a college student in the mid-60s. Pearlman, of course, went on to found, manage and produce Blue Öyster Cult, originally as Soft White Underbelly. Even the band’s eventual name was taken from their mentor’s monumental creation.

The band used Pearlman’s sprawling collection of poems on the subject as source material for lyrics on their first four albums, notably on two tracks on 1974’s Secret Treaties –Astronomy and Subhuman – but never tackled the whole. That task eventually fell to drummer Albert Bouchard, who, having been fired from the band in 1981, went on to work with Pearlman on a planned three-double-album saga. However, Columbia Records, BÖC’s label, rejected the first instalment of Bouchard’s magnum opus in 1986, by which point BÖC had also disbanded, demoralised after the failure of their most recent album, Club Ninja, and then re-formed once again.

Pearlman coaxed the band back into the studio using his and Bouchard’s recordings as bait. He had BÖC’s two singers, Eric Bloom and Donald Roeser, substitute Bouchard’s vocals on the original tracks. He also added to them a so-called ‘Guitar Orchestra’ that featured, among others, Joe Satriani, and then persuaded Columbia to release the reworked

Trimmed to a nine-track single disc and with the songs lifted out of sequence from Pearlman’s original story, this new version of Imaginos was finally released in July 1988 and promptly bombed. So much so that it would be another 10 years before Blue Öyster Cult made their next record. Yet in spite of the concept being rendered now entirely nonsensical, in all other respects, Imaginos was as powerful and cohesive as the band’s best works from the 70s. Whereas BÖC had strived on their two immediate predecessors for a more AOR-oriented direction and sounded neutered, this was a hulking, riff‑heavy beast, casting them once more as an American Black Sabbath.

Suitably grandiose, it includes such high points as a retooled version of Astronomy and the ludicrously but also magnificently overblown The Siege And Investiture Of Baron Von Frankenstein’s Castle At Weisseria.

Speaking to Classic Rock in 2018, Eric Bloom didn’t necessarily agree such sentiments. Speaking today from his New York home, he seemed faintly baffled by the Imaginos experience, even 18 years on. This is what he had to say.

When were you first made aware of the Imaginos concept?

Eric Bloom: Sandy made the lyrics available to the members of the group in the original band house on Long Island. I moved into that house on Christmas Day 1968 and joined the band as a member in April 1969. So the lyrics were always there, in a manila folder. Any of us could just dip into that folder and write a song. But I was never aware that it was supposed to be three double albums. It was Albert who really took that under his wing. Most of the rest of us weren’t that interested in taking this material and making a record with it.

Did you understand the overall concept, or even care about it?

I got the general idea, but not necessarily every nook and cranny of the story Sandy had written. For instance, I know that the aliens lived underwater.

From your point of view, how did Albert’s solo project become a BÖC album?

The band had already re-formed with Donald, Allen [Lanier, keyboards], myself and a couple of sidemen. We had started to work again and there was an ongoing discussion about us making a record. At the same time, Albert and Sandy had been working together for years and by then burned through a small fortune that they had got from the record company. Ultimately, Columbia wasn’t interested in putting their record out, so it came filtering back to us that if we were interested in, um… I don’t know what verb you want to use, but I’ll say ‘fixing’ it then it could be released as a Blue Öyster Cult album.

My part in that record strictly extended to going in and doing vocals. I flew to San Francisco and sang at Pearlman’s studio for six straight weeks. Then I met Donald at the airport, passed off the keys to my rental car to him and he went on and stayed out there for an equal amount of time.

Ultimately, do you think it even really counts as a Blue Öyster Cult record?

In a way, since I sang on it and there’s one of my songs on there, albeit a slightly left-hand voyage through it [an updated Subhuman, retitled Blue Öyster Cult]. But I don’t really have a lot of love for that record because my involvement wasn’t so great. I think it’s fair to say that Columbia, certainly in America, didn’t do anything with it also.

For us, it was a means to a method in terms of getting a new record out. It was helpful to us while we were out on the road and we did play a few of the tunes in the live show. The people that cared, the hardcore fans, knew the story, but it didn’t reach out to the general public. Certainly, it didn’t sell much.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 232 (December 2016)

In 1969, the Allman Brothers were in Jacksonville, Florida, staying at the home of a friend. In the middle of the night, Gregg Allman woke from a dream with some music and lyrics in his head. Because bandmate Berry Oakley was in the next room with his wife and new baby, Gregg knew he had to be quiet if he was going to get his idea down.

He couldn’t find a paper or pen, so he ended up writing lyrics and notes using the only things available – an ironing board and the burnt end of a matchstick. It was the seed of the song that would become Whipping Post. For a number about a man who’s helplessly awaiting more torture from the woman who betrayed him, words scrawled in ash seemed an appropriately poetic beginning.

As with many classic songs, Whipping Post had a different feel initially. Guitarist Dickey Betts recalled, “It was a ballad when Gregg brought it to us. It was a real melancholy, slow blues.” Bassist Oakley’s intro bass lick – worked on all night, but only five seconds long – soon propelled the song in a new direction. Unusual for rock, Whipping Post had an unorthodox time signature. Or two, really – 11/8 on the intro, 12/8 on the verses.

“I just stumbled onto ‘em,” Allman later said. “I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I just did it. My brother said, ‘That’s good, man. I didn’t know you understood.’ I said something intelligent like, ‘What’s 11/8?’ and Duane just said, ‘Okay, dumb ass, I’ll try to draw it up on paper for you.’”

Recorded at Atlantic Studios in New York in August 1969, the song took an entire day to get down on tape. It clocked in at five minutes and seventeen seconds. But once the band took it on stage, it quadrupled in length, a mélange of blues, rock, funk and fusion jazz (the 22-minute version on 1971’s At Fillmore East is definitive).

"We just felt like we could play all night and sometimes we did,” says Betts. "We could really hit the note. There’s not a single fix on Fillmore. Everything you hear there is how we played it."

If one song epitomises their concept of “hittin’ the note,” that interplay and musical telepathy they were famous for, it’s Whipping Post. The Brothers played it at every show they ever did, and no two versions were exactly alike.

They encored with it at their final show at New York's Beacon Theatre in 2014, Gregg Allman ended his last UK show with the same song the following year, and in 2020, when the surviving members of the final Allman Brothers Band lineup reunited as The Brothers at Madison Square Garden in New York, Whipping Post was the final number in a mammoth set. In 2025, they repeated the trick over three nights.

Whipping Post also developed an unlikely relationship with none other than Frank Zappa. During a 1974 show in Finland, an audience member famously disrupted Zappa by repeatedly screaming a request for the song. Zappa didn't know it, but improvised a response by playing his own track Montona while altering the lyrics to mock the request, which he subtitled Whipping Floss. This interaction became known as 'The Helsinki Incident'.

"We didn't know it, and I felt kind of bad that we couldn't just play it and blow the guy's socks off," Zappa told Guitar Player in 1983. "So when [pianist/vocalist/saxophonist] Bobby Martin joined the band, and I found out that he knew how to sing that song, I said, 'We are definitely going to be prepared for the next time somebody wants Whipping Post – in fact we're going to play it before somebody even asks for it.'"

Zappa eventually released his own satirical-yet-virtuosic cover of it on his 1984 album Them or Us, while Gregg Allman would rerecord the song for his 1997 album Searching for Simplicity, ignoring the original's mix of time signatures and rendering it in good old-fashioned 4/4.

While the Allman Brothers Band were rightfully proud of the song and its improvisational legacy, they remained resistant to easy labels. “I’ve heard that damn expression ‘jam band’ so many times,” Gregg told Classic Rock in an interview. “It’s b.s. The Brothers are not a jam band. We’re a band that jams."

When Genesis released fourth album Foxtrot in 1972, they’d pushed themselves to create something more challenging and satisfying than anything they’d done to date. History would record they achieved that goal – notably with the most feted prog suite in history in Supper’s Ready – but as Steve Hackett told Prog in 2012, they were by no means certain that they’d delivered a successful record.

The foxtrot – the dance itself, which premiered a century ago – is usually defined as a smooth dance of long, continuous, flowing movements. Genesis’ Foxtrot, which arrived 40 years ago, certainly has its long, continuous flowing movements, and much else besides.

Today it sounds as unique, dramatic, thrilling and ambitious as ever. It’s where the classic line-up of the band came fully into being; it’s when they realised how much they could do, how far they could go. “It was about creating a film for the ear rather than the eye,” says Steve Hackett.

“And it even got to Number 12 in the charts,” Tony Banks laughs. “Of course the next week it went down to Number 27 or something, but it was our first moment of scoring anything, so we felt that we were underway, that we were heading somewhere different. Foxtrot was where we first started, in my opinion, to become significant.”

While all of its tracks are strong and inventive, Foxtrot is unavoidably dominated by the 23-minute, seven-part suite which graced what used to be side two. Supper’s Ready is one of the towering landmarks of prog, dovetailing short surreal pieces with moving neo-classical reprises and recapitulations, serene flows with shuddering staccato, parochial realism with pulchritudinous dreams.

Across this fire from the skies, Peter Gabriel sings of battles between good and evil and love and war, of firemen, farmers, flowers (‘a flower?’), and a frog who was a prince (who was a brick) (which was an egg) (which was a bird). And of 666 and a new Jerusalem. Startling then, it remains a stunning achievement of vision and scale. Roger Taylor of Queen has called it “at separate times, homely, beautiful, tortured and epic.”

‘We’ve got everything,’ it declares presciently. ‘We’re growing everything…’

While Supper’s Ready is the main course, Foxtrot should be appreciated as more than just a set of appetisers leading up to it. It’s strange to learn that the album came about in a relatively ramshackle manner: no great master plan had been conceived.

The band sought a producer who could capture their improving live sound, and to that end had meetings or sessions with Paul Samwell-Smith, John Anthony and Bob Potter. None was quite the right fit; so David Hitchcock, whose work with Caravan had impressed, came in with the more outspoken engineer John Burns.

Hackett was fatigued by the heavy touring schedule and still somewhat intimidated by his fellow band members’ prowess – he’s recalled thinking, “These guys are so good!" In 2012, having just re-recorded Supper’s Ready and others for his Genesis Revisited II album, he remembers the steps towards Foxtrot more fondly.

“There weren’t a lot of days off; we were a hard-working live band,” he says. “Whereas with its predecessor, Nursery Cryme, we’d taken the summer off and written and recorded together as a unit, bonding the team, this time we were on the run, in and out of the studio. I remember flying back from Italy to be in there a day or two ahead of the others, who were travelling by road, just to finish off my guitar parts on the end of Supper’s Ready.”

If there’s one album that doesn’t sound like a rush job, it’s Foxtrot… “Maybe not. But when you’ve done something, you know what your intention was. The perpetrators will always be looking for improvements. We generally agreed to a man that we recorded Watcher Of The Skies too fast. To my ears now it sounds like a young band desperate to get the notes right in a race to the finish. Once we’d been playing it live for a while, we relaxed into it and it sounded bigger.

“The version that ended up on Genesis Live is more in-the-pocket. That rhythm is almost impossible for any band to play perfectly! It’s full of pitfalls.Yet there’s lots of weird and wonderful stuff; it’s a band at its most creatively eccentric.”

Rehearsals and writing sessions in a variety of locations may have coloured the album’s angles and attitudes. Hackett recounts that Foxtrot was worked up in a variety of “drab, functional” places, until they moved (without Gabriel, who added the words later) to the Una Billings School Of Dance in Shepherd’s Bush.

“There were girls upstairs, learning their tap-dance and what-have-you. And the sound of that, those rhythms would come down through the ceiling. We were below in what had been a refectory, so you had a counter here and a gobstopper-dispensing machine there. It was all a bit strange, and the atmosphere influenced our subsequent efforts.

“Much of Supper’s Ready was written in the two weeks there. With the tap-dancing upstairs, you couldn’t be too serious for long, because you’d hear them: clumpety clump clump. That rhythm would kick in, and we’d have to break into smiles…”

Watcher Of The Skies had grown out of Banks “fooling around” with the Mellotron. “We bought one of the ex-King Crimson Mellotrons,” he notes, “and Robert Fripp insisted it was the one they’d used on In The Court Of The Crimson King. Mind you, he had three, and I’m sure he said that about all of them when he was selling them!”

Hackett also emphasises the importance of that instrument to the album. “I’d kept hammering on that we should get one, saying it’d make our story-telling abilities so much greater. It meant that the band could function as a time machine, with all these various mythologies. The idea was that all the old instruments were there within the Frankenstein that was the Mellotron.

“It was like an alien orchestra being beamed to you by satellite. And you need to be able to smell the dust from time to time. It had a… cold warmth. I think it’s actually the most influential keyboard instrument in the whole of rock.”

Banks reckons people had never heard “a big, big sound like that” before. It brought the album in with an impossible-to-ignore surge.

“Time Table, Get ‘Em Out By Friday and Can-Utility And The Coastliners don’t get as much attention as the others,” agrees Hackett, “but they’re all part of the journey.” Not least because of Gabriel’s always busy, multi-voiced lyrics. “Yes, there’s important social comment on Get ‘Em Out…, and the rest is hardly boy-meets-girl, is it? And the sci-fi elements show that mythology doesn’t have to be backward looking.

“Time Table has something: there’s a magic between the piano and the six-string electric. It chimes. You get that third instrument – not piano, not guitar – where the distinction between them is blurred. The ensemble work welds instruments together, grafts them onto each other like that Star Trek mind-meld. It’s not so much an album of solos.

So how was the response to Foxtrot upon initial release? Were people dazzled, confused, appalled, or exhilarated? Or just indifferent? “All of those things,” muses Hackett. “Don’t forget, we weren’t The Beatles. Just before they released Sgt Pepper, they worried whether they’d gone too far and whether the crowd might give them the thumbs-down.

“We felt in a similar position. It was early days for the band. We just weren’t sure. We’d really gone out on a limb with Supper’s Ready, it was labyrinthine with layers, and it was by no means certain that the response would be positive.”

Of course, Paul Whitehead’s surrealist sleeve design is as much a part of the Foxtrot “immersion” experience as that pyramid-prism is to The Dark Side Of The Moon. Gabriel certainly dived in, courageously donning his wife’s red dress and a fox-head for stage shows. “It’s interesting how the most cherished albums have the most cherished sleeves,” ponders Hackett.

“I think for fans of it there was always that feeling of looking at it and thinking: ‘I’m onto something here that other people don’t necessarily know about.’ One’s taste becomes tribal: these albums become important bonding elements. Where language leaves off, music begins, and you share a dream.”

A dream that’s lasted 40 years and counting, in the case of Foxtrot… “Musicians do tend to disparage their early work – the need to continually move forward can be everything,” Hackett says. “I prefer to celebrate it, and look for what’s right about it. If you have passion, energy and honesty you will come up with something valuable. You don’t always verbalise it as a band; you try to do things instinctively, listening closely to each other without ego - and sometimes you get a great crystallisation.

“You may not recognise it at the time; you might think it was just a doodle, but someone else will see it as a full-blown portrait, a Mona Lisa. The musicians might still be searching, but the audience, the true owners, will say, ‘Look no further. We’ve found it.’”

“We still laugh about it now,” says The Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson,. “We were one of those local bands that really wasn’t very popular. If we wrote a riff at sound-check then we played it that night, we’d play the song on the spot, just throw it in there. People weren’t so keen on that sort of thing.”

Even their A&R man stumbled upon them by accident. George Drakoulias was in Atlanta scouting other bands for Rick Rubin’s American Recordings label. He happened to be nursing a drink in a bar when he asked the stranger next to him if there were any rock bands in town worth hearing.

“And someone mentioned Mr Crowe’s Garden, as we were back then,” Chris recalls. “Typically, we had no shows booked while he was in town, but we had a gig booked in New York coming up, third on the bill of five bands at Drums. George came down and he said we were all right. And I guess we were. He kept coming down to Atlanta after that and we kept working on demos.

“All these bands in Atlanta were working hard on their repertoires and their stage shows, and we were the worst – no work ethic, non-career minded, no local following. But for some reason we always had people flying in from LA or New York to see what we were doing. We just thought they’ll take us to dinner. We’d order eight pitchers of margaritas and by the time the gig started we were pissed out of our heads and barely able to finish the show. They’d fly back home and we thought we’d got one over on them.”

Dining on someone else’s dime and playing live intermittently enabled the band to focus on making what would become their debut album for the American label. Yet while they were recording Shake Your Money Maker, they hadn’t even signed the deal. And George Drakoulias hadn’t produced a full album before, so he was also feeling his way. They hunkered down in a studio and wrote and rehearsed for days at a time.

“That really was when we built up our relationship with George,” says Chris. “We were kids, we had a few guitars, a couple of amps… We didn’t have a budget for food, we kind of ate whatever George didn’t finish. It was fantastic, though, a real adventure for us. We were thinking, we’re making a record, then we’ll get a deal and we’ll try to get us much out of this experience as possible and then figure out what we’re going to do with our lives. It seemed to us that you had to be an asshole to get on MTV or in showbiz. We weren’t interested in that so much.”

“It was just like that,” agrees the other Robinson brother, guitarist Rich. “The studio was a place where Brendan O’Brien had worked. He was just our engineer then, which is very strange when you think about it now. I moved into my 20s in the middle of recording our first album – as good a way to start a new decade as any.”

Two years later, Rich had come up with a song that would make the final cut of the album, the elegiac She Talks To Angels.

“She Talks To Angels has always held up for us,” says Rich, “That was the first song I wrote. And when George heard it he really liked it. Chris wasn’t sure, but George insisted, said we needed it on the record. Chris likes to move on, he doesn’t tend to dwell on the past, and I think that song had been around a while by the time we got to making the album and he just wanted to hear new stuff.”

“It’s a George record,” Chris says, but not unkindly. “We were so excited and eager, and George was very methodical – thank God. He made a very radio-friendly record. It took a long time because we weren’t used to the studio, we weren’t used to things being perfect. But we were thinking, this is how it’s done so this is how we’ll do it. Though when we bought our freedom with that record selling millions of copies in the States, we never made a perfect record again.”

Both Robinsons agree that the album still stands up 20 years later, even if they can hear the band’s naivety between the grooves.

“We still play pretty much everything from that record,” says Chris. “The only song that’s been lost is Struttin’ Blues. Seein’ Things is still a band favourite and a song that we probably play twice a week if we’re on the road. I hear songs on the radio like Jealous Again and I like it. It’s still a big part of our show. It’s an iconic song for us, as is Twice As Hard. I still love to sing Sister Luck when we do it.”

“Though it was Sister Luck that was really hard to capture in the studio,” Rich remembers. “As a band we hadn’t played much together, and trying to find that dynamic was really hard for us on some songs. We recorded Sister Luck several times just trying to get it really right. But it holds up as an album, I think. I always view our records as what they meant at the time. I think when you’re that young and things happen that fast, you really wear your influences on your sleeve. And the only frame of reference you have is wanting to make music that moves people as much as the music that I loved moved me. That was always the goal. So to me it was the best possible record we could’ve made then. I still think the songs are pretty great.”

So did the record-buying public. Shake Your Money Maker sold more than seven million copies, and on the back of it the band went off on a world tour that would take them away from Atlanta for almost two years, playing more than 350 shows.

“I remember us coming over to London to play the Marquee club, and thinking the queue outside was for someone else,” Rich laughs. “The audiences over there were unbelievable compared to America. We played the Marquee, and then went out opening for the Dogs D’Amour. Then months later, at the end of the Shake Your Money Maker tour, we came back to London and did Hammersmith Odeon. That sort of wrapped up it all up. We came full circle, and then we got on the plane and finally went home.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 150 (September 2010)

Former Iron Maiden frontman Blaze Bayley says only one of the iconic metal band's line of vocalists has achieved truly legendary status.

The band's first singer was Paul Mario Day, who was part of the founding lineup from 1975 to 1976. He was replaced by Dennis Wilcock, who held the role until 1978.

Paul Di'Anno landed the job in 1978 and sang on the band's first two albums – the self-titled Iron Maiden and Killers. Many fans still cite those two records as the group's best ever work, and Bayley agrees.

He believes Di'Anno, who died in 2024, holds a status that nobody – not even current and longest serving frontman Bruce Dickinson – can match.

Bayley tells Metal OBS: "There are different eras of Maiden, of course, but in my mind, only Paul is the legend.

"After that, we carry the name, we carry the torch of Iron Maiden. I may become a legend, Bruce may become a legend. But the legend of Iron Maiden belongs to Paul on those first two albums.

"Because they broke the mould, not just of heavy metal, but of music. Those albums are so different and do so many things. They break the rules.

"He's a legend. He was a legend. He now is a timeless legend. So that's something that can never be changed, in my opinion. It's only my opinion.

"Other people will say different things, but in my opinion, you listen to some of the songs on the first two albums, it's so different to everything else that was going on."

Di'Anno and Bayley became friendly after their stints with Maiden came to an end, and the pair even performed Maiden material together on the road.

Bayley adds: "We were colleagues. Paul was a very funny guy. I think people don't know that about him. He had a great sense of humour.

"Russia from St. Petersburg, Moscow, right across to Vladivostok, and we did Sweden together. We did all Scandinavia, and we did Australia and New Zealand. And when we had a good band, and he'd rested well, you could close your eyes and it was like the first album, but better. It was like those first two albums, but better."

Di'Anno's health struggle towards the end of his life is the subject of a documentary released this year – Di'Anno: Iron Maiden's Lost Singer.

Tom G Warrior of Celtic Frost, Triptykon and Hellhammer fame might not be the first extreme metal musician you’d associate with progressive rock – but in 2017 he told Prog about his passion for a wide range of those artists, including Roxy Music.

“People might be surprised to read this, but I was very heavily inspired by progressive music when I was younger.

I listened to so many different artists that it’s very tough for me to talk about just one. It seems almost insulting when there are lots who had an effect on me when I was in my teens.

I have to make an honourable mention of Keith Emerson. The way he used classical music with ELP on albums like Tarkus had a massive impact on me.

But I’m going to celebrate Roxy Music here. I can’t exactly recall when I first heard them, but I would think it was on a southern German radio station which played a lot of prog.

What I loved about them was their fearlessness and delight in experimenting. If you listen to them now for the first time, then you might wonder what all the fuss is about, because what they did sounds like no big dea today.

But in the 70s, it was radical and exciting, and they were pushing the boundaries without any concern for commercial compromise.

Phil Manzanera’s guitar playing made an impression on me as a budding musician, but it was their all-round style that impressed me most. They became more mainstream, but in those early days there was nothing quite like Roxy Music.

I got into them through their second album, For Your Pleasure, and then retrospectively discovered their self-titled debut.

And there’s no doubt they had an influence on what Celtic Frost did on our albums Morbid Tales, To Mega Therion and, especially, Into The Pandemonium.

If I have to select the best Roxy Music album, it would be For Your Pleasure. What sets it apart from the rest of their catalogue is the songwriting; it’s of the highest calibre, and it’s very powerful.

If you combine that with the band’s devotion to being individual and cutting edge, then you have a very potent album that, to this day, still resonates with me.

There are so many progressive artists to whom I owe so much. But Roxy Music are one band that I would always choose as being a major part of who I am today.”

During December 1965 and the first two months of ’66, The Beatles’ Rubber Soul album spent eight weeks at No.1 in the UK and six weeks at No.1 in the US, and was still in the US Top 20 when the group returned to Abbey Road studios in April ’66 to begin recording material for their next new album. The ‘all killer no filler’ excellence of Rubber Soul had set a new benchmark for the world’s top rock artists to equal, and was even talked about as having shifted the focus of rock music from singles to albums.

As others strove to equal it, The Beatles set about the task of making something even better.

“At this point in their career there was very little external pressure on them,” Apple Records director Tony Bramwell remembers. “EMI had all but given up trying to make them do things, and [Beatles manager] Brian Epstein never interfered in that way.”

Being a close associate of the band since his days of being their roadie in Liverpool, Bramwell noticed a different kind of pressure on them. “They were no longer the four-headed mop-top monster they’d been at the start,” he recalls. “They were developing their own lives away from the band, with John and George leading their suburban existences, George becoming interested in Indian music and Paul being thoroughly metropolitan, checking out the galleries and exhibitions, going to clubs and so on.”

McCartney was also the driving force of the band, Bramwell confirms, and was the one who took the initiative to get them back into the studio to record the follow-up to Rubber Soul. Fortunately they were still prolific songwriters so there was no shortage of material.

The first track they worked on was the epochal Tomorrow Never Knows, a psychedelic, pseudo-Indian cosmic soup dreamed up by Lennon four months earlier, inspired by the lines: “Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream,” which he’d read in translator Walter Kaufmann’s book The Portable Nietzsche.

It was also the first track that 19-year-old Abbey Road engineer Geoff Emerick worked on, having that very morning been promoted from recording assistant. “I was extremely nervous,” he recalled. “One request from John was that he wanted the vocal to sound like the Dali Lama singing on a mountain top twenty-five miles away. Obviously we had no plug-ins or software. What we’ve got is two tape machines, a [recording console] and one echo chamber. So I’m looking through the control room window into the studio and saw the revolving Leslie speaker from the Hammond organ, and I thought: ‘If we could get John’s voice to go into that revolving speaker, maybe we’ll get something that sounds a bit new.’ And that is what we did use, on the last verse. That sort of won John over.”

McCartney, too, had been working on ideas that fitted nicely with the other-worldly ambience they sought for Tomorrow Never Knows. “I had an idea to use something I had been experimenting with at home on my tape player, where I would put a piece of tape over the record head and saturate the tape with all kinds of sounds,” he later revealed. “I was listening to Stockhausen, and these saturated loops were inspired by his work.”

Producer George Martin remembered how “they would bring me tapes of all the loops, and we would play them just for a giggle, like crossword puzzles. And when we made Tomorrow Never Knows, that was all the tapes they had made at home made into loops. We had about twenty-odd loops or more, at varying speeds.”

For its time, Abbey Road was a state-of-the-art recording facility, but Emerick reveals exactly how primitive state-of-the-art was in 1966: “We’d lace [the tapes] up on our tape machine, and people would have to hold them out with pencils. On Tomorrow Never Knows there weren’t enough people in the control room to handle holding them, so we got some of the maintenance department down to help. I think we put five loops up on faders and then just played it as an instrument.”

Even just with those sonic innovations, Tomorrow Never Knows would have been a revolutionary-sounding track. But Emerick then pulled another rabbit out of the hat to refresh Ringo Starr’s drum sound. The Beatles had been hearing hard, solid drums on American records that were not being matched in England. So – and strictly against Abbey Road rules – Emerick “took the front skin off the bass drum, stuffed a sweater inside and put the skin back on… I moved the microphone about four inches away from the drum and got the bass drum sound I really wanted, this hard sort of up-front thud.”

Contemporary Abbey Road wisdom decreed that any mic placed closer than 18 inches from a bass drum would be damaged by the air pressure from it. But Emerick and The Beatles were less interested in equipment than in achieving new sounds. “All I could do to accommodate requests for new sounds for them was really, basically, just to abuse the equipment,” he says.

Predictably, Abbey Road management rapped Emerick’s knuckles. But in the longer term, equipment abuse became another tool in the search for new sounds.

The following day, work started on the uptempo Got To Get You Into My Life, a more traditional Stax soul-based McCartney composition. At first listen it’s just another standard romantic relationship song. But as Macca himself explained, it was written after his first experience with marijuana and was “actually an ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret”.

The track didn’t require the kind of innovations that transformed Tomorrow Never Knows but even so, producer Martin and engineer Emerick racked their brains to devise ways of making it sound the way McCartney wanted.

“In those days they would hear a record coming from America where they had really good brass sounds,” Martin explained. “They’d say: ‘Let’s try some.’ So we would get brass players in the studio and I would write down parts for them.”

For Got To Get You Into My Life, Martin brought in a horn section, including members of Georgie Fame’s Blue Fames and a fistful of London’s go-to jazz session players. “Paul sat at the piano and showed us what he wanted, and we played with the rhythm track in our headphones,” Blue Flames sax player Peter Coe remembered. “We tried it a few times to get the feel right, and then John Lennon, who was in the control room, suddenly rushed out, stuck his thumb aloft and shouted: ‘Got it!’”

However, Lennon’s celebratory yell referred only to their performance. The sound that McCartney envisaged was still not quite there. He wanted it to be bigger. Emerick pondered how to achieve McCartney’s aim. “We could double-track it, but there were no more tracks left. So we actually recorded it on to a [separate] stereo piece of tape.”

There was no way in 1966 to sync up two tape recorders, so they simply marked off the ‘start’ point of the copy with a grease pencil and, when it came to the final mix, crossed their fingers, started up the copy and the original and prayed that the two would “marry up”.

On April 11 they started work on Granny Smith, a Harrison concoction later to become Love You To. Harrison had become fascinated by Indian music and, specifically, sitars at a late-August 1965 gathering in LA’s Benedict Canyon, where The Beatles hung out with The Byrds, whose David Crosby introduced him to the music of Ravi Shankar. Two months later, Harrison had executed an effective sitar part on Norwegian Wood, but Love You To went much further. With minimal participation from the other Beatles, Harrison created the track with tabla player Anil Bhagwat and several Indian musicians from London’s Asian Music Circle.

Bhagwat was rung up on the day of the session. “It was only when a Rolls-Royce came to pick me up that I realised I’d be playing on a Beatles session,” he later explained. “When I arrived at Abbey Road there were girls everywhere with Thermos flasks, cakes, sandwiches, waiting for The Beatles to come out. George told me what he wanted and I tuned the tabla with him. He suggested I play something in the Ravi Shankar style, 16 beats, though he agreed that I should improvise.”

As he had done with Ringo’s drums, Emerick close-mic’d Bhagwat’s tabla, achieving a previously unimaginably powerful thwack. What remains unclear is how much of the sitar on the track was played by Harrison, but it seems likely that the intro is his while the remainder is played by an uncredited Asian Music Circle member.

With Love You To completed, work started on Paperback Writer which, because it was released as a single, did not appear on Revolver (a common practice in that era). This is also true of its B-side, Rain, recorded one day later. But both songs are clearly products of the same gloriously freewheeling mindsets that created the album.

McCartney had conceived the structure of Paperback Writer on the drive from central London to Lennon’s suburban home for an afternoon songwriting session. “I developed the whole idea in the car,” he explained. “I came in, had my bowl of cornflakes and said: ‘How’s about if we write a letter: Dear Sir or Madam, next line, next paragraph etc?’”

Opening with the most distinctively layered harmony vocals of their career so far, the song was propelled on a dynamic guitar riff underpinned by the loudest drum and bass combo yet heard on a Beatles single, thanks to Emerick’s now firmly established techniques. With typically tongue-in-cheek Beatles whimsy, Lennon and Harrison’s backing vocals bear no relation to the song’s lyric, as they sing instead the title of the French folk song Frere Jacques.

Rain, which was chosen as the B-side of Paperpack Writer, would have fitted perfectly on Revolver. Lyrically, it takes an off-kilter look at its subject matter. “Songs have traditionally treated rain as a bad thing, and what we got on to was that it’s no bad thing,” McCartney pointed out. “There’s no greater feeling than the rain dripping down your back. The most interesting thing about it wasn’t the writing, which was tilted seventy-thirty to John, but the recording of it.”

The new grainy guitar texture was achieved by recording the backing track at a higher speed than normal, then adding the vocals to the slowed down instrumental sounds. When Lennon went home after the session – in a somewhat altered state – he accidentally played the reel-to-reel tape backwards. “I sat there, transfixed, with the earphones on, with a big hash joint,” he later remembered. “I ran in the next day and said: ‘I know what to do with it, I know… Listen to this!’ So I made them all play it backwards. The fade is me actually singing, backwards, with the guitars going backwards.”

Dr Robert Freymann, a Manhattan doctor notorious for dispensing ‘good vibes’ – in the shape of vitamin B-12 shots laced with amphetamine – to his wealthy clientele provided the subject matter for the Lennon song they laid down on April 17. Explaining how Freymann inspired Doctor Robert, McCartney said: “John and I thought that was a funny idea – the fantasy doctor who would fix you up by giving you drugs. It was a parody on that idea.”

Perhaps not the album’s most captivating composition, Doctor Robert does contain an example of ADT (Artificial Double Tracking), a new recording technique developed by Abbey Road staffer Ken Townshend. ADT freed the band from the chore of recording their vocals more than once to fatten them up. Instead the system copied the vocal track then played it back alongside the original, out of sync by a matter of milliseconds, just enough to create a double image.

On April 20 the band were back in Studio 2, working on the songs Taxman and You Don’t Get Me, later retitled And Your Bird Can Sing. Harrison’s Taxman would be chosen to open the album, probably because of its dynamic opening bars and harsh, trebly chord slashes, but its most intriguing guitar-related fact is that the energetically crazed solo was played by McCartney. “I got the guitar and was playing around in the studio with the feedback and stuff, and I said to George: ‘Maybe you could play it like this.’ I can’t quite remember how it happened that I played it, but it was probably one of those times when somebody says: ‘Well why don’t you do it, then?’”

Later that day, Harrison and McCartney played the guitar duet on Lennon’s And Your Bird Can Sing, delivering a powerful, distinctly Byrds-like folk-rock workout, but they felt they could do better. By the time they returned to it a week later, everything was tightened up, the guitar parts flowed better and the rock was decidedly more evident than the folk.

Lennon never revealed what his song’s cryptic lyric was about, but one favourite interpretation is that it was an attack on Mick Jagger, whose ‘bird’ of the time, Marianne Faithful, could indeed sing.

The gloriously soporific I’m Only Sleeping was the next track they worked on, beginning on April 27 but not completed until May 5. Lennon was a notoriously snoozy kind of guy. In the contentious “more popular than Jesus” interview, journalist Maureen Cleave wrote: “He can sleep almost indefinitely, is probably the laziest person in England. ‘Physically lazy,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind writing or reading or watching or speaking, but sex is the only physical thing I can be bothered with any more.’” There are known instances, notably Here, There And Everywhere, of McCartney working industriously on songs at Lennon’s Kenwood home while his writing partner remained in the land of nod.

Lennon had written the lyric on April 25, on the back of a car-phone bill. But at the first studio session, McCartney noticed the lack of a middle eight, and supplied the more upbeat ‘Keeping an eye on the world going by my window…’ section.

In the wake of Lennon’s ‘discovery’ of backwards recording techniques during the making of Rain, it was now virtually de rigueur to try everything backwards – just in case. Harrison’s eight-measure solo in I’m Only Sleeping was one beneficiary of that process. The technique was somewhat refined, however, because Harrison deliberately crafted a solo which he thought would sound good in reverse, then asked George Martin to transcribe it backwards. What followed was an exhausting nine-hour session during which Martin conducted Harrison painstakingly through the reversed notation until he got it right. “I can still picture George hunched over his guitar for hours on end,” Emerick wrote in 2006, “headphones clamped on, brow furrowed in concentration.”

When he finally managed to play the solo, it was reversed before being inserted into the track.

Eleanor Rigby, begun on April 28, was a very different story. Folk-rock hit maker Donovan, one of McCartney’s near-neighbours, has recalled a day that spring when the Beatle turned up at his house uninvited: “He knocked on the door and said: ‘What are you doing?’ I said: ‘Writing songs. What are you doing?’ ‘I’m writing songs too…’ He sat down, and I said: ‘Okay, what do you got?’ ‘He said: ‘Well, I got this,’ and he sang this: ‘Ola Na Tunjee/Blowing his mind in the dark with a pipe full of clay.’”

Sing those words in your head to the tune of Eleanor Rigby and its easy to see where Paul was headed. He always considered melody the most important element in a song, and frequently tried out different words before settling on a final version (famously, Yesterday was called Scrambled Eggs for several weeks).

There’s no definitive account of precisely how he got from ‘Ola Na Tunjee’ to ‘Eleanor Rigby’, but McCartney’s version holds that he combined the first name of actress friend Eleanor Bron with a sign he saw in Bristol advertising wine merchants Rigby And Evens Ltd. Most curiously, though, there’s a 1939 gravestone bearing the name Eleanor Rigby in St. Peter’s churchyard in Woolton, just yards from the hall where Lennon and McCartney first played together in 1957. McCartney himself has acknowledged that he might have seen that stone as a teenager, and unknowingly unearthed it from his subconscious while working on the song.

Once he had the name and the lyric outline, the others helped piece together the rest, but in the final version, only the voices of McCartney, Lennon and Harrison are heard, backed by a pair of string quartets, arranged impeccably by Martin. In response to McCartney asking if the strings could sound more ‘biting’, Emerick again used close-mic’ing, this time with a separate mic on each instrument. The result was a dramatic improvement in the sound definition – rich, resonant strings with a front-and-centre clarity previously unheard on record.

Another flirtation with the classical world came about during the recording of For No One, which began on May 9. It had started life back in March as Why Did It Die, a McCartney song composed in a Swiss Alps ski resort chalet after an argument with his then-girlfriend Jane Asher. Neither Lennon nor Harrison took part in the recording, on which McCartney played piano, clavichord and bass, with Ringo on drums and tambourine.

“Occasionally we’d have an idea for some new kind of instrumentation, particularly for solos,” McCartney has said. “I was interested in the French horn because it was an instrument I’d always loved from when I was a kid. It’s a beautiful sound. So I went to George Martin and said: ‘How can we go about this?’ And he said: ‘Well, let me get the very finest.’”

For a fee of £50, Martin got Alan Civil, principal horn player for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, who remembers: “I thought the song was called For Number One, because I saw ‘For No One’ written down. Anyway, they played the existing tape to me, which was complete, and I thought it had been recorded in rather bad musical style, in that it was ‘in the cracks’, neither B-flat nor B-major. This posed a certain difficulty in tuning my instrument.”

Civil’s horn part was constructed by McCartney singing the melody he wanted to George Martin, who then transcribed it for Civil to sight-read. But they slyly slipped in a top F, one note higher than the instrument’s usual range. “Alan looked up from his bit of paper: ‘Er, George? I think there’s a mistake here – you’ve got a high F written down,’” McCartney remembers. “Then George and I said: ‘Yeah,’ and smiled back at him. And he knew what we were up to, and played it. These great players will do it.”

With its plangent, descending bassline, For No One’s understated mood of weary resignation provides a stunning contrast to the vibrantly experimental tracks that surround it.

On May 20 the band briefly left the confines of Abbey Road to film promos for Paperback Writer and Rain in the grounds of Chiswick House in West London. They returned to the studio on the 26th to continue the tradition of including one song sung by Ringo on every Beatles album. McCartney recalls the origins of Yellow Submarine thus: “I was laying in bed in the Ashers’ garret… I was thinking of it as a song for Ringo, so I wrote it as not too rangey in the vocal, then started making a story, sort of an ancient mariner telling the young kids where he’d lived.”

During the same Donovan encounter when McCartney had sung him Ola Na Tunjee, he also sang him, Donovan says, “another song that was missing a verse. It was a very small part, and I just went into the other room and put together ‘sky of blue, sea of green’. They had always asked other people for help with a line or two, so I helped with that line.”

Several people contributed words here and there for the lyrics to Yellow Submarine. A second recording session on June 1 turned into a mini-party with guests including Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull, Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd and a gaggle of Abbey Road staffers, all of them handed noise-making devices, ranging from chains to old bathtubs, dredged from the trap room, an under-stairs cupboard described by George Martin as “full of general sorts of percussion instruments”. Yellow Submarine even used an ancient cash register, which was used again in 1973 by Pink Floyd for Money.

Inevitably, down the years, critics and pundits have allocated symbolic significance to the song’s lyrics, sometimes drug-related, sometimes socio-political, but McCartney has always remained adamant that “it’s a happy place, that’s all. You know, it was just… We were trying to write a children’s song. That was the basic idea. And there’s nothing more to be read into it than there is in the lyrics of any children’s song.”

Which is not quite the case for Harrison’s I Want To Tell You, which was put together on June 2 and 3. Superficially it’s a simple tale of a young man tongue-tied in the presence of a pretty girl, but Harrison revealed that it was actually about “the avalanche of thoughts that are so hard to write down or say or transmit” caused by taking LSD.

His acid daze did not, however, prevent him from innovating musically; the song includes a rare use of the chord E7flat9, with which he was inordinately chuffed. When asked what it is, Harrison explained: “That’s an E7 with an F on top played on the piano. I’m really proud of that, as I literally invented that chord… John later borrowed it on I Want You.”

Neil Innes, of novelty act the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (and later The Rutles) vividly remembers recording an inconsequential music-hall song in Studio 1, during which he “snuck out, down the corridor to outside their studio, and I could hear very clearly what they were doing. They were working on one of George’s songs, and it was just fantastic listening to this, especially this F over the E.” At that moment, Innes realised just how far out of The Beatles’ league he was creatively. “Then I had to go back to our studio and record My Brother Makes The Noises For The Talkies.”

As the Revolver sessions neared their end, time was being taken up with mixing and overdubbing. But on June 8 they spent the first of two days recording Good Day Sunshine, which McCartney has described as “very much a nod to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s Daydream, the same traditional, almost trad-jazz feel”. Neither as technically complex nor as musically sophisticated as many other tracks on Revolver, it nevertheless includes a neat piece of studio trickery in the shape of George Martin’s honky-tonk piano solo, which was recorded slow, then speeded up to give it some extra zip.

It took three days, June 14-16, to record the sublime Here, There And Everywhere, but the writing of it, at Lennon’s Weybridge home, was much faster. “It was written quite quickly,” McCartney recalls, “out by the swimming pool in St George’s Hill while I was waiting for John to wake up one morning.” By the time Lennon woke, the song was almost complete, although McCartney concedes that when they went indoors to finish it, “John might have helped with a few last words”.

The last song recorded for Revolver was She Said She Said. According to Lennon it “was written after an acid trip in LA during a break in The Beatles’ [1965] tour, where we were having fun with The Byrds and lots of girls… Peter Fonda came in when we were on acid, and kept coming up to me, sitting next to me and whispering: ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.’ He was describing an acid trip he’d been on.” Lennon’s home demos reveal that after getting the basic idea for the song he changed it several times, added new sections and sought advice from Harrison. Harrison recalls that Lennon “had loads of bits, maybe three songs, that were unfinished, and I made suggestions and helped him to work them together so that they became one finished song”.

Lennon was evidently not entirely happy with She Said She Said, because it was not a serious contender for Revolver until the last moment, when they realised they were one song short.

An acerbic counterpoint to the honey of Here, There And Everywhere, it required a nine-hour session on June 21, during which Harrison played bass because McCartney and Lennon had become embroiled in a squabble.

Once it, and therefore the album, was done, producer George Martin reportedly sighed: “All right, boys, I’m just going for a lie down.”

As soon as the album was mixed, The Beatles played three dates in Germany, followed by a brief Far Eastern jaunt. But even while on the road, the album was uppermost in their minds. On June 26, the day of their gig in Hamburg, they finally decided on a name for it, discarding suggestions including Abracadabra, Four Sides Of The Eternal Triangle, Magic Circles, Pendulum and After Geography (Ringo’s jokey take on the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath). The multi-layered pun of Revolver won the day, finding favour with all of the band.

Also during the German trip, in Essen on June 25, they played Got To Get You Into My Life for support band Cliff Bennett And The Rebel Rousers. “Paul and John came in the dressing room and let us hear Got To Get You Into My Life,” Bennett recalls. “They’d thought it would be great for us because of all the brass. John played his guitar and Paul ‘dah-dah-dah’d the brass parts. Right away, even like that, I knew it was brilliant for us.”

Cliff Bennett and co. recorded the song at Abbey Road with McCartney as producer. “We were mesmerised with the things he did,” Bennett says. “New techniques like putting limiters on the piano, stuffing the grand piano cover inside the bass drum to get that flat-slap sound, things like that. Actually, I preferred the old ‘ba-boom’ sound from a bass drum, but we went along with it.”

At two am, when McCartney called it a day, Bennett still hadn’t done his vocals, so they reconvened the following morning. “Paul lived just along the road, so he turned up in his pyjamas, carpet slippers, and a jacket over his pyjama top. Must have walked round the corner like that, which I thought was hilarious.”

Revolver was released in the UK on August 5. On its front cover was a surreal mixed-media artwork by Klaus Voormann, the bassist with Manfred Mann and a friend of The Beatles since their early days in Hamburg. Having heard Tomorrow Never Knows, Voormann had decided: “They were being so avant-garde. I thought: ‘The cover has to do the same thing. How far can I go? How surreal and strange can it be?’”

His instantly striking collage, part line drawing and part photographic, ingeniously coupled modern art with commerciality. “We were very pleased,” McCartney enthused. “We liked the way there were little things coming out of people’s ears, and how he’d collaged things on a small scale while the drawings were on a big scale. He also knew us well enough to capture us rather beautifully in the drawings. We were flattered.”

Voormann was paid £40 for his work, which reduced Beatles manager Brian Epstein to tears of joy on first seeing it. It was subsequently awarded the 1966 Best Album Cover Grammy.

Cliff Bennett’s version of Got To Get You Into My Life was released on the same day as Revolver. The feeding frenzy accompanying any new Beatles album meant that virtually anyone lucky enough to acquire a pre-release test pressing headed straight for the nearest studio to record one of its tracks. Thus August 5 also saw the release of Here, There And Everywhere by The Fourmost, Good Day Sunshine by The Tremeloes, Tax Man by The Loose Ends, and two versions of For No One, one by Marc Reid and one by Brian Withers. In the coming weeks, Cilla Black released yet another For No One, while Episode Six went for Here, There And Everywhere. Intriguingly, apart from Bennett’s single, which peaked at No.6 in the UK, none of the other versions were noticeably successful, probably because so many people already owned the album that buying an inferior version seemed pointless.

Revolver’s commercial impact was immediate, the album topping the UK chart for seven weeks and the US chart for six. Culturally, although there had been earlier instances of psychedelic music, mostly in San Francisco, London and New York, Revolver opened the floodgates, and changed the thinking, and the chemical preferences, of young rock and pop visionaries worldwide. It’s hard to imagine the careers of Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and many others without the trail blazed by Revolver.

Even beyond the music world, The Beatles could now be seen as a socio-economic force. On August 10, just days after the release of Revolver, the American stock market wobbled because the price of shares in their US label, Capitol Records, dropped sharply. The reason was that Lennon’s observation that The Beatles were now “more popular than Jesus” had triggered bans and burnings of Beatles records. Of course, before too long their popularity would recover, but the incident made it clear that the music industry, and The Beatles themselves, were now seriously big business.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 226 (July 2016)

Whatever your thoughts on who or what constitutes Sepultura, the fact that this is a band who have been a constant in the world of heavy music for four decades now is a remarkable achievement. This evening their 40th anniversary farewell celebration tour (now into 42 years) reaches Bloodstock for their final ever show on UK soil.

There’s a clear air of excitement for such an occasion in the field and the band are greeted like heroes as they walk onstage and launch in the immortal Inner Self. For a song that was released in 1989 it still sounds unbelievably fresh; a grooving, thrashing masterpiece, it’s an example of precisely why this band are held in such high regard.

Of course, as much as those in attendance want all of the classics from Sepultura’s golden, Max Cavalera-fronted era, you’d be a fool for sleeping on their more recent material. There’s a very good argument to be made that Derrick Green is one of metal’s most underrated frontmen; Kairos and Means To An End, both songs from his time in the band, sound massive today, and Green performs them in his usual commanding manner.

Sepultura also rip through three brand new songs from their recent The Cloud Of Unknowing EP, something that most bands on their final run would never even consider doing. The almost proggy The Place actually sounds more than at home in amongst their more legendary material.

Ultimately, though, as great as all of this is, things really reach fever pitch with the set's final lap. Can any band in heavy music match Territory, Refuse/Resist, Arise, Ratamahatta and Roots Bloody Roots as five-song run? Bloodstock clearly doesn’t think so and goes absolutely feral for 20 minutes of pure metal perfection.

As the final chords of Roots… ring out, guitarist Andreas Kisser thanks everyone for 42 years of support and to congratulate Bloodstock on its 25th anniversary; as he does Green stands beside him, glassy eyed and clearly emotional, knowing that this will be his last time in front of a UK Sepultura crowd. What a band, what a way to sign off.

The long and sometimes fractious relationship between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks has had plenty of drama over the years, but the story has just taken another twist.

Tensions have existed between the two ex-Fleetwood Mac colleagues – and former romantic partners – since singer and guitarist Buckingham was forced out of the band in 2018. But he has revealed that the ice has once again thawed between the two, hinting that they may even work together once more.

“Stevie and I are talking all the time now,” Buckingham told E! News. “Next year should be a pretty interesting year, because I think quite a few things will reveal themselves.”

Buckingham’s departure from the band was followed by a legal battle which was subsequently settled out of court. Nicks said in 2024 that the pair had only interacted once since then, briefly at the memorial service for late Mac keyboard player and singer Christine McVie, who died in 2022. “The only time I’ve spoken to Lindsey was for about three minutes,” Nicks told Rolling Stone. “I dealt with Lindsey for as long as I could. You could not say that I did not give him more than 300 million chances.”

The first hints at an easing in hostilities came in late 2025, when Nicks revealed that the pair had been talking ahead of a reissue of their pre-Fleetwood Mac album, Buckingham Nicks. Earlier this year, Buckingham himself confirmed their relationship was back on healthier terms via an Instagram video: “I think on a more general level, just the energy in terms of what Buckingham Nicks did to sort of create a resurgence of connection between Stevie and myself, I think on a larger scale, that seems to be something that’s in the air.”

His new interview with E! News seems to confirm this. Buckingham says an upcoming Apple TV Fleetwood Mac documentary was partly the catalyst for the pair’s renewed friendship. “I think the process of making that has been a very circular healing process for all of us,” he said, adding: “Because we had left things in 2019 [following the legal issues], maybe as far as I was concerned, not in a very good place for all the wrong reasons. No one was happy about it, and all of that has been healed and worked out.”

Whether the project Buckingham is teasing is a new collaboration between the pair or a Fleetwood Mac reunion isn’t clear – the guitarist was circumspect about the specifics, while Nicks hasn’t commented. But he didn’t explicitly rule out a Mac tour, despite the fact that Nicks has stated that she wouldn’t want to tour without McVie. “I don’t think the fact that Christine is no longer with us would be the deciding factor,” Buckingham told E! News. “If you want to be realistic about it, Christine left the band in the very late ’90s and we did 15 years very successfully and many tours and even did an album without her. And so there is a template that’s already been established for touring without Christine, so I don’t think that would be the decider necessarily.”

Whatever materialises, the fact that the two are talking once more indicates this long-running story has a few more miles in it.

Bloodstock is back, baby! After a triumphant first night with Saxon - who headlined the very first event back in 2001 - the 25th birthday celebrations are well underway by the time Lamb Of God rock up on Friday evening. It's their third time taking top spot - putting them on equal footing with Judas Priest and Nightwish for the bands who've headlined the festival most - and they aren't fucking about getting things started.

A blast of sparks marks their arrival as they get stuck into Ruin. From there, we get a crash course in why Lamb Of God are so beloved on these shores. Laid To Rest and Now You've Got Something To Die For are undeniable anthems, kickstarting a flurry of movement that is astonishing considering the day has effectively been HIT training with each successive band turning the dial up (Life Of Agony - Fit For An Autopsy - Biohazard - Municipal Waste - Sepultura's final UK show).

For all the energy the crowd bring, Randy seems to want to match them pace-for-pace. Leaping, howling and stomping his way around with a demonic sense of vitality, his howls take on an almost screeching, manic fury. It's all off-set with a sense of playfulness and humour that betrays that they aren't the same band who seethed with a genuine sense of danger and destructive force 20-odd years ago and to be honest, they're better for the change.

There's a sense these lads actually like each other, and are having the time of their lives on stage (Randy even brings out his beloved mock-British character "Roger Brilliant" for a few bits that clearly crack up guitarist Mark Morton), inviting 20,000 metal fans to join in the fun. Enhanced with pyro and some freewheeling instrumentals, the set feels loose and joyous as the band span almost their entire careers (no New American Gospel or Omens era tracks stops it being a clean sweep). While there's a few dips - the drum solo after Parasocial Christ doesn't help - they manage to keep things tight and explosive for the most part.

Given just how consistently brilliant they've been live over the past 26 years, it's easy to take Lamb Of God for granted. But when they break out the likes of Walk With Me In Hell, 512 or even a newer rager like Momento Mori, you can't deny they basically set the bar for 21st Century metal bands live. Accept no substitute.

In the summer of 1977, a journalist for US rock magazine Circus interviewed Paul Rodgers at Bad Company’s Palm Springs HQ. The group were touring their new album, Burnin’ Sky, and had rented houses in the California resort, from where they’d fly back and forth in a private jet.

When Circus’s writer arrived at Rodgers’ place, he found the singer waiting to have a karate lesson. In fact, Rodgers was photographed wearing his karate robe, known as a gi, on the cover of Burnin’ Sky. On Bad Company’s last tour the group had lived up to their outlaw reputation, but the singer insisted he was a changed man now. “I’m working at keeping fit,” he said, “because people can get very messed up on tour.”

The records that preceded it have always unfairly overshadowed Bad Company’s fourth album. In the band’s back catalogue, Burnin’ Sky is close to being a ‘great lost album’, if any US Top 20 gold-certified record could ever truly be described as ‘lost’.

Bad Company swept into the Château d’Hérouville studio in France’s Oise Valley in the summer of 1976, just as Iggy Pop and David Bowie swept out after recording Pop’s The Idiot. They weren’t in good shape.

“We had been on the road pretty heavily and we were burned,” admitted Rodgers, who wrote the chords for the title track in his Paris hotel suite and then ad-libbed the lyrics in the studio the next day. It was a one-take affair, recorded by the Rolling Stones’ engineer Chris Kimsey, but it worked.

Burnin’ Sky’s throbbing groove sets the tempo for what follows. Boz Burrell and Simon Kirke maintain a snake-charming rhythm for 5.22 unbroken minutes, as treated vocals, Mick Ralphs’ wailing guitar, peals of thunder and pattering percussion whizz around the mix. It’s spare and economical – Bad Company at their best.

Once again, Rodgers handled the lion’s share of the writing, serving up the bump-and-grind rockers but also the more thoughtful Like Water, co-written with his then wife Machiko Shimizu. Elsewhere, Ralphs delivers two of the album’s best riffs on Man Needs Woman and Too Bad – the last riff cheekily reconfigured by Whitesnake for their song Girl in 1981.

Elsewhere, there’s the jokey intro to Everything I Need, in which Bad Company sing a few lines from The Happy Wanderer (‘…with my knapsack on my back!’) and which evokes a 4am refreshment session, with empty bottles on the table and the unwelcome dawn light creeping through the curtains.

Burnin’ Sky ends as it began with another fine but often forgotten track. On Master Of Ceremony, Rodgers pleads for global harmony over a mesmerising groove. The whole song is fuzzy around the edges, suggesting either the last round in that 4am drinking session or the head-spinning after-effects of one of Rodgers’ karate chops.

Burnin’ Sky maintained Bad Company’s strike rate on the UK and US charts but without a big hit single to raise the profile, it’s since slipped between the cracks. More’s the pity. It’s high time to don the gi, head back to the château and get reacquainted.

You can say that you saw it coming, but you’d be a liar. On October 28, 2016, Avenged Sevenfold released their seventh studio album, The Stage. It had been rumoured for some time that the California chart-toppers were working on new music, in no small part due to a seemingly standalone single coming out in mid-October. But no one who woke up that morning truly expected to have 73 minutes of new music waiting for them.

To hear them tell it, Avenged surprise-released their progressive metal opus out of fatigue. Their last album, 2013’s Hail To The King, had a months-long rollout featuring online puzzles, a radio-ruling single and countless interviews. They were also in a legal battle with their former label Warner Bros and feared some kind of sabotage. Those fears were realised when friend and wrestler Chris Jericho ‘leaked’ a fake release date for The Stage and the label hurriedly announced an unauthorised Avenged best-of album to come out one week earlier. Long story short: they were sick of the industry’s shit, and they felt that their fans were, too.

“We could sense the boredom in our fans [after Hail…],” rhythm guitarist Zacky Vengeance told this writer in 2017. “‘Oh, Avenged is trolling us. They’re doing the campaign and doing scavenger hunts, just release the fucking songs already! We just wanna hear the album!’ This time, we gave them nothing and then we gave them the album, like, ‘Here you go. Make up your mind!’”

Of course, Avenged didn’t invent the surprise album release. It’s been a thing since alt-rock leaders Radiohead effectively leaked their own album In Rainbows in 2007. But since The Stage, and especially in 2026, metal has embraced the tactic like no other genre. Over the last few months alone, black metal band Ultha, doomsters Spirit Adrift and returning post-metal idols Neurosis have all put out new records with no notice. Converge released their long-awaited 10th album Love Is Not Enough in February, only to reveal shortly afterwards that it was the start of a two-part series, with Hum Of Hurt swiftly following. Avenged themselves went back to the well with the divisive Statica EP last month.

For Spirit Adrift, whose surprise album Infinite Illumination was also their last, the decision was born from the same music industry fatigue as Avenged. “I think bands and artists have two choices,” mainman Nate Garrett told MusicRadar. “You crawl out on your fucking hands and knees with the shit kicked out of you, or you walk away on your own two feet. That’s the way I look at it right now. I respect bands that go out that way, like, on the high-note.”

On paper, releasing an album without any singles or promotional interviews seems like commercial suicide, and it has been. The Stage was the lowest-charting Avenged album since 2007, and when A Day To Remember surprise-released Big Ole Album Vol. 1 in February 2025, they slid from the number 15 US chart position of predecessor You’re Welcome to 155. Talking to Guitar.com in May 2025, on the day his band surprise-released their final album Clockworked, Stray From The Path’s Tom Williams acknowledged the probable commercial slump yet was unfazed.

“Charting was important in 2016, but charting in 2025, no one cares,” he said. “I get an email every week about first-week sales and they’re just lower and lower and lower and lower. We charted back in the day, when it mattered, and that was cool, but right now, it’s more important for me to present the record in a way that’s fun and exciting and fulfilling.”

Zacky said similar in 2017: “Album sales [for The Stage] weren’t as good, but at what point do people critique success on how many fucking albums you sell in a week rather than how big your balls are? So for us, I think we had some pretty big fucking balls and we did some exciting shit. I think the fans appreciate that, too.”

That makes sense: in the streaming age, barely anyone makes a liveable profit from recorded music, so why not circumvent the time-consuming promo process? And for the majority of metal bands, who reside in the genre’s underground, their output is more album-focussed than single-focussed. No one could realistically accuse drone outfit Khanate, who returned out of the blue with 2023’s To Be Cruel, or panoramic stoners Sleep, whose 2018 album The Sciences stunned everyone, of being radio darlings.

Although there are major commercial drawbacks, there are also commercial benefits, albeit less obvious ones. Williams, who manages Canadian metalcore band Counterparts and oversaw the surprise-release of their 2024 EP Let Them Die, insisted that fans were relieved about the lack of a staggered preorder process, which sometimes doesn’t get the record to their doorstep in time for release day anyway.

“That’s when it really clicked for me,” he said. “Everyone was like, ‘Thank God! No fucking pre-order! The vinyl ships now!’ It’s what people want, and it’s what I want: I’m a consumer, too!”

Surprise album releases also have the potential to feel like events, in the way that traditional release days rarely do. When Neurosis came back with An Undying Love For A Burning World, it was monumental news. In the same instant, fans learned that the pioneers had reunited after a decade away, ex-Isis frontman Aaron Turner had joined, they were returning to the live circuit, and a new album was out, in full. It became a massive talking point for a cult band.

Had these stories been drip-fed, it would have been less of a moment, and the hype actually let Neurosis reverse the surprise-album commercial curse. Take a quick glance at Spotify and An Undying Love… is already one of their most listened-to albums, eclipsing even what was long assumed to be their swansong, 2016’s Fires Within Fires.

But these are all bands who are either firmly in the underground, who are breaking up or whose names are firmly established. For an up-and-coming artist looking to broaden their audience, a surprise release would be one of the worst things to do. As Sleep Token made readied breakthrough third album, 2023’s Take Me Back To Eden, the rollout was everything. Their scheme of sharing singles in rapidfire succession (five from early January to mid-February) offered the kind of frequency that social media algorithms reward, and they became a fast TikTok sensation. Safe to say, had the album just been unloaded in one go with no warning, they wouldn’t be filling arenas and headlining stadiums right now.

A surprise release is a great way to reward an active fanbase but no way to build one. For as long as heavy metal bands want to rebel against the music industry system and emphasise the album over the single, it will have a place in the genre. Whether or not it’s a good commercial move, if you’re truly set on doing a surprise release, you probably don’t care by that point either way.

Sevendust singer Lajon Witherspoon knew his band had made it when Ted Nugent turned up at one of their gigs with a live buffalo in tow. It was New Year’s Eve 1999, and the Atlanta five-piece were opening for Metallica at Detroit’s Pontiac Silverdome. The Nuge and fellow Motor City hero/future MAGA pitchman Kid Rock were also on the bill, as was the snorting 800lb hunk of meat Ted had brought with him.

“It was crazy,” Witherspoon says now, sitting in a dressing room beneath London’s O2 with Sevendust drummer Morgan Rose a few hours before his band take the stage as support to Alter Bridge. “We were in our bus and this truck pulled up. It was Ted Nugent and a big old buffalo. They had to reinforce the stage because he was gonna ride that buffalo on stage.”

That Metallica New Year’s Eve show was the result of a whirlwind couple of years that had taken Sevendust from unknown local band to national contenders. Their coronation would be complete at the end of Metallica’s set, when all four bands – Sevendust included – got on stage to jam on a cover of Kiss’s Detroit Rock City.

“At the end, James Hetfield gives me his guitar,” says Witherspoon. “I do not know how to play guitar, but I was playing my heart out.”

Have Sevendust spoken to any of the bands they shared the stage with that night since? Metallica, yes. Rock’s leading right-wing wingnuts? Not so much.

“Uh-uh,” says the singer, with a ‘do you really have to ask?’ look on his face. “Not me.”

Sevendust are one of America’s most resilient bands. They weren’t as successful as contemporaries such as Limp Bizkit and Creed, although a run of three gold albums on the bounce between 1997’s self-titled debut and 2001’s Animosity is nothing to be sniffed at. But their greatest achievement came afterwards – surviving the worst the music industry could throw at them. “Yeah, we’ve had a few moments where it looked like it was game over,” Rose says drily.

Atlanta wasn’t exactly a hotbed of hard rock and heavy metal in the mid-90s, but there were enough bands for Rose to cherry-pick musicians from to form Sevendust. As a teenager, the drummer had briefly been a member of local underground star and future Drag Race icon RuPaul’s new-wave band Wee Wee Pole. “I’m such a blip in that machine he’s run for the last forty years,” he says.

Sevendust rehearsed and sometimes gigged in The Wreck Room. “A rat-infested shithole,” as Rose puts it.

“There was a strip club next door,” Witherspoon adds. “You go in there you might not come out.”

They bagged high-profile management in the shape of former Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French, who also produced their self-titled debut album. That the union didn’t last much beyond that record says much about the relationship.

Sevendust sold exactly 311 copies the first week. But it sold more the week after, and more the week after that, until it sailed past half a million copies. They were road dogs, and feral on stage too – one band they supported, long-forgotten alt.rockers The Nixons, threatened to kick them off the tour for being too aggressive live. Sevendust found a place in the nu metal scene, but even then they felt like outsiders.

“They were cool kids from LA, we were hicks from Georgia,” says Witherspoon. “They kind of ignored us a little.”

There were fuck-ups along the way, mostly from the people around the band. Such as the time their label, TVT, blocked a collaboration with Eminem, who Sevendust had got to know on the 1999 Warped Tour, just as the rapper exploded. “They didn’t think it was going to be a thing,” says Rose, rolling his eyes.

Still, things seemed good. They opened for Metallica and Limp Bizkit and hung out at TV shows with a pre-megastardom Beyoncé. They were one of the best live acts around, and their records consistently sold. But it all came crashing down in the mid-2000s.

“There was a lot of money coming through,” says Witherspoon, “and we were making nothing.”

The reasons are complicated and a legal minefield. The short version is that a succession of managers and accountants didn’t necessarily have the band’s best interests at heart.

At one point they were so broke that they had to leave in the middle of a European tour.

“When you’re a week in and you hear: ‘You’ve lost seventy-five grand’, it’s bad,” says Rose. “We had to leave cos we couldn’t pay our rent back home.”

Later, the band attempted to sue one of their ex-associates for mismanaging their money, only to end up having to pay them $40,000.

“There were times we came close to going bankrupt,” says Morgan. “One of the people who was stealing from us is now in jail for stealing for somebody else.”

It took nearly a decade, and a new manager, to pull themselves out of the hole. Even then, their trials weren’t over. In 2022, Rose gave a podcast interview in which he said the band were planning to quit at some unspecified point in the not-too-distant future. “Oh, that was a real thing,” he says.

Today he admits that he and guitarist Clint Lowery were deadly serious about it. The pair were tired and frustrated that Sevendust seemed to be going in ever-decreasing circles. Tours had been confined to North America – their current European dates are their first in eight years, and their previous UK shows were nine years before that. They were ready to walk. The others?

“Everybody else despised the idea,” says Witherspoon. “I stopped talking to him [Rose] for a while. I can tell you, if they’d have done it, you’d have seen a band called Threedust, cos we weren’t giving up.”

The solution was to do what men of their age don’t do: talk about it. They re-examined their friendship and everything they’d been through. They emerged with new album, One, a record whose title underlines their rediscovered unity.

“It’s been tough - we’ve been ripped off, we nearly went bankrupt,” says Rose. “We survived what many people wouldn’t have survived. I don’t know how we did it, but out of everything we’ve done, I’m proudest of that.”

One is out now via Napalm Records. Sevendust are currently on tour in the US, and play the UK and Europe in November and December. For dates and tickets, check the Sevendust website.

The year 1971 was a momentous one for prog rock. Among the year’s signal albums were ELP’s Tarkus, Pink Floyd’s Meddle, Hawkwind’s In Search Of Space and Genesis’s Nursery Cryme, not to mention a brace from Yes.

The three-minute pop song had become passé. In its place were labyrinthine epics about things like Greek nymphs, moon dogs and strange Russian hogweed. This was music with a default setting of ‘challenging’.

Rock music was suddenly taking itself very seriously indeed. Never mind that much of it actually sounded thrillingly original, the battle lines between new and old – between knotty-browed experimentation and straight-up rock’n’pop – were well and truly drawn.

Enter Jethro Tull, who since 1967 had gradually morphed from a fairly conventional white blues band into avatars of something altogether weirder. Their fourth album Aqualung, released in March ’71, was a miasmic mix of folk, jazz and rock, wherein leader Ian Anderson vocalised all manner of thoughts on religion, consumerism and global poverty.

It sold by the bucketload, sealed their reputation at home in the UK and made them big stars in America. But critics suddenly started lumping Tull in with the prog pack, which Anderson didn’t exactly take kindly to.

“Prog was beginning to have a derisory and slightly critical note attached to it,” he explains today. “Bands like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes and Genesis were seen as being bombastic, over-the-top, pain-in-the-arse, showing-off kinds of performers. And to some extent I felt that, too.”

Anderson’s response was to pour his scorn for critics and portentous musos alike into Tull’s next album, Thick As A Brick. What began as a song idea soon flowered into an intricate, 45-minute treatise that made dizzying use of harpsichord, strings, trumpet, organ, acoustic guitar and Anderson’s signature flute, among other things.

The whole shebang was then housed inside a spoof 12-page newspaper, The St. Cleve Chronicle & Linwell Advertiser, which claimed that Anderson had adapted all the lyrics for the record from a poem by an eight-year-old child prodigy called Gerald Bostock. What could be more prog than that?

“When I wrote Thick As A Brick I tried to approach it in a humorous and satirical way,” Anderson says. “The whole idea happened very quickly. It was done in a fast and furious period of time. I’d just turn up at rehearsal every lunchtime with what I’d written that morning. Then the guys would dutifully grapple with it and we’d try to recap on what we did yesterday and the day before.

“By the end of 10 days we’d rehearsed to a performance level all the elements of Thick As A Brick. And we went in and recorded it, literally in a few days. The album cover actually took us longer than the music itself.”

So is Thick As A Brick a song, or an album? And was it intended as more than mere prog foolery?

“It was written very much as I went along, and was a very natural, organically evolving piece of music. There was an almost Monty Pythonesque idea in my head of this pastiche approach to creating this idea – ‘the mother of all concept albums’, as I’ve come to call it.

“It was presenting such a preposterous notion that an eight-year-old boy had written this saga in some poetry competition. Of course, you can then suspend disbelief and just go with it. But there were a lot of countries where they just didn’t get the joke. They thought it was a real story, that this precocious schoolboy had written this stuff and somehow I turned it into an album.

“You have to preserve the fiction to some extent, because that’s your starting point – the absurdity of precocious youth and complex ideas; that somehow Thick As A Brick is an album about what this youth might become and the distortion of his ideas as a prepubescent child. Essentially it’s setting out future scenarios of what might happen.”

So there was a serious side to it all?

“Some of the elements in the lyrics are quite serious,” offers Anderson, “where I drew upon my own childhood and my own early experiences for ideas for sections within the overall work. But I was also drawing very much on the world of the eight-year-old Gerald Bostock. It was part of the absurdity.”

Thick As A Brick was edited and released as a single in April 1972, a month after the album’s release. But skimming the cream from a three-quarter-hour masterwork was never going to be easy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it failed to make the charts on either side of the Atlantic.

The album, however, made No.5 in the UK, while over in the US it topped the Billboard chart for two weeks. It remains Jethro Tull’s second-biggest seller in America. Critics and fans generally adored it, but Anderson had all eventualities covered in any case.

One section of The St. Cleve Chronicle has the audacity to contain a mock review of the album, describing it as being marked by “ugly changes of time signature, and banal instrumental passages”. Was he trying to make it all ultimately bomb-proof?

“It’s okay for me to say those things about my own work,” Anderson reasons, “but I don’t think it’s too cool if somebody else tries to do it, because I’m already well aware of it. There’s every scope to say that this is noodly, extreme, anal, pompous, bombastic, arrogant – all of those words are applicable to prog rock and definitely applicable to Thick As A Brick – but they’re there on purpose. And if you don’t get the joke, fuck off! Don’t start telling me something that I know full well, because I wrote it to be like that. That’s the point!”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 159 (May 2011)

The 25th anniversary edition of Bloodstock Open Air Festival kicked off this week and tonight organisers announced Mercyful Fate, Electric Callboy and Motionless In White as main stage headliners for next year's 26th year of the event.

With Lamb of God, Saxon, Slaughter To Prevail and Judas Priest headlining at Catton Park in Derbyshire, England, this weekend, fans who had just watched Municipal Waste's set on Friday were told who will be the big hitters on the Ronnie James Dio Main Stage in 2027.

In a statement announcing the 2027 lineup, Friday's headliners Mercyful Fate say: "Mercyful Fate is honoured and looking extremely forward to playing Bloodstock again. Last time was awesome, and this time with a brand new album out, finally!"

Saturday's main draw Electric Callboy will be headlining the festival for the first time. The German electro-metal party-starters are cover stars of the new issue of Metal Hammer magazine which is available with an exclusive cover and special art print.

On being confirmed as Sunday headliners for 2027, Motionless In White frontman Chris Motionless says: "We were told that we are one of the most requested bands to perform at your legendary festival, so it is with great honour to announce that we are answering the call and will be seeing you next year for our first ever European festival headlining show, and only UK show of 2027! Thank you so much! Let the countdown begin."

The Sophie Lancaster stage in 2027 will be headlined by Madball, Gaerea, Kanonenfieber and Dethklok.

In 2019 David Gilmour made the shock announcement that he’d decided to sell 123 of his guitars at auction, many of them legendary among Pink Floyd fans. The move led to all kinds of speculation about his future. He’d eventually raise $21.5m (about £16.6m) for the ClientEarth charity in a record-breaking event; but before it took place, he talked – and played – through some of the unique lots with Prog, and offered some hope for those who feared he might be retiring.

“I’ve no intention of going and doing a Pink Floyd record or a Pink Floyd tour again.” Words from the mouth of David Gilmour that won’t come as a massive surprise to fans, but are still likely to be met by a sinking of many hearts in Progland. Earlier in 2019, the guitarist also announced he was selling around 120 of his own guitars to raise money for charity, a collection that includes the legendary Black Strat that was used on all Floyd albums from 1970 to the mid-80s, and again at the Live 8 reunion; the equally legendary 0001 Strat; and Gilmour’s 1955 Les Paul Goldtop that was used on both The Wall and A Momentary Lapse Of Reason.

One can understand a certain frisson of fear creeping through the Floyd/Gilmour fanbase. What on earth is going on, Mr Gilmour? Does selling so many guitars equate to an announcement of retirement for a man whose guitar tone has coloured the lives of millions of music fans the world over?

Christies, the auction house reselling the Gilmour collection, said his guitar solos were “both lyrical and layered with color, and immediately identifiable to critics and pop music fans as readily as the brushstrokes of Monet’s water lilies are to art historians.” For many (Prog’s editor, for example), the solo in Comfortably Numb remains the finest moment of the finest song on the finest album ever.

“There’s a purpose to what’s going on here,” Gilmour says. “We’re selling the guitars – it'll do good. I could do without one or two guitars here and there; one or two guitars that I use less. I think, ‘Just do it. Get it done.’ If I find that I need something, I'll hunt down the person that bought it and buy it back, or I'll buy another one that’s almost identical. The second option's much more likely.”

Gilmour is, of course, no stranger to grandiose charitable gestures. In 2003 he sold his £3.6 million house in London's Little Venice to Earl Spencer, brother of the late Princess Diana, and gave the proceeds to the homeless charity Crisis, for whom he acts as a vice president. He once donated £25,000 to the Save The Rhino foundation at the behest of Douglas Adams, in return for the author’s invention of album title The Division Bell.

And yet there’s something inherently more personal about a guitar collection: instruments through which this mercurial musician has coloured some of the rock world’s most memorable moments – moments of personal triumph even, in the ongoing battle for the heart of Pink Floyd. Even if Gilmour’s words hint at a continuation of making music, there seems something horribly definite about selling so many of the things that connect him to music lovers the world over.

“These are instruments that have served me very well,” he says. “They have given me music, I’ve loved them, but now it’s time for them to go off and be part of someone else’s musical life. I’m hoping they’ll inspire music in other people. And selling them will hopefully give a fair bit of cash to a number of charities which are in deep need of that cash right at this moment.”

Let’s start with the Black Strat. How old is this instrument?

The Black Strat – my main tool of the trade for the last... God knows how long. I believe it was made in 1969 and I bought it at Manny’s in 48th Street New York in 1970. And it’s been on most Pink Floyd recordings from then up into the 80s, when I put it out to pasture for a while. But then I brought it back again and it’s still the guitar I play more than any other.

Manny’s was fantastic; a brilliant shop. The guy who ran it was called Henry, not Manny. He was a great guy; he would troop off to a back room and dig out a guitar and say, ‘Try this!’ We mostly got new guitars from Manny’s; he had the pick of the crop.

Have you always been that person in the shop gazing out across the various instruments, unable to stop yourself getting another one?

Quite a bit, yes. In Cambridge when I was a teenager and there was no way I could afford a Fender of any sort, there was a music shop called Ken Stevens; I used to spend a lot of time in it. It was a miniature shop – one of those ones where it was only half the width of a usual shopfront, probably only seven or eight foot wide. But there were guitars all the way down both sides, and there was a Stratocaster hanging in there for years, which we sometimes persuaded the guy in the shop to let us touch and play a tune or two on. But I could never afford it.

When you’re in a music shop, when you’re testing out a guitar, what do you play? People will go into guitar shops and test guitars by playing your stuff!

I haven’t been into a guitar shop for quite a while – it’s not the way it works any more. My people talk to their people and the guitars come and you play them and put them back in the box and send them away. There are places in England where they have a range of beautiful old guitars that you can go and see and play and buy. One is an acoustic place I’m going to go to quite soon, with a bit of luck, in Kent.

The first Floyd material the Black Strat appeared on is Meddle – the album many see as the template for the Floyd that would come after that point. So this guitar comes in at the same time. Did it feel like that?

It didn’t feel like that guitar had created that change, no; that would be being a little sparing of the truth. But it became my main guitar, the one I used pretty much on everything, unless there was a reason to want a different sound. So that’s definitely on Meddle, it’s on Dark Side Of The Moon, Comfortably Numb. The four notes at the beginning of Shine On You Crazy Diamond popped out of this very guitar [he plays a short part on it], because it was there and in my hands! What can you say? It’s definitely earned its keep.

If you look at the composite bits it’s probably only worth a couple of grand, but it’s got this status that you’re now using for a good cause. You wouldn’t call it a particularly iconic historical instrument, would you – apart from your association?

No, it’s a 1969 Fender Stratocaster, of which thousands and thousands were made. The actual lump of wood that the body is made out of wasn’t always the same type of wood – some are made of alder, some are made of other things. Sometimes you get a bit of wood that’s really light, sometimes you get a bit of wood that’s really heavy. They’re all different. If you pick one up without plugging it in and play it and it feels and sounds great, then it’s gonna sound great amplified, too. This one happened to be in the right place at the right time.

When you retired it, it hung on the wall of the Hard Rock Café in Dallas. Of course, it’s nice that people can see it – but did it grate you a bit thinking, “It’s not being played?”

I have a duality about it, about my affection for it, my teenage lust to have a Fender Stratocaster, and then having one and thinking, “Well you know, it’s a tool of my trade; it’s just a guitar. Get another one, what’s the difference?” And I did get the red one, which has EMG pickups on it, which are battery-powered – it doesn’t react to all the gear, hums and buzzes. Throughout our early time touring, one of the biggest problems was hums and buzzes that the guitar picked up, single coil particularly.

That’s why humbucker pickups are called humbuckers, because they buck that hum. Single coils pick up everything. You’re constantly moving the guitar around two inches, pointing it this way and having to play whole songs that are pointing a certain angle, because if you’re doing it three inches that way, this hum would come up.

Every time you turn on an effects pedal that hum is magnified by 20. And with all those light rigs and stuff that we toured with, it was a constant battle. Our guys would be there in the daytime setting up the gear and they would spend hours trying to pinpoint everything that could make a hum or a buzz and get rid of it, but it was a nightmare. Getting these different electronic pickups got rid of all that in a second, so it made touring life for them and for me much easier.

Did you ever have that Spinal Tap moment where you picked up a local radio station or something?

Yeah! And taxis – people asking for a taxi, they’d come straight through the guitar.

There’s a mythology around a strap that you’ve used on that guitar, more recently on your last tour. Is the myth true?

The myth? Well, my lovely wife Polly Samson bought me, as a present, a Jimi Hendrix strap, that you can see. The strap that he’s wearing at a lot of his later shows, at the Isle Of Wight in 1970 – which I helped mix the sound for. Not a lot of people know that. From the side of the stage on WEM Audiomasters with Charlie Watkins.

What do you recall from that gig?

I went down and I was camping in a tent, just being a punter, and I went backstage where our main roadie, Peter Watts, was trying to deal with all the mayhem with Charlie Watkins of WEM. They were very nervous; they were going to have to mix Hendrix’s sound. I did some mixing stuff in those days and they said, ‘Help! Help!’ so I did.

Did you chat to Hendrix much?

Not then. I had met him previous to that, once. I didn’t know him.

Let’s talk about the acoustics next – we’ll do the Martins. You’ve always had a love for acoustic music, for folk music and early blues. Was the love for acoustic guitars there before you fell in love with electric guitars?

Most people are going to start off on an acoustic guitar. I started off on a nylon-strung acoustic and then graduated to an archtop guitar with F-holes. My background in music is very, very mixed, very broad; I’m a Jack of all trades. I loved acoustic music, I loved folk music, I loved acoustic blues music. Lead Belly was a favourite of mine. Lead Belly had a 12-string; I had a 12-string when I was a teenager, about 19, for a while.

I’ve racked my memory to try and remember what happened to the guitars I had at that time. In some cases I can only imagine that, when I wanted to get another guitar, I had to sell that one to raise the funds. Anyway, I had a 12-string back then and I did very much like Lead Belly’s playing. And a guy called Erik Darling I was very keen on who played 12-string – I had a bit of stuff from him.

So, the two Martins… I bought one from a friend in England. Dunno why he wanted to sell it, but I wanted a 12-string and I didn’t have one at that time so I got this one. Sounds nice! [He plays the start of Wish You Were Here]. So that fell out of this guitar in the control room of Number 3 at Abbey Road in ’75. The people around me picked up on it, and so evolved Wish You Were Here.

There’s a bit of mythology around various cables being taken out of studios and run into cars, and run back again and put through car radios. What’s the start of that track, the sound of that guitar?

The track was supposed to be imitating the sound of a car radio, music being played coming out of a radio, supposedly into someone’s bed sitting room; and the guy in the room joins in and starts playing those melody lines over the top. We did actually run a microphone out into my car in the car park at the front of Abbey Road. I just twiddled with the dial. We recorded some stuff of twiddling with the dial and the changing of stations and used a bit of it on Wish You Were Here.

These strange things happen – it’s the weirdest synchronicity that you get, those strange voices saying weird things and then moving to a different bit. We did it again on The Wall album, exactly the same thing (‘Surprise surprise surprise’). You know you’re gonna get something fantastic. Nowadays, of course, you press a button to change channels between stations. I don’t think it would quite work these days, but in those days you just turned the thing and it gradually went from one into the next one.

Is it true that that guitar was stolen but then later returned to you?

Yeah. I lived out in the countryside somewhere and I had a little studio room. My brother had a band and he was in there rehearsing quite a bit, and these guitars were in that studio room. It was locked and everything; and one night it got broken into and some guitars went. It turned out to be one of the musicians who was in my brother’s band at the time – a temporary musician, very temporary in this case – had half-inched them.

They were put into a studio in Surrey, owned by Nigel Gray. He recognised the guitar and called us. He said, “I’ve got a sneaking suspicion there are some guitars here that might not belong to the person who brought them here.” We got most of them back. There were a couple that I never got back, one of which was a three-pickup black Les Paul with humbuckers on it, which I’d loved after seeing it on the cover of a Smokey Robinson and The Miracles record. And a Gibson Les Paul TV model, a little blond thing with double cutaways, that I didn’t get back either.

Who do you think is going to buy these guitars?

I hope someone who genuinely wants to play them and have some fun with them and maybe create something with them is going to buy them. But I don’t really believe that’s going to happen. They should be looked after; they should be played and passed on at the appropriate moment – which is now for me.

Have you had many people enquiring? You know, friends or fellow collectors going, “Could you...? How much...?”

I’ve told people about the instruments, but I haven’t had people enquiring with a view to buying them, really. The sort of people I know aren’t going to be the ones who want to buy these things.

What guitar are we going to end with?

This is a white Fender Stratocaster, made in 1954 with sort of gold bits on it. It had gold tuning pegs, but they don’t seem to be on it any more. Gold scratch plate, gold plate on the back with 0001 on it; I’ve had it since 1978. It was made by a friend of Leo Fender’s called Rex Gallion. He was the guy who suggested the scalloping out of the Stratocaster body and the shaping of it so that it would better fit someone’s frame as they were playing it.

I don’t know what his frame was like – maybe a bit like mine. It was a very good idea. Leo Fender gave him this guitar in around ’54, ’55. It’s a very, very beautiful instrument – but he was a Gibson man, it turns out, and so he didn’t really play it very much at all and eventually sold it, I believe, in order to buy a tape recorder. It was then in the window of a store somewhere in California and it was bought by a guy to give to his son for Christmas when he was 12. The years went by, mysterious things happened; and in ’78, I got it. And here it is. It is actually as good a Strat as I’ve ever played. Beautiful.

For me, there has been no real improvement in the making of the electric guitar since this was made in 1954. I would be as happy to play this electric guitar as any other electric guitar, out of all the other ones I’ve looked at and been asked to try over the years. How do you improve on perfection?

Do they have names?

Pardon?

Have you given them names, your guitars?

No.

Because it’s reasonably common for musicians to name, be it a Lucille or whatever.

I’ve never quite done that.

Why not?

Tools of the trade, mate! I guess I have a different form of romanticism.

Has anyone ever tried to steal that one? Does it travel under lock and key? Does it get its own plane seat?

Well, it doesn’t really travel. It moves from this studio to a studio in another house or something; not great distances. It usually just gets chucked in the boot of the car. There’s no massive security around it, no more than any other guitar. I’m lucky – it hasn’t been filched yet.

Do you ever lend these guitars to anyone? Does anyone ever go, “Do you think we could borrow 0001?”

I don’t know if I’ve lent the 0001 guitar out. I’ve lent all sorts of other guitars out to friends. They give them back.

I sense there is a dichotomy here... How are you going to feel when you’re in the auction house and you see these instruments in front of you and you see the money being bid?

Obviously there’s going to be a dual feeling from a little bit of loss but a huge sense of relief, in that I don’t have to think about what’s going to happen to them in the future. I’ve had my time with them. I’m finding new friends now and they can move on, and they’ll do an enormous amount of good. I don’t think it’s something I’m going to have to struggle with in a major way. I don’t think I’m going to have to see my shrink for weeks and months and years to deal with this.

Finally, what’s next aside from this auction? Are your eyes set on a new musical horizon?

I write bits of music. I work. I haven’t done much lately. Other things in my life are tidying up a little bit, one might say, at the moment. Clear space is coming up to me. I’ll be getting into this studio we’re sitting in at the moment and listening to the hundreds of little bits of demos that I’ve got, and developing them; seeing where they go and seeing if I get my appetite back to start recording a proper album and doing all the stuff that goes with it.

Entering into that, for me, is about a four-year project – the writing, the refining, the recording. The marketing of an album and doing a tour, preparing for rehearsals, getting the musicians, all that shit, takes a lot of time. I usually find at the end that it’s taken me about four years to do the whole thing, so it’s a commitment which I have as yet to make. But we’ll probably get there.

During the auction at Christies in New York, the Martin acoustic, with an expected sale price of $20,000, went for $1,095,000; the white Strat, expected at $150,000, went for $1,815,000; and the Black Strat, also expected to raise $150,000, became a record-setting transaction at $3,975,000.

Iron Maiden have, in their time, covered Jethro Tull, Focus and Beckett tracks. It’s a matter of fact that bassist Steve Harris and singer Bruce Dickinson are both prog fans. The genre has permeated their music since the late 80s, so it wasn’t too difficult to present a list of their 10 proggiest moments in 2024. And as the bassist told us: “Prog taught me to do whatever the hell you want to do – go in any direction you want to.” Amen to that.

Cross-Eyed Mary (1983)

This cover of the 1971 Jethro Tull song from Aqualung was the b-side to The Trooper single, and the first indication for many fans that there was some love for prog rock within Maiden’s ranks. Unlike Dickinson, who’s performed with Tull mainman Ian Anderson, Harris tells Prog: “I’ve never met himn. I sort of don’t want to, because I love his music so much.”

Rainbow’s Gold (1984)

Nestled away on the b-side to 1984 single 2 Minutes To Midnight is this cover of a song by 70s UK prog rockers Beckett. Their main claim to fame was singer Terry Wilson-Slesser, later the vocalist for Backstreet Crawler and Geordie, who was linked with AC/DC after Bon Scott's death. He also unsuccessfully auditioned for Maiden after Paul Di'Anno left. Band manager Rod Smallwood had been an agent for Beckett and a young Harris had seen the band play live.

Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (1984)

The epic closing track for 1984’s Powerslave album was the first Maiden-penned tune to offer a glimpse of the band’s proggy proclivities. It’s based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 epic poem of the same name (Rush had previously based Xanadu on Coledridge’s Kubla Khan). “It might be significant that my two favourite pieces of music of all time are Supper’s Ready and Thick As A Brick,” says Harris of his lengthy compositions.

Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son (1988)

It was all-out prog rock by 1988, with keyboards introduced into the Maiden sound for the first time. The title track of the band’s seventh album - their first ever concept record - was the proggiest of the lot . “A lot of thought went into it,” says Harris. “It was a good change for us and I think it worked really well.”

Sign Of The Cross (1995)

For their first album after Dickinson had left, to be replaced by Blaze Bayley, Maiden didn’t go for the easy option. Instead they opened The X Factor with this 11-minute epic and its moody intro of chanting monks, building the suspense until it explodes in emphatic style.

Dream Of Mirrors (2000)

The band’s passion for prog really came to the fore when Dickinson returned for 2000’s Brave New World – especially this 9-minute workout. “I don’t really know the reason for it,” says Harris of Maiden’s increased progginess since then. “It was the way it naturally evolved.”

Paschendale (2003)

Although he normally writes shorter, more commercially minded material, guitarist Adrian Smith got his prog on with this epic about the Battle Of Paschendale from WWI on the Dance Of Death album. Did you know the infantryman’s outfit donned by Dickinson when the band performed this song live was in fact Hungarian, and not British, as many thought? Take that to your next pub quiz with you.

When The Wild Wind Blows (2010)

Another epic album closer from 2010’s The Final Frontier, this time clocking in at almost 11 minutes and as complex as you get with Maiden. Penned by Harris alone, it soon proved to be a live favourite in the band’s set.

Empire Of The Clouds (2015)

With its laid-back piano intro, the final track on 2015's The Book Of Souls remains the longest song on any Maiden album. Penned by Dickinson, the song tells the story of the British R101 airship, which crashed in northern France on 5 October 1930 during its maiden voyage. “I just had to say to him, ‘You’ve outdone me, you bugger!’” laughs Harris.

Death Of The Celts (2020)

You could take any of the final three tracks – all written by Harris – from 2020's Senjutsu, and make a case for them being some of the band’s proggiest. Indeed, on the vinyl version, the last disc almost becomes a standalone Maiden prog album! We've gone for Death Of The Celts, a stridently uplifting tale of days of yore. A bit Spinal Tap? Never...

English producer and composer William Orbit (born William Mark Wainwright) has died, aged 69.

Orbit's death on July 23 was announced today, August 7, on his social media accounts.

The statement reads:

"It is with profound sadness that the family and friends of William Orbit announce that William passed away at home on 23rd July 2026.

'We are deeply saddened by his passing. He will be greatly missed by us and by so many whose lives he touched through his music, friendship and kindness.

"We kindly ask that the privacy of William’s family and close friends is respected during this difficult time."

Orbit produced Blur's 1999 album 13, co-produced No Doubt's 2001 album Rocksteady, and also worked with Queen, U2, and many more. He is arguably best known for producing Madonna's 1998 album Ray Of Light. He also released 14 studio albums as a solo musician.

Former Guns N' Roses manager Merck Mercuriadis, founder and chairman of Hipgnosis Song Management, was among those who has paid tribute to the late producer.

He posted: "The word genius gets used so often that it’s actually a cliche to say it gets used so much but William was a genius, he was a beautiful man that made some of the greatest music of all time. He was special and I was proud to have him as a friend. Arguably the most important producer of the 90’s and noughties and his influence will forever be felt."

"William is a complete madman genius," Madonna said of his work on Ray of Light. "I’d come to him with an idea of where I wanted to go musically, hum melodies or read lyrics, and then leave him alone in the laboratory. Sometimes he’d go in the direction I wanted and sometimes he’d swerve off somewhere else entirely."

Peter Katsis, the former manager of Korn, Limp Bizkit, Smashing Pumpkins, Jane’s Addiction, Ministry and more, has died aged 69.

Katsis passed away on August 6 due to complications from congestive heart failure, Variety reports.

A native of Chicago, Katsis discovered and managed Ministry in the early '80s, before moving to Los Angeles to work with artists including The Cramps. In 1997, he became a partner at LA management company the Firm, where he helped guide the careers of Korn, Limp Bizkit, Audioslave, Thirty Seconds To Mars and more, including pop superstars the Backstreet Boys.

In 2008 to 2014, Katsis and Firm CEO Jeff Kwatinetz co-founded Prospect Park Entertainment with Rich Frank, adding Smashing Pumpkins, Jane’s Addiction, Bush and Ice Cube to their roster.

Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan was among the first musicians to pay tribute to Katsis following his passing.

"Heartbroken that Pete is gone," he posted on Instagram. "He meant a lot to Chloe and I as a dear friend and extended member of our family. He will be missed and I’ll always cherish his intense candor and deep love of great music; which was infectious. And he deserves immense credit for helping to usher in the alternative revolution of the 80’s and 90’s and beyond. He was truly one of a kind. One of a us. And Chicago royalty through and through."

MInistry's Al Jourgensen also expressed his condolences.

Rest in power Pete," he posted. "He was our first manager in 1981. May your next journey be as prodigious as this one. We (Ministry camp) loved you. Safe travels my friend."

"Peter was a force of nature", Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale told Billboard. "He lifted me up personally like no other and he drove our band towards the stars at all times. He will be deeply missed."

"Yorkshire! Yorkshire! Yorkshire!" There's something perfect about seeing Opeth in God's Own Country on Yorkshire Day, the band's early sound undeniably influenced by the Peaceville Three. Speaking of whom, Paradise Lost are actually pulling main support duty for the day (and we hear tell that former My Dying Bride vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe has been spotted in the crowd too).

Not to be entirely outgunned, Opeth have enlisted fellow Swedes Katatonia to kick the event off. Set within the gorgeous confines of Halifax's Piece Hall, an 18th Century market hall that hosted both Korn and Limp Bizkit ahead of their jump to Download headliner status - though we won't hold our breath for Opeth doing the same - Katatonia look and sound magnificent, their majestic, melancholic prog metal stirring and epic to behold.

Paradise Lost might steal the day. Apparently the doom metal masters have never played their hometown, but when frontman Nick Holmes mentions the fact it's nice to be at home it prompts an effusive chant like someone's set up a third faction in the English civil war.

Pulling from across their career, the set is proof positive that Paradise Lost have only gotten better with age: 90s classics One Second, The Last Time and their killer cover of Smalltown Boy are undeniable anthems, but the likes of The Enemy, Faith Divides Us - Death Unites Us and Ghosts (featuring a guest appearance from former drummer Waltteri Väyrynen, who now plays in Opeth) show PL are still producing some of their best material well into the 21st Century.

The difficulty with any Opeth setlist is, there's only so much they can squeeze into any headline set. Even so, they do a spectacular job of spanning their careers; from 1999 on, at least. There's no denying 2024's The Last Will And Testament felt like their finest moment in over a decade, so hearing just how well §1 and §7 work live adds more fuel to the desire for the band to perform the whole record in full. Frontman Mikael Akerfeldt does point out the difficulty in having guest contributions, however.

"If you've heard this record, you'll know we got Ian Anderson to do some spoken word," he starts, to a massive cheer. "He's not here. Now, we don't have any clicktracks or any of that shit, but we do have Ian's part on a tape. So we're going to play this song a little fast or a little slow, and we'll just see where his part ends up happening."

It turns out, Anderson comes in at exactly the right time... only for the video to run out of sync. Can't win 'em all. It's something the band take with good humour however. As the set winds back to their 'classic' era - Windowpane, The Grand Conjuration, The Drapery Falls - we're treated to some sublime visuals as lights shimmer amidst thick plumes of smoke that make it look like the band has opened a portal to another dimension, Akerfeldt undercutting the otherworldliness with a self-deprecating humour that feels as Northern as white roses and dark satanic mills. They'll make a Yorkshireman of him yet.

Opeth setlist @ Piece Hall, Halifax August 1 2026

1. §1
2. Hjärtat vet vad handen gör
3. Godhead's Lament
4. §7
5. The Devil's Orchard
6. Windowpane
7. The Grand Conjuration
8. The Drapery Falls
9. Hex Omega
10. Deliverance

Ding! The bell rings and all eyes snap back towards the bare-knuckle boxing ring in the centre of the arena. Alex Terrible, the Russian-born singer of Slaughter To Prevail, and Cameron Delano, an American bullrider built like a piece of farm equipment, rise to their feet, visibly exhausted, and step back to the centre of the ring. Both fighters are bloody, with faces swelling. Alex’s nose is broken, and he keeps wiping the blood from his face, yet, somehow, underneath all of it, he’s also grinning.

This is the climax of Blood4Blood, a meeting of metal and bare-knuckle fighting dreamed up by Alex and staged by heavyweight US promoter Danny Wimmer Presents at the 9,300-capacity Ocean Center in Daytona Beach, Florida. The idea is straightforward: a line-up of bands and a full Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship (BKFC) fight card, same night, same room, same crowd.

The bands, including Black Label Society, British metalcore heroes Malevolence, Crowbar and Slaughter To Prevail themselves, have been chosen by Alex and his bandmates. At the end of the night, Alex will climb into the ring for the event’s closing bout with Cameron Delano, a short, sharp shock of violence and viscera. That’s where we came in. For now, let’s go back to the start, when nobody in the building was bleeding yet.

6PM: The line at Ocean Center wraps a third of the way around the building. It’s mostly Slaughter To Prevail merch, but there’s a decent showing of Black Label Society gear, and a range of other metal bands are represented. Talking to a few people in the queue, two things become clear.

First, most of them are here for the bands. Second, most of them are also genuinely excited about seeing their first sanctioned bare-knuckle fight, including a few who say they wouldn’t have come for a fight card alone, and a few more who say the music is a bonus.

Hand-to-hand combat is a very old sport – one of the oldest. Two humans, no weapons, an audience. Alex has been a fight obsessive for years, training in combat sports. He’s already had one brutal professional fight in Russia, which left him with several serious fractures to his skull, air in his brain, and temporary blindness.

In spite of the pain, his love for fighting seems perfectly aligned with his pursuit to be the best version of himself.

“It gives you perspective,” he says. “You see things differently because it is serious. You could very easily die in there. Some people call me a poser or some shit like that. But you cannot fake it at all. It’s real as fuck.”

6.45: There are two focal points in the arena. One is a traditional stage at the far end. The other is the BKFC ring dead centre, with the crowd flowing around it. Local Florida band Chained Saint hit the stage in an arena that has no business being this full at 6.45pm on a Wednesday.

The music is classic thrash metal but the four people playing it are just kids, all less than 21 years old. Circle-pits are already going on both sides of the floor. The ring sits between them, fully lit, empty, waiting.

“Metal music isn’t all about being aggressive and high energy, but it is a big part of that style of music,” Alex says of his idea to bring these two worlds together. “It’s the same energy as in bare-knuckle fighting or in MMA in general. It’s so intense. It just fits very well.”

7.30pm: Pyro and strobes herald a condensed set of Slaughter To Prevail’s heaviest material. From the stage, Alex can look straight down into the ring he’s going to be fighting in shortly. In the photo pit, Cameron Delano is looking back at him with his arms folded, sporting a cowboy hat, completely still.

“From the moment I watched the band start playing, I knew the energy was gonna be crazy,” Cameron tells us later. “They brought the intensity the entire night.”

It’s a strange sight: a man calmly studying someone he’s about to spend three rounds trying to hurt, while that someone screams over breakdowns three feet above his head.

7.55pm: The first fight of the night lasts 66 seconds. Kratos, a Russian fighter making his BKFC debut with a moniker and ripped body both seemingly borrowed from the videogame God Of War, faces Brock ‘Alphadawg’ Walker. Kratos catches him clean inside the opening minute, and the referee waves it off. A few seconds later and it’s done. The Russian wins.

Most people in the room have never seen a sanctioned bare-knuckle fight up close. The sport was illegal in the US until 2018, when Wyoming legalised it after a 130-year ban. A growing number of states have followed. Florida is one of them, which is why what’s happening tonight, despite looking transgressive, is entirely above board, with ringside doctors, a referee, sanctioning bodies and a televised broadcast.

In contrast to other MMA styles, bare-knuckle boxing bouts are fast-paced. The fighters don’t wear padding to absorb blows. Knuckles cut skin in the opening exchanges. Blood is on the canvas within seconds. By the time you’ve registered what’s happening, somebody is on the floor. The fights are much shorter than traditional boxing bouts, so the intensity is cranked up to 11, and knockouts are common.

8.15: The early KO leaves time to fill, so the BKFC hosts come into the ring to throw t-shirts and work the crowd, eventually leading to an announcer crowdsurfing – reportedly a first for the organisation. Then Crowbar take the stage and slow everything down to molasses tempo. Alex is a fan.

“Every time we see a video of something cool on TikTok, it’s Crowbar playing in the background,” he says. “They are legends.”

8.50: The BKFC is often touted as a macho sport, but tonight’s card includes two veterans of the women’s division. Taylor ‘Killa Bee’ Starling is a dyed-in-the-wool metal fan, and her body is adorned with tattoos - a stark contrast to her opponent, Sydney Smith, who has none visible.

The lights cut, the spotlights come on, and the pair make their entrances to their own walkout tracks. Unlike the first fight, this one survives the opening round. Both women return to their corners, cut and visibly swelling. Round two ends at 1:32 when Taylor lands the shot that finishes it. She’ll spend the rest of tonight watching the bands.

9.10: Backstage, the contrast is striking. Aside from the rumble from out front, it’s as quiet as a quilting expo, though there’s a particular kind of nervous energy in the air that comes where people are about to do something they can’t undo.

Some fighters are getting their hands wrapped, others talk quietly with guests. Cameron Delano, Alex’s opponent, is here too, hanging out with his young daughter as though his televised fight won’t be talking place in less than two hours.

9.20: Malevolence are onstage, playing Trenches, and the pits are bigger than they have been all night. Zoltan Bathory and Chris Kael of Five Finger Death Punch – noted MMA heads – are watching from the floor. The crossover keeps writing itself.

9.45: Jake ‘Brutal’ Bostwick fights Roderick Stewart in front of a packed room that has fully accepted the format by this point. Bands stop, fights start, fights end, bands start again. Both fighters are tatted up and cast a menacing presence.

10.15: Black Label Society hit the stage. Zakk Wylde, in his plaid kilt, pounding out heavy riffs. By now, several of the night’s fighters are out on the arena floor in the crowd, bloodied and bruised, watching the bands. Taylor Starling’s newfound fans are getting photos taken with her battered, smiling face.

“It was a blast!” Zakk says after his set. “Fighting and heavy music go together like peanut butter and jelly.”

He’s not wrong. The metal community’s always embraced aggression – take a look at any moshpits. Bare-knuckle boxing is a natural extension of that. There’s mutual respect, too, before and after the bell, in a similar way metalheads knock someone down in the pit, and help them right back up.

10.50: The big fight. The one everyone’s here to see, or at least curious about. Alex Terrible vs Cameron Delano. The lights die and the crowd roars. The American walks on first – focused, narrow-eyed, the bullrider in him fully switched on. Then Alex, and the volume in the room peaks so hard you can’t make out his walkout track over the chanting.

“This is your main event of the evening!” comes the announcement, further riling the crowd up into a frenzy. The fighters meet in the centre of the ring. The bell goes. Ding! They start hitting each other. Within 90 seconds both men are bleeding from the face.

Round one is two solid minutes of trading: fists landing flush, knuckles opening cuts, the wet sound of impact audible over the crowd if you’re close enough. At the bell, the two men high-five through bloody teeth and walk to their corners. It’s a brutal opening round.

10.53: Round two. Alex lands a right hook clean on Cameron’s jaw and staggers him, but Cameron weathers it to the bell. Chants of “USA! USA!” and “AL-EX! AL-EX!” trade off in the rafters. There’s a Rocky IV-ish quality to it on paper – it was billed as The Russian Grizzly vs. The American Bull.

10.56: Twenty-nine seconds into the third round, Cameron counters with a clean right hand, and Alex goes down. He stands but his legs betray him and he wobbles to the ropes where the referee waves to signal the fight is over. Cameron takes the win by TKO.

Both men are wearing more of their own blood than seems possible. What most of the crowd doesn’t know is that Alex had been planning to play another short STP set after the fight, but the on-site doctor and the venue would not allow it. Presented with a man sporting a broken nose, several facial fractures and a suspected mild concussion, any competent medical expert would have firm opinions about the wisdom of headbanging in the immediate aftermath of all that.

The building, though, is in no rush to empty. Fighters are still mingling on the floor and fans are still photographing each other in front of the ring. Whatever Blood4Blood was supposed to be, it has clearly worked.

FOUR DAYS LATER: Alex Terrible is sitting backstage at Welcome To Rockville, where STP are due to headline the third stage this evening. The black eyes are something else. The voice is calm.

“To be honest, I’ve been asking myself that, and I still cannot find the answer yet,” he says, when asked why he fights. “It’s just something in my heart. We have this phrase: ‘Be a warrior means live forever’, and I believe I am a warrior, and my war is fighting fears and weakness. It makes me go to these places that I’m scared of going to and face my fears and try to build the best version of myself. Not only physically, but in all aspects of your life.”

He’ll fight again, he says. He might not perform on the same night next time, because he’s a competitor and he wants to win, and the split focus didn’t do him any favours. Other musicians have already been in touch about appearing on future cards. He says Pantera would be the dream get. Whether they came for the blood or the music, the fans in Daytona got both. For Alex, it was something simpler: a war he chose, fought and walked away from.

SLAUGHTER TO PREVAIL HEADLINE BLOODSTOCK ON AUGUST 8, PLUS GLASGOW SWG3 ON AUGUST 10 AND 02 ACADEMY BRISTOL ON AUGUST 12

Rush were holed up in Le Studio, a residential recording facility tucked away in the mountains of Quebec, when it all got too much for guitarist Alex Lifeson. It was the summer of 1982, and the band were mixing Subdivisions, the track that would open their ninth studio album, Signals.

Change was in the air in the wider music world. The hegemony of the guitar – for so long the weapon of choice for rock bands – was under threat from the technological advances made in the realm of electronic music. Synthesisers were moving in from the sidelines to become the pre-eminent instrument of the era.

Rush themselves weren’t immune to this new trend – certainly not singer/ bassist Geddy Lee, a self-professed “synth geek” who had been incorporating synthesisers into the band’s music since 1977’s A Farewell To Kings. But for Alex Lifeson, Subdivisions marked the point where the balance between guitars and synths tipped in the wrong direction.

“I was sitting there thinking: ‘I can’t hear guitar,’” says Lifeson, recalling the mixing process. “I’m a very easy-going guy, but I thought: ‘This is not right.’ So I pushed that fader up. I do remember Terry [Brown, producer] turning to me and smiling, and reaching over and pulling it back down. I could barely hear my guitar on that mix, and that just screams ‘wrong’ to me.”

By Rush’s normally equable standards, this kind of passive-aggressive tussle was a blow-out of the highest magnitude. But Subdivisions certainly did feel like a departure. As the compact, synth-heavy opening track on Signals, it ushered in a new era for these former progressive rock heavyweights, one that would bring them more in line with contemporary bands such as The Police or Ultravox than with their 70s prog peers.

The signs had been there on Rush’s previous album, 1981’s Moving Pictures, which expertly blended Lifeson’s guitar with Lee’s increasingly prominent keyboards. The two musicians had the wind in their sails from the success of that record when they began writing songs for the follow-up between legs of the Moving Pictures tour.

“Sound-check was the best opportunity for us to throw some ideas around,” says Lifeson. “We would play a couple of songs in full, but we would also do a little bit of writing. I’m sure there are ancient cassettes somewhere with snippets of ideas that ended up on all our records.”

Subdivisions emerged from the trio’s jam sessions, driven by Lee’s throbbing synth pulse. The band reconvened with Terry Brown in Le Studio in late 1981 to work on the live album Exit… Stage Left, and it was there that Peart began working the song’s lyrics, which revolved around suburban alienation and the nature of being an outsider – a subject that was close to home for three men who had grown up in the suburbs of Toronto. ‘In the high school halls, in the shopping malls, conform or be cast out,’ ran Peart’s lyrics, his critique of the push for uniformity amplified

“[It was] an exploration of the background from which all of us (and probably most of our audience) had sprung,” the drummer later wrote in his diary. “One afternoon as I was idly polishing my car, Alex and Ged returned from working at the little studio, set up a portable cassette player right there in the driveway, and played me the musical ideas they had come up with for it.”

Subdivisions would be given an early airing on the final leg of the Moving Pictures tour in the UK and America in late 1981. Bootleg recordings show that it was pretty much fully formed even then, albeit with Lifeson’s guitar much more prominent than it is on the finished studio recording. Rush returned to Le Studio in the early summer of 1981 to work on Signals. It was there that a shift in the track’s sound occurred, with Lee’s synths pushed to the forefront at the expense of Lifeson’s guitar

“Ged’s obsession with synthesisers had a lot to do with this change in direction, plus the desire to go with a stripped down guitar component,” Terry Brown says now. “The band were also listening to The Police and Ultravox, to name just two of their influences at the time.”

Lifeson’s annoyance over the vanishing levels of guitar on Subdivisions subsided, although it never completely dissipated. “It’s a strong song, it’s just the mix that I didn’t like,” he says. “I guess I just fought for my guitar rights for years after that.”

Despite his reservations, Subdivisions was released in October 1982 as the second single from Signals. It was accompanied by a striking video shot in and around the suburbs of Toronto that captured the dislocation and ennui of suburban teenage life (the kid who appears in the video was first-time actor Dave Glover, a student at L’Amoreaux Collegiate Institute, which was used as a location in the video).

“The video was really memorable,” says Lifeson. “And Neil’s lyrics really struck a chord with people, especially people who grew up in the suburbs like we did.”

But Subdivisions and Signals marked a shift in Rush’s career – and not necessarily a good one, in the eyes of their fans. Their subsequent 80s albums followed the same, keyboards-forward path, although they hit a more even balance between guitars and synths. Still, Signals remains the most divisive album in Rush’s back catalogue, even if attitudes towards it have mellowed in the years since it was released. But ultimately, both the record and Subdivisions itself embody progressive rock’s boundary-pushing spirit just as much as earlier Rush albums 2112 or Moving Pictures had.

“I guess you could stay where you are and do the same thing over and over and over again, but that’s not the kind of band we are,” says Lifeson. “Progress is important to us. We always need to go somewhere else. We always wanted to evolve.”

They strode out of the desert, dayglo sex-warriors with flash metal guitars and songs about fucking while the bombs dropped. Back then, bands just didn’t come from sun-baked dust-bowls like Phoenix, Arizona (they still don’t, really), so there was a glint of the exotic and alien in these hairsprayed he-harlots, spreading from their oddly mangled bright-red fishnets (hastily acquired and destroyed just minutes before their debut album’s photoshoot, if the legend is to be believed) to their sorta-familiar, yet highly idiosyncratic approach to Sunset Strip ass-rock.

It’s like they were outsider artists emulating Mötley Crüe, escapees from the local psychiatric hospital with twisted, fevered visions of their own private LA. Of course, they were snapped up by a major label – how could they not be? Who wouldn’t want to present this gorgeous lunacy to the world?

Icon’s self-titled debut was released on Capitol Records in 1984. The cover boasts a new-wavey painting of an Elvis-type trapped in a vacuum. The back cover features a photo of the band in tatters, looking suitably freaked-out. The music inside zooms along like a crazy motorcycle, every song a slight variation of the one before it, all of them sounding like no one else except Icon, despite Icon’s clearly desperate attempts to sound like everyone else.

The themes are self-empowerment, hardcore fucking, and the end of the world. There’s a highly unnecessary instrumental and a woeful, waltzing closer. It is bizarre and mundane in equal measure, and when it hit stores in the mid-80s, it became an instant cult classic. Too heavy and weird for the glamsters, Icon were the token glam-metal band for the Slayer kids.

Given the benefit of several decades, Icon’s deficits have become screamingly obvious. It was produced by Shrapnel Records’ head honcho/ guitar-wank champ Mike Varney and, like most of the records he handled in the 80s, the album sounds thin, reedy and weightless. The songs feel rushed and unfinished, the stun-gun guitars are laughably lazy, the lyrics are ridiculous (‘I’m a rock’n’roll maniac/With a six string gun I’m about to attack’) and Steve Clifford’s off-key catewauling on the album’s obligatory ballad, It’s Up to You… well, it has to be heard to be believed.

Clearly, this was all obvious to Icon themselves, who paused, regrouped, abandoned metal completely, and returned a year later with Night Of The Crime, a scandalously lightweight album that became a minor AOR classic, and their finest moment. Well, at least that’s the standard narrative at this point. In 1985, there was hell to pay. If there’s one thing that heavy metal kids hated in the 1980s, it was keyboards. And Night Of The Crime is awash in tinkling synths.

It also has one of the most bare-faced grabs at commerciality anyone’s ever heard, the shameless, feckless Rock My Radio, a ludicrous Slade pastiche that makes Metal Health-era Quiet Riot sound like King Crimson.

The Slayer kids hated it, and the Giuffria fans it was clearly aimed for had no idea who Icon were. So finding their niche was clearly an issue for Icon in 1985, and the band subsequently panicked, blinked, and spiralled into obscurity.

Still, for gooey, goofy, metal-tinged AOR kicks, you can’t beat Night Of The Crime. Produced by bazillion-selling starmaker Eddie Kramer, Night Of The Crime’s sound is bigger and beefier than Icon’s debut, although the approach is a million miles away. Opener Naked Eyes sounds like Bon Jovi’s Runaway, complete with pumping, state-fair keyboards, letting you know right off the bat that this is not your little brother’s Icon.

It’s a shock to the system, like running into an ex-girlfriend who's had an extreme nose job over the summer – it’s still the same girl, just with a radically different presentation. Dokkenesque harmonies and chugging guitars reign as the band steer their formerly punk-y bash’n’crash into strange new waters. Clanging metal gives way to silk-shirted pomp, teenage lust to suburban adultery, whiskey to white wine spritzers.

At first, you assume the tempo change will be brief and temporary, that the sizzling flash-metal kicks of ’84 will come roaring back into focus by track two, but relief never arrives, as Night Of The Crime continues its descent into radio-ready dad-rock.

Frozen Tears is an hilariously overwrought bit of power-balladry so saccharine that it should come with a reminder to see your dentist; Raise The Hammer is like Iron Maiden attempting a Journey make-over; Out For Blood spends a good minute noodling away like Uli Jon Roth before crash-landing into Queensrÿche’s stuffy proto-prog metal; Danger Calling sounds like John Waite’s never-was followup to Missing You; Take Another Shot At My Heart is unmasked Kiss at their most ludicrous; and Missing is so unapologetically cheeseball you could make fondue out of it.

Perhaps sensing that they needed to at least acknowledge their former selves, the band do include one fairly straight-ahead headbanger, The Whites Of Their Eyes, which is basically every song from the first album smooshed into three-and-a-half minutes. And it all ends with Rock My Radio, the aforementioned would-be cash-grab that collapsed under its own brazen chicanery.

Like the first album, …Crime is fatally flawed, but also so plucky and fun that it’s almost impossible to dislike. If AOR fans want a long-lost cult-classic, Night Of The Crime most certainly fits the bill.

Shortly before the tour scheduled to promote Night Of The Crime kicked off, Icon frontman Steve Clifford quit the band, leaving them to struggle on for two further albums. Various attempts to regroup/reunite have occurred ever since, to varying degrees of success, but today Icon are still active, with the lineup that recorded their first two albums firmly back in place. A new album is reportedly on the way.

And why not? Planet Rock needs bands like Icon, bizzaro semi-metal puffballs from cactus country with majestic keyboards and smears of lipstick, and tales of lust and ruin in the nuclear age. Literally one of a kind, these shapeshifting oddballs deserve a second listen, if only to hear what it might sound like if Angel were stranded in the desert in 1985 with nothing but a couple of Mötley Crüe and W.A.S.P. cassettes to find their way home.

Nancy Wilson says that Heart have finished recording a new album. A new collection of studio songs would be the band's first in a decade, following the release of Beautiful Broken in 2016.

The guitarist broke the news during an interview with Gold Darby, during which she was asked about her freshly dyed hair.

"I got my pink on again!" says Wilson. "It was starting to fade out. There's this one colour that lasts forever, but it finally faded. The Heart album is almost finished up now, and the photo shoot was happening, so I was like, 'I gotta get my pink on for the Heart thing,' because the recording's all done.

"I think it's going to be great. We wrote a bunch of new songs and recorded down in Nashville with the players that we just played the last tour with. It was like a secondhand thing with each other because we’ve played so many live shows, so the album was pretty much recorded live.

"So, yeah, it's crazy! I’m really happy. It really feels like a Heart record."

According to Wilson, Heart are scheduled to deliver the finished album to their record label before the end of the month, and are also working on a world tour, a documentary and a live-action feature film.

"It really feels like a Heart record," says Wilson. "It's all about these songs. It's what we were born to do, and do together. Hopefully ‘27 and ‘28 will be the year for Heart world domination, basically.”

Heart play two shows at the River Cree Resort & Casino in Enoch, AB, Canada, on October 23 and 24.

Ricky had been in London for less than six hours when his wallet was stolen outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. One of his best friends, also newly arrived from Japan, suffered the same misfortune, both men victims of the light-fingered professional thieves who prey daily upon unsuspecting tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of King Charles.

One might imagine that this double blow would have rather dampened the pair's holiday spirit, but visiting England for the first time to pay homage to The Beatles, the band that changed their lives, they refuse to let their bad luck kill their excitement. In fact, the world's most gracious crime victims will admit to a grudging respect for the sleight-of-hand deployed by the artful dodgers who relieved them of their credits cards and a not-insignificant chunk of their holiday spending money.

"I was shocked, but I felt like I had witnessed an incredible magic trick," Ricky says, displaying a generosity of spirit that very, very few of us could hope to emulate under similar circumstances.

As he shares the story, Kumamoto resident Ricky, along with his friends Masa, Moomin and Tora, is standing outside Abbey Road studios in St. John's Wood, on the group's second day in the English capital. When not taking shelter from the rain inside the world famous recording facility, or its gift shop at least, the four men - in common, one imagines, with 99% of visitors to this part of north west London - are attempting to recreate the iconic image, shot by Scottish photographer Iain Macmillan, which graces the cover of the quartet's 1969 album Abbey Road.

Displaying an admirable commitment and attention to detail, each of the four men is dressed as a specific Beatle, complete with suits, wigs and fake facial hair, where appropriate: for added authenticity, Ricky, aka 'Paul', will walk across the rain-drenched zebra crossing in his bare feet... and Paul McCartney isn't even his favourite Beatle.

"John was decided, and George was decided," he reveals. "I regret not switching roles..."

Ricky first heard The Beatles in 1973, during his second year at junior high school, when his older sister brought home the band's 'early years' compilation The Beatles 1962–1966, aka the 'Red Album'.

"Until then, I had only listened to folk and pop songs," he says, "and I clearly remember being very shocked. After that, I listened to The Beatles all the time... and it was The Beatles that inspired me to start a band with friends. I still remember the joy of buying my guitar after the summer break of my first year in high school, and our first practice song was Ticket to Ride.

"The Beatles were my gateway into British rock music," he says, "which led to me learning songs from Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Queen, etc. I still have a good relationship with those friends from that time."

One of those friends is Masa, Ricky's high school classmate and former bandmate, resplendent in double denim today as 'George Harrison'.

"We performed at the high school festival and even rented a local movie theater for a concert on graduation day," he recalls of the band the pair formed with four other school pals. "The Beatles were my youth. They are the gods of rock!"

As with so many of the world's best ideas, the quartet's plan to visit the UK to celebrate their shared love of The Beatles was hatched under the influence of alcohol.

"It all started at a celebratory classmates gathering when I said to Ricky, While we still can, we should make a pilgrimage to the sites of The Beatles in London and Liverpool," reveals Moomin, aka 'Ringo Starr'. "But shortly after, the pandemic hit, and we had to pause our plans. Once it was over, we started having meetings - basically drinking parties - to prepare.

"I wanted to come here at least once in my life," he continues. "The Beatles are a one-of-a-kind band who transcend eras, cultures, and borders. They elevated rock music into art."

Moomin, who discovered The Beatles in the early '70s after first falling under the spell of Wings, says that he and his friends selected their Fab Fake character a month ago during a karaoke session. Ricky is Paul because "maybe they looked alike when he was young", he suggests, Masa is George because he asked to be George "and they have similar body shapes", and Tora is 'John Lennon', apparently, "because he wears a white coat at work." Moomim, therefore, is Ringo "out of necessity."

"I don't remember clearly because everyone was drunk," he admits.

"I thought I might be Ringo," Tora chips in, "but I ended up as a slightly chubby John since my profession is a dentist and I happened to have the white pants and jacket that John wore."

"I wish we had talked about it more," Moomin adds. "It was difficult to get outfits and beards and wigs, but it was worth the effort."

While today is a special day for the four friends, it's an extra special day for Moomin, who's celebrating his 64th birthday, the significance of which is easily understood by all Beatles lovers.

"The Beatles have a charming song by Paul called When I’m Sixty-Four," he explains with a smile, delighted with the cosmic synchronicity as much as by the gifts he's received.

The four men, and their partners, have a busy day of sight-seeing ahead of them, including a visit to 3 Savile Row in Mayfair, formerly Apple Corps headquarters, and famously the site of the band's final live performance in January 1969. Then it's off to Liverpool, to visit The Beatles' childhood homes, Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields and the Cavern Club on Mathew Street, the home of the 'Merseybeat' sound, where the quartet made close to 300 performances. "Just thinking that The Beatles sang on that brick stage underground gave me chills," Tora later tells us.

"Everything I saw was exciting," says Ricky when we catch up over email, "but walking in the same place as The Beatles at Abbey Road and visiting the Cavern Club were the highlights. When I was in the Cavern Club, I was thinking, This is where it all started, while drinking whiskey and mingling with people from various countries, all dancing and singing along to The Beatles' songs. Great memories!

"Although I suffered financial loss, touching the history of The Beatles has become a lifelong treasure."

U2 frontman Bono passes through the world with the ease of a man with enough money to do whatever the hell he likes, and enough clout and confidence to choose whomever he does it with. He's a Zelig-like figure, as comfortable entertaining vast crowds as he is attending political summits with high-powered leaders. Put very simply, he finds himself in situations the rest of us never will, simply by dint of being Bono.

Which explains why he was flying on Jimmy Buffett's plane the day Jamaican police filled it with bullet holes.

It's January 1996. Bono has spent much of his time since the Zoo tour ended working on humanitarian endeavours and the Passengers album, a collection of tracks written with Brian Eno for imaginary avant-garde film soundtracks. U2 reconvene in late 1995 for the writing sessions for what will become the Pop album, after which the frontman takes a break and flies to Miami with his family: wife Ali, daughters Jordan and Eve.

There, he meets Mr Miami himself, Jimmy Buffett, the Margaritaville hitmaker with a famous penchant for all things tropical. Buffett is planning to go shopping for jerk chicken in his plane, a Grumman HU-16 Albatross flying boat named Hemisphere Dancer. It's a former long-range search and rescue aircraft that served in the U.S. Navy – including as an observation craft during Pacific nuclear testing in 1956. The plane was retired in 1967 and left in storage before being purchased and restored by Buffett in 1995.

Buffett decides to fly to Jamaica, against the wishes of his co-pilot, Jim Powell, who warns the singer that inclement weather may make a water landing difficult, and that neighbouring areas may not take too kindly to unexpected craft showing up. There have been problems, you see, with flying boats used to smuggle drugs in the Caribbean. Powell – wisely, as it turns out – backs out of the trip.

Bono and his family don't. And they're joined by Chris Blackwell, their former boss at Island Records, who'd grown up in Jamaica and built the famous Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas. Bono and Ali had honeymooned in Jamaica in 1982 as guests of Blackwell at his GoldenEye Estate, a 50-acre site at Oracabessa Bay that had once belonged to James Bond creator Ian Fleming.

As Powell predicted, Mother Nature does not oblige. The water at Buffett's intended destination, near Montego Bay on Jamaica's northern coast, is too rough to make a landing, so the flight diverts to Negril, on the island's west coast, where Hemisphere Dancer is able to touch down in calm water.

The local authorities are less calm, and open fire on the plane as it sits in the water, apparently convinced that the unannounced arrival is carrying illicit cargo. Thankfully, its passengers have just disembarked, and are on board a launch heading towards the shore when target practice commences

"These boys were shooting all over the place," Bono later told the Belfast Telegraph. "I felt as if we were in the middle of a James Bond movie – only this was real. It was absolutely terrifying, and I honestly thought we were all going to die."

More than 100 rounds were fired at Hemisphere Dancer, leaving several bullet holes in the fuselage, the windshield shattered, but its human cargo undamaged.

"Thank God we were safe and sound," said Bono. "My only concern was for their safety. It was very scary, let me tell you. You can’t believe the relief I felt when I saw the kids were okay."

The Jamaican Goverment were swift to apologise to the Irish special envoy to Jamaica, Peter King, who revealed that the apology had been "unreservedly accepted" by the U2 frontman. An official investigation eventually ascertained that Hemisphere Dancer had been a victim of mistaken identity, and that no criminal charges would be filed against the officers involved.

Buffett, meanwhile, who had capsized another seaplane the previous year while landing in Nantucket, documented the Negril incident in the unfortunately titled Jamaica Mistaica, a track on his 1996 album Banana Wind, with lyrics recounting his brush with death.

Just about to lose my temper
As I endeavoured to explain
We had only come for chicken
We were not the ganja plane

Come back, come back, back to Jamaica
Don't you know, we made a big mistake-a
We'd be so sad if you told us goodbye
And we promise not to shoot you out of the sky

Jimmy Buffet died in 2023, but Hemisphere Dancer lives on as a permanent outdoor exhibit at the Lone Palm Airport Bar at Universal CityWalk in Orlando, Florida. It was refurbished in 2025, when a bullet hole patched in 1996 to meet aviation standards was restored. It's a permanent reminder of the day Buffett and Bono went out for chicken and almost got killed.

"One of the inescapable encumbrances of leading an interesting life," Buffett once mused, "is that there have to be moments when you almost lose it."

Taking Back Sunday have announced they’re reissuing their third studio album Louder Now to mark its 20th anniversary.

It’ll arrive on October 16 via Craft Recordings in deluxe vinyl and CD packages, complete with the bonus tracks Sleep and Brooklyn (If You See Something, Say Something. On the LP version, they’ll be presented on a 7-inch single, while both songs will be included on the deluxe CD.

Frontman Adam Lazzara says: “Our record Louder Now represents a huge milestone for me and to know it has made an impact on so many other people’s lives as well is something I still struggle to get my head around.

“To have the opportunity to celebrate that record with both John Nolan and Fred Mascherino onstage together, along with Shaun Cooper, is incredible to me. The songs sound stronger than I can ever remember live and I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am to share that with everyone.”

Taking Back Sunday are currently on tour, with their next live performance scheduled for Musikfest in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on August 8. They also have further dates planned with Thrice and Saves The Day.

Next year, the band will head back out on the road with Weezer for their run of UK and European shows, with the first date taking place in Dublin on May 12.

Taking Back Sunday: Louder Now Deluxe

Vinyl edition

Side A
1. What’s It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?
2. Liar (It Takes One To Know One)
3. MakeDamnSure
4. Up Against (Blackout)
5. My Blue Heaven

Side B
6. Twenty-Twenty Surgery
7. Spin
8. Divine Intervention
9. Miami
10. Error Operator
11. I’ll Let You Live

7"

Side A
1. Brooklyn (If You See Something, Say Something)

Side B
2. Sleep

CD edition

1. What’s It Feel Like To Be A Ghost?
2. Liar (It Takes One To Know One)
3. MakeDamnSure
4. Up Against (Blackout)
5. My Blue Heaven
6. Twenty-Twenty Surgery
7. Spin
8. Divine Intervention
9. Miami
10. Error Operator
11. I’ll Let You Live
12. Brooklyn (If You See Something, Say Something)
13. Sleep

• Looking for a budget turntable for your ever-growing vinyl collection? We have you covered
• Here's out top beginner record player picks to set you on your journey

In 2017 drummer, composer and painter Terry Bozzio – who’s just been named as the new drummer in King Crimson side-project Beat – looked back on a his life and times with Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and UK, and said his 2010 collaboration with Allan Holdsworth, Beat’s Tony Levin and Crimson’s Pat Mastelotto was one of his greatest experiences.

You’d had quite a lot of experience before your audition for Frank Zappa. But was it still daunting?

It was amazing! He said he wanted to hear me after he’d heard the rest of the guys, and nobody wanted to audition after me. He said, “It looks like you’ve got the gig if you want it.” My words were, “Are you sure I can do this?” He said, “Do you want to do it?” I said, “Yeah!” I wasn’t sure if I was heavy enough to work with his guys – he told me that if I was willing to work hard I could do it. So like a good father, he took me in.

I came to him so naive. Every negative thing he said about the music business or politics I almost refused to believe because I couldn’t go there – I couldn’t lose hope, you know what I mean?

But everything he said has come to pass. Everything he ever said, as cynical as it was, was true. He was really one of these guys who was like an arrow. He could cut through anything, get right to the heart of it and sum it up in the most succinct way.

How did you come to leave Zappa’s band?

I’d been playing with Patrick O’Hearn, Mark Isham and Pete Maunu as Group 87 and we’d been to audition for a deal at CBS. I was late for rehearsals with Frank because of it. He sensed what had happened.

We started playing something but he felt that I didn’t have the heart for it any more. He said, “Bozzio, step into my office.” We went behind the little riser in the rehearsal studio and he said, “I think it’s time to go out and do your own thing.” And once again, I said, “Are you sure I can do this?” Like a good father he kicked me out of the nest.

What’s the thing you regret the most about that period with Zappa?

That I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t want to show my ignorance. Many times he used words I didn’t understand and I’d just laugh because I didn’t want to appear stupid. I wish I’d asked what the words meant. Stuff like that.

But I was young and just happy to be there, going through all the rock’n’roll, groupie bullshit. Nobody can tell you how to handle success. When it comes you’re on your own, and you just get swept along with whatever’s happening. Later, you learn through experience that it may not have been the best way to do this or that.

What was the transition from Frank Zappa to UK like?

It was painful. It was depressing. I did the Group 87 record, but as a sideman – looking at the record contract was really shocking so I’d decided not to sign. A year later I think I had an audition for Thin Lizzy that didn’t come together. I’m not a drink-fight-and-fuck kind of guy. Gary Moore wanted me and we got on great, but I was not in that same headspace as the rest of those guys. So it was the right thing.

Eddie Jobson talked to me about [departing members] Bill Bruford and Allan Holdsworth wanting to be more jazz, whereas John Wetton and he wanted to go more rock. So I started in UK in ’78. That was a tough transition. I was still just a sideman; I didn’t want to sign another contract where the company owns everything into perpetuity.

Eddie and John made all the decisions, and there’s always that Upstairs, Downstairs thing when you deal with the English! Eddie and I just cannot see eye to eye. He looks at it like a corporation and he’s the CEO, and I don’t feel I’m respected as somebody who contributed to what they are, and even what they can be today. I have much respect for Eddie as a composer and a musician; but as people, we have two different ideas about how things should be.

Out of all your varied bands and projects over the years, what stands out for you?

My stint with Allan Holdsworth, Tony Levin and Pat Mastelotto in 2010 under the name HoBoLeMa was one of the best experiences I ever had. I regard that band as incredibly important. Allan was playing his ass off! He’s a complete master of that instrument and he’s taken it places that nobody else has.

It’s a tough environment for musicians to make a living. How do you stay optimistic?

With my work. I release my music and my art on my website, so now I can sell directly to the public. I’ve been very, very lucky and I’m grateful to have had the life experience I’ve had. I’ve never had to have a day job. I’ve been lucky to just survive and learn and try to grow from all the experiences I’ve had. I’m very blessed to have had many brushes with greatness.

On 36th studio album Stories From Time And Space, released in 2024, Hawkwind showed they’d lost none of their sense of global injustice. Bandleader Dave Brock told Prog about the drive behind their new music, why he was continuing to fight for an alternative society, and responded to recent concerns about his health.

Ask a musician what the highlight of their recent tour might have been, and the answers will range from positive crowd reaction to new material, or a hospitality rider that included a decent feed as much as libation, to perhaps wifi that worked or just good old camaraderie on the tour bus.

For Dave Brock, linchpin of the venerable space rock institution that is Hawkwind, it’s all of these things and more – not least as the six-date tour he completed in support of 36th album, Stories From Time And Space, very nearly didn’t happen.

“It was quite hard going because prior to that, I had just come out of hospital,” recalls Brock as he talks to Prog from his farmhouse in Devon. “I got Covid in February and I was really ill. It affects your breathing a lot and, you know, singing and all that was difficult. It knocked my heart out of sync, so I had to go to hospital. I’ve had all the checks.”

Much like the stoic generation of which he’s a member, 82-year-old Brock isn’t one to dwell on what might have been or what he had to go through to get match fit, so we’ll draw a veil over his recuperation. Instead, he’s more interested in how the tour developed and how his enforced hospitalisation actually brought out the best in his bandmates – guitarist-singer Magnus Martin, keyboardist Tim ‘Thighpaulsandra’ Lewis, bassist Doug Mackinnon and longtime drummer Richard Chadwick.

“I started getting better as I went along,” Brock reassures. “The band had been rehearsing without me for all of March. And because they didn’t know if I was going to be able to do it or not, they’d been practising all their vocals. The good thing was, all of them can sing. Some of them say they can’t, but they really can. So, when I came back, we had really good backing vocals!”

Not only is Brock pleased with the way the tour went, he’s also thrilled by the reaction the new material has been receiving. Rarely looking in the rear-view mirror, it’s precisely this attitude that’s ensured the continuation of Hawkwind’s late-period purple patch that began with the eerily prescient The Machine Stops in 2016.

And with Stories From Time And Space, the band have consolidated their strengths – melodies that burrow their way into the brain, insistent riffs, instrumental workouts, all driven by the allegory of science fiction – to keep moving ahead. It gives them the opportunity to bend their new songs this way and that, helping them take their place in the band’s ever-increasing pantheon.

“I’d hate to just constantly play the old numbers,” stresses Brock. “We do lots of new numbers, and the more you play them, the more they change and the more interesting they become. Some of the stuff started off at maybe about four minutes. And now you can play it for about eight or 10 because it’s got more interesting. People feel more comfortable with it and we can go off on tangents.” He adds: “You’ve got to get the balance. You can’t just rely on your old material, because the music is going forward.”

Hawkwind’s sonic attack, along with their fabled and gloriously intense light show, is also pulling through a new generation of fans in its slipstream – a fact that tickles Dave Brock pink. “We do actually get quite a few young fans, and that’s a good thing,” he says with no little pride. “We’ve got a really good fanbase, and they actually travel around. A lot of them come every night and a lot of them bring their families and kids on tour. It’s really good fun!”

Crucially, even after 55 years of playing and recording, they still manage the high-wire balancing act that has entertainment on one side and something to say on the other. A visceral and occasionally disorientating experience that’s left its mark on scenes as disparate as psychedelia and rave, Hawkwind are mindful not to churn it out for the sake of it.

“What you’re doing is you’re entertaining people,” reasons Brock. “The objective of music is an escapism for people to enjoy themselves. We’ve got a really good laser light show; we’ve got a really good back projection. The guys who do all our stuff want it to be a wonderful show. And so the audience come along wanting to be taken off on a big trip. That’s what musicians want to do: they want to entertain people and make it a wonderful experience. And if you perform really well, they’ll go, ‘Wow! That was a really fantastic evening!’ That’s what you do it for.”

Underpinning that entertainment is Hawkwind’s central and long-standing opposition to the mainstream. This is the continuation of a journey that began more than half a century ago in the urban squalor of Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill, and honed to perfection as the de facto house band of the free-festival ‘freak’ scene of the 70s and 80s. Their abhorrence of the political elite and the institutions that keep them there beats at the heart of their oeuvre.

“The same things occur,” says Brock with a sigh. “You know, doing The Psychedelic Warlords (Disappear In Smoke): ‘Sick of politicians, harassment and laws/All we do is get screwed up by other people’s flaws.’ The words mean the same thing as they did many years ago. You do songs about situations and you think, ‘Crikey – 50 years on and nothing’s really changed.’ Unfortunately, it’s getting worse.”

Warming to the theme, Brock continues, “You know We Took The Wrong Step Years Ago? That was influenced by Rachel Carson, who wrote a book in the 60s called Silent Spring; she actually wrote all about pollution. And now you look at the amount of sewage and dumping that’s going on in the rivers. Years and years ago, we used to go swimming down where we live here and we all became ill. We all thought we had flu, but it was the bloody water!

“We found out that there was a slurry pit about a mile down the river, which was leaking into the river. Eventually, the farmer got fined £5,000 for leaking his slurry into the river and polluting the river and all the fish died. This is happening on a huge scale now. The water companies are more interested in making money instead of investing.”

Turning his ire to the ill-fated HS2 project, he continues, “I mean, look at the stupid railway system. Do we really need to spend all this money on a high- speed train going to Birmingham? Billions and billions of pounds wasted and all those people who have lost their homes because of it; it’s all wasted time. We have no control, I don’t think, anymore. So we write songs about it.”

Despite the passing of the years, Brock insists that he’s still making music for the same reasons that he always has – though the causes may have changed over the years, Hawkwind are here to highlight them as they continually struggle against oppression and fighting for the possibility of an alternative society.

“We were younger when we were doing the free festivals; as you get older you slow down a bit,” he says. “But we do lots of stuff constantly for animal charities to bring attention to what’s going on – like dogs being kidnapped and having ransoms demanded for them. A dog to a family of people with kids is part of that family, and they’re living entities. I mean, there’s so much going on all around the world; you try and bring attention to certain things.”

So, while Hawkwind’s commitment to an alternative way of life is as solid as ever, their use of psychedelic substances as a means of composing music and fuel for their belief system and lifestyle has long been shelved. “At our age in life?” chuckles Brock. “I think when you’re younger, you can accommodate these things. You don’t have to take them forever. Once you’ve opened the doors of perception, you can see what’s going on, and therefore you don’t have to take drugs anymore because you’ve got the ideas.” He adds sagely: “And remember the saying – ‘a little is always better than too much.’”

The only chemistry that interests Brock at this stage is the one that exists between the band’s principal players. Not for them the internecine fighting and drug and alcohol problems that blighted previous formations – it’s all about the joy of making music as a coherent and focused unit. “It’s a nice line-up at the moment,” he says proudly. “We all get on and we don’t have any arguments. We work on things as a group because that’s what a band’s supposed to be: a unit of people coming together.

“Richard’s been our drummer now for nearly 40 years. Doug’s a really good bass player; and when you’ve got a really solid rhythm section, you can go off into different areas. Tim is really good on the synths and Magnus can double up on the keyboards and the guitar. And, like I say, now everybody comes to the fore and can sing. And to think they tried not to do it for so long!”

But what of the work in progress with famed dance and electronics producer William Orbit? As revealed last year, Hawkwind have begun recording their next album, though Orbit’s production commitment to the project hasn’t been as exclusive as might have been desired.

“He’s in Jamaica recording a reggae artist who is in prison,” laughs Brock. “He wanted me to do some synthesiser on that. I think that’s what he’s up to. I’ve got a lot of his stuff that he sent me, and he’s got some of ours. He’s quite busy at the moment.”

He chuckles again, revelling in the time and space he’s afforded himself. “We have just come back from touring, so who knows what’s gonna happen next?” And with that, Dave Brock looks ahead to the future once more.

Hardcore's rise over the last half-decade has happened for many reasons, but one of the most pertinent is young musicians remembering that this is a genre that needs to evolve and be experimented with.

“Post-hardcore just meant hardcore guys trying new and different things,” shrugs Excide frontman Tyler Washington. “We definitely come from that lineage and ideology.”

You’ll hear that loud and clear when you stick on Excide’s second album, Bastard Hymns. It’s a superb slice of pounding hardcore, but peppered throughout with odd, angular time signatures and huge swathes of grungy, alt rock melody.

For fans of forward-thinking heavy music, this is a real gem. Tyler namechecks Quicksand, Failure, Fugazi and others as influences, but there’s one band that stands above them all.

“For me, it all started with finding [cult 90s New York hardcore band] Snapcase,” Tyler says of his biggest inspiration. “The lyrical content is super-positive, but it still has that poetic element. It showed me that you can make hardcore weird. We try and do that: rip a power chord and then throw a little pinkie out there and it just makes it… sort of strange.”

Considering the success of pioneering peers such as Turnstile and Knocked Loose, it’s not outside the realms of possibility that Excide could follow their lead. But Tyler states that as much as he’s pleased for them, he’s happy to stay in his own, idiosyncratic lane.

“Seeing those huge shows Turnstile do is awesome, so I’m not diminishing anyone’s achievements at all,” he begins. “But I’ve been in this scene and making this music since I was 15. I know I’ll be doing the same thing until I just can’t anymore. The ambition comes not from achieving success, but from connecting with people with our unique music.”

Bastard Hymns is out now via SharpTone

IN SHORT

SOUNDS LIKE: A fantastic amalgam of 90s alt rock heroes Failure’s melody with Every Time I Die’s knack for a killer riff
FOR FANS OF: Snapcase, Quicksand, Every Time I Die LISTEN TO: Call Box

Born in Austin, Texas in 1954, Eric Johnson is ranked among the all-time great Texas guitar slingers. His dazzling 1990 showpiece Cliffs Of Dover won the Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance, and made him a shoo-in for the third spot (alongside Steve Vai) when Joe Satriani launched the G3 tour six years later. Guitar pyrotechnics can be taken as read, but as Johnson’s choices below confirm, there’s far more to his palette than shred.

The first music I remember hearing

My dad used to play a lot of Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington around the house. But as far as rock’n’roll, I remember being about four years old and hearing Elvis’s (Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear. I still love his music.

The first guitar riff I mastered

I begged my dad for a white Fender Musicmaster, and the first song I learnt was Your Cheatin’ Heart by Hank Williams. But that’s just chords. My first riff was Out Of Limits by The Ventures. Was I instantly brilliant at guitar? Oh no. It’s always been a struggle. If I’ve hit anything decent over the years, it’s because I’ve grovelled and really tried to learn it. I don’t think it ever comes for free.

The first song I performed live

I was probably thirteen years old. Now, playing guitar is mainstream, but back then it was rebellious to play loud music and grow your hair out. We played at a party, and people were barely listening, but I remember the whole setlist: (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay, Gloria, You’re Gonna Miss Me, and Splash by the 13th Floor Elevators. Steppenwolf’s Born To Be Wild was a big one for us.

The guitar hero

I totally remember hearing Are You Experienced [1967] for the first time. It was like somebody had landed from outer space. Hendrix is timeless. But if you put that album in perspective of when he came out, nobody was doing that. It was so revolutionary – all this feedback and fuzz – that I didn’t even know if it was guitar. At first, that record was kinda over my head. I wasn’t even sure if I liked it. But the more I listened, the more I realised how great it was.

The singer

Sam Cooke. Just his soulfulness and intonation, all the little nuances he put in. The way he delivered a song like You Send Me, it just drew you in. And he spawned a lot of great singers after him too.

The songwriter

Joni Mitchell is one of them. I love Ladies Of The Canyon [1970] or Clouds [1969], and For Free is one of the most emotional songs I’ve ever heard. Her guitar tunings sound so fresh. I started listening to her in high school. I wasn’t very cool at that age. I was just this strange geezer, and I was becoming more withdrawn, because I was just waiting to get out so I could go play music.

The greatest album of all time

Stevie Wonder’s Music Of My Mind, for the vibe, the writing and his musicality. It’s a record I’ve been listening to my whole life and I’ve never gotten tired of it, because the feeling behind the notes is so strong. It makes you take a fresh look at your instrument, instead of just being stuck in the ABCs of guitar.

The best live act I've seen

I always knew Queen was great live, and I’d kinda heard their music on the periphery, but I have a friend that knows their stuff verbatim. And about five years ago she said: “Hey, you gotta come to this show.” The songs, the musicality, the production, the stage set-up, the sound – everything was just world-class.

My rock anthem

Summer Of ’69 or Run To You from Bryan Adams’s Reckless [1984]. That’s the perfect driving music. He’s got just the right amount of distortion on his voice, and [producer] Bob Clearmountain captured a magic emotion – it feels like you’re a kid and the whole world is ahead of you. I know those songs have been played a bunch, but when they come on it’s like: “I’m sorry, we gotta crank the stereo”.

My cult hero

I would say Free. I mean, they were big. But they did that record Highway [1970], and I’ve read they were very disheartened and broke up soon after that, because they put so much heart and soul into it and it didn’t get the success and attention it deserved. I think it’s a pop masterpiece.

The cover version

All Along The Watchtower. It was a great song that Dylan wrote, but what Hendrix did to it was amazing. I mean, you can learn the lead lines, but Jimi played them with such soul and emotion. And it’s the little nuanced rhythm things he’s doing in between the vocals. You might think: “Oh, I can play that”. But it’s so hard to get that vibe and pocket it just right.

The song I want played at my funeral

Well, I’m gonna be cremated, so I think I’ll have ’em play Elvis’s Hunk Of Burning Love. I could even get an Elvis impersonator, and he can be up there going: ‘He’s just a hunk, a hunk of burning love’, and I can be, like, going up in flames. I think that answer is even more morbid than your question was!

In January 1982, Def Leppard entered Park Gate Studios in Battle, East Sussex to make the follow-up to their breakthrough album High ’N’ Dry. Under the aegis of producer ‘Mutt’ Lange, they pieced together a record the likes of which had never been heard before: the gleaming pop-metal behemoth Pyromania. And Photograph was the perfect single with which to launch it.

Photograph embodied Leppard’s brave new sonic world. Gone were the gritty AC/DC-isms of High ’N’ Dry, replaced by machine-tooled melodies and Lange’s hi-finish gloss, oven-ready for brand new music channel MTV.

Lange himself came up with the song’s lyrical hook. “Mutt had the line ‘All I’ve got is a photograph,’” said Elliott. “I said, “That’s a Ringo Starr song.” He went, ‘Nobody will ever notice.’ For Elliott, the song title referred to an unobtainable someone.

"I said to Mutt, 'Wouldn't it be great to write a song about a woman who's the ultimate woman, but also a woman you could never have?' He said, 'What do you mean, never?' And I said, 'Because she's fucking dead!"

The video featured footage of Marilyn Monroe, suggesting the iconic Hollywood star was its subject. “Over the years it’s become exaggerated to Biblical proportions that Photograph was written about her,” said Elliott. “I don’t want to break anybody’s heart here, but Marilyn Monroe was just another average actress to me.”

"I used to live in a little basement apartment on the outskirts of London, toward Heathrow," he told Rolling Stone. "It was a real dump – there was a hole in the wall with a poster covering it up, kind of like in The Shawshank Redemption. It wasn't an escape hatch, but it looked like one! And the poster that was over this hole was Marilyn Monroe."

"Def Leppard's Photograph looked different from anything at the time," said the video's famed director, David Mallet, who'd previously worked with David Bowie, Queen, Blondie, the Rolling Stones and more. "Different colours, mood, visuals, editing, photography. It's hard to believe now, because it looks like every heavy metal video ever made. But nothing had ever looked like that before."

"When we did Photograph, we went mental," said Elliot, who frosted his hair for the first time on the morning of the shoot. "Phil wore a polka-dot top. Steve wore all white. The day before the shoot, I had £25 in my pocket, and I went down Kings Road in London to get some clothes. I found a pair of black pleather trousers that were too short by about four inches, so I bought them, and some leg warmers, which I'd seen in the TV show Fame.

"When I was done buying the pants and the effeminate leggings, I had £8 left. I walked past a punk rock shop, and they had a red, white and blue Union Jack shirt in the window for £7.99. It was all I could afford, and it was loud. After that video, the shirt became so iconic that we sold almost 100,000 of them on tour that summer."

The reception to Pyromania in Britain was decidedly cool, a hangover from Leppard allegedly “selling out” to America a few years earlier. In the US it was a different story: Photograph was a huge hit on radio and MTV. “Photograph blew out the door the way More Than A Feeling or Radar Love or Black Betty did,” says Elliott. “I met George Michael, and he said: ‘I bought Photograph – great song!’ That’s when you know you’re crossing over.”

Not everyone appreciated it. Photograph was one of the videos that spurred Tipper Gore to form the PMRC, the organisation that advocated for increased parental control over children's access to music, after she watched it on MTV alongside videos by Van Halen, Mötley Crüe and Scorpions. "The images frightened my children; they frightened me," said Gore. "The graphic sex and violence were too much for us to handle."

Nevertheless, the single was the first proper stepping stone on Def Leppard’s journey to megastardom, helping to push the sales of Pyromania into the multi-millions. It remains a staple of the band’s live set today.

“When I was a kid in Sheffield,” Elliott says, “I was this geeky twat who liked music and wasn’t living in the real world. All I ever wanted was to be a star.”

It was Photograph that helped him achieve that dream.

Henry Rollins will publish a new autobiographical memoir next year.

Bait Dog Boy is described by publishers Random House as "a searing memoir of a broken childhood and the hope of escaping it" and as "a coming-of-age story with the teeth and truth of a great punk anthem."

A synopsis of the book reads: "What happens when a child grows up in an almost total vacuum of love? That was the reality for Henry Rollins, pioneering punk frontman of the seminal groups Black Flag and Rollins Band, who came of age in an environment seemingly determined to break him.

"For the first time, Rollins tells the story he spent most of his life trying to avoid, taking us through his childhood and adolescence - from a volatile Washington, D.C., childhood spent shuffling between indifferent parents, to his encounters with a seemingly endless parade of abusive adults, to his eventual meeting with Ian MacKaye, and their ultimate discovery of punk rock, which would become a lifeline. Rollins tells what it was like to live a life colored by the experience of constantly absorbing pain, like a bait dog.

"It’s an unforgettable tale of what it means to not quite fit in anywhere, except on stage: A memoir as dynamic and singular as its subject."

"I have no desire to be a survivor," says Rollins writes. "I’d rather accept, absorb, adapt, fight and break that which seeks to break me—to be that which remains."

The book will be published on March 2, 2027 by Random House, and can be pre-ordered here.

Rollins has previously written about his experiences in the music industry and beyond in memoirs such as Get In The Van, Smile You're Travelling, and Black Coffee Blues.

Aurora is the third Yes studio album to be released in five years, an astonishing work rate for a veteran band who seem to be riding a genuine wave of creativity. Prog spoke to Steve Howe and vocalist Jon Davison about this burst of activity and how, even after nearly 60 years, the band are still honing their craft.

To release three albums in the space of five years would be a fine effort for any contemporary band. For a supposed ‘heritage act’ with a history spanning more than 55 years, it’s a herculean feat – although Yes’ current rate of work isn’t quite on a par with their run of early-1970s classics.

They recently unveiled Aurora, the third work in a trilogy that began with The Quest in 2021 and continued with Mirror To The Sky in 2023. “I really like some of the songs on The Quest,” says guitarist Steve Howe. “But we were finding our feet. Then on Mirror To The Sky, we were much more assertive with the rock elements. When the opportunity came up for another record, we all felt we should try to do even better; we wanted to develop more polish and detail, leading to a greater continuity in the music. I think it’s quite a successful project in that regard.”

A feature of Aurora is the varied combinations of writing credits, with even Jay Schellen – playing drums on a Yes album for the second time following Alan White’s passing in 2022 – contributing to the 13-minute album centrepiece, Countermovement. “Each song takes a great deal of crafting, and every member of the band contributes,” explains Howe, “especially in developing the arrangements. That’s always been the key to Yes music. We still want to attempt to inspire, and to get across that Yes are a band of very high standards, which we still hope to achieve.”

A further aspect of the record is the enhanced contributions of keyboardist Geoff Downes, following a somewhat muted role on Mirror To The Sky. Vocalist Jon Davison confirms it was a deliberate move. “We wanted to bring him more tightly into the fold, so we expressed our love and appreciation for him and how important it was that he be given a position where he could place his unique stamp on the album.”

Downes was chiefly responsible for the Anytime Soon section of Countermovement, sung by Howe, and much of the music of the grandiose Ariadne. The latter is one of only two orchestral arrangements from Paul K Joyce, whose fine work graces all three recent albums; his other contribution being on the title song. “The treatment’s quite different this time because although we only use the orchestra twice, they’re on big tracks,” says Howe. “I didn’t want them to keep interfering with the band too much, so when they had their moments, I wanted to make them really huge.”

Davison is also full of praise for Joyce: “He’s our sixth bandmate, if you will, because his classical touches are simply beautiful, and really give a broader sense and legitimacy to our music. I love working with him. His two arrangements are very different. He composed the piano on the beginning of the title track and then arranged that surge into its great, powerful intro, taking various vocal themes from the song and intertwining them. It’s just brilliant.”

Even though Downes is much more prominent on Aurora it doesn’t mean there’s any less of Howe. As always, he provides a wealth of textures, from the layering on the two short pieces that bookend Countermovement to the acoustic and classical textures of Turnaround Situation and Love Lies Dreaming, then the almost aggressive distortion of All Hands On Deck. His beloved Gibson ES-175 was a key instrument.

“It was really enjoyable having the opportunity to use the 175 so much on this album,” he says. “But I still like to develop my steel guitar work, especially because it lets me combine unusual textures. You get that very stern and emotional steel in Freedom’s Edge [the final part of Countermovement]. But in Taro [the first part], it’s more of a playful interplay between the electric and the steel, and I don’t know whether anybody’s ever done that. So I still try to cross bridges I haven’t attempted myself yet.”

Davison’s approach to vocal melodies is intriguing. He’s often working with music that’s already composed and arranged and so his melodies sometimes explore directions the listener may not expect, or indeed appreciate on first listen. “I sometimes approach the vocal melodies instrumentally,” he says, “so I’ll write them with a keyboard, which brings out more complexity than if I were just singing off the top of my head.”

In other areas Aurora is downright catchy; listeners may find that the chorus of Turnaround Situation, for instance, becomes an earworm. Davison laughs as he remembers how he came up with the melody: “I have this habit of repeating something my wife has said – I’ll sing it back to her. It’s quite annoying, actually. One evening, we got lost leaving engineer Curtis Schwartz’s studio. It was late at night in the dark English countryside, and we kept missing our turn. Emily started saying, ‘You know, this is a turnaround situation.’ So rather than me helping her through our navigational predicament, I start singing, ‘Turnaround situation lately,’ and there it was!”

One aspect of the album that might intrigue listeners and even split the crowd somewhat is its structure. It’s front-loaded with pieces that will sound relatively familiar in style; but it finishes with three shorter tracks that display some wild stylistic twists – Howe’s surprising All Hands On Deck, the wordless Outside The Box and the sensitive Davison ballad Emotional Intelligence. How were the sequencing decisions made? “That’s down to the brilliance of Thomas Waber of InsideOut,” says Davison. “He formulates the song order and how it should flow, and then suggests it to the band. It’s worked out that way each time over the last three albums that we finish on a quieter song. Perhaps I have some quality in my songwriting that appeals to him as a nice closure.”

When the title track was released ahead of the full album, fans reported mixed reactions. “I don’t really read any comments,” Davison says, “but when the video came out on YouTube and I saw there were so many likes and views, I read some of the feedback. The first one caught my eye – it was really insightful, which led me to the next one. I thought, ‘Don’t read the comments; you know better.’ I kept going, and in the main they were really positive. But I’m not part of Facebook, so I’m not privy to the battle zone, if you will.”

One song that might well prod the hornet’s nest is Howe’s deceptively simple All Hands On Deck. “Fundamentally, Yes is a rock band,” he says, “and if we weren’t, we wouldn’t be Yes – we’d be a lot more middle of the road. So yeah, All Hands On Deck does shout in your face a bit, but I think it’s refreshing to have a track like that.”

While some of Davison’s lyrics, such as on Ariadne, have their roots in mythology, others hint a little at former vocalist Jon Anderson’s more oblique phrasing. Does Davison feel any pressure of legacy? “I’ve learned to see it not as pressure, because that would be limiting. I see it as inspiration. I just respect the man so much. He’s a sheer genius; he’s a hero of mine, and for whatever reason, the universe decided that I needed to step up and accept this call of duty from Chris Squire, Alan White and Steve Howe.

“And I’ve done my best to honour Jon. So it’s not like I want to go one way and this voice in my head is telling me to go another. I just do my best to celebrate the Yes music – music I love.”

With Howe awaiting an essential medical procedure, the band’s upcoming live shows have been pushed back to the spring of 2027. The plan had been to perform the same set they’d been playing during the US tour in 2025, based around the Fragile album, and it seems that will remain the case. They also included Circles Of Time from Mirror To The Sky, which raises the question of whether a song or two from Aurora might appear.

“It’s really challenging to take on the new songs, which is why it’s impossible to say for certain,” Davison says. “When we first toured after Mirror To The Sky came out, we played Cut From The Stars, which wasn’t easy; and we attempted All Connected, which went really well for a while,but the set got too long and that was the one that had to get cut.”

Although the band see their three recent albums as a trilogy, it seems that this definition is a loose one – it isn’t the end of a Yes journey, but more a convenient way to frame the last five years. There’s a clear feeling that there’s more to follow. “We’re really in a good stride now,” says Davison. “There’s a sense of momentum. The muse and its music are sort of taking over the artist, if you will. So, I certainly think there is more music to come.”

Howe feels the same: “These three albums bookend a story about the band. So where we go next has to be more revolutionary or stylistically somewhat different. I think that’s what Yes are about: we don’t have to confine ourselves to being a certain kind of band. We’re free to be whatever we can be. We need to keep moving forward. It’s no good to keep looking back and saying, ‘Lset’s do this song – it’s a bit like Yours Is No Disgrace.’”

So, regardless of how Yes fans react to Aurora, it seems this is a band with plenty more to offer, and with so many of their contemporaries now retired or, at best, sporadically active, that’s quite remarkable.

Aurora is on sale now.

Classic Rock has teamed up with Swedish hard rock royalty Europe to bring you the ultimate collector’s package!

In celebration of the Final Countdown hitmakers’ 12th studio album, Come This Madness, you can now pre-order a huge bundle featuring Classic Rock issue 358 with the band on the cover. It also comes with a marble vinyl variant of Come This Madness that you won’t find in the shops, plus a signed lyric sheet. Only 250 copies are available, so get yours while stocks last!

Inside the issue, we talk to frontman Joey Tempest about his near-50 years in rock’n’roll, from the early days of Europe and their ascent in the mid-to-late 80s through to the new album. “It was kind of Beatlemania in the UK – we couldn’t make it from the limo to the venue, they’re grabbing hold of everything!” he says of their heyday.

“You can get stuck in the pop world – like, ‘let's make copies of The Final Countdown for 10 years.’”

He also opens up about the band’s deactivation in 1992, before their reunion 11 years later. “I never really closed the door on Europe,” he tells us. “It was just complicated at the time with the shifting in the music business, my new interest in singer-songwriting, John Norum [guitarist] not in the band. So it was a good time to take a break, but it was difficult.

“I remember in Bournemouth, 1991 or something, it was the last UK show, John Leven [bassist] said: ‘I don’t know how to run a dishwasher. I don’t know how to run anything. I never had my own place, I’ve lived on the road since you guys picked me up.’ There was a lot of that sentiment in the tour bus, like, ‘how do you live a normal life?’ Because we hadn’t. We were teenagers straight into these huge tours. It was tough for a while.”

Read the full interview in this exclusive Classic Rock bundle, or get the regular version of issue 358, available from September 11. Pre-order your copy with the exclusive cover, marble vinyl and signed lyric sheet now!

Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant might be the last stranger Kate Bush kissed on the lips in public. It was September 1980, and the queen of witchy art-pop was doing a signing session at Virgin Records in Newcastle during a stop-off in the city as part of her now-fabled Tour Of Life audio-visual extravaganza.

Cronos’s love of Bush and her music might seem at odds with the filth-hound racket he was making with his own band, demonic NWOBHM brat-princes Venom, but it’s just one of many unexpected and interesting things about him.

“What’s not to love about Kate Bush?” he says now, 46 years later, Geordie accent as wide as the Tyne estuary. “She’s got an incredible way of writing. I even dyed me hair red with henna because of her.”

So when Cronos heard about that signing session, he told his bosses at the recording studio where he worked that he was bunking off for a couple of hours.

“I raced in and pushed me way to the front of the queue, got as near as I could,” he recalls. “She had these posters she was signing. I said: ‘Can you write “To Cronos…”? Then I said: ‘Can I have a kiss?’”

Some might have recoiled at the sight of a short, scrawny Geordie in a leather jacket asking for a smacker. But Kate Bush was made of sterner stuff.

“She leaned over and kissed me on me lips,” he says. “My knees went. As I was walking away in a daze, the guy behind us says: ‘Can I have a kiss?’ And I heard this voice: ‘No more kisses.’ I was the last one.”

He beams like a moonstruck teenager at the memory. “I’ve still got the poster: ‘To Cronos, lots of love, Kate Bush.’”

There are two versions of Cronos. One is the gargling, bass-wrecking Beelzebubian madman who has fronted Venom on and (occasionally) off since the end of the 70s. The other is the garrulous Geordie who used to teach aerobics, is into birdwatching and growing chillis, and loves Joni Mitchell, Jethro Tull and, yes, Kate Bush.

Both versions are here on this warm Saturday morning in May in London, nursing Coke-and-ice in a booth in a Wetherspoons on Camden Lock. Later today, he and current Venom guitarist Stuart ‘Rage’ Dixon and drummer Danny ‘Dante’ Needham will descend on nearby metal shop Raven Records for their own in-store ahead of the release of the band’s sixteenth album, Into Oblivion, a wild-eyed rush of noise and sacrilege. ‘Satan ejaculates!’ Cronos snarls on one song, Man And Beast. “I just like using profanity for the fuck of it,” he says with a grin.

But it’s not just provocation. Nevermore references Cronos’s beloved Edgar Allan Poe. “The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart, I love that stuff,” he says. He was even thinking of recording his own audiobook version of Poe’s poetry, putting his own spin on it. He begins reciting phrases from The Raven: “‘Bleak December… saintly days of yore.’”

When talking, Cronos might make Jimmy Nail sound like a minor royal, but he was born in London. South Chelsea, specifically. “The Who used to park their van around the corner and me mam used to get her cigarettes from the shop where Mick Jagger and them lot bought theirs too,” he says. “I remember seeing him on the telly and saying: ‘That’s the guy from the corner shop.’”

Moving to Newcastle at seven or eight was tough. He got into a fight on his first day of school because of his accent. “‘Cockney wanker!’” he says, then mimes a punch: “Bam!” He doesn’t say who was on the receiving end of it.

He grins when he describes what he was like as a teenager. “A wanker. A proper twat. Me and me mate would terrorise the school.” One day, he broke into his mum’s stash of Mogadons and washed them down with a bottle of vodka. “I can’t even remember that day at school, but apparently I was wanting to fight all the teachers.”

He wanted to join the army as a kid, which he thinks might have straightened him out, but getting shot in the eye with a pellet when he and his friends were messing about with air rifles put the kibosh on that. “I’m blind in this eye,” he says, pointing to his right peeper. “The pellet’s still in there.”

He loved music as a kid: early Queen, Jethro Tull. His elder brother, Graham, was an in-demand drummer who ended up joining local heroes Prefab Sprout. “Oh, they were shite. I hated those fuckers,” he says of the latter. “They turned up in the studio one day and the engineer said: ‘This is Prefab Sprout.’ ‘Prefab what?’ We were rolling round the floor laughing our cocks off.”

Cronos got a job in a local recording studio, Impulse. In his telling, he persuaded the owners to set up Neat Records to release singles and albums by local bands such as Fist, Tygers Of Pan Tang and, eventually, Venom themselves. “I said: ‘All this heavy music is going on. Yous needed to get on it.”

He’d joined Venom when he was 16, fuelled by the mad rush of punk. He wasn’t their singer at first. That was Clive Archer, who wore protocorpse paint make-up and had the stage name Jesus Christ. “Jeff and Bray said: ‘We think you’re better than him.’ So we kicked him out and became a three-piece. I’ve never seen him since.”

Jeff is Jeff Dunn, aka original Venom guitarist Mantas, and Bray is drummer Tony Bray, aka Abaddon. This unholy trinity were on a mission to drag rock’n’roll to Hades, and they damn near succeeded. Venom’s first two albums, 1982’s Welcome To Hell and the following year’s Black Metal are the twin fonts from which all extreme metal springs. Rough-arsed hymns of blasphemy that made Motörhead sound like The Nolans. As Cronos puts it: “Ozzy was singing about the Devil. I wanted to be the Devil.”

To some, he came close. The title track of 1985’s heroically abrasive Possessed album landed them on the PMRC’s ‘Filthy Fifteen’ list of songs likely to corrupt America’s youth.

“I thought it was fucking great,” he says. “Fucking hell, you’ve got Frank Zappa and John Denver stepping up against these bored housewives. I’m a massive John Denver fan as well.” He starts singing: ‘You fill up my senses, like a night in the forest…’

The air of malevolence surrounding Venom electrified a generation of young American metal fans. Metallica and Slayer opened for Venom in the US. “Me and Cliff Burton used to hang out,” Cronos says of the late Metallica bassist. “He’d bring weed, I’d have hash. He was a proper stoner, Cliff. Good lad.”

Things were different back home in Britain. Gnarly metal fans loved Venom, but everyone else thought they were a joke, not least the press. “It seemed like England wanted fuck-all to do with Venom,” he says. “We must’ve stepped on the wrong toes.”

The only people who disliked Venom more than the press were Venom themselves.

“People have made up this myth about that line-up,” he says. “There was no camaraderie. We weren’t friends. When this band split, it was on bad terms.”

Technically, Venom didn’t split. Cronos quit in 1987, but the other two carried on without him. The original line-up reunited for one album in the mid-90s but the old problems resurfaced. One by one, Abaddon and Mantas fell away, leaving Cronos to lead the band ever since. The current three-piece line-up has been together for 17 years, almost three times as long as the original. Today there’s no love lost between Cronos, Mantas and Abaddon.

“Nah,” he says. “I don’t want anything to do with them two. Too much piss-fartin’ around.”

This is where the public perception of Cronos splits from the reality. Post-Venom, he considered quitting music. “I was gonna pack it all in. I was gonna be a slaughterman or work in the forestry commission. I love being outdoors.” Instead he formed a new band, Cronos, who leaned into more melodic heavy metal, verging on hard rock. They released two albums that are interesting rather than great.

But the early 90s saw him diversify in an unexpected fashion. He’d done his share of hard living in the 80s, but he was into weightlifting and fitness too. He’d seen how the aerobics craze had taken off on the back of Hollywood star Jane Fonda’s workout videos and he wanted in on the action. “I knew fuck-all about cardiovascular exercise, so I decided to go and learn how to do it properly,” he says. “I went to college, got top marks for everything in all me exams.”

By the early 90s he was working as a fitness instructor. “I did loads of classes. I played rave. We’d start off with mid-paced stuff, just to warm up, then it was bang! bang! bang!” He worked with guys from the military. “They used to come to the classes. We’d do it in sports halls or fields. They’d have their boots and backpacks on.”

Cronos was with his military buddies when he had the accident that nearly finished his music career for good. They’d take him climbing in Wales and Scotland. “Have you ever done it?” he asks. “The feeling you get being on top of a mountain is almost spiritual.”

He was on a climb in Wales in the early 2000s when he was hit by a falling rock. “The guy above us, the rock under his foot gave way,” he says. “I ducked out of the way, but it hit us square in the back of me neck – boom. I was braced up for a while.”

It wasn’t life-threatening, but it was serious. “I couldn’t play bass,” he says. “I certainly couldn’t stand up and play bass. I felt like I was done playing music. That’s when I took up the computer.”

This is yet another avenue that Cronos’s strange life has led him down

“A mate of mine had a computer company in Newcastle,” he says. “I was laughing at the graphics on the company logo, and he said: ‘Can you do better?’ I went: ‘Yeah.’”

He dived into Photoshop and began working as a multimedia engineer for his mate’s company. He saw it as an extension of what he’d done all his life. “Everything’s an art medium,” he says. “I could pick up some mud and create a picture on a canvas. This is the way I see creativity – nothing’s off the table. So AI comes along, and I’m like: ‘Yeah, I’ll try that.’”

He’s talking about the visual arts, not music.

“Nah,” he says. “I’ll always write me own music.”

Life today is only slightly less full-on than it has been. He grows chillis for a hobby, making sauces that he gives to friends. “If you’re talking Carolina Reapers and Nagas and all them boys, you’ve got to get your compost right,” is his tip. He was a member of the RSPB as a kid, and he still keeps an eye out for birds around his house in Northumberland. “Goldfinches, robins, wrens. We even had a heron in our back garden. I’ve always been into birds. Not just the flying ones,” he adds with a cackle.

It’s the kind of ripped-from-the-old-days gag you want from Cronos, a man who has spent almost 50 years giving less than zero fucks about what other people think of him – an approach that has brought him the good and the bad with it.

“It’s a journey and a story, and you’ve got to take everything in your stride,” he says, momentarily philosophical. “If you go back and change something, you change who you are today.”

It should sound surprising coming from a man who wrote a song called In League With Satan. But this is Cronos, and with him everything and nothing is a surprise.

Into Oblivion is out now via Noise/BMG.

Ghost frontman Tobias Forge, Anthrax bassist Frank Bello and Korn drummer Ray Luzier have contributed to a re-recorded version of German heavy metal band Accept’s 1980 deep cut Save Us.

The re-imagining, which you can hear below, also features Accept themselves and is taken from an upcoming tribute album marking 50 years since the Solingen band formed. The 19-song set, Teutonic Titans 1976–2026, comes out on September 4 via Napalm.

Accept guitarist Wolf Hoffman says in a statement that Forge “was not really on my radar” until he met him at a show in Stockholm. The singer told him that Save Us was his favourite Accept song, and that he once wanted Ghost to cover it, but plans were scrapped.

“Save Us? I don’t even remember that song,” Hoffman jokes. “Nobody has even mentioned that song! I had to go back and listen to it. After I saw a Ghost show it all made sense to me. It really fits his style and I could really imagine him doing that song really well. He’s right, it’s a fun song!”

Teutonic Titans 1976–2026 was announced in April and features guest spots from 50 rock and heavy metal musicians. Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and ex-Motörhead drummer Mikkey Dee play on Fast As A Shark, Judas Priest vocalist Rob Halford sings Balls To The Wall and The Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan appears on Love Child.

Ex-Judas Priest guitarist K.K. Downing, Overkill singer Bobby Blitz, Fozzy frontman Chris Jericho and many others are set to appear on as-yet-undisclosed tracks.

Accept are also celebrating their 50th anniversary on the road. The band are currently making their way across mainland Europe and will perform at Helsinki Metal Fest on Friday, August 7. They’ll play two headline UK dates and a set at Stonedead festival in Newark later this month, before returning to the mainland for a headline tour from November to December.

Although Ghost are best known for such successful hard rock originals as the multi-Platinum-selling Mary On A Cross and the Grammy Award-winning Cirice, they’re a prolific cover act. They’ve released three EPs mostly or entirely composed of covers, the latest being 2023’s Phantomime. In 2021, they contributed a take on Metallica’s Enter Sandman to the US heavy metal giants’ tribute album The Metallica Blacklist.

Ghost are currently on hiatus following the completion of their globe-trotting Skeletour earlier this year, but are the subject of a new documentary/concert film, 2 Big To Rig, which hits cinema and IMAX screens worldwide from August 26. The film follows 2024’s Rite Here Rite Now and offers a rare look at the real-life workings of the band, who wear masks onstage and are made up of anonymous members apart from Forge.

Meanwhile, Bello’s band Anthrax are gearing up to release their 12th album Cursum Perficio on September 18. It will mark their first studio release in 10 years. Luzier’s Korn will tour Europe and the UK in October and November.

Tim Pope, The Cure's long-time video director, has revealed that working with disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein on gothic horror film The Crow: City of Angels left him with "mental scars I bear to this day".

Pope, who shot 37 videos for The Cure, in addition to working with David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Queen, Rush, Neil Young, The Bangles, The The and more, signed up to direct the 1996 sequel to cult hit The Crow for Miramax, the hugely successful film and TV production company founded by brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein. But the experience proved to be hugely frustrating, deeply humiliating and traumatic for the now 70-year-old Pope, to the extent that he didn't make another film for 25 years.

Pope writes about his spectacular career in his forthcoming memoir I Shoot Rock Stars, and lays bare his painful memories of working with Harvey Weinstein in new interviews with British newspapers The Guardian and The Telegraph.

Having carved out a reputation as one of the most imaginative and innovative video directors of the MTV era, Pope was approached to direct the sequel to The Crow, a surprise commercial hit for Miramax, and a cult favourite film for a generation of goths and metal fans. Tragically, the film's charismatic leading man, Brandon Lee - the son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee - died during the film's production due to an on-set accident with a prop gun, which left Pope at an immediate disadvantage when seeking to follow up the film's success.

"It was a tricky situation," Pope admits to The Guardian, "but I’d loved [Quentin Tarantino's award-winning Miramax films] Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. This was before we knew about [Harvey Weinstein] wanking into flowerpots and destroying women’s lives.

"He was still seen as ‘good old Harvey’, the most powerful man in Hollywood, but his other nickname was Harvey Scissorhands. He had a reputation for meddling in the cutting room and I suffered that really badly. I poured everything into that film and ended up with something I loathed."

At a disastrous test screening, Pope learned that his original cut of the film had been completely reworked at Harvey Weinstein's request. In The Telegraph Pope recalls that during this screening Weinstein threw popcorn at his head and shouted, "Call yourself a fucking director?" at him. Afterwards, at dinner, Weinstein told Pope, "Just cut the damn picture as we want it, or else, you fucking bastard… Remember, pal, we own you."

Pope calls the whole experience of working with Weinstein "brutal".

"There were times working with him when I thought I was going to end up at the bottom of the Hudson River wearing concrete wellington boots," he told The List last year.

"I hope Harvey Weinstein reads my book" he tells The Guardian.

Weinstein is currently in prison in theUS after being found guilty of three counts of rape, plus sexual assault. More than 80 women made allegations of sexual harassment or rape against him.

The death of Cardiacs leader Tim Smith in 2020 came after he’d been forced out of action for health reasons 12 years earlier. In 2014, while fans still harboured hopes of some kind of return, Prog writer Dom Lawson indulged his passion for the band with guitarist Kavus Torabi (also of Gong) – who’d return to the reactivated line-up in 2024.

As far as I’m concerned, Cardiacs were the greatest band that ever walked the Earth. The perfect combination of prog indulgence and complexity, punk energy and subversion and sublime pop melodies, the band completely changed the way I thought about music. And, like virtually Cardiacs fans, I cherish them more than any other band I’ve ever heard.

The obscenely talented Kavus Torabi joined Cardiacs on guitar in 2003 and remained a member until bandleader Tim Smith suffered a heart attack and stroke in June 2008 and the band’s activities fizzled to a distinctly tragic halt. I spoke to Torabi about five of my favourite songs and asked him whether they conjured up any specific memories.

Is This The Life

The best-known Cardiacs song of them all, Is This The Life was a permanent fixture in the band’s set lists for over two decades. It was famously played on Radio 1 by an only slightly bewildered Steve Wright and was as close to a hit single as the band ever got. You can find it on both 1984’s cassette-only release The Seaside (since released on CD but fairly hard to track down) and the classic 1988 album A Little Man And A House And The Whole World Window.

Torabi: The first time I heard it was as part of A Little Man And A House. It had just come out; I’d never heard of the band before and a friend of mine lent it to me and said, ‘You’ve got to hear this!’ At the time it didn’t strike me as being particularly different to the other tunes on the album. It was just part of the whole thing.

Obviously it’s the one that really gets to you, because it’s so catchy and amazing. Later, speaking to friends and trying to get them into Cardiacs, there’d be people who only liked that one. So I realised that this one that the straights can get! I used to love playing it live. It had one of the few bits where we’d get to improvise. Some nights it would just be magical.

You’d think that someone would’ve come up with that chord progression before, wouldn’t you? It dates as far back as 1979, but I’m surprised that no one had thought of it before that. No one could ever have come up with most of the Cardiacs songs – Tim was the only person who could’ve written them. Is This The Life is just beautiful.

R.E.S.

Another track from A Little Man And A House, R.E.S. is a glorious example of Tim Smith’s ability to combine razor-sharp pop melodies with sinister, nursery rhyme insanity and mind-bending, prog-fuelled intricacy. Madder than a lorry full of boxes of frogs but still oddly beautiful, it almost certainly – as Kavus explains – feature the greatest guitar solo of all time.

Torabi: When I had to learn how to play that song, it helped that I’d known it since 1988 and it was just wired into my DNA. It was a case of having to remember where to put my fingers. I just knew all the funny timings without having to think about it.

I once said to Tim that I thought it was the greatest guitar solo of all time and he said ‘Oh, it’s a bit too Canterbury-ish for me…!’ It’s an incredible solo. It sounds corny, but I remember getting that record home in 1988 and playing it. My friend had already told me that he was sure I’d like it, and I loved the funny photocopied album cover with the big flower on it.

I remember getting through side one and thinking ‘This is really, really good!’ but when the guitar solo in R.E.S. came in, they’d become my favourite band – before I’d got to the end of side two.

Jibber And Twitch

First released on The Seaside in 1984, this early Cardiacs classic is another dizzying eruption of crazed musical ideas, insidious hooks and twinkly-eyed macabre. Shortly after joining the band in 2003, Kavus had to learn Jibber And Twitch, along with a ludicrous number of other songs from the band’s early years, for three shows in London – captured on The Special Garage Concerts Volumes I and II albums.

Torabi: Learning those songs was a really interesting experience! I found out a lot about myself during those couple of months. I knew two thirds of the songs because they were on The Seaside and Archive Cardiacs, but there were bits I’d never heard before. There was so much to learn – about 35 songs including the encores – but Tim’s attitude was, ‘You know what to do, just get on with it!’

He gave me and Bob Leith, who also wasn’t around in the early days, a free rein to do what we wanted with the songs. The weird thing about that is that I’ve never been one of those people who works out other people’s songs. It was the first time I’d ever really sat down and committed to learning such a big body of stuff. I really liked it! It became my life. I’d go to work each day and then come home and spend two or three hours learning it all. I’d learn maybe one new tune each night and then run through the rest of what I’d learned previously, until three or four weeks before the gigs I was just coming in and running through both sets.

It takes up so much of your brain – it was like revising for an exam. Even two weeks after those gigs I’d forgotten how to play half those tunes. We had a party afterwards and it felt like my mind was slowly coming back to me.

Dirty Boy

In 1996, Cardiacs released a double album entitled Sing To God. An audacious and ambitious 90 minutes of pure Tim Smith genius, it’s an album that encapsulates the overwhelming magic and majesty of the band’s sound, with a wonderfully vivid and powerful production they never quite equalled on their other recordings. The greatest song on an album full of great songs, Dirty Boy is nine minutes of dark, monumental and lavish psychedelia. There’s nothing else quite like it.

Torabi: “The funny thing with Dirty Boy was… I remember when I was a kid, maybe 10 or 11, and into rock music, and you’d always hear older people talking about how Stairway To Heaven was the best song ever written. It had an alluring title, but I wasn’t really into Led Zeppelin at the time; I was into Maiden and stuff.

I started to imagine what this song must be like, but when I heard it a couple of years later – and I do really like Zeppelin now – I was so disappointed! I thought, ‘Is that all it is? Is this supposed to be the greatest song ever?’ Let’s face it, it’s not even the best Led Zeppelin song!

So when I heard Dirty Boy it sounded like what I imagined Stairway To Heaven would be like. Surely it’s the greatest psychedelic rock song ever recorded, by a long way! It was great to do live, but one of the hardest to play because of the amount of chords.

Tim’s attitude to some of the punky songs was that if you fucked them up it didn’t matter, because ‘It’s fuckin’ punk, isn’t it?’ But with Dirty Boy you were not allowed to play even one chord wrong; and there are so many, going from major to minor and then back.

It was so hard to learn, but you really owe it to that song to play it properly because it’s so amazing. It makes you want to believe in God! It makes the whole God thing seem plausible!

Ditzy Scene

Recorded shortly before the last Cardiacs tour before Tim became ill, Ditzy Scene was the first song to be committed to tape by the Kavus-era line-up. It was released as a limited-edition single by Org Records and offers a tantalising glimpse of what the band’s proposed next album, tentatively known as LSD, might have had in store. Vocals aside, Smith had recorded most of the album when he fell foul of ill health but, as yet, the songs remain hidden in some magical dusty vault somewhere.

Torabi: I wrote the words for that song! It was weird one to record, because we felt a bit pressured to get it recorded before the tour. I’m not mad on the mix of it, so the plan would’ve been to remix it for the LSD album that never happened.

I love the tune. It was the first thing we did with that new line-up and it was a new thing. When we started recording it was like, ‘Fucking hell… here we go!’ When those girl vocals came in at the start, going ‘Aaah aaah,’ it was a real goosebump moment and I thought, ‘Okay, we’ve really got something here…’ It’s just brilliant.

We only played it right maybe once or twice on that tour. It was so frustrating! It became one of things when so much pressure is put on and it just makes matters worse. That intro was so hard to play – we’d have to completely concentrate for it. Once you got lost it was all over, particularly doing stuff with tapes. You had to be in with the tape, so the minute you dropped a beat we had to stop.

We did it right in Leeds – I remember that, because when we did it Mel Woods threw a tambourine into the audience! After the gig I remember Tim saying, ‘I hope that wasn’t one of the good tambourines…!’