Trevor Horn’s career began at a time when music producers’ names were barely recognised. But with a passion for good music and a desire to share, the Buggles co-founder became one of the most celebrated studio stars of the 80s and 90s – and never abandoned his passion for prog. He looked back on his career so far in 2019.

What was it like to work with Genesis on the The Carpet Crawlers 1999, their reworking of the 1975 song with the classic-era line-up including Peter Gabriel?

What fun!

Were they all in the studio for it?

The four of them – not Phil Collins. I had to go to Switzerland to record him. Phil’s the loveliest man. The first time I went over, he played the drums, and then he did his backing vocals. After his first take I said to him, “I don’t suppose you’ve ever thought of going solo?”

It was a pleasure; they had great manners. Peter’s the slightly crazy one while Tony Banks is the core of the group. A Trick Of The Tail is one of my favourite all time albums. I love Los Endos; I crank that up while I’m washing the dishes. And Ripples is my favourite singalong track, when it hits the big high note.

One of the first records you made in LA was Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells II.

It was the first time I’d heard of a ‘two’ album. I liked Tubular Bells, although it wasn’t my favourite album of Mike’s – that’s Incantations. I used to play it in the car, especially the Hiawatha section.

Mike was cool. He rented a house in Beverly Hills and we made most of it there. It was when the riots were happening. He was playing everything, so he was totally in control.

There was a section, the bit where the “strolling player” [Alan Rickman] talks. It was 48-track and we’d been working on it for two weeks; I thought we were nearly there. When I came in [one morning] people were looking at me; they told me that Mike, who’d just gone to bed, had changed the bit.

He’d wiped it. It was changed forever – there was no undo button. I was in shock. It was the only time it’s ever happened to me in 40 years.

What did you say when he woke up?

Mike asked what I thought and I told him it would take me a little time as I’d kind of liked the other one!

I was always encouraging him to give the guitar lots of love – he’s an amazing, extraordinary player, the way he comes up with the tunes. He has names for all of the sounds.

The way you’ve able to smuggle prog into the charts is great. Probably the absolute zenith was the title track of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome.

Oh, it was absolutely prog! I was trying to do a long track for the simple reason that I found tracks like Yes’ Gates Of Delirium and Close To The Edge were just great when you were driving. They were instrumental pieces of music with songs in that seemed to go somewhere. In the 70s, those songs had given me such pleasure. I wanted to see if I could do it.

I think Pleasuredome stands up still; it’s entertaining. What really strikes me when I hear it is what a brilliant engineer Steve Lipson is. I think that’s some of the best mixed stuff I have ever heard – it’s extraordinary.

You’ve kept in with Yes, reworking Fly From Here and aligning yourself with Steve Howe’s version of the group onstage at the London Palladium last year.

I’m very fond of Steve; he’s really worked hard to keep the whole thing going. He’s been doing that for 10, 15 years now, and I have to admire him for it. I think they’re really good. It will never be the same – it’s different, but it has the same excitement.

Are you able rise above factions?

That’s what I always try to do. I was talking with Trevor Rabin just yesterday on the phone and we’re going to get together when I get back to LA. I don’t have beef with anybody.

New episodes of Toyah Willcox and Robert Fripp's much-loved series of Sunday Lunch performances are increasingly thin on the ground, so we're delighted to report that a fresh edition emerged this weekend.

In what we believe to be only the third new performance released in 2026 – most weeks, the couple share a video from their extensive archive – the Fripp-Willcox kitchen is once again filled with joie de vivre as the King Crimson man and his bubbly bride embark on a typically ragged cover of the 1968 Rolling Stones classic Jumpin' Jack Flash.

"Yes, it's a toothless, bearded hag!" bellows Fripp at the climax. "With Toyah and Robert's Sunday Lunch."

"Who's the hag?" asks Toyah.

This week, it was announced that Toyah will receive an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Worcester next month.

“I am thrilled to receive an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Worcester," she says. "I have constantly strived to push boundaries in an unpredictable industry, and if my life can inspire, guide and help those who are about to do the same, then my 50 years in show business mean even more to me today. This honour will be a highlight of my life, and I am grateful to all who have made it possible. I very much look forward to the day I receive it."

Meanwhile, 11 King Crimson live shows – recorded in 2000 in Japan as the band promoted their 12th album The ConstruKction of Light – have been made available to download via the band's partnership with streaming platform nugs. The shows were originally available from the band's DGM Live website in 2016.

Former Skid Row singer Sebastian Bach has played his first show with Twisted Sister. Bach was announced as Dee Snider's replacement back in March, when Snider was obliged to retire from live performance on doctor's orders.

Twisted Sister – billed as Bent Brother – gave Bach his debut at the 2500-capacity Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, New Jersey, on Saturday night, a warm-up for the band's previously announced appearance at the Borealis Theatre in Palmer, Alaska, on September 4. The show was the band's first at the Starland since a 2015 performance honouring late Twisted Sister drummer A.J. Pero.

At the climax of a 17-song set that included two Skid Row songs – I Remember You and Youth Gone Wild – the band played the classic We're Not Gonna Take It. A fan-shot video of the performance is embedded below.

"When I sing Twisted Sister music, I’m like a steamroller," Bach told Classic Rock earlier this year. "I’m a beast. I’m out of control."

"The question was not whether Sebastian could do this; I knew that he could," added guitarist Jay Jay French. "He was phenomenal."

Since announcing an initial four-show schedule of September dates, the revamped Twisted Sister lineup has confirmed a series of shows in the final quarter of the year. Full dates below.

Twisted Sister – Starland Ballroom setlist

What You Don't Know (Sure Can Hurt You)
You Can't Stop Rock 'n' Roll
We're Gonna Make It
Shoot 'Em Down
Tear It Loose
Destroyer
The Kids Are Back
Like A Knife in the Back
Ride To Live, Live To Ride
Under The Blade
The Beast
Burn In Hell
The Price
I Remember You
I Wanna Rock
Youth Gone Wild
We're Not Gonna Take It

Twisted Sister feat. Sebastian Bach: Twisted Forever, Forever Twisted tour dates

Sep 04: Palmer Borealis Theatre, AK
Sep 06: Salem L.B. Day Amphitheater, OR
Sep 12: Choctaw Grand Theater Durant, OK
Sep 27: Puyallup Washington State Fair, WA
Oct 02: West Springfield The Big E, MA
Oct 08: Niagara Falls OLG Stage at Fallsview Casino, ON
Oct 10: Windsor The Colosseum at Caesars Windsor, ON
Oct 18: Gary Hard Rock Casino Northern Indiana, IN
Nov 12: Bristol Hard Rock Live Bristol, VA
Nov 14: Charles Town The Event Center at Hollywood Casino, WV
Dec 11: St. Petersburg Fergs Pavilion, FL

Find Twisted Sister tickets.

Original Slipknot singer Anders Colsefni says he has no regrets over not being the voice that made them one of the biggest bands in the world.

Colsefni was the lead vocalist on Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat – considered the secret debut album that started Slipknot’s ascent.

But it was when he was replaced by Corey Taylor that the Iowa group exploded onto the scene with their self-titled debut album.

Colsefni has remained friends with Taylor and he has performed the Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat songs live over the years with Taylor's support.

Discussing his departure from Slipknot and the rapid rise that followed, Colsenfi tells The Phase Remains The Same: "I'm a death metal singer by heart, and they had the opportunity to go on and do what they're doing now.

"They were able to do some radio songs. Nothing I would do was gonna get on a radio. I already knew that.

"While it ended up crushing my spirit for a little while, I was able to realise that I'm just one of a long line of original singers that weren't the ones that actually made the band famous.

"And it took a little while, but I was fine with it. And I'm certainly fine with it now. I don't have any regrets.

"I only did what I could do based on what was going on at the time. And if it took bringing in a different singer to get a local band that I was part of out and make such an impact on history, I'm totally down with that."

While he is still performing, Colsefni also works a regular job and is happy doing so.

He adds: "I'm not living the rock and roll lifestyle like all of them. I still have to work 40 to 60 hours a week and do all that normal stuff and try to fit my music afterwards, but that's what most people do.

"The majority of the musicians out there, that's what they're doing. It's only a select few that actually get the golden cup in their hand."

Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson took aim at US President Donald Trump's 'Lake America' antics as the metal giants opened their Run For Your Lives Tour in Toronto, Canada, on Saturday night.

Trump is in an ongoing trade war with his northern neighbours and has been delivering a series of jibes, including saying he would make Canada the "51st State" of the US.

And after Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from trade talks this week, claiming the US negotiators had tried to move the goalposts at the last minute, Trump predictably did not take it well.

In an orchestrated media conference in the Oval Office this week, Trump crossed out the name of Lake Ontario on a map using a marker pen, and wrote "Lake America" in its place. He previously renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf Of America.

Dickinson has joined a string of people in pouring scorn on Trump's stunt, telling the sold out audience at Toronto's Scotiabank Arena on Saturday night: "How long has it been since we have been to Toronto? Too long, too long. And in Canada, in fact.

"We got here, we crossed Lake Ontario, we will be crossing the Gulf of Mexico.

"It is a ridiculous state of the world."

Trump's stunt has drawn ridicule and anger from Canada and beyond. Carney responded by saying that no matter what the US calls it, Canadians will know it as "Lake Ontario – then, now and always."

Ontario's top-ranking politician, Premier Doug Ford, also hit back, comparing Trump's stunt to a sketch from Saturday Night Live.

Lake Ontario is the smallest of the five Great Lakes of North America and sits between the Canadian province of Ontario to the north and the US state of New York to the south. Toronto is the capital city of Ontario.

Iron Maiden North American tour 2026 remaining dates

Aug 30: Toronto, ON - Scotiabank Arena *
Sep 03: Montréal, QC - Parc Jean-Drapeau *^
Sep 05: Harrison, NJ - Sports Illustrated Stadium *^
Sep 09: Boston, MA - TD Garden *
Sep 11: Bristow, VA - Jiffy Lube Live *
Sep 12: Charlotte, NC - PNC Music Pavilion *
Sep 15: Hershey, PA - Hersheypark Stadium *
Sep 17: Louisville, KY - Louder Than Life Festival
Sep 19: Shakopee, MN - Mystic Lake Amphitheater *
Sep 22: Chicago, IL - Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre *
Sep 25: Los Angeles, CA - BMO Stadium *^
Sep 29: San Antonio, TX – Alamodome *^

* Megadeth supporting
^ Anthrax supporting

Leprous’ most recent album, Melodies Of Atonement, followed the release of Aphelion three years earlier, which had featured a song co-written with their fans during Covid lockdown. That experience informed what they did with their eighth studio record – although not in the way it might have been expected, as they told Prog in 2024.

When crafting 202 album Aphelion, Leprous wrote the track Nighttime Disguise over a series of lockdown livestreams with the help of their fans. That experience, says guitarist Tor Oddmund Suhrke, “showed us that a lot of our fans are also musicians. I said that if we give them the option of combining different elements, like time signatures, then that’s what they’ll choose.”

He continues: “I was right. We ended up using three different time signatures, three different keys, both six- and eight-string guitars and acoustics. It has hectic riffs, epic brass, growling and high-pitched vocals. I guess our fans agree with Yngwie Malmsteen – more is more!”

Those who adore Nighttime Disguise will find plenty to love on new album Melodies Of Atonement. With Einar Solberg’s blossoming solo work set to explore the orchestrations that characterised Leprous’ previous three records, the prog metallers are going the other way.

“We wanted to see what we can do with the instruments we have in the band,” Solberg says. “We’ve also tried to use each member to the best. We tried to work more like a football team; you don’t have everyone playing in the same position at the same time.”

While slightly at odds with the Suhrke’s Malmsteen reference, Solberg reflects: “I think by removing elements, you can make other elements more prominent and shine more. Music doesn’t get bigger by adding stuff – that’s a misconception.

“Symphonic orchestras rarely have everyone playing at the same time. By removing some elements you can make the music so much more impactful when everyone does come together. We love to play with the dynamics. It was amazing to do it with only the five of us.”

Leprous’ blueprint remains multidimensional, allowing for new influences and ideas to seep in. “We wanted lots of 90s hip-hop grooves with Leprous on top,” Solberg reports. “Imagine B-Real from Cypress Hill rapping over the top of the intro of Like A Sunken Ship – that was the vibe we were going for.

“We’ve found we can do whatever we want, musically: once we’re all playing on it, no matter how much we change our sound, it will always sound like Leprous. When you stop trying and stop worrying about what you want to be, you put yourself be out there in the open for people to love or hate you.

“That is the key to originality. The human mind is universal; people always find something to recognise in their own life in your lyrics and music, even if it’s different from how it was intended.”

"There are only two kinds of music: good music and the other kind," wrote Duke Ellington in a 1962 essay. Metal didn't even exist then – imagine that – and six decades on, it would be interesting to find out what the jazz legend would think of metal off-shoots like cybergrind and funeral doom.

In an attempt to make sense of the continually sprawling world of metal and all its subgenres, here's a comprehensive list of some umbrella terms that may have passed you by.

Atmospheric Black Metal

If the sound of eternal torment recorded on a battered cassette player wasn't atmospheric enough, this frostbitten subgenre reimagines the black metal blueprint and adds swathes of dense ambient layers to the mix, replacing verses about Gamle Erik with screeching vocals about nature and general melancholy.

Notable bands: Wolves in the Throne Room, Drudkh, None

Blackened Crust

Marrying the relentless hectoring of crust punk and the relentless sonic pummel of black metal, blackened crust combines anti-establishment lyrics with raw power. Imagine Old Scratch writing a strong letter to his local council, then screaming it over the most unforgiving wall of sound.

Notable bands: Martyrdöd, Dödsrit

Cybergrind

This offshoot of grindcore delivers short blasts of glitchy noise over a frantic drum machine, creating time signatures the average human mind could scarcely comprehend. Bear in mind, there is no suitable time to put a cybergrind album on, other than when you're cornered by robot gangs in a dystopian city war.

Notable bands: Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Genghis Tron

Drone Doom

Slow and low, that is the tempo. Drone doom is the preserve of the patient, with its proponents playing resonant riffs which move at a glacial pace and shake the calcium from your bones. Guttural screams optional.

Notable bands: Sunn O))), Khanate

Electronicore

Here's a mix of the deliberate chug of metalcore and the world of electronic dance music. In fact, electronicore's reach is vast, with heavy bands mixing wobbly synths, sub-bass, and pop sensibilities. On paper, it should wind up metal purists, but the genre's irresistible charm goes a long way at outdoor festivals. Exceptionally good at helping indoor cycling enthusiasts 'dig deep' or whatever during a Peloton session.

Notable bands: Electric Callboy, Enter Shikari

Funeral Doom

Amateurs may describe this genre as simply slow and repetitive, but they'd be wrong. It's doom, but with the added vibe of a winter burial on the outskirts of a desolate industrial town.

Notable bands: Bell Witch, Ahab

Goregrind

An overwhelming and disturbing amalgam of grindcore, death metal, and the sort of imagery that you'd find on the now-defunct Rotten website, goregrind is the most abrasive of all metal. Unless you count gorenoise, which is an elitist subgenre for people who think goregrind is 'soft'.

Notable bands: Carcass, Repulsion

Heavy Negative Wizard Metal

Australian artist Bob Nekrasov's solo project, Rebel Wizard, is an unholy blend of power metal, black metal, and New Wave of British Heavy Metal. All the metal, basically. He calls it an “anarchic alchemical process of outsider energies respecting the power of traditional triumphant metal into a unique sound to smash out the coerced gloom and banality of our times.”

Notable bands: Rebel Wizard

Industrial Black Metal

It's the frosty sound of black metal with all the percussive charm of a foundry. Lovely stuff.

Notable bands: Mysticum, Blut Aus Nord

Jazz Metal

In 1958, legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk said: “Where’s jazz going? I don’t know. Maybe it’s going to hell.”

Almost seven decades later, we can safely say the genre is firmly in the big pit of hot punishment, taking the genre's swing and improvisational techniques and marrying them to heavy, distorted riffs, the raspy honk of a sax, or a squeaky trumpet parp. Nice.

Notable bands: Shining, Naked City

Kawaii Metal

Named after the Japanese word for 'cute', kawaii metal effortlessly blends catchy J-pop with propulsive, aggressive riffs. Metal purists scoffed when Babymetal first arrived in 2010, but the Tokyo-based band took the genre worldwide and introduced their unique take on metal to a whole new audience.

Notable bands: Babymetal, Hanabie

Medieval Metal

If you've got a mate who says stuff like 'my liege' and bows, there's a massive chance they'll be into this music. If they're not, they're a time-traveler. It's metal for people who yearn for the hand-cranked riffs of a hurdy-gurdy, the painful wheeze of the dudelsack, or even the dull thud of a frame drum. If that sounds appealing, then there's a whole world of minstrel music waiting for you.

Notable bands: In Extremo, Saltatio Mortis

Nintendocore

Thanks to 8-bit computer processors, early console users could enjoy a handful of beeps which soundtracked their games. Nintendocore takes those technologically primitive noises and combines them with rock and metal. HORSE the Band frontman Nathan Winneke is responsible for this particular genre's name: “It amused us to say that the keyboards in our songs sounded like a Nintendo game. So we said we were 'Nintendocore'. And now it’s stupid.”

Notable bands: HORSE the Band, Powerglove

Pornogrind

Remember our evocative description of goregrind earlier on? Well, if you swap out the lyrical obsession with disease and death for pornography, then you've got yourself a whole new take on extreme metal. It's cock rock, but not as we know it.

Notable bands: Cock and Ball Torture, Anal Blast

Red And Black Anarchist Metal

Red and Black Anarchist Metal, or RABM, is black metal with left-leaning lyrics that opposes everything National Socialist Black Metal stands for.

Notable bands: Dawn Ray'd

Symphonic Black Metal

Doing away with the genre's embedded nihilism and general mischief, here we have a focus on gothic and fantasy themes, while adding lush, sweeping strings and crisp production to produce an altogether epic take on black metal. Tuxedos not included.

Notable bands: Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir

Tech Death

With a name that sounds like some sort of a computer calamity, this subgenre takes death metal's blueprint and adds a sweep-picking virtuosic element to its complex chaos.

Notable bands: Death, Archspire

Unblack Metal

This subgenre has all the hallmarks of traditional black metal – shrieked vocals, cold washes of tremolo-picked guitar, and monotone, Olde English font logos. But here's the twist: it's performed by Christian musicians. Horde, one of the genre's leading bands, are from the frostbitten forests of, um, Australia. Their album Hellig Usvart is the Christian black metal equivalent of Darkthrone's A Blaze in the Northern Sky.

Notable bands: Horde, Crimson Moonlight

War Metal

While some purists call this subgenre bestial black metal, war metal is basically sonic hostility. While we're extremely lucky not to have been caught in an actual war zone, we can only imagine it sounds like this.

Notable bands: Blasphemy, Archgoat

Yodel Metal

Metal was forever tainted by this viral guff that combined Alpine singing with heavy riffs. While it's not strictly a genre, we've heard it and now you must too. We could lump Korpiklaani in with this section for including traditional Sámi singing, which sounds a bit like yodelling to the untrained ear.

Notable bands: The Institute of Quackology (sort of)

Zombiecore

We're on the last letter of the alphabet. There's a ton of thrash bands obsessed with and inspired by horror films. Take Washington thrashers The Accüsed, who pioneered splattercore, or Leeds' Send More Paramedics, who named themselves after some dialogue in The Return of the Living Dead and dressed up like zombies.

Notable bands: The Accüsed, Send More Paramedics

In terms of bizarre musical ideas, indie for metal fans is right up there. But the healing process between the tribes might just have been given a kickstart in Belgium of all places.

“Yeah, indie for metalheads, you heard me right,” laughs Ronker vocalist and guitarist Jasper De Petter. “You could almost say that we’re the Arctic Monkeys trying to play Slayer.”

Let’s back up a minute. Formed during lockdown in 2020 when the members were feeling the frustrations of not being able to tour with their various bands, Ronker were initially nothing more than an outlet to shake off the grim reality of being trapped indoors.

“We all come from a world of post-rock and melancholic indie,” Jasper tells us. “During lockdown, I just couldn’t get my head around the situation, so when we got in a room, we started to play that music, but it came out with so much frustration and anger it was just like…”

Indie fans playing metal? “Exactly.”

Having realised that they were getting more from their new side-project than they were their other bands, Ronker became the members’ number one concern. Superb second album Respect the Hustle, I Won’t Be Your Dog Forever comes on like Every Time I Die fist-fighting Franz Ferdinand with Idles as the special guest referee. It’s a weird mix, with Jasper happily describing Ronker as “heavy, cathartic music”. He also credits his sobriety as a big reason for his band’s sound.

“I used to write fucked-up,” he shrugs. “But I wrote this last album sober. I learned a lot about songwriting and opening up – it focuses your mind, it made me more pointed, more blunt. Which, I believe, in turn makes it heavier.”

Whatever the genre, making it heavier is always an approach we approve of. Welcome, boys.

Respect The Hustle, I Won't Be Your Dog Forever is out now via Labelman.

Sounds Like: Idles refereeing a cage-match between Arctic Monkeys and Slayer
For Fans Of: Idles, Refused, The Chariot

Brian May first saw Eddie Van Halen play live on October 30, 1978. The American guitarist’s eponymous band were supporting a flagging Black Sabbath at the Circus Krone, a former circus venue in Munich, Germany on a tour that has since passed into legend as a hard rock changing of the guard.

May had been invited to the show by his friend, Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi. He knew next to nothing about the opening band; information wasn’t easy to come by in those pre-internet times, and his attention was focused on Queen anyway.

“I got there early, thinking:, ‘I wonder who these Van Halen people are? I wonder what they’re like?’” the recently knighted Queen guitarist says now. “I sat there watching them and my jaw just dropped. Watching Ed was like watching Jimi Hendrix for the first time. I was awestruck.”

Afterwards, May went backstage to say hello to Iommi. Eddie Van Halen was there too, and the two men struck up a conversation. “We just hit it off,” says May. “It felt like an easy friendship.”

The pair stayed in touch. Every so often one or the other would bring up the idea of jamming. “We’d say: ‘Oh, we should really get together,’ but it never happened,” says May.

Except it did happen, albeit five years after they first met. And when these two superstar guitarists did finally come together in an LA recording studio, in April 1983, it wasn’t for a high-profile, high-stakes supergroup. Instead it was for a three-track mini-album whose lead song was a version of the closing theme to a kids’ TV puppet show.

“It was a step into the unknown for me,” May says of the mini-album, titled Star Fleet Project after its lead track, Star Fleet. “But it was a chance to have some fun, play with guys I knew and liked, and finally have the opportunity to play with Ed.”

Forty years after its original release, the Star Fleet Project mini-album has been reissued as a lavish, out-take-packed box set. It’s an outlier in May’s back catalogue – not as familiar or successful as the albums he made with Queen, nor as fully fleshed out as the two hard-rock solo albums he released in the 90s. But, free of the pressures and expectations that came with his regular band, it’s the sound of a man having fun in the studio with his friends. As May writes in the sleeve notes of the reissue: “Those sessions are still there in my head, glowing like a warm beacon of joy in a period which for me was heading into uncertainty and darkness.”

If anyone can take credit for seeding the idea of Star Fleet Project in May’s head, it’s his son, James. James May was four years old when a new children’s sci-fi show featuring Gerry Anderson-style marionettes began airing on Saturday mornings on ITV in late 1982. Originally broadcast in Japan under the title X-Bomber, it had been dubbed into English and retitled Star Fleet for Western audiences. The repackaged show’s propulsive, synth-powered opening and closing theme were composed, and in the case of the latter, sung, by British composer and songwriter Paul Bliss.

“We used to get up every Saturday morning really early to watch the next episode together,” says May. “It was all very exciting to see what happened. And I enjoyed it as much as he did. I heard the signature tune and I thought: ‘Hmm, I like that. Maybe I could do something with it.’”

Queen were between albums at that point – “We’d made a conscious decision to lay off for a while,” says May – and the guitarist decided to make the most of his down time by heading out to Los Angeles.

“There’s something about LA where I feel more able to get out into the world,” he says. “I tend to be quite reclusive in England, it takes a lot to get me out. But in LA I wake up in the morning and think, ‘Who can I call? What should I do today?’”

It was on one of those days, in the spring of 1983, that he decided he should round up a few friends and go into the studio and have some fun. He knew just the people: REO Speedwagon drummer Alan Gratzer, former Rod Stewart/Jeff Beck bassist Phil Chen, and Queen’s touring keyboard player Fred Mandel. And then there was Eddie Van Halen.

“I immediately thought about Ed: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually get in there and play together?’” says May.

The admiration May felt for Eddie was mutual. Van Halen had told him his band were covering Now I’m Here as far back as 1974, long before Queen made their big US breakthrough.

“He pointed out little bits in their arrangements which were inspired by things we’d done,” says May. One of those things was the ‘tapping’ technique which had become Eddie’s signature. “He said: ‘Well, you did that on [Queen’s 1977 album track] It’s Late.’ I said: ‘Yeah, I only played with the idea because I’d seen this guy in Texas doing it.’ I’d done it in the most rudimentary form, then I’d moved on to something else. Whereas Ed basically made the guitar a new instrument.”

May didn’t have to give the idea of heading into the studio for a couple of days the hard sell to any of them, least of all Eddie. “I just got on the phone, and they all said: ‘Tell us what you want, we’ll be there, let’s go and have some fun.’ Explaining what it was came after.”

The idea of doing his version of the theme to his son’s favourite TV show was still kicking around his head. Aware that the other musicians wouldn’t have a clue what Star Fleet was, he made a rough demo and sent it to them.

“A very rough demo,” he says with a laugh. “It was just me singing into a tape machine and imitating guitars and drums. Phil and Ed came round to my little house in LA and we sat there going through it and kicking ideas around. It was just a great feeling from the beginning: ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’ It was like stepping into a place we’d never been.’”

This hastily convened collective gathered at the Record Plant Studios in Hollywood on April 21 for the first day of their two-day session. With them was engineer Mike Beiriger, who had worked with Cheap Trick, among others, although May would be credited as producer. Queen sessions could be intense, competitive and sometimes fractious. It was clear from the start that these were different.

“We were hyped up, it wasn’t like being in the studio with your regular band,” says May. “At one point, Alan finished one of the takes and said: ‘This is so much fun, this is going to be like cheating on your wife.’ I don’t think he ever cheated on his wife, but that sums up the feeling. It was exhilarating. It felt like an illicit liaison.”

The plan was to keep it simple: no individual tracking, none of the analysis or debate that went into a Queen or Van Halen record, just five musicians playing off each other. “It was a total band recording session,” says May. “We were all there, plugged in, playing at the same time during every take.”

May’s version of the Star Fleet theme was the main focus. With vocals from May (‘Send a message out across the sky, alien raiders just passed Gemini’), it stayed true to the TV show theme that inspired it, although the original version was a jumping-off point. Here, it ran to eight minutes, the two guitarists pushed on by admiration rather than competition. May has a vivid recollection of what it felt like to play alongside Eddie Van Halen: “It was like going down a really challenging ski run. I was very much conscious of his talent and his incredible aura. But to hear the two guitars together was a blast. Not the same, by any means, but we locked together very easily.”

May had another song he wanted to record, a seven-minute blues number titled Let Me Out. The blues wasn’t an obvious part of Queen’s arsenal, although they’d dabbled on songs such as 1974 B-side See What A Fool I’ve Been and ZZ Top-esque News Of The World album track Sleeping On The Sidewalk. But the style was certainly part of May’s own musical DNA.

“It had always been there with me,” he says of the influence of the blues. “I think it was different for Freddie. He didn’t feel the blues. He felt rock’n’roll, he felt Elvis and Little Richard, but he didn’t feel Muddy Waters. He did feel Aretha Franklin, though, to the bottom of his heart. I think Freddie wanted to be Aretha Franklin.”

Let Me Out wasn’t as pre-planned as the album’s main track. May remembers singing it to the rest of them in the studio. “Once you get the hang of it, there’s really not that much to the song,” he told them. “It’s all in the feeling.”

Van Halen’s presence on Let Me Out isn’t as prominent as it is on the Star Fleet theme. “You can hear that he’s not particularly au fait with the song,’ says May. “He plays a few little bits as it goes along, chucking in a couple of notes. He’s waiting for the moment where he’s going to pitch in and try some licks.”

The musical theme continued on the mini-album’s final track, a spontaneous 13-minute blues workout that saw the two guitarists trading the kind of licks they’d grown up listening to years before. Its title was a dead giveaway: Blues Breaker (Dedicated To E.C.), a reference to John Mayall’s groundbreaking 60s blues-rock collective and their one-time star guitarist Eric Clapton.

“There’s all sorts of differences between the way Eric runs his life and the way I run mine, but he’ll always be my hero,” says May. “Every time I hear Key To Love [from 1966’s Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, aka The Beano Album] I get chills up my spine. That’s why I do what I do, because Eric did that.

It wasn’t just May that Clapton influenced. “I remember Ed saying: ‘I haven’t played like this for a while. It’s how I started off playing. I wanted to play like Eric before I started all this tapping stuff.’”

May has a hazy memory of sending the finished song to the man who inspired it. “I think I did send it to Eric, but I never heard back,” says May. “He probably hated it, but that doesn’t matter to me.”

Overdubs on all three tracks were kept to a minimum. Chief among these was the run both guitarists played on Star Fleet. “We’d tried it during the takes but it always went wrong, more due to my mistakes than anything else,” says May. “We decided to put it in afterwards so not to distract ourselves any further.”

And so two of the pre-eminent guitarists of the era sat facing each other in the control room, instruments plugged in. “When the moment came we both went for the run,” May remembers. “It’s probably my favourite moment of the session.”

Brian May first saw Eddie Van Halen play live on October 30, 1978. The American guitarist’s eponymous band were supporting a flagging Black Sabbath at the Circus Krone, a former circus venue in Munich, Germany on a tour that has since passed into legend as a hard rock changing of the guard.

May had been invited to the show by his friend, Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi. He knew next to nothing about the opening band; information wasn’t easy to come by in those pre-internet times, and his attention was focused on Queen anyway.

“I got there early, thinking:, ‘I wonder who these Van Halen people are? I wonder what they’re like?’” the recently knighted Queen guitarist says now. “I sat there watching them and my jaw just dropped. Watching Ed was like watching Jimi Hendrix for the first time. I was awestruck.”

Afterwards, May went backstage to say hello to Iommi. Eddie Van Halen was there too, and the two men struck up a conversation. “We just hit it off,” says May. “It felt like an easy friendship.”

The pair stayed in touch. Every so often one or the other would bring up the idea of jamming. “We’d say: ‘Oh, we should really get together,’ but it never happened,” says May.

Except it did happen, albeit five years after they first met. And when these two superstar guitarists did finally come together in an LA recording studio, in April 1983, it wasn’t for a high-profile, high-stakes supergroup. Instead it was for a three-track mini-album whose lead song was a version of the closing theme to a kids’ TV puppet show.

“It was a step into the unknown for me,” May says of the mini-album, titled Star Fleet Project after its lead track, Star Fleet. “But it was a chance to have some fun, play with guys I knew and liked, and finally have the opportunity to play with Ed.”

Forty years after its original release, the Star Fleet Project mini-album has been reissued as a lavish, out-take-packed box set. It’s an outlier in May’s back catalogue – not as familiar or successful as the albums he made with Queen, nor as fully fleshed out as the two hard-rock solo albums he released in the 90s. But, free of the pressures and expectations that came with his regular band, it’s the sound of a man having fun in the studio with his friends. As May writes in the sleeve notes of the reissue: “Those sessions are still there in my head, glowing like a warm beacon of joy in a period which for me was heading into uncertainty and darkness.”

If anyone can take credit for seeding the idea of Star Fleet Project in May’s head, it’s his son, James. James May was four years old when a new children’s sci-fi show featuring Gerry Anderson-style marionettes began airing on Saturday mornings on ITV in late 1982. Originally broadcast in Japan under the title X-Bomber, it had been dubbed into English and retitled Star Fleet for Western audiences. The repackaged show’s propulsive, synth-powered opening and closing theme were composed, and in the case of the latter, sung, by British composer and songwriter Paul Bliss.

“We used to get up every Saturday morning really early to watch the next episode together,” says May. “It was all very exciting to see what happened. And I enjoyed it as much as he did. I heard the signature tune and I thought: ‘Hmm, I like that. Maybe I could do something with it.’”

Queen were between albums at that point – “We’d made a conscious decision to lay off for a while,” says May – and the guitarist decided to make the most of his down time by heading out to Los Angeles.

“There’s something about LA where I feel more able to get out into the world,” he says. “I tend to be quite reclusive in England, it takes a lot to get me out. But in LA I wake up in the morning and think, ‘Who can I call? What should I do today?’”

It was on one of those days, in the spring of 1983, that he decided he should round up a few friends and go into the studio and have some fun. He knew just the people: REO Speedwagon drummer Alan Gratzer, former Rod Stewart/Jeff Beck bassist Phil Chen, and Queen’s touring keyboard player Fred Mandel. And then there was Eddie Van Halen.

“I immediately thought about Ed: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually get in there and play together?’” says May.

The admiration May felt for the guitarist was mutual. Van Halen had told him his band were covering Now I’m Here as far back as 1974, long before Queen made their big US breakthrough.

“He pointed out little bits in their arrangements which were inspired by things we’d done,” says May. One of those things was the ‘tapping’ technique which had become Van Halen’s signature. “He said: ‘Well, you did that on [Queen’s 1977 album track] It’s Late.’ I said: ‘Yeah, I only played with the idea because I’d seen this guy in Texas doing it.’ I’d done it in the most rudimentary form, then I’d moved on to something else. Whereas Ed basically made the guitar a new instrument.”

May didn’t have to give the idea of heading into the studio for a couple of days the hard sell to any of them, least of all Eddie. “I just got on the phone, and they all said: ‘Tell us what you want, we’ll be there, let’s go and have some fun.’ Explaining what it was came after.”

The idea of doing his version of the theme to his son’s favourite TV show was still kicking around his head. Aware that the other musicians wouldn’t have a clue what Star Fleet was, he made a rough demo and sent it to them.

“A very rough demo,” he says with a laugh. “It was just me singing into a tape machine and imitating guitars and drums. Phil and Ed came round to my little house in LA and we sat there going through it and kicking ideas around. It was just a great feeling from the beginning: ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’ It was like stepping into a place we’d never been.’”

This hastily convened collective gathered at the Record Plant Studios in Hollywood on April 21 for the first day of their two-day session. With them was engineer Mike Beiriger, who had worked with Cheap Trick, among others, although May would be credited as producer. Queen sessions could be intense, competitive and sometimes fractious. It was clear from the start that these were different.

“We were hyped up, it wasn’t like being in the studio with your regular band,” says May. “At one point, Alan finished one of the takes and said: ‘This is so much fun, this is going to be like cheating on your wife.’ I don’t think he ever cheated on his wife, but that sums up the feeling. It was exhilarating. It felt like an illicit liaison.”

The plan was to keep it simple: no individual tracking, none of the analysis or debate that went into a Queen or Van Halen record, just five musicians playing off each other. “It was a total band recording session,” says May. “We were all there, plugged in, playing at the same time during every take.”

May’s version of the Star Fleet theme was the main focus. With vocals from May (‘Send a message out across the sky, alien raiders just passed Gemini’), it stayed true to the TV show theme that inspired it, although the original version was a jumping-off point. Here, it ran to eight minutes, the two guitarists pushed on by admiration rather than competition. May has a vivid recollection of what it felt like to play alongside Eddie Van Halen: “It was like going down a really challenging ski run. I was very much conscious of his talent and his incredible aura. But to hear the two guitars together was a blast. Not the same, by any means, but we locked together very easily.”

May had another song he wanted to record, a seven-minute blues number titled Let Me Out. The blues wasn’t an obvious part of Queen’s arsenal, although they’d dabbled on songs such as 1974 B-side See What A Fool I’ve Been and ZZ Top-esque News Of The World album track Sleeping On The Sidewalk. But the style was certainly part of May’s own musical DNA.

“It had always been there with me,” he says of the influence of the blues. “I think it was different for Freddie. He didn’t feel the blues. He felt rock’n’roll, he felt Elvis and Little Richard, but he didn’t feel Muddy Waters. He did feel Aretha Franklin, though, to the bottom of his heart. I think Freddie wanted to be Aretha Franklin.”

Let Me Out wasn’t as pre-planned as the album’s main track. May remembers singing it to the rest of them in the studio. “Once you get the hang of it, there’s really not that much to the song,” he told them. “It’s all in the feeling.”

Van Halen’s presence on Let Me Out isn’t as prominent as it is on the Star Fleet theme. “You can hear that he’s not particularly au fait with the song,’ says May. “He plays a few little bits as it goes along, chucking in a couple of notes. He’s waiting for the moment where he’s going to pitch in and try some licks.”

The musical theme continued on the mini-album’s final track, a spontaneous 13-minute blues workout that saw the two guitarists trading the kind of licks they’d grown up listening to years before. Its title was a dead giveaway: Blues Breaker (Dedicated To E.C.), a reference to John Mayall’s groundbreaking 60s blues-rock collective and their one-time star guitarist Eric Clapton.

“There’s all sorts of differences between the way Eric runs his life and the way I run mine, but he’ll always be my hero,” says May. “Every time I hear Key To Love [from 1966’s Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, aka The Beano Album] I get chills up my spine. That’s why I do what I do, because Eric did that.

It wasn’t just May that Clapton influenced. “I remember Ed saying: ‘I haven’t played like this for a while. It’s how I started off playing. I wanted to play like Eric before I started all this tapping stuff.’”

May has a hazy memory of sending the finished song to the man who inspired it. “I think I did send it to Eric, but I never heard back,” says May. “He probably hated it, but that doesn’t matter to me.”

Overdubs on all three tracks were kept to a minimum. Chief among these was the run both guitarists played on Star Fleet. “We’d tried it during the takes but it always went wrong, more due to my mistakes than anything else,” says May. “We decided to put it in afterwards so not to distract ourselves any further.”

And so two of the pre-eminent guitarists of the era sat facing each other in the control room, instruments plugged in. “When the moment came we both went for the run,” May remembers. “It’s probably my favourite moment of the session.”

May had no plans to release the tracks the group had recorded. “But then when I’d got back to London and messed around with it and done mixes with [Queen producer] Mack, I just thought it would be a real shame if people didn’t hear it,” he says. (Queen bandmate Roger Taylor would add backing vocals to the chorus of Star Fleet.)

He called the other musicians. How would they feel if the tracks came out? “They were all up for it,” he says. “I made sure they all made some money out of it – which nobody asked for.”

The Star Fleet Project mini-album, credited to Brian May + Friends, was released on October 31, 1983. It peaked at No.35 in the UK. A heavily edited version of the lead track, fared less well as a single, falling outside the Top 50. Perhaps people were less interested in either May or Van Halen outside of the context of their respective bands, or maybe the idea of two of the most venerated rock stars on the planet teaming up for a song inspired by a kids’ TV theme was just too strange a concept. But chart positions weren’t really the point – this was about a group of musicians having fun.

The Star Fleet session turned out to be a one-off. After it was finished, everyone involved went back to their main bands. May returned to Queen, who released The Works, the following year, while Eddie Van Halen soon began work on the album that would become Van Halen’s 1984.

“We stayed in contact to a degree,” May says of his friendship with Eddie. “There was one particular time when I disgraced myself by falling over in a hotel bathroom because I wasn’t used to drinking at the rate he was drinking at. But we never played together again.”

There’s a sweet moment at the very end of Blues Breaker, the final song on the original mini-album, where the tape captures a snippet of conversation after the band have stopped playing. May can be heard saying: “I wish I’d done this more often in my life.” If it sounded heartfelt at the time, the death of Eddie in 2020 (and bassist Phil Chen the following year) casts it in a more poignant light today.

“I really wish I had done it more often,” says May. “I wish it more now than I did then. I wish I’d made those phone calls more often. Especially when you lose somebody, you think: ‘There were times when I could have picked up the phone.’ Life just takes you off in different directions.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 316 (June 2023)

Few modern metal bands are as volatile as Five Finger Death Punch. The Las Vegas five-piece have had their share of ups and downs over the years, many of them revolving around combustible frontman Ivan Moody.

The singer, who is now sober after struggling with alcohol addiction over the years, has admitted that he performed drunk in the past. Moody had an infamous onstage meltdown in 2015 in Memphis, Tennessee in 2015, prompting the rest of the band to walk offstage and abandon the show. Another incident the following year saw a seemingly inebriated and emotional Moody apologising to the crowd for a sub-par performance at a show in Worcester, Massachusetts, blaming his issues on his mother’s illness.

More recently, the singer admitted to tensions with 5FDP guitarist and founder Zoltan Bathory over the controversial ‘anti-mask’ video for 2020’s Covid-era single Living The Dream, directed by Bathory. “I called [Zoltan], like, ‘You implemented your own platform into Five Finger Death Punch, and now I’m gonna have to answer for it, because I’m the singer,’” Moody told Metal Hammer in 2022, adding: “I love Zoltan to death, that’s his opinion, but it won’t ever be done with my name on it again.”

In an in-depth interview in the new issue of Metal Hammer, Bathory addresses the relationship between the two men. Asked if the turbulence within 5FDP – who recently released their tenth studio album Legacy – has ever made him consider ending the band or firing Moody, the guitarist admits that he could sometimes “kill” his bandmate, but they remain “brothers” despite it all.

“Never,” says Zoltan, on the question of splitting the band. “Because I always respected that Ivan is the middle finger of this generation – a hand grenade with a loose spring. That’s who he is. I always looked at that as amazing: he’s uncorruptible. I could tell him, ‘Ivan, you’ll lose a million dollars if you don’t feel like doing these shows’, and he’d say, ‘Fuck off, I don’t care. I don’t give a shit.’ So he’s hard to manage, but I could, because I respected that he’s as punk rock as punk rock can get.

“Sometimes I want to kill him,” the guitarist continues. “Sometimes I’m making plans, thinking about what supplies I need, where I hide the body. But then I’m like, ‘Man, then I don’t have a singer who can do all these things.’ So you stay with the fantasy. And I’m pretty sure he’s plotting, too – ‘If I could just tie some dynamite to his backpack…’ We’re brothers, but we understand who we are and how to work together, and what’s worth fighting about and what isn’t.”

Bathory talks about any regrets he may have had over the band’s 20-plus year career. “Maybe the stress of it. I always worked 150%,” he tells Hammer. “People imagine a rock band is stripper poles and disco balls and mountains of whatever drug is your choice. I like the business aspect, because it's all strategy. But at the same time, it takes time. If I hadn't stressed, maybe it would've worked out anyway. But then again, it's a butterfly effect. Would I change anything? Absolutely not. I wouldn't be me; I wouldn't be here.”

Read the full interview with Zoltan in the new issue of Metal Hammer, on sale now. Order it here and have it delivered straight to your door.

It’s January 1980 and Aerosmith are playing Reefer Head Woman from their new Night In The Ruts album at the Civic Centre in Maine. It’s a sold-out show, but singer Steven Tyler doesn’t care.

Frustrated at having no cocaine to counteract the intoxicating effects of all the booze he’s swallowed since waking – rounded off by two double martinis gulped minutes before taking the stage – he gives up and pretends to pass out. Throwing himself to the stage he fakes a seizure, twitching his leg to make it look authentic.

Such is his level of chemical dependency and alcoholic intoxication, this is the best idea he can come up with to avoid the indignity of playing a gig just plain old-fashioned drunk.

To this point in the tour Aerosmith have just about been getting away with it. Though with guitarist Joe Perry no longer in the band – replaced by JP-lookalike Jimmy Crespo – they are a shadow of their former selves. They’ve played shows where the singer has frequently forgotten his lines, and, when not at the mic has just sat on the drum riser, too unsteady to stand, much less move about.

Tonight it’s worse. The band stop playing, and Tyler is carried from the stage, a faker and a fuck-up.

Elsewhere in early 1980, Perry is touring with his original Joe Perry Project. The guitarist had left Aerosmith the previous year, midway through recording A Night In The Ruts, the “dysfunctional depression” that was crippling Aerosmith forcing him out of his own band. But now his new outfit faces ruin because singer Ralph Morman has turned into an out-of-control drunk.

“One night he showed up in a wild state of inebriation,” Perry recalls in his autobiography Rocks. “I hauled off and decked him.”

There’s an irony to his complaints. Perry was not in good shape himself: a barely functioning drunk addicted to snorting heroin. Career-wise, The Joe Perry Project’s Let The Music Do The Talking album had been well reviewed, but was poorly promoted by Columbia and wasn’t troubling the charts. The gigs, though good, were small-scale. This was a problem – because Aerosmith’s co-manager David Krebs had not long since told Joe he personally owed $180,000 in room service charges and helpfully suggested that a solo album might be a good way to pay the bill.

For Aerosmith and for Joe Perry, however, things are going to get worse before they get any better.

The 1980s began less than four years after Aerosmith’s fourth album Rocks had shipped platinum upon release, rising to No.3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Hindsight suggests that Rocks, the multi-platinum follow-up to the multi-platinum Toys In The Attic, was where the ‘first career’ of Aerosmith peaked. Afterwards, their decline and fall would be as marked and meteoric as their rise had been.

After Tyler’s fake seizure, Aerosmith cancelled a week’s worth of dates – thereby falling a little further – then resumed and limped on to the end of the tour, and more drink- and drug-induced lethargy. When they reconvened, work on a proposed next album was painfully slow. Then that faltering progress all but ground to a halt after Tyler badly injured himself in a motorcycle crash. Silently but inevitably, poverty crept up and was soon crippling them all.

Bassist Tom Hamilton: “For two years, the album we were working on – Rock In A Hard Pace – was always two months away. It was hard times, we [Tom and his wife Terri] sold our house and moved into a condo…”

Drummer Joey Kramer: “It was rough. There was no money. I was on the balls of my ass. I spent everything I had… until, finally, nothing.”

Guitarist Brad Whitford: “No money, no income, all my savings going to alimony and mortgages. Sold my guitars… sold my house…”

Eventually Whitford could stand it no more, and quit. Aerosmith were down to just three original members, Tyler plus the rhythm section of Hamilton and Kramer.

As Perry’s marriage to fellow drug addict Elyssa continued to falter and debts mounted, he released the second Project album, I’ve Got The Rock’N’Rolls Again (featuring new vocalist Charlie Farren) in 1981. Whitford, meanwhile, hooked up with Ted Nugent’s singer Derek St Holmes to release the eponymous Whitford-St Holmes the same year. They toured briefly, but their record didn’t sell well.

On the recommendation of producer Jack Douglas, Aerosmith recruited Rick Dufay to play on Whitford’s side of the stage. It seemed like a good idea at the time, even though Dufay boasted to the singer that he had escaped from a “loony bin” having jumped out of a window and broken his legs…

The older, wiser and sober Tyler now reckons Dufay was “out of his mind”. Back then, though, the singer barely cared.

When the tour ended he “got deeper and deeper into drugs”, hanging out with and scoring heroin off his friend Richie Supa (with whom he’d co-written a live favourite called Chip Away The Stone). Somehow, stoned and hallucinating, he eventually managed to write enough lyrics to finish Rock In A Hard Place in time for release in August 1982. Good in parts, but a long way from former glories, it wasn’t a record that suggested the epic amount of time spent on it had been a wise investment. A Gold sales award – ending a string of Platinum hits for Aerosmith – and a Billboard chart peak of No.32 confirmed this.

Eventually, Tyler admitted to himself he needed help. He first tried detoxing at the Good Samaritan Hospital in New York in 1983 but, as he admitted in his 2011 biography Does The Noise In My Head Bother You?: “One of the reasons I wanted to go to Good Samaritan was that I heard they did
tests on heroin… I thought: ‘Can I be one of the guinea pigs?’”

By then, Aerosmith’s Krebs was hiring psychiatrists to meet Tyler and report back with their thoughts. Domestically, Tyler’s fights with his wife of 12 years, Cyrinda, had turned physical and violent. Once, as she prepared to drive off, he jumped on her car and smashed the windscreen.

Tyler: “Cocaine insanity! She got out of the car and a violent, uncontrollable fight erupted. We were punching and scratching, and we fell over and rolled on the ground…”

For Perry, domestic life was no sweeter. Elyssa continued to spend money extravagantly, as if he were still a member of the 70s Aerosmith.

He recalled: “I was on the verge of losing my house. I was fucked up from drinking. I thought I was at the bottom, but every day that bottom kept getting deeper and darker.”

Sometimes, though,, rock bottom can become a solid foundation on which to build a new life.

That new life – or “second career” as the five original, once-again-Platinum-selling members of Aerosmith are wont to describe it – was still a way up the road.

Perry was taking any gigs he could to earn cash – sometimes supporting the likes of Heart and the J Geils Band, always travelling in a van and staying in cheap hotels to keep costs low. Back home, he took the life-changing decision to walk out on Elyssa, after six-and-a-half years together – but paid a heavy price in the battle for access to their infant son Adrian.

He was happy to play with the Project, but the debts he faced weren’t going away. One good thing was happening in the guitarist’s life, though. He had hooked up with a new manager, Tim Collins, who became “the only steady force in my life”.

The deal was sealed after Perry tested Collins’ commitment by emptying a drawer in which he kept his unopened mail: mostly bills, IRS claims and foreclosure notices threatening repossession of his home, but also some unsigned death threats (presumably from drug dealers he owed money) and royalty cheques worth thousands of dollars. Collins took them away in a grocery bag and came back a week later offering to pay off “a big portion” of the guitarist’s debts, no strings attached.

Asked why, Collins simply reasoned: “I figure I need to do this to win your trust. I believe in your talent. I believe your best years are ahead of you. I want to manage you.”

One of his first moves was to negotiate Perry out of his deal with Columbia and get him a new one with MCA. Perry disbanded the old Project and hired a new one (fronted by singer Cowboy Mach Bell) on smaller salaries to record their third album, Once A Rocker, Always A Rocker, in 1983. It wasn’t as good as the first two, but the band got to open for ZZ Top on some of their US Eliminator tour. The headline gigs they were playing, though, Perry says, “were getting smaller and smaller”.

He did persuade Whitford to join the line-up, however, and the rhythm guitarist stayed for a month. Kramer later played drums at a few dates, too. Much more significantly, though, Perry was about to meet his soulmate, who was discovered when the Project were about to make a video for their last chance at a hit, a song called Black Velvet Pants.

Perry: “Tim Collins had a bunch of books sent over by talent agencies, I thumbed through half-heartedly until I came to a picture that stopped me in my tracks – a headshot of a beautiful blonde called Billie Montgomery. There was a look in her eyes that got to me, heart and soul. I had to meet her.”

When he did meet her, it was love at first sight. And their relationship would endure long after the video shoot had wrapped, to this day.

Aerosmith, meanwhile, were in trouble. They were playing bigger venues than the Project but, as Tyler has admitted, the tour for Rock In A Hard Place was “a disaster”.

Tyler: “By 1983 I had no money and no future except getting further into the pit. Back in 1976, when I read stories about guys who lost everything and blew a million bucks snorting all they had, I used to say: ‘That’ll never happen to me.’ But in the end, I blew $20 million.”

In addition, he came to admit that he was missing his buddy: “During the years that Joe and I were broken up I realised I wasn’t half the musician I thought I was without him.”

The two had kept in touch, though.

Perry: “I’d occasionally call Steven, or he’d call me… ‘How’re things going?’ Great, I’d lie. How about you? ‘Great!’ he’d lie… The bullshit flew thick and fast.”

Tyler: “I went to see the Joe Perry Project perform at the Bottom Line, then Joe came to the Worcester Centrum in the spring of 1983 to see an Aerosmith concert. We did a few lines of heroin in the dressing room – just for old times’ sake…”

The heroin took its toll on Tyler, who collapsed on stage in front of 14,000 people… and although it had been Tyler’s wife Cyrinda who supplied the drug, Perry took the blame.

“It’s just like the old days, Joe,” Tom Hamilton told him angrily. “You’re no good for this band. Look what you did! Why don’t you just stay the fuck away from us?”

Yet the idea of a reunion persisted.

In early 1984, Tyler and Perry met with Tim Collins and, despite some initial friction, Tyler – by then living in a hotel on $20 a day – agreed the original line-up should get together for a meeting at the only place available: Tom Hamilton’s house.

Perry: “If you want to put it on the IQ meter, Tom is a really smart guy, but I think he had just been more conservative with his money and watched what was going on. Also, he didn’t have to go through a divorce. He’s the one who’s been married the longest among us.

“Any professional who has to go through a divorce, the finances are going to take a real hit. It’s one of those things in life, it isn’t peculiar to rock’n’roll. If you’re making a lot of money, they take a lot of money.”

Once it became apparent that Joe would only rejoin the band on the condition it cut all ties with Leber-Krebs Management and joined him with Tim Collins, they set about discussing a way forward and naming a scapegoat for all their problems. They settled on David Krebs.

Perry: “The main influence that the drugs will have had was that we were partying too much and didn’t notice the kind of money we were spending or take care of the decisions we were making – I don’t think we could have spent that much on drugs! And it’s not like we all had three houses and 16 Maseratis. We all had one house and a couple of nice cars, and that was it.

“I look back and just think we were taken advantage of, maybe in some quasi-illegal ways. You just have to do the numbers in your head: all those years we were selling out so many arenas, so many times. So to sit there and be told that the band’s kitty was empty, I mean – did they do something illegal? I don’t think so. We couldn’t prove anything. Was it immoral? Yeah!

“They weren’t taking care of us in terms of taxes and things like that. I should have been more on top of it but that was my own naïveté. There was a lot of money there, just lying on the table, and people took it because they could. That is the story. I can’t prove anything – but I was constantly asking for accountings and things like that, but it was kinda tough to get the rest of the band to lock up.”

While the reunion idea was left hanging, a third party was about to plant a crucial seed. Alice Cooper was looking for a new guitarist, and his manager Shep Gordon called Collins to sound out JP. Seeing no long-term future for the Project, Perry jumped at the chance and went to Gordon’s county pile to meet and jam with Alice. The next day, while Alice played golf, Perry called Tyler to gloat.

At the time Tyler pretended not to care but deep down he was incensed. His book suggests he remembers the incident differently to Perry, but says that he later called him back. “Are you seriously going to be his guitar player? What the fuck?” the singer wrote. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard! Just stop. The shit’s over. Why don’t you just come back with Aerosmith?”

Well, since Tyler had asked so nicely, how could Joe refuse? Within months, the Toxic Twins would reunite and the crazy train would be back on the rails.

Additional quotes: Rocks: My Life In And Out Of Aerosmith by Joe Perry, Does The Noise In My Head Bother You? by Steven Tyler and Walk This Way – The Authorised Biography Of Aerosmith by Stephen Davis.

Knocking on the door of success for years, Styx embodied the never-say-die, never-surrender ethos of their blue-collar Midwestern roots. Signed to Wooden Nickel Records, their self-titled debut was released in 1972 to little fanfare. A quick succession of studio albums followed in its wake (Styx II, The Serpent Is Rising, Man Of Miracles, Equinox and Crystal Ball); these prog-pop confections, anchored by muscular musicianship and consummate song craft, failed to make a major dent on the national charts, save for power-ballad Lady, penned by vocalist/keyboard player Dennis DeYoung, which reached No.6 in the US Top 40 in March 1975.

Steadily building their audiences on a grassroots level off an exhaustive touring schedule and explosive, well-oiled live presentation, Styx remained resolute in their quest for superstardom, seemingly undeterred by the obstacles that lay in their path. The Grand Illusion (1977), the band’s seventh album, finally connected with the public on a grand scale, delivering the smash career-changing hit they so desperately needed with Come Sail Away. The group’s gifted trio of songsmiths, DeYoung and guitarists Tommy Shaw and James ‘JY’ Young, supplied the firepower that kept Styx permanently residing in the upper reaches of the album and singles charts.

Following their initial split in the wake of 1983’s divisive Kilroy Was Here, the band regrouped at the end of the decade minus Shaw. Another split in the mid-’90s was followed by yet another reunion, though DeYoung and the band parted company in 1999. The two parties have never reunited, though the singer has continued to fly the flag for the band he formed decades earlier.

In 2014, as he prepared to release a new CD/DVD combo, Dennis DeYoung And The Music Of Styx – Live In Los Angeles. Classic Rock sat down with the charismatic frontman to discuss the stories behind a suite of his old band’s classic songs.

Lady (1973)

DDY: “Lady was the first song I ever wrote and sang by myself on a record. I was not a songwriter when we started making records in 1972. We started writing a few songs in those early days in 1970-71, but we were really a covers band. We spent most of our time getting hired and playing gigs by covering other people’s music.

“So I was not really a writer, and Lady was my first attempt to write a song from start to finish by myself. It was written for the first album, but the producer kept it off and made us record four other songs that were by outside songwriters – one [After You Leave Me] being George Clinton, believe it or not. Styx and Parliament/Funkadelic, yeah, they go together [laughs].

“Lady is really one of the first songs of its kind, and I can tell you why. When it was released to radio, they wouldn’t play it at first because they said they didn’t know how to categorise it. It started out like a sweet ballad and ended like a big rock song. Now that defines pretty much 50 per cent of all the music that’s written these days. Back then they didn’t really know what to do with it, so there you go. We’d often be compared to bands like Queen, but that was written before I ever heard a Queen record.”

Lorelei (1975)

DDY: “Lorelei was a song that was originally written by James Young and myself. It was the first song we wrote together in 1970 when he joined the band. It was originally called Live Our Lives Together. We wrote it, and then two years later we got a record deal. We’d never completed it, so in 1975 we revisited the structure. I wrote the lyrics, and it was influenced by the Stones’ Let’s Spend The Night Together. They were changing times in the 70s, where for the first time people were moving in and living together – I know it’s hard to imagine today but people gasped over that kind of thing. In fact, James was actually living with his girlfriend, later to become his wife.

“So they lived together, and at the time while it wasn’t unheard of – it was definitely groundbreaking. So I wrote those lyrics for Lorelei based on the idea of people living together and not being married. That’s what was the impetus to the lyric. The original hook was ‘live our lives together’, so I needed a three-syllable name. I started thinking of the letter ‘L’ and I came up with ‘Lorelei’, which is a made-up name. I never knew a Lorelei, and I’ve met many since who have told me their mothers named them that, and of course I apologise to them [laughs].”

Suite Madame Blue (1975)

DDY: “Suite Madame Blue was written in 1975. Everywhere you looked they were advertising the coming Bicentennial celebration in 1976. They were advertising Bicentennial mugs and trinkets, and I think there were Bicentennial panties too [laughs]. This is the first song I ever wrote about America. I got to thinking about how I felt about the state of the country in 1975, and I didn’t feel too good about it, considering we had just come through the end of Vietnam, Watergate and the oil embargo of 1974.

“At the time, we were on the road trying to travel in a van. For the song, I used a metaphor of a once-beautiful lady who had refused to acknowledge that she’d grown old, and that it was time for her to look in the mirror and figure out a new way to make it in the world. I guess because I was afraid of saying it literally, I used some sort of phony baloney metaphor. At the end of the song I do say red, white and blue – so Suite Madame Blue was the metaphor for the United States.”

The Grand Illusion (1977)

DDY: “The Grand Illusion was my way of expressing to the audience that the pressure that is put on them by advertising, media and, yes, rock stars, to believe in an illusion that really does not exist, was not healthy for them.

“I was trying to point out to them simply that they shouldn’t believe the myths that other people create for them; they should understand that it really is in some ways a form of entertainment or simply advertising. That message comes across in the song: ‘Don’t be fooled by the radio, the TV or the magazines/they show you photographs of how your life should be/but they’re just someone else’s fantasies.’

“It’s about trying to fulfil a fantasy and feeling that you come up short if you don’t meet these certain requirements, but that’s a never-ending chase. You can’t ever get the carrot, because there will always be another one placed in front of you. It’s under the guise of me telling the audience clearly in the opening lines of the song: ‘Here we are and don’t we look good up on the stage because we’ve got the great lights and we look larger than life’ – we had this big PA.

“But really, in The Grand Illusion, I was warning them not to buy into what we were presenting to them, the whole idea that [recites lyrics again] ‘deep inside we’re all the same’. This is something I thought about in 1977. The people who write about music are ultimately the people who kind of determine what is cool and what is not cool. I don’t think the band ever really received much credit ever outside of our audience, which was pretty substantial, about what we were trying to say in a lot of our songs.

“We really wrote a lot about what it was like to be an American. I’m proud of those lyrics in The Grand Illusion and the fact that I was clear to the audience. The funny thing is, when you’re dealing with an audience of younger people at the time – let’s figure that they were between 15 and 20 years old – I don’t know that they understood what was being said as much as that it had a good beat, that they like the singer and how tight their pants are [laughs]. But I’m proud of those lyrics, and I can look back and say that wasn’t the stupidest thing I ever said.”

Come Sail Away (1977)

Dennis DeYoung: “This song was written out of frustration from always having been the bridesmaid and never the bride in terms of a touring band.

“Before Come Sail Away we were everyone’s favourite backup band. We backed up groups like Kiss, Aerosmith, ZZ Top and [Bob] Seger – you name them, we played with them. But we never seemed to be able to make that leap to headliner status. So Come Sail Away to me is a reflection on my life to that point. It’s a song about a yearning to sail away to a better place.

“When I was writing the song I was just writing it about little old me, and somehow it became embraced by other people, some I know and a lot whom I don’t know personally.”

Babe (1979)

DDY: Babe was never intended to be a Styx song. It happened by accident. It was 1979, and it was my wife’s birthday. I wanted to write her a song to tell her how much I understood how hard the separation between us was on me as well as on her, because Styx were on the road a lot. So I went into Pumpkin Studios with John [drums] and Chuck Panozzo [bass] and we did a demo. Our guitar players were not around – JY was in California and Tommy was in Michigan. I’d just written the song, and it was supposed to be a demo for my wife only. The grand piano in the studio was out of tune but in the corner was a Fender Rhodes owned by a musician who hadn’t picked it up that day. I’d never played a Fender Rhodes before; I had
a Wurlitzer but I never played a Rhodes. But I said: “Hey, what does it matter?” Babe was just for my wife. So anyhow, they rolled out the Rhodes and we did the song, and I sang all the background harmonies.

“I played it for my wife, and then we played it for family members, because it was her birthday present. People were weeping openly and saying: “That’s a great song.” So then I played it for the band, and played it for the record company, and they loved it. So we went back in to try to re-record it, because it was just a demo and I thought I could sing it better, but we couldn’t recapture what was on there. I sang it better, but there was some frailty in the original demo. So the record you’ve heard on the radio all these years is that demo that I did, with me singing all the background vocals. The only thing we added was Tommy came in and played the guitar solo.”

Borrowed Time (1979)

DDY: Borrowed Time was a real collaboration between Tommy and I. In the last 20 years or so the political divide in this country has become so rampant, particularly with the media, whether it’s on TV or in magazines. But when I look back on that song today, I didn’t feel exactly that way in 1979.

“In Borrowed Time, I was reflecting on what I felt like as a teenager in the early 60s, when I say: ‘I was so cool back in ’65’. People seemed to know what they had to do and what their purpose was in this country at that time. They knew what they had to do to survive, and then suddenly things changed. [Recites lyrics:] ‘I’m so confused by the things I read/I need the truth but the truth is I don’t know who to believe/The left says yes, and the right says no/I’m in-between and the more I learn well/the less that I know.’ And that’s when we sing: ‘Yes! No!’ To me, that was like the left and the right, the conservatives and the liberals, yelling at each other. And I say: “I’m in the middle”, because that’s where I feel that I am in terms of my politics.

“When I look at politics today, even though I tend to be more conservative than liberal on certain things, I am not easily defined. I say right in the song [recites lyrics]: ‘I had my car and I made the scene/didn’t give a damn about no gasoline…’ That was the point. In 1965 gasoline was ridiculously cheap. In that song I’m reflecting on the change that has come and the change that is coming for this country.”

Rockin’ The Paradise (1981)

DDY: “All the lyrics in Rockin’ The Paradise are mine, but the music is an equal collaboration between JY, Tommy and myself. I was walking to an art gallery and saw a serigraph by a Chicago artist called ‘Paradise Theater’. I loved it. It was image showing urban decay of an old movie theatre with the Paradise Theater marquee, and it said ‘temporarily closed’.

“This was in 1980 and it was a very difficult time for America. We had suffered the Iranian hostage crisis all through 1979, and there was the Presidential election between [Jimmy] Carter and [Ronald] Reagan. Those lyrics really sprung from my feelings about the country.

“I used a metaphor of an old broken-down movie palace in an inner city, a once proud example of paradise as it’s often referred to as America. It’s the land of plenty and milk and honey, and the streets paved with gold. In 1980, to me things seemed even more dire. Carter was doing those fireside chats without the fire. He was wearing a sweater, and talking about turning your thermostat down, and the end of oil as we know it.

“There was this feeling that we had definitely lost our way, and our place in the world. The lyrics in Rockin’ The Paradise deal directly with my feelings. Lots of people tell me the intro riff sounds like The Who. My apologies to Pete Townshend, but I have subconsciously and consciously been ripping him off as long as I can remember [laughs]. My first attempt was a song on Styx II called Earl Of Roseland; that was my first attempt to be in The Who, but they never called me.”

The Best Of Times (1981)

DDY: “I can honestly say in all seriousness that I have pretended with great aplomb to know exactly what I’m doing when actually all I’m doing is making things up as I go along.

“Performers are 50 per cent pure unabashed ego and 50 per cent complete insecurity, and those two things are always clashing. But I’ve always known when I’ve written something special. It’s a good quality to have as a creative person. You have to be able to be honest with yourself and know when you’re writing mediocre crap. You don’t want to assign As to C-minus work. So with The Best Of Times I felt, “Hey, this is a good song but where it goes from there will be dependent on the music business and less upon what I do. But I can only cover what I do.” So when I wrote The Best Of Times I thought, you know, Dickens had a good idea when he wrote the beginning to A Tale Of Two Cities, why shouldn’t I have this idea again?”

Mr Roboto (1983)

DDY: “Here’s how the song was written. At the time I had
a little keyboard set up in my loft that was in the front of my house – it had 16-foot ceilings and was a cool little space. I bought this brand new Roland synthesiser, and it was the first synthesiser with an arpeggiator on it: you can hold one key and it plays a rhythmic pattern. It’ll do anything you want to programme. I put this programme up and I held this note down and it was going [imitates sound] ‘ding, ding, ding, ding…’ I had this other keyboard and I went [imitates percussive single note] ‘bomp, bomp’ – and that’s where the music came from. It really sprang from my purchase of a brand new synthesiser. And why it was written? It was a song that was supposed to take the narrative of the film that would precede our concert and connect it to the very first song on stage. It was a transitional piece of music to connect a film with a concert.

“That’s all I ever thought of it as, and Mr Roboto was the only song that I’ve ever written that was a million-seller and became a hit that I didn’t ever think would ever be a single. Never. It was never written as a single. When we were doing it, and we did it collectively, nobody in the band would have ever imagined it as a single when we were recording it. It was my wife who said to me: “That is a hit record, Dennis.” I said: “You’re nuts! What are the fans gonna think this record is about? At the end I’m yelling, ‘I’m Kilroy!’ Where the hell does that come from? How can anybody make any sense of that?” And she said: “That’s a hit record.” And it was and I was fooled. All it was, was a transitional piece going from point A to point B on the Kilroy Was Here album.

“The fact that it became a hit record surprised the hell out of me. And contrary to popular belief, the band wasn’t leery of Mr Roboto. To dispel all craziness and rewriting of history, everyone dug that song when we were doing it. Now, was there some scepticism or was there some doubt as to whether or not we could pull off a concept like Kilroy on stage, by having the band members to act in character? Yes.

“There was trepidation and there was fear; there was all that stuff. So none of us ever considered the fact that it was going to have any effect on our audience, however, we didn’t initially see it as the first single. Imagine the first song you heard off Kilroy on the radio was Don’t Let It End. Imagine that. People would have been totally comfortable and understood who that was. Right? That was no shock to the system. But we all agreed collectively to put out Mr Roboto first. The consequences were both positive and negative. But it was a hit. With the fear of sounding like a pompous ass, Mr Roboto has somehow manoeuvered its way into popular culture. And I’m expecting
a cheque any day now from the Japanese people for making Americans aware of how to say ‘thank you’ in Japanese.”

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents AOR issue December 13

After exploring the gothic menace of Edgar Allan Poe on Tales Of Mystery And Imagination, The Alan Parsons Project looked to the future for their second album. Coinciding with the late-1970s science fiction boom, I Robot gave producer and engineer extraordinaire Alan Parsons a showcase for his studio mastery. He told Prog the story in 2013.

Immortalised by Homer Simpson as ‘some sort of hovercraft’, The Alan Parsons Project created classic prog albums even while defying the conventions of what constituted a band in the first place. As an in-house engineer at Abbey Road Studios, Parsons’ place in prog history was assured when he worked on Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. With credits that included The Beatles’ Abbey Road, Parsons was right at the forefront of what could be accomplished in the recording studio; and his expertise was much in demand in the 70s when he worked with Paul McCartney, The Hollies and Cockney Rebel, to name just three.

Not content with just being an engineer and producer, Parsons teamed up with songwriter Eric Woolfson to form the Project and provide a platform for their musical ideas. Joined by a host of guest musicians, the duo released their debut album, Tales Of Mystery And Imagination, in 1976, inspired by the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. It impressed Clive Davis sufficiently to sign them to Arista Records for their follow up, I Robot, which took its name and concept from the science fiction writings of Isaac Asimov.

“I wasn’t familiar with his work – it was really Eric that instigated the thing,” says Parsons about the inspiration behind the album. “I certainly was a science fiction fan – I used to read short stories quite a bit; although I wasn’t really much of a reader; never was, probably never will be. I read I, Robot cover to cover once the idea came up and I thought it was great.

”I think it’s fairly well documented that we don’t follow his philosophy at all, or the story. We had opposing ideas about the relationships that man and machine would have. But it was a good link to have because a lot of people knew of Asimov’s work long before our album came out.”

Parsons’ name may have fronted the group, but at the time his role was very much focused on the technical side of the music. “Clive Davis signed us without really knowing anything about the way we worked or who contributed what,” he says. “It was always my role to put my engineering hat on and try to make best use of what the studio could contribute to a recording or to a composition.

“There's no question that some of the time the production itself would shape the composition, and that’s why I felt justified in sharing the composing credits with Eric because we very much worked together towards the end result. Sometimes he would literally come up with a complete song but I would change it in certain ways and make it slightly different and therefore I had my stamp on it.”

The core of the group that played on I Robot came from Scottish rock band Pilot, for whom Parsons had produced the hit single Magic – Stuart Tosh on drums, David Paton on bass and guitarist Ian Bairnson. Joining them was a stream of a different lead singers – eight in total – that included Allan Clarke from The Hollies and Steve Harley from Cockney Rebel; Parsons having worked on Make Me Smile (Come Up And See Me). “I think Cockney Rebel were actually quite progressive. Because of their appearance they were possibly considered to be rather glam rock and glam pop – but I think their music was really quite prog,” says Parsons.

For an album hailed as a prog classic, I Robot features remarkably few musicians with previous experience in the genre, particularly on the vocal front. For example, Lenny Zakatek came from the pop group Gonzalez, who scored a disco hit with I Haven’t Stopped Dancing Yet – as far from prog as can be. “I think people liked to do guest appearances,” says Parsons. “I don’t think Allan Clarke had ever been asked to guest on anybody’s album before, nor had Steve Harley as I recall.

”I think the choices we made were a little on the unexpected side. Allan Clarke from The Hollies – wow, that’s a strange choice! We felt there was a strength there. Dave Townsend, who sang Don’t Let It Show, was not known as a singer, but was very well known as a writer because he wrote Miss You Nights, a hugely respected ballad that Cliff Richard had a hit with.

“The other thing was purely practical. I’d worked with Allan for years with The Hollies. All I had to do was pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, can you come and listen to a song and see if you’d like to sing it?’ Nearly everybody we worked with right through to the last album tended to be people we knew or people whose managers we knew. Rather than desperately trying to find somebody that we thought would fit the bill we tried to think of people that we knew or that we’d worked with before in some capacity.”

One unique challenge from this way of working was that the songs were invariably written before Parsons and Woolfson knew who would end up singing them. In the case of Some Other Time, when they couldn’t find one singer who fit the tune, they ended up with two – Peter Straker, best known for being the star of the musical Hair, and Jaki Whitren, who took the first crack at the track.

“I got her in to sing the song and I thought she totally nailed the choruses but I didn’t get the right effect on the verses,” says Parsons. “Then Peter Straker came in and had a go at it. What was interesting was that the voices were actually very similar. Most people haven’t realised the song is sung by two people – one voice on the verses, one voice on the choruses.”

For an album as densely arranged and meticulously produced as I Robot, one of Parsons’ constant battles was against the limits of the studio technology, at a time when state-of-the-art was 24-track analogue tape. “It was always a challenge to make tracks available. You would either mix seven or eight things down to a pair of tracks so you had six more tracks available or you would copy from one 24-track tape to another, condensing all the tracks down to a lesser number so we could add stuff. We quite often added stuff just wild on the mix, particularly effects, and stuff like that would be done at the mixing stage. It was a challenge.

“It was even worse, of course, on 16-track – and remember that Dark Side Of The Moon was 16-track. You were always fighting to find a way to squeeze things on. You would sometimes have to mix a backing vocal track with a sax track just to squeeze it on there.

”That’s the producer/engineer’s job, to know where everything is and how it fits and how to make the mixing process as simple as possible. We didn’t do stuff just to make it deliberately complicated – it was hopefully well laid-out so, had I got run over by a bus, somebody else could have picked it up and made reasonable sense of it.”

Fortunately, no buses interfered with the finishing of the album, which was released in the summer of 1977 – as science fiction was just about to take over the world in the form of Star Wars. “That was just a dream come true; it really was. We were out promoting I Robot and the buzz was starting at exactly the same time – people queuing up all night to go and see this mysterious movie. We all went to see it in Chicago while we were on a promotional trip. I loved it. To this day it’s in my top three movies.”

He describes the reaction to the album as “fantastic,” adding: “I remember one of the principal A&R guys at Arista saying, ‘This isn’t just a record; this is an event.’ Fantastic initial reaction. It was the age when the concept album was fashionable and hip. If I decided to put out a concept album now they’d go, ‘Oh no, Alan Parsons, another concept album, oh dear.’ But that’s the way it was. It was good timing and everybody liked the basic conceptual idea.”

Well, almost everyone. “We barely got a single play on Radio 1. If anything we’d get on Bob Harris late at night, or Alan Freeman. Alan was very good to us; he was well known for being out of the ordinary and supporting real rock music as opposed to Top 10 pop.”

The lack of radio didn’t stop the album reaching Number 30 in the UK chart, while it broke into the Top 10 on The Billboard 200. The music industry was a very different place in 1977: the money was in album sales and big bands put on spectacular tours that bled cash but more than recuperated their losses in record sales. However, the Project weren’t about to venture outside of the comfort of their studio home.

“We made it very clear in interviews at the time, ‘Oh no, we couldn’t possibly do this live; we’re a studio band’ – that was the feeling,” says Parsons. “‘This music is simply too complex, particularly because of the orchestration, to ever play live.’ Nobody was more surprised than I was when eventually we started doing it, and today it’s my main activity.

“The other thing was that I was not a performer on the albums, except for the occasional backing vocal part or rhythm guitar part. We’d muse over what I would do in any live band anyway. Get on the stage and warm up the audience?”

I Robot still holds a special place in his affections. “I remember when Allan Clarke went into the studio and sang for the first time, I went, ‘Oh my God, he’s nailing it!’ And on Genesis Ch.1 V. 32 I was very touched when Clive Davis said to me, ‘This is a great piece of music – congratulations!’”

Anika Nilles has been pulling onstage pranks on Geddy Lee and and Alex Lifeson during Rush's hugely successful Fifty Something reunion tour.

Her antics show that she is unfazed at having to step into the shoes of the late, great Neil Peart who died of glioblastoma in 2020 at the age of 67.

Nilles' latest onstage stunt came as they were wrapping up a performance of Working Man at Little Caesar's Arena in Detroit, Michigan, on Wednesday night.

As shown in the video below, Lee and Lifeson are waiting for her signal to strike the final chord of the song when she grabs a bag of chips and has a quick snack before offering the bag to the guitarist and bassist.

They decline and she puts down the bag and quickly plays her part in an attempt to catch them off guard. But the seasoned pros aren't put off and nail the timing.

The prank led one fan to quip in the video comments that Nilles is "all that and a bag of chips."

Nilles has been pulling similar pranks throughout the tour and a compilation of her best efforts can also be viewed below.

The German drummer, who previously worked with Jeff Beck, came under a lot of scrutiny when it was announced that she would take on the role.

Peart was ranked among the greatest drummers on the planet and Nilles was a relative unknown before being asked to perform with Rush.

She recently told Classic Rock she discussed Peart's thoughts on music when she met Lee and Lifeson for the first time in Canada.

She said: "I had a few songs prepared before I flew over, and we played those. But during the session we also talked a lot about Neil – about his view on music and drumming.

"We spoke a great deal about the feel of the songs. The most important point is simply to capture the feeling – that it feels right for the two of them to play their music again.

"And ultimately it will feel right for the fans as well. We talked about that a lot. The first session was really about getting to know each other and seeing how we function together."

Rush: Fifty Something remaining tour dates 2026

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 dates 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

Before Bob Defrin helped create some of the most iconic images in rock history, he first had to figure out what AC/DC looked like. And the answer was standing right in front of him: Angus Young and Bon Scott.

Over the course of four classic albums – Let There Be Rock, Powerage, If You Want Blood You’ve Got It and Highway To Hell – Defrin helped define the visual identity of AC/DC’s golden era. He art-directed the covers, guided the concepts, and even oversaw the creation of the now-iconic AC/DC logo, ultimately designed by Gerard Huerta.

He remembered a grin.

Defrin believed an AC/DC album cover should work exactly like an AC/DC song: “It comes in, hits you over the head and leaves,” he told me. “That’s what the cover should do.”

That philosophy can be seen across Bon’s entire AC/DC run. On Let There Be Rock, Bon stands in the foreground darkness as Angus is bathed in heavenly light. On the back cover of Powerage, he smirks behind a crazed schoolboy. On If You Want Blood You’ve Got It he’s singing along as though there’s nothing unusual about Angus being impaled by his own guitar. By Highway To Hell, Bon leans in, wearing mysterious symbols around his neck and with that familiar smile. The imagery became bigger, bolder and darker as the band’s star rose.

“It was a cartoon,” Defrin said of Highway To Hell. “We were just trying to have a good time.”

That sense of mischief was something he recognised immediately in Bon. The best example came during the If You Want Blood photo shoot in Boston. Defrin had flown in with a photographer, a severed guitar neck and gallons of fake blood. After the concert ended, the band returned to the stage and quickly recreated one of the most famous images in AC/DC history: Angus laying ‘impaled’ by his Gibson SG while blood poured across the scene. Most people remember Angus. Defrin remembers Bon.

“Bon’s expression is perfect,” he recalled. “The way he’s looking at Angus. He was just devilish.”

While Angus occupies the foreground, Bon hovers just behind him wearing a grin that somehow manages to be amused, mischievous and dangerous all at once.

“He was into it,” Defrin said, laughing.

Across Defrin’s covers, Angus was often the spectacle. Bon was the wink. The smirk. The guy quietly letting everyone in on the joke. AC/DC were never really about darkness. It was about mischief.

“Artists who don’t know who they are are the ones who give you trouble,” Defrin said. “AC/DC never had that problem. They knew exactly who they were.”

So did Bon Scott. Long before the world turned Bon into a legend, Defrin had already captured the essence of him.

A devilish smile.

Zak Starkey is back with The Who after last year's in-again-out-again saga which saw him fired, re-hired and fired again.

The drummer confirmed he was working with Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend again in a social media post, not long after Daltrey told an audience in Las Vegas the same thing.

Daltrey was performing a solo show at the Encore Theater in Vegas on Wednesday night when he revealed The Who had been rehearsing with Starkey and that it "sounded great", according to the Las Vegas Journal-Review.

In a post on Threads the next day, Starkey wrote: "Nice one Rog. Looking forward to tearing it up with The Who again.

"The rehearsal was great. I don’t think we’ve ever rehearsed as tough as that. Usually we drink tea and talk about what time we’re going home!"

Starkey had been part of The Who since 1996 when he was fired by the band in April of 2025, before being reinstated just a few days later. But the following month, he was out once again just weeks after the band had announced a North American farewell tour which wrapped up in September.

The first sacking was thought to be sparked by an incident during the band's performance at a Teenage Cancer Trust benefit show at London's Royal Albert Hall.

Zak said the band were playing The Song is Over when, Daltrey came in a bar too early and took it out on the drummer.

It appears the relationship has now been mended and that The Who will perform live again soon.

Their 2025 American dates were billed as The Song Is Over farewell tour, but Daltrey and Townshend admitted they likely weren't ready to retire the band.

On November 5, 2021, Nita Strauss was in Las Vegas for a very special performance. The Los Angeles-born guitarist, who made her name in Alice Cooper's band, had been booked to play World Boxing Organization (WBO) super featherweight world champion Mikaela Mayer to the ring for her title unification fight against IBF champion Maiva Hamadouche.

"I know that Mikaela-walking-on-stage face, and I can't wait to see it up close in person again," Strauss said in a press release promoting the fight at The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas. "It's going to be a great, great feeling to look across a stage at her again."

On the surface, this may have read like a stock quote talking up a corporate booking, but that wasn't the case at all. Strauss first met Mayer in 2003, when the future world boxing champion was just 12-and-a-half. A fan of Black Sabbath, Tool and System of Down, Mayer had been playing bass in her bedroom for over a year and was seeking to join a band : Strauss, fellow guitarist Tina St. Claire, and drummer Kirsten Schluter had three-quarters of a group, but no bassist.

"They said: ‘We need a bass player, can you meet us at the mall?’," Mayer told The Guardian's legendary boxing writer Donald McRae in 2022. "I was beyond my years and I looked the part in my black top with light brown hair and black tips and all my piercings. Even though they were older than me, they were like: ‘Okay, this girl likes our kind of music...'"

Mayer was in, and Lia-Fail, LA's newest metal band, was born.

The quartet played their first show at the legendary Whisky A Go-Go in. Hollywood in September 2003. The following summer they embarked upon their first tour, with Mayer's dad Mark acting as tour manager and unofficial chaperone for the teenagers. And then in 2005, the group entered a Battle Of The Bands contest in LA with a unique opportunity for the winning act.

"The prize was to play four or five shows on the Warped Tour," Nita Strauss told Metal Hammer earlier this year. "So, in our infinite wisdom, we thought, ‘Well, we’re already borrowing a van and trailer – we should go on and do our own tour.’

So they did: 15 show across 13 states.

"It was rough," Strauss recalled. "We made no money, we were hungry and thirsty and tired. Two of the girls were old enough to drive, so they took turns while the other two of us navigated. We had no crew members, it was just four girls slugging it out on the road. We were eating food from gas stations, cramming into hotel rooms, outrunning tornados…”

The headliners on 2005's Warped Tour were Avenged Sevenfold, Fall Out Boy, Dropkick Murphy's, and My Chemical Romance. Lia-Fail played one of the small side stages, as did an emerging emo-punk called Paramore.

"It was difficult," Strauss recalled, "but it’s still the most fun experience I’ve ever had."

"It takes a lot of balls for a group of kids, girls no less, to roll into a new town with people you've never met and go give the performance of your life, hungry and cold and tired every night, to people you've never seen before and are never going to see again," Strauss told ESPN.

The tour would be the high point of Lia-Fail's career: following their second US tour, Mayer quit... and went off the rails.

"One of my horrible first boyfriends was giving me problems about being away," she explained to The Guardian, "such a stupid teenage thing. I broke up with him shortly after that, thank God. Then I had my party phase. From about 15½ to 17 I put my dad through hell, wouldn’t come home for weeks at a time... I was rebellious, like: ‘I’m going to my boyfriend’s house to hang out, smoke pot, do whatever I want.’ I got kicked out of my original high school and ended up in a school where all the bad kids go. That’s when I found boxing and had this epiphany: ‘I don’t want to continue on this pointless path. I want to be successful, I want to be good at something',"

And she was. Mayer won a bronze medal at the 2012 World Championships and fought for the US at the 2016 Olympics. The following year she turned professional, and on Halloween night three years later, she became the WBO female super-featherweight world champion. Last year, she was was named Sports Illustrated's Female Fighter of the Year.

Not a bad second life for a failed rock star.

Tonight, August 29, WBA and WBC super welterweight world champion Mayer will fight Britain's WBO super welterweight world champion Chantelle Cameron over 10 rounds in Birmingham, with all three world titles going to the winner. No prizes for guessing who Nita Strauss will be cheering on.

"This girl and I have been through the fire and in the trenches of DIY touring together," Strauss said of her former bandmate in 2018. "I’m proud as hell of her continuing to kick ass!"

On the day that they released a remixes album featuring 'reimagined' takes on songs from last summer's Never Enough by artists as diverse as Elton John, jazz-influenced Mancunian electronic producer and DJ Floating Points, death metal stalwarts Dying Fetus and their O.G. Baltimore hardcore bros Angel Du$t, it feels entirely apposite that Turnstile are playing the closing weekend of London's All Points East festival on an eclectic bill, headlined by the bold and brilliant Californian rapper Tyler, the Creator, leaning heavily into alt. hip-hop and EDM.

Given that they've spent a portion of their summer playing special guests to Deftones in mainland Europe, it would, presumably, have been an easy win for the quintet to have lobbied for a late evening slot at last weekend's APE Presents Outbreak festival in this same park, instead of performing today alongside the likes of Clipse, Sexyy Red, BB Trickz and Ravyn Lenae. But Turnstile didn't get to where they are today by staying in their lane, or adhering to tried and trusted industry templates. Know any other hardcore bands with the chutzpah, wit and humanity to walk onstage at a festival to the sound of Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers duetting on Islands In The Stream, and have their audience singing along in delight? No, no, you don't.

With that said, if you saw Turnstile headlining Outbreak festival here last summer, you can probably guess with some confidence which songs made the cut when the quintet had to trim 2025's 75 minute set-list down to tonight's hour on stage, with choice cuts from Glow On and Never Enough - Blackout, Holiday, Mystery, Birds, Dull, I Care - given equal weighting. You might even have a feeling of déjà vu when, just like last summer, the roaming cameras onstage pick out a fan holding aloft a retro rotary telephone in the rain during Dull, as frontman Brendan Yates sings, "Deep in the night, I'm waiting for the call." But the inclusion of a cover of The Stone Roses' I Wanna Be Adored is another inspired little deviation from orthodoxy.

The truth is that, whatever they choose to do right now, Turnstile can do no wrong. And if tonight feels like a genuine victory lap in front of a partisan audience who cheer their every move, you can't say that they haven't earned it. At one point Yates talks about the UK feeling like“a second home" for the band, humbly adding"Thank you for always making it feel like home" to warm cheers. This sense of mutual respect makes for a wonderful feel good vibe throughout, and a genuine sense that the bouncing pit is a safe space for all.

After a joyous T.L.C. (Turnstile Love Connection), with their allotted hour complete, Turnstile exit the site's West Stage with several thousand curious newcomers to the party now fully welcomed, integrated and converted. Gig by gig, year on year, this band are building not just a community, but a legacy, and it's a wondrous experience to be part of. Thank You (Falettinus Be Arse Elves Agin).

When David Bowie parted company with legendary long-standing guitarist Reeves Gabrels in 1999, he picked up the phone to ask Helmet's Page Hamilton to join his band for his Hours world tour.

In order to impress his new boss, guitar prodigy Hamilton practiced for 16 hours a day, learning 30 songs including Cracked Actor, Rebel Rebel and Changes. For that phone call meant more to the Portand-born musician than Bowie could possibly have known.

“Reeves, who’s been a friend of mine for many many years, was going through a very difficult time in his life and he and Bowie parted ways after 13 years,” Hamilton recalled in a 2016 interview with Louder. “Bowie knew Helmet – we had met two years earlier at a festival in Germany – I met him and he was like, 'Helmet? I love Helmet!' And I started laughing, like, Yeah… right. Right! And he says, 'We go way back!'

“He was just a really gracious human being,” Hamilton continued. “Just so nice for a guy that has changed so many people’s lives and influenced so many musicians. In Germany, I tried to get him to talk about Ziggy Stardust when he jumped off speakers and broke his leg. He was wearing just his underwear as he was in the middle of a costume change, and I’m like, So what happened? What happened? And he smiled and said, ‘Oh God… I don’t remember much from back then.’

“He liked me, and when he later called, I had just left my wife. It was one of the worst times in my life. I was crashing on my manager’s couch and I had got back to the apartment at four in the afternoon. I’d met some chick, been to an after-hours Budweiser pool hall… it was pathetic. I was a pathetic mess.”

“And I’ve said this before, but he pulled me out of a real shitty time,” the guitarist admitted. “He might have saved my life. Because I would have continued – I’d gone out with my buddy Erik Sanko from Skeleton Key and Lounge Lizards who said, 'We’ve been out for 38 nights in a row.' And I was saying, Alright! Let’s make it 39! And I’m talking until after sunrise. So it’s amazing that in that state of mind I could have learned thirty David Bowie songs and gone out and played them.

“He didn’t know how I was living before I got the call, he didn’t know that I was going through a divorce. But Coco, the super-great lady who was with David said to me: ‘You know, David’s been very happy since he’s been sober.’ At the time he’d been sober for 12 years. I was like, Yeah… but I’m of Scottish, Irish, Welsh descent with German and Native American in me. I have all the drinking genes. It’s probably not happening for me. But my tribute to David Bowie would be to say: He’s not like you and me.”

In 2024 Prog explored Cocteau Twins’ third album, 1984’s Treasure, and presented solid evidence that Elizabeth Fraser’s approach to vocals and her colleague’s soundscape creations bore all the hallmarks of progressive music.

Back in the mid-80s when levity and piss-taking were an integral part of the music press, British weekly music mag NME ran a humourous column called Bismillah in its jokey Thrills pages.

It was dedicated to highlighting excruciatingly bad lyrics – who can forget The Cult’s ‘Sittin’ on a mountain, looking at the sun/Plastic fantastic lobster telephone’ from Aphrodisiac Jacket, among many other dubious pearls?

Bismillah probably sealed the image of Cocteau Twins singing in gibberish when it ran the lyrics of Ivo, the opening song of Treasure, as: ‘Ping pong page scrub pandor pompadour/Henry he’s sweet he saved me.’ (They are, in actual fact, ‘Peep hole, peach blow, Pandora, pompadour/Pale leaf, pink sweet, Persephone.’)

Of course, Cocteau Twins, and more specifically, singer Elizabeth Fraser, were much smarter than the jokes suggested.

Partly masking her own shyness, her lyrical obfuscation worked better when looked at as a form of instrumentation that blended with the ethereal contributions of guitarist and co-founder Robin Guthrie, plus newly-joined bassist Simon Raymonde – who would later find even greater success as the founder of the Bella Union record label.

Released in1984, Treasure is the point where musical vision and ambitions coalesced to create a world that was wholly their own. Previous LPs Garlands (1982) and Head Over Heels (1983), along with a steady series of EPs, had displayed their evolving maturity.

The catalogue had won them the support of John Peel’s listeners and the more cerebral wing of what was later to be defined as ‘goth.’

Treasure found the trio unshackling the ties of inspiration to set sail into an ocean of creativity that defied the narrow strictures of easy categorisation. Restraint was something that other bands did.

In the studio they luxuriated in the soundscapes of reverb and the widescreen effects of delay pedals and echoes. Embracing the emerging digital technology, their walls and sheets of sound would shine the light for the legions of bands for years to come.

It would be called shoegaze in the UK; the Americans would dub it dream pop – while really, with little precedent, Cocteau Twins were a progressive band to their very core.

Witness the chimes of Lorelei that evoke the frosts of winter; or the sang-froid that drives the chilly yet charming Aloysius. And while the musical backdrop from Guthrie and Raymonde pushes forward, Fraser’s vocal whoops and undulations, seemingly couched in childlike splendour, elevate Cocteau Twins to the height of true originals.

The Victorian-sounding names for song titles (see Beatrix and Cicely) left them open to detractors. But like all true pioneers, their hats were always going to be shot through with arrows.

The Cult’s Billy Duffy divides his band’s career into two massively uneven parts. “It goes Death Cult to She Sells Sanctuary,” the guitarist told Classic Rock in 2022, “and then She Sells Sanctuary and everything else.”

It’s right that he names The Cult’s 1985 single as the point on which everything pivots. This instantly recognisable swirl of patchouli-soaked psychedelic goth-dance genius transformed these ambitious post-punk contrarians into unlikely chart stars. The Cult weren’t the first alternative rock band – everyone from Siouxsie And The Banshees, U2 and The Cure to Devo and REM might have something to say about that. But She Sells Sanctuary is one first true alternative rock anthems, a song that quickly became bigger than the narrow scene it came out of.

Duffy and singer Ian Astbury first teamed up in early 1982 after leaving their respective groups, Theatre Of Hate and Southern Death Cult. They figured the latter had enough brand recognition to repurpose part of their name for the new band: Death Cult. By the time their debut album, Dreamtime, was released in August 1984, the name had been truncated even further, and Death Cult had become The Cult.

Dreamtime was a fine start, defined by Duffy’s ringing white Gretsch and Astbury’s fascination with indigenous cultures around the world. But these post-punk gunslingers were in love with the mythology of rock’n’roll too. They namechecked Led Zeppelin, The Doors and Hendrix at a time when most of their peers would rather admit to having a poster of Margaret Thatcher on their wall than owning a copy of Physical Graffiti.

“There were certain guidelines in the post-punk, new wave movement, and that was to stay clearly away from long hair and guitar solos,” Astbury told Classic Rock in 2010. “Then you hear Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and The Doors, and suddenly it’s like, ‘What is this? We’re not supposed to listen to this? You’re kidding me!’”

Dreamtime had barely cooled on the shelves when The Cult – completed by bassist Jamie Stewart and drummer Nigel Preston – began working on the song that would become She Sells Sanctuary.

“Sanctuary came together very easily,” Astbury said in 2010. “I took the bassline from [The Cult’s 1984 single] Spiritwalker. Billy came up with the melody, and we worked out a vaguely psychedelic guitar sound which seemed to fit it well. We were heavily into 60s psychedelic music.”

They debuted the new song in October 1984 on the Dreamtime tour. It immediately became a fixture of their set and a shoe-in for their next album. An early demo of the song shows all the parts in place, albeit in more muted form – The Cult hadn’t quite thrown off the shackles of post-punk at that point.

It was a marker of the band’s ambition that they wanted Steve Lillywhite to produce the follow-up to Dreamtime. Lillywhite was white-hot at the time thanks to his worth with U2 and Simple Minds. A meeting was arranged at the offices of the band’s label, Beggar’s Banquet. There was just one problem – they’d got the wrong Steve.

“This guy turns up and says, ‘Hey, I’m Steve,’” Astbury told The Telegraph in 2023. “We sat down and we started to work out that it wasn’t Steve Lillywhite, it was Steve Brown. But he was cool. We said ‘What have you produced?’ and he said ‘Wham!’. I’m like ‘Wham!?’ We just went with it.”

Brown – a schoolfriend of Lillywhite, ironically – would ultimately turn out to be a blessing in disguise. But at the time, the band still needed to make sure they could work with him. “Our record company said, ‘Look, this is a gamble. Why don’t you go in, do one song with him and see how it goes?’” Duffy told Classic Rock. “That turned out to be Sanctuary.”

The Cult and Brown entered London’s Olympic Studio in March 1985 to road-test this new partnership. It worked better than Astbury and Duffy could have imagined. As Brown put it in 1985: “I like to produce songs that you want to turn up.” It was a maxim that the band fully brought into. Between them, The Cult and Brown punched up the song, and She Sells Sanctuary went from being black and white to full colour.

“He was very focused on pop and wanted to bring out the commerciality in the band,” Duffy told Classic Rock. “He felt we had talent but hadn’t quite gotten our pop hooks together. He was instrumental in helping us work on that.”

The finished song drew on the band’s love of classic psychedelia and hard rock (Duffy employed a violin bow he found lying around in the studio on the song’s instrumental opening, reasoning that if it was good enough for Jimmy Page then it was good enough for him), as well as their more recent post-punk past and the goth scene in which they had one military surplus boot firmly planted. But Brown gave it a modern pop gloss and a pulsing heartbeat that made it eminently danceable.

Lyrically, it was wilfully enigmatic, all turning heads, burning backs and sparkling eyes. “The fire in your eyes/Keeps me alive,” Astbury sang on the chorus, wolverine howl set to max. “I'm sure in her you'll find/The sanctuary.” What was it all about? “Sex,” said the singer, “plain and simple.”

The Cult hadn’t even started recording their new album when She Sells Sanctuary was released in the UK in May 1985. It climbed to No.15 in the singles chart and got the band on Top Of The Pops for the first time.

Not everyone was convinced by the all-new Cult. Astbury’s commitment to their rock-forward transformation had extended to his look. The mohawk he’d sported during his Southern Death Cult days was long gone, replaced by beads, paisley shirts and long, ironed black hair – Jim Morrison by way of a Native American shaman. “When I grew my hair, people were having a meltdown,” he told Classic Rock. “They were tripping out.”

Shit-talking was the least of his worries. “I remember going out when She Sells Sanctuary got in the charts and some kid came up and punched me right in the face at a concert,” Astbury said. “There was so much hatred in his eyes, and all that was because we came from the streets in Brixton, we came from punk rock and I think this guy saw us as breaking the code by not pretending we couldn’t play our instruments or for having success.”

There was turbulence within the band too. She Sells Sanctuary would be the last Cult song Nigel Preston played on. The drummer was fired after failing to turn up to the video shoot for the song (Preston died of a heroin overdose in 1992).

But the good stuff outweighed the bad stuff. She Sells Sanctuary ensured Brown passed his unofficial audition as producer, and went on to work with the band on their second album, Love (that title was a fuck you to the notoriously vitriolic British music press – the NME sniffily dismissed She Sells Sanctuary as “gimmicky”).

The song also cracked open the door to America for The Cult. College radio picked up on it, and the band even got to play it on a December 1985 episode of Saturday Night Live. Tellingly, it was a big radio hit in Seattle, where it didn’t go unnoticed by some of the city’s young musicians. Future Mothe Love Bone singer Andrew Wood was a fan, as was Layne Staley, later of Alice In Chains. “[AIC guitarist] Jerry Cantrell told me that Layne was really into us – the gothic stuff,” Duffy recalled. (Perhaps coincidentally, another local band, Nirvana, shared their name with Love’s opening track).

It wasn’t just grunge’s future superstars who were listening to The Cult. A line can be traced from She Sells Sanctuary’s psychedelic rock swirl to the shamanic stew of Jane’s Addiction, who were just beginning to coalesce in the freakier corners of the LA club scene. (Ian Astbury’s godfather-of-the-alternative-nation bona fides were solidified by 1990’s The Gathering Of The Tribes, his visionary-but-forgotten festival which cross-pollinated genres a year before Perry Farrell did the same with Lollapalooza).

She Sells Sanctuary heralded the first of The Cult’s many transformations: the bangle-shaking hippie-goth era soon gave way to AC/DC-channelling rock’n’roll, hair-swishing arena rock and beyond.

The song itself has had a similarly unlikely journey, travelling from mid-80s goth club dancefloors to big-budget movies (Singles, Layer Cake, The Pope’s Exorcist), TV shows (Billions, Euphoria, even Love Island), games (notably Grand Theft Auto) and TV ads (it’s been used to sell everything from Budweiser to online gambling games). Today, it stands as one rock’s great all-purpose anthems, up there with the classics that inspired them in the first place.

“It’s funny,” Duffy told Classic Rock, “you write a song like that, where everything comes together far beyond what you could’ve expected and then you spend the rest of your life trying to write another one as good.”

If The Terminator was a band, it would be Fear Factory – a gleaming mecha-human powerhouse who, with classic early albums Soul Of A New Machine, Demanufacture and Obsolete, harnessed technology to open up a door to a bold and terrifying new future.

The band’s new single Roboticist makes the link with the iconic Arnold Schwarzenegger movie series explicit. Their first new song in five years has just dropped on August 29 – the day the movies’ malevolent AI system Skynet became sentient.

“In Terminator 2, August 29 is the exact date Skynet becomes self-aware and launches the apocalypse,” FF guitarist Dino Cazares tells Metal Hammer. “Roboticist deals heavily with the rise of AI. The ‘roboticist’ is the architect who creates the artificial intelligence, like a human Skynet who doesn’t realize what he’s unleashed until it goes haywire.”

While Roboticist, which is the first single from Fear Factory’s upcoming 11th album, doesn’t directly reference the Terminator movies, it does share many of the same themes – something Fear Factory have tackled from the beginning of the band.

“If you go back to Demanufacture and Obsolete, we've always explored man becoming obsolete and machines taking over,” says Dino. “We've always sung about the relationship between man and machine, and now it's caught up to reality. People complain about AI, but they’re using it every day, they just don’t realise it. We all have to embrace it in some way because it's already integrated into everything we use, from cell phones to cars. Unless you live off the grid in the mountains, you can't avoid it.”

Roboticist marks the recording debut of the very definitely flesh-and-blood Milo Silvestro, who replaced original Fear Factory singer Burton C Bell in 2023 following the latter’s acrimonious departure. Cazares discovered the Italian singer during Covid via the FF Facebook page, where he had been posting cover versions.

“As soon as airlines opened up, I flew him out, auditioned him, and was blown away,” says Dino. “We had a tour booked with Static-X in 2023, so I brought him into the band a month before we left, and we didn't stop touring for three years straight. Milo's voice brings a new energy, but it feels familiar because Burton was one of his favourite singers growing up.”

The guitarist is keeping details about the upcoming album close to his chest, though he does reveal that it will feature 10 songs, including Roboticist and the band’s next single, Detonizer. “He’s a character who is fighting back against the AI, who wants to detonize the system,” says Dino of the latter song.

The album, which will be released in 2027, comes on the heels of a turbulent decade-and-half in the band’s career. Cazares and Bell spent much of the 2010s embroiled in lawsuits with former FF drummer Raymond Herrera and bassist Christian Olde Wolbers, which eventually led to the guitarist filing for bankruptcy in order to retain the rights to the Fear Factory name. Bell himself officially departed in 2020, citing a breakdown of his working relationship with Cazares. If the new single is anything to go by, the 2026 model of Fear Factory have a massive point to prove.

“For me, every record is made out of desperation,” says Dino. “I always feel like I have to prove something. With this, it took a while to get back on our feet after all the lawsuits we went through and Burton quitting. But we’ve come out of it stronger than ever.”

“It's about escaping,” said Noel Gallagher in 1994, speaking ahead of the release of Oasis' debut record Definitely Maybe.

But really, it's about so much more than that.

One of the defining cultural documents of the '90s, the Manchester quintet’s ferociously optimistic and thrillingly self-possessed debut album is a snapshot of what it means to be young, fearless and fiercely convinced of one’s own capacity to transcend the mundane and mediocre. Last summer, as the reunited Gallagher brothers reclaimed their mantle as The People's Champions on the most euphoric tour of the 21st century to date, their 23-song setlist featured no fewer than six selections from the record, their swagger and snap utterly undiminished.

Written in the wake of the Conservative party securing a fourth consecutive general election victory in the UK, at its core Definitely Maybe is an album about working class pride, anger, ambition and defiance.

Though it was rarely identified as such upon its release, being bracketed alongside inferior Britpop albums with which it shared precious little DNA - "I'd hear Blur or Pulp or Suede on the radio and think, Fuck these idiots" Noel Gallagher admitted in 2023 - it’s a punk rock album at heart, a collection of dole queue anthems which thrust two upraised fingers in the faces of a firmly entrenched establishment doing its level best to break the spirit and solidarity of working class communities from Burnage to Belfast. And as such, it’s the most fearless collection of attitudinal rock n’ roll to emerge from Britain since the Sex Pistols' incendiary debut Never Mind The Bollocks. In fact, in a 2023 interview with UK music magazine Mojo, Noel Gallagher, who wrote every song on the record, explicitly linked the two albums, boldly describing Definitely Maybe as “the last great punk album.”

“We were a punk band with Beatles melodies,” Gallagher stated. “We had no effects, barely any equipment, just loads of attitude, 12 cans of Red Stripe and ambition. If you listen to that and Never Mind The Bollocks, they’re quite similar. That album was about the angst of being a teenager in 1977. Fast forward to 1994 and Definitely Maybe is about the glory of being a teenager. It’s being down the park with a ghetto blaster distilled... There’s no bullshit on it. It’s an honest snapshot of working-class lads trying to make it. It’s about shagging birds, taking drugs, drinking and the glory of all of that."

From its unapologetically nicked opening T. Rex riff, Definitely Maybe is Oasis’ own great rock ‘n’ roll swindle, an album which shamelessly pilfers and re-appropriates some of the most familiar riffs, rhythms and themes from rock n’ roll history while looking the listener square in the eyes and asking ‘So. Fucking. What?’

“Look at you now, you’re all in my hands tonight” sneers the then 21-year-old Liam Gallagher at the end of the strutting Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, a self-fulfilling prophecy the younger Gallagher brother later quite correctly identified as “the most arrogant song ever”.

Even the cocksure Gallagher boys would concede that Definitely Maybe is not a flawless collection… though if 'The Chief' had swapped out Digsy’s Dinner and Married With Children for contemporaneous B-sides Fade Away and Half The World Away it’d be as close to perfection as makes no difference.

As ubiquitous as pub jukebox mainstays Shakermaker and Supersonic might still be, their vitality and verve is wholly undiminished by over-familiarity, while Gallagher junior’s stretched vowels on the opening lines of Cigarettes & Alcohol remain an undeniable rock ‘n’ roll moment.

With its rallying call to the “outcast” and the “underclass”, the Stooges-inspired Bring It On Down, dusted down and sounding immense on the Live '25 tour, is the album’s most overtly punk (and political) four minutes. Slide Away consists purely of choruses, each more uplifting than its predecessor, while the six minute Columbia, with its roots in Acid House jams and Ecstasy-fuelled mischief-making, is a blissful tangle of over-driven guitars and wide-eyed euphoria.

Best of all though is Live Forever, arguably Noel Gallagher’s defining song. Written as a response to (erroneous) ‘inkie’ music paper reports that Kurt Cobain was considering naming Nirvana’s third album I Hate Myself And I Want To Die, it’s the Oasis credo writ large, a surge of ‘Fuck you’ positivity and bullish self-belief standing as a grand secular hymn for the dreamers and schemers. Critics have often sneered at Oasis’ nursery rhyme lyrics, but Gallagher – like his nemesis Cobain – intuitively understood that there’s a beauty in simplicity, and Live Forever remains one of his most pure, perfect compositions.

On September 4, 1994, Definitely Maybe debuted at Number 1 on the UK album charts. That evening, Oasis played Belfast for the first time, receiving the news of their triumph as they sat backstage in the Limelight venue’s tiny dressing room. This writer was present that night, and recalls the Manchester band being greeted with an ovation which far exceeded the customary greeting for visiting bands, a reception which spoke of a shared belief that their chart success was a victory for ‘us’ over ‘them’. Even at their most cocaine-bloated and indulgent, Oasis managed to retain that sense of connection, as is being emphatically demonstrated in every sold-out stadium they visit this summer.

It's easy to see why Definitely Maybe is connecting with a new influx of Gen Z fans. It's a record about possibility, and hope, and growing up without giving in, whatever shit is thrown at you. Only Noel and Liam truly know how long Oasis' second act will last, but their first album will forever remain an impossibly thrilling declaration of independence and intent.

Summer might be over (or almost, at least), but the big season for new releases is well and truly upon us. Just today, there's new albums from Mastodon, Beartooth and In This Moment, plus what feels like hundreds of new singles arriving each week. That's exactly what we're here for though, cutting through the clutter to bring you a collection of brilliant new metal songs each week.

First, the results of our last vote! As ever, brand recognition isn't always a guarantee of top placing, though Mastodon still managed a very respectable third place finish in the poll. Above them however were Japanese newcomers Zilqy, who edged into second, while Derby newcomers The Cartographer proved your overall favourite by some way.

It's all to play for this week as we've got more big names returning to the mix in the form of Amon Amarth, Clutch, Imminence and Comeback Kid. But there's still some rising underground talent in there too, so check out the tracks below and don't forget to cast your vote!

In This Moment - I Want To Believe (ft. Dayseeker)

If any metal band is overdue a TikTok blow-up, it's In This Moment. The industrial outfit have been going for over 20 years now, and their striking visuals and canny earworms have made them a mainstay of the metal scene, but it's not outside the realms of possibility that they'll get a Crowbar-style lift-off at some point. I Want To Believe sees them team up with Dayseeker's Rory Rodriguez for a powerful, atmospheric track.

Imminence - If Not Now, When

Imminence have gone full Deftonescore. There's no shortage of bands tinkering with heavygaze in 2026, but the Swedish metalcore group's dive into thick, floaty melodies doesn't sacrifice their own unique sound, the violins adding a gorgeous, melancholic tone to If Not Now, When that shows new album Axis Mundi - due October 2 - might be their true breakout moment.

Comeback Kid - Chosen Hell

Stride with absolute confidence to yet another howler from Comeback Kid. Pounding beats and big riffs make Chosen Hell a real swing-for-the-fences from the Canadians, marking the announcement of their new album - also called Chosen Hell - for a November 6 release date. We'll be keeping our ears out for the planned Courtney LaPlante collab, too.

Amon Amarth - Eight Legs Of Thunder

Thor might have a hammer, but he doesn't have an eight-legged steed, does he? That's the topic of Amon Amarth's latest melodeath banger, Eight Legs Of Thunder appropriately powered by a galloping riff and the distinct sense the Swedes are having the time of their lives on new album The Allfather Awakens, coming October 2.

Turnstile - Birds (Dying Fetus version)

#WhynotDyingFetus indeed. On a remix album that features appearances from Elton John and Hayley Williams, the biggest left-turn is surely Birds being 'reimagined' by Dying Fetus. It's gloriously short and to-the-point, bringing to mind DF's earlier grindcore-adjacent material.

Kamelot - Sanctuary (feat. Clémentine Delauney and Ignacia Fernández)

Kamelot know their way around an epic composition. Their new album Dark Asylum is positively packed with 'em, but with guest appearances from Visions Of Atlantis' Clémentine Delauney and Decessus's Ignacia Fernández, they've expanded their repertoire impressively on this new track, making great use of melody and Ignacia's brutal howls.

Burner - Accelerationist

If you're in the market for something fierce and nasty, you'd do well to give Burner's Accelerationist a spin. Lumbering, limb-swinging hardcore meets guttural death metal in a whirligig of violent intent. Taken from new album No One Is Coming To Save Us - out September 25 - it's sure to scratch an itch for underground brilliance.

Maple’s Pet Dinosaur - Child’s Play

Quite literally the next gen of talent, Australia's Maple's Pet Dinosaur has been signed by Warner Music at just 15 years old. Child's Play - the title track of her upcoming debut EP - gives an insight as to why, the track taking horror aesthetics and pulsing riffs to create something unique and striking.

Clutch - The Drifter Returns

In a week that's robbed us of legends, it's good to have some of the old reliables come back as fiesty and fierce as ever. The Drifter Returns is a slick, punchy Clutch song in the vein of Earth Rocker or X-Ray Visions. There's no word on when we'll get a new album just yet, but this has us excited nonetheless.

Black Spikes - Dulkés

Lithuania's Black Spikes released their new album Ydos this week, and Dulkés shows off their unique sound. There's an odd, slightly off nursery rhyme quality to the song to start with, but when the band flex their more aggressive side they hit with pure nightmare-fuel force.

Love Is Noise - Smile

Bounding into life, Love Is Noise have announced their new EP The Space Between Happiness And Heartache for an October 9 release with the infectious Smile. The heavygaze markers are unmistakeable, but the band also inject so much energy and enthusiasm it's hard not to want to leap about the room with joyous abandon.

I Helvete - Nälkätalvi

If you didn't gather from our recent albums of 2026 round-up, black metal is having a stellar year. You can add I Helvete to the pile, if Nälkätalvi is anything to go by. The Finnish band have been through some line-up turbulence as of late, but this new single sees them asserting a ferocious and classic take on the BM sound, laying just enough melody atop a bedrock of frosty, furious extremity.

Celebrations for what would have been the 80th birthday of Syd Barrett, the late Pink Floyd co-founder and solo maverick, will take place in October, with proceeds raised going to mental health charities. Barrett, who died in 2006, aged 60, quit Floyd in April 1968. After the release of two solo albums, he walked away from the industry, seeing out the rest of his days as a recluse.

With the full support of the Barrett family, Syd’s legacy is honoured with a live concert in Cambridge, an all-star tribute album and an exhibition. As well as Cambridge being his home city, Barrett’s last known live performance took place at the Corn Exchange there on February 24, 1972.

The tribute show – featuring Kula Shaker, Soft Machine, Men On The Border, Diana Silveira & The Psychedelic Circus, Radhika and Pünk Floyd, with additional surprise guests set to be announced – takes place at the same venue on October 10, which is World Mental Health Day.

“Eighty years after his birth, Syd Barrett’s influence remains as powerful as ever,” says co-organiser Neil Jones. “It’s especially fitting that this celebration takes place in Cambridge, the city at the heart of his story.”

The album, Clowns And Jugglers: The Songs Of Syd Barrett, scheduled for release the previous day on coloured vinyl and CD, stars an array of heavy-hitters and stylistically related acts including Pink Floyd, David Gilmour, Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets, Soft Machine, and Robyn Hitchcock featuring John Paul Jones. Curated by Mark Wilkinson (designer of sleeve art for Marillion, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest), Syd’s nephew Ian Barrett and Gonzo record label boss Rob Ayling, most of the tracks were recorded specially for the project.

“It isn’t just a bunch of oldies,” Wilkinson says. “Some of the best tracks are by the younger artists – I love what Rosalie Cunningham has done with Lucifer Sam, from [Floyd’s debut] Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.”

The inclusion of Terrapin, from Syd’s solo debut The Macap Laughs, by Mancunians Henge, was down to Ian Barrett. “Henge are an incredible band,” he enthuses. “For me they are one of the highlights of it all.”

The project has taken more than a year of planning, helped by several twists of fate. It effectively began when Wilkinson exhibited a portrait of Syd at the Bloodstock Festival and happened to have a conversation with Syd’s nephew Mark Barrett. Talk of an album led to the show at the Corn Exchange, and then the exhibition, which turns the spotlight on Barrett’s life, art and cultural impact. Running from October 3-9 at the Cambridge OpenSpace arts venue, with a further display on October 10-11 at The Cambridge Guildhall, it showcases original paintings and sketches by Syd, alongside prints of larger works.

All of the above confirms that 20 years after Barrett’s passing, his legacy remains as strong as ever. “People still care because Syd was completely unique and always adventurous,” says Wilkinson. “I can’t praise his lyrics enough – they were incredible. You can see where Bowie and Bolan took some of their ideas from.

“[Noted journalist] Nick Kent wrote that as an artist Syd emerged from the womb fully formed,” he continues. “There was no lead-in period, it was bang! And he was doing it all straight away. That’s what we are celebrating here.”

“From a family perspective, we are still slightly amazed that people are as interested as they are,” comments Syd’s nephew Ian Barrett. “After he died I kind of expected it to fade away slightly, but I’m realising that it probably won’t happen. The fascination is as strong as it ever was.”

Mental health is a strong part of the narrative that runs through the project’s several strands. It’s a subject that people are far more comfortable talking about than they used to be.

“It helps that there are names for these conditions now,” says Ian Barrett. “People can get treatment for it. There’s less of a stigma and hopefully things will get better still in the future. We are raising money as well, so that’s another positive.”

Ian still has strong memories of his uncle, specifically the year in the 80s that Syd spent Christmas with the family in Luton.

“He came over from Cambridge, and he seemed pretty normal, really,” he recalls. “I didn’t realise what he had done, because nobody talked about his fame. I couldn’t really understand how he fitted into the Pink Floyd story, because in a sense he didn’t.”

In the internet age, and thanks to the 2023 film Have You Got It Yet?, Ian believes that a lot of past myths and falsehoods about Syd have now been corrected.

“I hope so,” he says. “Rob Chapman’s book [A Very Irregular Head] took some of that stuff apart. The old stories about Mandrax and being locked in cupboards have all been discounted.

“Nobody is trying to deny that some strange things happened, and it was certainly a mysterious time,” he continues, “but I think people no longer believe in that stuff and hopefully they can focus on what’s important – the creativity he achieved in such a short career. And then he quit. The quitting was the important part. Nobody could understand that when he said that he was stopping, he meant it.”

Ian is prepared to offer hope that more of Syd’s work could be found and brought out of the archives in the future.

“Everyone’s looking around for it, and it’s possible there might still be some left to discover,” he says cautiously. “I’m pretty sure there will be something further, but these things don’t happen quickly.”

Asked to speculate what his uncle Syd might have made of the celebrations surrounding his 80th birthday, had he lived to experience it, Ian is adamant.

“Syd would have been pleased with it all, I think, especially because there is art involved,” he explains. “Personally, I think of him as an artist that ended up in music. Fundamentally, he wanted to be an artist, but he happened to play guitar too well and it all blossomed out of control. I think he just wanted to paint, really.”

Tickets for A Tribute to Syd Barrett - Official 80th Anniversary Celebrations are sold out.

In 2007, Queens of the Stone Age played 115 shows to promote their fifth studio album, Era Vulgaris.

They played clubs, theatres, arenas and festival dates over the course of the year, but one event in particular stands out – an intimate show 2300 feet under the surface of the earth.

The date was November 20, 2007. They'd played Löwensaal in Nuremberg the night before, a venue which holds around 1500 people and doesn't necessitate the need for safety equipment for fans and performers alike.

"We were tired of the same old concert experience, so management got us some interesting ones – a castle, a church, and old slaughterhouse," said the band's former sound engineer Patrick 'Hutch' Hutchinson in an interview with Heil Sound. "We played an old salt mine in Germany."

Their label Interscope Records held a contest to give away 300 tickets to fans to see the band play the Erlebnisbergwerk Glückauf in Sondershausen. It would take around a day to transport the equipment down into the cavernous venue and allow it to acclimate to the surroundings. The fans, who looked like Fraggle Rock's Doozers in their matching yellow hard hats and hi-vis jackets, were met with their own logistical challenges when navigating their way to the bottom of the facility.

“I play rock n’ roll to have that classic moment and you never know when something like that is coming," said Josh Homme. "But this had classic written all over it from the word ‘go’, you know? We were looking for something good to do that was off-kilter and bizarre, somewhere to play that would be very special."

“What I like is that there’s so much hard work done in here," he added of the cavernous room. "This place exists from hard work. It’s nice to throw a bit of a party here too, celebrating miners... and I don’t mean young kids.”

Ba-dum-tss. The band played a stripped-down show, opting to change up their set list for the special occasion.

"This place was so psychedelic," remembers Patrick. "The excavation machines left spiral patterns everywhere. The idea was to play a semi-acoustic set – it quickly turned a lot heavier with everyone getting excited.

"My mind got the better of me after being a half-mile closer to the centre of the earth. Maybe we shouldn’t be rocking out. What if we cause some seismic destruction?

"An epic rock 'n' roll death – what a way to go," he added. "Looking around we saw the giant machines and quickly realised these things eat rock and spit it out. We weren’t going to cause a cave-in making rock; these machines ate rock and they were bigger than all of us and our gear combined."

Their 14-song set featured songs from Era Vulgaris, as well as some, ahem, deep cuts for the event and covers of Billy Idol's White Wedding and Tom Waits' Goin' Out West.

“Playing semi-acoustic is great for us and the songs translate," explains Josh. "We did do some rehearsals as we felt this place was so unique we should do songs that we never play or quite often don’t play, and we were changing them up until last night and it involved rewriting stuff. You know how Elvis would do those medleys of like, five songs? It’s just like that, except it’s not fat and in a jumpsuit.”

The set was filmed for future release. A teaser trailer was released in early 2008 followed by interviews and a clip of Make It Wit Chu, but footage of the full show remains "locked in a vault" somewhere in Germany.

Following the performance, the frontman and guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen joked about the next unusual venue they could play.

“Our next record is going to be called Hot Lava, so we feel we need to play a volcano," said Josh. "I think we’re officially the most underground rock band in the world.”

It's a good job no one mentioned that Finnish metallers Agonizer had played 4169 feet underground at the Pyhäsalmi Mine in Pyhäjärvi, Finland just a few months previously. But still, it's an impressive feat.

Almost two decades later, the band would make music history of their own by becoming the first band to officially perform deep in the Catacombs of Paris on July 8, 2024.

Maybe that volcano show isn't too far away.

The lazy, hazy summer of 1990: Every day was warm and woozy. Or so it seems now. LA rocked, and so did London. Guns N’ Roses were number one, permanently; Mötley Crüe were number two; the rest were duking it out for position. Rock was out of the ghetto; even dudes like Run DMC and Public Enemy thought so. They were hooking up, connecting, remixing.

Wanton record companies had more money than sense. They signed anything with hair and a pulse. Hundreds of albums came out every week – great ones, okay ones, funny ones, disastrous ones, dirty and dumb ones. The scene fed on itself. Everything was hot, everything was sunny, everything was beautiful.

Right into this wide open space dropped Burning Tree – great name, taken from the street sign outside the guitarist’s girlfriend’s house. Classic line-up: the power trio. Cool concept: a retro-rock take on trippy metal. They had the look, but they’d cut their hair and gone shopping in 1966. They had the muso chops, but they subjugated them for the benefit of their songs.

They had the chance to fall in line, but they preferred to make their own way. Burning Tree was a singular record in a time of general conformity. It stood out, but got itself swamped by the tide. It left a legacy, though: the guitarist and singer in Burning Tree was Marc Ford, who would go on to join the Robinson brothers in the Black Crowes.

The album was released as part of the Epic label’s Epic Rock series – essentially an excuse to throw a bunch of crap against the wall to see what stuck. Nine albums were released on the same day, but Epic ended up cannibalising their own marketing budget. None of the bands made videos, and the stunt failed. Only Suicidal Tendencies' Lights... Camera... Revolution! was a commercial success, and Burning Tree was lost.

Perhaps Burning Tree wasn’t quite immediate enough in a time when subtlety was often swamped by straightforwardness. The record took a while to tune up, to get going; the eponymous opener was woolly and indistinct, probably their worst song; Wigs, Blues And High-Heeled Shoes was a woozy wig-out, and Fly On was a clunker. But they imparted the Burning Tree vibe well enough. This was rock from a desert climate, blurred and soft-edged in the heat haze.

Mistreated Lover was the album’s first great song, with barely the momentum to move above its semi-spoken beginnings before its shimmering chorus; Playing In The Wind might have come off Cream’s Disraeli Gears; Turtle should have been the last tune at an all-night party.

But what made the record rare and worthy were Crush and Baker’s Song. The former could have been remixed by PM Dawn; it’s a lyric about the seductions of being in a band set to a tune that should have filled stadiums. When the band sang – and they all sang – the hip little ‘nah nah nahs’ at the end, all felt right with the world.

Baker’s Song, though, is the tune the Black Crowes might have covered. A doomy tale (‘Worried me none/that the river rolled by my loaded gun’), it nonetheless had the epic sweep of all truly great songs; you could hum it forever.

Marc Ford got his due in the Crowes, and joined Rich Robinson's The Magpie Salute when the Crowes were on hiatus. Drummer Doni Gray played in the Chris Robinson Brotherhood during the same period, and bassist Mark Dutton recorded with Izzy Stradlin before hooking up with LA Guns, and joined the Black Crowes in 2025.

Sporadic reunion shows have taken place in the decades since Burning Tree's 1992 breakup, and a studio reunion in all but name occurred when the three musicians worked together on Ford's 2007 solo album Weary And Wired.

A second Burning Tree record might have been special, but such is the band’s timeless sound that the first wouldn't sound out of place if it were released today. It's that good.

In 2019 Jinjer lead vocalist Tatiana Shmailyuk explained how her discovery of Opeth helped her develop her performance voice and paint gloomy, dark images

“I discovered Opeth in around 2003 when I was 16 or 17. A friend of mine gave me a mix CD with a bunch of different bands on, and that’s when I first heard Damnation. I fell in love with it and I’ve been a huge fan ever since.

It’s my favourite album of theirs. Oh my God, it’s so atmospheric! And Mikael Åkerfeldt’s voice is so soothing – I’d never heard a male metal vocalist sing so clean before, but when he growled, it was the deepest shit I’d ever heard.

He’s also a wonderful composer; he really hits the jackpot. Mikael’s vocals have definitely inspired me to growl as deep as I can, but I try not to imitate other performers as I prefer to do my own thing.

I love all the songs on Damnation, but the one I like the most is Death Whispered A Lullaby [written by Steven Wilson]. I have goosebumps just talking about it!

I appreciate listening to the album all the way through, as one long song, and that’s how I used to listen to it when I was painting. I used to do these very gloomy and dark paintings, and Opeth’s music really inspired my creativity.

I found their 2016 album, Sorceress, very relaxing too. It’s an album that needs time to really appreciate and understand it. I like to have it on when I go to sleep. I find it very soothing – but I miss his growling!

Discovering Opeth was a revelation to me. At the time I was listening to mostly nu metal and alternative music, then through Opeth I discovered progressive metal. Tool came next, then Anathema, Porcupine Tree and Katatonia. I really like Soen and Riverside now as well.

The first time I got to see Opeth live was actually this summer. We were both playing at Rock The Coast Festival in Spain and I was lucky enough to be able to watch them from the side of the stage. I was singing along and it was so cool.

I didn’t go up to Mikael afterwards though. I don’t think he needs to hear what I think about his music. I would probably have been too paralysed with fear to talk to him anyway, because he’s my hero!”

Rewind 35 years to 1991, the high-water mark of grunge. In a provincial outpost of Our Price, something makes me reach past the album featuring the baby’s tadger to the purple one with the human maypole. As it turns out, a good choice.

I loved Ten back then, and a quarter-century later, that righteous anger and jaw-breaking riffage holds a magic that Pearl Jam have never quite matched. I could be happily marooned with any one of these 11 songs, but if you’re putting a gun to my head, here’s how they stack up for me.

11. Deep

I put up with Deep back in the day, mostly because I couldn’t afford a Discman, and my Walkman’s fast-forward button usually chewed the tape. In the iPod era, though, my knee-jerk response to that fruity opening flourish is to move along. The stalking, wah-drenched groove and pummelling beat is decent enough, but on an album of such riches, ‘decent’ brings up the rear.

10. Porch

It was a live highlight, of course, with Eddie Vedder using the instrumental break to straddle the gantry, swan-dive into the crowd and generally give Pearl Jam’s tour management the cold sweats. On the album, though, I’ve mostly sucked the juice out of this two-chord thrasher.

9. Garden

That eerie intro riff was required learning for the bedroom guitarists of the nineties, and the way the bass slopes in beneath Vedder’s shamanic moan is a moment of malevolent genius. But by the time Garden wraps up, I’m ready.

8. Release

In a flash of rehearsal-room serendipity, Ten’s slow-burn finale was born when Vedder improvised his vocal over Stone Gossard’s shimmering riff. It’s the perfect sun-setter on Ten’s tempestuous tracklisting, but, honestly, I could have done without the Master/Slave instrumental reprise tacked on the end.

7. Why Go

Sandwiched between big-hitters Alive and Black, Why Go was kinda overlooked at the time, and that’s probably why its furiosity still sounds so fresh. Vedder’s spitting-mad vocal was sparked by a news story about a teenager sectioned for minor drugs offences, but it’s Jeff Ament who deserves the backslaps, for both writing and driving the song on twelve-string bass.

6. Oceans

A musicologist might argue there isn’t much meat on this two-minute vignette (even Gossard admits “it’s just two fingers that come on and off to create the whole thing”). Still, for me, Oceans is a work of strange, glowering beauty, and gave Ten’s first indication that Pearl Jam could shift gears. “We thought it was important to pick the weirder moments,” noted Ament, “because we wanted to be able to explore those areas further down the line.”

5. Alive

What’s that you say? Alive should be in pole position, and I’m a towering arsehole with shit for ears? Well, maybe. The trouble is, I’ve heard Pearl Jam’s signature tune too many times now: that riff has been blunted by ubiquity, to the point where it’s practically the alt-rock Layla. But if I imagine myself unjaded, hearing it for the first time, then, yes, Alive is obviously a stone-cold classic, from Gossard’s stadium-ready intro lick to Mike McCready’s spring-heeled solo (which he admits, incidentally, that he stole from KISS’s She).

4. Even Flow

Pearl Jam themselves seem to have a problem with Even Flow, generally agreeing that they flogged the spark out the original demo with too many takes (“Not sure why we didn’t use that one,” said original drummer Dave Krusen, “but I know it felt better”). For everyone else, the version that made it onto Ten was a belter, driven by that muscular-yet-snake-hipped riff, and managing to sing about homelessness without getting up your nose.

3. Jeremy

When Texas teenager Jeremy Wade Delle shot himself in front of his classmates on January 8th, 1991, the seed was planted for what remains arguably Vedder’s most powerful lyric. The blood-spattered MTV video was sensationalist, but the song is deathless, from Ament’s opening chimed harmonics to the bereft outro. Strange to think that Jeremy almost didn’t make the cut for Ten, the band struggling to balance the dynamics. “But this was an instance,” remembered Ament, “when persistence paid off.”

2. Black

Epic apparently badgered the band to release Black as the fourth single from Ten, but the lineup dug in their heels, helping the song to its enduring fan-favourite status. It’s a bit of an odd one, Black, alternating between rock’s most jaunty verse and most gut-wrenching chorus, but when Vedder delivers the devastating pay-off – “I know you’ll be a star in somebody else’s sky, but why can’t it be mine?” – you’ll feel a cold shiver of recognition. Stunning.

1. Once

During the false start of the Master/Slave instrumental – which burbles away pointlessly for the opening forty seconds of Ten – it was only natural to start fishing for your receipt. Then a key turns in the ignition and Ten’s whip-crack opening salvo leaves the blocks, Vedder in character as a vengeful maniac with pedal to the floor and “sixteen-gauge buried under my clothes”. A song to make your neck bristle and your fists bunch, it announced Pearl Jam as a band to treasure, right out of the blocks.

Pearl Jam - How Death Brought Ten To Life

In 2013 guitar maestro Joe Satriani told Prog about his passion for Jethro Tull, which has remained despite a “very strange” dramatic experience when he played alongside Ian Anderson’s band at a festival.

“I have great memories of listening to early Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer – Keith Emerson’s compositional brilliance is unbelievable – and King Crimson too. Their stuff came from another world.

On my last tour I’d play those records backstage almost every night; I drove the guys crazy! To me and my friends they all belonged together somehow, and they were to be celebrated.

Jethro Tull was one of the first concerts I ever saw as a young kid. It was at the Westbury Music Fair in New York, a theatre-in-the-round where the stage would rotate slowly.

You’ve got to imagine how exotic someone like Ian Anderson was to a kid growing up in New York back in the early 70s! When people pulled into town it was an event, and Tull had quite the act going.

Every single person in the band played like no-one else. They were touring their third album, Benefit (1970), and they were the essence of early progressive rock: they used odd time signatures; there was instrument switching. And unusual instruments too – flute and mandolin, and the sound of the bass guitar was different.

Ian was brilliant in how he’d write and arrange those songs and get those guys to play, and Martin Barre really brought the rock to the band. Of course they progressed to Thick As A Brick, but for me Stand Up was a truly brilliant record. It fused elements of jazz and rock, and it was engineered by the wonderful Andy Johns.

A New Day Yesterday has that really cool rotating guitar sound, which Andy told me he got by swinging a microphone in the air while Martin was playing. Reasons For Waiting is a particularly beautiful, powerful song – the metre of it, the strings, the subtle arrangement.

Years later, I wound up on the bill with them at a very strange rock festival in Malaysia, where I got escorted offstage by police with automatic weapons. Long story! Back at the hotel we had dinner together, and it was very special for me.

Ian is a hero of mine – he’s such a brilliant musician. I still listen to those records to this day.”

Watching The Tide, the posthumous album by late guitar great Steve Cropper, is out today. Amongst its dozen tracks is My Angels Are Calling, a poignant number co-written and sung by Queen guitarist Brian May – featuring a solo from ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons – and a video for the song has been released today.

“We were all incredibly sad at Steve's passing, and I was already collaborating with Steve and his band on a track for this album," says May. "The backing track, which Jon Tiven, producer of the album and a very old friend of mine, sent me, includes Steve Cropper's unmistakable riff in a style which has influenced us all massively over the years.

"As soon as Steve was gone, I could hear something different in my head – a tribute to Cropper himself. The way I saw it, I wanted to try to step into his mind at the moment when he knew it was time to move on. So in the track I'm attempting to speak with his voice, and I felt that spiritually he would find a way of bringing his usual optimism into play.

"In the song, the angels are calling, and it seems to me that, along with being grateful for his wonderful life, he would imagine heaven to be something like going back to sitting on the dock of the bay, a moment in time that he shared with Otis Redding, creating that immortal hit, Dock Of The Bay. Having Billy Gibbons play a spectacular solo for me is the final wonderful bonus to this experience. The whole band did a terrific job, and I'm very proud to be a part of it.”

“Brian is singing from Steve's point of view,” says songwriter/producer Jon Tiven, who oversaw the project. "Looking back over his life and his road. It’s very powerful.”

Cropper, the legendary guitarist with Booker T. & the MG’s, the Blues Brothers, and many more, passed away on December 3 last year, aged 84. He had been working on Watching The Tide, the follow-up to 2024's Friendlytown, in the months prior to his death, and had completed 10 of its 11 tracks with Tiven. The album features several guest players in addition to May and Gibbons, including Ronnie Wood and Eric Clapton, who delivered a transcendent solo on the first single from the album, Ticket First.

"I told Eric, ‘Man, you just turned that song inside-out – I think we’re gonna have to give you a writer’s credit,” says Tiven. “And Eric said, ‘Well, anything to get my name next to Steve Cropper’s…’”

Watching The Tide – named in tribute to Dock Of The Bay – is out today.

Barely able to hear himself speak above the noise of the crowd, Chevy Chase asks for quiet. “We’ve got another group coming up that I think is gonna excite everybody,” the comedian-turned-Hollywood-star promises.

It’s July 13, 1985, and not yet 10am on the US’s eastern seaboard. But the day has dawned brightly for the 89,484 ticket holders gathered inside Philadelphia’s John F Kennedy Stadium for the US leg of the history-making ‘global jukebox’ famine relief concert Live Aid. They’ve already seen performances from folk legend Joan Baez, Motown greats the Four Tops, The Hooters, Billy Ocean, and Bernard Watson, an unsigned and completely unknown 18-year-old singer/ songwriter from Florida, who somehow charmed legendary promoter Bill Graham into letting him open the show, after sleeping outside the stadium for an entire week.

Later, this audience will be treated to short sets from some of the most iconic artists in rock history, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and a reunited Led Zeppelin among them. Before that, Chevy Chase informs the Philadelphia crowd – and the billion-plus music fans watching the live TV broadcast from the City Of Brotherly Love – that they’re going to see “one of the most visible heavy metal bands of the seventies, considered by many fans to be the standard-setting band of heavy metal”. “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Black Sabbath featuring Ozzy Osbourne.”

“Come on, clap your fucking hands!” Ozzy urges, the profanity bleeped out for television viewers worldwide. Not that anyone anywhere would expect good behaviour from rock’s most notorious wild man, heavy metal’s outrageous Prince Of Darkness, reunited on stage now with the band who unceremoniously sacked him six years earlier, which sent him spiralling into an abyss of self-loathing, self-destruction and severe depression.

A lot has changed since 1979. Since firing the singer who fronted the band on their first eight albums, Black Sabbath have hired and parted company with three more vocalists – Ronnie James Dio, Ian Gillan and previously unknown American singer David Donato – and now exist in name only, with original bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward having exited stage left too.

Meanwhile, having been dragged out of the darkness by his wife and manager Sharon, daughter of Sabbath’s hard-nosed manager Don Arden, Ozzy Osbourne is now a major star, his most recent solo record, 1983’s Bark At The Moon, already certified as his third successive multi-platinum US release.

Tony Iommi will later admit that he viewed Black Sabbath’s three-song Live Aid performance as a potential first step towards a full reunion for the Birmingham band. Ozzy Osbourne was harbouring no such thoughts.

“Deep down,” he wrote in his 2009 autobiography I Am Ozzy, “part of me wanted to say to them, you fired me, and now I don’t need you, so fuck you.”

In truth though, for all his success and notoriety, Osbourne was facing issues of his own. When the 36-year-old singer graced the cover of the July 1985 issue of American rock magazine Hit Parader, the magazine’s editor Andy Secher told readers: “With the release of his latest album, The Ultimate Sin, Ozzy Osbourne has once again proven that he remains the true master of the heavy metal form”, adding, “Osbourne has emerged with an album that has silenced those who questioned his continued viability”.

Powerful words, but utter nonsense, since no record shop in the world yet stocked said album. Because, contrary to Secher’s bold claim that Osbourne was “ready to take on the world”, the singer was fucked-up, fragile, and about to face some of the biggest and more serious challenges of his life.

The previous year had been a rollercoaster for him. On January 12, 1984, two nights into the North American leg of his Bark At The Moon world tour, Ozzy had told his friend Doc McGhee, manager of support act Mötley Crüe, that “someone’s gonna die before this is over”. That someone, Sharon Osbourne feared as the tour progressed, would be her beloved husband.

“Every night,” Ozzy recalled, “bottles would be thrown, knives would be pulled, chair legs would be smashed, noses would be broken, property would be destroyed. It was like bedlam and pandemonium rolled into one, then multiplied by chaos.”

When the tour ended, and the Osbournes learned that Sharon was pregnant with the couple’s second child, Kelly, Ozzy was informed by his wife that he had been booked into rehab facility the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs, California, for a six-week stay, beginning the week after his new daughter was due.

“I think you’ll have a good time there,” Sharon promised Ozzy, explaining that among other things the facility would teach him “how to drink like a gentleman”.

Reflecting on the experience in 2009, Ozzy wrote: “In my head, I imagined this beautiful oasis of a hotel out in the middle of the Californian desert, with a shimmering swimming pool outside, a golf course, lots of hot chicks in bikinis everywhere, and all these Hugh Hefner types in velvet smoking jackets and bow ties, leaning against an outdoor bar.”

The reality, as he was to discover, to his horror, was somewhat different.

“I walk in and I’ve got pockets full of Valium, Quaaludes, coke,” he told US ‘shock jock’ Howard Stern in 1996. “They go: ‘Empty your pockets.’ I go: No! Why?… They’re itemising syringes, bottle openers, crates of beer…”

“My stay in Camp Betty was the longest I’d been without drink or drugs in my adult life,” he wrote in I Am Ozzy, “and the comedown was horrendous.”

Post-rehab, and before beginning work on his fourth studio album, in January 1985 Osbourne visited South America for the first time, for the inaugural staging of the Rock In Rio festival – a 10-day event drawing 1.4 million music fans to a purpose-built ‘City Of Rock’, where Queen, AC/DC, Yes and Rod Stewart were booked among the headline attractions. Upon boarding his Riobound flight, the singer told me in 2018 that he proceeded to get “fucking loaded”. “I woke up with my wife stabbing me in the chest with a fucking dinner fork,” he said, laughing.

Back in Los Angeles after the festival, Ozzy set aside time to write with guitarist Jake E Lee. But that schedule was immediately disrupted when Lee informed his boss: “I’m not doing anything until I get a contract.”

A former member of LA rock glam-metal act Rough Cutt, Lee was a relative unknown, aged 25, when he joined Osbourne’s band. While his predecessor, the late, legendary Randy Rhoads, received a songwriting credit for every song on Blizzard Of Ozz and Diary Of A Madman, Lee wasn’t credited for a single song contribution on Bark At The Moon, with every song on the album, for the first time in his career, credited solely to Osbourne. Asked about this by Hit Parader, the singer stated: “He didn’t deserve any writing credits, all the ideas on that album were mine.”

Lee said nothing at the time, but in 2014, during an appearance on US DJ Eddie Trunk’s Sirius XM show, he presented an entirely different perspective on the subject.

“I was told from the get-go: ‘You write part of the songs, you’ll get writing credit, you’ll get publishing. That’s part of your deal,’” he said. “Finally, once I lay down the final track of my guitar playing, they said: ‘Ah! We have the contract for you.’ And in it, it says, specifically, Ozzy Osbourne wrote all the songs. You had nothing to do with any of the writing, you have no claim to publishing, and you cannot say so publicly.’

"I’m looking at Sharon, and I said: This is not what you told me before. And she says: ‘No, it isn’t.’ [I said]: Why do you think I’m gonna sign it? And she says: ‘Because if you don’t, we’ll give you a plane ticket, you go back home and you stand in line and you sue us. In the meantime, we have all your tracks, we’ll get another guitar player, he’ll redo your tracks, and you’ll have nothing.’

“They realised they got away with something on Bark At The Moon,” Lee told Guitar World earlier this year. “They knew it was something that would never happen again.” “While Ozzy was in rehab, I came up with everything that’s on The Ultimate Sin except for Shot In The Dark. Before I gave him my demos, I said I want a contract that says exactly what I’m gonna get out of this record. I need songwriting credit. I want the publishing I deserve. I said give me a contract that says that, and we can move forward. There weren’t any problems.”

Originally, Lee worked on the music for The Ultimate Sin with bassist Bob Daisley and drummer Jimmy De Grasso, but both men were gone by the time the album sessions commenced with producer Ron Nevision, who’d previously worked as an engineer on Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti and The Who’s Quadrophenia, and also produced records for Thin Lizzy, UFO and Survivor.

From the outset, Lee recalled, the new-look band – completed by bassist Phil Soussan and drummer Randy Castillo – were “butting heads” with the producer, over everything from guitar sounds, to what time the daily recording sessions should start, from the temperature of the rooms used at Townhouse Studios and AIR Studios in London, to the mix, which Nevison was forced to completely redo when Lee and Osbourne decided his initial attempt featured “too many fucking keyboards”.

“He wasn’t the most pleasant of men to work with,” Osbourne admitted to Kerrang!, “but he got the job done. I was there to make an album, not to make friends… In the end, his treating me like a bastard really worked. I think there’s some good songs on there, and I hope it’ll do well on the streets. It’s better than any Sabbath album I made.”

Ahead of the album’s scheduled release – January 27, 1986 in the US, and two weeks later in the UK – Osbourne was confronted with matters more concerning than a hard-ass producer.

In late 1985, shortly after the birth of his son Jack, Ozzy had a one-night stand with a woman he met at West Hollywood’s Sunset Marquis hotel. Worried that he might have contracted a sexually transmitted disease as a result of the encounter, he had a check-up with a doctor.

“Well, Mister Osbourne, the good news is that you don’t have herpes, the clap or syphilis,” he was informed.

“What’s the bad news?” Ozzy enquired.

“Well, I’m afraid there’s no easy way to tell you this,” his doctor admitted. “You’re HIV positive.”

“I couldn’t even look at Sharon, I felt so fucking terrible,” Ozzy recalled in his memoir. “She must have hated me at that moment. But she didn’t say anything. I suppose the shock of it must have been as bad for her as it was for me.”

The couple underwent tests again, and this time, to the immense relief of both parties, there was no trace of the virus. But that news didn’t mean he’d got the all-clear.

“Basically, your immune system currently isn’t functioning,” Ozzy was told. “Your blood contains near-fatal quantities of alcohol and cocaine, Mr Osbourne, not to mention a number of other controlled substances. You might not be HIV positive, but your life is still in grave danger if you don’t take it easier.”

The Osbournes scarcely had time to process the news before they were hit by another bombshell. On November 1, 1985, the parents of John Daniel McCollum, a 19-yearold Californian who had died by suicide in October ’84, filed a lawsuit against Osbourne and CBS Records, alleging that their son’s death was triggered by listening to the song Suicide Solution on Blizzard Of Ozz.

Osbourne always claimed that the song, which opened with the lyrics: ‘Wine is fine but whisky’s quicker, suicide is slow with liquor’ was about the death of AC/DC frontman Bon Scott. But Bob Daisley, who wrote the majority of its lyrics, later confessed that they were aimed at Ozzy himself. Whatever the truth, the lawsuit made Osbourne infamous once more.

“I became public enemy number one in America,” he recalled. “I started to get death threats wherever I went.”

“The fact of the matter,” he told Smash Hits, “is there was a boy who was very sick – that poor kid was well sick before he even listened to an Ozzy Osbourne record. I genuinely feel very sorry for both the parents and the child. But I’m a parent myself, and if my kid locked himself in his bedroom all the time and acted abnormally, then I’d feel distress and as a parent, I’d try to find out what the problem was, and I’d make sure he had some professional help from a psychiatrist or whatever. But they are just trying to pass the buck onto someone else – me!”

“It’s absurd to blame me,” Ozzy continued. “The poor kid shot himself through the head with his father’s gun. Instead of suing me, why don’t they sue the people who sold the gun?”

Ultimately, the case was thrown out, with the trial judge ruling that song lyrics were protected by the right to free speech.

“He said that although I was ‘totally objectionable and repulsive, trash can be given First Amendment protection too,’” Ozzy wrote in his autobiography. “I had to read that sentence about five times before I realised that the bloke had actually ruled in our favour.”

“I’m so used to being called Satan and having fingers at me, that I’m pretty used to the controversy,” he told Hit Parader with a sigh. “I just try to ignore it.”

The global release of The Ultimate Sin was preceded, on January 20, 1986, by the release as a single of the album’s most obviously commercial track, Shot In The Dark.

“That started as almost a disco song, from one of Phil Soussan’s other bands, and me and Jake transformed it into a metal thing,” Ozzy told me in 2018. “We completely stripped it down and rewrote the fucking thing. And then he said we stole it from him!”

In a typically mischievous move, Kerrang! decided to review The Ultimate Sin on a double-page spread alongside Black Sabbath’s Seventh Star, originally intended as a Tony Iommi solo album, which had its US release the week after Ozzy’s album. Ozzy had already made his feelings on the new Sabbath album clear.

“It’s a fucking disgrace,” he told Hit Parader. “To me, the whole notion of Black Sabbath has become a fucking joke.”

The British magazine, however, took a more generous view. Iommi’s album was awarded a maximum five out of five rating (“Seventh Star is a monstrous work that, in terms of recent output, gives Iommi a definite edge on old colleagues Ozzy and Dio,” wrote Malcolm Dome), while Ozzy’s new record received three out of five, with writer Dave Dickson stating his belief that the album “plumbed new depths of ordinariness”.

Twisting the knife, he shared his opinion that Ozzy’s “contribution to rock music has at best been negligible, at worst non-existent”, but conceded that “even if this was a pile of dingo’s kidneys, it would still shift in enormous quantities, so whatever I say isn’t going to make much difference.”

On the latter matter, at least, Dickson was correct. The Ultimate Sin reached No.6 on the Billboard 200 album chart, and peaked at No.8 in the UK. It would go on to sell more than two million copies in the US alone.

In 2022, Ozzy declared the record his least favourite solo album. “The songs weren’t bad, they were just put down weird,” he told Rolling Stone. “Everything felt and sounded the fucking same. There was no imagination.”

But 40 years on from its release, it stands up rather well. The title track, ushered in by a martial drum beat and a killer Jake E Lee riff, is an excellent opener, and Thank God For The Bomb, one of several mid-80s metal songs concerning the threat of nuclear armageddon, is another powerful highlight of the LP’s first side. (“Thank God For The Bomb doesn’t mean ‘thank God for the bomb,” Ozzy clarified. “All I’m saying is, if it’s the only way to keep the peace, then thank God for it. Does that make sense?”) Jake E Lee sparkles on the musically sophisticated Never and the superb Killer Of Giants, originally mooted as the album’s title track, and album closer Shot In The Dark is an inarguable classic. If this is Ozzy at his worst…

Whatever Ozzy’s take on the record, The Ultimate Sin sold more copies than any of his previous solo records, making him the biggest name in mid-80s metal. In the UK, his superstar status was confirmed when he was booked to headline the Monsters of Rock festival at Donington Park for the first time, on August 16, 1986, topping a bill that also included Scorpions, Def Leppard, Motörhead, comedy metallers Bad News and Warlock. That Black Sabbath reunion, and his former bully Mr Iommi, could wait.

“My ego loved it,” a smiling Ozzy admitted to me in 2014. “It was like: ‘Fuck you, I told you I was right!’ It was fucking unbelievable. Success is the best revenge.”

Fontaines D.C. have announced an extensive UK and Europe arena tour in support of their forthcoming Dopamine Chamber album.

The Irish quintet will kick off the tour at Lisbon's MEO Arena on October 21, and work their way through mainland Europe before launching the UK leg of the tour at Liverpool's M&S Bank Arena on November 20. The tour closes at London's O2 Arena on November 27.

The Irish band are also headlining the opening day of Reading festival today, August 28, and if you're not planning on being there, here's how you can catch the action, wherever you might be. The band also have a huge homecoming gig this weekend in Ireland at the Electric Picnic (August 30).

The follow-up to 2024's Romance, the group's fifth album Dopamine Chamber will be released on October 16 via XL Recordings.

"The album itself is a dopamine chamber,” says frontman Grian Chatten. "You step inside, and we test these different mind- or mood-altering pieces of music on you.

"I think Romance was maybe 60 per cent human and 40 per cent corrupted by automation, and a loss of feeling. This one feels more like 60 per cent corrupted – the mask is wearing the face a little more.

"I felt it would be more powerful to leave the hope out and reflect the ugliness honestly," he continues. "This one needed to feel more like a catastrophic warning.

“There’s a poignant sense of us being on the brink of some other kind of form of humanity, or non-humanity."

A presale for the tour begins at 10am BST on September 1, with the general on-sale following at 10am on September 3.

Tickets can be purchased here.

Fontaines D.C. UK and Europe tour 2026

Oct 21: Lisbon MEO Arena, POR
Oct 22: MadridMovistar Arena, SPA
Oct 24: Barcelona Sant Jordi Club, SPA
Oct 26: Bologna Unipol Arena, ITA
Oct 28: BelgradeHangar Stage 1, SRB
Oct 30: Prague Sportovní hala Fortuna, CZE
Oct 31: Łódź Atlas Arena, POL

Nov 02: Berlin Max-Schmeling-Halle, GER
Nov 05: Stockholm Hovet, SWE
Nov 06: Oslo Spektrum, NOR
Nov 08: Copenhagen Royal Arena, DEN
Nov 10: Amsterdam Ziggo Dome, HOL
Nov 12: Antwerp AFAS Dome, BEL
Nov 13: Paris Accor Arena,FRA
Nov 20: Liverpool M&S Bank Arena, UK
Nov 21: Manchester AO Arena, UK
Nov 22: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Nov 24: Leeds First Direct Arena, UK
Nov 25: Birmingham Utilita Arena, UK
Nov 27: London O2 Arena, UK

In 2021, Metallica brought together a head-spinningly diverse selection of artists to record reimagined cuts from the metal titans' seminal, self-titled 1991 LP, AKA The Black Album. Titled The Metallica Blacklist, it saw everyone from Miley Cyrus and Elton John to Ghost, Rina Sawayama, Chase & Status and Kamasi Washington get involved. It wasn't just seen as a celebration of 30 years of The Black Album itself, but a mark of how just widely respected and appreciated metal's biggest band had become.

Now, just four albums in and two fewer decades into their career, Turnstile have managed to pull off the same trick. Last year's Never Enough was widely regarded as an instant classic, a companion album to 2021's Glow On that added yet more shades to the Baltimore crew's versatile, increasingly pop-infused brand of arena punk. So far had they outgrown the US hardcore scene by the time of its release that even Charli XCX referenced them at the end of her Coachella headline set a couple of months prior.

Perhaps, then, we shouldn't be too surprised that the five-piece's seemingly boundless ambition has led them to this: Never Enough: Versions, a project that unites Turnstile's peers, heroes and pals from across the music spectrum for a series of refurbished versions of the songs from that record.

The guestlist here is quite remarkable: where else would you find Hayley Williams, Slayyyter and Four Tet rubbing shoulders with Elton John (him again!), Julien Baker and Dying Fetus? And, most importantly of all, it makes for a fascinating record full of genuinely brilliant moments.

Slayyyter's rambunctious reimagining of Birds borrows many of the motifs that made her outstanding latest album Worst Girl In America such a hit to produce a simmering electroclash banger; Dying Fetus, meanwhile, choose to trade the song's buzzing hardcore riffs for scything death metal, to wonderfully brutal effect.

Floating Points mashes Sole into pulsating hard house, while Baltimore hardcore mob Angel Du$t take their version of Sunshower on a delirious journey that stops off at scuzzy punk, eerie ambient electro and doom metal. It's a far cry from Four Tet's funky edm redub of Look Out For Me or Blood Orange's beautifully wistful, flute-powered Light Design, but no less enjoyable for it.

Other highlights? Elton John's twinkly piano and echoey vocals lend Seein' Stars a surprisingly surreal bent; Dan Deacon's take on Dreaming swaps out the mariachi hardcore of the original and replaces it with flittering, euphoric drum 'n' bass, while Brandon Woody's version opts for smooth jazz and woozy saxophone. A.G. Cook grinds Dull through a gritty industrial filter; Hayley Williams brings some gorgeous, slow-burn soul to Ceiling.

Not everything works. Porches' strained croons and damp acoustic dabblings on Never Enough open the album on a bit of a bum note, Chanel Beads' pondering take on Dull embraces its namesake and you can't help but feel the closing Time Is Happening would have been better if Julien Baker had just left Mustafa to it. But these are mere nitpicks on what is undoubtedly one of the boldest and most interesting musical projects of 2026. This is Turnstile's world now; we're just living in it.

Beartooth's sixth album sees the quintet shifting from raw, chaotic metalcore with deeply personal, troubled lyrics to polished, electronically tinged rock and a newly determined outlook.

Caleb Shomo created Beartooth in 2012, writing, recording and producing all instruments entirely himself. Since then, he’s endured an onslaught of personal storms, weathering mental health issues, successfully overcoming substance abuse, and most recently coming out as a “proud gay man” to his wife and then fans.

In parallel, he’s steered the band to become a metalcore powerhouse known for passionate vocals, huge guitar chugs and massive melodic hooks. These elements remain, but the sound has noticeably evolved from one rooted in pain and darkness to one now bristling with hard-fought hope and self-love.

Longtime fans may struggle with the shine and poppiness this transformation brings. Not only is the sound more approachable but also more heavily produced, thanks in part to Jordan Fish (Architects, Poppy) who collaborated on Free, and Periphery’s Misha Mansoor who helped with the title track.

Sorry is memorably sassy, You and Stadiums neatly combine aggression and dramatic flair, and Bullshit is an energetic blend of old and new Beartooth. However, much like Caleb’s newfound self-assured poise, the electronic playfulness of For Me By Me and the singalong purity of Lose You To Find Me and Made It feel worlds apart from the bleak angst of the 2014 debut album, Disgusting.

But if you can push the nostalgia for misery aside, a catchy, spirited and uplifting reincarnation of Beartooth unveils itself. It’s one that’s faced demons, changed record labels and collaborated with heavy-hitters to deliver a bunch of memorable tracks deserving of repeated radio plays and the warmth of a fresh spotlight.

Pure Ecstasy is out now via Fearless. Beartooth tour the UK in October.

We're back with a brand new Tracks Of The Week! This week we've got another seven new and diverse slices of progressively inclined music for you to enjoy.

Congratulations to last week's winner, Spain-based guitarist Rodrigo Pagavino, who romped away with things with his high-octane instrumental track Velomorph. Congratulations, Rodrigo and commiserations to Lonely Robot, who came second, with IT in third place.

The premise is simple - we've listened to a batch of new releases by bands falling under the progressive umbrella, and collated them together in one post for you - it makes it so much easier than having to dip in and out of various individual posts, doesn't it?

The idea is to watch the videos (or listen if it's a stream), enjoy (or not) and also to vote for your favourite in the voting form at the bottom of this post. Couldn't be easier, could it? We'll be bringing you Tracks Of The Week, as the title implies, each week. Next week, we'll update you with this week's winner and present a host of new prog music for you to enjoy.

If you're a band and you want to be featured in Prog's Tracks Of The Week, send your video (as a YouTube link) or track embed, band photo (please, don't forget the photo!) and biog with quotes to us here.

CHIMPAN A - EYE FOR AN EYE

UK art rockers ChimpanA have teamed up with rock legend Andy Fairweather Low, best known for his work with Roger Waters and Eric Clapton, for their latest single, An Eye For An Eye, and for which they have released a suitably dramatic video. That said, he's almost overshadowed by the powerhouse backing vocals from Kirstie Roberts! The track did not feature on the recently acclaimed ChimpanA album, Music Is Art - Vol. 1, but helms a brand new EP which is on sale from today.

“It’s such a thrill to work with Andy," the pair say. "He is a Welsh hero. We were looking for the voice of reason, so it had to be mature. Although Andy is perhaps best known these days for his guitar playing, his voice has so much character and really suited the music. We wanted the video for Eye For An Eye to feel cinematic, but also to reflect the strange, unsettling world we’re all navigating at the moment. The idea of the VR headset gave us a way into that - a kind of ‘Matrix’-like world where you’re constantly questioning what’s real. We move between the darkness of that inner world, the geopolitical madness and general weirdness that so many of us feel, and the reality of the room around it. As the video progresses, those boundaries start to break down until, quite literally, the room falls apart. What’s left is light. That felt like the visual counterpart to the song: rather than accepting the darkness and division around us, we have the choice to step beyond it and find something more hopeful, human and connected.”

KALANDRA - LET ME BE OPEN

Expressive Norwegian folky proggers Kalandra have just announced that they will release their third album, The Other Side, through By Norse on November 13,l from which comes new single Let Me Be Open, with its dramatic video. On the album, the band explores the mysterious imagery of the subconscious, where memories, fears, and imagination quietly intertwine, itself inspired by vivid dreams singer Katrine and bandmate Jogeir Daae Mæland kept notes of in a notebook by the bedside.

"There’s a moment when you realise how much of yourself you’ve learned to hold back," Katrine explains. "Let Me Be Open grew out of that feeling, the longing to loosen your grip, let go of some of the fear, and rediscover the sense of wonder you had as a child. It’s a song about making space for something softer to emerge, and trusting that not every shadow needs to be fought."

EYRE LLEW - EVERYWHERE

Nottingham-based post-rockers Eyre Llew will release their second studio album, Bloom, on September 18, through the rather severe-sounding Penance Music Group. Fortunately for the quintet, making their secind appearance in Tracks Of The Week, their sound is far more pleasant on the ears - new single Everywhere's chiming guitars and mellifluous vocals showing why they've been dubbed "Britain's answer to Sigur Rós". They play a hometown show in Nottingham to launch the new album on September 17.

"It traces back to a fleeting moment, a spontaneous drink before a goodbye, when my now-fiancé was heading back to Wales the day after her birthday, and everything in that moment felt like it was aligning," the band say. "Two people being drawn together, glowing in the feeling of it, knowing something important was starting. The song reflects falling deeply for someone later in life, not at the beginning when it seems to be the scenario written in movies and fairy tales, but from the middle, when you understand yourself more, and recognise the weight and meaning of real connection."

DIKAJEE - HOME OF THE WIND

Multi-instrumentalist Dikajee has shared a delightfully dramatic video for her latest single, Home Of The Wind. It's taken from her upcoming album, The Frame, which is released on November 6. The single features a guest appearance from Within Temptation keyboardist Vikram Shankar, while the album itself features quite the cast list: Jonathan Noyce (Archive, Jethro Tull), Varijashree Venugopal (Snarky Puppy), German Vergara (Aisles), Guillaume Bernard (KLONE), Christian Ayala (Avandra) and more.

"Home Of The Wind is about how the most terrible and most wonderful things can happen at the same time and your happiness can be bittersweet," Dikajee explains. "I always wanted to go live in the UK - but I’ve never thought that I’ll be moving during the war; and having to separate with my family that was going through grief after the loss of my father. But at the same time, it’s about not letting fear and grief make my decisions for me. I still want to follow my dreams and make art, and I want to follow my music, not fear and depression. It’s very hard, but regretting would probably hit harder. The alternative name for the song is 'black wings' cause I feel like I’m flying to my dream on black wings now."

COULD SEED - DRUIDS

French instrumental progressive post-rock quartet Could Seed also features guitarist Jordan Jupin and drummer Elie Chéron, both of whom also play with HamaSaari, who recently made an impact in the UK with a couple of live shows in July. Joining them are fellow guitarist Dimitri Even and bassist Magloire Thomas. There's a similar sense of musical exploration, too. This is a live version of Druids, recorded at a session at Studio de la Fuie, which will feature on the band's forthcoming second album, Terminal, due out October 23 via Klonosphere Records.

'This track refers to ancestors and their knowledge, specifically, how the bonds and interactions they shared with those around them were more respectful of differences and more integrated into their environment," the band say.

POLYPHIA - POWER IN THE BLOOD

Guitar-led instrumental proggers Polyphia have announced that they will release their fifth studio album, Be Not Afraid, through Rise Records on October 23. The band have also shared a video for their latest single, Power In The Blood, on which the Texan quartet's undeniable six-string prowess is very much to the fore. On the new album, guitarist Tim Henson took a different approach to composition, initially singing lines aloud and then translating them onto guitar, creating a process that encouraged the entire band to build on each other’s ideas in real time.

"During the making of this record, we went down some pretty dark rabbit holes," Henson explains. "We kept coming across things that were so depraved they sounded insane when you said them out loud. Then some of the very things we had been talking about started appearing in documents released to the public. You can read that stuff and feel disgusted, demoralised, and completely powerless. Be Not Afraid is our response to that. Rather than allowing the ugliness of the world to paralyse us, we put everything we had into making something beautiful. We weren’t afraid of whether something was too different or whether people were going to understand it. We just followed what excited us and made what I believe is our best record to date."

HYPNO5E - MOLECULAR ANGEL

French quartet Hypno5e will release their latest album, Trame Noire, named after the French term for "dark infrastructure", through Pelagic Records on November 6, and the twisting and turning Molecular Angel is the band's latest single. It's a busy time for the band, who have a 13-album box set coming out at the same time as Trame Noire, which celebrates their 20-year career and features their 2007 debut album, Des Deux L’une Est L’autre, on vinyl for the very first time.

"Molecular Angel is the turning point in Trame Noire’s trajectory, marking the moment when the mutation of the surrounding space gives way to the character’s inner transformation," the band state. "Direct and raw, the track unfolds over a relatively short span of time for an Hypno5e song. It moves through ethereal passages before ending in a frantic chaos that announces the album’s second half. Molecular Angel was conceived differently from the rest of our compositions: with no detours, more condensed, and focused on a direct and immediate expression."

Dream Theater guitarist John Petrucci started trolls typing when he recruited Mike Portnoy for second solo album Terminal Velocity. It generated speculation that, after Portnoy’s traumatic departure from DT a decade earlier, the door might be opening for his return. And while that was to happen three years later, in 2020 Petrucci told Prog that wasn’t part of his plan – and he had a selfish motivation in wanting Mike Mangini to remain in the band.

One of the world’s most celebrated virtuoso guitarists, John Petrucci has been a driving force behind Dream Theater since their inception in the 1980s. His musical journey began with studious practising of the guitar, before playing Iron Maiden and Rush covers at Berklee College Of Music alongside Mike Portnoy and John Myung, who between them would form the nucleus of Dream Theater.

Petrucci’s gentle voice and mild manner belies some of the fury that zaps from his fingers, but his solo material – as well as the music made during his day job – continues to ooze plenty of nuance, with melody and songwriting remaining key, as demonstrated on his solo record Terminal Velocity.

And so to the moment when Petrucci and Portnoy reunited. The drummer spent six days recording for the album, basing his work on full programmed drums put down by Petrucci and his engineer James ‘Jimmy T’ Meslin.

Bassist Dave LaRue, who’d worked with Petrucci on Suspended Animation and the G3 tours, and is also Portnoy’s bandmate in Flying Colors, recorded bass.

“Dave came in and did an amazing job, but drummer-wise, I wasn’t sure,” Petrucci says. “When Mike was in the band and I did my first solo album, I purposely didn’t want to use him because I wanted to keep my solo album separate from Dream Theater.

“But now he’s not in Dream Theater any more, so it was a perfect opportunity. I’d told him I was working on it and he – maybe unbeknownst to him – planted the seed.

“He was like, ‘Hey, if you ever need a drummer, I’m here.’ It kinda just like stuck in my mind: ‘Hey, Mike would be great on it.’ It was really cool having him come in. He did an awesome job.”

But what was it like when they faced each other in the studio for the first time in a decade?“At one point I picked up my guitar – we were going to work on something – and he’s like, ‘Okay, this is the first thing we’re going to play in 10 years together. Just guess what it is,’” Petrucci says.

“He counted it off and started playing… and I came in with the wrong song! I didn’t read his mind. I think he was playing the first song that [their pre-Dream Theater band] Majesty ever wrote. I thought he was going to play Metropolis. That was totally wrong!”

The guitarist is clear on one thing, though: the rekindling of the Petrucci-Portnoy working relationship isn’t going to have any effect on Dream Theater.

“People will speculate that Mike playing on my album all of a sudden means that things are gonna change in Dream Theater, and it’s not that at all,” he confirms.

“Mike Mangini is the drummer in Dream Theater. That’s not changing, and I want to make sure that people don’t extrapolate something that’s just not the case.”

He added: “For me, selfishly, it’s great because I get to reunite musically with Mike Portnoy and have him play drums on my album, and then still be in Dream Theater with Mike Mangini. So I get to play with two of the greatest drummers in the world.”

Death shadows few bands like it seems to shadow Mastodon. Several of the Atlanta band’s past albums have been directly and indirectly informed by loss and grief, from 2009’s psychedelic prog-metal masterpiece Crack The Skye (inspired by the death of drummer/vocalist Brann Dailor’s sister) to 2021’s Hushed And Grim (dedicated to their late manager Nick John).

Marrow Deep hits even harder. It comes 12 months after the death of their former guitarist Brent Hinds, who left the band acrimoniously at the start of 2025, as well as the death of Dailor’s mother. How much of Mastodon’s ninth album has been specifically shaped by those events isn’t clear – lyrically they’ve always dealt in the cryptic and the elliptic, although that title is something of a tell.

Musically, the album’s dense knottiness can’t hide the seam of anguish at its core, but it’s not a dour listen. Longtime members Dailor, bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders and guitarist Bill Kelliher – augmented here by touring guitarist Nick Johnston and keyboard player João Nogueira – have retained their heaviness and complexity.

Barbarians Blood pushes on through a wind tunnel of its own creation, slipping from time change to time change as the grizzly Sanders and smoother-voiced Dailor alternate vocals (poignantly, Hinds’s voice, so often the third leg on the stool, is notably absent). The roaring A Vampire’s Demeanour is fuelled by what sounds like cathartic fury, unsurprisingly.

But any air of moroseness is dispelled by Marrow Deep’s shape-shifting approach. Poisonous Weapons shifts from low rumble to upward-spiralling euphoria, and Nogueira brings jazzy detail to In The Ruins – territory Mastodon have never really ventured into before.

Elsewhere, Geezer Butler adds a fantastically fitting bass intro to The Vanishing that sounds like it could have been lifted from any of the first four Black Sabbath albums, before the track veers off into liquid-psychedelic Planet Caravan territory (Dailor has talked about it being his vision of travelling into the cosmos to be reunited with his mother and his late sister). Clutch’s Neil Fallon makes his second appearance on a Mastodon album, here dialling up the babbling backwoods preacher man act on the playfully ominous The Three Fates.

In its own way, Marrow Deep is a defiant album, one that takes all the bad experiences the band have endured in recent times and turns it into something positive. Not laughing in the face of death, but not crumbling under it either.

Pearl Jam are celebrating the 35th anniversary of the release of their debut album, Ten, by releasing a complete live performance of the 1991 classic on vinyl.

Ten Live was recorded on April 29, 2016, at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, a show that saw Pearl Jam play Ten in its entirety for only the second time in their career. The choice of setlist was a last-minute decision made by Eddie Vedder after he learned that the band had sold out their 10th consecutive show at the venue. (The first occasion was in 1992, at the Nachtwerk club in Munich, Germany, during a promotional tour for the album.)

Ten Live is available on three-sided black vinyl and clear vinyl (the latter for Ten Club members only), and is available for pre-order now. It'll be released on November 29. Full tracklist below.

In other Ten-related news, bassist Jeff Ament has appeared on Pearl Jam's Sirius XM channel with mixing engineer Tim Palmer to discuss the making of the album.

Meanwhile, guitarist Mike McCready has joined many in the music world by paying tribute to Dolly Parton and Rocky Horror Picture Show star Tim Curry, who died on the same day this week.

"RIP Tim Curry, one of the greatest," writes McCready. "Darkness must flow down the river of nights dreaming. Dolly Too, one of the greatest! Don’t dream it, be it!"

In 2020, McCready filmed a version of the Wild And Untamed Thing from the musical's soundtrack for the Rocky Horror Picture Show project, a livestream fundraiser organised by Wisconsin Democrats in support of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's presidential campaign. Molly Sides and Whitney Petty of Thunderpussy appeared as dancers in the video.

Pearl Jam: Ten Live tracklist

Side One
Intro
Once
Even Flow
Alive
Why Go

Side Two
Black
Jeremy
Oceans
Porch

Side Three
Garden
Deep
Release
Master/Slave

Fusing psychedelic rock, free jazz and pop whimsy, Soft Machine’s 1968 debut album The Soft Machine helped lay the foundations for prog rock and the Canterbury Scene. We explored its intriguing background in 2012.

It’s early December 1968 and Julian Glover, an actor who’ll later appear in The Empire Strikes Back among numerous TV and film productions, is rushing back to 48 Dalmore Road, West Dulwich, from Soho’s One Stop Records. “I’ve got it!” he shouts, running into the living room where a small number of friends and family are waiting.

Glover, Robert Wyatt’s older half-brother, is holding a copy of The Soft Machine. Removing it from the impressive sleeve with its revolving pinwheel interior, he puts the imported vinyl onto the player, and the room fills with the strange sounds of Soft Machine’s debut album.

Bill MacCormick – later a member of Wyatt’s post Soft Machine band Matching Mole – was there. “When Julian played it I thought, 'Bloody hell, this is not like anything I’ve heard!’” For the Wyatt family and friends Christmas had come early.

The Soft Machine explodes into life with an abrupt drum roll and Wyatt’s voice in freefall descent. Fragmentary words and phrases slowly accrue around Mike Ratledge’s droning Lowery organ, with gentle nudges from Kevin Ayers’ bass. With echoed percussion clattering from speaker to speaker, the introductory moments are designed to draw the listener in slowly, rather than gruffly grab attention.

But when opening track Hope For Happiness does crank up nearly two minutes later, its wild, abrasive sound offers little in the way of concession to newcomers. “Get on board or get left behind” is the implied message in the song’s bouncing, breakneck delivery. Wyatt’s voice sounds raw and unvarnished as explores philosophical and spiritual conundrums. Then, just as the listener settles down for the ride, the group execute a hair-raising handbrake turn into a wall of discomfiting noise.

From this wreckage, atonal keyboard chords fly side-by-side with reverb-drenched drums and tape-manipulated sounds, all eerily manifesting like a poltergeist wreaking havoc from inside a toy box. Coming at a time when extraneous psychedelic effects were pretty much de rigueur, Soft Machine’s take on such grooviness isn’t the usual cosmically-inclined peace-and-love audio embroidery – it’s something far grittier, confrontational and experimental.

Soft Machine were the place where free jazz, psychedelic rock and whimsical pop converged. The band also operated on the frontier of art, sound and light. They formed in 1966 in Canterbury, Kent. Wyatt and Ayers had played together in the Wilde Flowers, which would also include future members of Caravan. Wyatt and Ratledge also played at various times in a backing group for the poet/songwriter Daevid Allen. They started Soft Machine with Allen, but the Australian left before their first recording was made.

From the start, the new group aligned themselves to all kinds of artistic movements both at home and abroad. They played regularly in Paris and St Tropez, and provided soundtracks for ballets, art installations, free theatre and ‘happenings.’

Life-long fan, Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera, says: “I recall seeing them at Christmas On Earth Continued, a large event in 1967 at Olympia which had bands like Pink Floyd, Eric Burdon And The Animals, Tomorrow and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. That was fantastic. They had such a combination of sounds – Mike Ratledge’s jazzy keyboards; Robert, who’s totally into jazz but loves pop; and then Kevin, who’s much more song-oriented.”

Speaking to author Mike King in his 1994 book Wrong Movements: A Robert Wyatt, the then-drummer and singer said: “In terms of how we amplified our music we were a rock group, but what we heard in our heads wasn’t pop music. We never looked to other groups for inspiration – in fact we were listening to John Coltrane records... Our music didn’t fit into an already existing format. Pop music didn’t offer enough open space for improvisation. When you have a hit record, you always have to play it the same way; and there was no way we were going to play a tune the same way twice.”

Powered by such energies, The Soft Machine serves up a kind of genetically-mutated forward-looking pop that draws upon jazz and classical music with a disregard for restrictions. However, the band’s instrumental prowess is incidental to the process.

“What was great live was We Did It Again,” says Manzanera, recalling the band’s propensity to turn in versions of the tune that, on at least one famous occasion, lasted for 45 minutes. “It was just an excuse to have a great long jam, of course, but it was great conceptually – almost a kind of systems music. Their live sets were just continuous, and that was rather innovative and wonderful – the way they mixed it up together. That made seeing them a whole experience.”

Wyatt would never dominate another Soft Machine album to the extent that he does here. His self-referential lyrics on Why Am I So Short? brilliantly depart from normal boy-meets-girl territory, preferring instead to examine himself like a specimen under a microscope. He sings: "I’m nearly 5 ft 7 tall / I like to smoke and drink and ball / I’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pam / And every day I like an egg and some tea / But best of all I like to talk about me! ”

That kind of whimsical and highly observational approach would later become a template for Hatfield And The North and the other bands gathered under the ‘Canterbury scene’ banner. Yet there’s a perverse irony to the fact that the album which birthed that most English sub-genre of progressive rock was actually recorded in New York’s Record Plant, while the band were touring with Hendrix.

Produced by the band, Hendrix manager Chas Chandler and Tom Wilson – whose credits included Bob Dylan and The Velvet Underground – The Soft Machine was recorded and mixed in just four days. Discussing the sessions to biographer Graham Bennett, Ayers recalled: “All I can remember about Tom Wilson was that he sat on the phone and called his girlfriends all day long. We just played the live set and he said, ‘That’s a take!’ There was very little dubbed on. Had there been a more sensitive or more efficient producer, it could have been much better.”

Yet perhaps because of its relative lack of polish, the album succeeds in presenting Soft Machine without artifice or affectation. It lacks the kind of punch they generated in concert – but there’s a palpable sense that the players are throwing caution to the wind and going for a real performance. Ratledge’s soloing on Lullabye Letter is a high point, closer to the swirling pointillism of free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor than the blues-based idiom usually preferred by his contemporaries.

“Ratledge was groundbreaking,” says Bill MacCormick. “With other players of the day you can trace where they’ve come from. But where did his sound come from? Nobody had played keyboards like that ever. There was that aggression, apart from anything else, and the fact that he used a Lowery through a Marshall stack, rather than a Hammond organ and a Leslie cabinet like everyone else did. He had an incredible facility and speed that took keyboard playing into an area that nobody has done before or since.”

Though he would later enjoy a solo career that spotlighted his lugubrious eccentricity, Ayers’ presence on the album is somewhat muted, compared to the barrage churned up by the drums and organ. Only on We Did It Again and the brooding Why Are We Sleeping? does he truly come to the fore. Yet MacCormick argues that Ayers was a crucial part of Soft Machine.

“He had a difficult job in that band. Whether there was more available than what he was playing in terms of technique, I don’t know, but what he does do works very well. He plays an essential role in keeping Robert’s drumming and Mike’s keyboards within the same universe. Otherwise I think they could have spun off in different directions.”

The album ends with a curiosity that’s an augury of things to come. Box 25/4 Lid features Ratledge on piano and Soft Machine roadie Hugh Hopper playing fuzz bass. Though lasting less than a minute, it anticipates the thematic complexity with which the band would later become identified.

Their debut album was only released in America, housed in a lavish sleeve with a revolving disc that rotated the players with cogs and wheels. It pre-dated and possibly inspired the sleeve of Led Zeppelin III by two years. By that time Soft Machine had split up, exhausted and killed off by the treadmill of continuous touring. Then, in late 1968, came a reminder from Probe Records that they were contractually obliged to record a follow-up. With Ayers on sojourn in Spain, Wyatt made the call to Ratledge, and drafted Hopper in to play bass on what would become Volume Two, released in 1969.

“The Soft Machine is one of those albums that’s been like a friend to me,” says Manzanera, who bought his copy in 1968 and has never parted with it. “There are about 15 bits of vinyl I’ve had with me since I was brought up in Cuba, Hawaii, Venezuela and London. This record, along with Volume Two and [1970’s] Third are all like friends, really.”

Bill MacCormick retains a similar love for the album. “It reminds me of all the hours spent drinking tea and listening to jazz in Robert’s bedroom upstairs at 48 Dalmore Road. The place should have a bloody blue plaque on the wall: ‘Soft Machine annoyed the fuck out of local people rehearsing here, 1967-1969.’”

Dolly Parton didn’t talk to just anyone, and her schedule was famously and rigorously observed. But in 2014, as she geared up to release her Blue Smoke album and embark on a world tour, she spoke with Classic Rock's Nashville correspondent Bill DeMain and gave us one of the funniest and most poignant interviews you’ll ever read. This feature has not previously appeared online.

One day in 1975, Dolly Parton got the phone call that all songwriters back then dreamed about. Elvis Presley was making a new album and he wanted to record her song I Will Always Love You. A No.1 country smash for Dolly the year before, it was written about what she calls “the painfully heartwrenching time” spent with her singing partner Porter Wagoner.

Significantly, it was also the first song Dolly penned for her own publishing company. So the prospect of The King unleashing his gusty vibrato on that towering “I-eee-I…” chorus was doubly thrilling – it was sure to be a crossover hit that would put the royal in royalties.

But there was a catch.

“Elvis loved the song,” Dolly says. “So [RCA producer] Felton Jarvis notified me and I was so excited. Though I’d had a few chances to meet Elvis, I never had. I think I just wanted him to always be the way he was in my mind. He was so spiritual and out there anyway, I didn’t want nothing to blow the image. But they were inviting me to the studio to hear him doing my song.

"Then Felton said: ‘But Elvis has to have half the publishing on the song. Everything he records, unless it’s already a standard, he gets half the publishing.’ I said: ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t give my publishing to nobody. Not half, not 10 per cent, not any of it. If he loves the song and the song is that good, then he’ll record it anyway. And if he don’t, well, just say that I’m flattered with the thought.’”

This song credit-sharing gambit had been going on since 1956, when Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, realised that the serious dough was in music publishing. Sadly, some writers sold out. Dolly didn’t.

She recalls: “Everybody told me I was crazy. ‘You’re saying no to Elvis Presley?!’ To be honest, it wasn’t Elvis. It was the Colonel. And thank God I said no, because that song made me more money than all of the others I’d written put together. If I’d given up half the publishing, then I would’ve made half the money, but much more than that, I would’ve lost half the pride in it. The fact that I wrote and published the song by myself just made the whole thing more special.”

It wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last that someone tried to take advantage of Dolly Parton. Maybe they were misled by the blonde wigs, the impossible curves, the girlish giggle. She may refer to herself as a “Backwoods Barbie,” but as she made clear in one of her early hits, “this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool.”

Her remarkable 50-plus year ride through the music business is like a slalom through an obstacle course that she’s navigated with integrity, keen intelligence and a drive to constantly expand her creative horizons and reinvent herself. While most of her contemporaries are either retired or recycling hit medleys for tourists, Dolly is still moving forward, revealing new aspects of herself, from writing a Broadway musical to founding a childhood literacy programme in Tennessee to keeping in constant touch with three million followers on Twitter.

Her new album, Blue Smoke, mixes the stripped-down immediacy of the acclaimed bluegrass records she’s made over the past decade with what Dolly calls “some more modern, rockin’ things.” And whether she’s pouring her still-supple mountain tremolo voice over her own new songs, or covers of Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right and Bon Jovi’s Lay Your Hands On Me, she still sounds like she means every word.

“I don’t want to rest on my laurels,” Dolly says. “I don’t want to sit around and count my money. I’d rather count my blessings, and count the songs I can write every day, and all the good things I could do for somebody else. I have no desire to retire. Even working at Dollywood [her theme park] at one of the theatres would be like semi-retirement, like something I settled for.

"I like getting out there with the big dogs. I like to run. I don’t feel my age. And I’m going to always look the same. I’m a cartoon. They never age anyway. It’s like, ‘She could be 12 or she could be 112.’ But I have a youthful energy, and I think that comes from staying in the mainstream and loving what I do. I feel as young as I did when I first left the Smokies in 1964 to live in Nashville.”

That move to Nashville is even more remarkable when you consider Parton’s hardscrabble beginnings. Dolly Rebecca Parton entered this world on January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin in the mountains of East Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children born to poor sharecropper parents. While Dolly grew up without electricity, a telephone or indoor plumbing, she was surrounded by a loving family who instilled in her common sense and a passion for music.

After singing for “my brothers and sisters and chickens and dogs with a tin can as a make-believe microphone,” Dolly got her first break at 10 years old when she landed a job singing on a programme called Farm And Home Hour, broadcast from Knoxville. “I was on TV before we owned one,” she says.

This led to her first recording at 14, a rockabilly number called Puppy Love, an appearance on the Grand Ole Opry, where she brought the house down, and a brief songwriting deal with Tree Publishing. In between, she found time to attend high school classes. Some weekends, she snuck away to Nashville with her Uncle Bill, also a tunesmith. The two of them lived in “an old junked-up car,” writing songs, washing in gas station restrooms and being what Dolly laughingly calls “show business squirrels.”

On the day after she graduated high school in 1964, Dolly grabbed a suitcase full of clothes, boarded a bus and headed for Nashville. In short order, she was signed to a publishing deal at Combine Music and a record deal with Monument. While Kitty, Minnie and Loretta were already raising the flag for country girl power, young Dolly was aware she was wading right into a chauvinistic, male-dominated business.

“But I didn’t think about it in those terms,” she says. “I knew I was a woman. I always say I patterned my look from the local town tramp, which is the honest truth. But that was a country girl’s idea of glamour, with the peroxide, the big hair, the tight clothes. I did look a certain way, so a lot of men thought I might be easy. I was easy to be around, easy to like.

"But I was also very serious about my work, my business, and if I needed to use my femininity and my look for a weapon and a tool, I did that. But I didn’t do it intentionally. I was just secure in who I was. I made the deals just like if I’d been a man. I always say: ‘I’ll always look like a woman, but I’ve always been able to think like a man.’ Meaning I can think in a man’s world, because I had all those brothers, my dad, my uncles. It served me well being a woman at that time.”

It also served her well in her songwriting. Dolly is a singer who has always refused to play the victim, and her strength and twinkling intellect shine through in songs like the early feminist anthem Just Because I’m A Woman.

It was after my husband and I had been married for a year, he asked me if I’d ever been with anybody else – I didn’t feel like lying, and I had been,” she says, explaining the roots of the song. “But he’d never asked me before, so I certainly wasn’t gonna volunteer any information [laughs]. So I said yes, and he was really hurt, he was crushed, and he was in a terrible mood for two or three months over that. And I just felt terrible, so I wrote that song from a very personal place. Not just about women in general or how they’re treated.

"It was just about that relationship, that moment in time – like, ‘My mistakes are no worse than yours just because I’m a woman.’ That all cleared up later, and that was all fine after I’d said enough times: ‘You can kiss my ass. I did it, and I can’t say I’m sorry I did it because that was part of my growing up and part of my life. I’m just sorry that you’re acting like this about it, because I could’ve lied to you and then done it too.’ If I had to do it over, I would, so I just said: ‘My mistakes are no worse than yours.’”

While she was comfortable with her gender, it took Dolly a year of experimentation to find her direction as an artist. Early Monument recordings like Busy Signal and Don’t Drop Out, cut with producer Fred Foster, are more Dusty Springfield than down-home country.

“Fred didn’t quite know how to market me,” Dolly says. “I was a very country girl. Just really raw, and not refined at all. We felt around and Fred saw that I could do that big dramatic pop style, but that I was best to do more country-flavoured music, until I grew into my own self.”

One of Dolly’s early songs that she demoed with producer Ray Stevens (later known for novelty tunes like The Streak) was titled Everything Is Beautiful In Its Own Way. So it was more than a little suspicious when Stevens had a Grammy-winning hit of the same name a few years later.

“That gives some idea of what a young girl trying to break into the music business at that time could expect,” Dolly wrote in 1994 in her autobiography. Today, she takes the high road. “I don’t believe that Ray Stevens, who was successful and is so talented in his own right, would have the need to steal somebody’s song. It’s a good title, so what happens, happens.

"I have no resentment about it. I wouldn’t let my publisher sue him, though I could have got half of his song because we were both working at Monument and he was producing me, and the songs had a few similar lines, ‘the snow covered mountains’ and different little things. But still, I’d like to think it was the kind of accident that happens with songwriters.”

What ultimately helped Dolly dial in her signature mountain girl style was what came most naturally – songwriting as storytelling.

“That’s my favourite style of writing,” she says. “That’s more natural for me than trying to just do a few words in a simple song. Honestly, I can sit down and write a big long story song much easier than I can the more commercial, typical songs.” And some of those story songs, such as Down From Dover and Jeannie’s Afraid Of The Dark, tackled heavy subjects like teen pregnancy, suicide and madness, striking a pitch black tone that might surprise her more casual fans today.

“It’s taken people all these years to realise that I am all of that he says. “I am a girl of many colours. I am dark and I am light and I am grey and I am in between. I’m very yellow, I’m very blue, I’m very red. I’m all those colours. You have to be all that to be a real person, and you certainly have to feel all that to be a good songwriter. But everything I ever wrote, I’m proud of. I was that girl in Down From Dover. I didn’t get pregnant. It wasn’t a true story about me, as many of my songs are.

"But I had numerous nieces and relatives that had gotten pregnant and their daddies wanted to kill the boy that done it. I was just trying to find a way to make it as sad and pitiful as I could. People may see me as this ray of sunshine, but it’s not against my nature at all to go to these dark places. When I hurt, I hurt all over and I’ve been through some major sad things in my life.”

While Dolly sometimes embraced the dark side in her songs, she avoided its allure in the hard-drinking, pilled-up world of 1960s Nashville.

“I never wanted to do anything that was gonna mess with my mind,” she says. “I knew that taking drugs would do that. And I’ve never been a big drinker. There’s always been a lot of problems in my family on both sides with drinking, so I was always leery about it. Plus, I didn’t have time for that kind of recreation. Not to say that I’m a prude, or I don’t know everything that’s going on. I’ve been around it.

"But I had enough problems just trying to make it in the business and doing the things you’ve got to do without creating problems for myself. I’ve never been a smoker either. All of that stuff affects your voice. Now that I’m older, I think that all of those decisions helped keep my singing voice in good shape.”

In 1967, Dolly’s career kicked into high gear when was hired by Opry star Porter Wagoner to replace Norma Jean as the new girl singer on his popular syndicated television show. It was the beginning of a successful but stormy seven-year run that mixed highs such as CMA awards for Vocal Duets and Top 40 classics like Just Someone I Used To Know, Yours Love and Please Don’t Stop Loving Me with the lows of knock-down, drag-out backstage fights.

To watch early archival clips of them together is to see the seeds of what Dolly calls their “duelling dreams.” There’s Porter, the Nudie-suited good ol’ boy introducing his “purty little lady,” a hint of chauvinism and condescension in his voice. And here’s Dolly, flashing 1000-watt charisma, giving it her all, whether singing a novelty tune like Something Fishy or a commercial jingle for Black Draught laxative (“Smile from the inside out”).

As the years pass, Dolly grows more confident, her songwriting talent blossoming with fantastic new tunes like Coat of Many Colours and Just Because I’m A Woman. Porter’s perpetual grin can’t hide his jealousy as his ingenue starts to steal the show.

By 1974, Parton was ready to fly solo.

“I had a vision of where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do all along,” Dolly recalls. “I had agreed that I would stay with Porter for five years, and wound up staying for seven. I’ll always appreciate all he did for me. But I helped him some too. In fact, Porter never wrote a song in his life until I helped him try to become a songwriter. And he was writing some good and serious songs while I was still with him.

"I would try to tell Porter what my vision was. I would’ve stayed with the show if he would’ve allowed me to bring in some producers, to have management of my own, to build my career the way I wanted to. But his ego and pride couldn’t handle that. He was not willing to change. So I wasn’t going to stay there and grow old. I had to do what I felt God was leading me to do. I didn’t want to just be a girl singer in somebody else’s group. I wanted to be an independent star.”

Wagoner didn’t let go easily, even resorting to scare tactics. Dolly recalls: “Porter told me that RCA was not interested in me, that they were going to drop me from the label when I left his show. I thought, ‘I just don’t know if that’s true or not.’ The only way to know is to get on a plane, go to New York City and ask them. So I went up there on my own to meet the heads of RCA, and found out that they never said they were going to drop me.

"I said: ‘Are you interested in going with me where I plan to go? I’m going to find new management, new producers, and I’m going to try to build a new career of my own.’ And they said: ‘We’re with you!’ Then I got on another plane and flew to LA to meet with Sandy Gallin, and said the same things. Sandy was managing my friend Mac Davis at the time. As soon as I met Sandy, he got who I was and what I wanted to do, and we worked together for 20-some years.”

The two decades that transformed Dolly into one of the most recognised pop culture icons of our time began with a controversial hit single. Penned by former Brill Building tunesmiths Mann & Weil, Here You Come Again threw down a shiny pop gauntlet that confused and angered Nashville.

Dolly reflects: “The break with Porter was so public [in 1979, he filed a $3 million breach of contract suit], and everybody was thinking I was going to fail. Some people were hoping I would. When I didn’t, everybody said: ‘She’s leaving country music.’ My answer was: ‘I’m not leaving country, I’m taking it with me.’ How could anybody think I wouldn’t be country no matter where I am? Look at me. Even after all these years, I’m so country it’s sickening.

"But I knew I would always be the goodwill ambassador for country music and the Grand Ole Opry. I love the Opry. I’ve been a member since 1969. I don’t get to play there very often, but it’s sacred to me. I love country music, and I like to think that I’ve contributed a lot to it, and still do. Wherever I go, I’m promoting Nashville and the Opry and country music. But I also like knowing I can do movies, other styles of music.”

And in the 1980s, Dolly’s southern charm lit up Hollywood. Her debut, 9 To 5, was a huge hit, as was the No.1 title song (written on set to the accompaniment of Dolly rhythmically clicking her long red nails). More movies followed, along with a TV variety show series and countless guest spots on everything from The Tonight Show to the Bob Hope Christmas specials.

And, of course, more hits climbed the charts, including Islands In The Stream (the first of many duets with Kenny Rogers), Heartbreak Express, Tennessee Homesick Blues and Think About Love. But as the decade wore on, Dolly’s blonde ambition began to catch up to her.

"I’d been going so fast that I met myself coming back,” she says with a smile. “I was having trouble with my weight and having some personal emotional things, and eating like a pig and getting fat. If you don’t feel like you look good, you don’t feel good. You’re depressed. I guess God just had to smack me down back then to really get my attention. I went through a couple of years of depression. I’d never slowed down enough to reflect before.

"It was a time for me to say: ‘Okay, get off your fat ass and do something about it. Get your thing going, or blow your head off and get out of other people’s misery.’ We all come to those places. I’m not ashamed of it. I think it’s helpful for people to know that everybody goes through that. I’ve had a lot of hard times. I feel everything to the nth degree. You can’t be a loving, caring, sensitive person otherwise. I can’t harden my heart or become cynical. I have to keep myself open to be a songwriter and the kind of artist I want to be. Some things you’ve just got to suffer for. That’s how I feel. I’ll suffer. I’ll pay my dues. It’s been a good, rich life. Painful at times. But it’s been worth it.”

As the 90s dawned, Dolly wasn’t the only country star of a certain vintage to be feeling the pain of finding themselves stranded in Nashville’s version of Logan’s Run. It’s a harsh reality that persists today. Once you hit 30, you’re pretty much banished from the airwaves, farmed out to casino and state fair gigs and expected to disappear quietly.

Always open to change, Dolly tried to stay current. On albums like White Limozeen and Slow Dancing With The Moon, she gamely flirted with the boot-scootin’ achey-breaky pop sounds of the moment, but with diminishing returns. Then at the turn of the new century, she found a smarter solution. On a trio of albums, The Grass Is Blue, Little Sparrow and Halos & Horns, she reinvented herself – or more accurately, rediscovered herself – in all her mountain girl glory.

Dolly says: “It was unexpected, that people would really take to my music again, that I would luck upon a good time for bluegrass and American folk music again, which is what I do best and love doing. The new album Blue Smoke has a lot of that same mountain spirit. As a singer and performer, it’s been a wonderful feeling to see that the fans really still want to see me. It just does my heart good. I get real emotional sometimes. I get back on the bus and nearly cry. It’s like, ‘Wow, they still love me, they still want to see me.’”

And the world does still love her. Not only for her music, but because she’s a born show-woman whose openness and warmth make her seem like part of everyone’s family.

“I feel a responsibility to live up to the image that I’ve created, for the sake of the fans,” she says of the Dolly Parton character we’ve got to know so well. “Although that’s who I am, it’s just that people don’t want to hear all the sad, sappy shit. They do love to hear the gossip and the scandal and all the bizarre, sensational stories of how ‘she was scarred for life in laser surgery’. Or how ‘her husband’s leaving her because she has all these lovers’. I wish I had as much fun as they said I did [laughs]! I try to be strong enough to tolerate all the different versions that people have of me. I think you have to have a great inner strength. I think you have to know who you are.

"Being Dolly Parton, I have to be strong to live up to that image that I have created and that other people have created of me, whatever their interpretation or their image of me is, and what I’ve allowed them to believe. It brings me up to certain standards, too. I need to live up to that. If that’s who I say I am, then that’s who I am, because I’m not going to lie about it.

"But by the same token, I’ll sit right here and tell you how vulnerable I am and how tender-hearted, and how this and that. But just being true to myself, being true to Dolly Parton, and she is all those things. I’ve been guilty of most of the stuff that’s been said about me to some degree. And if I ain’t done it, I probably will [laughs]. Or I’m sorry I missed the chance.”

As Dolly reflects further on her longevity in the business, does she have any survival tactics for country’s younger performers?

“A lot of it has to do with personality, with character, your background, timing. There are so many elements. But I would say that, certainly in my case, I’ve been around a long time because I’ve never let my business slip. I’ve never lost motivation. Even at times when they weren’t playing me on the radio because I was an older country artist, I thought, ‘Well, I’ve won every award anybody could hope to win, I’ve had all these songs, I’ve had this wonderful career, so I’m grateful for that. But I’m not done!’

"I never stopped writing songs, even when nobody was listening. I knew that I was going to sing, even if I just recorded stuff and sold it out of the trunk of my car. I’ve often joked about that, but it’s basically what I’ve been doing with my last few albums. I paid for them myself then leased them to labels. I own the masters. I’m responsible for everything. I thought, ‘You can’t give up, you can’t lose momentum.’ Even though somebody stops on you, you can’t stop yourself. You’ve got to do quality work and you can’t get down on yourself.

"If you’ve got a gift, you’re gonna always have that gift. So just find new ways to place it, new ways to market it. You have to always be dreaming and thinking and working.”

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock Presents Country #2, published in January 2014.

California‘s Palm Desert might not be a location immediately synonymous with punk rock, but, just like CBGBs in New York and The Roxy in London, this arid wasteland incubated a rebellious DIY music scene whose impact still resonates. Inspired by local skateboarders’ imaginative quests to find new spaces in which to ride, bands such as Yawning Man and Across The River sought out desolate locales in which to spark up, plug in portable power generators and rock out, out of sight of the authorities.

Fuelled by beer, weed, acid and crystal meth, these impromptu, free-for-all assemblies became the stuff of local legend. And it was here that the teenage Josh Homme served his musical apprentice, in Kyuss, a brooding, intense, psychedelic punk band completed by his high school buddy Nick Oliveri on bass, vocalist John Garcia and drummer Brant Bjork.

“We were a little young to go to see Black Flag and the Misfits and GBH and Discharge without getting killed,” Homme recalled, “so we ended up creating what we wanted to hear those bands evolve into. In the desert, it was about having to make your own thing, and being isolated enough to do it without anyone fucking with you.”

Kyuss ended up recording four studio albums, peaking with 1994’s Welcome To Sky Valley, before imploding acrimoniously.

“Business started to dictate what we were doing,” says Brant Bjork, “and the spirit of creativity and camaraderie and brotherhood, all that made our band pure and organic, started to evaporate.”

It would have been all too easy for Josh Homme, the band’s most charismatic and confident character, to re-emerge from the wreckage with a vehicle which traded upon the cult success that his former band had enjoyed. Instead, following a summer serving as a touring guitarist in Screaming Trees, Homme purposefully took a hard left, renouncing stoner rock for something altogether more nimble, more abstract and more sensual.

With Queens Of The Stone Age, 'The Ginger Elvis' aspired to create “trance robot music… heavy enough for the boys and sweet enough for the girls.”

Inspired in equal measure by The Stooges, Misfits, Discharge, Can, Frank Sinatra, Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash, the band’s self-titled 1998 debut album, with its motorik riffs, studied minimalism, louche Rat Pack swagger and obvious disdain for hard rock orthodoxy, represented both a razing of the past and a signpost to new horizons.

The wired, unhinged and stylistically promiscuous Rated R was an even bolder leap forward. Introduced by the remarkable Feel Good Hit Of The Summer, on which Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford joined Homme and his berserker sidekick Oliveri to deliver a verse resembling a junkie’s letter to Santa (“Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol”) and a single word chorus - the word “cocaine” gleefully stretched like bubblegum – it saw QOTSA anointed as “the new saviours of rock music” by broadsheet newspapers and fashionista style mags, much to Homme’s bemusement.

“Is rock’n’roll in trouble?” he asked drolly. “Is it drowning somewhere and I don’t know? I’ve been listening to good rock music since I was a kid. I mean, I love our music, and I want other people to love it as well, but I just don’t know that rock needed saving.”

Homme was right, obviously, but with Rated R racking up 100,000 UK sales. plus Album Of The Year accolades from Kerrang! and NME, his band were were now regarded as serious players in an industry which, via indie darlings The Strokes and The White Stripes, had suddenly fallen in love anew with guitar bands.

“[Our label] have suddenly realised they’ve got this cool little band on their hands, all ready to go,” Homme observed. “It’s almost like a challenge to stay ahead now. Some people may say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but I say, Fuck you. Catch me if you can motherfuckers.”

Expectations for the group’s third album were duly inflated… which Homme, forever a punk at heart, naturally interpreted as a green light to make Queens’ new songs louder, darker, weirder and more fucked-up.

“There are a lot of people who like heavy music but don’t want to listen to Creed or nu-metal bands,” he reasoned. “I think we can offer something a little more esoteric.”

“It's a three-record plan," Homme said at the time. "The first record needed to step away from Kyuss and announce a new sound, which was repetition, trance, and simplicity. Then the second record needed to fan the music out so we could display it and play whatever we wanted. So, the third record, to get it right, should combine the first two and go even further.”

Sessions for the third Queens Of The Stone Age album began in October 2001, with Homme confident that he had amassed his strongest set of songs to date.

Many of these had actually been recorded before, at the Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree, California, during the Homme-helmed Desert Sessions, freewheeling, spontaneous, experimental jam sessions involving the likes of PJ Harvey, Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan, Masters Of Reality mainman Chris Goss (producer of three Kyuss album and both previous QOTSA long-players), Goatsnake/Earthlings’ vocalist Pete Stahl and more.

Homme imagined that he could recreate the loose, organic feel of these sessions in the studio with Queens, but the vibe with new producer Eric Valentine was markedly different, regimented, meticulous and not altogether fun. To Homme’s fury, word began to filter through that “the adults”, the executives at Interscope Records, were expressing concern over the album’s direction, or, more specifically, its lack of direction.

“To other people there seemed to be a lot riding on this record,” he noted pointedly, “and they ended up standing in our way trying to help. Our main thing we had to overcome was other people that were not involved with us and sort of pushing them to the side, whether gracefully or violently.”

One man who voluntarily stepped away from the project after a mere seven days, due to other obligations, was Queens’ drummer Gene Trautmann. Fortunately, Homme had a back-up option, namely former Nirvana drummer-turned-Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, a long-time friend.

“I called Dave and said, Do you want to finish this record?” Homme recalled. “He said, ‘I’m in Malibu. I’ll be there at six o’clock’.”

“I first met Josh in 1992, at a Kyuss show at the Off Ramp in Seattle because he was touring with my friend Pete Stahl's band, Wool, and The Obsessed,” Dave Grohl told this writer in 2009. “This was the first time I'd seen Kyuss and I was blown away, they were fucking great. They seemed like us, like kids who grew up in the suburbs listening to rock ‘n’ roll records, doing petty crime and drugs, just a little vandals from the middle of nowhere.”

“Then we had QOTSA on tour with us for a really long time in 2000. Instead of putting ‘Queens Of The Stone Age’ on their dressing room door we used to put ‘Critic’s Choice’ because they were the coolest band in the world, and honestly, we thought that too. So in 2000, as we were touring with Queens, someone asked me what was my biggest regret of the year and I said that it was that I didn’t get asked to play on Rated R.

“So Josh said, ‘Dude, if you want to play on a couple of songs…’ Then, that day, I was driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, going to the beach, and he called and said, ‘Do you want to play on our whole record?’

“Josh and I have a connection musically that I just don't have with anybody else: as a drummer, playing with him, we share this frequency that I haven't shared with anyone else. It's intangible and unspoken, almost like ESP. I made a U-turn, went straight to the studio, and we recorded the drums in like 10 days, maybe two weeks.”

“Dave came in and made these songs that I thought were good, really phenomenal,” marvelled Nick Oliveri. “It uplifted not only our spirit, but us as players, including Josh: his playing on it really made everybody come forward. Dave was a champion of all things. He helped us in so many ways we could never repay the guy.”

As the sessions finally gathered momentum, Homme hit upon a unifying concept to tie his band’s “eclectic, schizophrenic” new songs together: they would be presented as a selection of tracks aired on disparate radio stations dialled in on a night drive from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree, a road trip Homme had undertaken countless times.

“When I’d do it, I didn’t have a stereo, all I had was a radio,” he recalled in 2002. “And it goes into weird religious stations and really bad, bad music on that trip through the middle of nowhere. I used to really enjoy the silence and then every once in a while the station you were at would all of a sudden let out a screech, and become a new station. I just wanted to bring that to a record somehow. It is kind of a concept record, but as if the word ‘concept’ didn’t suck.”

The idea was a masterstroke. With friends such as The Cramps’ Lux Interior, Eagles Of Death Metal’s Jesse Hughes and Marilyn Manson bassist Jeordie White recruited to voice mock radio station idents – “KRDL… we spoil music for everyone”, “KLON… we play the songs that sound more like everyone else than anyone else” – the album was given continuity and cohesion.

Crystallising QOTSA’s ‘last-gang-in-town’ outlaw cool, Songs For The Deaf is a wild, disorientating joyride into a grotesque world of sex, drugs, violence and death, laced with subtle black humour. On a diverse and challenging album, not everything quite worked - the scorched-earth punk of Six Shooter is disposable at best, while The Sky Is Fallin’ resembles a cast-off from co-producer Chris Goss’ Masters Of Reality – but when Homme’s band hit their mark, it’s irresistible.

Opener You Think I Ain’t Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like A Millionaire boasts a storming route one riff and a manic Nick Oliveri screaming “Gimme some more!”, First It Giveth deals with chasing narcotic highs, Another Love Song is surf guitar-driven Motown metal and Go With The Flow is a deathless ode to squeezing every last drop of pleasure out of life.

Best of all is the kinetic No One Knows, a Josh Homme/Mark Lanegan co-write, where the thunderous interplay between guest Dave Grohl, Oliveri and Homme recalls Led Zeppelin at their most telepathically locked-in.

Like its desert setting, this is music without horizons, all heat, light and awe-inspiring elemental power.

Released on August 27, 2002, Songs For The Deaf debuted at number 4 in the UK, and peaked at number 17 on the Billboard 200 chart in the US. Its release was preceded by festival dates for the band, including an appearance at England’s Glastonbury festival, with Dave Grohl on drums.

This was all the more notable because, at the time, Grohl was supposed to be in a Hollywood recording studio making the fourth Foo Fighters album, One By One, a fact that understandably alarmed his bandmates. Some wondered privately whether Grohl might ever return. For a fleeting moment or two, the thought crossed Grohl’s mind too.

“I did a one-off show with Queens at the Troubador [on March 7, 2002],” Grohl recalled, “and we walked offstage and Mark Lanegan said – and this was one of the few things that Mark Lanegan ever said to me - ‘You know, it’d be a shame just to do that only once’. My decision was purely musical and motivational.

“Being in Queens was one of the greatest experiences of my life. If you can say that you were a member of Queens Of The Stone Age that’s like wearing a patch on your chest that says ‘I Am A Badass’ for the rest of your life, because the only people that get to play in Queens Of The Stone Age are badass motherfuckers, and that’s the truth.

“Walking through the backstage area of a festival with Queens is like the moment in a Western where the saloon bar doors swing open and the piano player stops playing and everyone just stares. You have Josh, [Mark] Lanegan, [Nick] Oliveri and me walking in a straight line and it's like being in the coolest gang. We never had a bad show. I was now playing drums in the best band I’d ever been in and fucking loving it.”

This busman’s holiday ended for Grohl at the Fuji Rock festival in Japan in July 2002.

“I started missing my friends,” he explained. “The Foo Fighters had become a family by this point and I’d been away from home for too long.”

“I always knew that Dave was going to go back to Foo Fighters,” Josh Homme admitted. “I was always trying to intimate that this wasn’t something the other guys needed to worry about. But band people, and I mean this in a very blanket way, are very easily rattled, because many bands don’t last, and they’re such an unpredictable animal that it’s easy to get your confidence rattled.

“What was great about that time was that Dave did go back, and that said that it’s possible to have a musical mistress: it would have been terrible if Dave had stayed in Queens because it would have eliminated and killed the suggestion that you can do multiple things. In a rare moment it had proved that having multiple personalities isn’t a bad thing for someone playing music. Once you feel you can do anything in music, that’s when you can get closer to God.”

Asked to ponder his band’s new found popularity in 2002, Homme had this to say: “Kyuss got noticed because it didn’t give a shit if anyone noticed it. Bands now scratch and they claw. I don’t wanna show up and go, Please can I get into this club? I want someone to ask me. That attitude is the reason why it’s still fun. It’s like being a deliberate outsider. You invited the outsider in, and now the outsider’s gonna fuck things up.”

Songs For The Deaf ensured that Homme’s band would be outsiders no more.

The annual Reading and Leeds Festivals kick off today (August 27) with Fontaines D.C. headlining Reading on Friday night. They're joined on top of the bill by co-headliners Charli xcx, Florence And The Machine, Raye, Chase And Status and Dave.

The BBC are once again on-hand to bring us the action from Reading, and they’ll be broadcasting select headline sets over the course of the weekend on BBC One, with the footage set to be uploaded to BBC iPlayer shortly afterwards.

How to use a VPN

If you're going to be out of the country and want to watch the Fontaines D.C. set as soon as it hits iPlayer, you'll need a VPN to help you.

Virtual Private Networks are used to change the location of your IP address, enabling you to watch Fontaines D.C. from anywhere. Nord VPN is Louder's favourite. Here's how to use a VPN:

1. Install a VPN: As we've mentioned above, Nord VPN is Louder's favourite.

2. Choose the location you wish to connect to in the VPN: If you're currently outside the UK on holiday or on business and want to watch the set from the Reading Festival, just select 'UK' from the list, then log into your streaming service account.

3. Turn the volume up as loud as you're able and relax: That's it - you're all set to watch the performance.

How to watch in the UK

Viewers in the UK will be able to watch Fontaines D.C. on BBC One, with the programme set to get underway at 10.40pm on Friday, August 28. If you miss the late-night coverage, you'll be able to catch up through BBC iPlayer shortly afterwards, providing you have a valid TV licence.

If you're a UK viewer away from home, a VPN such as Nord VPN will let you access your usual free stream from anywhere in the world.

How to watch in the US

If you're in the US on holiday and want to watch Fontaines D.C. from the Reading Festival, you'll be able to catch up on their set shortly after the main BBC One programme ends via BBC iPlayer. At the time of writing, no official time has been given.

A VPN like Nord VPNwill allow you to access your usual stream from overseas.

Fontaines D.C.'s Friday night headline set from the Reading Festival comes just a few days after the Irish group announced details of their fifth album, Dopamine Chamber. The follow-up to 2024's Romance will arrive via XL Recordings on October 24.

You can watch the video for Marianne – the first single from the record – below.

Speaking about the new album, frontman Grian Chatten said: "The album itself is a dopamine chamber. You step inside, and we test these different mind or mood-altering pieces of music on you."

Following Reading and Leeds, Fontaines D.C. will play the Stradbally Hall Electric Picnic in Ireland on August 30, before heading to the US for further live shows.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example:1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service).2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad.We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

Stevie Nicks has posted a handwritten tribute to the late Dolly Parton, and described working with the undisputed queen of country music as a "masterclass".

Parton passed away on Tuesday, August 25, in Nashville, aged 80.

Nicks and Parton spent time together in Nashville when Parton was recording songs for her 2023 album Rockstar. The pair collaborated on a new take on What Has Rock and Roll Ever Done For You, which Nicks demoed, but never released, for her 1985 solo album Rock a Little.

In a 2023 interview with USA Today, Parton described the track as "a cute little song", and recalled working with Nicks as "fun" when asked about the most enjoyable moments of recording the album.

In a new Instagram post, Nicks shares her own thoughts on the experience.

"I spent a week with Dolly in Nashville to record one of my songs with her for her ‘Rock Star’ album," she writes. "Best week ever.

"A week with Dolly was like a master class for me. I tried to be a sponge ~ and learn everything I could learn from her ~ in a very few days. Learning from her was easy because she was a really good teacher. I think she saw me as a really good student; I just tried to listen.

"She said she could become a rock star ~ and I watched her do it. When I was there she was not even close to being finished gathering more rock & roll songs that she wanted to sing."

Nicks concluded her post with a remembrance verse for Parton.

"So,
Dolly, Dolly, Dolly ~
Rock and Roll & Country ~
Carry all those songs with you ~
Right up to heaven ~
Sing your songs to all those you meet
This will be their blessing
Dolly, how we’ll miss you
There’ll never be another you ~
And I will always love you
Love Love Love,
Stevie”

A host of other musicians, celebrities and public figures have also paid their own personal tributes to Parton.

"Her songwriting, her singing, and her philanthropy were unrivaled in the world of country music and it is hard to imagine living in a world without Dolly," Paul McCartney posted, calling the singer "the best."

"Shocked and devastated to hear of Dolly’s passing," Elton John posted. "A giant of an artist - unique and irreplaceable, with the kindest heart"

"What a wonderful songwriter and singer Dolly was," Mick Jagger posted. "She brought so many people together, we will all miss her so much."

Metal For Nepal has launched an emergency fundraising appeal following a devastating flash flood on the Nepal-Tibet border which has led to 332 deaths.

The severe flood that struck Nepal's Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts on the morning of August 26 also displaced families and damaged infrastructure in the country: experts suspect the flood may have been triggered by a Glacial Lake Outburst Flood (GLOF) originating in Tibet.

Nepal's National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority have revealed that 910 people are still missing as a result of the flood, and remain uncontactable. This includes 517 foreign citizens, 44 members of the Nepal Army and 28 Nepal police officers. Search and rescue operations are ongoing.

Metal For Nepal is mobilising to support affected communities, as they did during the 2015 Nepal earthquake. The charity uniting the global music and art community is working with local NGO partners on the ground to deliver relief as quickly and effectively as possible, from emergency supplies and clean water to longer-term rebuilding support. While the response will prioritise the welfare of children - who are especially vulnerable in the days following a disaster like this - the relief efforts are intended to reach affected community members of all ages.

"We need to come together exactly like we did after the 2015 earthquake," says Metal For Nepal director Flower KC. "The heavy metal and tattoo community has always shown up for people in need, and this moment is no different. Every donation goes straight toward getting families and children the support they need right now."

Donations can be made here.

Donations of any size help Metal For Nepal and its local partners respond immediately, getting emergency support to families and children who have lost their homes.

Tears For Fears will release a new Deluxe Edition of their 1989 third album, The Seeds Of Love, on various formats, through UMC, on October 16.

The new reissue includes brand-new Steven Wilson Atmos and Stereo mixes (Wilson ranks The Seeds Of Love as one of his top five albums of all time).

The album is reissued on various vinyl and CD formats, including a 2LP edition on special-effect blue vinyl with alternate artwork, which pairs the original album with a second disc of B-sides and demos, some of which are appearing on vinyl for the first time, a three-CD set featuring alternate and rare mixes, single versions and B-sides, and a limited edition Blu-ray.

Released in September 1989, the heavily Beatles-influenced album was a commercial and critical triumph, debuting at No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart and achieving Platinum certification from the BPI within just three weeks. In the United States, it was also a Platinum album, reaching No. 8 on the Billboard Top 200.

"Out of all our albums, I’d probably rank it highest," says Roland Orzabal. "I think it surprised a lot of people, a lot of our peers as well, people who maybe we were being compared to in the mid-Eighties."

"The tracks I liked then, I still like now," adds Curt Smith. "Woman In Chains, Badman’s Song, Sowing The Seeds Of Love and Advice For The Young At Heart have all stuck around. We still play those live."

Pre-order The Seeds Of Love.

Pre-order The Seeds Of Love Blu-ray.

Tears For Fears: The Seeds Of Love Deluxe Edition

2LP Deluxe Edition
The original album plus a bonus LP of B-sides, demos and rare recordings, several appearing on vinyl for the first time. Housed in alternative sleeve artwork and pressed on limited edition blue marbled vinyl.

Side One
1. Woman In Chains
2. Badman’s Song
3. Sowing The Seeds Of Love
4. Advice For The Young At Heart

Side Two
1. Standing On The Corner Of The Third World
2. Swords And Knives
3. Year Of The Knife
4. Famous Last Words

Side Three
1. Tears Roll Down
2. Always In The Past
3. My Life In The Suicide Ranks
4. Music For Tables
5. Johnny Panic And The Bible of Dreams

Side Four
1. Rhythm Of Life (Demo)*
2. Advice For The Young At Heart (Demo)*
3. Swords And Knives (Demo)*
4. Famous Last Words (Demo)*
5. Sowing The Seeds Of Love (Instrumental / Demo)*

*First time on vinyl

3CD Deluxe Edition

Expanded 3CD edition featuring the original remastered album, B-sides, radio edits, alternate mixes and rare recordings from The Seeds Of Love era, presented in a deluxe digipack with interviews and commentary.

CD 1 - The Seeds Of Love
1. Woman In Chains
2. Badman's Song
3. Sowing The Seeds Of Love
4. Advice For The Young At Heart
5. Standing On The Corner Of The Third World
6. Swords And Knives
7. Year Of The Knife
8. Famous Last Words

CD 2 - The Sun - Single Seeds / 45s and B-sides
1. Sowing The Seeds Of Love (7" Version)
2. Tears Roll Down
3. Woman In Chains (Single Version)
4. Always In The Past
5. My Life In The Suicide Ranks
6. Woman In Chains (Instrumental Version 2)
7. Advice For The Young At Heart (7" Version)
8. Johnny Panic And The Bible Of Dreams (Instrumental Version)
9. Music For Tables
10. Johnny Panic And The Bible Of Dreams (Mix One)
11. Johnny Panic And The Bible Of Dreams (Mix Two)
12. Sowing The Seeds Of Love (US Radio Edit)
13. Woman In Chains (US Radio Edit)
14. Advice For The Young At Heart (Italian Radio Edit)
15. Year Of The Knife (Canadian Single Version)
16. Johnny Panic And The Bible Of Dreams

CD 3 - The Moon - Radio Edits and Early Mixes
1. The Year Of The Knife (Overture)
2. Year Of The Knife (Early Mix / Instrumental Version)
3. Sowing The Seeds Of Love (Alternate Mix)
4. Tears Roll Down (Alternate Mix)
5. The Year Of The Knife (Steve Chase 7" Remix)
6. Badman's Song (Early Mix)
7. Advice For The Young At Heart (Backing Track)
8. The Year Of The Knife (Instrumental Version)
9. Johnny Panic And The Bible Of Dreams (Mix One / 7" Edit)
10. Sowing The Seeds Of Love (Early Mix / Instrumental)
11. Woman In Chains (US Radio Edit 2)
12. Year Of The Knife (Canadian Single Version / Instrumental)
13. Famous Last Words (French Radio Edit)
14. Woman In Chains (Reprise)

1LP Steven Wilson Mix (D2C Only)
The classic 1989 album newly mixed in stereo by Steven Wilson, pressed on exclusive sunburst orange and red vinyl.

Side One
1. Woman In Chains
2. Badman’s Song
3. Sowing The Seeds Of Love
4. Advice For The Young At Heart

Side Two
1. Standing On The Corner Of The Third World
2. Swords And Knives
3. Year Of The Knife
4. Famous Last Words

1LP Half-Speed Master Edition
The classic 1989 album remastered by Jon Astley and cut at half speed by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios for enhanced audio fidelity and exceptional vinyl playback.

Side One
1. Woman In Chains
2. Badman’s Song
3. Sowing The Seeds Of Love
4. Advice For The Young At Heart

Side Two
1. Standing On The Corner Of The Third World
2. Swords And Knives
3. Year Of The Knife
4. Famous Last Words

Limited Edition Blu-ray

Steven Wilson Atmos Mix
Steven Wilson 5.1 Mix
Steven Wilson Stereo Mix
Steven Wilson Instrumental Atmos Mix
Steven Wilson Instrumental 5.1 Mix
Steven Wilson Instrumental Stereo Mix
1989 Stereo Mix (Miles Showell 2023 Remaster)

BONUS TRACKS: TOWNHOUSE LIVE JAM SESSIONS
Woman In Chains – Townhouse Jam
Broken – Townhouse Jam
Rhythm Of Life – Townhouse Jam
Badman’s Song – Townhouse Jam
Badman’s Song – Reprise – Townhouse Jam
Standing On The Corner Of The Third World – Townhouse Jam

“Musical event of the year? Musical event of the 21st century so far wouldn’t be overstating it.” When Prog witnessed the attitude and energy of Kate Bush’s Before The Dawn show in 2014, we didn’t hold back the praise.

And why should we? They’d been building up unused since her one and only large-scale tour in 1979, waiting for the hardly-imagined moment that she’d bring her musical genius to another stage some day.

And she had – 35 years later, in the form of a 22-date residency at London’s Hammersmith Apollo from August 26 to October 1, containing 25 songs over two acts, and seen by over 80,000 fortunate people. “The spectacle embraces modern technology and stagecraft to raise Bush’s unique eclecticism – song, film, costume, lights, props, magic and high drama – to another dimension,” we said.

“More than a rock gig, it’s a sensual sound-and-vision extravaganza. It takes flight. Yet for all the razzle-dazzle, it proves intensely moving. At the centre of the whirlpool: that voice, richer than ever.”

We reflected: “It may be that Bush has brought mannerisms often reductively labelled as prog back to mainstream acceptance. Or it could just be that Britain’s most gifted female star can do anything she wants, such is the love and adoration displayed here. The young girl who once yelped ‘Wow’ is now a mature woman confirmed as the genius godmother of art rock – 35 years on, the moment is hers again.”

While the multimedia show was a triumph, no one should have been surprised. Bush gathered the best talent to multiply her own, including two former members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, an illusionist, a puppeteer and a video projection designer. This, along with seven musicians, 13 actors and countless crew, helped her deliver two stories, one based on The Ninth Wave from Hounds Of Love and the other on A Sky Of Honey from Aerial.

Those who didn’t see the show were treated to the release of a video for And Dream Of Sheep, part of The Ninth Wave. Bush is seen floating on an ocean, wearing a life jacket after her ship has sunk – and that attention to detail nearly delivered severe consequences after she spent three days in a water tank, singing live, to shoot the scenes as used in the show.

“This was to create a sense of realism, as the character in the song is lost at sea,” a press release explained. “She spent so long in the water during the first day of filming that she contracted mild hypothermia. She recovered after a day off and carried on filming.”

Once the run was over, Bush described it as “one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.” She added: “I was really delighted that the shows were received so positively and so warmly – but the really unexpected part of it all was audiences you could only ever dream of.

“They took my breath away. Every single night they were so behind us. You could feel their support from the minute we walked on stage. I just never imagined it would be possible to connect with an audience on such a powerful and intimate level; to feel such – well, quite frankly – love. It was like this at every single show.”

Bush most recently made chart history with the second-wave impact of 1985 single Running Up That Hill after its appearance in Stranger Things in 2022. Before that – and after the success of 1978 debut hit Wuthering Heights – she entered the record books again when Before The Dawn led to eight of her albums entering the top 40 at the same time, and her entire catalogue made the top 50.

Looking back her residency’s success, she admitted in 2016 that the endeavour had terrified her. “The idea of putting the show together was something that I found really interesting and really exciting,” she said. “But to actually step into it was something that I had to really work hard on.

“I was really nervous every night as a performer, but I had complete faith in everybody on the stage, everybody in the team, all the sound guys. The most difficult thing for me was to be continually in the now because I naturally tend to race ahead in my mind.

“Once we started running the show I had to be absolutely in that moment. I was so terrified that if my mind wandered off, when I came back I wouldn’t remember where I was. I had to really fix myself, so that I would remember where I was in the song.”

Naturally, speculation circulated that Bush might stage another show – but to date that hasn’t happened. She also said she wasn’t writing new songs at that time, although of course she’d have an impressive pile of creations stored away.

Asked if she’d put a full stop on creating music, she replied: “Oh no, I don’t think so. I think it’s just a rather big comma.”

A mysterious pink box is making its way across Los Angeles. It travels through the skies above Santa Monica by pigeon, interrupts a sandwich for Nekrogoblikon’s John Goblikon, and is lost down the subway by comedian, actor and metal musician Brian Posehn, before inexplicably landing in a taxi with Dexter Holland, frontman of The Offspring.

Moments later, Dexter and Electric Callboy open the box with great anticipation. Is this going to be a ‘What’s in the briefcase?’ Pulp Fiction moment? No… It’s Electric Callboy in miniature, dressed in flamenco-style shirts with thick moustaches and gelled coiffes. Shaking their hips enticingly, co-vocalists Kevin Ratajczak and Nico Sallach utter the immortal line from The Offspring’s 1998 banger, Pretty Fly For A White Guy: ‘Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, cinco, seis!’ If any of this sounds… odd, rest assured it’s all completely in line with what we’ve come to expect from Electric Callboy.

The video for Let The Good Times Roll, the latest single from the German electrocore band’s upcoming album, Tanzneid, is the latest in a long line of wacky music videos that have won the hearts of metalheads everywhere. The band have just kicked off their European festival season with two massive shows at Germany’s Rock Im Park and Rock Am Ring, and played a tremendous main stage set at Download festival.

Tanzneid is their seventh album since forming in 2010, but their second since 2022’s Tekkno turned them into one of the biggest success stories and most beloved bands in modern metal. Since then, they’ve made a name for themselves for their ridiculous, inventive music videos, which have almost all gone viral. Babymetal collab Ratatata was voted the best song of 2025 by Hammer readers, while their gigs have become legendary half-rave half-mosh blowouts. To take the party further, Tanzneid feels like it’s been written to capture the energy of those rabid, day-glo live shows.

“We love the combination of metal and techno that gave Tekkno its name,” explains Nico.

He and Kevin have dialled in, all smiles and high spirits, from backstage at Heavy Week-End festival in France, where Electric Callboy are headlining the final night at the Zénith du Grand Nancy outdoor amphitheatre.

“Tanzneid is an evolution of Tekkno. We wanted to go a bit deeper into that and force the Tekkno vibe even more.”

Let The Good Times Roll is pure summer – a riff on The Offspring’s 2021 song, Let The Bad Times Roll. More of a tribute than a cover, Dexter even sings on the track. It’s a multigenerational crossover that captures the spirit of both bands.

“When we knew that Dexter would be on the song, we put little Easter eggs in it,” Kevin says of the Pretty Fly For A White Guy reference.

They met Dexter and Offspring guitarist Noodles two years ago, at Belgium’s Graspop festival.

“They told their crew to tell our crew that they wanted to talk to us that day, and we actually thought that they wanted to tell us that we did something wrong,” remembers Nico. “But they just wanted to tell us that they like our music!”

In 2010, Kevin Ratajczak was living a double life. He was 24, and working as a car salesman for Mercedes-Benz in Castrop-Rauxel, the German town where he grew up – clean-shaven, suit, tie, the whole nine yards, and he quite liked it.

“I love cars,” he says. “That is my other passion.”

Not only did he enjoy the job, he was good at it. Who knew the skillset needed to entice people into a moshpit isn’t that much different to persuading them to drop tens of thousands of Euros on a new Mercedes-Benz?

“I can find a connection to nearly every person on this planet, so I was a good salesperson,” he explains.

His colleagues knew him as “the friendly student who doesn’t do any harm”. Little did they know that Salesman Kevin had just formed a metalcore band, known back then as Eskimo Callboy. On weekends, the rest of the band would pick him up from work and drive to play gigs at local youth centres. He struggled to keep the two existences separate.

“These freaked-out guys with the Sprinter van would park up with loud music, opening the doors, beer cans rolling out. I would take off my suit and get out the building, trying [to ensure] nobody saw them.”

He had wanted to perform from an early age. Pushing his way into the front of his family’s camcorder home movies, he describes himself as “the annoying kid, the kid that’s a little bit too much”. In school plays, he was always the “guy that freaked out onstage and had no problems with embarrassing stuff”.

This is the Kevin that Electric Callboy fans know, the all-round goofball and hedonist whose roars contrast with Nico’s clean vocals, but there’s a surprising side to him they don’t usually see. One that’s more sensible and “rational” than you might expect from a man whose day job involves conducting mass raves in garish outfits and wigs.

“My character has got a bit more polarising,” he explains. “Onstage, I’m way over the top, and it’s me, it’s not that I’m playing a role. But it’s an exaggerated version of myself.”

When Kevin’s not on tour, he prefers a quiet life. He still lives in Castrop-Rauxel, and has a wife and two children, along with a small circle of friends.

“I’m very homebound,” he confesses. “I need my family.”

Born into a working-class family, he grew up with his sister, while his mother was a housewife and his dad was an electrician. His dad was into classic rock and had a vast record collection, through which Kevin discovered bands such as Led Zeppelin, Toto and Deep Purple, with the latter’s Made In Japan 1972 double live album proving particularly formative.

“My father was passionate, and he transferred that passion to me.”

As a teenager, Kevin started going to local thrash and death metal gigs, but the real lightbulb moment came on January 26, 2002, when Slipknot rolled into the neighbouring town of Essen on their Iowa World Tour.

“That was a show when Joey Jordison had this huge drum set-up where he was lifted in the air and was circling around,” he remembers, with a sense of wonder. “I’d never experienced something like it.”

It didn’t take long for him to join a band himself. In 2008, he became the keyboardist and backing vocalist for Her Smile In Grief, the metalcore band of Electric Callboy guitarists Daniel Haniß and Pascal Schillo. After their singer left in 2010, they advertised for a new vocalist on MySpace, eventually finding Sebastian ‘Sushi’ Biesler, and rebranding themselves as Eskimo Callboy.

“We all came together in short pants,” Kevin grins. “We felt like summer inside our bodies!”

It wasn’t long before he quit his day job to do the band full-time. Quickly, Callboy became the linchpin of the German metalcore scene.

“Being authentic is very important,” Kevin says. “We had our music, but we also showed our personality. We had some vlogs out. We just drove around town, talked to the people, and I think we were one of the first bands that did it that way. We hosted some gigs and invited bands from other cities, so the whole scene grew. That was a cool time.”

He fondly describes the early days as free and hedonistic, driving from gig to gig, getting wasted and sleeping on floors. The music they were making sounded like a party, influenced by larger-than-life scene bands of the time, such as Attack Attack!, Asking Alexandria and Bring Me The Horizon.

“We wanted to be hard, but we didn’t want to be black and serious,” he explains. “We wanted to be bright and funny.”

It’s not surprising that Nico Sallach ended up in a party band too. In his 20s, the singer threw weekly house bashes in the cheap, cramped flat he shared with his best mate, until one time it got completely out of hand.

“At its peak, we had 80 people in this tiny flat. People that we didn’t know were ringing the doorbell,” he says, likening the situation to the 2012 film Project X, where a party spirals into chaos. “People started smoking everywhere and didn’t use an ashtray. They treated our flat like shit. I wanted to go to bed, and there were drinks and liquids that I couldn’t identify all over my bed!” He laughs. “Very good memories, even if it doesn’t sound like it.”

Much like his bandmate, Nico craved the spotlight from a young age. The first instrument he picked up was the drums, but he quickly realised he wasn’t suited to it. He wanted to be up front.

“Sitting there in the back, I didn’t feel it,” he smiles. “After a couple of years I recognised that singing is way cooler.”

As a kid, he was the hyperactive “class clown” – the guy who was always “trying to make anybody laugh, even in situations where you just should have shut up”. At school, so as not to be “too infectious” (read: disruptive), he was seated on a separate table from his classmates, for his own good, he says, as well as theirs.

“That was more or less my life as a young kid, but it never changed,” he says of his hyperactivity. “I just learned how to deal with it.”

He grew up in Essen, a town close to Düsseldorf, only 30 minutes from Kevin’s hometown, Castrop-Rauxel, and was introduced to rock by his dad, who had been the singer in a prog band. There was a healthy local music scene, and teenage Nico would spend his time watching emo and metal bands at various youth centres, sometimes taking in several gigs in one weekend.

“It wasn’t even about the music. It was about being there, being connected to other people,” he explains. “I made a lot of friends during that time that I still have.”

On June 28, 2008, he attended Linkin Park’s Projekt Revolution tour in Düsseldorf, which included HIM and Pharrell Williams’ N.E.R.D. on the line-up – and that was it. He knew what he wanted to do with his life.

“It changed me,” he says. “[Late Linkin Park vocalist] Chester was and still is one of my biggest idols.”

Nico was in a few bands before joining Electric Callboy. The first, metalcore outfit Through Your Veins, was “basically trial and error”.

“We didn’t play many concerts,” he says. “But when we quit, I knew that I’d never want to stop.”

In 2012, he joined To The Rats And Wolves, whose genre-hopping sound wasn’t a million miles away from Electric Callboy’s sound today, albeit much less refined. Two years later, To The Rats And Wolves supported Callboy on tour.

“We gained our first fans,” he smiles. “Having people in front of you singing along to the songs that you have written was the best thing on Earth.”

For the five years before joining Callboy, Nico worked as a nurse, first in the geriatric department at his local hospital, and then in the Intensive Care Unit. He reckons there’s not as big a jump as you might imagine between the two professions: taking care of people is still part of his job.

“We get messages from people that are like, ‘I’m having the toughest time right now, and whenever I see you live, I feel way better afterwards,’” he says.

Even so, working on the Intensive Care Unit was tough.

“In the end, it was really hard for me to deal with, because I’ve seen too much. It’s not as rewarding as you might think,” he admits. “Even if I hadn’t joined Electric Callboy, I would have searched for another job.”

In 2020, it seemed like To The Rats And Wolves and Callboy were on a parallel crash course, their futures intertwined by something larger than fate. That year, both bands disintegrated. Callboy were five albums in, their momentum had plateaued, and relationships between vocalist Sushi and the others had completely broken down.

“In the end, it was just toxic,” Kevin says today. “Five people had one opinion, and then one was totally going against it. It took all the fun away, it took all the passion away.”

They recorded one last album together, 2019’s patchy Rehab, a record Kevin now brands as “soulless”. But when Sushi finally left in 2020, Kevin faced a reckoning: “I quit my job, I quit everything. The band was my world, my dream.”

As luck would have it, they had found themselves in the market for a new singer just as Nico was searching for a new band. Having stayed friends with the Callboy guys since supporting them with To The Rats And Wolves, he auditioned for the job, submitting a video of himself singing Callboy cut Prism, far and away the best track on Rehab. After joining them for a couple of rehearsals, Nico had a good feeling about it.

“It felt pretty natural and felt right. I was driving home and I remember looking at my wife like, ‘Yeah, I’m probably going to do it.’”

It’s hard to believe now, looking at them finishing each other’s sentences, completely at ease in each other’s company, but, for Kevin, the choice wasn’t as immediately obvious.

“Not from the beginning,” he admits. “I knew Nico, but didn’t know him [as well as some of the others in the band]. It was a sad situation where we were coming from. I wasn’t sure a new singer was gonna work.”

He went over to Nico’s house, and the two hung out.

“We talked about being onstage, and that’s when we actually got to know each other.”

After that, things fell into place pretty much immediately; it was like a switch had been flipped.

“It was the same feeling we had had when we started the band,” Kevin smiles. “No responsibilities, nothing in our heads, just working, just doing what we love.”

The first song the new line-up wrote together was Hypa Hypa, a garish party anthem that blended 80s synths with aggressive breakdowns, and which immediately went viral.

“Hypa Hypa was created within one or two days; it was very fast,” recalls Kevin. “And that was the time when we were sure: let’s do this together.”

In 2021, amid the neon, laugh-a-minute momentum, Kevin received a call from his sister: his father had passed away suddenly at the age of 61. He dealt with his grief privately.

“To be honest, it was hard,” he says. “My first reaction whenever I did something in my life, when I achieved something, was to call my dad. I can’t call my dad, so in the end, being successful means being sad. That’s one thing that I have been suffering from, but it’s getting better and better. It’s a journey.”

Not long after the release of Hypa Hypa, the band changed their name to Electric Callboy, and released a spate of personality-packed singles. Their live shows grew with every tour, and the band had a clear camaraderie that made their gigs seem more like a wild night out with thousands of new mates. So, it was a shock when drummer David Friedrich left in April of last year. (Currently, ex-Sum 41 drummer Frank Zummo is behind the EC kit.)

In a candid post on Instagram almost a year after his departure, David revealed how much the band’s rapid success had impacted his mental health, admitting: “As the venues got bigger, I felt smaller inside.” Did it come as a shock?

“I think the main problem is we didn’t talk much,” says Nico. “Over the last months, he started driving on his own, and slowly but constantly separated himself from us.”

Despite trying to reach out, they haven’t spoken to David since he left. “I just hope that he’s feeling better."

A lot is riding on Electric Callboy’s new album, Tanzneid. In the four years since releasing Tekkno, they have kept busy by drip-feeding singles, including a cover of Cascada’s 2005 Eurodance anthem, Everytime We Touch (the video saw them dancing in satin shirts at a country manor) and playing to bigger and bigger crowds. But the success of Tanzneid will determine just how big things can get. Right now, Electric Callboy are one of metal’s hottest bands, and a stumble would be disastrous.

“The pressure during the last three months of recording pushed us to the limit,” admits Nico. “Writing an album that is successful as Tekkno… you can’t force it, you can’t plan it.”

“It’s not good for your creativity,” adds Kevin. “You want to be free of all those expectations.”

They needn’t worry. Tanzneid will easily satisfy the fans who enjoy both the serious and silly sides of Electric Callboy’s songwriting.

“We wanted to go a bit rougher and harsher,” said Nico, referring to songs such as dark rager Heartclub, and The Savior, which combines hard beats and classic 80s metal riffery. On the other side of the coin, the silliest moment by far is The Way You Are, a 90s boy band ballad in the vein of Backstreet Boys, which implodes in a cacophony of pig squeals, blastbeats and Lorna Shore-esque apocalyptic synthwork. It’s reminiscent of Hurrikan, a track on Tekkno which mashed German schlager music with deathcore, and is destined to become a moment in future sets.

“We are fans of Backstreet Boys,” laughs Kevin. “There were so many great songs coming out of that era.”

Footage from their sets at Rock Im Park and Rock Am Ring, filmed by a drone, has landed on social media. We comment on the size of the crowd – a sea of ravers and moshers as far as the eye can see, all united in joy. It’s a scene that underlines how far Electric Callboy have come, and hints at how far they could still go.

“There are always goals that you want to reach,” says Nico. “All our tours are arena tours right now, which is unbelievable, but playing in a stadium once, that’d be crazy.”

Or maybe it’s not so crazy at all. Surely only a fool would bet against them.

“Everything that’s going on at this point is so much more than we could process,” says Kevin, who is still trying to wrap his head around how big his band has become. “Last night, I was sitting on the bus, checking social media, and I was like, ‘Wow, that was us onstage… That was me!”

Tanzneid is out now via Century Media. Electric Callboy tour the UK in January 2027 and headline Bloodstock Open Air on August 7 2027.

The shadow of cruel mortality has fallen across two of the year’s biggest metal releases, both unavoidably steeped in grief for much-loved creative talents taken far too soon. After processing Tomas Lindberg’s final At The Gates record, The Ghost Of A Future Dead, we’re confronted with the first Mastodon album without the unique voice and guitar wizardry of Brent Hinds, who quit the band last March and died five months later.

Mastodon’s previous LP, 2021’s double platter Hushed And Grim, was itself born of sorrow following the death of their long-time manager, Nick John. It was ambitious, audacious and liberally sprinkled with Mastodon’s patent genius, but attention couldn’t help flagging on a few mid-tier tunes. Nothing about Marrow Deep is mid-tier; every song pulls its considerable weight, maintaining an artisanal consistency across its comparatively concise 63 minutes.

More than once Brent declared to the press his dislike of heavy metal, bringing more of the psychedelic, progressive and punk influences to bear on the band’s sound. So perhaps it’s no surprise that this is the heaviest and most devotedly metallic Mastodon have sounded for 20 years.

After spending decades broadening their sonic palette and refining their melodic nous, many of the Atlanta outfit’s fans have long yearned for a return to the brute-force riffing and volatile aggression of their early work. The opening song’s vivid title, Barbarian’s Blood, confirms that the time is now, and the tune marauds with pugilistic intensity through Neurosis-damaged sludge chops, d-beats and exuberant guitar harmonies.

Tense, heaving chords and hammering drums continue to dominate Poisonous Weapons, but perhaps out of respectful restraint, there’s no guitar solo until the fifth song, Out Like A Lamb. When it finally arrives it makes up for the wait, new boy Nick Johnston bringing his Satriani-schooled precision to a full minute of cosmic heroism, flamboyant but maintaining a melodic melancholy.

There are still shades of 70s prog, but they’re fleeting moments of light relief among the head-caving metal. Witness the quirky notes soothing the jittery dynamics of Your Ghost Again, the intergalactic Moog in Snakes For Dinner, which features Queens Of The Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, or the burbling electric piano and dogfighting Hammond over closing epic The Three Fates, enhanced by a slavering vocal from Clutch’s Neil Fallon. The record’s most prestigious guest star - only Geezer bloody Butler - provides a bass intro to The Vanishing, the closest Marrow Deep gets to a chill-out zone, with bluesy guitars and spacey vocals building to a tumultuous crescendo.

Mastodon fans will always nitpick over this or that LP, but the band have never really put a foot wrong in 25 years, maturing from the ravenous young bucks of the early millennium to the grizzled gateway legends of today. Their development has been a thrill to behold, as has the prog-sludge scene that flourished in their wake. Marrow Deep may not shepherd us into bold new pastures, but after the first tragic breach of their line-up, it makes sense to revisit old stomping grounds with newfound purpose and profundity. Not for the first time, Mastodon have snatched joy from the jaws of heartbreak.

Marrow Deep is out August 28 via Loma Vista Recordings.

Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi has opened up about collaborating with Queen’s Brian May on his upcoming solo album, From The Dark.

Talking to Loudwire, Iommi, 78, calls May, 79, his best friend, having known him for “56, 58” years. “And of course, Eddie Van Halen was,” he adds. “We always stayed in touch a lot. They were the only two I really did stay in touch with.”

He goes on to describe the process of getting May to contribute to Death Wake, the sixth song on the From The Dark tracklisting. He details a very casual process where May “came to my house, and we always have a little fiddle about”.

“He brings a guitar or I’ve got one here and he’ll use that,” he continues. “I said, ‘Oh, bring your guitar when you come,’ he brought his guitar and I said, ‘You’re going to be playing on this track here.’ He’s great.”

He reveals that he wanted May to play on more From The Dark songs, but that the guitarist politely declined: “I said to him, ‘Play on some other tracks,’ but he went, ‘Oh no, it’s your album.' That’s the relationship we’ve had with each other for all these years. We’ve played a lot together. He is a great friend.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Iommi looks back at Black Sabbath’s final show, Back To The Beginning, which took place at Villa Park stadium in their hometown of Birmingham on July 2, 2025. The guitarist calls the show a “great honour” but “unusual” due to singer Ozzy Osbourne’s declining health at the time. Ozzy died of a heart attack 17 days later, aged 76.

“For me, it was difficult because seeing Ozzy sitting in a throne is not the way I see him,” says Iommi. “Always [when] we’ve been onstage, he’s been running around and he’d run up to Geezer [Butler, bass] and pull a face jokingly and come over to me and pull a face or the drummer or whatever.

“We always had a little laugh onstage and enjoy when he’d run about. But at Back To The Beginning, of course, he's in a throne and I couldn’t see him, which felt very unusual.”

From The Dark is set to drop on October 23 and will be Iommi’s first solo album since 2005. Joining the pioneering heavy metal axeman on every song will be singer Jørn Lande (Masterplan, Avantasia, etc.), bassist Becky Baldwin (Mercyful Fate) and drummer Karl Brazil (Robbie Williams). Iommi and his longtime collaborator Mike Exeter co-produce.

Iommi unveiled the album’s details and screened the music video for its lead single, World Alone, at a Birmingham launch event on July 29, where he took part in a Q&A with stand-up comedian Frank Skinner. The guitarist commented: “It’s an album we’ve really enjoyed making. We’re not trying to prove anything – it’s a great album, it rocks!”

Iommi isn’t the only Sabbath member to continue a solo career following the band’s retirement. Drummer Bill Ward said in June last year that he has two new solo albums in the works. He revealed last month that he now needs a wheelchair to get about, but defiantly added, “I’m still a drummer.”