Here’s something you probably weren’t expecting to hear this bright early autumn morning: Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, has written an advertising jingle for meatloaf dippers.

Strange but true. The singer has written and recorded this jingle for the Minnesota restaurant Howard’s Bar, which was opened in 2023 by the local musician Caroline Smith. The song’s ad is accompanied by animation by the illustrator Nick Stokes and – as you can tell – it’s as catchy and more-ish as the deep-fried comestible it’s promoting.

All together now: “Meatloaf dippers at Howard’s in Stillwater/Meatloaf dippers can be a whole meal or starter/Meatloaf dippers, oh so light and yummy/Go on and warm your tummy, with dippers.”

You may be unaware of it, but there is a noble tradition of rock musicians writing advertising jingles. And often it’s been the most unlikely, hippest names that have got themselves involved in penning those crunchy tunes that grease the wheels of capitalism.

Incredibly, in the mid 1960s the Rolling Stones – then the coolest band on planet Earth - recorded a jingle to advertise… Rice Krispies. The tune was apparently one of the few penned by the group’s original leader Brian Jones.

The music from Coca-Cola ads has reached Number One in the UK on two occasions (The New Seekers’ I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing in 1972 and Robin Beck’s First Time from 1988) so it’s somewhat strange that Jack White’s Coke song, What Goes Around Comes Around, has become a genuine White rarity.

The ad was produced in 2007 but supposedly was pulled after just one airing on the UK’s Channel Four and the song has never cropped up on any subsequent White release.

And then there’s Justin Hawkins of the Darkness. Before the group emerged in the early 2000s, Hawkins’ day job was as a TV jingle writer. The singer composed the music for ads for Mars Bars, Tango and this effort for IKEA:

Indeed, Hawkins once boasted to the Guardian that the Darkness wouldn’t have got off the ground without his ad work: “That's how we paid for the first album. It was TV adverts. I did HSBC, Tango, Mars bars, Irn Bru, the Sunday Express gardening supplement TV ad – I've been running a jingle company for the last 15 years."

After Joy Division came to an untimely end following the sad death of its chief, Ian Curtis, a new band rose from the ruins. New Order featured former Joy Division members Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris, alongside Gillian Gilbert joining on keyboards. They would come to epitomise the passion and creativity of the Manchester music scene, continuing the legacy left by their era-defining predecessor.

But New Order became far more than just another band; they fronted a movement - placed front and centre in the Factory Records catalogue - while almost single-handedly bank rolling the inspirational (but ultimately ill-fated) Hacienda nightclub.

Despite many tales and tall stories, they also hold the record for the biggest selling 12” single of all time… or do they?

We’re actually old enough to remember hearing the very first play of Blue Monday by John Peel, on his late night Radio One show. An industrious and forward-thinking friend even had the good sense to record it to cassette, so that we could hear it on a loop the very next day.

Blue Monday was the single that really brought New Order to the attention of the mainstream, but it did so at a cost.

Firstly, the band did not want to truncate the track, leaving it in its full 7:29 state for release. There was no way that this would fit on a 7” single, so it had to be pressed to a full 12” single instead.

While the release is generally recognised as the biggest selling 12” single of all time, Factory Records were an independent label, and without membership of the British Phonographic Institute (BPI), their sales record could not be acknowledged officially.

But at least the record company were making serious profits? Right?

Not quite! The initial release of the 12” single featured a silver cardboard inner sleeve, with a black outer sleeve, made to look like a computer floppy disk, complete with three cut-out holes to mimic a disk’s design.

Ironically, the cutting of these three holes upped the cost-per-unit for each record sold, meaning that with the sale of each record, Factory Records made a 10p loss.

While undeniably a creative powerhouse, business acumen was not a Factory hallmark.

This also explains why later releases of the single moved to a one-sleeve black cardboard design, with no cutouts.

But what price is art, we hear you cry? The storied making and production of Blue Monday was replete with a number of genuine mistakes and happy accidents, along with a sizeable amount of inspiration from other artists and records.

We have to begin with the drum track, programmed by drummer Stephen Morris, who was (and continues to be) incredibly proficient when it comes to music technology.

That being said, it seems that the best version of the track was wiped when the mains cable was… er… accidentally yanked out from the rear of the Oberheim DMX Drum Machine by Stephen’s foot…

“He spent all day programming a backing track and then he caught a power cable to the DMX drum machine with his bloody foot,” Bernard Sumner recalled in an interview with GQ in 2012. “He ripped the power cable out and lost all the drum programming. So we had to start again on the drums. We managed to get most of it but we lost the original drum for Blue Monday. It was different. It's funny that it's become one of our most famous songs”

Even so, the drum track is heavily influenced by the work of Giorgio Moroder, and specifically the Donna Summer track, Our Love (released as the B-side to Sunset People in 1980).

Moroder employed a delay to create a 16th note kick drum effect, which is recreated at the beginning of Blue Monday, but in a fully programmed form.

Listen to the kick sound carefully and you can hear a short and subtle reverberation of the sample. The kick element was played out through the main monitoring at Britannia Row studios, before the room’s reverberation was captured via microphones.

The legendary bass sound on the track is supplied by a Moog Source synthesizer. Released in 1981, the Source was the first synth to use digital parameter access, allowing easy storage of patches, while maintaining a sound which was unmistakably Moog, albeit with only two VCOs.

“It was an exploration into pure electronic music, so we took the machines to the limit to see what we could do with them,” Bernard Sumner told GQ. “What we could do with them was very basic at the time, so it was making the most out of what little gear we had.”

The bassline itself does sound characteristically familiar, in part thanks to its tight programming alongside the drums which was inspired by numerous disco and club recordings.

Sylvester’s You Make Me Feel from 1978, was clearly an inspiration here, sporting an exceptionally similar bass part. The Blue Monday bass part begins with a F, to a C and finally a D, before altering the sequence slightly, replacing the note F with a G.

If we think about the harmonic structure of the song, there is an argument that the song remains on a single chord of D minor for its entirety. The movement of the bass part below it merely helps to maintain interest, as does the directly associated line, which is played above it.

According to keyboardist Gillian Gilbert, she made a subtle error in the programming of one of the upper synth parts, which resulted in the part being slightly out of sync with the bass and drums. Nonetheless, it was left as-is to make a characterful part of the final arrangement.

Blue Monday is also one of the first commercial releases to take advantage of the E-mu Emulator 1 sampling keyboard. Offering a mere 4 seconds of sampling, the band used the Emulator at key points in the track. Apparently the first thing they sampled was… you guessed it… a fart! So much for artistic credibility and intent.

The infamous thunderclap that we hear halfway through the track, emanated from the Emulator. More contentiously, the beautiful choir sound, which we hear at various points in the song, is a direct sample of the electronic choir sound from Uranium by Kraftwerk.

The original motivation behind Blue Monday stems from the band’s desire to get around the problem of an encore when playing live.

Much like the concept where Kraftwerk had imagined that robots would perform their concerts for them, New Order came up with the idea of walking on stage at the end of a show, pressing a button, and letting the machines play an encore, while they went back to their dressing room to enjoy a beer.

Of course, this was reliant upon technology, which left bassist Peter Hook out in the cold.

His musical contribution was inspired by Ennio Morricone, and specifically the score to the film A Few Dollars More. In typical Hook style, he treated his bass like a semi-acoustic guitar, adopting a similar musical poise to the Spaghetti Western score.

In terms of melodic content, Blue Monday shares many traits with previous songs, and even New Order releases. Just listen to one of their previous singles, Everything’s Gone Green, to hear the similarity in the melodic line, alongside other elements of this song.

As the song climbed the UK charts, it was merely a matter of time before the BBC TV show Top of the Pops came calling. But, in typical New Order fashion, they weren't prepared to simply mime in this post-punk TV world.

After weeks of back-and-forth, the BBC finally relented to the band playing Blue Monday live, in what has gone down in history as one of the most enigmatic and un-energetic performances in pop history…

To make matters worse, their aforementioned thunder and choir samples were loaded into the sampler in the wrong order, meaning that instead of hearing the thunderous clap at the appropriate point in the song, we heard an off-key choir instead! The band’s reaction? They just laughed it off and put it down to experience.

“Blue Monday has a sonic impact that very, very few records have,” Peter Hook told NME. “It really was a gift, and it was quite ironic – and quite sad, really – that we stole it off a Donna Summer B-side. It is a weird song. It’s become one of Manchester’s greatest records.”

Black Sabbath could have recorded one final album with the original lineup. But according to Tony Iommi, he passed on the opportunity.

That’s what the guitarist has said in a new interview with Classic Rock. The final Sabbath album, 13, did not involve Bill Ward after the drummer failed to reach an agreement regarding his contract. After its release in 2013, there had been talk about a follow-up, but nothing really happened.

Now Iommi has revealed that producer Andrew Watt – who had helmed Ozzy’s final solo albums Ordinary Man from 2020 and 2022’s Patient Number 9 – had approached him earlier this decade about getting the original line back for one more album.

"I'd met Andrew Watt when he was producing Ozzy," Iommi said. "He was very keen and a bit too excited. He also didn't know what it was like working with the original Sabbath, working with Bill. Also, we'd done 13, and I didn't like the idea of: 'Now here’s another album.'"

In other Iommi news, the guitarist has apparently signed up for William Shatner’s metal album, What The F is Heavy Metal? Well, according to Brian May he has.

May confirmed his friend’s appearance on Zoe Ball’s show on Greatest Hits Radio. Talking about Shatner, he said: “He's a very active man, and for him to step into... Well, it's not... I don't call it heavy metal; I call it rock, really. But it will probably be a heavy metal album because I think Tony Iommi's gonna play on it now as well. Tony's really my best mate, so it's easy for me to pick up the phone to him. And Tony's like me - he loves a challenge."

News about the 95 year old actor’s latest wheeze has filtered through gradually during 2026. We know that Rob Halford of Judas Priest, John Moyer of Disturbed and Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo have all put their names down for the project. May confirmed his involvement last week, and now it seems Iommi too. Shatner is set to preview some of the tracks at Chicago’s Riot Fest next week with a band that includes Phil Sossan (Ozzy Osbourne, Billy Idol) and Britt Lightning of Vixen.

“What a great guy,” May said of Shatner. “He's 95. And he's full of life and vitality and ambition and anger and all this stuff. He's like a kid. I really enjoyed meeting him... I mean, I've worked hard on it. He loves it, and I love the song 'cause you might think William Shatner... I mean, if you don't know Star Trek, it doesn't mean anything perhaps, but if you've lived like we did through all those editions of Star Trek, he's a hero, and he's, in later life, become a real luminary in the world. He does so much for children, so much for the outreach of science.”

The two remaining members of Queen seem to be considering an avatar show in the same vein as Abba Voyage.

That’s what Roger Taylor suggested during an appearance on Virgin Radio’s Breakfast Show. When the host Chris Evans asked about future Queen activity, the drummer replied: “Brian and I talk because we live near each other. There is a possibility of doing something...not quite sure what it is yet.”

“But technology has come on so far,” he mused. “Like the Abba show, for instance. It’s come on…”

At which point his host (and his production colleagues) became audibly excited. “So you’re going on tour with Freddie?” Evans said. “This is what’s happening! Is that what’s happening?”

“No,” said Taylor, sounding somewhat embarrassed at having raised the subject. “I wish it was.”

“It could happen, though, couldn’t it?” asked Evans puppishly.

“Sort of,” replied Taylor. “It sort of could.”

It’s not the first time Taylor and Brian May have publicly pondered the possibility of a Queen avatar show. Last year May told The Big Issue he was open to the possibility of using new technology to create such a spectacle: “It wouldn’t be just playing old footage or whatever. It would be creating Queen as if we were creating it today. I’m very taken with the idea that we can be the original Queen again.”

For such an idea to go from a ‘could’ to a ‘definitely will’, it would need to overcome some fairly considerable barriers. The two largest stumbling blocks are of course the non-availability of the other half of Queen. As we know, Freddie Mercury has been dead since 1991.

Meanwhile, John Deacon retired from public life in the late 1990s. It is very much doubtful whether the bassist would be willing to submit to the time-consuming motion capture technology necessary to create a digital avatar, or re-record his parts for such a project.

Aside from Abba Voyage, the only other ‘avatar show’ (scare quotes used deliberately) to make it from the drawing board to first night is Elvis Evolution. The dictionary definition of a damp squib, it consisted of a live band playing against projections of old footage of Elvis. It remains to be seen whether the Kiss avatar show – which is set to open next year – marks any sort of improvement.

If JRR Tolkien was the primary literary influence upon prog rock, there’s an argument to be made that Lewis Carroll served a similar role during the psychedelic era just a few years before.

John Lennon’s work during this era – I Am The Walrus, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Cry Baby Cry and more – is suffused by prolonged exposure to Carroll and his two Alice novels. And then there’s White Rabbit.

One of the signature hits of the Summer of Love, White Rabbit reached Number Eight in the Billboard charts, an extraordinary feat considering how unusual it was for its time – a Spanish bolero that doesn’t have a conventional verse or chorus but builds and builds until it reaches a strident crescendo.

Then there are the lyrics. It’s hard to believe that the song’s writer, Grace Slick, got away with a song that – on the surface at least – seems to celebrate experimentation with drugs. But White Rabbit got radio airplay and TV exposure despite its references to pills, mushrooms and “hookah-smoking caterpillars”. Not to mention Slick’s closing exhortation to “feed your head”.

Slick wrote White Rabbit in early 1966 whilst she was in her previous band The Great Society. In a 2016 interview with the Wall Street Journal, she recalled how she put it together. “I found a small upright piano for $80 at a warehouse in San Francisco. It was painted about 90 coats of bright red and was missing around 10 keys in the upper register. I didn’t play way up there anyway - the notes were too pingy - so I bought it. Jerry (her husband) and I put the piano in our living room.”

The Great Society were starting to get some press attention, and Slick gave a press interview in which she spoke in favour of marijuana and LSD. “(It) got back to my parents. It was painful for them, I’m sure, but I didn’t care whether they minded. Parents were criticising a generation’s choices while sitting there with their glasses of scotch.”

“They also seemed unaware that many books they read to us as kids had drug use as a subtext. Peter Pan uses fairy dust and can fly, Dorothy and her friends in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz cut through a poppy field and wind up stoned and fast asleep.”

“I loved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The stuff Alice drank and ate made her high (tall) or brought her down (small). There were all kinds of drug metaphors in there. The 60s were very much like that.”

One afternoon while her husband was out, Slick began work on a song inspired by Alice. First came the lyrics. Once those were completed, she moved over to her piano. “I worked on the chords, writing the names of the ones I liked over the phrases. I wrote the song in F-sharp minor, a key that’s ideal for my voice. Minor chords have a certain darkness and sadness.”

The music she came up with had a distinct Spanish flavour. A couple of years before, Slick had had a particularly intense experience listening to Miles Davis’s Sketches Of Spain whilst on LSD. She became obsessed with the album, playing it over and over. This all came out in White Rabbit.

“With the chorus - the Alice lines, like ‘Go ask Alice, when she’s 10 feet tall’ - I shifted to major chords for a release and to celebrate Alice’s courage following the white rabbit down the hole. Once down there, she didn’t have a Prince Charming. She had to save her own ass while going through all the insane hallucinogenic stuff.”

“I identified with Alice. I was a product of '50s America in Palo Alto, California, where women were housewives with short hair, and everything was highly regulated.

"I went from the planned, bland 50s to the world of being in a rock band without looking back. It was my Alice moment, heading down the hole. White Rabbit seemed like an appropriate title.”

“I always felt like a good-looking schoolteacher singing White Rabbit,” she reflected. “I sang the words slowly and precisely, so the people who needed to hear them wouldn’t miss the point. But they did. To this day, I don’t think most people realise the song was aimed at parents who drank and told their kids not to do drugs.”

A version of the song with a lengthy raga-like introduction quickly became part of the band’s live repertoire. But by the summer of 1966 the Great Society were falling apart: a recording session with producer Sylvester Stewart was a disaster that saw the future Sly Stone walk out in exasperation. Some members were talking about going off travelling. Meanwhile, another up-and-coming Bay Area band were eyeing their singer up with interest.

Jefferson Airplane had already recorded their debut album Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, but when vocalist Signe Toly Anderson left to raise her newborn child, they needed a replacement. In a 2021 Guardian interview, bassist Jack Casady explained why they chose Slick:

“One of the reasons I wanted to get Grace into Jefferson Airplane is that she walked to the edge of the stage to sing right to the audience and look right at you. Prior to that I’d only seen guys doing that.

"The chord structures that she wrote were really interesting and she allowed me to construct her songs in a different manner.”

Slick brought with her both White Rabbit and a Great Society B-side, Someone To Love, which was retitled Somebody To Love. In her first rehearsal she taught the former to her new bandmates. “The song is in F sharp, which is difficult for guitar players as it requires some intricate fingering, but (lead guitarist) Jorma (Kaukonen) and Jack are very good musicians so they were able to adapt to it and do it very well.”

Just two weeks after joining Airplane, Slick and the rest of Airplane were at RCA Victor Studios in Hollywood recording their second album, which would be titled Surrealistic Pillow.

In a 2021 interview with the website Happy Mag, Casady recalled the November afternoon they cut White Rabbit. “We recorded it out at Sunset and Ivar, in a huge room at RCA where they used to record A Hundred And One Strings. The room was massive, so we basically set up the instrumentation in the middle of this room and played it live onto four-track.

"It was very simple to record. I just led the song out as a bass part like Bolero, ripping off Ravel. It was all slow and slinky, it gave us the atmosphere we wanted.”

The lengthy introduction of the Great Society’s version was hacked off so the new version was a succinct two minutes 27: ideal for radio play. “After we recorded White Rabbit, we all went into the control room to hear the playback on the monitor speakers,” Slick said in 2016. “I was blown away. I wasn’t aware I sounded like that, with all that power. I was impressed.”

Surrealistic Pillow was released in February 1967 and, though well received critically, took a while to take off. It took the Top Five success of the new version of Somebody To Love to open doors for the record. Then the follow-up White Rabbit completed the one-two punch that took Airplane, the San Francisco scene, and the Haight-Ashbury counterculture all overground.

Speaking in 2016, Slick remembered that: “After the White Rabbit single came out, RCA told us each week where the record stood on the charts. I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t set out to write a hit single and I felt that radio only liked White Rabbit because it was short and they could get more ads in.”

Nevertheless, it reached Number Eight in August and would become one of the enduring aural mementoes of that epochal summer.

Jefferson Airplane too would become forever associated with the initial psychedelic explosion. Though they would never hit those commercial heights again, they carried on until they spluttered to a halt in 1973. Together with guitarist Paul Kantner, Slick then formed the successor band Jefferson Starship, remaining there even after they evolved into AOR rockers Starship.

Now 86 and retired from the music business, she’s still a curiously underrated figure in music history. Slick was one of the first women to play a creative role within a rock band, but her pioneering contributions have only rarely been acknowledged by those who walked through the doors she opened.

And White Rabbit not only pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in a pop song, but was a clarion call to a generation to open their minds in a more general sense. “Psychedelic drugs showed you that there are alternative realities,” Slick said in 2021. “You open up to things that are unusual and different, and, in realising that there are alternative ways of looking at things, you become more accepting of things around you.”

“The line in the song “feed your head” is about both reading and psychedelics. I was talking about feeding your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention.”

When Buddy Guy emerged from the clubs of the Chicago blues scene at the dawn of the 1960s as one of its most electric performers, charismatic and a not a little wild, something had changed. And it was he who was doing the changing.

Chicago was the proving ground for a generation of blues guitarists who had grown up in the South. Guy was not the first. He got there in the fall of 1957. The likes of Muddy Waters, BB King and Otis Rush were already doing their thing. It was Rush who introduced Guy to Waters at the legendary Bronzeville blues institution, the 708 Club, down on Chicago’s South Side.

Even now, aged 90, Guy often speaks as though he is still the outsider in the scene, the shy boy who had to be invited onto the stage to show folks what he was about. “I didn’t go there thinking I’d be good enough to play,” he said, speaking to Total Guitar in 2015. “I just wanted to watch these greats playing – Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy [Williamson], all those guys – and I got stranded.”

But Buddy Guy, the world’s greatest living bluesman, was not stranded. He was simply out there on his own.

Music history resists grand proclamations. It’s too messy, too unwieldy. But there is a case to be made that Guy – this unassuming man, born George Guy, in Lettsworth, Louisiana, to sharecroppers Sam and Isabel – is the most influential guitarist of all time. This is the player whom Eric Clapton, the original guitar god, described as his Elvis.

Guy had made a name for himself in Chicago but it was time to plant his flag in other territories. Blues guitar was having a tough time breaking through the US. But maybe the UK would be more receptive. In 1965, he crossed the Atlantic to take part in The American Folk Blues Festival tour.

Eric Clapton was watching as Guy took to the stage at London’s Marquee Club. For Clapton, this was like watching the King play Hound Dog on The Milton Berle Show – it was the performance that changed everything.

“All in all, everything about that night was deeply profound for me,” said Clapton in 2005, when he and BB King inducted Buddy Guy into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “The blues was clearly alive and well and it looked good too, for as well as being the real thing, musically Buddy was a star. His suit, his hair, his moves, his sunburst Strat, everything was sharp and perfect. He was for me what Elvis probably was for most other people.”

Within a couple of weeks of Guy’s Marquee set, Clapton quit the Yardbirds. He joined up with John Mayall and his Bluesbreakers to spearhead the British blues explosion.

But Buddy Guy’s performance stuck with him. When Clapton grew frustrated under Mayall’s charge, it was Guy’s performance – with only bass and drums backing him – that planted the idea to hook up with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker and form Cream.

“That was what did it,” said Clapton in 2005. “What it said to me was ‘this was possible.’ If you were a good enough guitar player – like Jimi was when his time came round – you could just do it as a trio. I thought, ‘Oh?’ And also, it seemed to be so free. You could go any way and change directions. If you were the soloist, you could do whatever you like. You can dictate.

“So I think with Jack in my filing cabinet, in a fairly rigid structure like John Mayall’s band, where we had a set that we played every night, I was thinking about that as a way of breaking free.”

Guy was only getting started. His Marquee performance was two years before he would release his debut album, Left My Blues in San Francisco, and he had already blown Clapton’s mind and played a pivotal role in the creation of Cream. Guy had also converted Clapton’s fellow Yardbirds alumni, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck.

His choice of guitar, a Fender Stratocaster, challenged their preconceptions, too. That was a country-and-western guitar, the “Roy Orbison-type thing” that all those cats in Nashville played.

“They all were telling me they didn’t know a Strat could play the blues and I laughed and said, ‘What do you mean!?’” Guy told MusicRadar. “Because they were all looking at the Gibson guitars and when they saw me, I went in there with a Strat and was playing them in a kind of wild and crazy way, and I was doing some of the things that I would do like throwing it up and catching it.

“I was amazed for them to tell me that they’d sat there and watched me and didn’t know the blues could be played like that on a Stratocaster.”

The Strat was the perfect vehicle for him. It would sustain. He could dig in and it would sting a note, and you could drop the thing and it wouldn’t break.

“If you’d see me play, I wanted you to say, ‘He’s playing his guitar like he don’t care whether tomorrow comes.’ Because if people come see you, I think you should give them every damn thing you’ve got,” he said. “I knew the Strat could give me that and I’ve been in love with it ever since. It just stuck to me.”

Guy’s live show was becoming the stuff of legend. He would walk the guitar right up to the edge. He always said he wanted to play like BB King but perform like Guitar Slim.

“In the flesh, he was earth shattering,” said Clapton at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony. “His style on every level was fantastic. Doing all the things we would later come to associate with Jimi Hendrix, playing with his teeth, his feet, and behind his head. He brought the house crashing down.”

Guitar Slim might have influenced Guy but his style, his physicality with the instrument, was all his. Who else was doing this before him? Guy did to his guitar what Little Richard did on his piano. Would Jimi Hendrix have played a Strat with his teeth without Guy? Would he have set fire to one?

“He transcended blues and started becoming theatre,” Jeff Beck told Louder. “It was high art, kind of like drama theatre when he played. He was playing behind his head long before Hendrix. I once saw him throw the guitar up in the air and catch it in the same chord.”

There was no question Guy was the player Hendrix looked to. They first met in 1967. But they played together in 1968. It was an occasion that stuck in Guy’s mind; he remembers it as the night Martin Luther King Jr was killed.

“I was playing a little place in Greenwich Village called the Generation,” Guy told Billboard in 1993. “I was up there with my guitar behind my head and people started hollering, ‘Hendrix! Hendrix!’ He came right up to me and said, ‘Pay them no mind. Can I tape what you play?’ He was always so nice to me.”

When they played together at Steve Paul’s The Scene, Guy recalls it was the first time he ever saw a wah pedal. It would later become part of his live rig. He would put it to good use when covering Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile (check out his incendiary 1993 performance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival below, which also features a cover of Cream’s Strange Brew).

Guy is too humble to accept the role he played in shaping Hendrix’s artistic sensibility. When out on the Experience Hendrix Tour in 2014 with Zakk Wylde, Dweezil Zappa, Eric Gales, Eric Johnson and others, Guy described Hendrix as “one of a kind”.

“I don’t want to take credit for someone like Hendrix,” he told Guitar World.

But Zakk Wylde saw it differently. The blues was the source. Buddy Guy was the source.

“That’s what Jimi Hendrix was doing,” he said. “He was copping Buddy’s licks before me and everybody else on this tour. That’s where it all comes from. If you’re a rock guitarist, blues is your foundation.”

Kenny Wayne Shepherd agrees. He was on that Experience Hendrix Tour, too.

“This guy is one of Hendrix’s biggest influences! I think one of the things that Hendrix got from Buddy Guy was the ability to just unleash on your instrument,” he told MusicRadar in 2016. “I mean, Buddy Guy, you can see him today and he’s 80 but he plays ferociously!

“It’s like his signature thing: he just unleashes on his instrument, and that’s something I think Hendrix learned from him. He’s another legendary player that has inspired so many people.”

The multi-generational reach of Guy’s influence lends further support the theory that he is the most influential player to have done it.

If BB King was the undisputed King of the Blues, its centre of gravity, Guy spun threw the blues out of its axis with his bold electric guitar radicalism, feedback, distortion, high volume – all that stuff that Chess Records used to give him grief about in the ‘60s is what today’s players seek him out for now.

“BB was the good guy and Buddy Guy was the bad boy,” Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram told the Boston Globe. “He’s the one I immediately wanted to be like, and I’ve definitely emulated him.”

Gary Clark Jr is another contemporary blues phenom whose imagination was lit up by the fire in Guy’s playing.

“My biggest tricks came from people like Buddy Guy, who would overbend his strings and exaggerate the hell out of it,” he told Guitar World. “It’s ridiculous how far that guy can bend a string! I learned how to do things like that in order to evoke emotion.”

Jonny Lang, who was also on the 2014 Experience Hendrix Tour, sees Guy as the player from that OG Chicago Blues generation who brought some danger to the art form.

“I remember seeing him play at some point early on in my career, just watching him go crazy onstage,” Lang told MusicRadar. “He wasn’t thinking about it at all. That’s what made me realise it’s okay to be reckless when you play music. That’s perfectly fine. It can actually help push you into a different place – that guy is the master of that. He’s amazing.”

Study Buddy Guy’s back catalogue, watch him onstage over the decades, and you’ll find a player who’s challenging orthodoxy and daring others to follow him there.

Gary Clark Jr gets frustrated by people who talk about keeping the blues alive yet fail to recognise that players like Guy – and pioneers such as Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters – were great because they sounded like no one else.

They put themselves into their art, and found a way to expand blues guitar’s vocabulary in the process.

“If you’re trying to do Muddy Waters, that’s some big shoes to fill, and I don’t really want to spend my time trying to be that guy,” Clark told Total Guitar. “People used to tell me all the time, ‘Just play the blues, you gotta preserve the blues!’ And I’d think, ‘Yeah, but look at Buddy Guy with a record like Sweet Tea – what the hell is that?’

“Why would people want me to sound like Buddy Guy’s old records when even Buddy Guy doesn’t sound like that anymore?”

But keeping the blues alive is also about staying at at, and persevering. Buddy Guy is still persevering. He still plays his club in Chicago, Buddy’s Legends. Didn’t he announce his retirement, embarking on the The Damn Right Farewell Tour in 2023? Well, that was a bit of kidology, because he’s still going.

He’s on the BG90 Tour right now, a run of dates that terminates in Midtown Manhattan on October 1st when he plays Radio City Music Hall.

This will be quite the evening. Buddy’s Got The Blues: A 90th Birthday Concert will feature an all-star cast of guest players including John Mayer, Gary Clark Jr, Joe Bonamassa, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, Eric Gales, Billy Gibbons, Bobby Rush, Robert Randolph, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and more.

Eric Clapton will be there, too. But it’ll be another night in which all eyes will be on Buddy Guy, our greatest living bluesman, the puckish raconteur with the polka-dot Strat.

Who knows who might be watching in the audience, and what they’ll do with their guitar when they next pick it up.

• Head to Buddy Guy for dates and ticket details for the BG90 Tour.

As he prepares to release Ride Lonesome, his 15th studio album, Beck has been reflecting with The Times on his unlikely early success and the frequent left turns he’s taken throughout his career.

The singer-songwriter’s breakthrough, of course, came with 1994’s Loser, but prior to that, he was struggling to make an impact on both first the New York and then the LA folk scenes.

“I really didn’t have much of a following at all,” he says. “People weren’t ready for deconstructed folk music featuring fingerstyle guitar with surrealist lyrics. In fact they hated it.”

All that changed, though, when Beck switched things up and Loser became a hit: “I had no idea what I was doing, it was a giant experiment,” he admits. “Previously I’d been writing 30 different versions of Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row for solo acoustic guitar and suddenly I had a hit with Loser, which is a rap song.”

It seemed entirely possible that Loser would be a flash in the pan, but two years later, Beck’s fifth album Odelay would sell more than two million copies. “Everyone was as baffled as I was,” he says. “I remember the president of my record label doing a toast to the success of Odelay, saying that he had no idea why it worked but he was happy it did.”

At this point, it seemed that world domination was on the cards, but Beck says that this was never on his mind, despite encouragement from rock royalty. “I remember Bono sitting me down and saying, ‘What are you doing? We were all waiting for you to take over!’ I didn’t have the stomach for it.’”

And so Beck continued to be Beck, just sort of doing what he fancied. After Odelay, he released the decidedly more downtempo Mutations, and then came Midnite Vultures, which saw him move towards funk and R&B.

One of the most memorable songs on the record was album closer Debra, which sounded almost like a pastiche of a classic Prince ballad.

“It was an ode to the R&B songs I was hearing on the radio at the time,” says Beck. “I was fascinated by how sexless alternative rock was while the R&B songs were full of it, so I imagined a working-class guy with a normal job, in his cheap car, trying to embody that spirit of seduction.”

If that was Beck playing a character, it sounds like Ride Lonesome comes from a much more personal place. It was written during the aftermath of his divorce, when he says he was “navigating difficult waters.”

“The album is about those moments when everything is stripped bare and you’re without the things you care about the most,” he explains. “You’re trying to find your faith again.”

Ride Lonesome is released on 18 September.

Lil Wayne has become the latest artist to get involved in the wonderful world of Fortnite.

The New Orleans rapper is set to join the game as part of their Icon series, which has already featured the likes of Sabrina Carpenter, Travis Scott and EsDeeKid amongst others.

What does the collab involve? Well, a pair of Lil Wayne skins and three of his biggest songs have been added to Fortnite Festival. There are also a number of accessories that fans will be interested in.

There’s a Lil Wayne outfit that includes gold graffiti glows and toggleable sunglasses, a Weezy outfit with toggleable tank top, hat and shades; Weezy Board back bling in the form of a flaming skateboard, a Weezy Boardbreaker pickaxe and a Young Money Stage glider, which sees pyrotechnics flare out when deployed.

And if you’re left utterly baffled by that last paragraph, clearly you’re not au fait with either the rapper born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr, nor the video game that has enraptured a generation. Or perhaps both.

Fortnite has also uploaded a trailer that features the Grammy winning rapper (or a computerised simulation of him, anyway).

Anyway, the Lil Wayne – Fortnite collab goes live tomorrow (12 September). Players will be able to compete in the Weezy Icon Cup in either Solo Battle Royale or Solo Zero Build.

“Top regional performers will earn the Weezy Outfit and Weezy Board Back Bling before they hit the Shop, and everyone who competes earns the YM Emoticon,” Epic Games announced in a blog post.

It’s not been confirmed yet how much the Lil Wayne Fortnite bundle will cost. However, given the number of cosmetics it includes, it will likely be one of the game’s larger Icon Series bundles.

Tony Iommi has revealed that he seriously considered cancelling Black Sabbath’s farewell show with Ozzy Osbourne because he feared that the singer was too weak to perform on stage.

In a new interview with Classic Rock magazine, guitarist Iommi also says that he didn’t want Osbourne to perform a set of his solo material before Sabbath’s performance ended the show.

The Back To The Beginning event at Villa Park in Birmingham on 5 July 2025 saw Osbourne singing solo and with Black Sabbath while seated on a throne. Just 17 days after the show, Osbourne died at the age of 76.

Back To The Beginning also featured sets by a host of bands who were influenced by Black Sabbath, including Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Tool and Slayer.

Iommi tells Classic Rock: “I said to Ozzy: ‘I don’t think we should do it.’ I said: ‘We should just let the other bands play our stuff, and us come out at the end and say thank you. But it was for a good charitable cause, and eventually we said okay.”

Iommi explains that the band’s signature song Black Sabbath was dropped from their set because drummer Bill Ward had struggled to play it during rehearsals.

“We needed to rehearse with Bill, because it had been twenty years and he couldn’t remember how to play some of his stuff,” Iommi says. “We wanted to do the song Black Sabbath on the night but it was too difficult for him.”

When the members of Black Sabbath reunited to prepare for the Back To The Beginning show, it had been three years since Iommi had last seen Osbourne, and as he recalls now: “I hadn’t seen Ozzy for a bit, and it was difficult seeing him like that.”

Seeing Osbourne in such a frail condition, Iommi thought it would be best for Osbourne to cancel the solo set he had planned before Sabbath’s performance.

He admits: “I was concerned he was going to blow himself out, and by the time we came on he’d be struggling.”

In the end, however, Osbourne managed both sets, climaxing with four Sabbath classics: War Pigs, N.I.B., Iron Man and Paranoid.

“The adrenaline carried Ozzy through,” Iommi says. “And I’m so glad we did it. But of course we didn’t expect him to go so soon.”

Elsewhere in the Classic Rock interview, Iommi talks about his new solo album From The Dark, his first studio release since Black Sabbath’s swan song 13 emerged in 2013.

One of the key track on From The Dark is Death Watch, which features a guitar solo from Queen legend Brian May. “I’d already done a solo, but I took mine off,” Iommi says.

Iommi and May have been friends for decades, but even after all these years May was stunned when Iommi revealed how many riffs he has stockpiled on a number of CDs: “Five hundred, six hundred riffs,” he says. “Brian couldn’t believe how many I had.”

Iommi also recalls how, in the early 2020s, a famous producer tried to persuade him to make another Black Sabbath album with the others three original members of the band – Osbourne, Ward and bassist Geezer Butler.

The producer was Andrew Watt, who has recently made albums for Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones.

“I’d met Andrew Watt when he was producing Ozzy,” Iommi says. “He was very keen and a bit too excited. He also didn’t know what it was like working with the original Sabbath, working with Bill.”

Geese have responded to accusations that have been floating around for the past few months that they are ‘industry plants’ or part of a major label ‘psyop’.

Yes, daft as it may seem, this moderately successful New York indie band have been accused of being part of a dastardly psychological operation to use social media to create fake fans and thus a buzz around the band.

The allegations stemmed from Geese’s relationship with PR firm Chaotic Good. In a Billboard interview in the spring, a couple of members of the marketing company talked about how they performed ‘trend simulation’ via farmed social media accounts. “We know how to go viral, we have thousands of pages,” one of them boasted, somewhat unwisely.

Geese aren’t the only artists that Chaotic Good have worked with – other clients have included Coldplay and Travis Scott – but they seemed to get tarred by association. Then The Wire magazine published a news piece in April with the headline: ‘The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop.’

Now in a Rolling Stone interview, the band have suggested that they had their own doubts about the veracity of their sudden success. “I thought the same thing, I really did,” frontman Cameron Winter says. “That seemed like a reasonable explanation.”

It seems the accusations about astroturfing (or should that be indie-turfing?) caused consternation inside the band too. “We were just like, ‘Oh, my God. The whole fucking thing is fake.’ We were having a meltdown. Then we marched up to our label over email, the relevant team members, like, ‘How long have all our fuckin’ fans been fake, you sons of bitches?’”

Winter says that he and the band had a meeting with Chaotic Good and were assured that their marketing extended to nothing more than sharing and reposting live clips of their music. “It wasn’t comments or fake fans or bots or anything,” the singer said. “It was low-effort TikTok posts that were used to boost the algorithm. They showed us samples, and it made me feel better because they were so shitty.”

Anyway, whatever the truth behind the marketing, Geese seem genuinely popular now. Their fourth album Getting Killed has gone silver in the UK, and their autumn US tour of theatres and arenas is already nearly sold out.

And the group themselves seem to have few regrets about the controversy. “I’m glad that people have thoughts about our stuff at the end of the day,” Bassist Dominic DiGesu told Rolling Stone. “At least we’re not boring and mid.”

There’s no shortage of plugin brands touting machine learning tech right now, but Norwegian outfit Acon Digital has proved itself to be one of the most adept in the field.

Last year’s innovative Remix:Drums, for example, put a uniquely-focused spin on stem separation, applying the ubiquitous tech specifically to percussion in order to allow live remixing and editing of already mixed drum parts. It proved to be one of our favourite software releases of the year.

Now the brand has returned its focus to its longstanding audio editing, mastering and restoration application, Acoustica, for what Acon claims is the most significant update in the company’s history.

Acoustica 8 updates and expands upon its predecessor’s suite of tools, working the latest versions of Acon Digital’s AI and machine learning algorithms throughout. This includes overhauls to the DeNoise and DeHum modules, which are now machine learning-powered. The DeClip and DeClip tools, meanwhile, get new, streamlined interfaces.

Version 8 also includes Extract:Dialogue 2, which introduces individual sliders and sensitivity controls for adjusting voice, noise and reverb elements. This is joined by AudioFill, which can intelligently close gaps in audio content and as of this update promises to fill larger regions for “smoother, more natural repairs.”

Acoustica 8 also features some more fundamental updates. The entire UI has been overhauled, adding a new launch page, customisable toolbar and dockable workspace. The application also supports immersive audio, allowing for up to 9.1.6 channels, including Dolby Atmos.

There are updates to the application’s spectral editor too. This gains a new ‘select similar’ tool, along with adjustable feathering for smoother edits, and improved visualisation of the stereo field.

"Acoustica 8 is a result of listening closely to our customers and the wider audio community to fully understand the technical challenges they face every day,” says Acon Digital CEO Joel Heatley. “It is our most ambitious release to date, combining best-in-class tools with pricing unmatched in our industry."

As with previous versions, Acoustica 8 is available in several tiered editions. These start at £119/$149 for the Standard edition, rising to £239/$299 for the Premium and £359/$499 for the Ultimate editions. Each tier has differing levels of flexibility – Standard, for example, is stereo only, with no immersive support.

Acoustica 8 runs as a standalone app or as AU/VST3/AAX plugins (depending on the edition). As of this version, the application supports ARA2.

Head to the Acon Digital site for more information on each edition.

Arturia has updated its top-end desktop audio interface, Audiofuse Studio, launching a Rev 2 edition with ‘optimised’ preamps and an upgraded Bluetooth module.

Among the crowded audio interface market, Audiofuse Studio stands out for the breadth of its flexibility, offering a wide array of I/O capabilities that aim to cater for any and all studio needs. It features a total of 18 inputs, eight of which are analogue inputs on the device itself, the rest provided by digital I/O.

Of those analogue inputs, four are combo mic/line/instrument inputs along the front edge, each equipped with a DiscretePRO preamp. Those preamps have, according to Arturia, been upgraded for the Rev 2 model, now offering more headroom and extended gain range (-129dBu EIN, 119dB dynamic range, to be precise about it).

The remaining analogue line inputs sit along the device’s rear panel. Inputs 5 and 6 can also be switched to make use of an integrated phono/RIAA preamp, allowing for connection of a vinyl turntable,

On the output side, the Audiofuse Studio has four line outputs and two aux reamping outputs. There are also two independently controlled headphone outputs with integrated talkback and direct monitoring.

Beyond its analogue connections, the interface packs several digital connectivity options. This includes eight channels of ADAT inputs and outputs, along with S/PDIF input/output or Word Clock input/output/thru.

The device has a primary USB-C port for connection to a host computer, plus three additional USB 2 ports that allow it to act as a USB hub. There are also 3.5mm MIDI input and output ports.

Audiofuse Studio can also stream audio via its integrated Bluetooth module. This is another area the Arturia has upgraded for Rev 2. The module now supports AAC, aptX along with aptX HD and aptX Low Latency.

AudioFuse can be configured and controlled using the associated Audiofuse Control Center software, which can be instantly accessed by pressing the Arturia logo on the hardware. Alongside the launch of the Rev 2 interface, Audiofuse Control Center has been updated to version 2.5, which is free for all Audiofuse users and introduces features including preset import and export.

With its abundance of connectivity and customisation options, Audiofuse Studio remains one of the most versatile interfaces you’ll find at this price point. Its usefulness is enhanced further still by a generous bundle of Arturia plugins, including Analog Lab Intro and a selection of preamps, compressors, delays, reverbs and modulation effects drawn from the brand’s excellent FX Collection bundle.

Audiofuse Studio Rev 2 is out now, priced at £849/999€/$1,199 USD. Head to the Arturia site for more information.

On 26 September 1969, The Beatles released their eleventh studio album Abbey Road. It was the last album the band recorded together and is widely regarded as a masterpiece.

Abbey Road was a triumphal swan song for The Beatles’ astonishing recording career. It also captured them still in their prime, capable of creating music that left most of their contemporaries standing.

Across its 47:03 running time, Abbey Road spans a dizzying array of styles, yet it is a stunningly cohesive work. It is also bold and innovative, as demonstrated by the song that opens the album, Come Together.

Come Together is a strikingly raw and direct song, written by John Lennon. It opens with one of the most iconic bass lines in rock and melds surreal stream-of-consciousness lyrics with a mean and gritty swamp-infused groove.

57 years since it was recorded, Come Together stands as one of the most distinctive songs in The Beatles’ peerless back catalogue.

The initial idea for Come Together was reportedly sparked when American psychologist, writer and early advocate for psychedelic drugs, Dr Timothy Leary, asked John Lennon to write a song. This was to be used for Leary’s campaign to become Governor of California in 1969.

Leary already had the campaign slogan ‘Come together – Join the party’, and Lennon attempted to create a track for Leary’s political bid.

“‘Come together’ was an expression that Leary had come up with for his attempt at being president or whatever he wanted to be, and he asked me to write a campaign song,” Lennon told author David Sheff in a 1980 interview, published a year later as All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon And Yoko Ono.

“I tried and tried, but I couldn’t come up with one. But I came up with this, Come Together, which would’ve been no good to him – you couldn’t have a campaign song like that, right?”

Lennon took the phrase ‘come together’ and created a heavily modified new song, which he brought along to the Abbey Road sessions. This was an upbeat blues composition, which allegedly took its musical cue from the 1956 song You Can’t Catch Me by Chuck Berry.

When Lennon played the song to the band in the summer of 1969, Paul McCartney instantly spotted the reference. “He originally brought it over as a very perky little song, and I pointed out to him that it was very similar to Chuck Berry’s You Can’t Catch Me,” said McCartney in Barry Miles’ 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now.

“John acknowledged it was rather close to it so I said, ‘Well, anything you can do to get away from that’. I suggested that we tried it swampy – ‘swampy’ was the word I used – so we did, we took it right down.”

Slowing the pace gave the song its power. But it was McCartney’s iconic bassline, with its long, undulating slides, that really stood out.

“I laid that bass line down, which very much makes the mood,” said McCartney in Barry Miles’ 1997 biography.

In late 1973, Lennon was sued by music mogul Morris Levy, who claimed that Come Together infringed the copyright on Berry’s You Can’t Catch Me, owned by Levy’s publishing company, Big Seven Music.

They settled out of court, with Lennon agreeing to record three songs from Levy’s Big Seven publishing catalogue for his next project. This ultimately led to Lennon’s 1975 cover album Rock ‘N’ Roll.

At McCartney’s request, engineer Geoff Emerick returned for the Abbey Road album, and Come Together was the first Beatles session he had worked on since he walked out of sessions for The White Album in 1968, exhausted by the arguments within the band.

Emerick helped create the dark, heavy sound of Come Together and captured its deep groove with extraordinary warmth and weight.

On the Revolver album, Emerick had pioneered close-micing and it’s a technique he used on Come Together to give Ringo’s kick and toms a real heavy physicality and presence

By the recording of Abbey Road, Ringo was regularly draping tea towels over his snare and toms in the studio to deaden the sound. “A terrific effect,” Emerick told Joe Bosso of MusicRadar. “Loud drums would have destroyed the song's spooky mood.”

Emerick also helped create the beautiful clarity and weight of McCartney’s bass sound, a crucial element in the song’s dark, swampy feel.

Abbey Road was the first Beatles album to be recorded on a transistorised mixing console, rather than the valve consoles used on previous Beatles’ albums.

“It delivered a bit of a softer sound,” Emerick told MusicRadar. “The guitars, the bass, the snare and the bass drum were all a bit softer and warmer. It took a little bit of time for the guys to get used to it.”

The Beatles recorded Come Together over six days – 21, 22, 23, 25, 19 and 30 July 1969. The sessions took place in Studio Three at EMI Recording Studios in Abbey Road – now known as Abbey Road Studios – and were produced by George Martin and engineered by Emerick and Phil McDonald.

On 21 July 1969, The Beatles recorded eight takes of Come Together. Take six was marked “best” and selected as the basis of the album and single version of the song, although the edit of the single version fades earlier and has different stereo balance and mastering on some releases.

Confusingly, take six was then designated as take nine. It was recorded on four-track and transferred over to eight-track tape in Studio Two at Abbey Road, ready for overdubbing and manipulation of EQ.

On 22 July 1969, Lennon re-recorded his vocal and added handclaps, with Emerick adding tape delay to both.

At one point in the song, Lennon adds “shoot me”, a phrase allegedly alluding to heroin, although as Emerick noted in the book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn, “On the finished record you can really only hear the word ‘shoot’. The bass guitar note falls where the ‘me’ is.”

In his 1980 interview with David Sheff, Lennon described his lyrics for Come Together as “gobbledygook” but they reflect his liking for the nonsensical and surreal. For all their seeming randomness, there’s an exhilarating sense of liberation to Lennon’s scattergun word association.

“He wear no shoeshine, he got toe-jam football/He got monkey finger, he shoot Coca-Cola/He say, ‘I know you, you know me’/ ‘One thing I can tell you is you got to be free’.”

The overdubs on the recording included an electric piano solo but to this day, opinions vary about whether it was Paul McCartney or John Lennon who played the funky and percussive solo.

In a 1984 interview with Playboy magazine, McCartney said that he played the part.

“With Come Together, for instance, [John] wanted a piano lick to be very swampy and smoky, and I played it that way and he liked that a lot. I was quite pleased with that.”

But in his 2014 interview with MusicRadar, Geoff Emerick recalled that it was Lennon who played the electric piano solo used on Come Together.

“Initially, Paul played the electric piano part, but John kind of looked over his shoulder and studied what he was playing. When it came time to record it, John played the electric piano instead of Paul. Paul might have been miffed, but I think he was more upset about not singing on the choruses – John did his own backing vocals.”

Listening to Come Together almost six decades on, it’s striking how fresh and timeless it sounds.

Lennon’s flat, staccato-style vocal sounds compelling and intense, set against the dark, spacious murk of the backing track.

McCartney’s undulating bass predominates and he leaves heaps of space, moving between deep root notes and higher melodic motifs.

Unsurprisingly, it is Starr and McCartney that give the song its swagger.

As ever, Starr’s drumming is impeccably judged and understated. There are some inspired tom fills and his cymbal work helps keep the sound dark and spacious.

Ringo sits slightly behind the beat on Come Together. His drumming is loose and as always, he knows exactly when not to play.

George Harrison’s rhythm guitar is raw and gritty when it comes in on the chorus, and he provides some inspired lead guitar flourishes, such as the slide guitar after the keyboard solo at 2:15. Harrison also contributes some beautifully melodic lead playing on the outro, from 3:12 onwards, which is woven between Lennon’s ad-libbed vocal and the soulful keyboard vamps on the Fender Rhodes.

But what really stands out here is the strength of the band’s live performance in the studio. The tensions within the band still prevailed but this is the sound of The Beatles at the top of their game – raw, strident, assured and with an innate energy and feel.

It was a point highlighted by George Martin in the liner notes to the compilation album Love. Martin described Come Together as a simple song but one that “stands out because of the sheer brilliance of the performers”.

Come Together was released on a double A-side single with George Harrison’s Something on 6 October 1969. It reached No 4 in the UK and No 1 in the Billboard Hot 100 in the US.

Critics such as the New Musical Express concluded that Come Together was one of the funkiest songs The Beatles had ever recorded.

In 2006, MOJO placed Come Together at No 13 in its list of 101 best Beatles songs while four years later Rolling Stone voted it No 9 on their list of the band’s 100 greatest songs.

The listening public later rated it higher. When the Beatles catalogue became available on major streaming services on Christmas Eve 2015, Come Together almost instantly became the most streamed Beatles song. 11 years on, it is the second most popular Beatles song on Spotify, after Here Comes The Sun.

Numerous artists would cover the song, including Ike & Tina Turner a month after its release. Their soul/funk treatment became a highlight of their live set and they released it as a single in December 1969.

Other artists who covered the song include The Supremes, Joe Cocker, Aerosmith, Michael Jackson, Soundgarden, Arctic Monkeys, Eurythmics and Prince.

For John Lennon, Come Together remained a highlight of his work with The Beatles.

“It was a funky record,” Lennon told writer David Sheff in 1980. “It’s one of my favourite Beatle tracks, or, one of my favourite Lennon tracks, let’s say that. It’s funky, it’s bluesy, and I’m singing it pretty well. I like the sound of the record. You can dance to it. I’d buy it!”

Kevin Saunderson, techno pioneer, one third of the Belleville Three and all round dance music legend is to give a Roland 909 workshop this coming Saturday (ie tomorrow, 12 September).

It’s being facilitated with the Underground Music Academy, which is a Detroit-based gathering space for “educators, artists and visionary thinkers”. Saunderson, you’d have to say, ticks all those boxes.

Anyway, if you’ve recently purchased the iconic drum machine, or you simply want to improve your skills, this is an invaluable chance to learn from a master. Saunderson will be looking at both the original TR-909 and the new TR-1000, and even if you own other drum machines, there’s doubtless loads to pick up.

The workshop will apparently dive into sequencing, sound shaping, and performance techniques while connecting the history of the 909 to where the technology is heading today.

And it’s absolutely free! There are both in-person slots and online options. If you happen to be in Detroit tomorrow and want an in person ticket, you need to move fast as they are almost sold out. Or you can simply log into the stream (above) which will be going live on Saturday.

Registration is taking place now but the deadline is midnight tonight Detroit time. It all takes place at 3pm – 6pm tomorrow Detroit time (that’s 9pm – 12am in London or 10pm – 1am if you’re in Berlin). For more information head over to undergroundmusicacademy.com.

Wind down for your weekend and test your mighty musical brain with our quiz on all that's been moving and shaking on the pages of MusicRadar this week.

We've 10 fiendish questions to fling your way, all set to test whether you're number one or failing to chart.

So who's been rocking what, where, and why? Let's start this up.

Queens Of The Stone Age were going at it until well after witching hour and yet were still getting no closer to what they were looking for.

As drummer Jon Theodore remembers it, they had been trying to finish one of the more aggressive tracks from their forthcoming album, Perfecth, and it just wasn’t happening.

They were trying too hard. Music is like that. It’s mercurial. But just as they were about to call it quits, they got back into position and started playing. Something called them back into the room, and whether it was exhaustion or the drinks they’d had to loosen up, there was a kind of magic happening right there on the floor of the studio.

As they called out ideas to one another, a song took shape. It would be titled Insignificant Other, and little did they know it at the time, but this lithe after-hours groover would become the centrepiece of their record, emotionally, spiritually and musically, especially in its embrace of imperfection.

“We recorded that song at the end of a full day of, like, hitting our heads against the wall,” says Theodore. “We were pretty frustrated. It was late. It was like two in the morning, a little drunk, just trying to blow off some steam. The lights were already out in the studio.

“We were all ready to leave. Some people had their jackets on. We went in there, and the riff started kicking around, and we just played a little and then, after a very short amount of time, we had a couple of parts.”

Frontman Josh Homme, who produced Perfecth alongside bassist Michael Shuman, has described Insignificant Other as “a song about distance”, a song about how relationships that were once the centre of your universe can just disappear, and what’s left of a person after that. It’s about “how someone can be your entire world only to simply vanish. And about the strange vertigo of being on the receiving end of that”. 

And the song does have a strange vertigo to it, a wooziness befitting its creation. It is a little reminiscent of the Rolling Stones’ Miss You, smoky and confessional, the kind of song that plays well in low-lit bars with tasselled lamps on the table, or in dive bars illuminated in neon, a Hopper-esque green colouring everyone with a shade of melancholy.

The key to finding it was not to overwork it, or to finesse it to the point of perfection. Insignificant Other is the kind of song that slips through your fingers if you try to hold it too tight. You can hear the freedom.

“There’s interplay. It’s free. It’s loose,” says Theodore. “We were literally calling out the changes as we’re taping it, and later, we went to New Orleans and we tried to do this with better sounds and we couldn’t beat it, because the best thing about that is that is actually hearing the interplay between the people.”

It is the sound of a band listening to one another. That sounds like it should be a given but it’s not always the case.

“We were all just reacting and moving as a unit, which is obviously the foundation of jazz and improvisational music,” says Theodore. “You’re listening and moving together. So it instantly became very special. We tried it a few times and we were just calling the arrangement out as we went. No one really knew what we were doing, and we ended up getting it.”

Insignificant Other reminds us that rock ’n’ roll is a nocturnal enterprise. There is a vampiric quality to the track; you can’t come up with something like this when the sun is up. Besides, they had almost given up for the day. The song didn’t even exist until they started calling out the changes. Theodore says they could play without the weight of expectation.

“We were like, ‘Oh, this sounds great.’ But when you listen to it, it’s definitely all of us doing what we look like without any pressure, or any sense of, ‘You have to do this right, and in a particular way,’” he says. “We just did what we did. And we were listening very carefully. Like, you can hear the glue between us.”

As guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen joins us, he says it was approached in the same way as the Stones would have in the early ‘70s.

“If you know anything about the recording process for Exile On Main St. [the Stones' 1972 classic], they just let the tape roll, and that was what we did with that song,” says Van Leeuwen. “I think we went over the arrangement once, it was late at night, and we were tracking to two-inch tape, and all five of us were in the room, and that’s the second take that you hear on the record. That feels like what the Stones might have done.”

Theodore describes Insignificant Other as a bridge between the past and present, where Queens Of The Stone Age have been, and where they are going. It’s the link to their “old life”. How could it not be, with its themes of estrangement and dislocation, and the black hole of relationship breakdown?

We’ve already heard the shambling, beautiful mess of Easy Street, a two-hander between Nikki Lane and Homme on vocals. Homme produced Lane’s last studio album, 2022’s Denim & Diamonds, and now she is repaying the favour. What comes next?

Well, those expecting Queens Of The Stone Age to make the same record twice have not been paying attention, but even so, Theodore promises Perfecth will catch many by surprise. “I would say this record is a pretty big departure in a lot of ways,” he says.

Expect the unexpected. But maybe in time we will look on Insignificant Other as the key to understanding this chapter in Queens Of The Stone Age history, a band haunted and inspired, who came out of the Catacombs beneath Paris somehow changed, with a greater appreciation of the liminal space between the living and the dead, and of how – all things considered – it is better to count yourself among the former.

“It’s a big part of the record for all of us,” says Van Leeuwen. “It says everything about our playing and it’s coming out of some of the dark personal and physical things that Josh had to go through. I think that we captured something really magical there – and there’s mistakes everywhere, and that’s part of it.”

Perfecth is available to pre-order and will be released on October 30 via Matador. In other QOTSA-related news, Troy Van Leeuwen’s signature Squier Telecaster XII has officially been released. It is one cool take on the Tele, and one of the coolest 12-string guitars you can buy for $599. See Fender for more details.

Having dropped an exquisite high-end limited edition Penguin a few weeks back, Gretsch has something special for those of us whose budgets are a little more modest, with its Electromatic Jet and CVT remodelled in black limba.

These handsome electric guitars have a Sunburst finish and sprayed in high-gloss, and both feature a lot of the same DNA. They are a modernistic take on the traditional Gretsch guitar, with each housing a pair of gutsy Pure Volt Twin Six humbuckers at the neck and bridge positions.

Indeed, the CVT itself is something of a newcomer to the Gretsch lineup, officially arriving in the lineup in August 2025, evolving out of the cult-classic Corvette, which had in turn been attracting a bit of attention when Jack Antonoff’s Princess signature guitar introduced its body shape to a new generation.

And that’s what Gretsch is trying to do with these guitars – with the Jet, too, but especially the CVT. Of course the brand will always have its association with the OG rock ’n’ roll players, the Chet Atkins devotees and anyone who watched Billy Duffy under the stage lights and thought that his White Falcon looked cool AF. But it needs fresh blood.

These guitars should broaden the appeal nicely. Black limba is an exotic wood choice. To quote Gretsch it gives you “smooth, rich midrange and serious presence”. It’s worth noting that black limba, the actual wood species, is the same as korina – as in the timber popularised by Gibson on its original 1958 Flying Vs.

They typically used the lighter stuff. Here we have the darker stuff, and you can see with that deep grain why Gretsch has chosen it. With a Sunburst finish and gold hardware (sealed die-cast tuners Lockdown wraparound bridge here, folks), it looks the bee’s knees.

Both guitars have a Performance C profile neck and 12” radius ebony fingerboards. We can confirm that these are comfortable indeed, with the arched contours and rounded heel of the Jet and bevelled doublecut body of the CVT more ergonomic propositions than some original Gretsch designs.

There are some fundamental differences. The Jet has a glued-in neck and a chambered body. The CVT is a bolt-on with an all-solid body. The necks are both carved from limba. Limba all round. The humbuckers are interesting.

The Twin Six neck pickup is Alnico IV, the bridge Alnico V, with adjustable pole pieces on both. The CVT offers a simple volume and tone knob, three-way pickup selector control setup, while the Jet has individual volume controls and a master tone.

These limited edition electrics are available now with the Electromatic Black Limba Jet priced £629/$749, and the Black Limba CVT priced £/$549. That looks like a pretty good deal.

For more details head over to Gretsch.

From its miraculous conception, multiple re-recordings, endless procession of unsuccessful sax solos and the small matter of paying £17,000 for a haircut, the saga of George Michael and Wham!’s Careless Whisper is a tall tale with a smash hit ending.

Beginning as an ode to a betrayed girlfriend, Careless Whisper, while underscoring Wham!’s output in the public consciousness, was actually among the first songs that the teenage Michael ever wrote. The story goes that, while accompanying his sisters Melanie and Yioda at the skating rink, his head was turned by a new girl on the scene, prompting him to begin dating her behind his girlfriend’s back, and soon his guilty feet had got no rhythm.

The song that tells the story appeared fully formed in the 18-year-old Michael’s brain while he was travelling to his regular DJ gig at the Bel Air restaurant near Bushey. “I remember I was handing the money over to the guy on the bus and I got the sax line: der – der – der – der… I worked on it for three months in my head.” he says in his autobiography Bare.

Meanwhile Wham! bandmate Andrew Ridgeley had been picking his way through some guitar chords on the white Fender Telecaster he’d just received for his 18th birthday. “‘What do you make of this?’ I said working through the chords,” writes Ridgely in his book Wham! George & Me.

“He looked at me, a little surprised. ‘Oh my God, Andy. That goes perfectly with an idea I’ve had going round and round in my head! Play it again… I carried on playing with Yog singing what would later become the haunting saxophone melody. Through an extraordinary coincidence our separate ideas complemented each other perfectly.”

“I feel so unsure…”

Recorded on a TEAC four-track portastudio, manned by local producer Paul Mex (for a fee of £20), the first incarnation of the future classic was spirited into being in the Ridgeley family front room in 1981. The band had spent most of the day getting Wham Rap! to sound as good as possible, thus, with minutes before the arrival of Ridgely’s mum, the pair sped through a single take of Careless Whisper to complete the session.

Realising its potential, a second demo was made the following year, on the 24th of March 1982 at Halligan Band Centre, Holloway, London, this time with a backing band and the first airing of its famous saxophone riff. All for a total fee of £200.

It’s a little-known fact that while always being the perfect first George Michael solo vehicle, Careless Whisper instead sat alongside an improved Wham Rap! and new song Club Tropicana on the demo tape that landed the band their first rushed record deal with local label Innervision.

But perhaps more remarkable is the fact that despite being a nailed-on hit and winning the band their contract, it didn’t even make the cut for their debut album, Fantastic, and its run of four hit singles. Instead it would have to endure being trapped in demo form – referred to as Tuneless Whisper by Michael’s teasing sisters – for two more years before getting its next iteration. And this time the band were going to Make It Big.

In July 1983, Michael travelled to Muscle Shoals Studios in Sheffield, Alabama for Careless Whisper’s third take – the first track for second Wham! LP, Make It Big – with legendary producer Jerry Wexler. And with tracks such as Aretha Franklin’s Respect, Booker T. & the MG’s, Green Onions and Wilson Pickett’s, In the Midnight Hour under his belt, what could go wrong?…

“I had the idea of using Jerry Wexler,” writes Wham! manager Simon Napier Bell in his book Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay. “I sent him the song and he loved it. ‘Let’s record it at Muscle Shoals,’ he suggested. With the backing track done and George’s vocal recorded,

"Jerry had booked the top sax player in LA to fly in and do the solo. He arrived at eleven and should have been gone by twelve. Instead, after two hours, he was still there while everyone in the studio shuddered with embarrassment. He just couldn’t play the opening riff the way George wanted it, the way it had been on the demo. But that had been made two years earlier by a friend of George’s who lived round the corner and played sax for fun in the pub.

"The saxophonist from LA appeared to be playing the part perfectly, but each time George told him, ‘No, it’s still not right, you see….’ and he would lower his head to the talkback microphone and patiently hum the part to him yet again. ‘It has to twitch upwards a little just there! See …? And not too much.’

"After over an hour of this, I wandered off to the studio’s poolroom and idly knocked coloured balls around the table. Then Jerry joined me. ‘What d’you think?’ I asked. ‘Is there really something George wants that’s different from what the sax player is playing?’"

"Jerry thought so. "Definitely! I’ve seen things like this before. There’s some tiny nuance that the sax player is somehow not getting right. Although you and I can’t hear what it is, it may be the very thing that will make the record a hit. The success of pop records is so ephemeral, so unbelievably unpredictable, we just can’t take the risk of being impatient. But this sax player’s not going to get it, is he!"

“He probably played with incorrect fingering which gave it the unique feel George wanted. The American guys were just too good to get it.”

And he wasn’t the only one who was disappointed with the third Whisper.

“What was disappointing about it was not that it sounded like an old Atlantic record, but that it sounded too middle of the road,” writes Michael in his 1990 autobiography Bare. “I think Jerry Wexler is a wonderful man and I loved working with him but the version of Careless Whisper we did had more to do with the recording he was doing at the time than with their stuff that I loved. It just didn’t have any of my character on it. It took everyone back in London to convince me that it wasn’t right.”

“It had been eviscerated,” moans Ridgely in their recent Neflix doc. “It had lost all its character, its essence. It was average.’”

The experience wasn’t a complete loss however. During the sessions, Wexler advised Michael never to put a key change at the end of a song. “All it means is that you can’t think of anything else to do. It’s the oldest and worst cliché in the book,” he explained. Thus no Michael creation ever featured a key change. More Wexler advice? When asked prior to his death in 2008, what he would like on his gravestone Wexler replied “Two words: More bass.”

Nevertheless with the obvious smash hit in the can prior to the recording of Wham!’s second album, the band and their management had an important bargaining chip in their ammo to renegotiate their record deal on more favourable terms.

Using Careless they were able to secure the full backing of US giants CBS who both stepped in to prevent their old label Innervision from releasing the Wexler cut of Whisper, and bankrolling new sessions at London’s Advision Studios for George – again, solo – to create his own (fourth) version of the song.

“Though it’s easy to pretend, I know you’re not a fool…”

Speaking to American Recording and Music, Michael explains. “Eventually I just thought ‘Sod this. I’m going to go in and do it as if it had never been done before with the musicians we normally use and see what happens’.

"The track was much better because I was relaxed and I think that our usual musicians did a much better job than the Muscle Shoals section." In the same article engineer Chris Porter describes some of the gear used to get the track’s distinctive vocal sound: Neumann’s U87 and AKG’s C414 EB with the Advision’s bespoke echo plate studio reverb plus EMT 140, AMS and Lexicon 224X.

However, the song wasn’t out of the woods just yet, and once again the knotty issue of the sax solo would be its stumbling block. “After hiring and firing ten different sax players George eventually heard what he was looking for from number 11,” says Ridgely. “At last the nuanced melody that had lived inside his head for so long found expression from a saxophonist with soul and sensibility as well as virtuosity. George had recorded his first masterpiece and nobody was more pleased about it than I was.”

The man who finally nailed the part to Michael’s satisfaction was session player Steve Gregory and while Gregory quibbles with Ridgely’s remembrance as to his place in the queue – “I wasn’t the eleventh player, I was the ninth,” he says in a radio interview – he was the first to employ a little studio trickery to help make the part sing.

“I was doing a lot of session work at that time and I had a session in the afternoon and a gig in the evening. George’s secretary phoned me up about midday, she said ‘Well come whenever you can’ so by the time I got there it was getting on for midnight.

"When I arrived, there was another saxophone player there, who I knew quite well and he says ‘What are you doing here?’. George hadn’t shown up and he says, ‘You can do it. I’ve had enough of this,’ and he left. So there was just me and the engineer Chris Porter there and I said ‘I’ve had a long day, can we do something? Cos I’ll be better now than I will be at three…”

“George had insisted that it was played on a tenor sax – an alto would have been easier – but my saxophone is an old Selmer from 1964, and it didn’t have that top note – it was what we call a ‘fake finger’ – so I suggested that if he took the track down by a semitone I’d have all the proper notes on my horn. So he did his calculations, he slowed the tape down and I had a go.

"We went into the control room and he put it back to the proper speed. And as he was playing it back George walked into the studio. He listened and he said ‘We got there!’ and he pointed at me and said ‘You were number nine!’.”

With a recording befitting the track’s brilliance now safely in the can, there was just the small matter of releasing it and dishing out credit where credit was due.

With Whisper being such a solo effort through the entirety of its third and fourth recordings (and playing such a pivotal part in launching Michael’s solo career) you’d be forgiven for thinking that it carries a solo Michael writing credit. But while Whisper features none of the Ridgely-supplied fun-loving jangle that would define their hits, it’s billed as a 50/50 George Michael/Andrew Ridgely co-creation with the pair sharing writing credits and proceeds.

It has been suggested that Ridgely’s co-writing credit was a parting gift to say sorry for jumping ship, rather than any conventional songwriting notion of sharing the heavy lifting, but this is something that Ridgely vehemently denies. “In the wake of his passing it’s been suggested that George gave me a co-writing credit as an act of generosity, the implication being that I couldn’t have helped him with the writing. That misunderstands the nature of our relationship,” he explains.

And then there’s the track’s tortuous timeline and – despite being Michael’s first solo single – its true place in the Wham! canon…

“As the music dies, something in your eyes…”

While it's by no means unusual for a band’s lead singer to fly the nest, using old bandmates as a launchpad to greater success, releasing a solo single prior to the band’s break up is – fortunately – an audience-baffling rarity.

So while collective public memory has Careless Whisper down as the first solo product from the Wham!-free Michael, in actuality it’s only the second single from their second album (following opener Wake Me Up Before You Go Go) with Wham!-credited releases Freedom, double A-side Everything She Wants/Last Christmas AND official ‘final Wham! single’ The Edge of Heaven all carrying the Wham! brand after Careless Whisper’s arrival.

Nonetheless, the track was credited to a solo George Michael upon its single release in the UK in July of 1984, clearly signposting Michael’s exit strategy almost two full years ahead of their official parting of the ways at their Wham! The Final Wembley Stadium concert on 28 June 1986.

Meanwhile, in the States there were even more blurred lines with Careless Whisper credited to ‘Wham! featuring George Michael’ to help shore up the nascent Wham! brand (their US trajectory of single releases and success being about six months behind their UK stature) while simultaneously teeing up the George Michael persona for use later.

“In July 1983, Careless Whisper came out as George’s first solo record. This was the beginning of the transition from Wham! To George Michael, but he still pretended to the press it was no such thing,” says Simon Napier-Bell in his book I’m Coming To Take You To Lunch.

“Careless Whisper, he said, was only being issued as a solo record because it ‘didn’t fit’ with the style of Wham!… Then he spoilt it by telling them, ‘Well, perhaps it is a sort of a spring-board for me.’ He was testing the waters; edging things towards the result he wanted.

“He’d already told me to take him seriously about an eventual break-up. With Careless Whisper he was telling Andrew too.”

And with a release strategy and secret future solo plans in the hatchery (and the small matter of finally having a track that hit all the buttons) it was time to make sure that Whisper looked as good as it sounds. Even if that means paying £17,000 for a haircut…

Filming for the Careless Whisper video had taken place in Miami’s Coconut Grove, around the many hotels and marinas with – of course – a sequence of highly necessary shots involving a speedboat. Simon Napier-Bell tells the story of pop’s most famous chop.

“George came back from his boat trip, happy with the day’s filming. But the next morning, when he looked at the rushes, he flipped. 'It’s my hair. It’s dreadful. Too long. Too posey.'

"Having his hair cut and the filming redone would add almost fifty percent to the total budget of the video, but his sister Melanie was flown out to cut it and the next morning – with his hair restyled and the speedboat re-rented – the first day’s filming was reshot.”

The story made the UK tabloids with the video’s £17,000 overspend (on a budget of £30,000) being roundly credited to George’s maniacal mane management.

Follicle foibles aside, the publicity certainly didn’t hurt. Careless Whisper was finally released as a single on the 23rd of July 1984, entering the UK Singles Chart at number 12 and two weeks later it sat at the summit of Mount Pop – ending Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s nine-week run for Two Tribes. The track remained in the number one slot for three weeks and would go on to become the fifth best-selling single of 1984 in the UK.

It would also top the charts in 25 countries, including a three-week run as number one in the States, becoming Billboard’s number one song of the year.

Understandably, Billy Joel has remained pretty tight-lipped about the brain disorder he was diagnosed with in 2025 that forced him to cancel all upcoming shows.

At the time, he said that the condition, known as Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH), was being treated with physical therapy, but he’s now confirmed that he’s undergone surgery in a bid to improve it.

NPH is caused by excess fluid building up in the brain’s ventricles. This leads to greater pressure, which compresses brain tissue and can lead to issues with hearing, vision and balance.

When Joel announced that he’d been advised to take a break, it was widely assumed that his performance schedule was making the condition worse, and he’s now confirmed this while speaking on SiriusXM’s Billy Joel Channel.

“The doctors told me because of my job, which is playing rock and roll music very loud, that it was giving me something like a concussion every time I did a show,” he explained. “It was causing damage to my brain nerves and I could be losing more brain cells the more shows I did and I realised that means I shouldn’t be doing this right now. I got to improve. They don’t want me to stress too much.”

Joel went on to admit that he was reluctant to go ahead with surgery, which involved the fitting of a device called a ‘brain shunt’, which helps to drain the excess fluid away, but ultimately decided that it was the best way forward for him.

“I read up on it and I realised it can help improve your balance and can help your memory,” he said. “You know, I don’t want to lose my marbles. It’s hard to tell what’s age and what’s a condition, so I agreed to do the shunt and I had a surgery, and they implanted a shunt in my brain and it actually improved things. My memory got better, my balance got a little better, my ability to function was better.”

All of which is great to hear, though 77-year-old Joel still isn’t committing to any kind of permanent return to the stage. He did make a comeback of sorts earlier this year when he surprised fans by playing two of his songs with a Billy Joel tribute band, but he hasn’t performed any full-length gigs of his own.

He does want to reassure his fans that he’s on the mend, though. “I’m OK,” he says. “I want people to know, don’t worry about me. I’m still here.”

Just starting out as a pianist or keyboard player? Welcome to your first big hurdle – learning to play with two hands.

At first it’ll feel impossible but be assured, with practice you can beat this thing and soon play along with the best of them.

The steps to take are all simple and achievable and, yes, you’ve heard it a million times before – practice and repetition is absolutely key to success. Trust us, keep going and it WILL get easier!

Get your hands comfortable

OK. First things first. Your first step has to be getting both hands used to playing on the keyboard.

Start with your left hand and place your little finger on C. C3 (one octave down from middle C) is a good place to start and will allow you to sit centrally at your keyboard (regardless of whatever size it may be).

Your other fingers on your left hand should now comfortably rest on the keys that fall naturally below them. So, with your little finger on C, your next fingers (and thumb) should rest on D, E, F and G.

Try playing each note in turn, each with their respective finger – C… D… E… F… G… And then back down again – G… F… E… D… C.

And try mixing up the notes – C then E… D then G and so on. The aim is to get your hand used to moving fingers individually and for each finger to feel as ‘important’ and ‘usable’ as the others.

Yes, it’s possible to bash out tunes with a single outstretched index finger but you’ll never amount to any kind of player if you keep that up. And as for playing with two hands? Forget it.

Try moving your left hand up and down the keyboard. Place your little finger on D and try the exercise above.

Practice lifting and moving your hand three or four keys away from each starting point, playing the five notes and resetting your hand in a different position after each five-note playthrough.

And try spanning your fingers out, leaving gaps of ‘empty’ keys between a couple of them. And again, playing the five notes and moving your hand to a different position after each playthrough.

And try mixing in some black notes too. It’s a simple fact that black notes sound ‘cool’ and your favourite tunes are full of them, so don’t forget to get them involved!

This simple exercise really can’t be repeated and practiced often enough. You’re teaching your brain and hand where the keys fall and what message you need to send to your hand to trigger the note that you want to hear. The more you do this the more natural the entire process becomes.

So stick at it.

And – of course – when your left hand needs a rest, do the same with your right hand. Place your right thumb on C5 (the C above middle C) and perform the exercises above.

If anything, getting your right hand nimble, flexible and connected to your brain is even more important than getting your left hand working. That’s because – traditionally at least – your right hand will be playing the melody of the tune you're working on while the left provides harmonious backing.

That is to say your right hand will be playing the lead lines and solos (or the melody that a singer would sing) while the left hand plays chords or basslines.

And, if you’re using sheet music you’ll see both your left and right hand’s ‘roles’ clearly defined right there on the stave – your right hand plays everything on the treble clef and your left hand performs everything on the bass clef.

Left hand lessons

OK. With both hands warmed up, let's zoom in on a few simple exercises that are entirely bespoke for each hand. Starting with your left, let’s play some of the basic ‘jobs’ that your left hand will be employed with.

Block Chords
Place your little finger on C, then miss a white note and place your middle finger on E, then miss a note and place your thumb on G. That’s the C major chord – one of the most popular building blocks in music and you’ve just played this as a simple triad.

Now simply move this chord shape up and down the keyboard – always three notes, always with a single blank, white note ‘gap’ between them.

Try extending the gap… placing two ‘gap’ notes between those that you’re playing. Pretty soon you’ll find something pleasing to the ear and a sequence that you can repeat and practice. Keep experimenting and keep those fingers moving!

Broken Chords and Arpeggios
Don’t let the fancy name put you off. These are simply chords where rather than striking all three notes at the same time, you play them separately – just as you did with the five finger warm-up exercises earlier.

Instead of playing your chord sequence as block chords, play each note separately as a sequence before moving your hand to your next chord. This is called an arpeggio and being able to rhythmically enhance a chord rather than simply bashing it out is an essential element in modern music and something your left hand needs to get used to.

Octave Bass
Finally let’s master a simple but much beloved bass technique.

Place your left hand’s little finger on C2 and your thumb on C3, the octave above. Play the low C, then the high C… Low C, then high C. And repeat… And repeat… And that’s it… Keep rocking your hand side to side and striking the keyboard with your little finger and thumb alternately. Now move your hand up and down the keyboard, playing the same note in different octaves. Simple.

This bass line pattern is still a hugely popular bass line and is all over countless tunes, being particularly popular in the 80s. Try it for yourself. Play along from 0:32 on this classic of the era – Laura Branigan’s Self Control.

Altogether now… F#… down to C#… F# again… down to C#… up to E… up to B… down to D… up to A… And repeat.

Get good at this and there’s a world of electro classics waiting for you!

And something for your right hand too…

The right hand usually carries the melody or a harmonic counterpoint to the melody, but often plays solo single notes.

Place your right thumb on C5 and without moving your hand play Mary Had A Little Lamb. The notes will fall under your fingers. There’s just one tiny stretch to do, moving your little finger up from G to A for the word ‘little’ but that’s it.

Keep practicing this until you can do it in your sleep (not literally… but you get our meaning).

And when your right hand isn’t playing melodies and counterpoints it’s often playing chords too, while your left hand plays the bass.

Try some more of that octave bass with your left hand and play some block triad chords with your right. Now you're using your thumb, middle finger and little finger (left to right up the keyboard) playing the notes with gap white notes in between.

Play octave Cs with your left and play that C major chord – C, E, G – with your right. Now simply move that triad up and down and move the octave bass note to match. E on the left hand and triad beginning with E on the right. And so on.

With octaves and triads nailed, try and introduce some different timing. Try striking the chords to a rhythm rather than simple blocks and keep that left hand octave bass ticking along to match. It’s a good idea to try playing along with a metronome to tighten up your timing.

You can simply play along with the ticking of a clock of course, or there are countless metronome apps both online and for your phone.

Getting your two hands to play different rhythms in time to a ticking tempo is hard, but it’s key to playing with two hands. This triad-plus-octaves is a great way to get started in getting your hands working to different rhythms.

Imagine you can play the piano…

By now you’ve got the basics. And you’re doubtless dying to play something ‘real’. Want the perfect ‘starter’ song?

We recommend Imagine by John Lennon. Everyone loves it and it’s incredibly simple to learn and play, using all the block triad chords and fingering we’ve used above.

And there are hundreds of lessons on YouTube to help, but here’s a particular favourite of ours:

Take your time and have fun!

Things to remember

Slow it down
Go too fast or don’t practice enough and you’ll always make mistakes. If it sounds messy, slow it right down until it sounds clean and perfect with each note struck perfectly in time. Get it right by playing it slow… And only then try speeding it up.

Break it up
Learn it with each hand separately first, before putting the two together. You’ll find it much harder if you try to learn both hands together.

Little and often
Keep your practice sessions to ‘little and often’ rather than one mammoth session. 15 to 20 minutes fun each day will get you much further than a three-hour workout once a week.

Relax
Be patient with yourself. Two-hand coordination genuinely takes time to develop – it's not a talent thing, it's just practice. Remember that everyone finds it hard at first but everyone gets better with practice.

Good luck!

It might be more than 10 years since the world lost Prince, but thanks to regular posthumous music releases and frequent remembrances from those that knew him, it can sometimes feel like he’s still around.

To illustrate these points, the latest Prince album, Timeless, was released just a couple of weeks ago – not without a little controversy, it should be said – and now R&B star Jill Scott has been telling the slightly surreal story of the time that Prince and Stevie Wonder came into her dressing room after she’d played a show at The House Of Blues on Sunset Strip on 2011.

The gig had already been a memorable one for Scott, as she’d performed a new song, And I Heard… (Do You Understand), that she’d written the day before when it came to her, fully formed, in a dream.

“It woke me up and I sat straight up in the bed,” she tells Scott Evans. “I got some paper, and I just started writing, and it didn’t stop. I didn’t have to question. I didn’t have to go back and erase. I didn’t have to do anything. It came out as a fluid, 100% fact.”

So taken was she with the song that Scott decided to play it at her House of Blues show, teaching it to the band at the venue. It sounds like it went down a storm; the biggest thrill, though, was still to come.

“I was in the dressing room after the show and Prince comes in in a white pant suit,” Scott remembers. “It looked like it was made out of angel hair.”

“I’m talking to Prince and the people who are in the parking lot outside of the House of Blues are still singing [the new song],” Scott continues, “and then who should walk in but Stevie Wonder.

“And he’s like, ‘What’s going on?’ and Prince says ‘Jill sang a song tonight – it’s a new song.’ And Stevie Wonder was like ‘Oh, how does it go?’”

According to Scott, Prince immediately started singing the song, with Stevie providing rhythmic backing.

“Stevie Wonder is beatboxing and Prince is singing this song verbatim. What? How? How?” wondered Scott. “Prince is singing the words that came to me last night like they came to him. He is singing it word for word. Stevie Wonder’s beatboxing and Prince is singing this song. I think I just had my mouth open. Like, this is amazing.”

The night didn’t end there, though: after everyone had left, Scott got a call from Prince’s assistant saying that he wanted her to hang out with him. At first, she turned him down – she had to travel to the next show – but Prince then ended up calling her personally.

“He calls me himself and he’s like ‘I want you to come dance with me,” says Scott. “So, I go to the Roosevelt Hotel and he has rented out this disco room in there. And that man twirled me around like I was nothing. When I say smooth, I mean so smooth. I danced with Prince until four o’clock in the morning.”

Scott described the evening as “the best night of my life,” and, to be fair, it does sound like it would take some beating. She would later release tAnd I Heard… (Do You Understand) in its live incarnation – check it out below.

Brian Fallon can thank his wife Stacy for the fact that the Killers frontman Brandon Flowers is on his new solo album.

She was producing the Killers’ concert film of their 2022 Madison Square Garden show when Bruce Springsteen joined the Sin City band for the encore. They played Badlands, A Dustland Fairytale and Born To Run. It was a real event. But not all the Fallons were having the time of their lives. Brian Fallon had FOMO.

“Funnily enough I didn’t get invited – and it was Bruce Springsteen and the Killers at Madison Square Garden!” he says with mock outrage. “I was like, ‘How come I’ve got to stay home with the kids!? Those are my friends!’ She obviously says, ‘Bruce says hi!’ Whatever. I didn’t get to go.”

But it brought Flowers into Fallon’s orbit. When the Killers swung through Atlantic City, he went along for the ride.

“I went to the Jersey show, and my wife was going to talk to the band and talk to the crew, like, ‘Hey, how are we going to do this? What shots do you want?’ I was just tagging along,” he says. “This was strange. I was going as my wife’s plus-one. That’s not usually the way it goes [but] my wife has got her own thing going on. She gets emails from Mick Jagger!

“So I was tagging along and then Brandon was like, ‘Hey, how are you doing, Brian from the Gaslight Anthem?’ I was like, ‘Hey! How you doing?’ And we just hit it off, exchanged numbers, and the rest is history.”

They had a lot of shared interests. Both of them love Depeche Mode. They share a love of CS Lewis. “The Screwtape Letters! Both of us have the same favourite book,” says Fallon. “Brandon is probably one of the most exciting people to be around because his energy is wild. He is just brimming with pure songwriting and pure love for music. He loves music.”

Fallon’s first solo album in more than five years, Not Bad For New Jersey, has a lot of guests. There’s stunt guitar from the venerable Phil Collen from Def Leppard, of whom he is a longtime superfan. Marc Ribot plays a wicked solo on Wolf By The River.

And there are some old friends too, such as Canadian country-folk star Donovan Woods, who joins Fallon on The Big Sleep, and Lori McKenna, who is on On Good Terms. “Donovan, Lori and I are kind of a team,” says Fallon. “We write together a lot.”

Fallon dropped Flowers a text to see if he would be up for writing something. When he said yes, he took off to meet him in a studio in Utah. However this song was going to turn out, it was going to be an adventure.

“He was on the piano. We were sitting there. I was on an acoustic, and we were in the studio that they use, and it was just like fiddling around,” says Fallon. “Then I think Brandon played that riff on the synthesizer that starts the chord progression for the song.”

This caught Fallon’s ear. It wasn’t like anything else that he had for the record – and it certainly wasn’t something he would have come up with there and then.

“It’s a very unusual chord progression,” he says. “It’s not something that you would write on guitar. You would not write that on guitar. I was like, ‘Oh that’s cool. What’s that?’ He was like, ‘Nothing, I thought it was another song.’ ‘That’s nothing? Let’s use that.’ So we started a little melody, and we had a title and a few lyrics, maybe a chorus, and then we started working on a structure.”

And that is when things got weird. Much of Not Bad For New Jersey is Fallon on home turf musically, with the triumphant Friday night feeling of ‘80s FM rock, blue-collar power-pop that leans hard into the chorus, and then there is the punk-rock energy of Nobody Likes You In New York City. Love At The End Of The World is not like anything else on the album.

It tumbles out as though under a spell, roots-y folk acoustic guitar and the caw of something – electric slide guitar and maybe wah – in the upper registers. And then there’s the verse and it just keeps going until its three minutes are up. It’s like the All Along The Watchtower principle of foregoing a chorus, because maybe there’s too much going on in the verse, or because maybe it’d break the audience’s concentration.

Fallon says that was Flowers’ idea.

“He was like, ‘You know what? Let’s not do verse/chorus, verse/chorus. Let’s do two verses, throw a bridge in there and maybe another verse, and then a bridge, and then that’s it,’” explains Fallon. “I was like, ‘What? That’s insane! That’s not real song structure.’ And he was like, ‘Yes it is.’

“We wrote the lyrics together – honestly – just talking together in his truck, and just worked it together. I get to the hotel room, I put it together as lyric structure, brought it back to him the next day, we worked on it, he came up with the vocal melody and that was it.”

Neither of them had that much left in the tank. Both had been out on the road for a long time when they wrote it. Maybe that’s why it came out like it did, like, as Fallon says, “a conversation”, without a chorus and all forward momentum. But it’s also a love song for the end of the world and how do you write a chorus for that?

“It was incredibly freeing,” says Fallon. “I think that’s what we were both trying to do, because I was fresh out of The History Books Tour with Gaslight Anthem, and he was just finishing up the Killers tour, so we were both kind of exhaling. Phew! No pressure for a second, because we were like, ‘If nothing happens with this, who cares?’”

Not Bad For New Jersey is out now digitally via Lesser Known Records, on all formats tomorrow (September 11).

While we caught up with Fallon to discuss the making of the album, he also told us about the time Bruce Springsteen gave him a guitar tip and taught him an old Roy Buchanan trick.

It’s now over a decade since Motörhead ended with the death of Lemmy. But the band are set to get an overdue tribute in the form of a special exhibition at the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas this October.

What do you mean, you didn’t know there’s a Punk Rock Museum? Yes, there is, and it’s been open since 2023. It regularly features luminaries from the worlds of punk and rock in general, providing guided tours for visitors as well as acoustic gigs and film screenings.

You may well raise an eye at Motörhead being mentioned as part of punk, but there was a crossover between the band and the late 70s punk scene. Lemmy played with a version of The Damned called The Doomed before that original band reformed in 1979. The bassist also wrote R.A.M.O.N.E.S, a tribute to that band, and later produced an EP for the New Yorkers.

The Motorhead exhibition will include items from Lemmy’s personal collection, including photographs and handwritten lyrics.

A must for every visitor will be a chance to actually play Lemmy’s bass through a stack he once also used.

According to the Motörhead website, which broke the news of the exhibition, visitors “will be able to plug in, pick up the bass and experience the gear that created Motörhead’s unmistakable sound. It’s a rare opportunity to interact directly with an important part of the band’s history.”

In addition, Motörhead albums will be available at Vinyl Threat, the Museum’s official record store, and band merchandise will be available in the gift shop.

The exhibition opens on Friday 2 October. As yet there’s indication of how long it will be open for – the Punk Rock Museum hasn’t yet added it to their list of events. Their website can be found at thepunkrockmuseum.com.

Serato has unveiled the latest major update to its DJ software, Serato DJ 5.0, which has just arrived in public Beta.

The headline feature of this new version is a significant overhaul to the application’s beat detection technology. This arrives in the form of new Lucid Beatgrids, described by Serato as its “most accurate and intuitive beatgrid technology to date”.

These beatgrids make use of new analysis processes, designed to adapt better to tracks with fluctuations in BPM, resulting in less manual editing and better reliability when playing, for example, classic funk, soul or disco tracks not recorded to click track or DAW timeline.

According to Serato, both the ‘flexible’ and ‘fixed’ modes in v5 offer more accurate and reliable analysis. Lucid Beatgrids also offer improved labelling and customization, as well as improved editing controls and better labelling of BPM changes.

The other major change for Serato DJ 5.0 is improved integration of streaming services. As with previous versions, users with the relevant subscriptions can mix with tracks from Apple Music, Tidal, Beatport, Soundcloud and Spotify within Serato DJ. As of this update, however, it's possible to mix and match tracks from different streaming platforms – and your own library – all without signing in and out of different accounts.

In the library, each streaming service now appears as its own crate, with a new provider search dropdown added, making it easier to find tracks across different services. The library also now displays BPM and key information for streaming service tracks before analysis, for better on-the-fly selection and preparation.

Both of these feature upgrades come to both Serato DJ Pro and the free Serato DJ Lite. Pro users get an additional new feature in the form of Cue Loops, which lets users save loops as cue points, allowing DJs to easily jump to a pre-defined loop point and activate it on the fly.

Serato 5.0 is in public Beta now. You can learn more about the Serato DJ 5.0 Beta at Serato’s The Drop blog and join the public Beta here.

What is it?

It feels like the original Positive Grid Spark was launched a lifetime ago, but really, the amplifier was only announced in October 2019 and began shipping to customers in early 2020, making it a little over 6 years since the smart amp burst onto the scene and changed the practice amp game entirely.

Since then, the San Diego-based amp titan has expanded the Spark line with countless variations, from the pint-sized Spark Mini and portable Spark Go to live options like the Live and Cab. The latest offering takes a slightly different direction, with a three-button floor unit that aims to deliver all the power of the Spark in a much smaller, pedalboard-friendly package.

Running on Positive Grid's acclaimed HD Tone Engine, which is the same DSP architecture housed inside the latest Spark 2 practice amp, you get a whopping 33 amp models, 43 effects, and access to thousands of tones through the online ToneCloud.

The Spark Pedal is mainly positioned as a gig-ready unit, but it has a few other use cases. Of course, as expected, it can also be used as a stand-alone all-in-one option for live use or as a traditional multi-effects pedal to run into an amplifier if you bypass the amp modelling, but it can also serve as an audio interface for desktop recording or a silent headphones rig for quiet at-home practice.

There’s also built-in Bluetooth audio, so you can jam along to your favourite tracks, a handy 60-second looper and, of course, a free companion app that helps you dive deeper into tone creation.

Specs

• Launch price: $199 | €209 | £179
• Type: Multi-effects/amp modeller
• Controls: Footswitches, Multi-function Control Knob, Drive/Gain, Mod/Bass, Delay/Mid, Reverb/Treble
• Features: All Spark features including effects, amp modelling, looper, and practice tools via the Spark app
• Connectivity: 1/4" input, 2 x 1/4" output, 1/4" expression in, USB-C, MIDI in & out and 1/8" headphone output
• Bypass: True bypass
• Power: USB-C/rechargable bettery
• Dimensions: . 180 x 100 x 50mm
• Weight: 1.4 lbs
• Contact: Positive Grid

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★☆

After stepping away from its classic gold-and-black branding for the new Reactor amp a few months ago, it's nice to see the Spark Pedal return to something that just works so well for Positive Grid. Sure, it’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s a good-looking pedal, and one that most definitely fits into the greater, now pretty stacked, Spark line.

In terms of the build, it’s another thing that is classically PG. It feels sturdy and robust, and since this is designed to be put on a pedalboard and toured, it does really need to live up to some serious strain and abuse, and it really feels like it could handle it with no problems.

Connectivity-wise, everything you need is on the rear of the pedal, easily accessible and logically laid out. With a single input, stereo outs, expression in, MIDI functionality and even a headphone out, this pedal really has everything covered.

It is worth noting that the unit comes with an internal rechargeable battery and is charged via a USB-C port. Ideally, I’d have liked the option to power it with a standard 9V pedalboard power supply. Since it’s intended to go on a pedalboard, it would make sense to be able to power it this way.

I don’t particularly like the idea of having to charge the pedal before a show, or carry an extra USB charger in my gigbag for this one pedal. It would be far more convenient if it could tap into the power supply already tucked away under my board.

I reached out to Positive Grid about this, and a representative said the brand “deliberately chose USB-C because of how it integrates into various scenarios.”

Of course, the unit can be used while charging, and many modern pedalboard power supplies now have USB outputs, which should be fine for most players, but if you want to run it on your old power brick, you may need to factor in an upgrade.

That said, really, there’s nothing too big to fault here. The Spark Pedal is a well-made unit that feels as robust as I’ve come to expect from Positive Grid.

Usability and features

Usability and features rating: ★★★★☆

I’ve been using and reviewing Spark products since they launched, so I’d like to think I know how to navigate them pretty well, but the Spark Pedal could use a few usability tweaks.

I think the Spark Pedal is mostly intuitive to use, and it doesn’t take long to get a usable sound out of the device, but with the dials all having secondary functions, it’s easy to get lost and end up adjusting the wrong parameter – especially mid-song.

The central control knob is the perfect example. This one dial is the main control point for the entire pedal, letting you adjust the pedal's volume, switch between FX Mode and Amp Mode, turn the Cab Simulator on and off, and even activate the tuner. Honestly, I think it’s too much to put into a single control.

The other four dials also have secondary functions. In FX Mode (Green LED), they select your effect and adjust its level, while in Amp Mode (Red LED), they shape your tone with Gain, Bass, Mid, and Treble.

I totally understand that laying the dials out like this saves space and keeps the unit compact, but personally I’d rather have a slightly bulkier pedal with more knobs if it means better usability. Perhaps a screen would solve the problem. It would certainly make it more obvious what you were adjusting, without trying to remember what the LED colours mean.

That said, the unit runs on the same ecosystem as other Spark products and shares the same app, so you can adjust it more easily from your phone if you’d prefer. Here you can tweak until your heart is content, from switching out the pedals to trying different amp voices, and if you’re not terrified of AI, you can also use Positive Grid’s Text To Tone feature to generate any guitar sound you can imagine, or, well, describe.

The unit pairs well with the app, and if you have time, adjusting the parameters on the hardware is also pretty easy, but as this unit is being marketed as a gig-able solution as well as a practice tool, it needs to be looked at from that point of view, and in my opinion, it feels a little impractical.

In an effort to keep things streamlined and sleek, I think Positive Grid has forgotten the working musician who needs to make small tweaks to their tone throughout a live show.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★½

To test the sound of the new Spark Pedal, I ran my Gibson Les Paul into the pedal and directly into a DAW. This way I can hear all the amp modelling and effects in great detail through a flat set of studio monitors.

So, if you know anything about Positive Grid, you know it is known for its incredibly polished clutch of tones, and thankfully Spark Pedal is no different.

We’ve got sparkling Fender Twin-like cleans to Soldano-esque high-gain tones, and so much more. Honestly, the tonal palette on tap here is huge – and it only gets better once you connect to the app. That said, I could do without delay on almost every preset. I like delay as much as the next guy, but not, like, all the time.

Now, I have noted before that I think Positive Grid presets are a touch too bassy for my tastes, and again, it’s the same story with the Spark Pedal – well, that is to be expected, it’s the same tone engine after all.

Moving on to the effects, and there’s everything you’d ever need. We’ve got a variety of different delay options, plenty of verb, and a slew of modulation sounds. Thankfully, they all sound perfectly lush. Like all PG products, there’s a sense of depth and space that makes noodling around on this thing flat-out addictive. I’ve always loved a good ambient reverb wash or a swirling chorus, and the Spark Pedal absolutely delivers on that front.

Yes, the Spark Pedal doesn’t exactly bring anything new to the table in terms of sounds, especially for existing Spark users, but these are the core tones we’ve come to expect from Positive Grid, and well, if it ain't broke, why fix it, right?

Below are a few sound clips I recorded directly from the pedal, straight into Pro Tools, using a Gibson Les Paul Standard loaded with Burstbucker Pro pickups. All amp sounds, effects, and EQ come from the pedal; even the bass on the full-band track is played through the Spark. The only post-processing done is a small amount of master bus compression to level out the volume between the sounds.

Verdict

Since the launch of the Positive Grid Spark, fans have wanted an easy way to use the sounds live, and this may be the most convenient way yet. But the Spark Pedal goes far beyond just a pedalboard rig, and instead, we get a stomp that can be a practice rig with headphones and Bluetooth, a clever recording interface, and a live amp-sim and effects pedal all in one.

It’s hard to deny that what Positive Grid has packed into this tiny floor unit is impressive, but it can feel a little overstuffed at times.

If I’m honest, I’m not totally convinced it needs all the practice aids and features. The Spark 2 or Mini is arguably a better option for practising at home, since you get a speaker without losing any functionality, so it might have been better if Positive Grid paired the Spark Pedal back slightly and focused on making it the very best live unit it could be, with slightly better usability.

That said, I think Positive Grid has nailed the sounds. I am a fan of the tones on offer in all the Spark amps, and the Pedal is no different. It presents a versatile collection of sounds that cover a surprisingly broad range of genres and styles.

Overall, this is a welcome addition to the Spark family, and if you are in the market for a way to bridge the gap between your at-home practice rig and your stage setup, then it is undoubtedly a convenient little package.

MusicRadar verdict: The Spark Pedal puts the power of the famed practice amp into a convenient, capable floor unit, and it's also pretty competitively priced. While I fully understand why the controls are laid out the way they are, I still think navigation could be improved to make the pedal easier to use in a live setting.

Also try

Hands-on videos

Positive Grid

Soundcraft has announced the Signature Plus Series, a new range of analogue mixing consoles that succeeds the company's Signature line, aimed at studio engineers, live performers, podcasters and content creators.

There are four models, offering 12, 16, 22 and 32 channels, and Soundcraft says the feature set is consistent across the range, meaning you don't lose functionality by opting for a smaller desk. The 12- and 16-channel models are equipped with rackmount ears.

The channel strips are built around Soundcraft's Ghost mic preamps, which the company says deliver smooth overload behaviour and rich harmonics while providing up to 65db of gain. These are paired with Sapphyre EQ and dbx one-knob compressors with harmonic enhancement, and insert points are onboard for patching in outboard gear.

Signature Plus’s headline feature is the built-in Lexicon hardware effects processor, which Soundcraft claims is unique at this price point, and now features both preset storage and Tap Tempo. The effects available span multiple styles of reverb, delay, and modulation effects.

Soundcraft has also redesigned the layout of the mixers, separating the input and output sections to make navigation more intuitive. Colour-coded buttons and what the company is calling "squircle" knobs are designed to make adjustments quicker and more accurate in low-light and high-pressure environments.

Recording and playback are handled by a 4x4 USB-C interface capable of operating at up to 192kHz. USB returns can be routed into channel strips like any other input, or sent directly to the main output for playback between acts or DJ sets.

Elsewhere, there are four aux sends with a Mix to Auxes function, a Listen bus for monitoring individual channels without disturbing the main mix, and Talkback To routing. Headphone and control room outputs each get configurable monitoring options covering mute, dim and mono sum, while a QR code on the mixer links to manuals, training videos and support resources.

“Developing this new series was first and foremost driven from listening closely to what engineers and content creators needed,” HARMAN Product Manager Scott Wood said in a press release.

“We included all the features that users can most often utilize and added many others they always wanted to. With this lineup and this feature-set, users have everything they need to bring out their best work.”

The Soundcraft Signature Plus 12 is priced at £699/$799, the 16 at £799/$899, the 22 at £1,099/$1,199 and the 32 at £1,299/$1,499.

Find out more on Soundcraft's website.

Elektron has launched Outbox 8, a new eight-channel audio/CV breakout box designed to be a complement to the company’s range of hardware grooveboxes. The hardware unit, which we first spotted at Superbooth back in May, features eight fully assignable outputs designed to transmit both audio and control voltage signals.

Outbox 8 is not restricted to working exclusively with Elektron gear, but its most obvious use case is as a way to expand the limited number of physical output found on devices such as Digitone II and Digitakt II – each of which features 16 potential synth or sample voices but just one stereo analogue output.

Although most current gen Elektron instruments can already output individual audio tracks via USB, doing so relies on the use of Elektron’s Overbridge plugin or connection to a USB host in order for the instrument to function as an audio interface. With Outbox 8, users can achieve the same functionality without the need to use a computer as an intermediary.

According to Elektron, “Outbox 8 enables you to route individual tracks, stems, or submixes for external processing, mixing, or performance – creating a flexible bridge between your Elektron workflow and the wider world of sound and control.”

As well as routing audio, Outbox 8 also functions as a MIDI-to-CV converter, allowing users to route digital control outputs from a sequencer, DAW or controller through the device’s outputs as an analogue signal, which can be routed to a hardware synth or modular rig.

Outbox 8 can also be used as a portable audio interface, paired with a laptop, tablet or smartphone for a compact multi-output setup.

Most Elektron grooveboxes will allow users to configure the routing and output type directly from the menu of the connected instrument. When used with third-party devices, Outbox 8 can be configured using Elektron’s browser-based app.

With their deep sequencers and modular approach to audio generation, the current generation of Elektron grooveboxes – which also includes the likes of Syntakt, Tonverk, Model:Cycles, Model:Samples, Analog Rytm and Analog Four – are popular choices for electronic live performers and ‘DAWless’ music makers. With its promise for plug-and-play expansion of those devices’ audio and sequencing capabilities, Outbox 8 looks like a potentially smart investment.

Outbox 8 is out now priced at 299€/£259/$349 USD. For more information head to the Elektron site.

Harley Benton guitars have slowly cultivated a cult following over the past few years, thanks to their ability to deliver cheap electric guitars with an incredible spec and build quality. Now those prices have gotten even cheaper as Thomann launched its Guitar Days sale with up to 60% discounts.

I’ve reviewed quite a few Harley Benton models, and for my money, they are amongst the best value guitars you can buy right now. Naturally I was curious to see what was on offer in the sale, and very pleased to see three guitars and a multi-effects I’ve been personally hands-on with get some mega discounts.

Tame Impala mainman Kevin Parker has announced that he’s had it with signing autographs. In fact, he’s not going to do it any more.

The Aussie musician has explained in an Instagram Stories post why he’s made the decision. “Hey guys quick PSA to say due to the rise of aggressive autograph hounds I won’t be signing anything or doing photos out the front of hotels or at airports at all anymore, so if you happen to catch me please don’t be offended if I say no,” he wrote.

“I wasn’t that passionate about it before but they’ve started using kids which I think is all kinds of wrong. Love you guys.”

In a later post, Parker also added that he wouldn’t be meeting fans in venue car parks before shows either “for the time being” because of the “obvious security risk.”

It seems this is something he has previously been happy to do but “the numbers were getting out of control and we don’t have the security to manage it … so my team has asked me not to. So please have the best time at the shows and get home safe!”

Parker is, of course, not the first musician to have publicly declared he’s sick of signing stuff. The rather more famous Ringo Starr declared in 2008 he wouldn’t be signing any more autographs, partly due to the fact that he invariably saw the same items for sale online.

Likewise, Billie Eilish cut out signing autographs in 2019 for similar reasons. “(I) realised all anyone did was sell everything that I signed, so I stopped doing that”.

Still a teenager at the time, she had already witnessed the dark side of fandom. “They wait outside for you and then immediately they don’t get what they want, and they boo you, and fucking curse at you. I’m like, ‘Bro, I’m 17’.”

Perhaps Parker (and others) might want to adopt the same tactic as Steve Martin. The comedian didn’t like signing autographs either, but when asked he would give out a card to fans that read: “This certifies that you have had a personal encounter with me and you found me warm, polite, intelligent, and funny.”

Perhaps best known for being the man who directed Britney Spears’ iconic Baby One More Time video in 1998, Nigel Dick has also shot promos for the likes of Guns N’ Roses, Oasis and Cher.

As you’d expect, this means that he’s got some stories to tell, and he’s about to tell them in his new memoir, Music Video Mischief, which is released on 15 September via Trouser Press Books.

Ahead of that, he’s been talking to Music Week about some of his many encounters with rock and pop royalty, starting with Guns N’ Roses as they began their era of world domination in 1987 with Appetite for Destruction.

Even in this early stage of their career, the band had got themselves a reputation for debauchery and a certain amount of bad behaviour, but Dick suggests that, when he first encountered them during the making of the Welcome To The Jungle video, they didn’t cause him too much trouble.

“Guns N’ Roses were meant to be ‘The Most Dangerous Band In The World’ but I’ve met worse – I’ve been threatened a few times! On some level, and certainly at the beginning with Axl Rose freaking out and disappearing to hide in a room for two hours they were far more nervous around me than I was around them.”

Dick also shot the video for Sweet Child O’ Mine, which would go on to become the band’s biggest hit. He admits, though, that he nearly made what would have been a mistake when he was putting it together.

“For Sweet Child O’ Mine, I thought Axl’s snake-like dancing wasn’t rock and roll, so I actually told the editor to completely cut all of that stuff out!” he remembers. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Oh my god, that’s so sexy!’ and suddenly you go, ‘I missed something here – put it back!’”

Guns N’ Roses might have been pretty amendable, but Dick suggests that he had a rockier relationship with Oasis – he directed the videos for Don’t Look Back In Anger and Champagne Supernova in 1996 – and one member of the band in particular.

“Noel Gallagher said my video for Don’t Look Back In Anger was a “bag of shite”, but it says more about Noel than anything else,” he says. “I’d have been shocked if he’d said, ‘I love that video, it’s so wonderful!’ I mean, the little time that I spent with Oasis, there was no sort of sense of joy around them, which I was quite sad about. I got the impression they hated making videos. But this is my job.”

Nigel Dick’s memoir, Music Video Mischief, will be released on 15 September via Trouser Press Books.

Positive Grid has expanded its digital guitar amp and multi-effects eco-system with the Spark Pedal, a compact unit powered by its HD Tone Engine and featuring an onboard looper and the many of the smart features that helped revolutionise the desktop amp market.

Again, this is electric guitar tone seeking perched out on the frontiers of digital innovation; the technologists among you will surely be excited by the AI-powered Text To Tone features offered via the accompanying Spark app, and the capability to browse more than 100,000 tones on Positive Grid’s ToneCloud, and putting together a custom signal chain from whichever amps, effects, and cab emulations that take your fancy.

Old Spark favourites such as Audio Chords, which listens to the track you are playing along to and gives you the chords in real-time, are present and correct.

“This gig-ready rig makes it easy to bring the tone and power of Spark amps to live performances, rehearsals, home practice and recording sessions,” says Positive Grid. Designed for electric, bass and acoustic players, it incorporates into any setup for fast, intuitive tone building with no learning curve.”

It is easy to forget that all of this is a brave new world, and yet the success of the Spark platform has always been about presenting these smart and novel features in a way that we old fuddy-duddy analogue types can get behind.

In other words: is it easy to use? Does it feel like an amp? The setup certainly seems intuitive enough.

The Spark Pedal is a three-footswitch unit that can be easily thrown into a backpack. One footswitch toggles between Amp and FX Modes.

In Amp Mode, the knobs control Gain, Bass, Middle, Treble “like a traditional amp head” while FX Mode appropriates those same controls for Drive, Modulation, Delay, and Reverb depth.

There are, of course, presets. Out of the box you get 33 amp models and 43 effects. Again, the ToneCloud is where there are thousands upon thousands of news sounds to explore.

Positive Grid have designed the Spark Pedal to be an all-in-one fly rig; everything you need to play a show is here. Simply send the signal direct to the PA system.

Similarly, you can use it as a guitar audio interface and tone hub, and use it as recording solution. There is a headphones output for silent practice, too, and you can stream audio to it via Bluetooth for playing along to an accompaniment.

Alternatively, just use it in the old-school way of any other preamp/multi-effects pedal and hook it up in front of your amp – or in its effects loop – and use it alongside the other pedals on your ‘board.

The onboard looper gives you 60 seconds of looping time, and all these features – record, overdub, etc – is operated via the footswitches.

The Spark Pedal is available now, priced £169/$199. Head over to Positive Grid for more.

You could probably build a tower to the moon with all the books that have been published about the Beatles over the years. But the man who published the first and only authorised biography of the band – Hunter Davies – is still with us and still working at the age of 90.

And Davies has another Beatles book out. His fourth in total about the band, Get Back: The Boys Who Became The Beatles focuses on the lives of the four members up to 1962 and the author has given an interview to the Telegraph about his long career and his relationship with the band.

You’d think that Davies has used up all his good Beatles stories. But not so. When he was researching the original biography in 1968, Ringo visited his house and asked for some vegetarian food. “Margaret (Davies’s wife) did a very poncey Delia Smith aubergine dish,” he recalls. “Ringo went, ‘What’s this?’ By veggie, he meant beans on toast.”

And he drops a bombshell, of sorts, about Yoko Ono: “I believe she was in love with Paul first. But Yoko’s still alive, so I’ll say no more.”

Davies was in close contact with the band during the latter half of the career, and can remember Paul McCartney presenting Getting Better to John Lennon for the first time in early 1967. “They loved each other, but they really were competitive,” he says of the two friends. “Each one wanted the other’s appreciation.”

“I remember when Paul and I came back from a walk in Primrose Hill. Paul played the basic tune of It’s Getting Better, which he’d just written while I was with him. I can still see John’s face, National Health specs on, absolutely blank, betraying no emotion. Paul was waiting for him to say, ‘That’s great.’

“But he said, ‘That’s good. I’ll try to think of a second verse.’ And he came up with a very cruel one about beating his woman. That’s why it’s a brilliant song, because it turns dark. And that’s why they were the best combination.”

When Davies published the original Beatles biog he assumed they’d be forgotten about in ten years’ time. “But nobody else has come close to the Beatles in influence, or the creativity of their lyrics and music,” he reflects. “ The farther away we get from the Beatles, the bigger they become. Until the last syllable of recorded time, someone will be humming a Beatles song.”

The Oasis documentary hits screens this week, and the directors of Don’t Look Back In Anger have given an interview to the Guardian which reveal some interesting insights into the dynamic behind the Gallaghers’ reconciliation.

We already know that the pair - Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace - hid their cameras in the sound kit whilst the brothers ran through their set for the first time in 16 years. But they also had one trained on the door to capture Liam’s arrival.

The singer was late, you see. “Nobody knew exactly when he was coming,” says Southern. “There was a palpable tension. We knew we had these historically volatile characters, so you ask yourself, ‘Are they going to fight – or hug each other?’ And of course they do neither. They have a job to do. Apart from a very brief photoshoot, they hadn’t been in a room together for 16 years.”

“Then Liam walks in, drops his bag and goes, ‘Are we ready then?’ Two hours later, while they’re playing the outro to Champagne Supernova, he picks up his bag and leaves. He did that every single day. And then suddenly they were playing the gigs – and the tension started melting. You could see Noel and Liam getting closer every night.”

“The reconciliation didn’t happen in rehearsals,” the director says. “It started happening on stage and continued happening.” Lovelace adds: “They’re healing this enormous chasm not in private, but in public. And things were forgiven without saying a word. Maybe that’s part of what people are responding to.”

Both men reveal that back in the day they were Oasis fans themselves. Lovelace was still a teenager when Definitely Maybe came out and remembers thinking: “This is the first music that feels like my own.” Meanwhile Southern was lucky enough to catch them at the 200-capacity Hull Adelphi in 1994. Oasis “felt like our band”, he says.

And like so many people, they both initially failed to get tickets when the reunion gigs were first announced in August 2024. Lovelace was “in a car on my phone failing to get a ticket” while Southern “eventually gave up”. Don’t Look In Anger provides a happy ending in all sorts of ways...

Cliff Richard will be 86 in a few weeks’ time and Britain’s original rock n’ roller is still working and releasing records. In fact, he’s announced that he’s got a new covers album later this autumn.

And it has a theme. Only Number Ones features twelve songs by other artists that have reached Number One in the UK singles charts. In a statement Cliff said: "I suggested to Warner Music that I record an album of songs that made it to number one. Thank heavens they agreed! I listened to dozens of songs and chose 12 of my favourites.”

"This record is my tribute to fabulous artists who had recorded wonderful tracks that achieved the number one position."

So with 1457 different songs to choose from, what has the singer gone for? Well, he’s included tracks by his contemporaries: Return To Sender by Elvis, All I Have To Do Is Dream by the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison’s Oh Pretty Woman. The most recent inclusion is Harry Styles' 2017 chart topper Sign Of The Times.

There are also a few choices that nod towards Cliff’s own spiritual beliefs - Spirit In The Sky, I’m A Believer (made famous by The Monkees) and George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord - as well as a song that you cannot believe has never elicited a high profile cover until now: David Soul’s 1977 chart topper Don’t Give Up On Us.

In other Cliff news, his 1976 hit Devil Woman has been included on the soundtrack to the much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6. This time around the series which, among other things, is known for its hipper-than-hip soundtracks, has decided to include a few selections which might leave some older gamers open-mouthed.

Along with Devil Woman, mid-1970s MOR duo Captain and Tennille are in with their 1980 deep cut But I Think It’s A Dream, as are the Bellamy Brothers with Let Your Love Flow and Wang Chung with Everybody Have Fun Tonight.

Many of those have already received huge boosts in terms of Spotify plays just by being included in the GTA6 trailer, which is up online now. Devil Woman has increased its plays on the platform by 325%. Another surprise inclusion, Prefab Sprout’s 1988 single Cars And Girls, leapt by 530% and the Captain And Tennille track went up by a whopping 130,730%.

Proof, if proof were needed, that among Gen Z at least, musical snobbery is increasingly a thing of the past.

For one of the best hard rock bands to come out of Los Angeles in the ’80s, there was always a problem.

No matter how high they flew, selling millions of albums and playing on the world’s biggest stages, there was something rotten at the core of Dokken – a bitter feud between the singer who gave the band its name, and the guitar hero who never liked the singer in the first place and grew to dislike him even more as fame, money, ego and drugs took hold.

Don Dokken and George Lynch made some great music together. In a decade when fellow LA bands such as Mötley Crüe and Ratt were at their commercial peak, Dokken delivered some of the finest albums of the era in Breaking The Chains, Tooth And Nail, Under Lock And Key, Back For The Attack and the double live set Beast From The East.

But the friction between singer and guitarist was the band’s undoing, and although there have been brief reunions over the years, the animosity between them has remained.

Don Dokken gave his side of the story in an interview with Rock Candy magazine.

He began by confessing: “I’m not a great singer. In my early bands I became the singer by default, because we had singers who quit. When I went to Venice High School in LA, I started playing drums, then guitar. But I never thought about being a famous rock star.”

In the late ’70s his first serious band was Airborn, who gigged regularly at Hollywood clubs such as the Whiskey A Go Go and the Starwood.

“We played with Van Halen all the time,” he said. “The dream was to headline at the Whiskey on a Friday night for 300 people. Man, if we did that we’d made it.

He continued: “Airborn was getting kind of popular, but we had to change our name because some other band called Airborne [featuring future Ratt producer Beau Hill] got a record deal. So that’s why the band became Dokken, not out of ego.

“One of the first times we played as Dokken was with Van Halen and Quiet Riot – Randy Rhoads’ last shows with Quiet Riot before he joined Ozzy’s band. I still have the flyer from that show.

“But this was a weird phase in LA: rock was in, and then it was out. It was all new wave, The Knack, and the punk scene was bubbling, with bands like Black Flag. So I went to Germany, and Gaby Hauke, the manager of [German metal band] Accept, took my demo to Carrere Records and got me a deal.”

It was at this point that George Lynch and drummer ‘Wild’ Mick Brown entered the picture.

“I needed a band,” Don said, “but honestly, I didn’t want George. I said from day one, ‘This is not gonna work.’ I was a lead guitarist and a lead singer, and I wanted a three-piece. So I got Mick and [bassist] Juan Croucier. Mick kept pushing me to get George in the band, and he was certainly a great guitar player.

“When I got George and Mick in the band, they were working as truck drivers, delivering wine to liquor stores. They said, ‘Hey, we’ll go to Germany and make this record if you give us two thousand dollars each.’”

The first Dokken album was recorded at Dierks Studios in the village of Stommeln near Cologne. While Dokken worked in a basement room, upstairs in the main room the famous producer Dieter Dierks was working with the Scorpions on their album Blackout.

At that time, Scorpions singer Klaus Meine was recovering from surgery on his vocal cords, so Don helped out by tracking guide vocals for the entire Blackout album.

As he recalled: “I was into the Scorpions back in the day, when they had Uli Jon Roth on guitar. I loved Fly To The Rainbow and Virgin Killer. Their breakout record was Blackout and I did the background vocals.

“Klaus Meine had problems with his voice. They wanted me to do the groundwork – those big-ass high harmonies – to save Klaus’s voice, because he’d had surgery.

“Truth is, I can hear myself on that record, but they buried my vocals. I have a tape – the entire Blackout album with me singing lead vocals and harmonies. For years they denied this. They made me look like a bullshitter. Then years later we became good friends.”

During their time in Germany, Don and George Lynch clashed on a regular basis. Soon after the band returned to LA, Juan Croucier jumped ship to join Ratt.

As Don remembered it: “Juan said to me, ‘I can’t be in a band where there’s constant turmoil – arguing, fighting. I don’t need this in my life.’ So he left. I don’t blame him.”

The band’s debut album (originally titled Breakin’ The Chains, minus the ‘g’) was released in Germany in 1981 and marketed as a solo project, credited to Don Dokken. The cover photo featured the singer alone. The title track picked up radio airplay in the US and caught the ear of a highly influential figure in the music business – Cliff Burnstein, who co-managed Def Leppard alongside Peter Mensch.

“Cliff Burnstein found the record in an import store, called me and said he wanted to meet me,” Don said. “I was expecting a guy in a suit and tie and a big cigar, and Cliff looked like a homeless person – scruffy beard, curly hair, a faded t-shirt with spaghetti sauce stains on it.

“He took me to see Metallica at The Troubadour. He said, ‘I’m gonna sign these guys, they’re gonna be huge.’ I said, ‘Really? I mean, really?’ I didn’t get it. At the time it was all Journey and Foreigner and all these commercial rock bands. After Cliff said he wanted to manage me, he said, ‘Keep George in the band.’ I called George, but he wasn’t interested.”

Lynch auditioned for Ozzy Osbourne following the death of Randy Rhoads in March 1982, but lost out to Jake E. Lee.

Don said of Lynch’s missed opportunity: “George was ‘The Guy’ – it was down to him and Jakey. And George probably would have got the gig, but Jakey bonded with Ozzy.”

He added: “Years later, Ozzy and I were in a bathroom peeing together, and he said to me, ‘You still got that guy George in your band? That motherfucker’s crazier than I am!’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know what to say about that…’”

When Cliff Burnstein secured a contract with Elektra Records, the classic Dokken line-up came together.

“Elektra wanted George in the band,” Don said. “So did Burnstein. So it ended up with me and George and Mick, and then I found Jeff Pilson in a bar, playing in a top 40 covers band, doing Little Red Corvette with a chick singing. Jeff was out of his mind when I met him. We went back to his shitty apartment to talk about him joining Dokken and he whipped out some coke and started chopping it out. I said, ‘No thanks.’ But I liked him, liked the way he played. So that was the band.”

Elektra re-released the debut album in 1983 under the Dokken band name with the ‘g’ added to the title Breaking The Chains. A year later the second album Tooth And Nail reached the top 40 on the Billboard 200.

George Lynch was hailed as a new guitar hero, but as Don told Rock Candy: “People thought George wrote the music and I wrote the lyrics. Not true. I’m a guitar player. Half the songs on Tooth And Nail were mine.

“The poppiest songs always got made the singles, but we had songs that were totally heavy. I was into Saxon and all the European bands, so we had that heavy edge, which helped when we toured with Judas Priest.

“I could hit those big screams like [Priest frontman] Rob Halford but I couldn’t do the heavy metal type singing. I’m a more melodic singer. I didn’t have that high, popular sound.

“The record company was pushing me to be a David Lee Roth-type frontman, running around and doing the splits. But that’s not my gig at all, and when Cliff Burnstein said that to Elektra, it changed their minds. By that time, Def Leppard had sold six million albums. That was his power.”

Don said that drugs created a division within his band. “If somebody invites you over for a three-day Jack Daniel’s and cocaine binge, and you don’t go, you’re the odd man out. Cocaine, everybody was doing it but me. Alcoholics and drug addicts hang out together. The problem was, the three of them would get an ounce of cocaine and go off someplace, and I’d go off to my apartment and write my songs.”

Dokken’s 1985 album Under Lock And Key and 1987 album Back For The Attack were both million sellers.

But as Don saw it, there was no pleasing George Lynch.

He stated: “I believed that if we had success, if we had money, then George would be happy. But as I said to Mick: ‘It seems like the more famous we get, the more unhappy George is.’ It was the oddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

“When I met George he had a Ford Pinto station wagon and he was sleeping in the back of it with his girlfriend. That’s how far down he was. He had nowhere to go but up. But even when we sold a million records, he still wasn’t happy. And in that moment, I realised this had nothing to do with me. I couldn’t take it personally.”

In early 1988, when Dokken toured the UK as the opening act for AC/DC, thew tension between Don Dokken and George Lynch came to a head.

“Touring with AC/DC was a thrill for me,” Don said. "But when we got to London, I got into a fight with George. We were arguing in the back of a limo, and I said, ‘Let’s get out to the parking lot and just get this over with. And one of us is gonna go to the hospital.’

“George was pretty buff, strong, a big guy, but I’d been doing martial arts since I was 12. I told him, ‘If you hit me, you’re probably gonna knock me out. But if I get up, you better run.’ We went at it, but the manager then came out and said, ‘Guys, you’re on in ten minutes!’ So we just stopped and went, ‘Okay!’ It’s kind of funny, looking back at it.”

In the summer of 1988 Dokken performed in US stadiums as part of the Monsters Of Rock tour. It proved disastrous. Instead of raising Dokken to the next level, that tour ended with Don quitting his own band.

“It was such a great bill,” he said. “Van Halen, Scorpions, Dokken, Metallica and Kingdom Come. My dream had come true. We had 100,000 people in a stadium and my name’s behind me on a forty-foot banner. I thought I’d won the lottery.

“But on that tour, the drug thing had gotten way out of hand. I’ve never done coke in my life, and I said, ‘Somebody’s gonna die.’ On that tour we should have been going out there and kicking it, but the bottom line was: we sucked. After a couple of shows, going on after Metallica, we dropped every hit we had. I was like, ‘Let’s just do all our heavy shit, man, cos we’re getting our butts kicked.’ It’s the truth. No point clouding it.

“Monsters Of Rock should have been the pinnacle of our career, but George was doing everything in his power to throw the band under the bus. I don’t know why. I’m not a psychiatrist. I was so distraught, I started drinking heavily, and I was taking Valium because I was having anxiety attacks.

“I couldn’t figure out what I could do to make the other guys see the folly of being self-destructive. Everybody was getting high and thinking no matter how much they misbehave I would never leave because that would be crazy. But that’s when I left the band, after that tour. At the last Monsters Of Rock, I said, ‘I can’t play with you any more, George. Not for any price.’”

The story did not end there. In the early ’90s Dokken reunited – with all four members of the classic line-up. There have been various albums and tours since then, with and without George Lynch. But for Don Dokken, the Monsters Of Rock tour was where the band really died.

“We had a lot of success,” he said. “But really, we could have been huge.”

AI music platform Suno has unveiled a new suite of music generation models, the first to be developed in partnership with major record labels following its licensing agreements with Warner Music Group and BMG.

Suno claims that its V6 models are the best that the company has ever developed, describing them as “faster, more expressive and higher quality” with new features that offer more precise control over the music they produce.

The V6 models are said to understand “more of the language and building blocks that musicians use”, and prompts can now cover everything from vocals, instrumentation and structure to more abstract attributes like mood, feel and non-musical references.

Rolling out today, Suno’s V6 suite consists of three distinct models, each designed for a different use case. V6 is the flagship model for subscribers to Suno’s Pro and Premium plans: it’s described as reliable and precise and said to deliver “polished music across every genre and style”.

V6-wild is a more experimental model built for creative exploration. Also only available to paid subscribers, it’s less predictable than V6 and capable of producing “unexpected, textured and ambitious results”. Finally, V6-mini is the only model that’s available to all users, and is described as fast, efficient and easy to use.

The V6 models offer more fine-grained control over their output than the previous generation. Creators can now edit specific parts of an existing song using prompts, combine elements from multiple songs together, or sample an element of an existing track and build something new around it. Along with text and audio, V6 can also use images and video as the basis for a track.

Following the launch of V6, all of Suno’s previous models will be permanently retired. While the previous models were trained on tens of millions of songs – including copyrighted works – Suno tells us that its V6 models have been trained from scratch.

The company has confirmed that they were not trained on the same data as the previous models, and instead were trained on a combination of licensed data from its industry partnerships and user data. This includes licensed recordings from the catalogues of Warner Music Group and BMG.

Warner and BMG have both stated that artists and songwriters will be compensated under their partnerships with Suno, but neither company has disclosed how much individual creators will receive or exactly how the money will be distributed.

Suno has also announced today that it has inked a partnership with Believe, a digital music company that provides distribution, publishing and artist development services to independent musicians and labels. Believe is the owner of TuneCore, a DIY distribution platform for self-releasing artists.

Tracks created using Suno will now be eligible to distribute through Believe and TuneCore, and music from participating Believe and TuneCore artists and labels will be used to train the new V6 models, should they choose to opt in. Believe said in a statement that "artists who consent to participate will be compensated for their music and their rights will be protected".

Alongside the launch of the V6 family of models, Suno has revealed that it’s developing new product experiences that will allow users to create with and remix the music of individual artists who choose to participate. Suno has confirmed that participating artists will be compensated for the use of their music, and says that the products will "open up revenue opportunities across the music ecosystem".

Suno’s move towards licensed training data arrives as the company faces ongoing legal challenges from the music industry.

Warner Music Group settled its copyright lawsuit with Suno last year as part of the partnership that led to the development of V6, while Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment continue to pursue copyright claims against the company, alleging copyright infringement "on an almost unimaginable scale". Suno maintains that its use of copyrighted material was lawful under the fair use doctrine.

In July, a German court ruled against Suno in a case brought by performance rights organization GEMA, finding that the company had infringed copyright by using protected works to train its models without permission.

In a press release, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said the release of V6 marks “the beginning of a new chapter for music”.

“V6 is designed to expand what is creatively possible and open up new revenue opportunities across the music ecosystem,” the statement reads. “We believe this is a blueprint for how AI and the music industry can strengthen one another and build entirely new product experiences for artists, fans, and the broader music community.”

Last month, Suno launched the next iteration of its browser-based DAW, Studio 2.0, enabling users to work with its music generation models in a more conventional production workflow. Studio 2.0 introduced a number of new features, including MIDI support, audio effects, and a chat interface that lets users generate stems, create plugins and interact with their projects via text prompts.

William Shatner might not have been able to lay his hands on a real Gibson Les Paul Standard for the promo shoot for his forthcoming all-star metal album – the electric guitar he is holding is monstrous AI-creation – but he is having no problem signing up human talent for the project.

Among a reported 35-strong cast of guitarists, Queen’s Brian May has now been announced as one of the actor and musician’s special guests. He even mixes the track he is appearing on.

On the face of it, it’s an unlikely collaboration. But these two have a lot in common. They have both spent considerable time among the stars; Shatner as Star Trek’s Captain James T Kirk of the USS Enterprise, May as an astrophysicist. Both have asteroids named after them; as the press release reads, “Asteroid 52665 Brianmay, meet Asteroid 31556 Shatner”. Quite. Asteroids are all well and good. But this project is going to be a very different kind of rock.

Shatner says the project was inspired by former Megadeth guitarist Chris Poland and the work he is doing now in Nuclear Messiah.

“When Nuclear Messiah came to life, something clicked,” said Shatner. “It wasn’t just a track – it was a doorway. It made me want to go all the way in, bring in the best metal players I could find, and create something fearless.”

May is the first guitarist to be confirmed for the project – though we would expect Poland to turn up, and given that Zakk Wylde gifted Shatner an electric guitar, then surely the Black Label Society frontman will drop in, too.

Shatner isn’t short in some serious players, though. We’ve got a bona-fide Metal God contributing vocals as Rob Halford signed on. There is one of metal’s greatest drummers, Dave Lombardo, formerly of Slayer. John Moyer from Disturbed will play bass guitar.

The production team includes Adam Hamilton and Brian Perera of Cleopatra Records, whose label is releasing the album.

Shatner, who will be performing in Chicago at this year’s Riotfest, promises some original material – plus a few classics from the old masters.

“I’ve spent a lifetime exploring in both reality and fiction,” said Shatner. “Now I am stepping out into the unknown once again with my new project in heavy metal. I am covering Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden as well as a number of new songs written by my team. The whole project is destined for this year. I hope you will join me in the exploration.”

Angus Young has gone viral in a YouTube clip from AC/DC’s August 31 performance at the Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas. The reason? He seemingly lost his bearings during his solo to Whole Lotta Rosie.

The clip is titled “Angus Young forgets the solo and gives AC/DC a different Whole Lotta Rosie” and it has nearly half a million views in under four days – but is that what really happens here? We beg to differ.

And Accadaccaologists – of whom there are many in the comments – would tend to agree with us. This is Angus Young doing what Angus Young does when deep into an AC/DC set; he takes the solos to the edge then he walks it back.

It’s performance, a little drama, electric guitar as theatre. It’s the kind of thing he would have learned from watching his hero Chuck Berry,

And we are deep in the set here. AC/DC have already played Back In Black, Thunderstruck, Highway To Hell and You Shook Me All Night Long. The hits had been coming thick and fast. There were deeper cuts too. They opened with with If You Want Blood (You Got It), played Sin City and Riff Raff. Whole Lotta Rosie was the second-last song of the night.

There is often a subtext to these kinds of videos. If the artist is a legacy artist, i.e. a veteran act, and AC/DC are that – Angus Young is 71 – then there can be a whiff of condescension around their performance. You’re past it. And all that unsavouriness. We’ll give this video the benefit of the doubt. It comes via an AC/DC superfan account, Marco’s HIGH VOLTAGE Music Channel. And Marco is right; Young gives us something different, but that’s rock ’n’ roll, and that’s oftentimes how he handles this solo as the band back off and he takes the spotlight.

The only concession here to age is that he keeps his shirt on. But c’mon, he’s still in uniform. Yes, he throws in a sour note, or at least one off-menu note, or maybe he is just vamping and momentarily lose the run of it – it doesn’t matter. All this, and yet what he does play effectively signposts the denouement of the solo, when he gives it that same ripping pentatonic/blues scale treatment, a punk energy brought to bear on barroom boogie-woogie blues-rock.

As one commentator on Reddit writes: “Are you going to post the clip of him messing up?”

Was this the definition of styling it out or throwing in a red herring to keep the audience guessing? Jury’s out. But Angus Young can play what he wants is the consensus.

You can watch the clip above and judge for yourself.

AC/DC's PWR/UP Tour continues apace. See AC/DC for full dates and ticket details. Tonight they rock St Louis, Missouri.

Denon DJ has released its latest all-in-one DJ system, the Prime 4 G2, a four-channel device that includes some intriguing features lifted from Akai’s recent MPC designs.

The Prime 4 G2 is a fully standalone setup running on a built-in CPU that allows users to mix with digital media loaded from the onboard storage or streamed via Wi-Fi. Its so-called ‘omnisource’ architecture is also designed to move seamlessly between standalone DJing and acting as a DJ controller for software applications including Serato DJ Pro and Algoriddim djay.

For this second generation update, Denon has taken its cues from its inMusic stablemate Akai Pro, replicating many of the enhancements the company recently brought to its MPC range. The most interesting of these is the inclusion of the same multi-expression MPCe pads found on the MPC Live III and MPC XL.

The MPCe pads are both velocity and pressure sensitive, and are also divided into four quadrants across their X/Y axes. In their application here, that allows users to control a variety of functions from each of the 16 pads, such as triggering multiple hots cues or samples, manipulating stems, engaging rolls, performing with effects or even controlling lighting.

How usefully having this kind of multi-expressive control within a DJ context will likely come down to how much of a ‘performance’ focused DJ you are. For many users applying multiple functions to 16 pads may well be overkill, but more dexterous performers are likely to find fun ways to expand their DJ sets.

Like the MPCs, this G2 update also significantly enhances the processing power under-the-hood. That comes in the form of an eight-core ARM processor with 4GB of RAM that, according to Denon, results in four times the processing power of the previous generation. This allows for faster browsing and loading of tracks. More significantly, it allows users to render and manipulate track stems within the hardware in standalone mode.

Other improvements include better effects capabilities. The Prime 4 G2 now features over 25 Main FX, 10 Touch FX, four Fader FX, and four Sweep FX.

Like its predecessor, the hardware has a central 10.1-inch touchscreen acting as the primary interface for its software elements. The G2 unit has larger jogwheels than its predecessor, up from 6 to 8-inches, along with redesigned dual-rail faders.

The Prime 4 G2 offers wireless streaming from platforms including Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, Beatport, SoundCloud Go+, and TIDAL for those with the relevant subscriptions. It also has Bluetooth connectivity for connectivity with tablets and smartphones.

Other highlights of the design include a 3-pin DMX output that allows for direct control of lighting without the need for an additional interface. The device also has an additional Zone audio output that allows it to stream an entirely independent audio signal alongside the main output, allowing event or party DJs to provide music for two rooms simultaneously.

"Performance-driven DJs want technology that disappears into the background and lets creativity take centre stage,” says inMusic DJ Brands Product Manager Jason Stout.

“As someone who regularly DJs high-end events, I rely on equipment that can adapt as quickly as the crowd does. Prime 4 G2 combines powerful performance tools, onboard Stems, streaming access, and integrated DMX lighting control into a single workflow, giving DJs the freedom to shape both the music and the atmosphere without missing a beat."

The Prime 4 G2 is out now, priced at $2,599 USD/ 2,699.99€/£2,299.99. Head to the Denon DJ website for more information.

It was the worst kept secret in guitar, but now it’s official: Troy Van Leeuwen and Squier have unveiled the latest addition to the Fender-owned brand’s Paranormal series, a 12-string reimagining of the Telecaster, replete with signature details and a price tag that puts it within reach of a wider demographic.

The Telecaster celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. There have been some sweet-looking Teles in that time. But finished in a metallic Copper Age paint job, with a tortoiseshell pickguard, Squier’s Troy Van Leeuwen Telecaster XII could hold its own with any one of them.

There’s a lot to like; there is a lot to tune. Just look at that 6x6 headstock, outfitted with vintage-style machine heads. But we have been lucky enough to play this unorthodox and quite brilliant guitar, and the best compliment we can pay it is that it’s well worth the effort of tuning a dozen strings before playing. Its wider 1.6875mm nut gives your fretting hand a bit more room.

Also, Squier has made it a little easier than most 12-string guitars with a very user-friendly bridge that is configured for top-loading and stringing up through the body – it’s a design that takes some of the pain out of string changes (and helps tuning stability).

This Telecaster XII has a solid nyatoh body, a bolt-on maple neck, an Indian laurel fingerboard, and has an origin story that takes us all the way back to Queens Of The Stone Age’s …Like Clockwork era. Fender was working on Van Leeuwen’s signature Jazzmaster, but they had other irons in the fire, too.

Speaking to MusicRadar in July, the morning before Queens Of The Stone Age took to the stage at London’s Tottenham Stadium in support of System Of A Down, Van Leeuwen reveals that it all started when he commissioned Master Builder Paul Waller of the Fender Custom Shop to make him a double-necked electric guitar.

There was only one problem: it was going to take some time. Waller said it would be six months, maybe even a year, before the double-neck was finished.

“I was working with Paul Waller because I was like, ‘I need a double-neck for this record, because there’s 12-string and six-string everywhere,’” says Van Leeuwen. “In the process of making that double-neck – which I’ve been playing a lot during this tour – he was like, ‘I really, really want you to play a Fender, so can I make you something in the meantime while you’re waiting for your double-neck?’ And I was like, ‘Sure! I’ve always wanted a Tele 12-string.’”

Waller was well up for the challenge.

“I love him,” says Van Leeuwen. “He’s like, ‘Well, let me just make you a Fender Tele, a simple Tele with a 12-string neck.’”

A 12-string Telecaster is a rare sight indeed. Bruce Springsteen has played one, as has Robin Zander of Cheap Trick. The Fender Custom Shop made a run of them for a short while in the late ‘90s. But you don’t see them every day (little wonder Squier considers it weird enough to release Van Leeuwen’s Tele XII as part of its Paranormal Series).

Van Leeuwen had some requests for his Custom Shop model. He had a Burns 12-string that he really liked, and wanted Waller to copy the neck.

“I’ve had this Burns Double Six for ever,” he says. “Man, it’s a really great sounding 12-string guitar, and the cool thing about it is that the neck is super wide, and you can really get in there and play it like… like the ham-fisted guy that I am. [Laughs] I was like, ‘For that guitar, please copy the neck of the Burns.’ And so I’ve been playing that guitar onstage – and Dean and I share it for different songs – for the last 14 years.”

Fender and Van Leeuwen launched his signature Jazzmaster in 2014. It is still on the market, and has history been a unit-shifter for Fender. Van Leeuwen says it still sells “pretty well”.

When Fender reached out to him to see if he was interested in doing something new they could put out, he had just the idea. The market isn’t over-saturated with affordable 12-strings. What about the Tele?

“I’m like, ‘I’ve always wanted to do a Squier.’ Just because I have that thing where it’s like, when I was a kid, I didn’t have money, and every guitar that I’d have to just scrounge up for was like a Squier,” he says. “Or some cheap pawn shop guitar. And so I just wanted something affordable, ‘cos not many people play 12-string guitars and they’re usually really expensive. Maybe we could do a Squier. It’s a very much a simplified version of that same Custom Shop [Tele].”

It’s a fixer-upper too. If you were of a mind to buy one, there’s also scope for upgrading the Fender-designed Alnico single-coil pickups if you wanted a more premium pairing. But Van Leeuwen is kind of tickled by the fact that you don’t need to do that. It sounds good as it is. He didn’t see any need to do anything to it before playing it live onstage – and on television, too.

“Yeah, I mean, it’s funny because I played on this show, the Jimmy Kimmel show, the other night with Michael Stipe,” he says. “Andrew Watt asked me to jump up there and play, and I was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna break this thing out. See what it does.’ So that was the debut of the Troy Van Leeuwen Squier Telecaster XII. So cool.”

And with that, the cat was out of the bag. Van Leeuwen posted about it on his Instagram page. There would be a new 12-string Telecaster on the market – officially for the first time as a regular production model – and it would bear his signature on the neck plate. It might well be the pick of the litter from this year’s Paranormal Series.

Maybe it’s time Fender took a leaf out of Squier’s book and launched its own Paranormal range. Van Leeuwen agrees. But he argues you don’t need Fender on the headstock to make a guitar roadworthy. His Telecaster XII has already proven it’s one tough beast. This is a 12-string that cannot be killed.

“Well, here’s a funny story,” says Van Leeuwen. “They sent me a prototype, the first of them. Maybe it was the first sort of factory test. And they sent it to my house, and the guy who delivered it, he ran over it on the way out of the driveway, in the box. [Laughs]”

Now, this kind of thing is not considered best practice in quality control, but it does go some way to proving that the hardiness of the Fender Telecaster translates to the 12-string format.

Van Leeuwen says it just needed the twist of an Allen key and it was good to go.

“Yeah, I picked it up, and I didn’t know it until I opened it up,” he says. “And I was, like, ‘I mean, the action’s really high,’ but it didn’t break or anything! [Laughs] It was just like maybe the truss rod needed to be tweaked a bit.

“But I always like stuff like that because it’s definitely roadworthy. I love that. More than anything, I like guitars that are roadworthy. I leave all my vintage stuff at home. Anything that I can just take on the road and it works is something that I will always want.”

The Troy Van Leeuwen Telecaster XII is available now, priced £509/$599. See Fender for more details.

Queens Of The Stone Age’s new album, Perfecth, is out October 30 via Matador.

Concert films are big business these days – just ask Taylor Swift – so it’s perhaps not surprising that Janet Jackson is choosing to celebrate the 40th anniversary of her breakthrough album Control by releasing one.

Rather than being built around archive footage, though, this will be based on a multi-camera recording of Jackson’s upcoming show at the Amerant Bank Arena in Florida on 12 December, which will see her perform not only Control in full but also other songs from her extensive back catalogue.

“It will be a whole new show – new costumes, new stage and maybe a little glimpse into the making of the album,” says Jackson. “It’s going to be filmed for a movie, which means that our time together will be remembered for decades.”

Released in 1986, Control was actually the third Janet Jackson album, but it was the one that marked her commercial breakthrough. Its tracklist reads like a greatest hits set – What Have You Done for Me Lately, Nasty, When I Think of You, Control and Let’s Wait Awhile were all smash hit singles – and its influence on other artists, particularly female stars, was felt for years to come.

While the title of the album makes it clear that this was Jackson setting her own creative agenda, it wouldn’t have been made possible without co-writers and producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who worked across the record. But, speaking to MusicRadar in 2021 about how the collaboration came about, Jam admits that it was kind of by chance.

“There was another artist that we were supposed to be working with and - at that time - that artist didn’t want to work with us!” he explained. “So John McClain, who was A&R at A&M calls and says ‘Sorry, the artist doesn’t want to work with you. Guys, I’m really embarrassed. Is there anyone on the A&M roster that you’d like to work with?’

“So we said ‘Send the roster,’ and this was before the internet, so he had to literally send the roster, and we were going down it and we said ‘Janet!’. And he said ‘Oh wow, that’s cool. Do you want to do two songs? Three songs?’ And we said ‘We want to do the whole album,’ because we felt like we knew what we wanted to hear Janet Jackson sound like.”

This was around the time that Jam and production partner Terry Lewis were working with Cherrelle, who had scored a 1984 debut hit with I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On. During this time, Jam and Lewis’s engineer walked out on them, but rather than hire another one, they decided that they were going to become self-sufficient and do the job themselves.

The problem was that they didn’t have any experience: “Cherelle was the guinea pig of our experiments,” admitted Jam. “We were blowing speakers up. Blowing headphones up… plugging the wrong thing in. She was so understanding. We learned to use the studio doing [1985 single] Saturday Love [a duet with Alexander O’Neal], and Control was the album after that and we ended up engineering it all ourselves.”

The duo were still kind of making it up as they went along, though, so decided to record in the way that they’d seen Prince do when they were working with him as part of The Time.

“When we recorded with Prince, Prince would always record in the red, on the VU meter,” Jam told us. “So we were like ‘We need to record like Prince records,’ so we recorded everything in the red. We were so proud of ourselves!”

The mood changed, though, when they took what they’d done to mixing engineer Steve Hodge.

“When Steve Hodge came up to mix it, he put the tape on and says ‘Who engineered this!?’ And we were so proud, we said ‘We did!’ And he said ‘Everything is recorded way too loud.’ We said ‘Yeah, we meant to do that - that’s the way Prince records.’ And he was like ‘Yeah, but what kind of machine does Prince use? An Ampex? On Prince’s machine zero is zero… Your machines are set to plus six… Zero is already six dB above… and you’re pinning the needles…’ And we were ‘Can it be saved?’ and he was ‘Yeah, yeah. But I’m going to have to come up and teach you guys how to record.’

There was an upside to Jam and Lewis’s technical naivety, though – their ‘mistake’ actually contributed to the way that Control ended up sounding, and made its songs jump out of the speakers.

“The way Control sounds is an accident because we didn’t know what we were doing and then Steve just basically saved us,” said Jam. “He made it sound great. But it made the record sound frantic. That’s what Prince always said. When your ear hears distortion, it thinks something is loud. He always wanted his records to sound loud and a little bit frantic on the radio. That was what Control had.”

Tickets for the Control 40 show are on sale now. A release date for the movie has yet to be announced.

Back in June, Universal Audio announced the release of Topline Vocal Tune, a native vocal pitch correction plugin that lifted the vocal-tuning engine from the company’s existing Topline Vocal Suite plugin and made it available as a standalone tool.

Today, the company has made Topline Vocal Tune available for Apollo and UAD-2 hardware, meaning that owners of compatible products can run the plugin on their hardware's internal DSP. This enables ultra-low-latency pitch correction when monitoring vocals while recording, without relying on your computer's CPU for processing power.

UA launched Topline Vocal Suite in 2024 as an all-in-one vocal chain, offering producers analogue-emulating preamps, saturation, compression, EQ and a multi-effects section alongside its vocal tuning capabilities.

Topline Vocal Tune strips that back to the tuning engine alone, which UA says offers “ultra-low-latency” performance, allowing vocalists to perform live through the plugin or monitor pitched vocals without delay while recording.

According to Universal Audio, Topline Vocal Tune can handle everything from transparent and natural-sounding correction to the recognizably hard-tuned effects associated with hip-hop, R&B and pop.

At the core of the plugin is a single Tune control for dialling in correction speed, ranging from subtle to fully hard-tuned. The Natural section adds Elastic and Sustain controls, which are intended to keep a vocal in tune while maintaining the slides, vibrato and tonal character that pitch correction can often mess with.

Topline Vocal Tune's Shift panel features Pitch and Formant controls for conventional pitch- and formant-shifting that can be blended in with a Mix dial, while the MIDI Repitching function lets you input melodies and harmonies through a MIDI keyboard to retune your vocals with your playing.

The plugin's Topline Key Finder detects the key and scale of your session automatically, saving time on set-up, and the Scale Define mode can be used to lock pitch correction to custom scales.

"When singers feel good in their headphones, that's when great takes happen," says Julian Prindle, Senior Product Designer at Universal Audio. "Topline helps artists stay confident and in the moment while giving producers everything they need to shape vocals behind the scenes."

Topline Vocal Tune is priced at $99 with an introductory discount of $79, and the purchase includes both DSP and the native version, which runs on macOS and Windows in VST/VST3/AU/AAX formats.

Find out more on Universal Audio's website.

Billy Joel has announced the death of an early colleague and bandmate: Jon Small.

The 77-year-old singer-songwriter posted a brief message on Instagram, simply writing: “RIP Jon Small”. He didn’t mention a cause of death.

Who was Jon Small? Well, long before he found solo fame, Joel was a member of a late-60s psychedelic rock group called The Hassles. The band released a couple of albums on United Artists before Joel and Small, Hassles’ drummer, left and formed a hard rock duo, Attila.

Attila lasted just one album, and it wasn’t just a lack of commercial success that caused their split: Joel had begun an affair with Small’s wife.

In the 2025 documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, Small and Joel discussed the subject in some detail. “Elizabeth was very important to me, but I think I was not the guy she hoped I would be,” Small said. “I kept seeing that Billy was not the same guy. Something was the matter.”

“And Billy one day came up to me, became a little honest, and said to me, ‘I’m in love with your wife.’ So it was a very devastating thing for me, because these were basically my two best friends.”

Joel, for his part, admitted in the doc that he felt deeply guilty about what happened. “They had a child. I felt like a homewrecker.” In fact, he felt so upset that he attempted suicide by drinking furniture polish. In a scene straight out of a novel, it was Small who saved the piano man’s life and drove him to hospital, an episode Joel depicted on the song Tomorrow Is Today from his 1971 debut album, Cold Spring Harbor.

Small went on to become a renowned video director and incredibly he and Joel patched up their friendship. In fact, the videos for two of Joel’s signature hits, Uptown Girl and Tell Her About It, were both directed by Small and he was later nominated for a Grammy for his work behind the camera on Joel’s Live At Yankee Stadium concert film.

The director also worked on videos by Whitney Houston, Kenny Rogers, Reba McEntire and Garth Brooks, as well as the Run-DMC/ Aerosmith promo for Walk This Way that was one of the defining videos of the 1990s.

In a Facebook tribute that has been posted by a friend, it was noted that “his behind-the-camera impact on popular music goes far beyond just one artist. As one of the first music video directors and producers of the MTV era, Small helped define the format with landmark videos and live concert recordings.”

Gene Simmons didn’t believe that Bob Dylan would agree to write a song with him – but to his surprise, all it took to make it happen was a couple of phone calls.

In a new interview with Michael Moynihan of The Moynihan Report, Kiss star Simmons discusses various aspects of his career, including his relationships with former bandmates Ace Frehley and Peter Criss and his approach to songwriting.

Asked to name the best song he ever wrote for Kiss – the one he is proudest of – Simmons gives an unexpected answer. He picks We Are One, a track from the band’s 1998 album Psycho Circus.

Released in the wake of a hugely successful reunion tour, Psycho Circus was the first Kiss album since 1979’s Dynasty to feature all four of the band’s founding members – Simmons (bass/vocals), Paul Stanley guitar/vocals), Frehley (lead guitar/vocals) and Criss (drums/vocals).

It was later revealed that Frehley and Criss had only minor roles in the recording of this album, with session musicians assisting Simmons and Stanley across the majority of tracks.

We Are One was composed by Simmons alone.

“It was gonna be the single,” he says, “but it had too many harmonies and the lyrics were non-Kiss: ‘Everywhere I go and everyone I see/My face looking back at me/We are one.’ Kind of a cornball lyric that I believe in.”

In the same interview, Simmons refers to a story told by Paul McCartney about the writing of The Beatles’ classic Yesterday. McCartney said that when he composed the melody to Yesterday it seemed so familiar to him that he initially believed it was from somebody else’s song. Simmons had a similar experience when he wrote the song 1000 Dreams for his 2004 solo album Asshole.

“I’m not McCartney,” Simmons says, “but the same thing happened to me. ‘I dream a thousand dreams/I’d walk a million miles for you…’ The lyric and the melody came to me and I was convinced that this song [already] existed.”

That 2004 solo album also included the song Simmons wrote with Dylan.

He tells Michael Moynihan: “I always wanted to write with Bob Dylan. A crazy idea. Why would he pay attention to a peanut like me when he’s written iconic songs that were covered by Hendrix and The Byrds… everybody?”

Nevertheless, he made the call to Dylan’s then manger, Jeff Kramer.

“I call Kramer and I say, ‘I’d like to write songs with Bob.’ And he was about to say words to the effect of ‘Are you on crack?’ But guess what? The phone rang and it was Bob. ‘Where do you live? I’ll be up in a day or so.’”

Some days later Dylan duly arrived at Simmons’ home in Los Angeles.

Simmons recalls: “An unmarked car shows up, Bob gets out with an acoustic guitar and, ‘Hi, how are you?’”

He adds: “By the way, I recorded the songwriting session. I put out a box set, The Vault, 167 tracks, and one of the tracks is Bob and I exchanging ideas about how to write songs.

"The song we wrote together was Waiting For The Morning Light. I’m so proud of it. And I couldn’t get Bob to write the lyrics after we finished it.”

Simmons also confirms that he and Paul Stanley are continuing to create new Kiss music.

He reveals: “We wrote something with a world famous producer, I don’t want to mention his name, and it went okay, but Paul on his own came up with a thing we recorded, Kiss, and that will be coming out at some point.”

During the early ‘80s, synth-pop was gathering pace, made possible by the greater availability of synthesizer technology. Under the mentorship of Daniel Miller and Mute Records, Depeche Mode’s 1981 debut album release Speak & Spell was both popular and acclaimed. Thanks to the singles New Life and, of course, Just Can’t Get Enough, Dave Gahan, Martin Gore, Andy Fletcher and Vince Clarke were propelled to stardom very quickly… but with a number of caveats.

By their own admission, Depeche Mode seemed to accept every invitation going, be it interviews or television appearances, regardless of how bizarre or inappropriate the environment.

They were, oddly enough, no strangers to children's television, which contributed to their initial teeny-bop appeal (it wouldn’t last!). This was partly to blame for a backlash in the music press, accompanied by the inability for some to accept that a band formed of synthesists and a singer (let alone a lack of guitars), could actually represent a creative force-for-good. Regardless, the tracks they were putting out were selling. Depeche Mode were here to stay. But not all its members were…

It all became a bit too much for Vince Clarke. Just a whole calendar month after the release of Speak and Spell, Clarke announced his departure from the band, citing a difficulty with the attention brought by the band’s fame.

“I never expected the band to be this successful,”Clarke told Smash Hits. "I didn't feel happy. Or contented. Or fulfilled. And that's why I left.”

With the departure of the band’s main songwriter, Martin Gore's role increased, while the keyboard chair left vacant by Clarke’s departure was filled by another talented musician, Alan Wilder.

Having studied music, particularly the piano to a very high level during his educational years, Wilder capably contributed both in the studio and as a live player.

It should therefore be no surprise that the new lineup’s first visit to Blackwing Studios, in January 1983, would yield a successful single which was quickly released within the same month, on the 31st of January 1983.

Although later dismissed by the band, on a sonic level, Get the Balance Right! marked a perfect transition between the analogue content of Speak and Spell, and the sampler-driven and digital output that followed on DM’s subsequent albums.

Composed by Martin Gore, Get the Balance Right! stood alone as a single - it was never included as part of an album, although it has subsequently gone on to be included on many compilation albums, and has grown into a fan-favourite.

The song also follows many of early Depeche Mode's stylistic and theoretical traits; it makes extensive use of exceptionally strong hooks and phrases, with very minimal use of chordal content, which can make it very difficult to establish its harmonic landscape.

The introduction begins with minimal electronic bongos and other electronic percussion sounds, supplied by a Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer, before a web of synth-lines appear, conjured by an ARP 2600 and a Wilder’s state of the art Synclavier.

Above the percussion we hear two notes - Eb and Bb - which occupy the tonal territory, with a degree of rhythmic insistence. The Bb falls to a G halfway through each bar, but it provides no concrete evidence of our key, until we hear the bright synth riff, which employs the notes Eb, D and C.

This riff favours C minor (an ever-popular synthesist’s key), but it is not until the bass puts in an appearance, that we can be absolutely certain of our tonal centre.

Before the entry of the vocal, we hear our second synth riff doubled by two sounds, the most notable being the bright bell-like upper tone, which moves up the scale from Eb to Ab, before heading south and resting on the note C.

It's another strong riff, compounded by the insistent bass part, which jumps in octaves, passing from notes C, to Bb and A.

This also presents a slight conundrum from a theory perspective, as there is an implied change of harmony with the shift in the bass part to the note A.

We can interpret this as a chord of F/A, which is chord IV in C minor, so it makes sense. It could also be interpreted as a diminished chord, containing the notes A, C and Eb - also notes that are included in a chord of F7.

The verse structure is pretty simple. The accompaniment remains static on the note C, although there is an implied note G in the mix too. This could simply be included as part of the programmed synth sound.

Unusually for a Depeche Mode track, a guitar makes an appearance, albeit processed through a synth and phased out of time to make it sound ‘more interesting’.

The vocal part itself falls from the note C, to a Bb and Ab, before hitting the notes G and Eb. It's reminiscent of the earlier bass part, and of the James Bond theme, which plays heavily on the use of a minor 6th interval; the note Ab, in this case.

The verse section is short, at only eight bars in length, heading straight into the chorus section, which is heralded by a pianistic riff and the harmonised lyric. This is also the moment when the bass part rises up to an Eb, before falling to a D and back to C.

One of the most surprising elements here, is that it is only after the first verse and chorus that we hear what we could regard as the strongest riff or hook of the entire song.

It adopts echoes of previous riffs, but it is the ultimate ear-worm, and the one that will stick with you for the rest of the day!

As the song proceeds, the verses are often punctuated by synth stabs, creating moments of interest as we move from section to section.

After two rounds of verse and chorus, we head to the bridge section, which is strange and curious in equal measure.

The backbeat, which is consistently provided by a Simmons snare, stops momentarily to make way for individual monosynth parts, as they weave a texture which is quite reliant upon some of the elements we have previously seen and heard, such as implied diminished chords.

It shouldn't work, but work it does, and is beautifully juxtaposed against the rest of the song, particularly with the reappearance of the main riff, which signals a return to the song’s previous construction.

After a further verse and chorus, we are then treated to a compilation of all of the riffs, as they compete for dominance in the repeat-to-fade finale of the song.

Whether it was due to the band’s urge to move on from the Speak & Spell era or not, Get the Balance Right! signalled an evolving outlook for Depeche Mode in the studio.

According to Alan Wilder, there was a real sense that their writing and production should begin to embrace 12” club mixes, which is certainly something which is represented in the overall sound of this track.

Despite the affection held for it among fans, the band themselves soon became dismissive of what they’d created…

“We were just thinking of making a stomper. But it's my least favourite track,” Dave said in a 1985 issue of Melody Maker. Martin Gore agreed… “I hate it, and I wrote it. This was the only time we HAD to turn out a single whether we wanted to or not.”

The Oasis documentary Don’t Look Back In Anger hits the big screens this week and we’ve already found out one eye-rolling nugget from the film.

According to the Daily Mirror, Liam Gallagher missed the final rehearsal before the band’s opening night of their 2025 tour in Cardiff and only rocked up to gig 20 minutes before show time.

One can imagine Noel’s reaction. Indeed, in the film the guitarist says: “We’ve got a chance here to change the narrative of the band. We have got a chance to fix all the shit that we have just let drift apart.

"The final run-through, the night before the thing. Didn’t see him. Ohh. The next thing is one of the biggest fucking moments of our lives, right? And he’s not rehearsed.”

“I am like, oh yeah? He turns up 20 minutes before the gig - ‘alright, what’s the catering like?’.

Noel continued: “I am like, how the fuck is this… what the fuck. And then he grabs my hand and I am like ‘what the fuck?’. And off he goes, sounding like he was 30 years young.

"Just rocked up and did it. And I am like ‘you absolute mad…’”

In other Oasis news, a treasure trove of recordings of the band, many of which have never been heard before, are up for auction, despite the objections of the Gallaghers.

The collection was amassed by Huw Richards, who worked as the group’s sound engineer between 1994 and 2001. It features over 100 hours of rehearsals, soundchecks and live concerts, including the only known recording of their 1996 gig at Loch Lomond. The auctioneers in question – Littleton Auctions of Evesham – have set aside a guide price of between £1.2 and £1.6 million.

However, the Gallaghers are said to be far from happy about the situation. Understandably so, given the tapes are likely to contain all sorts of arguments between Noel and Liam, just at a time when - publicly, at least – all is sweetness and light between the brothers.

Ben Homer, Littletons' managing director, has said in a statement: “The Oasis camp is aware of the auction and has expressed concerns, which is entirely understandable given the scale and significance of the material.”

Apparently, the tapes are in a good enough condition to be released. It should be said that they just cannot be put up on YouTube by whoever buys them. Oasis retain the intellectual property rights, meaning the audio collection cannot be commercially exploited without the band’s cooperation.

Burning Man finished today (7 September), and the sad news is that two people are reported to have died during the week-long festival.

The festival organisers have identified one of the two people as 60-year-old Craigh Mann. They have said that he was found dead by his friends at his camp at around 3pm on Saturday (5 September). A cause of death has not been provided as yet.

The organisers have put out a statement saying: “Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with the participant’s family, friends, campmates, and all those affected by this loss.”

Mann’s death comes a couple of days after another man died at the festival, which is held annually in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

According to the organisers, the man in question received lifesaving measures before being transported to the on-site emergency care centre, where he was pronounced dead. His identity has not yet been released.

It comes a year after the festival ended in a murder investigation. The 2025 Burning Man was memorable for all the wrong reasons. Initially, the festival was hit by dust storms, 50 mph winds that demolished camps and then flash floods. More serious was the killing of Vadim Kruglov. The 37-year-old was found fatally stabbed on the Saturday night of the festival. As yet, no one has been arrested in that case.

Other incidents at this year’s edition include one punter who was seriously injured earlier on in the week after falling from the 55-foot Nest Tower at the Square One camp. Other than that, there has been one arrest related to domestic violence and 34 connected with drug dealing, the latter of which is par for the course at a countercultural gathering such as Burning Man.

The festival has been running since the mid-1980s and is unique in terms of US mass festivals in its emphasis on participation and the creation of art during its duration, not to mention its strict no-corporate sponsorship policy.

Though once a purely underground event, it has faced problems of scale in recent years, as well as accusations that it’s become a magnet for influencers and celebrities. Interestingly, whereas once tickets sold out in minutes, they are now noticeably slower – in 2024, the event’s CEO Marian Goodell went public with a plea for donations to secure the festival’s future.

There are some people whose advice is worth listening to and, if you’re a musician, legendary keyboard player Greg Phillinganes is probably one of them.

Alongside synth programmer Anthony Marinelli, Phillinganes has recently been in the studio recording a bang-on recreation of Baby Be Mine, a song from Michael Jackon’s Thriller that was written by Rod Temperton. Both Marinelli and Phillinganes worked on said album, and it was during a discussion about that time that Greg dropped his truth bomb.

It came as they recalled what producer Quincy Jones used to tell them: “You’re never more of a musician than you are a human being”. This is something that Jones was himself told by Nadia Boulanger, his famous music teacher, and Phillinganes suggests that it’s still as valid today as it ever was.

“That comes in the music,” he says. “That’s infused in the music.”

Explaining further, Phillinganes argues: “You have to respect the groove, and there’s certain musicians that understand that and there’s certain ones who don’t. And you can tell – you can tell if they’re respecting it or not. No question. It’s painfully obvious.”

Reiterating what he’s just said, Phillinganes adds: “Respect the groove – by any means necessary, respect the groove. Or else, stay home. What’s the point?”

Addressing the camera and wagging his finger, he says: “Yeah, I’m talking to you. Stay home. If you can’t respect the groove, just stay home. Wash dishes. Sell shoes. What’s the point if you can’t respect the groove? [If] You can’t respect the groove, you can’t respect people. If you can’t respect people, what’s the point. Yeah, I said it.”

Consider us told.

Phillinganes’ respect of the groove is certainly evident during his runthrough of Baby Be Mine. He plays a variety of synths, including the actual Minimoog and Prophet-5 that were used on the original recording.

The drums and synths were programmed by Marinelli, and the guitar played by Jarrett “Bueno” Goodly. Ray Monteiro, Jesse McGinty and Garrett Smith made up the horn section.

Brian May has revealed how a guest appearance on a track by Steve Cropper turned into a tribute from one legendary guitarist to another.

Speaking on his YouTube channel, May says that he developed the song My Angels Are Calling as a eulogy following Cropper’s death at the age of 84 on 3 December 2025.

“I don’t usually explain songs,” May states. “But I kind of wanted to tell you the story about this one because it means a lot to me, this particular song.”

May begins by acknowledging the huge influence that Cropper has had on generations of guitarists.

As a member of Booker T. & The M.G.’s, Cropper backed a host of major stars including Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Sam & Dave. Cropper also co-wrote several iconic hit songs – most notably Redding’s (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay, Booker T. & The M.G.’s’ Green Onions, Pickett’s In The Midnight Hour and Eddie Floyd’s Knock On Wood.

Says May: “Steve Cropper, of course, is a seminal white blues guitarist. One of the people who influenced everybody who’s playing rock ’n’ roll today. One of the very first people to bend strings that way, and we were all like, ‘Whoa!’ I mean, I was a kid, and for us it was like making a guitar talk.”

The 2024 album Friendlytown, credited to Steve Cropper & The Midnight Hour, featured a guest appearance from May on the track Too Much Stress, with another famous player, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, contributing throughout the album.

May says of Too Much Stress: “It’s part of Steve Cropper’s lineage. And I’m proud to be part of that.”

Nevertheless, May admits that when he was sent a demo track for Cropper’s following album he was initially reluctant to collaborate on it.

“I was like, ‘Well, I'm not sure if I can do it right now. I’m not really in the mood. I’m not really hearing it. I don’t relate to what you’re saying. It doesn’t quite click with me, so maybe I have to pass on this one.”

However, when May received a second track – featuring Gibbons – he was immediately intrigued by the rhythm parts played by Cropper.

“He’d done these wonderful little riffs,” May says, “and it’s a very odd chord sequence. It goes all the way up, and it goes all the way back down again.”

May was working on a new arrangement for this song when he received the news of Cropper’s death.

He recalls: “The very day, like the following week, when I’m supposed to go into the studio to record this song, I hear that Steve’s passed away. Very sad to hear, and immediately my brain clicked into a different place – I thought, ‘This song has to be a memorial for Steve.’ If I can do it… I’m going to sing it as if I were him. He’s already played on the track, which is great.”

He continues: “As soon as he’d gone, I could feel it, and in just a few hours I had the thing written out. And my idea was, ‘Okay, Steve had a great life.’

“I knew him a little. I wish I’d known him better. But he was a very accepting guy, a very philosophical guy, very spiritual, and I figured he’s he’s thinking, ‘I’ve had a great life and I’ve done some great stuff. You know, I’m really grateful… but I’m realising now I’m hearing my angels calling me, so I’m really realising it's time for me to go. But I’m okay. I’m all right about that. I’m ready to go. I’ve done great stuff, and I’m hearing my angels. They can take me away. They’re going to take me to heaven. So what could be bad about that? So this is a happy song, really.’”

The result is My Angels Are Calling. It features on the recently released Steve Cropper & The Midnight Hour album Watching The Tide. The album’s title quotes the lyric to (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay, as do the lyrics May wrote for My Angels Are Calling.

“I figured he would be taken away to the place where he feels like he’s in heaven,” May says. “He’s back at his favourite moment in time, sitting on the dock of the bay.”

Speaking on behalf of countless guitarists, May concludes with a smile: “Steve, oh boy! If it hadn’t been for you, I don’t think any of us would really have been here doing what we're doing.”

The Arts Council has launched a new fund that should be of interest to any up-and-coming artists, DJs, groups, producers and well, anyone who makes music who isn’t yet conspicuously successful.

It’s called the Music Creators Growth Fund and according to the public body it’s “a new investment programme designed to support growth across new music.”

The fund will offer “direct investment” of between £10,000 and £20,000 so that established music creators can pursue new opportunities and undertake "ambitious creative plans" in their careers.

The key word there is ‘established’. The Music Creators Growth Fund isn’t for absolute beginners. It’s open to artists, collectives, bands, musicians, DJs, songwriters or producers who in the words of the Arts Council, can "demonstrate a minimum of three years’ active music creation practice with a proven track record."

You also need to have earned £5,000 from music for at least one year in the last three and have professional support in place, which may include management, publishing, label representation, agent, lawyer. However, the Arts Council say that if you don’t currently have any of those, “you will have an opportunity to explain how you access professional advice, support or networks, and why a formal team structure is not currently part of your practice.”

The fund, which has a total pot of £3 million, is one of three funding schemes that the Arts Council are setting up as part of the government’s Music Growth Package, which was announced back in July.

In a statement, the Arts Council’s Director of Music Claire Mera-Nelson said: "Through our work to develop the Music Growth Package, we've heard about the vital role played by direct access to investment. Insights shared by the people who bring new, original music to audiences around the globe confirmed our belief that we could do more to realise the full potential of the UK's talented creators.”

“We look forward to receiving applications from artists and music creators across the country, working in every genre, and investing in sounds and voices that reflect the diversity of the UK’s communities."

The first funding round runs from October 1 to 29. For more information about the fund and the ins and outs of how to apply head over to the Arts Council website at artscouncil.org.uk.