Features archive
September 2026
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43 articles
- September 18
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- “People will say they are really Phil Collins records. Fine. If that’s all they can hear, they’re not listening properly”: How Eric Clapton’s ‘80s reinvention peaked with Behind The Mask – a song written by Ryuichi Sakamoto and dumped by Michael Jackson
- “Thom and Jonny used to write together a lot. So when we got to rehearsals, they had their parts worked out and I used to be like, ‘Where do I fit into this?’”: Ed O’Brien on shaping his Radiohead role
- Don't Wanna Miss A Thing? It's MusicRadar's Quiz of the Week #22!
- September 17
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- “He told us how it would change the band’s trajectory, it could be an albatross around our necks – but we wanted a radio hit”: The Wonder Stuff tell us how they spawned an uplifting indie classic
- “I’m 42 years old; I’ve only just realised you can change the tuning to make it easier to play stuff!”: When Death Cab for Cutie shared their guitar rig with us
- “One day Mike played a riff on the guitar, with an echo, and I suddenly sang, ‘She seems to have an invisible touch – yeah!’ It came into my head fully formed”: How Genesis created their biggest hit – with a writing process “like jazz”
- September 16
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- “We were with Rick Rubin, drinking vodka and grapefruit juice, and we wrote that song in about five minutes”: How the Beastie Boys created the most ironic party anthem of the ’80s
- "This is just the beginning": Nopia launches on Kickstarter and hits $1.4m in 24 hours
- “I walked into the studio and she was sitting at the piano, playing the song we were going to cut that day. When you’re in a room with greatness like that, it’s hard not to be affected in a visceral way”: Steve Lukather hails the genius of Joni Mitchell
- “He said, ‘Maybe you could build German gothic cathedral architecture out of guitar.’ And I just kind of went, ‘Okay…’”: The odd ways that David Bowie expressed musical ideas to his players
- “With tracks over 10 minutes… forget about it – nothing's going to happen on streaming services”: Can ambient music survive the era of the one-minute song?
- “You wouldn’t have expected me to state Blur and Radiohead as influences. But I get bored and I sit around and play along to songs that I like”: Slipknot’s Jim Root on his unlikely guitar inspirations
- September 15
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- “I was listening to a lot of the ‘80s stuff. Born In The USA, Bryan Adams, Def Leppard, Siouxie and the Banshees, The Cure and The Smiths... These people were crucial to me”: Brian Fallon on how ‘80s rock lit the fuse for his star-studded solo album
- “It nearly didn’t happen. After I wrote the song, me and Diplo had a massive fight and I threw the hard drive at his head from the top floor”: How M.I.A. and producer Diplo broke the rules – and channelled Pink Floyd – on her mega hit Paper Planes
- “No one is quite sure how the acid got inside the synth”: Can using psychedelics make you a better musician or producer?
- “By the end, you go ‘Oh my god, I love this guy’”: We speak to director Garth Jennings about capturing Pulp’s remarkable return in a new film
- “I reached out to Biggie. He came through. He sat in the studio and vibed, no paper, just listening to the music and rapping off the top of his head”: Jay-Z recalls his early days with The Notorious B.I.G. and the fatal beef between Biggie and Tupac
- “It’s the first long-form video - I can’t think of a band that would let their lead guitarist fall flat on his face in the opening scene”: Giles Martin on the enduring importance of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night
- “It was an absolute balls-up fiasco. It almost ruined me”: Hans Zimmer, Dr Who and the worst charity record of all time
- September 14
- September 12
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- “I don't think most people realise the song was aimed at parents who drank and told their kids not to do drugs”: How Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane went down the rabbit hole and created a psychedelic classic
- “He was for me what Elvis probably was for most other people. His style on every level was fantastic. Doing all the things we would later come to associate with Jimi Hendrix”: Buddy Guy at 90 – how the world’s greatest living bluesman transformed guitar
- September 11
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- “Paul might have been miffed, but I think he was more upset about not singing on the choruses – John did his own backing vocals”: How The Beatles managed to come together one final time and create one of their funkiest grooves
- Ready or not, here I come: It's MusicRadar's Quiz of the Week #21!
- “The lights were already out in the studio. We were all ready to leave. Some people had their jackets on”: How Queens Of The Stone Age found their album centrepiece at 2am, a “little drunk” and ready to go home
- September 9
- September 8
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- “The guy who delivered it ran over it on the way out of the driveway... it didn’t break or anything!”: QOTSA's Troy Van Leeuwen on his Squier Telecaster XII’s Custom Shop origins – and when he learned it was going to be (literally) roadworthy
- “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”: How this chart-angled Depeche Mode cut signalled the band’s innovative future
- September 6
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- “I said, ‘This guy has had 18 top 10 singles. He’s a great writer.’ But there was something not quite there”: Drumming legend Carl Palmer recalls how an eccentric pop star almost ended up singing for ’80s rock supergroup Asia
- “In the past, what I do would not have been considered production - it would have been considered noise”: When a young Skrillex explained how he made his early dubstep bangers
- September 5
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- “Somebody threw a live chicken on stage, and I threw it back, thinking it would fly. It didn’t, and the audience tore it pieces!”: Alice Cooper’s crazy early years – and the hit song that Gene Simmons described as “a sucker punch in the kidneys”
- “I have them because they sound so bad – if it sounds good on them, then it’ll sound good anywhere”: Erol Alkan on the gear that he trusts above all else
- September 4
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- “At The Troubadour, she broke the seal on this brand new tune. And I was sure I knew the song already because it was such a classic immediately”: The iconic Carole King song that she believed was heaven-sent – and how James Taylor took it to No 1
- Back to school: It's MusicRadar's Quiz of the Week #20!
- Laney welcomes all instruments to the party with refreshed Audiohub lineup – feature-packed combos for guitars, bass, keys and more
- “Everybody knows the song, but it’s not like one of the Beatles songs that gets played all the time – It was a little more off the radar”: Bryan Adams on the key songs that defined his youth
- September 3
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- “I got over the fact that I was lumbered with the bass – I realised the control you had over the band. They can’t go anywhere, man. Ha! Power!”: Revisiting a classic Paul McCartney interview from our archive
- “We were talking about Lana Del Rey the other day”: Dani Filth tells us about his dream collaborators, Cradle of Filth’s reliance on Dropbox and his surprisingly stripped-back home studio
- September 2
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- “Eddie would say, ‘Can you hit this note?’ I’d hit it and everybody would go, ‘Wow!’ And from there I could just see Eddie opening up as a musician and a songwriter”: Sammy Hagar recalls the making of Van Halen’s classic album 5150
- “I don’t feel like we were trying to do a new Cream”: Legendary guitarist Robin Trower on the ’80s supergroup he created with Jack Bruce
- “I was jamming and I heard 'Bam!' – I looked at the stage and there was an open Buck knife sticking in the screen of my cabinet”: Slipknot and Korn on the perils of life on the road
- September 1
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- “We’d made this record that was so far to the left of Rumours. And when it didn’t sell 16 million copies, that was hard. There was a lot of anxiety”: Lindsey Buckingham on the highs and lows of life with Fleetwood Mac
- “I've got somewhere between 80 and 90 guitars and I'd say 75 percent of them are Les Pauls. It seems ridiculous - but they all have a unique purpose”: Slash on his enduring devotion to the Gibson Les Paul