Features archive

October 2025

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45 articles

October 31
- “I’ll never forget it – the three of us were almost in tears. We’re getting to sing this, Elton and Bernie’s whole history up to that point”: Davey Johnstone on the making of Elton John’s 1975 masterpiece, Captain Fantastic And The Brown Dirt Cowboy
- “Brian Johnson was screaming. A producer working in the studio next door came in and said to Mutt, ‘You’re gonna kill him!’ Mutt said, ‘Yeah! But doesn’t it sound great?’”: How AC/DC’s singer suffered during the making of the classic Back In Black
- “Eddie definitely wasn’t functioning very well during the Van Halen reunion tour in 2004. It was one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in my life”: Sammy Hagar’s regrets about his final tour with the band – and his true feelings about David Lee Roth
October 30
- “It made me want to write a song that, if it ever got back to the people going through those troubles, might just help them a little bit”: The intricate genius and powerful subtext behind a Beatles acoustic gem
- “It’s the heart of my studio”: The story of the Akai MPC, from the MPC60 to the MPC Live III
October 29
- “Occasionally I've been worried that I've poisoned myself but it's always turned out fine”: We speak to the artist who has just made an album from dangerous plants
October 28
- “Nobody knew you could do that, we always try to do things to break the normal order”: More than 30 years before Teenage Engineering, Kraftwerk saw the future of portable music-making and released a pocket calculator instrument
- “To my knowledge, no one else has tried a project like this”: Reinier Zonneveld is playing B2B with an AI clone of his “musical brain”
October 27
- “It’s a pretty bizarre day when you find an email from Robert Smith in your inbox”: Electronic polymath Daniel Avery on the genre-blurring magic of new album Tremor and remixing the Cure
October 26
- “He was clearly intrigued by this ‘happening' music'": When David Bowie turned junglist on Little Wonder
October 25
- “We’re all sitting around waiting. Finally, Jeff strolls in. Mickie says, ‘Jeff – where's your guitar?’ He’s like, ‘Oh, it's in the van on its way to Leeds!’”: When a classic track was created out of chaos by Donovan, Jeff Beck, Ronnie Wood and friends
October 24
- “I remember sitting down with Roger and saying, ‘Roger, this is insane!’”: The strange lost album that Pink Floyd abandoned in 1975
October 21
- “I’ve seen people say that I hate John Bonham because he stole my stuff. Yeah, right. I don’t hate anyone! Knock on wood, I’m still here to enjoy it all”: The legendary heavy rock drummer who influenced Bonzo, Alex Van Halen, Tommy Lee and more
October 20
- “I went to the label and said, ‘This song sucks. This is not the song I wrote.’ They said it sounded fine. I did not agree”: When a songwriter went to war with her producer and record company over the track that became a ’90s anthem
- “In the hands of lesser musicians, this would simply sound sloppy. In D'Angelo's hands, it’s perfectly imperfect – the precise right amount of wrong”: A music professor breaks down the genius of D'Angelo
October 19
- The history of virtual analogue synthesizers
October 18
- "She was in that cavewoman outfit, doing her dance with a big wig and the two dancers going at it. I’m like: ‘This is really not me.’”: Heaven 17 on their unlikely role in Tina Turner’s comeback
- “Each of our albums had a synth that really excited us. The first was a Prophet ‘08, the second was the MS-20, and this time the Moog Matriarch is on every track”: Maribou State on Hallucinating Love
- “For about three days, just listening to this thing, I was looking at Kevin and the other two guys saying ’What have we created? This is brilliant’“: The difficult bossa nova birth and enduring brilliance of 10CC’s I’m Not In Love
October 17
- “All I did was crank it up to 10 and start to rock and roll. When you stand in front of a Marshall stack and crank it, nothing sounds better!”: The 10 greatest Ace Frehley songs from his glory days with Kiss
- “When the record company heard it, they said, ’This is a number one smash record. Let’s not put it on a B-side and lose it’”: The low-budget recording story of one of Madonna’s most iconic hits
- “We lost our minds at various stages of this”: How the Avalanches gradually constructed the stunning follow-up to Since I Left You over 16 years
October 16
- “I said, 'Fred, I don't know if this is going to be possible to sing,' And he went, 'I'll do it, darling’ - downed a vodka, and went in and killed it”: How Freddie Mercury took on death itself for Queen’s majestic final single
- Just why are some producers so obsessed with tape?
- “It’s the sound of a pro-level studio within a tiny, portable shell”: IK Multimedia’s new ARC ON·EAR finally allows headphone-based producers to mix with a pro studio sound, wherever they are
October 15
- “All contemporary pop utilising computers and samplers owes something to the innovations of Trevor Horn”: How Trevor Horn’s anonymous electronic group - the Art of Noise - revolutionised sample culture
- Singular Sound’s BeatBuddy 2 is here, your drummer just got an upgrade
- “We said, ‘We’re calling the band Leonard Skinner!’ And everybody laughed and clapped and thought it was cool. So we kept it”: The early days of Lynyrd Skynyrd recalled by legendary guitarist Gary Rossington
- “You don't need all the latest plugins and everything else. I think that my best instrument is the mind”: Adam F on making '90s DnB classic Colours
- “The average upright contains around 12,000 parts - and 80% of those are moving”: How to record a real piano perfectly
October 14
- “I never realised just how difficult it was for Alex. He had to rethink everything”: When Geddy Lee’s obsession with synthesizers made Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson feel sidelined in his own band
- How Beck and Nigel Godrich’s “simple and clean” philosophy produced one of the best-sounding albums of the 21st century
- “Everybody knew Jeff was a great drummer. It was the same when I joined The Who to replace Kenney Jones – and when I was with Mick Jagger, playing the Stones tunes that Charlie played”: How Simon Phillips succeeded in replacing Jeff Porcaro in Toto
October 13
- “Before we knew it we had a sound no one had ever heard before”: How David Bowie created one of the greatest songs of all time via a range of innovative recording techniques
- “It's an arcane 18th century German form of rap. I really enjoy it because it's an opportunity to say some quite bizarre things that I wouldn't necessarily be able to sing about”: The inside story of the Gorillaz classic Feel Good Inc.
- “A user-friendly investment into a world-class monitoring arena”: Why EVE Audio’s all-new EXO Series is the ultimate modern monitoring solution
- “Dolly turned it down - and I’m glad that she did because what Kate did on it is brilliant”: How Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush brought one of the most emotive songs of the 1980s to life
- Echotown Studio: A world class recording studio in the stunning Dorset countryside
October 10
- "I brought the synth into the studio with Harry, flicked through the presets and there’s one called Harpoon Dream. I took the delay off and we were like… ‘yeah!’": Kid Harpoon on the Moog One preset that made Harry Styles' As It Was
October 9
- “Years from now kids are going to be like, ‘Damn, remember when Kendrick and Drake battled?’”: The story of Kendrick Lamar's ferocious, chart-smashing diss track Not Like Us
October 8
- “My producer Mickie Most said, ‘We can’t let a wild boy like Hendrix in there. We have to control the song, Don’”: ’60s icon Donovan tells the story of the “heavy metal folk” song that connects him to Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles
October 6
- “I think every serious fan of hard rock music would love Stargazer. It’s one of those all-time epic masterpieces. It’s Ritchie Blackmore in his most experimental mode”: How guitar hero Blackmore created his magnum opus with Rainbow
October 4
- “We wanted to make the barrier as low as we could": Sequential on designing the Fourm and continuing Dave Smith's legacy
October 3
- “It was my least-favourite song on the record and I didn’t think it should go on there. It felt throwaway”: How Sheryl Crow learned to love the song that became her breakthrough hit
October 2
- “I didn't even want it to be on the record, honestly. How wrong could I have possibly been?”: How Linkin Park created their biggest song that has now racked up billions of streams