It looks like Spotify will finally launch an AI remix service early next year.

According to a report in the Financial Times, the Swedish streaming platform are looking to get the service underway in the first quarter of 2027, with the unveiling possibly happening around the time of the Grammy Awards in February.

The idea is that, for an extra $4 to $5 per month, users would be able to use AI to create their own remixes – you could press a button and transform a classical piece into a dance track, or cover one artist in the style of someone else.

Before Spotify goes ahead with its plans, there are still some ruckles it needs to straighten out. Whilst the streaming firm has struck deals with Universal Music Group and the French music company Believe for the remix feature, it is still in negotiations with the two other majors – Sony Music and Warners.

Another challenge may be persuading major contemporary artists to take part in the scheme. Though artists will have a veto on whether they want their work to be transformed in this way, many may be reluctant.

Olivia Rodrigo was just one who told Hollywood Reporter in October that “I would never use AI in any of my music, absolutely no.” While artists will receive a share of extra fees when their songs are remixed by AI, that may not be enough for some who – quite understandably – want to retain control over their body of work.

It may well be that Spotify will go ahead even if they don’t get the agreement of Sony, Warners or a large proportion of current artists. All will no doubt be revealed over the coming months...

Released on this day (2 November) in 1967, the seminal album Disraeli Gears was the apex of Cream’s short but brilliant career – a masterpiece created by the legendary power trio of Eric Clapton (guitar, vocals), Jack Bruce (bass, vocals) and Ginger Baker (drums).

Epic in scope, Disraeli Gears fused the blues and jazz together in a searing, psychedelic blast of 100-watt Marshall tone.

Jack Bruce passed away in 2014, but two years before his death he gave a detailed account of the album’s making to Guitarist magazine. Here we collect those exclusive insights from Bruce and poet Pete Brown – who wrote classic tracks such as Sunshine of Your Love together – about the making of the album.

“I think that the whole band was kind of misunderstood by everybody,” Bruce said. “And it gave us a sort of an edge, you know? I think Eric thought he was going to have this little blues trio and he would be sort of like Buddy Guy standing out the front. And then I thought: great, I can be a composer and get some songs out there. And I think Ginger just wanted to conquer the world, basically, like Genghis Khan or somebody. We had different ideas.

“Meanwhile, the management – the dire management of Robert Stigwood – was thinking, ‘Let’s milk this for all it’s worth because it ain’t going to last. So let’s get them out there and make them play every toilet in the US for as long as they’ll last before they go barmy or kill each other.’”

During Cream’s brief two-year lifespan, they had it all: in Eric Clapton a supremely talented guitarist whose only serious rival was Jimi Hendrix; in Jack Bruce a star bassist with the chops and vision of a jazz maestro; and in Ginger Baker a volatile but brilliant drummer capable of welding their contrasting talents together.

Yet, initially, some doubted whether the band would produce anything more notable than a short-lived stream of cash.

Pete Brown, the visionary London poet who co-wrote some of Cream’s greatest tracks, including Sunshine of Your Love and White Room, was the fourth key figure in the story of Disraeli Gears.

Brown recalled: “Cream’s management thought it was going to be an all-star band that would fill the blues clubs, and maybe be a nice festival attraction. They never thought it would spread; they never thought it would get to America; they never thought we’d have hit songs. They had absolutely no bloody idea. And when you look at it, it’s a miracle that it happened.”

Power trio

As Clapton later noted, whatever tension existed between the trio “all just turned to magic” as soon as they started to play.

Jack Bruce was convinced that they had all the ingredients they needed to forge a new sound.

“I did have grandiose conversations with Eric at the very beginning of the band, trying to come up with a kind of musical philosophy,” Bruce said. “Eric was really into the blues and he knew a lot of stuff that I didn’t know. So I was being a bit presumptuous by saying, ‘I love the blues, but I’d want to take it a step further and use the language of the blues as a way to write music for us.’

“Eric understood, but he probably thought I was getting a lot on myself to say something like that,” he admitted. “But I was always like that anyway, when I was young. I always thought I could really change the world through music.”

Pete Brown argued that despite Clapton’s abundant talent and ferocious chops, working with jazz-trained players such as Bruce and Baker helped take his playing to another level.

“The one thing they never did, which I’m sure they got from [Alexis Korner band leader] Graham Bond, was that they didn’t put Eric down,” Brown said. “They didn’t say, ‘You don’t know enough about chords’, or, ‘You don’t know enough about jazz to play with us.’ What they did say was: ‘You’re a terrific player with terrific feeling, and if you play with us then this thing will happen – the magic will come.’”

And it did.

Cream’s first album, Fresh Cream, was released in December 1966, reaching No 6 in the British charts and a single, I Feel Free, was picked up by ATCO – a subsidiary of US label Atlantic Records.

Ahmet Ertegun, the head of Atlantic, was influential and had helped launch the careers of Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin. A way to break into America beckoned, although as Jack Bruce ruefully recalls: “It’s very important to remember that Cream were originally signed to Atlantic as a rider on the Bee Gees contract.”

Nine chaotic dates at the RKO Theater in New York followed in March 1967, plus one day at Atlantic Studios, where they recorded a Buddy Guy track, Hey Lawdy Mama, that would later evolve into Strange Brew. The next time Cream returned to New York, a month later, it would be to record Disraeli Gears.

Midnight express 

When the band returned to London, Jack Bruce and Pete Brown met up to write. With studio dates for Disraeli Gears just days away, the pressure was on to deliver new material.

“They were milking us for every penny, so we never had any time to rest, or write, or live,” Bruce said. “So Pete and me had to come up with some material for what was to be the next record. But we didn’t know what it was going to be. We were just desperately trying to find time to write songs, which usually entailed staying up all night in between gigs.”

Bruce had already worked with Brown on earlier Cream hits, such as the single I Feel Free, for which Bruce scored out the song’s pop-rock melody on paper like a composer, while Brown provided the epic poetry of the lyrics.

Brown recalled: “I don’t know why they needed me, because Jack and Ginger are both very, very intelligent people – and Eric too, though Eric wasn’t writing, hardly. But then, I suppose I had a lot of chops as a writer by then. I was a well-known poet, and I wrote and practised a lot.”

Bruce and Brown resumed their writing partnership as preparations for Disraeli Gears hit full swing, with songs written in the small hours and road-tested at gigs.

“Basically you’d come up with a song, then go into the studio and see if the guys liked it,” Jack Bruce recalls. “And if they did, it would go straight into the live act.”

Working on Sunshine

This high-intensity approach was how Cream’s most famous track, Sunshine Of Your Love, came about.

As Bruce explained: “Pete and me were doing an all-night session at my place in Hampstead, at the flat, and we hadn’t really come up with anything. And I picked up my double bass, which was lying there, and played the riff of Sunshine.

"Pete looked out the window and it was getting near dawn so he wrote, ‘It’s getting near dawn.’ So there we had the first part, which is the part where the riff is, and we had the words of that. But we didn’t have a song. So we took it into rehearsal and Eric came up with the turnaround. Pete wrote the words for that and we had a song.”

Brown stated: “Later on our writing became more complex. But in that period of time it was a question of getting good alternatives: stuff that Jack felt happy singing. He had to feel good about the sounds of the words.

“Sunshine Of Your Love really is a song about being on the road,” he added, “coming home after you’ve done a gig and arguing with your girlfriend, who’s going to be in a receptive mood to have a nice little scene after you’ve been doing your hard work. It’s a gig song.”

Some may be surprised by how workmanlike the writing process was, with gigs and deadlines driving the creativity more than the band’s experiences. As Brown explained, even the more tripped-out tracks on Disraeli Gears, such as She Walks Like A Bearded Rainbow, were not actually inspired by drugs.

“I remember this very psychedelic person saying to me when Disraeli Gears came out, ‘Ah, that lyric, So many fantastic colours, on SWLABR. You must have been tripping when you wrote that.’ And I said, ‘No – actually, it’s a completely sexual image to me. It’s about sensuality, and the colours that come to mind when you’re having great sex.”

Return to New York 

When May came around, the band were exhausted, but otherwise ready to cut the album. Although Bruce and Brown had done the lion’s share of the songwriting, Clapton had teamed up with Australian artist Martin Sharp to write Tales Of Brave Ulysses, which became a pillar of Cream’s live set. Sharp also designed the striking cover art for Disraeli Gears, highlighting what a melting-pot of ’60s counterculture the album was.

When the band got to New York to record at Atlantic’s studio there, they were joined by two studio professionals who would further shape the sound of Disraeli Gears – producer Felix Pappalardi, who would later play bass in Mountain, and crack sound engineer Tom Dowd. With just one week of studio time in which to cut the album, their contributions would prove vital.

As Bruce said: “The philosophy at Atlantic Studios was not, ‘Let’s have this really great song’ or, ‘Let’s have this riff.’ It was, ‘Let’s make a record.’ Tom Dowd was one of the all-time geniuses of recording and that’s what you had to do: you had to convince him that what you had was a proper record.”

Dowd and Pappalardi took the band’s gig-focused song arrangements and helped sculpt them into something that was more complex and satisfying for album listeners.

“When we played Sunshine Of Your Love live, before we went in the studio, it was much more of a straight-ahead rock feel,” Bruce recalled. “But Tom Dowd came up with an idea. He said, ‘Why don’t you play it like in those Westerns where the Indians’ drums go: Boom boom boom.’ So Ginger tried that. Then it gave it a new life.”

Brewing up trouble 

The move to Atlantic Studios saw Cream’s music evolve rapidly – it introduced record label politics. Bruce was dismayed to find that Clapton was viewed as the band leader by Atlantic executives, which influenced how another famous track from the album, Strange Brew, was recorded.

“The way that came about was quite strange because we had already made a recording of a blues song called Hey Lawdy Mama,” Bruce said. “But then Felix Pappalardi was told there had been an executive decision that Eric had to front the band and I was going to be the bass-player guy who stood in the background quietly.

“So all of my material was sort of ‘non grata’, and they had to come up with a song for Eric to sing. So Felix took Lawdy Mama home and came back the next day with Strange Brew, which he had co-written with his wife Gail. So that was how that came about. I was well pissed off, because the bass part that I had didn’t fit the new structure of this new song, although it was used.

“It still pisses me off because it sounds like the bass is playing the wrong tune throughout – which it wasn’t for the original thing. It was very much against my wishes, but I had absolutely no power in the band, in the studio – because Ahmet Ertegun was more or less in love with Eric. He thought Eric should be the frontman.”

The intervention by Atlantic executives was a reminder that, despite the obvious vision and talent of the band, Atlantic still had their eye on commercial hits driven by the fan-appeal of the band’s star guitarist. Nonetheless, when the week’s recording ended, it was clear to anyone with functioning ears that the band had cut a game-changing rock album.

Hitting top gear

When Disraeli Gears went on sale in late 1967, it was a hit in Britain – reaching No 5 in the charts – and an even bigger success in the States, where it went to No 4. This prompted a punishing round of touring in America that signalled the beginning of the end for the band.

“It was enjoyable until they broke the band’s spirit by putting us on the one-nighters for seven months without anybody to help us,” Bruce recalled. “That was what destroyed us – that and the lack of PA.”

The band cut two more albums at a breakneck pace in 1968 – Wheels of Fire and their aptly named final recording, Goodbye. When Cream played their last British gigs at the Royal Albert Hall on 26 November, everyone in the band was exhausted and ready to move on.

Disraeli Gears had undoubtedly been the highwater mark of the band’s astonishing two-year career.

Looking back, what did Bruce feel about the album?

“I think you always would like another go,” he concluded, philosophically. “You’re never quite happy about it. There’s definitely things that could be changed and obviously you only hear the mistakes. But once it’s finished, it’s finished.”

• “It was very much against my wishes but at that moment I had absolutely no power in the band, in the studio” – Cream and the troubled birth of Strange Brew

The poignancy of Love is a Losing Game - the Ivor Novello-winning fifth single from Amy Winehouse’s final album Back to Black - only seems to deepen with the passing years. To mark twenty years since Back to Black was released, we’re taking a closer look at this pivotal track, examining how Amy channeled her own heartbreak into one of her greatest ever songs.

Before we look at the song, however, we need to understand the context in which it was written. Amy’s second album Back to Black was made during a period of intense personal tumult for Winehouse. Her tempestuous relationship with boyfriend Blake Fielder-Civil had come to an abrupt end - leaving Amy despondent.

It was a factor, amongst other things, that pushed her deeper into an unhealthy fixation with alcohol and drugs. The pair had split a mere six months after beginning their relationship, with her mercurial partner returning to the arms of his ex. In the fall-out, Amy's feelings of utter dejection spurred her to write the lion’s share of Back to Black.

Meanwhile, Amy's label Island Records were growing impatient. Her debut, Frank, had been released to rapturous acclaim in 2003, however Winehouse was retrospectively disappointed with the record’s ‘smooth’ and polished sound - and what she perceived as a bungled marketing campaign.

“You couldn’t rein her in, you couldn’t tame her and there was no point in trying to. She wouldn’t comply, rightly or wrongly, and with the benefit of hindsight that’s someone that knows her sense of self,” remembered Island Records’ A&R legend Darcus Beese in an interview with Music Week. “She was one of those artists where you just had to get out of her way.”

Her next album then, would be something altogether more self-directed, and more in sync with Amy's increasingly varied musical touch-points. Back to Black’s 11 songs would present a more honest reflection of Amy Winehouse in the mid-2000s, both as a blossoming artist and as a battle-worn, fallible human being.

Initial recording sessions with Frank producer Salaam Remi bottled some true magic. Most notably, Remi and Winehouse crafted the sublime Tears Dry on Their Own (which we’ve explored in depth in a separate feature), Some Unholy War, Me & Mr Jones, Just Friends, and Addicted. But it was the portion of the record that Amy made with her new friend, upstart producer Mark Ronson, that would lead to Amy’s strongest-ever clutch of songs.

Meeting Ronson - with whom she shared a publishing company - the pair quickly hit it off on a creative level.

“Even though I wasn’t a big producer at that time I was just happy to have any gig,” Ronson told NME. “I remember people being like, ‘Oh, you’re working with Amy Winehouse, good luck with that. I heard she’s been working on that album forever’.

“The six songs that we did on Back to Black together, we did in five to seven days,” Ronson continued. “I always think, ‘Damn, I wish it did take longer’, because I would have more memories. Not that we didn’t spend plenty of time hanging out after that, but it was just so quick.”

Working with Ronson at his New York studio, Amy and Mark developed six new songs. Firstly, the gloomy, piano-based title track alongside lead singles Rehab and You Know I’m No Good. Then came Wake Up Alone (co-written with Paul O’Duffy) and He Can Only Hold Her (co-written with Richard and Robert Poindexter).

But, perhaps the song that would go on to have the most abiding resonance would be the shimmering Love is a Losing Game.

Written while Amy was processing the emotional shock of being abruptly discarded by the man with whom she had planned a future, Winehouse poured her feelings of fragility, and a sense of detached resilience, into a lament for love more broadly.

Lyrically, she pointed to the idea of love as being akin to a game, with two players taking a gamble on something impossible to know the outcome of.

In Amy’s hard-learned case, it was a risk that hadn’t paid off…

For you, I was a flame
Love is a losing game
Five story fire as you came
Love is a losing game
One I wished I never played
Oh, what a mess we made
And now, the final frame
Love is a losing game

To compound the analogy, Amy’s allusion to a ‘final frame’ recalled her penchant for a pool table, amid references to poker chips and a losing hand of cards. It was a strong and fitting conceit that revealed much about Winehouse’s own philosophy.

Beyond the personal specifics, Love is a Losing Game also spotlighted Amy’s wisdom. In her words, there's a sense of cosmic inevitability to the fractured promise of love. Her experience seemed to prove a universal truth, that love is always a game we're all destined to lose, one day…

Though, though, oh, I battle blind
Love is a fate resigned
And the memories, the memories mar my mind
Love is a fate resigned
Over futile odds
And laughed at by the gods

Despite the contemporary media portrayal of Winehouse as an off-the-rails hell-raiser, Love is a Losing Game's lyrics demonstrate, perhaps more clearly than anything else, that she was a mature songwriter beyond compare for her age.

Ridden with contemplative emotion, in conjunction with the wistful, jazz-informed chord structure that Amy had crafted the song within, it was firm evidence that Amy's abilities were flourishing.

“Amy’s musicality… she was like a monster, and I definitely want everybody to know that,” Mark remembered when addressing the crowd during an Amy Winehouse tribute performance alongside Yebba at London’s The Roundhouse, ahead of performing Love is a Losing Game.

“The chords were so complicated and jazzy, I was like, ‘Man, you just play this song. I don’t even know what I’m doing right now.’ So she did.”

Feeling that the song’s simplicity needed to be retained, Ronson recorded Amy performing the song with just an acoustic guitar.

It was perfect.

“I’d become so attached to it that I felt there was no way we could top that emotionally. But there was a part of me that still wanted to hear the sonic of reverbed drums in the background,” Mark remembered in an interview with Performing Songwriter.

Ronson turned to a couple of members of Amy’s then-backing band, the Dap-Kings to figure out if it was possible to develop the arrangement without tarnishing the song’s beauty.

“I sat with [Dap-Kings band members] Gabe [Roth - bassist/bandleader] and Homer [Steinweiss - drummer] and asked them, ‘How can we put a beat behind a ballad like that and not remove any of the sentiment?’ That was a real challenge: coming up with a beat that wouldn’t detract from the song and still become an integral part of it. With a song like Rehab or You Know I’m No Good it’s a lot easier because you can put something hard behind it that’s going to drive the track. Coming from DJ’ing, you’re always thinking about the beat but sometimes I have to shut down that side of my brain and remind myself it’s not about that.”

Realising that the jazzier heart of the song needed to be brought to the fore, Ronson, Winehouse and Roth devised a more instrumentally-coloured arrangement. A steady drum performance was laid down by Steinweiss, with a distinctive fill that opened the song and recurred before each verse. Crystalline electric guitar chops were applied by Binky Griptite and Thomas Brenneck, and understated bass from Nick Movshon.

Wanting to emphasise the emotion even further, Ronson and conductor Chris Elliot penned an orchestral backing. Originally, this was a little more overwrought than the subtler final result.

But Ronson wasn’t sure how Amy would take the idea, having previously heard her being dismissive of the concept of cheesy-sounding strings. Particularly considering the personal stakes behind this stark and deeply emotive piece.

Mark tried his luck…

“I said, ‘I’ll pay for it then. If you don’t like it, we can take it off’,” Ronson remembered in an interview with Red Bull Music Academy. “She was like, ‘Don’t waste your f**king money.’ She really just wouldn’t have it, so I had to do it without telling her. I did the strings without telling her. I went and did the arrangement.”

Having spent a day mixing the new arrangement, Mark was nervous about playing back the results to Amy.

“She didn’t know I’d put the strings down until we’re mixing the final thing. At that point we’d been mixing the song for the whole day. If she’d just come in and said, ‘Take the strings out,’ it would’ve been a pain in the ass and kind of ruined the record. So she’s listening with her head down in the console for two and a half minutes. And I couldn’t see the expression on her face and I’m like, ‘Oh, please, let her like it.’ And she just jumps up at the end of the song and goes, ‘Come here Ronny-chops,’ and gives me a hug”.

Although Amy wasn’t without notes…

“Without missing a beat she says, ‘Just take that Mariah Carey harp bullshit out at the third breakdown, alright?’ and walks out of the room. So that was that,” Mark recalled.

The story was also told to The Fader: “She had her head down on the desk, and I was kind of terrified. When the song was done, she looked up, beaming, and said, 'Okay, you can leave it in.'”

Amy's long-awaited second album was worth the wait, becoming nothing short of a phenomenon. Topping charts globally, it would, of course, go on to scoop five Grammys and sell over 20 million copies.

Love is a Losing Game would go on to become one of Back to Black’s immediate highlights. For many, it was the record’s emotional centre - the crux of the album's thematic exploration of heartbreak.

“I had never really made a hit record before,” Ronson reflected in an interview with the BBC. “It didn’t sound like anything else that was on the radio. It certainly didn’t seem like something that was going to be this huge commercial success. It just felt raw and honest.”

Sadly, Winehouse’s unexpected death at the young age of 27 on July 23 2011 tragically ended her journey. Love is a Losing Game, in fact, stands as her final ever single release - chosen as the fifth song to be put out from Back to Black on December 10 2007, well over a year since the best-selling album was released. Thusly, it entered the charts at a lowly 46 - as most people were already very familiar with it.

Even Amy herself apparently saw little point in releasing the single. Personally, things had changed a lot. Now reunited and married to Blake, she infamously never turned up for the song's planned video shoot.

Lifelong best friend Tyler James shared in his book My Amy: The Life We Shared, that on that day, the onus had been on him to ensure the increasingly unpredictable Amy attended the shoot.

“A huge, elaborate set was hired at Pinewood Studios, a street had been built, there were plans for fake rain,” said James. “As usual, it was all on me to try to get Amy there. Amy had stayed with Blake the night before; I got there in the morning, there were a hundred people waiting for her, and [director] Phil Griffin was frantic. ‘Please, please, Tyler, you’re the only person who can get her here.’”

After calling Winehouse and telling her how brilliant the design for the video looked, Tyler could hear Winehouse asking Blake whether she should go along. Blake said no. Options for how to proceed were limited…

“Me and Phil had to make the video for Love Is a Losing Game,” James recalled. “We had editing equipment installed in a spare hotel room and put the montage of images and performances together. We wanted Amy to be involved. She did come in once. She said, ‘I don’t care, you and Phil do it, you know what I like,’ walked out the door, swung the door back open, and said, ‘Make sure you put in loads of Blake!” And that’s why he’s in it.’”

Interestingly, musical titan Prince soon recognised Love is a Losing Game's beauty, and took to performing the song in his live set during his 21-night residency at London’s O2 arena in September 2007.

“I love the song,” Prince said during a press conference, and answered in the affirmative when asked if he’d be up for a live duet with Amy herself.

Once she learned of the prospective offer, Amy was flabbergasted. “I’m going to Minneapolis - see you later,” she joked when MTV informed her of Prince being up for a duet. “I hope I can do it, though - I’ll drop everything to do that,” she said.

Although they never shared the stage during Prince’s main stint at the O2, Winehouse did join the Purple One during one of his legendary after-parties on September 22 2007 at the neighbouring IndigO2 venue.

Prince and Winehouse performed the song together on stage (only this grainy footage remains, sadly) with the former in true form - elaborating on the song with a slew of slinky guitar lines and a vibrant solo. “I got tears - I’m gonna have to get my shades on,” Prince said after they’d finished their rendition.

Love is a Losing Game cuts to the very heart of Amy Winehouse, and remains a testament to her talent. Rightfully, it won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically And Lyrically in 2008. In the wake of her death, the song's emotions only hit harder.

“I was with her two nights before she died and I spoke to her on the phone two hours before she went to sleep for the last time,” remembered bassist and live musical director Dale Davis in a new interview with The Times. “I wasn’t worried. Completely the opposite. We had such a nice conversation. She rang up, she said, ‘I’ve been watching YouTube clips of myself, I can sing, can’t I?’ I went, ‘Yeah, of course you can sing, you’re the best.’”

Pioneering techno producer Juan Atkins has died aged 64, his management company has confirmed.

Atkins was due to perform at Mexico City’s Yu Yu Club on the night of 31 October, but is reported to have been found unresponsive in his hotel room before his scheduled appearance.

Born in 1962, Atkins was one of the most notable figures within the Detroit music scene that birthed techno in the 1980s. He was a member of The Belleville Three, alongside school friends Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, a trio of producers widely credited with inventing and nurturing the genre in its early years.

Atkins released some of his earliest music as a member of Cybotron, a duo he formed at the age of 18 with Richard “3070” Davis. Cybotron’s fusion of influences from funk acts like Parliament-Funkadelic and, notably, Kraftwerk, helped shape the synthesized, groove-focused sound of early techno across influential tracks including Alleys Of Your Mind and Clear.

Later work included releases as Model 500, including the 1985 classic No UFO’s. Atkins also formed close ties with the second generation of producers shaping a European take on techno in Berlin, most notably with Basic Channel founder and dub techno pioneer Moritz von Oswald, who he later collaborated with as Borderland.

Atkins came of age at a time when synthesizers and drum machines were becoming more widely available, a fact that was very influential on the toolkit that shaped the sound of early techno. His first electronic instrument was a Korg MS-10, but gear including the ARP Odyssey, Sequential Pro-One and Roland TR-808 and TR-909 all helped shape the sound of his early releases.

Speaking to MusicRadar in 2012, Atkins said that his all-time favourite instrument was the Boss DR-55 drum machine. “It was the most quantum innovation that ever happened. If I had to pick one machine, that would be it. Being able to program a drum machine was a huge thing."

Black Sabbath’s Paranoid was an album of happy accidents and happenstance. It wasn’t even meant to be called Paranoid. Until the record label intervened, Sabbath were going to all it War Pigs – and even then War Pigs was a compromise.

Guitarist Tony Iommi had intended War Pigs to be titled Walpurgis, to mark the ‘Satanic Christmas.’ That was a little too satanic for Vertigo’s tastes. But then what did they expect from the band who had invented heavy metal just a few months earlier, its eponymous title-track warning of “Satan coming round the bend…”?

Well, history tells us that Black Sabbath relented, and looking back they can have few regrets. Walpurgis would have been a cool title, for the song, for the album – plenty of metal bands have taken up the name in the years since. But Paranoid – that is, as they say, the song that made them famous.

Speaking to Total Guitar in 2010, a conversation you can read in full on MusicRadar, Iommi admitted that he was caught off-guard by its runaway success. Here they were getting all musically adventurous, expanding their sound, heaving doom metal into existence with Electric Funeral, exploring the terror of the wide-open spaces with War Pigs, and the spaced-out stoner jam Planet Caravan, and this three-minute throw-and-go rocker was getting all the attention.

“We really didn’t want a hit single with Paranoid because in them days, to have a hit single was selling out,” said Iommi. “We didn't want a hit single and we didn’t expect it to be a single. We just did it as a filler track.”

Again, this was at the behest of Vertigo, whose interference was most unwelcome but, arguably, justified by the success of Paranoid, both the song and the album.

“We were recording the album and the label suddenly said, ‘You don’t have enough songs!’” recalled Iommi. “We didn’t know what to do and they asked us to come up with another song. Within a few minutes I came up with the riff to Paranoid, played it to the other guys and they liked it, so off we went. That’s how simple Paranoid was – we wrote and recorded it in a day.”

This was 1970, an analogue era. There was no Voice Memos app on your phone. There were no laptops for recording. Sabbath didn’t have anything to record on as they played. But maybe these limitations played their part in making the Iommi metal’s riffmaster general. “In those days, you didn’t have tape recorders,” he said. “You had to play riffs, keep playing them and remember them.”

It helps when the riff is memorable. Paranoid had that. In that sense, it fit into what Sabbath were doing. This is an album packed with riffs. It is for many – MusicRadar’s guitars editor included – the definitive heavy metal album. It also was the most radio-friendly song they had.

“Most of the tracks on the album were quite long and a lot of people probably wouldn’t have played them because they were too long,” said Iommi. “Paranoid was an ideal track to release, being short and up-tempo. It just took off.

“We were as shocked as anybody when that got in the charts. We thought, ‘Bloody hell, there’s all this stuff here we’re trying to do musically and then something as simple as Paranoid gets in the charts and everybody remembers it!”

Paranoid wasn’t the only song to just come straight off the practice room floor. Planet Caravan came together with Iommi getting in touch with his jazz-prog side and going for it.

It was the album’s sleeper hit, presenting this other side of Sabbath, a work of psychedelia for the acid trippers and the perma-stoned. Ozzy Osbourne put his vocals through a Leslie rotating speaker unit. Planet Caravan played well to those who had gone to see 2001: A Space Odyssey two years earlier and leaned into the tagline, ‘The Ultimate Trip.’

“Planet Caravan was about playing something different,” said Iommi. “It was one of those songs that, when we were in the rehearsal room, I just start playing it and thought, ‘this is nice.’ I never thought that it might be too far ‘on the other side’ for Sabbath to do. If we liked something that was a bit different, we just played it. That attitude gave me an opportunity to play a couple of jazzy things that weren’t planned.”

And back then, Sabbath never overworked it. Like their eponymous debut LP, Paranoid was recorded in days, not weeks. Rodger Bain puts mics in the right places and hit record. For Planet Caravan, Bill Ward stepped out from behind the kit to play congas. They were on a tight schedule but they sure sound relaxed on this one, as though something heady was being passed around in the studio. Iommi was just glad of the chance to stretch out a little and platy.

“I do like the blues and jazzy stuff, which you can hear on Planet Caravan,” he said. “I think any guitar player likes to play that sort of stuff, and I suppose the blues and jazz have influenced my playing more than most, so I try to get some of those flavoured licks in without even thinking about it.”

Tony Iommi’s first solo album in more than 20 years, From The Dark, is out now via BMG. Iommi recently discussed what drives him on at the age of 78 and admitted, “I carry on wondering when I’m gonna keel over”.

• Tony Iommi interview part one: Gear, tone and early Black Sabbath

It’s Halloween, folks. Congratulations, we made it. The witch hat knobs are officially in season. Pumpkin spice lattes are back on the menu – please enjoy responsibly. Oversized spiders constructed of nylon and wire are descending from doorways, and the gear just keeps on coming.

If there is a common thread, a narrative through line that joins this month’s biggest gear releases together, then we haven’t found it. But maybe there was some seasonal spice to Fender’s decision to launch John 5’s signature Phantom Telecaster – and his Ghost Tele – this month.

And if Halloween really is the heavy metal Christmas, then Christmas came early on Wednesday when Epiphone announced its refreshed and upgraded Prophecy Series. It comprises its most high-performance metal guitars yet – and the range includes a baritone Les Paul that promises a whole lotta chug from that extra scale length and those custom-voiced Fishman humbuckers.

There has been a lot of cool stuff. Kim Gordon’s signature Jazzmaster is definitely cool. The new bedroom-friendly Katana-25 combo from Boss is definitely cool. And Mark Hoppus’ limited edition Stoned Fruit Jaguar Bass is definitely cool (especially if you like stickers).

This was the month that brought us the big news from Fender that the American Professional Series had landed with a raft of player-friendly updates. Ovation brought back the Viper for a limited anniversary run, and MXR teamed up with Sonic Research for its first-ever guitar tuner. Gibson’s Flying V celebrating 50 years of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers also arrived, and it will surely break some hearts.

But what was the shut-up-and-take-our money release? Jackson’s Legend Series, in which it recreated four of the most iconic metal signature models of all time for Randy Rhoads, Scott Ian, Marty Friedman and David Ellefson would be in the running.

The aforementioned Kim Gordon Jazzmaster, with its Seymour Duncan JB/Fender Alnico V single-coil pickup configuration, has to be in the conversation too. And then PRS Guitars made its play for the shred/metal market with the all-new Tekton series – six and seven-string guitars, with or without Floyd Rose vibratos, all with the Maryland brand's high-end attention to detail.

There was much to get excited bout. Here we are going look at some of the highlights from October’s gear releases, and having just written “definitely cool” three times in the one paragraph, we've summoned something Candyman-style into being that fits that very description…

Dr No Effects Blameshifter

We are suckers for a Queens Of The Stone Age pedal, official artist tie-in or not. Often these stompboxes come with the promise of unlocking the band’s arcane tone secrets, such as the Skeleton Key from Funny Little Boxes.

But the Blameshifter is different. This is a clever little high-end routing box and buffer to mark 10 years of collaboration between QOTSA guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen and Dr No Effects, and is also available as part of a specially designed capsule collection that comes boxed, limited to 10 units worldwide (only eight of which are available to the public), and bundled with TVL’s Raven and Octavia stompboxes.

The idea for it came from QOTSA inside joke. What if there was a pedal that could shift a mistake to another player’s amp? Well, this doesn’t shift blame per se but it does offer the player with a complex live rig options. There’s one input, one buffer, four outputs, a finger that points to where you want the signal to go.

Each unit is handmade, and at $375, it is not the cheapest signal switcher on the market, but it gives the finger to passive units by promising to preserve your tone with that buffer.

Check it out at Dr No Effects.

• “The guy who delivered it ran over it on the way out of the driveway... it didn’t break or anything!”: Troy Van Leeuwen on his Squier Telecaster XII’s Custom Shop origins – and when he learned it was going to be (literally) roadworthy

Boss Katana Artist Gen 3 10th Anniversary Edition

The big Boss news from October was most definitely the Katana-25 launch, but the figured maple veneers and translucent blue finishes on these 10th anniversary Katana Gen 3 amps is all kinds of boutique, dispelling the notion that digital guitar amps have to look dull and functional, and as aesthetically utilitarian as the dashboard on a family sedan.

We could use more amp design like this.

Find out more at Boss.

Seymour Duncan Iron Maiden Signature Set and the 50th Anniversary Duncan Distortion

If Halloween really is the heavy metal Christmas then here’s a gift for all Fender Stratocaster owners who celebrate, with Dave Murray and – for the first time – Janick Gers’ signature pickups. Both are available as a standalone set or bundled with a pre-loaded pickguard.

We could go into the magnets, the wiring, all these design details, but isn’t that quite redundant when we all know what they sound like? And if not, crack open a cold one, stick on Nights Of The Dead, Legacy Of The Beast and have yourself a good time.

This time the bass guitar players are not left out; there’s a Steve Harris set for dropping into your Precision Bass (wedge monitor for planting your foot on, sold separately).

Pretty cool, and as speaking as someone who owned No Prayer For The Dying on cassette, I dig the packaging.

Lastly, we are getting unconfirmed reports that the Janick Gers set contains some kind of technology that helps you balance a Strat on your index finger. Of course, if you’re more of a full-fat humbucker kind of player, there’s also the 50th Anniversary Duncan Distortion – a limited edition doozy from the Custom Shop.

See Seymour Duncan for more details.

Walrus Audio Storybook Series Lore MK II and Fable MK II

For the pedalboard that has everything, or at least has all the essentials covered, the latest from Walrus Audio’s Storybook Series offers something completely different – a pair of sequels that take your sound somewhere surreal.

The Lore is a reverse delay and reverb with pitch-shifting capabilities, while the Fable is a granular delay pedal with a number of tools for creating off-kilter textures, glitches, swells, weirdness and textures.

And while effects like this can seem a little niche, there is so much to explore, and so many sounds, that they’re not just the preserve of the bedroom soundscaper.

Check ‘em out at Walrus Audio.

Neural DSP Morgan Amps Suite X

Okay, this is a big one for those who prefer their boutique tube amps to be digital, in-the-box and ready for recording at any time of the day or night.

The X edition updates the user experience, adds a bunch of design features to make it more easy to use, and it’s a free update to existing users – check it out at Neural DSP.

Fender x Pokémon Telecaster and Strat

Fender has teamed up with Pokémon Center for this 30th anniversary MIJ Strat and Tele that was originally thought to be a Japanese exclusive – and one that you actually had to enter a lottery to be in with a chance to buy – but is now coming to the US and UK some time later, details TBC.

Now, yes, this is for Pokémon fans and collectors, but the most interesting thing from our perspective is this onboard 8-Bit effect that is activated via a push-push function on the volume knob that gives the guitar tone some retro arcade texture.

 Taylor Guitars Legacy Koa

Taylor adds a pair of Hawaiian koa models to its Legacy Series for the very first time, but they’re strictly limited to 52 instruments each – 52 because these mark the brand’s 52nd anniversary.

We’ve got a jumbo-sized Legacy K65e LTD 12-String that’s koa all over and is so highly figured it looks animated even in still photography. And there’s the spruce-topped Custom Legacy K10 LTD dreadnought, koa on the back and sides. They're pricy, exquisitely crafted, and typically Taylor.

“Koa has been part of the Taylor story for a long time, and bringing it into the Legacy Collection felt like a natural fit,” says Andy Powers, Taylor’s chief guitar designer, president and CEO. “One of these guitars looks back to the 12-strings that helped put Taylor on the map, and the other takes a fresh look at the Dreadnought. Both are a celebration of what this wood can do.”

Find out more at Taylor Guitars.

Positive Grid Spark Cab 2

A welcome expansion of the Spark digital tone universe, these upgraded FRFR Speakers are available in Pearl or Black and are packing 140-watts, and promise tighter low end and more detail and clarity thanks to its retuned acoustics.

It is obviously designed for Spark users but has stereo combo XLR/TRS inputs and a balanced XLR for connecting any amp modellers, amps or outboard gear you like.

There is also an XLR output for sending your signal to a PA system, plus USB power outputs for Spark MINI, Spark Pedal, and Go, and DC power for your Spark 40 and Spark 2.

The price is $399 and you can find out more at Positive Grid.

Emerald Guitars X20

What happens when your favourite guitar brand just gets up one morning and decides – what the fudge! – time to discontinue every single model we make?

Well, if it’s Emerald Guitars, you just hang on a tick, because the Irish brand has no intentions of going anywhere. It was just time to clear the decks, and the X20 is pretty radical and futuristic carbon-fibre build available with steel or nylon-strings, and as a 12-string guitar.

For more details head over to Emerald Guitars.

Ernie Ball Music Man Ball Family Reserve editions of the John Petrucci Majesty, and Albert Lee Collection 2026

It has been all systems go at Ernie Ball Music Man as it reminds us that John Petrucci’s Majesty is one of the most state-of-the-art high-end electric guitars ever made, and that Albert Lee’s signature model is one of the most slept-on.

Lee’s guitar is quintessential EBMM, a guitar with a angular, retro-futuristic body shape that looks straight out of the late ‘50s. The finish options are magnificent.

But setting aside the aesthetic, its googie vibe, the Albert Lee model is a quietly radical and super-versatile HSS electric that crosses the streams with a pair of Lee’s signature Seymour Duncan single-coils and a DiMarzio humbucker at the bridge.

As for the BFR Majestys, you’ve got a six- and a seven-string option, both finished in a Blonde Roast or the delightful Chocolate Grizzle (a celebration of the fact Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man is getting a Criterion release on Blu-ray?), and each numbered and signed by Petrucci himself.

Yes, we’re talking $5,999 for the six-string, $6,199 for the seven-string, but these are collector-grade instruments (only 75 and 30 units of each respectively), and have the DiMarzio Dreamcatcher/Rainmaker humbucker combo plus the Fishman Powerbridge piezo, the curliest of maple tops, everything totally on point.

Find out more at Ernie Ball Music Man.

DiMarzio unveils The Chopper and Cruiser Tele pickups, teams up with Phillip Knight for the Northern Lights humbucker

DiMarzio’s big release of the month is aimed at Telecaster players whose heart sinks whenever they switch to the neck pickup. Apparently, this is a large percentage of Tele players.

Well, The Chopper and The Cruiser might help rehabilitate your relationship with the Tele neck sound – and they’re both hum-cancelling.

Also, YouTuber Phillip Knight partnered with DiMarzio to make his Blackstock Northern Lights humbucker because everybody kept ordering them and he couldn’t keep up with demand. They’re also cheaper now thanks to this partnership – find out more at the Know Your Gear Podcast page, and head over to DiMarzio to see what it can do for your Tele.

Crazy Tube Circuits Rapture

At first I was disappointed to learn that this was not a Trey Azagthoth distortion pedal to nail the tone to one of Morbid Angel and death metal’s greatest songs. But it was no small thing to learn that what CTC had really done was taken the low to mid-gain drive section out of the Triptychon (a pedal that I was disappointed to learn wasn’t a Tom G Warrior signature drive), and made it a standalone overdrive.

CTC adds interactive More and Mod switches to “extend its headroom, gain structure and clipping response”.

Find out more at Crazy Tube Circuits.

EarthQuaker Devices Plumes Jr and Blumes Jr Ltd Edition Mosfet Mods

EQD shrinks down the Plumes and Blumes into a mini-pedal format and adds a third Mosfet clipping stage to make this versatile tube-style drive pedal even more useful.

What difference does the mod make? Well, EQD says the new Mosfet mode produces “a harmonically rich, focused overdrive with enhanced low end and a dynamic response similar to a modern high-gain tube amp”.

Find out more at EarthQuaker Devices.

Gibson Baggs HiFi DNA acoustics

Having partnered with acoustic guitar pickup specialist Baggs to develop the HiFI DNA system, Gibson is now rolling it out, and this quartet of fresh acoustics from the Original Collection showing us how this unobtrusive solution to the age-old problem of amplified acoustic tone can be applied to a traditionally built instrument.

The J-45 Original, J-45 60s Original Fixed Bridge, Southern Jumbo 40s Original and Country Western 60s Original look little different to their vintage counterparts, but plug them in and you’ll notice the difference.

Find out more at Gibson.

Fender Dark Horse Records George Harrison Stratocaster

This is one to file under “Japan gets all the cool stuff” but it’s worth having a look at this Strat that’s built in honour of Harrison’s Dark Horse Records label, and comes with a capsule collection that was launched on October 16 at Fender’s Tokyo store with George’s son, Dhani, and Fender CEO Edward ‘Bud’ Cole.

See Fender for more.

Wylde Audio Acoustics

Zakk Wylde told us these were coming. You can hear them on the latest Black Label Society album. He told me over many cups of espresso that these were coming. And yet somehow I couldn’t quite envisage what an acoustic guitar designed by Wylde would look like.

Now we know, and they’re, well, firstly, you couldn’t impale anyone like you – theoretically – could with his electrics. These Grand Auditoriums conform to the cutaway shape. But there is a bullseye version. There are runic fingerboard inlays. And they’re the most Viking acoustics you could get for under $1,000.

Find out more at Wylde Audio.

Harley Benton Guitar MAX Fusion LH

You can read all about the YouTuber and shred virtuoso Maxxxwell Carlisle’s signature guitars here. But this was the month that the German budget gear giant answered the call of left-handers everywhere to give us a southpaw model.

Find out more at Harley Benton.

Fulltone OCD’Lux

The OCD is one of the most cloned, copied, maybe even misunderstood, but definitely one of the great drive/distortions of the modern era, and so Fulltone decided to jam two circuits together, each with switchable voices, and it’s as much OCD as you could ever want.

As an owner of the OCD Germanium, I can confirm that it sounds incredible. Those sounds are here and more.

“There are a lot of OD’s comparing themselves to and stealing from the Fulltone OCD, and that’s to be expected when you’re the best selling handmade overdrive of all time,” said Mike Fuller. “There are many out-and-out clones of the OCD, and that’s some form of a compliment I suppose, but I’d like to personally thank you for buying and supporting the original...the one and only OCD.”

Find out more at Fulltone.

Behringer Zentara

Speaking of cloned overdrive pedals, who here remembers Behringer’s $69 Klon clone that flew too close to the sun design-wise, and then the legal stooshie that followed?

Well, Klon Centaur designer Bill Finnegan wound down his legal campaign because Behringer did a little bit more designing and made it a little different. Now it’s back as the Zentara and it’s still as cheap as chips (and it has the same circuit).

Found out more at Behringer.

JHS Pedals Pherb and Wanderer

Josh Scott has had a busy month. Not only did he announce that he is selling hundreds of pedals on Reverb, but he launched the Wanderer, a twofer that combines the legendary Morning Glory and NOTAKLÖN circuits in one dual-footswitch pedal, and he also added the Pherb to his $99 3 Series. Yes, Pherb.

The people kept on asking for Flerb, i.e. that setting from the EHX Holy Grail reverb pedal that some love, most hate, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “Flanger inside of a reverb just makes my skin itch,” he says. But what about phaser inside of a reverb? That works. That’s Pherb.

Find out more at JHS Pedals.

Zoom Neurig

In the amp modeller space, there is a new next-gen innovation arriving every other day. This month it’s Zoom’s Neurig.

Riffs, Beards & Gear’s Ryan ‘Fluff’ Bruce did a deep dive on it so you can hear it what this “next-gen” modeller sounds like in action above. Another YouTuber, Landon Bailey, asked the provocative question: “Is this the Quad Cortex Killer” but that just made us think of Crazy Horse and Neil Young.

Anyhoo, metaphorically dancing across the water with its galleons and guns and presets, the Neurig has AI tools, NAM A2 Lite integration, DNA Engine neural modelling... There are so many buzzwords in its spec that it’s probably unhealthy, definitely next-gen.

Check it out at Zoom.

Line 6 Helix Stadium Eras update

The Eras Stadium update is Taylor-made* for those who want to take a track and break it down into its constituent elements – drums, bass, guitar, vocals, and “other” – via stem separation tech, and then mute whichever you desire and play along. It’s a powerful learning tool.

Oh, and the update also includes three new Agoura amps, four distortions… Look, you’ve got a Helix Stadium? Hook that mother up and patch this in.

Find out more at Line 6.

[*sorry]

Neko Pocket Wireless Guitar Studio

This thing is only at the Kickstarter stage but it’s racking up the investors and offers the tantalising prospect of a full guitar studio and recording tool that fits inside your pocket.

It's just the thing when staying at some huge Airbnb in the English countryside and are suddenly taken by the urge to go Full Led Zeppelin IV and make an album.

See more at the Neko Kickstarter.

EHX Wailer Wah Pro

The constant bombardment of new features, options, switches all over the place, secret settings and easter eggs, it is reassuringly refreshing when one of the pedalboard stalwarts just comes out with something so uncomplicated.

The Wailer Wah Pro doesn’t let you adjust the sweep every way ’til Sunday. Just step on it. The “Pro” bit in its designation speaks to the build quality, with EHX promising road-readiness from its rugged aluminium enclosure. And it’s EHX, so the price is very competitive at 88 bucks.

See EHX for more.

Keeley Electronics Compressor Plus Germanium

This has been a big month for anniversaries. Here’s another one to celebrate 25 years of the industry standard compressor pedal, which is upgraded with a germanium transistor as a buffer and all-round sweetener of tone. Lovely stuff.

Find out more at Keeley Electronics.

Dunable Riley Pinkerton Minotaur Summoner

Let’s finish up with something metal, a single-pickup axe for battle from the Dunable Custom Shop that's spec’d up for Riley Pinkerton of Brookyln-based doom band Castle Rat.

This was originally part of a super-limited four-model run alongside her Castle Rat bandmate’s signature models: the Crimson Burst Cyclopse for Franco ‘The Count’ Vittore, and a Thunderclapper for Charley ‘The Plague Doctor’ Ruddell.

All sold out in no time, so Dunable brought back the Rat Queen’s Minotaur for a limited build-to-order run. Alas, is it gone for good? The Dunable site suggests as much. But you should have seen it. Oh, man… It was white, with a gold sparkle pickguard, and one humbucker doing the dark lord’s work....

Who knows, maybe Dunable will bring it back some day? Address your spells and hexes, and whatever black magic you’ve got at your disposal, to the Dunable Custom Shop. It can't hurt.

Gavin Harrison is one of the finest drummers of his generation. He loves the creative process, and he likes to keep busy. But as he admits to MusicRadar: “Being in three bands around the same time is tricky.”

Juggling his recording and touring commitments between those three bands has proven a daunting task. His tenure with Porcupine Tree began in 2002, followed by King Crimson in 2008 and The Pineapple Thief in 2016.

“There was a quite a lot of time where I was in King Crimson and The Pineapple Thief at the same time,” Harrison says. “And I don’t like to come off one tour and then the next day go out on another tour. I need time to recover and to change my mental hard drive.

“These tours are planned so far ahead, a good 18 months in advance. So I would carefully select time periods. I would say to The Pineapple Thief, ‘We could do something in this period. I know King Crimson are not gonna be busy in this period.’ I already know that because we’re talking about shows booked long in advance. So that was easy to manage.”

Harrison recalls his negotiations with King Crimson’s guitarist and leader Robert Fripp and bassist Tony Levin.

“There might be times where Robert would have suggested, ‘Can we do a tour next fall?’ And maybe Tony would say, ‘Oh, I’m touring with Peter Gabriel.’ Or I would say, ‘I’ve already got a tour planned.’ And Robert would say, ‘Fine, okay, we’ll move it to the following spring.’ All these things had to slot together.”

Due to Porcupine Tree being on hiatus between 2010 and 2021, there was less overlap for Harrison to deal with.

“By the time Porcupine Tree came back , King Crimson had stopped,” he says. “Plus, we went through the whole COVID thing, so I didn’t really have to juggle Porcupine Tree and The Pineapple Thief too much.”

Harrison is on tour with The Pineapple Thief in early 2027. The band’s 16th studio album, Far And Wide, was released in October 2026.

As for the futures of King Crimson and Porcupine Tree, Harrison says: “Well, King Crimson is completely inactive. So, I haven't left it, I haven't joined it – it’s just inactive. There’s no news in the King Crimson world at the moment.”

Asked if he would work again with Crimson if Robert Fripp made the call, he replies: “Yeah, if I could, sure.”

Recently, Porcupine Tree’s frontman and leader Steven Wilson stated in an interview with Prog magazine that the band had not managed to complete much new music. “We’re a long way from it being an album’s worth,” he said, “so it could be years.”

Harrison gives MusicRadar a rather different story.

“Porcupine Tree is still an ongoing concern,” he says. “We are writing another album. And next year we’re hoping to get together and finish that album off.”

Looking back on his time with King Crimson, Harrison has named Discipline as the most challenging Crimson track to play. The equivalent in Porcupine Tree’s catalogue is the epic track Anesthetize from the 2007 album Fear Of A Blank Planet. It’s a track so quintessentially prog that it features a guitar solo from Alex Lifeson of Rush.

Harrison says of Anesthetize: “That a song is incredibly hard to play if you play the whole thing – 17 minutes. From a drummer point of view, your heart rate probably gets up to maximum in the middle.

“The hard bit is that when you play it live as a 17-minute song you play the first five or six minutes all on the toms. The muscles in your arms really start aching, because you’re only playing the toms. So if you haven’t paced yourself carefully, your arms are really, really tired by the time you get to the heavy section in the middle – the bit where you really need them.”

Another Porcupine Tree song that’s a favourite of Harrison’s is one that he co-wrote with Steven Wilson – Start Of Something Beautiful, from 2005 album Deadwing. “That one is really heavy to play,” he smiles.

He finds it difficult to pick favourites from his years with The Pineapple Thief.

“At the moment, I’m just concentrating on the new songs from the new album,” the says, “as we’re now rehearsing them. My head is full of those songs. But I’ve always liked Our Mire [from 2020 album Versions Of The Truth] and White Mist [from 2018’s Dissolution]. And the first song I ever recorded with The Pineapple Thief is called In Exile. We still play that song a lot, and it always goes down well.”

Harrison has a wide-ranging approach to recording and miking his drums.

He explains: “I’ve got this drum kit in my home studio close-mic’d. I also have some overhead mics, mics from the ceiling.

“I’ve got this massive hall. The room is about 50 foot high by 50 foot wide, and I have some microphones placed out there. So I’ve got this massive reverb and ambient hall sound. I record that on four different mics out in the hall.

“I’ve got options when I come to mixing. I can mix it dead dry, close mic’d. Or I can have more of an overhead sound. I can have a massive hall sound, or anywhere in between.

“For all intents and purposes it’s like you’re in a dry drum booth. So I’ve got that sound, and the big hall, and all this overhead stuff. I record on 20 mics, and then I can I can mix it any way I feel like.”

He works closely with The Pineapple Thief’s vocalist and guitarist Bruce Soord.

“The way we do it is I do a stereo mix of the drums, and I send that to Bruce, and he mixes everything else to my stereo mix. We keep updating. He’ll send me that mix with his mix on top, and then he’ll send me a drum-less version, and I’ll do another mix. That could happen 10, 15 times over a month for each song.

“So I keep refining the drums based upon how I’m hearing the guitars, the bass, the keyboards, the vocals. ‘Ah, okay, now I need a little bit more of the underside of the snare, or maybe the bass drum should have more attack.’ I make decisions, and then I'll print another stereo mix and send it to Bruce. I always mix the drums, and he mixes the rest of the band.”

From studio to stage, his kit remains unchanged.

“It’s exactly the same,” he says. “I would use exactly the same cymbals, the same tuning. I might use different mics on tour, only because I don’t want to take out these kind of quite fragile studio mics. Some of them are valve mics. They’re not really tour-worthy. We’ve got a slightly different selection of mics, but other than that, the drum kit is identical.”

He finishes on one small but important detail.

“I've always liked the K-sounding Zildjian cymbals,” he says. “I’ve always liked darker sounding cymbals, actually. I don’t need the super high-frequency shiny sort of quite brash things, and I know Robert Fripp doesn’t like that either. I remember putting up a post one day about Zildjian, because they sent me some new cymbals whilst I was on tour. And Robert said how much he liked Zildjian cymbals too.”

Journey singer Steve Perry had been driving across the Golden Gate Bridge when he was blown away by the sound of a Donnie Iris song on the radio. The year was 1980 and the song was Ah! Leah!

This turned out to be the biggest hit that Pennsylvania-born Iris had under his own name. It made No 29 on the US Billboard Hot 100. The most successful song of his entire career had come a whole decade earlier – The Rapper, recorded with his early band The Jaggerz, reached No 2 in 1970.

What struck Steve Perry on that day in San Francisco was the vocal power in the chorus of Ah! Leah! Sometime later in 1980, when Iris and his band The Cruisers opened for Journey at a show in Ohio, Perry visited them in their dressing room and told Iris: “That’s the way vocals are supposed to sound!”

The secret was in the production. Mark Avsec was Iris’s producer, bandmate and co-songwriter, and for the chorus of Ah! Leah! he had overdubbed – or stacked – Iris’s voice more than 60 times.

This was just one of many great songs that made Donnie Iris a major talent and a minor legend in the Pittsburgh music scene.

Born Dominic Ierace on 28 February 28 1943 in New Castle, a city 40 miles from Pittsburgh, Iris co-founded The Jaggerz in 1964 and was the sole writer of The Rapper. After leaving the band in 1976 he was briefly a member of Wild Cherry, who had scored a huge hit that year with Play That Funky Music. Mark Avsec was Wild Cherry’s keyboardist at this time, and it was with Avsec that Iris created his best music in the early ’80s.

Iris was not a conventional rock singer and certainly didn’t look like one. With glasses and short hair, he looked a little like Buddy Holly.

Back On The Streets, his debut solo album, featured Ah! Leah! and other slick, quirky pop rock tunes including I Can’t Hear You and Agnes.

When this album was reissued by Rock Candy Records in 2021, Mark Avsec said of his and Iris’s experimental approach to vocals: “His normal voice is not that distinctive, but as we worked together more and more I discovered the depth and range of his ability, and we began to develop a sound that was very, very distinctive.

“He has a whole Beatles style of voices that we tapped into. His falsetto is like no other, there are various things within his falsetto, whereas most singers barely have a falsetto in the first place. And of course he has the raspy growl that plays opposite the falsetto for such a dramatic contrast.”

Iris, a modest personality for a singer, said of creative partner: “Mark just has a way of getting those voices out of me.”

Referring to his signature song, he recalled: “We started out with just the hook, not even realising it was a name. We just wanted some sort of a chant vocal going on in the song. I said, ‘I know this girl named Leah. Why don't we just make the song about her?’”

Iris’s second album King Cool was released in 1981 and yielded a top 40 hit in Love Is Like A Rock. Another single, Sweet Merilee, boasted a stacked-vocals chorus even bigger than that in Ah! Leah!

The hits dried up soon after, but Iris continued making music for many years. His last album was a 2010 Christmas collection punningly titled Ah! Leluiah! The last track released in his lifetime was the anthem Pittsburgh Made.

In 2023 Iris was diagnosed with bladder cancer. After a farewell live performance in Pittsburgh on 28 September, he announced his retirement in a Facebook post dated 9 October in which he stated: “Music has given me far more than I could ever put into words.”

He died on 26 October at the age of 83.

Back in 2021, another famous singer gave praise to this underrated talent.

“I worked with Donnie more than a few times in the ’80s.,” Huey Lewis said. “He was tremendous. I’ve always been surprised he wasn’t much more popular considering how great he was.”

Hip-hop star Nelly has revealed that Taylor Swift once paid him for a show appearance with $50,000 cash stashed in a McDonald's bag.

The gig in question was the Houston leg of Swift's 2011 Speak Now World Tour, which saw the then-21-year-old bring new hits like Mean, Back to December, and Mine to arenas across the globe.

Despite this, the pop star's budget was pretty modest at the time, and in a recent appearance on The Breakfast Club podcast, Nelly revealed an unusual tactic for getting around that.

"She called me one night, just out of the blue, and said, ‘Yo, Nelly, listen, me and my friends, we made a routine to Hot in Herre last night and I wanna ask you a really big favor... I got two shows in Houston tomorrow and the next day. Can you come down to Houston and just perform it?"

He continued: “Now, listen to her. She says she doesn’t really have a budget. But she said, ‘What I will do is send my plane. I’ll get your room and all of that. And we only have like $50,000.’ I said, ‘Can you put that in a McDonald’s bag?’"

According to Nelly, Swift's G5 private jet landed in St. Louis, picked up Nelly and his family, and delivered them to Houston for the shows. After performing, the hip-hop artist received a handsome — but less than glamorous — piece of remuneration.

"We did it, and she was like, ‘Yo, three minutes, three minutes!’ Her [manager Robert Allen] comes out and tosses me a McDonald’s bag with $50,000 in cash. We never even saw the room. We went from the show right back to the airport."

It's a testament to the jaw-dropping power and status Swift commanded even in those early days — the kind of power that causes modern rap icons to up sticks at the drop of a hat.

"The money wasn't really the issue," he said. "I would’ve done it for free.'"

Ministry of Sound opened in 1991 in a disused bus garage in South London's Elephant & Castle and has since become a nightlife institution, expanding into a record label and worldwide events operation.

Now, the award-winning Martin Audio sound system that's soundtracked thousands of sweat-soaked, hedonistic nights in the club's main room is up for sale through music memorabilia auction house Wax Poetics.

The mammoth rig is made up of six stacks, each combining two Martin Audio W8C cabinets with two 18-inch bass bins and two passive 21-inch subs. Wax Poetics says the output is around 25kW per stack, and six XTA amplifiers are included. It's up for private sale, with price available on request, and Wax Poetics is taking enquiries from venues, hire companies, festivals and collectors.

Described by Wax Poetics as a "once-in-a-lifetime piece of dancefloor history", the system was used in the club's main room from 2010 to 2025, earning the title of Best Club Sound System at the International Dance Music Awards four years running.

It's now being retired on the club's 35th anniversary as part of a major refurbishment, which saw the Martin Audio rig replaced with with a bespoke four-point KV2 system made up of KV2 SL412 top speakers alongside VHD2.21 and VHD2.16 subwoofers.

Also up for sale by auction is a collection of memorabilia from the club's 35-year history, including two mirror balls, club flyers from the Ministry of Sound archive, a 12-issue run of the club's annual magazine, and the sales award for Eric Prydz's Call on Me, one of the label's biggest releases. If you're really feeling nostalgic, you can even bid on a actual piece of the club's dancefloor itself.

"Each piece in this collection tells part of Ministry of Sound's story, from the line-ups on the flyers to the nights captured in photographs", Wax Poetics co-founder Dave Holt said in a statement.

"The soundsystem has a different role. It's the equipment through which records became a shared experience, night after night. This rig connects directly to The Box and the generations of people who made it their dancefloor."

Head over to Wax Poetics to find out more.

Kiss bassist and vocalist Gene Simmons has spoken about the group's decision to stop touring in 2022, saying it was all about "respecting" their fans.

In a new interview with NewsNation's The Hill, Simmons reflected on the band's End Of The Road farewell tour, insisting that it was the right time for them to bow out.

"You’ve got to know when to gracefully and proudly step off that stage, because you have to understand that Kiss was and continues to be the only band of its type," he said.

"Every show I had to spit fire ... fly through the air, keep my tongue out all the time. Wear 70 lbs, as much as that, or as little as 50 to 60 lbs of armour, studs, guitars, and all on seven-inch platformed boots for two hours. It’s exhausting. I’m 77 now, and boy, do I look good. But you’ve got to know — you’ve got to respect the fans enough to know when to get off that stage.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Simmons talked about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in music, expressing hope about the possibilities it offers. On whether it will help or harm the music industry, he said: "It doesn't matter. The future is here. You've got to learn how to use it, otherwise it will use you."

For Kiss, this means the development of an avatar-based live show reportedly set to launch in Las Vegas in 2028. With Simmons revealing earlier this year that “Kiss was actually sold - the makeup and the tunes and the publishing and all that" for a presumably eye-watering sum of money, creative control for this show now rests with the Swedish music and entertainment firm Pophouse.

Co-founded by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, Pophouse has already produced several notable live music experiences and virtual concerts, including the record-breaking ABBA Voyage show.

Speaking in a promotional video for the avatar concert, Simmons explained: "We can be forever young and forever iconic by taking us to places we’ve never dreamt of before."

"The technology is going to make [rhythm guitarist and co-lead vocalist] Paul [Stanley] jump higher than he’s ever done before ... If you think you are going to get rid of us then that's not going to happen."

Foo Fighters have released a cult cover of Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street, almost 30 years after recording the track at a BBC Maida Vale session in April 1997.

Despite resurfacing previously on 10th anniversary editions of the band's 1997 album The Colour And The Shape, the cover has largely been missing from streaming platforms for almost 30 years. Until now.

"We sorta thought it'd be fun to do four songs that people would probably hate and never expect us to do," Dave Grohl told Steve Lamacq in an interview held around the original BBC session.

He added: "I think it's sort of funny that this album we've been tagged as this 'rock band' and everyone seems to think there's this big 70s influence to the band, so we might be taking the piss."

The Maida Vale recording came just a couple of weeks after Foo Fighters' iconic late drummer Taylor Hawkins joined the band, and has become a pivotal part of band lore in the years since.

In total, Grohl and co. played five tracks that day: Drive Me Wild by Vanity 6, Requiem by Killing Joke, Carry On Wayward Son by Kansas, Friend Of A Friend (a Grohl solo), and Baker Street — with the latter arguably viewed as the most memorable cover of all.

"You know, it's like a classic 70s song and a few people need to be reminded just how weird that decade could be," said bassist Nate Mendel.

The timing of the track's resurfacing is significant: last night was the climax of Foo Fighters Week on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, a four-night residency in which the band reprised the cult tune, among other classics. It may seem light-hearted, but speaking on Kimmel's show, Grohl made it clear how special the cover was to him personally.

"I don't know if anyone remembers Gerry Rafferty," he said. "Baker Street is one of my favourite songs of all time. It reminds me of being young in the '70s. And driving around with my mum in the front seat, with AM radio on. It is truly one of my favourite songs of all time. We'll rock that."

Back in May, a leak appeared to reveal 14 unreleased products from Behringer, including an E-mu SP-1200 clone and a Roland-inspired, hybrid drum machine/sampler called the RD-765, prompting budget-minded gearheads to collectively lose their shit across the internet.

This week, a flurry of new products from Behringer have either been put up for preorder or teased through the company's social media channels, including several that were unveiled in the leak, along with a few totally unexpected drops.

Alongside its long-awaited Korg Polysix clone, Behringer has launched a trio of open-source, ultra-affordable pieces of gear, hinting at a new direction for the company with their user-modifiable firmware: the Kick sampler/groovebox, the Ignite sequencer, and Anima, a standalone DJ system priced at only $400. Here's what we know so far.

Behringer RD-765

First up, we've got the RD-765, a freshly-unveiled hybrid drum machine that – like most of Behringer's most popular products – draws inspiration from classic gear of yore. This isn't a clone of a single Roland drum machine, though, but a kind of Frankenstein that bolts together pieces from four models in the Japanese manufacturer's '80s lineup.

Bearing a strong visual resemblance to the TR-707 – the first Roland beatbox that exclusively used samples rather than analogue sound generation – the RD-765 is equipped with eight banks of 176 sounds based on that machine, the TR-505, TR-626, and TR-727, giving you a broad array of vintage-style samples to work with. If all those retro Roland sounds aren't doing it for you, then you can load up samples of your own using a companion app or sample directly through its 1/4" input.

Elsewhere, you get a bundle of features that you'd rarely find in a drum machine retailing at £329/$459: a dual-mode analogue filter; a flexible 64-step sequencer with microtiming, probability, polyrhythms and per-step filter automation; and heaps of connectivity from per-voice outputs and trigger outputs to MIDI In/Out and analogue sync. The RD-765 is available for preorder now.

Find out more

Behringer Polyeight

Another affordable recreation of an '80s gem, Behringer's Polyeight is a 49-key, eight-voice take on the Korg Polysix, a 61-key, six-voice analogue synth released in 1981 that – along with Roland's Juno series, launched only a few months later – brought polysynths to the masses with its accessible price point and straightforward design.

We're promised a "faithful recreation" of the original, right down to its single per-voice VCO, 2044 low-pass filter, and BBD effects section with chorus, phaser and ensemble. However, it wouldn't be a Behringer clone without a few modern enhancements thrown in to bring the synth into the 21st century: along with the two extra voices, the Polyeight gains polyphonic aftertouch, velocity sensitivity, a noise generator, LCD display and MIDI/USB connectivity. Priced at £429/$699, it's also up for pre-order now.

Find out more

Behringer Ignite

Behringer upended the music tech world this week with the news of Kick, a sampler, groovebox and MPC lookalike with open-source firmware. Spurred on by the recent trend of users using AI-powered 'vibe coding' to modify their gear's firmware or even build their own, Behringer is encouraging Kick owners to develop their own firmware for the instrument by making the code available on GitHub, opening the door for users to “create, modify and reinvent" what Kick can do.

Along with Kick, Behringer has teased a hardware sequencer built around the same open-source concept: Ignite. A 64-channel multi-track sequencer with USB-C, Wi-Fi, five pairs of 5-pin DIN MIDI In/Out jacks, 8 CV outputs, 8 Gate outputs and analogue sync, Ignite is more than capable of acting as the sequencing brain for an entire set-up with multiple synths, samplers drum machines, Eurorack modules or a laptop.

A generous touchscreen is joined by eight assignable knobs for sound-shaping, and a row of 16 RGB step buttons and LED-ringed encoders below for sequencing. The 64-channel sequencer in the stock firmware can program patterns of 16 bars with 16 steps per bar, crafting songs out of multiple scenes of up to 200 bars in length, but there's no telling what it'll be capable of once the community starts experimenting with custom firmware.

Ignite really is an ugly piece of gear – its crude, paint-by-numbers aesthetic looks about as basic and uninspiring as they come – but nonetheless, it could become a powerfully versatile sequencer once the vibe-coders get their hands on it. We've no word on price or release date yet, so watch this space.

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Behringer SP1200X

Behringer's "tribute" to the classic E-mu SP-1200 sampler has been in the works since 2019, but the company didn't publicly acknowledge the product until early 2025, when it asked users for feedback on what kind of features they'd like to see in it.

Nearly two years later, and the company has shared an update in a typically hyperbolic Facebook post, telling its customers that it's "pushing hard" to get the SP1200X into their hands as soon as possible, and that it's aiming for a price of only $200, which – for something like the SP1200X – is low even for Behringer. It seems as if Behringer's embrace of open firmware will be going beyond its original product designs and stretching to its clones, too, as the company has also declared that the SP1200X will be open-source.

The company has yet to share any finer details on features or functionality, but the unit looks reasonably SP-1200-ish, and seems to update the original with a larger, full-colour display, stereo sampling inputs and USB connectivity. The big question is whether Behringer will successfully nail the SP-1200's famously gritty, 12-bit/26.04kHz sound, and what compromises it might have to make to hit that $200 price point.

Find out more

Levi Seacer Jr., Prince's right-hand man during the late 1980s and early 1990s, has spoken out about the ridiculous amount of music the iconic rock star had stored in his famous "Vault".

Speaking to Ultimate Guitar, Seacer Jr. said: "One day, I was doing a session with Prince in Studio A, and we happened to be talking about the vault. I said, 'Yeah, I've heard a lot about the vault.' He made a quick call to his assistant engineer, and his assistant engineer brought up three binders, like two to three inches thick. Really thick.

"I said, 'What's this?' He said, 'That's all the songs that are in the vault.' And there were like 20 or 30 songs on each sheet of paper, in three binders. It was mind-boggling."

He continued: "I'm reading these titles, and I'm like, 'Man, I wonder what that sounds like.' He said, 'Why don't you pick some songs, and he'll bring them up, and we'll play them.' I'd never seen anything like that. Because most artists, I don't want to say lazy, but they're kind of lazy about recording. But for him, it was like drinking water. He was just recording all the time. But he kept it cataloged and organized."

Prince's 1987 double album Sign O The Times ultimately evolved from songs picked out from this famous vault, which according to one staffer, contained “at least five hundred finished or near-finished Prince tracks" in 1989.

In one interview with Rolling Stone, Prince admitted "I didn't always give the record companies the best song. There are songs in the vault that no one's ever heard. There are several vaults; it's not just one vault."

That relationship between Prince and his record labels is a fascinating one to dig into. Speaking to MusicRadar in a recent interview, Seacer Jr. opened up about his role as the so-called 'Prince Whisperer', capable of getting through to the pop mega-star and smoothing out relationships in a way few could.

"I got a call from Warner Brothers, and it was Mo Ostin,” said Seacer, reflecting on the run-up to 1991 Prince & The New Power Generation album Diamonds and Pearls. “He said, ‘Levi, we got a problem.’ I’m saying, ‘What’s going on?’ He said, ‘We need a first single. We got a solid record, but all the radio guys don’t feel like they have the first single."

Eventually, Seacer reluctantly broke the news to an understandably frustrated Prince. He departed, then woke to an unusually early call from his frontman at 7 am the next morning, asking him to run to the studio.

"I sat in the chair and he played Cream for me, on 10. It was loud. I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ He said, ‘Well, what do you think of that?’ I said, ‘Oh, man, they gonna love that.’ I mean, I knew it right when I first heard it. I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, they gonna be happy!’”

The Allman Brothers Band’s legendary live album At Fillmore East is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest of all time. Al Di Meola certainly thinks so – and with good reason.

“I was there,” he recalls to MusicRadar. “I was at the Fillmore East when the Allman Brothers recorded that live album.”

Di Meola was just 16 when the Allmans performed at the New York City venue in March 1971. The band played three nights. The album was pieced together using recordings from two of those shows.

The Allman Brothers Band line-up at that time featured Gregg Allman on vocals and keyboards, Duane Allman and Dickey Betts on guitars, Berry Oakley on bass, and both Butch Trucks and Jaimoe (AKA Jai Johanny Johanson) on drums and percussion.

Di Meola says that these performances left a deep impression on him.

“It was unbelievable,” he says. “You have to understand what that band sounded like in that room. Duane Allman. Dickey Betts. Gregg Allman. Berry Oakley. Butch Trucks. Jaimoe. The energy was incredible.”

The Allmans’ style of Southern rock might seem an unlikely inspiration for a jazz fusion artist such as Di Meola, but as the guitarist recalls, he drew on the experience of those Fillmore East shows when, as a 19 year old prodigy, he began performing in fusion group Return To Forever, led by pianist Chick Corea.

“There’s actually a direct line from hearing that music at the Fillmore to my first days with Return To Forever,” Di Meola explains. “When I first joined Return To Forever, Chick wanted everybody to play a solo feature. I’m nineteen years old and thinking, ‘What the hell am I going to play by myself?’

“So, during my solo, I started playing some Allman Brothers licks. The place went crazy. I mean, crazy. I came offstage, and Chick came up to me and said, ‘What was that?’ I said, ‘The Allman Brothers.’ He had no idea.

“Chick didn't know the Allman Brothers. But the audience certainly did. And that taught me something very early on. Music doesn't have to live in these little boxes. I could be playing with Chick Corea in Return To Forever, and something I’d absorbed from Duane Allman and Dickey Betts could come out in my solo and connect immediately with an audience. If it’s part of you, it’s part of you.”

A circle was completed for Di Meola in 2026 when he had the opportunity to play the actual 1958 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop used by Dickey Betts during those landmark gigs in ’71.

“What a thrill,” Di Meola smiles. “I got to play the original Dickey Betts Les Paul from that Fillmore East recording.

“Think about that. I’m a kid sitting in the Fillmore East hearing that guitar. Then I joined Return To Forever and played Allman Brothers licks during my solo because I’m trying to figure out what the hell I’m going to play – and the place erupts. And more than fifty years later, I’m in Chicago at a collector’s showroom, and the guy is handing me the actual Dickey Betts guitar to play. Those are the moments where you really feel the passage of time.”

What is it?

When JHS Pedals were researching The Electro-Harmonix Story, EHX gave them access to Bob Meyer's workshop and notebooks.

Meyer, the co-founder of EHX, was the inventor of the Big Muff, and there, in his notebooks, was an alternative Op-Amp Big Muff that never was. Having found a new take on a classic fuzz pedal circuit, inevitably, it had to get made.

Specs

• Launch price: $188 | £189 | €179
• Type: Fuzz pedal
• Controls: Volume, Blend, Tone, Sustain, Gate, Mids, Frequency, High Q, Low Q, Wicker
• Features: Fuzz pedal
• Connectivity: Input, Output, Power, Exp
• Bypass: Buffered
• Power: 9V DC Centre-negative PSU, 45mA
• Dimensions: 146.05 x 120.65 x 63.5 mm
• Contact Electro-Harmonix

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★½

Like any of the EHX Deluxe line, this is a solid unit with a sensible control layout. Its main issue is about its functionality as much as its build. It sports two footswitches, and yet one of those is simply to toggle the mids. This is a huge missed opportunity for a premium-price pedal with two footswitches.

This means it can switch between a 'rhythm' sound and a mid-forward lead, but that's an assumption about how you might use the pedal. A better solution to the same conundrum would be to stick a boost or distortion on the other switch, mirroring how many players already stack the Muff.

Alternatively, since it's double the price of the Nano version, it would have been possible to just have two Muffs in a single enclosure.

Usability and features

Usability and features rating: ★★★★½

The Big Muff 2 Deluxe is straightforward. For most players, the Wicker and Q controls will be set-and-forget, as, to be honest, will be the Sustain and Tone controls. This reveals a weakness, because on some level, it shows that those extra controls don't do anything essential.

Being a harsh purist, I can't really imagine who's asking for a blend control on a Big Muff (besides bassists, who are catered for with the Deluxe Bass Big Muff 2), or an expression control. Back when I gigged regularly with one, I didn't move the controls for Sustain or Tone in nearly 10 years – only the Volume knob changed depending on the venue backline.

Still, all these gripes have also been true of every big-box or Deluxe Muff, so the Big Muff 2 Deluxe isn't unique in that regard.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★½

The first thing to say is that yes, this does sound different to the Op-Amp Big Muff, but that's not surprising, since the circuit is pretty different. The Op-Amp Muff had three pairs of symmetrical clipping diodes in a soft-clip configuration on a single stage. The Big Muff 2 takes a different approach; like the transistor Muff, it has four stages. Unlike the transistor Muff, while all are cascaded, there are three clipping stages rather than two.

Like both the transistor and Op-Amp Muffs, the diodes are arranged in a symmetrical soft-clip, and, again like the transistor Muff, it has a pair per stage. This makes sense, as Meyer was presumably adapting what he knew, having designed the original Muff. By comparison, the Op-Amp Muff is more of a bottom-up redesign.

What's more surprising then, given the differences, is how similar it sounds to the Op Amp circuit. There's a more pronounced bass response, but that's not a deal-breaker.

Being a habitual Black Russian Big Muff user, I'm used to assuming the Tone control should be somewhere around or past 1 o' clock. The DIY community has commented on the noise issues in the unmodified Meyer circuit, and that's why the Gate control is the most useful feature of the Deluxe.

The mids being on their own and having a dedicated Q control enables, with an expression pedal, some EHX Cock Fight-style pseudo wah sounds. Still, it's a bit of a niche feature compared to simply scooping or bumping the mids.

Like other Muffs, this responds best at higher sustain settings. Though running it with sustain dimed exacerbated the bass rumble, I did it anyway. As far as I can tell, that's the correct way to run a Big Muff, and this pedal is no different. It records well, it stacks as you'd expect - a boost in front will drive saturated lead sounds, while a drive after will tighten it.

However, in both cases, the more pronounced bass response will need taming. Marshall-voiced amps handled this better with flat controls, to my ear, but it's nothing that can't be handled by amp EQ.

With bridge humbuckers, it's especially cutting. The sharper bridge 'bucker also helps tamp down the additional bass output. Single coils work equally well – you could get the Smashing Pumpkins multi-tracked humbuckers and single-coils wall of sound effect pretty easily on record.

The Big Muff 2 is more aggressive on the whole than either the transistor or Op-Amp Muff. Even so, it's not a day-and-night difference. The pedal can flex between rhythm and searing leads easily – just don't expect them to be 'violin-like.'

Verdict

There's one unspoken question which is at the heart of the Big Muff 2, and that's whether Mike Matthews knew about it. Obviously, he signed off on this modern reissue.

According to JHS he said it had "something special," but that it strayed from the voicing he usually preferred. The question is whether he heard it at the time, and decided it was a dead-end.

By implication, Meyer did. Now, as a self-confessed Op-Amp Muff fanboy, obviously I'm glad it exists. However, even I have to concede that, especially when the Op-Amp already exists, it's perhaps a little short of the hype, even if it is a cool pedal

MusicRadar verdict: For all the 'what ifs' and overthinking, the Big Muff 2 is a great pedal. The question, to my mind, is whether the Deluxe version earns its keep. That's tougher. To me, it doesn't, and I'd be looking at either the wedge-enclosure Big Muff 2, or the Nano 2, depending on budget.

Also try

Hands-on videos

EHX

The Pedal Couple

• “Pairing this with a fuzz pedal is full-on rainbow neon fun”: Electro-Harmonix Pico Shimmer Cosmic Reverb review

The hype around early Black Friday music deals is officially in full swing, and retailers aren't hanging about this year. A whole bunch of them are launching sales way ahead of schedule. That's brilliant news if you're keen to bag a bargain on fresh gear without waiting around until late November.

Guitar Center is leading the charge right now. Head over to their site, and you'll find up to 30% off a massive range of big-name brands in their early Black Friday sale.

As you can imagine, there are plenty of discounted electric guitars, doorbuster savings on selected desktop amps, and tasty savings on drum kits and recording gear. Honestly, there's something for every type of musician here. If this is how good the pre-sale is, I can only imagine how big Guitar Center will go for Black Friday itself!

Just keep in mind that this early event finishes on Wednesday, 11th November. You haven't got long to grab something before it wraps up, though the main sale will likely follow right behind it.

As always, you’ll find a few of my sale highlights below.

If you like your Les Paul a little less traditional and a bit more ‘metal’, this amazing-looking Epiphone Les Paul Custom Widow might just take your fancy. It’s got a nice $120 off and is exclusively available at Guitar Center, so you won’t find this finish anywhere else.

Next up, I've found a sizable discount on the IK Multimedia TONEX, which is down from $429.99 to only $299.99. The TONEX amp models are excellent, as you’d expect from a company that has been at the forefront of amp modelling for a decade. From Fender Cleans to Dumble Crunch and even metal chug, all the tones you’d expect are here. If amps all day is the goal, then the TONEX may well be the best-sounding unit in this price bracket.

Next, the Casio CDP-S110 is down from $499.99 to only $ 399.99. For my money, the Casio CDP-S110 is easily one of the most impressive beginner digital pianos on the market, combining quality sounds, a fantastic-feeling keyboard, and stellar build quality. Right now you can save $100 at Guitar Center.

Lastly, a pair of KRK Kreate 3 studio monitors are down from $179 to only $149. I found these monitors particularly good for production duties despite the tiny price tag! Okay, they have a sound that's a little more 'hyped' than pure mixing monitors, but they sound good. Because of the rear ports, they're best placed slightly away from the wall, though you can correct this with the low-frequency EQ controls on the back.

For more music deals, check out the entire sale. The event ends on Wednesday, 11th November, and we're sure the official Black Sale will start immediately after, so stay tuned!

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were hurtling along a freeway near Washington DC when Nicks glanced up and noticed a sign for Silver Spring, Maryland.

It was 1976 and Nicks’ and Buckingham’s band Fleetwood Mac were on tour to promote their breakthrough self-titled album, which topped the US charts in September that year. The follow-up album Rumours, released in February 1977, would catapult them to global superstardom.

The name Silver Spring struck a chord with Nicks, whose relationship with Buckingham was imploding just as the band were on their mercurial ascent. It inspired her to write a song called Silver Springs, with an additional ‘s’ – a break-up anthem about what might have been.

“I wrote Silver Springs about Lindsey… and I loved the name,” Nicks told MTV in 1997. “Silver Springs sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me. And ‘You could be my silver springs’ – that’s just a whole symbolic thing of what you could have been to me.”

The song was recorded as part of the Rumours sessions but never made it onto the album. It was relegated to the B-side of Go Your Own Way, after which it pretty much disappeared without trace.

It would take 20 years for the song to be released and take on a whole second life, when it was included in Fleetwood Mac’s live set during The Dance Tour and released as a single from the 1997 live album The Dance. Critics hailed this live version of the song, and for many Fleetwood Mac fans it was the first time they had actually heard it.

“I thought it was an old Buckingham Nicks song,” Courtney Love told Rolling Stone. “It really moved me. I was like ‘What the fuck is this?’”

Lorde, Florence and the Machine, Tori Amos and Lykke Li would all go on to cover the song live – and its themes of hurt, heartbreak, jealousy and emotional revenge would go on to speak to Gen Zers into the 2020s.

But it was the video of Fleetwood Mac’s live 1997 performance at the Warner Bros studio in Burbank, California that really resonated with audiences. At the song’s climactic end, Nicks can be seen turning to face Buckingham, glaring at him with a ferocious intensity as she sings the lines: “I'll follow you down ’til the sound of my voice will haunt you/You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.”

It’s a powerful scene, as noted by Rolling Stone: “That image… of Nicks singing the words at Buckingham, her eyes burning into his soul, as if casting a spell, 20 years after writing the lyrics and still meaning them – has become the stuff of legend.”

The video of that performance on YouTube has now racked up 88 million views and the collective obsession with it on TikTok has really gained traction. There is a sense that Nicks’s empowerment in the face of devastating heartache has really resonated among young people. As one TikTok user wrote in a caption over the clip: “Don’t just write a song about your ex, make him play lead guitar and sing it right to his face on stage.”

What is remarkable about Nicks’s performance is that it begins at a point of vulnerability yet builds to one of power. Once Nicks makes direct eye contact with Buckingham she doesn’t let up. There is anger, grief, defiance, and Buckingham is the direct recipient of it all.

“It was me realising that Lindsey was going to haunt me for the rest of my life,” Nicks told Rolling Stone, “and he has.”

But beneath all the drama and pain lies a beautiful and brilliantly crafted song from Nicks. Silver Springs is a graceful, stately affair with a country-tinged sound that set it apart from the soft rock strains of the Rumours-era tracks.

With a running time of 4:48 for the 1976 studio version and 5:33 for the 1997 live version, the song has room to breathe and it builds slowly, with two verses and a pre-chorus before the chorus finally comes in at 2:15.

“Time cast a spell on you, but you won’t forget me/I know I could have loved you/But you would not let me.”

Prominent guitar swells from Buckingham and lush flowing piano from Christine McVie intro the song, before Nicks’s voice enters, a warm plaintive timbre with a real sense of longing.

Nicks’s voice lends itself seamlessly to the lonesome country-tinged cadences in the song. The ascending chorus when it hits is rousing and triumphant, and Buckingham delivers a tasteful and beautifully understated guitar solo.

The backing vocals, sung primarily by Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham, add haunting counter melodies and raw emotional tension.

For Stevie Nicks, the release of the live version of the song as a single in 1997 was the culmination of two decades of struggle to have her song heard and recognised.

The basic track for Silver Springs was first recorded at the Record Plant studio in Sausalito, California, on 11 February 1976. In the 2012 book Making Rumours, The Inside Story Of The Classic Fleetwood Mac Album, co-written by the album’s co-producer Ken Caillat and author Steve Stiefel, Caillat recalls that the initial takes were laid down with drums, bass, electric guitar, a Fender Rhodes electric piano and a scratch vocal.

Two days later, the band recorded 19 more takes but none were deemed satisfactory. Caillat recalled that on 14 February 1976 the band began using a click track and Christine McVie switched from the Fender Rhodes to a grand piano, recorded in an isolation room to prevent spill. Buckingham’s guitar, meanwhile, was fed through an amp in one room and a Leslie speaker in another. Take 8 was the one chosen and used for overdubs.

Additional work was done at Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco, where Buckingham redid his guitar part. Caillat noted that he highlighted the upper frequencies of the strings on Buckingham’s Stratocaster using a Lavalier microphone – traditionally used for TV broadcasts – which he says gave the guitar a “delicate, glasslike, music box-type sound”.

Caillat described Silver Springs as “gorgeous”, “powerful”, and “a masterpiece”. There was only one problem. “I knew the song was too long to fit on the album,” he said.

Silver Springs was eventually dropped from the album and replaced by another Nicks song, I Don’t Want To Know, which the rest of the band reportedly liked better and which was shorter.

It fell to drummer Mick Fleetwood to inform Nicks that Silver Springs would not be included on the Rumours album.

One day, towards the end of the Rumours sessions, Fleetwood asked Nicks to come out into the parking lot at the Record Plant in Sausalito.

“I knew it was really serious ’cause Mick never asks you to go out to the parking lot for anything,” Nicks recalled in a 1991 BBC radio interview. It was there that Fleetwood revealed that Silver Springs had been cut from the album for being too long and “a lot of [other] reasons,” according to Nicks.

Fleetwood wanted the lighter I Don’t Want To Know on the album instead. Nicks was incensed.

“I started to scream bloody murder and probably said every horribly mean thing that you could possibly say to another human being and walked back in the studio completely flipped out,” she continued.

According to a 2017 feature in Rolling Stone Caillat and the album’s other co-producer Richard Dashut tried to find a way to keep Silver Springs on the album, offering to edit it down or trim one of Nicks’s other songs. But the idea wasn’t pursued.

For Nicks, the omission of Silver Springs had another profound consequence. She had intended to give the royalty cheque for the publishing rights of the song to her mother Barbara as a thank you. Given the colossal success of Rumours, such a payment would have been substantial.

“Stevie was devastated for a number of reasons,” Caillat told Rolling Stone in 2017. “She loved the song, and by it not being on the LP, her mom didn’t make all the extra publishing because the single didn’t sell very much.”

When the decision was taken to put I Don’t Want To Know on Rumours instead, Nicks reportedly refused to sing it. But she eventually changed her mind.

“With a gun to my head, I went out and sang I Don’t Want to Know,” she told the BBC in 1991. “And they put Silver Springs on the back of Go Your Own Way.”

Nicks’ problems didn’t end there. In 1990, she began planning her greatest hits album Timespace – The Best Of Stevie Nicks. She had every intention of including Silver Springs on the album.

But her plan coincided with Mick Fleetwood’s own desire to include it on a forthcoming Fleetwood Mac boxset. This resulted in another heated exchange between the two.

“I told [Mick Fleetwood’s manager] that I want Silver Springs because it belongs to my mother,” Nicks told the BBC in 1991. “It didn’t occur to me that they wouldn’t let me have it back. I said to his manager, ‘You find Mick, and you tell him that if I don’t have those tapes by Monday, I am no longer a member of Fleetwood Mac.’”

Fleetwood got his way and Silver Springs appeared on the 1992 Fleetwood Mac boxset, 25 Years – The Chain. True to her word, Nicks quit the band.

It took an unlikely musical duet between Buckingham and Nicks in 1996 – on the song Twisted, from the soundtrack of the film Twister – to spark the reunion of Fleetwood Mac and the 1997 tour and live album The Dance.

Nicks’s performance on the live 1997 version of the song earned Silver Springs a belated Grammy nomination, in the category of Best Pop Performance. The song would remain a staple of the band’s live set until 2015. For Nicks, performing the song live with Fleetwood Mac on the 1997 tour was an experience she had never believed would happen.

“I never thought that Silver Springs would ever be performed onstage,” Nicks reflected during a 1997 MTV interview. “My beautiful song just disappeared [20 years ago]. For it to come back around like this has really been special to me.”

Storied session musician Spooner Oldham has reflected on his experiences playing with soul icon Aretha Franklin during the early stages of her career.

Speaking in a recent interview with Vulture, he shared his memories of the now-infamous studio session that spawned Aretha's breakout track I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You). The track — which ended up reaching No 9 in the Billboard 100 and became the title track of Franklin’s 1967 breakthrough — all started with Oldham playing around with a five-note riff on a Wurlitzer electric piano.

"The demo I heard had no keyboard," Oldham said. "We’re all musicians sitting around scratching our heads, “What are we gonna do with that? I don’t know what to do.” And that was the first song of a one-week booked session with Aretha at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. So this is song one, day one, and I’m thinking, This could be over, this could all be over right now. So I said a little prayer to God, and then I sort of noodled that part."

Oldham's long-time collaborator Dan Penn and guitarist Chips Moman spotted their bandmate noodling away, and the rest is history. He continued: "Dan and Chips both said, "Spooner's got it". The rest of the band looks around at me, and I turn it up a little bit, play it again. Then they join in, and here we go.

"You could feel it get off the ground, you know?"

A legend of modern American music, Oldham has appeared on countless iconic albums stretching across several decades.

As well as being a trusted collaborator of Aretha's, the Alabama native played organ on Wilson Pickett's track Mustang Sally, added a crucial Southern touch to Bob Dylan's '80s gospel days, and worked with Neil Young extensively over the years.

Besides his creative talents, the 83-year-old has a glowing reputation for being easy-going and well-liked. Perhaps that's why he was able to get I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You) off the ground — after all, the studio environment it was created in was highly dysfunctional.

"Never Loved A Man was “kind of a strange song”, bassist David Hood later reflected, referencing the passing around of a bottle of vodka and the combustible presence of Franklin's husband and manager Ted White that day. Speaking to the Guardian, Hood recalled White firing two horn players for "making passes at my wife". Ultimately, Oldham saved the day.

“Spooner came up with this great little lick, and everyone fell in line with that, started playing, and that saved the song," Hood said. "It was minutes after that we did the horn parts."

According to Oldham, "That’s one of the few that I felt like, It’s gonna be good, she’s gonna be big, she’s gonna do great. We’re onto something different here. A lot of the records I play on, I don’t know how well they do, but that one, I felt that before I left the building."

Another week bites the dust and that can only mean one thing… It's time for our run-down of red-hot music happenings in 10-question quiz form!

Each week, we dive through our back catalogue and pick out our greatest hits from the last seven days of MusicRadar.

Our quick quizzy recap will soon get you up to speed on who's rocking what, where and why.

Hit that play button and start the party!

Want even more quizzy action? Try our last bunch of weekly quizzes for size:

Quiz of the week 27
Quiz of the week 26
Quiz of the week 25
Quiz of the week 24
Quiz of the week 23

What is it?

Sitting somewhere between the Katana-50 and the Katana-Mini X, the Boss Katana-25 pitches itself as the ultimate home practice amp. Building on the ever-popular Katana platform, Boss has got an interesting amp on its hands, as this model isn’t quite small enough to be a desktop guitar amp, while anyone who wants to gig will be better off with at least the Katana-50 Gen 3.

The Katana-25 features an 8-inch speaker housed in an open-back cabinet, with a design that looks pretty much exactly the same as any other amp in the lineup aesthetically. There are quite a few differences overall, though, and the control panel on the top is noticeably slimmed down versus the full-size Katana-50.

Controls for gain, volume, bass, middle, and treble line the left-hand portion of the top panel, and a new tone-setting encoder with a push-button function. Either side of that is an effects switch and a tap tempo. After that, there’s a small switch for the two power options: 25W and 0.5W, plus a master volume.

In an interesting change from the bigger 50- and 100-watt models, Bluetooth connectivity is built into the amp and doesn’t require the purchase of a separate adapter. In a new development from Boss, you can use an app on your phone for tone creation, jamming to backing tracks, and audio streaming, bringing it in line with competitor products from Positive Grid, Blackstar, and others.

Connectivity is a simple affair, with a single 1/4-inch input for the guitar, a 1/4-inch footswitch or expression pedal connection, a 1/8-inch output for headphones or recording out, and a USB-C connector for plugging it into your laptop or PC.

Specs

• Launch price: $ | £ | €
• Type: Digital modelling combo
• Origin: Thailand
• Output: 25W, switchable to 0.5W
• Speaker: Custom 8-inch speaker
• Channels: 6 (amp types)
• Controls: Gain, volume, bass, middle, treble, effects, tap, tone setting select/edit, power control, master volume
• Connectivity: 1/4 input, 1/8 headphones, USB-C, Bluetooth (audio streaming and app control)
• Footswitch: Optional. Compatible with FS-5L, FS-6, FS-7, FV-500H/L, EV-30, Roland EV-5, EV-1-WL, FS-1-WL
• Weight: 4.8kg / 10 lb 10 oz
• Dimensions: 360 x 180 x 310mm
• Contact: Boss

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★★

While it’s not quite desktop amp-sized, it is pretty small. It’s lightweight, too, making it an easy one-handed lift as I pull it out of the box. It looks very much part of the Katana lineup, with the four chrome screws in the front grille and the silver piping at the top and bottom.

The hard plastic handle isn’t what I’d call comfortable on the face of it, but the amp is so light that it doesn’t make all that much difference. It’s rounded in the right places to make it comfortable enough to carry around, secured to the top of the chassis with two very sturdy-feeling metal brackets. The vinyl covering of the open-back cabinet gives it a durable feel, and I don’t doubt it will deal handily with being knocked around a bit.

The speaker is mounted off-centre in the cabinet, screwed to a front-facing piece of wood with a circular hole cut into it to allow the sound through. On the top panel, all of the controls have a nice and sturdy feel to them, whether flicking switches, pressing buttons, or turning knobs. Overall, it’s a solid-feeling cabinet that will easily handle home use.

Usability and features

Usability and features rating: ★★★★☆

One of the hallmarks of the Katana series is its simple usability and physical controls, and that’s something that’s carried over to this model. It’s got a good selection of controls on the top panel, but as I start to get stuck into it, it becomes clear why this type of bedroom amp has been largely usurped by those that use companion apps. It’s annoying having to reach over to the amp to change a preset or make an adjustment if you’re not already standing up with your guitar on a strap.

With a Sire S7 S-type plugged in, when I put it on my desktop, it’s too high up to see the controls on the top panel. With it on the floor, I have to keep bending down to reach it and change presets. It’s also blasting at my feet rather than my ears, meaning more volume is needed. This could be solved with a footswitch, but alas, these are sold separately.

The screen is tiny. It’s only really good for displaying patch names and the onboard tuner. When I press the effects button to get rid of the tremolo on a preset, it’s displayed small and pretty difficult to decipher. There’s no way to just turn an effect block off that I can discern. Instead, I have to roll the encoder all the way back to zero to remove an effect from the chain.

There’s no adding effects via the unit either; you’re stuck with the five blocks of the chosen preset. It’s easy enough to adjust the amp EQ controls, but when adjusting presets there’s no marker to say what setting the control was on when I first started tweaking it. This makes it difficult to roll back the settings to where they were, or understand how much I’m changing the core tone.

The good news is that pairing and controlling the amp from its Tone Studio app is a doddle - I tested it on an iPhone, which discovered the amp immediately.

The Tone Studio app has been redesigned to offer a single app for multiple Katana amps, when you connect, any Katana in the immediate vicinity with its Bluetooth enabled shows up in the app, you tap its icon on the screen and you're connected.

Inside you can scroll through all the available effect and amp blocks, assign your chosen effects to them, switch them on and off by tapping, and you get expanded controls for each too. It's a nice, linear layout and makes building tones really quick and easy. When you're done, you can name and save them to one of the user slots.

But it only really starts there, because one of the big features is the Session function. This allows you to search and watch YouTube videos direct from the app.

You can build a library of videos (lessons, for example) and come back to them next time you want to practice. But Boss has also created a number of soundalike playalong tracks. These come with tab for you to learn, plus they'll automatically switch your sounds to reflect which part of the song you're playing. You can add your own markers, as well as looping sections of the track and adjusting the speed until you're comfortable playing along.

There's a bigger graphic representation of the tuner too, which while perhaps a 'given' is still nice to have, and makes tuning quicker and less fiddly.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★½

With it set to 0.5W mode, we’re very much in bedroom-friendly territory. With the master volume at the halfway point, I’ve got enough volume to be heard over the attack of the raw guitar strings without being offensive to others in my home. It still reacts like a non-modelling amp, backing off with the volume control and picking dynamics as you might expect at full volume.

I cycle through the settings, and the amp models sound just as good to my ear here as they do on the full-size Katana. As a bit of a metalhead, I find myself on the ‘brown’ amp tone a lot, enjoying its midrange punch and controlled low end. The clean amps are great as well, and the range of six cpre models plus their variations is plenty to cover pretty much any style of music you could imagine.

I end up really loving the ‘pushed’ setting as well. It’s like a hot-rodded clean amp that reacts beautifully to my picking dynamics, staying clean when I pick gently and breaking up when I dig in, no matter what the volume is set to. The crunch tone does what it says on the tin, and I particularly enjoy the ‘Texas’ preset with its huge low end.

Although you wouldn’t know it from the presets on the face of it, the effects are of that typical Boss quality. There’s just a handful of the presets that really show this off, so I have to dive into deeper editing to really put them through their paces. As anyone who knows Boss knows, the company's reverbs and delays are simply superb, and that’s true of the Katana-25. It’s the same with the modulation effects, which sound wonderful with a healthy dose of the mix value turned up.

Turning it to max power mode and cranking the volume three-quarters of the way, it’s certainly loud enough to earn you some noise complaints. It’s really bright as well, which is perhaps a voicing decision of the presets to make it sound good at lower volumes. I find myself instantly reaching for the tone knob of my S-type to cut it back some.

In the low end, of course there’s not as much heft as a bigger amp. That said, I find myself surprised by how good it sounds when I play my baritone guitar through it. The chuggy stuff sounds great, even if it’s lacking a little of that chest punch I get through my full-size guitar amp. For bedroom metal players, you won’t find it lacking here.

I can understand why Boss ended up with quite a treble-heavy amp. Putting it in a closed-back cabinet would’ve likely made it boxy-sounding, and with the current design there’s none of that present, which is a welcome change for a small guitar amp. I don’t doubt that the room spread plays a role here as well with the open back, allowing it to sound much louder than its size would with a closed back design.

Verdict

The Boss Katana-25 feels like a return to the classic practice amp format, albeit with a digital twist. It’s too big to sit on a desktop, but too quiet to hang with a drummer like its larger and more powerful Katana cousins. Like popular options from Positive Grid, Blackstar, and Fender, it delivers a huge wealth of tones that can cover any and every style, making it a great option for first-timers.

It’s incredibly lightweight and quite small, yet despite that, it delivers room-filling sound. It also manages to overcome the classic small amp boxiness with an open-back cabinet and surprisingly full-range sound. I was very impressed with the low-end response in particular, but I did find that the presets were voiced a little too treble-heavy for my taste.

The actual hands-on control isn’t as nice as what I’ve found from using the Katana-50 Gen 3. Without an Amp Type knob and that minuscule screen, its formula of presets delivers good core sounds, but gets let down by the tweaking aspect. The app fixes this issue, and is a joy to use with plenty of features to keep you coming back (aside from being fairly reliant on it). So, be prepared to fire-up your Bluetooth connection when you plug in.

MusicRadar verdict: If you’re looking for a practice amp that lets you put down your smartphone, the Boss Katana-25 isn’t the amp you’re looking for. If you want a huge range of great-quality sounds in a compact chassis that sounds way bigger than it looks, then this might just be the ideal practice partner. Ideal for beginner guitarists, Boss’ halfway house between a full amp and a desktop variant delivers a great playing platform for bedroom guitar players.

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• Best practice amps buyer's guide

U2 have announced a fresh UK and Europe leg for their The Greatest Show On Earth world tour, set to kick off in Spring 2027.

The Irish pop-rock superstars had already confirmed a run of dates in Latin America, with Beck supporting the band in cities including São Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City across February and March 2027.

After that, Bono and co. will jet off to Stockholm, before playing dates in Paris, Lisbon, Amsterdam, London, Berlin and Milan. In Europe, U2 will be joined by Mercury Prize-winning UK band Wolf Alice, with tickets for the newly announced shows going on sale on Monday 2 November.

The group recently gave a taste of what's to come on their forthcoming album Carnaval de Luz, with the release of the anthemic new single Street of Dreams. The track was accompanied by a music video in which the four-piece performed on the roof of a Mexico City bus in pouring rain.

Ahead of the newly unveiled Spring 2027 dates, Bono and The Edge also spoke out about one of the most controversial moments in the group's long history — their decision to have 2015's record Songs of Innocence automatically downloaded to over 500 million iTunes users across the globe.

"I went too far on that one," Bono admitted to the New York Times. "I mean, we were experimenting. We wanted to see if we could get Apple or another company to pay for our music and then they distribute it. And look, it’s going to take some experimentation to fix the music [business]. It’s astonishing how little other musicians are paid, and it’s frightening. But yeah, that was all on me."

The Edge chipped in to defend the decision, saying: "We have to take risks. So you fail, you fall on your face at times. That’s part of the gig." Previously, producer Flood argued that "what it did was raise whether music is valued in society right now, and I think that’s something that still hasn’t been answered correctly. It brought about the question of ‘What are people’s listening tastes?’"

The critic-baiting title of U2's new tour suggests the group is still well aware of their ability to polarise music fans around the world. But with tickets for the new round of dates set to fly off the shelves next week, their crowd is as loyal as ever.

A touchscreen MacBook has long been talked about, but when Apple launched the iPad, in 2010, the assumption for many years was that the company wouldn’t put touch on a laptop for fear of cannibalising sales of that. Times change, though, and a touchscreen MacBook Pro – or the MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display to give it its full title – was officially announced yesterday.

As you’d expect, Apple hasn’t skimped on the internals here: you can choose between an M5 Pro and M5 Max processor; up to 128GB of memory can be installed; and you can have up to 16TB of storage. It’s the display, though, that the company is really talking up, and the specs sound undeniably impressive.

Whether you go for the 14- or 16-inch model, PROLED XDR uses “tandem OLED technology” to deliver “Extreme Dynamic Range (XDR)” and high levels of detail and brightness. In fact, the display engine is said to control each pixel in real time.

And then there’s that touch interface, which brings swiping, pinch-to-zooming and all those other gestures we’re familiar with to the Mac for the first time. Apple says that the touch sensor is built into the display panel rather than layered on top of it, the theory being that this will reduce latency.

This could be important, of course, if you’re playing keys or tapping drum pads in Logic Pro, as Apple’s launch video suggests you might. We’re intrigued to find out how this feels; while touch certainly makes sense in iPad music making apps, where the device can be placed flat on the desk or slightly angled, we’re yet to be convinced that leaning across a laptop keyboard and tapping keys on an upright screen (the one on the new MacBook Pro can’t be folded back on itself) is going to be conducive to an accurate or pleasurable playing experience. We shall see.

Elsewhere, Apple has also kitted the new MacBook Pro out with an enhanced six speaker audio setup. We’re promised 50% deeper bass and newly-designed tweeters, while the mics are said to be of “studio quality.”

Connectivity options are plentiful, too: we’re talking three Thunderbolt 5 ports, HDMI, an SDXC card slot, MagSafe, and a headphone jack.

None of this comes cheap, of course – the 14-inch model starts at $2,749/£2,899 and the 16-inch machine at $3,399/$3,399. Pre-orders are being taken now, and shipping will start on 6 November.

Find out more on the Apple website.

Slipknot drummer Eloy Casagrande has confirmed that the band is working on a new album, with the Brazilian claiming his parts on the record are all recorded.

Speaking to Craig Reynolds on The Downbeat Podcast, Casagrande said: "I just finished recording the drums, so all the drums, they are recorded. They are done. I finished like 10 days ago or a week ago."

The hotly anticipated new project will be Slipknot's eighth studio album, coming over a quarter of a century after their self-titled 1999 debut, and hot off the heels of Look Outside Your Window, an experimental side project released in the summer.

Details of a full record to follow on from 2022's The End, So Far have emerged gradually, with guitarist Jim Root claiming last year that there were "six finished arrangements" in the vaults. Casagrande's comments suggest things have been progressing steadily since then.

Diving into the band's recent recording process, Casagrande explained: "I didn't wanna do overdubs, I don't wanna do push-ins, punch-ins. I wanna just play it straight."

By all accounts, there's been a real drive amongst the group for unfiltered, spontaneous collaboration, with Root saying he wanted to "revisit the raw energy of how those first two records were produced". Interestingly, Casagrande's experiences teaching drums to kids in Brazil appeared to have a real impact on this side of the process.

"A few years ago I used to give classes in São Paulo," he recalled. "I used to have many students, and they think that what they listen [to] in a record, especially from the new metal bands, they think that's the reality. And it's not. It never is."

He continued: "When I was recording the songs, I was playing them many, many times — like five, six, seven times each — and the best take was, like, 'Okay, I think I like the last one. That's my favorite one. Let's use it.'

"Sometimes I was putting some songs together — choosing half of one take, half of the other take, but never punch-ins. Never like that. I was trying to keep it real — to be honest, to be like in a real-life situation, that sometimes you're good, sometimes you're bad, and you gotta deal with that."

The first taste of maximum rock ’n’ roll duo His Lordship’s new Chuck Berry covers album, Promised Land has been unveiled today. The pair – vocalist/guitarist James Walbourne and drummer Kris Sonne – have unleashed their incendiary take on Berry’s classic Nadine.

Recently, we spoke to James at length about his infatuation with Berry, which started at a young age. In fact, six-year-old Walbourne was lucky enough to see Chuck himself play at London’s Hammersmith Odeon.

“I remember waking up in the morning and thinking, ‘Oh my God - it’s eight hours before we see Chuck Berry!’”, Walbourne told us. “I remember there were Teddy Boys there and an underlying air of violence about the place - it was very different to what it would be like now.”

James was a rock ’n’ roll obsessive as a kid. “That was my thing: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis… I was enamoured with it and it just consumed me - that was the start of me being involved in music. I used to watch videos of those guys over and over at home, and I was fortunate that my dad took me to see some of those people that were alive in the ‘80s. I think the first gig I saw was Fats Domino at the Royal Festival Hall.”

For new album, Promised Land - which has been made to mark what would have been Berry’s 100th birthday - Walbourne and Sonne have taken on 13 Chuck Berry classics. These aren’t just straight covers though, instead the pair have reworked the songs into entirely new forms…

“I came back to England, and we realised it was his 100th birthday [this year], so we thought, ‘Why not? It’d be a great thing to do to honour Chuck.’” James told us. “We’ve got our own studio, [Karma Studios, London], so we thought we’d just do it. There wasn’t much thinking about it - we had the means to do it, so we did it, and the Berry family seemed into it; that was part of it. But we did f*** around with the songs quite a lot!”

Although a fun project, it wasn’t without its challenges. “We went around the houses a bit to try and reimagine the songs. It was like, ‘How would Kraftwerk do Chuck Berry? OK - that sounds pretty good; let’s do that’. I’d go away and do a demo at home and then come in and play it to the boys, and then we’d go in and record it.”

The video of the first taste of the record, a snarling, garage-rock take on Nadine, has just dropped on YouTube, and will hit streaming services tomorrow (October 30) alongside a 7-inch release. The album itself arrives on November 13.

We asked James why the band chose to come at the song in a particularly hi-octane way…

“It’s very straight-ahead garage rock. I think Nadine would’ve influenced all those Chiswick Records bands. I grew up playing in pubs all over London - that’s how I learnt the craft of playing in a band, and Nadine was one of those songs that everyone played. It was a massive song - the Wonderwall of pub rock!”

As to what Walbourne thinks Berry himself would make of his take on Nadine, and the album as a whole, James is unsure…

“He’d either love it or hate it. We didn’t want to play it safe, so I think Chuck would possibly get off on that.”

Read our full interview with James Walbourne here.

A founder member of The Human League, Martyn Ware went on to form Heaven 17, one of the most influential synth-pop acts of the 1980s.

Now Martyn Ware is sitting in the MusicRadar interviewee hot-seat, recalling how the early days of the band paved the way for a decade of innovation.

“We deliberately set out to make something timeless, that you couldn’t attach to a particular period,” Martyn told us of Heaven 17’s debut album, Penthouse and Pavement, in our wide-ranging new interview. “A lot of other eighties records have aged poorly because they were more throwaway, but we had a different mindset. Which sounds ambitious but that is what we told ourselves back then.”

First forming the band after splitting from The Human League’s Phil Oakey, the Sheffield-born Ware and fellow HL member Ian Craig Marsh created Heaven 17 with vocalist Glenn Gregory and immediately relished their newfound liberation.

“Starting Heaven 17 was like being set free from prison,” Ware tells us, “[First single] (We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang was the first track we did and it meant a lot as all three of us [including vocalist Glenn Gregory] were political. It was a forbidden subject during the early days of The Human League. They were great but much more sci-fi and metaphorical.”

On that blinding debut album, which is marking its 45th anniversary this year, Martyn remembers that the gear in play was cutting-edge at the time…

“We used the Linn LM-1 drum machine which had just come out,” he says. “You could create a rhythm which was so accurate, similar to the electronic regularity of a band like Kraftwerk.

“[(We Don't Need This) Fascist Groove Thang] has an important message which unfortunately still resonates today,” Martyn explained. “We were like the Nostradamuses of synth-pop. Looking back, I’m eternally grateful to Virgin for putting their faith in us. With Penthouse and Pavement, we were a slow-burning act even though we didn’t have any big hits on that first album, we were in the top 40 for 45 weeks. They took a gamble on us and it paid off.”

Read our full interview with Martyn Ware here. Heaven 17 continue to tour.

Justin Sargent puts it simply: “It feels pretty damn good!” The 40 year old from New Jersey is the new singer in multi-million selling hard rock band Skid Row.

“It’s a natural fit,” he says. “I’m in heaven. It’s a dream.”

To celebrate this new milestone in Skid Row’s career, it’s the new guy who speaks first to MusicRadar – before bassist and founding member Rachel Bolan gives his side of the story on behalf of the band.

Sargent has previously worked as an actor and singer on Broadway. He says of his role in Skid Row: “It just perpetually keeps being the coolest thing. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever done. And I’ve done some pretty cool stuff.”

Rachel Bolan is one of the band’s three remaining founding members alongside guitarists Dave ‘Snake’ Sabo and Scotti Hill. Drummer Rob Hammersmith has served since 2010.

The last singer to perform live with Skid Row was Lzzy Hale of Halestorm, who helped them out as a guest star after their Swedish frontman Erik Grönwall was forced to leave the band due to health issues.

The biggest challenge for Justin Sargent is to perform the hit songs that were originally recorded with larger-than-life singer Sebastian Bach during Skid Row’s glory days in the late ’80s and early ’90s – the heavy metal anthems Youth Gone Wild and Monkey Business, and the power ballads 18 And Life and I Remember You.

But Sargent promises: “I know I can not only bring it – but bring it consistently.”

Skid Row’s first recording with Sargent is a cover of The Who’s 1971 classic Won’t Get Fooled Again.

Beyond that, the band are writing and demoing, with a slate of shows to be announced.

In early 2026 the band had invited singers to audition online via music retailer Sweetwater, but as it turned out, they found Justin Sargent by chance – when their manager Robby Hoffman attended a charity gig in New Jersey.

“I do this big charity gig every year,” Sargent says, “and Robby came to see the event. I got an email the next day, saying, ‘Hey, we’re looking for a vocalist for Skid Row. Are you a fan?’ I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? Of course I’m a fan! Yes. This is unbelievable.’”

Tell us about the moment when you first heard that you’d got the gig with Skid Row.

“It’s one of those things where during the entire process, every step of the way, I kept saying, ‘If this is as far as it goes, this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my life.’ Getting in a room with the guys, going through the setlist, I was just like, ‘This is the coolest thing.’

But getting that phone call, where they were all on for like a FaceTime situation, Rachel just said, ‘I’ve got one last question before we move to the next step…’ Then he was like, ‘How would you like to be the next singer of Skid Row!?’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God! Yeah!’ It was just a very cool moment.

It goes without saying that this job comes with an element of online judgment because of the volatility of the vocal position.

“No, really?! You gotta ignore it. You gotta just shut it off. I’m considering buying a flip phone, just to make sure there’s no temptation, you know what I mean?”

Another way to look at it is you’re part of a long lineage of talented vocalists.

“Man, it’s a really fun and interesting perspective to have. I get to look back at everybody, study, and take in what they’ve done. And they’ve all done it so differently, you know?

“But at the same time, it’s all been very much Skid Row. A credit to the guys is that the vocalist may change, but there’s an undeniable Skid Row quality. I’m honoured to carry that forward.”

How important was personality in the decision-making process?

“They wanted to make sure that we melded artistically. But there’s also the dynamic of, ‘Can we hang?’ That’s a hard thing to achieve off the bat, but every time we get together, I feel like I’ve known the guys for a long time, and my cortisol levels drop.”

According to Rachel, it was your idea to record a cover of The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again, which is your first official recording with Skid Row.

“I was so surprised when they said, ‘Yes.’ It was one of those things where I was just like, ‘I’m going to throw this out there.’ My parents raised me on classic rock, and so when we were all brainstorming about doing a cover I was like, ‘They’re never going to go for this.’ But their reaction was immediate. They said, ‘That’s a great idea. That’s what we’re gonna do.’ Even now, I get kind of emotional talking about it. It was such a cool experience.”

Rachel, Snake, and Scotti have been busy writing songs during their layoff. Have you started working on any new music?

“So, they’ve been hard at work writing new material. I’ve been down to kind of lay some demo vocals down, and I’ll tell you what, man: it’s really cool. Not only is it very much Skid Row, but there’s this whole feeling of the next chapter. The sound is really cool. I can’t wait for people to hear what’s been cooking.”

What’s the toughest classic Skid Row song to pull off?

“Songs like 18 And Life, Monkey Business and I Remember You are just unrelenting, man.

“With those songs, you have to nail them for the audience every single night. All those songs… those are the ones that are the earmarks for people to go, ‘Let’s see. Oh, there it is. Okay.’

“Then they’re saying, ‘Okay, let’s see how he does on this big part. Oh, there it is… he’s got it.’ It’s that kind of thing. But I think that’s where my background really has a big benefit because I’m very used to consistency and delivering over and over and over again.”

And have you considered how you’ll feel when you step behind the microphone for the first time in concert?

“Oh, my God! Every single day, man! You kidding me? Every single day since I got that phone call. I imagine it as a dream fulfilled. That’s the best way I can put it. And knowing that I get to do it perpetually afterward… It’s just unbelievable. This is my job. This is what I’m here for. This is priority – and I’m not going anywhere.”

When Rachel Bolan is asked whether Skid Row had considered a reunion with their former singer Sebastian Bach, he says flatly: “It’s never gonna happen.”

Now, after 1500 singers had submitted auditions via the Sweetwater campaign, Bolan is more than happy to have Justin Sargent fronting the band.

“It’s pretty crazy,” Bolan says, “because we did that huge campaign, and there’s really a lot of talented singers out there. Some were great, but not right for Skid Row. Then, there were some on the outside of the whole thing that people suggested.

“With Justin, our manager Robby Hoffman happened to be at a show, and Justin got up, jammed, and sang. Robby immediately called me, and it was like Back To The Future. ‘Hey, here’s that sound you’re looking for!’”

What was it like initially meeting with Justin?

“We had him down months and months ago. He came into the room, and he’s like, ‘I live in Jersey…’ I’m like, ‘Man… he’s from New Jersey? We’ve been listening to stuff from all over the world, and here you are, like a few exits up the parkway!’”

Did you offer Justin the gig then and there?

“Well, when he came in – and we’d sent him five songs, but he learned the whole set, which we weren’t expecting – we were floored. But we had a lot of people to audition still, and we wanted to keep our word and do our due diligence.”

So how and when did you finally decide Justin was Skid Row’s new singer?

“We always kept circling around to Justin. We said, ‘Hey, dude, can you come in again?’ We kept doing that, and every time he was there it was just like, ‘I feel like I’ve known this guy since I was 16.’ Maybe it’s a Jersey thing… who knows?

“But it worked out really well. The guy has such a powerful voice, and fits perfectly. He’s cool dude, and so now here we are. Finally, we can make an announcement. Even my family didn’t know! They were like, ‘You found a singer yet?’ I’m like, ‘We’re getting close.’”

When it comes to vocals, Sebastian Bach is the benchmark for Skid Row. How does Justin stack up?

“Justin has a huge range and huge power. There’s nothing that we do that’s difficult for him. I don’t know what else I could say about the guy. There was nothing that we threw at him that he couldn’t sing with ease.”

As far as Sebastian goes, why have you avoided a reunion?

“Is this a riddle? Everyone knows the answer: it’s to get to the other side! You know, the past is the past, man. We’re in the here and now. That was a decision we made three decades ago.”

The idea of reuniting for a bigger paycheck doesn’t appeal?

“We’re getting huge paychecks. We’ve got a bunch of shows booked for next year – and we’re getting huge paychecks. So, we’re doing it for the right reasons, and getting paid well for it.”

So, it’s about the music, and by the sound of it, reuniting with Sebastian wouldn’t be about the music, and wouldn’t be for the right reasons…

“It’s always about the music. We’re moving forward. It’s never going to happen. That’s all I can give you, man. We’re Skid Row, and we’re in this to play music, go on tour, and that’s what we’re doing.”

On that note, you’ve recorded your first music with Justin, a cover of The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again.

“We have songs written, but we’ve been planning on doing some covers, but couldn’t decide on one. We got on Zoom, and it was actually Justin who brought it up. He goes, ‘Are you guys Who fans?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, we all are.’ He goes, ‘What about Won’t Get Fooled Again?’

“As a bass player, I’ve always loved that song, so I was, ‘Yeah! Let’s do that song.’ We were all throwing songs around; Justin suggested that, and it was the perfect fit. We all learned it, and made an arrangement that shortens it a little because it’s almost eight minutes long.”

With the cover in the can, what can you say about Justin’s chops?

“I talked to [producer] Nick Raskulinecz afterward, and he said, ‘Man, I’m exhausted. This last week and a half was crazy.’ He goes, ‘If Justin wasn’t as good as he is, we probably wouldn’t have finished as quickly as we did.’ For a guy like Nick, who has worked with the likes of Amy Lee and Lzzy Hale, that’s a pretty huge compliment.”

Are Skid Row working on the next album?

“We have been writing, and we’ll eventually record the songs we’ve written. We’re trying to stockpile because in the downtime, Snake and I would get together and write. And I’d also get together with Scotti, and I’d write on my own. It’s just a matter of us all getting in a room, going through everything, demo it up, and getting enough to do a record.”

Skid Row have had many lead singers over the years. How do you feel about having Justin in the fold as you move forward?

“The outlook is bright. We can’t wait to hit the road. We have a bunch of shows lined up. The last two and a half years have been mind-numbing. You want to get out there with your bros and play the songs you wrote, so we’re super excited about it. We can’t wait for the first show.”

Pete Townshend has given an interview to Classic Album Review, ostensibly about the upcoming reissue of The Who By Numbers. But the 81-year-old guitarist has also shared some interesting thoughts on where The Who stood vis a vis ‘heavy’ music.

Many cite Black Sabbath as being the starting point of metal as we know it today, but The Who were - on their day - as loud and heavy as any band in the late '60s and early 70s. Did they have a part to play in the evolution of the genre, then?

“In a way,” Townsend replies. “But I do think that the difference really was that [for] bands like Black Sabbath and all of the other big heavy metal bands – until Led Zeppelin came along, who combined heavy metal with some softer songwriting and ballads – heavy metal was almost a religious philosophy. It was rooted in a sense of darkness and often irony.”

“No, I don’t necessarily think so,” he decides. “I think Live At Leeds is probably as explosive as it got. For example, at Woodstock we did a good chunk of Tommy and then we did some heavy stuff as well. We did both… The only heavy metal I really listened to was AC/DC.”

“I never really got into Led Zeppelin,” the guitarist admits. “At the time I didn’t like it that they were, in a sense, trying to pinch our audience. I’d been through it before with Jimi Hendrix coming over with his big amplifiers and his distortion and his wah-wah pedal, and having to admit, ‘Wow, here is a guitar genius.’”

And Sabbath? “I don’t know about bands like Black Sabbath and so on because I really didn’t listen to them, despite the fact that I think they were great fun and enjoyable,” Townshend explains. “And I really love the parts of the music business where people don’t take themselves too seriously. That was my issue in my early days – I felt I was carrying a big cross, a big manifesto for rock and roll. I felt that this was important for me to deliver.”

As for new Who activity, Townshend gave no details. We know that he and Roger Daltrey have rehearsed recently with Zak Starkey once again – despite the fact the drummer left the band amid much controversy and to-ing and fro-ing last year – but no dates for 2027 have been announced as yet.

Jon Bon Jovi has admitted his decision to agree to a gut-busting key change in Livin' on a Prayer has ended up causing problems later in life.

Speaking in an interview with the Australian TV show A Current Affair, the 64-year-old explained the extent of his recent vocal struggles and made light of a certain creative choice he made when “young and dumb”.

Discussing the key change at the climax of his band’s biggest single, he joked: "You know when they say: how many regrets have you had in your career? I'd never modulated a song at the end before. So I'm wide open to the idea. [We were] 24 when we wrote the damn thing, and you work up the demo, and they go ‘let’s try this!’ When you’re that young and dumb, you’re like, ‘I could do this’”.

In recent years, Bon Jovi has been forced to take a break from performing due to health concerns that have made Livin' on a Prayer a particularly difficult track to sing.

In 2022, he underwent risky surgery to repair an atrophied vocal cord that meant he couldn't even sing Happy Birthday.

The vocal damage came as a huge shock, with Bon Jovi insisting, "I never did anything to hurt the cords. I didn’t have any excesses. I’m a trained vocalist.

"I’ve practiced the craft. So when a doctor had to explain to me that one of the cords was literally atrophying, it was confusing.”

After a long recovery, the rock icon returned to the stage earlier this summer. Elsewhere in the ACA interview, he reflected on the brilliant doctor who helped turn things around.

"I found this guy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who was literally on the verge of retirement," he explained. "He’s very majestic in his approach. To seal the deal with me, he says, ‘I promise you nothing. Stick to the protocols. Do this operation because it’s your only choice. And eventually you will be better than you are now. Trust the process.' I couldn’t have said thank you any deeper.”

Sought-after super producer Andrew Watt has opened up about his experiences working with some of the most iconic musicians on the planet.

The 38-year-old has built up a very particular niche for himself: the ability to coax the best out of legendary rock and roll stars in their twilight years, from Elton John to Iggy Pop, Paul McCartney to Ozzy Osbourne.

Speaking to Vulture, he shone a light on the process: “I believe it’s cool to be a fan. I don’t think you have to pretend you’re cool or act like you don’t like this person.

"I’m a giant music fan. That’s all I know. I've had it before where I’ve met someone and talked to them about how much I love them, because I can be very vocal about that."

Watt first started racking up huge production credits in the 2010s, working with major pop stars like Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, and Post Malone. His collaborations with the latter singer-songwriter helped spawn new connections with some of the world's biggest rock legends, leading to a Grammy-winning 2021 track with Ozzy Osbourne (Ordinary Man) that tipped him into a whole new stratosphere.

Recent projects Watt has helped deliver include Foreign Tongues by the Rolling Stones, The Boys of Dungeon Lane by Paul McCartney, and Dark Matter by Pearl Jam. It’s a list of rock legends that would intimidate plenty of younger producers, but not Watt. Partly, that's because he recognises a key thread that runs between each artist.

“They all have an overwhelming kindness,” he explained. “All the great achievers are kind to the people they work with. They go over and beyond to make sure everyone feels good.

"They come down to your level. Or they invite you up to theirs. People ask that all the time: ‘How the fuck are you giving the guys suggestions?’ Because that’s what you’re paid to do. What the fuck else are you there for?”

On how he wins artists' trust in the first place, Watt added: "This is a results-based business, it's that simple. If they’re happy and they’re jumping up and down about the art that they made, that’s the reason I do what I do. I don’t know if that’s the reason why I get hired, but I like to think they’re happy with the sound I make.”

Okay, here’s something cool – a kool thing, if you will – it’s the Kim Gordon signature Jazzmaster, and it’s quite a different take on the classic offset guitar.

Yes, it has that unmistakable silhouette, a solid piece of alder that’s all angles. But at the bridge position, the alt-rock icon has swapped out the traditional over-sized single-coil pickup for a Seymour Duncan JB/TB-4 humbucker.

At the neck, you’ve got a more traditional Jazzmaster Alnico V single-coil, and it makes for one seriously versatile electric guitar.

Gordon says it’s so versatile you don’t need to consult your pedalboard for extra sounds.

“One thing that’s great about the Jazzmaster, if you have a guitar that sounds good by just plugging it into an amplifier, it doesn’t need effects,” she says. “That’s really satisfying…I just really like the sound…Electricity in the guitar is the gateway to losing yourself.”

As co-founder of Sonic Youth, Gordon helped popularise the Jazzmaster.

These were the guitars that were going cheap, unloved and unused. Sonic Youth could buy up loads of them on the cheap and keep them in their unique alternate tunings. The rest of the wolrd caught on quick.

How times have changed. Now the Jazzmaster is one of Fender’s most dependable unit-shifters – and this one is sure to be a hit. It arrives in Olympic White, with a black pickguard. The neck is bolted to the body, maple as per the usual style, and topped with a 9.5” radius rosewood fingerboard with pearloid block inlays.

There’s no faffing about with a Rhythm/Lead circuit here. The controls have been simplified, with a three-way pickup selector toggle located on the lower cutaway, plus skirted amp-style volume and tone controls. The zebra-coloured bobbins of that uncovered JB humbucker (always and forever a much-loved electric guitar pickup here at MusicRadar) just add to the aesthetic appeal.

In fact, this new signature model looks like a mirror image of the black Mexican-made Jazzmaster Gordon has been playing live with for decades, which had a similar humbucker/single-coil pickup configuration.

Elsewhere, Gordon’s Jazzmaster has a floating tremolo, Mustang saddles. And it has the the rolled fingerboard edges, too, which is a nice upscale touch that Fender’s Ensenada facility has been giving its guitars of late.

The Kim Gordon Jazzmaster is a limited edition signature guitar. So get it while it’s hot. It’s priced $1,499/$1,099. That price includes a gig bag. See Fender for more details.

Boss has expanded its third-generation Katana series with a compact 25-watt digital guitar amp combo that’s the ideal size and spec’d for home practice, and this little thing costs just $199.

It has a single 8” speaker, is housed in the familiar Katana styling. So familiar is this look that you’ll swear you’ve seen the Katana-25 before, until something is beside it for scale. And crucially had has Boss’s Tube Logic tech under the hood to make its modelled amp sounds all the more convincingly ‘real’.

As Boss explains, Tube Logic makes the Katana series behave a little like a tube amp, give you “authentic tube sound and feel that’s the benchmark among pro players everywhere... Katana-25’s speaker and 25-watt reactive analogue power section [working] in harmony to create a highly interactive playing experience with rich bass, sweet high-end detail, and punchy dynamic response”.

In other words, you have a practice amp that sounds good, sounds legit, and then has a great abundance of digital features that today’s players have come to take for granted, but really, we shouldn’t – and of course there is a huge range of Boss guitar effects onboard.

All these features can be a little intimidating but Boss lays this out much like a regular guitar amp. You still have the Gain and Volume controls, Bass, Middle and Treble, too. There is a Master Volume dial with a low-power toggle switch to put them amp down to a half-watt setting that allows you to really push the amp a low volumes.

Almost everything you need to control the amp is on the front panel, including the connections for USB-C, the mini-jack headphones/recording output, 1/4”external footswitch input, and the Tone Setting section that also includes the onboard guitar tuner.

Boss is aiming this at “new and returning” guitarists so we would hope this would be easy and intuitive to get started on. You get six core amp sounds, covering all the main electric guitar tone styles from glassy clean chime etc to saturated high-gain, and one of these is voiced for acoustic electric guitar, too.

There are more than 60 Boss effects available and you can use up to five of them in any one sound. The Katana-25 also has tap tempo for time-based effects such as delay and modulation. When you find a sound that you like, you can save it down to one of the 30 available user preset slots in the Tone Settings section.

The amp comes preloaded with 20 factory presets, and you can make tweaks to the preamp settings without having to reach for your smartphone and the accompanying app to make edits.

Now, the Boss Tone Studio app. This is where you can make deep edits and really organise your sounds, and access more from the Boss Tone Exchange community.

This being 2026, you can browse YouTube on the Tone Studio app and play the content through the amp to practise along to, and you can actually cue in effects changes – e.g. going from some super-clean chorus sounds for an intro into a high-gain rhythm tone – in any external audio so you can play along and the amp changes the preset for you.

This all seems a little bit like having your one guitar tech working your pedalboard from the side of the stage except you’re probably using this in your bedroom.

The Katana-25 is available now, priced $199. See Boss for more.

What is it?

Since the inception of the Roland Corporation in 1972 and the release of the TR-33, 55 and 77 Rhythm Machines, the Japanese company has become synonymous with electronic instruments. Following the release of its first full electronic drum kit (the a-DRUM) in 1985, Roland’s V-Drums technology has been at the forefront of e-drum design, catering to drummers of all ages and abilities, from practice rooms to stages alike. I for one wouldn’t be half the drummer that I am now without the copious hours spent behind my trusty Roland TD-8 as a teenager.

With a wealth of electronic drum set options now on the market, Roland strives to offer affordable packages whilst still developing and pushing the technology forward. The TD-07 series, initially released in late 2020, is a great example of this; relatively affordable kits, centred around Roland’s notoriously excellent hardware and aimed at providing drummers with the tools they need to improve.

With the release of this kit - the TD-07DMK2 - and the TD-07KV2, the five former configurations based around the TD-07 module have been streamlined to just two. The module itself remains unchanged, but both kits boast upgrades to pad hardware and a new rack system. The TD-07DMK2 which we have for review is the smaller of the two new kits, yet both share much of the same makeup.

Included in this setup are three 8” tom pads (single-zone), a 10” snare pad (dual-zone), plus 10” pads for the hi-hats, crash and ride. Unlike the previous DMK kit which used a small rubber kick pad mounted on the frame itself, the DMK2 comes with a standalone KD-10 bass drum tower; offering improved playability due to its mesh head.

Unfortunately no bass drum pedal is provided which means you’ll need to allow some extra budget for one, alongside a stool, headphones and drumsticks. In the box you also get an FD-1 pedal for controlling the opening and closing of the hi-hats. Each of the drum and cymbal pads mount to the four-post rack which comes with pre-installed hardware straight out of the box.

Comparing the DMK2 and the slightly larger TD-07KV2 side-by-side, there are a few noteworthy differences. The KV2 has larger 12” cymbal pads for the crash and ride and is also supplied with an additional 10” crash. The floor tom pad is also bigger to match the 10” snare pad. Lastly, in place of the FD-1 hi-hat controller, a slightly posher FD-9 pedal is included which delivers added stability and a more realistic feel. Aside from these features both kits use the exact same hardware, including of course the TD-07 module.

Performance & verdict

With the TD-07 series targeted squarely at the beginner to intermediate market, there’s a clear focus on keeping things simple. This spans from general usability in terms of navigating menus and changing sounds on the module, through to how easy it is to put the kit together in the first place.

Unlike previous models (and most e-kits for that matter), the rack comes mostly pre-assembled in the box and only requires the two halves to be connected via a central pole. This is an extremely welcome development whether you’re embarking on building your own first drum kit or perhaps a parent dutifully assembling a kit for their child and looking to pull out as little hair as possible in the process. Once the rack is together, the snare, toms, cymbal pads and module can be attached to the relevant pre-installed mounting hardware.

Because the same rack system is shared with the KV2 model which uses a second crash, you’ll find a spare cymbal arm already attached, eagerly anticipating a cymbal pad that it will sadly never see... that is unless you choose to expand the kit with a separately available add-on cymbal. An extra CY-5 pad will set you back around around $130/£100. And you’ll probably be wanting to make that upgrade sooner than later.

The final step in the kit build is to connect each pad to the module using the included cable loom and connect the module to power. Then all that’s required is a pair of headphones or a suitable e-drum monitor speaker. It’s one of the quickest e-kit setups I’ve experienced in recent years and will get new players drumming without excessive faff.

For the most part, the TD-07 module is intuitive to use. A scroll wheel or left and right arrows enable navigation through the 25 kit presets and empty slots for 25 custom creations. There are buttons for accessing kit editing, metronome and coaching modes, plus a large drum kit button for quick navigation back to the default kit screen. There’s also a Bluetooth button which opens up the pairing screen of which the backlit icon glows blue when a device is connected. Pairing is a quick and painless process.

When delving deeper into the menus to access the wealth of in-built multi effects and ambience settings, the navigation can take a bit of getting used to, but is relatively straight forward once you know where to look.

The kit presets themselves are of a good quality and a wide array of styles are catered for. From rock kits such as Solid Rock and Arena Rock to Pop, Studio and Live Acoustic, there’s something for everyone. There are also plenty of processed electronic sounds alongside jazz, reggae and percussion kits.

The coaching functions are well thought out and offer five options for improving time keeping. These include a Time Check mode which rates beat placement, indicating whether the notes land early or late. Quiet Count which mutes the click for a set amount of bars and gives a score based on consistency of time, Auto Up/Down which accelerates and decelerates the click between two given tempos and Change Up which moves between subdivisions and really puts your accuracy to the test. Finally is Blast Beast, a newly added function which records a personal best for the most amount of notes played within a set time period.

As if these aren’t enough to keep any budding drummer busy, the TD-07DMK2 also comes with a free lesson pack for Melodics containing 40 lessons. Melodics is an app based tuition software which can actually connect to the electronic drum kit via USB and detect which drum or cymbal is being struck, and when. This is not only seriously clever but also makes for a lot of (quite addictive) fun, turning actual drumming into what is essentially best described as a video game.

Points are awarded for accurate beat placement and a star rating is given after each performance. Melodics is a subscription based platform but the included Roland Drum Pass unlocks several courses and individual lessons and is a real win for anyone picking up the sticks for the first time.

Specification

• Module: TD-07
• Kits: 50 (25 preset), 143 Instruments
• Coaching modes: Time check, Quiet count, Auto up/down, Change-up, Blast Beast (new).
• Other features: Built-in FX, room and mic simulator, USB audio, Bluetooth
• Hardware: PD-10H snare, 10-inch (dual-zone), PD-8H tom 1, 8-inch (single-zone), PD-8H tom 2, 8-inch (single-zone), PD-8H tom 3, 8-inch (single-zone), CY-5 hi-hat, 10-inch (dual-zone), FD-1 pedal, CY-5 crash, 10-inch (dual-zone), CY-5 ride, 10-inch (dual-zone), KD-10 kick, four-post stand
• Contact: Roland

Hands-on demos

Roland

Andertons

Edrumcenter

Behringer is teasing a forthcoming hardware sampler, Kick, which looks an awful lot like Akai’s recently-updated MPC One. That in itself isn’t especially noteworthy. Barely a week goes by without Behringer teasing a new product concept, many of which are very obviously inspired by existing, pricier hardware from rival brands.

What makes Kick different is the fact that, even before the hardware itself has been released, Behringer has uploaded resources for its open source firmware to GitHub, inviting potential users to “create, modify and reinvent what an instrument can do.”

Although the Kick hardware itself largely mimics the format of Akai’s MPC, with 16 pads, four assignable knobs, a touchscreen and a mix of audio, MIDI and CV connectivity, there are a couple of intriguing features mentioned in the specs.

One of these is the inclusion of an ‘AI camera’, which is said to allow for gesture control. Kick also includes a small touchstrip, similar to that found on Akai’s higher-end MPCs but not the similarly-sized MPC One.

Behringer announced Kick on Facebook in typically modest fashion, with a post that reads:

“HE WAS KICKED OUT OF A MUSIC STORE BECAUSE HE COULDN’T AFFORD ANYTHING.

That young musician was Uli Behringer.

That experience inspired a mission: Democratize music technology and empower those who have not and cannot.

Nearly 40 years later, we’re taking that mission to another level.”

Sure. This mission, the post goes on to explain, not only guided Kick’s affordable price point – which at a promised $150 is certainly very cheap – but also the decision to open the hardware and software resources in order to allow the user community to shape the device’s capabilities.

This sudden shift towards open source isn’t happening in a vacuum, of course. With the rise of AI-powered ‘vibe coding’, DIY firmware and custom plugins have become a topic of hot discussion in music technology circles. This same emphasis on open firmware is what has powered the whirlwind success of M-Wave’s FM-1 digital synth, which has inspired countless user-generated reimaginings thanks to its FM1 Open SDK.

In the same Facebook post, Behringer is explicit about the role it sees AI playing in the ongoing development of Kick: “With AI, even people without programming experience can turn their ideas into new features and firmware.”

Behringer is hardly alone in jumping on the open source bandwagon. Akai itself looks set to embrace an open approach with the recently teased MPC Sample Key, which is reported to be open source too.

There are a few ways to look at this industry shift. There are obvious benefits in this embrace of community collaboration. Open source music technology is nothing new, and there are numerous examples – such as software like Surge XT or VCV Rack, or Mutable Instruments’ digital hardware – where open source code has resulted in thriving communities of like-minded collaborators.

There is also an obvious danger though, that this move ends up shifting certain responsibilities from the brands themselves onto their user bases. Over the past few decades, it’s become standard practice for makers of music tech hardware to issue post-release firmware updates, used to fix bugs and improve performance, but also often as a way to extend a product’s lifespan by adding new features. By opening a product up to AI-generated firmware, at least the latter part of that deal becomes more of a community responsibility.

It will be interesting to see what Behringer Kick is capable of – and how it runs – when it hits the market. Its Github specs tout capabilities including sample editing, step sequencer and looper, and appears to be based around something called 'JAM DAW', implying it should ship with fairly capable ‘official’ firmware. For users, the ideal setup would be one where a product arrives with a broad set of features that make Kick a worthwhile purchase in its own right, and any user-generated content becomes an entirely optional bonus.

It’s not hard to imagine a world, however, where brands see AI-empowered users as a way to save money on the development, testing and updating of products. Effectively striking a deal whereby hardware brands put hardware in the hands of users in a minimal viable state and let the community refine it themselves.

Which is not to say this is what Behringer, Akai or any other brand has planned. It’s also worth acknowledging that users have started creating AI-generated firmware for a multitude of hardware devices whether officially sanctioned or not – a fact that likely contributed to Elektron banning unofficial updates from its forums.

This could well be the dawn of a newly democratised hardware market where a single cheap desktop device unlocks a multitude of inspiring workflows. Then again, five years from now we could be looking back wistfully on the days when we didn’t have to wade through a mountain of AI slop just to get our new synths to function properly.

A letter, sent by Brian Jones to Charlie Watts to convince him to join The Rolling Stones, is to go up for auction in December.

It was written by Jones – at that stage very much the leader of the band – in 1962. The Stones at that time comprised Jones, Jagger, Richards, Dick Taylor – who later formed The Pretty Things – Ian Stewart on piano and an unnamed drummer, who Jones was decidedly unimpressed with: “Our present drummer is atrocious!” he wrote.

Addressed to ‘Mr. C. Watts’ at his childhood home in Wembley, Jones’s letter is most polite. It begins: “Dear Charlie, if you consider this letter rather impertinent, please excuse me.”

Charlie was at that time behind the kit for Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated – a steady gig – and Jones evidently had to sell the idea of the Stones to young Mr Watts: “We are looking for a good drummer. Already we consider our band far better than Alex’s – we are getting a very tightly-knit sound.”

Clearly Charlie took some convincing – it would be another seven months before he would commit to the Stones. By then Jones had recruited Bill Wyman on bass and Dick Taylor had returned to art college.

The newly-assembled line up played their first gig at Ealing Jazz Club in February 1963, recruited Andrew Loog Oldham as manager in May and signed to Decca shortly afterwards. Ahead lay fame and immortality.

The letter apparently ended up in the possession of Watts’s sister and is to be auctioned by Sotheby’s in December. It’s expected to fetch somewhere between $70,000 and $80,000 (£52,000-£60,000).

“Few documents bring us as close to the formation of a legendary band as this letter,” said Craig Inciardi, Sotheby’s music and pop culture specialist.

He continued: “Written just weeks before the Rolling Stones’ first performance and months before Charlie Watts officially joined the group, it captures the excitement and ambition of a band on the cusp of history. Having remained in the Watts family for more than six decades, it stands as an extraordinary first-hand record of the moment Brian Jones set out to recruit the drummer whose distinctive sound would help shape one of the most influential bands in rock history.”

If you so wish you can see the letter before it’s sold, at New York Sotheby’s from 2 to 8 December. The auction will be on 15 December.

Akai Professional has previewed a new keyboard sampler in two teaser videos shared on the company’s Instagram account. Sample Key appears to be a keyboard-equipped counterpart to the MPC Sample, released in March this year, but Akai has yet to share any details on specs, price or release date.

The Sample Key has a two-octave, 25-key mini keyboard in place of the MPC Sample’s 4x4 grid of pads, with pitch and mod wheels, a built-in speaker and a central display surrounded by knobs and buttons. In the video, Akai’s Dan Gill explains that Sample Key can sample on individual keys and create automatic key splits, but that’s about all we know so far when it comes to the sampling features.

What sets Sample Key apart is the firmware. Akai has said that it will be “embracing the AI and vibe-coding community” by opening up the instrument's firmware for users to modify, giving them the ability to design new features, add new sound engines, and effectively turn it into a different instrument; Gill says that the Sample Key “can be whatever you want”. Akai hasn’t yet clarified whether the source code for Sample Key’s stock firmware will be published, or whether modding will be limited to tools Akai provides.

In the first video, two of Gill’s colleagues discuss their own mods for Sample Key; one has used Claude to transform the sampler into a chord machine, with the keys acting as a strum plate and the pitch wheel selecting the chord type, while another has loaded up a version of Native Instruments’ Massive soft synth on the device.

In a second video, posted today, multiple Sample Keys are lined up next to each other, each loaded with a different custom vibe-coded synthesizer, covering virtual analogue, FM and wavetable synthesis. Several MPC Sample units are also shown running the same synths, as Akai confirms that its firmware will be opened up in the same way.

Akai’s teasers arrive as the music tech world is engulfed by a wave of custom firmware, much of it vibe-coded. Since September, independent developers have been modifying or replacing the firmware on existing instruments using AI coding tools. The M-Vave FM-1 – a budget FM synth – has been the focal point, but the trend has spread well beyond the FM-1 to devices from Elektron, Roland and even Akai itself.

The timing of Akai’s teaser is worth noting, as it arrived a day after Behringer unveiled Kick, a prototype sampler and groovebox that looks suspiciously similar to Akai’s MPC One. (Though Akai hasn’t referenced Behringer’s Kick, it’s hard not to read the Sample Key teaser as a response.)

A sampler, step sequencer and looper equipped with 16 RGB pads, a large touchscreen, four assignable knobs and a jog wheel, Kick also features an “AI camera” for gestural control, along with USB, MIDI and CV/gate connectivity on the rear. The price could reportedly be as low as $150, seriously undercutting the $799 MPC One Gen 2.

Like Sample Key, Kick is designed to be reprogrammed by its users, but Behringer has potentially gone further by making its firmware open source, allowing users to build their own custom OS for the hardware that suits their own workflow. Music Tribe, Behringer’s parent company, has already published its own code for Kick on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 license, which permits anyone to use, modify and share it, provided that anyone who distributes a modified version releases it under the same terms.

Whether Akai's Sample Key will be opened up to the same degree remains to be seen, but with two major manufacturers embracing the custom firmware boom in the space of two days, it looks like community firmware is about to go mainstream.

Who would have thought it? Of all people it’s Bryan Adams – an artist not known for making big political statements – who has come out with the song that passes the harshest judgement on... well, you know who.

Adams has released Lake Ontario today (28 October). Evidently, it’s been written recently – certainly since President Trump unilaterally decided that Lake Ontario, which borders both Canada and the US, should be renamed ‘Lake America’. The song is to be added to Adams' new album, How’s It Goin’, as a digital bonus track.

The song is straight and to the point. The verse tells how the lake originally got its name – "The lake of shining waters is what the Iroquois called her/ It’s a first nations name - not an executive order" – before the chorus goes for the jugular with references to the ongoing war in Iran and the Epstein files.

Adams has also put out a statement about the song, saying: “Empires and regimes, dictators and kings, they all come and go. Lake Ontario is forever. This is a song for all the sane people on both shores who know that the current madness will pass, and that Lake Ontario will always be Lake Ontario.”

Anyway, How’s It Goin’ is something of a concept album about Adams’ homeland. That much is obvious from the track titles: 51st State, When Canada Joined Newfoundland, Canada’s Wild Eastern Edge.

It's also made clear by the record company blurb that accompanies its release: “How It’s Goin’ is about Canada: its vast landscapes, the characters, the history, the humour, the resilience and the stories that make it the country that it is. It is Adams looking back at the place that helped shape him while discovering new ways to tell its stories.”

Has there ever been a patriotic concept album about Canada? We’re not sure. It’s just another unlikely thing to add to all the other unlikely things would never have happened prior to January 2025.

How It’s Goin’ lands at the end of next week (6 November). Lake Ontario is out now.

Amy Winehouse never really rated herself as a guitarist – she once claimed to be barely adequate – but for many, watching her play and sing at the same time was a magical experience.

This is something she did less as her career developed, which makes it all the more pleasing to see the newly released footage of Winehouse accompanying herself on acoustic guitar as she sings You Know I’m No Good, the second track on her classic 2006 album, Back to Black.

This sounds markedly different from the finished song, suggesting that, at the time the clip was recorded, it was still at a fairly early stage.

The video is appearing first on Spotify, and the streaming giant has confirmed that it was captured at Metropolis Studios in London before the studio demos that appear on the new Back to Black 20th Anniversary Edition were recorded.

This and two other performance videos of Back to Black songs (Rehab and Love Is A Losing Game) have been unearthed from a 2006 electronic press kit, and have never previously been released.

Speaking in 2004 as she was in the midst of promoting her first album, Frank, Winehouse explained that her idiosyncratic guitar playing style stemmed from the fact that she was self-taught.

“People say to me all the time, ‘how come you taught yourself?’” she revealed. “And there's things people can always show you - but the truth is, if you learn how to play guitar off someone, you just kind of learn to play it like them, you know what I mean? And that's why I can say that, while I'm not even probably an adequate guitarist, I'm still always a distinctive guitarist, you know. I sound different.”

One person who was definitely impressed was the Libertines’ Pete Doherty, who spoke to MusicRadar about WInehouse’s playing in 2024. “I’ve actually sat in a room with her and a guitar,” he recalled. “Watching those tiny hands finding all these weird jazz chords. And her strumming patterns... crazy, off-kilter timings. She made it look so effortless.”

Freshly interpreted by maximum rock ’n’ roll duo His Lordship (James Walbourne and Kris Sonne), the most cherished staples of Chuck Berry’s songbook have been given a new - often frantic and feral - lease of life in the form of Promised Land, a covers album released to mark what would have been Berry’s 100th birthday.

In our recent wide-ranging interview with Walbourne (the guitar-wielding bandleader who is also a member of The Pretenders, currently a member of Primal Scream and one half of The Rails), he told us how electrifying it had been to come at some of Chuck’s most celebrated work with a more experimental approach.

But first, how did the album come about?

“I came back to England, and we realised it was his 100th birthday [this year], so we thought, ‘Why not? It’d be a great thing to do to honour Chuck,’” James told us. “We’ve got our own studio, [Karma Studios, London], so we thought we’d just do it. There wasn’t much thinking about it - we had the means to do it, so we did it, and the Berry family seemed into it; that was part of it. But we did f*** around with the songs quite a lot!”

Not half. Sonne and Walbourne decided to go pretty left-field with some of the new arrangements…

“As it’s the holy grail, I’d rather not do [straight covers]. There’s been enough cover versions of those songs… I think the first song we did was Promised Land, which is my favourite [Chuck Berry song]. So, we started playing it and when we listened to it, it was quite disappointing because it was normal. I thought, ‘The world doesn’t need this - it just sounds like us playing Chuck Berry’, so we decided we had to tear up the rule book and do it how we would approach our own songs, which is in a very different way. We had to deconstruct them, for want of a better word. That would be a better way of showing respect - what would Chuck Berry do in that situation?

“We had to try and reimagine the songs,” James continued. “That took a while to do. The journey was interesting and we had the luxury of the studio, so we could just go in and record - just the three of us, me, Kris Sonne and Dave Page. Dave is a great engineer and mixer - he understands it. So many times, you go into a studio, and people don’t understand what you’re after.”

Plotting out a track list that omitted Berry’s signature Johnny B Goode (“What’s the point”), the group began to re-shape the Berry catalogue n in exciting - and surprising - new ways…

“At some points it was quite challenging - we went around the houses a bit to try and reimagine the songs. It was like, ‘How would Kraftwerk do Chuck Berry? OK - that sounds pretty good; let’s do that’. I’d go away and do a demo at home and then come in and play it to the boys, and then we’d go in and record it. The actual recording of the tracks we would only do a few times - it was very spur of the moment. We didn’t re-record and re-record… Once we’d found what we wanted, we’d only do a couple of takes - all live,” James said.

“There were only a few overdubs, we recorded some [extra] guitars on the song Promised Land, because that’s what it needed, but what you’re hearing [on most of the album] is a live band and live singing. I didn’t even have earphones on - none of us had them on - and I had a little monitor. We just recorded like they would’ve done back in the day, but we modernised it with the sounds we were using. The initial recording took five days, then we went back… The master tapes got nicked somewhere along the way! Luckily, we had made initial mixes that we loved and that’s what we had to use.”

So what song was it that Walbourne and Sonne tackled with Kraftwerk hats on we wonder? None other than Brown Eyed Handsome Man, James tells us…

“That’s the one where we went quite far with reimagining it - I thought it needed to be completely different. It took a while to come up with it, but I was imagining Kraftwerk… even though it’s not. It’s that relentless riff that goes around. The whole thing with this album is not to concentrate on the sound of Chuck Berry - the big red ES-335 - but it’s more about his songs and how we reinterpret them. I didn’t want to sound like a facsimile of Chuck - I wanted to focus on his songwriting.”

Read our full interview with James Walbourne here. His Lordship’s Promised Land is released on November 13th, find out more over on their official website.

Epiphone has officially brought back the Prophecy Series and gave its metal guitar range an high-performance upgrade in the process.

Across the board, the 2026 lineup features stainless steel frets, Fishman Fluence humbuckers that were custom-voiced for the series, thermally aged, one-piece maple necks with graphite reinforcement and a speedy Hyperglide profile, and there is this new DAPS (Dual-Axis Pickup Stabilization) fitting that anchors the pickups to the body and always for super-precise height adjustments.

The Prophecy Series is also much expanded from before. This time around we have a 27” scale Les Paul Baritone, and a Floyd-equipped Victory double-cut joins the SG, Les Paul and Flying V.

These all have the 10” to 14” compound radius ebony fingerboard, and are replete with details that will cause Epiphone/Gibson purists to wince: 24 jumbo frets? A 25.5” scale length on the SG, Les Paul and Flying V? Weight relieved bodies with aggressive contouring? Black hardware? Check, check, and check. But then these are built to shred.

“The Prophecy Series is built for players who expect more from their instruments,” says Aljon Go, Epiphone’s product development manager. “By pairing our iconic designs with modern performance features like custom-voiced Fishman Fluence pickups, Hyperglide necks, and stainless-steel frets, we’ve built a lineup that’s fast, versatile, reliable, and built for today’s players. Every detail was engineered to help musicians focus less on their gear and more on their performance.”

The aesthetic is suitably metal. All come with solid mahogany bodies painted black and topped with a figured maple veneer and translucent satin finish. We’re talking Flying Vs in Orchid Bloom purple burst and the über-dark burst Obsidian Storm. The Les Paul comes also comes in Forest Phantom Satin.

Everywhere you look there’s something, y’know, contemporary. There are Posi-Lok strap buttons, locking Grover Rotomatics. Both the baritone and standard scale Les Pauls have the LockTone Tune-O-Matic but that’s string through via two offset groups of three body-mounted ferrules.

And the spec? Well, there’s no question, it’s pro. You get the multi-voiced capability from the Fishman Fluence humbuckers (you’ll need a 9V battery for these electric guitars) that offers a high-output modern voicing, a vintage PAF-style ‘bucker and quote/unquote optimised single-coil-inspired clarity. The tone controls select the voicing, while the individual volume controls activate the coil-tap for each pickup.

“Heavy music comes in more than one shape, and the players pushing it forward aren’t coming from just one scene,” Lewis McKinney III, marketing manager, Epiphone. “The rebuilt Prophecy Series gives guitarists across metal, hardcore, and beyond an instrument they can count on gig after gig, with the range to turn the sound in their heads into something you can feel in the room.”

These are priced at the upper end of the Epiphone price range – £1,249/$1,499 – but that price includes a Protector Ultralite guitar case. There is also something bougie and Gibson Custom about these designs, what with their multi-ply binding, split-diamond headstock inlays and black mother of pearl block inlays on the fingerboards.

But let’s not get carried away with all this finery. A Prophecy Les Paul is way more Hammer Smashed Face than Sweet Child O’ Mine, and if that sounds good to you, then you can check them out at Epiphone.

What is it?

Epiphone’s Prophecy line is all about high-performance electric guitars designed for contemporary technical and metal players. Sure, they offer classic Gibson body shapes, but they are outfitted with sleek, modern specs and eye-catching finishes. The line launched back in 2008 and has been phased in and out of production since then. Today marks the fourth generation of Prophecy models, and these may be the most highly spec'd so far.

For this review, I am looking at the Prophecy Victory. The original Gibson Victory was once a forgotten Gibson ‘80s relic, but the Nashville guitar giant has since reintroduced it, albeit in a very different getup from the original. In the two years since the Victory returned to the Gibson catalogue, it has had a few variations, most notably this year’s Floyd Rose version, which seems to be what Epiphone is taking most of its inspiration from.

In terms of specs, it has a satin-finished mahogany body topped with a highly-figured flamed maple veneer and what Epiphone calls a “thermally-aged” one-piece maple neck. The neck also has graphite rods inside to keep it as stable as possible. It sports a Hyperglide profile, a longer-than-usual 25.5” scale length, a bound ebony fretboard with a 10”-14” compound radius and 24 stainless steel frets.

Up top, an Explorer-style headstock proudly displays an inlaid mother-of-pearl Epiphone logo and houses a set of Locking Grover Mini Rotomatic tuners. At the other end of the instrument, there’s a Floyd Rose 1000 Series locking tremolo.

As for pickups, the model comes with a duo of custom-voiced Fishman Fluence humbuckers developed exclusively for the new Prophecy series. These p'ups provide a trio of tone options, easily accessed via push/pull master volume and tone controls, from high-output modern active humbucker tones to vintage-inspired PAFs and even single-coil-style sounds.

The model also ships in a large semi-soft hard case and is available in two finish options, Obsidian Storm Satin and Aqua Smoke Satin.

There’s no denying that this is a fully spec’d guitar, loaded with a lot of the features that today’s most modern players are looking for, but how does it hold up in practice – and is it more than the sum of its parts?

Specs

• Launch price: $1,499/£1,249/€1,299
• Made: China
• Type: Six-string electric guitar
• Body: Mahogany with figured maple veneer
• Neck: Maple, HyperGlide
• Fingerboard: Ebony
• Scale length: 25.5"/647.70 mm
• Nut/width: Floyd Rose R3 locking nut (43mm)
• Frets: 24, stainless steel
• Hardware: Grover Rotomatic, Floyd Rose 1000
• Electrics: Fishman Fluence with High Gain, PAF and Single-Coil modes
• Weight: 7.2lb/3.2kg
• Options: N/A
• Left-handed options: No
• Finishes: Obsidian Storm Satin, Aqua Smoke Satin
• Cases: Epiphone semi-soft hard case
• Contact: Epiphone

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★½

Out of the box, the Prophecy Victory FR makes a pretty good first impression. I have to admit, I’ve really come around to the Victory body shape after reviewing three variations over the last couple of years. It was definitely an acquired taste when Gibson first dug it out of the ‘80s archives, but in this aggressive modern styling, the angular cuts and offset curves just work.

My review model arrived in the Aqua Smoke Satin finish, and it looks superb in person. The translucent green and grey hues play nicely across the figured maple veneer top. Granted, there isn’t much 3D movement to the figuring as you’d get from a deeply carved, true flame-top Gibson Les Paul, but for an Epiphone at this price tier, it looks good. It’s certainly eye-catching.

As with almost every matte or satin guitar on the market today, the finish is an absolute fingerprint magnet. If you plan to keep it looking pristine under stage lights, you’ll need a microfibre cloth handy in your gig bag. Still, the satin feel on the body and back of the neck gives it a sleek, tactile quality that feels great in hand, so it’s a small price to pay.

If I have one aesthetic gripe, it’s with the fretboard markers. I think Epiphone could have done a bit more with the inlays here. Previous Prophecy models featured custom designs, ranging from tribal graphics to block inlays with coloured inserts matched to the guitar’s body finish. By comparison, the standard pearloid dots on this fretboard feel a little safe and, dare I say, boring. They could have gone a bit wilder to match the guitar's edgy shape and the Prophecy name.

Where it truly counts, however, the construction is spot-on. The fit and finish across the body, neck joint, and headstock binding are completely clean. Best of all, the 24 stainless steel frets are expertly fitted, levelled, and polished to a brilliant mirror shine right out of the box, with zero sharp fret edges to complain about. It’s a job well done.

Playability

Playability rating: ★★★★½

It’s pretty obvious from just looking at it, but this guitar is built for high-speed shredding.

To me, the Hyperglide neck profile is noticeably thin, fast, and agile. Combined with the smooth satin finish on the back of that thermally-aged maple, my hand glides effortlessly, without the drag or stickiness that can come with high-gloss necks. I really like it. Sure, it’s a little thinner than I’m used to, but it serves a purpose.

As expected, access to the highest frets is very easy indeed. Thanks to the generous deep lower cutaway and the cleverly contoured neck heel, reaching the 24th fret requires zero hand contortion.

Overall, it is a fantastically fluid guitar to play. Complex legato, fast alternate picking runs, and wide bends feel natural and easy to navigate.

A huge part of this effortless feel is down to the fretboard’s 10”-14” compound radius. Down near the nut, the 10-inch curvature makes chording and rhythm work feel comfortable and familiar, but as you move up the neck toward the body, the fretboard flattens out to 14 inches. This flat profile allows for ultra-low action without notes choking-out during massive multi-semitone string bends.

The 25.5-inch scale length provides excellent string tension and keeps riffs tight and snappy if you tune lower, though you’ll need to set up your Floyd Rose to play nicely with it.

Speaking of the Floyd Rose, this one is very well set-up from the factory. The action measures just 1.2mm at the low E, and the unit itself is smooth and easy to dip with very little pressure. Yes, it can do the Dimebag harmonic squeals, I checked.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★½

In many ways, Fishman Fluence pickups are the modern era's answer to the classic active EMGs that dominated metal tone for decades. They offer that same ultra-quiet, high-output punch, but I'd argue that they have more clarity, dynamic range, and ultimately better versatility – there’s a reason we’re seeing so many of the biggest names in metal guitars making the switch.

Simply put, these humbuckers sound absolutely ace. Just like every other Fishman Fluence set I’ve tested, they deliver an articulate tone that handles high gain effortlessly without turning to mush as soon as you turn up the distortion.

To put the Victory through its paces, I'm tracking the guitar directly into Pro Tools and testing it across a range of modern digital amp models. Running through a Peavey 6505 model, chugging rhythms sound crisp and immediate, with tight bass response and aggressive upper-mid bite. Switching over to a Soldano SLO-100 patch yields a very satisfying harmonic-rich lead tone. So far, so good.

Even on crunchier settings, like a Tube Screamer-boosted Marshall JCM800 model, the push/pull voice controls really do a good job at replicating a passive pickup.

Engaging Voice 2 unlocks a warm, vintage Patent Applied For-style humbucker tone with decent dynamics that do give the sense that I’m playing a vintage Gibson humbucker. It's not 100% convincing, and certainly won't hold up in an A/B test against the real deal, but it's close enough for most people, definitely close enough for me.

Voice 3 splits the coils for a glassier single-coil tone that sounds great through a Fender Princeton. Again, it's not the perfect single-coil Strat replacement, but it's more than serviceable for live and even studio use.

Verdict

Epiphone had one type of player in mind for the Prophecy Victory FR, and created a guitar that caters masterfully to the demands of contemporary metal guitarists.

From a hardware perspective, it goes all-in on the modern appointments. The inclusion of stainless steel frets, Grover locking tuners, a Floyd Rose tremolo, and Fishman Fluence humbuckers means you get premium features out of the box without needing to do the upgrades yourself.

Yeah, sure, the satin finish can be high-maintenance with smudges, and the dot inlays are somewhat understated compared to past Prophecy models, but these are minor cosmetic nitpicks on an otherwise stellar instrument.

Honestly, if you’re in the market for a reliably priced metal guitar, then its combination of effortless playability, massive tonal variety, and rock-solid tuning stability makes it a formidable contender in the modern shred market.

MusicRadar verdict: The Epiphone Prophecy Victory FR takes a forgotten Gibson design and elevates it into a powerhouse built for modern metalheads. With versatile active electronics, fast playability, and rock-solid hardware, it delivers exceptional performance that far outweighs its price point.

Also try

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Gibson Gear Guide

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• Best metal guitars: riff machines for any budget

Dave Grohl appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show on Monday night and recalled a pivotal early show the Foo Fighters played back in 1995.

This was a KROQ festival in Los Angeles that also had the likes of Sonic Youth, Radiohead, No Doubt and Garbage on the bill. Also present was Alanis Morissette, whose drummer was a 23-year-old fellow called Taylor Hawkins.

“I met Taylor at that show,” Grohl remembered. “Our first record came out around the time Alanis’s first record came out. So we were doing a bunch of those festivals and radio shows and things. But that was the first time I met Taylor, and I was backstage. And here comes this blonde surfer dude. He’s like [all shouty] ‘Yo, dude, I love your band.’ And I knew right then I was like, ‘Oh, we’re gonna be best friends for the rest of our lives.’

“And then every time we went to a festival, and I saw that Alanis Morissette’s band was playing, I’d think, ‘Oh my God, that blonde kid is here!’ So I’d grab a bunch of beers and I’d find Taylor, and I’d just find him backstage, and we became so close.”

Apparently Morissette noted that Hawkins and Grohl were becoming best buddies. “According to Taylor, [one time after a festival] when they got on their flight, he was sitting next to Alanis, and she said, ‘What are you going to do when Dave asks you to be his drummer?’ And he said [lovingly and apologetic] 'Nope, baby, I love you. I would never.' He was our drummer like in six months.

“But I thank God for Alanis Morissette because she put that amazing band together and really brought Taylor up in the world.”

Hawkins joined the Foos in 1999 and stayed until his tragic early death in 2022. Being the drummer behind one of the great drummers is hard, something that Hawkins admitted when he and Grohl appeared on the Howard Stern show on Sirius XM in 2021.

“He’s never a dick about it,” said Hawkins. “But it’s intimidating. When I joined the band I was super-intimidated because you know… I met Axl Rose the first time and he said ‘what’s it like being the drummer for the greatest drummer of the 1990s.’ And I’m like [winces] ‘hard.'"

Mickey Thomas has given a lengthy interview to Rolling Stone that covers the whole of his six-decade long career.

Who is Mickey Thomas, some of you may be asking? Well, he was – and indeed still is – the vocalist with Starship, the mid-'80s rockers who evolved out of Jefferson Starship, which had in turn evolved out of Jefferson Airplane. We Built This City and Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now? Yup, that’s him.

The former was a Billboard US Number One in 1985 and has led several lives. In the 1990s and '00s it was critiqued by many critics as being the epitome of mid-'80s ‘corporate’ rock, from a group whose members were also in one of the leading groups of '60s counterculture. 'Sell outs', etc. Latterly, it’s been embraced (somewhat inevitably) by hipsters and, in 2018, ended up being appropriated for a Christmas novelty song about sausage rolls (by LadBaby).

None of this might have happened, Thomas reveals, if the band hadn’t intervened when they received the song from its writers, Bernie Taupin and Martin Page.

“When I first heard it, I thought, this is real interesting little song,” remembers Thomas. “It’s kind of quirky. I love the lyric. I thought that was one of his [Taupin’s] better lyrics ever.

“The thing was, it didn’t have a chorus. The demo that I received, it went from the part where it goes ‘Don’t you remember we built this city. We built this city on rock and roll,’ and then immediately back to the second verse. So there was none of that, ‘We built this city!’ That didn’t exist.”

So, Thomas brought it in and discussed it with the group’s producers, Peter and Dennis Lambert. “So they went out into the studio. We sat at the piano and came up with the anthemic chorus, which became the double-edged sword of the song. That’s what made it a gigantic hit, but it’s also the part that alienates people a lot, polarises people, purists and so.”

And what of that puzzling line, ‘Marconi plays the mamba’? Marconi is obviously Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio. A mamba is a big snake. But even the group were mystified, it seems…

“The night that the song went Number One, we were touring, we were in Kalamazoo, Michigan,” remembers Thomas. “And so we’re calling everybody we know because we just got the Number One song in Billboard and we’re pretty thrilled. And so I said, ‘Let’s call Bernie.’

“I get on the phone with Bernie and say, ‘Now, Bernie, now more than ever, everybody’s going to be asking me, what does 'Marconi plays the mamba' mean?’ And he didn’t miss a beat. He goes, ‘I have no fucking idea. It sounds good to me.’ It reminded me of something that John Lennon said once, ‘Sound over sensibility.’”

It’s been a busy month for Apple: following the release of the iPhone Duo last week, the tech giant has dropped a major iPad Mini update and launched the next generation of MacBook Pro and iMac with M6 chips onboard.

But that’s not all – yesterday, Apple unveiled the next version of its long-established DAW Logic Pro as part of a broader update to the Creator Studio suite, sharing a feature overview ahead of the update's launch in November.

The headline addition to Logic Pro 13 may be a controversial one: Apple has launched an agentic AI assistant designed to help users make music. Offering users advice and instructions in a chatbot-style interface, the Assistant can control a project by adding tracks, opening plugins and adjusting levels in response to the user's instructions.

The limits of what exactly the Assistant can do aren’t yet clear – Apple has said that it’s capable of helping users “navigate production workflows, start a new song, set up a vocal track from a single prompt, or refine an active project” – but we’re curious to find out whether it can generate MIDI notes or create arrangements out of existing regions on the timeline, for example.

Powered by a combination of AI models from OpenAI and built in-house by Apple, the Assistant will require users to be running macOS 27 Golden Gate or later on an Apple Intelligence-capable Mac. It’ll only be available in English when it launches in beta in November.

Logic Pro’s Browser has been redesigned to make sound selection more intuitive, and is now equipped with an on-device audio analysis tool that automatically analyses, classifies and tags sounds in your library to make hunting down the perfect loop or sample faster and more efficient. It’s now possible to search for sounds with natural language (ask for “heavy techno drums” or “jangly electric guitar”, for example) or even drop in an audio file to discover results that sound similar. Apple has followed Ableton and Avid in adding native Splice integration to the Browser, too.

Apple first brought stem separation to Logic Pro in 2024 with Stem Splitter, an AI-powered tool that can isolate vocal and instrumental elements of a multitrack mix and extract them as stems. Stem Splitter has received an upgrade in Logic Pro 13, and is now capable of splitting drum recordings into six individual stems: Kick, Snare, Hi-hat, Toms, Cymbals and Other.

Not only giving users the ability to isolate individual drum parts, this also allows them to replace a dodgy-sounding hi-hat, for example, or adjust the levels of a snare in a mixed drum recording without reaching for an EQ. It’s a welcome upgrade to a stem separation tool that was already one of the best on the market.

Logic Pro 13 also boasts a slick new look, bringing the Liquid Glass design language rolled out in 2025 to the DAW with its translucent surfaces and rounded edges. The colour scheme is a touch darker, too, making coloured elements pop out a little more.

Finally, Apple has dropped another of its Producer Packs for Logic Pro – sound and preset libraries created by prominent artists and producers – from Grammy-winning pianist and producer Sergio George, a leading figure in salsa and Latin music. The pack gives users access to George’s “signature piano sound”, along with a variety of Latin jazz and salsa loops, including a full salsa percussion section and brass ensemble.

Logic Pro 13 signals a clear direction for Apple: the company is doubling down on AI, not only in its music software but across the entire Creator Studio suite. It comes as no surprise, as earlier this month we learned that Apple had acquired Swiss AI music company Samplab, hinting at an expansion of the DAW’s AI-powered functionality.

Logic Pro 11 and 12 were already heavily AI-focused, but 13 goes even further – every new or updated feature detailed above is AI-based. They all sound mighty useful, but we’re hoping that Apple implements some substantial, bread-and-butter improvements to Logic’s core DAW functionality alongside its shiny new AI tools when the full extent of the update is revealed in November.

Logic Pro 13 will be a free update for existing users. New users can purchase the software outright for £199.99/$199.99, or access it as part of a Creator Studio subscription, priced at $12.99/£12.99 per month or $129.99/£129.99 per year.

Find out more on Apple's website.

Back in 2001, The Strokes’ arrival gave rock ’n’ roll a much-needed jolt. Their invigorating debut, Is This It, became a treasured must-own album globally. It’s hard to believe that a scant few months prior to its barnstorming success, the New York five-piece were playing to tiny crowds in the city’s bars and dingier venues, with nothing but vague hopes of making it into the big leagues.

However their determination to become the best band on the scene instilled in them a rigorous work ethic.

Producer Gordon Raphael, who we interviewed at length this month, told us that when he first laid eyes on the scrappy young indie outfit, he wasn’t massively blown away - instead he was more captivated by the other act on the bill.

“When I first saw the Strokes performing in New York, I was much more interested in the band that opened up for them,” Gordon told us. “Then a couple of days after I handed the Strokes my business card, Albert [Hammond Jr. - the Strokes’ guitarist] came over to my studio to suss me out.”

Hammond Jr was overawed by the aesthetics of Raphael’s studio, Transporterraum, which Gordon described to us as having “silver walls, dark lights, old antique equipment and strange dolls hanging from the ceiling”.

Albert raced back to the other members, telling them that Gordon – and his outlandish studio – was perfect for the band. And so, in November of 2000, the young Strokes came down to Gordon’s studio to cut their first EP.

“I gave the Strokes a three-day, three-song deal,” Gordon says of his initial connection with the band. “So come in on Friday, leave on Sunday night with three songs in your hands - and that was it. It was the music from that weekend that turned into The Modern Age EP. I thought it was just going to be a little demo and never even expected it would be heard by the public.”

Gordon was impressed at the professionalism demonstrated by the band's members; Julian Casablancas, Hammond Jr., Nick Valensi, Nikolai Fraiture and Fab Moretti.

“When the Strokes came in to record, I was so impressed by them, how seriously they were taking the music and how they let zero mistakes go by.”

With Gordon, the band cut the title track - The Modern Age - an early version of the soon to be omnipresent Last Nite and future debut album highlight Barely Legal.

Despite Gordon’s fears that it might never be actually heard, the EP's eventual January 2001 release in the UK (via Rough Trade records) revealed to all the obvious brilliance of The Strokes. Once the labels caught wind, a highly publicised bidding war began.

RCA was victorious in the US, while early birds Rough Trade continued to serve as the band's label in the UK ahead of the recording of their first studio LP.

The response paved the way for Gordon to helm their debut album proper.

“Rough Trade and the band came back to me and we went on to make their debut album,” Gordon says. “My personal favourites from the record have changed over the years. When I heard Take it or Leave It during recording, I was sure that it was a masterpiece and we’d captured something unbelievable in terms of its impact and aggression. Now I like Trying Your Luck, which is more subtle but magical in its rhythm.”

Is This It, of course, became phenomenally popular - and is still regarded as one of the greatest rock records of the 21st century. Its success put Gordon’s name in the spotlight. Leading him to relocate to London…

“Everywhere I went in London, I was being asked to produce so many acts,” he recalls. “Then a big difference was every studio I was using, one of the ones was called The Garden in Shoreditch. It was a phenomenal studio with these giant SSL boards, they had great microphone collections and tape machines. Every band that came through, I recorded to tape.”

You can read our full interview with Gordon Raphael here.

John 5 knew what he was getting into when he signed up for the Mötley Crüe gig. It was not his first rodeo. But then again it was the biggest rock ’n’ roll circus he could have signed up for.

It’s now four year since the guitarist joined the band alongside bassist Nikki Sixx, drummer Tommy Lee and singer Vince Neil. And it’s the silly little moments that get him.

Speaking to MusicRadar – ostensibly about his recently launched signature Fender Telecaster Collection – he casts his mind back to the last leg of the Crüe’s Carnival of Sins Tour, when the band were all ready to make their way home for a break.

“This is the most rock ’n’ roll thing,” he says. “We were on the West Coast, and we all had our own buses and all that stuff, but with the longer trips we were taking planes, just to get there in time, not be too tired.

“Anyhoo, so me and Tommy are on a plane. Then Nikki has a plane because he’s going back to see his family on days off. And then Vince has a plane, because he’s leaving at different times.

“So at this private airport, there’s three airplanes in a line, and it’s me and Tommy, Nikki, and Vince, and we’re all going to the same destination! And I just thought that was so rock and roll.”

But this being Mötley Crüe, some people wondered if these travel arrangements were a precautionary measure to reduce internal tension.

John smiles: “People are like, ‘Oh, do you guys not get along?’ And I’m like, ‘No, we get along great! It’s just everyone goes to different places on their day off.’”

And he’s serious about this – Mötley Crüe is a fun job.

“Oh my gosh!” he says. “It’s ridiculous. You have no idea. We have so much fun. All of us. We have so much fun, all of us together.

“When I was a kid, and I would look in the rock magazines, and I’d see everybody hanging out and having fun, and having a good time on stage, that just made me feel... good, you know? And that’s how it is with Mötley. We just all have such a great time together.”

We have absolutely no reason to doubt John 5. He is a reliable witness. You can hear it in his voice. But if it’s so much fun playing in Mötley Crüe, it begs the question: will they make a new record together?

John says they have never sounded better. They are getting along. So why not? They got into the studio in 2023, reunited with Bob Rock, the über-producer behind Crüe’s most commercially successful album, Dr Feelgood, and made the three-song Cancelled EP.

There were two original tracks, Cancelled and Dogs Of War, and a cover of the Beastie Boys Fight For Your Right, and it landed in October 2024. It was the first original material they recorded since John replaced Mick Mars on guitar.

Well, the bad news is there are no plans to record an album. The good news is that this doesn’t mean anything. This is just how the band operates. It’s how bassist Nikki Sixx runs the show, and it works.

John explains: “Well, with Nikki, it’s funny, because he’ll say, ‘Oh, nothing in the future.’ Y’know? ‘We don’t have any things booked.’ And then all of a sudden, we’re like, ‘Oh, well, maybe we’ll do this, we’ll do that.’ Which is great. ‘Oh, we’re not gonna do any more new music or anything like that, but Nikki calls and he goes, ‘I have this great song.’ And so, I’m like, ‘Okay, great.’ So, you never know.”

You never know?

“You never know. But I don’t know. I’m super excited for Mötley’s future. We have a show booked in Europe right now, but there’s probably more to follow, so I’m excited.”

You could be like Jim Carrey in Dumb And Dumber – ‘So you’re telling me there’s a chance?’ – and read too much into this. But really John 5 is saying he’s like any other Crüe fan. He’s waiting on the call. The only difference is that he’ll be the one who has to pick up the electric guitar and get to work when that call comes in. But you can’t second-guess Nikki Sixx.

“I don’t know. Nikki knows exactly what he’s doing,” says John 5. “He has been keeping this train going for 45 years, so to second-guess anything he’s doing is something I would never do, because he knows exactly what he’s doing and what’s best for Mötley Crüe. That’s for sure.”

What's also for sure is that John 5 released some new material. The track is called Phantom, it's named for his new signature Tele, and you can check it out above. You can read more about how Fender and John 5 reinvented the Telecaster here, and why John 5 takes accusations that Mötley Crüe are playing to backing tracks as a compliment.

As we know, one of the stories of the year has been the resurrection of Rush and the way drummer Anika Nilles has pulled off one of rock’s biggest challenges – stepping into the shoes of the late great Neil Peart.

For the German drummer, it’s involved walking a fine line of absorbing Peart’s style without replicating it exactly, and in a new interview, Nilles has talked about exactly how she achieved that.

One of the standout challenges has been the drum fills on Tom Sawyer, one of the group’s iconic tracks, but according to Nilles, they were in many ways the easy parts. “That song requires a really specific feel. What happens playing-wise is doable. You have to get it into your DNA," she told Rolling Stone. "But the feeling of all of those parts is really special, and it’s also hard because I had to let go of some of my technique, which I usually use when I play those sneaky 16th notes. And to make the feel right and the sound right, I had to let go of that. I have to play more out of muscle power to make that sit right."

Specifically, Nilles explains, "The technique I’m using is coming from my wrist, and it creates two sounds. And for that song, you just need that one specific sound. And so you play more out of your forearm and less out of your wrist.

"I had to learn how to create that sound, and it’s definitely coming more out of a strong accent stroke all the time. So yeah, that’s a hard one to play.

Nilles explained how she has had to put aside a lot of her style and absorb Peart’s to make it work. “I have to let go of certain things which I trained on for many years to be perfect in that, but it doesn’t fit to the music, then that’s the task. So I do that."

She's also acquired a new admiration for Peart’s musicality. “He constantly built and built the drum part to a point where you think, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And he did that in detail along with the vocals. I think a big part of it is because he wrote the lyrics, so he was focused on lyrical parts and put that together with his drumming, and also melodically. And this is why you cannot just do your thing on it. You have to appreciate that and understand it as a musical composition in total.”

As she has mentioned in other interviews, Nilles wasn’t a die-hard Rush fan prior to getting the call from Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. However, she very much is now.

“(A) couple of times I thought, “Why didn’t I learn and listen way earlier in my life to Rush?” she says. “Because I love it. The music is great. It’s so much fun to play. As soon you don’t have to think about parts anymore and can loosen up a little bit, it’s just so much fun to play with those guys.”

Taylor Swift added another trophy to put on what must now be a seriously crowded mantelpiece yesterday when she was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

At 36, she is the youngest inductee ever. In her acceptance speech, Swift took time to praise the town and its songwriting tradition and reflect on how she learned her craft when she first arrived.

Recalling her early days in the city, Swift said: “I think back to when I first got to Nashville and I started writing on Music Row. I was lucky enough to get a publishing deal with Sony Publishing when I was 14 and I just hit the ground running.

“I started writing every single day. I learned so much. But I learned by repetition. I think you truly learn a craft when you do it over and over and over and that is what the magnificent songwriters that work in this amazing town do. There is no music community like this music community. I know. I checked all the communities. There’s no one doing it.”

She continued: “I learned how to push through a creative block when you’re in the middle of a session. Are we going to tunnel under this? Are we going to hurdle over it? I learned which ideas are worth fighting for, which ideas are worth letting go of and move on to the next one. I learned how to accommodate when your co-writer has a hangover or when they’re going to need to talk about their divorce for a really long time before we write anything.”

“Because one thing that I did learn is that songwriters, although they possess the superhuman ability to understand and interpret the human condition and insane levels of empathy, they are just people too. And they are people who in a lot of ways raised me and guided me through my formative years.”

Swift shared a couple of anecdotes from those years as a songwriter before ending by paying tribute to the city: “Nashville is the place that honed and polished the thing about myself and the thing about my life that I am the most proud of and the most passionate about. So to be here with you and to be getting to have this moment, I am truly grateful and it just feels like one of those amazing Nashville moments I’m going to revisit on a rainy day.”

The other inductees on Monday night included Shawn Camp, Lyle Lovett, Lee Thomas Miller and Bruce Channel (yes, him! Of Hey! Baby fame. He’s still with us, at 85). Also honoured was the late JI Allison, of Buddy Holly’s Crickets, who was inducted into the institution’s Legacy Category for his work on classics like That’ll Be the Day, Peggy Sue, and More Than I Can Say.

Tony Iommi has been doing the media rounds promoting his solo album, From The Dark. And as well as the rock press, he’s been popping up in some more unusual places, such as the Channel 4 News podcast Ways To Change The World.

He talked on the show about how, in contrast to previous Sabbath albums, making the record was a more relaxing experience. “This time I've had no pressure,” he told host Krishnan Guru-Murphy. “ I could just come in and do it when I want. And so I worked on it with my engineer. I'd say, 'Let's work on Monday and Tuesday, and do that every week for a bit. And if you've got something [to keep you] busy, we'll cancel it. And if I can't do it, we'll...' And we worked like that, really. 'Cause I still had to go for hospital appointments for my cancer checkups. So we'd work when we could and put the ideas down, and build it like that, really.”

Asked if, at the age of 78, a sense of his own mortality drives me on these days, the guitarist laughed: “I carry on wondering when I'm gonna keel over. Yes, I do that. But I enjoy [being creative]. I enjoy doing it, and it keeps me going.

"Even when I was diagnosed with cancer, when we'd done the last album Sabbath album [13, in 201]), I wanted to work through that just to get my mind off it and not just give in. And it worked. And I was flying back, flying to LA when we'd done the recordings with Rick Rubin. Then I had to fly back to have a treatment and fly back again to carry on recording. But I enjoyed [staying busy]... I had to keep my mind focused on the music, really, and it helped me a lot."

Iommi worked with Norwegian vocalist Jorn Lande on the album and it was Lande who penned the lyrics of one of the album’s highlights, World Alone. "It's the things that's happening in the world,” said the guitarist. “And even in them days with the old War Pigs we did, [the inspiration] was the Vietnam War. All the wars were going on then. It was relevant, and it is today. They're the same thing - the wars and wars, and nuclear things now. And it's hard to get away. How do you get away from it? It's on the news every day. It's constantly there. It's in people's heads, and it was obviously in Jorn's head when he wrote all the lyrics."

From The Dark – Iommi’s first solo album since 2005 - came out at the end of last week.

What is it?

The t.bone Free 300 HT 823 and PT 823 are two separate wireless audio packages from Thomann, designed to provide an affordable route into wireless performance. Although sold individually, we've chosen to review them together because their real appeal lies in the flexibility of combining the two systems.

At around £159 each for either package, the free 300 range builds on the foundations of the t.bone freeU HT 823 we reviewed previously, adding a few useful improvements without straying into expensive professional territory. Both systems operate within the 823-832MHz and 863-865MHz frequency bands, offering a practical solution for musicians, presenters and event organisers who want to lose the cables without spending a fortune.

The HT 823 package includes a handheld dynamic wireless microphone and a receiver, while the PT 823 provides a pocket transmitter, or bodypack, for connecting an instrument or a compatible lavalier microphone. The bodypack uses a 3-pin TQG connector, so you'll need to purchase a suitable cable separately if you want to connect your instrument or microphone. These cables are available from Thomann, but they're not included in the box.

One of the biggest improvements over the freeU HT 823 is the receiver's flexibility. The free 300 receiver can switch between handheld and pocket transmitter modes, allowing you to choose the setup that best suits your application. The two modes cannot be used simultaneously, but having both options available makes the system considerably more versatile than its predecessor.

The receiver itself feels solid and measures 210 x 45 x 193mm, weighing just under a kilogram. It features two BNC diversity antennas, balanced XLR and unbalanced 6.5mm jack outputs, and an adjustable gain range of 0-25dB. Power comes from a 12V 1A DC supply with a cable that measures around 115cm, which feels a little short if your equipment rack or power socket isn't close by. On the plus side, a UK plug adaptor was included this time around.

The receiver's LCD is another welcome improvement. It's brighter, clearer and provides more useful information at a glance, including the selected frequency, battery status, audio-frequency and radio-frequency signal strength, and volume. Three pre-programmed frequency groups offer ten channels each, and the system supports up to six units operating in parallel. An infrared link transfers settings from the receiver to the transmitter, helping to keep setup simple, while a frequency-scanning function makes finding a suitable channel less of a chore.

The handheld microphone has also received some attention. The slimmer grille and improved feel give it a more refined appearance than the freeU version, while the cardioid dynamic capsule provides a slightly different pickup pattern from the older model's supercardioid design. It operates on two AA batteries, with approximately eight hours of talk time and up to 12 hours on standby. The pocket transmitter offers similar battery life, a detachable antenna and an LCD showing the selected frequency and battery status.

Overall, this is a straightforward system with a few useful additions that make it more adaptable than the older freeU range. It's not designed to compete directly with premium wireless systems, but the extra flexibility is a welcome bonus at this price.

Performance

For anyone familiar with the t.bone freeU HT 823, the free 300 will feel reassuringly familiar. The general approach remains the same – keep things simple, make setup accessible and provide enough functionality for everyday performance without introducing unnecessary complexity.

The receiver is easy to get to grips with, and the improved display makes a genuine difference. Being able to see the selected frequency, battery level and signal strength more clearly is useful when setting up in a hurry, particularly in a dimly lit venue. The infrared synchronisation also helps remove some of the guesswork from pairing the transmitter with the receiver.

The additional flexibility is arguably the free 300's biggest selling point. With the receiver switchable between handheld and pocket transmitter modes, you aren't restricted to a single type of performance. The handheld microphone is convenient for speeches, presentations and casual vocal performances such as Karaoke, while the bodypack opens the door to instrument or lavalier microphone applications. Just remember to budget for the appropriate TQG cable, as this isn't supplied with the PT 823.

The stated line-of-sight operating range of up to 100 metres is another advantage over the freeU HT 823. That's a useful amount of freedom for larger rooms, stages and event spaces, although actual performance will depend on the surroundings, obstacles and radio interference. The receiver's diversity antenna arrangement and multiple frequency options also provide useful tools for maintaining a stable connection.

In terms of build quality, the handheld microphone is a noticeable improvement. The slimmer grille gives it a more conventional appearance, and the overall feel is more reassuring when picking it up. However, there's a difference between a microphone feeling well made and being comfortable to use for an entire performance. Unfortunately, handling noise remains a weakness. Movement and contact with the microphone can introduce unwanted noise, so we'd be more inclined to use it on a microphone stand rather than holding it throughout a set.

Sound quality is perfectly acceptable for the intended audience, but it's important to keep expectations realistic. The microphone produces usable vocals for general announcements, presentations and entry-level musical performances, but it doesn't have the same refinement, clarity or consistency as a more established microphone such as the Shure SM58. That isn't entirely surprising given the price, but it's worth bearing in mind if you're planning to use it as your main vocal microphone in a professional band.

For public speaking, weddings, community events and smaller venues, the free 300 should be more than capable of doing the job. In these situations, convenience and dependable wireless operation can matter more than squeezing every last detail out of a vocal performance. For musicians who regularly perform live and place a high priority on vocal sound, however, we'd recommend investing in a more capable microphone and wireless system. For our ears, the vocal signal is a tad too bass-heavy, so we were inclined to roll off a little of the lower frequencies at the desk. The performance for instruments using the bodypack also seemed to colour the sound with slightly exaggerated bass levels, so this is something worth accommodating when dialling in your preferred tone.

Battery flexibility is another practical advantage. Both transmitters run on two AA batteries, including rechargeable AA options, so you're not tied to a proprietary battery pack. The quoted eight hours of talk time should be sufficient for many performances and events, while the additional standby time offers some reassurance when the system is switched on but not in constant use.

There are a couple of smaller frustrations. The power supply cable feels unnecessarily short, and the need to buy a separate cable for the bodypack adds a little extra expense and preparation. Neither issue is a deal breaker, but both are worth considering before purchasing.

Ultimately, the free 300 doesn't reinvent the budget wireless microphone, but it improves on the freeU formula in several practical ways. The receiver is easier to read, the handheld microphone feels better designed, and the option to switch between transmitter types makes it a more flexible choice for users whose requirements might change over time.

Verdict

The t.bone free 300 HT 823 and PT 823 make a compelling case for anyone looking for an affordable, uncomplicated wireless audio setup. For around £159, you get a useful combination of handheld and bodypack options, a more informative receiver display, a line-of-sight range of up to 100 metres and support for multiple systems operating in parallel.

The improved microphone design is welcome, although handling noise remains an issue, and the sound quality doesn't quite reach the standard we'd expect for regular professional band work. The short power cable and separately purchased bodypack cable are also worth factoring into the overall cost.

That said, this isn't a system pretending to be something it isn't. It's aimed at people who need practical, accessible wireless audio without a hefty price tag, and in that respect, it does an excellent job. We'd happily recommend it for beginner musicians, public speakers, wedding speeches, and smaller events where convenience and value are the priorities.

If you're already familiar with the freeU HT 823, the free 300 is a sensible step up, particularly if you need the added flexibility of a bodypack transmitter. Just don't expect it to replace a professional wireless rig or a quality wired vocal microphone. At this price, the t.bone free 300 HT 823 and PT 823 offer a well-judged balance of features, usability and affordability.

Hands-on demos

the t.bone

Alternatives

Specifications