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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Waller was well up for the challenge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four famous musicians came together in 1981 to create one of the most successful supergroups of all time, Asia. But things might have turned out differently if they’d picked a flamboyant glam rock star as their singer – a crazy idea that could have happened, as drummer Carl Palmer tells MusicRadar.

At the time when Asia formed, Palmer was already a supergroup veteran as one third of progressive rock titans Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Joining him in Asia were three other musicians with impeccable prog rock credentials – bassist/vocalist John Wetton (formerly of King Crimson, Roxy Music and Uriah Heep), guitarist Steve Howe (a founder member of Yes) and keyboard player Geoff Downes (who had performed alongside Howe in Yes as well as starring in new wave pop act the Buggles).

John Wetton was the lead singer for King Crimson on the classic albums Larks’ Tongues In Aspic (1973), Starless And Bible Black (1974) and Red (also 1974). Wetton also sang for another progressive rock supergroup, U.K., which featured drummer Bill Bruford (Yes, King Crimson, Genesis), violinist/keyboardist Eddie Jobson (Curved Air, Roxy Music) and virtuoso guitarist Allan Holdsworth.

But as Carl Palmer recalls it, in the early stages of putting Asia together there was some debate about whether Wetton should be the singer, and also whether a second guitarist could be added to the line-up.

“We were looking for a lead singer,” Palmer says, “and the first one we tried was Trevor Rabin.”

Rabin, from South Africa, would eventually join Yes as guitarist in place of Steve Howe, and it was Rabin’s song Owner Of A Lonely Heart that gave Yes their biggest hit – a US No 1 in 1983.

Rabin was living in London when Carl Palmer was introduced to him in 1981.

“Trevor had sent me a cassette with some of his stuff,” Palmer says. “So I went round to his house in Edgware. I’m a big Trevor Rabin fan. Good guitar player, good writer, good singer. Everything works. You know, he’s the full deal.

“I remember the cassette because it had kind of a dodgy version of Owner Of A Lonely Heart on it, which didn’t sound like the Owner Of A Lonely Heart that Trevor Horn ended up mixing and producing.”

Nevertheless, the other member of Asia felt that Rabin was not the right fit for them.

As Palmer says: “Trevor was pretty good, I have to say. But it didn’t quite work. His voice and John Wetton’s voice didn’t go together so well. And I think there was more friction with Steve Howe at the time, because who was going to be playing lead guitar?

“You know, Steve had that signature lead playing, which is is fantastic. And we could see that it wouldn’t work with another guitarist.”

With Trevor Rabin out of the picture, it was Palmer who suggested that they turn to an old acquaintance of his – Roy Wood.

In the ’60s, Wood had performed with Jeff Lynne in The Move before the pair had formed the Electric Light Orchestra. Wood had subsequently left ELO to lead glam rock band Wizzard, best known for the festive anthem I Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day and another hit from 1973, See My Baby Jive.

Wood, like Palmer, was born in Birmingham, and Palmer liked the idea of doing a favour to a fellow Brummie.

He recalls his pitch to the other guys in Asia.

“I said, ‘This guy has had 18 top 10 singles. He’s a great writer. So let’s get hold of him and just see what he’s got.’ They said, ‘Are you serious, Carl?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m as serious as I was with Trevor Rabin. We should give it a go.’ John Wetton said, ‘It’s true. He is a damn good writer, isn’t he?’”

Palmer continues: “I got hold of Woody's number, and he came to see us. He had his silver shoes on, and his tights, and his red jacket, and his hair all over the place, and his round glasses. And he kept saying to Steve Howe, ‘Can you play some of that posh guitar?’

“He was great. I remember to this day he had a tune called Aerial Pictures, which is fantastic. But John and I were looking at each other and we said, ‘This is good, but there was something sort of not quite there.’

“It’s weird – here’s a man with a pedigree as long as your arm, an absolute diamond, but the following day, after we sent Woody away, we had a band meeting and we said, ‘He’s good, he’s bloody good, but it’s not right.’”

In truth, the answer had been with them all along.

“John said, ‘I want to ask you all something. Will you give me a shot at being the lead vocalist?’ We said, ‘Why not? Let's see what we can do. And if it’s not right, then you know you’ve got to own up as well and say you’re not comfortable.’ Because we had to get the vocals right.

“Of course, John had taken over from Greg Lake in King Crimson. John had a very radio-friendly voice, very similar to Greg. It wasn’t that blues rock voice. It wasn’t a David Coverdale type thing. It was a good, solid, straightforward voice. So we went with it, and that was it.”

Reflecting on why Roy Wood was rejected, Palmer says now: “His songwriting is masterful. In my whole life I’ve never written a song on my own. So Woody, he’s a force to be reckoned with. And he’s a lovely fella, but he’s also an oddball, which is hard to be around, I would imagine.

“There was nothing wrong with his credentials. It was just that the connection was missing. When you’re a musician, it doesn’t matter how good somebody is. It either works or it doesn’t, and in Woody’s case it didn’t.”

As it turned out, Asia was just fine without Roy Wood or Trevor Rabin.

The group’s self-titled debut album was a huge hit – in the US especially, where it held the No 1 spot on the Billboard 200 for nine weeks and sold in excess of four million copies. The big hit single, Heat Of The Moment, reached No 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. Asia also had the biggest selling album of 1982 in the US.

As Carl Palmer says: “It was one of the absolute highlights of my career.”

We’ve uncovered a few long chats with Skrillex in our archive recently, including an interview from 2012 where he was aghast at having a whole album’s worth of material stolen. It’s hard to remember now, considering his stature as something of an electronic music deity, but Skrillex - aka Sonny Moore - was once an enthusiastic and eager young creative, keen for people to experience the amalgamation of sounds and styles he’d concocted in the box.

“I wouldn't call myself stubborn in an egotistical way but I do like the idea that in the past, what I do would not have been considered production - it would have been considered noise,” Skrillex told us in a 2011 interview, prior to the mainstream explosion of dubstep. “I like doing things in a very minimal, unconventional way as a personal way of saying, ‘Look, I made a career out of carefully and craft-fully, though unconventionally, making records on laptops and blown speakers’.”

In this production-focussed conversation, Skrillex explained to his approach for making beats drop with impact;

“The easiest trick I use is basically to make sure that whatever sample you're using, it's hitting at 200Hz. Look through a spectrum analyser and you'll see a little 'dunk', and it should sound like that. The beginning transient should look like a brick that kind of bubbles out into the notes, creating a big hit that dominates the whole spectral sphere of your music for that one second. The drum becomes the loudest element in your mix just for an instant.”

For that gnarly dubstep-distortion, Skrillex had some key favourite plugins…

“I really like iZotope Trash, which is a great plugin for distortion, as is Ohmicide, which I love. It's an absolutely crazy multiband distortion, compression, EQ and filter, which pretty much lets you do anything.”

He also told us how he found working in the box to be a struggle occasionally, if he got so locked-in that he forgot to label his work…

“It's only evil when I work so fast that I haven't properly labelled anything and my project files are all messy. To me it's always a joy to create music no matter what it takes to actually get there. The real evils are always whatever stops you from doing that - like if your CPU is spiking and you have to sit there and bounce all your MIDI to audio. Now that's annoying!”

Read our full classic 2011 interview with Skrillex here.

It happened in Los Angeles in 1968 – the moment when the life of a young rock ’n’ roll singer named Vincent Furnier was transformed.

Just turned 20, Furnier and his band Nazz had only recently left their hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, lured by the bright lights of Hollywood like so many dreamers before them. One night, the new kids in town were hanging out with a local all-girl band, The Weeds Of Idleness, when the talk turned to a group from Philadelphia, also named Nazz, led by rising star Todd Rundgren.

Furnier’s band had used other names back in Phoenix – first The Earwigs, then The Spiders. Now they needed another. In that moment, Furnier said: “We gotta have a name that people listen to.” And as he later recalled: “The first thing that popped into my head was Alice Cooper.”

The name appealed to Furnier’s wry sense of humour. It sounded, in his words, “like some sweet little old lady that made cookies for everybody.” It was so perfectly wrong for a band of longhaired rockers playing loud rock ’n’ roll. And as he quickly realised, it was also perfectly suited to something else he had in mind. As he explained, “I was a little bit shy. I needed something I could hide behind. A character.”

A former art student, Furnier would make this character a living work of art – a singing, dancing, mischief-making, kohl-eyed cartoon bogeyman. Naming it Alice Cooper had a delicious irony, and the added bonus of gender-bending shock value.

“I created Alice to be my favourite rock star,” he said. “Back in the ’60s, there was no rock star that made me go, ‘Wow, I gotta see what happens next!’ So Alice was born out of necessity. And I didn’t want him to be a hero. I wanted him to be a villain...” His stated mission: “To drive a stake through the heart of the Love Generation.”

It was the birth of a legend. With Furnier playing this role to brilliant effect, Alice Cooper became a superstar in the ’70s.

Furnier had a simple strategy: “Pure showbiz with great rock songs.” His gift for satire was channeled into hit anthems including School’s Out, Elected, and No More Mr. Nice Guy. And on stage, he was a master showman, hailed by Gene Simmons of Kiss as “the prophet of the outrageous, the messiah of theatrics.”

Alice was acclaimed by Bob Dylan as an “overlooked songwriter”, and acknowledged by Salvador Dali as a fellow surrealist.

He also had his detractors. To the British pro-censorship lobby of the early ’70s, he was an affront to decency. America’s right-wing Christians branded him a Satanist.

Equally, in the bizarre double life he made for himself, Furnier has had his troubles, including a long battle with alcoholism that had him admitted to a sanitarium in 1977. But as with all the best horror movies, the monster he created has kept coming back from the dead.

Alice Cooper’s storied career has now spanned seven decades. His music, image and OTT stage show have inspired generations of artists, from Kiss and the Sex Pistols to Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, Slipknot and Lady Gaga.

What happened on that fateful night in ’68 has defined the life of Vincent Furnier ever since. As he stated in an interview with Rock Candy magazine: “Alice is the mask I put on every night. I couldn’t do it without him.”

Born in Detroit on February 4, 1948, Vincent Damon Furnier was raised to be a good, God-fearing American. “My dad was a pastor,” he said. “My grandfather was a pastor. I grew up a Christian.”

As a child he suffered with respiratory illness, a condition that led his father to relocate the family to the warmer climate of Phoenix in 1961. And it was there, at Cortez High School, that the teenage Vincent started singing in a rock ’n’ roll band, The Earwigs, backed by four fellow students – Glen Buxton and John Tatum on guitars, Dennis Dunaway on bass and John Speer on drums.

At a time when Beatlemania was at its height, they played mostly Beatles covers and drew plenty of girls to their shows, although Furnier admitted: “When I was in high school, people messed about in the back seat, but nobody ever really did it. If someone went all the way it was a real talking point.” He did, however, develop a taste for alcohol while still underage. “I didn’t know anybody that did drugs,” he said. “Not even a joint. But we all drank beer.”

After a change of name to The Spiders, the band cut a couple of singles for local indie labels, and brought in a new guitarist, Michael Bruce, in place of Tatum. Their music got heavier, influenced by other British Invasion groups, most notably The Who and the Yardbirds. In 1967 they became Nazz, made one single, found a new drummer in Neal Smith, and moved to LA. And in the following year, with the band and singer rechristened Alice Cooper, the freak show was up and running.

“The audience thought that they were going to get a blonde girl folk singer and they got us!” he recalled. “We already had that really strange kind of Baby Jane thing, the smeared make-up.”

They also knew how to work an angle. “We said that Alice was a 13^th Century witch. That was a story we let out – that one of the guys’ mothers was a medium and when she asked a Ouija board who Alice Cooper was, it said, ‘Vincent Furnier’. And she didn’t know my name. I thought, ‘Great press release!’ It all got very mystical. We had no one to answer to and everyone believed everything.”

The band’s kookiness caught the attention of rock’s maverick genius Frank Zappa, who signed them to his vanity label Straight Records because, as he dryly remarked, “I don’t get it.”

In 1969 came the debut album Pretties For You, a psychedelic rock blowout that was famously described by one critic as “a tragic waste of plastic.”

Lesser bands might have wilted in the face of such hostility. Not this one.

“We loved that quote,” Furnier said. “It might have hurt a little bit, but at the same time it was a quote that I remembered forever. We always made fun of ourselves, but maybe that was something that spurred us on to make better records.”

Pretties For You duly bombed, as did the follow-up, 1970’s Easy Action, another example of what Furnier called “very experimental rock’n’roll”.

But if hit records were hard to come by, notoriety came more easily. In September 1969, Alice Cooper made headlines in national newspapers – accused of killing a chicken on stage at a festival in Toronto. The story was not entirely true. As Furnier later explained: “Somebody threw a live chicken on stage, and I threw it back, thinking it would fly. It didn’t, and the audience tore it pieces!”

But for Alice, there was no publicity like bad publicity. It fitted Furner’s act. “The stage character created itself,” he said. “Alice developed. I was a little more Alice with each show. Pretty soon there was this character who was outstandingly inhuman, who stood for all the wrong things. He was crippled, a victim.”

In 1971, with a young Canadian producer named Bob Ezrin at his side, Alice nailed the sound that would make him a star.

He explained: “You get to a point where you want to have your records played on the radio. So you get a guy like Bob Ezrin, who listens to a song and says, ‘Keep these two parts and get rid of all this other crap.’

“Here were five guys that never listened to anybody. But we listened to Bob because was a longhaired kid like us, and that was the key. Bob was the one who just stopped everything and said, ‘We have to start all over, re-learn how to write, re-learn what Alice is about.’”

There was another significant change on the album Love It To Death. According to Furnier, “I became a lyricist. I said, ‘The lyrics need to mean something now.’”

This was evident in I’m Eighteen, an anthem for disaffected youth, written when Furnier was, by his own admission, “smashed on cheap wine.”

It was Alice’s first hit, reaching No 21 on the US chart, and it made a powerful impression on Gene Simmons, who in ’71 was still just a wannabe, performing in the band Wicked Lester with Paul Stanley, two years before they formed Kiss.

Simmons said of I’m Eighteen: “That song immediately got me with a sucker punch in the kidneys. “I’m a boy and I’m a man…” It killed me. It had guitars. It had a raw vocal quality. And it said something.”

The success of I’m Eighteen and Love It To Death, which made the US top 40, led to a deal with major label Warner Brothers, on which the band’s fourth album, Killer, was released in late ’71.

Again produced by Bob Ezrin, the album delivered straight-shooting rock ’n’ roll in Under My Wheels, shades of progressive rock in the epic Halo Of Flies, and macabre drama in Dead Babies.

“Dead Babies was an anti-child abuse song,” Furnier said. “But as in most cases, controversial songs are misunderstood.”

In concert, Alice would sing the song while chopping up baby dolls with an axe, and on the cover of Killer was the singer’s live stage prop, a boa constrictor named Kachina.

Furnier called Killer “my best pure rock‘n’roll album.” Former Sex Pistols singer John Lydon hailed it as the best rock album of all time. And with that, the monster that Vincent Furnier had created was set to become famous all over the world.

Held up as one of the key figures in alternative dance culture, Erol Alkan is hugely respected by both guitar-toting indie kids and club-going techno fiends.

Back in the early 2000s, Erol's clubnight Trash became a regular fixture for the various distinct quarters of London’s nightlife, uniting them under one banner.

Spinning the likes of LCD Soundsystem and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Alkan was driven by a desire to spotlight music he genuinely liked - and not caring much about genre rules and restrictions.

This then led to a career as a producer, remixer and industry figure that garnered respect from all corners of the musical map. Reworking the likes of Daft Punk, The Chemical Brothers, Tame Impala and Interpol and producing the Mystery Jets, Klaxons and many others.

Back in 2014, we had the great privilege of spending a day with Erol in his purpose-built studio space, Phantasy Sound in North London - a hub for both himself and those artists on his Phantasy label. Intrigued by what such a seminal figure would rely on, gear-wise, we started snooping…

First up, what was Erol’s DAW of choice?

“I use Pro Tools when I record bands, especially if I’m tracking drums, but Logic when it comes to using MIDI or anything like that,” Alkan told us.

“I tend to use the native plugins within Logic as I think they’re fine. To be honest with you, I haven’t found a stereo width plugin better than Logic’s one. EQ wise, they’re pretty good transparent EQs which seem to do exactly what you need an EQ to do. I tend to find that, if you’re not getting what you want out of a sound at that stage, maybe the EQ isn’t the main problem - maybe it’s another aspect of it? So I tend to use all of them in a pretty simple way, rather than expecting miracles from plugins.

“I don’t use any particularly esoteric plug-ins. I’ll focus more on what’s going in; that’s about 90% of it for me.”

We couldn’t help notice the Yamaha NS-10s, a studio staple. They’re essential for Erol. But, not particularly for the reason you might think…

“I just have them because they sound so bad.” Erol admitted. “As they say with NS-10s - if it sounds good on them, then it’ll sound good anywhere.”

A classic Roland TB-303 we discover was a recent snag…

“This is a recent purchase and something I’ve been wanting for a while. I’m in love with it - not just for the fact that it’s a 303, but also because it’s got cool things like CV out, so you can actually write a pattern inside of it and send that to other synths.”

Speaking of synths, and Alkan’s Russian Formanta Polyvoks were particularly intriguing…

“I’m fascinated by Russian synths, in the sense that they were built to try and mimic what Moog was doing at the time. They kind of didn’t get it right, but they came up with something quite different.”

Read our full classic Erol Alkan studio tour here.

Several songwriters over the decades have spoken about feeling as though they didn’t fully write the iconic songs for which they are known. Their sense is that these songs already existed and that songwriters act more like conduits than creators, channelling or uncovering works rather than writing them from scratch.

It was a view reportedly put forward by Bob Dylan in an interview with Sing Out! Magazine in 1962, as quoted in Howard Sounes’s 2001 book Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan. “The songs are there,” Dylan reportedly said. “They exist all by themselves just waiting for someone to write them down. I just put them down on paper. If I didn’t do it, somebody else would.”

Some songwriters allude to the feeling there is a higher, spiritual force at work. This was allegedly the experience of Carole King in January 1971 when she wrote You’ve Got A Friend, the song that opens side two of her classic 1971 album, Tapestry.

In a 2007 interview with MOJO magazine, King said the song “was as close to pure inspiration as I've ever experienced.” She stated: “The song wrote itself. It was written by something outside of myself, through me.”

You’ve Got A Friend is a song viewed by some as the emotional epicentre of the Tapestry album. It is an impeccably-crafted composition offering comfort, reassurance and hope. It is also a song that still resonates across the generations, 55 years after it was released.

By the time Carole King embarked on a solo career, she was already a hugely successful songwriter as one half of the songwriting team Goffin-King, with husband Gerry Goffin.

Together, they penned hits such as Will You Love Me Tomorrow by The Shirelles, (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman by Aretha Franklin, One Fine Day by The Chiffons and Pleasant Valley Sunday by The Monkees.

Goffin and King divorced in 1968 and King moved to the West Coast with their two young daughters, settling in the now legendary creative enclave of Laurel Canyon, tucked away in the hills above LA’s Sunset Strip.

By the time she began recording Tapestry, King had already released two albums – Now That Everything’s Been Said (1968) with folk-rock band The City and her first solo studio album The Writer (1970). Neither set the world on fire and there was no expectation that Tapestry would perform any differently.

“The tunes were extraordinary, there was no question about that,” guitarist Danny ‘Kootch’ Kortchmar told writer Graeme Thomson of Uncut magazine in 2016. “But the tunes on her previous two albums were extraordinary, too. We just thought, ‘Yeah, this is Carole. She writes great songs, that’s what she does.’”

King wrote You’ve Got A Friend in January 1971, during the sessions for Tapestry in Studio B at A&M Studios, on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and La Brea Avenue in Hollywood.

At the same time, across the hall in A&M’s Studio C, Joni Mitchell was recording the album Blue. Meanwhile, seven blocks away, at Crystal Sound Studios at 1014 N. Vine Street in Hollywood, James Taylor was recording his hit album Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon.

According to Danny Kortchmar, the relationship between King, Mitchell and Taylor was friendly and relaxed, with all three playing on each other’s records and using the same musicians, such as Kortchmar himself.

“We were all hanging out together, everybody knew everybody else,” recalled Kortchmar. “We all recorded with each other, but it was spontaneous. Joni or James would pop in and it was, ‘Let’s go!’ It was a utopian way of making music.”

James Taylor was integral to the story of You’ve Got A Friend. In an interview with Stephen Colbert on The Late Late Show in February 2026, Taylor recalled first meeting King and hearing You’ve Got A Friend before it had been recorded.

“When I finally got to meet Carole out on the West Coast, she and I just clicked,” said Taylor. “She played piano on my Sweet Baby James album, beautifully. It was just a great collaboration. And I played on Tapestry.

“We were playing a job together at The Troubadour, a dive really in Los Angeles, but an important gig to play. On the second or third engagement at The Troubadour, she broke the seal on this brand new tune. And I was sure I knew the song already because it was such a classic immediately and I literally ran to find my guitar so I could play it.”

Two weeks later, Taylor and his band were recording the album Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon. One day, they had a couple of hours left at the end of a session.

“So that typically is the time when someone will think of a cover,” Taylor told Colbert on The Late Late Show. “In this case I had learned the song of Carole’s and said, ‘Let’s play that song of Carole’s.’ It’s just spur off the moment… we do a quick arrangement and, boom!’”

Which is how James Taylor came to record You’ve Got A Friend before Carole King herself did.

“Of course she wants to record that song,” said Taylor. “It’s the best song written by a human being. So I blithely go and record the song and then we really liked the way it sounded. So I had to go to Carole and say, ‘I sort of cut your hit.’”

This could have presented a problem, but King welcomed the news. As Taylor recalled: “She said, ‘That’s great.’ It was typically generous.”

While he didn’t know it at the time, it was a line from Taylor’s own song Fire And Rain that had inspired You’ve Got A Friend in the first place.

As Taylor explained it: “She said, ‘You know that line in Fire And Rain – ‘I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend’? She said, ‘That’s what inspired that song You’ve Got A Friend’. She said, ‘I heard those lines and I was thinking to myself, I’m going to tell him he does have a friend.’”

Taylor’s version of the song was released as a single in May 1971. It was a colossal success, reaching No 1 in the US and No 4 in the UK.

King never released her version of You’ve Got A Friend as a single.

At the start of 1971, Taylor was a much bigger name than King, but all that changed when Tapestry was released on 10 February 1971. The album reached No 1 in the US, Canada, Spain and Japan and No 3 and No 4 in Australia and the UK respectively. The album went on to sell over 25 million copies worldwide and spent more than six years on the Billboard 200 chart.

Tapestry is an intimate and emotionally honest album that really tapped into peoples’ desire for authenticity and depth from singer-songwriters at the onset of the turbulent ’70s.

You’ve Got A Friend is one of its stand-out tracks. There is a universal appeal to the song’s core message of friendship without boundaries. It is a life-enhancing message of emotional reassurance, comfort and support.

“When you're down and troubled/And you need some lovin' care/And nothin’, nothin’ is goin’ right/Close your eyes and think of me/And soon I will be there/To brighten up even your darkest night.”

The lyrics had particular resonance for Taylor, who had just emerged from a depression when he first heard King play the song at the Troubadour.

There was widespread praise for Taylor’s sincerity and interpretation on You’ve Got A Friend, but critics seemed to favour King’s version, highlighting its soulfulness and the vulnerability and warmth of her vocals.

Modern critical opinion is particularly favourable to King’s version of the song. “King’s voice brings ‘gravity to every note’, noted Jenn Pelly of Pitchfork in 2019. “It makes You’ve Got A Friend an exquisite ode to friendship, interconnectedness, and mutual inspiration. King’s superior take amplifies its hope almost to a shout.”

In a review of the song in AllMusic, writer Stewart Mason concluded that Taylor’s version of You’ve Got A Friend “lacks the plainspoken intimacy” of King’s version. “King sings her song with a certain shyness that sounds as if the singer is making her promise at some personal expense to herself,” wrote Mason.

Such views are of course subjective. For many, James Taylor’s version of You’ve Got A Friend evokes a real sense of loneliness and vulnerability, while the intimacy of his fingerpicked acoustic guitar is a huge part of its appeal.

Numerous artists would go on to cover the song, such as Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson, Anne Murray, Tom Jones and Al Green.

In 1997, British acid jazz and funk group Brand New Heavies released a critically acclaimed cover of You’ve Got A Friend and in 2005, English pop-rock band McFly released the song as a double A-side with their own song All About You. This became the official single for UK-based charity Comic Relief.

For Carole King, You’ve Got A Friend remains a definitive song. In an interview on CBS Sunday Morning in 2005, King was asked if there is a particular song that she could “put her finger on and say, ‘That is a Carole King song.’”

“Well, acknowledging that I had help,” replied King, casting her eyes heavenwards, “You’ve Got A Friend. Absolutely quintessential, I think. It’s just a feeling. It’s uplifting. That would be it.”

Even though summer is over [sob] we're going to turn up the heat one more time… Yes, it's MusicRadar's near-legendary Quiz of the Week!

You know the drill. We take a look back, pluck out our 10 favourite stories from the week on MusicRadar, then put you to the test via the medium of multiple-choice.

Think you know the score?

Let's rock.

Those unmistakable raspy vocals of Bryan Adams have realised some of the world’s most cherished rock classics.

Summer of ’69, Heaven and that sublime ’91 epic, (Everything I Do) I Do It for You (this writer’s first single purchase) might be the songs that most people think of when they hear the name of Canada’s favourite son. For Bryan himself though, he's open about the influences that dominated his formative years, and how they shaped the way he wrote such peerless songs.

“I have this kind of thing where I consider the songs that I grew up with are kind of untouchable,” Adams told us back in an interview in 2014.

“AM radio was king in the ‘70s," Adams explained. "Back then, there was no discrimination between genres, so you’d get Ray Charles or a song like Kiss And Say Goodbye into The Beatles – easy. If it was a good song, it was gonna get played.”

At the time of our interview with Bryan, he was on the verge of releasing Tracks of My Years, a collection of his own takes on a set of songs that were influential to him in his youth. Amongst the chosen selection were cuts originally helmed by Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys and The Beatles.

“I just thought, ‘OK, let’s do songs that were on the AM radio and stick a picture of me on the cover from the time when I decided that music was what I was going to do. What unified everything was my voice and the way I produced it," Adams explained on these more bare-bones versions of the classic songs.

“The key was to not have anything on it. There’s no reverb, no echo – it’s raw and right in your face, off the microphone. It didn’t matter who produced it; I decided that my voice should have that quality of production throughout the record, and that’s what tied it all together. I'm really pleased with the results.”

Adams guided us, track-by-track though some of the songs he took on when making this album. He explained why he chose The Beatles’ more underrated A Hard Day's Night cut Any Time at All…

“It’s really hard to do a Beatles song without f****ng it up. [Laughs] I have a song called Back To You on my MTV album [Unplugged], and I thought that Any Time at All could work the same way – very strummy. And it did. It worked out beautifully.

“Everybody knows the song, but it’s not like one of the Beatles songs that gets played all the time. Because it was a little more off the radar, that’s why I was interested in it. I wanted it to rock out a bit more. One of the things about this record that I wanted to do was not do a pastiche of the original track; I wanted to do my own thing as best I could. I think I accomplished that.”

Read our full 2014 interview with Bryan Adams here.

As you might have noticed recently, we’ve been doing daily dives into our expansive archive, fishing for some of the most interesting interviews that MusicRadar’s (and its adjacent) writers have carried out over the years. Today, we’re bringing up to the surface a genuine gleaming treasure - a classic interview with arguably (is it arguable?) music’s most important living figure, Sir Paul McCartney himself.

The interview, which we republished in 2023, was originally conducted back in 1994 by writer Tony Bacon as part of his research for the first edition of his extraordinary The Bass Book. It was first published back then in what was our sister publication Bass Magazine.

At the time, Sir Paul was in the midst of creating The Beatles Anthology, and was in quite an open, reflective mood.

“McCartney could not have been more generous, entertaining, and candid in the few hours we spent together,” wrote Bacon at the time, "I started by asking about my favourite period of his bass work with the Beatles, during the making of Sgt Pepper.”

McCartney explained to Tony that the hailed Pepper was the record where he really locked-in to the idea of the bass being able to be a motor for independent melodies as opposed to merely a rhythmic instrument.

“That was really when I got into that. That was probably what ended up being my strongest thing on bass, the independent melodies. On Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, you could easily have had [he sings a root-note version through the first few chords].

“It would have been like Louie Louie or something. Whereas I was going [sings the Lucy bass-line], just running through that,” said Paul. “It’s only really a way of getting from C to F, or whatever, but you get there in an interesting way. That became my thing, doing that.”

Paul also explained how he initially felt the bass was a burdensome instrument - having took the role on following the departure of initial bassist Stuart Sutcliffe.

“From the word go, once I got over the fact that I was lumbered with the bass [laughs], I did get quite proud to be a bass player, quite proud of the idea. Once you realised the control you had over the band, you were in control. They can’t go anywhere, man. Ha! Power!” Paul said.

“I then started to identify with other bass players, to talk bass with the guys in the band. In fact, when we met Elvis, he was trying to learn bass, so I was like, ‘You’re trying to learn bass, are you … son? Sit down, let me show you a few things’. So I was very proud of being the bass player. But as it went on and I got into that melodic thing, that was probably the peak of my interest.”

Paul went on to explain how he developed as a bassist - and popularised many now firm ideas about what a bassist should do in a band - during the Beatles’ decade of creative brilliance. He was, however, shy about taking all the credit himself.

“I wouldn’t personally credit myself, but thanks for that. But I think James Jamerson, him and me, I’d share the credit there. I was nicking a lot off him.

"That was the thing, though, it did become a lot more of a funky instrument: it was becoming almost like a drum, the rhythmic possibilities. It was very exciting, that, and it also gave me something to keep me interested,” explained Paul.

“The danger with bass is that everybody else has got the interesting jobs and you’re just the last guy to get a part, and literally you get the root notes, two in a bar. But actually… now, I quite like that, I like the simplicity. Sort of country and western bass playing.”

Paul then told Tony that playing many of those trademark melodic bass parts could be quite difficult, especially if he was singing lead…

“The other thing for me that was hard was because some of these parts were independent melodic parts, it became much more difficult to sing, it was like doing this [pats his head and rubs his stomach].

“So I had to put a little special effort into that, which made it very interesting. If you were singing 'She was just 17…' and going [sings energetic bass-line], well… that became the skill, I could just learn [sings I Saw Her Standing There bass-line], nicked from Chuck Berry as I’m sure you know, I’m Talking About You. I’ve given him credit, though.”

Near the end of the interview, which also covered McCartney’s bass choices and plectrum/thumb preferences, Macca updated Bacon on the then in-development Anthology project.

“It’s very good. Funniest thing is that we don’t always agree on the memories, because it’s 30 years ago. So it’s hilarious… on camera,” laughed Paul. “There’s one bit, Ringo’s telling a story, and he says, ‘At that point George had a sore throat…’ Camera pans to George, George says, ‘I thought it was Paul’, and the camera pans to me, and I say, ‘Well I know it was John.’

“And I’ve worked it out since, I say this to people: if Ringo thought it was George, it wasn’t Ringo; if George thought it was me, it wasn’t George; I thought it was John, so it wasn’t me. It must have been John, he was the only one left! But this is funny, for the definitive bloody thing on the Beatles. It’s great, you’ve just got to laugh. It’s so human, so real. We forget… who cares? We did some great stuff. Exact analysis was never our bag. And it obviously still isn’t!”

Read this full legacy interview with Paul McCartney here.

The road to hell, it turns out, is paved with Dropbox links. Because although Cradle of Filth may sound as though they record inside a burning cathedral, Dani Filth’s home studio is actually more of a games room - complete with a dartboard.

Across 14 studio albums, the British extreme metal veterans have crammed serrated guitars, venomous screams, blast beats and swathes of orchestration into records that often feel closer to gothic horror films than conventional metal albums.

Dani Filth’s own description is even more simple, he tells us, when we sit down to discuss how the black metal is made: “Cinematic, loud, violent, symphonic.”

The process behind that sound, however, is rather less theatrical.

Strip away the flames, elaborate stage production and decades of monstrous imagery, and Filth’s personal studio setup amounts to a microphone and laptop in a games room.

As well as the dartboard, there’s also a chess set and a Creature from the Black Lagoon head mounted on the wall, naturally.

When we ask him to choose the most important piece of equipment in this rather modest studio, Filth initially offers three possibilities.

“The microphone, I should imagine,” he says, “Or the producer - he’s always quite useful. And the coffee machine.”

One microphone in particular has recently become an obsession for the frontman: a handmade model from boutique manufacturer Soyuz.

“Oh, there’s this amazing microphone called a Soyuz,” he shares with us, “Funnily enough, it’s Russian, and it looks like a Russian church: white and gold, with a bit up here. They don’t make many of them.”

Filth does not specify the exact model, but places its value somewhere between $6,000 and $7,000. A friend owns an even rarer black design which he says is no longer being produced.

That price might be enough to make most home recordists emit a scream worthy of Cradle of Filth itself - but after using one, Filth became convinced it was worth the investment.

“It sounds so good,” he say, “I’m just about to buy one because I’ve realised I can’t live without it.”

For now, his home rig remains surprisingly minimal.

“Mine’s only really just a microphone and a laptop,” he explains. “I’m investing in one of those sound booths and everything, but it’s in a room that’s kind of a games room.”

Alongside its dartboard, chess set and collection of skateboards, the room is decorated with objects more associated with a Cradle of Filth record sleeve than a vocal booth.

“I’ve got a Creature from the Black Lagoon head cast from the actor, some horns and things like that,” Filth says, nonchalantly, “And a big picture of Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel. Yeah, lots of weird things.”

Cradle of Filth’s international line up means that the musicians are not always able to begin a record together in one room. Instead, the band’s epic songs often start life as files passed across borders.

“It’s quite laborious, really,” Filth admits, “We do a lot by Dropbox - formulate ideas and then meet up before a tour, or go away for a week or so, or hole up in a hotel on tour and bounce things back and forth.

“We get the producer involved. There’s never really a plan. If there was, it would be easy - and everyone would be doing it!”

It is a fragmented way of working, but perhaps an appropriate one for a band whose music has always resisted neat categorisation. Asked to pin down the Cradle of Filth sound more precisely, Filth is characteristically blunt.

“We just do our own thing and then catch the flak for it later!”

That instinct extends from the studio to the stage. A Cradle of Filth performance translates the records’ cinematic scale into flames, volume and deliciously violent spectacle… although Filth claims his position in the middle of it all makes him a poor judge of the finished production.

“I’m on the wrong side of the stage to everybody else, so I can’t really speak for myself,” he says, “You’d have to come along to the show and find out, wouldn’t you?”

One performance at Download Festival last year even became the setting for Filth to propose to his partner in front of 10,000 people. He had devised the plan only a few days earlier, hoping he could keep her side of stage until the right moment.

“I wanted to do it properly,” he shares, “I wanted to make a bit of a… something you remember it by. Like, ‘Oh, 10,000 people go, yay!’ rather than, ‘Get on with it, play another song.’

“I was worried about people shouting: ‘Boo! We wanted Principle of Evil Made Flesh!’”

Fortunately, she said yes.

Filth’s laptop remains equally important once the band leaves the studio. On the road, he uses it to watch films, write poetry and keep up with Queens Park Rangers results, “for my sins”.

His idea of touring luxury is not expensive catering or a bottomless rider, but simply having somewhere private to use it.

“I was very lucky when we toured America to have my own room on the bus,” he says. “That’s my luxury. It’s like my little bedroom, and I decorate it.

“I think that’s the height of luxury - being towed around the whole of America in your bedroom.”

His touring inventory is not all that extravagant, mind. Asked what he carries with him as we chat, he deadpans, “Half a Curly Wurly.”

Filth’s dream collaborators span the outer reaches of pop and metal. Having already recorded with Ed Sheeran, he jokes that there is nowhere higher left to go.

“Oh well, we’ve done Ed Sheeran, so I can’t think of anybody else,” he says, “That was the top.”

“We were talking about Lana Del Rey the other day,” he continues, before turning to some rather heavier possibilities. “Probably one of the classics - Bruce Dickinson, Rob Halford, King Diamond. That sort of thing.”

Tarja feat. Dani Filth - I Don't Care is out now. Cradle of Filth are touring the US throughout September and October.

In early 1985, it seemed that the kings of American rock were finished. When it was announced that singer David Lee Roth had quit Van Halen, few believed that the multi-million selling Californian band could continue without him.

But the three guys he left behind – guitarist Eddie Van Halen, his elder brother and drummer Alex Van Halen, and bassist Michael Anthony – had no such doubts. And what they went on to achieve, following the acquisition of another superstar lead singer, was one of the greatest comebacks in the history of rock ’n’ roll.

For many fans, Roth was irreplaceable. A blond Adonis oozing sex appeal, funny and fast-talking, Diamond Dave was the best frontman since Freddie Mercury.

But as the name implied, Van Halen was always Eddie’s band, defined by his genius as the most innovative, game-changing rock guitarist since Hendrix. And after Roth walked out to go solo – less than a year after Van Halen had their first US No 1 single with Jump – it was Eddie who decided that Sammy Hagar had the voice, the charisma and the balls to fill that huge void.

At that time, Hagar, California born-and-bred, was a big name in his own right, with three successive million-selling albums as a solo artist. Moreover, in the early ’70s, he had been the singer for Montrose, whose debut album had a profound influence on Van Halen.

Hagar turned out to be a perfect fit. With their backs to the wall, the new Van Halen – nicknamed Van Hagar – delivered a brilliant album, 5150, which became a multi-million selling smash and their first No 1 album.

In an interview with Rock Candy magazine, Sammy Hagar recalled how he joined Van Halen and how his influenced reshaped this legendary band.

He claimed he had no fears about replacing David Lee Roth, stating: “If I would have tried to dress up funny and try to replace Dave in that sense, first of all I wouldn’t have done it, second of all I would have felt, well, I’m not sure I can do this. But I wasn’t mimicking anyone. So I never made that comparison. And I was very confident in myself.”

He added: “Those guys [in Van Halen] took more from me than I ever got from them. Especially Dave. He started wearing bandannas way after I did it. I hate to admit it, but I invented that ugly-ass thing. And it was the same with the Jack Daniel’s thing. I was singing about JD in the backseat in ’76 with Cruisin’ And Boozin’ on my Red album. I was drinking Jack Daniel’s on stage, and then Dave started doing it.”

Hagar said he felt that Roth’s act was a little too showbiz.

“That was how he was. Everything he said on stage, like, ‘Look at all the people here tonight!’ If you saw the band twice you’d already seen this shit.”

He did, however, give some credit to Roth.

“You can’t ever rekindle the energy and the originality of a young band starting out,” Hagar said, “because that’s the golden era, man. Eddie was so innovative and they had such a unique sound and Dave was such a flamboyant frontman. It’s like the first Montrose record – that kind of energy, it can only happen once.”

He commented on other major rock bands that had changed lead singers.

“Sometimes it doesn’t work,” he said. “Deep Purple kind of had that when they got Glenn Hughes and David Coverdale. They made a great record with Burn, but for some reason they didn’t get any bigger. AC/DC’s singer died. They didn’t have a choice. But what happened to Mötley Crüe, when Vince Neil left and they made that record with that guy [John Corabi] and it stiffed, people just didn’t think that record was good enough. The fans didn’t buy into it.”

As Hagar understood it, there were no guarantees that Van Halen fans would buy into the band with him singing instead of Roth. “That,” he said, “was unpredictable.”

But he remembered with complete clarity the moment when he realised they could make great music together.

He recalled: “I knew it the first time we jammed together at Eddie’s place, up above LA in the Coldwater Canyon area. It was a small, country-style house, and he had a studio there.

“Alex was really drinking heavy at this time, and he was plastered. He said, ‘Hey, you gotta sign something before we play.’ He had a piece of paper and a pencil. It was pretty funny. Classic rock ’n’ roll shit. He was trying to be a lawyer on me. I said, ‘You gotta be kidding! Let’s just play some music.’

“They already had the music for two songs, Summer Nights and Good Enough. So we messed around with them and we continued playing for eight hours without a break. They got excited and I did too.”

Asked to paint a picture of 5150, Eddie Van Halen’s home studio, Hagar laughed and said: “Oh boy. You got some mud and brooms for brushes? You’d paint that picture with mud, dirt, ashes, old stale beer for liquid, and you’d have to do it with an old worn-out broom.”

He continued: “The studio was a two-car garage turned into a control room and a room. It was really tight in there, with all these Marshalls stacked up. There were beer cans all over the place and twenty cigarettes lit and just sitting in ashtrays…

“I told the assistant engineer, ‘Can you get this fucking place vacuumed up?’ So it was cleaned before we finally got going on the record, but it wasn’t long before it was pretty much back to its same old state. It was hilarious.”

The day after that first jam session at 5150, Hagar agreed to join the band. Although he had been riding high as a solo artist, it was an easy decision to make.

He explained: “I went home and listened to what we had on tape, and I thought, ‘Fuck, man, this is good! This is unique. This is not the old Van Halen but it has just enough of the sound with Mikey’s voice in there.’

“So I called my manager and said, ‘I’m doing it!’ Then we started rehearsing. I was living in Marin County, Southern California, so I rented a house in LA. And my manager started working on the deal between my record company, Geffen, and theirs, Warner Brothers.”

By the time this deal was finalised, the band were already deep into the writing for the 5150 album.

Hagar said of the songwriting process: “Eddie and Al would stay up all night trying to come up with musical ideas, and the next day Mikey and me would come in at noon. While they were honing down the beat and the chord changes and Eddie’s guitar solo, I’d be making up a melody and the phrasing, just scatting, grunting and groaning like a sax player. Then I would take it home and write lyrics, if they came.

“The two things that impressed me was that these guys were easily inspired and they showed their emotions. I was raised on soul music, and I didn’t think they had any R&B or blues roots. They had that song Ice Cream Man on their first album, and to me that was pretty white blues, it wasn’t very authentic. But when we played together, they were groovin’.”

Undoubtedly, Hagar’s prowess as a vocalist brought a whole new dimension to Van Halen’s music.

As Hagar put it: “Eddie would say, ‘Can you hit this note?’ I’d hit it and everybody would go, ‘Wow!’ And from there I could just see Eddie opening up as a musician and a songwriter.

“What I did was inspire Eddie to go, ‘Oh, I can do this and I can do that. I’ve got this musical idea that I would never show Roth. But with Sammy, I can play it.’ So it was pretty damn organic.

“We were exactly who and what we were, and the chemistry between Eddie and myself created a more sophisticated style of music and songwriting. It was very inspiring. We were elevated. The whole thing just went up.”

Is it too much to say that Robin Trower, Jack Bruce and Bill Lordan’s 1980 all-star collaboration, BLT, is a stone-cold blues-rock classic? Maybe. But we can definitely call it a minor classic, ripe for rediscovery.

Here you have a power trio featuring Bruce, one of the format’s chief architects, on bass and vocals, the former Cream frontman’s very presence inviting comparisons to his promethean work with Messrs Clapton and Baker at the tail-end of the ‘60s. Lordan had played in Trower’s solo band, but had also racked up credits in Gypsy and Sly And The Family Stone.

The power trio was very much Trower’s preferred format since leaving Procol Harum in 1971 to stretch his wings on electric guitar. There was no room for guitar solos in a band where Gary Brooker’s keys were front and centre.

After a false start alongside Frankie Miller in Jude, the Robin Trower Band was more like it, with their 1973 debut, Twice Removed From Yesterday, a taste of things to come, and its follow-up, the seminal Bridge Of Sighs, inaugurating Trower as one of the great players of his generation.

He, like Hendrix, had fathomed the magic of the UniVibe, its chewy swirl a psychedelic counterpoint to the blues guitar DNA in his playing. Speaking to MusicRadar in 2019, Paul Gilbert says he felt like he was under the influence of something illicit when he first stuck that on.

“I never did drugs as a kid but to me it was what I imagined that drugs would do,” said Gilbert. “It was sort of like the whole world was resonating in an unusual but attractive way.”

For Gilbert, Trower was one of the world’s great “warbly players” alongside Frank Marino, Alex Lifeson, Pat Travers and Pat Thrall, and Peter Frampton.

“In Day Of The Eagle he’s got this looping riff, and when he hits those open top two strings and it warbles,” said Gilbert. “He might have like double-tracked it and bent one with the whammy a little bit – the whole world just comes unglued. When he hits that note, it’s so cool.”

Trower was still a blues player, albeit with one foot in Chicago and the other in Haight-Ashbury. He was taking the art form forward, even if he never gave it a second thought.

“Well, I wasn’t really intellectualising it,” he says, joining MusicRadar from his rehearsal room, where he is preparing for a string of UK live dates. “I was just doing what comes natural. The most satisfying music I come up with is always where the heart leads the head, definitely.”

Trower had made his bones in the psychedelic scene with Procol Harum but the blues was his heartland. His awakening as an artist came when he first heard BB King.

“Definitely. I first heard a BB King track in the ‘60s and that was very inspiring,” he says. “That was 3 O’Clock Blues.”

There were soul and R&B influences percolating in there, too. When Trower talks about “power soul” tracks on his forthcoming album Shine, that comes from the Godfather of Funk.

“Things like James Brown Live At The Apollo and that kind of level of performance are inspirational,” says Trower. “And it is as you say, it’s an underlying influence. There’s a lot of stuff like that. The main things that I would play during the ‘60s would be BB King Live At The Regal, James Brown Live At The Apollo, and I think the other big album for me – well, there’s a couple – Moanin’ In The Moonlight, by Howlin’ Wolf, then later on in the ‘60s Albert King’s Born Under A Bad Sign.”

Players such the Kings and Willie Johnson of Howlin’ Wolf’s band knew the value of economy in their playing, and how vibrato could be as good as a signature. The lesson was was not lost on Trower.

“Yeah, it was simple but very, very powerful,” he says. “I think that’s the whole thing about it. It had real potency to it.”

The Robin Trower Band had been prolific throughout the ‘70s. Seven studio albums in as many years, the hot streak culminated in 1980’s Victims Of The Fury, an album on which Trower’s old Procol Harum bandmate and gifted lyricist Keith Reid was brought on as cowriter. It was the last hurrah of the band’s classic lineup of Trower, bassist/vocalist James Dewar. Trower was looking for a fresh collaboration.

He had Jack Bruce’s number. Like his fellow Scotsman Dewar, Bruce was a fine bassist and had the voice. The former Cream frontman would be a perfect foil for Trower. A jazz head who drew influence from classical arrangements, Bruce was not your typical bassist. This was not to be your typical collaboration.

Once again, Keith Reid was heavily involved even if his name wasn’t on the cover. What was on the album’s cover was a sandwich photographed by Trevor Key.

It’s a little silly having an actual BLT on the cover – and it Key would certainly do better work with Mike Oldfield and New Order – but it was quite the visual.

Into Money opens the album with some artery-clogging grease from Trower’s Strat, a riff that dances all around Bruce’s vocal, breaking out in the throaty squawk of his guitar solo. It is implausible that a twenty-something Lenny Kravitz did not have this on his turntable.

What It Is and It’s Too Late remind us of what Gilbert was talking about when he described Trower as “warbly player”. Won’t Let You Down betrays the changing of the decades, a decade ferried upon a succession of clean arpeggios. More after-hours, nocturnal and witchy, Carmen finds Bruce singing in falsetto.

Throughout Bruce’s bass playing his on point, in dialogue with Trower’s guitar. This is something we hear on Trower’s latter material, where he has handled bass and guitar. Was this something he learned from Bruce? Trower doesn’t think so.

“It was wonderful working with Jack. He was such a unique musician,” says Trower. “Unique. I don’t think I could learn anything from him. He was on a different level altogether.”

If Cream fans tuned in and expected Trower to play like Clapton and for Lordan to channel Ginger Baker then they would have been disappointed.

Trower never felt that BLT as a trio was trying to be some kind of Cream Mark II.

“No, I don’t. I don’t feel like we were trying to do a new Cream or anything, no,” he says. “No, I still stuck to the writing that came natural to me. But obviously it was a great thrill playing with Jack.”

BLT had the tunes. Listen to No Island Lost for a taste of Trower’s Strat through his dimed 100-watt Marshall. It’s him at his most Hendrixian, with talky wah solos, and this great hydrocarbon groove. Believing they didn’t have enough original material, BLT didn’t tour the record – and these things mattered.

Lordan did not return for the 1982 follow-up, Truce. Billed as a Robin Trower and Jack Bruce album, it featured Bridge Of Sighs drummer Reg Isidore. It was the label’s idea they made another record. Trower was disillusioned.

Soon, he and Bruce would go their separate ways, only to reconvene in 2007. They were revisiting BLT and Truce and discussing a remix. Bruce suggested they write a couple of new songs for the release. One thing led to another.

“We got together and started writing. Before we knew where we were, we had four or five songs and it was obvious that we should do an album,” Trower told Guitar World in 2008.

“We didn’t rehearse at all, but we spent time, he and I, writing songs together, so that’s a kind of rehearsal. We had a good formation in our minds of how those pieces went. All we had to do was find a drummer and then record them.”

Enter the prodigiously talented Gary Husband. And this time Trower and Bruce did tour, releasing a live album in 2009. Their final collaboration on record came in 2014 when Trower visited Bruce at Abbey Road to record Rusty Lady for Silver Rails.

BLT? Stone-cold classic or not, it's definitely worth a second bite.

• Robin Trower is on tour in the UK this week and plays the Manchester Academy tomorrow night September 3. See Robin Trower for dates and ticket details.
• Trower's forthcoming solo album, Shine, is available to preorder, and is out on September 25 via Provogue

Back in 2015, we sat down for a roundtable discussion with a quartet of guitarists who had come to shape the sound of modern metal. From nu metal pioneers Korn, we had James 'Munky' Shaffer and Brian 'Head' Welch and, from Slipknot, Jim Root and Mick Thomson.

Between them, the four men had been responsible for conjuring those all-important riffs that had formed the indomitable foundation of their respective bands’ sound.

For this special, one-off summit, the four men traded perspectives on such topics as why guitar solos weren’t always a requirement, oddball effect choices and those early days when playing a gig could be hazardous affair…

Slipknot’s Mick Thomson recalled how he’d seen Korn playing at the Milwaukee Metal Fest in 1995, which triggered some particularly alarming tour memories of that era from Munky…

“We used to get shit thrown at us. On that tour, I was jamming and I heard 'Bam!' I looked at the stage and there was an open Buck knife! I think it was sticking in the screen of my cabinet…”

Jim Root chimed in, "We had some shit like that in France. We got booked to play some hardcore punk festival. There were bricks, bottles of piss, a dead…”

“There was a dead rabbit!” Added Thomson. “There was a rumour that went around that all the prices for tickets went up because our guarantee was so big. Which isn't even remotely true. But all these message boards got that shit rolling, and there were open knives, and someone killed a rabbit!”

So far so terrifying (would you really have expected anything less?) But, in a warmer moment, Korn’s Munky enthusiastically remembered how he felt when he first heard Slipknot’s 1999 debut, "I remember [producer] Ross [Robinson] gave me the CD and was like, 'You've gotta check this out.' I had this 4x4 Suburban, and I'd just put a new stereo in it, and I cranked it up and couldn't turn it up loud enough.

“You could just feel the anger coming out of the speakers. I called him up and said, 'Holy shit! You outdid yourself on this one!' It was like his masterpiece.”

Head made an apt comparison between the two bands; “If Jonathan [Davis] had the 'Why me?' thing - the emotional abuse and stuff - then Corey had the 'I'm gonna rip your insides out'. In all honesty, it was too heavy for me - I wasn't a heavy, heavy guy. I had to grow into it."

An interesting point in the conversation came when the topic turned to soloing - and both Korn and Slipknot’s respective axe-men’s initial reluctance to do so.

“I don't know if it [soloing] wasn't cool, it's just we were influenced by Faith No More and all these bands that weren't [playing solos],” recalled Head. “It was a shame, because I practised soloing my whole life! But our approach was to create a bridge section that everyone can do whatever. Get creative, make the weirdest sounds you can, and there's Korn - so a lot of kids were influenced by us that were like, 'Man, I could do this!’”

Slipknot’s Mick Thomson deduced why it was that Korn’s early material worked so well from a guitar perspective; “One thing that I think is a huge credit to you guys is that the heaviest shit isn't necessarily the simplest, but it's not verbose. You don't need loads of notes to be heavy. So you guys would come out and play just a few notes, but crushingly heavy.

“Clown and Paul used to have you guys louder than f** in any car all the time! That's how I got to know you. Just single strings, heavy as shit. That's kind of like the Sabbath way!”

Read the full roundtable interview with Korn’s Munky and Head and Slipknot’s Mick Thomson and Jim Root here.

The first album that Fleetwood Mac made with Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham was a huge success – but as Buckingham would later reveal, he wasn’t sure at first that he was the right fit for the band.

Buckingham and Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac on New Year’s Eve 1974, and as the group’s new guitarist Buckingham was following in the footsteps of highly acclaimed players including the legendary Peter Green.

In previously unpublished extracts from a major interview in 2006, Buckingham talks about joining Fleetwood Mac, the classic albums Rumours and Tusk, and his love of little-known Rolling Stones songs.

Discussing his initial reservations about his role in Fleetwood Mac, he admits: “As a guitarist walking into a band with an established, identifiable sound, there wasn’t always the space to always do what I do best. You get to thinking, ‘Who are you shooting to? Who’s gonna appreciate it?’”

He recalls that he quickly learned to adapt to what bassist John McVie was playing.

“You know, John is a very melodic bass player,” he says. “He takes up a lot of space. So you just do what is the right thing to do – you do what works for the band.”

As it turned out, Buckingham need not have worried. Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled album from 1975 – the band’s first with Buckingham and Nicks – was a No 1 hit in the US, powered by the hit singles Over My Head, Rhiannon and Say You Love Me.

Over My Head and Say You Love Me were written by Christine McVie, but Rhiannon was Nicks’s song, as were the key album tracks Landslide and Crystal. Buckingham wrote the two songs that bookended the album – Monday Morning and I’m So Afraid.

What followed, of course, was Rumours – one of the greatest and biggest selling albums of all time, its hit songs inspired by the dramas playing out in the band members’ love lives.

Reflecting on Rumours and how that album changed the band, Buckingham states: “Looking back at those days, the irony of it was that the disappointment wasn’t about the couples breaking up, the whole soap opera – it was the realisation that we didn’t all want the same thing. We let go of an idealism when it didn’t match up with the bottom line.”

Rumours was a hard act to follow. Fleetwood Mac’s answer came in 1979 with Tusk, an adventurous double album in which the band’s signature soft rock was mixed with Buckingham’s new wave influences and experiments in sonics.

Speaking in 2006, Buckingham reveals: “We’d made this record that was so far to the left of Rumours. And when it didn’t sell 16 million copies, that was hard. There was a lot of anxiety among the people at [record label] Warners.”

He also admits: “I sure had a lot of anxiety after Tusk!”

That album cost a reported $1.4 million to record, and while it sold over four million copies by 1980 this was deemed a failure after Rumours had sold more than 10 million in its first year.

Famously, Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 album Tango In The Night began life as a Buckingham solo project. The album was another huge hit, but Buckingham refused to tour behind it and eventually quit the band due to conflicts between himself, Nicks and drummer Mick Fleetwood.

In the 2006 interview, Buckingham briefly addresses the turmoil within Fleetwood Mac in the late ’80s. “After I left, following Tango In The Night, the situation was nuts,” he says. “But it has since healed itself.”

He also explains how the band’s 2003 comeback album Say You Will had similar origins to Tango In The Night.

“Say You Will was supposed to be a solo album,” he says. “It just didn’t turn out that way. But nobody held a gun to my head, let’s put it that way.

“I started working with Mick [Fleetwood] with the idea of it being a solo record, and I guess there was a certain significance to that – which people picked up on. I hadn’t done a studio album with the band for more than ten years. Traditionally, I’ve always had to wait to put out solo records because I’m working around Fleetwood Mac. But my conclusion is that the material [on Say You Will] was always destined to be a Fleetwood Mac album.”

In conclusion, Buckingham talks about his solo versions of deep cuts by The Rolling Stones and folk singer Donovan.

“There’s a spate of obscure Stones songs that I’ve recorded,” he says. “It’s The Singer Not The Song, She Smiled Sweetly – all from that period 1965 to ’66. And with I Am Waiting, one of the objectives was to have a certain quantity of one style of guitar presentation: one guitar, guitar-driven. This song was an effective vehicle for that. And the Donovan song, Try For The Sun? It doesn’t sound much like the original!”

Whenever you hear the name Guns N’ Roses mentioned, which member springs into your head first? For us, it’s always the top hat-adorned Slash (sorry Axl…) that is summoned to our mind's eye.

The man behind all those electrifying GN'R riffs and succulently-toned solos, Slash has become an iconic, singular figure in guitar history.

In a trawl through our archive of legacy interviews recently, we re-discovered a fascinating chat conducted with Slash way back in 2008. On the heels of the launch of Gibson and Epiphone’s signature Slash Les Paul Goldtops, Slash was eager, back then, to gush about his love of the guitar that he’s most associated with…

“I’ve played so many different Les Pauls, I've always had four, if not 10 Les Pauls out with me on the road, and I think the signature models are basically just accruing information that I've picked up over the years having played Les Pauls for so long,” Slash told us.

When asked why he didn’t push for the incorporation of any ‘crazier’ features into those (or other) signature models, Slash gave a to-the-point answer;

“Well personally all I'm doing is playing guitar. I don't go in for any pyrotechnics and I don't need any bells and whistles and I think the more you cut out of a guitar to make room for any sensationalistic amenities like that the more you take out of the guitar's original sound, and I try to keep it intact.”

He also shared with us his then-current roster of owned guitars. We can only imagine how this number has grown since ’08…

“I've got somewhere between 80 and 90 guitars and I'd say 75 percent of them are Les Pauls. It seems ridiculous - but they all have a unique purpose.”

But, if his house went up in flames, which guitars would he have darted back in to grab?

“Well, it would definitely be benefiting this particular promotion if I said one of my signature guitars,” Slash cheekily said. “But in all honesty it would be the guitar I've been recording with ever since Appetite For Destruction. It's been my main 'go to' guitar for years.

“Having said that I have 80 or 90 guitars there are two that I keep close by with me at all times. Really you only need one or two guitars in your whole career. But you end up collecting a lot of guitars before you discover that reality.”

It’s the 1991 Gibson Goldtop (and a replacement version custom-made for Slash after that particular axe was stolen from him in 1998) that he cited as a particular favourite.

“In the nineties on the Use Your Illusion tour, I picked up a brand new Gibson Goldtop which became a major part of the set and I used it for all of the sort of epic ballads that had long sustaining guitar solos. Sweet Child O' Mine, November Rain, Estranged, Knocking On Heaven's Door, So Fine, and my guitar solo as well, so I did The Godfather with it,” Slash said.

“I think Gibsons are hands down the toughest guitars, I have to say. I smashed one once at a show in New Jersey a while back, and it took a couple of good, heavy whacks.”

Read our full legacy 2008 interview with Slash here.

Mr. Jones is the single that turned Californian band Counting Crows into a household name following its release in December 1993.

It was written by singer Adam Duritz and guitarist David Bryson and appeared on their debut album August And Everything After, produced by T Bone Burnett.

Duritz had worked on the track for quite some time before it was recorded to his satisfaction. He once told The Guardian that “it was a very difficult song to finish” because “it’s not a slow song, but it’s not a straight ahead fast song either”.

He went on to describe it as “soul music – closer to Stax Records than it is to country” because of how it “gallops along” and requires the players to “get a real feel for it”.

The singer even admitted it must have taken him “fifty or sixty” takes to get one that everyone was happy with.

The roots of the song stretch back to his time Duritz’s time in The Himalayans, alongside bassist Marty Jones.

On an episode of VH1’s Storytellers, Duritz explained how himself and Jones went out one night to watch a gig by Jones’s father David Serva, a flamenco guitar player who lived in Spain. After seeing an “outrageous” performance, they got “completely drunk” and talked about what life would be like as “big rock stars instead of such loser, low-budget musicians”.

Duritz went home that night and decided to write a song about following your heart and living the dream – or at least attempting to – characterised by lyrics such as “we all wanna be big stars”, “I wanna be Bob Dylan” and “when I look at the television, I want to see me”.

But the song also has a darker edge, warning of how such hopes and ambitions can ultimately backfire and leave you exposed in a state of vulnerability.

Duritz continued: “It’s also kind of cautionary because it’s about how misguided you may be about some of those things and how hollow they may be too. Like the character in the song keeps saying, ‘When everybody loves me I will never be lonely,’ and you’re supposed to know that that’s not the way it’s gonna be.”

There are also theories about how the track also relates to the character referenced in the 1965 Bob Dylan song Ballad Of A Thin Man, which includes the line “because something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”

And then there’s the potential connection to The Beatles, who name-checked the very same Bob Dylan song on Yer Blues from their self-titled double album of 1968 (“I feel so suicidal, just like Dylan’s Mister Jones”).

Though both the Counting Crows and Beatles tracks explore themes of loneliness, Duritz has downplayed much of the wider associations, describing Mr. Jones as “a song that has been misinterpreted greatly, to say the least”.

He once explained: “I think people too often look for symbolism in songs when they’re simpler than they seem… I have heard everything from it being about some ancient blues man who taught me to play music, which is completely ridiculous, but like somebody’s movie fantasy. I’ve also heard it’s about my dick, which is even more ridiculous.”

The verses sections are made out of basic Amin, F, Dmin and G chords and the chorus sections are even simpler, built out of C, F and G major shapes.

Multi-instrumentalist David Immerglück can also be heard performing on the track, though was working as a session musician for the band until he became a full-time member in 1999.

Mr. Jones performed well on home soil, as well as the charts in Australia, Canada, France, Iceland and Peru – ultimately helping the group kickstart their career with a hit album.

For Adam Duritz, who has often pointed the irony of a song about ‘making it’ being his gateway into international stardom, it all came as a bit of a surprise.

“After SNL, it got pretty big on the radio,” he told Classic Rock. “By that summer, when we were playing, there was a lot of people who wanted to hear Mr. Jones. It seemed like the audience was there for Mr. Jones. But I noticed that more after the fact. I didn’t notice it blowing the record up, I just noticed that once the record blew up, Mr. Jones was really big.”

He added: “I remember being in a strip club in New Orleans and Mr. Jones comes on, and I was like: ‘No, no, this is not the vibe. Not to this song!’ I don’t mind getting a dance every now and then, but not to my song… that is not okay.”

Most of our audience will already be familiar with the great Trevor Horn. If not, you’ll certainly be familiar with the multitudes of tracks he produced for a veritable who’s-who of 80s pop superstars. It's a list that includes ABC, Spandau Ballet, Grace Jones, Pet Shop Boys, Cher, Seal and countless others.

But for Horn, who of course first started out as one half of the Buggles (the music-video - and arguably internet - predicting architects of Video Killed the Radio Star), there’s one band he’s particularly proud to have worked with. The controversy-stoking Frankie Goes to Hollywood…

“The first time you heard them you had to hear them again, because there was a whole bunch of s**t in there that nobody had done before,” Horn explained to us in an interview back in 2020. “Relax was a really good record and Two Tribes still sounds great. What always impressed me is Steve Lipson’s engineering because, sonically, the mixes were perfect. When we came to mix [the album] Welcome to the Pleasuredome, Lippo mixed it in one afternoon, although I wanted to mix it for another week. He insisted and he was right.”

In our extensive interview, Trevor reflected on the very beginning of his fascination with music, and what lured him into experimenting with sound in the first place…

“I had a job as a trainee cost accountant, but was playing in a band five nights a week,” remembered Trevor. ”I was riding home on my scooter from seeing this girl, and suddenly thought the only thing I’m interested at working in is music. I said to my dad, ‘I think I’ll turn pro,’ and he said ‘You’re not good enough.’ One evening I just thought, f**k it, woke them up and said, ‘Sorry, I’ve made my mind up – I’m going to be a musician.’ I knew I’d be a failure at anything else.”

Horn then embarked on a career as a session musician in the 1970s, which led him to develop an interest in record production…

“I worked on LPs when they were made in one day – when studios still had a red light. I loved the sound of control rooms and tried being a songwriter, but gave up. When I was 25, I’d made quite a bit of money playing in Ray McVay’s Big Band, which was a nightmare gig but I got a load of recording equipment, went up to Leicester and bought a studio. Nobody came in, so we started organising sessions. Leicester City FC’s This is the Season for Leicester was the first record I officially made, then somebody told me I was a record producer and I thought, ‘Wow, I am, and it’s what I want to do.’”

It was the electronic sounds coming out of Germany - particularly those made by Kraftwerk - that would draw Trevor's attention to innovative, cutting edge techniques…

“I only ran the studio for a year, and then I bailed out and came back to London. I was working in another band doing cover albums – Brian Ferry stuff or whatever was in the charts, then I started producing demos for a music publisher. I did that for five years, but somewhere along the way I heard Kraftwerk and that completely changed my view about production. The Man Machine was the one for me, and my other favourite was Grace Jones’ Warm Leatherette. I was also into JG Ballard and novels like Crash. The Buggles was meant to be a fantasy group invented on a computer – then real life came crashing in.”

Read our full 2020 interview with Trevor Horn here.

Many tears were shed over a song Dolly Parton wrote in the mid-’70s – an emotive ballad that ended up being a global hit for another singer.

I Will Always Love You was originally released on Parton’s 1974 album Jolene, and was a No 1 hit on the US Hot Country Songs chart. It was 18 years later that Whitney Houston’s version of the song became one of the biggest hit records of all time.

But as Parton revealed, I Will Always Love You was not the simple love song that its title implied. Instead, it was a farewell message to one of the most important collaborators in her career.

Missouri-born country singer Porter Wagoner was so successful in the late ’60s that he hosted his own syndicated TV show.

It was in 1967 that Parton first appeared on The Porter Wagoner Show, and for the next seven years the two singers regularly performed together.

By 1974, however, Parton felt the need to spread her wings and focus on her solo career. She would also admit that she and Wagoner had often butted heads during their long working relationship.

I Will Always Love You was her way of saying goodbye.

As Parton recalled in an interview with The Bobby Bones Show: “I was trying to get out, go out on my own… and the fact that we had one of those love-hate relationships, it was just hard to move on.”

She said of Wagoner: “He wasn’t listening to anything I had to say. So I went home and wrote that song, took it back the next morning and said, ‘Sit down. I need you to hear something.’ I sang it and he was crying, so he said, ‘Okay, you can go provided I can produce that record.’ So he did.”

As it turned out, Bob Ferguson was credited as the producer of the Jolene album, but Parton and Wagoner delivered two more collaborative albums in 1974 and 1975 – Porter ’n’ Dolly and Say Forever You'll Be Mine.

Parton herself ended up in tears when she had to make a tough decision about I Will Always Love You.

Not long after the release of the Jolene album, Parton was approached by Colonel Tom Parker, the manger of Elvis Presley. Parker told her that Elvis was interested in recording I Will Always Love You, but there was a catch. When Elvis recorded a song he would claim part – usually one half – of the publishing rights.

In a 2021 interview with W Magazine, Parton recalled her conversation with Parker: “I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t give you the publishing.’ I wanted to hear Elvis sing it, and it broke my heart — I cried all night. But I had to keep that copyright in my pocket. You have to take care of your business!”

Whitney Houston’s version of I Will Always Love You – featured in the soundtrack for the 1992 film The Bodyguard – was a No 1 hit all around the world and spent 14 weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100.

Speaking to CBS News in 2012, Parton said of Houston’s version: “She just took it worldwide and made it the most special song in the whole world for a long period of time.”

But Parton was taken by surprise when she heard Houston’s version for the first time. She knew that the song was being used in The Bodyguard but had no idea which singer had recorded it.

In her interview with The Bobby Bones Show, Parton recalled how she was driving when she first heard Houston’s version on the radio, and was initially confused by the intro in this new arrangement.

“I just heard Whitney singing the acapella part,” Parton said. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s weird.’ You know, something caught my attention. It was only when she went into the chorus of ‘I will always love you’ that I realised what I was listening to.”

She continued: “It was so overwhelming I almost wrecked. Just the greatness and the bigness and the fact that that was my song, it was just so out of nowhere. And I have to honestly say that it was one of the biggest thrills and one of the most overwhelming feelings I’ve ever had about anything in my life.”

In the wake of Dolly Parton’s death on 25 August, Priscilla Presley, Elvis’s former wife, paid tribute in an emotional statement in which she described her own attachment to I Will Always Love You.

“Dolly brought so much joy, kindness and beautiful music into the world,” she stated. “I will always remember our conversations, and especially the connection we shared through a song that holds such a personal place in my heart – I Will Always Love You.

“After Elvis and I left the courthouse following our divorce, he sang that song to me as we walked down the steps together. Years later, I shared that memory with Dolly.”

It's unquestionable that Prince was a musician beyond compare. There’s not many instruments that Prince couldn’t play expertly and, when it came to performance, few could equal his stagecraft. But, while it might look like Prince was effortlessly exhibiting God-given gifts, his aptitude came from relentless practice and discipline.

Back in 2019, we spoke to Prince’s Revolution keyboard player Lisa Coleman, who recalled how rehearsing with the hyper-focused Prince could be a gruelling challenge…

“They [rehearsals] were very intense. We showed up around 10 in the morning. Sometimes he would already be there, and other times he’d roll in later. And we’d be there all day until nighttime. Sometimes [the band] The Time would come in around 8 o’clock and they’d start rehearsing, but then we’d go to the studio and Prince would be working. It was non-stop.”

Coleman told us how rehearsals with Prince often resembled a spin class or a sweat lodge; “We could play the same groove for a number of hours. I’m not exaggerating. And Prince would work on things and walk in and out of the room saying, ‘Don’t stop! Nobody move!’ So it was a workout. We were like marathon runners.”

But while this might sound dictatorial, the proof of the Prince pudding was in those extraordinary live performances during the Purple Rain and Parade tours - which Lisa remembers vividly.

By the time the band got to the stage, they were tight as tight could be…

“We were just so completely in shape and trained that if Prince decided he wanted to jump to the left, he’d just give us a hand signal and we’d all jump to the left. And every night was different. We had a setlist but even that would change. He was a crazy man. We’d hit a groove and if it was really working and he was in a good mood, that could go on for 20 or 30 minutes with different hand signals and horn punches.

“Then he’d try and stump the band. He’d do this thing where he’d drop a handkerchief and when it hit the ground, we’d have to hit a horn punch. So it was kind of crazy!”

Aside from the intensity of playing live with the Purple One, Lisa also recalled how Prince would approach analogue synths in that period…

“Prince was incredibly bold in the way he would just use a preset and then brighten the f**k out of it! He would turn the filter way up so the sound would cut through the mix. I still have the OB-SX from those days. It’s one of the most simple Oberheims - there are just a few knobs on it, but that was the most quintessential keyboard from that era.”

When it came to songwriting, Prince’s approach varied - sometimes he’d lean on Lisa and Wendy [Melvoin]’s own considerable talents to shape new ideas…

“He was so prolific. One day he would come in and have a whole song written. He would pass out the parts at rehearsal and say, ‘Why don’t you check out this organ part?’ And then he’d go over to Matt’s station and say, ‘Check out this string part.’ But then on other days he’d just come in and say, ‘groove in E!’ He’d ask each one of us, ‘What you got?’

“So, it was a real balance, and I have to say that, back then, The Revolution was one of the only times he opened himself up and really drew from other people’s sound. Wendy’s sound on the guitar, Matt’s style on the synthesizer, etc. And that’s what made Prince and the Revolution what it was.”

Read our full interview with Lisa Coleman here.

The UK’s August Bank Holiday might signpost summer’s demise but the sun is not setting until Notting Hill Carnival, one of the world’s biggest street parties, takes over London.

Full of people, energy, steel bands, a parade and music, at its heart is the bass and huge speakers of more than 30 static sound systems powering the two-day party. Linett Kamala, an original founder, Notting Hill Carnival Board Director and one of the first women to DJ at the event during the mid-eighties, remembers many raucous years…

“I once had members of the crowd signal that there was smoke coming from one of the drivers of my speakers during someone’s DJ set,” she says. “I was prepared and had a fire extinguisher at the ready but sadly it was an expensive fix. I have kept the now defunct driver as a memory of the day.”

Some two million party goers are expected to attend, following the parade as it snakes its way around West London for this 60th birthday celebration. The afternoons on the Sunday and Bank Holiday are unmatched as a spectacle for the many attendees, with music coming from all angles. Daina Davidson-Shaw is daughter of George Watt, Killerwatt Sound founder, and works as a coordinator. She describes how it can be “a matter of survival” for sound systems on the day.

“The whole team has to be very switched on as it’s a free-flowing crowd and the energy can be unmatched,” she states. “From mosh pits to members of the public climbing on the speakers, the sound itself is usually well-looked after but there are external factors to consider. But this year will be extra special. It’s a jubilee and here in the UK, we do these kinds of celebrations in a very special way.”

2026 is certainly anticipated to be extra special, the 60th edition of an event that has had to change with the times as it has grown in size. But many of the systems involved are long-standing from Channel One and King Tubby’s to Gaz’s Rocking Blues and the eclectic energy of Rampage Sound. Veteran DJ and sound system operator Gladdy Wax is a regular at the event and has a long-standing connection to the Jamaican music he plays that stems from his family.

“My brother was an electrician and before we knew it, he had made a small amp at home,” he recalls. “We bought some speakers to play music on, then we’d be getting music from Jamaica to play. Many of the UK shops didn’t stock these records so we had to get them sent over.”

Originally based in Birmingham, Gladdy first played on the Leisure Sound System, then became part of Quaker City Sound collective when he moved to London. He opened his own Gladdy Wax shop before putting together his own system. When he first visited Notting Hill Carnival, he felt like his love of music and sensibilities around how music should be shared could find a home.

“Crucially, many of the sound system operators weren’t musicians and I was, I come from a musical family,” says Gladdy. “I listen to music to hear what all the musicians are doing as individual players. That wasn’t clear when I first went to Notting Hill - many just wanted more overpowering bass whereas I wanted to do something that people who appreciated music could listen to.”

Daina of Killerwatt describes how her father George, who first took his system to carnival in 1982, has a similar deep passion in music and interest in how speakers work. His interest in the mechanics of music led him to take his family’s gramophone apart when he was a kid.

“My dad ended up being the one at the family party who would DJ and that’s where his journey began,” says Daina. “He even took apart his mother’s own gramophone and he made his own speaker box out of it when he was younger.

“In a West Indian household, the gramophone is a sacred treasure and ripping this apart didn’t go down well but this is where he started, then going out to different commons and playing music to family and friends.”

Sound systems were born in Jamaica and landed in the UK via the Windrush generation of the post-war era. Due to the racial prejudice of the time many of those arriving from the Caribbean were not allowed into British bars, pubs and dancehalls. So instead they forged their own entertainment. These ‘blues dances’ would take place in homes and halls and feature Jamaican music to establish a new sense of community, despite many of the participants being so far away from home.

Sound systems had become a centrepiece of the Notting Hill Carnival by the 1970s, serving as tools for cultural empowerment.

Rooted in community, united by music, the ethos and values of coming together still stand for the participants. Linett Kamala, one of the original pioneers behind the event, has now diversified to establish her own LIN KAM ART creative hub and family-friendly chill out space at the event. While technology has changed down the decades, there are still essential elements that need to go into a system’s technical infrastructure.

“There is the common centre, the preamp which includes the frequency crossover, EQs and your FX input, such as where the mic is plugged into, then your high-powered amplifiers manage the amount of electricity that is going through the system and the turntables,” she says.

“The more visual aspect which people associate are the drivers or cabinets, these big boxes which contain the speakers. Typically made from birch plywood, you usually have your sub bass or scoops, mid-range kick bins, then your mids or tops. This is known as either four-way or five-way set-up. Rather than one speaker trying to do everything, each speaker is designed for a specific frequency.”

In the early years of sound systems, many operators would adapt whatever speakers they could find to play music to the masses. Fast forward to today, and many have embraced the latest technology to ensure their audio is of the best quality possible. Daina at Killerwatt describes how their four-way system is designed for an outdoor residential environment and provides the specific "weight, clarity, and presence" necessary to maintain the system's historical sonic identity.

“A common misconception in heritage management is that using modern technology ‘betrays’ the original tradition,” she says. “But Killerwatt’s philosophy argues the opposite: innovation is a continuation of tradition.”

Killerwatt’s rig features ten stacks and a four-way configuration to split the sound across the different frequency ranges. Powered and managed by Full Fat Audio hardware for maximum control and stability, four stacks will be on each side of the stage with two stage-left. The system features Noise Control Audio (NCA) IFLY Series units with the NCA 10TMT units for the high and mid, RGWs for the bass and kick with the VSB 218 systems utilised for the sub-bass.

“The idea is to ensure strong, consistent coverage for an audience that is constantly moving through the space and avoiding the need for extreme, concentrated volume levels that would be lost or distorted in a residential street setting,” Daina explains. “While the acoustic configuration ensures the sound reaches the crowd, the massive physical scale of the rig necessitates a critical logistical focus on power and reliability.

“Historically, sound system operators were always experimenting, modifying, and hacking gear to get extraordinary performance. Using modern digital processing and professional amplification is simply the 21st-century way to achieve those same original goals.”

If you’re on the corner of Golborne and Portobello Road at Notting Hill, then you will likely hear Gladdy Wax’s selections. He’s a stalwart of the event, having been located in the same spot for 37 years. Gladdy’s commitment has seen him receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the London Notting Hill Carnival Enterprises Trust in recognition of his decades of service.

“I’ve always been well received at Notting Hill, the only thing that’s tough is when it’s time to dismantle the equipment and you have to take the system home despite being totally exhausted,” he explains. “But apart from that, I love everything about it.”

There have been many favourite moments over the years for Gladdy including the year he played a Michael Jackson tribute. The star passed away in June 2009 and Gladdy responded by playing a mix of soul music instead of his usual classic reggae or ska.

“I’d never seen so much excitement”, he says. “But he was too important not to pay tribute to, and it was so exciting. I was a little scared at how crazy it was but we rocked the place and it was hard to stop the music.”

Gladdy has also represented the sound system community at an event with King Charles and Camilla at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill. The meeting took place in 2022 to welcome carnival back after a forced hiatus due to the pandemic.

“I usually wear white gloves to play my records so I took them off to shake Charles’ hand,” says Gladdy. “I thought it would be a matter of just saying hello but he wanted to know more about the music. I was playing The Skatalites’ reggae cover of The Beatles' song This Boy [aka 'Ringo's Theme'] and King Charles was really interested in finding out more about it, I had to relax and answer his questions.”

As the carnival has expanded, there have been different challenges to navigate. For Gladdy, it is adhering to the rigorous health and safety rules that have come into place alongside lugging his speakers to the event itself. Linett cites both physical and environmental challenges too including crowd management and the vibrations that can cause stacks to become unstable.

“You always need to ensure a consistent and reliable power supply source to drive the sound system, particularly if you are outdoors,” she says. “There’s also the ongoing concern of avoiding blowing your drivers during the event, not only does this compromise the sound quality but they can potentially damage the entire system too.

Still, no matter what the obstacles might be in making the event happen, the love for music is what keeps it moving forward. Much like Notting Hill Carnival’s parade, people and dancing, nothing stays still - there’s a process of constant ongoing evolution around it. At Killerwatt, the team are interested in exploring how they can retain the original spirit and energy but with the more modern equipment.

“We believe that authentic heritage lives in the knowledge, intention, and identity of the operators and the physical equipment is merely the medium for that knowledge,” she states. “By codifying these principles, we ensure the sound's survival and its authentic core persists - but now it has a rigorous professional approach so it can navigate the modern regulatory environment.”

This focus on the new generation is also a preoccupation for Linett who worked closely with young people on the LIN KAM ART Sound System Futures programmes back in 2024.

“It was one of my favourite years when I first brought out my beautiful custom hand built LIN KAM ART Sound System to the street in Notting Hill Carnival and we invited Deep Medi Musik to do a five hour takeover,” she says.

“We had Mala, Von D, Silkie, Commado, Shafique Rider and Sciara - the energy was incredible, and it was magic watching the reactions to those who couldn’t believe their eyes that that DJs who created some of their favourite dubstep tunes were there in person on the decks.”

London’s Notting Hill Carnival runs this weekend on the 30th and 31st August.

We’ve no shame in admitting we’re all mega Kraftwerk-nerds here at MusicRadar (would you have suspected anything less?) and yet, as Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware speculated in an interview with us back in 2020, just how many other potential creative geniuses could have achieved similar heights to Düsseldorf's finest - but were unable to realise their potential due to a lack of funds?

“Everybody goes on about how brilliant Kraftwerk were. Yes, but they were only brilliant because they were rich!” Said Ware back in our interview.

Martyn (a Kraftwerk fan, we might add) then went on to clarify his point; “If you’ve got a studio that’s wall-to-wall synths and Bob Moog is custom-building stuff for you… yes, you still need a good idea, but the chances of you turning that idea into a great album have been greatly increased.”

One of the founder members of the original Human League line-up alongside Ian Craig Marsh and vocalist Philip Oakey, Ware’s pioneering synth-work on the 1978 single Being Boiled and LPs Reproduction and Travelogue influenced a generation of budding synth-poppers. A short-while later, Ware had quit the League alongside Ian, setting to work with vocalist Glenn Gregory to create a new vehicle; Heaven 17. The rest is history…

But years before that, and though the allure of the synth on young Martyn was strong, getting his hands on this exciting new music tech was incredibly difficult…

“When I was a teenager, living in a two-up-two-down in Sheffield, with an outside toilet, my chances of owning a Moog [the cost of the original Moog Modular system ran into tens of thousands of dollars] were zero. Less than zero. Wasn’t going to happen.”

A fascination with prog, and with Bowie, Roxy Music and the new (well-funded) electronic sounds coming from Germany kept him determined to get his hands on a synth of his own.

“There was one other important stage in the development of the band: an interview Brian Eno did with the NME,” Martyn recalled. “The basic thrust of his argument was that rock ’n’ roll was dead, and all you needed to make music was a synth, a mic and a tape machine. Me, Ian and [Human League vocalist] Phil [Oakey] all read that interview, and we all believed him.”

Eventually acquiring some half-decent (for the time) tech, Martyn, Ian and Phil created that first single in their humble studio…

“[We had] my Korg-700, Ian’s [Roland] System 100, a [Shure] SM58 mic and a Sony two-track tape machine that, luckily, had bounce facility. No computer, no MIDI, no sync of any kind. The only sequencing we had was the System 100, so all the basic rhythms came from that, and everything else worked around it. Everything was played live and bounced down to make room for the next bit of music,” Martyn told us.

“We had a lot of grand ideas for that song, but we soon realised that there were built-in limitations because you could only bounce-down four or five times before you began to lose quality. People always talk about the ‘wonderful minimalism’ of Being Boiled, but that wasn’t anything that came from us. It was simply because the equipment didn’t allow us to add anything else.”

Read our full 2020 interview with Martyn Ware here.

The world of music never stands still and keeping up with the pace can prove quite the burden…

But don't crack up… Bend your brain… See both sides… And throw off your mental chaaaains by taking on our top 10 test below.

We've got all the facts and fun jammed into one place, all culled from the pages of MusicRadar this week.

Let's see who's been rocking what, where, and why. Hit it!

On 5 October 1992, a decade after unveiling their beguiling EP Chronic Town, REM released their eighth studio album, Automatic For The People. It was a game-changer release.

With its themes of mortality, loneliness, grief and disillusionment, Automatic For The People demonstrated that a band could make a darker, slower and more introspective album that was still a massive commercial success.

Automatic For The People spawned one of REM’s most moving and enduring songs, Everybody Hurts, a graceful, majestic and achingly moving song which lies at the emotional core of the album. It is a composition widely regarded as one of the finest and most emotive songs that REM ever recorded.

It was mid-January 1991 when three members of REM – guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry – gathered at their West Clayton Street rehearsal room in Athens, Georgia to start working on ideas. They wrote without drums, often swapping instruments, with Berry on bass, Mills on organ or piano and Buck on mandolin.

One morning, Berry brought a new song into the session. He had been inspired to write it following a widely-reported rise in adolescent suicide in the US, which had become a major public-health concern by the late ’80s and early ’90s.

“Bill brought it in and it was a one-minute-long country and western song,” Peter Buck commented on the band's official site remhq.com. “It took us forever to figure out the arrangement and who was going to play what.

“It didn’t have a chorus or a bridge. It had the verse. It kind of went around and around, and he was strumming it. We went through about four different ideas and how to approach it and eventually came to that Stax, Otis Redding Pain In My Heart kind of vibe.”

In an interview for the Broken Record podcast with producer Rick Rubin in 2022, Michael Stipe said that Everybody Hurts was also influenced by Nazareth's rock cover of the classic ballad Love Hurts.

In June 1991, REM booked into John Keane’s studio in Athens to demo songs for the album. Everybody Hurts was one of 30 tracks that Buck, Mills and Berry delivered to Michael Stipe.

The plan for Automatic For The People had been to create something that was far more guitar-driven, rockier and upbeat than previous REM albums. But that wasn’t how it turned out.

“Very mid-tempo” and “pretty fucking weird” is how Stipe described the new material to Rolling Stone magazine, elaborating: “More acoustic, more organ based, less drums”.

In February 1992, the group recorded another set of demos at Daniel Lanois’ Kingsway Studio in New Orleans before relocating one month later to Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, New York, with co-producer Scott Litt.

The remoteness of Bearsville meant limited distractions and over the next 18 days, REM laid down 26 tracks, one of which was the stirring and emotive Everybody Hurts.

Bearsville Studios was where the bulk of Everybody Hurts was recorded and they reportedly worked on the song on 4, 14, 15, 18, 20 and 22 April 1992.

For the bulk of Everybody Hurts, a Univox drum machine was used, which was bought by Mike Mills for $20. The drum machine was perfect for the song’s “metronome-ish feel”, Mills told Pulse magazine in 1992.

“Mike (Stipe) and I cut it live with this dumb drum machine, which is just as wooden as you can get,” he reportedly said. “We wanted to get this flow around that: human and non-human at the same time.”

Dropping the needle on Everybody Hurts over 30 years since its release, it is striking how emotionally pure and timeless the song still sounds.

From the very first bars of the D-G chord progression, REM’s treatment of Bill Berry’s heartfelt composition is a masterclass in restraint. The lo-fi metronomic minimalism of the drum machine only amplifies the song’s powerful emotional message.

Peter Buck’s stark, arpeggio guitar propels the track along, cushioned by warm keyboards from Mike Mills. Opinions vary wildly about what keyboards Mills used but it seems likely it was either a Wurlitzer electric piano or a Fender Rhodes.

Everybody Hurts is in 6/8 time, with a tempo of around 94 bpm, which gives the song a slow, rolling hypnotic groove. It’s almost lullaby-like, with a comforting and deeply melancholic feel that really draws the listener in.

Much of the appeal of REM in their early days was Michael Stipe’s semi-discernible lyrics – blurred consonants that enticed the listener in and conjured up mysterious and enigmatic imagery. But on Everybody Hurts, the approach was far more straightforward.

Bill Berry conceived Everybody Hurts as a very direct message – to tell young people who felt overwhelmed and hopeless to have hope and to not give up.

Consequently, Stipe’s vocal when it enters is uncharacteristically clear and direct, because he didn't want the song’s core message to get lost.

“When your day is long,” begins Stipe, “And the night, the night is yours alone/When you're sure you’ve had enough/Of this life, well hang on.”

In the liner notes for the band’s 2011 greatest hits album Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011, Stipe noted that he didn’t remember recording his vocal on the song.

“I still kind of can’t believe my voice is on this recording. It's very pure. This song instantly belonged to everyone except us, and that honestly means the world to me.”

It’s a beautiful vocal performance, warm, unaffected and veering seamlessly into falsetto at times. Stipe’s tone is almost conversational at first, opening up as he ascends the scale on the chorus. “Don’t let yourself go/’Cause everybody cries/Everybody hurts sometimes.”

There are some beautifully sweet vocal cadences on lines such as “When your day is night alone (hold on, hold on).”

On the first line of the second chorus, at 1:55, strings enter the mix, with a beautiful cyclical motif. REM had dabbled with strings on their 1991 album Out Of Time, with mixed results. But when Scott Litt happened to meet ex-Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, he seized on the opportunity to ask if Jones would be interested in contributing string parts for Automatic For The People.

Jones accepted and the band sent him four tracks, one of which was Everybody Hurts. By the time Jones’s plane touched down in Atlanta in June 1992, for sessions at Bobby Brown’s Bosstown studio, the former Zep bassist was armed and ready with charts for the musicians.

Over 12 hours of sessions, spread over four days, Jones led 13 members of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra through his arrangements. By the time they had finished, they had laid down string parts on four tracks: Drive, Everybody Hurts, The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight and Nightswimming.

Jones’ arrangements are inspired, enhancing the grandeur and emotion to the songs.

By the second half of Everybody Hurts, the band are building in intensity and the tone shifts from despair to resilience. The turning point comes at 2:18, as the strings ascend and Bill Berry’s live drums and Buck’s overdriven guitar chords kick in. It’s a strident, uplifting section, concluding with Stipe singing “No, no, no, you’re not alone.”

At 2:54 there’s a stop and the whole thing builds again, with the introduction of organ played by Mills – probably a Hammond through a Leslie speaker – introducing a religious tone.

At 4:07 Berry’s juddering drums herald the start of the outro, as Stipe sings “Hold on” over and over. The band really ramps it up, the strings ascend majestically and the whole glorious composition begins its slow, majestic fade.

Everybody Hurts was released on 5 April, 1993 as the second single from Automatic For The People. The song reached No 3 in France, No 4 in the Netherlands and Iceland, No 6 in Australia and Ireland, No 7 in the UK and No 8 in Canada. It performed less well in the US, reaching No 29.

Critics adored it. Chris Roberts from Melody Maker named it ‘Single of the Week’, stating: “This is clearly a Let It Be/Candle In The Wind of its (white rock) generation, [and] it avoids being fatally overblown by virtue of Stipe’s meticulously understated vocal.”

David Cavanagh in Select magazine was equally effusive, noting that the song is “virtually beyond words. It will have non-REM maniacs in hysterics with its delicate Spector structure and childlike message. It will make everyone else cry. It really is that straightforward.”

Over the years, the song would become a global anthem of comfort and hope for people in despair and distress.

In 2010, UK prime minister Gordon Brown asked music industry mogul Simon Cowell to arrange a charity single to help the victims of the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010. Cowell chose Everybody Hurts and assembled a massive array of A-list artists such as Robbie Williams, Mariah Carey, Kylie Minogue and Miley Cyrus to sing on it.

Brown waived the VAT (value added tax), REM waived their royalties and it became the fastest-selling charity record of the 21st century in the UK.

When REM were preparing to record the song, Michael Stipe reportedly intended for Patti Smith to be a second vocalist, but this plan came to nothing. Smith later included her own cover of the song as a bonus track on the 2007 album Twelve.

Many other artists have covered Everybody Hurts, including Joe Cocker on his album Heart & Soul in 2004 and Bonnie Tyler on her 2003 album Heart Strings. Paul Anka reimagined the song in a jazz-swing style in 2005, while soul icon Al Green released a powerful, slowed-down version in 2024.

For REM, the most fulfilling impact of the song was the significant impact it reportedly had on the prevention of suicide among teenagers.

In 2001, the Nevada Assembly passed a formal resolution officially commending the band for “encouraging the prevention of teen suicides”. Nevada had historically suffered from some of the highest youth suicide rates in the United States.

In 1995, British charity The Samaritans launched a major UK press advertising campaign aimed at young men, that consisted solely of the lyrics to Everybody Hurts, alongside the charity's crisis hotline number.

Everybody Hurts has also reportedly been cited as an example of the Papageno effect, a phenomenon where media messages of hope, healing and coping with a mental health crisis help to prevent suicide.

In a number of press interviews, Michael Stipe said that the most rewarding part of creating the song had been hearing how it had helped save lives and helped young people to pull through their darkest moments.

“It saved a few,” he told MOJO magazine. “People have told me. And I love hearing that. That’s my Oscar, that’s my gold on a shelf right there – that something we did impacted someone's life in such a profound way. That’s a beautiful thing.”

Growing up in Northeast Philadelphia, by the age of sixteen Will Yip was charging eight dollars an hour to record bands out of his mother's basement. It's that sort of persistence that has defined his career, talking his way into an internship at Studio 4 in Conshohocken, which he eventually went on to co-own alongside the production duo known as the Butcher Brothers.

Within a few years, he was engineering for Lauryn Hill and touring as her drummer before returning full-time to work with punk and hardcore bands that would define his reputation. These included Title Fight, Turnover, Circa Survive and Turnstile, who Yip helped earn a Grammy this year as an additional producer/recording engineer for the rock album, Never Enough.

Having spent nearly two decades building a reputation as one of rock and hardcore's most trusted producers, this year Yip opened Memory Music Studios, a four-room, ground-up facility in South Philadelphia. We talked to him about why he left Studio 4 after eighteen years, how a mansion session with Rick Rubin shaped his design instincts, and the gear he considers non-negotiable…

MusicRadar: How did booking studio time at the age of 12 give you a taste for engineering?

Will Yip: “Even at 10, I was an ambitious kid. I thought I was going to be a professional drummer and my parents were like, ‘Sure you are’, but I was a fan of Nirvana and fell in love with music when I bought a pair of drumsticks and a practice pad. My best friend played bass, guitar and sang, so we wrote a couple of hip-hop/pop songs and found a studio in Northeast Philadelphia called Ground Control.

“We saved up all of our allowances and lunch money, got our parents to drop us off outside and walked right into this basement studio. I’ll never forget what that felt like. I could smell the gear, the tubes - even the aged carpet. The second I stepped foot inside I said, ‘I'm going to spend the rest of my life in studios.’

“I'm a true studio rat who was there when no one cared for me to be there, absorbing everything, but I've loved every second of it.”

MR: By the age of 16, you were charging bands $8 an hour to record in your mother's basement. Was that instinct to compete on price, or did it just feel obvious?

WY: “I got help to build a small 12 x 14 studio in my mom's house because I wanted to start getting work. 20 bucks an hour was the golden rate, but I thought I'd charge half that because I was half as good as every other engineer. It was never about undercutting; I just didn’t want to take advantage of people – especially kids because I knew that this was all the money they had.”

MR: Your first solo production role was Title Fight’s Floral Green album. How did that change your life?

WY: “I’d produced smaller stuff for local bands, but Floral Green was the first record where I was officially credited as a producer for a big release. That changed everything - not just because it was successful, but because every producer in the rock, pop, punk and hardcore space wanted to work with Title Fight.

“I’d engineered and assisted on their previous record with legendary producer Walter Schreifels, so I expected them to go with someone like him, but they gave me a call on their way back from Japan and said ‘We think you should produce the next record because we love and trust you’.

“I was shook up - and still am thinking about it now. I took the challenge because I knew that even if my skills weren't comparable to the veterans, I would outwork every one of them because I loved the band and their music.”

MR: Did that experience shape the way you’ve approached everything since?

WY: “A piece of advice that I give to engineers and producers is don't take records for granted. These days, a band is lucky to make five or six records and they have to play those songs for the rest of their lives. That's how I looked at every record.

“The downfall for a lot of our industry is that we're always chasing the next cheque, which is important because everyone has to keep their studios alive, but if you take care of the art, the rest will follow.”

MR: You’ve worked with Turnstile from their Move Thru Me EP right up to last year’s Grammy-winning LP, Never Enough. How has that collaboration evolved over time?

WY: “The second I saw Turnstile live and met them for the first time I just knew I wanted to be around them. I don't go into a job saying ‘This is my role!’ I go in saying ‘What do you guys need?’ Their songs already rocked; I just needed to capture them correctly. Then our relationship grew until they wanted me to produce the next record.

“But what is a producer these days? Everyone’s role is a little different, so I prefer to call myself a collaborator. Whatever your record needs, I'm there, whether that’s writing with you from zero to capturing stuff at the very end.

“To me, Never Enough is the best Turnstile record, and while we were making it I felt in my heart that we were making something special.”

MR: After spending 18 years at Studio 4, why did you decide to open your own Memory Music Studios?

WY: “I’m forever grateful for Studio 4 and some of my assistants still work there, but I felt like I’d outgrown it and needed more space and differently sized rooms. I want Memory Music Studios to be a one-stop shop. It’s not that I'm competitive, but I want to give artists everything they could possibly want.

“Whether you want a small room for tighter drum tones, 150 different cymbals or all the gear in the world, I got you. I've been making rock records for the last 20 years every day for 14 hours a day, and through that time I've collected my own data on what helps a rock band make a record, from the space and the gear to the ergonomics, lighting, and even the HVAC.

“We tried to check off every single box and built four studios and two huge lounges because the second you put five dudes in there with pedal boards and guitars it gets filled up, and I never want people to feel like they're on top of each other.”

MR: We read that Rick Rubin was somewhat influential to the design?

WY: “After working at Rick's mansion I noticed that it wasn't a studio, it was a house that got wired up and they put up panels and moving blankets and it sounded incredible. Obviously, I wanted mine to be more like a ‘proper’ studio, but I also wanted the vibe to be comfortable and I think people tend to overlook that. I don't know why, but in the ’80s and ’90s dark studios became a thing, but it’s such a bad working environment.”

MR: What was the hardest design decision you had to make? And once you’d completed the studio, what was the biggest step up level-wise?

WY: “Everything was a challenge, but it was worth it because I wanted to make the control room of my dreams and for it to be accurate. Not that the other rooms I worked in weren't accurate, but there were issues so we worked on diffuser and absorption sizes until we got what I thought felt good.

“I did the first test mix for Tigers Jaw in 45 minutes, which felt too easy, but I sent it to my assistant engineer and some other people, and they're like, ‘Bro, this is the best mix you've ever done’.

“Maybe it was a fluke, but the low end sounded consistent across the entire room and everything sounded the same on headphones and in my car. I was like, ‘Oh man, this room is accurate.’ So yeah, it's definitely helped my work and there's a lot less second guessing now.”

MR: Your outboard rack is insane, but are there any situations where you would gravitate to using software for processing?

WY: “I have a lot of hardware, but I’m not a collector per se. I just want to accommodate all artists, so if we do need something I got it. I have 225 guitars – and they’ll get used at some point, but for most of the stuff I do I’ll use the same three.

“It’s the same with Omnisphere. I want to create rock records the way I make hip-hop tracks, so if I want a different sound for the verse I’ll use the soft synths. I'm a hybrid guy, but I don't think I can really track without my Neve 1081s because I love them so much.”

MR: What other gear is vital to your recording chain?

WY: “I always say this, but Universal Audio is like my Nike. UA changed my life because they represent exactly what I just said - a hybrid engineering style. They understand the soul of analogue, but they're also a forward-thinking company that has grown with time.

“Everyone reveres them as a game-changing plugin company - and there are more of those than ever right now, but they were the godfathers making quality plugins that sounded like the hardware versions when we all chased hardware and couldn't afford it.”

MR: Do you feel the same about UA's hardware units?

WY: “I’m all-in on the Apollo. I know a lot of people use them for extra DSP plugin power or monitor control, but for me it's the main I/O and it’s in every single studio. If Billie Eilish can use an Apollo on the road and track Grammy-winning records, it’s certainly good enough for me. We actually shot it out against a million different converters; not only did it hold up, but it outperformed interfaces that cost five times as much.

“The UA Console software is also a daily part of my workflow for low-latency monitoring, so Universal Audio is truly the heart of my rig. My Apollos, the plugins, my Neve 1081s, and a few key microphones are how I make records. Along with my monitors, those are the staples that never leave. Everything else can change around them.”

MR: Do you have a bucket-list artist you haven’t got round to engineering or producing yet?

WY: “Honestly, there isn't one. I've done records and sessions with some of my childhood heroes and that was great, but I've had the most fun doing records with Title Fight and Turnstile. I'm grateful for any work I can get, but I want a band that wants to be there with me.

“I know it sounds like a cool guy punk answer, but ask my wife, that's all I give a s**t about [laughs].”

Will has just spoken to Universal Audio and made a new Apollo Creators video with the company, talking more about his reliance on its tech. You can watch it below

When Yes first exploded into the public consciousness back in the early 1970s, the monicker of ‘prog rock’ seemed to spawn almost entirely around their conceptually dense, instrumental-heavy arrangements.

The band's keyboard wizard, Rick Wakeman became one of the most well-known demonstrators of the abilities of the synthesizer - proving its worth as a viable rock instrument, years before Kraftwerk and their ilk reframed electronic music as the icy harbinger of a mechanised future.

For Wakeman, the synth was tantamount to a portal to myriad other dimensions, a multihued expressive tool that could bring even the group's most eccentric ideas to life.

“When you’re making music, you are automatically limited by what you’re able to create,” Rick told us in an interview we conducted with the great prog overlord in 2020, “But [you’re] also limited by what your imagination can conjure up. Does that make sense? It’s a bit like an artist saying, ‘I’m going to paint a picture with a colour blue that hasn’t been invented yet’. If you don’t know what that blue is and there’s no way of getting hold of it, you can’t really paint with it. Getting hold of the Minimoog in 1971 was like finding that colour blue. As well as reds, purples and millions of other colours you’d never thought possible.”

After years as a seasoned session keys-man, Wakeman reflected back on when he finally got his hands on that first synth, and shared how it unlocked new avenues of sonic exploration.

But using - and even getting hold of - a Moog synth was in no way a straightforward affair…

“Up until the late-’60s, I’d been making music on a piano, a Hammond and a couple of electric pianos,” explained Wakeman. “If I needed a weird noise, I’d stick the Hammond through a guitar pedal. Bob Moog had already started making synths, but the first time I really took notice was when Wendy Carlos released the Switched-On Bach album in 1968. Classical music played on a Moog Modular. Mind-blowing!

“But the Moog wasn’t cheap, with systems costing anything up to 4,000 quid,” remembered Rick. “Even when Moog released the Minimoog in 1970 - generally recognised as the first ‘affordable’ musician’s synth - it was way beyond the reach of ordinary folk. At £1,000, it would set you back more than a brand-new Ford Cortina.

“I eventually managed to get my hands on a Minimoog, and it was a complete game-changer,” said Wakeman. “As musicians, we were desperate for new sounds… new ways to experiment. This was our time!”

The Minimoog was a solid starting point and Wakeman’s further synth-buying exploits lead to him procuring an incalculable number of additional machines…

“God knows how many I’ve owned over the years. I don’t think I could even hazard a guess. It’d be well into the hundreds. The current collection has been trimmed down a bit. Including all the ones in storage, I reckon it’s about 50 or 60. Maybe more. But who’s counting? They’ve all put a smile on my face.”

As well as sharing his top five synths of all time in our interview, Rick also pondered whether the genre of prog itself would even have evolved if the synth hadn’t been on-hand to suggest new possibilities…

“Would prog music have happened without the synth? I’m not sure it would. But it wasn’t just prog that was affected. Pop, jazz, punk and new romantic. Electronic music, of course. Even classical… eventually. The effects were felt everywhere.”

Read our full 2020 interview with Rick Wakeman here.

One of Britain’s most fascinating bands, Supertramp garnered enormous global acclaim while also contending with their fair share of inner turmoil and personnel changes.

Despite their difficulties, Supertramp managed to nurture a unique sound during a golden era when complex songwriting and fastidious recording was the norm.

Formed in London back in 1969, Supertramp’s first two albums didn't manage to gain much traction, with commercial clout finally being attained with the release of their third album, Crime of the Century.

This album included the radio-friendly track Dreamer, while also introducing the world to their distinctive sound, which made extensive use of the Wurlitzer electric piano (more often described as a Wurly) played by lead vocalist Roger Hodgson.

The Wurly, along with other notable keyboards such as the Rhodes electric piano, went on to form a central role on their 1979 fourth album, Breakfast in America. The Supertramp entourage (of about 30 people) had moved to LA for a couple of years prior to recording the album. They also travelled with their own engineer, Peter Henderson, who had worked with them previously on Crime of the Century.

By their own admission, they lived in a bit of an English bubble during their time in LA, choosing The Village Recorder studio (a converted masonic lodge) as the venue for the recording of the album - citing its ‘homely vibe’. These sessions would result in the band's most successful single, The Logical Song.

One of the iconic elements behind the Supertramp sound is the use of relatively conventional triadic chord shapes, played repetitively as 8th notes (quavers), with notable accents. One reason for this musical choice is to occupy the void supplied by a lack of (regular) guitar in the band. The beautiful pounding rhythms, mostly supplied by Hodgson, act as a driving element, much like a rhythm guitar.

The Logical Song was recorded by the band formation that has become known as their classic lineup. Rick Davies supplied keyboard parts, embellishing Hodgson’s playing with similar instrumentation, such as Rhodes electric piano and Hammond organ. The song features John Helliwell on alto sax, in a highly virtuosic and solo capacity, with drums supplied by Bob Siebenberg and bass by Dougie Thomson.

The song’s lyric was inspired by Hodgson’s time at school, specifically his emergence from an English boarding school. Roger questions a system geared toward eliminating the quizzical and wondrous nature of childhood, in favour of expectations and results.

“Logical Song is very autobiographical,” Hodgson told Acoustic Storm. “I mean, you know, when I was young, life was very magical. I have old 8mm movies of me as a little child and I was just a joy bubble and most children are at that age and, you know, then they sent me away. Well, I was sent to boarding school. ‘They sent me away to teach me how to be sensible,’ and that was where confusion set in, really. I was taught all these ways to be and behave and it was not all bad but it definitely set in a level of confusion to what I felt when I was much younger. So when I left school, the burning question that came down to its rawest place was ‘please tell me who I am,’ and that’s basically what the song is about.”

Roger elaborated further in an interview with Songfacts; “I think it was very relevant when I wrote it, and actually I think it's even more relevant today. It's very basically saying that what they teach us in schools is all very fine, but what about what they don't teach us in schools that creates so much confusion in our being.”

Back to the arrangement and, in line with many other Supertramp songs, the Wurly plays a central role here, although the distinct sections are open to a degree of debate regarding which element is a verse or a chorus. In typical Supertramp style, the song is fairly unconventional in this regard.

We open with the classic sound of punctuating Wurly triads, based around a triad of C minor - it’s a natural keyboard key. Once the vocal enters, we hear a shift from Cm down to Ab major7, before landing on G minor7. We then shift up to Bb, followed by Ab and finally F7/A.

This is a fairly simplistic progression, but one that is complicated further by the use of alternating time signatures.

The occasional bar of 2/4 provides an unsettled feeling, as the harmony shifts and contorts. However, many of the chords are heavily associated, either by their relative major/minor standing, or their association by note inclusion, such as the shift from Cm to Ab major7.

A triad of C minor becomes the chord of Ab major7 when you play A flat in the bass. These harmonic choices speak to the pianistic nature the band, and how they went about their songwriting and composition.

The initial sequence repeats four times, to form what could be regarded as a verse. The next section, which adopts chorus sensibilities, shifts up to the relative major of C minor, Eb major.

Having settled on Eb for 2 bars, the bass remains static on the note Eb, while the upper chord shifts to A half-diminished, also be described as Am7 b5. After two bars, this resolves to Ab major 7 for two bars, before shifting to Db, which is accompanied by a bass line which descends in steps, down to Ab, before returning to the verse structure.

The first of two alto saxophone solos are played at the end of the second verse. The harmony itself remains the same, although the arrangement in the keyboard alters slightly, with higher voicings to illicit a sense of build.

John Helliwell’s exceptionally stylised saxophone playing relies upon several soloistic traits, drawn from jazz traditions. Various swoops and scoops lead up to notes while accents maintain interest throughout.

According to Helliwell, during the initial recording phase, he was forced to record in the studio’s toilet. Apparently, his sax was spilling onto the overhead drum mics, and so extreme measures had to be taken to ensure spill isolation…

“When we were recording the backing tracks, we didn’t want the sound of the sax to spill onto the drum mics, in case the sax wasn’t good and the drum was good and we wanted to keep it or whatever,” Helliwell told Connecticut’s 102.9 The Whale radio station.

“So the nearest place was the bathroom. So I sat on the toilet there, with a copy of Playboy in my left hand and my sax in my right hand and we did the takes there. In fact, the take that turned out to be the real good backing track was the one with the sax solo you hear on it. So I must’ve got the inspiration even through the walls, even sitting on the toilet.”

The microphone used for this alto solo was a Coles 4038 - a classic ribbon microphone, which is regarded as a classic for recording horns, and still in production today.

The thunderous outro for the song features more Wurly-based triads, but now with the superb use of a bass line to create tension. This section makes extended use of the dominant chord of G7, before resolving back to Cm, but the second time we hear it, the resolution adds a further element, with a shift to Bb and Eb - all associated chords, much like the rest of the song.

There was a feeling, particularly from Roger Hodgson, that The Logical Song had the potential to be something quite special. The band therefore took their time, not only throughout the recording process, but also during the mixing phase. According to a few sources, the track took two weeks to mix, with Hodgson even taking up residence in a camper van outside the studio, allowing him continual access, presumably to listen with fresh ears.

The results speak for themselves; The Logical Song is one of the classic tracks from the late 70s, and one of the go-to examples of Supertramp’s boundless musical creativity and gifted musicianship - whether tracking in a studio or on the can!

Since his 1996 debut, Endtroducing revolutionised - and legitimised - the notion of sample-based instrumental hip-hop production, DJ Shadow has been one of the world’s most celebrated crate-digging creatives. A singular talent, DJ Shadow's work proved that those dusty old records buried at the back of the record store shelf, or in your dad’s tatty old box, could just contain the raw materials of something new, and perhaps something extraordinary.

Sampling has, of course, moved on quite a bit since those foundational, vinyl-oriented days, but while there’s a wealth of cloud-synchronised platforms now offering you ready-to-go samples, for the purists it’s the artistry of corralling what you’d extracted with a classic Akai MPC that they still regard as ‘proper’ sampling.

Here at MusicRadar, we’ve maintained a good relationship with DJ Shadow, real name Josh Davis, across the years, speaking to him at various points across the last decade. Most recently we caught up with Josh in 2023 when he was creating his seventh LP, Action Adventure. In the conversation with Matt Mullen, he shared why - for him at least - that purist, MPC-oriented mindset had been consigned to history…

“It’s not so much about what you're using or where you're taking it from, but more the ideas that you're adding on to it,” DJ Shadow told us. “It’s about the way it's being used and the way it's being manipulated. The ideas, more than ever, are what drives interesting music for me.”

His rejection of the MPC was part due to the fact that Josh had long-since exhausted the abilities of the Akai workhorse;

“The last project I did that was very MPC-intensive was my second album, The Private Press,” Josh told us. “I had two or three MIDI’d together, and it was very much like, ‘on this record, I'm going to do everything that can possibly be done on the MPC’. After that project, I was really keen to make music in other ways, but it really did take some time.

Josh continued; “Think back twenty years, and even fifteen years, if you updated your computer, you had to go back and update every third-party plugin, every little piece of outboard gear that was USB-powered, nothing ever spoke to each other correctly. It was really a nightmare. That's what I hate about gear, at a certain point, is when it gets in the way of the creative flow. It seemed like every time I sat down to make music, some plugin was out of date. It was this constant process of chasing your tail.

“So I think around 2008, I said alright, I've had it, I'm gonna go and get the newest MPC and go back to doing it that way. I lasted about a day and a half. When you know what the possibilities are, and then you try to go back in time to something that's constrictive, it just doesn't work. Ever since that experiment about fifteen years ago, I just said nope, I'm gonna stick with it. Around 2012 was when I finally decided, okay, I've heard about this Ableton [Live], I'm gonna sit down and read the manual front-to-back. Everybody's mind works differently, but to me Ableton solved so many issues about my workflow and the way I think about music.”

While Davis now lets the ideas drive the process, and uses Ableton Live, and other more modern tech, to realise it, he did share that back in the early days, the quest to prove that sampling was an art form was a genuine motivator;

“I didn't want to limit myself to only samples anymore. At the time when I was starting out in the ‘90s, I was eager to demonstrate that samples were a legitimate form of making music. I wanted to articulate that in as many ways as I could. But I also knew that at some point I wanted to get into recording live instruments.”

You can read our full 2023 interview with DJ Shadow here, and an older interview we conducted with him from 2016 here.

Over a career lasting more than 40 years, Glasgow’s Primal Scream have always been masters of reinventing themselves. Their first album, 1987’s Sonic Flower Groove, was ‘60s-influenced, jangly indie-pop, but, two years later their self-titled follow-up, released on Alan McGee’s Creation Records label, showcased a harder, raw garage-rock sound.

Their third album, 1991’s groundbreaking Screamadelica, which was partly produced by maverick DJ, Andrew Weatherall, changed everything. This genre-blurring record won the inaugural Mercury Music Prize for its mix of rock, dub, acid house, rave culture and gospel.

Their next album, 1994’s Give Out but Don’t Give Up, saw the band get down and dirty with greasy and bluesy Stones-like rock ‘n’ roll, as well as soak up Memphis soul, funk and country influences.

Three years later, Primal Scream took another left turn with 1997’s Vanishing Point - co-produced by the band and Brendan Lynch, it was inspired by the cult 1971 action-thriller film of the same name, and was dark, trippy, cinematic, and often claustrophobic and paranoid, with ominous, bass-heavy grooves, krautrock, dub, psych, spacey sound effects and weird tape delays creating an unsettling atmosphere.

Primal Scream’s next album, 2000’s XTRMNTR, was even more extreme - a political and confrontational set of songs that attacked corporate greed, state corruption and authoritarian governments, and embraced punk, industrial noise, free jazz, hip-hop, techno, dark disco and motorik rhythms.

Its successor, Evil Heat, from 2002, felt like a natural progression and was heavily electronic, owing a debt to the incendiary sounds of the Prodigy, as well as early innovators like Kraftwerk and Throbbing Gristle.

The album featured a Gillespie and Kate Moss duet on an electro-clash overhaul of the Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood late ‘60s classic, Some Velvet Morning, but also found room for some Stooges-like rock ‘n’ roll and some howling blues harmonica by Robert Plant on The Lord Is My Shotgun.

This autumn, Vanishing Point, XTRMNTR and Evil Heat are being reissued as newly-mastered versions on 2LP, CD and digital - along with B-sides, extra tracks and rarities. This triumvirate has been dubbed the ‘Bunker Trilogy’, named for the band’s North London studio and rehearsal room, The Bunker, where they made those albums. This September, the band will embark on a UK tour playing the whole of the XTRMNTR album.

MusicRadar caught up with the group’s chief creative Bobby Gillespie and asked him to share some of his memories of working in The Bunker and the process of writing and recording Vanishing Point, XTRMNTR and Evil Heat…

MusicRadar: Let’s talk about your studio, The Bunker, which sadly no longer exists - it was converted into luxury flats a few years ago…

Bobby Gillespie: “There were two Bunkers, but they were in the same mews, behind Regent’s Park Road in Primrose Hill. Initially, we were at the very bottom of the mews, in what had been a dance studio. On one side, the walls had loads of mirrors on them, and I quite liked that because I had read that the New York Dolls had rehearsed in a room that had loads of mirrors - they used to check themselves out in them.

“So, in 1995, we were in that room, jamming - one of our crew, Murray Mitchell, had found that space, and it was meant to be a rehearsal room for us. At that point, two of us - myself and Robert Young [guitarist] - were living in Brighton. During the course of 1995, there were a few jams where we would get a bit wasted and then see if we could write any new songs, but nothing [came] - there were hours and hours of DAT tapes, but myself and Andrew Innes [guitarist] knew from the jamming that we were down a f***king dead-end street. It was very guitar-centric and bluesy, but it wasn’t what I or Andrew wanted to do musically. So, we stopped it for a while and then, in early 1996, I moved up to London and got a flat near the studio.

“During the summer of 1996, Andrew and I would go to The Bunker every day - he had found these Tascam machines; they had these little cassettes that were like a mini-VHS and were about two and a half inches wide and maybe an inch or an inch and a half deep. They were tiny and each of the machines had eight tracks, so we had bought two and had 16 tracks. Before that, he had 4-track facilities - some of the songs for our second album and some of the early Screamadelica demos were done on 4-track machines at his council flat on the Isle of Dogs.

“Andrew was au fait with recording in a basic way - he had the rudiments of recording and engineering, but he wasn’t trained. So, we got a few mics - one of them was a good vocal mic - a German Neumann - and we had some other mics for the drums and the guitar amps. Andrew and I would go into The Bunker four or five days a week, from 12 until 6, and we began making the music - the backing tracks - for what would become Vanishing Point.”

MR: So, Vanishing Point was made in that room - the first version of The Bunker - and then you moved into a larger studio nearby in 1998, where you made, or partly made, a lot of your albums after that, starting with XTRMNTR?

BG: “Yeah. Jon Moss from Culture Club had the studio at the top of the mews - we used to go out for coffee with him. He would be like, ‘How’s it going with the band?’ He was friendly and funny - he had a great sense of humour. He’d been in The Damned and we’d seen him play with them in 1977, when the Dead Boys opened for them at the Glasgow Apollo, so we were always asking him about The Damned and that tour with the Dead Boys.

“In 1998, he said: ‘Listen, lads, I think I’m going to move out of here [the studio] but come up and have a look and if you like it; I’ll put a word in for you with the landlords.’ So, we saw it and we thought that we could build a live room there, so, instead of having one big room, which we did in the original Bunker, we had two rooms, with a wall dividing them. We could rehearse in the live room during the day, without creating a noise, and we also record the guitars and drums loudly in there because we made it a dead room. So, that was the second Bunker.”

MR: Vanishing Point was the follow-up album to 1994’s Give Out but Don’t Give Up, which had been influenced by Stonesy rock ‘n’ roll, Memphis soul, country and funk. Mani joined on bass for Vanishing Point - how did that change the sound and the dynamics of the band?

BG: “Vanishing Point was mainly made without Mani - he didn’t join until late September/October 1996, when the majority of the album had been recorded - apart from Motörhead, and we didn’t have a bassline for Kowalski, so Mani put the bassline on that whilst we had started mixing the album.

“The bass player on Vanishing Point was a guy called Marco Nelson, who had played with The Young Disciples and on Weller’s Wild Wood - that mid- ‘90s Weller period. Some of the tracks [on Vanishing Point] didn’t have bass on them - they had keyboard bass. We borrowed something that was like a small version of the Fender Rhodes [a Fender Rhodes Piano Bass] - The Doors used it live, and we used it some of the tracks, like Out of the Void.

“We didn’t have a fixed lineup - the band was basically me and Andrew, and we’d bring in other people, like Martin Duffy, if we needed some keyboards. Andrew was already playing a lot of keyboards - all the synthesizer sounds were sourced or created by Andrew, and, in many cases, played by him, but sometimes we’d bring Martin in to play stuff. All the atmospheres and textures on Vanishing Point, XTRMNTR and Evil Heat were Andrew.”

MR: The Memphis Horns, who recorded for Stax, played on the Vanishing Point track Star. Did they come to The Bunker to record their parts?

BG: “Yeah. We’d worked with them in Memphis in 1993, for Give Out but Don’t Give Up, and then, in summer 1996, Creation Records, which was in Regent’s Park Road, got a phone call. They called us and said: ‘Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love [The Memphis Horns] are in town and they wanted to know if you needed them on any new Primal Scream recordings. I said, ‘Yeah, send them down’. I then looked at Andrew and said, ‘What are we going to put them on?’ So, Andrew goes, ‘Why don’t we put them on Star?’ We’d already recorded Augustus Pablo playing melodica on it, so The Memphis Horns came round and played on Star.”

MR: What did they think of The Bunker?

BG: “Well, you’ve got to understand that Stax, where they made their name, wasn’t like a normal studio - it was in an old cinema. In Stax, they just nailed the drums to the floor, because it was on a slant. The Memphis Horns had played in all sorts of studios, so they were cool. They were funky guys and we had a funky studio.

“We also had Jaki Liebezeit from Can in our studio. When he came in, I said: ‘I’m sorry about the mess,’ and he goes, ‘No, no - it’s alive! It’s lived-in - it’s good!’ He liked the fact that it wasn’t an antiseptic studio. We even had Michael Karoli [from Can] for a jam in there one night.”

MR: Didn’t Joey Ramone turn up there, too?

BG: “Yeah - Joey came in while we were mixing When the Kingdom Comes [B-side of the Accelerator single] in the second Bunker. He’d produced a record for Ronnie Spector, and they were doing a gig that night - Alan McGee sent him round as a surprise. He said to him, ‘Go and see the Scream - they’ll love it!’

“I opened the door, and there was a chap there who looked like a big body without a head, and he goes [does a Joey Ramone impression]: ‘Hey, is Bobby in?’ I looked up and it was f**king Joey! I went, ‘Oh my God - in you come’.

“Mani was there too - everyone was there that day, and they were all gobsmacked - they couldn’t believe it. Brendan Lynch and Max Hayes were doing the mix in the control room. I said, ‘Hey, guys - we’ve got a visitor’. They looked at me as if to say, ‘So what?’ and then Joey walked in and went, ‘How’s it going, guys?’ Everyone’s jaws hit the floor.

“I said, ‘Do you want to have a listen?’ He said, ‘Sure,’ so we played him where we were in the mix and when it had finished, he said: ‘It’s great to hear people still playing real rock ‘n’ roll.’ You know what? Put that on my f**king gravestone!”

MR: Paul Weller plays guitar on When the Kingdom Comes…

BG: “Yeah - he was always badgering us to play on a Scream track. So, when we did When the Kingdom Comes, we were like, ‘Right - we want you to play Rickenbacker and we want an auto-destructive solo!’ He went [he does a Paul Weller impression]: ‘F**kin’ yeah!’ He did it and he delivered. He played the way he played on the first couple of Jam albums, which is want we wanted - it was pure Pete Townshend ’65. I think Kevin Shields is on there doing some feedback as well. It’s mainly Andrew Innes - he’s playing the riff and then Weller joins in and does the solo. It’s a great track - I love it.”

MR: You mentioned Kowalski earlier, which was the first single from Vanishing Point - it came out in May 1997. It was a brave choice as a lead single, but it went into the top ten. Did you feel out of step with a lot of the other music that was coming out of the UK at that time, like Britpop?

BG: “Since we started the band, in 1984, we’ve always felt out of sorts or we’ve felt in opposition. We were born in opposition and we’ve remained in opposition - and it’s a good place to be. I think Mark E. Smith felt that about The Fall. Vanishing Point was written and recorded in the summer of 1996, and I guess ’95 to ’97 was the Britpop heyday. We toured for most of 1994, and I think it was bubbling under before then.”

MR: Britpop exploded with the Blur vs Oasis chart battle in 1995…

BG: “Yeah - we had nothing in common with bands like Blur musically, and it was also a class thing… We’re like a punk band with our attitude and stuff. I’m not going to put any other bands down - everybody does their own thing and I’m cool with that. I thought a couple of the early Blur singles in ’91 were brilliant, There’s No Other Way was fantastic. I didn’t like the Parklife stuff - it wasn’t for me; it was for younger kids, and I understood that. I was listening to experimental British music like Tricky and people like that.

“We loved Oasis and we were friends with Noel, Liam, Bonehead and the other guys in the band - we had a good relationship with them and we were label mates. We were very proud that they were on our label [Creation Records] and that they were so big and selling so many records. It was helpful because we had no constraints. We’d spent a lot of money making Give Out but Don’t Give Up, going to Memphis and LA, hiring the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section and Tom Dowd, and making expensive videos.

“Give Out but Don’t Give Up had great musicians on it and a great producer; it was a very sophisticated and polished production - the original one that Tom Dowd did before it got remixed. It got a bit grungier when George Drakoulias started doing mixes and stuff.

“With Vanishing Point, what Andrew and I wanted to do was something a bit more lo-fi. I liked American indie bands like Royal Trux and The Make-Up and I liked the fact that bands like the Palace Brothers - Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy - were recording in a lo-fi way. So, Vanishing Point was kind of influenced by that. We were trying to get away from a big studio production and big rock drum sounds and stuff. We wanted to do something a bit more intimate, lo-fi and psychedelic that was also informed by dub music, cinematic soundtracks, free jazz and krautrock.

“In the years preceding it - ’94 and ’95 - I’d been reading a lot of black revolutionary literature from the 1960s, and that sent me off on a few different tangents and made me think deeper about where we currently were in the culture of the ‘90s; what was happening in youth culture, and the mass proliferation of drugs post-acid house [and] the effects of those drugs on me and my friends. So, I began writing about that stuff and documenting it; it was like reportage. What we were doing was unique for the time - in terms of the musical palette we were using and the lyrical content of the songs. It was different from what everybody else was doing.”

MR: XTRMNTR was a more extreme record than Vanishing Point - it sounds like you’d built on the harder and darker sounds that you’d used on Vanishing Point, but then took it to another level, and added influences like techno and hip-hop…

BG: “Yeah - there was a lot. We were quite clever, and I have to credit Andrew Innes with this; he worked out how the hip-hop guys were making records. He loved the production and the arrangements, and he loved the fact that it broke down traditional rock song structures. I was feeling constrained by having to write lyrics to chordal structures that were great for high-energy rock ‘n’ roll. You had to have a verse, a pre-chorus then a bridge and a chorus… It was very structured and I was yearning for something that would free me up so I could do a long-form lyric.

“I was writing these poems, and the experiments that we began on Vanishing Point were about rhythm. The important thing was to try and create an interesting rhythm, good textures and an atmosphere, and then build on that and create a song out of it.

“A song like Kowalski was built from the bottom up - it was an atmosphere and a rhythm track that became a song, whereas Out of the Void and Burning Wheel… I think I had written the chords, the melody and the lyrics to Out of the Void when I was living in Brighton in 1995, and in 1996, me and Andrew wrote Burning Wheel, which was like a ‘60s psychedelic song. Long Life came from a jam and Stuka and Kowalski came from atmospheric drums and textures.

“The tracks were kind of like one chord, so you could do anything - you could recite words if you wanted to, and that freed me up. We didn’t record the songs with a live band like we had with Give Out but Don’t Give Up or our first two albums. We would build the tracks up and then I would put the vocal on, and somebody would come in to play bass.

“Sometimes Andrew and me would write the basslines and then we’d get Marco Nelson to play them, or Marco would write a bassline - Marco is on bass for Kill All Hippies [from XTRMNTR] because Mani tried it, but he couldn’t get the bassline for it. I think Robert Young tried it, but he couldn’t do it, and Andrew tried… We got Marco to come in and he nailed it. It was the same with the track Exterminator, the very last thing we put on was the bassline.

“We would bring musicians in, run the track and see what they played - if they played something good, we would keep it, or if not, we wouldn’t use it and we would move on to something else. We started that process with Vanishing Point and then we finessed it on XTRMNTR and Evil Heat.”

MR: Evil Heat is a really varied record - there’s krautrock, punk, psychedelia, rock ‘n’ roll and electronica, but do you think it was overshadowed by Vanishing Point and XTRMNTR?

BG: “I think Evil Heat is an extension of XTRMNTR, but there are more electronics on it - it’s a lot more electro. Some of the songs on Evil Heat should have been on XTRMNTR; for example, Deep Hit of Morning Sun was written and recorded during XTRMNTR, but I never got the vocal on it for one reason or another, we had the music. It was towards the end of mixing XTRMNTR, and I remember saying to Andrew, ‘This is some f**king track,’ and he said: ‘Why don't we leave it until the next album?’ So, that became the first song on Evil Heat.

“I wrote the lyrics for City, Detroit and Rise in 1999 or 2000 - Rise was formerly called Bomb the Pentagon and I imagined it would be like Public Enemy’s Shut ‘Em Down; I wrote it in my head to the rhythm of Shut ‘Em Down.

“I wrote Space Blues #2 in 2001, on an acoustic guitar at home, and then when we recorded it, I got Martin Duffy to sing it, and then instead of playing acoustic guitar, we did it on keyboards. It was written like a country song.

“Deep Hit of Morning Sun was written and recorded in 1999, and I had the lyrics for Skull X in the summer of 2000 because of what I was going through in my life - I was having a crazy time… I think I wrote the lyrics for The Lord Is My Shotgun in 2001.”

MR: Robert Plant plays harmonica on The Lord Is My Shotgun. How did that happen?

BG: “I think we were a song short for Evil Heat, and Andrew said to me: ‘Why don’t you do a duet with Kate Moss?’ I said, ‘I was thinking that…’ He said: 'Love Hurts?' and I said, ‘or Some Velvet Morning?’ So, we opted for Some Velvet Morning. So, when Kate came to the studio to sing it, we went to the pub afterwards and Robert Plant happened to be in there - he lived quite locally. I would see him around and chat to him - Alan McGee was friends with him - and we became quite friendly

“I'd had a couple of drinks, and I said to Robert: ‘We've got a song that’s a cross between Throbbing Gristle and Howlin’ Wolf. We'd love you to play harmonica on it - would you be up for it?’ He said, ‘Sure - when do you need it?’ I was like, ‘as soon as possible…’ He said, ‘I’m away tomorrow, but I’m back in nine or 10 days’ time…’ and he gave me the number of his manager or assistant and he said we’d sort it for when he was back. Then he said: ‘One more question - what key is the song in, because I’ll bring the correct harmonica.’ I was like, ‘I don’t f**king know!’ I asked Andrew and he was like, ‘I don’t know…’ So, I said we would find out, and we did, and when he came back, he came in and played harmonica, and it was brilliant.”

MR: In September, you’re going on a UK tour, playing the whole of the XTRMNTR album. Lyrically it’s provocative - anti-authoritarian and anti-corporate. With what’s currently happening in the US and the rise of the far right in the UK, it feels even more relevant now than it did when it came out in 2000…

BG: “I think it was - and is - a prescient album. It foretold things to come. I had suspicions. I had started to read left-wing intelligent literature, like Noam Chomsky, as well as critical theory. I was delving into more political writings, and I could start to see things more clearly than I had before - some of that panic is in the lyrics to that album. I can remember thinking that when British and American planes were leaving UK airfields and bombing Serbia, in the war in Kosovo, that it was a warm-up for something else… I thought there was more coming down the line - I didn’t know what it was, but something was going to happen.

“I’m not saying I predicted September 11, but all the stuff that was unleashed after that, like the Citizens Act [USA Patriot Act] in the US, which gave the government more powers to carry out surveillance on citizens, and just how everybody then became less critical of authority because they were scared.

“It [XTRMNTR] was an examination of power and a distrust of power and authority, and how it has to be held in check. You have to have checks and balances, which, as we can see in America, have been thrown off, and are a danger to democracy. And, as you say, the far right has grown. There was a fear of that and maybe it’s become more realised as the years go on. I was starting to be switched on and looking at things a lot more closely than I had before.”

The Bunker Trilogy by Primal Scream - Vanishing Point, XTRMNTR and Evil Heat - are released this autumn on 2LP, CD and digital. Vanishing Point is available now, with XTRMNTR to follow on September 4 and Evil Heat on October 30. A vinyl box set of all three albums is also available to preorder.

The XTRMNTR UK tour starts on September 3. For more info check out Primal Scream's official site.

“The general political malaise isn’t good for songwriting,” says cult singer and songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. “Unless the sight of Nigel Farage galvanises you into producing some demonic piece of modern protest punk.”

Six decades into his music-making journey, and despite the societal volatility, Robyn has kept his music full of uplifting power pop, surreal lyrical insights and psychedelia. As co-founder of seventies act The Soft Boys, and as Robyn Hitchcock and The Egyptians in the eighties, he’s become a prolific solo artist with his latest record, The Confuser, his 25th solo effort.

Now aged 73, the joyous collection marks a significant creative milestone and shows he’s clearly still got plenty of appetite for the songwriting craft.

“Well it’s what I do,” he smiles from his American home on his continuing creative journey. “If you carry on like I’ve done, you’re inevitably going to get to album number 25. Unless you’re someone like Kate Bush or Bryan Ferry, who thinks very hard about what they do and has the money to sit on top of projects for ages. Someone like me just churns them out.”

Robyn is as self-deprecating and as charming as his music, with our conversation sparked with off-kilter humour. When not in the studio, he’s on the road, keeping the wheels around his music spinning via the Tiny Ghost label, run by his wife and artist Emma Swift.

“I’m more blasé about my songwriting than I was,” Robyn explains of where his musical mojo is currently at. “I’ve learned over the years that songs appear to me. If a song is there, it’ll let you know and you have to receive it. It’s like getting a phone call, if you don’t pick up, it’ll go away and won’t leave a message. Some songs are like cats, they’re subtle, insidious and likely to stalk you.”

The Confuser is Robyn’s first album in four years and latest in a musical career that sprang to life during the mid seventies. His band, The Soft Boys, formed in Cambridge inspired by the songwriting of Syd Barrett and the Beatles. Their 1980 psyche classic Underwater Moonlight is now regarded as a classic of the genre.

Over 45 years later Robyn is still busier than ever, with The Confuser written and recorded in his home in Nashville, the capital of songwriting.

“Living here hasn’t influenced my songwriting but it has affected who I record with as there are so many great players in the city,” Robyn says. “There’s a huge level of empathy and professionalism among the musicians. Nashville wears a Stetson hat for publicity purposes but it’s also a very good place to make a psychedelic rock record.”

The new album bursts with many of his perennial themes - the transience of life, death and his own sense of self alongside lyrical oddness.

Recorded at various Nashville studios, The Confuser features crack accompaniment from Music City session players including guitarist Jeremy Fetzer, bassist Todd Bolden, and drummer/percussionist Eric Slick. Special guests include cherished friends Gillian Welch and Kimberley Rew, Robyn’s Soft Boys co-founder.

“On the album, I love My Dead Astronaut and Ghost in Sunlight is another I really like with Gillian Welch on harmony and Kim playing guitar and me on piano,” he says.

“Gillian came and overdubbed her voice, we spent a long time on it, it’s the most worked on song from the record. Building from the Ruins is a funky jam, I’ve not done anything like it before, I was making it up as I went along and shouting the chords out to the others. It was more experimental than most of my songs and I’m pleased with how it came out.”

Robyn’s wife Emma is a vocalist and has applied some new methods around the recording in order to get the most out of the album’s songs.

“Emma made me go back and redo some of the vocals, she’s a great singer and also quite strict and has said how my voice has been out of tune on some of my records,” he states. “In the days of Underwater Moonlight, the attitude was more important than the take. On some of my music in the eighties, my vocals were horrible but full of attitude. Us Brits are really great at it, you can see it in Liam Gallagher and Ian McCulloch. But now as a kindly old gent, I’m just trying to sing in tune. I think The Confuser features some of my best vocal performances.”

One of Robyn’s ongoing musical preoccupations surrounds human existence and the inevitability of death. It’s a theme that's only increased in prevalence as he’s grown older after being a staple concern throughout his career - My Wife and my Dead Wife, Sounds Great When You're Dead and The Face of Death are just a few songs that have the shadow of mortality hanging over them.

“The less time I have, the more active I feel and thankfully in my later years, I can still get up, tour and wave my guitar around,” he laughs. “Rock and roll is for senior citizens now. However strange one feels, you can just look at the Stones who are far older and further down the path to oblivion. Sooner or later, they, McCartney and Dylan will discontinue so spry youngsters like myself in our early seventies [can take over], there is still that canopy of boomer pioneers waiting to go over the waterfall.”

The Soft Boys formed in 1976 with one of the original concepts being that a robot would front the band, then Robyn would be the guitarist. It was a futuristic idea that never came to pass, in part due to his lack of technical know-how.

“I’m absolutely and practically inept - I did learn to change a plug once with my parents’ gramophone but I generally couldn’t put up a shelf, never mind build a robot,” he continues.

“This was 1976 and I moved to Cambridge, and was beginning to find great local musicians. I wanted to be the Robbie Robertson style Svengali figure behind the band where we’d have this handsome android fronting it. It would have fitted slightly with the science fiction concepts that were percolating, Bowie had a bit of it, but I became my own frontman.”

Underwater Moonlight turns 46 this year and is still one of the highlights in Robyn’s rich and sprawling catalogue. Its ten tracks were populated by Hitchcock's finely drawn characters and served as a blueprint for eighties college rock that dominated the next decade.

“In some ways, it’s a lifetime ago as life can sometimes be very slow, then suddenly, time is gone in a flash,” he says. “Underwater Moonlight was made in what is a vanished world of ashtrays, dial phones, turntables and cassette machines. Other things haven’t changed. It’s still Fender Telecasters and SM58 mikes, so some of the essential ingredients are the same but rock is so history driven these days.

“The great thing is how Underwater Moonlight has lasted, it vindicates me as a songwriter and The Soft Boys as a band, we did come up with something great in a low-key, low-budget way. At that point, we’d been written off by the business and it was down to Richard Bishop who formed the Armageddon label just to put our record out.”

Kimberly Rew had his own songs that he was stockpiling and had massive hits with Walking on Sunshine and Going Down to Liverpool. Bassist Matthew Seligman sadly passed away from Covid during the pandemic but was an energetic bass player.

“He had this bouncy bass style, so enthused and very can-do,” says Robyn. “He was insanely optimistic and in about five different bands, he worked with us, then the Thompson Twins, then Thomas Dolby, and played with Bowie at Live Aid. Morris Windsor played drums with me when I formed Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians in the mid-eighties. Kim and Maurcie play with me off and on - that quartet were friends afterwards, it’s a relatively happy story.”

Robyn’s sound is inspired by a template first forged by the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Revolver enmeshed with the whimsy of Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn and the sprawling chaotic artistry of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. His live sets wear these influences on their sleeve, seeing him dipping into classics including Waterloo Sunset, Purple Haze and A Day in the Life.

“I was aware back when I started The Soft Boys 50 years ago that I was retro, I was flogging the psychedelic horse at a time when it had long left the stable,” Robyn says.

Still, Robyn’s ability to still be writing, performing and releasing music suggests he’s adept at navigating what can be a notoriously fickle industry. But he’s never deliberately set out to storyboard himself as an artist. Instead, an almost puppyish enthusiasm for listening, writing and performing has sustained him.

“I never thought about it as an opportunity for a nouveau psychedelic act, I could be in,” he states. “I didn’t draw myself as an artist, I’m not very savvy at that. I just take my songs round to people to see if they like them and most of them do. Every so often they get picked up. In more recent years, his wife Emma has run the Tiny Ghost label, helping Robyn continue to carve out his own idiosyncratic space with the music industry.

“There’s this thing where the more monolithic things become, the more corporate they become, the more artisanal and smaller enterprises pop up - the big organisms just swallow each other and get bigger while you have all these little creatures moving around in the foothills, and one of them is us.

“I’ve been on various labels, I’ve had music that has been absorbed into the monolith. I’m just grateful that in the eighties, none of the monoliths were interested in us so I never signed away the rights to Underwater Moonlight. My solo albums belong to me and people still buy them, I’m grateful that I have them.”

With hundreds of songs to his name, advice around the creative process is an obvious question. His response veers from caffeine to sea swimming as ways to get the musical juices flowing while hangovers can also unlock new sonic pastures to explore.

“I don’t recommend them or seek them out but occasionally I give myself one,” he states. “I find it’s one of the best times to pick up a piano or guitar, it’s so hard to focus on what you’re supposed to do. Being hungover to me is having my mind scrambled and it’s trying to reset itself - at that point, it’s wide open and anything can appear.”

He’s also collaborated with a wide range of artists including XTC’s Andy Partridge and REM’s guitarist Peter Buck.

“Partridge is the only person who I’ve ever been able to sit down with and write eyeball to eyeball,” Robyn outlines. “As he’s very quick-witted, it tends to be rather cerebral than emotional, it’s like two old chaps sitting down to do a crossword puzzle. He’s a terrific guitarist and songwriting engineer so what we managed to do sounds great.”

REM’s Peter Buck is a prolific guitarist who has worked with Robyn over various projects down the years, including his outfit, The Venus 3.

“He’s very inventive, if you play a song with him, he will put in plenty of neat guitar hooks, he’s done that a few times for me,” says Robyn. “He’s one of the most empathic musicians out there, there’s no denying it.”

As The Confuser has now been released to rapturous reviews, Robyn is now looking to the autumn where he gets to play the songs live. He’ll be moving between full band and acoustic shows across the UK and Europe and cites his love for playing as an element of his forever youthful vim and vigour.

“I love playing so any chance I get to corral a bunch of people together to play too is very exciting for me,” he says. “I will be playing more rock these days. I’ve now reached this august time in my life, I feel like getting the electric guitar, the pedals and the amp and cranking it all out.”

The Confuser is out now on Tiny Ghost records. Robyn Hitchcock tours the UK and Europe from September.

Yesterday was a devastating day for the world of music. Dolly Parton’s death has sent shockwaves throughout the world of entertainment and far beyond.

For those who knew and made music with the great woman herself, the cherished memories they have of her must now take on even more emotional significance.

One such unique insight into Parton’s process came from former Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter who recalled working with Parton in the studio in a recent interview with our sister site, Guitar Player, prior to Dolly's death.

A session player of great repute and a soloist extraordinaire, Baxter was quite bemused - and undoubtedly amused - by Dolly’s unique way of explaining just what she wanted from him when working on her 1978 disco-infused song Baby, I’m Burnin (which would go on to be the theme tune to her late ‘80s TV series, Dolly).

“Dolly Parton asked me to make fireworks one time,” Baxter told Guitar Player. “I was working with my Roland guitar synthesizer, and she said, ‘Can you just make it, like, reds and greens and sparkles?’

“So I thought about it for a second, and then with one hand I played as many notes as I could while the other hand was working the Roland’s [pitch] transposer, slapping it back up and down. She was going, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Whee!’”

Dolly’s instincts were right on the money, as Baxter coaxed a flourish of colour from his Roland guitar synth, which reacted to Dolly’s chorus lyric; ‘Hot as a pistol with flaming desire’ and continued to interject throughout the second verse. It’s an insight into how Dolly thought about music - and how she envisioned the arrangements for her songs. This, just one of over 3,000 original compositions that Dolly realised in her lifetime.

“I’ve always prided myself as a songwriter more than anything else,” Parton told American Songwriter. “That’s my personal feelings. That’s not to say that’s what I do best, [but] that’s my way of speaking for myself... Songwriting is a hobby and to me it's therapy.

“I love getting on a big writing binge and staying up a couple days working on song and knowing at the end of those two or three days that I've created something that was never in the world before.”

Read the full interview with Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter over at Guitar Player

In the annals of synth-pop history, there's one name that continually resurfaces. Most famous as one half of Erasure with vocalist Andy Bell, as well as being part-responsible for the emotive brilliance of Yazoo (alongside Alison Moyet), Vince Clarke is regarded as one of the world’s most adept architects of staggeringly successful electronic pop.

But, back at the beginning, when Clarke was merely a schoolboy, it was his partnership with his mate Andy Fletcher that led to the birth of a true behemoth.

Depeche Mode was the result of a meeting of gifted minds, with Vince, Andy, Martin Gore and Dave Gahan uniting to craft that iconic 1981 debut, Speak and Spell. Following which, Clarke departed the band for pastures new.

Vince spoke to us back in 2023, and remembered those early days back when the fledgling Depeche Mode were just kids, jamming in their bedrooms…

“At first, I was making music with Andrew Fletcher – we had a drum machine, he was playing bass and I was playing guitar and singing badly,” Clarke told us.

“Then Martin Gore, who was a friend of Andy’s joined and he had his own synthesizer. We looked at this thing and thought, okay, this is a lot easier than learning chords on a guitar and you only need one finger to play it.”

It was this initial dabbling with Gore’s synth that would trigger a lifelong love affair…

“That’s when I started getting interested in the technology and the fact that I could maybe reproduce or do something similar to the music I loved at the time. It was all-analogue and very expensive, but then so were guitars and amplifiers, so we had all our synths on HP [hire purchase].”

With the early Depeche Mode finding their sonic niche, it soon became clear to Vince that the role of frontman wasn’t one that was a natural fit for himself…

“[Dave Gahan] was someone that we used to see in clubs who was really fashionable, as opposed to us,” Clarke remembered.

In our interview, Vince also recalled how he met the other two signature vocalists that accompanied his most celebrated work.

“I had no illusions about my singing style or capabilities at all and I’ve been very fortunate to have worked with some amazing vocalists, which really proved the point. These people were just mates or within a circle of mates, so to speak. Alison Moyet was in a punk band called The Vandals where my best friend was the guitarist," Vince recalled.

“Erasure was different because I was working in the studio a lot trying to write songs and make records and after a discussion with the producer we decided that working with different people would be interesting but we really needed someone to be there all of the time. I advertised for a singer in Melody Maker and Andy Bell came along for the audition. He was from Peterborough, but we had very similar backgrounds, which cemented our relationship.”

Read our full Vince Clarke interview here.

With a CV as extensive as Jack Antonoff’s you’d be hard-pressed to name a pop figurehead that hasn’t worked with him. The man who Taylor Swift trusts as her closest creative confidante (Antonoff co-produced and co-wrote on every one of her studio albums bar 2025’s The Life of a Showgirl), Jack has grown into one of modern music’s most esteemed luminaries.

Beyond Taylor, the likes of Lana Del Rey, The 1975 and most recently Sabrina Carpenter have drawn upon Antonoff’s emotion-led songwriting style and his distinctively retro gear-angled sensibilities when concocting the tracks that have dominated charts the world over.

But Jack, speaking to MusicRadar back in 2023, saw little distinction between the type of mass-appeal pop that he’s a dab hand at building for his roster of stars, and the music he makes himself under his synth-pop alias Bleachers.

For Antonoff, imperfection is often the key to making something sound unique;

“The irony of pop music is that it's this field that's so rigid, but the only stuff that's successful is the stuff that’s out on the other side of it,” Jack told us. “If you write something that you think is a perfect pop song, that fits perfectly into everything, it’s probably boring as f**k. The perfect pop song is by definition the imperfect pop song.”

It’s hard to believe, but Antonoff told us that he’s never once used a MIDI instrument, instead focusing on organic, out-of-the-box creation;

“I'm completely out of the box with gear. I've never used a MIDI instrument in my life. I'm always pushing myself by using different things, and what's nice about analogue gear is everything is a completely new journey.”

Antonoff’s fixation with analogue hardware can become a problem, particularly if he's having a sleepless night…

“The death of me will be that Reverb app. They're not paying me to say that, but Reverb and Vintage King and Soundgas and all those places… you know, at four in the morning when I can't sleep, I'm just looking for things and then dreaming about what I could do with them. Some people buy watches, some people buy cars, I buy gear. Since I was a kid, anytime I had a little bit of money, I would buy gear.”

Being such a tactile creative by nature, it’s no surprise that Jack has an aversion to presets;

“I have no presets. I’ve played synths long enough to know how to dial in the sounds I want,” Jack told us. “I know what to do, but I like the fact that it's new every time. Even if you have presets on a vintage synth, it's still new every time. That's one thing I love when we play live with Bleachers, we have Juno-106s on stage, and nothing ever comes out the same. Those things are just strange. Their mood is so interesting.

“One thing that I like about not having a preset is often if I’m just recording and I'm dialling in the sound as I'm going, the moments of dialling in a sound can become really interesting transitional pieces,” Jack explained. “If I’m dialling in a sound, it'll inherently sound like a question mark, and that's an interesting thing. So you can just go through the recording and grab those moments. For me, it's transitional bits: my rev up into a chorus or the panning sound that takes me into the next part, that could be a moment when I was searching for a sound and something happened that was interesting.”

Antonoff also told us about how he infused a heap of analogue synths into Taylor Swift’s 2022 record, Midnights.

“Oh, I went nuts on that s**t, man,” said Jack. “The funny thing about Midnights is, as synthetic as it is, it's actually very analogue. So much was going into tape. I was really into the Oberheim OB-8, which I had never used another album, so I got really crazy about that. We were getting a lot from Yamaha DX7s, which I hadn't used before really on anything. I was using the Solina in a lot of places, which I never use in other records. That album was just wanting to push into a different place with synths.

“There’s no Prophet on there, because I had used Prophet on a lot of other stuff, so I kind of just put that one away. Getting a lot of low end from the DX7, which I'd never done before. I was using patches on the DX7 that I thought were really rich, but then adding my low end afterwards, trying to find low end in odd ways. A lot of really grimy sounds I was dialling in on the OB-8 and then treating them after the fact.”

Jack continued, “I was just trying to play with the boundaries of things I hadn't done before. So what happens if all my delays are coming from tape, and all my choruses are coming from outboard gear, and I’m just running everything through as much analogue outboard as possible to make it so incredibly rich? When I listen back to that album, I have these memories of putting myself into those places. But really, for me, the OB-8 was the star.”

One thing we were keen to discover was how Jack gets the best from this revolving door of major superstars. How disciplined is the studio when working with these figures professionally?

“The room is a sacred place,” Jack told us. “There's no bulls**t. It's not about this, or that, we're all just working towards the album or the song. Like I keep saying, we’re finding that void in culture and then imagining what we want the world to hear and what's exciting us right now. It’s a gut thing, it's undeniable. When you're inspired, you're inspired. When you're not, you're not. I think that level of zero bulls**t about what we're feeling is the bedrock of making it at the level that it needs to be made at. I’ve always felt that way. I've always had a bit of deep, do-or-die, endless preciousness about how important this process is.”

Read our full 2023 interview with Jack Antonoff here

At the end of 1974 Glen Campbell’s career was on the slide. He hadn’t had a hit single for years. The movie offers had dried up. His network TV show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour had been cancelled in 1972 and even a reunion album with Jimmy Webb, the songwriter who had provided him with Wichita Lineman and By The Time I Get To Phoenix, hadn’t reversed this decline – it could only reach an embarassing 166 on the Billboard charts.

He was now in his late 30s and it looked as though the best years of his career were behind him.

Larry Weiss also had cause to worry that he’d passed his peak. In the 1960s he’d written Bend Me Shape Me, which had been a hit for The American Breed and Amen Corner. He’d also penned Hi Ho Silver Lining, which had been a hit for Jeff Beck. Both were now years in the rear view mirror.

He’d tried to launch himself as an artist with his 1974 album Black And Blue Suite, but it hadn’t been a success. Weiss was seriously considering quitting music and opening a furniture store.

The lead single from the album was a quasi-autobiographical song called Rhinestone Cowboy. The lyrics tell the story of a character who is down on his luck and refuses to be beaten down by fate or the elements.

The verses depict this person’s struggle – the hours spent walking in vain, the compromising that is so often essential in order to get to your destination, whilst the chorus is one great crescendo as Weiss describes their dream: to be the star attraction, a cowboy in a ‘star-spangled rodeo’.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2013, he remembered how he came up with the image. “I had heard the phrase ‘rhinestone cowboy’ somewhere, and it stuck. When I moved to Nashville 20 years ago, I finally found out that it meant rhinestone-studded country singers of the 50s and 60s. But I gave it my own spin.

“When I was a kid, I'd loved cowboy movies: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Hop-Along Cassidy. To me, the singing cowboys were the rhinestone cowboys.”

Weiss was also probably thinking about a singer called David Allan Coe. This country artist – who died earlier this year – had adopted a gimmick early on in his career.

Performing at the Grand Ol’ Opry, he’d wear glistening rhinestone suits that at a distance gave the impression that his stagewear was more expensive than it actually was, and thus he was a star.

Coe would even sign autographs as ‘The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy’, a phrase he used as the title of his album, which was released in June 1974.

Still, Weiss was undoubtedly thinking too of his own situation. "The idea for the song was also a crying out of myself,” he told American Songwriter in 1984. “It was the spirit of a bunch of us on Broadway where I started out - Neil Diamond, Tony Orlando - we all had dreams of making it."

The imagery for the chorus was directly inspired by the 1944 western Buffalo Bill. “In the last scene, he rides out on a white horse, in a white outfit, with long white beard and hair, and he thanks everybody for giving him such a great life.

“There's another scene where he's at his lowest point, sat on a stuffed horse in a penny arcade holding his hat in the air.”

The song was released as a single in August 1974, but could only reach Number 24 in Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart. But despite this Weiss was convinced of its potential.

He offered it to Elvis Presley, who turned it down. He even gave David Allan Coe the chance to sing his own theme song. “I thought it was a great song,” Coe said in a 2004 interview with The Review magazine, “but I thought it would be too egotistical to record since I was calling myself the Rhinestone Cowboy at the time.

However, it did reach the ears of Glen Campbell. The singer had heard it on the radio whilst out driving one day and was so moved by it, he had to pull over to the side of the road.

As it happened, Campbell’s record label, Capitol, was already one step ahead. Dennis Lambert was brought in to A&R for the singer.

In a 2013 Guardian interview, he remembered the sequence of events that led to the singer recording the song. “Glen was a product of the LA recording system and understood what went into making hit records.

“We'd been talking about his feelings, writing and bringing him songs, when Larry Weiss came to play me some tracks from his recent album. One of them was Rhinestone Cowboy.”

“I said, ‘Larry, this is amazing,’ and my mind was racing, because I was already thinking about Glen. Larry wasn't that excited to hear that we were going to be producing Glen, I think because he was more concerned about his own album, but he gave me permission to play him the song.

“At the same time, (Capitol Vice President) Al Courey had somehow got a copy. A whirlwind happened within the space of a few days.”

Campbell said he loved the song and so he and Lambert went down to Sound Labs in Hollywood to record it in February 1975.

“We didn't copy Larry’s version, but took the essence of it, which was right on the money,” remembers Lambert. “Why fix something that isn't broken?”

The producer convinced the singer to play acoustic guitar on the track. “His (Campbell’s) pitch is impeccable; he's got the soul of a true musician.

“He doesn't read music, but he is a virtuoso guitarist, and it transfers to his voice. In the studio, he didn't wear headsets: he liked a little speaker instead.

“When he started singing, he'd drown out the track, and that's how he was able to finesse his vocal. He'd give you one or two great takes, and you knew you had it.

“For Rhinestone, I made him play guitar because I knew the other musicians [one of whom was future Toto man David Paich on piano] would be excited to be sitting there playing with Glen Campbell.”

The single was released in May 1975 and instantly rebooted Campbell’s career. It gradually rose up the Billboard charts and reached the top in September that year.

Indeed, it pulled off the feat of topping both the Billboard country charts and the Hot 100 simultaneously, which hadn’t been done for 14 years.

It also hit big all over Europe – reaching Number Four in the UK and going Top Ten in Belgium, The Netherlands and Ireland. It would become the second most played song on American radio that year, second only to Captain and Tennille’s Love Will Keep Us Together.

Why did it hit so big? Well those lyrics are something so many of us can relate to, but in Campbell they found their supreme interpreter.

His background, of growing up poor in rural Arkansas – his family were, literally, cotton-pickers and there was no electricity in the house – meant he was able to deliver them sincerely and with authenticity.

“He understood it as a metaphor for anyone trying to make it,” Lambert said in 2013. “He'd expressed disappointment with the way life was unfolding for him.

“He was recently divorced, estranged from his family, drinking, and involved with drugs a little too much – and yet he was this beautiful soul who we got to know and really love.

“That song became his signature tune. When you can make that happen, it's very powerful.”

Over the years, there have been numerous covers. You’d expect country artists to have tried their hands at it – Charley Pride, Slim Whitman and Loretta Lynn all recorded their own versions - but Rhinestone Cowboy has such a universal message, it’s garnered covers from the unlikeliest of places.

It was a feature of Radiohead’s early live sets, and it’s also cropped up in Belle and Sebastian’s setlists too. David Hasselhoff recorded a faithful version on his Sings America album.

There have been versions in French, Danish and Flemish and the song has not been immune to the Europop treatment either - in 2002, a terrible dance version reached Number 12 in the UK charts credited to Rikki and Daz featuring Glen Campbell. Campbell even appeared in the video.

But as a song, Rhinestone Cowboy is sturdy enough to withstand any such indignities. One of Campbell’s last public performances of it was surely the most poignant.

The singer had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when he appeared at his own tribute section at the 2012 Grammys and brought the house down.

“My only regret is not going to there, for its tribute to Glen,” remembered Weiss in 2013. “I watched it, of course.

“When Glen walked out singing in a rhinestone outfit designed by my dear friend Manuel Cuevas (who created the outfit for the song's original video), the place just blew up.

“I suddenly realised: ‘My God, I've written an American anthem.’"

The song was written and recorded by British glam rockers Arrows in 1975 – but it was the Joan Jett version released as a single seven years later that turned I Love Rock ’N’ Roll into the world-conquering hit it’s known as today.

It served as the opening title track from Jett’s second studio full-length, which ended up being the most commercially successful album of her career.

As fate would have it, Jett was touring the UK in 1976 as guitarist/vocalist in all-girl band The Runaways when she saw Arrows performing the song on their weekly television show.

This led to the Runaways learning how to play the song the following year, though ultimately they didn’t release it as they had already covered a track with a similar name – The Velvet Underground’s Rock & Roll.

For Jett, I Love Rock ’N’ Roll became a mission statement.

She told Rolling Stone: “I think people have to understand that rock ’n’ roll is not just rock ’n’ roll. It’s more than that. It can be a message sender. It is something that is powerful and strong. And it is something that can be used to fight, people have injustices, and you can declare them and fight for it.”

She continued: “I think rock ’n’ roll is a brash sort of medium, so you’re allowed to say what you want and what you mean.”

These words are deeply insightful into the mind of someone who acted as a trailblazer for female musicians in the music industry.

Instead of playing up to the gender stereotypes being normalised at that time, she chose to express herself unconditionally – raw and uncut – in the process redefining the very definition of what it means to be feminine and helping carve out space for women in male-dominated circles.

She has been referred to as the Godmother Of Punk, the original Riot Grrrl and the Queen Of Noise – the latter being a reference to The Runaways’ second album Queens Of Noise.

“There’s nothing more threatening than a girl with a guitar,” she famously stated back in 1999.

Following the breakup of The Runaways, Jett recorded her first rendition of I Love Rock ’N’ Roll in 1979 with guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols, released on vinyl as a B-side to her single You Don’t Own Me.

But the definitive version of the track came into fruition two years later with Jett’s new band The Blackhearts, recorded at Kingdom Sound Studio in Long Island with producers Kenny Laguna and Ritchie Cordell.

As it turns out, The Rolling Stones were partly responsible for the song being written in the first place.

Arrows singer Alan Merrill revealed in 2009: “That was a knee-jerk response to The Rolling Stones’ It’s Only Rock ’N’ Roll. I remember watching it on Top Of The Pops. I’d met Mick Jagger socially a few times, and I knew he was hanging around with Prince Rupert Lowenstein and people like that – jet-setters.”

He went on to describe the song as “an apology to those jet-set princes and princesses” – a way of saying to the stuffy aristocracy of that time that there’s nothing wrong about loving loud music.

So when it came to writing his own version of that kind of track, he certainly did a good job with it.

“You have to write a three-chord song with a lick that people remember, and it has to build,” Merrill explained. “So I had the chorus, which to me sounded like a hit. And I thought, ‘I’ll do something really unusual. I’ll write it that this is a song separate from the verse.’

“So the actual chorus is something that’s coming out of a jukebox, and the two kids in the disco who are flirting are hearing this song that’s a hit. It felt like The Twilight Zone.”

Joan Jett And The Blackhearts’ version of I Love Rock ’N’ Roll starts with eight dramatic snare hits before its iconic riff comes in – based around E, A and B power chords which are commonly followed by a quarter note bend on the third fret of the low E-string. This means the note travels from G to somewhere in between G and G#.

The album liner notes state that Joan Jett performed lead vocals and rhythm guitar while Ricky Byrd was responsible for lead guitar and backing vocals, joined by fellow Blackhearts Gary Ryan on bass and Lee Crystal on drums.

During the verse sections, there’s a lower riff being performed by Jett that is matched an octave up by Byrd using the first position pentatonic shape up at the twelfth fret. Jett’s part is performed using completely fretted notes, while Byrd adds a degree of fluidity by incorporating bends.

It was this version of Love Rock ’N’ Roll that ended up topping the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks. It also made No 1 in Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand and South Africa, and peaked at No 4 in the UK charts.

When Jett appeared on Australian music television show Countdown in 1982, she confessed that “not many people get to be involved with an anthem in their life” and “if people want to call the song an anthem, I think it’s wonderful, I think it’s great”.

She admitted: “I know everyone says it sounds silly – I love rock ’n’ roll. But that is what I feel. I love rock ’n’ roll. I love to go out and perform in front of people. The whole band does. And that, I think, is the secret.”

One of the key outfits pointed at when trying to discern just when that pivotal ‘I’ was applied to electronic music (and the term, ‘IDM’ - Intelligent Dance Music - was first coined) Autechre's legacy has been increasingly recognised over the last three decades, with their extremely innovative and questing spirit influencing generations of budding young producers.

Formed in Rochdale, Greater Manchester in 1987, Rob Brown and Sean Booth’s pursuit of fascinating new forms of electronic music has resulted in a vast body of work.

From the foundation of 1993’s Incunabula spawned fourteen further studio albums, including such electronic classics as 1995’s ultra-intricate Tri Repetae, 2001’s software-embracing Confield and the extraordinary Exai from 2013.

Today though, we’re casting our eyes back to a time long before Autechre became a byword for the notion of dance music as art, back when Rob and Sean were just two extremely creative guys, surrounded by a nest of wires, drum machines and beer cans.

We spoke to Rob and Sean back in 1994, right after the release of their ambient-flavoured second record Amber (in our dear departed sister magazine, Future Music). Journalist Simon Trask asked them about their earliest workflow…

“We used to do turntable mixes together at Rob’s house and then go to my house and edit and cut ‘em up, imitating early Mantronix [1980s hip-hop and electro funk outfit] stuff with pause-button edits on my cassette deck,” Sean explained.

“We used to put loops into the [Casio] SK1 and cut stuff up on the turntables over the top of that,” said Sean. “Then when we got the [Roland TR-] 606 and the [Boss] RSD-10 we’d put samples in the RSD, trigger it from the 606 and play with the SK1 on top of that.”

In the early 1990s, Autechre prided themselves on learning and memorising every facet of their hardware set-up;

“We’ve found that whenever we buy a bit of gear we try and lay off it for six months, until we’ve got used to using it,” explained Sean. “It’s only then that we start doing things that are actually worth using; if we start using something immediately, we just do the corniest stuff with it. There isn't one thing about the gear that we’re using now that we don't understand. The analogue synths are second nature to us, and the [Roland drum machine] R-8 is completely our machine.”

In retrospect, the period that Simon spoke to the pair was fairly pivotal, as he caught them at a time when they were just beginning to dabble with DAWs, software and the capabilities of MIDI. Although, at this early stage the results weren’t always worth writing home about…

“Cubase is a song man’s program, and we’re not song people at all,” Sean told us. “A lot of the tracks we do are very loop-orientated, and [Emagic] Creator [the proto-version of Logic] is designed to be used by people who like working in loops. So we started using that and it was just like using a drum machine, which we were well into - using the R-8 as a sequencer gave us our first lesson in Creator, almost.”

One of the most interesting moments in the interview was when Sean explained how the pair didn’t particularly like bringing in outsiders to their two-man operation; “We’ve only really worked in one ‘proper’ studio and we just ended up getting on the desk ourselves,” said Sean. “I don't know - we just don't like working with other people, basically. It's a lot easier if we do everything ourselves. It seems that in studios you have this code of practice that says you have to do things in a certain way. People say to us, ‘you've got this weird way of working’, but to us it isn't weird, it's the correct way of doing things - we’re happier working like that.”

Read our full classic interview with Autechre here

When the teenage Jackson Browne was just starting out as a singer and songwriter, he received some blunt career advice from an older and wiser musician.

Monte Dunn was a guitarist who played with Canadian folk duo Ian & Sylvia. In the mid-’60s, after hearing some of Browne’s songs, Dunn told the young hopeful: “You know, they already got a Bob Dylan. And a really good one.”

Browne recalled this moment in an interview with MOJO magazine in which he looked back on his early years and his defining work created in the ’70s.

“It’s easy to talk about how records are made,” he said. “But what makes you write what you write, that’s just a big mystery.”

Browne was 14 years old when he started writing songs. It was 1962, and his family had recently moved from Los Angeles to nearby Orange County. His biggest influences were Dylan and other folk singers such as Mississippi John Hurt and Dave Van Ronk, and his first attempt at composition was inspired by a version of You’re No Good from Dylan’s self-titled 1962 debut album. Browne named his song Happy Woman Blues.

“It was not very good,” he said. “I think that was kind of a folk posturing stance. Most of my early songs were a little mawkish, and very derivative.”

Even so, there was one song from this early period that would stay with Browne for his whole career and define his signature style of sombre introspection. He was still only 16 when he wrote These Days, a world-weary lament which ended in defeat as he sang: “Don’t confront with my failures… I had not forgotten them.”

Browne explained: “I wasn’t a sad kid. It’s been remarked a couple of times by therapists: ‘What the hell happened to you?’ I can’t honestly tell you that there was anything that should have resulted in my feeling as if, to quote the song, ‘I’ve been losing so long.’ My entire life – all sixteen years of it! I don’t know where I got that. Maybe from The Beatles’ song, I’m A Loser.”

While still in high school, Browne was gigging regularly at an Orange County club called The Paradox. He was briefly a member of local ragtime group The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and signed a contract with Elektra Records as a songwriter.

After graduating in 1966, he travelled to New York City with the intention of making his name on the Greenwich Village folk scene. What he found there was a job as a backing musician for Nico, the German singer/model/actress who was then working with The Velvet Underground. After a brief affair between them, Nico recorded three of Browne’s songs, including These Days, for her 1967 solo album Chelsea Girl.

Browne had his songs recorded by a number of artists: another version of These Days, by Tom Rush, followed in 1968. It was only after Browne returned to California, however, that he established himself as a singer-songwriter.

He had felt burned when Elektra signed him as a recording artist and then quickly dropped him. David Geffen was different. He became Browne’s manager and then his label boss when he formed Asylum Records in 1971. Browne described Geffen as the perfect ally. “He was letting artists find themselves in the studio.”

Browne’s first two albums – his self-titled debut (1972) and For Everyman (1973) – peaked outside the Billboard 200. It was with his third album, Late For The Sky, that he achieved a commercial breakthrough in 1974.

It was this album that Bruce Springsteen referred to when inducting Browne into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2004.

“In ’70s post-Vietnam America,” Springsteen said, “there was no album that captured the fall from Eden, the long slow afterburn of the ’60s, its heartbreak, its disappointments, its spent possibilities, better than Late For The Sky.”

In 1976, Browne followed Late For The Sky with another masterpiece, The Pretender, recorded in the wake of a personal tragedy – the suicide of his wife, actress Phyllis Major.

In 1977 Browne delivered one of the most unorthodox records ever made by a mainstream rock artist. Running On Empty was essentially a concept album: the diary of a rock ’n’ roll star on the road, recorded in concert, at sound checks and in hotel rooms, with songs about women, songs about drugs, and throughout it all a sense of ennui encapsulated in the album’s title.

“Running On Empty was a rather imperfect banner to fly,” Browne conceded. “It’s not exactly what you want to tell people about your career or anything.”

The album’s title track was a driving rock song, but the lyric reflected Browne’s uncertainty about his life and where it was headed. “It was an admission,” he said, “that your ideals are changing. You’re still doing what you used to do, but now you do it for a different reason.”

Not every song on Running On Empty is autobiographical. Rosie is one of Browne’s most beautiful songs, and certainly the funniest. It describes a roadie losing a star-struck groupie to a member of the band – of all people, the drummer – and consoling himself through masturbation. “The story was true,” Browne said. “Just not of me.”

It was on Cocaine – a song originally written by bluesman Reverend Gary Davis – where Browne really let the audience in on what happened after the show. The track was recorded in a hotel room in Edwardsville, Illinois, by Browne, his guitarist Danny Kortchmar and his famous sidekick David Lindley, whose fiddle and lap steel had been a key tone on his previous records.

Browne recalled: “Danny and I were snorting a lot of coke while we made that recording, and Lindley was not.”

The track ends with the sound of the drug being chopped out and sniffed. “The commercial for cocaine,” Browne called it.

Running On Empty was a huge hit, reaching No 3 in the US. This was, however, Browne’s last album of the ’70s, and in one sense there was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy in Running On Empty. Browne wouldn’t make another truly great record until I’m Alive in 1993. He also knew that drugs were a problem.

“My whole generation took a lot of drugs,” he said. “And we went from thinking this is absolutely the best thing since nighttime softball to knowing that it was a trap.”

Browne’s first album of the 1980s, Hold Out, was also his first and to date only US No 1. It included the song Of Missing Persons, written in memory of his friend Lowell George, leader of Little Feat.

The following album, 1983’s new wave-influenced Lawyers In Love, also sold well. However, Browne’s popularity subsequently declined with two albums – Lives In The Balance (1986) and World In Motion (1989) – on which he explicitly criticised American foreign policy under the Reagan administration.

Since the mid-’90s, Browne’s working life has slowed to a leisurely pace. In the 33 years since the release of I’m Alive he has made just five albums: Looking East (1996), The Naked Ride Home (2002), Time The Conqueror (2008), Standing In The Breach (2014) and Downhill From Everywhere (2021).

As he said to MOJO: “I don’t know if I’m lazy. I’m just not in much of a hurry.”

He talked in that interview about the thing that connects every song he has ever written. “All these songs remain open questions,” he said. “Even if it comes around to some sort of resolution by the end of a song, it leaves the question intact, because that’s actually how we live. And as long as I’m writing songs, the questions continue.”

Browne also spoke of his pride in what his friend Bruce Springsteen said of his songwriting: “A condensed emotional power in each line of his great songs… the meticulousness of craft, always matched by the deepness of soul.”

As Browne saw it, nobody has ever captured the essence of his music better than The Boss did that night. “It was a great moment for me,” he said. “It was one of the few times that anybody has really been able to say in so many words what it is that I do.”

One of house music’s leading lights, Chris Lake has become a club and festival mainstay for the last decade, with his vocal-led arrangements a stylistic signature that has entranced crowds the world over.

A few years back, MusicRadar spent a morning with Chris Lake in a London hotel, having a fairly chilled natter about Lake’s rise in prominence and, interestingly, his how his music production process is often a much more intuition-led than many might expect.

Firstly, we were delighted to hear that it was our very own sister magazine Computer Music (now, sadly no longer in print but then, still going strong) that first empowered Lake to learn about the nitty gritty of music-making;

“When I first got into music, I was picking up Computer Music off the shelf every month,” Lake told us. “It really helped me learn and understand what was possible, and what was available for making music. I remember the magazine grew off the back of the possibilities of the first seeds of the DAW. It’s funny how I remember some of the old cover features and those artist interviews still stick in my head.”

We also learned that Lake had been an avid Ableton Live user for a long time, however he first started on much humbler software…

“It’s been a long time [with Ableton Live] But I wasn’t a first user. I got into music around the late ’90s. The first DAW that I used was Sonic Foundry’s Acid, I then moved into Reason and then to Logic, and then, finally, Ableton Live. Live is my language now.”

Often, due to the demands of touring, Chris was unable to monitor his mixes on high-end gear, and had to trust his instincts when using his mobile set-up.

“Honestly, there was a moment about seven or eight years ago where I realised I was spending a ridiculous amount of time on the road,” Chris told us. “I started to feel paralysed when touring. I felt like I couldn’t do anything when I was away from the studio. I realised that I had to teach myself how to make music when I was out and about. I kind of forced myself into being uncomfortable. I taught myself how to make music on a laptop and nothing else. How do you teach yourself that? Well you just have to accept that you don’t have your studio monitors, a MIDI keyboard and all the other home comforts. But this is what I do have. It was like going back to the initial constraints that I had when I first started making music.”

We were surprised to hear that Lake - a global superstar - had actually put things out that had just been monitored using his laptop speakers…

“I actually started making music just listening with the laptop speakers, using just the QWERTY keyboard instead of a MIDI keyboard to put in notes. Now I’m really good at it. I can make 80% of my music anywhere; in a noisy environment or a busy room. I feel like I understand the sound of the laptop speakers and I’ve even released music that I’ve only monitored on laptop speakers.”

“I made my track I Remember in my parents’ living room. I didn’t even listen to it on headphones. I finished it, rendered it out then played it the following night in Moscow. It was one of the best-sounding records I’d ever made. I ended up listening to it on monitors a couple of weeks later to check the final mix, but I hardly changed anything since that first laptop mix. It sounded fantastic. Don’t get me wrong – on the super low end it’s definitely pretty difficult to be accurate – but, on that occasion, I fluked it and got it right.

Read our full 2023 interview with Chris Lake here.

Operating at the intersection between electronic music, indie rock and pop music, British five-piece Hot Chip have built their career on tracks that balance undeniable hooks with an alluring strangeness.

That sound comes from the band's mix-and-match approach to songwriting, which combines synths and electronic instrumentation with guitars and acoustic drums, and sees band members regularly swapping roles in the studio and onstage.

But, as band members Al Doyle, Joe Goddard and Alexis Taylor explained to us when we visited them in their east London studio, in the band’s early days that approach often meant working around technical limitations.

“When we made our earlier albums, Joe was always trying to capture what was happening when everyone was playing, but it didn't always work,” Doyle says. “We just didn't have the setup to be able to do that. But the instinct was always there to try. Part of the reason for building this place originally was to make that whole process easy.”

Much of the band’s first few albums – Coming On Strong, The Warning and Made In The Dark – were started in Goddard’s home studio. Although to hear Goddard describe it, the word ‘studio’ might be overselling it a little.

“The computer and a small amount of gear was just next to my bed,” he says. “There was a kind of spaghetti of black cables all over the floor, which traumatised my wife and still does.”

In the years since, the band’s studio setup has been upgraded significantly. The band now primarily work out of a London studio primarily set up by Doyle. With multiple rooms, an envy-inducing collection of vintage synths and a Trident TSM desk at its centre, the studio allows the band to write tracks in a more collaborative manner.

“Because we’re in this studio that Al built, we have space to make things very readily from scratch,” Taylor says. “There may still be times where somebody brings an idea they’ve written in to play to the rest of the band, but there are also times with the new records we've been making where everything is just happening in real time. We’re improvising things, trying things out.

“You make a beat on a drum machine and then somebody joins in on the keyboard, and another person simultaneously joins in on another keyboard over the other side of the room. Kind of just building up layers to see what the song could become.”

As Doyle explains, allowing multiple people to try out ideas simultaneously is one of the key benefits to the design of the studio space.

“In terms of how Hot Chip operates in this studio, that's why everything is basically plugged in all the time, because it means that there's no barrier to capturing a performance that's happening on any instrument in any space in here,” he says. “I think that came from that culture of trying to do that, even when we weren't quite able to do it.”

“The room allows you to be working on one thing in here collectively, but then there's also the drum room and the piano room through there,” Taylor continues. “Often I’ll run in there if I have a different idea for something. So you can kind of develop a second song while you're working on the first song. There are different spaces to try things out, and for some reason I think that's been quite key to the way we've always worked.

“Whether it's going into a different room or just stopping what you're doing and starting another thing, basically having a couple of things on the go in one day can mean that you have a breather from something. Then when you try a new idea, a second song, that could be quite exciting because you feel like you're making progress on a different thing. It gives you the space to then come back to the first idea with a fresh perspective on it.”

We took the opportunity to quiz Hot Chip on a few of their studio highlights. In the video above, Doyle, Goddard and Taylor talk us through some of their favourite synths, and why the Trident desk brings a distinctive vibe to the studio.

The band has recently reissued breakthrough albums The Warning, Made In The Dark and One Life Stand. Revisit our breakdown of the band’s classic track Ready For The Floor.

Some songs stop you dead in your tracks the second you hear them. They seem to change the molecules in the air.

The Sound Of Silence, the breakout hit that announced Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel as a powerhouse songwriting duo, is one of them. But it took its time to work its magic on a wider audience.

When it did, Simon & Garfunkel were on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Their 1964 debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3AM, had flopped and they were doing what twenty-somethings did in the mid ‘60s. Simon headed across the pond and was living in England, working on his debut solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook, working the local folk circuit. Garfunkel was still at Columbia University where he was studying art history.

At Columbia Records, the phone was ringing off the hook. There was a song off Wednesday Morning, 3AM that radio audiences across the Eastern Seaboard couldn’t get enough of.

“From a radio contact business in Cocoa Beach, Florida, it became a call-in favourite,” said Garfunkel, speaking to MusicRadar in 2012. “It made the promotion man call the home office in New York and say, ‘It’s been a year now, and they won’t quit over this one folky song from a group called Simon & Garfunkel. The album isn’t selling, but this one tune just won’t quit with its appeal.’”

It wasn’t just Florida. Audiences in Boston were entranced by it, too. The Sounds Of Silence, as it was originally titled, was speaking to the youth of America, haunting the airwaves with its minimalist folk presentation, just two voices and an acoustic guitar. This song had potential.

Columbia had recognised this when Simon & Garfunkel first auditioned for them. As did Garfunkel when Simon first showed it to him.

“It was the sixth song Paul ever wrote,” said Garfunkel. “He would come to my apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, where the roaches were in the kitchen, and he’d play me his songs. When he got to this one, I said, ‘Best one yet! If that’s not a commercial hit record, I don’t know what is.’”

The Sound Of Silence was such a good song that Simon was initially going to give it away. He was exploring his post-college options once his degree in English at Queens College was finished, and took a job in music publishing.

“I had either graduated from college, or I was in my last year, and I was working part-time for a publisher in New York, trying to get songs from their catalogue recorded by other recording artists,” said Simon, speaking to NPR in 2003. “A job that I was completely unqualified to do.”

But the job paid in other ways. It was there Simon met Tom Wilson of Columbia Records, the producer who had worked with Sun Ra and had just been picked up to work with folk’s new superstar, Bob Dylan. Wilson could have used a song like this.

“He had a group that he was recording called The Pilgrims. The only great artist that he had was Bob Dylan,” continued Simon. “I said to him, 'Well, I have a song that I wrote that I think might be good for The Pilgrims', and I played the song, The Sound Of Silence.

And he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I’d like to record that with them.’ And then I said, ‘Well, you know, I sing. I sing with a friend. Could we come and sing this for you?’ So, he said yes, and he arranged an audition for us.”

Wilson had Dylan. He had the Pilgrims. After Columbia president Goddard Lieberson liked what he heard, Wilson now had Simon & Garfunkel. Although there was still some disagreement over what they should call themselves.

The duo had been operating under the name Tom & Jerry back when they were high-school kids signed to Big Records, scoring a hit with Hey, Schoolgirl and appearing on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.

That was a real-life American Graffiti scene, and the name would never have worked with this new folk direction. And the record companies back then discouraged to Jewish artists from using their own names.

“There was a duo called Art and Paul, a folk duo, so that was out,” said Simon. “So then, they were tossing out different names that they might come up with to give to us. And it was never a consideration to call the group Simon and Garfunkel, because it was ‘too ethnic.’ It was just nobody did that. Nobody did that then.

“Bob Dylan was called Bob Dylan; he wasn’t called Bob Zimmerman. So, when they came to a stalemate and couldn't find the name, it was Goddard Lieberson, who said, ‘Call the group Simon and Garfunkel.’”

Wilson handled production duties for Wednesday Morning, 3AM. The engineer Roy Halee, who had recorded the audition tapes, was in the studio to work his magic. He had a burgeoning reputation as a genius in the studio and would be a regular collaborator of the duo’s, with arguably his greatest production feat coming in 1986 when he produced Simon’s Graceland.

The album was recorded in spring ‘64, released in fall, forgotten by winter, and by the summer of ’65 Garfunkel considered himself “a veteran of failure”. At least that’s how he remembered it when speaking to NPR.

He had gone out to visit Simon during his summer vacation and upon returning to the States, he discovered The Sound Of Silence had been remixed by Wilson for a new single release scheduled for September 12. Wilson played it for him.

“I was just, you know, amused,” said Garfunkel. “I was not so invested in whether it’ll be successful or not. I was feeling like a veteran of failure at that point. So I was just amused – and then I watched my life change over the ensuing months.”

Wilson had an ear for the zeitgeist and the electric 12-string guitar was becoming the sound of the mid ‘60s. Roger McGuinn’s playing on the Byrds’ Mr Tambourine man transformed the sound of ‘60s guitar. That jangle and chime was in. So too was reverb, and Halee applied it generously to this remix.

Wilson had just finished up recording Like A Rolling Stone with Bob Dylan and rehired guitarist Al Gorgoni and drummer Bobby Gregg, adding Vincent Bell on guitar and Bob Bushnell on bass guitar. They were going to give it the Byrds treatment.

Garfunkel told MusicRadar that he had no bargaining power to persuade the label to think twice about it.

“The home office overdubbed electric bass, drums and the electric 12-string guitar, which was the sound of the era if you know The Byrds and Mr Tambourine Man,” he said. “We were using electric 12-strings that season. They did this while we were away in Europe. I had no power, no creative leg to stand on, so by definition I was just a bemused listener: ‘Whatever the label is going to do, OK, cross your fingers…’ It’s not like I could have a point-of-view like, ‘How dare you! You ruined my record’ – I could never go down that path.”

We can look back and say this proto-psychedelic treatment of this folk arrangement was just what it needed, Messrs Simon and Garfunkel’s vocals hanging disembodied in the mix, ethereal, godly. The problem was the original was just two voices and the guitar and naturally the rhythm did not sit on the grid. They did the best they could but there’s no question, it sounds a little off.

“I heard it and thought, ‘OK, the rhythm slips a bit between the fourth and fifth verses, the overdubs aren’t exactly in sync, but the sound is commercial. Who knows?’ You can’t figure out the market,” said Garfunkel. “Now it becomes a giant world-wide hit. What can I say? I knew the song within.”

Great songs are rugged. They can be remarkably resilient to reinterpretation. Even so, Garfunkel thought that the 12-string guitar stepped on the vocal a bit.

It is a feeling that informs how he performs it to this day, almost as though he is singing it for an audience who is hearing those lyrics clearly for the first time, even if the truth is those lyrics could well have accompanied them during the most significant, maybe the toughest, moments in their lives.

But it matters little; the emotional temperature of the remix is little different to the original recording, and the chord changes still effectively betray Simon’s prodigious genius. He was just 21 when he wrote it.

The fact that Halee cloaked it in reverb, this great splash of ambient melancholy, is more than appropriate – not only was it consonant with contemporary production styles, it was just as Simon had originally written the song.

In his NPR interview, Simon explained the kind of at-home setup he would put together to get him in the zone, and it is quite funny to picture, maybe a little melodramatic, but just ask any guitar player who has played acoustic in the bathroom. There’s a natural reverb there that makes for an echo room that some studios would pay thousands to install in their facility.

“I wrote it in the bathroom of our house in Queens, with the lights off and the water running,” said Simon. “That was the atmosphere that I liked. If you put a candle in there, then, you’ll immediately understand what it’s like.”

We can’t say for sure what guitar Simon used to write it. Likely it could have been one of the big-bodied Guild acoustics that were favoured by that generation of folkies, and later when he came to perform it live he would typically rely on his Martin D-18. Those are guitars of considerable boom, but Simon tamed that, capoing his at the sixth fret for the recording.

What makes the chord progression so genius is how it sits in conversation with the lyrics. It opens with an Asus2 shape, neither major nor minor, then an open G major then back to A minor on “again” – and in just two lines, three chords, and the audience is right where they want them, and the whole song unspools as some gentle, dark night of the soul.

Even after all this time, it still hits Art Garfunkel hard. He says his appreciation of it has only increased as the decades rolled by.

“Ahhh, what a tune! Sound Of Silence has more melodic genius, and simple power than I ever realised,” he said. “As the years go by, there’s something extraordinarily hooky about that simple melody – I didn’t know that. I knew it was a good-sounding record when it emerged.”

“Well the passing of four decades has given the lyrics an extraordinary power simply because they have endured for such a long time,” Simon told NPR. “Again, for me, I am always aware of the fact that I was 21 years old when I wrote it, so I am kind of amazed that I wrote that. Although at the time I just thought that I was writing better. But now when I look at it I think, ‘Well, that was really something extraordinary that I wasn’t aware of at the time.’”

The Sound Of Silence is a “serious song” but what is it about? Simon is coy. It’s about “many things”. To explain it would be to rob it of its magic. We can assign our own meaning to them. That’s what makes them endure between the melody sticking in our head.

What The Sound Of Silence meant to nu-metal band Disturbed when they covered it will have been different to the kinds of things that were percolating in Simon’s mind when he wrote it in late ’63, early ’64, when the US was roiling after the assassination of a sitting president and the civil rights movement was working for a better union, an end to segregation.

Simon, for what it’s worth, had rerecorded it in the UK for The Paul Simon Songbook but that always sounded incomplete, like a demo. Art Garfunkel’s vocal makes it transcendent.

Purists might cite the original 1964 recording as the definitive take, others Wilson’s remix. We don’t have to choose. But in remixing it and rereleasing it in ’65 Wilson helped Simon and Garfunkel on their way to their first number one – and there was more where that came from.

While many have debated who the real ‘fifth Beatle’ truly was, in our mind there’s simply no contest. It’s quite obviously the late, great George Martin who deserves that honorary mop-top.

He’s the man who unlocked the Beatles’ creative ambitions and enabled them to evolve from pop sensation to music’s most pioneering figures, Martin was part-producer and part close confidante to four men who changed the way we think about music itself.

Although George Martin sadly passed away in 2016, George’s son, Giles Martin has inherited his father’s flair for manning a console, becoming a key figure in how the Beatles' recording canon is handled today, producing, remixing and supervising all major releases by the brand.

From Get Back to the recent Anthology re-release, to the upcoming Rubber Soul remix, Giles has overseen it all. He's, quite simply, the man entrusted with the keys to music’s most celebrated legacy

But Giles’ studio career extends beyond just taking on his father’s mantle, he has been involved in a wide array of projects including the remixing of The Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup and, notably, the incredibly fascinating Dolby Atmos mix of The Beach Boys' timeless Pet Sounds, released in 2023.

It was at that point that this writer was able to spend some one-on-one time with Giles, talking in-depth about why expanding Pet Sounds into Atmos was tantamount to genuine musical archaeology - but required some delicate, respectful hands…

“The fact of the matter is that mono can be immersive too – Sgt Pepper and Pet Sounds came out in mono, and people fell into them,” Giles said. “You have to mix to the source. It’s the equivalent of restoring paintings, brightening up an old Dutch master’s work and making it bright. So it’s always a challenge. I was deeply honoured that they asked me to do it.

“There had to be a lot of audio restoration. There were elements missing. So we used a combination of the original master tracks and newly-sourced mix elements,” Giles explained. “There were a couple of vocal things that had to be taken off the mono. Generally speaking, we had about eight tracks to play with. A lot of the instrumentation was on three different tracks, locked-in together.”

With the project on his desk, Giles settled on quite a daunting starting point; “You have to start somewhere, and I thought I’d start with God Only Knows, because it’s such an amazing song. It’s one of the greatest songs ever written. That can be challenging in itself. Then we went through the rest of the album in track order from then on. Then you go back and revise and revise and revise.”

Beyond the discussion of the complex process of converting this hallowed record into an immersive Atmos sphere, Giles talked about the vast creativity and singular vision of Brian Wilson - who sadly passed away last year - and also shared his father’s perspective on Wilson's exceptional talent.

“I was with my dad on a plane once, and I just suddenly realised how awesome he was. I said to him ‘Dad, what you did with The Beatles was kind of amazing, wasn’t it?’ and he looked at me and said: ‘not as amazing as Brian Wilson’. He explained to me that The Beatles always had him, and he had The Beatles. But Brian Wilson didn’t have anyone, and he went and made this record. Without this record, The Beatles wouldn’t have made Sgt Pepper.”

Giles also explained to us why Pet Sounds continues to be revered all these years on; “Forget sampling, this was real innovation.” Giles gushed, “Pet Sounds is an organic record, and you kind of want it to be real, you want to be closer to them in a way, you want to fall into the record. It’s almost like a classical record, it’s so intricate and so beautiful.”

Read our full interview with Giles Martin on how he brought Pet Sounds into the Atmos domain here

When did music production begin to have so many rules? It used to be that you could get away with pretty much anything when making tunes. Vinyl mastering engineers would probably tell you to make your bass mono so the needle doesn’t jump out of the record, but other than that, the sky was the limit - if only because in a pre-social media era, who was going to tell you otherwise?

Nowadays, however, you can’t take two steps on the internet without tripping over a loud and confidently stated opinion on the “correct” way to make music. Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, they’re all lined with hot takes masquerading as unbreakable rules, purists and gatekeepers claiming that analogue is always better than digital, Behringer gear is garbage, and your cheap-ass monitors must be ruining your mixes. What’s an up-and-coming musician or producer to do? In short: ignore them.

Many of the most transformative genres to emerge in the last 50 years - from punk to jungle to trap - were based around breaking the rules. Producers of old didn’t worry about what they were supposed to do, or waste their time pondering the opinions of beard-stroking strangers. They just got on with making the music that they wanted to make. Many of the most persistent myths that get repeated as fact don’t even hold up in real life. Here’s our number one rule: if it sounds good to you, it is good.

In the spirit of those legendary rule-breakers of old, here we take a closer look at ten oft-repeated music tech myths that fall apart in the harsh light of day.

1. Analogue is better than digital

Let’s start with this old chestnut. Many people will try to tell you that analogue synthesis is somehow inherently ‘better’ than digital. They don’t bother with any of that virtual analogue nonsense (despite the power, flexibility and convenience that digital can provide), nor will they trouble themselves with wavetables, FM or indeed anything other than tried-and-true, old-school subtractive synthesis.

Analogue can sound great, it’s true. It’s hard to top a vintage Minimoog or CS-80 in top condition for sheer sonic deliciousness. But objectively better? That’s a stretch. Limiting yourself to just one flavour can lead to bland results. It can also be a real challenge to get a lead to pop out of an all-analogue mix. And if analogue is the be-all and end-all, why are digital synths like Serum so popular? (Hint: because they sound good.)

Choose a synth because you like the way it sounds, not because of what’s under the hood.

2. Behringer gear is garbage

Comments about Behringer gear tend to fall into two main camps: it’s either complete garbage, or it’s incredible, and the company is going to save the world by releasing budget synths. Somewhere in between these two polarities is the truth: products from a mass-market retailer occasionally do fail, but no more than those of any other manufacturer working at a similar scale.

So why the hate? This appears to be a holdover from users who got burned by unreliable products in the ‘90s before Behringer made a number of manufacturing changes. It also restructured the company, with Behringer now just one of many brands under the Music Tribe banner, an umbrella that also includes respected outfits like Midas, Klark Teknik and TC Electronic. They can’t all be bad, can they? And why would Behringer's products be inferior and the others' not… even though they’re all made by the same company?

It’s not just poor musicians that use Behringer products, either; plenty of big-name artists do too. Hans Zimmer famously took his Behringer 2600 on the road to spare his vintage ARP the abuse, while the acid clone TD-3 has been caned by Squarepusher, KiNK, Anthony Rother and many more. Some may question their imitative designs, but Behringer makes solid gear at an unbeatable price. Don’t let the past grudges of others prevent you from enjoying what the brand has to offer.

3. Korg Volcas are a joke

In 2013, Korg released a trio of tiny instruments, the Beats, Bass and Keys. These were all part of the Volca line, and they kick started a trend of low-priced, diminutive synthesizers, samplers and drum machines that continues to this day, with Korg now offering 10 Volca machines and plenty of other companies copying their style. And yet somehow, the name Volca has become synonymous with ‘joke’.

This smacks of gatekeeping. While the Volcas may be limited compared to other items in the Korg catalogue, they’re also much, much more affordable. This low price makes them ideal starting points for newbies looking to explore music production, or wanting to make the jump from software to hardware.

With their built-in sequencers and motion sequencing capabilities, Volcas are also exceedingly fun. Many also feature circuitry borrowed from much more expensive units too, ensuring that they sound just as good as their bigger siblings. They also have some pretty famous fans, with artists as diverse as Aphex Twin, Octo Octa, Gorillaz and Mura Masa all having used them.

The next time someone calls a Volca a toy, take that as a recommendation - toys are fun to play with, after all.

4. FM synths sound cold

In 1983, Yamaha’s DX7 completely disrupted the synthesizer world, knocking analogue off its perch and introducing the world to the possibilities of digital synthesis. With its precise sounds and metallic, glassy tones, FM soon gained a reputation for being icy cold - particularly when compared to warm and fuzzy analogue synthesis.

While the famous EPiano 1 - the electric piano preset that dominated a thousand ‘80s hits - is admittedly on the chilly side, FM synths don’t have to be frostbite-inducing. A lot of this is down to the way you program them. While FM may excel at colder timbres, it can certainly do warm strings and brass too - you just don’t notice them as often, because they don’t stand out as much in a mix.

And, as FM synthesis has evolved over time, it’s also gotten warmer along the way. FM synthesis circa DX7 had only sine waves to play with. Modern FM synths are much more varied, with the Korg opsix (pictured above) offering 21 different waveshapes, ensuring many more toasty harmonics in the sound. They also often have analogue filters now, which can also heat things up a few degrees.

FM synthesis has a lot to offer. Frigid tones are just a small part of its repertoire.

5. GAS is bad

According to the armchair doctors of RedditMD, GAS is the worst affliction that can befall a musician. Short for Gear Acquisition Syndrome, it’s a colloquial acronym that describes what happens when purchasing new gear becomes more important than using and making music with said gear.

There’s a persistent attitude online that if you’re not making and releasing music with your gear or software then you’re some kind of worthless poseur. If you believe this, then getting caught up in buying gear can become shameful. Really, though, what’s so bad about it? As long as you’re having fun, who cares? And, with local music shops fast disappearing, there’s really no other way to try out gear than to buy first and ask questions later.

Not everyone sees it as a negative either. Take this anonymous Reddit user, for example: “(GAS) seems to be common in musicians, they love their instruments, and each one brings something a little different. Inevitably you have your favourite that you use all the time, but loving the tools you work with is not a problem, in my opinion.”

Of course, if you’re buying gear with money that you don’t have, that can become an issue. But having fun acquiring new gear within your means? Have at it.

6. Roland has lost it

Spend enough time in the online synth community and you’ll start to see a pattern, especially when a new Roland product is announced. The story goes that the company has fallen off - it just isn’t as good as it was back in the day. This is largely due to the fact that it famously doesn’t “chase ghosts”, meaning that it won’t clone its own past products.

This refusal to dwell in the past is particularly irksome to those who pine for the halcyon days of analogue - never mind the fact that clones of the instruments they want are already available from a variety of competitors, both large and small.

Whether Roland is as innovative today as it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s is certainly up for debate - many of its most lauded products, such as the 808, 909 and 303, were actually failures at the time of release - but it remains a reputable company with a wide variety of successful product releases every year.

Just because it’s not focusing solely on the development of retro-styled analogue synths (although it occasionally still does), that doesn’t mean Roland is no longer a force to be reckoned with. The company continues to release affordable and innovative products that consistently rank highly in our reviews: just a few months ago, we included its P-6 sampler in our round-up of 2024's best gear.

7. Your monitors suck

Have you ever experienced this? You post a flex photo of your studio to a Facebook group, fishing for a few compliments on the set-up that you’re really rather proud of, and then the insults begin to roll in: “When are you going to get new monitors?” “I’ll bet you don’t mix your own music with those speakers.” “Ew, Rokits.”

Despite being consistently well-rated and used by, well, pretty much everyone in the entire world, KRK’s Rokit monitors have become a target of internet scorn. Perhaps because they’re popular, or perhaps because they’re not quite specialist enough, they’re the gatekeeper’s first port of call when they want to take you down a peg.

Are there better monitors out there? Of course there are. But not everyone has that kind of expendable income, especially not in these days of mindless tariffs and sky-high inflation. Isn’t knowing your monitors and how they react to the room the most important thing anyway? And speaking of rooms…

8. Without sound treatment, your studio is worthless

Once the trolls get tired of picking you apart your monitors, they’ll inevitably move on to the next low-hanging fruit: the lack of acoustic treatment in your studio. Oh, the eternal shame to be sans rock wool, bereft of bass traps, and short of sound-deadening panels. You may as well put your gear on Reverb and take up golfing because with those bare walls, you’re now persona non grata.

Don’t worry. Many home studios are without sound treatment of any kind. You can happily - and successfully - make music without it. Proper treatment could make things easier, sure, but only after spending a lot of money and/or time setting it up. Not to mention the fact that not everyone owns their own home and most landlords won’t take too kindly to you drilling a bunch of big holes in their property.

If you’re concerned about your room and don’t have the means to put up treatment, there’s always room correction software to help out.

9. DAWs have their own sound

Here’s a myth that refuses to die, despite plenty of tests having irrefutably proven otherwise. Every DAW has its own sound, some say, with Ableton Live leaving a different sonic fingerprint on a track than, say, Pro Tools or Logic Pro. And now even Bob Horn is claiming that Pro Tools meters have a sound too?

Let’s put this to bed once and for all: DAWs (and meters!) don’t sound different. They’re recording digitally to ones and zeroes. There’s no ‘sound’ being imprinted on them. Of course, a DAW's stock plugins will affect the sound you get out of them - but bouncing out audio as-is will give you the same audio file, every time.

10. Moog synths are low-quality now

Whenever a beloved company changes owners, rumours start to circulate. This is doubly true for Moog Music, who were bought by inMusic in 2023. Moog synths were famously made in Asheville, North Carolina and now that’s all changed, leading to a drastic drop in quality. Or so the gossip says.

While inMusic hasn’t gone into too much detail about what, in fact, has changed, it seems that Moog may have been manufacturing components in Asia all along, with assembly happening locally in Asheville. That will continue for Moog’s high-ticket items, while the rest of the products will be put together where the components are made.

As for a change in quality? While it’s true that some users are vocal about issues they’ve experienced with some modern Moog products such as the Grandmother, just as many have attested to their robustness and roadworthiness. Is this just a case of a vocal few dominating the conversation? Or a bias from people who disapprove of an independent brand being eaten up by a corporate giant? Either way, the vast majority of Moog users are not reporting problems.

Moog synthesizers continue to be highly-rated musical instruments with a sound that thousands adore. If you’re concerned about quality control, hang on to your warranty card (not a bad piece of advice for any purchase, certainly).

In the sweltering summer of 1995, sci-fi-loving, Northern Irish indie-rock trio Ash (Tim Wheeler - vocals and guitar; Mark Hamilton - bass, and drummer Rick McMurray), rocketed to just outside of the UK top ten with their infectious indie/punk-pop anthem Girl from Mars.

Their previous single, Kung Fu, which was a thrilling, two-minute, Ramones-like homage to martial arts movies, had only reached number 57 in the charts, but Girl from Mars took them into the big time, hitting the radio just as Wheeler and Hamilton (who were both 18) were finishing their A-levels.

It proved that the Undertones weren’t the only Northern Irish outfit who knew how to get their teenage kicks with a joyous and energetic guitar pop tune.

Opening with some acoustic guitar strumming, Wheeler’s youthful yet wistful vocals asked us if we remembered the time that he knew a girl from Mars. Before going on to remind us of the tale…

We'd stay up late playing cards, Henri Winterman cigars
And she never told me her name
I still love you, the girl from Mars

With a shriek of feedback, the whole song then exploded, roaring and accelerating into a delirious, fuzzy monster.

As the song progressed, Wheeler further recalled this whirlwind summer romance with a mysterious female alien, where there’s 'electricity in the air' and 'a strange light shimmering over the sea'. Tim remembers the two star-crossed lovers spending the evening ‘Twisting all through the night on the terrace.”

Sadly, so soon after she’s arrived from space, the object of Wheeler’s desire was on her way back to Mars, and Wheeler was left staring forlornly at the stars…

Was it just a dream… and was she really from Mars?

Girl from Mars is a brilliant fusion of teenage lust, adolescent heartbreak and sci-fi romanticism that ignited indie club dance-floors and festival mosh pits that halcyon summer of 1995 and long beyond.

Wheeler wrote the song - the second single released in advance of Ash’s number one, platinum-selling 1996 debut album, 1977 - in his bedroom at the family home in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland.

Part of the inspiration came from his love of sci-fi (underlined by the album’s Star Wars release year-referencing title) which was also shared by US band Pixies.

Wheeler was an avid fan of the Boston legends, particularly their 1991 album, Trompe le Monde, which thematically had one foot in the quirkier side of UFO conspiracy theories…

“I loved Trompe le Monde - it was such a cool record”, Wheeler tells MusicRadar, adding: “It [the idea for the song] also came from Bowie and Star Wars. My sister is 18 years older than me - she was into Bowie, and her and her friend had written ‘Life on Mars’ on the wall of our rehearsal room, which had also been her den when she was a kid. So, right from our very first rehearsal, Mars was always hanging over our heads.”

He adds: “I was also looking at the TV listings and there was a film called The Girl from Mars, which was on at two or three in the morning. I didn’t watch it, or bother to tape it, but as soon as I saw the title, my mind went off and I imagined this whole story without ever seeing the film. I think it was a made-for-TV film - I’ve still never seen it. I thought it was such a good song title, and I knew I had to write a song about it.”

Another inspiration for Girl from Mars was teenage angst, which Wheeler was experiencing after breaking up with his first girlfriend. “I’d had a blissful year being 15 - I had my first girlfriend and Ash had got together,” he recalls.

“All of a sudden, we’d gone from being a real laughing stock [heavy metal] band called Vietnam, who were having disastrous gigs, but, suddenly, Ash coalesced - our ability kicked in and all the songs got better. I was really happy when I was 15, but things fell apart when I was 16 and I think I was going through depression - I broke up with my girlfriend and, after that rush of the band coming together, I wasn’t sure if things were going to happen with it.

“I was listening to Joy Division and The Smiths - that was the stuff that really spoke to me - but, at the same time, I’d seen Teenage Fanclub open for Nirvana [at the King’s Hall, Belfast] in 1992, and Ioved their melodies and beautiful chords, so I was channelling that when I wrote Girl from Mars.

“I was sort of writing about missing my first girlfriend and missing those euphoric feelings from the year before. I’d also been to France on caravan holidays with my family and little bits of the lyrics came from those trips - we’d found some cool kids to hang out with, buy tiny Kronenbourg beers and drink them on the beach. One time we found some Henri Winterman cigars, so that memory snuck into the lyrics.”

Sadly, Ash never got offered a sponsorship deal from Dutch cigar brand Henri Winterman, but, amazingly, Girl from Mars did end up being used as the telephone hold music for NASA! “That was the year it came out - I thought that was genius,” says Wheeler. “Hopefully it brightened up some people’s day, although I’m not sure who would be calling NASA.”

As well as a failed extraterrestrial romance and teenage angst, Girl from Mars is also about escapism - getting away from grey and rain-soaked Northern Ireland to visit sunnier climes.

“I guess it’s a real summer song. We’d spent most of my childhood summers going to Kerry in southwest Ireland, where we had great times, but when we went to France the weather was guaranteed to be amazing all summer. I was loving that and that fed into the song too,” says Wheeler.

Tim remembers writing Girl from Mars on a 1977 Fender Stratocaster, telling us: “I only had two guitars; I didn’t have an acoustic. I had a [Gibson] Explorer copy - I think the brand was called Artist, and it was a cheap little guitar that came with a practice amp - but for my sixteenth birthday I got a ’77 Strat for £250. Someone was selling it in the listings of our local newspaper. So, by the time I was writing Girl from Mars, I’d switched to the ’77 Strat, which was my main guitar, so I’m pretty sure I would’ve written it on that.”

The initial 4-track demo of Girl from Mars that Wheeler recorded before the band was let loose on the song is very different from the final version - it’s a jangly, mid-tempo effort and sounds a lot like its earliest musical influence, Teenage Fanclub, rather than a punky-power-pop anthem.

“That demo shows how I was seeing it to start with - a dreamy little song. I used to borrow the school’s 4-track, it was nice of them to lend it to me,” remembers Tim.

“We also used to record demos at this little studio in Strangford [Northern Ireland]. The guy there had a copycat WEM tape delay unit, which was kind of in bits, but he’d lend it to me, so I made a little sci-fi intro and outro with delay echoes - it was my first sketch and it was unusual because I didn’t often bother recording demos of songs, but with that one I felt an urge. Once we started playing it with the band, it got pumped up and sped up - there was a big jump from the demo and it took on a kind of Buzzcocks quality, which is funny because I hadn’t really listened to the Buzzcocks. I knew Nirvana were into them… Years later, we did gigs with the Buzzcocks and I was like, ‘My God, there are a lot of similarities…’ Nice chords and nice melodies, high energy and high speed.

“Once we started playing the song in rehearsals, we transformed it, and when we started playing it at gigs quite soon after that, I can remember that people would say, ‘Oh, I really like that song…’ They were singling it out at gigs, and so were close friends whose taste we trusted. That took me by surprise - I did really like the song but right from the start it was connecting with people. We’d had that with a couple of songs before but not to that level.”

Someone who had an early input into the song was Wheeler’s younger brother, Pat. “I always tried my songs out on him because his bedroom was next to mine, so if I’d written something and I was excited about it, I’d play it to him,” says Wheeler. “He’s a guy who is always encouraging and gives good feedback - he ended up being an architect, so he’s a creative spirit as well. He would offer up cool ideas - on Girl from Mars, he said I should do a quiet breakdown. That’s always been a great part of the song, especially live, it’s amazing.”

To our ears, the killer melodic guitar solo in Girl from Mars sounds like it has a Dinosaur Jr. influence, and Wheeler agrees: “Yeah - Dinosaur Jr. were a big influence on us. Right from the start of Ash, at our first rehearsal, we attempted a cover of The Wagon. I loved his [J Mascis’s] soloing. A few years before Ash, I’d wanted to be a metal kid and I was trying to solo, but I wasn’t technically very good. I liked fast bits and solos and showing off. So, when I discovered Dinosaur Jr. I was like, ‘oh - this guy has the technique, and he gets very exploratory, like Neil Young, but you can also hear a metal influence in there’. J Mascis is definitely a big influence on my solos.”

Girl from Mars shares thematic and sonic similarities with that other great punky power-pop song about interstellar romance, Another Girl, Another Planet, by late ‘70s English New Wave band, The Only Ones, which, coincidentally, also features a brilliant melodic guitar solo.

“Yeah - that’s awesome,” says Wheeler. “I’m not sure I’d heard that song at the time, but when Girl from Mars came out, I remember Bernard Butler saying that it was the modern-day version of Another Girl, Another Planet, and he meant that in a good way. So, that sent me off in search of the song and I was like, ‘Oh my God…’ ”

Wheeler had written Girl from Mars ahead of Ash making their 1994 mini-album Trailer for label Infectious Records, but recognising the surefire hit potential of the song, the band were advised by their manager and their label to hold off from recording it and to save it for their debut album proper.

“When we signed with the label, they’d heard Girl from Mars at our gigs and they knew it had hit potential, and our manager, Tav [Stephen ‘Tav’ Taverner], knew it right from the start. He was like, ‘That’s a hit, but let’s not record that for anything [yet]’. So, when we did our first Peel Session and our mini-album, we held it back,” says Wheeler.

“Between Tav and the label, they knew the song could be a hit but for it to be a hit you needed to be available to promote the hell out of it, but we probably weren’t ready for that and we didn’t have the time because we were still finishing school. So, in the end, the song came out a month after we’d left school.”

The initial recording sessions for Girl from Mars took place at the legendary Rockfield Studios, in Monmouthshire, Wales, where classic rock acts like Queen and Black Sabbath had made records - Oasis recorded almost all of their 1995 album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? there with producer, Owen Morris, who was also at the controls for Girl from Mars. Morris went on to produce Ash’s album 1977, which was also mostly made at Rockfield.

“We recorded the rest of the album six months after Girl from Mars came out. As far as I remember, we recorded Girl from Mars in the Easter holidays in 1995 - we went to Rockfield for a few days,” remembers Wheeler. “It was amazing - we’d done a session at Loco Studios [in South Wales] at Christmas [1994], where we did [the singles] Angel Interceptor and Kung Fu, but things were going well, so the label spent a bit more money on us to go to a fancier studio. Owen was in Rockfield a lot around that time, doing (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?”

“Rockfield was a nice residential studio - every room was en-suite with a jacuzzi and each room had a nice TV and there was catering; it was a very cool experience. I remember Owen got a nice groove [on Girl from Mars] - there was just a little bit of swing in it, and he made sure we didn’t race off too much with the tempo. He allowed it to be fast but with a little bit of a groove to it. I think he added something really cool. He also added some feedback drones behind it, almost like Eno, Fripp and Visconti on Heroes [by David Bowie]. Then he mixed the song and we went back to school to get ready for our A-levels.”

However, Morris’s mix was ultimately deemed as not being up to scratch.

“Between everyone, we thought it wasn’t quite as good as it could’ve been. It had a slight darkness to it - it wasn’t quite as poppy - and there were bits of my vocals that I didn’t like,” explains Wheeler. “There were a few little things that I wanted to tweak and add. I’d been listening to a lot of Beach Boys, and I wanted to add some timpani, and, between the label and our manager, they wanted someone else to have a crack at the mix.”

That someone turned out to be Phil Thornalley, who’d produced The Cure’s 1982 gloom-fest Pornography and had played bass for Robert Smith’s goth-rock outfit, but was also known for his production, engineering and mixing work with acts including Duran Duran, Thompson Twins, XTC, Psychedelic Furs and Prefab Sprout - after working with Ash, he went on to produce Natalie Imbruglia’s 1997 hit single Torn, which he also co-wrote.

“So, we went in with Phil Thornalley - I can’t remember when we did that; it must’ve been on a weekend and it was around the time of our school exams. It was pretty hectic and I don’t think we told Owen,” says Wheeler. “We were going in to do another mix of it and we added a few elements. I think I replaced the electric guitar in the intro and the breakdown with an acoustic, and we added timpani. There was a sax player who came in to do some stuff, but you can only really hear that in the outro.

“We did the additional recording and the mix at RAK Studios, in London, and then we had to do some B-sides: Astral Conversations with Toulouse-Lautrec and Cantina Band [from Star Wars]. I think at some point Phil Thornalley walked out of the session because he got pissed off about something. Maybe he thought it was ridiculous that we were doing Cantina Band or that Astral Conversations didn’t have enough of a song - it was quite experimental… I don’t know. So, Phil walked out of the session, but Owen was in town, so he came down and helped us mix Cantina Band, but, in the meantime, he found out that we’d gone behind his back and done the other version [of Girl from Mars]. It’s amazing that he came back in and helped us to finish it, but he was pissed off with us for a long time about that. It was quite mad, but I was just 18 and I was trying to keep everyone happy.”

When the new version of Girl from Mars was sent out to radio stations its infectious hyperactive energy resulted in massive amounts of airplay. It peaked just outside of the top ten - at number 11 - in the UK singles chart, becoming Ash’s first top 40 hit. It also reached number 16 in the Irish singles chart too.

“In those days, your single would go to radio about six weeks before it would come out. So, I think during the last couple weeks of me doing my exams, it was starting to get heavy radio play, and that's one of the reasons it became such a big hit - stations like Radio 1 hammered it, and so did MTV,” says Wheeler.

“We did a video straight after leaving school. I used to get in the car, drive home from school, and hear Girl from Mars on Radio 1 in the daytime - that was a buzz like no other. When I was doing my A-levels, I also had to do lots of Australian phone interviews, as things were kicking off for us in Australia.”

Two days after he finished his A-levels, Ash played Glastonbury, but despite Wheeler pursuing his rock ‘n’ roll dream during his studies, his school education didn’t suffer: “I got two Bs and a C, which was good enough to get me into university, but, luckily, I never ended up going there,” he says.

Thanks to the success of Girl from Mars, Ash secured their debut appearance on iconic TV music show Top of the Pops.

“I sang live on it,” says Wheeler, whose fellow band members performed to a backing track. “There was quite a lot of pressure on me - especially as I kicked the song off. We tried to give a lot of energy, and it was good. I think it did well and it connected, the show was huge back then.”

Since it was released, Girl from Mars has had a permanent place in Ash’s live setlist - the band aren’t one of those acts who shy away from playing what’s arguably their most well-known song.

“We’ve got enough other big singles that it doesn’t feel too different from some of the other hits, but, over the years, it’s grown in a way even more than anything else we’ve ever done and it’s stood the test of time more” says Wheeler.

“I guess I’m very fond of it and it’s connected with a lot of people. We play it at every show, and it always goes down amazingly. As soon as you play it, you know it’s going to kick off. We normally play it second to last in the main set - it’s always a real sweet spot. Over the years, we used to play it earlier to kick things off, but it seems to work nicely towards the end - it’s a nice thing to build up to. When I play it now, I sometimes think back to those huge festival slots that we had at Reading and Glastonbury - it would always go off at those huge shows.”

This October, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of 1977, Ash are reissuing their debut album as a special 2LP or 2CD set, as well as a digital version. The new editions feature extra tracks, B-sides, live versions and rarities, including a new demo mix of Girl from Mars. From September, the band are embarking on a world tour, on which they’ll play the whole of 1977, as well as other songs from throughout their career.

So, international travel is on the cards for Wheeler over the next few months, but how does he feel about space travel these days? Would he like to go on a mission to Mars?

“I would find it quite terrifying now to be honest,” he says. “I like the Buck Rogers version [of space] where you’re walking around, and you don’t need any fancy headgear and all that. Last year, we did a video for [new song] Give Me Back My World, where we were in replica space suits and it was incredibly claustrophobic. I was like, ‘wow - this is so intense…’

“I’ve read a lot about the Apollo missions, and it seems like it must’ve been so terrifying. I do like hearing about how when you’re looking down at the world how small it can look and what perspective that can give you - that sounds amazing - but going to Mars is a whole other thing; an epic voyage. I’m not sure about it at this point in my life - I’ve got kids… I’m happier to stay on Earth, but it’s nice to look at the stars.”

Ash’s 1977 30th Anniversary Edition is released on October 16 via BMG. For tour dates, visit Ash's official website.

Any emerging artist with a strong fanbase who creates beguiling and innovative music will inevitably find themselves the focus of music supervisors eager to license, or ‘sync’, their songs to film, TV, advertisements or video games.

As most musicians know, sync deals generally utilise tracks from artists’ back catalogues but in some cases, the artist has created such a stir that they may be approached directly to contribute a work-in-progress or new songs specifically for a project.

This is what happened to Lana Del Rey in 2012, when Australian film director, producer and screenwriter Baz Luhrmann approached her to contribute a song for the soundtrack of his forthcoming reimagining of F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan.

Luhrmann was one of many people who were captivated by Del Rey’s talent. He recognised that her vintage Hollywood aesthetic and melancholic glamour would align seamlessly with the role he had in mind for a song in The Great Gatsby.

The song Del Rey contributed was Young And Beautiful and it would become the signature track for the film.

It is one of the high points of her career and a composition that captures Del Rey at her most haunting and exquisite.

It is now 15 years since Lana Del Rey emerged from seemingly nowhere with the song Video Games, a baroque pop ballad that would become a viral sensation.

Her breakthrough album Born To Die, released in January 2012, cemented her reputation. Hip-hop beats and sweeping cinematic strings converged to create a spacious enigmatic sound while grainy, evocative retro footage in her uploaded home-made videos exuded a powerful mystique.

Given the cinematic nature of Del Rey’s music it was no great surprise when director, producer and screenwriter Baz Luhrmann – one of the most visually-driven, maximalist directors in modern cinema – reached out.

Seemingly, Del Rey wasn’t Luhrmann’s first choice. Speaking at BAFTA’s Life In Pictures event in September 2022, Luhrmann said he approached Prince to write the lead song for the soundtrack.

“Prince had worked on a song for six months,” said Luhrmann, “and then suddenly decided to write a new one and it wasn’t right.”

There were also reportedly some rights complications as it was a “co-owned piece”.

At this point Luhrmann and his team approached Del Rey. Luhrmann believed that her signature melancholic, glamorous, and nostalgic persona made her the perfect artist to capture the opulence of the 1920s Jazz Age and the tragic romance of the character of Daisy Buchanan (played by Mulligan).

As anyone who has read Fitzgerald’s classic novel will know, the story focuses on mysterious, enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby – played in Luhrmann’s film by Leonardo DiCaprio – who is obsessed about reuniting with Buchanan, his former lover.

When Luhrmann and Del Rey first spoke about the project, she was working on her third EP, Paradise, with songwriter and producer Rick Nowels, a longtime collaborator who would go on to work on eight of her albums, from Born To Die (2012) through to Blue Banisters (2021).

“Baz had heard something else that I did and he wanted to know if I could write some ‘memory cues’ for when Daisy was thinking back to how she felt about Gatsby,” said Del Rey in a June 2013 interview with Jessie Jessup on 102.1 The Edge FM.

Del Rey and Nowels had been working on a song for the Paradise EP, which ultimately didn’t make the final tracklist. When she and Luhrmann first met in 2012 she sang him the chorus of this song as an idea for the track for The Great Gatsby.

“And so I had an idea for a phrase ‘Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?’ and it was kind of a long phrase to fit into a song,” continued Del Rey.

Luhrmann was inspired. “I was blessed with this beautiful, if you like, kind of innocent but slightly dark track that Rick Nowels and Lana Del Rey had come up with,” said Luhrmann in a trailer for the film, in which he talks about the gestation of the song.

From the outset, Luhrmann was directly involved with the development of the song, which would become called simply Young And Beautiful.

Luhrmann approached the concept of the song from the internal perspective of the character of Daisy Buchanan, capturing her tragic vulnerability, glamour, and profound insecurity about whether love can survive once youth and beauty have faded.

He wanted the ‘memory cues’ for the character of Daisy to capture these tragic insecurities and her fear of losing love over time.

At first, Luhrmann intended to place the song at the point in the film where Buchanan and Gatsby first meet. But he then realised the song could have a greater impact elsewhere. “It becomes clear that it's actually the major love theme in the moment [that] Gatsby shows Daisy around the castle,” Luhrmann said.

Luhrmann then realised that he would need a different vocal treatment for the song, which involved working directly with Del Rey and Nowels in the studio.

“But I'm in Sydney mixing the movie and Lana’s in Los Angeles with Rick Nowels,” recalled Luhrmann in a trailer for the film. “Thank you for Skype. I mean, really, we were very effectively able to have a Skype session where Lana was in Rick’s studio in LA, I was in my little garret in Sydney, and I sat there looking at Lana.”

Moments from this session are captured in the interview with Luhrmann in the official trailer for the film. “We’re very lucky that this song found the film, and most importantly, that you’re singing it,” Luhrmann tells the broadly smiling Del Rey via Skype as she sits down in front of a laptop 7500 miles away in Nowels’ studio in LA.

Luhrmann recalled that working on the session remotely with Del Rey and Nowels was as intimate as actually being in the studio with her.

“She was tremendously responsive to direction and very good at finessing things,” he said. “And she was a bit nervous at first. She just sat down and she sang. I directed her. Rick was there. You know, I wanted her to improvise.”

From the outset, Luhrmann was involved in shaping and editing the direction of the song, even reportedly amending the lyrics slightly to fit the narrative of his film.

“Abstractions,” he suggests to Del Rey at one point as she prepares to lay down some additional vocals that can be utilised throughout the film, “things that people aren’t gonna get on a record, you know?”

Luhrman referred to these as vocal textures. “[She was] terrific at doing that,” he said. “And then when we go back into the past, they're kind of a bit dreamlike”

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine anyone better suited than Lana Del Rey to write and sing Young And Beautiful. The characters in Del Rey’s songs occupy the same rarefied world as those in Fitzgerald’s iconic novel.

The themes and atmosphere too are strikingly similar – glamour, opulence, nostalgia for an idealised past, romance, reinvention and the inherent flaws within the American dream. The Great Gatsby is also a novel of youth squandered, a theme reflected in Del Rey’s work.

Sonically, Young And Beautiful is a majestic, heartbreaking chamber pop ballad with lush piano, deep sweeping orchestral strings, cinematic grandeur, and vulnerable lyricism about ageing and unconditional love.

It is vast yet spacious and Del Rey’s warm, rich reverb-soaked vocals sound effortlessly warm and rich. “I’ve seen the world, done it all, had my cake now,” she croons on the first verse. “Diamonds, brilliant, and Bel Air now/Hot summer nights, mid-July/When you and I were forever wild.”

Listening to Young And Beautiful now, it sounds like classic, almost cliched Lana Del Rey. But beneath the sweeping orchestration and breathy, echoey vastness, sits a stunningly-crafted song with strong, memorable hooks.

Young And Beautiful would ultimately be reworked by an orchestra and the song returns time and again through the film as a romantic motif for DiCaprio’s and Mulligan’s characters.

Released as a single on 23 April 2013, Young And Beautiful peaked at No 23 in the UK Singles Chart and No 22 in the US Billboard Hot 100. Elsewhere it fared better. It reached Top 10 in eight countries, including No 1 in Russia. No 2 in Greece and No 8 in Italy and Australia.

While not all journalists were taken with the song, the critical response was largely positive. Writer Davis Berry in the Canadian journal National Post concluded that Young And Beautiful picks up where Video Games left off. Berry added that the song’s “obsession with decay and the fleeting nature of the good life certainly resonates”.

It’s worth remembering that Young And Beautiful was written in the same year that her breakthrough album Born To Die was released. For all the viral acclaim, these were very early days for Del Rey, who was still in the ascent. It’s a testament to the song that, almost 15 years on, it remains a standout track in her rich and extensive body of work.

Young And Beautiful often charts highly in retrospective polls of the best Lana Del Rey songs. In a 2022 poll in The Guardian, Young And Beautiful was ranked No 3 in a poll of 20 greatest Del Rey works.

As writer Alexis Petridis put it: “By some distance the best thing on the star-studded soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, Young and Beautiful is Lana Del Rey at her most haunting. Co-opted by rather than commissioned for the film, its saga of fleeting youth and celebrity fits its story perfectly.”

Whenever we discuss the so-called ‘loudness war’ here at MusicRadar, a key citation is often Metallica’s 2008 album Death Magnetic. The extreme volume of this Rick Rubin-produced record was the result of deliberate mixing and mastering choices, designed to make the tracks as in-your-face as possible when heard on radio - albeit to the detriment of dynamic range…

Mixing the record back then was Andrew Scheps - now universally regarded as one of the industry’s most accomplished mixing engineers. Scheps has overseen records from Adele, Green Day, Lana Del Rey, Lady Gaga and Justin Timberlake to name just a few. Back in 2008, when the loudness war was in full force, Scheps unfairly swallowed some of the criticism for the record’s ultra-extreme peaks.

With the loudness war now (largely) consigned to history, we spoke to Scheps at length about his career in 2023. Andrew reflected on that time period… and the fact that Death Magnetic in a sense was the last word in the audio conflict, as it couldn’t really be topped when it came to volume…

“I was the poster child for ‘loud’ because of that Death Magnetic record. You know, everybody hated that Metallica record that was ‘the loudest thing’. My line is that the loudness war is over because I won. And that's it. And that was the record that did it,” Scheps told us.

“I think, in pop radio, there really was a loudness war,” Scheps elaborated. “You had to be loud. But radio stations compress the crap out of everything. Everything that plays on Radio 1 is exactly the same level, it doesn't matter what level the mix was. So I think it was all a little bit inflated, and it was a lot just completely outside of my awareness… I never did anything because it had to be louder. Ever. Everything I did was always because ‘it's not feeling right’.

For Scheps, sometimes going quiet just wasn’t an option when working with Metallica; “There are people who will say ‘well just make it a quieter mix, and we can turn the volume up,’ but it's just not as simple as that. Forcing all that audio energy through a smaller hole because it's bigger? It just sounds different. It really does.”

On the recording of Death Magnetic specifically - and just how a simple guitars, bass and drum setup yielded such volume - Scheps pointed to Metallica’s technical proficiency as the real underlying engine driving the sound…

“Greg Fidelman recorded that. But no, there aren't a ton of guitars. I think sometimes people just forget that everybody in Metallica is really, really good at what they do. I mean, James’s rhythm parts are insane. His right hand looks like it's not even moving. And it's one of the most aggressive, precise things you've ever heard in your life. So two of those? That's a big machine. If you put more on there, it would actually end up getting smaller because they would just start collapsing together. So it really is just the band,” explained Scheps.

“You're so lucky to work on projects like that. It's not like they aren't still hard work. And it's not like you don't have to do anything. It's really hard work and there's a lot to do. Those mixes took a long time to get right. Songs are very long, and you have to keep people engaged the whole time, but to have that raw material? You know, it's a pretty good start.”

Read our full interview with Andrew Scheps here.

Riding high in the pantheon of the most aura-farming rockstars, Motörhead’s Lemmy garnered respect from all corners of the musical map.

Formerly of Hawkwind, Lemmy (aka Ian Fraser Kilmister) founded Motörhead in 1975 and remained the group’s only continuous member, with his coruscating vocals and thunderous bass the pivotal centre that his fellow Motörhead-men orbited.

But the sideburn-sporting Lemmy, who sadly passed away in December 2015, wasn’t just a lover of high-octane riffage, he also had something of a lifelong fixation with rockabilly; a genre that stemmed from the early rock ’n’ roll he’d first fallen in love with as a teen.

Back in 2012, MusicRadar chatted to Lemmy about this unlikely side-passion which he indulged with his other band, The Head Cat.

The band included Stray Cats drummer Slim Jim Phantom and guitarist Danny B Harvey. Ahead of a show at the Roxy in Los Angeles, MusicRadar sat down with Lemmy for a chat about rockabilly and how this other strand of his career began…

“We were doing a track for this album [Swing Cats: A Special Tribute To Elvis], and when we were done, we started fooling around with guitars. Before you knew it, we were playing a bunch of songs. It came easy - and that's the best way, isn't it? That's how you know you've got something worth doing,” Lemmy told us.

“I wasn't looking to start another group, so it's probably a big mistake that I went ahead with this. [laughs] But you know, when you've got some chemistry, and everybody knows the same songs, and they're good at what they're doing, why waste the opportunity?”

One of the big benefits of the Head Cat for Lemmy was the lack of pressure on it compared to Motörhead;

“Touring with Motörhead is so time-consuming. It's all I can do to find the time to do anything else. I don't know when The Head Cat is going to go into the studio again – there's no plans – but if we get two days off, we could make another record.

“We just get together and play, that's all,” continued Lemmy. “We can play just about anything, you know. Name a song, play it, see if the other guys know it – that's what we do in the studio. If you can't remember something, then pick another song. It's pretty easy."

His love of rockabilly (and indeed, rock in general) stemmed from attending a Billy Fury show in his youth, and that’s where his fixation began…

“Billy had the whole star thing down, had a silver suit and the whole bit. He was from Liverpool, same as The Beatles. Ballads were his main thing, but he did rock 'n' roll on his B-sides - that's what I liked, the rock stuff.”

We asked Lemmy for his perspective on how that original form of rock ’n’ roll became more watered down and chart-angled as the 1960s grew. But Lemmy was surprisingly open-minded;

“I didn't care, really – still don't. Just as long as it's a good song, that's all I ever cared about. The word 'pop' is just shorter for saying 'popular.' Just 'cause something's popular, it can still be good. In fact, if more people are buying it, then you must be doing something right. People look down on stuff that sells. What do you call that? Downward snobbery, I guess.”

Read our full classic interview with Lemmy here

Cast your mind back to the golden age of music criticism when formulaic was one of the ultimate pejoratives – the caveat to give us the ick. How times change.

Pop formulas are on the syllabus at music schools. Melodies and song structures are engineered to anticipate our expectations rather than confound them. To quote Computer Music’s 2021 tutorial on Songwriting basics: how to create a modern pop song using just 4 chords, individuality is welcome, but, “if you want your tunes to fit well against the current landscape, they’ll inevitably need to conform to some extent to what your audience is expecting”. That’s just how it is.

But the brothers Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks never bought into any of that. They exist, Sparks exists, to summon something new out of the ether. Probably something a little weird.

Sparks are tribunes of pop’s avant-garde wing, career subversives who will give you what you want just as long as it’s a sense of surprise. Who else would advertise their “first full concert album” as having been recorded “at the beautiful Taruntius Crater” on the moon, with Hollywood A-lister Cate Blanchett the LA duo’s emcee for the evening?

The glint in Russell Mael’s eye as he joins MusicRadar over Zoom suggests Live On The Moon has a more terrestrial provenance but where and when on their MAD! Tour that would be telling.

No, this is Sparks going once more unto the breach, going “beyond” the music and deeper into their own universe, daring the audience to follow.

“The people that we have always liked the most in pop music have like, it seems to me, a universe around them where you can’t separate the person, or the artist, from their work,” says Mael. “It’s one and the same, and I think that it’s not something that we ever set out to do, but it’s just the way we are as artists, wanting to create a universe through the music – the lyrics, the image, the videos, the album artwork…”

The brothers Mael have been a blur of reinvention since the beginning, when they were presenting glam rock as radical pop theatre, a medium for absurdist lyrics, and over the course of 28 albums their stylistic convolutions have augmented the rock-and-pop idiom, laying the ground for the ‘80s synth-pop explosion, reinventing the rock opera…

You have Russell, the whirligig master of ceremonies with a puckish stage presence and falsetto range. You have Ron on keys/synth, stoic and theatrically impassive, his Chaplin/Hitler moustache now clipped into a less troubling pencil profile redolent of old Hollywood.

Even after Edgar Wright made a documentary about them, the brothers still seem enigmatic, wired to a different grid.

Mael feels today’s pop lacks something else beyond the immediate.

“[With] a lot of artists now, there’s a lot of this confessional kind of pop music that seems to be, like, it’s literally about, ‘Oh, that guy, he left me. I’m gonna pay him back!’ It is a lot of that,” he says. “It’s this confessional stuff that is kind of one-dimensional. It just seems like it’s there on the surface, and it’s literally about that.”

“What I really like is people who have a craft, or a craft for their music, where you care about the lyrics going beyond [that], and hopefully the music is going beyond, and the music always being challenging, and that you have – like you said – created a universe, and the rules within that universe can be anything, because it’s your world that you created.”

This pop-auteur theory afforded Sparks the freedom to follow their musical curiosity to see where it might lead. Not everyone wanted to follow them on that journey. The universe Sparks created bewildered some critics.

Their reinventions were a little too far ahead of the game, like when their heads got turned by the futuristic sounds of Giorgio Moroder’s studio work with Donna Summer as the disco era embraced new synthesized sounds. Why couldn’t the disco ball shine light across Sparks’ expanding musical universe? They would do a Moroder record their way.

“And for us, it was all consistent,” says Mael. “But at the time, you know, some [people], especially critics, thought that we were being blasphemous to whatever they thought our cause should be, that ‘it’s not rock music anymore’, or whatever. ‘You’re using electronics,’ and all that. Just being able to shift and work – with any kind of backdrop – that’s what we really enjoy. It’s the freedom that, we have a band, but it doesn’t mean that you have to use the band in a traditional way on every song.”

This freedom took Sparks from the bombastic avant-rock theatre of their 1974 hit This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us to the ecstasies of the Moroder-produced studio album Nº1 In Heaven in just five years. Welcome to the future.

Electric guitars were temporarily decommissioned in favour of the synthesizer, and yet tracks such as Beat The Clock, Tryouts For The Human Race, and The Number One Song in Heaven were quintessential Sparks. This was the Mael brothers doing disco, even if stumbling out of Studio 54 in the wee small hours was never their scene.

“It’s never been, from our standpoint, a thing of being infatuated with club music, or dance music,” says Mael. “What we liked was the sound of what Giorgio was doing with I Feel Love, and that sort of thing, and so we thought that the marriage of electronics with what we were doing, and with our lyrics, and my singing and all, would be something really fresh and special.

“And so it wasn’t that we ever hung out at Studio 54 or anything. [Laughs] It’s probably about as far from our sensibility as you can get.”

In Moroder they had found a kindred spirit. Dan Wyman, who had just worked with John Carpenter on the Halloween score, was hired to program the synths. Keith Forsey, who gave Blondie’s Moroder-produced hit Call Me its propulsive beat, played drums.

Nº1 In Heaven was something new for Moroder, too. Here he was working with a band, with two brothers at the heart of it. It was a collaboration on a different scale.

“No matter how amazing Donna Summer was, it was a challenge for him to be working with people coming from a band sensibility,” says Mael. “And so I think that was something from his standpoint, too, that was exciting.”

Sparks came as prepared as they usually did, which meant that some material was written and the rest was “winged” in the studio as they went along.

“It’s kind of what we do, and I think that was also what made it interesting,” says Mael. “Nobody knew what the final outcome would be, and it came out like it did. And I think it’s just working with three really strong people – Ron, myself, and Giorgio – and each coming with our own strengths and abilities, and pooling those things together.”

The synthesizers and sequencers brought a different energy to Sparks, a relentlessness. Moroder’s electronic production had the transformative effect they were looking for. Repetition, especially in lyrics, has always been a leitmotif of the Mael brothers’ songwriting, vocal refrains repeated to the point of giddiness, but here there was an electronic accompaniment doing something similar with the instrumentation.

Looking back, Mael simply saw it as a chance for them to push themselves and come up with something different.

“We just like having challenges and being thrown into situations where we’re uncomfortable, and I think that that was a situation where we were uncomfortable because it was out of our normal element,” he says. “I think it’s always good to be thrown into situations where you are uncomfortable because hopefully something new will come of it.”

It is one of the reasons why Sparks have always been so keen on collaborating with filmmakers. Cinematic references abound in their discography, in paeans to Katharine Hepburn, Veronica Lake, Gone With The Wind, and Ingmar Bergman. Dramaturgy’s Fourth Wall would certainly be a challenge worth scaling, allowing the Maels to work both sides of the curtain with a knowing wink.

They famously came close to working with the late Jacques Tati on his Monsieur Hulot films, a picture titled Confusion in which the veteran French director considered killing the character off in an on-set accident with a prop gun.

Their title track for the movie ended up on 1976’s Big Beat, with Sparks performing two tracks from the album in the 1977 cult disaster thriller Rollercoaster. Sparks stepped in after Kiss turned it down and played Big Boy and Fill-er-up. A young Helen Hunt can be seen rocking out to them.

But Sparks had to wait until 2021 to really scratch their cinematic itch when they teamed up with director Leos Carax for Annette, the musical starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, with Carax co-writing lyrics alongside the band.

“It’s throwing you into a world that is not your normal world, and that there’s a whole other set of rules,” says Mael. “And you’re fresh coming into that with your own sensibility of how things should work. I think that’s why a movie like Annette was really special and unique, because it was not going at it with a kind of jaded knowledge of what you do when you’re making a movie – and especially a musical. Any situation like that where you’re forced to be in an uncomfortable environment is potentially good for the outcome.”

Live On The Moon opens with So May We Start, the curtain raiser from the Annette soundtrack, and dives deep into the Sparks catalogue.

There are lesser-performed tracks like Academy Award Performance (another Hollywood reference) and Whippings And Apologies from their 1972 sophomore album, A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing, and performing them alongside perennials such as The Nº1 Song In Heaven and Sparks’ calling card, This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us (hey, another Hollywood reference).

“It’s a special song,” says Mael. “It was special then. I think it’s still special and unique now. So it’s a song that we would be remiss, I think, not doing it – and we enjoy doing it, and the fans enjoy hearing it, too.”

When Mael looks out from the stage, he is seeing younger faces in the audience.

“Some of it – a lot of it – we owe to Edgar Wright with the documentary [The Sparks Brothers], because he introduced the band to a lot of people that weren’t aware of Sparks,” he says. “I think those new fans that were attracted from that movie, and also from Annette… They see the new albums, the latest albums as being the focal point, and then going back and discovering albums like Kimono My House [and] Nº1 In Heaven.”

The cinema can be a compelling recruiting sergeant. But maybe it’s also a question of the audience seeking out new thrills.

Sparks have always been ahead of their time but in an era of programmatic pop – and worse, an era in which AI programs have digested the pop formulas required to make music ex nihilo with no living human needed, maybe we need a band who is just too weird to be anything other than human. A band that invites us all to consider the absurdity of the human condition, and to rejoice in it.

• Live On The Moon is out now via Transgressive
• Catch Sparks live at Green Man Festival this weekend Aug 23, at York Barbican on Aug 25 and Cliffs Pavilion, Southend On Sea on August 26. See Sparks for ticket details.

In the ’80s, Aerosmith pulled off one of the most successful comebacks in the entire history of rock ’n’ roll. But the band couldn’t have done it on their own – and one of their key collaborators was songwriter Desmond Child.

Aerosmith’s career was in disarray in the early part of that decade. Drug and alcohol problems had affected the band’s live performances and personal relationships, leading to the departure of guitarists Joe Perry and Brad Whitford.

1982 album Rock In A Hard Place featured two new guitarists, Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay, alongside the band’s three remaining founder members – singer Steven Tyler, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer.

Rock In A Hard Place was the first Aerosmith album to fail to reach the US top 30 since Get Your Wings back in 1974. And even when Perry and Whitford returned for the band’s 1985 reunion album Done With Mirrors, their struggles continued. That album also peaked outside the top 30.

It was in 1986 that Aerosmith’s fortunes turned around – when their classic 1975 track Walk This Way was covered by hip-hop trio Run-DMC with Steven Tyler and Joe Perry as guest stars.

The revamped Walk This Way was a worldwide smash hit, reaching No 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. And in its wake, the post-rehab Aerosmith worked with three songwriters from outside of the band to create the 1987 album Permanent Vacation.

Those three songwriters were Jim Vallance (Bryan Adams’s collaborator-in-chief), Holly Knight (co-author of Pat Benatar’s Love Is A Battlefield and Animotion’s Obsession) and Desmond Child (the so-called ‘hit doctor’ who had worked with Bon Jovi, Cher, Bonnie Tyler and Kiss).

Child ended up co-writing three songs for Permanent Vacation – Heart’s Done Time, Angel and Dude (Looks Like A Lady). And he discusses the latter song in a new interview for Rock & Roll High School with Pete Ganbarg.

As Child recalls it, his introduction to Steven Tyler and Joe Perry happened as they were already working on this song.

He tells Pete Ganbarg: “I walked in, not even a hello, and Steven called me over to this corner where Joe was recording this backwards guitar that had like a boogie woogie kind of ‘na na’. Then Steven started singing ‘Cruisin’ for the ladies.’ And then they stopped and he said, ‘What do you think of that?’ I said, ‘That’s really bad.’ I don’t know why I was so bold that I said this: ‘I don’t think Van Halen would put that on the B-side of their worst record.’

“Steven said, ‘Well, when I first started singing that hook, I was singing ‘Dude looks like a lady.’ And I said, ‘That’s a hit title.’”

Child says that Joe Perry disagreed about the title.

He recalls: “Joe kind of crossed his arms looking at me sideways. And he said, ‘Well, we don’t know what that means.’ And I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I know what that means.’”

And as Tyler then revealed, that title was inspired by a chance meeting with a fellow superstar rock singer.

Tyler said it happened when the newly teetotal band members went to a bar where they would relax drinking soda.

As Child tells the story: “It was an empty bar and there was this long row of bar stools and at the very end was this vision of loveliness. Teased-up platinum hair, ivory skin, all curvy with black nails.

“They were like drawing straws. ‘Who’s going to say hello? Who’s going to go up to her?’ And suddenly she turns around and it’s Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe!

“So that’s when Steven said, ‘Oh, that dude looks like a lady.’ That’s how he came up with it.”

Dude (Looks Like A Lady) was the lead single from Permanent Vacation, released on 22 September 1987. It reached No 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, their first top 20 hit since Walk This Way in 1976. And with that, Aerosmith were very much back in the saddle again.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer were one of the greatest progressive rock acts of all time. But as drummer Carl Palmer tells MusicRadar, the album they made under pressure at the end of the ’70s was widely ridiculed – and its commercial failure prompted the trio to go their separate ways.

That album was Love Beach, and as Palmer says now: “To be honest, we were really tired when we made that record. I mean, we’d done a lot.”

This sense of fatigue was reflected in contemporary reviews of the album. As critic Michael Bloom stated in Rolling Stone magazine: “Love Beach isn’t simply bad; it’s downright pathetic. Stale and full of ennui, this album makes washing the dishes seem a more creative act by comparison.”

In a later interview, keyboard player Keith Emerson agreed with Rolling Stone’s assessment of Love Beach, dismissing the album as “an embarrassment against everything I’ve worked for”.

But Carl Palmer insists that this much-maligned record really isn’t so bad.

“It’s not my favourite album,” he says, “but there are some good tracks on it.”

He cites their interpretation of Canario, composed by Spanish pianist Joaquín Rodrigo, as a highlight of the album.

He also says that for himself, Emerson and bassist/guitarist/vocalist Greg Lake, the writing was on the wall even before the sessions for Love Beach began.

He explains: “Just so you get the complete story, we had basically broken up by the summer of 1978 when we started on that album. We weren’t like big friends, but we used to hang together. We used to go out to the odd restaurant together. And in ’78 we’d gone to Nassau in the Bahamas because Keith had got a house there.

“So we were just hanging out on the beach, and that’s where we were when Ahmet Ertegun from Atlantic Records called and said, ‘Why don’t you try once more in the studio?’ And at first we said, ‘Well, we’ve got nothing really written.’

“Keith was a little bit panicked because he would come up with a lot of the big ideas, and Greg hadn’t got any acoustic stuff. But Ahmet kept on and on and on about it. And then Chris Blackwell came into the picture.”

Blackwell, the founder and head of Island Records, owned the famous recording studio Compass Point on the island of Nassau.

Palmer recalls: “Chris told us all about the studio and said, ‘I’ve got some free time for you if you want it.’ So we realised that they [Ertegun and Blackwell] were ganging up on us behind the scenes. And in the end we went into the studio and gave it a go.”

Love Beach was comprised of two very distinct halves. Side one featured six short tracks of fairly simplistic pop rock material, written by Greg Lake with lyricists Pete Sinfield, plus the version of Canario. Side two had just one track, the 20-minute epic Memoirs Of An Officer And A Gentleman, composed by Emerson and Sinfield.”

Palmer names Memoirs Of An Officer And A Gentleman as another highlight, but remains embarrassed by the album's cover art.

“We called the album Love Beach because that was the name of the beach in front of the studio,” he explains.

This was the location for the album’s cover shoot, for which the three smiling musicians wore outfits that would not have looked out of place in a ‘70s discotheque.

“We had that dreadful picture on the cover with the three of us looking like the Bee Gees,” Palmer recalls. “I remember standing on that beach and thinking, ‘This is wrong.’ I thought: ‘We play nice acoustic songs sometimes, but we’re meant to be a progressive rock band.’”

He admits: “I didn’t like it, but I went along with it. And the album really wasn’t that bad, but we never promoted it. It might have sold more if we’d promoted it, but we were tired. We’d toured so much.”

Love Beach was released on 17 November 1978.

The album’s opening track All I Want Is You was released as a single and was performed by the group on Top Of The Pops.

But Palmer’s attempts to organise a farewell tour came to nothing.

In 2021 Classic Rock descried Love Beach as ELP’s grand folly, stating: “For all their magnificent prog triumphs – Tarkus, Trilogy, Brain Salad Surgery et al – ELP also had some terrible lows. The band reached their nadir with the ridiculous Love Beach. Released at the height of punk, and with the three members dressed like The Bee Gees on the cover, Love Beach contained several ill-advised stabs at commercial pop plus a tragic wedge of prog-rock pathos, Memoirs Of An Officer & A Gentleman. More than the efforts of Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer, Love Beach was the thing that killed prog in the ’70s.”

Carl Palmer says now: “People often crack jokes about that album. Maybe somebody should have stopped us before we ran out of gas.

“I can see why the band came to an end. But that was one album. There are all those really high-end albums that we made, and I’m still so proud of them.”