Recently, this writer was lucky enough to attend a quite unusual screening of Queen’s newly remastered Budapest concert film at London’s Roundhouse. Encouraged to respond as if we were attending an actual gig, we readily allowed ourselves to be putty in the hands of the late, great Freddie Mercury. Alive again, albeit via a massive LED screen.

It’s the only time I’ve ever experienced the thrill of being a part of Radio Ga Ga’s signature call-and-response crowd double-clap-along. It gave just a small taste of what it must have actually been like, seeing Queen during the height of their mid-eighties pomp, at a time when their moustachioed frontman was at the peak of his performing powers.

It also made this writer fully realise just how perfectly geared for a crowd the song was…

Ostensibly a democratic unit when it came to divvying up the songwriting, Radio Ga Ga was - surprisingly - the first Queen single to be penned solely by drummer Roger Taylor. Mercury, bassist John Deacon and Brian May would all be integral in shaping Taylor’s initial idea into the setlist pillar that it became, however.

Radio Ga Ga was born at a time when the band had returned to the studio after taking a year out to creatively re-energise following 1982’s lacklustre Hot Space. But Queen were struggling to land on exciting ideas…

Early sessions for what would eventually become 1984’s robust eleventh album The Works at LA’s The Record Plant were arduous, and an ever-fastidious Mercury was particularly underwhelmed by Roger’s initial song suggestions, telling him so in no uncertain terms…

“Roger wrote three or four songs… as far as I was concerned, some of [Roger’s songs] weren’t good enough. I just said ‘Go back and write some more’” Mercury said following the album’s release.

“I was desperate for inspiration!” Taylor told Sounds magazine at the time. “Then one day the radio came on in the house and my three year old son Felix came out with ‘radio poo poo’ I thought that sounded good so I changed it around a bit and came up with Radio Ga Ga.”

What Felix - the bilingual son of Roger and his French girlfriend (and eventual wife) Dominique Beyrand - had actually uttered was, ‘radio ca-ca’ - the French term for faeces. It wasn’t a million miles away from the song’s eventual name. ‘Radio Ca Ca’ in fact became its working title.

Having previously been famously sceptical of their value, Queen had finally opened the door to exploring the abilities of the synthesizer - and other electronic instruments - during the making of 1980’s The Game. Running with the 'Radio Ca Ca' idea, Roger locked himself away for a three-day stretch with both a Roland Jupiter-8 and a LinnDrum, hammering out a basic arrangement for a wistful, but powerful, new song.

With Felix’s innocent dismissal of the radio as the foundation, Taylor began to reflect about just how much he owed to that crackly old plastic box - once his central conduit to those foundational songs that changed his life. Roger also lamented the radio's diminishing relevance, as television and music video were becoming the higher priority concerns for 80s musicians.

“The song is a bit mixed up as far as what I wanted to say,” Roger later remarked to Modern Drummer. “It deals with how important radio used to be, historically speaking, before television, and how important it was to me as a kid. It was the first place I heard rock n’ roll. I used to hear a lot of Doris Day, but a few times each day, I’d also hear a Bill Haley record or an Elvis Presley song. Today it seems that video, the visual side of rock ‘n’ roll, has become more important than the music itself - too much so, really. I mean, music is supposed to be an experience for the ears more than the eyes.”

Beyond music, Taylor’s lyric evoked some particularly iconic radio moments, from Orson Welles' historic pandemonium-causing reading of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, broadcast in 1938, to Winston Churchill’s ‘Finest hour’ speech. The lyric was a pointed, almost romantic dedication to the very box that had shaped his formative years.

I'd sit alone and watch your light
My only friend through teenage nights
And everything I had to know
I heard it on my radio

Taylor thought it was a stronger start than most for a song, but when he brought his new demo for the band and producer Reinhold Mack to listen to, Taylor was more than a little surprised by Mercury's immediate fixation with 'Radio Ca Ca'.

However, the architect of Bohemian Rhapsody had big ideas for what he wanted to do with the song’s shape. Not least working up that epic-scale call-and-response chorus that would soon energise crowds the world over.

Freddie was also certain that with a bit of fine-tuning, this could be Queen’s best single in years…

“I just instantly felt that you could build that into a really good strong saleable commodity, and I think Roger was just thinking of it as just another track, so I virtually took it over” Mercury told Westwood One.

“I’m an instinctive musician. I can play keyboards, guitar and drums, and I can write songs,” Taylor remarked in an interview with Making Music in 1988. “I have a facility for writing music, but I don't want to know anything particularly technical - like what the chords are called. Even in Radio Ga Ga, there are some very difficult chords. I don't know what they're called, but it doesn't matter. I'm a much better guitarist than I am a keyboard player, but now I find melodically it's much easier to write on keyboard. Radio Ga Ga was a completely keyboard-written song. I defy anyone to write that on the guitar because you wouldn't find the chords, they wouldn't come naturally to any guitar player I know.”

While Roger was away on a skiing holiday, Mercury set to work on building up the arrangement, crafting a wider scope to the now - more sensitively - re-titled Radio Ga Ga, alongside Canadian session keys-man Fred Mandel.

“It's basically [Roger's] song, you know, he had the ideas altogether, I just felt that there was some construction elements in it that were wrong to start with and he just said, 'OK, you do what you want.'" Mercury told Westwood One. "He wanted [to have a hit] very badly and I think he deserves it.”

The lyrics got a tighten-up, too…

“Initially it was to deal with the radio being too old or whatever, and I just said, 'I think you should change the lyrical content,’” Mercury was quoted as saying. “In fact, we went totally the other way, so, I mean, Radio Ga Ga… we were actually trying to say that video is trying to take over, what's the radio going to be?”

Musically, the other elements continued to be built atop the insistent, almost motorik beat that Taylor had conjured on his LinnDrum. This was later developed to incorporate cymbal accents and a heftier playing style. Building out the rhythm section, Mandel developed a swirling and throbbing bass part which later informed John Deacon’s eventual impactful line.

“Roger had done the original sequence bass part and I put down a piano part and then a synthesizer part on top of that, plus the bells you can hear throughout,” Fred told Queen Online. “Before I left the studio, I wanted the track to be more complete so I put on some bass parts, some of which were ideas that John later retained on the record.”

To heighten the paradoxical collision of nostalgia and futurism, Mercury opted to harness the then fashionable vocoder (Roland’s VP-330) to process his (and Roger's) backing vocals, with Mandel channeling their backing vox tracks via his Jupiter-8.

Oddly enough, the backing vocals still actually sing the track's original title, 'Radio Ca Ca';

Roland's colourful powerhouse synth was also relied on for the song’s distinctive arpeggiated rising-and-falling cascade of notes. Even at the time, this kitsch ‘futuristic’ sound felt - for want of a better word - naff, but these robot-like bleeps served to embellish the childish naivety of Taylor's lyric.

Not naff at all were the song’s stratospheric pads, which were also generated by the Jupiter-8 and stretched out each chord's thundering impact to gargantuan proportions.

Freddie's new chorus section stripped away many of the arrangement elements to emphasise his punchy delivery of the following lines:

All we hear is radio ga ga
Radio goo goo
Radio ga ga
All we hear is radio ga ga
Radio blah, blah
Radio, what's new?

This part of the chorus's stilted melody was balanced by Mercury's passionately delivered, descending line…

Radio, someone still loves you

Crucially, these lines were punctuated by double handclaps, responding call-and-response style. We'll come back to that…

Bolstered by a yearning, Roxy Music-inspired searing slide guitar solo from Brian May as the song nears its conclusion, Radio Ga Ga was undoubtedly the best thing the band had conjured since 1981’s stirring Bowie collaboration, Under Pressure.

It all but demanded to be released as the record’s lead single. And so, on January 23rd 1984, Radio Ga Ga hit the airwaves - and small screens - across the globe. Reaching number 2 in the UK chart, Ga Ga went on to top the charts of 19 countries globally.

The single was backed with a David Mallet-directed video which leaned into the wide-eyed nostalgia of the lyrics with clips from Fritz Lang's innovative sci-fi masterpiece, Metropolis (alongside other newly shot Metropolis-esque clips and eerie archive footage). These clips were interspersed with studio-filmed sections where the band traversed this long-forgotten vision of tomorrow in a flying car.

As we indicated earlier, the video also stressed the live-power-potential of its chorus by depicting the band performing live to 500 extras from the Queen fan club, each of whom enthusiastically engaged in the synchronised handclap-ritual in tight unison. It demonstrated to viewers at home how to behave when the band played this song on their next tour.

“One of David Mallet’s great contributions, of course, is when the chorus comes you get a hand clap. It was repeated electronically, on the record, and so it sounds like a double handclap. And Mallet kind of seized upon it and made it a double handclap done by the audience." Brian May said in the Queen web series The Greatest. “I think it became one of the first great proofs of the power of television.”

However, the bright red-clad band and vaguely fascistic aesthetic of Mallet's video put off some. In fact, more than a few (the NME in particular) suspected the band were being a little too casual with this perceived Nazi-esque totalitarian cosplay…

“That was so absurd,” Roger said in the Queen web series The Greatest. “It was meant to mirror the film… the oppressed workers. The Nazi thing is laughable. People will always find an agenda if they need one.”

Queen devotees were all-in, however.

This was evidenced across the band’s ensuing live dates when the hook-laden Radio Ga Ga became a fresh new centrepiece of the live set - with the crowd eagerly responding to Mercury’s lines with gusto.

First the hardcore, then the world…

Live Aid not only re-cemented Queen's status as one of the world’s most beloved stadium rock bands (and lock-in Freddie as the frontman for the ages in the eyes of the public) but it also was the perfect platform for Radio Ga Ga to reach its full potential.

The shots of the tens of thousands of Wembley attendees double-clapping in tandem to the song meant that it very quickly became not just another one to chalk up for Queen’s next Greatest Hits, but one of the most well-known songs around the globe in the mid-1980s.

Ironically, this paean to the waning wireless found its largest audience via a global television event.

“Freddie rose to the occasion,” Brian May recalled in an interview with Mojo magazine. “He was already a master of the art of communicating with a football stadium full of people. And when we did Radio Ga Ga and the whole audience all did the double handclap thing, I remember getting chills in that moment.”

Billy Joel has been pretty open about the “brain disorder” he was diagnosed with in 2025 that forced him to cancel all of his upcoming performances, while also being at pains to reassure fans that his condition isn’t quite as scary as its label sounds.

It doesn’t seem like there’s any guarantee that he’s ever going to fully recover from it, though, or that he’ll be able to resume playing shows in the way that he used to.

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Joel confirmed that he’s still living with the condition, known as hydrocephalus. “It used to be called water on the brain, so it affects your balance, it affects your memory, it affects your vision, your hearing,” he said. “But I’m OK. They call it a brain disorder, but it’s not that serious. It’s just something that affects your balance mostly.”

Asked if he’s ever going to be able to tour again, Joel added: “I don’t know. I have to take a series of tests before I know, but I can’t drive right now. I’m not allowed to drive. And I can’t do performances because what the neurologist told me, every time you do a show, it’s like you’re getting a concussion.”

Joel further explained that it’s not just the volume of playing a rock ‘n’ roll show that’s the problem: “It’s the lighting, the sound, the stress of the show, the audience, the energy of the performance. There’s a lot going on when you’re onstage. And they said, ‘Well, you really shouldn’t be doing that right now.’ So they have to test me further to see if I can go back and do performing again, which I would like to be able to do.”

Joel was speaking as he prepares to auction off 70 of his motorcycles at Christie’s. Asked whether he’d ever had an accident while riding one, he said that he had, back in 1982.

Discussing the injuries it caused, he said: “I still have no bone in my left thumb. And my right arm, the wrist got pulled out of its socket on my right hand, and my left hand got smashed and my leg got broken.”

Sounds rough – so did that mean that the Piano Man had to relearn how to play the piano. “No,” says Joel, before quipping: “I was never that good to begin with.”

Anyone who witnessed U2’s performance at Live Aid on Saturday 13 July 1985 will remember that their setlist did not go to plan.

In keeping with Bob Geldof’s stipulation that all artists perform no longer than 17 minutes (“Don’t get clever – just play the hits” as he bluntly warned Freddie Mercury of Queen), the band had chosen three songs to play – Sunday Bloody Sunday, Bad and Pride (In The Name Of Love).

Pride was their biggest hit at the time, and Live Aid was a golden opportunity to close their set with a song that the colossal TV audience would remember. But they never got around to playing it.

Instead, Bono went on walkabout to commune with the crowd – making an arduous clamber down from the stage to hug and slowly dance with a female member of the audience, 15 year-old Kal Khalique, who he suspected was being crushed against the front barrier by the surging crowd.

This meant that U2’s second and final song was an impromptu 12-minute version of the song Bad, from their latest album The Unforgettable Fire. Over the course of the song, Bono would ad lib snippets from the songs Satellite Of Love and Take A Walk On The Wild Side by Lou Reed, as well as Ruby Tuesday and Sympathy For The Devil by the Rolling Stones.

The band were reportedly furious that they had to scrap their performance of Pride (In The Name Of Love) and an argument allegedly broke out in their dressing room. Bono flew home to Ireland with his wife Ali, convinced he had blown it big time. “It was a great day but I thought I had fucked it up,” he told Rolling Stone.

But in the days that followed it became clear that U2’s performance of Bad was being viewed as one of the emotional high points of Live Aid. The themes of suffering and vulnerability that run through the song were particularly powerful in the broader context of Live Aid’s appeal for human compassion.

“It really took us by surprise when people started talking about U2 as one of the noteworthy performances of the day,” The Edge told Rolling Stone. “I thought they were joking, I really thought we were crap. But looking back, as I did a week later, I started to see what it was. It was the sense of real, total jeopardy, which is always very exciting for a live event, and Bono’s complete determination to make physical contact with the crowd and eventually getting there after two minutes of struggling over barriers. I think there was something about the effort he had to put in to do it that somehow made it even more powerful.”

Bono’s actions may have been perceived as indulgent and narcissistic by some, but that day he built an emotional connection with the audience and the 1.9 billion people watching across the world. Bad was the song that made it happen.

It remains one of U2’s most emotionally intense songs, and the band’s performance of it that day was a major turning point in their career. It introduced them to a colossal audience and paved the way for global mainstream stardom.

The song began as an improvised guitar riff during a jam session while U2 were living and recording at Slane Castle in County Meath in 1984, working on The Unforgettable Fire, their fourth studio album. The band had appointed Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois as producers and they in turn helped create a more ambient sound.

The results were radically different from their previous album, War.

“We were looking for something that was a bit more serious, more arty,” said Adam Clayton in the 2016 biography, U2 On U2, co-authored by the band and music journalist Neil McCormick.

Bono wrote the lyrics to Bad about heroin addiction, which was a devastating crisis in Dublin in the late-’70s and early-’80s. He specifically wrote the track about his friend Andy ‘Guck’ Rowen, who had turned to heroin after being traumatised by witnessing the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

For a long time, Bono didn’t specifically name Rowen, simply saying that it was written about a friend. But in later years he did. On 26 July 2011, at the final US show of U2’s 360° Tour at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh, Bono paused before performing Bad, to deliver a direct tribute to Rowen, who was in the audience that night. “This is for a very special man, who is here in your city, who grew up on Cedarwood Road. We wrote this song about him and we play it for him tonight.”

Bono has said that the song explores themes of surrender, isolation and personal addiction. “If you twist and tune away,” it begins, “If you tear yourself in two again/If I could, yes I would/If I could, I would/Let it go/Surrender/Dislocate.”

In the biography U2 On U2, Bono talks about watching teenagers fall victim to the heroin epidemic in Dublin. “They gave up everything they held sacred to this drug,” he explained. “I tried to describe that with the song, Bad, what it was like to feel that rush, to feel that elation, and then to go on to the nod, the awful sleep that comes with that drug, and then scream, ‘I'm wide awake, I’m wide awake, I’m not sleeping!’ I can see what’s going on.”

Instrumentally, the song was developed by the band improvising on the riff that the Edge had developed. “Some of the songs had no structure to them until we started playing,” The Edge told Guitar Player magazine in 1985. “We actually improvised them as we were working. Bad is an example.”

Producer Brian Eno reportedly used an Oberheim DSX sequencer to add the distinctive sequencer arpeggios, which give the song an enigmatic heft.

Bad is essentially an anthem in the key of A major, simply built around variations of the A and D chords. It’s been described as one of the Edge’s “ultimate delay” songs. According to Amnesta.net he used his Korg SDD-3000 digital delay as his primary modulated digital delay, with a secondary shorter delay, set to a dotted eighth-note rhythm and this was sent to a separate amp.

Opinions vary on which guitar’s and amp’s he used for the studio recording of Bad. While he certainly went on to primarily use his Stratocaster when playing the song live, some of the studio tracking on The Unforgettable Fire was reportedly done on his 1976 Gibson Explorer and a 1971 Telecaster.

As for his choice of amp, a vintage Vox AC30 was central to the Edge’s sound. Across the album, he also increasingly used various muting techniques.

“I was experimenting a lot with damping my guitar strings, using felt or gaffer tape over the strings near the bridge to give zero sustain,” he told Guitar Player magazine in 1985. “Using echo, I found some remarkable effects.”

The basic track of Bad was recorded at Slane Castle in just three takes, but the studio recording of the song on The Unforgettable Fire was panned by some critics as lacklustre, with Rolling Stone magazine describing it as “forgettably muddy”.

In many ways, Bad was a song that only really came to fruition once the band began playing it live. There was a sense that the song had not been sufficiently developed and only when it was performed live did it begin to show its true greatness.

“That is potentially a truly great song… if I had finished it,” Bono said of the studio version of the song in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. “It was very difficult to do, almost an impossible collision of cultures for us. It was a different kind of songwriting, like Philip Glass meets Astral Weeks, Van Morrison crossed with German electronica. You have sequences which are rigid and metronomic and then you have a bass which is improvising all the way, and the voice too. We were struggling so hard to find that song.”

While the studio version was stilted, on tour, U2 would play it obsessively in soundchecks until the song really came to life. Which is why the version of the song that would become most played on radio was not the studio version, but a live performance, recorded on 12 November 1984 at the NEC in Birmingham, England. This was released on the 1985 four-track EP Wide Awake In America, a curious title given that the EP’s two live tracks were recorded in England and the two studio tracks were recorded in Ireland.

It’s not a great EP but the version of Bad that is featured on it has a fire and intensity that the studio version lacks.

In the years that followed, four other versions of the song would be released. An edit of the studio version from Unforgettable Fire appears on the band’s 1998 greatest hits compilation, The Best Of 1980-1990. It is the only non-single to appear on the compilation, with the exception of a hidden version of the song October.

A live version of Bad from U2's 1987 The Joshua Tree tour appears in the documentary Rattle And Hum and a version of the song from the band’s 2001 Elevation: Live From Boston Tour, along with a snippet from the song 40, appears in the concert film of that tour.

Another version of Bad is featured on the live album Live From The Point Depot, from the 2004 digital box set The Complete U2.

Bad became a central song in U2’s setlist and a fan favourite. And it kept evolving, a work-in-progress with a life well beyond the studio and with seemingly no definitive finish.

“In a way, I do finish it every night, live,” said Bono in the biography U2 By U2. “I change the lyrics. Poets have no problem with revising their work. Songs shouldn't be set in stone. If they are any good, they are living, breathing organisms.”

Polyphia guitarist Tim Henson has some explaining to do when he talks to MusicRadar about his band’s new album, Be Not Afraid.

Last year, Henson intimated that this album would feature guest appearances from System Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian and Japanese pop-metallers Babymetal.

But once you play Be Not Afraid front to back, once your ear has surfed its breakneck changes between Polyphia at their most apocalyptic and most ecstatic, and your brain has processed this information as best it can, you’ll realise there are no guests.

Henson shrugs: “Yeah, well that came from our last record [2022’s Remember That You Will Die]. Half of the tracks on it had guests, and I know there’s a large portion of our listeners that really only fuck with half of the record, because the other half is different genres of vocalists.”

Previously, Polyphia had operated an open-doors policy when inviting guest musicians to collaborate on their recordings. Over the years, the Texan instrumentalists have drafted the likes of Yvette Young, Mateus Asato and Ichika Nito as pinch-hitters on guitar.

Early recordings featured stunt shred from Jason Richardson, Aaron Marshall and Jakub Żytecki, as Henson and fellow guitarist Scott LePage shuffled through their contacts book to seek out complementary talents – players whose style could be subsumed into their radically unorthodox whole. Virtuosity is the common thread.

Remember That You Will Die featured a cast of guest vocalists. Chino Moreno appeared on Bloodbath. Pop/R&B vocalist Sophia Black starred on ABC. Killstation, $NOT and Lil West brought the rhythm, and, most famously, Steve Vai brought his own brand of electric guitar genius to Ego Death.

A little help goes a long way when you’re taking progressive metal guitar, math-rock, hip-hop and R&B and EDM experimentalism through the looking glass.

But as Henson says, this time around they decided: “Let’s just give them us – us in our most raw form, and I say that loosely because the sound design on this record is so insane.”

Henson is not not exaggerating either. Be Not Afraid is the sound of Polyphia everythingmaxxing, splicing together those preacher samples so loved by Chicago and Detroit house producers with extended-range metal guitar riffs, pitch-shifted into glitchy squawks, setting all this to jacking beats. There is just so much sound.

“There are so many moments where it was just, like, ‘How can we make sounds that literally tear your mind apart?’” says Henson. “But in an effort to express raw emotion, it’s like the equivalent of tearing your vocal cords as a screamer in a screamo band, I guess, but on guitar.”

Henson says going all-in with a maximalist production allowed them to take their sound places their guitars couldn’t go.

“The sound of you literally snapping your string isn’t pleasant, and you can’t really do anything musical with that, so let’s use sound design to kind of express that same raw emotion,” he says. “That’s the thing.”

But then then the guitars are pretty nuts, too, with Scott LePage putting together a rhythm part that sounds like “the devil throwing a tantrum” and spending hours nursing a Scotch while putting together some of the wildest tones he can imagine.

So yeah, no guests might be a change of pace but Be Not Afraid is still the sound of Polyphia taking guitar to the frontier. Who knows how they're going to recreate this live when, but it's Scott LePage told us in 2022, “There is a small aspect of, ‘Okay, this needs to be performable.’ But sometimes we just do cool shit for the sake of doing cool shit and worry about it later.”

You can read all about the making of Polyphia's Be No Afraid in full, coming soon to MusicRadar.

• Be Not Afraid is available to preorder via Rise.

RECORDING WEEK 2026: “I used to make these punk cover versions of records I loved as a kid,” Rob Cavallo, Grammy Award-winning producer, tells us when asked about his initial route into music-making.

“My dad was in the business, he managed Prince for a time and accidentally played my version of When You Were Mine to him in the car when he once collected him from the airport. Apparently, Prince looked confused, then demanded I join his band, The Family, in Paisley Park. My dad said he couldn’t have me – I was only 16.”

Despite his dad denying this early opportunity for him, Rob went on to become a true heavyweight producer in the world of rock recording.

His stellar CV speaks for itself, being the studio mastermind behind myriad best-selling albums including Green Day’s most cherished canon; Dookie, Insomniac, Nimrod, American Idiot - all made under Rob’s watchful eye. Goo Goo Dolls’ Dizzy Up the Girl and My Chemical Romance’s era-defining The Black Parade, too.

Rob’s career began in earnest during the late eighties and has seen him navigate various technological changes, surfing the wave of opportunities afforded by software and the arrival of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs).

“I was one of the first guys to ever use Pro Tools, Green Day’s song Brain Stew was recorded on that when the DAW was only two tracks and 16-bit,” he says.

“In my studio now, I have a computer filled with every single sound and every single DAW. But despite technological innovation, the end results still boil down to your taste and how you take the listener on a journey from the beginning of a song to the middle, then end. It doesn't matter if you’re programming or talking to a drummer in a room with 16 microphones set up, the producer’s job is still the same gig.”

Rob was brought up in a musical family with his dad, Bob, a hugely successful industry figure who, as we said earlier, worked with Prince as well as Earth, Wind and Fire and the Lovin’ Spoonful.

While Rob was finding his own feet in the industry, he managed to secure some work experience in LA with George Massenburg, an influential producer in the studio universe.

“He was one of the great engineers of all time, and I was like the third engineer guy, I didn’t even know what a studio was although I learned quickly,” Rob explains. “George was amazing, he was so tough, and it was a gift he was like that.”

Rob made some demos during the holidays when the studio was closed to the public. Warner Brothers and their crack team of influential executives and producers - Ted Templeman, Lenny Waronker, and Michael Ostin - got wind, heard one of the demos he’d worked on, then offered Rob a job as an A&R.

“I really needed a job at the time and I was so just so in love with music,” Cavallo tells us. “I was going to all the clubs, listening to every band I could find and involved in a network of people. I knew who was playing the Troubadour, The Music Machine, the Roxy, Madame Wong’s, all these old LA clubs.

“This combined with me making records and being a player - I could play bass, drums and guitar - it all made sense and fit together for Warner Brothers.”

As a producer, Rob’s discography is full of huge, global success stories from early on in his career. Green Day’s seminal 1994 major label debut Dookie was one of his very first production gigs. Making the record with the three young men who’d soon become a global alternative phenomenon, Cavallo was driven by a vision of what the album should ultimately sound like.

“When working with bands, you need a clear goal of what you’re trying to make - and be as balls out as possible,” he laughs.

“With Dookie, it was the second record I ever produced and people were telling me not to work with a punk band. But I had this feeling about it, I wanted to sonically create something where there would be higher BPMs and it would still be clear for you to hear.”

Rob came up with a way to record the drums using an SM57 microphone and used a tube direct box to ensure that “the bass cut through all the way into the guitars”, Rob recalls.

“I devised a way to capture the first reflection of the drums so it would be aggressive but it wouldn’t be too roomy so the next snare drum would avoid being on top of the prior one,” Rob tells us.

“For the drums, it’s an SM57 pointed an inch away from a hard surface at a ninety degree angle to the snare. It really helps the drum set grow teeth and you can quite clearly hear it on Dookie.”

Alternative rock bands like Green Day and Nirvana both had similar trajectories, working on indie imprints at the start of the nineties before signing with majors. Green Day’s preceding (independent label) LP Kerplunk! had a raw edge that Rob leaned into when translating Green Day’s live sound into a chart-friendly, radio-ready sound.

“[Nirvana’s debut] Bleach and Kerplunk! are similar because they were recorded and mixed in the studio, live off the floor, so everyone played together, there were minimal overdubs and it was recorded, mixed and finished in three or four days,” says Rob.

“Now what would be interesting with today’s modern studio software would be to take a band into a rehearsal studio, rehearse them so they sound great, then make a record like Bleach where it’s recorded in a handful of days. You could make something that sounds almost as good as Dookie with today’s tech. The possibilities it offers are so great.”

Beyond Green Day, and another pop punk troupe owe their finest hour to Mr. Cavallo. My Chemical Romance recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of their landmark emo concept album, The Black Parade, and Rob was at the helm of the original recording sessions.

Infamously, some of the record was made at LA’s Paramour Mansion in Silverlake where the band’s frontman Gerard Way suffered recurring night terrors.

“I think environment is important in the writing and production, and the mansion was a cool, spooky place to go,” Rob says of the sessions. “It was absolutely haunted and freezing in there as there was no heat in the giant basketball sized living room. We put a PA in, hung a couple of fancy mics in there to record them stereo live.”

Rob also worked with Dave Matthews Band on their album, Big Whisky and the GrooGrux King in New Orleans while Green Day recorded much of their 2024 Saviors album at RAK Studios in London.

“With Dave Matthews Band, I convinced them to go to New Orleans and you can hear how the city rubbed off on them for that album, we even recorded some of the sounds of the city,” Rob explains.

“London is one the favourite cities for me and Green Day to work in, it’s such a vibe there, the people are amazing - and the microphones are pretty good too,” he adds.

“Culturally, people in the UK love rock music, they respect it, it’s a high art-form, you feel embraced and loved when you go to the UK as a music person. The energy is infectious.”

My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade and Green Day’s 2004 conceptual opus American Idiot both bristle with plenty of big ideas, although Rob feels they were born from quite different creative places…

“With Green Day, we didn’t like how iTunes, one of the biggest retailers at the time, would take your record and chop it up into 14 $0.99 dollar songs,” says Rob. “So we wanted to combat this and make an album that had to be heard as a whole.”

“With My Chemical Romance, Gerard is such a prolific writer, he has backstories for all his records, he just doesn’t show you - there are other things going on in his head that he’ll let you know when he’s ready.”

Rock music has gone through peaks and troughs over the years and Rob has rode the waves firsthand, including what he sees as today’s peak. At the moment, he’s working with a young band called Riff Wood who have just released their Butterfly In Black And White album after becoming a viral sensation.

“Guitar music coming off the stage is still the most powerful thing, you still feel it physically and emotionally when it’s performed there - more than any other genre,” he says of the sound’s enduring popularity.

“During Covid, more guitars were sold than ever before too, people needed something to connect with. And songs still find new audiences due to streaming. A song like Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, I cut that in the mid-nineties, it was their biggest streaming song in 2025 and younger audiences love it.”

Rob might be known for the big guitar outfits but he’s also worked with American rappers 03 Greedo and the late Lil Peep too.

“I always think there’s room for everything and innovation,” says Rob. “Lil Peep was the first emo hip-hop artist to ask me to collaborate with him, it was a tough one when he passed.

“I thought he could be so big due to how smart he was and as an artist, he asked if he could take one of my guitar riffs and put it to one of his FL loops. The first thing we did was Benz Truck and I love the sound of that record.”

With so much experience behind him and still in the mixer when it comes to new talent, Rob is well-placed to share some studio advice. He believes all producers should make sure they remember their purpose is to serve the band, not themselves.

“You want your artists to love what you’re working on,” says Rob. “I want whoever I’m working with to be over the moon with how the record sounds. What’s really smart about that, when you’re done, they’ll want to promote it, and serve it up to the world for the next few years, even the rest of their lives.”

Dookie might have been an early triumph for Rob, but the album's popularity - which includes Green Day staples Basket Case, When I Come Around and Longview - has an influence on guitar music that lives on and continues to inspire new generations of bands.

“After Billie Joe had sung about 90% of the record, he invited this couple to the studio and he played them the tracks,” Rob remembers. “I watched the look on their faces, their jaws hit the floor, they’d heard something they couldn’t believe, it was like a hit happened on the first listen.

“Then I remember Wendy Griffiths was in charge of promotions for MTV, she told me how the channel was looking for something faster and colourful after two years of grunge, maybe with a sense of humour. I was sitting on Dookie at the time, and just knew it would work.”

Rob is now busier than ever - he’s working with a string of acts including Henry Morris, and Riff Wood. He’s also trying to break Japanese band One Ok Rock in the US and Europe.

“Ultimately, your role as producer is just to try to serve up the record that meets the standards of every record you’ve ever heard,” he says in his final words of wisdom.

“Everyone has their own list of favourite bands - your goal is to make a record or sign a band that is as good as those. If you can compete, then you’re onto something. And of course, it might sound easy, but it’s definitely not.”

Find out more about Rob's work over at his website.

In 2026, even the most casual on-stage comment can get carried around the world and get turned into a ‘talking point’ via social media.

Take James Hetfield, for example. Last Saturday (10 October) at one of Metallica’s Sphere shows, the frontman took time to thank the audience for turning up and supporting the band. An uncontroversial thing to do, of course.

Hetfield said: “Unless you live in Vegas, you’ve come a long way to spend some time with Metallica. We’re grateful for that - your travels, the money you spend, the time it took, thanks for coming to celebrate with us.”

He then continued: “And I just gotta say, Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their bullshit, OK. No bullshit. We’re here to forget about all the outside shit, OK? Metallica’s agenda is love, energy and heavy music, baby!”

Many on social media have interpreted this as some sort of dig at Macklemore and the recent controversy over his pro-Palestine comments on the Ed Sheeran Loop tour. Who knows? Hetfield didn’t mention Macklemore by name. He could have also been referring to countless other artists, from Lennon to Springsteen to the (Dixie) Chicks who have all ‘done’ politics at some point or other.

Anyway, since then a clip of Nikki Sixx from Mötley Crüe saying much the same thing as Hetfield has gone viral on the socials. Recorded at the North Carolina date on the Crüe’s Return Of The Carnival Of Sins tour, it shows Sixx saying: “It does not matter to Mötley Crüe if you're a Republican, it does not matter to Mötley Crüe if you are a Democrat, it does not fucking matter if you are gay or straight, or if you're right down the centre of the fucking lane in life, because we are all in this together. Can we agree?”

Now, Roger Waters has lumbered in on this mini-kerfuffle with his usual understated charm. Appearing on Katie Halper’s podcast, the ex-Pink Floyd man said of Hetfield: “Can we stop talking about this prick? I’m so bored with him. He’s got an IQ of about three, and why we’re talking about him I honestly don’t know because he’s a nobody."

Waters then landed a below-the-belt blow: "He’s no musician. I heard them playing acoustic instruments, and they couldn’t. It was appalling.”

He added: “It’s a shame this prick didn’t have somebody around him to explain that being kind is way more important than all that loud music and bouncing around and whatever.”

Lovely.

Meanwhile, Metallica’s Sphere residency – with its loud music and bouncing around – continues through to March next year. Waters’ Pink Floyd Legacy tour, which one suspects will involve very little bouncing around, starts in February. Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone was the same?

U2 have announced the first dates of what is going to be their first world tour since before Covid.

And they’ve given the global jaunt a typically ambitious title that literally taunts their many critics. The Greatest Show On Earth tour will kick off in Mexico City in February with two dates apiece in the Mexican capital and then two in both Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. Support on all six dates comes from Beck.

The Greatest Show On Earth is also the title of one of the songs from the upcoming Carnaval De Luz album, which comes out next month. The track is being released as a single and its Anton Corbijn-directed video is already up on Youtube now.

The band have issued a statement about the tour: “‘The Greatest Show on Earth’? Now that's a throwdown. It's a dare, to ourselves as much as anyone, to try and have the best night of anybody's life.

“A bit of showman, a bit of shaman, a riot of colour, unreasonable guitar, bass and drums, and tunes you can hold onto. Because if people are gonna show up, we certainly are.”

Fans in North America and Europe are advised not to panic – there will be loads more dates announced over the next few weeks. The Greatest Show On Earth will be the band’s first extensive tour for eight years and their first dates with Larry Mullen Jr back behind the kit. The drummer had to miss out on U2’s Sphere residency between 2023 and 2024 due to his neck injury.

Anyway, those six dates are at Mexico City’s Estadio GNP Seguros (23 and 26 February), Sao Paulo’s Estadio Morum BIS (10 and 12 March) and Buenos Aires’ Estadio River Plate on 23 and 25 March. Given the space between those gigs, it could well be that additional shows are added.

For those dates, a presale via U2.com will commence on Monday 19 October, with remaining tickets being sold via Ticketmaster on Thursday 22 October.

And Carnaval De Luz, for those who don’t already know, comes out on 13 November.

The weekend is very nearly here, but there's one last thing we need you to do… And that's prove that you've been all over this week's music news.

At the close of every week we devise 10 fiendish and fun questions to test whether you've been paying attention. Or not…

So Are You Going To Go Our Way?

Then hit that button!

Brandon Flowers’ love of Bruce Springsteen is well documented. In fact, when his band, The Killers, released their second album, 2006’s Sam’s Town, critics noted the sonic similarities to The Boss’s classic 1975 LP, Born To Run.

After that, some sort of collaboration felt kind of inevitable, and it duly happened in 2009 at the Pinkpop festival in the Netherlands, where Flowers joined Springsteen and the E Street Band onstage to duet on Thunder Road, Born To Run’s opening track.

For Flowers, we’re guessing that this remains a career highlight, but even though Springsteen was one of his heroes, he still had to prove his knowledge of the song he was going to sing.

Speaking to The Standard, Flowers remembers what Springsteen did backstage in his dressing room before the show: “He put a piece of paper down and a pencil, and it was almost like, ‘how well do you know the song? Write out what you’re going to sing, what I’m gonna sing.’”

Fortunately, Flowers was able to rise to the challenge and demonstrate his Bruce-loving credentials. “I knew every word,” he says now. “We sang it together alone in his room, and that is about as close to heaven as you can get.”

Speaking of collaborations, Flowers also revealed that he was forced to raise his game when he recorded his new solo album, Thrasher, with a group of top-notch Nashville session musicians.

“I was humbled, because I went there feeling like I was hot shit, but I didn’t know how good these guys were,” he admits.

RECORDING WEEK 2026: While it might sound like something of a cliché, Erol Alkan is an artist for whom ‘the music’ always seems to come first.

Between his seminal mid-noughties clubnights Trash and Durrr, his production credits for the likes of Late Of The Pier, Mystery Jets and Klaxons, his numerous DJ accolades and his countless remixes and collaborations, he has had plenty of opportunities for self-promotion over the years. Yet Alkan’s is a career built not on his own ego, but on using every outlet available to share, nurture and promote new music.

He’s also one of that rare breed of musicians whose talents aren’t confined by genre, with a career touching upon indie, electro, house, techno and beyond, with seemingly little regard for trends or fashions, even when he’s caught up in the middle of them.

2013 saw Alkan setting up his first purpose-built studio space, The Phantasy Sound, a North London hub for himself and the artists on his Phantasy record label. This played a major role in birthing a pair of stunning, yet very different albums: the lo-fi pop of Connan Mockasin’s Caramel and the warped electronic experiments of Daniel Avery’s Drone Logic.

It also resulted in Alkan’s first proper solo release, some 20 years into his career, in the form of the intricately-produced, club-focused Illumination EP.

A few years back, we headed up to North London to meet Alkan and take a nose around his studio. We republish the complete tour and interview in full below to mark MusicRadar's Recording Week 2026.

We started with 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.

“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.”

That said, pride of place in the top slot of the rack is Alkan's own homemade compressor. “The Mustapha SSL-4000. It’s basically just an SSL clone that I’ve built with a Neve width module.

"If you whack it all to the far right you lose all the signal and you can check out your clocking as well. If your clocking is a bit dodgy, and it sounds all MP3-ish and digital, then that’ll tell you.”

Likewise Alkan has nothing but love for Pioneer's Rekordbox software.

“Ever since rekordbox came along, it’s meant that I can pool all my music together and organise it in a way I understand.

“The great thing is that you can come up with your own system of working. I do feel a bit guilty about being able to turn up somewhere with a pair of headphones and a USB key, when you see bands with trucks full of gear and a crew of 30 people to play the same stage, but that’s the way DJing has gone. I still believe that DJing in its greatest form is just as creative and exciting as what bands can do. It’s just a great system, though.

“I’m curious as to what the next thing is going to be. I know that you can do a lot of things with mobile phones now, but I don’t trust them!"

For crucial listening Alkan leans on those old favourites – a pair of Yamaha NS10 monitors. “I just have them because they sound so bad. As they say with NS10s - if it sounds good on them, then it’ll sound good anywhere," he explains.

“I’m a big fan of the Effectron delays from the ’80s. They’re great, unpredictable delays. I like to send stuff to them and have it very, very low in the mix.”

And while the Effectrons are best described as 'quirky' the next essential in Alkan's studio is only ever regarded as a classic: A Roland TB-303 bassline.

“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.”

Likewise another new addition to the studio is this Korg Mono/Poly dating from 1981. “So far I’ve just been messing around with it," Alkan says.

Something that regularly gets a workout in Alkan's studio however, is his trusty Roland SH-1.

“It tends to do bass like no other synth I have. I’ve a trick that I do with it, that I don’t want to reveal, but there’s a workaround if you experiment with the patching capabilities. You can get some pretty amazing, deep, cranium-quaking bass from it!”

And who else is going to team all of the above with a Formanta Polivoks?…

“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.”

Glenn Hughes, the former Deep Purple and Black Sabbath star, has undergone a successful open heart surgery this week.

In August 2026 he announced he was retiring from touring after nearly 60 years as a recording artist and performer.

Known to his fans as ‘The Voice Of Rock’, Hughes has sung lead vocals and played bass in an array of bands including Purple, Sabbath, Trapeze, Black Country Communion, California Breed and The Dead Daisies.

On 14 October Hughes revealed via Instagram: “Now home after an eight day stay, and a 10 hour open heart surgery, operation, at UCLA, Ronald Reagan, Medical Center. Gratitude beyond.”

Back in August, when he broke the news about his retirement from live performance, he stated: “This past year, I’ve had some health issues. The results from numerous MRIs, CT scans, and an echocardiogram have alerted my medical team, that I need another open-heart surgery. I really have no option and no choice as health is my number one priority.”

Sadly, a small percentage of Hughes’s followers posted negative messages following this announcement, to which Hughes replied: “99.9% of you understand my predicament, but a very small minority of you think it’s OK to joke, trying to get attention… [this] is not the way to live & breathe.”

He continued: “All my social networks have been a safe place, with a great camaraderie between myself and all of you. At this time in my life, I have lived and done it all musically, and have surrounded myself with family and friends, who are all on the same page. Be kind to one another…”

The last time Hughes performed live was on 1 August when he appeared with rock supergroup Kings Of Chaos at the Agua Caliente Casino in Rancho Mirage, California. That night he shared the stage with former Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora and current Bon Jovi guitarist Phil X as well as REO Speedwagon frontman Kevin Cronin and ex-Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver drummer Matt Sorum.

Of all the hundreds of performances in his long career, arguably the most iconic was on 6 April 1974 when Hughes was a member of Deep Purple. The band headlined the Californian Jam festival at Ontario Motor Speedway on Ontario, California. This show was co-headlined by Emerson, Lake & Palmer and drew an audience estimated at more than 300,000.

Rockstar Games has confirmed French electronic duo Justice as the soundtrack composers for Grand Theft Auto VI, the most eagerly anticipated videogame of the year.

In fact, scratch that: GTA VI is probably the most eagerly anticipated release of anything this year – movies and music included. As such, being tasked with writing the music for it is a considerable feather in Justice’s cap.

The announcement coincides with the release of Flower in a Hurricane, Justice’s new single, which also features Tame Impala, SZA, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard.

This features in the new Grand Theft Auto VI launch trailer, which has also landed and, for the first minute at least, has the vibe of Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing. The nuts and bolts of the music might differ, but the atmospheric synths, scattergun drums and chugging riff – played on an overdriven synth rather than a guitar, we think – definitely feel like an intentional nod. Have a listen and see what you think.

Flower in a Hurricane will also be included on Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album, the official game soundtrack, which can currently be pre-saved on streaming services and pre-ordered on CD and vinyl.

This 34-track collection will, presumably, feature more of Justice’s music, along with confirmed tracks by the likes of Yung Lean, Travis Scott, CA7RIEL and Paco Amoroso (with PinkPantheress, Fred Again and Etienne de Crécy) Morgan Wallen, Rauw Alejandro and even still-Rolling Stone Keith Richards.

Whether Cliff Richard’s Devil Woman will be included remains to be seen. It was featured in an earlier trailer for the game, but isn’t in the new one.

Grand Theft Auto VI will be released on 19 November on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Blondie are to release another album in the New Year, which will feature what are likely to be the last recordings of Clem Burke.

The drummer sadly died of cancer in April last year. But he’ll be heard once more on High Noon, which will be out on 26 February 2027. It’s the band’s first studio album since 2017’s Pollinator.

Aside from Burke, there are a number of guests on the record, including Glen Matlock and Johnny Marr. Indeed, Marr co-wrote the album’s first single, Spectral Eyes, which is out right now. You can hear his instantly recognisable guitar on the intro.

The album has been a long time coming. It was started way back in 2022 – hence Burke’s presence on the record. Back in 2024, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein announced during a BBC 6Music interview that a new record would be released. Then in August 2025, the band’s website announced that it would be released in spring this year. One way or another (sorry, couldn’t resist), that didn’t happen, and it was delayed again. Until now.

With Burke no longer with us, only Stein and Harry remain from the band’s classic lineup. High Noon will be the group’s twelfth album and the sixth since they reformed in the late 1990s.

So what’s it like? Well, in a statement, Harry has said that: “This album is classic Blondie – an amalgamation of all our different influences and eras into something new. This music feels grounded in the present, shaped by who we are and how we’re living now.”

Her longtime creative partner, Stein added: “It’s been a long, strange ride, and somehow here we are with another Blondie album. I’m not sure what the fuck I’m supposed to say at this point, except that we’re incredibly grateful for all your support over the years.”

Billy Corgan has showered Travis Barker with some extravagant praise, calling him “the most influential drummer of the last thirty years”.

Barker was a guest on Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast where the pair chatted about drumming, rock music and so on. About a third of the way into the interview, the Smashing Pumpkins man says of his guest: “You have influenced more popular drummers in the last thirty years than any drummer I can think of. When we talk about rock/ alternative, something about the way you played kind of unleashed this different way of playing.

"I guess power pop or rock drums, that comes directly from you because before you people didn't play like that, and after you, almost everybody plays like you.”

What can you say to that? Clearly honoured, the Blink drummer replied: “That means so much. Yeah, I mean, I don't even know what to say,” before going on to talk about his influences.

He described those as “just this weird kind of mixture of everything that I was raised on. I owe it to like Buddy Rich and everyone from Buddy Rich to, like, the Meters drummer was like a huge influence. Cissy Strut - I would sit at home and try to figure out these drum parts, you know.

"Even Tommy Lee, like seeing a drummer in the forefront of the band was… There was just so many great drummers. Jimmy Chamberlin, Dennis Chambers… Animal from the Muppets was my biggest influence as a child.”

Barker also told Corgan about how after his 2008 plane crash, getting back to the drums was an essential part of his recovery. “It was the first thing I did when I got out of the burns centre,” he reveals. “I actually didn’t tell Dr Grossman, my burns doctor… He was a straight shooter and he was like ‘I don’t know if you’re going to play drums again’. No one knew, but both of my hands were numb. And I didn’t want to say anything because I just wanted out of the hospital.”

“So I didn’t tell Dr Grossman and it turned out I had a bunch of nerve damage, but I just couldn’t wait to get home. And they would push me outside, and I would play on a practice pad. My hands were still scabbed. My burns weren’t even completely healed yet. (But) that was (when) I finally felt connected to something.”

RECORDING WEEK 2026: Touring rock musician turned film-score composer, Tyler Bates found his music-to-picture footing in the dark with 2004's Dawn of the Dead, then carried on with Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects and the Halloween films, where John Carpenter's iconic theme was refashioned into something grittier.

Notable credits include television’s The Exorcist, its notorious demonic dread stretched across ten episodes; a mountainous hybrid score for John Wick: Chapter 4; and a longstanding association with director Ti West on the slasher trilogy: X, Pearl and MaXXXine. His latest collaboration with West, the Johnny Depp-starring Ebenezer, is due out in November.

Beneath his experimental studio craft, however, sits a conviction to build sound around an emotional gesture or single vocal timbre. Always serving the scene, Bates believes learning starts with listening, a habit that never stops for a composer who first became enraptured by sound when layering up recordings on cassette tape as a boy.

For Recording Week 2026, we caught up with Bates to learn more about his route into film, his approach to recording technology and fascinating tales about working with William Friedkin, the legendary director of the original Exorcist movie…

MusicRadar: You began layering sound on cassette recorders as a kid. What were you trying to achieve with that setup before you had any sort of formal recording gear?

Tyler Bates: “It was clearly ignorance and experimentation. As I was composing my first music, I wanted to hear multiple parts and realised that I could play live into a cassette recorder while dumping tracks from another one simultaneously. Of course, the recordings were pretty muddy, but it was an opportunity to hear a multitrack of an idea, which was very inspiring and really set me on course to becoming a songwriter.

“I delved deeply into electric guitar after starting my musical journey on alto sax and was intrigued by sonority, song arrangements and developing song ideas that were more than me just strumming or hitting a guitar riff and yelling over the top of it. I began this period of experimentation out of pure curiosity and passion for sound and music.”

MR: Was there a specific moment when you had to make a decision between pursuing rock stardom or a soundtrack composer?

TB: “When I moved back to Los Angeles in the early ‘90s, I'd already been asked to do some cues for a movie because they had no money. I told them I didn't know anything about it, but I’d give it a shot if they really wanted me to, so the people working on the film shared their perspective with me, which is how I began learning about the craft and the purpose of music for film.

“At the same time, I was developing my band Pet, which signed to Atlantic Records, but I had to pay rent, right? People kept asking me to do scores, which kept me housed and gave me the opportunity to continue to make music for both, but before I knew it, I'd done 15 movies, and my 15th film was a jazz/bebop score that Blue Note ended up releasing.”

MR: What movie was your first big break?

TB: “Get Carter with Stallone and Michael Caine. It flopped terribly, but was such an incredible experience because it was among my first working with orchestras and hybrid scores, which set me on course for a lot of what happened afterwards.

“I had my lows - I was still painting houses between some of these projects until Tom Kapinos asked me to do Californication, which brought a true rock element back into my work scoring for film. At the same time, I was just starting on 300 and those experiences completely opened my mind to having a cinematic rock vision for music.”

MR: One of your transformative soundtracks was Dawn of the Dead. Was it a dream to soundtrack a film that was indirectly part of the George A. Romero canon?

TB: “To this day, I have to tell you I had such a good experience on that movie. I was up against a number of composers who had repertoires that were probably more appropriate because I hadn't had a tremendous amount of orchestral experience or any creepy music in my repertoire, but Zack Snyder believed I was the right person for the job.

“Once I was hired on Dawn of the Dead, I didn't have much time to do the movie and it was a massive challenge for me. It was right before Christmas 2003 and I was able to score a couple reels over the holiday break. They put the music into a test screening of the same cut they’d previously tested and the movie scored 25 points higher. They didn’t change one note about the score, and although I recognise my mistakes, I think the concept and tone were really distinct.”

MR: Does working on a score like Dawn of the Dead, or The Exorcist TV show, require a very different suite of tools to your ordinary movie?

TB: “If you look at most horror films, the horror exists inside of a drama, so if there's a really good dramatic story, there's a chance that the movie will be considered seriously and last the test of time. The Exorcist is really a drama - it just happened to scare the hell out of people. I've certainly learned a lot about that because I scored William Friedkin's final film, which was an extraordinary experience on so many levels.”

MR: Presumably, that was Killer Joe?

TB: “Yes, and I was hired under auspicious circumstances to work on Killer Joe. Billy had already hired someone who did a score for the movie in defiance of the producers, who then approached me at a party and asked if I’d be open to it. I asked them if Friedkin was amenable to it, so Billy came over to my studio and - I don't know if you've read his book or watched any interviews with him, but he was a very intense and highly intelligent but salty character.

“He came into the studio, sat on my sofa and said, ‘Tyler, I don't know why the f**k you're spending your time with me on my little f****g movie when you do all these big blockbusters’. I said, ‘Look Billy, the producers approached me and if you're open to seeing if we can do something that might suit the movie better, then I'm good, man.’”

MR: Having already done the score for The Exorcist TV show, you must have discussed the making of the original The Exorcist with William

TB: “In our conversation that day, I asked him about The Exorcist, and he told me the story about how he threw out Bernard Herrmann's score. He didn't want an organ score, but Herrmann didn't listen and sent the movie back with an organ score in it. That wasn’t going to work, so Billy fired him. I'm like, ‘Okay, so perhaps the greatest film composer of all time just got fired!’

“So then he hires his good friend Lalo Schifrin and tells him he wants a chamber orchestra, but when Billy showed up to the Warner Bros. sessions, there were 80 players and 5 percussionists. He said, ‘I don't want this crap in my movie’, so after a day and a half of recording Billy stopped the sessions and fired his good friend Lalo. At that point, Warner called Billy back into the studio and said, ‘Look, we'd really like you to use the music that we just paid Lalo to score and we're out of money, so either use that or look in the Warner Bros. library.’

“So Billy picked up the music reels, unspooled them in the parking lot right outside the studio and said, ‘Nobody's going to use that music.’ He was basically down to whatever he could find in the library and then happened upon Mike Oldfield's instructional album on the sonority of bells, which had the composition Tubular Bells.

“When Billy heard that, he said ‘That’s it!’ It’s crazy that a record that no one should have ever known about became a massive seller because Billy put it in the most successful horror movie in history. The Exorcist made $400 million in 1973 based on a $3 ticket price.”

MR: I understand Pro Tools is your hub for scoring, but you also lean on Logic and Ableton. How do you decide which platform a given musical idea belongs in?

TB: “I started on a PC because they were cheaper at the time, and Macs weren't fully developed until the end of the ‘90s. I went from Cubase to Digital Performer to Logic, but eventually realised that after they'd been playing back from Tascam DA-88s, all the dub stages had moved to Pro Tools and to deliver a score that was compatible, I needed to be on the same platform.

“For people just coming into movie scoring it’s way more cost-effective to work in Cubase or Logic. Ableton is fantastic for developing a passage or loop, and you can do things with effects that you can’t do elsewhere, especially when affecting a stereo sound. I basically use Logic as a sample playback platform for all of the bespoke sounds that I've made in the last 20 years.”

MR: We understand that you work quite closely with Wolfgang Mathis on creating sound design libraries?

TB: “He's still my dear friend and collaborator, but now lives in Canada. We used to set up multiple modular rigs in my studio, have our nerd jams, record stuff live, take the good moments of them and develop pads and pulses.

“I was always on a quest to have sounds to work with that nobody else had and would implement these conceptual ideas, but sometimes the clock would run out on me before I was able to manifest them as I’d envisioned. Sometimes it worked, like on the score for The Devil's Rejects, but that's a noise score really and it took a lot of tweaking to get that to land appropriately for the film.

“I do like to keep things interesting, because every time I experiment I learn more about the potential of sound synthesis and Wolfie really introduced me to thinking about the potential of a sound. It may start off as a bongo or some kind of bell or voice, then through experimenting with various synthesisers or modular synths, I learned the various permutations of sound and what the possibilities are. Now it’s part of my calculus when I'm thinking about what's appropriate for a TV show, movie or game.

“Sometimes that’s going to leave people scratching their heads, so as much as I love to experiment I have to make sure that the people I’m creating a score for can identify with it. They have to understand what it is, what it does to the picture and how to relate to it psychologically and emotionally. If they don't feel it right away, it's not a successful idea.”

MR: What will you focus on to nail those core psychological and emotional elements?

TB: “When I collaborate with different artists, especially singers, I'm thinking about the story they have to tell. Sometimes that’s intimated in the way they express themselves as much as it might be lyrically - or it might be encrypted, but it's important to understand how to help a person tell their story.

“With rock music, the riffs come when we need them and I never have had a shortage of riffs because I don't place all the weight on them. I place it on the storytelling, the song structure and how to best serve and frame a singer's voice.

“That could mean finding the right key for them to sing in to discover where their voice resonates best, but when I'm scoring on film, the actors are my singers. The timbre of their voice impacts my selections for various instruments and sounds because I don't want to compete with them; I want to make sure that the music complements the important aspects or frequencies of their voice.

“If the actor’s a baritone, I want to make sure that I clear the way for their voice to really resonate because that's going to empower their character and their dialogue the most. The whole thing is very much like a dance.”

MR: Looking at your studio - out of everything available, what do you like about using the Moog Muse?

TB: “It's very warm and sounds really good, but I've actually started working on this new TV show and have gotten back into using my Access Virus. It's kind of like a rekindled romance because I got away from this thing for 15 or 20 years, but even though it's an old synth, you can’t tell because of how I EQ and process it. If I run it through an overdrive pedal or delay, it takes on another life.

“But the Moog Muse has been great for really low tones. They're so rich and deep, and so many beautiful harmonics can emerge, even from a drone. The Dave Smith Evolver is another great one. If you want to do something weird or create some really crunchy pulses, that's an amazing instrument – and it’s favourably priced too.”

MR: You’ve mentioned that John Wick: Chapter 4 was the Mount Kilimanjaro of hybrid scores. What made that project a bigger technical challenge than anything else you previously worked on?

TB: “For anyone attuned to the properties of sound, the John Wick films have quiet dialogue, yelling and gunshots – and there’s a lot of Foley in John Wick 4, including car crashes and all that stuff. We also applied some orchestra, which didn't feel natural to the preceding three films, but the scope of it was so broad that we needed to engage an orchestra for some of it.

“At the same time, we still had all of these non-orchestral idioms that have been applied through the entire franchise that needed to be present – like all the crunchy synth pulses and atmospheres, and the hybrid rock/electronic orchestral score had to dance around all these frequencies. Believe me, gunshots always win, dialogue always wins, and in the case of John Wick 4, the cars win, so you have to factor in all that production sound.

“Mark Stoeckinger is a brilliant sound designer and a great collaborator - his sound design is so dense and compressed that there's no way I can beat it, so I had to be more like water in a stream. By being aware of what's going on in the sound package, you can negotiate a little bit by saying, I don't think you need all of those low synths in your sound package, but I’ll stay out of the way of your tyre screeches, crashes and engine revving.

“Mark and I would work on that and make sure that when they get to the final dub, all the required sound is represented by the two of us. It used to be, you're the composer, here's the picture, now write the music. Now the picture is moving even after we deliver the final score, so the whole time you're working on a movie like John Wick 4, it's literally like the tailor fitting the pants on the running man.”

MR: How do you mix a project when the compositions are continually changing?

TB: “When you’re working with pure orchestra, all those instruments are naturally harmonically balanced, but when you're using a ton of hardware synths, soft synths and playing guitars, mandolins, electric bass and drums, you've got so much going on. It's fun, but it's a nightmare to mix because you don't have much time.

“When we're delivering a score to a dub stage, it's all in stems and there’s some additional frequency management that takes place. They place the music into its appropriate context, depending on whether the sound is an enclosed space, a wide open space or a cavern.

“We have to factor all that in so that it's not only appropriate, but gives the mixers some latitude. If I slather a big reverb on everything, they’ll have way less latitude to get creative with how they place the music in the overall mix, so I want to give them options and make it a joy to work with as much as possible so people can actually hear the music in the movie.

“It's not like mixing a record. You have 25 minutes, and there might be 160 tracks of audio in a queue, so you've just got to do your best and rush through it, but sometimes we'll circle back around to the music when we do the soundtrack so it sounds a little bit more refined.”

MR: Once a film is released, can you totally relate to the score you made?

TB: “What you hear in the film is not necessarily the entirety of a composition. When I went to the premiere of John Wick 4, the music had definitely been thrown around to the point where cues that Joel J. Richard and I had done separately were intermingled and we didn't recognise a lot of our own work.

“We hear ourselves in it, but we're like, ‘I didn't do that’. That can be frustrating if you're emotional about the work, so I pour that into my songwriting where I know that what we're writing and recording in my studio is going to be on the final product. It's incumbent upon me to do that type of work so that I don't develop a bad attitude or become jaded about the fact that film is an entirely different process to what it was 20 years ago.”

MR: Do you have a bucket list of movies you want to work on?

TB: “I don't look at it that way. It’s an extreme privilege to work in this industry, because there are very few of us who have viable careers. I'm working a lot, so I prefer to just work on whatever I agree to do and not fantasise about the next thing.

“It would be fun to do a really interesting horror film because, creatively, you get away with murder and introduce concepts that would be inappropriate for any other style of movie, except for maybe an action movie. Having said that, doing a character drama would be cool!”

For more information on Tyler Bates, visit his official site.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer created some of the most accomplished and acclaimed progressive rock music of all time during their imperial phase in the ’70s. But if drummer Carl Palmer had to pick just one track that captured ELP at the very peak of their powers, what would it be?

Palmer has spoken to MusicRadar while preparing for his next set of shows in which he performs classic ELP material live – synchronised with 1992 video footage of his late former bandmates, keyboardist Keith Emerson and bassist/guitarist/vocalist Greg Lake.

These upcoming shows are billed: Welcome Back My Friends – An Evening with Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The drummer is joined on stage by Paul Bielatowicz on guitar and Simon Fitzpatrick on bass and Chapman Stick.

The setlist will of course feature the landmark tracks that established ELP as leading lights of progressive rock and also one of the biggest selling bands in the world.

But which of those tracks represents the absolute peak of the trio’s artistry?

Palmer smiles and tells MusicRadar: “When people say, ‘Can you can you tell me what Emerson, Lake & Palmer was like? What was it?’ Somebody who doesn’t know it. I’ve only ever come up with with two answers.”

First, he names the definitive ELP album, a classic from 1973.

“If you want the pinnacle of the creativity, I would say Brain Salad Surgery was the top end of that creativity.”

Then he names their greatest track – an interpretation of a famous English hymn that served as opening piece from Brain Salad Surgery.

“If you want to get the band in a nutshell, there’s the Englishness of it – because Greg had a choir boy voice, it wasn’t a bluesy soul voice. And we were keyboard-driven, not by guitars. Very unusual at the time.

“I would have to say the grandest piece that displays absolutely everything – our connection to classical music, and our connection to the big production – I would say it’s the track Jerusalem. Because that fulfils everything. We did play it on stage, not all of the time, but that to me just opens up the door and says, ‘That’s what ELP sounded like.’”

He continues: “Yes, there are other tracks like Fanfare [For The Common Man]. Yes, there are other big tracks like Lucky Man, C’est La Vie. But all in one, where you get the full blast of Keith Emerson, of Greg Lake, myself, I would say Jerusalem would always be the track that I would refer to as being The One.”

Palmer is hugely proud of what he achieved with ELP and proud of the show he is currently taking around the world. He does admit, however, that he wasn’t entirely happy with the last show that the legendary trio played together as Emerson, Lake & Palmer – headlining the High Voltage festival in London’s Victoria Park on 25 July 2010.

Palmer admits: “The band wasn’t in good health by the time we got to that concert. But we rehearsed for about five weeks. We got as much done as possible, and that was it.

“Really, after what everyone had gone through in the band, we knew we couldn’t actually tour again full time. We were offered other stuff, other shows, but it just it never felt right to me at the time, and I know that Keith and Greg felt the same as well.

“We knew that it wasn’t practical to tour with like three weeks off in between dates. So, truthfully, I think that High Voltage show was a way of saying goodbye to all of the English fans.”

The Finnish symphonic metal outfit Nightwish have parted company with their vocalist Floor Jansen.

The group claim it was a mutual decision. In a statement, they have said simply that: “Nightwish and Floor Jansen part ways.”

They continue: “After careful consideration, we have, in mutual agreement, decided to part ways. This decision is necessary and important to us and our future ambitions. Thus, we will now pursue those goals in our own separate ways. We wish each other nothing but the very best on our respective artistic journeys.”

“For you, dear listener, and indeed for us, this marks the end of a truly great voyage. Nightwish will continue. We will move forward and enter the studio in 2027 to record a new album. As we celebrate 30 years of Nightwish, we couldn’t be more excited about our music and our future.”

Jansen doesn’t seem to dispute this version of events. In her own statement on social media, she says: “Endings create new beginnings, and even though it was a hard decision to make, I believe there is a bright musical journey ahead of me.”

”I invite you to follow along on this path, as you were with me in all the great years before. Thank you for your support through the rollercoasters of life. My solo career will now get all of my attention and gives my new upcoming album Hytress (out 2027) and the tour all space to grow. Hope to meet you on the road again in a near and happy future.”

The Dutch singer has been with the group for thirteen years. Indeed, she is the third lead vocalist the group have had in their 30-year history. She replaced Anette Oizon in 2013, who herself replaced Tarja Turunen in 2005.

The band haven’t played live since 2023, but revealed recently that they have been working on their next album, the follow-up to 2024’s Yesterwynde. Speaking to Metal Hammer in August, keyboard player and songwriter Tuomas Holopainen said that he had already written six new tracks for the new album, which will presumably be recorded with a new vocalist, for release next year...

Born in Wakefield, Bill Nelson studied at the town’s art college before recording his first album, Northern Dream, in Mike Levon’s bedroom studio in 1971. Much to his astonishment, legendary DJ John Peel played it in its entirety, before Nelson formed Be-Bop Deluxe and forged a reputation as one of art rock’s most exemplary - if under-appreciated - guitarists.

Nelson’s kit has always leaned towards the experimental, using a Minimoog, an ARP Omni and an EBow on his stylish 1983 LP Chimera, collaborating alongside YMO’s Yukihiro Takahashi, Kate Bush drummer Preston Heyman, and Japan bassist Mick Karn.

Others soon called, with Nelson adding guitar and EBow to records by Yukihiro Takahashi, Yellow Magic Orchestra, David Sylvian and Harold Budd. Meanwhile, he produced the Skids and famously took his name off the production credit for Gary Numan’s 1983 LP Warriors.

In recent years, Nelson has distilled an astonishing 218 recorded tracks into improvised, texture-rich electric guitar instrumentals. Titled Guitars of Tomorrow, the first volume has produced the LP Magical Thinking. We caught up with Nelson to discuss his fascinating and surprising career.

MusicRadar: Hi Bill, tell us a little about Duane Eddy. We believe he was quite an influence on you when you first started?

Bill Nelson: “I was about 10 years old when I first got a Duane Eddy record - I’d heard a single he’d done called Because They’re Young on the radio and liked it an awful lot. My younger brother received a little toy plastic guitar, which he didn’t bother with, but I managed to pick out the theme from The Third Man on it. Then when I heard the electric guitar on the Duane Eddy records, I fell in love with its twangy, echoey sound.

“As a result of me being such a fan, my dad bought me a second-hand Zenith Archtop Acoustic. I tried to transfer what I’d managed to do on the toy guitar, but found it really hard going because the action was pretty high and it didn’t have little toy plastic strings.

“I almost gave up and then I met a pal at school called Ian Parkin who had an electric guitar. We were both trying to translate what was going on in our record collections, and I guess that gave me the encouragement to keep going.”

MR: When did the penny drop?

BN: “Before long, we’d managed to get some rudimentary chords, but the first time I ever played something properly was when we figured out the chord progression to The Ventures’ Walk, Don’t Run, but neither of us was playing the melody and then the penny dropped.

“I thought, ‘Hang on, let me try and figure out how this melody goes,’ and that’s when I became a lead guitarist and he became a rhythm guitarist. This was all during the late ’50s/early ’60s with instrumental bands like The Shadows, The Ventures and The Fireballs.”

MR: Jumping forward to when you first started making your own music, we understand that DJ John Peel opened a door after you released your debut LP, Northern Dream?

BN: “It was amazing because I had very little ambition to be a professional musician. Not that I wouldn’t have loved it, but it just seemed impossible for a young man from Wakefield to break into a music industry that seemed centred in London. I made Northern Dream in Mike Levon’s back bedroom studio. We recorded onto a two-track tape recorder and pressed up around 250 copies, one of which got into John Peel’s hands.

“He actually contacted me and said, ‘Listen to my programme tonight - I’m going to play the record.’ I thought, ‘Great, he’s going to play a track’, but he played the entire album in one go. I was thrilled to bits and about a week later I got a message from EMI saying they were interested in signing me as a solo artist and would I have a chat with them at Manchester Square in London.”

MR: Was this prior to the formation of your first band, Be-Bop Deluxe?

BN: “I’d just put the first line-up of Be-Bop Deluxe together and told EMI that I’d got a band and was now doing something different to Northern Dream, so they asked if they could get a cassette of it. We recorded the first two songs I’d ever written for the band, took it down to EMI’s A&R and they said they’d come up and see us in three months’ time to watch us play live.

“We did a gig at the Staging Post in Leeds and had already built up a good local following. It was packed out, but EMI still wanted to sign me as a solo artist. I said ‘It’s the band or nothing’.

“Eventually, we got a gig at the Marquee Club supporting String Driven Thing, and EMI turned up again to see how we’d go down with a London audience. As it happened, we went down very well, so they agreed to sign the band if they couldn’t get me on my own. That was how we got our first record deal, so we did the Axe Victim album and went on tour with Cockney Rebel.”

MR: At this point, were you practising guitar day and night?

BN: “I did when I first got into guitar, but I never learned to read music or study theory. Before Be-Bop was born, I’d played in lots of different vocal bands doing rhythm and blues and working men’s club kind of material, playing everything from Jim Reeves and Elvis Presley to Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry.

“That was useful because although my heart might not be in all those kinds of music, that sort of cross-cultural education helped me to understand a wide range of music. I’m not just a rock guy - I like to listen to jazz, classical and folk.”

MR: In 1979, you produced the Skids’ album Days in Europa. Why did you take a diversion into production?

BN: “I never intentionally wanted to produce other people. John Leckie and I co-produced the Be-Bop albums from Sunburst Finish and the Red Noise album. As it happened, Richard Jobson and Stuart Adamson from the Skids were big fans of both and approached me with a view to us producing an EP for them.

“For their next album, they asked if I’d do it on my own, so I produced it. It was the same with all the bands I produced, which was nice but it wasn’t something I went out looking for. It’s a very different skill set, but it’s quite frustrating watching other people have all the fun so I’d always try to get a little bit in there on guitar or keyboards.”

MR: You started Cocteau Records about a year later for your own music and other bands. Did you regret getting into such a cut-throat industry?

BN: “I wanted to open the label up to other artists because I had this altruistic idea that an independent label could be artist-centred rather than business-centred. I got a deluge of cassette tapes and 90 per cent of them were just horrible, but some good things came out of it.

“We released this band called Man Jumping, which was a bit like a cross between a prog band and Philip Glass, but my manager did a runner and it all fell apart. After that, I was picked up by Mercury, who liked my second album Quit Dreaming (And Get on the Beam). They bought it from EMI and it went top 10 in the very early ’80s.”

MR: You also signed the ’80s synthpop band A Flock of Seagulls, which seemed like quite a strange choice?

BN: “One of their managers had been part of the road crew for Be-Bop, so they rang me up and said ‘We’re managing this band from Liverpool but can’t get a deal’. We recorded the single (It’s Not Me) Talking at a tiny studio in Leeds and put that out, but they suddenly got a deal from a major label.

“In terms of electronics, I’d been dabbling since the early-to-mid-’60s. At college, I produced an electronic score for a play of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and used various techniques that John Cage had pioneered with tape cut-ups and putting objects through the strings of the guitar to slow it down and reverse it.”

MR: That takes us nicely to Chimera, your 1983 solo LP that leaned on a lot of synthesisers and sequencers. How did you acquire those instruments?

BN: “The first synth I ever got was the Minimoog, which I bought from a band called Hudson Ford. They couldn’t get on with it, so I got quite a reasonable price and used it a lot to write some of the Red Noise stuff. In fact, when we did the final Be-Bop album, Drastic Plastic, I used a Hagstrom Patch 2000 guitar synth on various tracks.

“I also used a big Yamaha CS80 and a Roland synth guitar that had a strange reinforced part that went over the neck to the headstock. It had really delayed tracking, so it wasn’t great for anything other than steady chord playing.”

MR: On Chimera, you worked with Yukihiro Takahashi from Yellow Magic Orchestra and Japan’s Mick Karn. What do you recollect from those sessions?

BN: “For the drum stuff, I’d been to Japan to play on a YMO album called Naughty Boys, and then I played on Yuki’s album What Me Worry. I basically asked if he could send me some drum tracks that might be useful to write to, so I got a tape of improvised parts and used them as a starting point for songs.

“I’d also done an album with another Japanese musician called Masami Tsuchiya and Mick Karn was at those recordings at Air Studios, so I asked if he’d like to play on Chimera. He came up to Yorkshire and we ran through the material, but he didn’t actually bring his bass. We used a proper studio for the recordings, but Mick was very talented.”

MR: Around that time you were invited to produce the Gary Numan album Warriors. Your relationship started well, but went downhill at some point. Why do you think it didn’t work out creatively?

BN: “I got the impression that Gary didn’t want to move from a safe place. His record company had contacted me and said that, whilst he was one of the early synthpop artists, the newer ones were moving ahead and doing something different. They felt he needed to push the envelope a little.

“I tried to get him to do certain things, but found it really hard going because he wanted to do stuff the way he’d always done it, which I can understand after you’ve been working in a certain mode. Anyway, engineer Nick Smith and I mixed the album, but I got a call from him about a week later saying he’d quit because Gary had gone in and remixed it.

“I managed to get hold of a copy of the remixes and it just wasn’t what I wanted to have my name put to, so I took it off the album before it came out. It was all a bit silly and sad really, but he’s actually been good enough to say he was young and naive and should have given me more space. I did some EBow guitar on the album, which hopefully stands up, but I haven’t heard it for years.”

MR: A happier collaboration unfolded in 1986 when you worked on David Sylvian’s Gone to Earth LP. We’re guessing Sylvian gave you a lot more latitude to interpret his material?

BN: “From what I remember during the sessions, the songs weren’t finished. In fact, there was no vocal at all and the tracks had ghost-shaped chords so it was literally let’s do six takes and improvise - then David would sort through all the takes, edit bits together and build a song around them. It was quite open and free - playing whatever came into my mind.

“At that time, I was into a lot of esoteric philosophical stuff, and he was very hungry to learn about that. I gave him a list of obscure books, which he sent his girlfriend out to buy from Atlantis Bookshop in Museum Street. I also introduced him to the music of Jon Hassell and they ended up working together.”

MR: You returned to work with Sylvian when the band Japan reformed as Rain Tree Crow. Was that one of your more gratifying projects?

BN: “It was an interesting project but slightly fraught because they didn’t stay a band and David and Steve Jansen fell out after that. It had a sad side to it because of the tensions within the band, but I remember doing sessions at Pete Townshend’s Eel Pie Studios and gave him a box set of ambient pieces I’d done.

“Pete got in touch later asking if I’d be interested in working with him on music for a stage production of The Iron Man, but I don’t know what happened.”

MR: When you do sessions for other people, do you make sure to reference whatever you’ve worked on?

BN: “I always found playing with other musicians nerve-wracking because it’s hard to know exactly what they want. Most times they probably wanted my guitar to sound like whatever it did on my records, but sometimes they wanted a certain style that I wouldn’t naturally gravitate towards.

“I can’t say that I always enjoyed playing on other people’s records because it’s always slightly stressful, but as long as they’re happy with it - and they usually seem to be - I won’t bother referencing it again. I tend to be like that with my own albums once I’ve released them too.”

MR: You made some albums with ambient master Harold Budd. Did you specifically seek him out for collaboration?

BN: “When I was working on the Red Noise album in the late ’70s, we were recording at one of Richard Branson’s studios in Shepherd’s Bush and I decided to go into the West End and browse some of the more avant-garde racks at the record store. It was there that I pulled out a Harold Budd album called The Pavilion of Dreams. I bought it on spec because the track titles were speaking to me in some way and it was just stunningly beautiful.

“Later, I did a track called the Shadow Garden on a cassette release for a Belgian label called Les Disques du Crépuscule and Harold had a track on that album. That’s how Harold heard my music and he later asked my friend for an introduction while he was working with Brian Eno.

“He came up to Yorkshire and we hit it off straight away and became great friends. Even though he lived in LA, Harold came over to watch me play live in 2020 at the Clothworkers Hall in Leeds and we did three numbers on stage.”

MR: What do you remember about working with Harold as a session player?

BN: “We recorded By the Dawn’s Early Light in Daniel Lanois’ Kingsway Studio and that was a fabulous experience. Harold had written out parts for everybody to play. BJ Cole was on pedal steel and there was a viola player, a harpist, Harold and myself, but I was a bit worried about this.

“I said, ‘You do remember, Harold? I can’t really play scored parts’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll play the piece, I’ll give you the nod when I want you to come in and you just play whatever you want for as long as you want.’ It was so easy to do and all the musicians were looking at me thinking, you lucky so and so, we’ve got to follow this score’.”

MR: You called your latest project, Guitars of Tomorrow, “heavily layered futuristic guitar instrumentals with a historical twist”. In what way is it futuristic, and what historical period are you nodding to?

BN: “The idea behind Guitars of Tomorrow started when I was thinking about what sort of guitar playing would be acceptable in, say, 20 or 30 years’ time. I almost called it Guitars of Tomorrow - Echoes of the Past because it sort of harks back to The Shadows, The Ventures, Duane Eddy, and even Wes Montgomery’s jazz stuff. It’s about trying to pull together all those different elements from the guitar’s past and possible future.”

MR: Over a period of around three years, you recorded something like 200 tracks and apportioned them to different albums. Is Magical Thinking the first of those?

BN: “The idea is that there’s going to be a series of albums, all subtitled Guitars of Tomorrow, but each one will have an individual title. Magical Thinking has just been released, and the second, Art of Light, is more contemplative and abstract.

“The third will be called Elsewhere, but it’s been hard going through all the tracks and deciding how to put them in the right running order. The process is very old school, but I do like to think of an album as a journey with variations in tempo and key. The tracks have to relate or flow somehow, but it takes time to come up with the right combinations.”

MR: Are you still working with hardware to process guitars, synths and other instruments?

BN: “When digital recording started, I got a Mackie D8B digital mixing desk and 24-track hard drive recorder, which worked fine because it was a fader-based system that I was used to with individual channels that could be manipulated by hands rather than a mouse. It eventually broke down, so I knew I’d have to bite the bullet and go down the software route.

“I eventually got a Mac mini with Cubase and a Mackie control surface with eight faders so that I could still have that sense of being able to ride a fader, which is totally different from messing about on-screen.”

MR: In terms of guitar improvisation, how do you decide when the playing ends and the editing begins?

BN: “There are two ways that I start a piece. One is using a drum or percussion sequence of some kind and playing guitar or keyboard chords against it; another will be starting with a keyboard pad sound and building on top of that. There’s not an awful lot of editing. I tend to play keyboards and guitar live and if there’s a mistake I’ll play it again rather than copying and pasting.

“I’ve got a Yamaha Motif 88 and a DX7 somewhere in my storeroom. I keep getting tempted to get myself another keyboard because I’ve exhausted all the sounds on the Yamahas, but I work in a very small space full of guitar amps with shelves full of science fiction toys, antiques and stuff. The house is more like a museum now. It’s terrible. My wife keeps asking me to throw stuff out, but I won’t! [laughs]”

MR: Do you lean towards using a chosen few guitars that you feel truly comfortable with?

BN: “I’ve got about 100 guitars and I’m actually going through a process at the moment of documenting them. I’ll typically try to get about eight out at a time and use them in the studio, but I’m nearly 78 now so lugging all these things around is getting to be a chore. I don’t use amps anymore and haven’t for a long time - when I play, I’ve got an Axe-Fx modeller and the POD Go effects processor going direct into the recording system.

“At the moment, I’ve got a 1962 reissue Gretsch White Falcon double-cutaway, a Fender Stratocaster, Les Paul Custom three-pickup and a couple of obscure things like a Musicvox. The Fenders, Gretsches and Gibsons are all great guitars, but I sometimes like to use something a bit quirky and obscure because it inspires different things. If something’s not so easy to play, that puts a different shape on what you actually do.”

MR: Does acquiring techniques make you a more creative player or do you have to unlearn certain habits in order to move forward?

BN: “I have arthritis in my hands, so I even find it hard to do an open D-shape chord. You work around your limitations, but when it comes to playing I’ve always said to people ‘If you’re thinking, you’re not really playing’.

“You should almost approach it like a child with building blocks and just let it happen. Once you’ve put the time in to understand how a guitar works and are reasonably competent, play and lean back on your instincts because they’ll usually serve you well.”

Bill Nelson’s Magical Thinking: Guitars of Tomorrow Volume One is out now on Sonoluxe. For more information, click here.

RECORDING WEEK 2026: “We’ll let you guys prophesy. We gon’ see the future first,” says Frank Ocean on Nikes, the opening track on his genre-melting musical patchwork, Blonde.

Few more prescient lyrics have been delivered by an artist who has managed to remain deliberately elusive despite the over-exposed times we’re living through.

The record, released back in 2016, is rightfully regarded as Ocean’s masterpiece – a brilliantly woozy immersive world that has yet to be followed up a decade later.

Featuring a huge cast of collaborators including Beyonce, Andre 3000, Pharrell, James Blake and many more, the starry names belie the subtle and nuanced atmosphere that surrounds the album's 17 tracks.

Blonde was the long-awaited follow-up to Ocean’s 2012’s debut Channel Orange and landed amid much speculation, following hazy rumours and intrigue behind the record’s delay. Was it writer’s block or Ocean’s bid for perfectionism that lay behind it?

“I had the time of my life making all of this,” Ocean wrote on his Tumblr in the days after Blonde’s release, in posts that led to as much online discourse around the record as it did offer clarification.

“Thank you all. Especially those of you who never let me forget I had to finish. Which is basically every one of ya’ll. Haha. Love you.”

Although born in California in 1987, it was in New Orleans when Ocean first began writing music. Real name Christopher Breaux, it was in the aftermath of the devastation wrecked by Hurricane Katrina that his life’s direction changed.

With his home and studio equipment destroyed, Ocean chose to move to LA with the little he had left and began working in a series of day jobs while writing songs for major artists.

In an interview with the New York Times Magazine in 2013, when discussing these formative experiences, Ocean said: “I had a problem listening to anybody. I had a problem listening to A&Rs telling me how a song was supposed to sound, or what this artist's vibe was.”

Despite the creative and financial challenges, these years saw him write Quickly for John Legend, Justin Bieber’s Bigger and Scared of Beautifulfor Brandy among many others under the pseudonym of Lonnie Breaux (a collection of more than 60 tracks of this music ended up online).

These songs were game-changing for Ocean, ultimately finding their way to the ears of producer Tricky Stewart who helped him sign a songwriting and artist contract with the legendary Def Jam label towards the end of 2009.

Some months later, Ocean came into contact with the left-field hip-hop collective Odd Future, including Tyler the Creator and Syd, at a live gig in the Valley near LA. It proved to be another turning point after he started to feel increasingly creatively neutered by his label.

Speaking to journalist Jeff Weiss in 2011, Ocean shared how Odd Future ignited a new fire within him.

“It’s refreshing for me to be in sessions with them. When I started working with them, it was the first time in a minute that I’d had fun in a session. If you f**k up on a take, someone’s clowning you on it, busting up at you. In normal settings, it’s not like that. It reminded me that this is supposed to be fun.”

His frustrations with Def Jam led to the unveiling of his mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra, in February 2011 as an independent release.

The genre-splicing mix featured Ocean rapping over tracks by The Eagles and Coldplay, with the former seeing the rock band threatening legal action. But it also led to greater visibility too. Ocean was subsequently called up to work on two tracks from Jay-Z and Kanye West's Watch The Throne album.

Nostalgia, Ultra attracted a cult status which, less than two years later exploded even further following Ocean’s debut album release, Channel Orange. It was a record that changed his fortunes forever.

Praised by critics, the album, in the words of Rolling Stone,displayed a, “kind of radical openness that would come to define a generation of young people who, like him, discovered their true selves with the help of the internet”, it debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 and sold more than 130,000 plus units during its first week.

At the 2013 Grammy Awards, Channel Orange was nominated for Album of the Year and won Best Urban Contemporary Album. Not only was the musical approach otherworldly, the teaser track Pyramids was ambitiously audacious - a nine minute masterpiece moving between ambience to electronic funk, it also came days after Ocean published an open letter on Tumblr detailing his first love with a man. The record marked a cultural moment, not only for shaping the innovative sound of contemporary hip-hop and R&B but also widening how artists in these genres could identify.

The record’s production was steered by Ocean alongside the likes of Om’Mas Keith, Malay and Pharrell. After three months of writing, the record was captured in the order the songs appeared on the record at a number of Hollywood studios including EastWest on Sunset Boulevard.

In an interview with Complex, Malay described how Ocean’s perfectionism saw him spend nine months on his vocals. The majority of takes were recorded using vintage microphones including a Neumann U-47 and a Telefunken 251. If a live feel was required, then a Shure SM-58 was utilised.

Keith said: “Channel Orange is one of the most incredible f*cking albums ever, and I’m just humbled to no end to have had the opportunity to participate in something so powerful and impactful.”

The record was a huge global success and one that meant Ocean was catapulted into the limelight, becoming much more in demand. He also caused intense speculation about what his next moves might be by telling the Guardian that Channel Orange could be not just his first, but also his last record.

“Storytelling's a different thing,” he said of his passions. “Like I said, it's the more interesting part about making music for me, or making albums and songs and stuff. So much so that I might not make another album. I might just write a novel next. I don't know!”

So what happened next? After the release of his debut amid its huge success, Ocean did the unthinkable for an artist of his stature at this point in the 2010s - he retreated from view.

Disillusioned with his label Def Jam and locked into a two-album deal, Ocean spent four years musically silent. Without any hints or teasers, fans and music journalists could only speculate as to what he was up to before he showed his hand in a dramatic move once again in 2016.

The first hints of what Ocean had been up to arrived via his website, which unexpectedly presented a live stream of a warehouse space. This mysterious black-and-white video loop ran for 15 straight days, and showing Frank silently building a spiral staircase in a warehouse. On the 15th day, Ocean unveiled his visual album Endless on Apple Music. Then days later, Blonde landed in what was described as one of, “the most cryptic album rollouts in music history”.

Unbeknown to the wider world, the working relationship between Ocean and Def Jam had completely deteriorated, with industry insiders telling Billboard that their final days were akin to a toxic, broken marriage where all the artist wanted was total independence.

The release of Endless in 2016 was described as the final move in what has been called "a seven-year chess game" with Def Jam Records. Having successfully fulfilled his contractual obligations, Blonde was released on his own label, Boys Don’t Cry. As a result, industry analysts believe that in its first week, Blonde saw 275,000 album sales and made Ocean more than $1m.

While the pre-release build up was unorthodox, the music on Blonde veered between elusive illusions and soul-baring emotion. It’s a blend that made the record so alluring back then and why, some ten years later, an album that explores the transience of our lives has so powerfully endured.

The records shifting title spelling alternated between Blonde and sometimes Blond, and was perceived as being a spearing of identity/masculinity and Ocean’s experiences with both men and women, recording for the album took place throughout 2013 and 2016 initially at New York's Electric Lady Studios. Then after a period of writer's block, he moved to London to work at Abbey Road Studios and in Los Angeles' Henson Recording Studios.

The themes of the 17 tracks hark back to Ocean’s past life as a teenager, reflecting on his relationships, sexuality, drugs and heartbreak. Nike is the opening track of the record, and, rather than announce Ocean’s return with huge bombast, is an all together weirder and more unexpected tune.

A stark drum beat, high-pitched vocals and synths evoke the teenage uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding how he identifies. The lack of drums on the rest of the record means it’s also aesthetically unusual within the hip-hop world.

In an exclusive statement provided to NME, producer Mysko talked about some of the Abbey Road sessions working with Ocean.

“During my time working with Frank it felt to me like we had embarked on a journey to find another world,” he said. “The path he chose was anything but linear and we travelled down routes to the furthest extremities imaginable. No rules applied and dimensions were explored that ended up bearing no relation to the eventuality. Somehow, at the end of it all, it feels to me like the planet he found is much like our own, it feels familiar and is full of beauty but contains wonders never seen or experienced by anyone before.”

Blonde’s musical palette is deceptively simple yet still tricky to pin down. The sonic landscape is built from guitar and loops with melodic highs and effects sprinkled liberally throughout from tracks Ivy to White Ferrari. At times, its psychedelia is more reminiscent of the Beach Boys than Ocean’s hip-hop peers.

Producer Malay, who worked on a number of tracks including Ivy, Siegfried and Pretty Sweet, said that it’s Ocean’s vocals that make the whole coherent. Instead of a traditional musical artist, his is a more magpie-like approach, compiling fragments of recordings and loops before fusing them together.

In an interview with Reverb, he said, “If you were to mute and go through the instrumentals on all the Frank Ocean stuff, it's super eclectic - the music, a lot of it, it doesn't connect at all. You could really [listen and say] there's no way that this should be with this, but it's just the subject matter, the feel, the vocal…”

One of the most revealing pieces capturing the creative process behind Blonde came from the New York Times. When Blonde and Endless were in the process of being made, Ocean reportedly carried the hard drives with his music in his backpack, and the backups, too. After suffering blocks in New York, he moved to London. Here he removed the flat he stayed in of everything but the essentials. Ocean then did the same at Abbey Road too, decluttering to focus solely on the music.

Speaking to the newspaper, Ocean said: “I just wanted to be able to walk around and not run into an end table or some useless piece of furniture.”

Alongside the two albums, Ocean also released his Boys Don’t Cry fanzine where the influence of cars was shared. Memories tied to drives ranging from late-night journeys on LA freeways to mushroom trips inspired the album’s sense of unstoppable forward motion. Still, there are some ironies to be found in how the popularity of an album defined by transience has continued to grow. He depicted the influence of cars in its production via Tumblr.

He said: “I found it romantic, sometimes, editing this project. The whole time I felt as though I was in the presence of a $16m McLaren F1 armed with a disposable camera. My memories are in these pages, places close by and long ass-numbing flights away.”

Despite the veneration that only continues to grow for Blonde since it turned 10 earlier this summer, at the time, some reviews were less than complimentary claiming the record was half-finished.

The Guardian declared 2016’s two albums as a “double dose of hookless morass that Ocean finally heaved on to the world”. The Independent gave the record two stars out of five, proclaiming it to be “a trickling bubble bath of an album that ultimately runs lukewarm”. Much as in the way critics struggled to comprehend Radiohead’s Kid A when it was released in 2000, it has since been universally applauded.

In the decade that’s passed since Blonde, Ocean still hasn’t released a third record. Instead, he appears to have been more preoccupied with other creative ventures into fashion and photography. But the impact of the record lives on despite Ocean’s silence.

As United Masters said, “from Omar Apollo to Daniel Caesar to Mk.gee, Frank Ocean didn’t just make an album, he opened a door that a generation of artists walked through.”

The fact that there is so much speculation surrounding and love for Blonde underlines his impact. Now DIY recording processes, surprise releases, stepping back from the limelight are strategies adopted by many.

What Frank might do next in music is anyone’s guess, but we can be assured that it certainly won’t be boring.

It’s one of the biggest hit songs of the 1980s, but its story begins way back in the 1890s.

In the small rural community of Elmore City in Oklahoma, a ban on public dancing had been imposed in 1898 – in an effort to curb heavy drinking. The ban remained in place until 14 high school students decided that enough was enough and that they wanted a high school prom.

In 1980, they persuaded the school’s board to overturn the antiquated legislation, so that they could dance. And when an aspiring screenwriter and songwriter named Dean Pitchford chanced upon this story in a newspaper, he knew it had all the elements of a powerful musical drama.

The screenplay Pitchford wrote would become Footloose, a film that would become box office gold when it was released in 1984, making $80 million in ticket sales and turning its star Kevin Bacon into a household name.

But it was the title song, released five weeks before the film, that seared itself into the public consciousness and kickstarted interest in the film.

Co-written by Pitchford and Kenny Loggins, the song rocketed to No 1 in the Billboard Hot 100 when it was released on 11 January 1984. Over four decades on, it remains a quintessential ’80s classic.

When Dean Pitchford came up with the idea for Footloose he was working as a staff songwriter for Warner Brothers Publishing. Intrigued by the newspaper story, he visited Elmore City to interview high school students and their parents.

While Pitchford had never written a screenplay before, he had worked as an actor before moving into songwriting and had an abundance of talent and an impressively diverse skillset. In 1980, he and composer Michael Gore wrote three songs for the Alan Parker-directed film Fame, including the title song, for which they won an Oscar.

Pitchford’s working title for his new screenplay was Cheek To Cheek, but he decided to change it once he had attracted interest from some major film studios. In an interview with Songwriting magazine in 2012, Pitchford said he filled page after page of a yellow legal pad with ideas for a new title.

“When I went back over the list, I think I had four that I thought might be good ideas. But Footloose was by far my favourite,” he said.

One of the studios that was interested in his screenplay was 20th Century Fox. For a meeting with Craig Melnick and Dan Zadan, two producers at Fox, Pitchford typed up four hypothetical title pages and deliberately placed Footloose on the bottom of the stack.

He recalled: “I took them into a meeting with Craig and Dan and I said, ‘Here are some ideas for the title.’ They looked at number one, they went, ‘Okay, alright.’ And they flipped it over, and number two, and they flipped it over, and number three, ‘Okay’. And then they flipped over the last one, which was ‘Footloose by Dean Pitchford’, and they lit up like a Christmas tree.

“They felt what I felt, which was it was just such an interesting looking word and it didn’t mean anything but it did. And all those ‘o’s gave it a visual kind of punch. We all just went for it. It sort of sold itself.”

In the end, Paramount was the studio that acquired Footloose. Pitchford’s plan was to create the film around a nine-song soundtrack, and he had an ace up his sleeve when it came to the person to co-write the title track with him.

Pitchford was good friends with Kenny Loggins, a major star at the time after having written the song I’m Alright (1980) for the film Caddyshack. In 1982, Pitchford had co-written the song Don’t Fight it with Loggins and Steve Perry, the singer from Journey, recorded as a duet by the latter pair.

Pitchford realised that a commitment from Loggins would carry real weight when it came to Paramount moving the project forward. In an interview with US journalist Dan Rather in December 2018, Loggins recalled the moment that Pitchford approached him to ask for his help.

“My best friend, Dean Pitchford, had written a screenplay, and he said, ‘Would you read my screenplay and check it out?’. And I read it, and he says, ‘I need a couple songs for this’. And I said, ‘Well, it's not Gone With the Wind, but…’”

Loggins then went on to explain to Dan Rather just how common screenplays are in Hollywood.

“People don’t realise,” he said. “In Hollywood, the cab driver has a screenplay. It’s not unusual to have somebody hand you a screenplay and say, ‘Would you write a song for it?’ But Dean was a friend of mine, so I did. So a favour to a friend becomes a favour to me. A year later, this is the biggest movie of the summer.”

With Loggins on board, Pitchford started to arrange a writing session. Creating a title song was the priority. But Loggins had tour commitments. When he fell off stage at one show and had to take time off to recover from his injuries, the project looked under threat.

There was only one possible opportunity for them to get together to write – at Lake Tahoe, Loggins’ last US show before the Asia leg of his tour.

“Paramount was chomping at the bit,” Pitchford told Songwriter magazine. “They wanted to know that Kenny Loggins was going to be doing the title song, and if he wasn’t then we had to move on and get somebody else. So it became absolutely vital that as soon as Kenny was back on his feet, I had to go and seal the deal.”

Pitchford flew to Lake Tahoe despite having a bad case of strep throat and a high fever, which he reportedly attempted to conceal from Loggins when they sat down to write in Pitchford’s hotel room.

“I think it was two or three days we kept up this charade with him showing up on his painkillers and me on my painkillers, and us getting the gist of the song,” Pitchford told Songwriter magazine. “We wrote the verses and the chorus melodies, we wrote the first verse, and we knew what we were going to do for the chorus.”

When Loggins left for his tour of Asia, Pitchford wrote the rest of the lyrics, except for the bridge. They finished the song when Pitchford visited the returning Loggins at his home in Los Angeles.

With a running time of just 2:55 in its single format, Footloose is an impressively lean and punchy track. It’s a pacy slice of high energy pop-rock, fuelled by feelgood vibes and a sense of joyous freedom.

The song boasts a big sound, with hefty thwacks of snare, jagged synths, punchy compressed bass and stabs of overdriven guitar. It kicks off with a thumping 4/4 beat, which hurtles along at 174 bpm.

In an interview with the YouTube channel The Professor of Rock, Loggins noted that the groove on the song was based on David Bowie’s song Modern Love.

He said that he got the idea for the chorus melody from the 1966 song Devil With A Blue Dress On by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.

Loggins also highlighted how Nathan East’s bassline in the song shared a similarity with a Little Richard classic. “Basically, he took Lucille out to the next level,” Loggins said.

There are other nods to ’50s rock ’n’ roll, such as the deep Duane Eddy-style bottom E twang that kicks in ten seconds into the song.

Loggins’ vocal on the song is gritty and powerful but it has a nice lilting cadence to it. His phrasing is impressive and he sits right in the groove with a tight, rhythmic delivery.

Structurally, the song is straightforward and mirrors the pent-up frustrations of the film’s central character Ren McCormack (Kevin Bacon), a native of Chicago who moves with his mother to a small town in Utah, where he attempts to overturn a ban on dancing enforced by a local minister (John Lithgow).

There are nifty compositional elements throughout the song, such as the second half of the pre-chorus, which builds with an ascending bassline before the stop, when the whole track shifts into the chorus.

At 2:20, guitar, bass and keys drop out, leaving drums, percussion and chants, with each instrument then gradually reentering the mix as it builds towards the climactic stop at 2:55 as Loggins unleashes the final line “Everybody, cut footloose!”

Footloose was released on 11 January 1984, five weeks before the film was released. But the official video, directed by Brian Grant, featured a montage of clips from the film and fuelled anticipation for the movie launch.

In his 2018 interview with journalist Dan Rather, Kenny Loggins highlighted the parallel promotional power of the song and the film.

“The movie thing is an interesting synergy because the movie lifts the song, the song lifts the movie, and back then that hadn’t been done,” said Loggins. “Pop music and movies were not necessarily symbiotic, and all of a sudden it was working. And MTV was a new thing, and MTV was playing the videos from the movies, and it was killing all the other videos.”

Footloose shot to No 1 in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Colombia and South Africa and reached No 6 in the UK Singles Chart. After his success with the film Caddyshack, Footloose bolstered Loggins’s growing reputation as the ‘King of the Movie Soundtrack’.

Dean Pitchford would go on to co-write all nine songs of the colossally successful Footloose soundtrack, which included other massive hits such as Let’s Hear It For The Boy by Deniece Williams and Holding Out For A Hero by Bonnie Tyler. Loggins also contributed another track, I’m Free (Heaven Helps The Man), which peaked at No 22 in the US Billboard Hot 100.

When Loggins co-wrote Footloose with Pitchford, he had no idea how prominent the song was going to be in the film. It first appears in the striking opening scene, which features a succession of people’s feet, moving to the beat.

In an interview with The Professor of Rock YouTube channel, Loggins spoke about watching the film for the first time.

“We wrote Footloose for that scene in the middle of the movie, where they go out of town and the first time they go dancing,” said Loggins. “And so when I went to the premiere of the movie and it opens with the shoes dancing and the song comes on, I turned to my wife and said, ‘Holy shit, this is a home run!’ It was so good.”

RECORDING WEEK 2026: 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

Led Zeppelin have done something they have never done before. They have actually allowed the use of Stairway to Heaven in a film.

Famously, the group have always refused to license one of their most famous songs in cinema. Cameron Crowe had to cut a sequence from 2000’s Almost Famous which showed the characters attempting to convince William’s mother to allow him to go on the road with the band Stillwater by listening to Stairway to Heaven.

The group’s policy has become so well-known that it was referenced in Wayne’s World. When Wayne walks into a guitar shop and attempts to play the song, he is directed to a sign on the wall that reads in no uncertain terms: ‘NO Stairway To Heaven’.

However, now, some 55 years after it was first released, Zeppelin are finally loosening their grip on the track. They have allowed Greta Gerwig to use a section in the trailer for the upcoming CS Lewis adaptation Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. During the three-minute-long snippet, you can hear Jimmy Page’s famous guitar intro, the bridge and Robert Plant’s outro line.

So why this film and why now? Well, it’s known that Robert Plant is a devotee of CS Lewis and Tolkien – his lyrics in both Zep and on his solo albums have referenced both authors’ works. Speaking to Rolling Stone about the trailer, Gerwig suggested that Plant and Page “saw the heart and the story and the drama in it.”

“It’s an epic song,” she said of Stairway. “It’s about the two paths of good and evil … It is a spiritual quest and a spiritual journey. So to me, this was a song that made sense to introduce the film to the world.”

Of course, the track has turned up in cinemas before, in 1976 in Zep’s The Song Remains the Same concert film/documentary. And some of their other more famous songs have been licensed to other films – Immigrant Song in both School of Rock and Thor: Ragnarok and That’s the Way in Almost Famous.

As for Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, you’ll have to wait a wee while to actually see it in the cinemas – it isn’t released until 12 February next year.

Jackson has unveiled the Legend Series, a limited edition run of signature guitars based on some of metal’s most iconic instruments.

The collection includes a replica of Randy Rhoads’ original Concorde, the asymmetric V-style that would become a mainstay of the Jackson catalogue to this day.

There’s a recreation of Scott Ian’s ‘NOT’ Rhoads, the single-pickup guitar he used across the first five Anthrax records.

And there are a pair of signature models that relive Megadeth’s Rust In Peace era; the Marty Friedman Kelly KE-1 and the five-string David Ellefson Concert Bass, both in black-on-black, with that unimpeachable six-in-line Jackson headstock that is one of the most aesthetically pleasing silhouettes in metal guitar design.

These four instruments are freighted with the weight of history. The significance of seeing the Concorde taking flight once more in the Jackson lineup was not lost on the late Randy Rhoads’ sister, Kathy Rhoads D’Argenzio.

She says her brother and the former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist would approve. “There is no doubt Randy would be so honoured to know the impact he has had on Jackson Guitars and on the world of rock and metal guitar,” she says.

Jackson has had quite the impact on some of the other players who have put their names to these instruments. Scott Ian has been a Jackson endorsee since the start. He says the NOT Rhoads played a fundamental role in shaping his super-aggro tone.

And long-time Anthrax fans will immediately recognise the graphics, the ‘NOT’ sticker, the anarchy logo… But look closely, that NYHC sticker has been changed to NYSI, the only aesthetic update to recognise Ian’s connection to the Big Apple despite moving out west to California many moons ago.

“My Not Rhoads was such an important part of my journey,” says Ian. “I discovered my tone with it. It’s been used on every Anthrax record – it was the main guitar on those first five albums in the ’80s. It’s the guitar that kind of made my life. I love that people connect with it.”

Part of the appeal of Ian’s NOT Rhoads is its simplicity. It has a single Seymour Duncan JB-1 humbucker, or technically its TB-4 trembucker-sized version to accommodate the string spacing on the Floyd Rose 1000 Series vibrato. It has an alder body with maple neck-through construction, built to shred, but as Ian’s right hand has proven over the years it is a bona-fide chug machine too. The blue Jackson logo on the white painted headstock is so cool, too.

Speaking of iconic single-pickup shred machines with a single Seymour Duncan JB-1 at the bridge position and some history in a Big Four thrash band, the Marty Friedman KE-1 Kelly, complete with the “1” graphic and the Kahler 7330 fixed bridge, is possibly the quintessential Megadeth guitar – the one you’re only allowed to plug in once you have posted a passable cover of Tornado Of Souls on TikTok.

Again, like the NOT Rhoads, it has the alder wings, maple neck-through construction, the 12” to 16” compound radius ebony fingerboard (those dimensions are almost ever present on today’s Jackson range), and is so recognisable that it doesn’t need many more signature details.

Friedman’s signature is on the back of the headstock. He says the devil is in the detail.

“The KE-1 represents living the dream to me,” said Marty Friedman. “When I had the opportunity to create my own signature guitar, I went all out with Jackson to build the ultimate heavy metal guitar. No expense was spared, from the pickup and bridge to every detail and dimension.”

Friedman’s former bandmate’s signature five-string bass guitar similarly takes us back to that halcyon era, Hangar 18, Vic Rattlehead presiding over a fetus in a jar, the Clash Of The Titans Tour… Great times.

This is also a neck-through build, with an alder body, quartersawn maple neck, plus EMG pickups and a HiMass bridge. All in black. There’s a radiation symbol on the headstock. Very Rust In Peace.

But it all started with Randy Rhoads and that Concorde, and this with the ivory finish and black pinstripes, the gold hardware and gold Jackson logo on the black painted headstock, and the block inlays on the ebony fingerboard, this limited edition CD-1 just too cool.

We’ve got one of the all-time great metal/rock pickup combos, with a Seymour Duncan JB-1 at the bridge, a ’59 at the neck. Note the positioning of the three-way pickup selector switch.

The simple non-locking tremolo unit might not have the same travel as a Floyd Rose but it’s a more fuss-free proposition. Well, it’s also more faithful to the original design.

Interestingly, all of these signature models are neck-through builds. All of the guitars feature Seymour Duncan humbuckers. Four players, four instruments, and we see the steady evolution of Jackson’s artist builds.

The Legend Series Marty Friedman KE-1 Kelly is priced £1,849/$2,299. The Scott Ian Rhoads RR22 is priced £1,849/$2,199. The Randy Rhoads CD-1 will set you back £1,899/$2,499, while the David Ellefson CB V Concert Bass is £1,899/$2,499.

Get them while they’re hot. Those prices include a Jackson Foam Core guitar case.

See Jackson for more details.

The Super Bowl Halftime Show now generates almost as much buzz as the game itself – probably more outside of the US – but it wasn’t always this way. In fact, the Halftime Show didn’t really become a ‘thing’ until 1993, when it was performed by Michael Jackson.

This moment is now set to be documented in a new film – Spectacle: Michael Jackson at the Super Bowl – which is coming to Hulu on Disney+ and ESPN in February 2027. Directed by Bao Nguyen, who previously helmed Netflix’s The Greatest Night in Pop, it promises to detail the behind-the-scenes events leading up to the performance, and includes never-before-seen footage.

Jackson’s show was produced and directed by the late Don Mischer. He was brought in at The King Of Pop’s request, having previously co-produced and directed the Motown 25 TV special 10 years earlier. This was notable for being the first occasion on which Michael Jackson performed his signature moonwalk dance move.

“I will always remember the first meeting with the NFL and with [TV broadcaster] NBC,” Mischer told Rich Eisen in a 2023 interview. “I brought Michael in and Michael went around the room and introduced himself quietly. We sat at the table and the first thing Michael said was ‘Now the first thing I want to do is move the start of the game four hours later so that my Halftime show will be in the dark.’”

With this request, Jackson was forgetting a couple of important things: firstly, that the Super Bowl is kind of a big deal in itself and isn’t likely to have its kickoff time moved on the whim of a pop star; and secondly, that the show was being staged in Pasadena, California, which is several hours behind US Eastern Standard Time.

It was left to Mischer to explain: “There was silence in the room and I said, ‘Michael, you know that means that people are going to be seeing you at midnight in New York? It won't work, man.’”

Mischer would go on to produce and direct Super Bowl Halftime Shows by Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Prince, Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, and Jackson’s start time request gave him an early lesson in how to deal with the talent on these occasions.

“The first thing you say to them is, ‘This is not your show. You're not 100% in control of it. It's not like going out on tour and playing a big venue like the Hollywood Bowl. You are one cog in a whole wheel that is called Super Bowl Sunday you’re one little piece of it.”

A little piece Jackson may have been, but his show was a landmark moment for the Super Bowl. His star power was deployed specifically to stop people from changing channels during the break – NBC had been stung in 1992 when rival network Fox aired a special episode of sketch show In Living Color during the halftime break, drawing viewers away – and the gambit worked.

In fact, for the first time ever, viewership actually increased for the second half, indicating that many people had tuned in specifically to watch Jackson’s performance.

Not that his set was as crowd-pleasing as it could have been. Yes, we got Billie Jean, but the rest of the set (other than the 90 seconds Jackson stood stock still after being propelled upwards through a trapdoor on the stage) was filled with songs from his 1991 album Dangerous – Jam, Black or White, and Heal the World – and a performance of USA For Africa’s 1985 charity hit We Are The World.

You wouldn’t think Paul McCartney – one of the rare individuals for whom that cliché ‘living legend’ doesn’t feel out of place – would ever feel shy about approaching any of his peers.

But there’s one that he, apparently, still feels nervous around.

When asked by Amy Poehler on her Good Hang podcast who he would most like to collaborate with Macca admitted: “I always think Bob Dylan. But I’m too nervous to ring him up.”

Poehler joked that he couldn’t exactly see Dylan on the phone, McCartney quipped that he was more likely to be “in some bush, in a sleeping bag, maybe.”

Dylan and McCartney have, of course, met on many occasions – famously, it was Dylan who introduced marijuana to The Beatles in 1964, thus altering the course of their career.

Speaking to BBC Radio Two earlier this year, McCartney describes another meeting backstage at the Desert Trip festival in 2016: “I came in to see him and it was like, ‘Wow.’ It was just him and me in this massive, big tent backstage and he was very complimentary,” he recalled. “It was funny ‘cause… A little bit embarrassing, he said, ‘You’re a star.’ I thought, ‘What do you say to that?’”

In the same Poehler interview, McCartney also revealed he’s a bit upset at the way he’s portrayed in the numerous biopics that have come out in recent years. Primarily because they depict him as shorter than he is.

It started with the 2009 Sam Taylor-Wood-directed Nowhere Boy, which depicted John Lennon during his teenage years. “The John character, he’s bigger than me in the film. My character is kind of wimpy, smaller than John. John knocks me to the floor. It’s like, Sam, this is not true. She said, ‘This is a movie; it’s not a documentary.’ And I thought, Well, I don’t like that explanation. But I couldn’t do anything.”

Now, he claims that Sam Mendes is doing the same thing in his quartet of Beatles biopics, in which Paul Mescal plays McCartney. “And guess what? He’s smaller than the guy who plays John,” he said of Mescal.

It seems Macca contacted Mendes about this very issue. “I said, ‘Sam, I’ve got just one thing that I need to say to you.’ I don’t know how Sam is going to deal with it. He sent me a picture, a still, from the filming they were doing and they’re crossing the Abbey Road crossing. And the Paul character is markedly smaller.

"I texted him, ‘Sam! Smaller! Don’t do this. You said you wouldn’t do it!’ He said, ‘No, it’s okay, it’s just the stride pattern.’”

There’s been an incalculable number of words printed that venerate the Strokes’ seismic 2001 debut, Is This It And, with good reason. That turn of the millennium album both re-directed the course of guitar music and established the Strokes as the reigning kings of back-to-basics rock n' roll across the ensuing decade.

As the years wore on, a troupe of similarly minded, leather-clad guitar-toters tried to recapture the early Strokes' natural cool. From Arctic Monkeys to The Libertines and The Killers to Bloc Party, a truckload of bands were inspired to attempt to re-bottle the same magic they’d been consumed by back in 2001.

We sat down with the Strokes' pivotal first producer, Gordon Raphael, to find out more about helming the desk for the Strokes most important early work. From their first EP to Is This It to 2003's searing follow-up Room on Fire and swathes of 2005’s First Impressions of Earth, Gordon was the band's trusted studio godfather.

Surprisingly, as Gordon remembers, he wasn’t looking to work with the Julian Casablancas-fronted outfit at all when he first heard their music…

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

It proved to be a fateful meeting for both parties and the ensuing history of guitar music was forever changed. The Strokes subsequently spent a weekend recording in Gordon’s Transporterraum studio in New York City, the result was a riveting three-track debut EP, The Modern Age. This fruitful first collaboration would cement a solid working relationship ahead of making their debut album proper with Gordon.

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

As a teenager growing up in Seattle, Gordon fell in love with music from an early age, embracing the hammond organ, synths, string ensembles and any other sounds or pieces of kit he could collect. It was joining a band called Medusa towards the end of his teens in the seventies that ignited his interest in studio intricacies.

“The leader of the band had recorded incredible symphonic rock music with a four track reel to reel tape recorder, an Echoplex, a phase shifter and a bunch of instruments,” Gordon says.

“It sounded really good and inspired me to start hacking away at expanding my own understanding of tape recorders and synths. I wanted to write my own music and record it with no one watching me so I was free to do anything.”

Gordon used borrowed gear from Seattle’s music community to help him evolve his craft, recording any would-be collaborators he could find.

“It was a four track reel to reel for many years, later a MXR digital delay unit, then an Oberheim DMX drum machine and digital reverb,” he says.

“I learned a lot and recorded hundreds of songs as part of this community of extremely creative weird people,” Gordon continues. “Many artists in Seattle were a strange bunch, you could see the oddness in the grunge bands like Mudhoney, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. It’s the Pacific North West so it rains all the time, there’s nothing to do other than stay in and practice music.”

From the beginning of Gordon’s musical journey, the ARP Odyssey synth has been a particular favourite, and an instrument he dedicated himself to understanding.

“I was pretty hit or miss with it to begin with, then I started getting the idea, and within two years I could make any sound that came to my imagination,” he says. “I love it because it doesn’t have any memory, or digital parts, it’s all about making sounds by hand with sliders. You can change all these audio parameters randomly at will which is hard to do with digital equipment.”

While growing up in Seattle, Gordon remembers having a realisation that although he’d learned a lot in the city, the only way to get further ahead in the music industry was to move to either LA or New York.

“I didn’t see myself surfing or hanging out on the beach, I saw myself grinding away in the East Village with the other weirdos so that’s where I ended up,” he laughs.

He initially tried to move to New York in the eighties, then returned to Seattle and enjoyed some success with his grunge band, Sky Cries Mary. After the city’s scene collapsed in on itself, he headed to the East Coast again and this time stayed and started to make a name for himself.

“I had just been very successful in Sky Cries Mary, we’d toured, made videos, been on late night television, so when I got to New York I was feeling confident,” he says. “I found this digital/analogue space hybrid that was a brand new concept when I moved there.

“All of the weird things I’d done at home in little dusty four-track studios, that was all the information and sounds I had in my head that I could apply in New York, from using spacey effects to more aggressive sounds. Everything I applied I had learned from my earlier formative years.”

During the late '90s and the start of the 2000s, Gordon remembers how guitars had started to feel a tad out of fashion. Instead, cooler kids were into jungle, drum and bass and hip-hop rather than the now tired cliches of rock n’ roll. Still, he was determined to immerse himself in New York’s band scene with his studio handily located in the middle of the East Village.

“Where I lived was maybe a seven minute walk from Ludlow Street where all the clubs were, so places like the Mercury Lounge, Lunar Lounge, Maxfish and the Pink Pony coffee shop,” he says. “Whenever I needed to work, I’d go to these clubs and hand out my business card to any band that seemed cool.”

The Strokes ended up in Gordon’s basement recording via such a meeting. After a few failed studio attempts with other producers, it was his eccentric space and creative flair that appealed to the five-piece garage rock outfit.

“When Albert saw how strange and artistic my basement studio was with its silver walls, dark lights, old antique equipment and strange dolls hanging from the ceiling, he loved it,” Gordon states. “When the Strokes came in to record, I was so impressed by them, how seriously they were taking the music and how they let zero mistakes go by.”

The three songs that became The Modern Age were the title track, the soon to be ubiquitous Last Nite and Barely Legal. It was released in January 2001 without any edits from Gordon’s session.

Even though the band and their label Rough Trade loved the demos, they initially chose to enter the album sessions for their full-length debut, Is This It with a different producer. But these recording attempts never came to anything. Remembering how easy working with Raphael on their EP was, the band returned to work with Gordon and his signature lo-fi basement sound.

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

Is This It was an instant classic, and had a colossal footprint following its launch in the summer of 2001.

As a result of its popularity, Gordon found himself in London as one of the most in-demand indie rock producers. With his photo on the record’s sleeve, he was constantly recognised and being pulled in different directions to work with bands and artists.

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

While working at The Garden, Gordon recorded Skunk Anansie’s Skin on her solo material and also parts of Regina Spektor’s critically acclaimed album Soviet Kitsch. Gordon’s nomadic lifestyle continued with another relocation, this time to Berlin courtesy of a connection with the German producer Moses Schneider.

“I just thought I could leave my UK rock and roll fantasy and start the European classical painting era of my life,” Gordon laughs. “But when I went there, no one was really introduced in rock music. In the mid-2000s, it was all about minimal techno and Ableton. Everything was needed except for me. I still enjoyed my time living there but I was flying around the world to South Africa, Belgium, Iceland, Mexico and Argentina to record bands.”

For Gordon, these globe-trotting adventures working with creatives, bands and musicians were what his younger self had always dreamed of doing

“Everywhere I went, no matter what language people would be speaking, I’d be talking in music,” he says. “Kick drums, guitar amps, distortion, vocals, mixing, speakers, every individual wants something slightly different but the currency is equal around the world.”

Fast forward to today and Gordon, now based in Hebden Bridge in the English county of Yorkshire, is busier than ever looking for new talent. He’s worked with The Abomic Toms and Widows of the Night, either from Leeds-based Eiger Studios or jetting off to different countries to record and produce. From his perspective, guitar music has never been healthier. A social media call on Instagram to work with new artists saw him inundated with production requests.

“I said, 'Hey, does anyone want to work?' I did this on Instagram and I got 60 bands in New York who all wanted to work with me,” Gordon says. “I wound up recording 20 of them, then I went six months later and ended up recording 20 more. There are so many amazing bands out there at the moment.”

Raphael feels new generations of music lovers are also discovering some sounds and styles for the first time.

“Some of these kids are so young, they think the new album from the the Strokes is like discovering a new band. It’s really weird that this is happening,” he says.

“Also, this generation were so impacted by the pandemic, actually, we’re over computer and internet stuff, instead let’s get out there and play electric guitar, start bands and do shows.”

For now, Gordon is content capturing raw energy and guitars in his Leeds studio. He’s been utilising the space for more than five years.

“It’s nothing super fancy but I have a lot of my gear there, there’s a very comfortable room where it feels good to make sounds and we get great recordings,” he states. “I’ve had bands from all over coming out to Leeds to work with me. As long as I can carry on meeting artists and new bands, then I’m going to be in good spirits.”

For more information on Gordon's studio works, career and current activities, head to his official website.

Al Jardine and Mike Love are the last two surviving founder members of The Beach Boys. But in a new interview, Jardine says he is deeply concerned for Love’s health after footage of Love’s recent onstage appearances went viral.

On 11 October, both Jardine and Love performed shows with their respective bands.

Al Jardine & The Pet Sounds Band played in Cerrito, California, with Jardine, 84, joined on stage by two other former members of The Beach Boys, Bruce Johnston and David Marks.

Meanwhile, on the same night, Mike Love, 85, appeared on stage with The Beach Boys in Nashville.

In footage from The Beach Boys’ show in Cincinnati show on 10 October, Love was seated throughout the performance and singing backing vocals which were limited and barely audible.

In a brief address to the audience in Cincinnati, Love explained that he had been “going through some health issues for quite a while”.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Jardine said that he has seen footage of Love on stage with The Beach Boys in Nashville.

“It’s shocking and I was really depressed,” Jardine revealed. “I had to really shake myself out of it just to get on stage. Just the optics of it were just awful and I’m speechless.”

Jardine said of Love’s decision to continue performing in his condition: “That’s just not right, that I can see. Obviously, he’s a total pro. He wants to be on stage, but he just doesn’t know how not to do it. He doesn’t know what else to do, so I think he’s trapped.”

In June 2026, Love had commented on his health struggles via Instagram, revealing that he had contracted bronchitis and COVID while mourning the loss of his sister.

“I feel stronger every day physically,” he stated, “but I am heartbroken emotionally.”

He added: “I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else than with our audience. For me, our audience is the medicine, and the music is the cure. Thank you all for your outpouring of love, well wishes, and healing prayers. I am deeply humbled and grateful.”

Past tensions between Al Jardine and Mike Love are well documented, and came to a head in 2025 following the funeral of The Beach Boys’ chief songwriter and visionary Brian Wilson.

During the ceremony, both Jardine and Love gave speeches honouring Wilson, but Jardine felt that Love’s comments about the classic hit song Good Vibrations were in poor taste.

Jardine told Rolling Stone: “Mike wanted everybody to know that he wrote every single word of Good Vibrations. I didn’t feel the compassion, let’s put it that way.”

The only real cure for grief is time and in a moving interview with Rolling Stone, Sharon Osbourne has been explaining how she feels about Ozzy’s passing and his farewell at the Back to the Beginning show, now more than a year has gone by.

The occasion for the interview is the release of the concert film of the event, something she admits she found “very hard” to watch. “It’s bittersweet. It’s amazing,” she says of it. “Everything about the show was amazing and just a joyous occasion and one that will go down in music history. I’m proud of that and that it was for my husband, and I’m so thankful to everyone that took part in it, for their time, their effort, their giving.”

She reveals that Ozzy did the gig against no less than six doctors’ advice. “They advised us not to do the show. They said it would kill him. We were all together and Ozzy said, ‘It’s not an option. It’s what I want.’ He said, ‘I know I’m dying. If I miss a few months of my life, I want to go this way. This is what I want.’ It was his wishes and we went through it. He said to me, ‘Another six months, what’s it going to do for me?’”

“He was very, very emotional,” she explains. “But you know what? It was beautiful too. It was amazing. How lucky was he to go out that way? I say he went out like a Viking. It was the way he wanted.”

“If we all have a chance to pick the way we go out … Do you know what I’m saying? It was a triumph to be surrounded by your friends, your family, your fans that adore you and what you are doing that day. It’s just amazing. It’s not sad. He was blessed to be able to choose the way you die.”

When asked if she felt Ozzy was still with her when she watched the film, she simply said: “He ain’t left me for a minute. I go to sleep wearing his T-shirts. I wake up wearing his glasses. I’m surrounded by him always.”

“That’s why there’s nothing to be sad. I was blessed to have him in my life, and nothing is forever. It’ll be my time soon, and it’s the circle. That’s what happens with everyone. It was just my time to lose the love of my life, but you go on.”

Ozzy and Black Sabbath: Back To The Beginning opens at cinemas around the world on October 28.

A while back, John 5 took to Instagram to post an explainer on how he was able to play Mötley Crüe songs without needing his right hand. Guitar players knew what was what. But it was interesting all the same.

It was in response to online accusations that Mötley Crüe had been using backing tapes in their performances. This controversy, in and of itself, invites further questioning; who among us is sober enough at a Mötley Crüe concert to notice such details?

Nonetheless, the accusations had clearly stung John 5, a player who is ridiculously gifted to the point where it is hard to imagine any piece giving him difficulty.

But nowadays, John 5 takes the opposite view. He sees these accusations as a sign that he and Mötley Crüe are doing something right. “It’s a compliment,” he tells MusicRadar. “It’s such a compliment. Like, it makes me so happy.”

In concert, John 5 plays a game with himself that is probably unhealthy but nonetheless keeps him honest; whether performing his solo material or tearing through Mötley Crüe’s back catalogue, he dares himself to play it as close to perfect as possible.

He is joining us to talk about the Fender John 5 Telecaster Collection, which was launched last week, and how his Custom Shop Phantom is so on-point that the prototype he has been touring with these past few years makes nailing the little nuances in former Mötley Crüe guitarist Mick Mars’ parts that bit easier.

“In Home Sweet Home, the solo, there’s all these pinch harmonics, and they have to be just right,” he says. “You have to be just right. You can go online and watch [this]. Everybody records it! I just hit that pitch harmonic perfectly on that because those guitars are set up so nice and perfect.”

This drive for perfection might be part of the problem, like it’s too good to be true.

“This is so strange, but I don’t really talk about this,” he says. “I’ll play just a ton of shows, a ton of shows, and people are like, ‘Oh, don’t you ever get tired of it?’ And I say, ‘No.’ This is why. I’m such a perfectionist. I always say it’s like Steely Dan. Like when Steely Dan were in the studio, it took them six weeks just to pick out a chair. But that’s how I am live. What I do live is I try to make it so perfect.”

Not everyone appreciates this. Some people want to hear him mess things up, or to hear something different from the records. But remember when John 5 took the gig. He promised that he was going to play Mick Mars’ solos just as they were recorded, because they were part of the song.

People don’t really like this,” he admits. “They don’t! Like, ‘Oh, it’s not rock and roll.’ There’s gotta be [mistakes]. But I try to make it so perfect where everything’s on time, in pitch, hit correctly, and that’s what I do with my instrumental shows. And when I got into Mötley Crüe, same thing. I will see how perfect I can get it, and it’s so much fun. I mean, I love playing shows and playing concerts, but it’s so much fun to see how close you can get.”

It doesn’t always work. At Mötley Crüe’s show in Salt Lake City, Utah, disaster struck, technical difficulties, and John 5 had no idea where he was in the song.

“I won’t forget it. It was in Utah, and it just happened,” he says. “We were playing Take Me To The Top, and my battery pack died, and these stages are so big. I was way out to the front. Tommy [Lee], our drummer, is way in the back. ‘Cos there’s like this ego riser. Vince [Neil] and Nikki [Sixx] were all out in front, and my pack died, and when you have those in-ears in, you can’t hear anything when that thing dies. So I was like, ‘Oh my God!’”

He wasn’t alone. They were all out of whack. And John 5 insists the ensuing “train wreck” is material evidence that they’re not playing to a tape. There was no safety net.

“I got lost and Vince got lost, and I had to run back to Tommy to get back on, to hear the acoustic of his drums,” he says. “And if that doesn’t prove [it’s real]… Because I got off and it was a train wreck for 10, 15 seconds, 20 seconds!”

Mötley Crüe frontman Vince Neil has copped some flack online, too. His performances have been put in the dock. But John 5 leapt to his defence, arguing that the vocalist’s delivery would be impossible to sync up with a tape.

“Vince is singing so well now, and it just drives me crazy,” he says. “Because sometimes he’s behind the beat, or ahead of the beat, but do you know how, not even difficult, impossible it would be to lip-sync if something was behind the beat!? It would be impossible! [Laughs] But, I don’t know. I take it as a compliment when people say, ‘Oh, they’re playing to a track,’ because we work so hard now to make it sound as amazing as possible. So, it’s wonderful.”

That said, bassist Nikki Sixx admitted that Mötley Crüe has used backing tracks to recreate the sound from the albums, taking the lead from Queen, and using the tracks for other instrumentation that the four of them could not replicate.

“Since we saw Queen using some to help during the song Bohemian Rhapsody live, we understood that we could bring in elements that we could not do live like orchestras, saxophones, etc etc and sync them up with what we are playing and we do play 100 per cent live. And it’s better for the fans and we enjoy being able to do what we did in the studio live. It’s a win win for us.”

Sixx's point was that they were not miming along to backing tracks of their own performances. When asked why they don’t play 100 per cent live, Sixx replied, “We do. You were lied to. Sorry.”

John 5 marked the release of the Phantom Telecaster with an eponymous new instrumental track featuring Joey Aguirre on drums, a riff that’s kind of Jake E Lee-era Ozzy, and all kinds of blazing arpeggios and lead-guitar fireworks. He can play anything.

There's a fine pop songwriting tradition of using the phrase ‘love song’ ironically. The Damned’s rumbustious punk-era hit Love Song was about as far removed from a traditional love song as it was possible to get in 1979.

Bon Jovi’s 1995 single This Ain’t A Love Song was – guess what? – actually very much a love song. And Sara Bareilles’ 2007 breakthrough hit? Well, reputedly, love was very far from the subject Bareilles had on her mind when she wrote it.

The singer-songwriter from Eureka, Northern California, had signed to Epic in 2005, and the story goes that during the year-long gestation period before the release of her major label debut Little Voice, Bareilles was being pressured by her new record company to come up with a hit.

Love Song, with its insistence of ‘I’m not going to write you a love song cause you asked for it, cause you need one,’ was her rebellious response. In 2007, Bareilles explained that “I got mad at myself for letting those doubts creep into my brain and swore I would write something totally honest, whatever it may be, good or bad. And I did. Love Song was my response to all that, my little stick it to 'em".

So a simple tale of a dastardly record company forcing an artist into a box they don’t want to go in, then? Well, the story is a little bit more complicated than that, though it took a few more years to emerge.

In a 2021 interview, Bareilles said that "The song wasn't a specific response to my record company. Nobody sat me down and said, 'I need this kind of song from you.' There was more of a subtle, nuanced… withholding. I was getting ready to release the first record, and I had a whole boatload of songs, so I was like, 'What's the deal? Let's get in the studio. Let's make the record.' There was a withholding of the green light."

It seems that Epic were unconvinced that Bareilles had the requisite songwriting chops and needed outside help. They set up some co-writing sessions, which the singer described as “a total disaster... devastating on every level. I felt invisible and unimportant and manipulated.”

“I was so stubborn, especially at that age. I was so protective of myself - I wasn't going to do what they asked me to do. I wasn't going to wear the sparkly dress, I wasn't going to wear the high heels. I was so concerned with losing myself, somehow, in the process."

In a 2015 Huffington Post interview, she was in a more reflective mood. Speaking of the co-writing sessions: “I think for me, they came at a time where I was still so unsure of my own edges. In a way, I was still sort of discovering who I was as an artist at that time. And while I don’t think that any of those collaborators had any bad intentions, I just don’t think I was ready to collaborate."

Love Song was, then, a frustrated response to those sessions, composed in her rehearsal room, on her own. By this point, Epic had recruited producer Eric Rosse to the project – he and Bareilles started working together midway through 2005.

In her record company biography for that album, Bareilles wrote that: “Eric Rosse and I spent countless hours deliberating, fighting, and seeking compromise on what would make this music the best it could be. I'm not proud to say it, but I feel like in many ways I walked in with my dukes up.” Speaking to Sound On Sound in 2008, Rosse admits that it was difficult at first: "Yes, she did need a bit of convincing.”

For five months Rosse and Bareilles worked through stories of songs, arrangement ideas and song structures. “She came up with a lot of material,” he recalled, “And we would demo stuff, just piano and vocal, and send it off to Pete Giberga (the A&R on the album), who was getting excited about the project.”

Both artist and A&R knew that they needed a single to launch the album and, luckily, halfway through these sessions, Love Song landed.

"Sara came in one day with the initial musical idea which included the phrase 'I'm not going to write you a love song,' and the rest was sort of la-la-la,” remembered Rosse.

“Structurally it was a bit different from the final version: there might not have been a bridge and I can't quite remember how she did the pre-chorus. But there definitely was a basic structure to the song, with most of the music, the main hook line, and several verse ideas.”

“We discussed where the song could go, thematically and structurally, and she went away and came back with more or less the finished song. I think that for Sara the idea of a love song was synonymous with a commercial hit, so she was taking poetic licence with the term.”

Now they had a potential hit single, both Rosse and Bareilles put all their energies into making the track count. The pair recorded three different versions of the song, though each had the same lead vocal.

"The first step of recording the backing tracks for the album was that Sara and I drove around LA for a day, trying out pianos for her in four or five different studios,” Rosse explained in 2008.

“We felt that a Yamaha seven-foot grand at NRG studios suited her music the best, so we did the basic tracks - piano, drums and bass - at NRG. The remainder, Yamaha CP80 electric piano, Mellotron, guitars, backing vocals, were overdubbed at my own studio, Squawkbox.”

However, the initial overdubs for the song didn’t seem to fit with the main vocal, so artist and producer had to have a re-think. “The issue was mainly one of feel,” Rosse reasoned. “A four-to-the-floor feel can easily sound heavy and laboured, so I wanted to make sure that the rhythm had enough movement. It had to drive the song forward, and not feel plodding, but also not feel so happy or poppy that it would make the song sound silly.

"We used two drummers on the song, and the final drum take took place at Sunset Sound. The piano was tracked twice, because it had to match the new feel of that last drum overdub. We also did a number of different approaches with the guitars, and there's a very subtle drum loop, programmed by Jake Davies, that you sort of hear rather than feel, but that helped drive the song forward."

Once these issues were ironed out, the mixing was relatively straightforward. "I wanted to make the song as driving and aggressive as I could, and feature Sara's voice as much as possible, squeezing every ounce of energy out of it,” Rosse said. “By the time it came to mixing, the issues we had during tracking were entirely resolved, and I was only looking at minor things, like how many backing vocals to use, and how much of a vocal double there should be.”

“Sara associates lead vocal doubling with slick-sounding pop music, so we had to come to various levels of compromises on that. But in general the heavy lifting had been done on this song, and it was just a matter of making it sound and feel really good.”

The finished single was helped massively by its video, the sort of sumptuous creation that you rarely see in 2026. Installed in a Wes Anderson-esque fantasy world in which she is a performer in a jukebox-like machine that dispenses love songs, Bareilles (wearing a dress and heels, natch) sings to order whenever a punter places a coin in the machine. She rebels, wedging a coin in the wheels of the contraption to give herself a break. It’s a brilliant metaphor for the ‘official’ story of the song, and one that Epic seemed only too keen to greenlight.

It did the trick. Love Song made Number Four in both the US and – more surprisingly – the UK charts. Following this, the album Little Voice was a Top Ten hit in both territories and went double platinum in the States.

It set Bareilles on a trajectory that has seen Broadway success in the form of her Waitress show soundtrack, which led to a second career in film and musical theatre. And all but one of her four albums have reached the Billboard Top Ten.

Sneaking in just before the close of music’s physical era, you couldn’t imagine Love Song being a hit in 2026. Even at the time, with its attention to detail, melodic richness and refusal to descend to cynicism, there was something very old skool about it, which Bareilles picked up on in that 2015 Huffington Post interview, in which she revealed that actually it was a love song, after all.

"It was a love song to my craft,” she argued. “It was a love song to my intention, to my heart and soul. I was fighting for the essence of some truth inside of me, which to me is a beautiful love song. It just wasn’t a duet between Peter Cetera and Amy Grant.”

The trick with playing heavy metal is to take it seriously but not too seriously, and to reckon with the fact that, at heart, there is a certain absurdity and outsized theatricality to it.

It’s an antiestablishment art form that’s nonetheless governed by rules, oftentimes rigorously enforced – ‘Death to false metal!’ – and almost always arcane to all those within the cult.

The Colorado doom quartet Khemmis have been wrestling with these contradictions ever since they released their self-titled debut EP in 2013. Now, on album number five, again a self-titled release, after all these years, they’ve finally made sense of them. There’s a clarity about their mission and their sound.

“We’re not the same dudes. We don’t play the same way,” says guitarist/vocalist Ben Hutcherson. “We don’t think the same way. We don’t feel the same way. We are, I think it’s fair to say, better dudes now than we were. We’re more holistically interesting dudes.

“I can say for myself that I’m a lot more chill, or at least try to be a lot more zen about stuff, and so, in many ways, that has allowed us to reconnect with those feelings of joy and the energy around just, ‘Let’s make heavy metal together.’ Like, that’s the mission statement. Capital H, capital M, heavy metal. What about it is joyous and raucous? What spoke to us all at such a young age, and still speaks to us, and how do we honour that?”

Khemmis, the album, finds bassist David Small joining the band full-time, and his talents on bass guitar – not to mention his jazz smarts – are brought to bear on an epic record that goes all-in with celebrating metal, with a full narrative concept, a cornucopia of gnarly riffs, and twin-guitar harmonies from Hutcherson and fellow guitarist/vocalist Phil Pendergast giving it the kind of melodic grandeur its concept deserves.

As Hutcherson explains, this is the sound of Khemmis taking their “responsibility” to metal seriously while recognising that their don’t-break-the-oath ethos depends on them reanimating the spirit of their teenaged selves.

“All we knew when we started was play loud, get free beer. Repeat. Like, that was it,” says Hutcherson. “Now, having a sense of, I think, responsibility to the art form – I can’t wait for online pundits to roll their eyes at me saying that about heavy metal. But it is! [Laughs] I mean, it’s an art form that we take very seriously. This is a sacred art form for us, but we also recognize it for what it is. And it’s at its best when it’s being performed by people who genuinely understand it in all of its complexities and flaws and still love it.”

Heavy metal, it contains multitudes. This is a record on which Pendergast is writing about – and channeling – a composer who is hearing “the music of the Spheres” and is possessed by the act of creation, and like some sci-fi Schumann-esque figure, he is going mad, astral projecting into all these scenarios in which he gains secret knowledge of the human condition yet surrendering to “creative madness” along the way.

Pendergast could see a little of himself in the composer as they worked 24/7 putting the album together.

“The idea of listening to music and then giving in to this madness and just seeing where it takes you, I decided was a cool concept for the record,” says Pendergast. “[The story] is a really a basic metaphor for what the record is doing on one level, but it’s also badass and heavy metal and has demons, and it’s cool because heavy metal is awesome.”

Khemmis are most definitely not the same players as they were on their 2015 full-length debut, Absolution, a fuzz-fried riff-burner that introduced them among the elite of US doom bands, Pallbearer, Spirit Adrift, Crypt Sermon et al.

Years of playing together have given Hutcherson and Pendergast a telepathic understanding of each other’s playing. Hutcherson teaches guitar. He has 17 students on regular rotation. He can explain what is going on in terms of music theory, but he is not thinking about theory when they are writing these songs.

“We have a very heart-first kind of writing, where we never sit down and think, ‘Okay, we want a riff to sound exotic. Well, let’s use harmonic minor for this riff,’” says Hutcherson. “My fingers know where to go to find the creepy or dissonant stuff, or at least where to start with that. And then we think, ‘Okay, now what's the next layer that we want to add to this idea?

“Do we want it to be a more emotive moment? And if so, what kind? Is it going to be a diatonic harmony because it’s going to have that kind of tug-at-your-heartstrings feel? It’s going to be something in perfect intervals, fourths or fifths or just octaves to just give it a fuller sound?”

Like most metal bands, Khemmis’ arrangements don’t always conform to music theory orthodoxy. Finding passing notes that work within the composition is a labour of trial and error, learning “what doesn’t suck” and using that. “We just come up with badass shit and then we play it cool,” deadpans Pendergast. As Hutcherson says, “Theory Brain” can explain what’s going on, but it’s the gut that does the heavy lifting.

Having Small on bass is affords them greater freedom on guitar. Hutcherson had played technical death metal with Small in Glacial Tomb, but even then he didn’t fully appreciate just what he could do for Khemmis. “When he brought in the riffs, I was like, ‘Oh my god, this guy rips! What the hell is happening?’” he says.

Small made an immediate impact on Tomb Of Roses, the first song they wrote for the record. Like all good bassists, Small knows when to lock in with drummer Zach Coleman, but he has an ear for when the bass can be the melodic counterpoint to the guitars. It might be a little cavalier a comparison, but nonetheless, you can’t help thinking that Khemmis have found their Cliff Burton.

“Oh my god, I’m gonna see Dave in an hour. When I tell him that, he’s going to shit his pants,” says Hutcherson. “Oh, he’s also really good at guitar. I mean, I think he’s probably the best musician any of us have ever met.”

Hutcherson and Pendergast both play Dunable electric guitars loaded with Bare Knuckle pickups. Hutcherson has one with a Black Dog humbucker at the bridge paired with a Cold Sweat at the neck; another pairs the Black Dog with a Supermassive 90; and a third is equipped with a pair of Rabea Massaad’s signature Silo humbuckers. Pendergast has a Riff Raff humbucker at the bridge and a Mississippi Queen V90 at the neck.

Both tune down to Bb, but with a lot of Khemmis rhythm parts played at the fifth position, the guitars still feel like a midrange instrument.

“We never have had an incredible amount of low-end in our guitar sound, not as much as you would think with that low a tuning,” says Pendergast. “Everything is pretty tight. We try and retain a lot of the note separation when we build guitar tones. We’re not using fuzz pedals to do this because it destroys that individual note character that’s so important to the types of riffs that we play.”

Pendergast did use one fuzz pedal, but only as as a boost. His $35 Behringer SF300 Super Fuzz – yes, the one with the plastic enclosure – was his always-on tone-sweetener.

“There’s this cheap-ass plastic fuckin’ fuzz pedal that we’re playing in not-fuzz mode, that is all over the record, and I just think it’s hilarious,” he says.

Khemmis are on tour in the UK right now and if you catch them live you might be shocked to find they’ve left the Rockerverbs at home. Neural DSP sent them a bunch of Quad Cortex units and they have been making digital versions of their rigs.

Going digital takes the pain out of touring. But leaving the tube amps at home – doesn’t this break one of the iron rules of doom metal?

Hutcherson is not about to decommission his tube amps any time soon. Nothing can beat them in the studio. But live, run an amp modeller through a power amp he says.

“Not worrying about tubes failing in the middle of a set, reducing your massive pedalboard with so many points of failure to one all-in-one unit, there’s a reason that all of these people do it,” says Hutcherson. “I mean, God, Kirk [Windstein] from Crowbar has made the jump to Quad Cortex, a dude that I never would have expected. If Kirk can get down with modellers, we can all get down with modellers.”

And besides, no one will notice.

“Nobody in the crowd is like, ‘Oh boy, I could really tell a difference when he stepped on that boutique delay.’ Most people don’t even play guitar. They don’t give a shit. Even the people that do, even the most cork sniffery blues lawyer, you can lie and tell them it’s a boutique delay. Then they’re like, ‘Oh, I could really tell with the way that the oscillation crept in.’ You’re like, ‘No, I lied, it’s a Behringer.’”

Hey, don’t knock Behringer when Khemmis roll into town. The SF300 is the one pedal to rule them all – the plastic stompbox that holds the secret to the Riddle of Steel.

• Khemmis are on tour in the UK – see the official Khemmis site for dates and ticket details.
• Khemmis is out now via Nuclear Blast.

RECORDING WEEK 2026: Imagine for a moment that you’re the radically inventive, off-the-wall troubadour Beck at the turn of a new millennium.

You’ve won countless plaudits and a devoted audience by being one of the most creatively audacious genre-fusers of the era. With a penchant for melding hip-hop with lo-fi rock, your wry artistic persona is driven by a playful wit. From Loser to Devil’s Haircut, Odelay to Midnite Vultures, it’s a post-modern posture thats strongly jibes with Gen X.

After seven albums (four of which were on a major label) of flavoursome stylistic smushing, everyone is keen to see what fresh aural adventures you’ll embark upon as a new century dawned.

But, instead of recording and album of upbeat, primary colours, your first album of the new century rebukes everything that the world previously thought they knew about you.

Gone was the slacker-coded irony. Gone were the weird, filtered sonics and excavated-from-a-record-shop samples.

In came wistful acoustic guitar, emotive strings, lyrics from the heart and an overarching sense of resignation and self-reflection.

This was a sea change in more ways than one.

Yes, Sea Change, Beck’s cherished eighth album, could easily have been the debut release of an entirely different artist. Some still hail it as Beck’s strongest song collection to date (it certainly triggered a side-strand of his career, which continued with the bucolic Morning Phase over a decade later).

It’s also a record that’s frequently held up for its exquisite recording quality and sonic fidelity, with a sparkling production ably helmed by producer Nigel Godrich, a producer most famous for his work with Radiohead.

Beck’s pull toward penning the album’s tranche of contemplative songs was triggered by the dissolution of his relationship with longtime girlfriend Leigh Limon in 2000.

By all accounts, the final nail in the coffin of their slowly fading partnership was the discovery that she had been cheating on him.

After a bitter split, Beck’s feelings of rejection, resentment and heartbreak were met with no small amount of soul searching, and a pinch of self-loathing. The wind had very much been knocked out Beck Hansen’s proverbial sails.

Clearly, mustering the energy to take on ‘the enchanting wizard of rhythm’ mantle once again was going to be a tall order. But, in time-worn, singer/songwriter tradition, the then-30 year-old musician was compelled to document how he felt.

Before we take a closer look at Sea Change’s recording story, we must first briefly look at this array of songs themselves, and the themes that would come to permeate the record.

From its serene, stately opener The Golden Age to wonky, slide guitar-laden epilogue, Side of the Road, Beck traversed a ragged psychological terrain questing for resolution. A journey of emotional penance.

There’s the hard mirror stare of the ‘living lies’ in Guess I’m Doing Fine, and there’s the sheer exhaustion of the dramatic Lonesome Tears - a crucial song which lurched dynamically from its beaten-down verse into quite the most passionately-charged chorus of the record. It led to a climax that ascended ever upward via a soul-touching swell of of strings.

Then of course, there’s key track (and the most well-known cut on Sea Change) Lost Cause.

Now a Beck staple, this gem found Hansen looking back to the dying days of his ailing relationship, bottling the feelings of surrender he felt as it neared its terminal phase.

Lyrically, Beck framed himself in the context of a solider, fighting a battle he knew deep down that he was doomed to not survive. As the highlighted lyrics below allude to.

Your sorry eyes, they cut through bone
Make it hard to leave you alone
Leave you here wearing your wounds
Waving your guns at somebody new

I'm tired of fightin'
I'm tired of fightin'
Fighting for a lost cause

Weapons, and destruction, often recur throughout Sea Change, another reference comes on the more existential Round the Bend, which depicted a pulled-back view of life rocketing by at uncontrollable speed; ‘faster than a bullet from an empty gun'. Meanwhile, album highlight Paper Tiger situated the fragile titular construct being torn apart by ‘idle hands’.

It’s not all violence and acrimony, though. The sumptuous Sunday Sun painted the protagonist at the ‘acceptance’ stage of his grief.

There's no other ending
Sunday sun
Yesterdays are ending

It’s clear, then, even from a cursory analysis of this set of songs, that this was the work of a wholly different facet of Beck’s persona. The mischievous master of ceremonies who once impishly proclaimed ‘I’ve got two turntables and a microphone’ had left the stage.

For Beck though, this candid honesty wasn't in any way a reproachment of his prior incarnations. “I’ve always challenged the idea that serious material is more indicative of who a person is,” Beck told Time following the record’s release. “I don’t think the laughing side of a human being is any less them than the side where they’re depressed.”

Beck realised that in his creative outpouring, he had the germ of an album that could resonate beyond the specifics of his own personal life, and communicate on a universal level.

Yet his material for this more stripped-back album would stand quite markedly aside from anything else in his kaleidoscopic canon.

“I just wanted the record to be simple and clean,” Beck told Time. “I wanted economy in the lyrics, and I wanted the songwriting to be very, very straightforward.”

Although the majority of Sea Change’s songs were written in quite brisk fashion, Beck’s desire to build the new album would take a frustrating two years to realise.

Eventually, with Mutations' (Beck’s country-infused 1998 record) producer Nigel Godrich again signed up to helm the album, the much-delayed recording sessions began at Ocean Way Studios in Hollywood, California on March 6th 2002.

“I think we originally wanted to do this record a year and a half ago, but it took a while for people to line-up,” Beck told Record Collector in 2002.

Godrich was struck by how Hansen had matured as a songwriter over the intervening years, and was impressed by the timbre of his voice.

“Before we recorded [Sea Change] we listened to Mutations, and his voice sounded like Mickey Mouse” Nigel recalled in an interview with Time, “His range has dropped. Now when he opens his mouth, a canyonesque vibration comes out. It’s quite remarkable. He has amazing tone.”

Sea Change’s central theme of heartbreak was an easy one for Godrich to zone in to. After all, he himself had just been through his own breakup.

“The producer, Nigel Godrich, had just broken up with his girlfriend [as well],” Beck told The Guardian. “So he was really devastated and heartbroken, too, and we were making the record together in that sense.”

While the album would retain the 'simple and pure' philosophy in terms of song construction, Godrich and Beck chose to augment the arrangement with both live band and luscious strings.

The live band largely consisted of the same players who’d worked on the more multi-hued precursor, Mutations. On bass was Beck’s longtime bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen. Synth, keys (and clavinet) was handled by Roger Joseph Manning Jr. while providing some of the icy lead guitar lines was another Beck mainstay; bluesy licks-man Smokey Hormel.

On drums for the first half ot the three-week recording sessions was Joey Waronker (now currently serving as Oasis' drummer). Unfortunately, Joey had to leave the sessions half-way through, and James Gadson stepped up to the stool to fill in.

Key to the album’s widescreen soundscape were those dazzling string arrangements. These were overseen by Beck’s father - noted composer and conductor David Campbell - working in tandem with his son to wring out the underlying emotion and elevate the compositions onto a cinematic plane. It was a musical universe not a million miles from the imperious heights of Scott Walker and Serge Gainsbourg.

“He’d have a rough sketch out, some chords and some melodies,” Beck told Record Collector. “I think the idea with the orchestra was that we really wanted to feature the orchestra and not just use it to augment a pop song. Really use it dramatically, not just as padding. Use it for all its worth.”

Aping the same brisk approach that they’d adopted during the Mutations' sessions, Beck and Godrich agreed to try and track a song a day - omitting the demo stage entirely.

However it soon became better to aim for a two-day recording timeframe for each song, to guarantee that the intricacies of the arrangements were captured as organically as possible without needing to spend too long overdubbing.

Despite this slight adjustment to plans, Godrich soon clicked into an easy working relationship with Hansen. “Everything with him is that simple,” Godrich told Time. “Because unlike most people, he always seems to know exactly what he wants to do.”

Recording the album at an iconic studio like Ocean Way allowed Beck and Godrich to harness some typically top-notch, iconic recording gear, to capture instruments with authentic analogue clarity, warmth and punch.

Beck’s most prominent acoustic guitar was a Martin HD-28, the recording of which was entirely the job of one Neumann U 47 FET microphone, owned by the studio’s well-travelled owner Allen Sides. Beck’s close-mic’d vocal was captured via both a AKG C12 and a Telefunken ELA-M 251 E.

The recorded signal was ran directly into Ocean Way Studio B’s impressive Dalcon console. This customised classic console had been purpose designed way back in 1970 by engineer Dallas Jorden for the studio's owner, Bill Putnam, and had been used on some of the most celebrated records of the pop age. Still in play in 2002, this remarkable feat of analogue desk design was key to the depth of Sea Change's sound.

Hailed by some as one of the most impressive desks on the planet, the Dalcon’s simple analogue circuitry prioritised pristine transparency yet its three internal amplifier stages could still be felt within the harmonic fidelity of the output audio.

A rack of API 550A EQ modules could be routed to any channel. These were frequently deployed by Godrich (in conjunction with the desk’s own EQ capabilities) to bring out just the right balance of treble and bass in both acoustics and vocals.

Godrich tended to ride the Dalcon’s faders live, approaching his role more akin to an instrumental player, reacting and adjusting instinctively to what he was hearing.

The Dalcon was so beloved by Nigel that he’d eventually buy it himself from the studio in 2011 (the desk currently resides in London’s Strongroom Studios.)

Compression was left to the reliable studio mainstays of the Universal Audio 1176 and Teletronix LA-2A. This pair of rack-mounted icons made every facet of the frequency range sing, and infused their authentic harmonic distortion and midrange presence onto the tape-recorded takes, emphasising the organic nature of the album.

Providing much of the record’s haunting ambience were Ocean Way’s classic reverb chambers and plates. These had been custom built by original studio founder Bill Putnam, and used by the hallowed likes of Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys to provide a classic smooth decay.

You only have to listen to Sea Change's very first track to hear their spacious presence on the vocal of the transcendent The Golden Age.

Beyond the authentic Ocean Way kit, there was another ingredient in the Sea Change recording arsenal which was presented to Nigel Godrich by Allen Sides as a gift.

As Justin Meldal-Johnsen recalled in an insightful forum thread on Gearspace, “[It was] this very bizarre three-knob digital reverb from the early '80's that Allen Sides gave Nigel as a gift. Awesome tone. Combining that with a chamber or plate reminds me of some of the sounds you can get with a Publison Infernal Machine.”

Speaking of Johnsen, in that same forum conversation, he revealed that his chosen bass setup for Sea Change rotated a Guild Starfire and an American Standard Fender Precision bass. Johnsen plugged these into an Ampeg B-15R reissue amp, with his output captured via a Neumann U 47.

“No DI was used on this record,” Justin shared on Gearspace. “We tried and abandoned it before we cut the first song. [Bass] compression was a [Universal Audio] 1176, and API 550A for some EQ. Sometimes pick, sometimes fingers, I alternate between song sections.”

To keep things crisp, the drums were largely recorded dry and often set-up within Ocean Way’s small vocal ISO booths to guarantee an ultra-clear sound, before being blended with the studio’s aforementioned reverb chambers. Some of the more spacious sounding tracks (such as the dreamy Sunday Sun) were captured within bigger rooms in the studio.

To maintain a retro-leaning vibe, Waronker and Gadson’s respective kits were equipped with vintage snares. In particular was Gadson’s 1970’s Pearl snares, all routed into the Dalcon. This resulting impactful snare sound was tailored by Godrich to suit the song in question.

Sea Change’s drum sound has latterly been cited by some as a solid yardstick for comparison tests, you only have to listen to the tightly-tuned snare of Paper Tiger, the intimate Lost Cause and the more full-blooded rock punch of Little One to understand why it's been held up as such a benchmark.

Although live instrumentation was the order of the day, there was still space for some surprising digital colouration. While some surrounding sonic shading was provided by the likes of a heavily-treated Wurlitzer, other regions of the soundstage were often peppered by a soft synth that came bundled with an early version of Pro Tools, performed on a small Yamaha MIDI controller.

Being so rooted in authentic analogue production, the record was suitably tracked in tape, layering an authentic, un-processed dynamic range and depth across the spectrum, as well as imparting a dreamlike, classic ‘Hollywood’ sound on the strings.

Ocean Way’s Ampex 24-track tape machines were deployed for this purpose, while further overdubs and mixing was completed in Pro Tools.

The resulting record wasn’t just a bountiful set of some of Beck’s finest ever songs. It was an audiophile’s dream.

Though eschewing many of the more showy production quirks of previous reords, Beck (and Godrich) crafted an album of immense sonic quality in record time.

Across its 12-song narrative, Beck managed to alchemise a personal low into a towering artistic accomplishment - and revealed an endearing new facet of himself.

Sea Change, released on September 24th 2002, remains a special record for a lot of people. An engaging journal of struggle, the death of love and personal penitence, it was an album that a massive array of listeners could find comfort and catharsis.

Now healed, Beck but would re-don his quirky experimentalist hat for 2005’s Dust Brothers’ reunion Guero. But Hansen would venture back to this more intimate plane with Sea Change’s spiritual successor Morning Phase in 2014. An album recorded once again at Ocean Way (now owned by EastWest) with the same team, albeit without Godrich.

“I don’t talk too much about my personal life,” Beck told the Guardian. “You’ll get a thousand times more of me from my music than anything I could say in an interview.”

We’ve had the vinyl, cassette and CD revivals, but we’ll admit that we weren’t quite ready for the second coming of reel-to-reel tape. There’s definitely some buzz (or maybe even some hiss) around the format, though, because it’s been confirmed that Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark is getting the R2R reissue treatment.

Duplicated in real-time from a 1:1 copy of the original stereo master tape, this is said to deliver “a master-quality listening experience that captures the full dynamics of the recording.” The 15 ips, half-track 1/4-inch tape is produced to the IEC equalization standard on premium RTM LPR90 tape stock and stored on a 10.5-inch metal reel.

Only 350 copies have been made, and it should go without saying that you’ll also need a compatible tape machine if you want to play one of them.

This could be a pretty desirable item for the Joni Mitchell obsessive, particularly as Court and Spark remains one of her finest albums. Released in 1974, it’s often viewed as the record on which she started to fully embrace her love of jazz; she was aided and abetted by LA Express, a jazz-fusion group that featured Max Bennett (bass guitar), Larry Carlton (electric guitar), Joe Sample (electric piano), John Guerin (drums, percussion) and bandleader Tom Scott.

The result was Mitchell’s highest-charting LP, while Help Me became her only Top 10 single. Mitchell and Tom Scott also won a Grammy for their arrangement work on the beautifully complex Down to You.

Despite digital recording technology offering far more convenience and flexibility, reel-to-reel tape is still viewed as a sonic gold standard by many music makers, who seek to emulate its warmth and character using emulation plugins.

The Court and Spark reel-to-reel reissue comes via Rhino High Fidelity, which has previously released albums by Black Sabbath, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Van Morrison, Fleetwood Mac, ZZ Top, Yes and T Rex in the format. At $300, it’s certainly a luxury item, but we’re pretty sure 350 analogue-loving Joni aficionados will consider that a price worth paying.

Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan fans are convinced that the two stars could be about to release a collaboration – almost certainly a reworked version of a song from Rodrigo’s recently released third album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love.

The rumours stem from Rodrigo’s Instagram Story, which currently features a short video of a Pro Tools project for a currently unconfirmed song. We only get to hear the very beginning, which features a voice that sounds very much like Roan’s saying: “Ooh, Olivia does remixes now.”

The pause button is pressed right at the moment when the beat is about to drop, but the solitary kick drum we get to hear sounds very much like the one from Expectations, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love’s penultimate song.

Eagle-eyed viewers will also notice the audio file labelled Jupiter, possibly a reference to the Roland synth line of that name. Expectations kicks off with a grizzled, vintage-sounding synth part, so we’ll take that as another clue.

Rodrigo has yet to get on board with the trend of pop artists following up new albums with remixed versions – Charli XCX did it with Brat, PinkPantheress did it with Fancy That, and Zara Larsson did it with Midnight Sun – though she did announce earlier this year that she’d recruited some of her favourite artists to cover songs from her debut album, Sour, which was released in 2021. The project kicked off with David Byrne singing Drivers License, her breakthrough hit, but seems to have stalled somewhat since.

A Rodrigo/Roan match-up has the potential to usurp that, though: the two artists are known to be friends – Roan has contributed backing vocals to several Rodrigo tracks in the past and they’ve also performed live together – and both have collaborated extensively with producer Dan Nigro.

Since Rodrigo uploaded her teaser, The Sun has reported that the new version of Expectations will be released this Friday, with Roan providing a new second verse. Let’s see.

As Elton John’s collaborator-in-chief, Bernie Taupin has written lyrics to some of the most popular songs of all time – Rocket Man, Candle In The Wind, Your Song, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, I’m Still Standing and many more. But nobody’s perfect, and as revealed in a new interview, Taupin still cringes at the mention of one hit song he co-wrote in the ’80s.

Speaking to MOJO magazine, Taupin discusses his whole career, from his early days with Elton all the way through to his new solo album The Sea Has No Mercy.

He talks about several of the key songs that made Elton a superstar, saying of the breakthrough hit Your Song: “It wasn’t written about anybody in particular, but Elton at the time thought it was. I wrote it when I was 17, 18. It came from a very idealistic place. A very virginal place, because I was. My experiences were absolutely nil. But I remember he took that lyric and, wearing his dressing gown, sat down and wrote the music.”

Taupin also paints a picture of how he and Elton worked together on the classic 1972 album Honky Chateau, recorded at the residential studio at Château d’Hérouville near Paris.

“There was a piano in the canteen,” he recalls, “and as I completed the songs I took them down and stuck them on the piano. Elton would come in the morning while the band was having breakfast and he’d write two songs within the space of that time.”

However, when asked about a song he co-wrote for American rock band Starship, Taupin laughingly says: “Oh, please don’t go there!”

The song in question is the soft rock anthem We Built This City, which hit the No 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1985.

In all the years since, We Built This City has been the butt of many jokes, and Taupin himself can certainly see the funny side of it.

He tells MOJO: “I wear it as a badge of honour that it was voted the Worst Song of All Time by several periodicals. At the same time, as I always say, people don’t understand that the original song was much different. But that song has paid the rent for many decades.”

The writing credits for We Built This City are shared by Taupin, English singer-songwriter Martin Page, American musician and producer Dennis Lambert and Austrian producer and arranger Peter Wolf.

And Taupin is not the only person embarrassed by their participation in this song.

In 2025, Starship singer Grace Slick talked to The Guardian about We Built This City, saying of Taupin’s lyrics: “I thought they were ridiculous.”

She added: “Stupid song. But our producer said, ‘Yeah, but it’s a hit.’ And he was right.”

Asked why she would sing material she disliked, Slick replied: “I kind of had to because I was trying to make it up to the band. I’d been this wild, crazy-ass drunk. So to make up for it I was sober all through the ’80s … which was a mistake!”

RECORDING WEEK 2026: “I feel like all of the records that have become special to me are born out of great friendships,” says producer, songwriter and mixer, Oli Barton-Wood.

This year, Oli bagged the Music Producers’ Guild’s (MPG) Breakthrough Producer of the Year for 2026. Noted for his ability to blend technical know-how with buzzing creative energy, Oli has worked with Ezra Collective, Luvcat, The Zawose Queens and many more.

Regardless of genre, the emotional rapport he establishes with his collaborators is equally as crucial as his studio expertise.

“It’s important to me when working with an artist that we have a connection, not just being their technical person but being part of their support network, building a relationship and understanding each other - it really informs every creative decision made.”

The MPG win came earlier in the year but Oli was unable to attend the event at London’s Troxy due to being on a trip to Vietnam. It was only when his phone started lighting up with calls and messages that he realised he’d been victorious.

“I never thought I’d win the MPG, which is why I booked the trip. I’d had this really busy year making Luvcat’s Vicious Delicious record and needed a break,” Oli explains. “I was asleep in the jungle when the awards happened and got all these calls at four in the morning.”

Does winning bring on new pressures and expectations? “I’m trying not to think about it too much,” he laughs. “I’m just trying to make good music and keep up with the projects I have going on. And pleasingly, most of my jobs come from people who have heard records I’ve worked on that they like.”

Oli’s studio ambitions first stemmed from playing in bands as a teenager, then he acquiring recording software so he could refine his own playing. He started out capturing the sound of his own emerging group before word spread of his affinity for the producer’s chair. Before long he began to work with others.

“I was putting every single penny I could gather into trying to build up my collection of gear, picking up microphones from Poundland, and using Audacity on my barely working PC,” OIi says.

“Initially this was for my own band but before I knew it, I’d started recording with other local bands in my parents' spare room. I guess I had a bit of entrepreneurial spirit and I feel very fortunate to have caught the bug early on.”

Producer Jim Abbiss was also a key early influence for Oli. Having been behind favourite records from Bombay Bicycle Club and the Arctic Monkeys, Oli chose to follow in Jim’s footsteps and study the Music and Sound Recording (Tonmeister) degree at the University of Surrey.

“I was really excited to have got on the course, then when I was finishing my degree, Jim was the judge for the final year of portfolio recordings and he chose mine,” says Oli. “I managed to have a slightly nervous conversation with him after the formalities, we stayed in touch and a few years later he asked me to come and work with him on an album with Tom Odell.”

The record was Tom’s second, Wrong Crowd, and saw Oli heading to Rockfield Studios in Monmouth in Wales.

“The stars just aligned,” says Oli. “It was my first major label gig, so we worked in Wales, then we went to Abbey Road, then RAK, it was a full circle moment and something I’d dreamed of when I was younger.”

These days, Oli mixes out of The Premises Studios in Hackney with an additional writing space in Peckham. But when he was starting to navigate the industry, alongside engineering, he’d been striving to build his production portfolio. A pivotal moment was working with Mellah (artist Liam Ramsden).

“I’d worked with Liam's band Black Manila and always loved his artist project,” says Oli. “We were experimenting with his solo work when he signed a small deal with Lucky Number. Off the back of that, he signed with Columbia and we worked on a couple of EPs together. He’s one of my absolute favourite musicians.”

Ever since, Oli has dedicated himself to building up an ongoing portfolio of projects with his time split between mixing, producing and songwriting sessions.

“Ultimately, I’m there to help in whatever capacity an artist needs me, which requires me to be flexible and keeps the work exciting,” he says. “I don’t think there’s any set way into the industry now. I came through the studio assistant path, but a lot of today’s young producers are just so insanely quick and talented on Logic or Ableton, they are making hits in their bedrooms in a few hours!

“I come from a technical background so I’m a producer that gets really involved in the sound sculpting element. I think having lots of strings to your bow in the studio is important, particularly as music tech gets more accessible and budgets fluctuate too.”

When Mellah signed a deal, Oli also secured a music publishing deal with Domino and the pair invested in building their own studio. Their Peckham base includes their main writing room and features plenty of music toys, drum kit and Oli’s mic collection too.

“I do plenty of writing there but I like to record in other spaces where the budget allows,” Oli says of his studio preferences. “If I’m working on a band record, I try to go to a studio to get a bigger drum sound and better separation, I prefer recording live as much as possible. My favourite studios in London are RAK, The Premises and Baltic, but working in residential studios is always great too, you’re able to totally zone in and tap out of normal life routines.”

Oli’s musical CV is one bursting with exciting records, artists and studio projects although the role he takes on differs depending on the artist’s needs. He worked with Nilufer Yanya as a co-writer and producer on her Miss Universe debut album from 2019 while also mixing Maisha, a band signed to Brownswood, and their 2020 record, Open the Gates.

Elsewhere, Oli produced and mixed Luvcat’s highly acclaimed Vicious Delicious album from 2025 while also working with Los Bitchos, Laura Misch and Jordan Rakei among many others.

“Ezra Collective are always a fun band to work with,” Oli says. “A lot of the work we’ve done has been at Livingstone in North London, they're amazing, often frenetic long days, chopping up parts, looping sounds and piecing songs together.”

God Gave Me Feet for Dancing is one of the group’s most popular moments taken from their 2024 album, Dance, No One’s Watching. Oli was asked to work on the session while packing down the Lemon Lounge stage at We Out Here Festival, a sound system project he helps run.

“I was working at Lemon Lounge when I took this call and they asked me to get to the studio within a few hours,” he says. “They were supposed to be collaborating with some huge American hip-hop artists, so I went straight to Livingstone. The collaboration didn’t materialise so the band ended up jamming, and we worked on the track that became God Gave Me Feet for Dancing. Those kinds of sessions are always my favourites due to the high levels of energy and musicianship.”

Another big project was Porridge Radio’s debut album Every Bad. A record that was Mercury Prize nominated in 2020.

“The basis of the tracks had been recorded with someone else,” says Oli. “I got hold of the files with the singer Dana [Margolin] and we set about injecting life into them. That was a really fun process, bringing in new character in the mix process and helping them realise their vision for it. To get the Mercury nod was amazing too.”

The music of The Zawose Queens is an ongoing project for Oli, a Tanzanian musical duo he discovered while in East Africa providing music production workshops as part of a British Council-backed initiative.

“I spent some time there as a kid and always had this affinity with Tanzanian music,” OIi says. “I went with fellow UK producer Tom Excell and while we visited, we connected with Pendo Zawose and her niece Leah Zawose from the Wagogo tribe.

“We started putting a record together with them. It turns out Pendo's father, Dr. Hukwe Zawose, had been signed to Real World, Peter Gabriel’s label. The Real World team were really keen to continue working with the family, we connected them with a booking agent and for the last four years they’ve been touring extensively throughout Europe - we’ve almost finished a second record with them which I can’t wait for people to hear.”

Alongside studio work and Lemon Lounge, Oli is also busying himself developing a new studio complex in South London. In collaboration with Mallah, the pair are looking for a property where they can run a number of production and rehearsal rooms with a recording studio.

“This doesn’t really exist in South London,” he says. “North of the river, there are all these great places that can offer this kind of community as well as functional music space. We want to build an educational side into it too and create learning opportunities for kids who want to pursue production or those young adults who might not be able to afford to work in traditional studios.

“Our aim is to support the next generation and give back too. I’ve just started mentoring as part of Fraser T Smith’s ‘Future Producer Academy’ as well as past work with BRIT School and Abbey Road Equalise. It’s something I’m really passionate about and can't wait to work on a similar project at our own studio.”

Find out more about Oli's work over at his official website.

Al Di Meola has always loved to surround himself with the very best musicians. In a stellar career dating back to the early ’70s, the virtuoso guitarist has recorded and performed with prodigious talents such as bassist Jaco Pastorius, drummers Steve Gadd and Phil Collins, pianist Chick Corea, keyboardist Jan Hammer and fellow guitarists John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía.

As Di Meola explains to MusicRadar: “I didn't want anonymous great players. What’s the point of that? I wanted personalities.”

Di Meola’s big break came when he joined jazz fusion group Return To Forever, led by Chick Corea and also featuring bassist Stanley Clarke and drummer Lenny White. Di Meola’s debut solo album Land Of The Midnight Sun, released in 1976, featured Jaco Pastorius and Steve Gadd along with guest spots from Corea, Clarke and White. The follow-up album Elegant Gypsy (1977) included Di Meola’s first collaborations with Paco de Lucía and Jan Hammer.

1981 saw the release of the legendary groundbreaking live album Friday Night In San Francisco, performed by Di Meola with Paco de Lucía and John McLaughlin. And on his 1983 studio album Scenario, Di Meola was assisted by two famous drummers with roots in progressive rock – Bill Bruford and Phil Collins.

Di Meola is full of praise for these fellow musicians as he looks back on the first decade of his recording career.

JACO PASTORIUS

“Jaco was unbelievable. He had this thing where he’d walk up to other musicians – great musicians – and say, ‘I’m the best bass player that ever lived.’ And we’d all kind of look at each other like, ‘Yeah, that’s probably true.’

“There really wasn’t anybody like him. Jaco played on my first solo album, Land Of The Midnight Sun, on Suite Golden Dawn. This was before the whole world knew Jaco as Jaco, but everybody around him knew.

“You couldn’t hear that guy play and not know something unusual was happening. He didn’t think like a traditional bass player. He heard melody, harmony, and rhythm all at the same time. He could hold down the entire bottom of the music and then suddenly become another lead voice.

“That was Jaco. He had unbelievable confidence, thinking, ‘I’m the best bass player that ever lived.’ It sounds incredibly arrogant – except he could back it up. And the funny part was, nobody really argued with him.”

STEVE GADD

“You didn't need to spend a month teaching Steve Gadd a drum part. You showed him the music. Steve got it.

“There’s a reason everybody wanted him. I used Steve on Land Of The Midnight Sun, then on Elegant Gypsy, Casino, Splendido Hotel, Electric Rendezvous, Tour de Force. I was using musicians who could walk into a studio, look at very difficult music, understand it, and play it.

“When Steve plays a groove, you don’t have to think about where the time is. It’s there. And Steve could read anything. That’s something people don’t always understand when they hear those records.

“Steve is just unbelievable. You can give Steve something extremely complex, and he doesn't make it sound complex. That’s the genius. His time is so deep that everybody else can sit inside of it.”

PACO DE LUCÍA

“Paco was like a brother. I miss him. I still miss him.

“What Paco did took tremendous courage because flamenco was a very closed world at that time. There were people who didn’t want him playing with jazz musicians. They didn’t want him moving outside of the tradition.

“But Paco was curious. He wanted to grow. He respected where he came from, but he wasn’t going to let tradition put him in a box.

“Rhythmically, he was frightening. And he couldn’t read music. Think about that. We had some very complicated arrangements, and Paco learned everything by ear. His memory was unbelievable.

“People know the serious Paco with the guitar and that incredible intensity. But there was another side of him. There was a sweetness to Paco. We spent so much time together. I loved him.”

JAN HAMMER

“Jan is one of my favourite keyboard players – a monster. People who know Jan mainly from Miami Vice may not understand what kind of player he was. Jan could make the synthesizer function almost like another lead guitar. There was aggression in his phrasing. Attack.

“So, when Jan and I traded things, it wasn't guitar with a keyboard behind it. It was two strong voices coming at each other.

“He played on Elegant Gypsy, and later we worked together on Scenario, when I was getting very interested in sequencing, synthesizers and all this new technology that was coming in. We were experimenting. That’s what you're supposed to do.”

JOHN McLAUGHLIN

“I knew John’s playing long before I knew John. Miles. Bitches Brew. Tony Williams. Then Mahavishnu. I saw Mahavishnu when I was still basically a kid, and it blew my mind. Nobody had heard anything like that.

“The energy. The odd meters. The level of musicianship. It was almost frightening. Then, years later, I’m sitting next to John, playing acoustic guitar with him. John is competitive. So am I. Paco was too. And I think that was good for the trio.

“There was this healthy competition where you'd go onstage, and somebody would do something, and you'd think, ‘Okay, I heard that. Now watch this!’ Not in a nasty way. It elevated everybody. And the audience got the benefit of it.”

CHICK COREA

“Chick changed my life. There’s really no other way to say it. I was 19 years old. I was at Berklee [College of Music] and Chick heard a tape of me playing with Barry Miles. Then I got the call. Return To Forever. Suddenly I’m with Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White. These were my heroes. And I’m 19. It was insane.

“Chick taught me an enormous amount without ever sitting me down and saying, ‘Okay, Al, today I’m going to teach you this.’ You learned by being around him.

“His time. The syncopation. His writing. His discipline. And his attitude toward music. Chick could write music that was incredibly sophisticated and still have joy in it. That’s hard.

“He had a massive influence on me as a composer. I wouldn’t have had the career I had without Chick. Period.”

PHIL COLLINS

“Phil was on Scenario. That was 1983, and I was fascinated by what was happening with technology – sequencing, synthesizers, drum machines, the Fairlight. All these things that were completely new. That record had Jan Hammer, Tony Levin, Bill Bruford and Phil Collins.

“Think about those personalities. You don’t call Phil Collins because you need somebody to hit a snare drum. You call Phil because you want Phil Collins. He had a sound. He had a feel. You knew it immediately. That’s what I always wanted from musicians on my records.”

Gavin Harrison is one of the world’s most acclaimed drummers. He’s also a member of not one but three great progressive rock bands – Porcupine Tree, King Crimson and The Pineapple Thief.

The new album by The Pineapple Thief, titled Far And Wide, is Harrison’s seventh with the band. And as he tells MusicRadar, he’s immensely proud of what he and his bandmates have achieved.

Harrison says of his creative partnership with the band’s leader, guitarist/vocalist Bruce Soord: “When I started to write with Bruce for this record we were in a good space, just me and him. My girlfriend was away, the house was empty, and me and Bruce just spent the first five days, day and night just bouncing ideas off each other, playing little bits, writing little bits, slowly starting to paint on the blank canvas and decide, ‘Yeah, this is nice, we should go here.’”

In his long career, Harrison has steadfastly drawn respect and admiration from the global drumming community and progressive music circles for his consummate technical ability, melodic and innovating rhythms – including head-turning reverse tom fills – and ability to launch endless musical ideas for those bands lucky enough to have him in their employ.

On the Far And Wide album, his muscular pocket grooves, surprising tom fills and cymbal crash flurries perfectly convey a sense of urgency and angst in the album’s key tracks.

Originating from those early writing sessions at Harrison’s home in North London are a number of plaintive songs that punch hard and call out societal woes. Honourable mention to Steve Kitch, synthesizers, whose instrumental ideas resulted in four additional songs for the album. Meanwhile, Jon Sykes’ bass parts provide a solid underpinning that locks tightly with Harrison’s rhythmic pulse.

Technically, The Pineapple Thief wanted to bring their live sound into the recording studio, thus minimising overdubs. Interestingly, this is also their first album without acoustic guitars. Harrison adopted this leaner approach when arranging the album so the songs would be road ready for the band’s upcoming tour.

The album’s opening song, New World Order, sets the stage of a dystopian world in chaos. Harrison’s beat displacement adds to the tension of the track. God Knows has a Nine Inch Nails feel with fuzzy octave pedal bass lines and overdriven vocals, while Still Living brings a collective redemptive calm through Kitch’s dreamy keyboard pads, Soord’s soaring guitar solo and Harrison’s relaxed 6/8 groove.

On an existential note, the song Hold The Ashes stares mortality straight in the face. The track draws inspiration from Soord’s personal journey of losing a parent in hospice care.

Despite the bleak, melancholic themes on Far And Wide, there is also a stoicism – an affirmation of human resilience and the will to rise above adversity. The album’s cover art subtly illustrates this concept through a solid granite sculpture whose beauty emerges from the rock’s blank canvas. Artist Michael Schoenholtz is credited for the sculpture and is also father of Harrison’s partner, Hannah.

Harrison explains the group’s approach to this album:

“Well, we’re always trying to not repeat ourselves,” he says. “Sometimes we start something and say, ‘Oh, this sounds a lot like something we’ve done, so let's abandon it.’ But even the ideas that we initially think don’t work will stay on the hard drive, and later on they can be incorporated into another song.

“There was a song called Oh, So Typical, and I really liked it, but we just couldn’t develop it. But it had such a nice hook in it, and that’s included in the song No Exceptions. When we were writing No Exceptions we reached a point where we thought, ‘It would be nice if it did something different here.’ And I said, ‘Bruce, that song we wrote a while ago, Oh So Typical, I think it could work if we slide that into this section.’”

He continues: “Sometimes there’s bits – they might be in a different tempo, they might be in a different key – but you can tell from the mood of it that it could fit really nicely into this other song. So sometimes a song is made up of two or three other songs. Or at least three, two or three ideas that we’ve had that we liked.

“But it’s not a patchwork quilt thing. We don’t think, ‘Let’s take all these little bits and stitch them together and hope it makes a song.’ But in post production, editing or arranging, we sometimes say, ‘Yeah, we really like where this is going, but it needs something else.’”

In the grand tradition of progressive rock, The Pineapple Thief are no strangers to unusual time signatures, as illustrated in the new song Through The Noise.

Harrison explains: “Quite often, I’ll play a piano line for Bruce, and it will be quirky in an odd time signature. In the middle of Through The Noise I had this little pattern that I wanted to play on the piano, and I said, ‘This could be an interesting riff.’ It turned out in 21/8. Not that it sounds like it's in 21/8, or sounds like it’s clever. It’s just the way the notes ran, the way the groupings of notes ran.

“As I wrote it, I didn’t know what the time signature was. I just followed the melody of the notes. And then on the way down, on the patterns at the end of the melody, I said, ‘Yeah, it needs to resolve here. So how many is that?’ I played it a few times and we recorded it.

“But it’s not done to be clever – it’s done because we like the sequence of notes in the rhythm that they’re in, and none of us are going to sit there counting to 21. We just learn the the riff, we learn the hook. And even when we play it live, we’ll just be singing the riff to ourselves. It’s not like some math kind of thing that we figure out. ‘Oh, how many notes could we fit together and make a crazy time signature?’”

He stresses: “I've never been interested in just doing stuff to sound clever. I think the hard and the most interesting part is to do things that sound musical and meaningful. And because we’ve been recording and playing together for ten years, and we’ve done a hell of a lot of gigs, we can actually imagine what this would be like on stage, how the lights might be, and how this could be a dramatic section where the drums stop. And then you’re just playing this thing on the guitar. So we do start imagining how this is gonna be when we perform it.

“Years ago we would write and record things and then worry about live performance later. But now, at the moment of composition, and especially when arranging the song, you think, ‘Oh yeah, this could be twice as long, and we could really build it, and then the lights will come up, and it will do all these things’. That’s quite helpful from an inspirational point of view.”

He refers to the noisiest track on the album, God Knows.

“Bruce was singing this pattern over the top at the end and I said, ‘You know what, Bruce? I don’t think you should sing over this end. I could imagine you walking away from the microphone, going to the front of the stage and totally rocking out with this riff, and we’ll all be smashing away. This will be good. And then come back and just sing the last line, and that will be the end of the song.’ And then when we thought about it like that, it kind of made more sense to us.”

Harrison returns to the theme of time signatures when discussing the song Scattering Like Flies.

“There’s always a little bit of rhythmic ambiguity, which I like” he says. "At the start of Scattering Like Flies it sounds like it’s in a different tempo than it really is. It’s actually in 7/8, or 7/4 if you like. Let’s say 7/4, but grouped into groups of three 16th notes. So you get a different pulse, except at the end of the bar, where we resolve it into the next bar. So there’s about eight or nine groupings of three, and then a grouping of two, or a grouping of four, or something, that resolves it back to the one.

“I played it to someone when we were writing it, and I said, ‘Where do you think the beat is?’ And they fell for the rhythmic illusion of that. I said, ‘OK, when I put the drums on, I’m gonna put a bass drum on beat one of a bar of 7/4, and I’ll play the snare drum as if I’m following you in the dotted eighth or three 16th notes pattern. And then the second verse, I’ll drop a bass drum every two beats and the listener will start to think, ‘Oh, hang on, something’s a bit different here.’ Then on the third verse, I’ll play all seven notes on the bass drum in a four-on-the-floor kind of way. And that will finally give people the realisation that actually the tempo is here with the bass drum, not with the illusion of the guitar and the vocal line. So those kind of things are done by design, really.”

In terms of inspiration, Harrison cites two songs from the ’80s – one by Paul Simon featuring legendary session drummer Steve Gadd, and another by Scottish pop group Danny Wilson, who took their unusual name from the 1952 movie Meet Danny Wilson, in which the titular character was played by Frank Sinatra.

“Sometimes you get inspiration from a song from decades ago,” Harrison says. “You think, ‘I always liked that vibe they did on that song.’ And I was thinking about that Danny Wilson song Five Friendly Aliens, where the drummer plays a kind of snare drum, almost military-esque pattern, with a few accents in it.

“That stuck in my mind, and when we were writing No Exceptions I thought, ‘I wonder if I could do something like that Five Friendly Aliens thing?’ A week after we finished No Exceptions I played the Danny Wilson album and I thought, ’It’s nothing like Five Friendly Aliens!’ But in my mind, the vibe is the same, even though the tempo is different and the pattern is different.”

He adds: “Hearts And Bones is a Paul Simon song, and I really like the way Steve Gadd plays on that song. It’s very, very subtle, but it gives such a nice vibe, and I’ve used that reference as inspiration for songs. What ends up is me trying to recreate that vibe.”

Gear-wise, Harrison used nothing new on this album.

“No, not really,” he shrugs. “I’m comfortable with my instrument. I mean, it’s like the piano to me. I don’t need to have a new piano, or a piano with different notes in a different order. I don’t need to set my drums up backwards to try to play something different. So the limitations are all in my head. If I’m not playing anything new, it’s not because of the equipment, it’s because I'm not thinking of anything new. So you need to get in a good space mentally.”

This was certainly true of Harrison and Bruce Soord this time around.

“Sometimes it goes really well, really fast,” Harrison says. “Sometimes it takes all day and we get nowhere. Sometimes we get somewhere we think it didn’t really click, but let’s keep it because we might come back to it.

“Scattering Like Flies was a song that we actually started writing for the last record, and then we abandoned. And actually there was only one section of it that Bruce really liked, so he basically wrote a whole new song, but kept that one section. It was previously a song we’d abandoned, and, if you heard the original, you would barely recognise it was even the same song.”

He adds: “We’ve done this type of writing collaboration on the previous album. To be in the same room together is actually much better. It focuses your energy, and it’s great to have someone to bounce off immediately.

“We also have very similar tastes, and we know what we both like. So, it’s not long before we recognise something good is happening. We might work for hours and hours and hours on one piece and be really happy with it. So it’s a bit of a random thing.”

To finish, Harrison names two tracks on the album as his personal favourites.

“I like playing Through The Noise,” he smiles. “It goes through a lot of different sections and moods rhythmically. I also like playing Scattering Like Flies. There are a few things happened on that track that I was really happy with.

“Bruce took some of my demo drumming and actually wrote a little riff around a couple of fills. So there’s a short fill and a slightly longer fill that happens at the end of every two bars, but the guitar riff plays with it, so the drums kind of become part of the riff. That's good fun!”

He laughs: “We’re gonna start rehearsing next week, so we’ll find out which songs really work and which ones really click together live.”

Slash received another prize to put on his mantlepiece last week, and a special one at that: he was honoured with the Les Paul Spirit Award at a ceremony in Hollywood.

The award is given annually by the Les Paul Foundation. But it’s not just dished out to any old guitar hero. Recipients have to exemplify “the spirit of the late Les Paul through innovation, engineering, technology and music”. Previous winners have included Bob Weir, The Edge, Steve Miller, Nile Rodgers and Peter Frampton.

In a statement, Michael Braunstein, the Executive Director of the Foundation said: “We are honoured to present the Les Paul Spirit Award to Slash this year. He and Les shared a special friendship and often jammed together when they could.”

“Not only does Slash exemplify the creativity and curiosity Les had during his life, but he is also an extraordinary talent and a wonderful supporter of the Les Paul Foundation. If Les were still alive today, Slash and he would be jamming onstage together somewhere regularly.”

Interestingly, the actual physical award is slightly different every year. It’s fashioned from hand-carved acoustic boards that Les Paul himself built and used in his home studio, so no two awards are exactly alike. Presumably, at some point they’ll run out and have to use some other material...

Anyway, Slash himself was understandably pleased about the accolade. “Les was so much more than a great guitarist and innovator,” he said of receiving the award. “He was an actual inventor who changed the instrument itself, built groundbreaking recording equipment and completely reimagined how artists could record music. I feel incredibly lucky that I got to know him, hang out with him and play music with him. I cherish the relationship we had, and receiving an award that carries his name and spirit is a tremendous honour.”

Prior to the ceremony, selected members of the media were treated to a sneak preview of new material by the Guns N’ Roses man. He’s got a new album early next year under the name Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators and those guests heard four new tracks – Good Time Girl, One Of Your Kind, Flying Blind and Looking For A Miracle. All four are set to appear on the album, also titled Flying Blind, which is out in February.

Over the course of a six-decade long-career, songwriter Don Black has done it all, from extensive work in musical theatre to writing lyrics for everyone from Meat Loaf to Quincy Jones to Robbie Williams.

He’s also penned the words to no less than five Bond themes - Diamonds Are Forever, Thunderball, The Man With The Golden Gun, Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough - and in a new interview in the Telegraph, was asked about the possibility of being asked to do the new one. Now, aged 88, he’s realistic about his chances.

“I’d be thrilled,” he says. “But lately, it’s always gone to whoever’s popular. So I’m sure the next one will have Harry Styles or Taylor Swift or something. That’s probably how it’ll go.”

Indeed. Billie Eilish and Finneas wrote the No Time To Die theme in 2021. Before that, Spectre was given to Sam Smith and Skyfall fell to Adele.

Black also bemoaned the royalty rates he gets from streaming services, describing what he receives as “a terrible rate, there’s no question about it”.

Talking in general, he cited the example of a friend and colleague, the late Herbert Kretzmer, who wrote the lyrics to I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables.

Describing the song as a Number One “everywhere”, Black said: “I said to him, ‘You must be making a fortune.’ It was a billion hits or something silly like that. And he got £1,500. That’s all you need to know.”

Black worked with John Barry on three of his Bond themes - Man With The Golden Gun, Thunderball and Diamonds Are Forever. Regarding the latter, he remembers Bond producer Harry Saltzman initially raised objections to his lyrics: “He thought it was too sexy. Well, he thought it was filthy – ‘touch it, stroke it and undress it,’” Apparently, it was Barry who defended his colleague, asking Saltzman “What do you know about songs?”

Regardless of your thoughts on pop music in the current age, there is no denying that there is a wealth of incredible talent operating in the commercial world, both in terms of the artists themselves and their production/writing teams.

One of the most successful artists of recent years has to be Dua Lipa. As an artist, she prides herself on her vocal and performance prowess - and works with a talented team in the studio to construct her blazing bangers.

Nowhere is that more apparent than with her exceptional second album, Future Nostalgia from 2020. Laden with hits (and album tracks that sound like hits!) the musical colour and production flair is top-drawer. Re-listening to this vibrant record has inspired us to lift the theoretical lid on the album’s lead single, Don’t Start Now.

Production and writing credits for the single fall to Dua Lipa herself, Caroline Ailin, and - one of the most prolific chart songwriters of the last ten years - Emily Warren. Ian Kirkpatrick also contributed to the writing, while acting as programmer and producer through his DAW of choice, Cubase.

The track started life while the four were on a writing retreat at Emily Warren’s writing cabin, based in Wyoming. The team were tasked with replicating the success of her 2018 smash hit New Rules, inspiration was somewhat lacking however. That is until, the team (sans Lipa) visited a local bar, in the town of Jackson Hole which just happened to be hosting a disco night.

A late night of glittery retro-tinged fun heavily influenced the direction of the track which was speedily rustled up the very next (likely bleary-eyed) day. The new arrangement was built atop a disco style of programming, particularly in the drums and bass, which bore the influence of a night on the illuminated tiles most explicitly.

“The next morning, we woke up, and were like, ‘We have to make a disco song. It’s the most fun to dance to,’” remembered Emily Warren in an interview with Rolling Stone. Dua herself had been similarly exploring new genres, and was onboard with the new direction.

Despite this disco leaning, we have to admire just how fresh the production sounds although it was entirely created in the electronic domain.

The exceptionally punchy drums, particularly the kick and snares, play an essential role as the backbone for the track, alongside a bass part which sounds entirely live. If only! It was programmed by Kirkpatrick, using the stock Native Instruments Scarbee Bass plugin, specifically the MM-bass patch. It just goes to show how realistic samples can sound when you understand the roles instruments play in different genre contexts.

“Many people s**t on pop music. They think it's a lesser form of music,” Kirkpatrick told Sound on Sound. “But I actually think it's the most mysterious and advanced, because you have to make the most amount of people happy. It's like a riddle, and there are no rules.”

A bright acoustic piano sound provides an essential role, particularly in certain sections of the song, where it is doubled with synth pads and sustained synth basses. The production relies upon the arrangement to emphasise sections, so let’s take a deeper look at the structure of Don't Start Now…

There is a heavy association between D major and its relative minor, B minor. These keys share the same key signature of two sharps, which also explains why they are such happy bedfellows in the context of a song such as this.

For the moment, we will move past the four-bar introduction, which harks back to one of the main sections in the song. Once beyond this, we immediately hit the first verse.

The arrangement begins very simplistically, but equally effectively. Breaking down to just bass, drums and vocals, the bass part follows harmony that we hear more fully later in the song. Working with a chord per bar, we hear Em7, Bm7, G and D.

By way of a turnaround, the final chord is for only half a bar, before shifting to a chord of A, as a pivot back to Em7. The sequence repeats 3 times, making up 12 bars.

This chordal structure is orchestrated more fully when we hear the same sequence in the chorus section, although this doesn't happen immediately. There is a very recognisable bridge section between the verse and chorus, which we could simply describe as the piano bridge - you can guess why!

Making full use of the chordal sensibilities provided by an acoustic piano (at least in sampled form) the rhythm breaks down to just hand claps, later joined by a tambourine, and a very cool synth-vocal sound, which sounds a little like a rhythm guitar.

The chords in this section are Bm7, D, Em7 and Gmaj7, but, in a beautifully syncopated rhythmic arrangement, the final two chords are preceded by D and F#m7 respectively.

The first chord in each pairing lands on beat one of the bar, with the second chord appearing on the 16th note push to each second beat.

This is a clever device (alongside the hugeness of pop orchestration in this section) which helps to keep the rhythm element moving, despite a slight letup in the full rhythm and drum arrangement.

Let’s rewind to the beginning of the track, and, as is now de rigueur for modern pop, the song wastes no time getting underway.

Apart from a short fade in, provided by a synth sound, the introduction section draws its chordal inspiration from the later piano bridge, although it is heavily interrupted and truncated in the third bar, before heading into the first verse.

It also underlies a sharpness in the production, where there is a tendency at the end of a number of sections to stop things dead. It creates impact, despite reducing the number of instruments we hear at this point and the overall volume.

Don’t Start Now, in common with so much commercial production, benefits from a very heavily compressed rhythm backing. This begins with the drum sounds which provide enormous impact, while being very forthright in the mix.

The snare, in particular, has been layered to create the desired colour, although there are some other more left-field components, such as the sample of a wood block and a good-old-fashioned ‘syn-drum’ sound, with both filling voids in certain locations, or providing disco-inspired drum fills.

The association between the bass part and the kick drum is prominent in the mix. According to Kirkpatrick, the MM-Bass sample was only part of the picture, as he also blended the sound with a sub-bass, provided by Spectrasonics Trillian; this plugin instrument was probably also responsible for the ground-shaking sustained bass synth in the piano bridge section.

On the vocal front, Dua Lipa recorded a considerable number of takes for the track, compiling a rough mix which consisted of approximately 100 tracks, pre-final mix down.

It's slightly unclear which microphone was used to record the track, although we have seen mention of both a Telefunken 251 or Shure SM7. Judging by the clarity, we would suggest the former, but as we know, the SM7 is responsible for some very heavy duty vocal recording in pop history.

Dua’s vocal recording inspired Kirkpatrick to tighten-up the arrangement;

“The song went through several changes,” he told Sound on Sound. “It's weird, once Dua put her voice on it, it helped me understand the song more, and there were more changes after that. Her A&R, Joe Kentish, said that the bridge sounded like an afterthought, which was true, so I added a vocal chop to the bridge. The first version of the drums didn't sound as fat. I was worried that the song would sound too disco, too classic. It needed something new, to make it the perfect mix of the old and the new. I listened to the Weeknd's I Can't Feel My Face, and the drums on that are fatter, so I added some extra drums.”

The single became a huge hit, reaching number 2 on UK and US charts in late 2019, and received respectably high chart placings elsewhere.

Many cite the single - which was eventually nominated for three Grammys - as launching something of a disco revival of sorts in contemporary pop. The parent album, Future Nostalgia would unexpectedly drop at the outset of the COVID pandemic in March of 2020. In this new context, Don’t Start Now’s lyric would take on an affecting new meaning in the midst of the socially-distanced lockdowns;

Don't show up
Don't come out
Don't start now

“I definitely didn't plan for my music to be so fitting for a time like this,” Dua Lipa told Live with Kelly and Ryan Wednesday. “I definitely, while making it, imagined being able to go out and dance and party, but, um, you know - kitchen dancing. And if it's rules to live by at a time like that now then I'm happy for it.”

But, despite the fame of the song, and its still enduring popularity some six years on, some musicians were largely unaware of the track upon its initial release.

One such musician is Justin Stanton; a virtuoso keyboard player, who plays with Snarky Puppy and many others. He was presented with the track, in the form of just the vocal and drum stems, and proceeded to completely re-harmonise the track, in an extraordinary rendition, which he recorded live in the studio for the keyboard tuition company Pianote.

If the original isn't for you, check out Stanton’s re-harmonisation, for a really fascinating peek at how an amazing musician may approach the same song. It’s radical, impressive, and incredibly funky!

Linkin Park have released a documentary, Unshatter, which looks at the band’s resurrection since the suicide of lead vocalist Chester Bennington in 2017.

Replacing Bennington with ex-Dead Sara singer Emily Armstrong was a brave move for all concerned, and Unshatter covers the adjustments that had to be made by both the band and their new vocalist.

In an interview with People about the film, Armstrong admits that she was initially intimidated by the scale of the task in front of her: “You see it in the documentary where I’m just like, ‘Am I even cut out for this?’ You’re trying to give yourself every reason to just be like, ‘You’re not good. Everybody knows these songs.’”

It was essential, she explains, to put her own touch on the band’s extensive back catalogue. “That’s the only thing that I could think of. Don’t try to be like anybody. You’re not a replacement. Nobody could ever, ever replace Chester. Do what you do.”

Part of that involved adapting some of the band’s classic songs. The documentary shows the additional prep that Armstrong and fellow new recruit drummer Colin Brittain had to do, which, as the drummer explains in the film, included making sure those songs felt natural for Armstrong’s voice.

“She and I would get together at my house probably four days a week for a period of months learning the songs,” Brittain says. “We changed a bunch of the keys a bunch of times to try to find what was comfortable for her to sing it in while still retaining the same original energy and shape.”

Speaking to People, the documentary maker and the band’s ‘creative director’ Joe Hahn remembers capturing the band going through this process with Armstrong and Brittain. “I think the first one we addressed was Crawling [from 2000’s Hybrid Theory]. The important thing for us was for her to sing it her way, not to imitate anything. If it’s personal to her, then it’s gonna resonate."

“We heard that, made a few little modifications and were just like, ‘OK, this really works,’ Hahn says, remembering it as the moment the band knew the new line-up was right. “It was almost like the icebreaker to make the rest feel very achievable.”

As for Armstrong, she still seems to be pinching herself that she’s fronting the band she’s been a fan of for years. “I know how lucky I am,” she says in Unshatter. “It’s everything I’ve dreamed of. I’m so fortunate to be in this position. It’s crazy. Having it happen later in my life is something I wouldn’t change.”

Unshatter is currently enjoying a limited theatre run. At some point details will no doubt be announced about its streaming release.

Mike Love returned to live duties with the Beach Boys over the weekend after a summer that has seen the 85-year-old sidelined by some serious health issues. But concerns remain around Love’s condition – Rolling Stone has described his appearance at the show in Cincannati as “alarmingly frail”.

As you can see from the footage below, the singer moved very slowly – with the help of his son Christian and fellow performer John Stamos - to his position centre stage, where he sat for the duration of the performance, contributing occasional backing vocals.

Neither the band nor Love himself have revealed the exact nature of his health problems. After an appearance in London in June, Love wrote on Instagram that “Losing my sister, Maureen, on the first anniversary of cousin Brian’s death, combined with my ongoing recovery from what started out as bronchitis, followed by Covid, has taken both an emotional and physical toll on me. I feel stronger every day physically, but I am heartbroken emotionally.”

Since then the group have pulled a number of shows, though they did play a private event in California the Saturday before last (3 October). Following that, a gig in Bloomington, Illinois on Friday (9 October) was cancelled due to “unforeseen circumstances”.

After the Cincinnati show, they were due to play in Nashville last night. Before the show, Stamos posted on social media that “My beloved friend, father figure, musical hero and mentor, Mike Love, is facing serious health challenges. We hope he’ll be doing what he loves for years to come, but we don’t know what the future holds. We have tonight. Mike is a fighter. Despite doctors, family and friends urging him to focus on his health, he insists on being on stage. He says he needs his band, the audience, his friends and drummer surrounding him to lift him up.”

He continued: "I’ve played with Mike for 41 years. I never imagined how deeply it would affect me to see someone larger than life face something so human and fragile. The Mike Love we see tonight may not be exactly the Mike we’ve always known. But he’s still every bit the Mike we love.”

All very concerning for the group’s many fans. As they know, Love has been the one continuous thread in the Beach Boys since they formed in 1961 - sadly, all three Wilson brothers have died and the other surviving founder member Al Jardine hasn’t been a part of the band since their 50^th anniversary reunion tour in 2012.

When Lindsey Buckingham presented Sombr with the Songwriter of the Year award at the Variety Power of Young Hollywood event earlier this year, he revealed in an interview that the young artist – real name Shane Michael Boose – had spoken to him about the possibility of a collaboration.

“I don’t know what form that will take, or if it will take at all, so we will just have to wait and see,” said the Fleetwood Mac legend.

But now we have at least some of the answer. During his show at the Los Angeles Kia Forum on 10 October, Sombr sprung a surprise by inviting Buckingham on stage to duet on Go Your Own Way, a classic Fleetwood Mac song from their much-loved 1976 album, Rumours.

After Sombr had described him as a “fucking legend”, Buckingham arrived to a rapturous reception. Taking a guitar from a tech, he proceeded to lead Sombr and his band through the song, singing the first verse himself and leaving the young pretender to handle the second.

Which might not have been such a good idea: Boose appeared to stumble over some of the words and struggled with the lyrics’ phrasing, leaving some to wonder how well he actually knows Go Your Own Way – or, indeed, how much he’d rehearsed it.

No one at the gig seemed to mind, though, and nerves may well have played a part (it must be pretty intimidating to perform with one of your heroes, after all). What’s more, Sombr was on safer ground in the choruses, which pretty much everyone in the building seemed to join in with.

Lindsey, meanwhile, was busy proving that his guitar chops are still present and correct as he delivered a blistering solo in the outro.

The question, of course, is whether we’ll ever again see Buckingham performing the song with his surviving Fleetwood Mac bandmates. He hasn’t played with the band since 2018, when his relationship with Stevie Nicks soured, but the two are now believed to be back on speaking terms, and Buckingham has hinted that there could be big things to come in 2027. We shall see.

RECORDING WEEK 2026: For a variety of reasons, the 1980s often get a bad rap. Unfettered capitalism shifted the western axis from good to greed, and pop music began to mirror this newfound faith in consumerism - and our collective fixation with the life-enhancing benefits of modern technology.

Old certainties were being supplanted by a vision of just what tomorrow might look like - with science and innovation leading the way towards a glorious tomorrow for households throughout the western world.

Someone who’d long been dreaming of a techno-utopian future however, was Thomas Dolby. A man who came to a epitomise the synthesist-pop artist of the early 80s, Dolby spent his formative years listening to bands like Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk - but the prohibitive cost of synthesizers meant that he was forced to head to the West End of London in order to play expensive synths in shops, often getting booted out a closing time!

Growing up in South West London he could often be found hanging around the Electronic Music Studios - also known as EMS - who produced legendary synthesizers such as the VCS3.

By chance, he found a discarded circuit board for a synth in a skip at the back of their studio, and, being inquisitive and fairly industrious, took the circuit board home. Before long, Dolby had built his own synth.

And so, the perception of Dolby as something of a synth-scientist started to become more like art imitating life. He worked as a programmer and keyboard player for the band Foreigner (the intro of Waiting for a Girl Like You, specifically) and supplied keyboards for an early 7-piece lineup of the Thompson Twins, before they became a trio.

Monetising his passion allowed him to afford the creation of his first album, and what a debut it was!

The Golden Age of Wireless is regarded as a classic, despite the fact that at the time, Dolby was a relative unknown, and the album didn't do terribly well. The skeptical record company told him that they needed a hit, or his prospects were looking bleak…

Dolby had become increasingly aware however, of the increasing importance of music video. In his head, he imagined the visuals for a prospective short film. Albeit one that needed a particularly compelling track to soundtrack it…

“I was very keen to try out my talent as a music video director. I was always a big fan of silent movies: Chaplin and Keaton and Lloyd and so on. And I saw music videos as really a silent movie with a soundtrack,” Dolby told Songfacts.

“I managed to persuade my record company to let me take a shot at writing and directing [a video]”

His label were intrigued, however they wanted to hear the song that the video was actually for… “I said, ‘Oh, well, I'll bring it on Monday morning.’ Then I went home and wrote the song,” Dolby told Forbes. “So it was definitely spurred by the enticing idea of writing and directing my own video.”

Created over the space of this single weekend, She Blinded Me With Science was born. Dolby harnessed his carefully assembled instrumental rig to maintain the sound-set from the first album. Given EMI's retrospective desire to integrate the single, that was clearly a good move.

Dolby was a huge advocate for the PPG Wave and associated computer. Offering wavetable synthesis, the Wave also provided basic sequencing and sampling, which proved invaluable for the song. He even nicknamed the wave computer ‘Henry’.

The drum track was generated from both the PPG and a Simmons drum module. The iconic offbeat cowbell was played by the PPG, which was also used to sample the snare sound, which was detuned before being incorporated into the track. The other drum sounds, particularly the highly distinctive toms, were supplied by the Simmons module.

Regrettably, the Wave Computer that had done so much of the heavy lifting on the first album had a terrible accident. It ended up falling down a lift shaft, and with that, Henry regrettably met a less than auspicious end.

Consequently, Dolby nicknamed his newly acquired Fairlight CMI Henry the 2nd! Of course!

He was only able to afford said Fairlight thanks to an advance from his record company, with which he also bought a flat. According to Dolby, the Fairlight was more expensive than the flat.

Long-time friend and bass player Matthew Seligman (also previously with The Thompson Twins) played the bass part on Science using Dolby’s Moog Source synthesizer. Rather than simply DI’ing the signal, it was played through a bass amp in the studio which was mic’d.

The magic created between the metronomically sequenced drum parts, and the organically played bass part is just perfect. There are subtle moments of improvisation in the bass, while it sits just behind the timing of the drums.

The iconic lead lines and jazz-influenced synth chords were all played by Dolby on his Roland Jupiter-4. He would later own a Jupiter-8, but the identifiable saw brass perfectly shores up the verse and chorus sections in both an accompanying and lead sense.

Drawing upon his experience of playing with bands, both live and in the studio, Thomas Dolby never seems to overplay on his songs. Everything has a place, with space being an important element, often letting musical moments of interest peep through, from a vocal to a synth sound.

What's quite surprising about this song is that it doesn't have a vocal heavy chorus. In many respects, this is the genius of the song - because it just continually references the song’s name. One element which really hammers this home is the continual interjection of the word “Science!”

Back in the early 80s, a scientist called Dr. Magnus Pyke, was quite a celebrity. He could often be seen in the role of an eccentric scientist on many television programmes. Hence, he was quite a household name in the UK.

Thomas Dolby discovered that it was possible to hire the good doctor by the hour, so he bravely booked him to come to his studio and deliver a few choice lines, as well as earmarking him to appear in the soon-to-be iconic music video.

Apart from the word “Science!” , in various stylised proclamations, he also delivered the line “Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto, you're beautiful!”

Of course, by today's standards, this feels slightly inappropriate, but it came from a position of love and respect, and cheeky a nod to the wife of legendary artist and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was a good friend of Dolby's.

One particularly interesting moment of the production stems from the interjecting vocal line in each verse, which feels quite ‘eastern’ in musical style and delivery. This was supplied by session vocalist Miriam Stockley - apart from being a superb singer, her versatility was fairly renowned in the industry, making her an ideal person to sing the line which is also doubled by violinist Simon House.

But as fantastic as the song was, its real purpose was to back Dolby's vivid video vision. Based around the concept of Dolby being a patient on the psychiatrist's couch, the video depicts him being questioned by Dr. Magnus Pyke in the extraordinary setting of Holme House - an enormous Georgian mansion located near Regent’s Park, in London.

All of this played into a narrative that became quite successful for Thomas Dolby. The notion of him being something of a whacky professor or inventor, surrounded by synthesizers and wire-trailing studio equipment, became the overriding perception of him during this part of his early career.

As a single, She Blinded Me With Science sadly failed to trouble the UK charts, topping out at number 56.

However, in America, it went all the way to number #5, due largely to the widespread rotation of the video, which was a mainstay on the freshly-launched music channel MTV.

“If you had a video that was a little bit original, then it definitely causes some waves,” Dolby reflected in an interview with The Electricity Club. “And I think in my case, they were talking in the States about the new ‘British Invasion’ and synthpop so everyone was casting around looking for what this thing was. There was a guy with a catchy song and a very specific image and it was the antithesis of the mullet rock ‘n’ roll of the late 70s. So I think that’s why it really caught on. It was perceived as being very English and quirky. Whereas in the UK, there’s quirky Englishness around you all the time… Magnus Pyke was always on TV so there was nothing so extraordinary about seeing or hearing him!”

With a hit to his name finally, Dolby’s record company EMI re-released the album, frustratingly losing the superb track The Wreck of the Fairchild in favour of the new Science single, along with its accompanying B-side, One of Our Submarines. Great as this was for invigorating sales, it seemed to unbalance the conceptually-structured album.

But, Dolby would go on to prove his artistic breadth across albums such as The Flat Earth and Aliens Ate My Buick. His command of studio technology, coupled with an exceptionally sound musical background, meant that while he was possibly denied the exceptional success that he deserved, his albums were critically acclaimed.

“Obviously I was very pleased with Science,” Dolby told Billboard in 1984. “But, something about it also turned me off. I thought it was my most frivolous song, that it wasn't me. I'm more serious, more intense than that.”

With his finger ever on the technological pulse, Thomas even went on to supply the software that was used in early Nokia mobile phones that allowed them to play polyphonic ringtones.

For Dolby, science and innovation continue to excite, and open new creative doors…

"I think over the years, starting with electronic music but then going on to MTV videos, to production, to working with computers and the internet, web, ringtones, filmmaking, writing novels, teaching at university… Each new field I've gone into I’m really out of control and that's what sparks me,” Thomas told us last year.

"I sort of go into atrophy if I find myself working in an area where I do have control and I know what I'm doing. I get bored and uninspired quite quickly.

RECORDING WEEK 2026: We last spoke with Karl Bartos back in 2013 for the release of his wonderful trawl through his own musical archives, Off The Record. For those of us of a certain age, Kraftwerk were arguably the gateway drug when it came to all of the electronic music that followed.

Bartos was a pivotal member of the ground-breaking German band for 15 years, contributing to what are considered all of their classic albums until leaving in 1990, frustrated at the band’s prolonged creative stasis. His autobiography The Sound of the Machine: My Life in Kraftwerk and Beyond is essential reading.

Post-Kraftwerk, Bartos formed Elektric Music, releasing two albums before collaborating with Bernard Sumner and Johnny Marr on their Electronic project as well as also working with OMD’s Andy McCluskey. In 2021, he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as part of Kraftwerk’s classic line-up.

2024 album The Cabinet of Dr Caligari had been a long-time labour of love for Bartos and the soundtrack itself was a product of a two-year-long creative flow between his Hamburg studio and the Düsseldorf studio of his friend and engineer, Mathias Black. According to Black, the pair “used FaceTime, screen sharing and, for file share, a cloud server. It cannot substitute working together in one studio, but it helps”.

The resultant album was an intoxicating fusion of the orchestral and the electronic; it beggars belief that it was Karl Bartos’ first foray proper into soundtrack work (having previously contributed to Kraftwerk’s track Metropolis, which was a paean to Fritz Lang’s movie of the same name).

A couple of years ago, we relished the opportunity to excitedly chat music and philosophy with the delightful Mr Bartos, over at his minimalist studio in Hamburg (as well as hearing more about his surprisingly cautious attitude to computers). We republish our conversation here for MusicRadar's Recording Week 2026 in full…

MuiscRadar: It's incredible to discover that this is your first ever soundtrack project. How did composing this music for Dr Caligari differ from putting together a new album of songs?

KB: “The difference in creating a soundtrack is that, like dance music, it’s functional music… it’s made for a reason that people on a dancefloor move their bodies to it. The same applies to film music. Some music, for instance, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was composed for a ballet.

"During the process of composing for this movie, I considered the movement of the actors as a ballet so, of course, the music has to fit their movements. It’s a reverse process of choreography. The process of writing a film score is very stressful; you don’t have much time, and someone will tell you to make it a certain way, but I chose to do this for Dr Caligari as I needed this movie in my autobiography.”

MR: When we last spoke for the release of your solo album, Off The Record, you’d trawled your personal audio archive for material to work on. Did you do something similar for putting the soundtrack together?

KB: “Actually, that’s a good question, as I incorporated some of the music I wrote when I was a student at the Rhineland State Conservatory of Music during the counterpoint lessons. So I put it all together with my musical partner Mathias Black. One of the reasons I wanted so much to do this soundtrack was because the film was almost like the big bang of pop culture.

"The character Cesare almost looks like David Bowie [laughs] or the predecessor of David Bowie, I guess. I have a lot of living that I still want to do and a lot of music still in my head, so I must bring it out.”

MR: Did the warm critical reception that Off The Record received surprise you?

KB: “Yes, and it’s steadily grown over the years too. Initially, I think it was slow to take off because we didn’t play live. I dont have a band, so we couldn’t do any live shows. So, it took quite a while, but even now it’s getting bigger and bigger.”

MR: Are there still lots of musical delights to be extracted from the archive, and has the digital domain made storing everything too convenient?

KB: “Yes, but for storing and administration the computer is perfect [laughs] which is almost the only thing!”

MR: In your early days with Kraftwerk did you ever imagine a time when you could effectively have a functional music studio in the palm of your hand?

KB: “No, not really. When we came up with the idea of making an album called Computer World, I always compare it to the book Neuromancer by William Gibson, which was written on a typewriter; analogue. The things he was imagining in his head were so far ahead of the time. So, when we did Computer World we had a Moog synth, an ARP synth and a 16-step sequencer but we had the image in our head. We couldn’t have imagined that in 2023 you could, in theory, reach everyone in this world with your music via a mobile phone.”

MR: Do you think young artists and producers who started making music on Reason or Ableton Live have any idea of how difficult it was back then to even get two electronic machines to sync to each other?

KB: “A few years back I had a professorship of the arts at the University of the Arts in Berlin, and some of the students were just DJs. Some of them came up with the idea that everything they would need to rely on was in their laptops. That really took me by surprise at the time. Usually when we had a new semester, we would go to the rehearsal for a symphony concert.

"I remember the first one we went to was with Sir Simon Rattle and, after watching the concert we sat outside the Berlin Philharmonie hall with some music scores, and I explained to them how similar a score is to a computer screen – the main difference being that a score doesn’t playback. So, you have to know how to write notes and use your imagination to put all the blocks together.”

MR: What bits of gear have you utilised in your studio for the Caligari album?

KB: “Well, over there is an original Polymoog and it’s still working! A lot of the music on the album was made with the Polymoog. I work from this studio in Hamburg and my musical partner Mathias (Black) has his studio in Düsseldorf, and sometimes he comes crawling into my computer from there.

"He sometimes helps me with all the technology when it gets too complicated with the computer, as my brain is used to more abstract things like music. Computers always make you feel like you have problems to solve. It’s so anti-creative, so I get Mathias to help with it, and he’s also a good musician, which helps.”

MR: So, you think computers in the music-making process can potentially create as many problems as they solve?

KB: “Sometimes I get the feeling that music culture today is made by computer scientists, because you need to always fill in a form. So, I had to fill the forms while making Caligari even though Caligari was composed in my head, and the piano is supporting the imagination and my Martin D28 acoustic.

"So, I work on the idea, write it down, and then I turn to the computer. In the early days of Kraftwerk we had a tape machine, and now I basically use the computer just as a recording tool.”

MR: Do you carry any portable devices around with you for capturing ideas in transit?

KB: “No… I made an observation that, if I have an idea for a song, I take my guitar and sing along with it, and I don’t record it. I don’t even write it down. Then, next time I pick up the guitar, my subconscious will add something. Chords are the bricks of pop music, so I play some of these brick-chords and my subconscious fills in the gaps. That way it’s not planned and it comes up from somewhere in my soul…[laughs] or from my stomach!

"It just appears, and I have no idea where it comes from. I don’t even write this second idea down. I have some songs for the next musical project I’m working on that I haven’t written down. I have a few lyrics and sometimes I’ll write down some chord changes – just like Paul McCartney did in the beginning, or at least that’s what he always says.”

MR: Your computer is far from a musical hub for you, then?

KB: “You have to keep this process going and you have to remember what you did before. With a computer, it plays every little idea back to you… why? I just want to fill in the blank tape in my mind, not in reality. The process of creativity is not like filling in a form. It’s more about observing the world and nature and trying to imitate that, put it into art and interpret human feelings.

"If I do this, then I don’t want to hear it again from the computer. I want to explore, and find the next generation of the chord. Then I play it the next day, and my brain comes up with another chord. You have to always keep in mind the act of creation, which is about an idea, isn’t it? The question shouldn’t be what I have in the studio or what equipment I’m going to use, the question is, ‘what do I need?’ It’s a fight between idea and reality… always, to put my idea into reality.”

MR: We remember last time we talked, we discussed how easy it is to get swamped by options amidst all the new technology. Is that still relevant for you?

KB: “That’s why I reinvented this procedure of not recording something but developing it. Again, like Paul McCartney said in his last book, he’d go over to John’s and there was a coming together of creativity, and they’d come up with an idea. Next day they’d return and if they couldn’t remember the idea, then it wasn’t any good.”

MR: It’s like a filter?

KB: “Yeah it’s a brain filter and if you can’t remember, then forget it. If you can remember, then next day, something else pops up; the bridge, the chorus or the words, whatever. If you write pop music then, of course, you have to have words. They have to put your everyday life into poetics. Unfortunately, this wonderful machine, the computer, has employed so many administration tools that you’re always distracted by them. So, you have to always remember how to turn off the computer.”

MR: That ethos is certainly in keeping with a growing trend at the moment to take music-making back outside of the box...

KB: “It’s pretty much a dead-end street. Ray Davies said in Waterloo Sunset, ‘every day I look at the world from my window’ and then he says what he sees. That’s exactly what you do if you’re a composer. You look at the outside world and you try to transpose what you see into music.

"With Kraftwerk, we had that concept of the man machine, which was taken from Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis about the female robot called Futura, but we (Kraftwerk) were playing together in a room and looking each other in the eye. We put our communication into music. The turning point for us was digitalisation, and when Kraftwerk became an institution we stopped being contemporary [laughs]. Instead we became salesmen of nostalgia.

“You know, when the computer turned up it was the dream of a businessman. In the beginning we often called our studio an electronic garden, but that garden developed into a factory farming industry. When we wrote Computer World we were still human beings playing together.

"We were playing with the Music and Rhythm Laboratory sequencer, aka the Friend-Chip “Mr. Lab” – Kraftwerk also used the Synthanorma Sequenzer around this time, but the computer came and turned us into a musical box. We became a musical box and also our brains became digitised. We spent all of our time solving problems with technology.”

MR: What equipment do you have at your disposal in your Hamburg studio?

KB: “I have many computers. For the Caligari project Mathias and I worked with Logic Pro on a Mac Pro each, with every plugin available like Organteq, Vienna Symphonic Library, Waves and hardware from Neve, Tubetech, BSS, Lexicon, Sony.”

MR: Would we be right in thinking that you have a trove of desirable old synths in storage too?

KB: “I still have my two Minimoogs, the Polymoog, ARP-Odyssey, Korg PS-3100, Ms-20, Ms-50, Roland MC-202, TB-303. Some diverse keyboards like the Roland D-50, Yamaha DX-7, Nord Electro, Virus B, Novation and others. They all sound great, but then you have to go into the virtual space for the production. All the analogue gear is recorded into the digital space, and this is the confusion again.

"With Kraftwerk, we’d turn up at the studio and start playing and we’d have an aim. Or we’d even just celebrate the improvisation. We’d talk to each other, have fun, look each other in the eye and transfer all that into music. That was the whole secret! The idea was that the computer would give us more time for creativity, but it was just the opposite. We spent too much time with the organisation of sound and with the computer technology. The human beings were not at the centre of everything, the computer was. And we were serving the computer industry.”

MR: So, ironically, the computer impacted negatively on Kraftwerk’s music process?

KB: “Yeah, we didn’t speak to each other and there were many engineers coming into the studio. It’s like every business now thinks they need a computer. It’s not true, but the industry is so clever that they’re selling their computers to everybody… to shops and schoolkids. They all think that this is our future but that’s not true, as the future is what we make it.

"Some of my partners in Kraftwerk believed so much that it was progress, but I actually couldn’t follow that. I think innovation and progress are not synonyms. Would you consider the machine-gun or the atomic bomb as being progress for human beings? I’m not so sure about that.”

MR: This seems like a perfect point to ask for your thoughts on AI in music?

KB: “It’s overestimated, I think. It’s just an archive of human logic. So, if you were to remix The Gutenberg Galaxy [Marshall McLuhan’s revered book from the early ’60s], the Mona Lisa and the Goldberg Variations, what would we get with copy and paste? I don’t know! I think it’s a wet dream from some of those guys in Silicon Valley. They’re really clever at selling us AI… where’s the results?”

MR: You’ll be playing some live screenings of Dr Caligari in the near future. How will you go about presenting the music for those?

KB: “Mathias will be playing alongside me. He’s my friend and my musical partner. I don’t know if you’ve seen any footage of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry performing their musique concrete? Where they used tape machines, we have the computer, because the foundation of the sound is the symphonic orchestra, and then Mathias and I play along. So, Mathias is doing what Stockhausen referred to as ‘sound direction’. There are so many musical things to be excited about just now.”

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is out now on Bureau B.

It was May 1976, early summer in Hollywood, California, and Phil Lynott was on a high.

The singer, bassist and leader of fast-rising rock heroes Thin Lizzy, Lynott was enjoying a night out at the famous Rainbow Bar & Grill on the Sunset Strip. At his side was Lizzy’s California-born guitarist Scott Gorham.

They had a swagger about them, and for good reason. Lizzy’s single The Boys Are Back In Town – partly inspired by the band’s first trip to LA – had become a huge hit both in America and across the Atlantic. In Ireland, Lynott’s homeland, it was No 1.

Thin Lizzy and Phil Lynott had arrived, and Lynott wasn’t shy about letting people know it. As he walked into the Rainbow that night, he felt invincible.

The Rainbow was where rock ’n’ roll royalty held court. In its dark corners and private booths, drug dealers and groupies attended to the stars.

Led Zeppelin, especially, loved the Rainbow. Whenever they were in Los Angeles they made the place their own: they were the biggest band in the world, and threw their weight around accordingly, drummer John Bonham most of all.

Bonzo would think nothing of ordering up ten Black Russian cocktails – for himself – and then picking a fight with anyone who looked at him the wrong way. He was one of rock’s true wild men. But even Bonzo was taken aback when he ran into Phil Lynott in the Rainbow on that night in May ’76.

Lynott and Scott Gorham stood at the bar, knocking back drinks with Ritchie Blackmore, the ex-Deep Purple guitarist, who had once tried to lure Lynott away from Thin Lizzy to play bass in a new group. Blackmore was feared as the meanest, moodiest bastard in rock. He was a huge star with a big reputation and a savage wit. But Lynott wasn’t intimidated. Lizzy had been booked to support Blackmore’s new band Rainbow on a forthcoming US tour, and Lynott was fired up about it.

As John Bonham looked on, Lynott sneered to Blackmore, “Man, when we get on the road we’re gonna kick your ass every night. You won’t know what’s hit you!”

Blackmore was speechless. Bonzo was laughing his head off. Both were amazed at Lynott’s cockiness. But that was Phil Lynott. The man wasn’t short on self-belief. He was good and he knew it.

In ’76, Phil Lynott and Thin Lizzy were on a path to glory. The Boys Are Back In Town blared from radios throughout that long, hot summer. Lizzy would follow it with many more great songs and classic albums.

The band would develop into one of the definitive hard rock acts of the ’70s; the first internationally successful Irish rock band, fronted by the first black rock superstar since Jimi Hendrix. Thin Lizzy’s wild lifestyle would become the stuff of legend. And their music would inspire future rock giants from Bon Jovi and Def Leppard to Guns N’ Roses and The Darkness.

But Thin Lizzy, and Phil Lynott, were bound for self-destruction. By 1983, the band had split up. And on 4 January 4 1986, just 10 years after that night at the Rainbow when the world was at his feet, Phil Lynott was pronounced dead, his heart, liver and kidneys all having failed due to the effects of prolonged drug addiction.

His death, at just 36 years old, was described by his friend Bob Geldof as “a sickening tragedy.” Phil Lynott had lived fast and paid the price. But the man had such charisma, and produced so much great music, that he would never be forgotten.

The bronze statue of Phil Lynott that stands on Grafton Street in Dublin, one of his favourite haunts, confirms his status as a great Irish hero and a genuine rock ‘n’ roll icon. As Scott Gorham stated simply, “Phil left an impression like nobody else.”

Phil Lynott was the kind of rock star who made it all look easy. He exuded an effortless cool. But he’d been through many tough times, and won many hard battles.

He was born Philip Parris Lynott on 20 August 1949 in Birmingham. His mother Philomena Lynott was a student nurse from Dublin, his father Cecil Parris a black American serviceman. The couple never married, and separated soon after Philip’s birth.

Philomena, a devout Catholic, admitted, “I was a sinner in the eyes of the church.” ’50s society was scornful of unwed mothers and mixed-race relationships. There were few black kids in Dublin back then. Philip was subjected to racist abuse. He grew up without a father, and was also separated from his mother at the age of four when Philomena took a job in Manchester and left Philip in Dublin to be raised by her family.

It was not an idyllic childhood, but Philip was smart, and his confidence grew when, aged just 11, he joined his first rock ‘n’ roll band, The Black Eagles. Philip was the singer and he loved the attention he got.

The Black Eagles were no more than a covers act – Beatles and Stones hits a speciality – but by the mid-’60s they were performing four nights a week, giving Philip his first taste of stardom, albeit on a very modest scale.

Also of significance was the bond Philip formed with the Eagles’ drummer Brian Downey, who attended the same school as Philip in the working class district of Crumlin. The pair would become co-founders of Thin Lizzy in 1970, but only after Philip had learned another hard lesson.

When The Black Eagles fell apart in 1967, Philip worked for a brief time at an iron foundry. It was to be his final, half-hearted attempt at holding down a normal job, aborted when he was invited to join a new rock band named Skid Row in 1968. He got the gig because, as Skid Row’s leader Brendan ‘Brush’ Shiels later revealed, “Philip was the best looking boy around, and I knew that with him fronting the band, we’d get lots of attention from girls.”

Skid Row played the psychedelic rock songs of the era – Hendrix, Cream, etc – and were soon one of the most popular bands in Ireland. Philip the gangly youth was becoming Phil Lynott the rock star. And when the band acquired a brilliant new guitarist in Belfast-born Gary Moore, they were emerging as serious contenders. Then they fired their singer.

Phil couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He had been struggling with his voice and needed an operation to have his tonsils removed. When he returned to the band, they’d decided that they were, in Shiels’ words, “better off without him.” It was a bitter blow for Phil and a tough call for Brush Sheils to make, especially as Phil had been best man at Shiels’ wedding.

Shiels did what he could for Phil: he taught him how to play bass, and gave him a bass guitar at a knockdown price (which Phil never did get around to paying). Most valuable of all, however, was the lesson Phil learned from the Skid Row experience: that even friends could screw you over, and that the only sure way to avoid getting screwed in the future was to boss your own band.

That’s exactly what Phil did with Orphanage, formed in 1969 with old friend Brian Downey, bassist Pat Quigley and guitarist Joe Staunton. This being Phil’s band, they played Phil’s songs: new, original compositions. And this being the new, more ruthless and business-savvy Phil, when a better option materialised, he grabbed it.

Another hot young guitarist from Belfast, Eric Bell, turned up at an Orphanage gig at Dublin’s Countdown Club, and despite being off his face on acid (“It was like waking up on Jupiter!” he later confessed), Bell talked Phil and Brian into forming a new band with him.

The new band got its name from a character in the children’s comic The Dandy: Tin Lizzie, the Mechanical Maid. It was Eric Bell who said they should change the name to ‘Thin Lizzy’, because heavily accented Dubliners would pronounce it the same anyhow. Phil laughed: Thin Lizzy it was. And in three years, that name was at the top of the British and Irish charts.

Thin Lizzy’s first hit was a complete fluke. Their first two albums, released in 1971 and 1972, had sold poorly, so when co-manager Ted Carroll heard them playing around with an old Irish folk song called Whiskey In The Jar, he suggested they record it for a single. Brian Downey was horrified. “Fuck off!” he snapped. “It’s a joke song – it’s not Thin Lizzy.” Downey had a point: Thin Lizzy were a hard rock band, and although their version of Whiskey In The Jar had a rock feel, it was still, plainly, a folk song. They recorded it anyway, mostly to keep Carroll happy, and in March 1973, to the band’s surprise, the single hit No 1 in Ireland and No 6 in the UK.

Phil Lynott was on Top Of The Pops. He was a star. But celebrations were short-lived. When subsequent singles bombed, Lizzy were written off as one-hit wonders. And although they’d made a third album together, Eric Bell was faltering. He loved music but hated the music business. Also, he was, by his own admission, “drinking too much, doing too many drugs.” Following a disastrous gig in Belfast when he was so pissed he could barely play, Bell resigned. “I’d lost my mind,” he confessed years later. From hereon in, Thin Lizzy would change guitar players like most bands would change guitar strings…

Bell’s replacement, Gary Moore, would last just four months. He and Phil had hit it off when they were in Skid Row, but when Moore toured with Lizzy in early ’74 he would irritate Phil by hogging the spotlight, and would drink even more than Eric Bell did. “I was killing myself,” Moore admitted. So he quit the band, and in doing so, almost finished them off.

With two guitarists gone in quick succession, Brian Downey grew so disillusioned that he quit too. For a brief period, Thin Lizzy was Phil Lynott and Phil Lynott alone. But after luring Downey back for an extra £50 per week – big money in those days – Lynott had a great idea: he’d replace Gary Moore with not one but two new guitarists. First came 17 year-old Glaswegian Brian Robertson, then 21 year-old Scott Gorham. Both would play lead guitar. A new Thin Lizzy sound was born.

What they needed next was another hit record, and fast. Thin Lizzy were massively in debt, and their new record label Vertigo wanted a quick return on their investment. As Scott Gorham admitted: “The guillotine was hanging right over everybody’s heads.” Lizzy delivered two patchy albums inside a year, Nightlife and Fighting. Neither of them was a big seller. The third album for Vertigo would be their last chance with the company – maybe the last chance that Thin Lizzy would ever have.

Released in March 1976, Jailbreak was a quantum leap. The sound was bigger and tougher. The songs were stronger. The performances oozed confidence. Thin Lizzy meant business. And although it didn’t look so good when Jailbreak started off selling slowly, the breakthrough came when a song from the album started getting radio airplay in America. Incredibly, it was a song that wasn’t even going to be on the album until one of the band’s managers said he liked it.

As Scott Gorham recalled, “We were on tour in America and our management said The Boys Are Back In Town was bustin’ out of the Midwest. We said, ‘Shit, we’d better put it in the set!’ It really caught the record company with their pants down, like, ‘Holy crap, man! I think we got a hit on our hands!’ It did a hundred yard dash up the American charts, and the album took off. We couldn’t quite believe that this was happening.”

Phil Lynott had really nailed it with The Boys Are Back In Town. It was a great song – fluid, catchy, punchy – with a brilliantly evocative lyric about boys and girls, drinking and fighting. It was, said Phil, a song that “every street gang in the world can relate to.” It would become one of the classic rock anthems, and the song Thin Lizzy would always be remembered for. But its short-term effects were no less impressive. The Boys Are Back In Town saved Thin Lizzy’s career.

It certainly gave Phil Lynott something to boast about when he bumped into Ritchie Blackmore in LA in ’76. But Phil would regret telling Blackmore that Lizzy were going to kick his ass every night on tour. Lizzy had to pull out of those dates when Phil contracted hepatitis. His eyes were “banana yellow”. He ended up in a hospital in Manchester for three weeks.

Phil told the press that this illness had made him reconsider the kind of lifestyle he was leading. “You’re chasing the wrong things,” he said. But he wouldn’t slow down. He even wrote the next album, Johnny The Fox, while he was in that Manchester hospital.

Phil Lynott had worked hard to get to the top and he would work hard to stay there. And he loved to play hard too. As Scott Gorham said with a laugh, “I liked to actually sleep every once in a while, but Phil, he was the original 24-hour guy.”

In the late ’70s, no band worked harder or partied harder than Thin Lizzy. Gorham: “We were touring so heavily, we were getting so tired out on the road, we were looking for inspiration anywhere. You wanted to get fucking high, man.” As the band’s former tour manager Frank Murray once noted, wherever Lizzy played, “every chick in town got a backstage pass.”

Phil was exceptionally popular with the ladies. “He had this image as a leather-clad rocker, a tough character,” Gorham said. “But Phil had a real romantic, poetic, charming side to him. He could charm the ass off anyone, women especially.”

Equally, he was very capable of looking after himself and the other guys in the band whenever a jealous boyfriend or drunken idiot fancied throwing a few punches.

“It was like the Wild West,” Gorham smiled. “We were the fastest guns in town and there was always some young punk who wanted to take you down. He was a fighting guy, Phil – even if he was stoned. He had that attitude: fuck with me, man, or fuck with my band, and there’s gonna be a world of hurt going on here!”

If Phil was the kind of guy you could rely on in a fight, Brian Robertson was the kind you could rely on to start one. Lizzy’s young guitarist was drunk a lot of the time, often putting away two bottles of whiskey a night. The amount of speed he was snorting didn’t help, either.

“I was like a stick of dynamite waiting to explode,” he admitted. But Robbo often came off worse from a scrap. In 1977 he missed Lizzy’s tour of the US with Queen after injuring a hand in a brawl, Gary Moore acting as stand-in. Robbo returned for another tour at the end of that year, and in June 1978 the band were celebrating their biggest success to date when the Live And Dangerous album hit No 2 on the UK chart.

It remains arguably the greatest live album ever made. As Scott Gorham says, “Live And Dangerous is what Thin Lizzy was all about.” But it was also the last album Brian Robertson would make with the band.

He quit before he was sacked. “I was just out of control,” Robertson said. “A complete asshole.” In August 1978 Gary Moore joined on a full-time basis, and in April 1979 Lizzy had another top 10 album with Black Rose. Thin Lizzy looked solid, and Phil Lynott was a happy man – his girlfriend Caroline Crowther, daughter of TV personality Leslie, had given birth to their first child, Sarah. Plus, he was working on his first solo album, Solo In Soho, another personal milestone.

But behind the scenes, Lynott was sowing the seeds of his own destruction. During the recording of Black Rose in Paris, he and Scott Gorham had become hooked on heroin. “That was me and him gone for the next six years,” Gorham said. It was an addiction that Lynott would never shake.

Slowly, Phil Lynott’s life would fall apart. His band would go into decline, his marriage to Caroline would disintegrate, his health gradually eroded by the drugs.

Gary Moore quit Thin Lizzy – for the second and final time – during the summer of ’79, midway through an American tour. Moore was drinking heavily but felt that Lynott was doing far too many drugs. “I couldn’t stand there watching Phil blowing it night after night,” he said.

With Moore’s replacement, former Pink Floyd sideman Snowy White, Lizzy made two more albums, but they were sounding past their best. Lynott’s second solo album was a mess. So too was Scott Gorham. He could feel the heroin killing him. “I was in way too much pain,” he recalled. “I wasn’t having fun anymore. I said, ‘Phil, I’m done, baby!’”

But Phil managed to talk him into doing one last tour. The fans, he said, deserved a proper farewell. Reluctantly, Gorham agreed. A new guitarist, ex-Tygers Of Pan Tang star John Sykes, was recruited. A new album, Thunder And Lightning – the heaviest of the band’s career – was recorded.

In January 1983, Thin Lizzy headed back out on the road for the very last time. Scott Gorham winced at the memory.

“Fuck, it went on forever,” he groans. “It was the most painful thing I ever went through. People didn’t want to let go.”

A four-night residency at the Hammersmith Odeon was concluded on 12 March with guest appearances from Brian Robertson, Gary Moore and then Eric Bell during the encores. Old grudges were forgotten.

Thin Lizzy’s last British show was at the Reading Festival on 28 August 1983, the Sunday evening. The last they ever played with Phil Lynott was on 4 September in Nuremberg. Brian Robertson was present at that show as a member of Motörhead. He cried as he watched from the wings. Scott Gorham did not. “I was numb,” he said. “Numb to any emotion that was going on.”

Many believed that Phil Lynott had always intended to reform Thin Lizzy somewhere down the line. When his post-Lizzy band Grand Slam fizzled out in 1985, the reunion seemed inevitable. Phil and Scott Gorham discussed it in December 1985 when Scott visited Phil at his house in Kew, south London. They had not seen each other for a year, in which time Scott had kicked heroin. When Phil greeted him, Gorham was shocked at his appearance.

“He was fucked up, bloated,” Gorham said. “He just didn’t look good, and he was wheezing with asthma. That was always a telltale sign with Phil. When he was doing smack it affected his lungs.

“We sat talking. He told me he was gonna stop doing all that crap and get healthy again. He talked about getting the band back together. And there was something in the way he said it that convinced me that he wanted out. So I actually walked out feeling quite upbeat. I felt he had a chance. Three weeks later I got the phone call…”

It was on Christmas Day, at the house in Kew, that Philomena Lynott found her son lying unconscious. Phil was driven to a rehab centre near Salisbury, where staff immediately referred him to a local hospital. There, eleven days later, he died.

“Phil was a true star,” Brian Robertson said. “He was an original.”

Perhaps it was British DJ John Peel who described Phil Lynott best: “Part rakish lover, part football hooligan, part incurable romantic, part historic warrior.” Peel added, with more characteristic understatement, “He has written some good songs.”

According to his friend and Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof, “Philip was the classic rock star in every sense. He was a rock star to the very core of his being, and therein lies the tragedy. He couldn’t be anything else: it was that or nothing.”

“I still dream about him,” Scott Gorham said. “And there’s one dream I keep having, where he just shows up, and I say,’ Jesus, Phil, you don’t know what I’ve been going through, man!’ And he taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.’ And after that, everything’s okay.”

Olivia Rodrigo’s third record, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love, is most definitely an album of two halves. While Side A documents the start of a relationship and its subsequent blossoming, Side B covers themes of doubt and rejection as it starts to fall apart – though there is some optimism towards the end, too.

You could probably argue that the album reaches peak sweetness on track 3, Honeybee, and alongside producer Dan Nigro, Rodrigo recently sat down with Mix with the Masters to discuss its writing and production.

“I remember writing it in like, an hour – just feeling like it sort of captured this feeling of intense romantic love and also the fear that comes with that,” says Rodrigo. “This song was just such a piano ballad to me – I wrote it on the piano with these arpeggios and I was so tied to this idea; I just loved how it sounded ‘acoustic’ in my living room.”

This presented Nigro with a slight problem: “The sad part of being a producer a lot of times is the artist coming in and being like ‘I just like my demo. I just like the way it sounds when I’m singing it and you’re not doing anything to it.’”

This being the case, Nigro had to be careful with his production choices, and we’d say that he managed to retain the sense of purity and innocence pretty well.

Honeybee does contain one element that ended up being slightly divisive, though – the synthetic choir backing that you hear in the second verse, which was played on a Mellotron.

In fact, even the person who the song was written about – presumed to be Rodrigo’s now ex-boyfriend, British actor Louis Partridge – didn’t quite get it. “When I played the song for the person who it's about, they were like, ‘Oh my God, I love it so much!’” she remembers. ‘“ But that weird choir bit in the second verse…’”

“It was really polarising to people, the fake choir,” concedes Nigro, but it sounds like both he and Rodrigo fought for it and it ended up staying.

This isn’t the only Mellotron moment in Honeybee, either. In fact, the parts played on the tape-based keyboard instrument – including the delicate flutes, which Nigro says are one of his favourite parts of the song – were there pretty much from the start.

Addressing Rodrigo, Nigro says: “The first thing that happened, besides laying down a demo the first day, I think you and I sat together and I started just messing around with the Mellotron, and so a lot of the sounds from the original day 1 demo are still in the song.”

Subscribers can check out the full six-part Honeybee video series on the Mix with the Masters website.

It’s been confirmed that Don’t Look Back In Anger, the Oasis documentary that covers their triumphant 2025 reunion is up on streaming platforms from today (9 October).

The film – which was released at cinemas last month – will be available via Hulu and Disney+ in the US and just Disney+ internationally. Unfortunately, there aren’t any free trials happening for either platform at present. So if you missed it at the cinema, you’ll have to take out a subscription of some description. For more details head over to the Disney+ website at disneyplus.com.

In a statement, the Head of Content at Disney+ Angela Jain said: “The great wait is over... as we now bring Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger to as many people as possible through Disney+, and to be doing it with exclusive unseen footage too, is so exciting for fans."

"The Oasis reunion has been one of our defining cultural moments of recent times. We have seen how the documentary has resonated with audiences around the world as they celebrate the power of Oasis and music through this evocative and moving reunion story.”

The film has picked up generally positive reviews from the critics, with the Guardian describing it as “highly enjoyable” and adding that it "recollects how effortlessly funny the Gallagher brothers are, like a great comic double act.". The most memorable quip came from Time Out, which dubbed it: “The Last Waltz with parkas”.

The release of the documentary coincides with the announcement of next year’s round of Oasis dates. The ticketing process, compared to the bunfight that occurred for the initial reunion dates a couple of years ago, has been relatively straightforward this time. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that all forty two European and North American dates have already sold out. It remains unclear whether any more will be pencilled in.

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The government has made some encouraging noises about sorting out the more ridiculous aspects of Brexit that have burdened UK touring acts since 2020.

In his speech to the Labour Conference last week, Prime Minister Andy Burnham insisted he was willing to “look at the options” regarding the country’s relationship with the EU, including “going all the way” and rejoining.

Now Minister of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Ian Murray has indicated that the government would like to see “real progress” in making life easier for musicians touring mainland Europe.

In a speech in Belgium, after meeting senior EU representatives as well as European legislators and music industry stakeholders, the minister hailed the importance of the music industries to both the UK and EU’s economies and pointed out that the Prime Minister (as we know, a keen music fan himself) agreed that “our creative industries are not a ‘nice to have’, but a real national and collective strength”.

However, he bemoaned the barriers that Brexit has thrown up between the UK and its largest export market. “Recently published government-commissioned research reveals that the real-world cost of reduced UK touring in the EU is significant. For the UK, £208 million in lost economic value and 2,500 jobs. Across the EU, around £1 billion has been lost, along with more than 17,000 jobs.

“These figures are a powerful reminder of how closely connected our music sectors are. But behind them are artists unable to reach new audiences, crews losing opportunities, venues missing performances, fans losing the chance to experience music from across Europe, and critically, opportunities for us all to tell each other’s stories through music.”

Murray said that the government and its EU counterparts were working hard to “explore pragmatic joint solutions that can make touring simpler and more affordable, particularly for emerging artists, the big superstars of the future”.

Fine words, of course. But EU institutions are hardly known for the fast pace of their negotiations. Agreements have been ratified by all 27 states. British musicians would be advised not to get ahead of themselves and get their hopes up just yet. The much-hated carnet - which a generation of touring acts assumed had gone for good – will be a fact of life for a while yet.