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Whatever else British director Nigel Dick does in his career, it’s doubtful that he’ll ever make anything more famous than his video for Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time.

Released in 1998 as Britney’s debut single, the promo has now been viewed on YouTube more than a billion times, but Dick is happy to admit that the idea to set the video in a school wasn’t his.

Speaking to Music Week, he says: “My original treatment for Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time video was set in a boxing ring. The label came back and said, ‘Look, this isn’t working, but speak to Britney; she’s got an idea.’ The schoolgirl thing was hers, and it’s good it came from her. At the time I made that video, I was a 40-year-old British guy – I had no idea what was going through the mind of a 16-year-old American girl!”

Such was the strength of the song, Baby One More Time might well have been a hit even without that video, but the two remain inextricably linked, and its success followed Dick around.

“Afterwards, I would always be on the set of a video and the manager or record company would come up and say, ‘So, is this going to be iconic, like Britney?’” he says. “It was like, ‘I haven’t got a fucking clue, pal.’”

Dick also admits that, when he first met Spears, he wouldn't have predicted that she would soon become the most famous pop star on the planet.

“I didn’t know Britney was a superstar right away. I just thought, ‘Wow, she’s really good in front of the camera,’" he says. "She nailed it, was a very hard worker, and I was very impressed by her. She told me that by 23 she wanted to be as big as Madonna and I was going, ‘Yeah, right, good luck with that…’ – and she was!”

Dick would end up directing four of Spears’ videos, the last of which was for 2000 single Oops!... I Did It Again, which featured another memorable Britney look. However, he says that this was another example of the star going in a different direction to the one he originally had planned.

“For Britney’s catsuit in the Oops!… I Did It Again video, the one that we picked had a bit more character to it, rather than just being like they’d spray-tanned her with red plastic paint,” he remembers. “Of course, when she appeared on the morning of the shoot and it wasn’t that, you couldn’t have a discussion about it. But yeah, history has proven her right to switch it and me wrong!”

Indeed – Oops!... I Did It Again has now surpassed more than half a billion views. A good job, too, because it didn’t come cheap.

“That video cost $750,000 – I’ve done hundreds of videos for less than the cost of just renting that stage!” says Dick. “But the fact we’re talking about it 26 years later means that, obviously, it paid for itself!”

Nigel Dick’s memoir, Music Video Mischief, will be released on 15 September via Trouser Press Books. It will tell the story of his work with not only Britney, but also the likes of Guns N’ Roses, Oasis, Cher, Céline Dion and Band Aid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In an era of the featured artist when everyone is nice about everyone else, it’s refreshing to find someone who isn’t afraid of being honest about what they don’t like.

That someone on this occasion is Doja Cat, who on a Twitch livestream tuned into Ella Langley’s monster hit Choosin’ Texas. The rapper, it seems, is not impressed by the song, which has now clocked up nineteen weeks at the top of the Billboard charts. She stopped it before the chorus.

“Yeah, this is not my vibe, but she has a very pretty voice,” she said. “If this is, like, number one on the charts, it's cos people are like putting on their radios and shit. I'm sure it's like on the radio. I can see them playing this shit on the radio. I don't like it, but that's fine.”

“It's very earwormy,” she mused. “It's like [a] catchy melody. I get it. And she's pretty. I get it. Also, singers are just fucking pretty. That's just kind of how that works, I don't know why.”

The rapper then appeared to scan the comments, which seemed to be criticising her for dismissing the song.

“Are people saying that I'm spreading hate?” she chuckled. “I mean, out of respect, I could play the whole thing? Let's play the whole thing. Will that make you feel better if I play the whole thing?”

However she only gave the song a few bars more, before pulling the plug: “The song's not bad. It's literally not bad. The music isn't bad. I just don't fucking like it. Just cos I don't like something doesn't make it bad. I'm sorry. I can't do more than like a minute and 17 seconds of that. I'm not going to play the whole song. I'm sorry, I'm not sorry… Let me play some motherfucking Chingy.”

The livestream came after Doja Cat was interviewed by Caleb Pressley on her Sunday Conversation podcast. Pressley asked her whether she liked Ella Langley and the rapper professed to not have heard of her - “I don’t what that is. Ella Langley? Ella Langley?” she asked.

Not unreasonably, you’d have to say. After all, the days when we all knew who was currently Number One in the charts are long gone and, nineteen weeks or not, Ella Langley is still some way from being a household name.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read our full 2020 interview with Rick Wakeman here.

Jay-Z’s music career has taken something of a backseat to his various business interests in recent years – his last solo album 4:44 was released way back in 2017. But he’s dipping back into that world in a new eight-part documentary series that starts in September.

It’s called Jay-Z In 8 – or perhaps, given that he’s now officially added an umlaut to his name and capped it, that should be JAŸ-Z In 8. However you choose to pronounce that, it’s directed by Rick Rubin and features eight conversations between the two men about creativity, influences and the experiences that shaped the rapper’s three decade plus career.

According to the synopsis of the show it involves: “Travelling song by song through JAŸ-Z’s extensive back catalogue... Rick Rubin curates an expert playlist as a means of examining the creative process of a music legend. Across eight episodes, the pair discuss key influences, formative experiences, and his singular approach to artistic innovation.”

The series will be shown via HBO in the States and Canada and on MUBI everywhere else in the world. The first two episodes will debut on Saturday 19 September with the rest of the series coming in two episode portions every Saturday until it concludes on 10 October.

The rapper has been playing some live shows this summer on his JAŸ-Z 30 tour, which commemorates the fact that it’s three decades since his 1996 debut album Reasonable Doubt. Next week he has two shows at the Tottenham Hotspur stadium in North London, followed by a date at the Stade De France in Paris. Then there are another two shows at LA’s SOFI Stadium in October.

As for a new album, aside from a few one-off tracks and the occasional feature there’s been no indication that the rapper is planning another full-length record.

Olivia Rodrigo’s festival Daisy Chain Fields arrives at Irvine, California this weekend. It features an all-female line-up and an exceeedingly strong one at that – artists include Chappell Roan, Stevie Nicks, The Breeders, Garbage, Doechii, Mitski, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Santigold.

Artists putting on their own one-day events isn't anything new, of course, but it seems that Rodrigo was deeply involved in formulating the bill. According to Shirley Manson, who has talked about the festival in a Guardian feature, she called up every act personally, one by one.

“I told her it was very unusual for an agent not to be doing that.” the Garbage singer said. Rodrigo is, of course, very open about her influences, and Manson’s band are just one of the many older acts that she has gushed about. “Unlike many artists, she doesn’t say she’s inventing the wheel; she knows she’s just a spoke within it,” said Manson.

Another interesting facet is that no act will overlap with another and every artist on the poster is the same font size. “It creates a necessary and refreshing culture of community, setting up women’s art to be received and valued in a less competitive and capitalist environment,” suggests Eli, the 25 year old singer who is one of the younger artists on the bill.

Rodrigo’s model for Daisy Chain Fields was the Lilith Fair, a touring all-female fest that ran for several years in the late 1990s. Like its predecessor, net profits from the fest will go to charity, in this case non-profit organisations dedicated to ‘advancing and advocating for women and girls’. Indeed when she first had the idea for the event, Rodrigo called Lilith’s founder Sarah McLachlan for advice and the Canadian singer-songwriter is set to perform in Irvine on Sunday.

Lilith was partly set up to counter all-male concert line-ups back in the 1990s. And whilst in some areas there has been progress since then – female festival headliners are certainly more common now – in other ways things have gone backwards.

Back then Garbage turned down a chance to play at Lilith Fair. “I might have been naive, but it felt like there was more progress for women then,” Manson said. “And here we are in 2026, as women’s rights are regressing all over the world. We’re at a crisis point.”

Daisy Chain Fields takes place at Great Park, Irvine on Sunday 29 August.

Guitar Center and Eric Clapton have teamed up once more for an exclusive collection featuring limited edition electric and acoustic guitars from Martin, Fender, and PRS – plus a special signature set of electric guitar strings from Ernie Ball.

This long-standing collaboration supports the Crossroads Centre, in Antigua, with a portion from each sale going to support the addiction recovery unit. And there are some special guitars in the lineup. Special? Clapton prefers “sacred”.

“Music has always been my most reliable source of inspiration, or salvation,” said Eric Clapton. “These guitars are sacred things to me.”

He might have a point. The Blind Faith Telecaster fits that description, and here it is makes a welcome return. So-called after the hybrid Telecaster with the Stratocaster neck that Clapton played with the short-lived supergroup, it was last released in 2019, a Custom Shop dream machine made by Fender Master Builder Todd Krause, marking the 50th anniversary of the band that only existed in 1969.

This one does not have the aged lacquer on the neck like its predecessor but it is replete with Custom Shop detail, right down to the slight gap in the neck pocket.

Clapton put this guitar together on his kitchen table, swapping out the original Tele neck for a Strat neck, he took it out with Cream. But then decided to take the neck off of his Brownie Strat, that soft-V profile just perfect for this Tele. The Strat’s neck is a smidge thinner, hence the gap.

This comes fitted with a pair of Alnico 2 ’63 Telecaster pickups. You’ll find the ashtray bridge cover in the guitar case, plus instructions on how to return it to ‘50s wiring. It’s amazing, and there are only 130 of them, each priced $4,999.

Gabe Dalporto, CEO of Guitar Center spoke of the gear retail giant’s long-standing support for the Crossroads Festival and the addiction support centre it helps fund.

“For more than two decades, we’ve partnered with Eric Clapton and the Crossroads organisation to create iconic instruments, with powerful stories behind them, and put them in musicians’ hands,” says Dalporto. “The 2026 Crossroads Guitar Collection continues that tradition, with every one sold supporting a cause Eric has championed for decades.”

Think of Clapton and you think Martin guitars, and this year’s collection does not disappoint – not least because, at $1,899, the Martin 000-13E Eric Clapton represents a more affordable option, and a very nice guitar it is too, with its 24.9” scale, the Golden Era 42-style snowflake inlays on ebony, Slowhand’s signature on the fingerboard.

It has a solid spruce top, Ziricote fine veneer on the back and sides, and lots of MTV Unplugged mojo.

At $9,699, the Martin Custom Shop 000-42 Eric Clapton Ziricote is the first of his signature Martins to be made from ziricote. It looks incredible with that shade top 1935 Sunburst finish. Brand-new pre-War stylings for the serious player.

Last but by no means least, we have Martin making a withdrawal from its premium tonewood bank, putting together a $24,999 000-42 with Brazilian rosewood on the back and sides. It does not get any better. They’re only making five of these, for obvious reasons. Clapton has signed the soundhole label and the COA, and this, well, this is the ultimate Clapton acoustic. “See if you can spot this one… [plays Layla].”

John Mayer is among the special guests at this year’s Crossroads Guitar Festival, which takes place over the weekend of September 26 to 27 and also features the Tedeschi Trucks Band, Julian Lage, Joe Bonamassa, Buddy Guy, Billy Gibbons… The lineup is incredible.

When you see Mayer take the stage he might possibly be sporting this new-look PRS Silver Sky in Incline Blue. This augments the traditional birds inlay with the Crossroads logo at the 12th fret. It has a commemorative neck plate, too. PRS has only made 70 of them and they’re priced $3,750.

And if you’re not in the market for a new guitar, that’s okay, too, because Ernie Ball has got in on the action with Clapton signature packs for that Stratocaster (or Tele/Strat hybrid, SG, Les Paul etc) in your life, gauges 10-46 as per Slowhand’s preferences, three sets in a tin for $29.

These are all available from Guitar Center and historically all of these limited run guitars sell out in no time. Head over to Guitar Center for more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ronnie Wood is a good guy to have in the Rolodex. He is a good guy, period. When the phone rang on a November’s afternoon in 1979, Al Anderson from the Wailers was on the other end of the line, and he was in a jam.

Bob Marley and the Wailers had a gig in Oakland, California, and someone had stolen his guitar. He asked Wood if he could help and sure enough he could. That the Rolling Stones guitarist was in a different city entirely didn’t matter. Consider it done. He didn’t need to think about it twice.

“Al Anderson called me up when I lived in LA, and Bob was playing in Oakland,” recalled Wood, on Sky Arts’ The Ronnie Wood Show. “Someone had stolen Al’s guitar. And he said, ‘Ronnie, what can I do!?’ I said, I’ll bring you one out. So I flew up to San Fran. He said, ‘I’ll introduce you to Bob’ – because I had never met him.”

Bob Marley was not a big talker. There was not much conversation. “He didn’t say much at all,” said Wood.

Writing in his new book, the superlative Fearless: The Anthology, Wood takes us backstage at the Civic Auditorium, in Oakland, the latest stop on the reggae icon’s Survival Tour of the US.

As with many of the stories in Fearless, a stolen guitar is the inciting incident that sends our protagonist on an adventure. Sometimes he’d end up with a new guitar.

On November 30 1979, he got smoke in his eyes and the offer of a lifetime.

“I jumped on a plane, got up there, went into the dressing room,” writes Wood. “And I was asked if I’d like to play with Bob. I said, ‘Are you kidding? Of course I would!’”

Marley was as yet unaware that the night’s show would have a special guest, and Rolling Stone or not, all things considered Marley was a little circumspect.

“His people took me in to meet him,” continues Wood. “The room was full of smoke, drifting out through the door, and Bob was just moving around, not really acknowledging anyone.”

We all know what Ronnie Wood is like. He’s got an infectious enthusiasm. He’s good with people. He took it upon himself to break the ice.

“I said, ‘Bob, my name’s Ronnie…’ and he just looked through me,” recalls Wood. “I told him, ‘You’re the only member of the band who doesn’t know I’m playing with you tonight.’ He said, ‘You know – you’d better be good then.’”

This was the Some Girls era. The previous year, you would have seen Wood onstage been playing a sunburst Firebird VII – three mini-humbuckers, vibrola, reverse headstock, gold ‘top hat’ knobs with silver inserts… Classic.

He and Keith Richards had also adopted the Mesa/Boogie in the late ‘70s, playing through Randall Smith’s MkI 100-watt tube amp combos with cherry wood cabinets and wicker grilles.

These are what we hear at the legendary EL Mocambo 1977 recording, when the Stones turned up at the Toronto nightclub billed as the Cockroaches and brought the house down for an audience of 300 people.

We can’t say for sure what Wood played through on the night with Bob Marley and the Wailers but bootleg footage has him with a Fender Stratocaster. Also, when they said he would be playing with Marley, they really meant it.

“Bob said I could come on for the encore so I waited,” writes Wood. “Then onstage he gave me the nod, as if to say ‘You passed. Don’t worry. You’re all right.’ It was great, and the encore lasted about an hour and a half!”

Wood is only exaggerating a little; there were six songs in the encore. After closing out the set with Exodus, Marley returned onstage to play Is This Love. Cue Ronnie Wood. Then there was Jamming, Ride Natty Ride… Roots Rock Reggae was up next then Natty Dread.

The songs kept coming. If Wood had bought a Bob Marley tablature book in 1978 it would have been money well spent. But Wood could sit in with anyone. They closed the night out with a storming rendition of Get Up, Stand Up.

Marley was a good judge of a player after all. Wood did not let him down, not before the show, and certainly not during the show.

Fearless: The Anthology is out now via Genesis Publications. The print run was limited to just 1,000 copies.

The Deluxe box set has sold out but the Collector box sets are available to pre-order now for £325, regular price £355, with each hand-signed by Ronnie Wood and numbered 351 to 1,000.

See Genesis Publications for more.

Following the news that British actor Tim Curry has died at the age of 80, fans have been fondly remembering some of his greatest performances, including roles in films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Home Alone 2, Annie and The Hunt for Red October.

What's less well-known, though, is that Curry also had a sporadic music career, releasing his debut album, Read My Lips, in 1978. Tucked away on side 2 of this record is a song called Sloe Gin, written by producer Bob Ezrin and Michael Kamen, and this was later made famous by Joe Bonamassa on his 2007 album of the same name.

As such, it was no surprise to see Bonamassa paying tribute to Curry on Instagram yesterday: “Rest in Peace Tim Curry,” he began. “Many do not know that Tim cut the original version of Sloe Gin on his debut album Read my Lips in 1978. The song was composed by Bob Ezrin and Michael Kamen.

“20 years ago, [producer] Kevin Shirley rang me and said he found the perfect desperate blues song for me. He was right and our version changed my career trajectory forever. Tim's version was bold, beautiful and featured the mastery of Dick Wagner on guitar.”

Back in 2024, MusicRadar reflected on the making of Bonamassa's version of Sloe Gin – which he also played in his tribute to Curry – and you can revisit it below.

By the time his Sloe Gin album was released in the summer of 2007, Joe Bonamassa was already well on his way to becoming the undisputed master of 21st century blues rock and heir to the '60s blues boom throne. With five solo studio albums already tucked neatly under his belt – including a smattering of No.1s on the Billboard Blues chart – the NYC-born bluesman's talents were being heralded the world over.

Sloe Gin’s 11 tracks are a heady mix of out-and-out blues-rock stompers and folk-tinged acoustic cuts. Sitting at the record’s epicentre is the title track: eight-plus minutes of down-and-out angst, haunting organ and some of the greatest heartfelt soloing you’ll hear this side of ol’ ‘Slowhand’ Clapton himself.

While the album has gone on to be one of Bonamassa’s best-loved and best-selling platters, Sloe Gin as a song has taken on a life of its own and is still the highlight of his jaw-dropping live sets. “It’s a close call between that one, The Ballad Of John Henry and a few other songs,” pondered Joe when writer Matt Frost caught up with him for Total Guitar back in 2011 on a rare day off, “but I think Sloe Gin is probably my biggest song!”

In the 11 years since then, he's notched up even more contenders in his ever-expanding discography. But Slow Gin has some curious origins; the track was penned by Bob Ezrin and Michael Kamen and first recorded in 1978 by Rocky Horror Picture Show star and English actor extraordinaire Tim Curry, who was dabbling with a semi-successful musical career at the time. It was Bonamassa’s producer, Kevin Shirley, who first played the song to Joe.

“[Kevin] was like, ‘If we do this correctly, I think this could be one of the best blues songs ever!’” Bonamassa revealed. “I listened to it and thought it was great. Tim’s playing that role of this destitute, down-on-his-luck, I’m-down-to-my- last-swig-of-sloe-gin kind of character. When I first heard it, I was really stricken by the guitar playing, and I was really taken by the whole vibe of it.”

Sloe Gin was recorded at the Document Room Studios in Malibu, and the first version featured vocalist Doug Henthorn, the singer on Joe’s version of Tea For One. This early cut remained faithful to the lyrical expletives present in Curry’s original.

“The original words to the original song were: ‘I’m so fucking lonely!’” explained Joe. “And we played [the Henthorn version] to a few people and the two comments were: (a), ‘You know, you’re a nice guy… I dunno if you can get away with that!’ and (b), ‘This seems well within your range – why don’t you sing it?’ So I was like, ‘OK’. We went back into the studio and I just changed the lyric to: ‘I’m so damn lonely’.”

Guitar-wise, Bonamassa was using a ’59 reissue Les Paul. A guitar he would later own more than one original example of. As he explained: “It predates my signature model, but it’s the one we based it on. It’s got a Bigsby on it and we used all the contours and neck shape for the signature, although it’s an Iced Tea Sunburst.

Then I used my Two-Rock Custom Signature Reverb, the Marshall Silver Jubilee and a small pedalboard with, like, a DD-3 delay, a wah and maybe a TC chorus box, and EV [Electro-Voice] speakers. The real magic, that really big tone where it sounds like it’s distorted but it’s really clean and clear? That’s the EVs… The EVs give you that feeling.”

Joe and co were able to lay down the track in just a couple of days as well. “The first section with the first solo, the verses and the bridge section were all done on a single day,” explained Joe. “Then, on the second day, we went in and decided to make this long, big solo at the end after the siren. ”

When it came to the solos on the track, Bonamassa was his usual improvisational self. “I very rarely work out parts in advance,” he told Total Guitar. “My very first take on things is usually the best and I’ve always kind of stuck to that. And the solos were done live… But the sort of Jimmy Page bits, those were overdubbed. I had the hardest time doing those. For some reason, I couldn’t get the timing. I was hearing it the way Jimmy Page would play them and I couldn’t get it, but finally I got there.”

Joe first played Sloe Gin to an audience back in early 2007 and it’s formed the key part of his live shows ever since. “The first time we played it was in Amarillo, Texas, and it got a standing ovation!” explains Bonamassa. “The record hadn’t been released and only a very few people had heard it. But when Rick [Melick], my keyboard player, went into it, we got applause like they’d heard the song! It’s just one of those familiar-sounding riffs.”

So did Mr Bonamassa have any tips for players eager to tackle his killer take on Sloe Gin? “The key is in the tone,” he advised. “The sound has to be clear. You need to resist that temptation to make it more distorted, especially on the end solo. If you play it cleaner, it’ll come across a lot better. The other thing is that I switch positions a lot from low positions to high positions and back… So it really teaches you how to find the octaves pretty quick. But man, it’s pretty simple; it’s not rocket science or anything!”

Yeah, whatever you say, Joe!

• Joe Bonamassa: the 10 guitarists that blew my mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dolly Parton is still in the thoughts of many in the music world, and in the last 48 hours, a number of artists have been paying tribute to her in the live arena.

During John Mayer’s concert at Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett, New York, the guitarist played I Will Always Love You as the intro to his 2006 hit Gravity, which was his final song of the night. As you can see below, it’s a particularly tender and soulful version of the song that Parton released back in 1974 and which later became a blockbuster hit for Whitney Houston.

Prior to the gig, Mayer reflected on Parton's death with SiriusXM's Andy Cohen, calling it a "huge loss", but also took the positives from the collective outpouring of warmth since her passing.

"While the world is paying tribute to one person and one soul, which feels good on its own, we're all connected while that's happening and I haven't felt connected like that for a long time."

Mayer went on to say: "This is one human being who's left this incredible testament to love throughout their whole life and you can feel it. This is what a life well-lived looks like, feels like, sounds like, and you take apart every layer of herself and career, and it's a brilliant, classy, talented, fully artistic rendering. That is how you give your life to the thing you love."

Elsewhere in New York, Harry Styles was playing the first night of his residency at Madison Square Garden and took time to share his thoughts about the singer: “I just wanna give a proper thank you to all the musicians who have inspired me over the years. Dolly, we love you. Thank you so much.” Later, her original version of I Will Always Love You was played over the venue’s speakers as the sold-out audience sang along.

Meanwhile at a concert in Pittsburgh, the singer Kesha covered a slightly more obscure Dolly hit Old Flames (Can’t Hold A Candle To You). The song was originally released by Joe Sun in 1978 with Parton’s version coming two years later. Kesha revealed to the audience that the song has a family connection to her – her mom was one of its co-writers.

“I’m sure many of you all know that we lost Ms Dolly Parton,” Kesha told the crowd. “We literally lost an angel. But through her art and through her kindness and through her love, she will live forever. And I want to talk about her a little bit. For those of you who don’t know, I come from a long lineage of songwriters and before I was born, my mom wrote a song for Dolly Parton. And that song bought us a house. That song put me through school.”

In 2017 Kesha recorded a cover of Old Flames with Dolly herself while she was embroiled in a legal battle with her ex producer Dr Luke. “I was making that album in the middle of a very scary litigation,” she explained to the audience, "and I was in the MeToo movement, and having such a legendary woman do this song with me and stand beside me, it made me feel like God was on my side.”

Over the next few days there will doubtless be more tributes to an artist who drew admiration and warmth from across every music genre.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MR: What did they think of The Bunker?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex Warren has revealed that John Mayer is a guest on his upcoming second album, Wildchild.

The 25-year-old singer-songwriter has posted a clip to Instagram that shows him miming a guitar part that is apparently Mayer’s contribution to the new record. He’s written across the clip: “My dad’s favourite musician was John Mayer… so I put them on a song together.” Presumably, there is a recording of his father somewhere else in the song.

Warren has captioned the post: “Dad you would have loved Wildchild.”

The singer’s father died from kidney cancer when he was just nine years old. It’s fair to say the lad’s had quite a difficult upbringing – his mother, who he has previously described as an alcoholic, kicked Warren out of the house when he was 18 and he often ended up having to sleep in friends’ cars.

Warren is probably best known for Ordinary, the monster hit that topped charts all over the world last year and in the UK spent 13 weeks at number one.

It’s been a busy week for him. A few days ago, he was forced to cancel a concert in Auckland’s Spark Arena due to illness just hours before the doors opened.

Warren apologised profusely on social media, saying: “I never have to do this and it breaks my heart to even write this but I have to cancel tonight’s show.

“I have tried everything to be able to make this show work and I’m sadly bedridden sick at the moment. I can barely talk let alone sing and it sadly isn’t possible to play tonight’s show. I understand what it takes to be able to attend concerts and the fact so many of you travelled for this one has made this decision even more difficult. I love you so much and hope you understand.”

Anyway, Wildchild – featuring John Mayer and all – is set to come out this coming Friday (28 August).

UMG and Apple Corps have released a fascinating titbit from the upcoming Rubber Soul reissue.

It’s an early version of Day Tripper, but without the famous riff that provides the song with its spine. Instead, the a two-minute piece features Lennon and McCartney working on the song at Lennon’s home in Weybridge, Surrey.

This version is slower than the finished track we all know. At several points the two Beatles can be heard cracking up and laughing, Lennon gets the words of the chorus wrong - ‘one way driver, yeah’ - but their harmonising is already spot on and the fun that they had in each other’s company in moments like these is evident even on this short excerpt.

In a sense, the song was written to order. Parlophone needed a new single for the end of the year and in the UK the custom in 1965 was that singles and albums were kept entirely separate. So, on a spare day between the sessions that had already started for Rubber Soul, the two songwriting partners set to work. In the end, McCartney came up with an equally strong track in the form of We Can Work It Out a few weeks later and both songs were released as the Beatles' first double A-side single in December.

Day Tripper (Songwriting Work Tape) is one of a number of unreleased home demos and takes that are included on the upcoming release. Apple Corps have already shared Michelle Take 1 but for the moment are holding back the big selling point of the reissue – a John Lennon demo called Little Girl, which up until recently Beatles scholars had no idea even existed, let alone was in any kind of releasable form.

The Rubber Soul Special Editon comes out on 2 October and is available in a variety of formats to fit your budget and the fervency of your fandom. This version of Day Tripper will be included only on the Deluxe and the Super Deluxe editions, which you can already pre-order.

This was always going to be something completely different – Sleep Token guitarist IV, and bassist III, working in collaboration with Jackson and Charvel on a signature guitar and bass.

This is their first-ever signature models. The masked and numbered enigmas were never going to just pick something out of the catalogue then slap a signature on it.

But even so, these are pretty darn radical, with IV and Jackson cooking up a Pro Plus Series Monarkh that is tuned down a whole octave, has an EverTune bridge with custom saddles to accommodate this madness, and an extended 30” scale.

And that’s just the half it – wait till you see the pale moon ebony fingerboard, or that headstock shape for that matter. It's all kinds of radical, a true 21-st century metal guitar.

The Charvel Sleep Token III Signature Pro-Mod San Dimas Bass V might have a little bit more of what you’d call a classic silhouette – it has the licensed Stratocaster headstock, albeit reversed – and yet with it’s 34.4” to 35.5” multi-scale design, the caramelised maple neck and the custom-voiced Fishman Fluence Bass pickups with 2-band EQ and, y’know, the question mark inlay on the fingerboard. It’s like something the Riddler might play.

Needless to say, these will offer something quite different from your typical built-for-metal high-performance electric.

Justin Norvell, chief product officer, at Fender, who owns both Jackson and Charvel, says they are purpose-built for Sleep Token’s sound – a sound that booby traps celestial electronic pop arrangements with over-sized djent-muscle riffs.

“Sleep Token’s sonic and visual identity is so distinctive, and the Jackson and Charvel signature models are a huge part of shaping that sound,” says Norvell. “These instruments let players tap directly into that tone… We’re always looking for artists who redefine what a signature instrument can be, and Sleep Token does exactly that.”

There are some familiar elements to these guitars. The Pro Plus build and specs are evident on IV’s Monarkh, from the Luminlay side markers to the stainless steel jumbo frets, the truss rod adjustment wheel nested at the top of the fretboard and so forth.

It has a bound mahogany body, its chunky singlecut profile topped with a quilted-maple veneer and the three-piece set neck carved from caramelised maple. It all makes for one of the strangest electric guitars we’ve played this year.

It might be built primarily for low-end work but it has the compound radius fingerboard to invite some lower-register shred. It sounds monstrous, those Fishman Fluence humbuckers doing the business.

Obviously, the appeal is there for Sleep Token fans – and the aesthetics might put some off – but it would be interesting to hear what some extreme metal players would do with with in the studio. It could be the doom metal Excalibur the world has been waiting for.

As for the Charvel bass, we have a poplar body, a bolt-on construction, and it too has the Luminlay side markers and 12” to 16” compound radius fingerboard found on most instruments from Fender’s high-performance brands – Charvel, EVH Gear and Jackson.

There are heaps of tone options here, with each pickup offering a trio of modes from a toggle switch.

You can watch IV and III demo these instruments above. Just don’t expect them to do much talking. They’re not much for conversation.

The Monarkh will set you back £1,949/$2,199, while the Charvel five-string bass is priced £1,399/$1,699.

Head over to Jackson and Charvel for more details.

Brian Fallon makes no secret of the fact that Bruce Springsteen is a core influence. Spend some time in his company talking music and the Boss will inevitably come up in conversation. They have performed together. They’ve hung out. They’re buddies.

The way Fallon speaks about him, it’s like they live over the fence from each other, or run into each other down Whole Foods when they’re out buying groceries. “I do, funnily enough. I see him all over the place!” laughs Fallon.

And he isn’t joking. Fallon was in Springsteen’s company not that long ago, shooting a documentary about the Telecaster. “It’s basically all these people talking about the Fender Telecaster and it’s me and Bruce,” says Fallon. “I’m interviewing Bruce about his Born To Run guitar. I got to hold it and play it. It was nuts. And that was a huge moment for me to get to see and touch [it], just holding that guitar, the Born To Run guitar!”

Springsteen also had a guitar lesson for him. The Boss taught him how to play pinched harmonics.

“He actually gave me like a little tip, because there was this thing that he was doing that was like a little Roy Buchanan kind of squeal,” says Fallon. “I think the best place you can hear it is if you listen to Bell Bottom Blues from Eric Clapton, the first couple notes of the solo are like picked out with your thumb and then [hums pinch harmonic] and Bruce was showing me how to do that – and that was kind of cool.”

Talk about pinched harmonics these days and Eddie Van Halen, Zakk Wylde and Dimebag Darrell are the kinds of players who get mentioned in dispatches. But Roy Buchanan was doing them in the ‘50s, Clapton just over a decade later on Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs – and the example Fallon describes, where Clapton chokes his guitar out on them, is a very different thing to the super-sized squeal in rock and metal guitar.

Fallon says there is a lot we can learn from Springsteen the player. Yeah, we all give the Boss props for his songwriting, for performing. But his playing goes under the radar.

Fallon reminds us that Springsteen has ridiculously good chops.

“Oh, man, well, you got to watch this. If you go on YouTube, in 1975, they did the Live From Hammersmith Odeon album, then did Born To Run. Go to It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City,” he says. “Go watch that and how he plays guitar during that. And then he does at the end he does like a little trade-off thing, like a jam with Steven, and you’ll just see.

“Bruce, around Asbury Park in 1970, pre-Born To Run, like 1972/1973, he was known as the best guitar player in town, he was a serious gunslinger – and he still can really rip.”

Springsteen did not join the likes of Brandon Flowers and Phil Collen on Fallon’s new star-studded solo LP, Not Bad For New Jersey, but he was on The Gaslight Anthem’s 2023 comeback album, History Books, and there’s always next time.

He did however directly influence it.

The tempo and rhythm to the track Pearl, with the throb and pulse of that tremolo guitar, was an idea Fallon got from Aretha Franklin’s recording of The Dark End Of The Street, when she was accompanied on the track by two legendary Muscle Shoals players, Eddie Hinton and Jimmy Johnson (with Johnson sometimes credited on bass guitar it was surely Hinton who was responsible for the tremolo guitar part).

But the rhythm – where it is almost like a heartbeat – comes straight from golden era Springsteen.

“I like that pulse, even when it’s exaggerated, I really am enjoying that in any kind of music now, that kind of like heartbeat thing,” he says. “I think it’s really from Born In The USA, because that’s what Bruce said about, ‘I’m on fire!’. It’s like that’s the rhythm.

“The rhythm was supposed to be a pulse, like a heartbeat, so I think it was probably from that in my head. That’s where it came from.”

You can read our interview with Brian Fallon in full, coming soon to MusicRadar – and you can preorder Not Bad For New Jersey now, which is out via Nash York Records on September 11.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tributes have been cascading in for Dolly Parton, who died yesterday at the age of 80.

A huge range of figures have paid their respects: from every music genre you can think of, from the fields of entertainment and film, and right across the political spectrum. Few public figures had the reach of Dolly Parton, or were regarded with such genuine warmth, love and affection by so many.

Beyoncé collaborated with Parton on a version of Jolene on her recent Cowboy Carter album and has written on her website: “Dolly, you were the barometer. The north star. Bold and brilliant. Talented and tenacious. You taught so many lessons on how to be uniquely oneself. I am grateful for your art, your heart, your generosity, your humour, your entrepreneurship. I’m honoured that I had the privilege to work with you.”

Paul McCartney has written on Instagram: “Her songwriting, her singing and her philanthropy were unrivalled in the world of country music and it is hard to imagine living in a world without Dolly... There was no greater honour for me than to have her sing my song Let It Be and, even though I only made a small contribution to it, I am so honoured that she did it. I am so proud to have known her and admire her unique talents.”

In a press statement, Taylor Swift has said that: “A world without Dolly doesn’t feel possible, real or right. But because of the eternally generous way she spent her time on this earth and the countless lives she changed for the better, her legacy will be an everlasting one.”

Barack Obama has written on Twitter/ X: “It’s hard to imagine many people having a bigger impact than Dolly Parton. Born in a one-room cabin, she earned 11 Grammys and an Emmy, built a business empire, helped millions of kids learn to read, and – as if that wasn’t enough – helped accelerate the research that led to the Moderna Covid vaccine. What a life.”

Eminem has shared a letter that the singer sent to him after he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame that said: ‘Even though I don’t know a lot about rap music, I’ve come to know you are the very best of it’. The rapper added: “Getting this note from Dolly really had an impact on me. She definitely didn’t have to take the time to do it. Even for a kid who mostly listened to rap music, she was an icon.”

Meanwhile last night at the Hammersmith Apollo, Jack White covered Jolene for the first time in nearly 20 years (the song used to be a feature of early White Stripes setlists). Footage of the performance has already gone online - at the end of the song White points to the sky and makes the sign of the cross.

His label Third Man Records has already paid tribute, issuing a statement: “Dolly’s legacy goes far beyond the music. For decades, she’s used her voice, her success, and her heart to make a difference. From the Imagination Library putting millions of books into children’s hands to supporting education, literacy, disaster relief, and communities in need. An incredible artist, philanthropist, advocate, and human being.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Erasure was different because I was working in the studio a lot trying to write songs and make records and after a discussion with the producer we decided that working with different people would be interesting but we really needed someone to be there all of the time. I advertised for a singer in Melody Maker and Andy Bell came along for the audition. He was from Peterborough, but we had very similar backgrounds, which cemented our relationship.”

Read our full Vince Clarke interview here.

It has been hailed by critics as one of the most expressive songs in the country genre and has been recorded by artists such as The White Stripes, Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus and Olivia Newton-John.

Lyrically inspired by Dolly Parton's worries that a certain red-headed bank teller was getting too familiar with her husband, Carl Dean, it is also the song that launched its writer into the mainstream pop market and became her first big crossover hit, encapsulating in two minutes and forty-one seconds her straight-talking Tennessean roots with a storyline and hook that would resonate with millions across the globe.

Jolene was the song that made Dolly Parton - whose death was confirmed earlier today - transforming her into a household name. It’s also a song that she regarded as one of her crowning achievements.

“The one that’s most recorded is Jolene, that seems to be the favourite,” said Parton in a Q&A with The Guardian on 31 October 2024. “Do you know that song has been recorded, somebody told me, 450 times in the last 52 years? I’m so proud of it."

The whole story of how Dolly Parton rose from a dirt-poor background in the Tennessee hills to become a global superstar has become the stuff of legend.

The fourth of 12 children, she was born on 19 January 1946 to sharecropping parents in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon river in East Tennessee.

When Parton was a young child, the family moved to a farm in the Smoky Mountains. Parton attributes her musical abilities to the influence of her mother Avie Lee Carlin (née Owens), who entertained her children with ancient ballads from her Welsh immigrant ancestors, brought to southern Appalachia in the 18th and 19th centuries.

At seven, Parton started playing a homemade guitar. One year later, her uncle, Bill Owens, bought her a proper instrument, and by the age of ten she was appearing on The Cas Walker Show on WIVK Radio in Knoxville Tennessee.

At the age of 13, she appeared on the Grand Ole Opry, where she met Johnny Cash for the first time.

The day after she graduated from Sevier County HIgh School in 1964, Parton moved to Nashville. She landed a publishing deal and co-wrote several singles with her uncle, including two Top 10 hits for Bill Philips and Fuel To The Flame (1967), a No. 11 hit for Skeeter Davis.

In 1967, she released her debut album, Hello I’m Dolly, and was invited by country music entertainer Porter Wagoner to join his weekly TV variety show The Porter Wagoner Show. It launched her career. Her natural onscreen persona suited the show’s informal feel.

While singles such as Just Because I’m A Woman were only moderate hits, her recording of the Jimmie Rogers’ song Muleskinner Blues in 1970 yielded a No 3 hit in the Country Chart, followed by a No 1 hit with Joshua the following year.

Her signature song, Coat Of Many Colours reached No 3, and heralded a series of hits.

By the end of 1974, Parton had parted from Wagoner, formed her own band and launched her solo career. But not before she had written and recorded the song that would become her biggest hit. That song was Jolene and it was immediately clear she had created something special.

In a 2008 interview with Washington DC-based public broadcasting organisation, NPR, Parton said she first got the idea for a song called Jolene back in the late ’60s while signing autographs after one of the Porter Wagoner live shows.

"One night, I was on stage, and there was this beautiful little girl – she was probably eight years old at the time," Parton recalled. "And she had this beautiful red hair, this beautiful skin, these beautiful green eyes, and she was looking up at me for an autograph. I said, 'Well, you're the prettiest little thing I ever saw. So what is your name?' And she said, 'Jolene.' And I said, 'Jolene. Jolene. Jolene. Jolene'. I said, 'That is pretty. That sounds like a song. I'm going to write a song about that’."

This touching encounter would take on a more adult tone when Parton sat down to write the song in 1973. According to Parton, the song was ultimately inspired by a red-headed bank clerk who flirted with her husband, Carl Dean, at his local bank branch around the time they were newly married in 1966.

It’s hard to recall a celebrity spouse who so successfully maintained their privacy (Dean passed away in March 2025).

“I’ve never seen Carl Dean, nor never met him,” recalls session musician Lloyd Green in the BBC documentary Dolly Parton: Here I Am. “I know he exists [but] I don’t know anyone who’s ever seen Carl Dean.”

One person who clearly did see Carl Dean was the red-headed bank teller who became immortalised as Jolene.

“She got this terrible crush on my husband,” Parton told NPR. "And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us – when I was saying, ‘Hell, you're spending a lot of time at the bank. I don't believe we've got that kind of money!’ So it's really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one.”

It’s also a story that Parton recounted thousands of times from the stage when introducing the song. “She was trying to take care of my husband while I was out on the road,” said Parton in a live clip in the BBC documentary. “Well that didn’t go over too big with me. I fought that red-headed woman like a wildcat. She took my wig off and almost beat me to death with it! But I kept my husband.”

Simplicity is key to the song’s appeal. “It’s just the same word over and over,” Parton told NPR. “Even a first-grader or a baby can sing, 'Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene'. It's like, how hard can that be?"

The lyrics of Jolene are essentially an exchange between two women and as author and musicologist Lydia Hamessley points out in the BBC documentary, the man is noticeably absent throughout. “In Jolene, Dolly is singing a song about a cheating man. But she doesn’t address the man at all. In fact, he seems not to be relevant to the story. She’s really engaging with this other woman. It may seem that she doesn’t have very much power in that dynamic but in fact she’s the one who speaks all the lines.”

Parton has said that Jolene is a song that “fits a lot of people”, because it is fuelled by our insecurities. “We all are insecure,” said Parton in the BBC documentary. “There’s always someone that could take that person from you and you’re vulnerable.”

The song is instantly evocative. “I can see Jolene walking down the street,” says Kylie Minogue in the BBC documentary Dolly Parton: Here I Am. “I can see Dolly bristling. It’s a real art of storytelling. How to say a lot and paint a picture in a three minute song.”

Jolene was recorded in RCA Studio B in Nashville, in October 1973. Written and recorded in the key of C#min, with a capo on the fourth and the chord shapes of Am-C-G-Am-G-Am, it skips along at a pacey 111bpm. “It’s a great chord progression,” Parton told NPR.

What first draws the listener in, though, is the song’s infectious guitar lick.

“The thing I remember most was all the musicians when I came up with the little guitar lick, the Jolene lick, saying: 'Damn, that’s so good. That’s the coolest little lick,’” Parton told The Guardian. “I was playing guitar pretty seriously back then, before I had all the long nails. I remember all the guys learning to play it and everybody thinking how cool a rhythm it was. It was a little out of the norm for the things we’d been doing up to that time. I remember everybody in the studio just loving that song.”

The lick is a one measure, four-beat riff played in the Am shape, which is repeated throughout the track and gives the song a real skip and groove. This lick was played in the studio by the late Nashville session guitarist chip Young, a revered player renowned for his thumb-style, or Travis-picking style.

The other Nashville session guitarist who played on Jolene was Wayne Moss, handling the steel-string part that complements Young’s primary riff, which Young played on a gut-string classical guitar.

"It's a great chord progression, people love that 'Jolene' lick,'" Parton told NPR in 2008. “It's as much a part of the song… as the song [itself].”

Jolene was released on 22 May 1973 and reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Chart, peaking at No 60 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2024, in Rolling Stone’s poll of 200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time, Jolene was placed at No. 1.

Parton re-recorded and re-released the track a number of times, as in 1995, when it appeared on her 33rd album Something Special.

In 2000, The White Stripes released the first of a number of covers of the song, raw and visceral renditions that elevate the core sentiment of the song to one of yearning desperation.

On 29 March 2024, Beyoncé released her version of Jolene. “With similar instrumentation but fresh lyrics, Beyoncé has taken the age-old concept and breathed new life into it,” wrote Lauren Boisvert in American Songwriter magazine. “Beyoncé employs a smoother guitar sound backed by a pulsing beat to tie the song into her pop/R&B roots.”

Such covers are a testament to the enduring power of the song and yet Parton’s original 1973 recording still resonates across the decades, thanks largely to her effortlessly heartfelt delivery and simple restraint.

“Staying true to her intentions, Parton fortunately chooses not to decorate the song with vocal harmonies, additional instruments and pop hooks,” wrote Barry Webber of AllMusic in a retrospective review. “The song is stripped down to guitar and Parton's vocals. The melody itself is immensely catchy, and the lyrics are simple enough to avoid melodrama in favour of raw, blunt emotion.

“Jolene… continues to stand as not only one of her best songs, but one of the great country ballads of the 20th Century."

It’s with huge sadness that we report on the death of a genuine musical legend. The great Dolly Parton has sadly passed away at the age of 80.

The news was announced by her nephew, Bryan Seaver via an Instagram video posted on Tuesday afternoon. Seaver had been extremely close with his aunt, having served as her head of security for over two decades.

“This video announcement is something Dolly asked of me years ago,” Seaver said. “Sadness lies with us, not with Dolly. Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus.”

Although a cause of death wasn’t disclosed, it’s been no secret that Parton was suffering from myriad health issues in recent months, with a series of concert and public appearances being cancelled as a result of ill health.

One of the most well-loved figureheads of country music, Dolly was of course best known for her iconic signatures 9 to 5, I Will Always Love You and Jolene. Born on January 19th 1946 in Sevier County, Tennessee, Parton, who started her musical career in the early 1960s, was also a prolific songwriting powerhouse, responsible for writing upwards of 3,000 songs. She scooped 11 Grammys (with a staggering 50+ nominations) and witnessed 44 of her LPs ascended to the top ten of the country music charts.

Widely believe to be the world’s wealthiest country music star, Parton humbly spread her reported $550m around various causes dear to her heart. Perhaps the most notable being her encouraging of literacy around the world with her Dollywood Foundation’s Imagination Library. Her wealth has also been used in the combating of Aids, funding the American Red Cross and urgently investing to help to develop the Covid vaccine during the pandemic.

We’ll bring a full obituary of Dolly’s incredible life and work soon.

The full official statement, put out by the Dolly Parton PR team, reads as follows;

“Global icon and humanitarian, Dolly Parton, known to the world as a beloved singer, songwriter, philanthropist, actress, playwright, and author died peacefully today in Nashville, Tennessee. She was 80 years old.

“Dolly is preceded in death by her beloved husband of 59 years Carl Thomas Dean (1942 – 2025), her mother Avie Lee Caroline Owens (1923 – 2003), and father, Robert Lee Parton, Sr. (1921 – 2000).

“A rhinestone life that shone bright enough for the world to see, Dolly will forever stand as an inspiration not only through her timeless music and prolific songwriting, but also her wit, warmth, and kindness that made us all feel like family. Dolly Parton’s legacy is one of love, compassion, and resilience. With a seven-decade career, she inspired multiple generations of artists and fans with her music and an unwavering commitment to making the world a better place.

“Her songs will continue to resonate with people of all ages, and her philanthropic work will have a lasting impact.”

A grand piano once played by Freddie Mercury is up for auction in October and could be yours if you have a spare hundred thousand or so currently burning a hole in your wallet.

The Yamaha C3 grand is one of a number of Freddie-related items once owned by Reinhold Mack which the producer (who turns 77 today) is selling. The piano was played on the Hot Space, The Game and The Works albums, as well as by a list of not-insignificant artists including Bryan Ferry, the Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen and Led Zeppelin. Its pre-sale estimate is somewhere between £200,000 and £400,000.

If that’s a bit beyond your budget, then how about an AKG C414 EB mic that Mercury used and which can be seen in the video to One Vision? That could set you back anywhere between £40,000 and £80,000.

Both of these fell into Mack's possession after his years working at Munich’s Musicland studios. Originally set up by Giorgio Moroder, Musicland birthed a number of classic albums – Donna Summer’s I Remember Yesterday, ELO’s Out Of The Blue and Black And Blue by the Rolling Stones, to name just a few.]

Queen were particularly fond of the facility, and struck up a close relationship with the in-house engineer. Freddie was godfather to Mack’s son, named Freddie Junior. He was also namechecked on Dragon Attack, a Brian May-written track on 1980’s The Game (‘gonna use my stack/ it’s gotta be Mack’).

The auction also includes a number of personal mementoes that the late singer gave Mack. There are handwritten lyrics to the songs My Love Is Dangerous and Let’s Turn It On, from Mercury’s 1985 solo debut, Mr Bad Guy. These are expected to fetch between £1,500 and £6,000. Rather touchingly, there’s also a teddy bear that Freddie presumably gifted to his godson that is estimated to fetch between £800 and £1,600.

In a statement, Mack has said: “Freddie was not only a colleague and close friend; in many ways, he was part of our family. Away from the countless hours we spent creating music together at Musicland Studios, our home in Munich became a place where he could escape the pressures of fame, relax and simply be himself. To us, he was never a celebrity; he was ‘Uncle Freddie’ - spending time with his godson Freddie Jr, playing table tennis with Julian and celebrating family birthdays with us.

“We have carefully preserved these items for decades, not because of their value, but because of the memories they hold. We now feel the time has come for others to enjoy and appreciate them, and we hope they offer fans a connection not only to Freddie’s extraordinary artistry, but also to the warm, funny and kind-hearted man we were privileged to know.”

Propstore are hosting the auction, which takes place on 1 and 2 October. Auction registration is now open with the full catalogue available to look at on the Propstore website. Alternatively, you can see the items at a free exhibition at The Cumberland Hotel in London from 23 to 27 September.

Andy Burnham was visiting Kyiv in his first visit to Ukraine as British prime minister, when he was presented with an electric guitar as the cameras were rolling.

This was not to be unexpected – and it surely wasn’t. Burnham was in the mobile recording studio of Ukraine’s military and artistic unit. Even so, when passed with a Woodstock T-style he had a decision to make.

Having credited the Smiths’ debut album, Hatful Of Hollow, as “the record that changed everything” for him, Burnham treated an audience of Ukrainian soldiers to an impromptu rendition of Rusholme Ruffians, the Elvis-inspired classic from Meat Is Murder.

The prime minister was a little out of practice. He didn't have a guitar capo. But that didn’t stop him; his right hand is in pretty good shape. Discretion being the better point of valour, Burnham did, however, draw the line at singing.

“It was an honour to spend time with Ukrainian soldiers in Kyiv. Not sure if they regret handing me that guitar now,” he wrote on Instagram.

Nonetheless, it was an opportunity for the former mayor of Manchester to rep one of the city’s great cultural exports. It was also a great choice. Rusholme Ruffians was inspired by Scotty Moore and Neal Matthews Jr’s playing on the King’s cover of Del Shannon’s (Marie’s The Name) His Latest Flame.

How did Burnham do? Well, appearing on Absolute Radio, Marr looked a little taken aback – lost for words, even – and described the moment as a “victory for guitar”.

“I can’t quite get my head around it,” said Marr. “I don’t know if pride’s the word, but it probably is. I’ve only just been told about it! I’ve only just been told about it, in great detail. I think it’s an amazing thing. In all honesty, for me, it’s like a victory for the guitar. Just the way I’m wired, I always think like that.”

Marr looks visibly shocked, and says that, in the grand scheme of things, his role in all of this, having written the song, was less important than the political context. But it is a clip that speaks to the cultural power of music, and of the guitar as a tool.

“It’s kind of beyond me to process it, really, ‘cos it could be massive that,” he says. “But I just sort of go, ‘How great is the guitar? I think, ‘Well, what an amazing tool the guitar is.’”

Speaking to the Quietus, Burnham said discovering the Smiths was a revelation.

“I remember everyone at school going on about The Smiths on Top Of The Pops, it was a massive thing when that happened, and someone took a record to school and told me to take it home, it was Hatful Of Hollow,” said Burnham. “Then I remember buying it at Piccadilly Records. I listened to that to death. It was the first indie record I ever bought.”

Earlier today, Marr released It’s Time, the latest single from his forthcoming solo album, The Age Of Everything, which is out on October 2 via BMG. You have to admire Marr’s timing.

Marr describes It’s Time as a protest song about “finding defiance in idealism”.

“I wanted a lyric that matched the exuberance of the music but is actually about resisting cynicism and corruption,” he says. “'Everybody ain't making it, change the weather and breaking it. Mobilise to know the truth. Open eyes to know the truth.' I guess it’s about the assholes with dodgy views.”

You can pre-order The Age Of Everything now.

The film makers behind the upcoming Oasis tour documentary Don’t Look Back In Anger have revealed the lengths they went to ensure they were invisible to their subjects.

And by ‘invisible’ they mean literally. In the current issue of Billboard, Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace have explained that they hid a camera rig in the London studio where Noel and Liam met and rehearsed for the first time in 15 years. “I don’t think Liam even realised there were cameras there for the first week,” Southern says.

The duo filmed the rehearsals and every gig on the band’s reunion tour, as well as the Gallaghers’ first joint interview in over 20 years. But whilst the two brothers are undoubtedly the stars of the show, almost as important are the fans, who had waited so long for their reconciliation.

“When the lights came up at the end of the first concert in Cardiff,” Southern explains, “we have a sequence where you just see people looking shell-shocked, like they’ve been through every possible emotion. Seeing that in real time... we were like, ‘We knew this was going to be big, but it’s on a different level emotionally than what we’d thought.’

“Then, as the film progresses, you see the music bringing (the brothers) together,” Southern continues. “The [fan] reaction is a huge catalyst in where they end up in terms of their relationship by the end of the film.”

Southern and Lovelace said that they had prepared for “any eventuality” before filming began (it’s easy to forget that many scoffed that the Gallaghers would be able to make it through an entire world tour without the whole thing exploding in a familiar familial conflagration). But of course, in the end, both the film and the fans were provided with a happy ending. “Our hope was to make a film about reconciliation and forgiveness,” Southern says, “and I think it’s ultimately about those things - and the breakthrough moments that happened throughout.”

Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger will get a cinema release on 9 September. But before then it premieres at the Venice International Film Festival. Later this year it will be available for streaming on Disney+ and in the US, both Disney+ and Hulu.

Kiss can never perform again without the permission of people outside the band.

That’s according to no less an authority than Gene Simmons. The bassist was talking on the Detroit classic rock station WCSX about the band’s future and whether they’d ever reunite.

“Kiss was actually sold - the makeup and the tunes and the publishing and all that - for a…” At that point the bassist garbled his words to suggest an unnamed sum that is a lot of money.

Indeed, Simmons and co sold the Kiss catalogue, brand name, likenesses, the whole kit and caboodle to Pophouse, a Swedish ‘global entertainment and music investment firm’ back in 2024. Pophouse is the group that's developing the Kiss avatar show, which should – if all goes according to plan – be with us in 2027.

“We're involved together in the future,” Simmons said of the Pophouse deal. “So there's gonna be a motion picture, which is being cast now, and there's gonna be - I don't know - cartoon shows, theme park, you name it, it's all coming up. So it's gonna be bigger and better than you've ever heard, including the avatar show.

“But that also means that Kiss can't play live without Pophouse's permission,” he continued, “because they own the makeup and everything.”

That, of course, doesn’t mean that they won’t ever play live again. Indeed, since what was supposed to be their final performance in 2023, Kiss have already reunited for a handful of shows in November last year. These were the Kiss Kruise: Landlocked in Vegas fan club events and featured the band ‘unmasked’ or without makeup. It’s not clear whether Pophouse had to provide their permission for those gigs to go ahead.

Simmons did admit in the interview that he still has a performance itch that he has to scratch. So he’s created the Gene Simmons Band to assuage that desire: “I didn't wanna stay away from the stage,” he explained. “It's the most fun. Being up on that stage and rocking out is the most fun I can imagine with my pants on. And there's a magic that happens there.

"Imagine being a painter, and you paint something, and you're really proud of it, and it just stays in your living room, and nobody sees it. Or if you write a song, and you really like it, you go, 'Whoa, this thing rocks,' but you're the only one who hears it. No, no, no. So I can't stay off the stage," he admitted. "I love it too much."

Incredibly, it’s 20 years this October since Amy Winehouse released her second album, the multi-platinum Back To Black. And with it being a significant anniversary, it's no surprise that there is a reissue planned for the record that sent the North London chanteuse’s career into the stratosphere.

So what are the deets? Well, this time you can purchase a triple vinyl edition. In addition to the original album, there’s a record of B-sides and demos and another that features a live set she played at the Amsterdam Paradiso in February 2007. There is also a triple CD edition with extra tracks on each disc.

Both of those editions features brand new alternative cover artwork, with Amy looking upwards instead of straight at the camera as on the original. There is also an image from the producer Mark Ronson’s archives of Amy’s handwritten lyrics, never-before-seen photos by original album photographers Mischa Richter and Alex Lake, ands liner notes from Ronson and Salaam Remi.

A ‘Chalkboard Marble’ colour vinyl version of the album is also on offer, as well a webstore exclusive ‘Zoetrope’ version that includes moving footage of the late singer.

The original Back To Black sold a now mind-boggling 20 million copies, going 15 times platinum in the UK alone and becoming the country’s second biggest selling album of the 21st Century (Adele’s 21 is first). It truly was a different era.

It’s hard now, perhaps impossible, to disentangle the songs from that album from the whole tragic story of Amy Winehouse. Whatever the whys and hows behind her early demise, the facts are plain: the runaway success of the record kept the singer on the road for the next two years and she had only just started recording a follow-up when she died in July 2011, at the age of – yes – 27.

These days, anniversary reissues get churned out for all sorts of albums that barely merit them, but Back To Black was a cultural blockbuster that truly deserves to be memorialised. All the new editions of the album come out on 23 October, and are available for pre-order now.

It’s 40 years this month since Paul Simon’s Graceland was released, and in an era when the sun is slowly setting on the long playing record, it’s hard to recall the dust kicked up by that one album.

Much of the discourse revolved around Simon’s breaking of the cultural boycott of South Africa and whether its immense success (16 million copies sold) and the exposure it gave to Ladysmith Black Mambazo, South African music and so-called ‘world music’ (a term that itself is now viewed as anachronistic) as a whole justified Simon’s original offence.

For better of worse, Graceland became known as his South African album. But it was only partially recorded inside the country. Indeed, its lead single You Can Call Me Al, was put together entirely at the Hit Factory in Simon’s home city of New York.

The lyrical idea for the track came from a party that the singer and his then-wife Peggy Harper had attended. The French conductor Pierre Boulez was at the same gathering and mistakenly addressed Simon as ‘Al’ and Peggy as ‘Betty’. This amused Simon no end and was the spark for a song that alighted on a man experiencing a midlife crisis of some sort.

Simon didn’t have far to look for inspiration. The early 1980s were a tough period for him. His previous album, 1983’s Hearts And Bones, had flopped completely, his marriage to Carrie Fisher had disintegrated and - like many of his generation - his music was increasingly seen as all a bit old hat in the fast-moving, go-getting 1980s. Speaking in 2010 to his biographer Marc Eliot, he recalled: "I had a personal blow, a career setback, and the combination of the two put me into a tailspin."

Al’s first two verses feature a character dealing with some sort of personal disappointment. The man wants ‘a shot at redemption’, asks ‘why am I short of attention’ (note the double meaning), laments that ‘my nights are so long’ and asks‘where’s my wife and family?'

In a 1990 interview with Song Talk magazine, Simon broke the song down: "You Can Call Me Al starts off very easily with sort of a joke: 'Why am I soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?' Very easy words. Then it has a chorus that you can't understand. What is he talking about, you can call me Betty, and Betty, you can call me Al? You don't know what I'm talking about. But I don't think it's bothersome. You don't know what I'm talking about but neither do I. At that point.

“The second verse is really a recapitulation: A man walks down the street, he says... another thing. And by the time you get to the third verse, and people have been into the song long enough, now you can start to throw abstract images. Because there's been a structure, and those abstract images, they will come down and fall into one of the slots that the mind has already made up about the structure of the song.”

Of course, the third verse is where the character finds his redemption on the street ‘in a strange world’. Here he is a complete outsider but is enchanted by ‘the sound, the sound’ and decides to surrender to it: ‘Amen and Hallelujah!’

It’s hard not to link this to Simon’s own experience early in 1985 when he travelled to Johannesburg and played jam sessions with a number of SA bands. He and his long-standing engineer Roy Halee developed melodies, built up grooves and laid the foundations for Graceland.

Back in New York, Simon and Halee edited the material and began to shape the album. Several of the South African musicians were flown in to the Sound Factory, as were established session players such as Adrian Belew.

The guitarist was specifically asked to bring his latest gadget – the Roland GR-700 guitar synth: cutting-edge mid-'80s tech that could store sounds like a Fairlight.

Speaking to the Music Aficionado blog in 2020, Belew remembers being baffled when he heard what Simon had recorded in South Africa: “I honestly thought Roy had mistakenly put up the wrong master tapes because what I heard confused me. It was obviously some sort of South African music, not Paul Simon music. As usual there was no singing on the tracks yet. I sat there quietly listening, slightly embarrassed for Roy, but just then Paul arrived.”

Simon then sang along to the music that had been recorded: “He began singing phrases right into my ear, so close to me it gave me chills! It was a remarkable experience having Paul Simon singing quietly in my ear. I realised then he had made a major transition in his work.”

Belew agreed to offer his bank of sounds for use on the project. “We spent four days, just Roy, Paul, and me pouring over my 200 synthesizer sounds to find things which fit the songs. Paul was very detailed and painstaking in the parts he asked me to play.”

For You Can Call Me Al, Belew’s synth contributed a saxophone section. “I had written a variety of saxophone emulations from baritone to alto which had a realistic yet unorthodox quality. He spelled out each part exactly as he wanted them for the iconic beginning of the song. They may have added real saxophones later but my synthesized saxophones are definitely there as well. I’m sure very few people realise that.”

One problem was the fact that, like many of the songs on Graceland, You Can Call Me Al has a very complex vocal, which when combined with the busy, detailed backing, spelt trouble. Which is where Roy Halee came into his own. Speaking to Sound On Sound in 2008, Halee recalled thinking: "We've got to make this work."

"What I came up with was a tape delay feeding the left channel and a different delay feeding the right," he says. "All of a sudden his vocal receded into the track, at least to some degree, and we could understand the words! Don't ask me why, but it worked, and I couldn't have done that with an echo chamber or EMT 140. In fact, remove that tape delay from You Can Call Me Al and, what with all of the sibilance, pops and other little mouth noises against what was going on in that track, the vocal would be unintelligible.

"It's about the material being well recorded and using the leakage to your advantage. How many times throughout my career have I heard, 'Oh, that's OK, we'll fix it in the mix'? In a lot of cases you can't fix it in the mix."

One of the song’s most memorable features was the two note fretless bass solo that gives way to the coda. This came courtesy of South African bassist Bakithi Kumalo, who had travelled to New York to play on the album in May 1986.

When the group reached the breakdown in the song, Kumalo asked if he could improvise a little. "I said, 'Paul, it's my birthday today. Can I just play a little bit more on the part where there's a break?'" he recalled to For Bass Players Only in 2012. "And Paul said, 'Go ahead. If it's good, we'll keep it.'"

On the spot, the bassist came up with a snake-like lick that adds a cherry on top of what is already an infectious song. "I just played, and they loved it. It was one take," he said. "Listening back, I didn't know what happened; I thought it was from God, you know? I never planned it."

Then Halee reversed the first part of Kumalo’s lick and spliced it to the second half, creating a figure that was impractical for the poor bassist to replicate live. "People have tried to copy those licks," Simon mentioned to Guitar World in 2023. “But it’s impossible.”

The lead single from the album, You Can Call Me Al was released in the July. In the US initially it could only reach a disappointing 44. It was in the UK – where it made Number Four and was Simon’s biggest hit since Bridge Over Troubled Water - that it piqued listeners’ interest, helped enormously by its playful video. All of us above a certain age remember Chevy Chase lip-syncing Simon’s vocals whilst the song’s author plays various instruments featured on the track.

It was the key to Graceland's success. Released at a time when non-western music was also making inroads into the consciousness of the mainstream media, and pressure on the South African apartheid regime was ratcheting up, the album became a sensation – one of the cultural talking points of 1986 and 1987. Eventually, after winning the Grammys for Record and Album of the Year and reaching Number One around the world, Al finally showed up in the Billboard Top 30, peaking at Number 23 in May 1987.

In an era when we’re all familiar with the phrase ‘cultural appropriation’, controversy still dogs Graceland. Aside from the breaking of the cultural boycott, there were allegations that Simon failed to sufficiently credit other guests on the album, most notably Los Lobos and the zydeco band Rockin' Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters. But at its best – on the title track, The Boy In The Bubble and indeed You Can Call Me Al - Graceland transcends all that and turns one rich man’s midlife crisis into a joyful knees-up: no mean feat.

With a CV as extensive as Jack Antonoff’s you’d be hard-pressed to name a pop figurehead that hasn’t worked with him. The man who Taylor Swift trusts as her closest creative confidante (Antonoff co-produced and co-wrote on every one of her studio albums bar 2025’s The Life of a Showgirl), Jack has grown into one of modern music’s most esteemed luminaries.

Beyond Taylor, the likes of Lana Del Rey, The 1975 and most recently Sabrina Carpenter have drawn upon Antonoff’s emotion-led songwriting style and his distinctively retro gear-angled sensibilities when concocting the tracks that have dominated charts the world over.

But Jack, speaking to MusicRadar back in 2023, saw little distinction between the type of mass-appeal pop that he’s a dab hand at building for his roster of stars, and the music he makes himself under his synth-pop alias Bleachers.

For Antonoff, imperfection is often the key to making something sound unique;

“The irony of pop music is that it's this field that's so rigid, but the only stuff that's successful is the stuff that’s out on the other side of it,” Jack told us. “If you write something that you think is a perfect pop song, that fits perfectly into everything, it’s probably boring as f**k. The perfect pop song is by definition the imperfect pop song.”

It’s hard to believe, but Antonoff told us that he’s never once used a MIDI instrument, instead focusing on organic, out-of-the-box creation;

“I'm completely out of the box with gear. I've never used a MIDI instrument in my life. I'm always pushing myself by using different things, and what's nice about analogue gear is everything is a completely new journey.”

Antonoff’s fixation with analogue hardware can become a problem, particularly if he's having a sleepless night…

“The death of me will be that Reverb app. They're not paying me to say that, but Reverb and Vintage King and Soundgas and all those places… you know, at four in the morning when I can't sleep, I'm just looking for things and then dreaming about what I could do with them. Some people buy watches, some people buy cars, I buy gear. Since I was a kid, anytime I had a little bit of money, I would buy gear.”

Being such a tactile creative by nature, it’s no surprise that Jack has an aversion to presets;

“I have no presets. I’ve played synths long enough to know how to dial in the sounds I want,” Jack told us. “I know what to do, but I like the fact that it's new every time. Even if you have presets on a vintage synth, it's still new every time. That's one thing I love when we play live with Bleachers, we have Juno-106s on stage, and nothing ever comes out the same. Those things are just strange. Their mood is so interesting.

“One thing that I like about not having a preset is often if I’m just recording and I'm dialling in the sound as I'm going, the moments of dialling in a sound can become really interesting transitional pieces,” Jack explained. “If I’m dialling in a sound, it'll inherently sound like a question mark, and that's an interesting thing. So you can just go through the recording and grab those moments. For me, it's transitional bits: my rev up into a chorus or the panning sound that takes me into the next part, that could be a moment when I was searching for a sound and something happened that was interesting.”

Antonoff also told us about how he infused a heap of analogue synths into Taylor Swift’s 2022 record, Midnights.

“Oh, I went nuts on that s**t, man,” said Jack. “The funny thing about Midnights is, as synthetic as it is, it's actually very analogue. So much was going into tape. I was really into the Oberheim OB-8, which I had never used another album, so I got really crazy about that. We were getting a lot from Yamaha DX7s, which I hadn't used before really on anything. I was using the Solina in a lot of places, which I never use in other records. That album was just wanting to push into a different place with synths.

“There’s no Prophet on there, because I had used Prophet on a lot of other stuff, so I kind of just put that one away. Getting a lot of low end from the DX7, which I'd never done before. I was using patches on the DX7 that I thought were really rich, but then adding my low end afterwards, trying to find low end in odd ways. A lot of really grimy sounds I was dialling in on the OB-8 and then treating them after the fact.”

Jack continued, “I was just trying to play with the boundaries of things I hadn't done before. So what happens if all my delays are coming from tape, and all my choruses are coming from outboard gear, and I’m just running everything through as much analogue outboard as possible to make it so incredibly rich? When I listen back to that album, I have these memories of putting myself into those places. But really, for me, the OB-8 was the star.”

One thing we were keen to discover was how Jack gets the best from this revolving door of major superstars. How disciplined is the studio when working with these figures professionally?

“The room is a sacred place,” Jack told us. “There's no bulls**t. It's not about this, or that, we're all just working towards the album or the song. Like I keep saying, we’re finding that void in culture and then imagining what we want the world to hear and what's exciting us right now. It’s a gut thing, it's undeniable. When you're inspired, you're inspired. When you're not, you're not. I think that level of zero bulls**t about what we're feeling is the bedrock of making it at the level that it needs to be made at. I’ve always felt that way. I've always had a bit of deep, do-or-die, endless preciousness about how important this process is.”

Read our full 2023 interview with Jack Antonoff here

ZZ Top have got back on the horse in double quick time. Just five days after Frank Beard’s passing last week, they’ve resumed their Big One! tour in Austin.

Earlier this month the band announced that Michael Monahan would take over Beard’s place on drums for the time being. At the time, no further information was given about the reason for Beard’s absence. We know now, of course, that the 77-year-old drummer was entering hospice care, although we still don’t know the specific cause of Beard’s death.

Founder member Billy Gibbons introduced Monahan during Saturday’s gig at Austin City Limits. After the opener, Got Me Under Pressure, the guitarist got straight to the point: "I guess some of you probably know there’s a new man in town.

“In fact, it all started a little while back. [Bassist] Elwood [Francis] and I got an unexpected call from our dear Frank Beard, our dear drummer for 50 years. I've never heard him admit, he said, ‘My bass drum foot’s a little weak. Can you get my man [Monahan] to take over?’

"I said, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, he’s been doing pretty good.’ Frank said, ‘Yeah, that’s what worries me.’ "

Gibbons then shifted his tone a little bit, telling the audience: “We’re all here for a celebration, you know what’s going on. So we’re gonna have a good time.”

It’s not the first time ZZ Top have got back up quickly after a long standing member’s death. In 2021, longtime guitar tech Elwood Francis took over on bass just days after it was announced that Dusty Hill had passed on.

The group are on the road in the US all the way through to October when their The Big One! tour winds up in Port Wentworth, Georgia. Following that they have dates in Mexico and South America in November. It’s not known yet whether Monahan will remain behind the kit for those shows.

Two of the most influential figures in modern music have spoken up in favour of AI in music.

Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre – for it is they – have given an interview with the New York Times, in which they were asked in detail about the technology. Iovine was positively gung-ho, saying: “I’m very pro-AI in music creation. I don’t see the downside at all. There will be some crappy music. There’s crappy music now. In the studio, when gifted people have AI, they’re going to make better records.”

“The AI companies have the worst public relations in the history of the world,” he pointed out. “I don’t know the history of the world, but let’s just put it this way: They have terrible communication skills. That’s why everybody is all up in arms.”

Meanwhile Dre says, somewhat nonchalantly: “I don’t see it as a threat. I think the only people that see it as a threat are the people who have trouble creating.”

It seems the producer views it as just another piece of gear: "I had a discussion with a few people a few days ago. They were against AI and I’m like, 'OK, you sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.' Or synthesizers, right? It’s a new tool for creativity. Some people are afraid of learning new things. I’m embracing it. I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen with this.”

The two men have worked together since the early 1990s when Iovine’s Interscope label backed Dre’s solo albums, which rewrote the rules of hip-hop. In the Noughties, the pair launched the Beats By Dre headphones brand, which was acquired by Apple in 2014.

Both men say that they use AI. In fact, Iovine suggests that there are a lot of producers out there who are “closet” AI users. “They’re using it, they just don’t want to admit it,” adds Dre.

Iovine admits that he uses it all day. When asked what was the last thing he asked it, he reeled off a list: “The last thing I asked was what’s going on with democratic socialism. And another thing I asked was about David Byrne’s setlist. And about the absorption of iron in your body and the timing of it. And as far as iron’s concerned, shrimp versus tuna?”

As for Dre he asked how you put on muscle and lose fat. But revealingly, he says that the bot told him “nothing that I didn’t already know.”

Chris Slade, the Welsh drummer best-known for his stints with AC/DC, has announced his retirement.

Slade was brought into the band after previous incumbent of the drummer's stool Simon Wright left in 1989. He played on The Razor’s Edge album and the accompanying world tour, but left in 1994 when Malcolm Young intimated they wanted to bring Phil Rudd back into the band.

The decision to retire at the age of 79 comes after he suffered a stroke seven years ago. Announcing the news on social media, Slade wrote:  "Hello, everybody. It's with a heavy heart that I'm announcing my retirement from drumming."

"I'm near enough 80 years old. I've been drumming professionally since I was 16 with Tom Jones. I've had a good innings. And thank you all for coming to the shows.

"So, what happened was that I had a stroke, as you probably know, about seven years ago. A small stroke, but it's got worse. And I'm afraid that has screwed me up. I'm really jealous of people like The Stones or Paul McCartney who are going well into their 80s, and I wanted to do that. But it looks like I can't. So, as I say, with a heavy heart, it's bye for now.”

As he mentioned in his statement, Slade’s career goes back to the mid -60s and a stint behind the kit for Tom Jones. He later joined Manfred Mann’s Earth Band and his CV has a long list of diverse names on it – he’s played with Frankie Miller, Asia, Uriah Heep, Gary Numan, David Gilmour and Jimmy Page’s post-Zeppelin outfit, The Firm.

Slade rejoined AC/DC in 2015. You might recall that this was when Phil Rudd was in all sorts of legal trouble – his house in New Zealand had been raided and he was accused of possessing amphetamine, cannabis and – more seriously – hiring a hitman and attempting to kill two people.

Those charges were later dropped, but with Rudd unable to take part in the band’s Rock Or Bust world tour, Slade stepped into the breach. He stayed until 2020 when he was announced that he had left once more before the release of that year’s Power Up album.

At the end of 1974 Glen Campbell’s career was on the slide. He hadn’t had a hit single for years. The movie offers had dried up. His network TV show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour had been cancelled in 1972 and even a reunion album with Jimmy Webb, the songwriter who had provided him with Wichita Lineman and By The Time I Get To Phoenix, hadn’t reversed this decline – it could only reach an embarassing 166 on the Billboard charts.

He was now in his late 30s and it looked as though the best years of his career were behind him.

Larry Weiss also had cause to worry that he’d passed his peak. In the 1960s he’d written Bend Me Shape Me, which had been a hit for The American Breed and Amen Corner. He’d also penned Hi Ho Silver Lining, which had been a hit for Jeff Beck. Both were now years in the rear view mirror.

He’d tried to launch himself as an artist with his 1974 album Black And Blue Suite, but it hadn’t been a success. Weiss was seriously considering quitting music and opening a furniture store.

The lead single from the album was a quasi-autobiographical song called Rhinestone Cowboy. The lyrics tell the story of a character who is down on his luck and refuses to be beaten down by fate or the elements.

The verses depict this person’s struggle – the hours spent walking in vain, the compromising that is so often essential in order to get to your destination, whilst the chorus is one great crescendo as Weiss describes their dream: to be the star attraction, a cowboy in a ‘star-spangled rodeo’.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2013, he remembered how he came up with the image. “I had heard the phrase ‘rhinestone cowboy’ somewhere, and it stuck. When I moved to Nashville 20 years ago, I finally found out that it meant rhinestone-studded country singers of the 50s and 60s. But I gave it my own spin.

“When I was a kid, I'd loved cowboy movies: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Hop-Along Cassidy. To me, the singing cowboys were the rhinestone cowboys.”

Weiss was also probably thinking about a singer called David Allan Coe. This country artist – who died earlier this year – had adopted a gimmick early on in his career.

Performing at the Grand Ol’ Opry, he’d wear glistening rhinestone suits that at a distance gave the impression that his stagewear was more expensive than it actually was, and thus he was a star.

Coe would even sign autographs as ‘The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy’, a phrase he used as the title of his album, which was released in June 1974.

Still, Weiss was undoubtedly thinking too of his own situation. "The idea for the song was also a crying out of myself,” he told American Songwriter in 1984. “It was the spirit of a bunch of us on Broadway where I started out - Neil Diamond, Tony Orlando - we all had dreams of making it."

The imagery for the chorus was directly inspired by the 1944 western Buffalo Bill. “In the last scene, he rides out on a white horse, in a white outfit, with long white beard and hair, and he thanks everybody for giving him such a great life.

“There's another scene where he's at his lowest point, sat on a stuffed horse in a penny arcade holding his hat in the air.”

The song was released as a single in August 1974, but could only reach Number 24 in Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart. But despite this Weiss was convinced of its potential.

He offered it to Elvis Presley, who turned it down. He even gave David Allan Coe the chance to sing his own theme song. “I thought it was a great song,” Coe said in a 2004 interview with The Review magazine, “but I thought it would be too egotistical to record since I was calling myself the Rhinestone Cowboy at the time.

However, it did reach the ears of Glen Campbell. The singer had heard it on the radio whilst out driving one day and was so moved by it, he had to pull over to the side of the road.

As it happened, Campbell’s record label, Capitol, was already one step ahead. Dennis Lambert was brought in to A&R for the singer.

In a 2013 Guardian interview, he remembered the sequence of events that led to the singer recording the song. “Glen was a product of the LA recording system and understood what went into making hit records.

“We'd been talking about his feelings, writing and bringing him songs, when Larry Weiss came to play me some tracks from his recent album. One of them was Rhinestone Cowboy.”

“I said, ‘Larry, this is amazing,’ and my mind was racing, because I was already thinking about Glen. Larry wasn't that excited to hear that we were going to be producing Glen, I think because he was more concerned about his own album, but he gave me permission to play him the song.

“At the same time, (Capitol Vice President) Al Courey had somehow got a copy. A whirlwind happened within the space of a few days.”

Campbell said he loved the song and so he and Lambert went down to Sound Labs in Hollywood to record it in February 1975.

“We didn't copy Larry’s version, but took the essence of it, which was right on the money,” remembers Lambert. “Why fix something that isn't broken?”

The producer convinced the singer to play acoustic guitar on the track. “His (Campbell’s) pitch is impeccable; he's got the soul of a true musician.

“He doesn't read music, but he is a virtuoso guitarist, and it transfers to his voice. In the studio, he didn't wear headsets: he liked a little speaker instead.

“When he started singing, he'd drown out the track, and that's how he was able to finesse his vocal. He'd give you one or two great takes, and you knew you had it.

“For Rhinestone, I made him play guitar because I knew the other musicians [one of whom was future Toto man David Paich on piano] would be excited to be sitting there playing with Glen Campbell.”

The single was released in May 1975 and instantly rebooted Campbell’s career. It gradually rose up the Billboard charts and reached the top in September that year.

Indeed, it pulled off the feat of topping both the Billboard country charts and the Hot 100 simultaneously, which hadn’t been done for 14 years.

It also hit big all over Europe – reaching Number Four in the UK and going Top Ten in Belgium, The Netherlands and Ireland. It would become the second most played song on American radio that year, second only to Captain and Tennille’s Love Will Keep Us Together.

Why did it hit so big? Well those lyrics are something so many of us can relate to, but in Campbell they found their supreme interpreter.

His background, of growing up poor in rural Arkansas – his family were, literally, cotton-pickers and there was no electricity in the house – meant he was able to deliver them sincerely and with authenticity.

“He understood it as a metaphor for anyone trying to make it,” Lambert said in 2013. “He'd expressed disappointment with the way life was unfolding for him.

“He was recently divorced, estranged from his family, drinking, and involved with drugs a little too much – and yet he was this beautiful soul who we got to know and really love.

“That song became his signature tune. When you can make that happen, it's very powerful.”

Over the years, there have been numerous covers. You’d expect country artists to have tried their hands at it – Charley Pride, Slim Whitman and Loretta Lynn all recorded their own versions - but Rhinestone Cowboy has such a universal message, it’s garnered covers from the unlikeliest of places.

It was a feature of Radiohead’s early live sets, and it’s also cropped up in Belle and Sebastian’s setlists too. David Hasselhoff recorded a faithful version on his Sings America album.

There have been versions in French, Danish and Flemish and the song has not been immune to the Europop treatment either - in 2002, a terrible dance version reached Number 12 in the UK charts credited to Rikki and Daz featuring Glen Campbell. Campbell even appeared in the video.

But as a song, Rhinestone Cowboy is sturdy enough to withstand any such indignities. One of Campbell’s last public performances of it was surely the most poignant.

The singer had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when he appeared at his own tribute section at the 2012 Grammys and brought the house down.

“My only regret is not going to there, for its tribute to Glen,” remembered Weiss in 2013. “I watched it, of course.

“When Glen walked out singing in a rhinestone outfit designed by my dear friend Manuel Cuevas (who created the outfit for the song's original video), the place just blew up.

“I suddenly realised: ‘My God, I've written an American anthem.’"

The song was written and recorded by British glam rockers Arrows in 1975 – but it was the Joan Jett version released as a single seven years later that turned I Love Rock ’N’ Roll into the world-conquering hit it’s known as today.

It served as the opening title track from Jett’s second studio full-length, which ended up being the most commercially successful album of her career.

As fate would have it, Jett was touring the UK in 1976 as guitarist/vocalist in all-girl band The Runaways when she saw Arrows performing the song on their weekly television show.

This led to the Runaways learning how to play the song the following year, though ultimately they didn’t release it as they had already covered a track with a similar name – The Velvet Underground’s Rock & Roll.

For Jett, I Love Rock ’N’ Roll became a mission statement.

She told Rolling Stone: “I think people have to understand that rock ’n’ roll is not just rock ’n’ roll. It’s more than that. It can be a message sender. It is something that is powerful and strong. And it is something that can be used to fight, people have injustices, and you can declare them and fight for it.”

She continued: “I think rock ’n’ roll is a brash sort of medium, so you’re allowed to say what you want and what you mean.”

These words are deeply insightful into the mind of someone who acted as a trailblazer for female musicians in the music industry.

Instead of playing up to the gender stereotypes being normalised at that time, she chose to express herself unconditionally – raw and uncut – in the process redefining the very definition of what it means to be feminine and helping carve out space for women in male-dominated circles.

She has been referred to as the Godmother Of Punk, the original Riot Grrrl and the Queen Of Noise – the latter being a reference to The Runaways’ second album Queens Of Noise.

“There’s nothing more threatening than a girl with a guitar,” she famously stated back in 1999.

Following the breakup of The Runaways, Jett recorded her first rendition of I Love Rock ’N’ Roll in 1979 with guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols, released on vinyl as a B-side to her single You Don’t Own Me.

But the definitive version of the track came into fruition two years later with Jett’s new band The Blackhearts, recorded at Kingdom Sound Studio in Long Island with producers Kenny Laguna and Ritchie Cordell.

As it turns out, The Rolling Stones were partly responsible for the song being written in the first place.

Arrows singer Alan Merrill revealed in 2009: “That was a knee-jerk response to The Rolling Stones’ It’s Only Rock ’N’ Roll. I remember watching it on Top Of The Pops. I’d met Mick Jagger socially a few times, and I knew he was hanging around with Prince Rupert Lowenstein and people like that – jet-setters.”

He went on to describe the song as “an apology to those jet-set princes and princesses” – a way of saying to the stuffy aristocracy of that time that there’s nothing wrong about loving loud music.

So when it came to writing his own version of that kind of track, he certainly did a good job with it.

“You have to write a three-chord song with a lick that people remember, and it has to build,” Merrill explained. “So I had the chorus, which to me sounded like a hit. And I thought, ‘I’ll do something really unusual. I’ll write it that this is a song separate from the verse.’

“So the actual chorus is something that’s coming out of a jukebox, and the two kids in the disco who are flirting are hearing this song that’s a hit. It felt like The Twilight Zone.”

Joan Jett And The Blackhearts’ version of I Love Rock ’N’ Roll starts with eight dramatic snare hits before its iconic riff comes in – based around E, A and B power chords which are commonly followed by a quarter note bend on the third fret of the low E-string. This means the note travels from G to somewhere in between G and G#.

The album liner notes state that Joan Jett performed lead vocals and rhythm guitar while Ricky Byrd was responsible for lead guitar and backing vocals, joined by fellow Blackhearts Gary Ryan on bass and Lee Crystal on drums.

During the verse sections, there’s a lower riff being performed by Jett that is matched an octave up by Byrd using the first position pentatonic shape up at the twelfth fret. Jett’s part is performed using completely fretted notes, while Byrd adds a degree of fluidity by incorporating bends.

It was this version of Love Rock ’N’ Roll that ended up topping the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks. It also made No 1 in Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand and South Africa, and peaked at No 4 in the UK charts.

When Jett appeared on Australian music television show Countdown in 1982, she confessed that “not many people get to be involved with an anthem in their life” and “if people want to call the song an anthem, I think it’s wonderful, I think it’s great”.

She admitted: “I know everyone says it sounds silly – I love rock ’n’ roll. But that is what I feel. I love rock ’n’ roll. I love to go out and perform in front of people. The whole band does. And that, I think, is the secret.”

The old adage is that if you work hard enough you will – eventually - make it. But a 26 year old singer songwriter is intent on testing that theory to destruction.

Derby-based musician Isaac Neilson is the fellow in question and at the time of writing he’s 235 gigs into a bonkers challenge that will see him play live every day in 2026. And almost bankrupt himself in the process.

In a feature in the Guardian, Neilson explains why on earth he’s doing it. “I was in a position where I could maybe put a deposit on a house or I could do this crazy experiment. I chose to go all in on the music.”

He’s set himself two rules – he has to perform every day and busking doesn’t count. To his credit, he’s kept it up so far. His gig list for 2026 so far includes more than 60 gigs in Derby alone, a support slot with Cast and some deserted rooms during the recent men’s World Cup. “Christmas Day is going to be difficult but I have a plan,” he says.

Part of his objective, it seems, is to see if it’s possible to make it the old-fashioned way, by working hard on the live scene and building up a genuine following. “Virality is overrated,” he says. “People are yearning for community and looking for a connection. Numbers on a screen don’t represent the impact you can make in the world if you actually go out and meet people. My marketing budget is the time I spend in a room with you.”

So far he says he’s had “two major mental breakdowns and six minor ones.” Almost as serious is the sheer cost of the undertaking. Neilson estimates that he had £30,000 in savings at the beginning of the year and will probably end 2026 with about £3,000. It costs around £400 a week to keep going with fuel costs not surprisingly the biggest expense.

His music? The sort of indie-rock that there could be an audience for... somewhere out there. Will he be able to find it by the end of the year? Will he get through to 31 December with his sanity intact? “Regardless of the outcome of this year, I can die knowing I threw everything at it,” he says.

For more details about his upcoming gigs, head over to Neilson’s Instagram.

One of the key outfits pointed at when trying to discern just when that pivotal ‘I’ was applied to electronic music (and the term, ‘IDM’ - Intelligent Dance Music - was first coined) Autechre's legacy has been increasingly recognised over the last three decades, with their extremely innovative and questing spirit influencing generations of budding young producers.

Formed in Rochdale, Greater Manchester in 1987, Rob Brown and Sean Booth’s pursuit of fascinating new forms of electronic music has resulted in a vast body of work.

From the foundation of 1993’s Incunabula spawned fourteen further studio albums, including such electronic classics as 1995’s ultra-intricate Tri Repetae, 2001’s software-embracing Confield and the extraordinary Exai from 2013.

Today though, we’re casting our eyes back to a time long before Autechre became a byword for the notion of dance music as art, back when Rob and Sean were just two extremely creative guys, surrounded by a nest of wires, drum machines and beer cans.

We spoke to Rob and Sean back in 1994, right after the release of their ambient-flavoured second record Amber (in our dear departed sister magazine, Future Music). Journalist Simon Trask asked them about their earliest workflow…

“We used to do turntable mixes together at Rob’s house and then go to my house and edit and cut ‘em up, imitating early Mantronix [1980s hip-hop and electro funk outfit] stuff with pause-button edits on my cassette deck,” Sean explained.

“We used to put loops into the [Casio] SK1 and cut stuff up on the turntables over the top of that,” said Sean. “Then when we got the [Roland TR-] 606 and the [Boss] RSD-10 we’d put samples in the RSD, trigger it from the 606 and play with the SK1 on top of that.”

In the early 1990s, Autechre prided themselves on learning and memorising every facet of their hardware set-up;

“We’ve found that whenever we buy a bit of gear we try and lay off it for six months, until we’ve got used to using it,” explained Sean. “It’s only then that we start doing things that are actually worth using; if we start using something immediately, we just do the corniest stuff with it. There isn't one thing about the gear that we’re using now that we don't understand. The analogue synths are second nature to us, and the [Roland drum machine] R-8 is completely our machine.”

In retrospect, the period that Simon spoke to the pair was fairly pivotal, as he caught them at a time when they were just beginning to dabble with DAWs, software and the capabilities of MIDI. Although, at this early stage the results weren’t always worth writing home about…

“Cubase is a song man’s program, and we’re not song people at all,” Sean told us. “A lot of the tracks we do are very loop-orientated, and [Emagic] Creator [the proto-version of Logic] is designed to be used by people who like working in loops. So we started using that and it was just like using a drum machine, which we were well into - using the R-8 as a sequencer gave us our first lesson in Creator, almost.”

One of the most interesting moments in the interview was when Sean explained how the pair didn’t particularly like bringing in outsiders to their two-man operation; “We’ve only really worked in one ‘proper’ studio and we just ended up getting on the desk ourselves,” said Sean. “I don't know - we just don't like working with other people, basically. It's a lot easier if we do everything ourselves. It seems that in studios you have this code of practice that says you have to do things in a certain way. People say to us, ‘you've got this weird way of working’, but to us it isn't weird, it's the correct way of doing things - we’re happier working like that.”

Read our full classic interview with Autechre here

When the teenage Jackson Browne was just starting out as a singer and songwriter, he received some blunt career advice from an older and wiser musician.

Monte Dunn was a guitarist who played with Canadian folk duo Ian & Sylvia. In the mid-’60s, after hearing some of Browne’s songs, Dunn told the young hopeful: “You know, they already got a Bob Dylan. And a really good one.”

Browne recalled this moment in an interview with MOJO magazine in which he looked back on his early years and his defining work created in the ’70s.

“It’s easy to talk about how records are made,” he said. “But what makes you write what you write, that’s just a big mystery.”

Browne was 14 years old when he started writing songs. It was 1962, and his family had recently moved from Los Angeles to nearby Orange County. His biggest influences were Dylan and other folk singers such as Mississippi John Hurt and Dave Van Ronk, and his first attempt at composition was inspired by a version of You’re No Good from Dylan’s self-titled 1962 debut album. Browne named his song Happy Woman Blues.

“It was not very good,” he said. “I think that was kind of a folk posturing stance. Most of my early songs were a little mawkish, and very derivative.”

Even so, there was one song from this early period that would stay with Browne for his whole career and define his signature style of sombre introspection. He was still only 16 when he wrote These Days, a world-weary lament which ended in defeat as he sang: “Don’t confront with my failures… I had not forgotten them.”

Browne explained: “I wasn’t a sad kid. It’s been remarked a couple of times by therapists: ‘What the hell happened to you?’ I can’t honestly tell you that there was anything that should have resulted in my feeling as if, to quote the song, ‘I’ve been losing so long.’ My entire life – all sixteen years of it! I don’t know where I got that. Maybe from The Beatles’ song, I’m A Loser.”

While still in high school, Browne was gigging regularly at an Orange County club called The Paradox. He was briefly a member of local ragtime group The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and signed a contract with Elektra Records as a songwriter.

After graduating in 1966, he travelled to New York City with the intention of making his name on the Greenwich Village folk scene. What he found there was a job as a backing musician for Nico, the German singer/model/actress who was then working with The Velvet Underground. After a brief affair between them, Nico recorded three of Browne’s songs, including These Days, for her 1967 solo album Chelsea Girl.

Browne had his songs recorded by a number of artists: another version of These Days, by Tom Rush, followed in 1968. It was only after Browne returned to California, however, that he established himself as a singer-songwriter.

He had felt burned when Elektra signed him as a recording artist and then quickly dropped him. David Geffen was different. He became Browne’s manager and then his label boss when he formed Asylum Records in 1971. Browne described Geffen as the perfect ally. “He was letting artists find themselves in the studio.”

Browne’s first two albums – his self-titled debut (1972) and For Everyman (1973) – peaked outside the Billboard 200. It was with his third album, Late For The Sky, that he achieved a commercial breakthrough in 1974.

It was this album that Bruce Springsteen referred to when inducting Browne into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2004.

“In ’70s post-Vietnam America,” Springsteen said, “there was no album that captured the fall from Eden, the long slow afterburn of the ’60s, its heartbreak, its disappointments, its spent possibilities, better than Late For The Sky.”

In 1976, Browne followed Late For The Sky with another masterpiece, The Pretender, recorded in the wake of a personal tragedy – the suicide of his wife, actress Phyllis Major.

In 1977 Browne delivered one of the most unorthodox records ever made by a mainstream rock artist. Running On Empty was essentially a concept album: the diary of a rock ’n’ roll star on the road, recorded in concert, at sound checks and in hotel rooms, with songs about women, songs about drugs, and throughout it all a sense of ennui encapsulated in the album’s title.

“Running On Empty was a rather imperfect banner to fly,” Browne conceded. “It’s not exactly what you want to tell people about your career or anything.”

The album’s title track was a driving rock song, but the lyric reflected Browne’s uncertainty about his life and where it was headed. “It was an admission,” he said, “that your ideals are changing. You’re still doing what you used to do, but now you do it for a different reason.”

Not every song on Running On Empty is autobiographical. Rosie is one of Browne’s most beautiful songs, and certainly the funniest. It describes a roadie losing a star-struck groupie to a member of the band – of all people, the drummer – and consoling himself through masturbation. “The story was true,” Browne said. “Just not of me.”

It was on Cocaine – a song originally written by bluesman Reverend Gary Davis – where Browne really let the audience in on what happened after the show. The track was recorded in a hotel room in Edwardsville, Illinois, by Browne, his guitarist Danny Kortchmar and his famous sidekick David Lindley, whose fiddle and lap steel had been a key tone on his previous records.

Browne recalled: “Danny and I were snorting a lot of coke while we made that recording, and Lindley was not.”

The track ends with the sound of the drug being chopped out and sniffed. “The commercial for cocaine,” Browne called it.

Running On Empty was a huge hit, reaching No 3 in the US. This was, however, Browne’s last album of the ’70s, and in one sense there was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy in Running On Empty. Browne wouldn’t make another truly great record until I’m Alive in 1993. He also knew that drugs were a problem.

“My whole generation took a lot of drugs,” he said. “And we went from thinking this is absolutely the best thing since nighttime softball to knowing that it was a trap.”

Browne’s first album of the 1980s, Hold Out, was also his first and to date only US No 1. It included the song Of Missing Persons, written in memory of his friend Lowell George, leader of Little Feat.

The following album, 1983’s new wave-influenced Lawyers In Love, also sold well. However, Browne’s popularity subsequently declined with two albums – Lives In The Balance (1986) and World In Motion (1989) – on which he explicitly criticised American foreign policy under the Reagan administration.

Since the mid-’90s, Browne’s working life has slowed to a leisurely pace. In the 33 years since the release of I’m Alive he has made just five albums: Looking East (1996), The Naked Ride Home (2002), Time The Conqueror (2008), Standing In The Breach (2014) and Downhill From Everywhere (2021).

As he said to MOJO: “I don’t know if I’m lazy. I’m just not in much of a hurry.”

He talked in that interview about the thing that connects every song he has ever written. “All these songs remain open questions,” he said. “Even if it comes around to some sort of resolution by the end of a song, it leaves the question intact, because that’s actually how we live. And as long as I’m writing songs, the questions continue.”

Browne also spoke of his pride in what his friend Bruce Springsteen said of his songwriting: “A condensed emotional power in each line of his great songs… the meticulousness of craft, always matched by the deepness of soul.”

As Browne saw it, nobody has ever captured the essence of his music better than The Boss did that night. “It was a great moment for me,” he said. “It was one of the few times that anybody has really been able to say in so many words what it is that I do.”

One of house music’s leading lights, Chris Lake has become a club and festival mainstay for the last decade, with his vocal-led arrangements a stylistic signature that has entranced crowds the world over.

A few years back, MusicRadar spent a morning with Chris Lake in a London hotel, having a fairly chilled natter about Lake’s rise in prominence and, interestingly, his how his music production process is often a much more intuition-led than many might expect.

Firstly, we were delighted to hear that it was our very own sister magazine Computer Music (now, sadly no longer in print but then, still going strong) that first empowered Lake to learn about the nitty gritty of music-making;

“When I first got into music, I was picking up Computer Music off the shelf every month,” Lake told us. “It really helped me learn and understand what was possible, and what was available for making music. I remember the magazine grew off the back of the possibilities of the first seeds of the DAW. It’s funny how I remember some of the old cover features and those artist interviews still stick in my head.”

We also learned that Lake had been an avid Ableton Live user for a long time, however he first started on much humbler software…

“It’s been a long time [with Ableton Live] But I wasn’t a first user. I got into music around the late ’90s. The first DAW that I used was Sonic Foundry’s Acid, I then moved into Reason and then to Logic, and then, finally, Ableton Live. Live is my language now.”

Often, due to the demands of touring, Chris was unable to monitor his mixes on high-end gear, and had to trust his instincts when using his mobile set-up.

“Honestly, there was a moment about seven or eight years ago where I realised I was spending a ridiculous amount of time on the road,” Chris told us. “I started to feel paralysed when touring. I felt like I couldn’t do anything when I was away from the studio. I realised that I had to teach myself how to make music when I was out and about. I kind of forced myself into being uncomfortable. I taught myself how to make music on a laptop and nothing else. How do you teach yourself that? Well you just have to accept that you don’t have your studio monitors, a MIDI keyboard and all the other home comforts. But this is what I do have. It was like going back to the initial constraints that I had when I first started making music.”

We were surprised to hear that Lake - a global superstar - had actually put things out that had just been monitored using his laptop speakers…

“I actually started making music just listening with the laptop speakers, using just the QWERTY keyboard instead of a MIDI keyboard to put in notes. Now I’m really good at it. I can make 80% of my music anywhere; in a noisy environment or a busy room. I feel like I understand the sound of the laptop speakers and I’ve even released music that I’ve only monitored on laptop speakers.”

“I made my track I Remember in my parents’ living room. I didn’t even listen to it on headphones. I finished it, rendered it out then played it the following night in Moscow. It was one of the best-sounding records I’d ever made. I ended up listening to it on monitors a couple of weeks later to check the final mix, but I hardly changed anything since that first laptop mix. It sounded fantastic. Don’t get me wrong – on the super low end it’s definitely pretty difficult to be accurate – but, on that occasion, I fluked it and got it right.

Read our full 2023 interview with Chris Lake here.

Operating at the intersection between electronic music, indie rock and pop music, British five-piece Hot Chip have built their career on tracks that balance undeniable hooks with an alluring strangeness.

That sound comes from the band's mix-and-match approach to songwriting, which combines synths and electronic instrumentation with guitars and acoustic drums, and sees band members regularly swapping roles in the studio and onstage.

But, as band members Al Doyle, Joe Goddard and Alexis Taylor explained to us when we visited them in their east London studio, in the band’s early days that approach often meant working around technical limitations.

“When we made our earlier albums, Joe was always trying to capture what was happening when everyone was playing, but it didn't always work,” Doyle says. “We just didn't have the setup to be able to do that. But the instinct was always there to try. Part of the reason for building this place originally was to make that whole process easy.”

Much of the band’s first few albums – Coming On Strong, The Warning and Made In The Dark – were started in Goddard’s home studio. Although to hear Goddard describe it, the word ‘studio’ might be overselling it a little.

“The computer and a small amount of gear was just next to my bed,” he says. “There was a kind of spaghetti of black cables all over the floor, which traumatised my wife and still does.”

In the years since, the band’s studio setup has been upgraded significantly. The band now primarily work out of a London studio primarily set up by Doyle. With multiple rooms, an envy-inducing collection of vintage synths and a Trident TSM desk at its centre, the studio allows the band to write tracks in a more collaborative manner.

“Because we’re in this studio that Al built, we have space to make things very readily from scratch,” Taylor says. “There may still be times where somebody brings an idea they’ve written in to play to the rest of the band, but there are also times with the new records we've been making where everything is just happening in real time. We’re improvising things, trying things out.

“You make a beat on a drum machine and then somebody joins in on the keyboard, and another person simultaneously joins in on another keyboard over the other side of the room. Kind of just building up layers to see what the song could become.”

As Doyle explains, allowing multiple people to try out ideas simultaneously is one of the key benefits to the design of the studio space.

“In terms of how Hot Chip operates in this studio, that's why everything is basically plugged in all the time, because it means that there's no barrier to capturing a performance that's happening on any instrument in any space in here,” he says. “I think that came from that culture of trying to do that, even when we weren't quite able to do it.”

“The room allows you to be working on one thing in here collectively, but then there's also the drum room and the piano room through there,” Taylor continues. “Often I’ll run in there if I have a different idea for something. So you can kind of develop a second song while you're working on the first song. There are different spaces to try things out, and for some reason I think that's been quite key to the way we've always worked.

“Whether it's going into a different room or just stopping what you're doing and starting another thing, basically having a couple of things on the go in one day can mean that you have a breather from something. Then when you try a new idea, a second song, that could be quite exciting because you feel like you're making progress on a different thing. It gives you the space to then come back to the first idea with a fresh perspective on it.”

We took the opportunity to quiz Hot Chip on a few of their studio highlights. In the video above, Doyle, Goddard and Taylor talk us through some of their favourite synths, and why the Trident desk brings a distinctive vibe to the studio.

The band has recently reissued breakthrough albums The Warning, Made In The Dark and One Life Stand. Revisit our breakdown of the band’s classic track Ready For The Floor.

Some songs stop you dead in your tracks the second you hear them. They seem to change the molecules in the air.

The Sound Of Silence, the breakout hit that announced Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel as a powerhouse songwriting duo, is one of them. But it took its time to work its magic on a wider audience.

When it did, Simon & Garfunkel were on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Their 1964 debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3AM, had flopped and they were doing what twenty-somethings did in the mid ‘60s. Simon headed across the pond and was living in England, working on his debut solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook, working the local folk circuit. Garfunkel was still at Columbia University where he was studying art history.

At Columbia Records, the phone was ringing off the hook. There was a song off Wednesday Morning, 3AM that radio audiences across the Eastern Seaboard couldn’t get enough of.

“From a radio contact business in Cocoa Beach, Florida, it became a call-in favourite,” said Garfunkel, speaking to MusicRadar in 2012. “It made the promotion man call the home office in New York and say, ‘It’s been a year now, and they won’t quit over this one folky song from a group called Simon & Garfunkel. The album isn’t selling, but this one tune just won’t quit with its appeal.’”

It wasn’t just Florida. Audiences in Boston were entranced by it, too. The Sounds Of Silence, as it was originally titled, was speaking to the youth of America, haunting the airwaves with its minimalist folk presentation, just two voices and an acoustic guitar. This song had potential.

Columbia had recognised this when Simon & Garfunkel first auditioned for them. As did Garfunkel when Simon first showed it to him.

“It was the sixth song Paul ever wrote,” said Garfunkel. “He would come to my apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, where the roaches were in the kitchen, and he’d play me his songs. When he got to this one, I said, ‘Best one yet! If that’s not a commercial hit record, I don’t know what is.’”

The Sound Of Silence was such a good song that Simon was initially going to give it away. He was exploring his post-college options once his degree in English at Queens College was finished, and took a job in music publishing.

“I had either graduated from college, or I was in my last year, and I was working part-time for a publisher in New York, trying to get songs from their catalogue recorded by other recording artists,” said Simon, speaking to NPR in 2003. “A job that I was completely unqualified to do.”

But the job paid in other ways. It was there Simon met Tom Wilson of Columbia Records, the producer who had worked with Sun Ra and had just been picked up to work with folk’s new superstar, Bob Dylan. Wilson could have used a song like this.

“He had a group that he was recording called The Pilgrims. The only great artist that he had was Bob Dylan,” continued Simon. “I said to him, 'Well, I have a song that I wrote that I think might be good for The Pilgrims', and I played the song, The Sound Of Silence.

And he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I’d like to record that with them.’ And then I said, ‘Well, you know, I sing. I sing with a friend. Could we come and sing this for you?’ So, he said yes, and he arranged an audition for us.”

Wilson had Dylan. He had the Pilgrims. After Columbia president Goddard Lieberson liked what he heard, Wilson now had Simon & Garfunkel. Although there was still some disagreement over what they should call themselves.

The duo had been operating under the name Tom & Jerry back when they were high-school kids signed to Big Records, scoring a hit with Hey, Schoolgirl and appearing on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.

That was a real-life American Graffiti scene, and the name would never have worked with this new folk direction. And the record companies back then discouraged to Jewish artists from using their own names.

“There was a duo called Art and Paul, a folk duo, so that was out,” said Simon. “So then, they were tossing out different names that they might come up with to give to us. And it was never a consideration to call the group Simon and Garfunkel, because it was ‘too ethnic.’ It was just nobody did that. Nobody did that then.

“Bob Dylan was called Bob Dylan; he wasn’t called Bob Zimmerman. So, when they came to a stalemate and couldn't find the name, it was Goddard Lieberson, who said, ‘Call the group Simon and Garfunkel.’”

Wilson handled production duties for Wednesday Morning, 3AM. The engineer Roy Halee, who had recorded the audition tapes, was in the studio to work his magic. He had a burgeoning reputation as a genius in the studio and would be a regular collaborator of the duo’s, with arguably his greatest production feat coming in 1986 when he produced Simon’s Graceland.

The album was recorded in spring ‘64, released in fall, forgotten by winter, and by the summer of ’65 Garfunkel considered himself “a veteran of failure”. At least that’s how he remembered it when speaking to NPR.

He had gone out to visit Simon during his summer vacation and upon returning to the States, he discovered The Sound Of Silence had been remixed by Wilson for a new single release scheduled for September 12. Wilson played it for him.

“I was just, you know, amused,” said Garfunkel. “I was not so invested in whether it’ll be successful or not. I was feeling like a veteran of failure at that point. So I was just amused – and then I watched my life change over the ensuing months.”

Wilson had an ear for the zeitgeist and the electric 12-string guitar was becoming the sound of the mid ‘60s. Roger McGuinn’s playing on the Byrds’ Mr Tambourine man transformed the sound of ‘60s guitar. That jangle and chime was in. So too was reverb, and Halee applied it generously to this remix.

Wilson had just finished up recording Like A Rolling Stone with Bob Dylan and rehired guitarist Al Gorgoni and drummer Bobby Gregg, adding Vincent Bell on guitar and Bob Bushnell on bass guitar. They were going to give it the Byrds treatment.

Garfunkel told MusicRadar that he had no bargaining power to persuade the label to think twice about it.

“The home office overdubbed electric bass, drums and the electric 12-string guitar, which was the sound of the era if you know The Byrds and Mr Tambourine Man,” he said. “We were using electric 12-strings that season. They did this while we were away in Europe. I had no power, no creative leg to stand on, so by definition I was just a bemused listener: ‘Whatever the label is going to do, OK, cross your fingers…’ It’s not like I could have a point-of-view like, ‘How dare you! You ruined my record’ – I could never go down that path.”

We can look back and say this proto-psychedelic treatment of this folk arrangement was just what it needed, Messrs Simon and Garfunkel’s vocals hanging disembodied in the mix, ethereal, godly. The problem was the original was just two voices and the guitar and naturally the rhythm did not sit on the grid. They did the best they could but there’s no question, it sounds a little off.

“I heard it and thought, ‘OK, the rhythm slips a bit between the fourth and fifth verses, the overdubs aren’t exactly in sync, but the sound is commercial. Who knows?’ You can’t figure out the market,” said Garfunkel. “Now it becomes a giant world-wide hit. What can I say? I knew the song within.”

Great songs are rugged. They can be remarkably resilient to reinterpretation. Even so, Garfunkel thought that the 12-string guitar stepped on the vocal a bit.

It is a feeling that informs how he performs it to this day, almost as though he is singing it for an audience who is hearing those lyrics clearly for the first time, even if the truth is those lyrics could well have accompanied them during the most significant, maybe the toughest, moments in their lives.

But it matters little; the emotional temperature of the remix is little different to the original recording, and the chord changes still effectively betray Simon’s prodigious genius. He was just 21 when he wrote it.

The fact that Halee cloaked it in reverb, this great splash of ambient melancholy, is more than appropriate – not only was it consonant with contemporary production styles, it was just as Simon had originally written the song.

In his NPR interview, Simon explained the kind of at-home setup he would put together to get him in the zone, and it is quite funny to picture, maybe a little melodramatic, but just ask any guitar player who has played acoustic in the bathroom. There’s a natural reverb there that makes for an echo room that some studios would pay thousands to install in their facility.

“I wrote it in the bathroom of our house in Queens, with the lights off and the water running,” said Simon. “That was the atmosphere that I liked. If you put a candle in there, then, you’ll immediately understand what it’s like.”

We can’t say for sure what guitar Simon used to write it. Likely it could have been one of the big-bodied Guild acoustics that were favoured by that generation of folkies, and later when he came to perform it live he would typically rely on his Martin D-18. Those are guitars of considerable boom, but Simon tamed that, capoing his at the sixth fret for the recording.

What makes the chord progression so genius is how it sits in conversation with the lyrics. It opens with an Asus2 shape, neither major nor minor, then an open G major then back to A minor on “again” – and in just two lines, three chords, and the audience is right where they want them, and the whole song unspools as some gentle, dark night of the soul.

Even after all this time, it still hits Art Garfunkel hard. He says his appreciation of it has only increased as the decades rolled by.

“Ahhh, what a tune! Sound Of Silence has more melodic genius, and simple power than I ever realised,” he said. “As the years go by, there’s something extraordinarily hooky about that simple melody – I didn’t know that. I knew it was a good-sounding record when it emerged.”

“Well the passing of four decades has given the lyrics an extraordinary power simply because they have endured for such a long time,” Simon told NPR. “Again, for me, I am always aware of the fact that I was 21 years old when I wrote it, so I am kind of amazed that I wrote that. Although at the time I just thought that I was writing better. But now when I look at it I think, ‘Well, that was really something extraordinary that I wasn’t aware of at the time.’”

The Sound Of Silence is a “serious song” but what is it about? Simon is coy. It’s about “many things”. To explain it would be to rob it of its magic. We can assign our own meaning to them. That’s what makes them endure between the melody sticking in our head.

What The Sound Of Silence meant to nu-metal band Disturbed when they covered it will have been different to the kinds of things that were percolating in Simon’s mind when he wrote it in late ’63, early ’64, when the US was roiling after the assassination of a sitting president and the civil rights movement was working for a better union, an end to segregation.

Simon, for what it’s worth, had rerecorded it in the UK for The Paul Simon Songbook but that always sounded incomplete, like a demo. Art Garfunkel’s vocal makes it transcendent.

Purists might cite the original 1964 recording as the definitive take, others Wilson’s remix. We don’t have to choose. But in remixing it and rereleasing it in ’65 Wilson helped Simon and Garfunkel on their way to their first number one – and there was more where that came from.

While many have debated who the real ‘fifth Beatle’ truly was, in our mind there’s simply no contest. It’s quite obviously the late, great George Martin who deserves that honorary mop-top.

He’s the man who unlocked the Beatles’ creative ambitions and enabled them to evolve from pop sensation to music’s most pioneering figures, Martin was part-producer and part close confidante to four men who changed the way we think about music itself.

Although George Martin sadly passed away in 2016, George’s son, Giles Martin has inherited his father’s flair for manning a console, becoming a key figure in how the Beatles' recording canon is handled today, producing, remixing and supervising all major releases by the brand.

From Get Back to the recent Anthology re-release, to the upcoming Rubber Soul remix, Giles has overseen it all. He's, quite simply, the man entrusted with the keys to music’s most celebrated legacy

But Giles’ studio career extends beyond just taking on his father’s mantle, he has been involved in a wide array of projects including the remixing of The Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup and, notably, the incredibly fascinating Dolby Atmos mix of The Beach Boys' timeless Pet Sounds, released in 2023.

It was at that point that this writer was able to spend some one-on-one time with Giles, talking in-depth about why expanding Pet Sounds into Atmos was tantamount to genuine musical archaeology - but required some delicate, respectful hands…

“The fact of the matter is that mono can be immersive too – Sgt Pepper and Pet Sounds came out in mono, and people fell into them,” Giles said. “You have to mix to the source. It’s the equivalent of restoring paintings, brightening up an old Dutch master’s work and making it bright. So it’s always a challenge. I was deeply honoured that they asked me to do it.

“There had to be a lot of audio restoration. There were elements missing. So we used a combination of the original master tracks and newly-sourced mix elements,” Giles explained. “There were a couple of vocal things that had to be taken off the mono. Generally speaking, we had about eight tracks to play with. A lot of the instrumentation was on three different tracks, locked-in together.”

With the project on his desk, Giles settled on quite a daunting starting point; “You have to start somewhere, and I thought I’d start with God Only Knows, because it’s such an amazing song. It’s one of the greatest songs ever written. That can be challenging in itself. Then we went through the rest of the album in track order from then on. Then you go back and revise and revise and revise.”

Beyond the discussion of the complex process of converting this hallowed record into an immersive Atmos sphere, Giles talked about the vast creativity and singular vision of Brian Wilson - who sadly passed away last year - and also shared his father’s perspective on Wilson's exceptional talent.

“I was with my dad on a plane once, and I just suddenly realised how awesome he was. I said to him ‘Dad, what you did with The Beatles was kind of amazing, wasn’t it?’ and he looked at me and said: ‘not as amazing as Brian Wilson’. He explained to me that The Beatles always had him, and he had The Beatles. But Brian Wilson didn’t have anyone, and he went and made this record. Without this record, The Beatles wouldn’t have made Sgt Pepper.”

Giles also explained to us why Pet Sounds continues to be revered all these years on; “Forget sampling, this was real innovation.” Giles gushed, “Pet Sounds is an organic record, and you kind of want it to be real, you want to be closer to them in a way, you want to fall into the record. It’s almost like a classical record, it’s so intricate and so beautiful.”

Read our full interview with Giles Martin on how he brought Pet Sounds into the Atmos domain here

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

Every week, we devise 10 fiendish and (hopefully) fun questions to test whether you've been paying attention. Or not…

Brain on? Let's go...

We hear a lot about hit songs having long runs at number one, but spare a thought for those that stayed at number two for numerous consecutive weeks but never managed to hit the top spot.

One notable example is Donna Lewis’s I Love You Always Forever, which peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 almost exactly 30 years ago and remained there for nine weeks.

Born in Cardiff, Wales, Lewis was all but unknown before the song became a hit. Remarkably, what you hear on the finished record is pretty much exactly what Lewis recorded in her home studio – but as we’ll discover, things could have worked out very differently.

These days, it’s taken for granted that you can make a release-quality track from start to finish in your bedroom, but in the mid-’90s, most aspiring songwriters were working with far more limited technology, and Lewis, who had spent years trying to get a record deal in England without success, was one of them.

“I was working with my Tascam PortaStudio eight-track recorder and my little Alesis MMT-8 sequencer [an ‘80s multitrack MIDI recorder that enabled DAWless music-making before DAWless music-making was ever talked about],” she said in an interview with Sony Music Publishing earlier this year.

“I probably manifested that song because I was walking around the streets in Birmingham [UK], and I was thinking to myself, ‘I wonder what it's like to write a song where you get on stage and everybody knows it as soon as you start singing it?’ And so I had this ‘feels like’ [opening line from the song] in my head, that little melody, and got to Martin, my husband's office, and said, ‘Give me some paper. I need to just jot this down. You know, I did some manuscript lines, to write the melody, so I didn't forget it, as we didn't have phones in those days.”

There’s definitely something quaint about the idea of someone rushing to notate a musical idea rather than humming it into a phone or mobile recorder, but Lewis clearly knew she was onto something, and was determined not to lose it.

“I think some songs come on the wind and you just go with it,” she says. “I think that probably took a day or so to write because I was obsessed with the single note sound on the Korg M1 [a synth that Lewis had recently bought] so I started sequencing that, and then adding all these atmospheric sounds around it, and then I was ready for the melodic ideas.”

Discussing the song’s lyrics and title, Lewis explained: “Originally, it was called Lydia when I wrote it because at the time I was reading the book For the Love of Lydia by H E Bates – just a simple romantic novel set in the 1920s in the English countryside – and I just thought, ‘Oh, the verses will work well, you know, falling in love for the first time in this descriptive wonderful world.

“There's a line in the book – ‘I love you always forever, near and far closer together’ – and I just thought that was great. So that ended up being the chorus.”

Lewis has said that she had doubts about this main hook: “I remember trying to rewrite the chorus because it sounded too much like a nursery rhyme,” she told Celebrity Parents Magazine in 2023, “but when I did, it didn’t work, so I kept it the same.”

A good idea, as it turns out, but there were other potential changes along the way that could also have scuppered the song’s ultimate success. The demo eventually got into the hands of Jen Stark, who worked in Atlantic Records’ A&R department, which resulted in Lewis being flown out to the US to meet company boss Doug Morris.

“I wasn't that optimistic because I thought, ‘Oh, probably just another rejection,” Lewis admitted to DJ Bowie Jane in a podcast interview last year. “So I sang a bunch of songs for him, and then he said, ‘Congratulations, we'd like to offer you a record deal. And who do you fancy producing – Trevor Horn, Steve Lipson? And it was like, you know, all my heroes. And so it's a bit like a fairytale at that moment.”

Ultimately, neither Horn or Lipson was available, so Lewis ended up working on I Love You Always Forever with Canadian producer Pierre Marchand. After a while, though, she began to feel like the song was going in a direction that she didn’t like, so she ended up back in New York working with another producer, Kevin Killen.

“I’d recorded everything on my Korg M1 keyboard - the brass organ, the sequence, everything – and then when we came to record it [in the studio] he said, ‘Why don't we get Chris Botti [US trumpeter and composer] in to do all the brass section? OK, that sounds great. And we did a bunch of different things with it. But then when I went to meet with Jason Flom [record company exec] after it was finished, he said, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘I do feel it's lost the magic.’”

At this point, it sounds like frustration was starting to creep in in some quarters: “I did have a couple of people saying, 'Oh God, you're being so obsessive, Donna.’ But it had – it had lost the magic, and so he said, 'Do you know what to do?’ And I said ‘I do.’

“So we went back in the studio. We got rid of – it sounds crazy – we got rid of all the real brass. We brought in all the Korg M1 corny brass organ, everything.”

The result is that, other than a re-recorded vocal, the finished version of I Love You Always Forever is pretty much identical to the demo. “I'm glad I stuck to my guns,” says Lewis. “It was hard, you know, because you can so easily say, ‘OK, yeah, you're right,’ but it definitely lost magic, and so we brought the magic back. And thank God, you know, it did what it's done.”

In the sweltering summer of 1995, sci-fi-loving, Northern Irish indie-rock trio Ash (Tim Wheeler - vocals and guitar; Mark Hamilton - bass, and drummer Rick McMurray), rocketed to just outside of the UK top ten with their infectious indie/punk-pop anthem Girl from Mars.

Their previous single, Kung Fu, which was a thrilling, two-minute, Ramones-like homage to martial arts movies, had only reached number 57 in the charts, but Girl from Mars took them into the big time, hitting the radio just as Wheeler and Hamilton (who were both 18) were finishing their A-levels.

It proved that the Undertones weren’t the only Northern Irish outfit who knew how to get their teenage kicks with a joyous and energetic guitar pop tune.

Opening with some acoustic guitar strumming, Wheeler’s youthful yet wistful vocals asked us if we remembered the time that he knew a girl from Mars. Before going on to remind us of the tale…

We'd stay up late playing cards, Henri Winterman cigars
And she never told me her name
I still love you, the girl from Mars

With a shriek of feedback, the whole song then exploded, roaring and accelerating into a delirious, fuzzy monster.

As the song progressed, Wheeler further recalled this whirlwind summer romance with a mysterious female alien, where there’s 'electricity in the air' and 'a strange light shimmering over the sea'. Tim remembers the two star-crossed lovers spending the evening ‘Twisting all through the night on the terrace.”

Sadly, so soon after she’s arrived from space, the object of Wheeler’s desire was on her way back to Mars, and Wheeler was left staring forlornly at the stars…

Was it just a dream… and was she really from Mars?

Girl from Mars is a brilliant fusion of teenage lust, adolescent heartbreak and sci-fi romanticism that ignited indie club dance-floors and festival mosh pits that halcyon summer of 1995 and long beyond.

Wheeler wrote the song - the second single released in advance of Ash’s number one, platinum-selling 1996 debut album, 1977 - in his bedroom at the family home in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland.

Part of the inspiration came from his love of sci-fi (underlined by the album’s Star Wars release year-referencing title) which was also shared by US band Pixies.

Wheeler was an avid fan of the Boston legends, particularly their 1991 album, Trompe le Monde, which thematically had one foot in the quirkier side of UFO conspiracy theories…

“I loved Trompe le Monde - it was such a cool record”, Wheeler tells MusicRadar, adding: “It [the idea for the song] also came from Bowie and Star Wars. My sister is 18 years older than me - she was into Bowie, and her and her friend had written ‘Life on Mars’ on the wall of our rehearsal room, which had also been her den when she was a kid. So, right from our very first rehearsal, Mars was always hanging over our heads.”

He adds: “I was also looking at the TV listings and there was a film called The Girl from Mars, which was on at two or three in the morning. I didn’t watch it, or bother to tape it, but as soon as I saw the title, my mind went off and I imagined this whole story without ever seeing the film. I think it was a made-for-TV film - I’ve still never seen it. I thought it was such a good song title, and I knew I had to write a song about it.”

Another inspiration for Girl from Mars was teenage angst, which Wheeler was experiencing after breaking up with his first girlfriend. “I’d had a blissful year being 15 - I had my first girlfriend and Ash had got together,” he recalls.

“All of a sudden, we’d gone from being a real laughing stock [heavy metal] band called Vietnam, who were having disastrous gigs, but, suddenly, Ash coalesced - our ability kicked in and all the songs got better. I was really happy when I was 15, but things fell apart when I was 16 and I think I was going through depression - I broke up with my girlfriend and, after that rush of the band coming together, I wasn’t sure if things were going to happen with it.

“I was listening to Joy Division and The Smiths - that was the stuff that really spoke to me - but, at the same time, I’d seen Teenage Fanclub open for Nirvana [at the King’s Hall, Belfast] in 1992, and Ioved their melodies and beautiful chords, so I was channelling that when I wrote Girl from Mars.

“I was sort of writing about missing my first girlfriend and missing those euphoric feelings from the year before. I’d also been to France on caravan holidays with my family and little bits of the lyrics came from those trips - we’d found some cool kids to hang out with, buy tiny Kronenbourg beers and drink them on the beach. One time we found some Henri Winterman cigars, so that memory snuck into the lyrics.”

Sadly, Ash never got offered a sponsorship deal from Dutch cigar brand Henri Winterman, but, amazingly, Girl from Mars did end up being used as the telephone hold music for NASA! “That was the year it came out - I thought that was genius,” says Wheeler. “Hopefully it brightened up some people’s day, although I’m not sure who would be calling NASA.”

As well as a failed extraterrestrial romance and teenage angst, Girl from Mars is also about escapism - getting away from grey and rain-soaked Northern Ireland to visit sunnier climes.

“I guess it’s a real summer song. We’d spent most of my childhood summers going to Kerry in southwest Ireland, where we had great times, but when we went to France the weather was guaranteed to be amazing all summer. I was loving that and that fed into the song too,” says Wheeler.

Tim remembers writing Girl from Mars on a 1977 Fender Stratocaster, telling us: “I only had two guitars; I didn’t have an acoustic. I had a [Gibson] Explorer copy - I think the brand was called Artist, and it was a cheap little guitar that came with a practice amp - but for my sixteenth birthday I got a ’77 Strat for £250. Someone was selling it in the listings of our local newspaper. So, by the time I was writing Girl from Mars, I’d switched to the ’77 Strat, which was my main guitar, so I’m pretty sure I would’ve written it on that.”

The initial 4-track demo of Girl from Mars that Wheeler recorded before the band was let loose on the song is very different from the final version - it’s a jangly, mid-tempo effort and sounds a lot like its earliest musical influence, Teenage Fanclub, rather than a punky-power-pop anthem.

“That demo shows how I was seeing it to start with - a dreamy little song. I used to borrow the school’s 4-track, it was nice of them to lend it to me,” remembers Tim.

“We also used to record demos at this little studio in Strangford [Northern Ireland]. The guy there had a copycat WEM tape delay unit, which was kind of in bits, but he’d lend it to me, so I made a little sci-fi intro and outro with delay echoes - it was my first sketch and it was unusual because I didn’t often bother recording demos of songs, but with that one I felt an urge. Once we started playing it with the band, it got pumped up and sped up - there was a big jump from the demo and it took on a kind of Buzzcocks quality, which is funny because I hadn’t really listened to the Buzzcocks. I knew Nirvana were into them… Years later, we did gigs with the Buzzcocks and I was like, ‘My God, there are a lot of similarities…’ Nice chords and nice melodies, high energy and high speed.

“Once we started playing the song in rehearsals, we transformed it, and when we started playing it at gigs quite soon after that, I can remember that people would say, ‘Oh, I really like that song…’ They were singling it out at gigs, and so were close friends whose taste we trusted. That took me by surprise - I did really like the song but right from the start it was connecting with people. We’d had that with a couple of songs before but not to that level.”

Someone who had an early input into the song was Wheeler’s younger brother, Pat. “I always tried my songs out on him because his bedroom was next to mine, so if I’d written something and I was excited about it, I’d play it to him,” says Wheeler. “He’s a guy who is always encouraging and gives good feedback - he ended up being an architect, so he’s a creative spirit as well. He would offer up cool ideas - on Girl from Mars, he said I should do a quiet breakdown. That’s always been a great part of the song, especially live, it’s amazing.”

To our ears, the killer melodic guitar solo in Girl from Mars sounds like it has a Dinosaur Jr. influence, and Wheeler agrees: “Yeah - Dinosaur Jr. were a big influence on us. Right from the start of Ash, at our first rehearsal, we attempted a cover of The Wagon. I loved his [J Mascis’s] soloing. A few years before Ash, I’d wanted to be a metal kid and I was trying to solo, but I wasn’t technically very good. I liked fast bits and solos and showing off. So, when I discovered Dinosaur Jr. I was like, ‘oh - this guy has the technique, and he gets very exploratory, like Neil Young, but you can also hear a metal influence in there’. J Mascis is definitely a big influence on my solos.”

Girl from Mars shares thematic and sonic similarities with that other great punky power-pop song about interstellar romance, Another Girl, Another Planet, by late ‘70s English New Wave band, The Only Ones, which, coincidentally, also features a brilliant melodic guitar solo.

“Yeah - that’s awesome,” says Wheeler. “I’m not sure I’d heard that song at the time, but when Girl from Mars came out, I remember Bernard Butler saying that it was the modern-day version of Another Girl, Another Planet, and he meant that in a good way. So, that sent me off in search of the song and I was like, ‘Oh my God…’ ”

Wheeler had written Girl from Mars ahead of Ash making their 1994 mini-album Trailer for label Infectious Records, but recognising the surefire hit potential of the song, the band were advised by their manager and their label to hold off from recording it and to save it for their debut album proper.

“When we signed with the label, they’d heard Girl from Mars at our gigs and they knew it had hit potential, and our manager, Tav [Stephen ‘Tav’ Taverner], knew it right from the start. He was like, ‘That’s a hit, but let’s not record that for anything [yet]’. So, when we did our first Peel Session and our mini-album, we held it back,” says Wheeler.

“Between Tav and the label, they knew the song could be a hit but for it to be a hit you needed to be available to promote the hell out of it, but we probably weren’t ready for that and we didn’t have the time because we were still finishing school. So, in the end, the song came out a month after we’d left school.”

The initial recording sessions for Girl from Mars took place at the legendary Rockfield Studios, in Monmouthshire, Wales, where classic rock acts like Queen and Black Sabbath had made records - Oasis recorded almost all of their 1995 album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? there with producer, Owen Morris, who was also at the controls for Girl from Mars. Morris went on to produce Ash’s album 1977, which was also mostly made at Rockfield.

“We recorded the rest of the album six months after Girl from Mars came out. As far as I remember, we recorded Girl from Mars in the Easter holidays in 1995 - we went to Rockfield for a few days,” remembers Wheeler. “It was amazing - we’d done a session at Loco Studios [in South Wales] at Christmas [1994], where we did [the singles] Angel Interceptor and Kung Fu, but things were going well, so the label spent a bit more money on us to go to a fancier studio. Owen was in Rockfield a lot around that time, doing (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?”

“Rockfield was a nice residential studio - every room was en-suite with a jacuzzi and each room had a nice TV and there was catering; it was a very cool experience. I remember Owen got a nice groove [on Girl from Mars] - there was just a little bit of swing in it, and he made sure we didn’t race off too much with the tempo. He allowed it to be fast but with a little bit of a groove to it. I think he added something really cool. He also added some feedback drones behind it, almost like Eno, Fripp and Visconti on Heroes [by David Bowie]. Then he mixed the song and we went back to school to get ready for our A-levels.”

However, Morris’s mix was ultimately deemed as not being up to scratch.

“Between everyone, we thought it wasn’t quite as good as it could’ve been. It had a slight darkness to it - it wasn’t quite as poppy - and there were bits of my vocals that I didn’t like,” explains Wheeler. “There were a few little things that I wanted to tweak and add. I’d been listening to a lot of Beach Boys, and I wanted to add some timpani, and, between the label and our manager, they wanted someone else to have a crack at the mix.”

That someone turned out to be Phil Thornalley, who’d produced The Cure’s 1982 gloom-fest Pornography and had played bass for Robert Smith’s goth-rock outfit, but was also known for his production, engineering and mixing work with acts including Duran Duran, Thompson Twins, XTC, Psychedelic Furs and Prefab Sprout - after working with Ash, he went on to produce Natalie Imbruglia’s 1997 hit single Torn, which he also co-wrote.

“So, we went in with Phil Thornalley - I can’t remember when we did that; it must’ve been on a weekend and it was around the time of our school exams. It was pretty hectic and I don’t think we told Owen,” says Wheeler. “We were going in to do another mix of it and we added a few elements. I think I replaced the electric guitar in the intro and the breakdown with an acoustic, and we added timpani. There was a sax player who came in to do some stuff, but you can only really hear that in the outro.

“We did the additional recording and the mix at RAK Studios, in London, and then we had to do some B-sides: Astral Conversations with Toulouse-Lautrec and Cantina Band [from Star Wars]. I think at some point Phil Thornalley walked out of the session because he got pissed off about something. Maybe he thought it was ridiculous that we were doing Cantina Band or that Astral Conversations didn’t have enough of a song - it was quite experimental… I don’t know. So, Phil walked out of the session, but Owen was in town, so he came down and helped us mix Cantina Band, but, in the meantime, he found out that we’d gone behind his back and done the other version [of Girl from Mars]. It’s amazing that he came back in and helped us to finish it, but he was pissed off with us for a long time about that. It was quite mad, but I was just 18 and I was trying to keep everyone happy.”

When the new version of Girl from Mars was sent out to radio stations its infectious hyperactive energy resulted in massive amounts of airplay. It peaked just outside of the top ten - at number 11 - in the UK singles chart, becoming Ash’s first top 40 hit. It also reached number 16 in the Irish singles chart too.

“In those days, your single would go to radio about six weeks before it would come out. So, I think during the last couple weeks of me doing my exams, it was starting to get heavy radio play, and that's one of the reasons it became such a big hit - stations like Radio 1 hammered it, and so did MTV,” says Wheeler.

“We did a video straight after leaving school. I used to get in the car, drive home from school, and hear Girl from Mars on Radio 1 in the daytime - that was a buzz like no other. When I was doing my A-levels, I also had to do lots of Australian phone interviews, as things were kicking off for us in Australia.”

Two days after he finished his A-levels, Ash played Glastonbury, but despite Wheeler pursuing his rock ‘n’ roll dream during his studies, his school education didn’t suffer: “I got two Bs and a C, which was good enough to get me into university, but, luckily, I never ended up going there,” he says.

Thanks to the success of Girl from Mars, Ash secured their debut appearance on iconic TV music show Top of the Pops.

“I sang live on it,” says Wheeler, whose fellow band members performed to a backing track. “There was quite a lot of pressure on me - especially as I kicked the song off. We tried to give a lot of energy, and it was good. I think it did well and it connected, the show was huge back then.”

Since it was released, Girl from Mars has had a permanent place in Ash’s live setlist - the band aren’t one of those acts who shy away from playing what’s arguably their most well-known song.

“We’ve got enough other big singles that it doesn’t feel too different from some of the other hits, but, over the years, it’s grown in a way even more than anything else we’ve ever done and it’s stood the test of time more” says Wheeler.

“I guess I’m very fond of it and it’s connected with a lot of people. We play it at every show, and it always goes down amazingly. As soon as you play it, you know it’s going to kick off. We normally play it second to last in the main set - it’s always a real sweet spot. Over the years, we used to play it earlier to kick things off, but it seems to work nicely towards the end - it’s a nice thing to build up to. When I play it now, I sometimes think back to those huge festival slots that we had at Reading and Glastonbury - it would always go off at those huge shows.”

This October, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of 1977, Ash are reissuing their debut album as a special 2LP or 2CD set, as well as a digital version. The new editions feature extra tracks, B-sides, live versions and rarities, including a new demo mix of Girl from Mars. From September, the band are embarking on a world tour, on which they’ll play the whole of 1977, as well as other songs from throughout their career.

So, international travel is on the cards for Wheeler over the next few months, but how does he feel about space travel these days? Would he like to go on a mission to Mars?

“I would find it quite terrifying now to be honest,” he says. “I like the Buck Rogers version [of space] where you’re walking around, and you don’t need any fancy headgear and all that. Last year, we did a video for [new song] Give Me Back My World, where we were in replica space suits and it was incredibly claustrophobic. I was like, ‘wow - this is so intense…’

“I’ve read a lot about the Apollo missions, and it seems like it must’ve been so terrifying. I do like hearing about how when you’re looking down at the world how small it can look and what perspective that can give you - that sounds amazing - but going to Mars is a whole other thing; an epic voyage. I’m not sure about it at this point in my life - I’ve got kids… I’m happier to stay on Earth, but it’s nice to look at the stars.”

Ash’s 1977 30th Anniversary Edition is released on October 16 via BMG. For tour dates, visit Ash's official website.

Any emerging artist with a strong fanbase who creates beguiling and innovative music will inevitably find themselves the focus of music supervisors eager to license, or ‘sync’, their songs to film, TV, advertisements or video games.

As most musicians know, sync deals generally utilise tracks from artists’ back catalogues but in some cases, the artist has created such a stir that they may be approached directly to contribute a work-in-progress or new songs specifically for a project.

This is what happened to Lana Del Rey in 2012, when Australian film director, producer and screenwriter Baz Luhrmann approached her to contribute a song for the soundtrack of his forthcoming reimagining of F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan.

Luhrmann was one of many people who were captivated by Del Rey’s talent. He recognised that her vintage Hollywood aesthetic and melancholic glamour would align seamlessly with the role he had in mind for a song in The Great Gatsby.

The song Del Rey contributed was Young And Beautiful and it would become the signature track for the film.

It is one of the high points of her career and a composition that captures Del Rey at her most haunting and exquisite.

It is now 15 years since Lana Del Rey emerged from seemingly nowhere with the song Video Games, a baroque pop ballad that would become a viral sensation.

Her breakthrough album Born To Die, released in January 2012, cemented her reputation. Hip-hop beats and sweeping cinematic strings converged to create a spacious enigmatic sound while grainy, evocative retro footage in her uploaded home-made videos exuded a powerful mystique.

Given the cinematic nature of Del Rey’s music it was no great surprise when director, producer and screenwriter Baz Luhrmann – one of the most visually-driven, maximalist directors in modern cinema – reached out.

Seemingly, Del Rey wasn’t Luhrmann’s first choice. Speaking at BAFTA’s Life In Pictures event in September 2022, Luhrmann said he approached Prince to write the lead song for the soundtrack.

“Prince had worked on a song for six months,” said Luhrmann, “and then suddenly decided to write a new one and it wasn’t right.”

There were also reportedly some rights complications as it was a “co-owned piece”.

At this point Luhrmann and his team approached Del Rey. Luhrmann believed that her signature melancholic, glamorous, and nostalgic persona made her the perfect artist to capture the opulence of the 1920s Jazz Age and the tragic romance of the character of Daisy Buchanan (played by Mulligan).

As anyone who has read Fitzgerald’s classic novel will know, the story focuses on mysterious, enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby – played in Luhrmann’s film by Leonardo DiCaprio – who is obsessed about reuniting with Buchanan, his former lover.

When Luhrmann and Del Rey first spoke about the project, she was working on her third EP, Paradise, with songwriter and producer Rick Nowels, a longtime collaborator who would go on to work on eight of her albums, from Born To Die (2012) through to Blue Banisters (2021).

“Baz had heard something else that I did and he wanted to know if I could write some ‘memory cues’ for when Daisy was thinking back to how she felt about Gatsby,” said Del Rey in a June 2013 interview with Jessie Jessup on 102.1 The Edge FM.

Del Rey and Nowels had been working on a song for the Paradise EP, which ultimately didn’t make the final tracklist. When she and Luhrmann first met in 2012 she sang him the chorus of this song as an idea for the track for The Great Gatsby.

“And so I had an idea for a phrase ‘Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?’ and it was kind of a long phrase to fit into a song,” continued Del Rey.

Luhrmann was inspired. “I was blessed with this beautiful, if you like, kind of innocent but slightly dark track that Rick Nowels and Lana Del Rey had come up with,” said Luhrmann in a trailer for the film, in which he talks about the gestation of the song.

From the outset, Luhrmann was directly involved with the development of the song, which would become called simply Young And Beautiful.

Luhrmann approached the concept of the song from the internal perspective of the character of Daisy Buchanan, capturing her tragic vulnerability, glamour, and profound insecurity about whether love can survive once youth and beauty have faded.

He wanted the ‘memory cues’ for the character of Daisy to capture these tragic insecurities and her fear of losing love over time.

At first, Luhrmann intended to place the song at the point in the film where Buchanan and Gatsby first meet. But he then realised the song could have a greater impact elsewhere. “It becomes clear that it's actually the major love theme in the moment [that] Gatsby shows Daisy around the castle,” Luhrmann said.

Luhrmann then realised that he would need a different vocal treatment for the song, which involved working directly with Del Rey and Nowels in the studio.

“But I'm in Sydney mixing the movie and Lana’s in Los Angeles with Rick Nowels,” recalled Luhrmann in a trailer for the film. “Thank you for Skype. I mean, really, we were very effectively able to have a Skype session where Lana was in Rick’s studio in LA, I was in my little garret in Sydney, and I sat there looking at Lana.”

Moments from this session are captured in the interview with Luhrmann in the official trailer for the film. “We’re very lucky that this song found the film, and most importantly, that you’re singing it,” Luhrmann tells the broadly smiling Del Rey via Skype as she sits down in front of a laptop 7500 miles away in Nowels’ studio in LA.

Luhrmann recalled that working on the session remotely with Del Rey and Nowels was as intimate as actually being in the studio with her.

“She was tremendously responsive to direction and very good at finessing things,” he said. “And she was a bit nervous at first. She just sat down and she sang. I directed her. Rick was there. You know, I wanted her to improvise.”

From the outset, Luhrmann was involved in shaping and editing the direction of the song, even reportedly amending the lyrics slightly to fit the narrative of his film.

“Abstractions,” he suggests to Del Rey at one point as she prepares to lay down some additional vocals that can be utilised throughout the film, “things that people aren’t gonna get on a record, you know?”

Luhrman referred to these as vocal textures. “[She was] terrific at doing that,” he said. “And then when we go back into the past, they're kind of a bit dreamlike”

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine anyone better suited than Lana Del Rey to write and sing Young And Beautiful. The characters in Del Rey’s songs occupy the same rarefied world as those in Fitzgerald’s iconic novel.

The themes and atmosphere too are strikingly similar – glamour, opulence, nostalgia for an idealised past, romance, reinvention and the inherent flaws within the American dream. The Great Gatsby is also a novel of youth squandered, a theme reflected in Del Rey’s work.

Sonically, Young And Beautiful is a majestic, heartbreaking chamber pop ballad with lush piano, deep sweeping orchestral strings, cinematic grandeur, and vulnerable lyricism about ageing and unconditional love.

It is vast yet spacious and Del Rey’s warm, rich reverb-soaked vocals sound effortlessly warm and rich. “I’ve seen the world, done it all, had my cake now,” she croons on the first verse. “Diamonds, brilliant, and Bel Air now/Hot summer nights, mid-July/When you and I were forever wild.”

Listening to Young And Beautiful now, it sounds like classic, almost cliched Lana Del Rey. But beneath the sweeping orchestration and breathy, echoey vastness, sits a stunningly-crafted song with strong, memorable hooks.

Young And Beautiful would ultimately be reworked by an orchestra and the song returns time and again through the film as a romantic motif for DiCaprio’s and Mulligan’s characters.

Released as a single on 23 April 2013, Young And Beautiful peaked at No 23 in the UK Singles Chart and No 22 in the US Billboard Hot 100. Elsewhere it fared better. It reached Top 10 in eight countries, including No 1 in Russia. No 2 in Greece and No 8 in Italy and Australia.

While not all journalists were taken with the song, the critical response was largely positive. Writer Davis Berry in the Canadian journal National Post concluded that Young And Beautiful picks up where Video Games left off. Berry added that the song’s “obsession with decay and the fleeting nature of the good life certainly resonates”.

It’s worth remembering that Young And Beautiful was written in the same year that her breakthrough album Born To Die was released. For all the viral acclaim, these were very early days for Del Rey, who was still in the ascent. It’s a testament to the song that, almost 15 years on, it remains a standout track in her rich and extensive body of work.

Young And Beautiful often charts highly in retrospective polls of the best Lana Del Rey songs. In a 2022 poll in The Guardian, Young And Beautiful was ranked No 3 in a poll of 20 greatest Del Rey works.

As writer Alexis Petridis put it: “By some distance the best thing on the star-studded soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, Young and Beautiful is Lana Del Rey at her most haunting. Co-opted by rather than commissioned for the film, its saga of fleeting youth and celebrity fits its story perfectly.”

Whenever we discuss the so-called ‘loudness war’ here at MusicRadar, a key citation is often Metallica’s 2008 album Death Magnetic. The extreme volume of this Rick Rubin-produced record was the result of deliberate mixing and mastering choices, designed to make the tracks as in-your-face as possible when heard on radio - albeit to the detriment of dynamic range…

Mixing the record back then was Andrew Scheps - now universally regarded as one of the industry’s most accomplished mixing engineers. Scheps has overseen records from Adele, Green Day, Lana Del Rey, Lady Gaga and Justin Timberlake to name just a few. Back in 2008, when the loudness war was in full force, Scheps unfairly swallowed some of the criticism for the record’s ultra-extreme peaks.

With the loudness war now (largely) consigned to history, we spoke to Scheps at length about his career in 2023. Andrew reflected on that time period… and the fact that Death Magnetic in a sense was the last word in the audio conflict, as it couldn’t really be topped when it came to volume…

“I was the poster child for ‘loud’ because of that Death Magnetic record. You know, everybody hated that Metallica record that was ‘the loudest thing’. My line is that the loudness war is over because I won. And that's it. And that was the record that did it,” Scheps told us.

“I think, in pop radio, there really was a loudness war,” Scheps elaborated. “You had to be loud. But radio stations compress the crap out of everything. Everything that plays on Radio 1 is exactly the same level, it doesn't matter what level the mix was. So I think it was all a little bit inflated, and it was a lot just completely outside of my awareness… I never did anything because it had to be louder. Ever. Everything I did was always because ‘it's not feeling right’.

For Scheps, sometimes going quiet just wasn’t an option when working with Metallica; “There are people who will say ‘well just make it a quieter mix, and we can turn the volume up,’ but it's just not as simple as that. Forcing all that audio energy through a smaller hole because it's bigger? It just sounds different. It really does.”

On the recording of Death Magnetic specifically - and just how a simple guitars, bass and drum setup yielded such volume - Scheps pointed to Metallica’s technical proficiency as the real underlying engine driving the sound…

“Greg Fidelman recorded that. But no, there aren't a ton of guitars. I think sometimes people just forget that everybody in Metallica is really, really good at what they do. I mean, James’s rhythm parts are insane. His right hand looks like it's not even moving. And it's one of the most aggressive, precise things you've ever heard in your life. So two of those? That's a big machine. If you put more on there, it would actually end up getting smaller because they would just start collapsing together. So it really is just the band,” explained Scheps.

“You're so lucky to work on projects like that. It's not like they aren't still hard work. And it's not like you don't have to do anything. It's really hard work and there's a lot to do. Those mixes took a long time to get right. Songs are very long, and you have to keep people engaged the whole time, but to have that raw material? You know, it's a pretty good start.”

Read our full interview with Andrew Scheps here.

Brian Setzer says that he feels “98 per cent” and is playing as good as he ever has after recovering from an autoimmune condition that left him unable to play the guitar.

Speaking to Guitar World, the Stray Cats frontman admitted that his career was hanging in the balance, after losing the use of his hands in late 2024.

““It was the strangest thing…before you knew it I was having trouble holding a toothbrush, a fork. I couldn’t button my pants,” he said. “There was no pain, but my hands just wouldn’t work. Of course, there was no way I could play the guitar, which was pretty scary.”

Worst still. There was no off-the-shelf cure, no magic pill to make him better. What worked was his doctor’s “Plan A”.

“When my doctor diagnosed my condition, he told me there was no real cure, so it wasn’t a slam-dunk that I would see results,” he said. “But his plan A was to get me playing again.”

Setzer announced he had the condition in February 2025, and first noticed it during the Stray Cats’ tour, when his hand would be cramping up. “It feels like I’m wearing a pair of gloves when I try to play,” he wrote on Instagram. He was in the early stages of his treatment but had recuperated to the point of being able to tie his shoelaces and hold a pen.

Setzer received treatment for almost a year, undertaking a programme of infusions at Mayo Clinic until he regained the ability to hold a Gretsch guitar in his hand and fret some notes – and regain it he did.

The Stray Cats have returned with their first new material in six years, with two singles, Stampede and Teenage Heaven – and Setzer is on blistering form. The latter is an old Eddie Cochran tune, and the former has an interesting back story. It’s technically a cover, too – though a reimagining/rewrite might be a better descriptor. It was originally a super-short, sub-two-minute surf-rock instrumental by the Scarlets, which was put out on 7” by Prince Records in 1959. There was not much there but it planted the seed in Setzer’s mind.

“I heard the song and thought the guitarist was so good,” he tells Guitar World. “I said, ‘I want to play that!’ There wasn’t enough of a song there, but I loved the riff, so I basically wrote a song around it.”

That Scarlets riff is a doozie. Setzer gives it a different treatment, a little rawer and more overdriven and throaty than the splish-splash spring reverb soaked original. But it’s a strange riff, with a little something about it that reminds us of something – one YouTube commentator said Master Of Puppets.

And it is an important riff. Pete Antonio and John Sanzone laid this down in 1959. Could they credibly claim to be the first surf-rock band, beating Dick Dale to the punch? Dale did not release Let’s Go Trippin’ until 1961.

Besides his peerless rockabilly playing, this is another of Setzer’s gifts – he unearth’s classics from rock ’n’ roll history that are ripe for rediscovery.