In 1979, few rock bands were hotter than Cheap Trick and AC/DC – and when they toured together in the US they got on like a house on fire.

It was tour that Cheap Trick guitarist Rick Nielsen remembered with great affection in an interview with Classic Rock in 2021.

“Cheap Trick did theatre shows with AC/DC all over the place,” he said. “East Coast, West Coast. We flip-flopped as headliners, because we were both on the way up at that time.

“When you’re on tour together, you’re birds of a feather, and there was a camaraderie between us. We loved their band and, well, they tolerated us, you know?”

Cheap Trick, from Rockford, Illinois, played hard rock with a strong pop sensibility inspired by The Beatles. Their 1978 live album At Budokan had been their commercial breakthrough, yielding a huge hit single with I Want You To Want Me.

AC/DC, from Sydney, Australia, played hard rock, full stop. No fancy stuff. And their 1979 album Highway To Hell would be their first million seller.

Nielsen recalled: “We toured with so many bands, but AC/DC was the only band I watched every night, every show, because they were so good. I liked everything about them. They were totally unique.

“I know I’m pretentious,” he admitted, “but there was nothing pretentious about AC/DC. They were straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll. Sure, they did [blues song] The Jack, but that was about the campiest thing they did. Otherwise it was just straight rock from start to end. There was no baloney.”

Nielsen remembered one occasion when Cheap Trick were joined on stage for their encore by AC/DC’s guitarists Angus and Malcolm Young and singer Bon Scott.

“We closed that show and Angus and Malcolm and Bon got up with us and we did Johnny B. Goode together.”

The roles were reversed some time later. “I got up with those guys in Germany when we were both opening for The Who,” Nielsen said. “They played Highway To Hell and there was me – jumping around with my checkerboard guitar! That was a real thrill.”

Nielsen had great admiration for Bon Scott, and enjoyed time with him away from the stage.

“I thought Bon was the ultimate frontman. He was like a rock ’n’ roll pirate. He seemed like he was ready to swab the deck!

“And he was the sweetest guy. I remember taking him to a Mexican restaurant one night. He’d never eaten Mexican food before, and he was the only guy I ever saw have a taco with a Scotch!

“I was a drinker too, I’d have a case of beer a day, but I never got into a competition with anyone, and Bon wasn’t the kind of guy to do that either.”

Tragically, on 19 February 1980 – just three weeks after AC/DC had played the last UK date on the Highway To Hell tour – Bon Scott died in London after a night of heavy drinking.

When news of Scott’s death reached Rick Nielsen, Cheap Trick were on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, working on the album All Shook Up with the legendary ‘fifth Beatle’ George Martin in the producer’s chair.

“I was so shocked and sad when Bon died,” he said. “We were in Montserrat with George Martin, and I had my wife and kids with me out there.

“I got a call about my house back in Rockford, Illinois. It was being renovated and there had been an electrical fire and the house had burned down. And it was the very same day that I got the call telling me that Bon had died. When that hit me, I couldn’t have cared less about my house.

“That night, I wrote some lyrics about Bon, which became the song Love Comes A-Tumblin’ Down.”

This song was featured on the All Shook album.

Nielsen said of the song’s lyrics: “All that stuff about Johnny B. Goode and ‘the highway to hell’, I wrote it in memory of Bon.”

He added: “As a rock ’n’ roll singer and as a person, he was one of the best.”

One of the most frequently shared clips to emerge from last year’s headline-grabbing Oasis reunion was that of a young fan Shazam-ing the indomitable Bitter Sweet Symphony, being performed live on stage - with characteristic swagger - by Richard Ashcroft during his solo support slot.

While some of the more belligerent Britpop aficionados mocked the girl for not recognising a song that has, across the decades, become something of an indie institution, the song’s writer himself was delighted that new ears were being pricked up.

“If you don’t know it Shazam it, all new fans welcome!” wrote a gleeful Richard Ashcroft on Instagram.

The unyielding power of the Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony, driven by its strident violin motif, has demanded attention almost from the moment it was first written. Its fusion of stately strings and propulsive beat herald the message loud and clear; ‘This is an important song.’

Clearly, it retains that call-to-attention power even now, nigh on 30 years after its birth.

Although for many of us older music nerds, the contentious background of the song - and the fierce wrangle to control the song’s rights - has been an oft-discussed talking point. Yet many newcomers who discovered the song via Ashcroft’s Oasis stint are perhaps wholly unaware of the anguish that its writer has had to endure before the situation was finally (for the most part…) resolved in 2019.

The Bitter Sweet story began back in 1996, and the staggered making of The Verve’s mainstream breakthrough third album, Urban Hymns.

Prior to its recording, the Wigan-hailing four-piece indie rock troupe had all-but called it quits after the turbulent recording of their second album A Northern Soul.

With entirely different attitudes when it came to approaching making an album and building a career as serious musicians (namely, the attitude of whether heavy ecstasy use was a good idea or not…) Ashcroft found himself increasingly at loggerheads with guitarist Nick McCabe, who had taken to operating under a different working schedule in the studio.

It was clear to everyone that this tension couldn’t go on and, during the post-launch promo phase for A Northern Soul, the Verve disbanded.

“Looking back, something clearly had to give," Hut Records’ founder Dave Boyd said in an interview with Select. "They'd been together since they were 18. They were young men with lives of their own, and they needed time alone to find out who they were."

But, after just a few weeks isolating himself in his new home in Bath, Somerset, Ashcroft realised that he’d made a terrible mistake…

Quietly reconvening with bassist Simon Jones and drummer Peter Salisbury a few weeks after the split, Ashcroft set to work on rebuilding his band. More cynically-minded people assumed that Ashcroft had shrewdly used the pretence of a band break-up simply as means to extricate himself of McCabe.

Absence, however, made their respective hearts grow fonder, and a bit of distance clearly did the business. Unbeknownst to the other Verve players, Richard eventually picked up the phone to Nick, inviting him back into the fold in January of 1997. McCabe accepted.

It wasn’t just the time away that underlined Nick’s centrality to The Verve though. During the preceding McCabe-less months, the band had attempted to replace him with former Verve rhythm guitarist Simon Tong and ex-Suede guitarist Bernard Butler, neither of which panned out - news that would put a bit of wind in McCabe’s sails upon his return.

“It was gratifying when I came back that they had tried to replace me with two guys, and they couldn’t. I am the guitarist they couldn’t replace,” Nick told XS Noise. “It did work in my favour, allowing myself to feel a bit of pride because when I went back into the studio, that obviously informed my mentality that I had been brought in as a problem solver.”

With the band now fully back together, attention turned squarely to the making of album three. Thankfully, Ashcroft hadn't been wasting time. On the contrary, he'd rustled up a veritable feast of outright gems during the downtime.

Future Verve staples Sonnet, The Drugs Don’t Work and Lucky Man had all-but poured out of him.

King amongst all though, was the grand Bitter Sweet Symphony.

Ashcroft had written Bitter Sweet Symphony the previous year, amid that post-split flurry of creative urgency.

The starting point came following the purchase of one of The Andrew Oldham Orchestra’s LPs which consisted of David Whitaker-arranged string interpretations of Rolling Stones tracks (The Rolling Stones Songbook, to be precise, assembled by their infamous manager, Andrew Loog Oldham).

Ashcroft was captivated by the arrangement of The Last Time in particular, and the swelling four-chord harmony that underpinned it.

Adopting the DIY sampling ethos of hip-hop, Ashcroft looped the sequence from the track with a hardware sampler, feeling that with a bit of fairy dust, this radiant foundation could be built out into something even more spectacular.

“[It’s] essentially hip-hop because it was written by me sampling a piece of music and building on that sample. It’s a way of writing that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for hip-hop and the process they go through making records,” Ashcroft told Sirius XM.

Richard kept pushing, driven by the idea that this track could become bigger than just another song. In his own words, Ashcroft wanted it to grow into something ‘outrageous’;

“I wanted something that opened up into a prairie-music kind of sound, a modern-day Ennio Morricone kind of thing,” Ashcroft told Rolling Stone. “Then after a while, the song started morphing into this wall of sound, a concise piece of incredible pop music.”

With Salisbury laying down a propulsive live drum beat underneath, the nature of Bitter Sweet Symphony pivoted from the romantic bucolicism of its starting point to a resilient march.

With this feel of tenacity running through the music, Ashcroft’s verse lyrics channeled the semi-hopeless feeling he felt during the band’s downtime into a defiant square-up to the very notion of a life of drudgery

'Cause it's a bittersweet symphony, that's life
Trying to make ends meet, you're a slave to money then you die

For the jubilant chorus, Ashcroft alluded to freeing himself from this resigned and self-defeating mindset. It was an idea borne of the idea that circumstance (and class) can prevent great people from rising up.

“Lyrically, it touches most people on the planet,” Ashcroft reflected in a 2025 Virgin Radio interview. “Purely because of its sentiment. Often through circumstance and what we’re born into, we can become trapped within ourselves, whether that’s financially [or] in our jobs. Yet we do have so much to give.”

I can change, I can change
But I'm here in my mold
And I'm a million different people
From one day to the next
I can't change my mold

After initially laying down some demos for Urban Hymns with debut album (A Storm in Heaven) producer John Leckie at Real World Studios in Bath - and trialling Oasis (and A Northern Soul) producer Owen Morris for a few sessions, Ashcroft finally gelled with Killing Joke co-founder and Orb collaborator Martin ‘Youth’ Glover, who pushed Ashcroft to lean further into the new vein of pure songwriting classicism that was plainly evident across the latest batch of work.

Decamping to Olympic Studios in London, a future staple of most British teenager's CD collections in the late 1990s was crafted.

Despite the obvious brilliance of Ashcroft’s clutch of new songs, the demos that had been tracked prior to McCabe’s rejoining (in the midst of the Olympic sessions) were somewhat lacklustre.

At McCabe’s suggestion, the album’s engineer Chris Potter rented-in a then innovative new technology: Pro Tools. Together, they were able to cut even deeper into the arrangements.

“Some of the stuff [on the demos] was born out of loops, and the problem with using loops which is a well-known syndrome with working with computers and stuff these days, is things can get locked into four-bar segments without having any developmental interest happening in them. I had been experimenting with hard disk recorders in my time off, so I had developed a new way of working, which was liberating for me in that I could do the thing that I always did,” Nick told XS Noise.

“[Chris and I] got our hands dirty with Pro Tools on that session which wasn’t a thing back then, but it was the perfect toolset for a band like us that was semi-improvisational. Previously we had had to get it right on the spot.”

As Bitter Sweet Symphony grew, a high register string line (which had shades of Elgar and Tchaikovsky) was scored by Will Malone, who extrapolated an idea that was semi-hinted in the original sample.

He gave instructions to a 24-strong group of string players to perform the music with adjectives like ‘tough’ and ‘determined’ - in conjunction with the forthright energy of the beat. Ironically, people would later incorrectly assume that it was this original repeating violin ostinato that was the contested part of the song.

But, on one track of the mix there was indeed The Andrew Oldham Orchestra's original swelling string harmony, while the band filled a further 47 tracks with instrumental colour.

“We’ve got our own string players, our own percussion on it. Guitars,” Ashcroft told Rolling Stone. “We’re talking about a four-bar sample turning into Bitter Sweet Symphony.”

When married to Ashcroft’s world-weary lyric, the contrasting tension of the triumphant-sounding strings elevated both the urgency of the down-beaten lyric, and eased any sense of the lavish string section being pretentious. It was a perfect balance.

With its collision of high-brow pomp and Ashcroft's lyrical prognosis of the lives of the countless listeners who never had the chance to achieve their full potential - the song sounded almost revolutionary.

When released as Urban Hymns’ lead single on June 16th 1997, Bitter Sweet Symphony's frank-but-optimistic spirit jibed with a renewed sense of hope in Britain, Many were revelling in the wake of the victory of Tony Blair's New Labour after a decade of Conservative rule the previous month. Things were seemingly getting better as their official campaign anthem had promised,

Now, ‘Cool Britannia’ had its very own Land of Hope and Glory.

Bitter Sweet Symphony soared to The Verve’s highest ever chart placement of number 2 in the UK charts (frustratingly kept from the top spot by Puff Daddy and Faith Evans’ colossal Notorious B.I.G. tribute, I’ll Be Missing You). It remained in its upper echelons for a staggering three months. Even in the US, it gathered serious momentum, landing at a not too shabby number 12 on the Billboard Top 100.

The song’s iconic video, directed by Walter Stern, focused on Ashcroft striding down Hoxton Street in London, thoughtlessly barging into people and delivering the song straight down the lens of the camera, before being joined by his gang of bandmates for the song’s conclusion. It was an unforgettable visual amplifier of the song’s defiance-in-spite of obstacles theme.

The video also asserted that Ashcroft was a natural inheritor of Oasis’s prideful northern swagger.

“It was an inspired idea and look how it worked. It was amazing,” Ashcroft told Hot Press.

The Verve had come back from the brink, and were now buzzing with self-belief.

“Would any other rock band in the world make a track like this?” Ashcroft boasted to the Toronto Star. “We want to stand head and shoulders with the giants. We want to look at them in the clouds (and say) ‘Yeah it is nice up here Bob Dylan, John Lennon because I'm Richard Ashcroft. I'm Simon Jones. We're The Verve.’’

But this confidence was soon punctured by those aforementioned legal developments, which came from the representatives of a couple of other 1960s' giants…

To be fair to them, The Verve’s label (Virgin) had done due diligence and acquired the permission (the recording rights, that is) to keep the particular Last Time string swell sample in the released track. However, the Rolling Stones’ former manager - and head of ABKCO Records - Allen Klein was notoriously sniffy about samples. He gave the track a closer listen.

As Klein still held the compositional rights to the original song, Klein felt he was due some of the proceeds, as were its original writers, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Despite being a sampling-skeptic on principle, Klein’s case was built not so much on the lifted string section, but the actual vocal melody that Ashcroft employed in the song.

Klein, and a budding team of musicologists, believed it to be a half-time interpolation of the Last Time melody. A melody line that was, legally speaking, his property.

“It’s not really the sample that’s the issue,” McCabe relayed to XS Noise. “It is credited to Jagger/Richards because of the melody line, so the sample is by the by.”

After a heated legal back-and-forth, ABKCO won a lawsuit prior to the single’s release. Initially, this meant that The Verve and ABKCO would split the proceeds of the still unreleased song.

When Bitter Sweet Symphony became a generational mega-seller however, things changed.

“We were told it was going to be a 50/50 split, and then they saw how well the record was doing,'' bassist Simon Jones told the Toronto Star. “They rung up and said 'We want 100 per cent or take it out of the shops', you don't have much choice.”

With bigger financial and legal clout behind ABKCO, Ashcroft and the band had no option but to relent to their demands.

And so, from that moment on, all the publishing royalties for Bitter Sweet Symphony would flow straight to Klein. The full songwriting credit - and subsequent financial rewards for Ashcroft's most inspired piece of work - would go straight to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The Stones' figureheads themselves remaining quiet throughout proceedings.

For Ashcroft, who insultingly only received a paltry $1,000 as part of the settlement agreement, having the vast rewards for what fast became regarded as his signature song taken away was soul-crushing.

“Songwriters often talk about their songs as if they are their children and to have one of your children taken away from you has been brutal for Richard,” Ashcroft’s co-manager John Kennedy told Billboard. “He has endured it, not always patiently or in silence, but it has been terrible for him.”

There was a happy ending to the tale however, as in 2019, after multiple successive appeals to ABKCO (now in the hands of Klein’s son, Jody following his father's death in 2009) Jagger and Richards were finally contacted and immediately agreed to relinquish their songwriting credits and future share in the track’s success.

Ashcroft was delighted, still holding the Stones’ legends in high regard despite the drawn-out affair; “[It’s] a remarkable and life-affirming turn of events… made possible by a kind and magnanimous gesture from Mick and Keith,” Ashcroft said at the time.

“I never had a personal beef with the Stones,” Ashcroft told the BBC. “They've always been the greatest rock and roll band in the world. It's been a fantastic development. It's life-affirming in a way.”

It’s no surprise then, that when Richard Ashcroft now witnesses young newcomers discovering his most important song fresh, and fully oblivious to the years of turmoil it caused its maker, he’s absolutely thrilled.

“I think Bitter Sweet Symphony will resonate long after I’m gone,” Ashcroft told Virgin Radio. “I’m very lucky to have created something that genuinely is timeless. Subsequent generations are going to enjoy this thing because it’s tapped into something that’s difficult to describe.”

Legendary British actor Anthony Hopkins is set to release an album of original compositions titled Life Is A Dream, after signing a record deal with Decca Classics.

The two-time Academy Award winner for Best Actor has been playing piano since the age of four and regularly composed music for local drama productions as a teenager. Now aged 88, the Welsh film legend is finally ramping his musical ambitions up a notch.

Life Is A Dream consists of tracks from across six decades of original composing, with the recordings conducted by Gustavo Dudamel and performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Songs include Bracken Road, which was part of the composition 1947: Suite for Solo Piano and Orchestra, and My Fatherland, a nod to the traditional Welsh melodies that Hopkins grew up with in his hometown of Margam, Port Talbot.

While the legendary film star has never developed a musical project of this scope before, it's not the first time he has released his own compositions.

Back in 1986, his single Distant Star reached No. 75 in the UK singles chart, while in 2012, he released an album of classical music called Composer, performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

“Music was my first desire, my first wish,” Hopkins said in a statement. “I’ve been composing music all my life. Some of these pieces have lived with me for decades and I still find myself returning to them.”

He added: "It has been a true privilege to collaborate with the distinguished Philharmonia Orchestra and the virtuoso soloists, cellist Gregorio Nieto and classical pianist Sergio Tiempo.

"My deepest gratitude and respect go to Maestro Gustavo Dudamel, whose artistry is an integral part of this musical journey. With the graceful precision of his baton, he transformed each note with profound and indelible meaning, creating a pictorial landscape that invites the listener to feel and imagine something uniquely personal.”

On 22 May 2017, UK-based filmmaker Max Weiland visited Elton John’s spectacular 1920s villa known as the ‘Yellow Palace’, perched high on the lush, forested hill of Mont Boron overlooking Nice, which has been the singer-songwriter’s main home on the French Riviera since the ’90s.

Weiland had been invited by John and his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin to show them the video he had created for their 1971 song Tiny Dancer, which was due to receive its world premiere at that year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Weiland was one of three filmmakers selected to create videos for a YouTube-supported competition called The Cut, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of John and Taupin’s songwriting partnership.

Weiland’s video for Tiny Dancer captures the free-spirited characters of LA and is a sun-soaked homage to the Golden State. It also evokes that city’s bohemian spirit at the time.

In a short film about the making of the video, John and Taupin can be seen sitting on a sun-dappled balcony at John’s villa, watching the video on a laptop as Weiland looks on.

“Love, it, love it,” beams Taupin as he turns to face Weiland when the video ends. “The humour and the pathos you’ve got going there is just fabulous.”

“It’s so brilliant, because it sums up the LA you were writing about,” says John to Taupin. “It’s absolutely beautiful,” he tells Weiland. “It’s cinematic, it tells a story… it’s just got the essence of the song.”

For all its status as a classic song from the rich vein of Elton John’s early ’70s back catalogue, the song Tiny Dancer was actually something of a slow burner.

Released as a single in February 1972, it was the opening song on John’s fourth album Madman Across The Water (1971) but reached only No 41 in the US and wasn’t even released in the UK.

The disappointing chart performance was partly due to its epic running time of 6:12. The radio edit for the single stripped the song of its subtleties, its slow, graceful build, Elton John’s inspired arrangement and his stellar performance in the studio.

But in the years that followed Tiny Dancer grew to become one of John’s best-loved songs, appreciated in its epic entirety when embraced by FM radio’s emerging AOR format in the mid- to late-’70s.

With its stunning melody, sweeping strings and country-pop tinges, Tiny Dancer would slowly sear itself into the public consciousness.

It was late 1970 when Bernie Taupin made his first trip to the US, an experience that inspired the lyrics for Tiny Dancer.

Taupin wanted to capture the feel and the vibrancy of California at the time. In particular, he was struck by the young women around the Sunset Strip, who appeared freer, more expressive, and very different from the women he had known growing up in England.

“We came to California in the fall of 1970 and it seemed like sunshine just radiated from the populace,” Taupin told Rolling Stone magazine. “I guess I was trying to capture the spirit of that time, encapsulated by the women we met, especially at the clothes stores and restaurants and bars all up and down the Sunset Strip. They were these free spirits, sexy, all hip-huggers and lacy blouses, very ethereal in the way they moved.”

He continued: “They were just so different from what I’d been used to in England. They had this thing about embroidering your clothes. They wanted to sew patches on your jeans. They mothered you and slept with you. It was the perfect Oedipal complex.”

In the interview, Taupin stated that the song was also inspired by his girlfriend at the time and future wife, Maxine Feibelman, referred to in the song as “seamstress for the band”.

Taupin weaved elements of the people he met into the emerging song, conjuring up the freewheeling essence, bohemian style and the optimism of early 1970s Los Angeles.

In a 1971 interview featured in the US TV series Our American Stories, Elton John explained how he transformed Taupin’s lyrics into the song Tiny Dancer. John is seen seated at a white upright piano, wearing an orange satin jacket with huge yellow polka dots. He is holding sheets of paper on which Taupin’s lyrics are written.

“These are all lyrics here and I just sift through them,” says John. “There’s one that I’ve sort of done the other day called Tiny Dancer… that was the one that I fancied writing, mainly because I knew Bernie would like me to do this one because it’s about his girlfriend.”

John then takes the lyric sheet and places it on the music rack in front of him.

“I mean, you look at it and the words ‘Blue-jean baby, LA lady, seamstress for the band/Pretty-eyed, pirate smile, you’ll marry a music man’. ‘Ballerina…’ as soon as you get to the word ballerina you know it’s not going to be fast, it’s got to be kind of gentle and quite slow.”

“The way it’s written here,” says John, pointing at the lyric sheet in front of him, “is a verse, a middle eight and a chorus, then another verse, and I just ran it through and put two verses together, then a middle eight then a chorus and then back to the verse sort of thing. It happens very quickly. It sounds long but it sort of starts off…”

And then John proceeds to play the new song, going straight in on the first verse. It’s a beautifully natural rendition.

At its core, Tiny Dancer is a love song, a heartfelt tribute from Taupin to his future wife. But what is striking is John’s stunning melodic prowess in imbuing Taupin’s words with such achingly beautiful and graceful melodies. The speed at which he works is also impressive.

“Reg has to write very fast,” said Taupin in the same Our American Stories programme, still referring to John by his real name, Reginald Dwight, “because he hasn’t got the patience to spend hours or days on something, you know.”

Tiny Dancer is written in the key of C major and is anchored by John’s iconic, arpeggiated piano riff, which carries the rhythm. Much of the power of Tiny Dancer stems from its slow build. The chorus doesn’t actually arrive until two-and-a-half minutes in.

Up until that point, the song meanders through a verse and a lengthy pre-chorus before looping back, while instruments are steadily added to the mix.

Trident Studios in the heart of Soho in London was the facility chosen to record Tiny Dancer and the Madman Across The Water album from which it came. Ever since The Beatles recorded Hey Jude there on 31 July and 1 August 1968, Trident had become the studio of choice for artists such as David Bowie, drawn by Trident’s relaxed creative ethos, its Ampex eight-track recorder and its 24-hour opening times.

John had recorded his eponymous second album (1970) and its follow-up Tumbleweed Connection (1970) at Trident, and on Tiny Dancer he would once again be playing Trident’s house piano, a handmade 1898 Bechstein grand which has since attained legendary status for its bright, distinctive sound.

“I have heard many pianos in my time but I have never heard a better ‘rock’ piano than that one,” wrote Ken Scott, in-house engineer at EMI Abbey Road Studios who joined Trident Studios in 1969.

Tiny Dancer was recorded on 9 August 1971 and was produced by Gus Dudgeon.

The song features English pedal steel guitarist BJ Cole. Cole’s pedal steel glides into the mix at 0:53, just before the final line of the first verse “And now she’s in me, always with me/Tiny dancer in my hand”, before the backing choir, acoustic rhythm guitar and the rest of the rhythm section fully join in.

Another notable feature of the recording is Paul Buckmaster’s sweeping, soaring string arrangements, which first really make their presence felt at 2:45 on the chorus and remain a lush, strident force throughout the rest of the epic track.

Then there is the choir of ten backing vocalists – including prolific session musician Tony Burrows, bassist Dee Murray and John’s touring drummer at the time, Nigel Olsson.

It’s a masterful arrangement from John, beginning with an intimate piano accompaniment, then each verse slowly building the emotional intensity right up to the chorus. John’s playing anchors everything. It is both elegant and tasteful yet gutsy as the track opens up and the melody ascends.

The strings soar but never overwhelm, while the backing vocals bring a communal feel to the song. Throughout it all, the emotional impact builds.

Tiny Dancer is a song that could so easily have sounded schmaltzy but John hits just the right tone vocally. There’s a wonderfully rich quality to his vocal take and he steers clear of oversinging, delivering instead a wholly natural and emotive performance.

Despite its disappointing chart placing in the US, the song would resonate across the subsequent decades, sometimes in the most unlikely of environs.

In 1990, John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers performed his first impromptu performance of Tiny Dancer at the Pinkpop Festival in Holland and he has since performed the song at least 50 times during Red Hot Chili Peppers shows.

In 2000, Tiny Dancer received a significant renaissance when Cameron Crowe used it in his film Almost Famous, a semi-autobiographical comedy drama based on Crowe's experiences as a teenage writer for Rolling Stone.

John was pleasantly surprised by its inclusion and the subsequent renewed popularity of the track, as he recalled to Rolling Stone in 2011. “Jeffrey Katzenberg [film producer and media proprietor] called me and said, ‘There’s a scene in this film which is going to make Tiny Dancer a hit all over again.’ When I saw it, I said, ‘Oh my God!'. I used to play Tiny Dancer in England and it would go down like a lead zeppelin. Cameron resurrected that song.”

From that point on, Tiny Dancer was reinstated in John’s live setlist. In 2018, he performed the song with Miley Cyrus at the 60th Annual Grammy Awards and the following year, it was featured in the trailer for the film Rocketman, starring Taron Egerton. A few days after the trailer was released, John and Egerton performed the song live at John’s annual Oscars party.

For Maxine Feibelman, who inspired the song, hearing Tiny Dancer for the first time was a revelatory experience. In a 2019 interview with the New York Post, Feibelman recalled listening to the song for the first time in the control room at Trident Studios back in 1971.

“I knew it was about me. I had been into ballet as a little girl and sewed patches on Elton’s jackets and jeans. I had goosebumps.

“Elton was on one side of me and Bernie was on the other. That song was like having your really good friends give you the best gift you could ever receive.”

Retired singer-songwriter Huey Lewis has revealed how hearing loss has transformed his life completely.

Speaking on Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum, he opened up about his struggles making music in recent years, and detailed how he has been "basically deaf" for nine years.

“So eight, eight and a half years, and my life has changed immeasurably,” Lewis said. "I can't hear music. Music is not part of my life anymore, which is a hard pill to swallow."

The former frontman of Huey Lewis and the News was forced to cancel a tour with the band in 2018 after his hearing collapsed. At this point, he'd been relying on his left ear for decades, having lost hearing in his right ear in the early '90s.

Lewis was then diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, which impacts the inner ear and can cause ringing, dizziness and a feeling of congestion in the ear. In recent years, he's used a cochlear implant on one side and a hearing aid on the other.

"Now I'm deaf basically without the technology involved," he explained.

Raised in Marin County, California, Lewis started his career in music with the '70s Bay Area band Clover, but didn't achieve serious commercial success until after the formation of Huey Lewis and the News in '79. The band had several hits in the 1980s, including US No.1 The Power of Love, famously featured in the film Back To The Future.

In February 2025, Lewis became the first artist to be inducted into the People's Music Hall of Fame, a testament to his impact on the world of music over the last few decades.

After that landmark moment, he insisted that he wouldn't give up on producing new music.

However, this revealing interview with Michael Rosenbaum underlines just how debilitating his ear disease has become in recent years.

“It just ends up being frustrating for me when I can’t enjoy it,” Lewis said. “I can’t feel the warmth.”

It's a steaming-hot Friday once again, and that can only mean one thing… It's time for our weekly run-down of music happenings in 10-question quiz form!

Each week, we jam in the stories and test whether you – our loyal readers – have been paying attention or not.

Don't wanna miss a thing? Our quick musical quiz recap will soon have you back up to speed as to who's rocking what, where and why.

Here's this week's playlist of on-site highlights.

In 2008, Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson received a prestigious award from Queen Elizabeth II. He was made an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for services to the music industry. But as he revealed two years later, he very nearly turned it down.

He wouldn’t have been the first rock star to snub an honour from royalty. Keith Richards did so, as did David Bowie, George Harrison and Brian Eno.

But in the end, Anderson accepted the MBE, albeit with reservations.

As he told Classic Rock in 2010: “I came very close to saying I couldn’t accept it. My problem was that I was very much opposed to some of the policies of [then UK Prime Minster] Tony Blair during his regime, and my award had been decided under a Blair government.”

He added: “I’d like to think that the MBE was awarded for my efforts in having musicians’ copyright recognised, rather than for making rather too much money out of playing the flute for many years.”

Anderson is of course the most famous flautist in the entire history of rock, and equally famous for playing the instrument while standing on one leg.

In that 2010 interview he explained why he chose to play the flute in the first place.

“I started off with the guitar,” he said, “but I decided to give it up when I heard Eric Clapton, the way people are put off playing tennis when they watch Roger Federer. I found the flute gave me something very interesting melodically.”

Asked what else he could do on one leg, he replied: “I can hover in a rather interesting way!”

More seriously, he said: “Playing on one leg is a very stilling and focusing way of achieving balance, physically and mentally. And of course it’s a visual trademark, a bit of a moment for the audience.”

In the 1990s, Anderson played flute as a guest musician on albums by two similarly idiosyncratic artists – former Deep Purple and Rainbow guitar hero Ritchie Blackmore, and Led Zeppelin-endorsed folk singer Roy Harper.

In a radical departure from the heavy rock music he pioneered, Blackmore created the group Blackmore’s Night with his singing wife Candice Night to perform what is broadly described as “neo-medieval folk rock”. Anderson featured on the song Play, Minstrel, Play from the 1997 debut album Shadow Of The Moon.

Much was made of Blackmore’s eccentricities, but Anderson stated: “I don’t know Ritchie terribly well, but he’s far from dotty. He’s always had an interest in medieval music, and has cited Jethro Tull circa 1974 as being very illuminating.

“Ritchie certainly has a fondness for dressing up in what I believe they call ‘garb’. It’s a bit Men In Tights – he looks like Errol Flynn as Robin Hood. But it’s slightly tongue-in-cheek.

“Ritchie is not someone who is palpably comedic. His sense of humour, it has to be said, can be cruel. But he’s definitely not mad.”

Anderson’s collaboration with Roy Harper was on the latter’s 1998 album The Dream Society.

Anderson said that the folk influences in Jethro Tull were in part derived from Harper.

“I first became aware of folk music when I was at grammar school,” he said. “When I first heard Bob Dylan, I didn’t really take to him at all, but I was aware of this thing that was called the folk revival. It was called modern folk in the UK to separate it from traditional folk, be it Irish, English, whatever.”

He continued: “People from the folk tradition were now writing their own songs, people like Roy Harper and Bert Jansch. This was contemporary folk. That caught my attention, and Roy Harper was someone we bumped into here and there.”

As for what drew him to folk music, Anderson explained in a roundabout way: “I was immediately immersed in the world of European realities in the early days of the EU, learning that we Brits were really part of Europe – we had more to do with Europe than we had to do with the Americans, who were only third or fourth generation Europeans anyway, apart from the tribal nation conquests.

“So I always felt very connected to Europe from the early ’70s onwards. And that I think reinforced my musical inclinations. I was fond of the great composers – German, Italian, Austrian. And by extension, European folk music was something I felt more akin to than American blues.

“I still revere blues music to this day. I play things by Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson just to remind myself of where my musical voyage began as an aspiring professional musician. But I think really it’s the European stuff that always got to me.”

The Dutch DJ Franky Rizardo has withdrawn from the scheduled release of his remix of Everything But The Girl's Missing over concerns about the track's origins.

This came after the American DJ and producer John Summit claimed on X that Pete Tong had originally promised to release his version of the track, before repurposing that track and creating a remix with Rizardo instead.

Summit wrote: "Hey @petetong thanks for promising to release my missing remix with u (while doing nothing in terms of production) then jacking my remix to release with franky rizardo. release class act you are. to think i actually looked up to u too."

The Dutch artist responded by posting his own statement on X, which read: "After learning more today about the background surrounding this release,

"I’ve come to the conclusion that it no longer feels right for me to be part of it. This isn’t about taking sides or blaming anyone - it’s simply the decision that feels right to me."

He continued: "I truly wish all parties involved nothing but the best, and I hope everything gets resolved. I believe everyone acted with the best intentions, but it no longer feels like the right way for me to release my remix."

While he's hardly a volatile character, this isn't the first time Pete Tong has been at loggerheads with other artists over his remixes. In 2017, Massive Attack criticised the well-known radio DJ for covering their seminal single ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ for his ‘Ibiza Classics’ album without their permission. (NME)

"Thanks for covering one of our songs on your nostalgia nightmare roadshow. I don’t recollect you getting in touch to see if we would mind," they said.

"If you do mean to carry on coining it, why don’t you divide your nightly profit by the number of songs you murder in your set, and hand the total of that one song over to [charity] UNHCR.. It would be the least you could do."

Tong never responded to Massive Attack's criticism, and he's yet to comment on Rizardo's withdrawal from the remix.

"For now, it’ll remain a set-only track," Rizardo concluded. "At the end of the day, staying true to my values matters more to me than releasing a record."

Rolling Stones icon Keith Richards has spoken about his relationship with ex-Beatle Paul McCartney, claiming that he "really misses being in a band".

Chatting to Zane Lowe on Apple Music, Richards said: "You know I've realised that Paul really misses being in a band. And his joy of just being in that context is great. So if there's any more songs to do, I'll let you know, Paul."

The conversation came as part of the promo run for the Rolling Stones' new album Foreign Tongues, which is out July 10 and features a wide range of world-famous contributors including Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, The Cure's Robert Smith and, of course, McCartney himself.

A recent trailer posted on YouTube showed the band's three remaining members — Richards, Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood — on top form in the studio, an incredible 64 years after the group first formed.

They're joined by new drummer Steve Jordan, who appears to have slotted in seamlessly following the loss of original member Charlie Watts back in 2021.

"It was Charlie Watts that did suggest to me that if ever I was gonna work with another drummer, it should be Steve Jordan," Richards said. "I'm sure Charlie Watts is beaming down on us, so I feel good about that."

Reflecting on those studio sessions, Richards explained: "The only thing you're fighting is the room and the song, you're okay as long as you're not fighting each other. It was fun to make."

Asked by Lowe what the secret is to the Stones' longevity, Richards said: "Healthy living. Go to bed early. There's nothing like it. That's the formula: Be a good boy."

It's a formula McCartney has clearly been following himself; in 2022, he became the oldest solo headliner in Glastonbury festival history at the age of 80, and four years later, he's still going strong. According to Richards, the Beatles legend had an amazing time contributing to the new Stones record.

"I've known Paul… well basically since The Beatles started, since we started. John [Lennon] and Paul [McCartney] did a couple of backup vocals for us way back when on We Love You and Dandelion, I think way back in like '67 or something like that."

He added: "It's great to have somebody from your own era, from way back when. He's a lovely player and I'd like to do more with him."

Justin Bieber will co-headline the first-ever World Cup halftime show at the tournament final on Sunday, 19 July.

He'll join other huge global names like Madonna, Shakira, BTS, and Burna Boy in an 11-minute performance during the halftime break of the world's biggest sporting event.

Bieber said: “The FIFA World Cup brings the world together in a way nothing else can. I’m grateful to be part of this halftime show, and even more grateful knowing it’s already helping expand access to education for children around the world." (Music News)

His last comment refers to the fact that the show, curated by Coldplay's Chris Martin, will support the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund, which is raising $100 million to help children access education and soccer.

FIFA's decision to introduce a halftime show to the World Cup final for the first time ever - taking inspiration from the lavish, highly monetised interval performances seen in US sporting showpieces like the Super Bowl - has been roundly criticised by global football fans.

In response to FIFA's X post unveiling Bieber on the lineup, user Sportzz1 said: "The game is gone smh... this should be a one-off please, this is not the superball."

Meanwhile, @ehvsinner commented: "You should bother about football and not destroy it. We don't care about that show, because football is the show. The 15 minutes break is for pissing and grabbing a beer."

Fan concerns are unlikely to bother Bieber and co., whose performances at the New York New Jersey Stadium will be broadcast globally to hundreds of millions of viewers. Regardless of how the interval plays out, the backlash from supporters suggests that FIFA will be under real pressure to scrap its World Cup halftime show ahead of the next tournament.

Ahead of the release of his new album The Confuser (July 24), cult psychedelic rocker Robyn Hitchcock has spoken at length about the incredible musicians that have inspired him over his six decades in rock music.

In an interview with Stewart Lee for The Guardian, he reflected on the experience of coming of age in 1967 when Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd, psychedelic-era The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and acid-folk pioneers the Incredible String Band were all in their pomp.

"Although my prime influence was Bob Dylan, and Dylan showed me what I wanted to be, Syd Barrett showed me how I could be it," he said. "And I actually wound up sounding like John Lennon. To me, the Beatles are at the beginning and the end of everything. But my role has always just been to carry on a certain kind of music, which appeared in 66 and 67."

This remains the case on Hitchcock's new record The Confuser, which opens with 'I Am This Thing', a track that contains idiosyncratic lines like "I owe a lot to a dead man's cock / Tick-tock, I love to rock… I come at a price like egg fried rice / Every Sunday morning and it's ever so nice".

Across the project, there are strong traces of Barrett's lyricism, and of the humour that the Beatles continually revelled in. According to the 73-year-old, the focus remains on "creating a version of my existence [rather] than actually showing people the real Robyn." He suggests that across his 20+ studio albums with the Soft Boys, the Egyptians, the Venus 3 and as a solo artist, this has been a consistent thread.

At times, the tendency to hide behind his music led to moments of meanness, for example "writing a nasty song about his elderly neighbours.

"I was a self-centred, entitled little horror and arguably I still am," he says. "I've just learned to mask it more, and also I've learned to make a living out of it."

"I didn't invent this field of music, but I've perpetuated it," Hitchcock continued. "I wanted to maintain a tradition and do new work in that tradition. But the guys I worship were innovators. I'm the opposite. I'm sweeping up after them. It's like, 'Oh God, here comes Hitchcock with the broom.'"

Speaking on how he's often avoided major fame during his six decades in rock music, he added: "I always manage to dodge the extreme limelight. You know, in some ways I've avoided both success and failure. It's fantastic."

Few songs merit the term ‘power ballad’ quite as emphatically as Total Eclipse Of The Heart, the 1983 hit for singer Bonnie Tyler, who died on 8 July 2026 at the age of 75.

Tyler, born Gaynor Hopkins in the village of Skewen in Neath, Wales, had a long career in which she had a number of hits, but none bigger than Total Eclipse Of The Heart, which shot to No 1 in the UK, US and all across the world, and which, on 26 January 2026, surpassed one billion streams on Spotify.

Total Eclipse Of The Heart has everything a great power ballad needs – melodrama, bombast, massive hooks, a blistering build-up and a voice and lyrics that inspire and excite.

Admittedly, it’s all subtle as a flying mallet at times, but that’s the whole point. This is emotion writ large and it’s all delivered with straight-for-the-jugular emotional impact.

Total Eclipse Of The Heart was written and produced by Jim Steinman, who was best known for writing Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell album (1977).

Steinman had been a student at Amherst College, Massachusetts in 1969 when he wrote an experimental musical called The Dream Engine. The musical featured nudity. It also featured the line “turn around bright eyes”, which became a pivotal lyric in Total Eclipse Of The Heart.

The song had dark origins, as Steinman told Playbill magazine in 2002.

“I was trying to come up with a love song… its original title was Vampires In Love because I was working on a musical of Nosferatu… if anyone listens to the lyrics, they're really like vampire lines. It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in the dark."

Reportedly written during a lunar eclipse, the song remained unfinished when the musical was shelved. Steinman next revisited it when Bonnie Tyler contacted him 13 years later.

By 1982, Tyler had racked up four albums and come a long way from her humble beginnings in the village of Skewen, South Wales.

Born Gaynor Hopkins, she was the daughter of a coal miner and grew up with five siblings in a four-bedroomed council house. She started out as a backing singer and changed her name to Sherene Davis to avoid being confused with the singer Mary Hopkin.

In 1975, she was spotted singing in a Swansea club by a talent scout, which led to RCA Records offering her a record deal. When RCA requested another name change, she hit on Bonnie Tyler.

Her first single flopped but the follow-up Lost In France (1977) reached No.9 in the UK, No.2 in South Africa and charted in Europe and Australia.

Then, in the spring of 1977, an event occurred that gave her the distinct vocal sound for which she would become known. Tyler underwent surgery to remove vocal cord nodules and was advised to rest her voice for six weeks. One day, she screamed with frustration, which resulted in a permanent raspy tone.

“After I got my voice back, I went into the studio for the first time and started singing,” Tyler told The Guardian in 2009. “The band said, ‘Woah, your voice sounds great’. My voice was huskier than before, and had more of an edge… I had my first hit in America with my new husky voice on It's A Heartache.”

Released in 1977, It’s A Heartache reached No.1 in Spain, Sweden, Norway, France, Brazil, Canada, Argentina and Australia and went top five in the UK, US and seven other countries.

Her second studio album Natural Force went platinum but follow-up albums Diamond Cut and Goodbye To The Island fared less well, with the latter only charting in Norway.

By 1982, her career was floundering. RCA offered to extend her contract for another five years, but Tyler declined. Instead, she signed with another label and began looking for a whole new sound.

“I’d just signed to Sony and wanted to change from country rock to rock,” Tyler told The Guardian in 2023. “I’d seen Meat Loaf on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test doing Bat Out Of Hell, so I told [A&R man] Muff Winwood that I wanted to work with Jim Steinman. Muff looked at me like I was barmy and told me that Jim would never do it. ‘I just want you to ask him,’ I said.”

For her next album, Tyler wanted the production to emulate Phil Spector’s Wall Of Sound. As Spector had all but retired, she felt Steinman was the only producer capable of achieving such a sound.

Steinman initially declined Tyler’s request, but after hearing demos of her singing he was swayed, explaining that she had “the perfect voice” for the sound he was striving to achieve.

In April 1982, Tyler and her manager visited Steinman in his New York apartment, where he played her two of his favourite songs – Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Have You Ever Seen the Rain? and Blue Öyster Cult’s Goin’ Through the Motions.

Steinman wanted to gauge her reaction to these songs. Tyler’s response was overwhelmingly positive and Steinman agreed to produce her next album, Faster Than The Speed Of Night. Tyler would cover both songs on the album.

Steinman told People magazine that he wrote Total Eclipse Of The Heart as a showcase for Tyler’s voice. “It sounds ravaged,” he said, “like it's been through a lot. It's what rock 'n' roll is all about.”

He said the song was like “an aria to me, a Wagnerian-like onslaught of sound and emotion”.

A few weeks after their first meeting, Tyler returned to Steinman’s apartment, where he and Canadian vocalist Rory Dodd performed the newly-written Total Eclipse Of The Heart. The song was written as a duet and it was Dodd who would sing the line “Turn around bright eyes”.

Tyler was transfixed by what she heard. “I just had shivers right up my spine,” she told The Times, “I couldn't wait to actually get in and record it.”

Power Station in midtown Manhattan was one of three New York studios chosen by Steinman for the album, and the song was recorded and mixed in the summer of 1982.

When it came to selecting musicians, Steinman recruited some real heavyweights.

On drums was Max Weinberg from Bruce Springteen’s E-Street Band while his equally revered bandmate Roy Bittan played the iconic piano part.

Rick Derringer handled guitar duties and the line-up also included veteran Meat Loaf bassist Steve Buslowe. Larry Fast and Steve Margoshes were on synths while Jimmy Maelen handled percussion.

Total Eclipse Of The Heart is an epic emotional journey and everything about the song is maxed out. As Craig Marks of Time magazine noted in 2024, “Steinman didn’t do understated”.

Steinman built his mixes like Broadway productions and he honoured Tyler’s desire for the symphonic, reverb-laden Spector-style Wall Of Sound. Steinman and engineers Neil Dorfsman and John Jansen fully exploited Power Station's echoey stairwells for optimum reverb, while Steinman’s musical theatre background and Wagnerian strains came to the fore.

“It makes you feel like you're a Norseman in a blizzard,” observed Dr Freya Jarman, from the University of Liverpool's department of music, in an interview with BBC Culture.

In 1983, Tyler told North Carolina newspaper Times-News that the song was "a challenge [to sing]”, adding, “I like songs that need a lot of energy. It’s such a passionate song and it builds all the time… it’s incredible.”

Total Eclipse Of The Heart was recorded at Power Station while backing vocals were recorded at the nearby Right Track Studios.

In an interview with Mix magazine in 2024, engineer Neil Dorfsman says the track was cut live in studio A of Power Station with drummer Max Weinberg and bassist Steve Buslowe in the rhythm room, Roy Bittan in the piano booth and Tyler singing live with Rory Dodd in separate isolation booths. Rick Derringer’s guitar part and Larry Fast’s synth parts were overdubs.

Dorfsman told Mix magazine that Tyler and the band laid down about 20 takes of the track, which included the live lead vocals. He remembers that during the mixing in Studio B at Power Station, they literally ran out of reverb, as every reverb send on every fader on the desk was as far up as it could go, on everything but the kick drum and bass guitar.

Producer and engineer Frank Filipetti was in charge of recording the majority of the background vocals at Right Track Studios.

A “vocal tour de force” is how Filipetti described Total Eclipse Of The Heart. “Jim wasn’t as interested in adhering to traditional ways of doing things. He was always looking for something a little different. He was more interested in the emotional arc that the song was taking rather than going by the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge formula. In doing so, his music took you on a journey.”

The multiple recording and stacking of backing vocals was arduous, recalled Filipetti, but the results were worth it. “Jim really treated everyone first class, so it made all the hard work something you wanted to do.”

The track was mixed on the evening of 4 July 1982 during a 12-hour session at the Power Station’s studio B.

“You can tell from the final mix that Jim wanted the biggest drum sound to ever have been recorded,” Dorfsman told Mix magazine. “In the ’80s there was a competition to see who could have the loudest snare drum… I just remember all the faders just creeping, creeping, creeping, creeping.”

Everything about Total Eclipse Of The Heart is grandiose and it builds and builds, with dramatic shifting keys fuelling the intensity.

A plaintive piano melody intros the song, before Dodd’s sweet, haunting tenor on opening refrain “Turn around” is followed by Tyler’s soulful, gravelly vocal on the first line: “Every now and then I get a little bit lonely/And you're never coming 'round”.

After the first chorus, at 1:50, the whole walloping track powers upwards – “Together we can take it to the end of the line/Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time” sings Tyler in powerful gravelly tones.

Even from a distance of over four decades, Max Weinberg’s snare still sounds all-encompassingly massive in the mix.

There’s a depth and richness to Tyler’s voice as the song develops. It’s powerful, heartrending and defiant, and the call-and-response of Tyler’s and Dodd’s voices creates a compelling contrast.

Total Eclipse Of The Heart was released on 11 February 1983. Steinman’s theatricality made him an easy target for critics. Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Trevor Dann denounced the song’s lack of subtlety, suggesting that “Bonnie should be taken to see a Joni Mitchell concert”. The Guardian, meanwhile deemed it an “amusing, mildly camp curiosity”.

But Steinman’s theatrical impulses are precisely what make the song so thrilling and audacious.

Legendary songwriter Diane Warren – a doyenne of the power ballad who wrote or co-wrote classics such as Cher’s If I Could Turn Back Time – has nothing but praise for Steinman and Tyler’s achievement.

“It’s a perfect song,” Warren told Time magazine in 2024. “And Bonnie really conveys the drama. That voice brought Jim’s song to life.”

A shy 16-year-old Thai musician stunned the America's Got Talent audience and blew away judges, including Simon Cowell and Mel B, with an explosive rendition of The Cranberries' '90s hit Zombie.

The video of Nene Royal's performance, posted on YouTube, has already gathered over 2 million views in just a day, with viewers in awe of the teenager's incredible guitar shredding, vocal range, and stage presence.

Within a minute, she had a packed-out Pasadena Civic Auditorium (the arena where AGT auditions are filmed) singing every word with her, while host Terry Crews went wild to the side of the stage.

The song she chose to deliver has a fascinating backstory of its own. One of the biggest alternative rock anthems of the 1990s, Zombie was inspired by the violence of The Troubles, which at that point had plagued Northern Ireland for decades.

“A lot of people were very surprised at the dramatic change from Dreams, which was the last single they’d heard from us,” the band's guitarist Noel Hogan told MusicRadar. “Dreams and Zombie were completely different types of songs. But look – it worked." (MusicRadar).

Since its release, Zombie has developed into an unstoppable cultural phenomenon, with over 1.8 billion Spotify streams and enormous global reach — as this particular talent show audition proved.

"You are a rock star, young lady, you really are," said Howie Mandel, one of the four America's Got Talent who voted Royal through with a unanimous 'Yes'.

Simon Cowell added: "The tone of your voice is really authentic. Even the fact that it was all a bit messy made the audition for me really good." Meanwhile, ex-Spice Girl Mel B commented: "You've got really good vocal control and you can kill it on the guitar. You're like a match made in heaven. You're brilliant."

The 16-year-old guitar prodigy had travelled all the way from Phuket, Thailand, with her father to audition for the show. The 3,000-cap venue auditorium was by far the biggest stage she had ever performed on. (Loudwire)

"I started playing guitar since I was seven and my biggest dream is that I really want to be a superstar on tour," she told the judging panel. Their response suggests she's well on her way.

"You have a real chance to do very good in this competition," Sofia Vergara said. "That was spectacular."

U2 have teased the release of their first new album in nine years by dropping a fresh single titled Street of Dreams.

The track's official music video, produced by Jacknife Lee and uploaded to YouTube on July 7, sees the band performing atop a bus in the tight streets of Plaza Santo Domingo, Mexico City, before a sudden thunderstorm causes a generator to crash and forces them to relocate to a local's balcony.

U2's strong Mexican fanbase — which has its roots in the release of the 1987 album The Joshua Tree and the huge stadium shows which followed — play a central role in the video, while Bono plays up to the crowd with Spanish-language lines like: "La calle, calle de los sueños" ("The street, the street of dreams").

Another key element of the new U2 release is the reappearance of Larry Mullen Jr on drums. The band member temporarily left the group in 2023 and spent three and a half years recovering from major neck and back operations before making his return for 'Street of Dreams'. The most-liked comment below the YouTube music video reads: "Great to see Larry behind the kit again".

U2's new album doesn't yet have a release date, but Bono recently confirmed: "We are in the studio, still working towards a noisy, messy, 'unreasonably colour xerox album to play LIVE… which is where U2 lives."

This news came after the release of the six-track EP Days of Ash in February. The project focused on telling the stories of people whose lives were tragically cut short by conflict, from Palestinian dad and No Other Land documentary consultant Awdah Hathaleen to the Iranian schoolgirl Sarina Esmailzadeh.

According to Bono, "These EP tracks couldn’t wait; these songs were impatient to be out in the world. The songs on Days of Ash are very different in mood and theme to the ones we’re going to put on our album later in the year."

The Beach Boys were midway through their 1966 tour of Japan and Hawaii when their founder, leader and sonic visionary Brian Wilson began the writing sessions that would yield God Only Knows, a majestic and achingly beautiful paean to love that Paul McCartney has reportedly called the greatest song ever written.

It was January 1966 and Wilson’s growing fear of flying had prompted him to stay at home in Los Angeles and send Glen Campbell out on tour in his place. From January to April 1966, Wilson and guest lyricist Tony Asher worked on the album that would become Pet Sounds, the first pop album conceived as one coherent work of art.

God Only Knows would become a crowning creative achievement of the seminal album Pet Sounds, its plaintive loneliness elevated by Carl Wilson’s wonderfully emotive vocal. It is a song that exists entirely in its own space, a masterpiece that remains as beautiful and awe-inspiring as the day it was released.

By mid-1965, Brian Wilson had tired of writing songs about surfboards, hot rods and girls, and decided it was time to start writing songs for “geeks” such as himself. Freed up from touring commitments, he had time to pursue his creative visions.

Wilson and his wife Marilyn had moved into their new home at 1448 Laurel Way in Los Angeles and it was here that Wilson experienced a rush of creativity. In January, 1966, he painstakingly planned an album fuelled by the idea of “making of music for people on a spiritual level”, as he said in Keith Badman’s 2004 book The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary Of America’s Greatest Band, On Stage And In The Studio.

Wilson was a creative colossus; writing, arranging and producing the songs. But he needed help with lyrics. In late 1965 he was at a Hollywood party when he was introduced to Tony Asher, an advertising executive who had written jingles for companies such as Mattel and Max Factor. The two men hit it off and Asher visited Wilson to start work on the lyrics for Pet Sounds. They began by discussing Wilson’s interests in spiritual literature and the nature of love.

Wilson played Asher the pieces of music he had written for Pet Sounds and Asher wrote lyrics to fit the themes that Wilson had in mind. But when they got to God Only Knows, an argument began. Wilson was adamant that the opening line Asher had written “I may not always love you” was far too negative for a love song. Asher held his ground.

“I liked that twist, and fought to start the song that way,” said Asher in Charles Granata’s 2003 book, Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson And The Making Of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. “Working with Brian, I didn't have a whole lot of fighting to do, but I was certainly willing to fight to the end for that.”

Wilson’s second concern was the use of ‘God’ in the title. In the deeply religious America of the mid-'60s, using the ‘G’ word in a pop song was tantamount to blasphemy.

Asher convinced Wilson that it was spiritual and innovative, attributes that they were aiming for. But Wilson was proved right. When the song was released, God Only Knows was flipped with its B-side Wouldn’t It Be Nice after radio stations and record stores objected on the grounds it would cause widespread offence.

Given the complexity of God Only Knows, its actual creation was staggeringly quick. “I wrote God Only Knows in 45 minutes,” Wilson told Adrian Deevoy of The Guardian in 2015. “Me and Tony Asher”. But recording the song would take a great deal longer.

The Pet Sounds album was recorded between 18 January and 13 April 1966, with Wilson producing and Chuck Blitz engineering. God Only Knows was one of the last songs to be recorded and instrumental tracking began at 12:30am on 10 March, 1966. The location was Studio 3 at United Western Recorders, located at 6,000 Sunset Boulevard.

Twenty musicians were crammed into Studio 3 and many were members of the Wrecking Crew, the gifted and hip collective of LA session musicians who played on hundreds of Top 40 hits in the '60s and '70s.

Wrecking Crew regulars that day included drummer Hal Blaine, drummer Jim Gordon on percussion and renowned bassist Carol Kaye, who on this session played 12-string guitar. Carl Wilson also played 12-string that day. The bass part was played on upright bass by Lyle Ritz alongside a punchier-sounding electric bass guitar, played by Ray Pohlman.

Brian Wilson’s talent for achieving the exact sound he wanted shines through on the recording. The choice of French horn on the iconic opening motif, against Don Randi’s percussive piano chords, is inspired.

To his credit, Wilson was completely open to collaborative suggestions from the musicians on the studio floor, as is evident from audio clips of the session below from Behind The Sounds.

Distinguishing features of the arrangement include an echo-laden "clip-clop" percussion part, played by Jim Gordon on the bottom of two plastic orange cups, and Hal Blaine playing sleigh bells on every beat. The song’s iconic French horn part was played by Alan Robinson of the 20th Century Fox orchestra, who one year earlier played on the soundtrack of The Sound Of Music.

From the outset of the session, Brian Wilson was intensely focused. Three Dog Night singer Danny Hutton was at the session and marvelled at Wilson’s production skills. “[Brian] would hear something wrong, and bam 'One more time',” recalled Hutton in the 1997 Pet Sounds Sessions booklet. “I just sat there and didn't say a word. I had been in sessions where I thought to myself, they should do this and that. Not this time. I just shut up. What could I add?”

Wilson and the musicians worked fast, but the real stumbling block was the instrumental section. This is where the open collaboration between producer and musicians really bore fruit, as the audio from the session on Behind The Sounds series illustrates.

The musicians struggled to play the section’s accents and pushes in the way that Wilson wanted. It was pianist Don Randi who found a solution: “Let’s try when we get to that part, instead of playing the quarter note full, make it like a staccato note ‘bop, bop…” he suggested. It was a spontaneous suggestion from Randi that in an instant, brought cohesion.

Wilson then focused on the drums in the middle section. “Try a tom-tom one…let me hear it right now,” Wilson told drummer Hal Blaine. But it’s not the sound Wilson hears in his head. "Do a snare one," he suggested. "That’s it. Okay, let’s go".

And so it goes on. Wilson and the musicians worked fast and hard. Much of the talkback from the studio floor was swamped in echo, a result of the huge Phil Spector Wall of Sound ambience that Wilson so admired.

"Alright, Take 20' Wilson said later in the session. “One good strong take and we’ve got it… let’s play it strong, let’s go, move in closer flutes for the fade out."

And that as it turned out, was the take. The session ended at 4:30 a.m. It had taken just four hours to create a masterpiece.

Then it was time for the vocals. The first vocal overdubs were recorded later that day at Columbia Studios, with Brian singing lead. On 11 April, the band returned to Columbia but by then, Brian had decided that brother Carl Wilson should sing the lead vocal. “I gave the song to Carl because I was looking for a tenderness and a sweetness which I knew Carl had in himself as well as in his voice. He brought dignity to the song.”

Carl Wilson recalled the instructions he received from his brother, in Charles L Granata’s 2003 book Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson And The Making Of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, “[He said] ‘Don't do anything with it. Just sing it real straight. No effort. Take a breath. Let it go easy’.”

It was an inspired decision. There is a real purity and beauty to Carl’s voice which elevates the song to real emotional heights.

It was then down to Brian and Bruce Johnston to lay down the harmonies. “At the end of the session, Carl was really fried,” recalled Johnston in Charles L Granata’s book. “And he went home... there were just [me and Brian]. So in the fade, he's singing two of the three parts. He sang the top and the bottom part and I sang in the middle.”

God Only Knows was the opening track on side two of Pet Sounds, which was released on 14 May, 1966. Two months later, on 18 July 1966, the song was released as a single with Wouldn’t It Be Nice, relegated to the B-side simply due to fears over using the word ‘God’.

Much has been written by musicologists and music theorists who have sought to define what makes God Only Knows so compelling. While it can be diverting reading, nothing strips away the majestic brilliance of a song faster than dry academic analysis of its structural merits.

But broadly, one of the song’s major melodic strengths is that it seems to be in two keys at the same time – E major and A major. “It’s not really in any one key,” Wilson is quoted as saying in Paul Zolla's 2016 book. “It’s a strange song. That’s just the way it was written. … It’s the only song I’ve ever written that’s not in a definite key, and I’ve written hundreds of songs.”

The moving percussive bass part plays a strong role in elevating the song’s emotional core. God Only Knows builds and ascends, and it keeps promising and delivering more. Hope, yearning, sadness, joy, love and longing are among the powerful emotions it evokes.

One person who was deeply affected by the song was Paul McCartney. In 2002, at a benefit concert in Los Angeles, McCartney was invited to perform the song live with Brian Wilson. “I’ve actually performed it with him, and I’m afraid to say that during the soundcheck, I broke down,” recalled McCartney of the night. “It was just too much to stand there singing this song that does my head in and to stand there singing it with Brian.”

In an interview with BBC Radio 1 in 2007 McCartney spoke again about his admiration for the song: “God Only Knows is one of the few songs that reduces me to tears every time I hear it. It’s really just a love song, but it’s brilliantly done. It shows the genius of Brian”.

• Interview: Brian Wilson on Beach Boys hits, The Beatles, bass playing and more

People often speak about left and right-hand technique but for Carlos Santana playing the guitar is an act of mind, body and soul.

He made his bones in the San Francisco music scene of the late ’60s, his cresting genius consecrated with a legendary afternoon performance at Woodstock, whereupon he leaned into the psychedelic dimensions of an ill-timed acid trip to deliver a jaw-dropping set, bejewelled by a helter-skelter jam during Soul Sacrifice that opened up rock’s third eye to musical possibilities beyond blues-inspired sounds.

You can spot his guitar playing within seconds – the warm, quasi-horn tones of saturated overdrive, the conversational phrasing and instinctive modulation between major and minor. And yet it it somehow accommodates all who collaborate with him – a trick he pulled off to brilliant effect back in 1999 with the star-studded, multi-million selling Supernatural.

African rhythms, Spanish guitar, Miles Davis and John McLaughlin, Hendrix and Beethoven – for Carlos, it is all one continuum.

A true artist, he says, takes inspiration from it all. “As a musician, you have the nutrients and ingredients of many things in one note. In one note, you hear infinity’s breath.”

He might speak in spiritual allegories but the inference is clear. If you can put your heart and soul into one note you can do it with all of them.

In a 2021 interview with Total Guitar, he discussed his singular approach to music and life.

Collaboration is a spiritual thing

“When I was in the studio, in 1972, with John McLaughlin doing Love Devotion Surrender, it dawned on me that he trusted me, and he saw something in me that I was trying to see in myself. He saw something in me that Miles Davis saw in him.

“So there is a spirit in you that can complement anything that gets in front of you. It seems that the intangible becomes the tangible around me.”

Learn to take inspiration from all art, not just music

“Some people might scratch their heads and say, ‘What the hell’s he talking about!?’ But the best music that I ever heard is outside of time. Whether it is Beethoven or whether it is Jimi Hendrix or John Coltrane, time and gravity disappear when you hear that frequency, sound and vibration from those musicians.

“And you can’t practise that. You can only get out of the way and let the spirit take over your fingers and your mind, and articulate a language of light.”

Look beyond the guitar

“While everybody was experimenting with pedals I was getting closer to Aretha Franklin. I was playing my guitar to [Aretha’s classic album] Lady Soul, or Mahalia Jackson, or Billie Holiday, or Dionne Warwick. I wanted it to sound like a female. I wanted my guitar to sound like the voice of my favourite singers – Nina Simone, Etta James, or Tina Turner.”

Do what Miles Davis tells you

“One day, I was in an elevator with Miles Davis, and he said, ‘Hey, do you got a wah wah yet?’ ‘No, I don’t play a wah wah.’ He says, ‘I got one!’ I say, ‘You’ve got a wah wah pedal?’ ‘That’s right! You gotta get a fuckin’ wah wah!’ Miles is the one who told me to get a wah wah pedal.”

Chase melodies if you want to your music to last

“That comes from following and learning African music, call and response – y’know, like church music. ‘Somebody say Amen… Amen! Hallelujah!’

“So, yes, I learned to respect the singer, never to step on the phrasing of the vocals. While some people practise what they want to practise, which is either chords or theory, or harmony, I practise making melody become eternal, because when you go home after a concert, what you are going to remember is how that melody made you feel.”

Talent borrows, genius steals

“There are times when I hear my brother Sting quote Spartacus: ‘Do-dee-do/do-dee-do/do-dee-do-dee-do-dee…’ And that’s because the theme from Spartacus is very, very haunting. Great musicians quote other melodies that make time stand still.”

Free your mind and the rest will follow

“I grew up in San Francisco around ground zero for consciousness revolution! Which was Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and a lot of bands like that.

“Me being a teenager growing up in San Francisco, I also discovered Mongo Santamarìa, Miles Davis, Bola Sete. The way that Michael Bloomfield and Jerry Garcia articulated East-West by Paul Butterfield, this was like hippie music, like The Doors. It was like discovering Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan, and blending it with John Lee Hooker.

“And so I thought, this is fascinating! This is like alchemy – combining John Lee Hooker with John Coltrane? What a concept!

“Discovering Spanish music, or discovering Segovia, Paco de Lucìa, and many more of course, there is something very masculine about Spanish music. It is very masculine! Which, for me, is a perfect blend because I grew up listening to Aretha and Dionne Warwick, and so the perfect blend of feminine and masculine is very sexy!”

Find a guitar that works for you

“Paul Reed Smith convinced me that he was on the crest of creating something. At that time, there was only two, maybe three guitars that I liked – Gibson, Fender, and I never, with all respect, got into the Gretsch guitar sound. I didn’t feel like I wanted to create melodies with that, but it was easier for me to articulate with Gibson and Fender.

“Paul convinced me that he was creating another element, that it was a different voice, and God bless his tenacity to pursue something with such passion because he became, right there, in the middle of those three – Gibson, Fender, Paul Reed Smith, Gretsch. There are other guitars, such as Yamahas, but the top three are Gibson, Fender and Paul Reed Smith.”

Bruce Lee was right – you’ve got to be like water

“The more you focus on your spirituality, the easier it is for you to complement anything that gets in front of you. I don’t want to be anything but water, like [martial artist and actor] Bruce Lee said, because water quenches the thirst and it goes with everything.

“Sooner or later, you’ve got to drink water. You can drink whisky, bourbon, Scotch, tequila, but sooner or later you’ve gotta drink water. Water is pure and is life.

“Living water is spirituality, so with John McLaughlin we both focused on spiritual discipline. It is more exciting to become happy and forever young – like Bob Dylan says! – with purity and innocence, pursuing The Doors, and pursuing John Coltrane, and pursuing John Lee Hooker. If you stay like that then you will achieve your goal to be eternally relevant.”

Not everyone can play at high volume

“I was looking for a sustain like Peter Green on Supernatural. I was looking for a voice. It always comes down to a voice.

“I have only heard one person outside of Jimi Hendrix that could play with that volume with Marshalls. Cream was there. Led Zeppelin was there. Jeff Beck was there. But with respect to all my brothers, only Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray [Vaughan] found another way of articulating with this galactic sound!

“It’s not easy to sculpt beauty at that volume. It’s kind of like John Coltrane, when he starts scaring people, with sheets of sounds. Sometimes, it’s almost like it’s too much for your brain to take in. That’s why they say, ‘It blew your mind.’ That’s where that came from. Jimi Hendrix blew everybody’s mind.”

Use the energy in the room

“Tension is always a good thing, especially when you create vibrant energy. Vibrant energy gets rid of boringness, and predictability.

“Only boring people are bored. All the people who are bored are boring people. People I know are never bored because they are always striving and searching for a new way to enter the unknown and unpredictability.”

To thine own self be true

“What I have learned is that I am always teaching what I need to learn, and what I need to learn is always honesty. Be truthful, be sincere, be authentic, be individual, and play music to bring hope and courage.

“Anybody can learn from books, scales and chords and all kinds of things, but the thing you cannot teach is something that you have already but you have to learn how to bring it out. It’s like John Lee Hooker said, ‘It’s in you and it has to come out!’”

A good example of what Carlos Santana means when he alludes to Bruce Lee and being like water is the ability to inhabit different musical styles at the same time, taking a magical mystery tour through electric blues, through Latin and jazz styles. One way he does that is augmenting traditional blues and rock pentatonic scales with the Dorian mode, and using this to inform his chord progressions and solos.

You can hear how he uses this in action on his signature cover of Tito Puente’s Oye Como Va and Evil Ways.

Santana will often use a I-IV minor to major chord progression; for instance, in A minor, he might play an Amin7 then follow it with a D major.

Indeed, grab your guitar and alternate between those two chords and you’ll start to make sense. Or as Carlos says, the spirit will take over your fingers, and will hopefully do the rest.

Santana’s rig is pretty simple and yet pretty much impossible to replicate. Even if we had the money, there’s no guarantee we could find the amplifiers, because he runs his signature PRS into some bona-fide unicorn amps – a Dumble Overdrive Reverb, Bludotone Universal Tone heads, not to mention his original Mesa/Boogie.

Typically, there’s not much on his pedalboard, maybe a Real McCoy Custom RMC4 wah pedal – in case Miles is checking in on him on from on high – and a custom line driver from Pete Cornish.

It’s all about the sustain. How can we replicate this?

Well, the guitar is not too much of a problem. The PRS SE Carlos Santana is widely available for around 700 bucks, and it is superb.

Amp-wise, we’d say get an affordable tube amp such as a Laney Cub-Super12 (we’re talking £399 street) and stick a boost or overdrive pedal such as a Fender Santa Ana (£149) in front of it until you have just enough saturation for that warm, trombone-like sustain.

Don’t forget a decent tuner. Santana is meticulous about his, and uses Peterson Strobe tuners.

U2 were already a big deal in 1984 - 1983's War LP and its global tour, which also spawned the band's well-regarded live album Under a Blood Red Sky, had made the Irish band one of the world's hottest, if not hippest, tickets.

But it was The Unforgettable Fire that pointed the way to the band's record-breaking future as Steve Lillywhite's upfront rock production gave way to Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno's more nuanced soundscapes.

Eno, in particular, seems to have struck a career-chord with The Edge during the album's Slane Castle sessions. "He's not a great keyboard player, he doesn't write great songs really, he doesn't have the craft that say Bowie has to write a song, or Paul McCartney,” he told One-Two Testing magazine in 1984.

"His engineering and technical abilities are limited as well. In fact, he knows very little about an awful lot, but it's how he applies that knowledge.

"I suppose it's down to confidence, too."

That pragmatic creativity was something The Edge took confidence and inspiration from, as he'd told Hot Press the year before:"I could see how Eno had shaped his career not around any one particular overriding talent but through a collection of, I suppose you would say second-rate, abilities.

"But the way he used them, that he'd been so determined to follow the areas in music he found stimulating to create a career - that must be totally unique.

"Now I don't think I'm a particularly talented guitar virtuoso. My talent if it's anything is my approach to the guitar by the use of effects, by non-acceptance of the usual approaches to the guitar".

There were other, similarly pragmatic forces behind the U2 man's signature style, which was well in place pre-Eno, though.

Back with One-Two Testing: "My guitar style has always been the product really of the rest of the group. Adam is a very ostentatious sort of person, y'know, very extravagant, so when he started playing bass he wasn't interested in taking the bottom end of the sound spectrum at all.

"He wanted to be right up there in the mid-ranges, so his bass sounds were always extremely full with a lot of top end — very different to say Simple Minds or any of the other bands around that era, the Bunnymen or anybody like that.

"In order to give the group any sort of clarity, therefore, I had to stay away from the bottom end of the guitar as much as I could. So I tended to work around those high chords, that ringing sound...

"So when we started writing our own songs it just developed, this style of using high chords with that sort of ringing quality, not particularly rhythmic but more just a harmonic wash over little hook lines picked out within the songs, essentially very much as it is now.

"Then we started making a bit of money on gigs so I bought an echo unit and various other boxes, and most of the other boxes I discarded very quickly. I hate effects, the kind of things that jump out at you."

"I'm not an incredibly versatile guitar player, but I've made best use of what limited talents I have. I think my talent is possibly applying my abilities in a new way, so that could be production, it could be songwriting, it could be guitar playing, it could be anything. I enjoyed Eno because I could see he did that as well."

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Following the release of her fourth studio album Creature of Habit, Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett has opened up about her experiences recording the album, showering praise on one collaborator in particular: Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea.

“He is just such an incredible musician. The way that he approaches music, he’s so full of love," she said, speaking on the Kyle Meredith With... podcast (LPM).

Barnett also spoke about the experiences living and working in Los Angeles, a location that has allowed her to meet a range of other creatives and seek new sources of inspiration. Her focus on Creature of Habit was never to capture "bright sunny LA" but she claims the city seeped into the record in a "more metaphorical" way.

“I feel grateful that I have moved around a fair bit in my life and I get to kind of experience these different pockets of communities," she said. "You learn a lot from those things.”

In recent years, Barnett has received her fair share of critical acclaim, including being named in MusicRadar's Top 10 Alternative Guitarists following the release of her third album, Tell Me How You Really Feel.

The impressive list of musicians who contributed to Creature of Habit underlines how much respect she has garnered across the industry. As well as core collaborators like Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa and bassist Zach Dawes, she also worked alongside artists like vocalist Waxahatchee (Katie Crutchfield) and synth player and producer Sam Shepherd (aka Floating Points).

That's not to mention Flea, who played bass on the song One Thing at a Time and whom Barnett clearly has nothing but respect for. Of that track, she enthused: "It's a real fun one to play."

On Flea, she added: "He was so connected and so present the whole time. You can just tell when someone lives and breathes music. There’s just a lot of heart in the way that he plays.”

For most of us, the idea of having a global smash hit is a pretty alien concept, let alone the accompanying fame and fortune that goes with it. For Kylie Minogue, it’s almost as though she has never known any different.

Her formidable rise from 17-year-old Australian soap star to global pop sensation was nothing short of stratospheric, in part thanks to her success with the production outfit PWL (A.K.A Stock, Aitken and Waterman) during the late 80s.

The pure-pop sensibilities of I Should Be So Lucky defined the hooky calling cards of her early career. Those cards were ultimately trumped during a writing session/collaboration between Cathy Dennis and Rob Davis.

This brisk creative surge resulted in the extraordinary Can’t Get You Out of My Head – the song that ultimately would became the biggest selling of her career, with over 6 million sales.

Even more bizarre, the pre-Kylie demo of the song was originally pitched to pop act S Club 7’s management and Sophie Ellis-Bexter, with both acts turning it down.

While we should always admire the creative force of such fine musicians, The song's quick gestation also underlines the straightforward simplicity at the heart of the song’s arrangement, which was later bolstered in the studio.

“I always feel that Can’t Get You Out of My Head shouldn’t have been the hit that it was - it was written in about two-and-a-half hours,” Dennis recalled in an interview with Music Week. “There have been lots of songs that have been easy to write over the years, but it was probably one of the quickest, if not the quickest, sessions I’ve ever done in my life.”

With influences such as Bronksi Beat and Kraftwerk ringing in their ears, the pair set about creating a basic foundation, which involved a minimal amount of equipment.

At the very heart of the track - and generating the vast majority of the sounds employed - is the Korg Triton. The drums, shaker and bass organ sounds were all supplied by the Triton, as were the strings and Wurly sounds too. Backup support was provided by an Akai sampler, which was used for a basic drum/percussion loop, while a Roland Alpha Juno-1 provided a secondary bass part.

“The whole Kylie record was done on the Triton,” he confirmed in an interview with Sound on Sound. “The hi-hats, bass drum, snare, that's all off the Triton. There's another hi-hat off the Triton, a loop which was out of the Akai [sampler], and I think the shaker was off the Triton too.”

Despite the lack of overt guitar presence on the track, guitarist Rob Davis still managed to employ some guitar-like philosophy when constructing the chords used in the song. There are plenty of extensions used throughout, albeit played on keyboards.

With the music in place, the lyrics came quickly. Following a quick loo break…

“I remember going for a wee, and it was quite an inspirational one!” Cathy told Music Week. “I came back and a lot of lyrics fell into place quite quickly. Then we worked on the second verse together and then I came up with the, ‘la, la, la’ thing just before I was leaving and that was it.”

Cathy explained to PRS for Music that the ‘la, la, la’ motif came out of a need to pepper up the developing arrangement with more hooks; “We had the “Can’t get you out of my head” bit and we had the bridge, but it needed another hook and that was the ‘la-la’s. We knew it didn’t need another lyric, so I just went ‘la, la, la…’”

Let's take a closer look at the winning combination of harmony and melody that Dennis and Davis concocted then. The introduction and verse both make use of the most simplistic form, employing just two chords.

Centred around the key of D Minor, the song begins with a chord of Dm, for 2 bars, before the dominant chord Am is used, also for two bars.

The set-up in the voicing is particularly interesting, and largely down to the dominance and use of the bass organ sound. This sound places a particular emphasis on the 5th of the chord - in a chord of Dm this is the note A, and in a chord of Am, the note E. It's a similar technique used by Kraftwerk in their song The Model, but created using synths, instead of the bass organ sound.

Given this 5th-heavy construct, you could be forgiven for thinking that the chords employed are just open chords, but it is the additional riffs and voicings around this riff that provide the extended harmony by way of arpeggiation.

These additional notes change the character of the chord, ostensibly turning them both into minor 7ths - Dm7 and Am7.

The use of extensions becomes even more exaggerated once we hit the second verse, with the entry of the Wurly. The Am7 is pivoted into an Am9, also in an arpeggiated form, which continues to be employed as the song develops.

At the end of the second verse, we hear the pre-chorus bridge for the first time, which reveals a curious collection of chords, which similarly demonstrate Davis’s guitarist tendencies.

Relying on a chord per bar, we hear a flow of Bbmaj7, A, G#dim and A.

The use of Bbmaj7 adds a degree of sweetness to proceedings, while G# diminished is well-regarded as a perfect linking chord - engineering a degree of uncertainty ahead of the chorus.

To finish this section, we hear a chord of Gm7 for 2 bars, finishing with Asus(4) which resolves to A, before heading back to the original Dm and Am sequence. Neat.

The Triton-generated rhythm is suitably four-square; the kick plays 4-to-the-floor, with the occasional dramatic stop. The snare plays on beats 2 and 4, and is emphasised further by claps on beat 4. The hi-hats and shaker subdivide in 8th notes, which is about as simplistic as a drum pattern can be!

The rhythmic side of the track also relies heavily on influences from house music - the relentless presence of the offbeat bass part is the key example. The coupling of the bass organ sound with synth bass stress that club-leaning flavour.

Subtler elements of the mix add much to to the track's glacial, otherworldly feel.

We hear both synth and Wurly arpeggiations, while a high string line glides slowly over the top. There is also the iconic resonant synth sweep, which appears in the chorus. Unlike all the other instrumentation, it does so with a quaver push. This means that it is placed an 8th note ahead of beats 1 & 3.

Those vocal ‘la, la, la’s’ act as a linking section in the introduction and also between verses one and two. The recurring motif also makes several appearances later in the song.

The ‘la’ emphasises the minor 3rd of the Dm chord, endorsing the minor tonality, but in a slight mirror image of the bass/organ arrangement, the ‘la’s’ are also performed a 5th higher, meaning that as as well as as the note F (the 3rd of Dm) we also have the note C, which enforces the 7th of Dm7.

When listening to the track, the upper part sounds very slightly behind the lower part, which suggests to us that some form of pitch-shifter may have been used to create this effect. Having said that, Dennis has mentioned in interviews, that they also sampled one of Kylie’s ‘la’s’, which was then triggered over MIDI.

“None of the sections in the song conform to the typical verse-chorus structure,” Cathy said about the arrangement to PRS. “They’re misplaced sections that somehow work together, and that’s because we didn’t try to force any structure after the event. The seeds were watered and they very quickly sprouted into something bigger than any of us.”

For the first time in many years, there was an incredible buzz around Kylie Minogue following the release of the song in September 2001. Imbued with both a greater sense of sensuality but also a more musically-conscious maturity, the track - and its iconic, futuristic video - reignited Minogue's career. It reached No 1 in upwards of 40 countries.

Kylie’s star is still burning bright to this day, with 2023’s monster hit Padam Padam and a recent spotlight Netflix documentary keeping Kylie firmly in the public eye.

Examined as a song on its own merits, Can’t Get You Out of My Head is a fine example of what can be done with a basic amount of equipment, a simple set of chords and, well, a wealth of creative talent from Dennis, Davis and Minogue.

“I have never written a song that quickly and stopped myself interfering with it later,” Cathy told The Gentlewoman. “Normally, when something comes out, you have to pick it to pieces, and… I don’t know why, but that day I just didn’t feel like pulling it apart.”

Figures from across the world of music have spoken out in support of Yorkshire musician Yungblud after he shared a heartfelt Instagram post detailing his recent mental health struggles.

The Doncaster artist, real name Dominic Harrison, posted a video of himself addressing fans during a headline set at his Czechia-based festival BludFest 2026 on June 27.

He told the crowd: "Lately I have felt so disconnected from everything. I have been trying my best to wake up every day. I have felt in pain a lot and I don't know why, for a long time. But every time I find your faces, every time I find your eyes, every time I look at you, I know I belong somewhere."

In a longer caption posted alongside the video, Yungblud wrote: "Recently, I’ve been really struggling and this moment is a byproduct of my body releasing the wave of emotion that has hit me in the past year that I’ve been unable to process. I’m not gonna lie to you when I got off this stage I felt elated but 20 minutes later when I was in the shower on my own I had a breakdown."

"In the past 10 years I’ve been on a million different journeys tried a million different sounds trying to figure out who I am or what I can mean to the world everyday whilst the world shouts back.

"The amount of hate and disbelief around me from strangers on the Internet or bitter musicians really weighs on my heart as all I’ve been trying to do for the past 10 years is spread love, build something I believe in and unify people in a safe space."

The 28-year-old also referenced a recent article that attempted to debunk widespread accusations that he is an "industry plant" who owes his success to label support and experienced management (Blunt Magazine).

The article wrote: "First releases. Small rooms. Warped Tour. Support slots. Fan photos. EPs. Albums. Sold-out dates. Fan accounts. No.1 albums. BLUDFEST. Then Ozzy. Then the wider world finally caught up. That is not a clean corporate launch. That is a public build."

In the comments under Yungblud's Instagram post, a wide variety of artists backed up that claim. Scott Ian of metal band Anthrax commented: "I stood side stage at BTTB [Back To The Beginning] and watched you breathe rarified air the way you elevated Changes. You’ve earned it all Dom. Cheers brother."

Paloma Faith added: "Mate…. I feel you. Anyone who can live in this world right now and feel ok is not right in the head. It’s a mess…. Empathy drains out of this world like waste. But it’s not waste. It will come back. Be kind to yourself … it’s not you. It’s this messed up world and all its injustices."

Meanwhile, US pop superstar SZA replied: "rooting for you" and Sheffield band Reverend and the Makers commented: "Keep going lad. South Yorkshire vibes".

With that range of voices coming out in support of the young musician, it's clear his message is cutting through.

There are guitar players, and then there is Joe Satriani, a man for whom the epithet ‘virtuoso’ is something of an understatement. Satch – or as he is more ridiculously known, Professor Satchafunkilus – is the guitar player’s guitar player.

In a varied career, he has made 18 solo albums, performed with singer Sammy Hagar in and out of rock supergroup Chickenfoot, played as a touring guitarist with Mick Jagger and Deep Purple and worked as a tutor for a number of famous rock guitarists, most notably Steve Vai and Metallica’s Kirk Hammett.

In a 2010 interview with Classic Rock, Satriani told some of the funnier stories from his life in music, and began by discussing his attitude towards vintage guitars.

He laughed: “Don’t you hate that, when someone starts telling you they’ve got the original screws for a ’62 Esquire? Actually I keep pretty tight-lipped about all that stuff. I just want to play. I’m more concerned about writing a good song.

“Having said that, I do appreciate the idea that only a special tool will work for a special job, and sometimes you do need that ’66 electric Fender 12-string! If you’re reading an article about Jimmy Page and he happens to let slip the guitar he used on a song that you think is the Holy Grail, you have to play that thing!”

Satriani recalled the guitar lessons he gave to Kirk Hammett – first, when Hammett was a raw and undiscovered teenager, and later when he was an established star with Metallica.

He explained: “In the beginning, Kirk knew exactly what he liked, which is so important. He was into Stevie Ray Vaughan, Hendrix, Uli Jon Roth, Michael Schenker.

“I taught him music theory and it was up to him to decide what to use – that was the key to my lessons.”

Asked why Hammett was still taking lessons from him in 1988, four albums into Metallica’s career, Satriani replied: “Kirk is a very smart individual. He always acted on what he felt he needed to do.”

He talked about the importance of finding your own identity as a guitarist.

“Really, personality has so much to do with what you play,” he said. “The one thing I can do that nobody else can is be myself, and write those weird songs that I write. I don’t know if that’s a good thing.”

Satriani also confessed to two of the most embarrassing moments in his career.

He recalled – in detail – the worst review he ever had.

“I remember this so vividly,” he said. “It was 1987, and Surfing With The Alien [his second solo album] had just come out. Every morning I’d go for a cappuccino at this little café, and I read a review of my album in a magazine.”

He elaborated: “This guy did not like me, did not like my guitar playing, and did not like the music. He said it was the worst record he’d ever heard, and finished by saying that if you’re one of those people that likes to fill up the back of a pickup truck with a case of cheap beer, drive into a parking lot alone, turn up the music and get drunk, then this is the record for you. When I read that I peered over the top of the magazine to see if anyone knew that I was the culprit!”

He also admitted to one major artistic failure during the sessions for his classic 1989 album Flying In A Blue Dream.

“There was a song I wrote for the Flying In A Blue Dream record,” he said. “I spent hours in the studio, went through three bass players, pummelled it to death! I just couldn’t make this song work until finally I realised it was the worst piece of crap ever.

“I probably spent $10,000 trying to get it to work. That’s a lot of money!”

It is the Telecaster’s 75th anniversary, and Fender is keeping them coming, the latest finding Jim Root’s signature Tele refinished in Shoreline Gold. And he loves it.

“Fender guitars have been a cornerstone of my rig since the earliest days of Slipknot and continue to be today,” he says. “Seeing my signature model in Shoreline Gold gives it a completely fresh character. It’s the same guitar I’ve relied on for more than two decades, but this new finish makes it feel exciting all over again.”

Yes, of course, he does. Because Root is nothing if not a traditionalist, and Shoreline Gold is one of the truly old-school custom colour finishes from the Fender paint room, one of some 14 colour offerings in the 1960 custom colour chart (alongside the now familiar Daphne Blue, Sonic Blue, Olympic White, et al).

Spend any time with Root talking about guitars and he will invariably start talking about Persol sunglasses, Levi’s, Marlboro… And so on. Classic brands. He loves it. And the Telecaster fits in with that ethos.

His signature model, however, has had some modifications. This is not a 1951 Blackguard. We’ve got a mahogany body for starters, with a slightly sculpted neck heel, a belly cut for comfort.

The neck is maple, bolted to the body, kind of traditional in that sense, and yet it is carved into a slim Modern C profile, topped with a 12” ebony fingerboard – the kind of fingerboard you’d more regularly associate with a Gibson Les Paul Custom if it weren't for the more subtle dot inlays. Also, this comes with 22 jumbo frets.

The pickguard is black, single-ply, but look at the controls. There’s only one volume control, a skirted black plastic Strat-style knob, a three-way pickup selector, and they don’t sit on a metal plate as they do on traditional Telecasters.

Traditional Telecasters also don’t have active EMG humbuckers, like the 81/60 at the bridge and neck positions here. Or the six-saddle string-through bridge. Or locking tuners. Or the Bi-Flex truss rod that is adjustable at the headstock.

Wait, what was that about Jim Root being a traditionalist? This is quite far removed from the kind of thing James Burton played. But then James Burton didn’t play Psychosocial for fields full of people who self-identify as maggots. You need something a little more agricultural for that.

Previously available in white, this looks the part in Shoreline Gold.

Available now, for a limited time only, the John Mayer-approved Jim Root Telecaster is priced £1,599/$2,099. See Fender for more details.

In response to the rise of the controversial AI-generated band The Velvet Sundown, TV writer/producer Simon Blach has formed a rival tribute band made up of real musicians, named The Bootleg Velvet Sundown.

The Velvet Sundown generated headlines last year after accumulating hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners on Spotify, with songs that an unofficial spokesperson for the band claimed had been created via the AI music generation platform Suno.

A statement released by the band responded that this was false, and that in fact "The Velvet Sundown is a multidisciplinary artistic project blending music, analog aesthetics, and speculative storytelling." Regardless, their rise has indicated a notable shift in artificial intelligence's ability to make genuinely popular music.

Now, someone is fighting back. In a post on Instagram, Blach said: "What's the one thing AI music can't do? Play live. Until now. I've formed a tribute band of the most famous AI group of all, Velvet Sundown… but here's the twist. We're not actually paying tribute. Instead of giving any money to the Velvet Sundown, I'm giving all the profits back to real musicians, whose work AI stole in the first place."

The plan is for the group, which consists of musicians Leo Walrus, Enzo Allen, Milo Garland and Luke McQueen, to get in the studio and re-record some of The Velvet Underground's tracks, the ultimate aim being to gather more streams than the original band. This would be a first: as you'd expect, no tribute band has ever accrued more streams than the original band.

It's been suggested that the entire Velvet Sundown project is an elaborate scheme designed to highlight the troubling implications of AI-generated music. Alternatively, it could just be a cynical cash grab: the group is estimated to have already generated tens of thousands of dollars in royalty payments.

Whatever the group's motivations, their copycat band has been bullish in response.

In a recent Instagram video, The Bootleg Velvet Sundown were filmed standing on a London rooftop, with Blach narrating: "If you're making AI music, be very afraid." His posts have been tongue-in-cheek; but make no mistake, there's genuine anger here, and rightly so.

"This is humans versus machines, and today, the humans are rising."

50 years on from its release, the Ramones' self-titled debut album will be commemorated with a special Los Angeles show featuring a host of rock music legends, including Billie Joe Armstrong and former band member CJ Ramone.

Taking place on August 30th, 2026, at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, The Official Ramones Anniversary Tribute will see Cretin Family — a supergroup featuring Tim Armstrong (Rancid), Billie Joe Armstrong (Green Day), Travis Barker (Blink-182) and CJ Ramone (Ramones), plus special guests — perform a set of Ramones tracks live.

The concert will be accompanied by a DJ set from artist-activist Shepard Fairey and multiple screenings, including a showcase of John Travolta's new film Propeller One-Way Night Coach (Travolta is also scheduled to host the event).

"From the moment I first heard the Ramones, music was never the same," said Tim Armstrong. "They are my favourite band of all time! I can't wait to play those great and perfect Ramones songs with my friends CJ, Travis and Billie."

Billie Joe Armstrong added: "The spirit of the Ramones is alive in every backyard punk show, punk club and festival.

"Generation after generation of cretins and weirdos become Ramones lovers. Kids are influenced by the Ramones and they don't even know it yet."

The iconic punk band formed in New York in 1974 and helped establish punk music in the United States, creating a fuzzy, energetic sound that provided huge inspiration to British groups like The Clash and Sex Pistols.

While they went on to release 14 studio albums and toured constantly before disbanding in 1996, the Ramones' debut is still widely considered their greatest achievement.

The record was recently ranked Number One in Rolling Stone's list of the Greatest Punk Albums of All Time, a testament to its enduring legacy.

Ahead of August's show, a limited edition, first-time picture disc pressing of Ramones will be released (July 17th). Half a century on from their seminal eponymous album, they continue to have a huge influence on global music culture.

"The Ramones are the blueprint," said Travis Barker. "Punk rock wouldn't be what it is today without them."

In the summer of 1987, Ian Astbury, singer of British rock group The Cult, saw a hot young band from LA playing at the famous Marquee club in London. That band was Guns N’ Roses, and what Astbury witnessed that night convinced him that this was the perfect opening act for The Cult’s US tour later that year.

At that time The Cult were flying high with their third album Electric, a kick-ass hard rock record produced by Rick Rubin.

Electric was a radical departure from the goth rock style of previous album Love. Moreover, The Cult’s new music, typified by riff-based singles Love Removal Machine and Li’l Devil, was very much in tune with what Guns N’ Roses had created with their debut album Appetite for Destruction.

The gig that Astbury saw at the Marquee was in June. Appetite for Destruction was released in July. Guns N’ Roses toured with The Cult in August and September.

Looking back on that tour, The Cult’s guitarist Billy Duffy tells MusicRadar that once the two bands got out on the road together they bonded immediately and partied heavily.

“Oh, we very much hung out,” Duffy says. “We became very enmeshed. There were lots of shenanigans. It was like you can imagine, you know? Whatever you can imagine, it was pretty much like that!”

Duffy points out that while said shenanigans aren’t exactly the type of things he’d get into now, it was all in good fun.

“Nothing evil,” he says. “Just a lot of high jinks. I mean, if you put two bands like that together who get along, let’s just say you’re always trying to outdo each other’s stupidity.”

Duffy acknowledges Ian Astbury’s role in bringing The Cult and Guns N’ Roses together.

“Ian was the guy who found them,” he says. “He called me up in London when we were living there in ’87 and said, ‘There’s this band from America called Guns N’ Roses. They’re really good. You should go check them out. I think we should take them out on tour with us.’

“And Ian is like that. He’s always looking for new bands and finding them. He’s very passionate and has great ears for that kind of thing.”

Duffy tends not to focus on such things.

“I’m nowhere near as good as Ian at that,” he shrugs. “But I remember going to the Marquee club, and Guns N’ Roses were doing three nights, and they sold them out. But I couldn’t get in. The guy at the door was like, ‘I don’t care who you are, you ain’t getting in.’ But that was very typical of London.”

Once he heard Appetite for Destruction, Duffy agreed with Astbury’s assessment of Guns N’ Roses.

“They were really good,” he says. “When they were on tour with us, Appetite had just come out. It hadn’t really clicked yet. But the needle soon moved for them.”

He adds: “Guns N’ Roses were great then – and they’re great now. They were just the real deal, you know?”

He smiles: “Back then they were crazy – but who wants rock stars to be normal anyway?”

In the summer of 1988, New York-based rock band White Lion were flying high.

Their second album, Pride, had sold a million copies, and they were on a huge US tour opening for AC/DC.

Fronted by Danish singer Mike Tramp, White Lion had been on the road for a whirlwind 10 months.

They had also opened for Kiss – whose bassist/vocalist Gene Simmons had told Tramp he had “the coolest name in rock ’n’ roll” – and then Aerosmith, whose singer Steven Tyler would greet Tramp each night by singing White Lion’s breakthrough hit Wait.

Wait reached number 8 on the US chart and was followed by an even bigger hit.

When The Children Cry – a gentle acoustic song with a pacifist message – went all the way to number three.

As Tramp would recall in an interview with Classic Rock: “The rise of White Lion was like climbing a ladder with a rocket up your ass!”

But as it turned out, the band’s decline was equally swift.

The death of White Lion was the result of various factors – bad decisions, record company politics and the onset of grunge, the biggest revolution in rock music since punk.

But what ultimately destroyed White Lion was the very thing that made them great – the strange relationship between Mike Tramp and the band’s extravagantly gifted guitarist, Vito Bratta.

As Tramp said: “Vito and I had no connection whatsoever except through music. It’s sad, but true.”

Mike Tramp and Vito Bratta first met in New York City in 1982, when Bratta’s group Dreamer were headlining a show at the famous rock club L’Amour in Brooklyn, supported by Tramp’s band Lion, who had recently relocated to New York from their native Denmark.

Backstage that night, Tramp was amazed when he watched Bratta warming up by playing a note-perfect version of Eddie Van Halen’s guitar showpiece Eruption. “My jaw just dropped,” Tramp said.

By then, Tramp, at 21, was already a veteran of the music business. He made his recording debut at 13 when he and his elder brother, billed as Dennis & Michael, cut a single for EMI.

At 15, Mike joined Danish teenybopper act Mabel after seeing them open for The Bay City Rollers in Copenhagen. Mabel represented Denmark in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1978 with the song Boom Boom (they finished 16th out of 20 entries, with just 13 points).

Later, Tramp restyled Mabel as a hard rock band with a new and suitably macho name: Studs. The name was changed to Lion when the band moved to New York.

They lasted just six months until they ran out of money and returned to Denmark shortly after that gig with Vito Bratta’s band Dreamer.

But Tramp had the determination and the air fare — borrowed from his mother — to get back to New York. In early 1983, he and Bratta began writing songs and finding musicians for a new version of Lion, soon to be renamed.

“There was a band in New York called White Tiger,” Tramp recalled, “so Vito said: ‘Why don’t we call ourselves White Lion?’ I wanted something more original, but White Lion just stuck.”

With a solid line-up – featuring drummer Nicki Capozzi and bassist Felix Robinson, the latter formerly of pomp rock cult heroes Angel – the newly christened White Lion cut a debut album with German producer Peter Hauke.

The album was titled Fight To Survive, and featured the very first song that Tramp and Bratta wrote together – a brilliant melodic hard rock anthem called Broken Heart.

On the strength of that album, White Lion promptly signed to major label Elektra. But the band’s euphoria was short-lived.

As Tramp explained: “Two months after we signed to Elektra, our management told us: ‘We got good news and we got bad news. The bad news is: Elektra has dropped you. The good news is: we get to keep the money.’ We were devastated.”

Tramp believed that Elektra had a change of heart about White Lion because the label already had two successful hard rock acts in Mötley Crüe and Dokken.

Fight To Survive was eventually released in 1985 by the Victor label in Japan, followed by a US release via tiny independent Grand Slamm.

The band was strengthened by the acquisition of a new drummer, Greg D’Angelo, and a new bassist, James LoMenzo. But still no major labels were interested in White Lion.

The new-look band earned a little extra cash with an appearance in hit movie The Money Pit, produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Hanks.

When a second album was recorded in 1986, again with Peter Hauke producing, the results were underwhelming. But just when it seemed that White Lion would never catch a break, a saviour appeared in the shape of another German producer, Michael Wagener.

An expat based in California, Wagener was enjoying a hot streak during the mid-’80s as producer and mixer of hit albums for Mötley Crüe, Metallica, Dokken and German band Accept, for whom he’d played guitar in his teens.

As Tramp recalled: “Somehow, Michael Wagener heard this unreleased White Lion music, and instantly he called our management and said he wanted to re-record the album in California.”

At the same time, the band found another supporter in Jason Flom, an A&R man for Atlantic Records.

In early 1987, White Lion decamped to LA to remake the album with Wagener.

“Michael was great for us,” Tramp said. “He just let the band be the band, and he knew exactly what we wanted – something like the first Van Halen album or Journey’s Escape, but in our own style.”

The album was named Pride, and it captured what Tramp calls “the 100 per cent purity of White Lion”.

When the album was released in June 1987, Kerrang! declared it a classic.

Pride would eventually sell over two million copies, and for Tramp the success of When The Children Cry was especially important.

“It wasn’t Every Rose Has Its Thorn by Poison,” he said. “This was the era of Ronald Reagan, and I was singing: ‘No more presidents, and all the wars will end…’ That was pretty gutsy.”

This song was also influenced by events in Tramp’s childhood. “I was around five or six when my father left us,” he explained. “My mom was left with three boys. So without a doubt my own story is in that song.”

When The Children Cry proved that White Lion were that most unlikely of things – the thinking person’s hair metal band.

“I had a pretty loud image that went against me in many ways,” Tramp said. “As much as White Lion were affiliated with that hair metal scene, we found it very embarrassing to see women being degraded. I never wanted to engage in alcohol and drugs and that kind of lifestyle.”

What Tramp did become was a very rich man. He revealed: “At the end of the Pride tour in 1989, Vito and I, as the songwriters, were at that point of passing a million dollars each.”

But even then, at the height of White Lion’s success, Tramp and Bratta were already drifting apart.

The band recorded their third album, Big Game, with Michael Wagener at Amigo Studios in Hollywood, where they had cut Pride. But as Tramp admitted: “Outside of the studio, Vito and I were not spending any time together.”

Picking up where he left off with When The Children Cry, Tramp explored socio-political themes in new songs such as Little Fighter and Cry For Freedom.

But if the reaction from key players at Atlantic Records was positive, Tramp later discovered that he was being misled.

“We played Cry For Freedom to Jason Flom and [Atlantic president] Doug Morris and they were comparing it to Led Zeppelin,” Tramp said. “But many years later, we found out that Doug Morris had said to Jason Flom: ‘Why are you letting them do this?’”

During the recording of Big Game, White Lion were also working to a tight deadline: a tour with Ozzy Osbourne had already been booked, with a juicy fee of $25,000 a night.

Big Game was released in June 1989 when Tramp felt it “unfinished”. The album shipped gold on its release, selling 500,000 copies. But after this strong start, sales quickly dropped off as the album’s four singles all bombed.

“The record company didn’t know what to do,” Tramp said. “And we never had a discussion about it, because there wasn’t much we could change.”

White Lion mustered one more album, Mane Attraction. But by the time it was released in 1991, alternative rock was in the ascendancy.

“The major impact came when MTV changed its concept,” Tramp says. “In the ’80s, MTV buttered our bread, but after Kurt Cobain wore his grandfather’s sweater in the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit, there was no place on MTV for bands like White Lion and Mötley Crüe.”

A long-running dispute over money led to James LoMenzo and Greg D’Angelo quitting the band.

“The money was split 25 per cent equally on live performance, but also 25 per cent equal on expenses,” Tramp explained. “So Vito and I, as the songwriters, were making all the money. James and Greg weren’t asking for a lot, but the split happened.”

With new bassist Tommy ‘T-Bone’ Caradonna and drummer Jimmy DeGrasso, White Lion embarked on a 16-date club tour in the US. But when the tour reached New York, the band’s hometown, Tramp discovered that Atlantic Records had given up on White Lion.

“Nobody from the record company showed up at the gig,” he says. “I knew the song: there’s a new kid in town.”

The final date of the tour was in Boston. Tramp took Bratta aside and told him: “This is our last show.” Bratta offered a one word reply: “Okay.”

“We never, ever talked about why it was so easy to break up the band,” Tramp said. “And the phone call never came from the record company or the managers or the merchandising company that had once given us a million dollars in advance.

“We had a great band. We had two songwriters that knew how to work together. But nobody fought for White Lion.”

In the years since White Lion broke up, Bratta’s public profile has been virtually nonexistent, while Tramp has toured and recorded as a solo artist and with the bands Freak Of Nature and Mike Tramp And The Rock’N’Roll Circuz.

The singer continues to tour billed as Mike Tramp’s White Lion.

As he told Classic Rock: “I’m proud of what Vito and I did with White Lion. And for that, I still love him.”

Morrissey has launched a rant against the BBC, claiming that the broadcaster is blacklisting his single Notre-Dame and insisting that its commitment to diversity "is a lie".

In a post on his website Morrissey Central, the singer-songwriter claimed the track had received "no airplay" despite it currently sitting at Number 6 in the UK singles chart.

He wrote: "The public wants to hear the song, but the BBC will not play it even though their stations are a public service duty-bound to reflect public taste. Obviously not! If the song is suspected of independent thought - God forbid! it is not played, therefore, under these circumstances, any station that pledges allegiance to diversity is lying."

The song in question, released in February, amplifies a conspiracy theory based around the 2019 Notre-Dame cathedral fire, suggesting that the incident was arson rather than an accident (no evidence of arson has been found, according to BBC reports). The track includes lyrics like: "Notre-Dame, we will not be silent / Before investigations / They said, 'There's nothing to see here'".

This conspiratorial tone is hardly a surprise given the singer's lurch toward the populist right in recent decades. For years, he has consistently flirted with controversial figures and espoused troubling views, including backing the far-right party For Britain on his website (Morrissey Central).

"When people say 'Diversity is our strength' they fail to mention how their notion of 'diversity' entails very strict Third Reich regulations and punishments," his recent statement on the song Notre-Dame continued. "I wonder why people can't simply be honest about these things?"

Morrissey's single peaking at Number 6 is largely down to physical sales following the recent release of a deluxe vinyl of the track. The Singles Sales Chart is based on the purchases of vinyl, CDs, and digital downloads, but when it comes to the Official Singles Chart, which also factors in streaming, Notre-Dame isn't even in the Top 100. Perhaps this is a sign of the former Smiths frontman's fading relevance.

Pop superstar Taylor Swift has finally won a copyright lawsuit over her song lyrics, after beating claims labelled "absurd" by her legal team.

Self-published poet Kimberley Marasco first brought a case against Swift in 2024, alleging that the singer-songwriter had stolen lines and taken inspiration from her poems to help create over a dozen songs on albums such as The Tortured Poets Department, Midnights, Evermore, and Folklore.

However, on Monday 6 July, Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case, ruling that "common observations", "ubiquitous metaphors" and vague references to gaslighting were the only common threads between the two artists' work (NME).

"The allegedly infringed material — basic ideas, themes, metaphors, isolated words, and short phrases — is not protected expression and cannot be infringed," said the Judge.

Swift's attorney Douglas Baldridge responded: "This is plaintiff's second frivolous and harassing lawsuit" against the artist. He claimed that the case against her was "absurd and legally baseless."

This isn't the first time Swift has been embroiled in an intense copyright battle. Following the release of the popstar's album, The Life of a Showgirl last year, the Las Vegas-based performer Maren Flagg claimed that the branding around the record infringed on her own registered trademark 'Confessions of a Showgirl'.

And back in 2023, a federal judge dismissed with prejudice a separate case filed by the Mississippi poet Teresa La Dart, who alleged that Swift's 2019 album Lover had copied the title, colour scheme and format of a self-published poetry collection by the same name (Pitchfork). Swift has repeatedly faced these types of allegations and come out on top.

The news of the case's dismissal comes just days after Swift tied the knot with American football player Travis Kelce, whom she's dated since 2023. The wedding took place at Madison Square Garden on July 3, 2026, and included performances from the likes of Ed Sheeran, Selena Gomez and the Haim sisters.

With this legal win, Swift has even more to celebrate. That being said, Marasco has pledged to appeal the decision. This may not be the last we hear of it.

It sounded like a song from a bygone era – and that was exactly how the band had planned it.

I Believe In A Thing Called Love was the breakout hit for The Darkness in 2003, and as rhythm guitarist Dan Hawkins recalled: “We just tried to write the most ’80s song we could.”

This was the third single lifted from the band’s debut album Permission To Land, and it rose all the way to No 2 on the UK chart. It was also a top 10 hit in Sweden, New Zealand and Ireland, and achieved heavy airplay in the US.

I Believe In A Thing Called Love was written by all four members of the band’s early line-up: Hawkins and brother Justin (lead vocals and lead guitar), Frankie Poullain (bass) and Ed Graham (drums).

Speaking to Total Guitar in 2020, Dan Hawkins described the making of this classic rock anthem.

“I Believe In A Thing Called Love was such an important song for The Darkness, but when we wrote it I really wasn’t sure about it,” Hawkins admitted. “The chorus is so stupidly catchy, I thought people were just gonna take it as a complete joke!

“Right from the start, this song stuck out like a sore thumb. It’s at the Def Leppard/Queen end of what we did, whereas 90% of our stuff was inspired by 1970s AC/DC. And Aerosmith. And Thin Lizzy. Oh, I could go on!

“Writing it was a real collaborative effort. Me and Frankie shared a top-floor flat in Primrose Hill in London, which sounds posh, but trust me, it was a shithole! Justin would come over and the three of us would write in this flat, jamming on an acoustic, because we couldn’t afford to write in a rehearsal room.

“We started with the riff, which Justin came up with. It sounded really great right away. But when he sang the chorus for the first time, I just said, ‘No, you can’t do that – it sounds ridiculous!’

“I really thought people would just laugh at us when they heard it. So for the rest of the song, I tried to make it sound cool, more ‘rock’. The rest of the song is all in minor key.”

He continued: “Back in 2003 when I Believe In A Thing Called Love was released as a single, you never heard a guitar solo on the radio. But this song was designed to have guitar breaks in it. It was built towards the solos as much as the chorus.

“I was so unsure that we debated about playing the song live. But as soon as we did, people loved it. It’s party music, and it just gets people going.”

As a perfect pair of guitar-toting siblings, much like their heroes Angus and Malcolm Young were in AC/DC, Justin and Dan Hawkins have very different personalities both in person and on guitar. I Believe In A Thing Called Love saw them go head-to-head over the song’s two main solo sections.

It’s younger brother Dan who first steps up to the challenge after the second chorus, running through some E major pentatonic ideas around the bottom of the neck before heading up higher for some octave bends and bluesy ideas around the ninth fret – which would be the relative minor pentatonic three frets down from the major position found at the 12th fret.

Dan is typically known as the less flamboyant persona out of the pair, and his contributions are more country-leaning and laidback than Justin’s solo, which begins after the final chorus and lives in more of a bluesy world.

Justin starts his solo with a minor seventh to octave bend up at the 15th fret, also harmonised up a major third before some minor pentatonic lines around the twelfth fret. Then there’s a climbing run on the high E, fretting notes from the E major scale while pedalling against the open string, starting down at the fourth fret and eventually ending at the very top of his black Les Paul Standard’s neck on the 22nd fret where there’s one final whole tone bend up to the root.

This kind of single string idea can also be heard on rock classics like AC/DC’s Thunderstruck and Iron Maiden’s Wasted Years, and is an effective tool for making something sound a lot more complicated than it actually is, allowing guitarists to incorporate some wide intervallic leaps against what often tends to be the key centre.

For the outro of I Believe In A Thing Called Love, the band head back into the main riff – which is built off the first six notes of the E major scale, also known as the Ionian scale, and then there’s one final flurry of notes from Justin using hammer-ons and pull-offs before its closing stab.

In this song, neither solo would sound quite as good without the other, which is what makes it such an enduring celebration of their contrasting yet perfectly complimentary personalities as musicians.

As Justin Hawkins told Total Guitar: “I enjoy listening to Dan’s lead work because he does things that I’d never think of. He probably likes my stuff for the same reason.

“We know how to enjoy each other’s playing and not see it as a competition. It’s all about whatever’s best for the song – and it takes a while to learn that, but it’s the most important thing. Make sure the song works, otherwise nobody will listen and it might be totally pointless.”

As gifted in production as he is in songwriting, James Blake is a multi-faceted artist that draws from his background in experimental electronica to create the soulful but sonically adventurous ballads that make up his contemporary output.

On his latest album, Trying Times, Blake decorates his heartfelt crooning with scattered electronic beats, nervy synths and processed samples, resulting in a hybrid sound that owes as much to the cerebral post-dubstep of his early years as the more conventional influences – Joni Mitchell, D’Angelo, Leonard Cohen – that have shaped his songwriting.

Blake brought together these two sides of his craft on Trying Times highlight Death of Love by sampling the title track from Cohen’s 2016 album You Want It Darker, a creative decision he unpacked in a recent conversation with co-producer Dom Maker (one half of Mount Kimbie) for BBC Radio 6 Music’s Artist In Residence series.

Blake and Maker lifted the vocals heard in the song’s opening to create the eerily evocative instrumental for Death of Love, which were performed by a Cantor Gideon Zelermyer and the Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue Choir, an ensemble belonging to a synagogue in Cohen’s hometown of Montreal. Clearing the sample was quite a feat, Blake says, but it was Cohen’s son and collaborator Adam that helped them over the line.

“His son actually cleared the sample,” Blake says. “We weren’t sure if it would… I don’t know of Leonard Cohen ever approving a sample. There may have been a couple, but it’s quite rare, so I was very honoured. Maybe he liked the song, or possibly there’s a throughline between the feeling of both things, and I was respectful of the sample itself.”

The Cohen sample isn’t the only unexpected inclusion on Death of Love, Blake says. In an effort to augment the song’s unsettling vibe, he and Maker sampled a dub siren gifted to him by revered dubstep producer Mala, and the SOS signal sent out by the RMS Titanic before it sank into the Atlantic, which appears at the end of the track.

“Right at the end, the song wasn't really done,” Blake says. “I remember [Blake’s partner and co-producer] Jameela… it sounded good and it had impact, but there was just another 15% left, though I didn't really feel that way at the time. I was just going, ‘No, it feels done, it's fine’. But Jameela was like, ‘No, there's another 15% in this, this could hit harder.’”

“That’s when you were like, ‘can you try and get hold of the Titanic SOS’?”, Maker says. “There was one last touch, and I was looking for Morse code, which I believe also may have been Jameela’s idea,” Blake adds.

“[We wanted] the feeling of ‘we are in trouble’, basically, without actually being too on the nose about it. The only thing that actually sounded good was the real Morse code from the mayday on the Titanic. It was very eerie to listen to, and to read what it meant… and it just fit right in with a little bit of reverb! [laughs]”

Blake’s Morse code is unlikely to be the “real” Titanic SOS signal, as no audio recordings of the ship’s wireless transmission exist. Instead, he will have sampled a modern recreation of what radio operators at the signal’s receiving end will have heard, using transcripts reconstructed by historians from handwritten logs.

Regardless of its origin, though, the Morse code lends the song a suitably distressing atmosphere, representing another example of Blake’s talent for taking his tracks to another world by weaving in samples from unexpected sources.

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When the US Army was forced to withdraw from Vietnam in 1975 — also departing northern Thailand, a key strategic area packed with US military bases — they left a complex and troubling legacy behind.

They also left behind an array of equipment, from vehicles and communications infrastructure to Cobreflex horn loudspeakers that later found new life as village public-address systems.

First introduced in 1963, then adopted by Psychological Operations Soldiers (PSYOP) across Vietnam and Thailand over the following decade, aerial loudspeakers were crucial to the war effort, disseminating messages to local populations, urging enemy forces to surrender, pumping in sound effects and spreading eerie propaganda sequences in an attempt to weaken pro-Viet Cong sentiment.

Decades later, musicians from the remote Phetchabun Mountains in north-central Thailand reclaimed these US army loudspeakers and developed a local sound known as phin prayukt, which centred around the traditional Thai stringed instrument, the phin.

Electrifying this lute-like instrument, hooking it up to an ad-hoc, transportable sound system and adding bass drums, cymbals, and keys, the band that emerged — now known as Khun Narin Electric Phin Band and building an international following after high-profile radio plays, an electric US tour and collaborations with artists like ex-Amy Winehouse producer Tommy Breneck and Khruangbin guitarist Mark Speer — created a uniquely hypnotic and psychedelic sound.

"We use the three-stringed lute that is traditional to our region, but we run it through effects pedals: distortion, delay, things like that," says Khun Narin, the father of the band, who today plays the cymbal alongside a rotating cast of younger recruits from his village, Lom Sak, many of whom he trained.

"It's unlike the Western rock band — we are a community band," he explains, joining me on a call with a cold can of Leo Lager in hand, and the dark blue Thai night sky behind him. "We gather in the village, we come together to perform at weddings, at temple fairs, at ordination ceremonies [where adolescent Buddhist boys celebrate reaching manhood]. In the band, the older musicians carry the tradition and the younger ones can bring the energy; everybody has a role."

Currently, the other members of Khun Narin Electrified Phin Band are bassist Boss, percussionist Wallop Sangaroon (or Pao), drummer Oat, and phin player Bas. "The phin player usually plays two kinds of melody, the fast (called sut sanaen) and the slow (called lam phu thai)," Boss explains. "This is traditional music that spans the northern central part of Thailand."

The band's interpretation of this genre is incredibly pioneering. Years ago, fuelled by a simple desire to amplify their sound during performances, Khun Narin and his cohorts gathered a range of loudspeakers typically used to announce news in the village. They purchased amps from friends and acquaintances and constructed a DIY sound system fixed to the back of a cart.

The band members were never massive gearheads; they simply wanted to see where they could take this traditional musical form. "It was not very professional, we just wanted to make it loud and fun," says Khun Narin. "People at temples in Thailand usually own lots of sound equipment, so there was a DIY network to help build the sound system. We found whatever we could in our village… it was really organic."

The reclamation and repurposing of ex-US Army loudspeakers — USC Cobreflex horn projectors that were previously strung up along the village's electrical cables and used to announce local news — has given a fascinating edge to this DIY story, and the sound they've created has resonated with fans all over the globe.

After footage emerged online of their performances in the fields of north-central Thailand in 2014, momentum started to gather. US-based producer Josh Marcy headed to Lom Sak to meet the group and record their first two albums in a local field, an ambient setting that lent a naturalistic sense of place to the project.

At a US tour in late 2024, crowds flocked to see the band breeze through Austin, LA, Oakland, Portland, Seattle, and more. This period Stateside also allowed the band to head into a professional studio for the first time, the result being III, their first new record in a decade.

The album is a continuation of the sprawling psychedelic sound they've created, full of jagged strings and groovy percussion sequences. It's a heady and evocative concoction, a transcendental collision between American prog rock and Thai folk charm lifted from the baking tropical jungles of Phetchabun.

The remarkable trajectory this humble village band has been on in recent years has its grounding in the local community that Khun Narin remains firmly attached to. They're committed to playing "at almost every village ceremony", which ensures that the chemistry between instrumentalists is second to none; this fact played a decisive role in catapulting them to global fame.

The recording of Khun Narin's new album III took place in a more professional studio setting — the Pasadena-based Diamond West studio of renowned producer Tommy Brenneck, who has previously worked with the likes of Amy Winehouse, Nile Rodgers, and CeeLo Green — marking an interesting new chapter for the collective.

"We'd never done a professional recording before, so when we first got into a proper studio, it took us a bit of time to get to know the equipment," says Bas. It helped that Brenneck had a clear understanding of the group's sonic intentions.

"Making the music together, he did not try to control us, but there were times when he recommended new ideas to add into the music," Bas reflects. "It's always a discussion, and he tried to keep the energy of our music, not making it too clean in the studio setting. The equipment at the studio is kind of old-school, and it limited the time, so we could only play for three or four minutes," explains Bas. "When we recorded in Thailand, they used modern digital equipment that allowed us to do a long take."

According to producer Josh Marcy, "the recording was done direct to tape, so that did limit the amount of time they could play… and the guys were playing a lot! We were throwing on new tape to keep up, and you can hear the new tape winding up to speed at the beginning of [album opener] Sut Sanaen."

"In the previous album, [Thai and Laos folk genre] molam and rock come together, you can still feel the traditional part of our music," says Bas. "But in this new album, the music is more like molam with an international melody vibe, so it's more pop and it's more global."

Despite this shift, there's absolutely no intention for Khun Narin to veer away from their roots and cash in on their rising popularity. Performances at local ceremonies and parties remain their mainstay, and there are no current plans for a new Europe or North America tour.

In fact, with the rainy season now underway in Thailand and local temple policy restricting festivities during this time, the band has a solid period of relaxation on the horizon. Still, the prospect of interacting with their burgeoning global audience remains an exciting one.

"The feedback comes when we are on stage, and it's always the same: people having fun," says Khun Narin. "From 10 years ago until now, they still have the same fun at the shows. I just hope Khun Narin can continue to make people happy."

“I work on music all the time, even when I’m not in the studio,” says Grammy Award-winning producer Tyler Spry on his creative approach.

“I recently got this sampler app on my phone so I can chop up ideas when walking around the neighbourhood or at the beach,” Spry continues. “I have a journal full of song ideas, I take walks where I listen to music and make notes of inspiring sounds or chords - I’m either always making or thinking about music.”

Tyler is speaking to us from his home studio at the top of the Silverlake Hills in Los Angeles, and our conversation comes in the wake of some staggering success.

His recent credits include Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos , a Grammy Award–winning record from 2025 where Tyler co-produced and co-wrote album highlights DTMF and Kloufrens.

Other production work has been with Tate McRae, OneRepublic, Karol G, Rauw Alejandro, Omar Apollo, and Latin Mafia alongside lead single, Swim, for BTS’ 2026 comeback album, Arirang.

While Tyler is guiding some of the world’s biggest stars on their journeys to the top of the Billboard charts, his outlook on the mechanics of music-making is pragmatic and contemporary.

“Half the time I’m working from home as I prefer being creative here to anywhere else,” says Tyler on his process. “But I like being outside a traditional recording space too. I’m one of those producers who would rather write a song in a hotel room on headphones than in an old studio with a huge console.”

Tyler began his career as a musician and engineer, initially hooking up with producers, songwriters and OneRepublic bandmates Ryan Tedder and Brent Kutzle. Via their partnership, Tyler found himself increasingly embedded in the mechanics of music-making, contributing songwriting and production to nine tracks on the 2021 OneRepublic album, Human.

“I stumbled into music production out of necessity,” Tyler laughs. “I had a MacBook with Logic on it, a couple of SM7s that I was using to record my band’s rehearsals, and I pretty quickly realised that I could make songs on my laptop.”

Tyler was playing guitar with different groups before meeting Brent. Before long, he had started to work as his assistant engineer.

“My first projects that people heard were songs with OneRepublic and I just began by supporting studio sessions, this was more dog sitting and getting coffees than recording,” Tyler explains. “But it was a foot in the door, we went on to make this album together and that is how I won OneRepublic’s creative trust. It gave me a real shot at making more opportunities happen.”

Establishing a rapport with artists is a key part of the producer’s role and something Tyler has always kept in mind when crafting music. Since those first projects, he’s focused on establishing a safe and comfortable space for his collaborators to feel creative within.

“I’m fortunate to work with a lot of people who I’m friends with, we have a great rapport and mutual respect for each other and everyday, we’re trying to meet in the middle and make the best song possible,” he says. “Everyone has different takes, opinions and of course creative people are bound to come at an idea from their own angle. But when this happens, it’s one of the most exciting moments and can lead to special ideas.

“When everyone in the studio, whether it’s an artist, songwriter or co-producer, is able to get their ideas out, that’s when you’re able to make the song that no one else could make.”

The home studio is an important space for Tyler and he’s poured energy into its development and refinement. There are some essential items in his workflow, including the Eventide H3000.

“A few years ago I picked one up and it’s probably been on every song I’ve made since,” he says. “There’s something about an outboard chorus reverb or flanger that sounds perfectly imperfect. Sending a vocal or drum loop through metal or electricity always degrades sound but in a way that can work well for me and my music.”

New software and gear are an ongoing preoccupation but Tyler has reached a point where he wants to ensure he knows the potential of what he already has before investigating anything else.

“Like every other producer in Los Angeles, I am constantly downloading new plugins that I forget I have,” Tyler laughs. “But lately I’ve been trying to master the things that are here, and not have a wandering eye for new tech or gear. I have a vintage synth collection, I just got this Jupiter-8 a few months ago, and it’s hands down the most inspiring keyboard I’ve ever owned. I’m trying to excel at sound designing on it before I pick up something new and flashy.”

It’s an apt purchase, as Tyler’s first synth was a Roland Juno-6 - a piece of kit he spent hours searching for on Craigslist. He’s now had it for more than a decade and has influenced his love for the Jupiter.

“I paid $200 for a Roland Juno-106 with broken voice chips, and I know it really well,” he says. “The Jupiter has a really similar design and approach in terms of how you programme a sound on it. It just feels like the big brother of the Roland Juno-6.”

Tyler is unable to talk about his contribution to Bad Bunny’s album - what we do know is he worked on stand-out tracks, DTMF and Kloufrens. However, he can share more about becoming involved with South Korean megastars, BTS. The group, featuring Jin, Suga, J-Hope, RM, Jimin, V, and Jung Kook, have been on hiatus due to solo projects and their mandatory military service but have since come back with a bang in 2026.

“We ended up working with the band at Conway Studios in Los Angeles,” says Tyler. “I spent a few weeks with them writing and workshopping ideas, they were the nicest guys with great taste and they assembled some inspiring rooms for us to work in. One of those was the room that Swim was born in with James Essian, Sean Foreman and my co-producer Leclair.”

Tyler would prepare for a session by building a template with any song ingredients he might require from drum loops to chords and soft synth sounds. The aim was to ensure that he was ready to respond to whatever direction flows through the room.

“You never know what someone is going to be inspired by,” Tyler explains. “There might be a day when I walk in thinking we need to do an uptempo radio song or someone is really going through it and they want to pour their heart out on a Wurlitzer. I have to be prepared for anything.”

Alongside Swim, Tyler was also credited on the album track, Please. Although there are different songwriting and production teams involved in the making of the BTS album, the only thing that matters among the army of contributors is the song itself.

“In the initial moment of a creative spark, you have to believe what you’re doing is the best thing in the world and you have to encourage everyone who is in the room with you to dive in headfirst,” he says. “Then you can assess afterwards - with both Swim and Please, after the initial hour or two of writing, I took a step outside, listened to them and they felt special - not every song feels like that.”

Another part of the production process is to ensure the foundations of the song work as hard as possible. So if the production isn’t cutting it, Tyler is always will to clean the slate and start an idea from scratch.

“I’m happy to reimagine something, drop the vocals into a new session and start from there,” he says. “I’ll do this as many times as I need to find what works for the song. It’s my responsibility as producer to leave no stone uncovered in the search for the best version.”

Tate McRae is a Canadian pop star who has worked with Tyler and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder. The pair helped write and produce major hits on her albums, including the 2023 smash single Exes and 2025's Just Keep Watching.

“Tate has a clear and distinct vision so I always leave a session with her feeling like a better producer and songwriter,” Tyler states. “Ryan knows when something feels right and when it doesn’t, we will rework the drums, the arrangements, the vocal parts, the sound design, we could end up with 47 versions of a song.”

I Don’t Wanna Wait was a collaboration between OneRepublic and producer David Guetta, a dance music crossover that became a global hit. For Tyler, the challenge was to anchor the song, which was based on the melody of Dragostea Din Tei by the Moldovan Eurodance group O-Zone, within the OneRepublic universe.

“Ryan came on and really put more of his sound and story in the verses and pre-choruses, we did a lot of sound design, guitars and textures to try and bring it more into the world that people know OneRepublic for,” Tyler says.

“It’s always interesting to rework an existing song or new interpolation, to find a way to contextualise it in a new sound setting and for a new audience.”

Tyler has achieved remarkable success within the music industry during the last few years. He cites finding his people and team alongside an ongoing love for discovering new sounds as the reasons for his rise to the top.

“Aspiring producers need to surround themselves with people that inspire them, challenge them but are also those you want to spend eight hours a day in the studio with,” Tyler states.

“I’ve also never stopped listening to new music or at least music that is new to me. Your output is a fraction of what you put in - if you’re not staying inspired then the well will eventually run dry, so I listen to music every day, I go for walks with my dog, I spend time with friends, all those things matter, not just for your mental health but also because they make you a more prolific songwriter.”

Growing up, Tyler was a fan of bands like The Smiths, Radiohead and The Cure and had no time for pop music. Now, he’s front and centre of this musical universe, working with some of the world’s biggest stars in what could be seen as an unlikely destination from where he started.

“You have to stay open-minded,” Tyler says. “You might find a creative home where you least expect it and most artists are coming to you to shape them. One of the most exciting aspects of what we do is bringing our influences into the projects we work on.”

In 2026, musically anything is possible with creative boundaries blurred and genres being pulled into myriad new and exciting shapes. Tyler is among those producers whose music is helping to push the global pop universe forward.

“I think I just have to keep showing up and making music,” Tyler explains. “There is a unique kind of feeling when a song you made or a guitar part you created is out and being heard by people all around the world, affecting culture. I’m really happy to be part of this musical world.”

Five Finger Death Punch celebrate their 20th anniversary this year with new album Legacy. But as guitarist Zoltan Bathory admits, the band would never have reached this milestone if singer Ivan Moody had continued the self-destructive behaviour that very nearly killed him.

Bathory tells MusicRadar: “I’m so proud of the history of this band. 20 years of getting bigger and bigger, with millions of fans all over the world. And what’s crazy is it’s still getting bigger. We’re not done.

“But we’ve had to work really hard for this. Hard rock and metal is not the centre of the universe like it used to be. So for every territory, you have to work hard. You can be huge in America but no one knows you in England, no one knows you in Germany.

“For us there was never a one big global explosion. We did this territory by territory. And there’s a lifestyle that goes with that, and it’s not always healthy.”

The founder and leading figure in Five Finger Death Punch, Bathory clarifies: “I’m the sober one, right? I was the one at the steering wheel, dealing with the business and keeping it on the rails as much as possible. But there came moments when we could no longer hide what was going on in this band, and then you start to have the meltdowns.

“Everybody looked at Ivan. They said that he was the culprit, because he’s the singer, so when he falls down on stage and couldn’t continue a show, or he was so drunk that he could just barely be able to walk out on stage, that’s what everybody sees.

“People don’t realise that the rest of the guys in the band were just as bad. It wasn’t just Ivan, but because he’s the singer everybody focused on him.”

Bathory sighs and and shakes his head at the memory.

“All of them were out of control,” he says. “At every show we played they were doubling the security. They knew that this is going to be crazy, right?

“So there were moments when I’m like, ‘This is a lot to deal with.’ You have to be the psychologist, you have to be the general, and sometimes the dictator.”

Bathory says that Moody tried to get sober on various occasions, without success.

“He went to rehab several times, and he went back to the party life. When you’re on the road, when that’s your life, it’s very difficult to stay away from that stuff. Every day somebody will be like, ‘Hey, let’s party!’ They don’t realise we were in another town yesterday and another one before. They don’t really see that. Most people would say, ‘I can’t do this for ten days in a row’ – let alone two years in a row or twenty years in a row.”

Bathory says it was tough love from himself and a number of other metal musicians that eventually got through to Moody in 2017.

“Ivan and me, we’re like brothers,” he says. “There were times when we wanted to kill each other, but he’s like my little brother, right? And it got so bad with him that I was watching him and thinking like, ‘Man, he’s gonna die on my watch – and that can’t happen.’”

He pauses and adds: “I think he actually did die for a few moments. He flatlined. So I had to do something drastic.

“I thought, he’s a singer, he’s a performer, that’s what he's good at, that’s what he can’t live without. That’s what he loves and who he is. And the only threat I could make to him is that I’m gonna take this away from him.

“That was the hardest thing, because you know it was a bluff in some way. I wanted it to be a bluff, course. But if I don’t do something then you’re gonna die, because it’s getting to the point where you’re going to.”

Among the fellow musicians who supported Moody in this time were Pantera singer Phil Anselmo and the members of Korn.

At the point when Moody’s intervention was staged, Linkin Park frontman Chester Bennington was instrumental in making it happen.

Bathory recalls: “In that moment, when Ivan got really serious about getting sober, the support that we got from other musicians was unbelievable. The first person to step up was Chester Bennington. We were on tour with Linkin Park in South America and Chester got hold of Ivan and told him, ‘Bro, you’re going to rehab – like right now. Get it together. You can do it. I did it. You can do it.’”

Bathory says that he warned Moody: “If you don’t stay in that rehab facility for 30 days, you’re out of the band.”

The tough love worked.

“Ivan got sober,” Bathory says, “and that changed everything.”

If there’s one man who understands the current state of the music industry ecosystem, it’s John Dahlbäck. A DJ and production legend in his own right, Dahlbäck has weathered the changes of over two decades facing both the crowd and the execs.

Amassing over 664 million streams across numerous platforms, The Swedish house heavyweight has had high profile collaborations with the likes of Kaskade and the late, great Avicii - before the success of Levels launched him stratospheric.

Having signed songs to majors in Sweden - and a label owner himself - John has now pivoted away from the big leagues to help a whole new generation of music-makers build their careers without signing their rights away, and compromising on their just financial rewards.

We spoke to John about his role at artist and label partner Amuse - as well as digging a little more into his past - and those days he spent with a young Avicii…

MusicRadar: Hi there John, let’s begin by talking about your role as Head of A&R at Amuse. I’m fascinated by its artist-first ethos, and how you’re able to help artists navigate around the traditional route…

John Dahlbäck: “What I really like about Amuse is that we are 100% independent, so we're not under any sort of umbrella to anyone, we handle everything directly to the DSPs. It's all very transparent, which I think is important these days.

“Amuse is also two different businesses. The core is obviously the distribution side of things, where anyone can just self-release and upload their songs - and they get 100% of the shares. There are a bunch of add-on features that they can adapt to.

“My part is on the licensing bit and the partnerships-side. We partner up with people that we believe that we can do good business with, whether that is to help monetisation grow or just taking care of someone's back catalog. We help with the back-end. They [artists] can manage it themselves, but sometimes an artist just needs to be in the studio making music.”

MusicRadar: Do you think that rushing to sign-up to a major label is often a mistake that new artists make?

JD: “Well it depends on which stage you're in as an artist. If you're starting out, it can be very helpful to be attached to some sort of established brand or label. I have so many records with so many different labels in the past that felt right at that time. I might regret that now but starting out, I think that could be very helpful - to be part of something bigger.

“But then there are also stages where you manage [wider reach] already. You might have an active audience on socials, or whatever you have, but you have a base. So then it might not make any sense to sign off your rights.

“Then again, then there’s those in the top 30 or 20% on the verge of absolute stardom, when you need a major label to push that through. We try to focus on the mid-section when it comes to partnerships.”

MR: So in your role John, what are your main responsibilities, and how much are you able to get hands-on with artists themselves?

JD: “I'm very attached when we initiate conversations about a potential license agreement or a partnership, and then it's about where that person goes. That person might just end up having help with their catalog, which is then [given to] a certain team, and they have a point of contact at that team. Or, it's about frontline music, and then that person lands in our artist marketing team.

“I’m always here though. I have all the artists I've signed, or labels I've signed, on my WhatsApp, so they can freely talk to me whenever they want. I don't have any expertise when it comes to catalog management or a marketing effort in that sense, so it makes sense for me to not be that looped in.”

MR: What are the biggest issues that artists face in today’s music ecosystem would you say - is it primarily that 'time' thing of being an artist and managing everything else?

JD: “Yeah, I think that's always been the case. That's why artists turn to management or to labels. For independent artists, we try to just be there for sort of the day-to-day distribution side of things, and make sure that runs smoothly, so that you can focus 100% on being creative, whether that is on socials or actively making music.

“I personally prefer to leave artists be, but they need to trust that whoever is handling their back-end is still doing a proper job.”

MR: It sounds like Amuse has got lots of facets, how would you like to see it grow and evolve in the future?

JD: “Well, we have a very exciting product that we're launching after the summer, that is more of a label and management tool that gives a nice dashboard with fantastic insights that we're providing.

“I think a natural step for us would be to involve more labels or management companies and help them see what's bubbling somewhere in the world at some DSP, giving them that insight and providing a good service. But the core, for my team, has always been directly working with independent artists.”

MR: That’s interesting, and that dashboard and those metrics you mentioned, will they be using AI-driven insights into streaming data?

JD: “Not so much AI, more just total transparency of where the stream comes from - and why that stream happens in the first place. I think all the artists should know why people are streaming their stuff, and where - I think that's very crucial.

“People can say, ‘I have so many streams’, but then I see that it’s all editorial - meaning that Spotify added it to a playlist. That can be withdrawn from that playlist at any time - and what happens then? This is why I always speak for organic growth - talk to your audience and build it up to develop organic streaming. You can turn organic streaming into algorithmic streaming”

MR: Pivoting slightly from your role at Amuse John, I know you've recently become an adopter of using AI in a musical context, how do you use it?

JD: “I tend to make music on a daily basis - when the family and kids are asleep. I release heavily still. I tend to turn to AI for inspiration mainly. I use it more of an instrument - just as I would Splice or a synthesiser. Just as you’re tweaking things on a synth that eventually leads to something, I do the same with AI. I can feed [it] that beat that I’m doing, and it gives me ideas of where to develop it.

“[When I was younger] I was heavily into sampling. The way I would use samples is that I would try to re-create it rather than just include it in the final product. The same goes for AI in my case. I’m also a firm believer in voice-changing tools with AI. I sing something in the microphone with my horrible singing voice, and I change that into a beautiful singing voice.

“I’m very excited by AI if the person using it is also creative and not just lazy.

“My brother is a very old-school music producer, he records a lot of bands traditionally. Anyway, I used to be scared of AI in music, and he told me it was fantastic, he’d tell me that he had a singer who came in to do a full vocal, but then she left the studio, and he realised he didn’t have backing vocals. So, he just loads in her acapella, and he gets great stems and just backing vocals by using AI. It made the vocals more full. I just thought that was a brilliant use of it.

“I spoke to the producer of quite a famous Swedish singer (I can’t mention her name) she had discovered tapes from when she was singing at five years of age. and they are planning on doing a project by teaching AI on her singing voice at five years old, so that she can duet herself being her age now versus five years - it's kind of incredible.

“I’m all for that, and like I said, I don't like when it's just anyone sloppy using AI to just [generate] a pop song, then export and then upload Spotify. That doesn't make any sense.”

MR: It does feel that culturally, there’s a bit of a knee-jerk reaction to the merest mention of AI, but like you say - there’s creative potential in it…

JD: “One of my favourite synths that I use regularly is called Synplant. It’s fantastic - it’s shaped like a seed, and you can just do whatever you want with it. But they also introduced an AI function, where you would just describe what you would like to do with the sound. I love that.”

MR: It’s still that fundamental joy of discovery isn’t it. Speaking of which - how did you first discover music and how did it become your passion, John?

JD: “My father is a drummer - everyone seems to be a drummer in my family - but he played in a bunch of progressive rock bands in the 60s and 70s. I grew up on that music, and I've always enjoyed making music.

“He had an old Atari computer with the first version of Cubase. I started using that when I was 10, just making music.

“I discovered electronic music through my cousin Jesper (who is sort of a pioneer within the electronic scene here) So I started liking that music and started making that type of music.

“I think what was always different with me was that I didn't discover it through clubbing - I discovered it by listening to it. So I made house music before I’d even heard it in a club. It’s usually the opposite. You go out, you listen, you hear a Prodigy song and you want to make that. I just heard it on CDs,

“So I was already making music when I discovered electronic music. When I was 17, I had to start DJing. The request came and I was like, ‘well, maybe I should’, because I needed to get my music more out there. I released songs for about two years before my first show, and then I got booked into some weird club in Amsterdam or Rotterdam, and then, yeah, then I continued on that path for a long time.”

MR: Of course one of the most notable moments of your career was when you collaborated with the late, great Avicii on Don’t Hold Back (under the name Jovicii) What do you remember about making that track with him? At that point I guess he wasn’t quite the global superstar that he’d inevitably become.

JD: “It was right on the verge for him to become that. We spent a lot of time in the studio right at the point when he started getting requests for DJ shows - like his first ones. He was just extremely talented musically. We spent a few weeks in the studio making a bunch of songs, and that was the only thing that we finished, before he released a track called Bromance [later re-released in vocal form under the title Seek Bromance] and then right after that came Levels. I only met him at airports after that.

“It was a good few weeks for sure. I wish the other songs we did were better, but we did a few songs, and there’s a reason why we never put any of those out. But yeah, he was phenomenal with melodies, and just linking everything together.”

MR: Did you have an inkling at that point that this guy was going to end up going to the places that he went to?

JD: “Yeah, yeah, of course. He moulded himself. There were a bunch of things going on in Sweden at that time, where blogs were breaking artists, and Avicii was just one of those guys who was bubbling on these forums and blogs.

“I would go to these forums on a daily basis because if they wrote about a song you knew it was going to be big. They were writing about Avicii all the time, so you could sort of sense where things were going.”

MR: As someone who has been on both the artist and label/distribution side, how has the industry changed - it must be quite different now to that early 2010s period, right?

JD: “I was firmly against streaming at first - because I came from vinyl. I just wanted to continue with this vinyl thing. and then streaming happened, and you can't just [ignore] that and leave it be. So I adapted to that.

“What was interesting about that time was that there was a big label focus. I would go to the record shop and the records were structured under labels. The categories were all these labels, and not artists. That was very interesting to me, because I had so many projects - I've had 15 aliases!

“The fun thing with that was that I could [put out a track] with another name, and then release it on this label, because I knew that it was going to get picked up by someone. It was quite a fun time running all these different sorts of genre-based names at the same time.

“Then when streaming came, it became a lot more difficult, obviously. Now it’s much more artist-driven - and even song driven.

“Today, there are artists where I’ll listen to one song by them. I have no idea what their discography looks like. But back in the day, for example, I was a big fan of Cassius [French house duo]. I would listen to everything they put out. But now I can listen to one song from an artist - and that's it. So it's gone from a label focus to artist focus to song focus almost. That's a fairly interesting thing.”

MR: Do you think that’s a positive development?

JD: “It’s a different thing. It sounds bad when I say it, but I’m not against it necessarily. Spotify feeds us new artists, and I listen but sometimes I don’t even bother to follow them. I listen to one of their songs and move on to the next one.

“It’s good for the listener. I’m perhaps not the best advocate for it, but I should follow these artists that it sends me to, which I hope other people are doing better than I am! But music discovery these days is fantastic in that sense.

“I wouldn't have done the same thing browsing records in that record store, you know, 20 years ago, I would just be like, what's this label, I don't know, I'm not even going to listen to it. Now it’s much more open.”

MR: So what would you recommend that new artists starting today prioritise?

JD: “If I was 25 years younger, I would 100% start independently, but I would just do so much content as possible to build that fan base. I cannot do that these days. I'm horrible with content, but I think if I was younger, I would not have seen it as ‘cringy’ as I do today.

“Building a fan base is crucial - and talking to your fans is so important. I hate my own ways of doing it, because I'm not doing what I think is the best key to success. You need to promote all the time - not just the first couple of weeks before or after [a release]. You make this music, you put it out there. And then what.

“There used to be a hype around releasing something, oh, this guy or this girl is, they're promoting their singles, can release it in six months from now on. People were hyped. Now those same artists are releasing two double albums in a month. There’s so much music.

Axwell from Swedish House Mafia is known for being very detailed. He almost overworks a song because he wants it to be completely perfect when it comes out. Most people these days, they do something sort of quick, and then put out, and then they move on to the next single, which is going to be released in a week's time after that. I don’t think it’s wrong - I think you need to to keep your audience entertained. Look at Skrillex, he’s always delivering albums. He wouldn’t do that 10 years ago. But you need to do that now.

“I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but it is what it is.”

In May 1988, LA hair metal band Dokken set out on the biggest tour of their career - but it would prove disastrous.

Monsters Of Rock was a travelling festival playing 30 dates in stadiums across the US. Van Halen headlined. Below them, in descending order, were Scorpions, Dokken, Metallica and Kingdom Come.

At the end of 1987, Dokken had released their most successful album to date, Back For The Attack, which hit No.13 in the US. They’d also had an MTV hit with the song Dream Warriors, which was on the soundtrack to horror film A Nightmare On Elm Street 3 (the video features its star Robert ‘Freddy Krueger‘ Englund).

But on the Monsters Of Rock tour Dokken had a problem. They had to follow Metallica.

Dokken were a melodic hard rock band with some punchy songs and a genuine guitar hero in George Lynch. But in 1988 Metallica were the fast-rising kings of thrash metal with a fanatical following.

At the Monsters Of Rock show at the LA Coliseum, a near-riot ensued during Metallica’s performance.

It was a hard act to follow, and Dokken didn’t stand a chance.

As singer Don Dokken recalled to Classic Rock: “After Metallica went out and played Master Of Puppets, we sounded like the f**king Partridge Family!”

As the tour progressed, Don asked Cliff Burnstein, co-manager of both Dokken and Metallica, if the two bands could swap places on the bill.

Don said: “I told Cliff: ‘I know we’re making twice the money as Metallica, but can you please put ’em on after us, because they’re killing us?”

Burnstein said no, and Dokken’s humiliation was complete following a show at Giants Stadium in New Jersey.

“There was this huge review in the New York Times,” Don recalls. “It said that Van Halen kicked ass, the Scorpions were super-amazing, Metallica are the new upstarts just breaking out in America, Kingdom Come was good… and there was just one line about us. It said: ‘During Dokken’s set a record number of hotdogs were sold.’ It was horrible.”

At the outset of Eminem’s Lose Yourself, a question is posed which would stir millions of listeners around the globe to contemplate whether they - if given the chance - could be brave enough to reach upwards and fight for something better…

If you had one shot or one opportunity
To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip?

Here was worldwide rap superstar Eminem, then held in notoriety by some for his incendiary, parental advisory-emblazoned brand of rap, delivering something less likely to trigger outrage.

Even the skeptical middle class parents of his legions of of young fans could, on some level, relate to Marshall’s question.

They probably wouldn’t have liked to admit it though…

And the rock faction - formerly dismissive of Eminem back in those mono-cultural days when competition for alternative dominance was high - had their ears pricked by the track too.

Led by a tension-stoking, palm-muted electric guitar motif and launching into a headrush of energy, fans of nu-metal were transfixed by Lose Yourself. This wasn't like any Eminem track they had ever heard before.

Lose Yourself would become a global mega-hit for Eminem in 2002, and the key track from the soundtrack to the rapper’s acting debut, 8 Mile.

The track served as a window on the inner mental state of its central character, Jimmy ‘B-Rabbit’ Smith Jr (who Eminem portrayed in the film). It caches him preparing himself for the live rap battle that could change his fortunes forever.

It’s a narrative that was easy for Eminem to relate to, being largely sketched on his own lived experiences of making a name for himself in his native Detroit, back when he was still just Marshall Mathers.

“I always felt that if I was going to do a movie, I wanted it to be authentic,” Eminem told the BBC at the time of release. “I don't read much, but as soon as I got this script and started reading a few pages, I went: ‘This is something I want to do’.”

Rabbit’s drive to escape from a depressing life in poverty via gaining respect in the local rap scene was analogous to young Marshall’s own ambitions. The titular 8 Mile being a reference to a stretch of road that marked the divide between working class white families and working class black families in both Rabbit and Eminem’s home city of Detroit.

“Really both sides had the same income but when I was coming up, it was literally black on one side and white on the other side and me growing up on both sides. It was interesting to see,” Eminem relayed to the BBC. “This movie literally took me back to that time and to that place, stripped me of all ego, before I was Eminem, before I was anybody.”

As the star (and inspiration) of the Curtis Hansen-directed film, Eminem was expected to bring a number of tracks to the table for the soundtrack.

Nobody though, could have expected Eminem to rustle up something that not only bottled the essence of the film so perfectly, but would soon be regarded as his most important, and most universally-known, track.

Working with longtime producer (and one half of the team that first discovered the young Marshall) Jeff Bass, the bones of the track were worked on for quite a while within Eminem’s studio mainstay of 54 Sound in Detroit, long before the film’s script had been delivered.

“We started Lose Yourself in September of ‘01, and it came out in ‘02. So it took about a year, back-and-forth, to complete,” Jeff told Billboard. “A lot of the music was completed but the vocals and the words weren’t 100 percent completed by that time. I’d say it took about a year to really develop that song.”

Opening with a slightly spooky piano part, the majority of the track is built around the coiled spring-like momentum of a palm-muted D power chord, played by Jeff on his Fender Stratocaster.

The rhythmic movement of the second note of the chord (from A to A# then to C and back) creates a dissonant tension in the three-part motif. This voice leading approach is a time-worn trick for psychologically creating an uncertain harmonic space, delaying the feeling of resolution. It's something Led Zeppelin also applied to the not entirely dissimilar Kashmir.

How does that feel? It's the musical equivalent of peering over a precipice or, in this case, preparing to stride out on stage and face the baying crowd…

Wedding this scratchy guitar motif to a 808-style pulse-like beat (likely programmed by Eminem on an Akai MPC3000) Lose Yourself grew into a powerhouse.

“The chunky guitar in the song, I think it goes really well with the drums that were done. It rolls in a way that’s very motivating,” Bass said to Billboard. “It’s not that it’s so difficult; it’s just two, three chords that just kind of grab your soul and don’t let go.”

Further instrumentation, including synthesised piano, choral parts and strings imparted a cinematic scope, and a feeling of importance, to proceedings.

On earlier iterations of the track Jeff also had heavier distorted guitars during the choruses. Eminem wasn’t a fan though, and they were ultimately taken out.

Despite being a pretty awesome piece of music even before the lyric was applied, Eminem was initially stumped when it came to getting the bars down. It would take the words of the Scott Silver-penned script for 8-Mile for it to eventually crystallise.

During the production of the film, Eminem - now fully enmeshed with the character of Rabbit - could be frequently found scribbling down lyrical fragments between takes.

To assist the rapper in channeling his inspired ideas straight to tape, his then production company manager Joel Martin had a mobile studio established. The mission: make Eminem’s notes into gold.

“We couldn’t get the analog machine [from 54 Sound] in the trailer, so we went full digital,” Martin told The Ringer. “Marshall would pop in and write and do lyrics and he would lay the s**t down in the trailer.”

Lose Yourself’s first verse illuminated the apprehensive headspace of Rabbit. It would end up being regarded as one the sharpest lyrical depictions of how it actually feels to be nervous.

His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There's vomit on his sweater already, mom's spaghetti
He's nervous, but on the surface, he looks calm and ready

By dint of the fact that he was ‘in character’ Eminem allowed himself to be vulnerable, revealing the self-doubting human underneath the superstar pomp. But beyond the autobiographical nature, it was a cogent and affecting expression of the physiology of anxiety that many fans would invariably relate to it.

As his lyric continued, the building intensity reached fever pitch before surging outwards. Eminem underlines why Rabbit is so fixated on this moment.

This could be it. The salvation that could finally lift him from a life of misery.

But he has to believe in himself…

Ope, there goes Rabbit, he choked, he's so mad
But he won't give up that easy, no, he won't have it
He knows his whole back's to these ropes, it don't matter
He's dope, he knows that, but he's broke, he's so stagnant

“The positive aspect of the movie is that no matter where you come from, you can break out of that. If your mentality is right, if your drive is right, you can break out of that cycle,” Eminem explained to the BBC. “The whole point of the movie is that it doesn't matter where you come from, you can break out of that.”

The infectious chorus spelled out the now-or-never objective of the song - and the core theme of the whole 8 Mile project.

Rabbit needs to grapple up the rope, and lift himself out from his current lot, metamorphosing into the champion that he knows he can be. But what if it goes wrong?

You better lose yourself in the music
The moment, you own it, you better never let it go
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime

The second verse then diverges. With perhaps a bit more lived self-reflection, Eminem accelerates forward in the narrative to find a very different version of Rabbit - and illustrates that age-old adage of ‘be careful what you wish for’.

Having now achieved the fame and adoration he craved, Rabbit finds that he’s grown distant from the things that once meant everything to him - most importantly, his daughter who he ‘barely knows’.

Fame then, is another trap - an inversion of the despair of poverty.

He realises too late that the adulation and ecstasy of fame is only an ephemeral thing. As sales (and female attention) begin to dwindle, this post-success Rabbit reflects on what he’s lost. Charles Dickens would have loved it.

The third verse balances the scales of both preceding verses. Regardless of the pitfalls, he is now committed to his course. The practical reality is, that things can’t go on the way they are:

All the pain inside amplified by the
Fact that I can't get by with my nine-to-
Five and I can't provide the right type of life for my family
Cause, man, these goddamn food stamps don't buy diapers

It’s a captivating lyric, delivered with authentic passion - and perfect rhythmic punctuation. It's a lyric Eminem invites you to feel.

It's essentially Eminem revealing his own origin story. From timid, beaten-down underdog to hyper-famous rap titan. Rap served as the exit door from the brutal hardships of real life.

"The vocal that ended up being the final vocal was the first take," mixer and engineer Steve King told Tape Op. "He tried to sing it a few other times, but just couldn't beat it because he had some kind of other energy. The emotion he put into that particular performance was awesome - we were all like, 'Oh my God!' That guy is super talented, brilliant."

Hearing the demo, Martin was similarly gobsmacked, “It was a combination of the script and Marshall’s actual tale,” Martin told The Ringer. “I was like, ‘What the f**k, are you kidding? How did you put that together?’

“It’s one of those moments - and it doesn’t happen very often, even though I was in the music business - where the hair stands up on the back of your neck,” 8 Mile’s executive producer Carol Fenelon recalled in The Ringer, remembering her feeling when she first heard the finished track;

“You just know that this is going to be a huge song.”

Fenelon was bang on the money. Lose Yourself fast became a global phenomenon when released on October 28th 2002.

With the film following closely on its heels the following month, the 8 Mile period saw Eminem extend his audience tenfold. The film's themes of class mobility and dogged perseverance underlined the cultural, liberating value of rap.

Some, who'd previously not paid any heed to Eminem, suddenly started listening.

Lose Yourself topped the US Billboard Charts for 12 weeks, and also reached number 1 in the UK and eighteen other countries. Being ostensibly a soundtrack song, the track was nominated and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 2003 - it was the first rap song to do so. It also bagged Grammys for Best Rap Song and Best Rap Solo Performance the same year. Quite a haul.

24 years later, and Lose Yourself remains the motivational banger, and is frequently deployed at sporting events, for competitive feats of endurance, for geeing up a crowd before a keynote speech, or just as a backing for big night out preparations.

It’s one of those tracks that, despite its autobiographical nature, has now become bigger than Eminem himself.

The perennial pump-up tune, mark our words; people will still be psyching themselves up to Lose Yourself in decades to come.

The young American guitarist had no idea what he was getting into when he went to audition for an Irish rock band. But he was desperate – and this gig was offering decent money.

It was 1974, and Scott Gorham, from Glendale, California, was in London trying to make it as a pro musician.

It was hard going. With his band Fast Buck he was playing in tiny venues and earning next to nothing. So when a friend tipped him off about this Irish band looking for a guitarist, he jumped at the chance.

As Gorham recalled in a previously unpublished interview from 2010: “I was broke. Playing in the pubs I was making £11 a week. And then this guy told me about the audition and said, ‘I think they’re gonna pay £30 a week.’ I said, ‘I’m in!’”

This was all the information he had when he walked into the band’s rehearsal space.

“I was thinking, ‘Irish rock?! What the hell is that?’ I wasn’t even really aware of Irish music at that point. I’m half Irish, my mother’s full Irish, but we never had any of that playing in the house.

“So I’m expecting a red-haired white guy, and I get a tap on the shoulder from this big black guy with a massive afro and a little moustache and an Irish accent. ‘Hey, I’m Phil!’ I thought, ‘Shit, this is gonna be interesting…’”

Phil Lynott was the charismatic bassist, lead vocalist and primary songwriter in Thin Lizzy.

The band had previously been a trio with Lynott alongside drummer Brian Downey and guitarist Eric Bell. When Gorham and a young Scottish guitarist named Brian Robertson both impressed at audition, Lynott chose to expand the band’s line-up to a quartet – and as a result, a new signature twin lead guitar sound was created.

In 1972, as a trio, Thin Lizzy had scored a hit in with their version of the traditional Irish song Whiskey In The Jar.

But they had failed to build on that success, and by 1974 the situation was dire.

Gorham explained: “The band was seriously in debt, which I didn’t know. I was blissfully naïve about the whole thing. I was just thinking, ‘Isn’t it great to be in a band?’

“Unknown to me, when we played at [London club] the Marquee the feeling was, ‘We’d better get a record deal from that show or it’s done.’ So thank God we did.”

Thin Lizzy’s first album with Gorham and Robertson was Nightlife, released on 8 November 1974. The album’s opening track, She Knows, was co-written by Gorham and Lynott. On the following album, 1975’s Fighting, Gorham had two co-writes with Lynott (King’s Vengeance and Freedom Song) and one solo credit for Ballad Of A Hard Man.

Looking back in 2010, Gorham remained highly critical of those albums. “We didn’t have a clue,” he said. “We were so fucking green we didn’t have a hope in hell.”

But with the album that followed, everything changed. That album was Jailbreak, released in 1976. Gorham co-wrote two tracks on the album, Warriors and Emerald. But it was Lynott alone who wrote the game-changer track. The Boys Are Back In Town was Thin Lizzy’s breakthrough hit, No 1 in Ireland, No 8 in the UK and No 12 in the US. It lives on as a classic rock anthem.

“The crazy thing is, that song wasn’t even planned to be on the album,” Gorham said. “Before it was a single the album was doing nothing in England at this point – or the same amount as the last two. But one day the manager said, ’It looks like we’re starting to get big radio play on The Boys Are Back In Town.’ We got this domino effect, a ton of radio stations picked it up, and then it just took off like a rocket.”

As Thin Lizzy’s profile rose, there were various benefits.

“The hotels got better,” Gorham said. “You got your own room. I didn’t have to look at Phil’s naked ass any more! Every so often I’d say to him, ‘I want you to take this party down the road, to somebody else’s room.’ He was the original 24-hour guy.

“And we actually started to see women at the shows! We’d written love songs. It wasn’t all thrash and leather and heavy riffs and all that. We went out of our way to write love songs and more lyrical, medium-tempo kind of things. We started to see a lot of women at the shows, which was nice. It had its perks.

“And Phil was in his element. He had a real charming thing about him. He loved women, absolutely loved them. And he really respected them, so he treated them well.”

There was, however, a tougher side to Phil Lynott.

“We were that kind of band that didn’t go out looking for trouble but we always got it,” Gorham shrugged. “And it would always end up in a huge fucking mess, fighting like you wouldn’t believe.

“If you fucked with Phil, he’d go for you. He wouldn’t back down. There were a fair few occasions when somebody would be fucking with me and Phil would go, ‘Let me take care of this guy for you.’ Boom! ‘Thanks, Phil!’

“Being around a guy like Phil, you toughen up real quick. I never hung around with someone like that before. Back home all my buddies were like surf guys, stoned on weed, just, ‘Cool, man!’

“But not Phil – not even if he was stoned. He could be real aggressive if you fucked with him, especially if you fucked with his country – he was so nationalistic – or if you fucked with his women. And if you fucked with Thin Lizzy, he was really gonna go for you!”

Ultimately, drugs were Phil Lynott’s undoing, and it was on the Jailbreak tour that the first signs of trouble became evident. Lynott was hospitalised with hepatitis, forcing the cancellation of shows in the US.

The band had another album out by the end of 1976 – Johnny The Fox, featuring the classic track Don’t Believe A Word.

But on the 1977 album Bad Reputation, Brian Robertson played on only three tracks and was not featured in the band photo on the cover. Robertson had missed a US tour after sustaining an injury to his hand in a brawl in a London club. His replacement on that tour was Gary Moore.

Robertson was reinstated for the Bad Reputation tour, and in 1978 the band’s live album Live And Dangerous reached No 2 in the UK chart, held off the top spot by the Grease movie soundtrack.

Live And Dangerous is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest live albums of all time.

Robertson quit Thin Lizzy during the 1978 tour, with Gary Moore again stepping in to replace him. Moore remained as a full band member for the recording of the 1979 album Black Rose. But it was during the sessions for that album in Paris that Lynott and Gorham fell into the heroin addiction that would eventually contribute to Lynott’s death.

As Gorham recalled in 2010: “In the beginning it was booze and weed. The class A stuff started to come in after a few years. Whether it was mental inspiration or physical inspiration, you were looking for help. It was a sign of the times. You wanted to get loaded.

“But going to Paris to make Black Rose was a big mistake. At that point, we’d done morphine in New York City. No big deal. But in Paris – and I’m still not sure to this day why or how it happened – all of a sudden we were just inundated with dealers.

“It was like an open door. You’d get to the studio and every other night there’d be a new dealer chopping out a line of smack or whatever.

“The first night I remember it happening, Phil gave me a call at my hotel room. ‘Hey, why don’t you come down to my room, I got something I wanna show you.’ I had no idea what he was talking about. I go in, he whips open some packets and says, ‘Hey, man, you ever seen any of that?’ I knew exactly what it was. I’d already tried it out in LA. He says, ‘You wanna try some?’ ‘Uh, yeah!’ And that was me and him gone for the next six years.”

On the Black Rose album, one song was sung by Lynott as a kind of confessional. Its title: Got To Give It Up.

As Scott Gorham sadly recalled: “Nobody thought we were gonna get strung out. This was not gonna last forever. You are going to give it up after a while – we will come to our senses. But of course we never did.”

Eric Clapton was on a mission from the start and there was no time to waste. He joined the Yardbirds in ’63, left in ’65 to join up with John Mayall and his Bluesbreakers, and within 12 months he had co-founded Cream to establish a new paradigm for blues-rock, the power trio.

He had reconfigured guitar in just three years. Little wonder it would go to his head. When some oik spray-painted “CLAPTON IS GOD” on a wall in North London the list of suspects was long but most definitely included Clapton himself. “I thought it was quite justified to be honest with you,” he told Guitarist in 1994. “I suppose I felt I deserved it for the amount of seriousness that I’d put into it.”

Clapton was serious.

His mission was to spread the gospel of blues guitar. He had been weaned on early rock ’n’ roll just as his peers were. That’s what made him aware of the electric guitar as an instrument, seeding its potential in his mind. He found his calling after hearing Freddie King for the first time.

“Listening to him had an effect on me similar to what I might feel if I were to meet an alien from outer space,” said Clapton, in his 2007 autobiography. “It simply blew my mind.”

The record in question was the 7” for Hideaway. The B-side, I Love The Woman, contained an “earth-shattering” moment, a guitar solo in which King demonstrated just how rich and wide and musically literate the blues could be. Clapton said it took his breath away.

“It was like listening to modern jazz, expressive and melodic, a unique kind of playing in which he bent the strings and produced sounds that gave me the shivers,” he said.

Eureka! The electric guitar could be the lead instrument, on an even keel with the vocals.

There were other formative influences. George Barnes’ playing on Connie Francis’ Lipstick On Your Collar made an impression. James Burton’s countrified styled jived with Clapton’s sensibility, too, and it fit in with this recognition that it was all interconnected, and the blues held it all together.

Not that the world was paying attention. A four-piece modern beat combo out of Liverpool was having much success. They were making the weather. Clapton thought this was “despicable”. Seeing all these young people succumbing to Beatlemania was a ‘hello, sheeple!’ moment. How could the music buying public at large confer godlike status upon them when Clapton’s heroes went to their graves unsung?

We shall allow ourselves a wry smile at Clapton taking umbrage at people deifying another artist then move on.

This pique played its part in refocusing a young teenaged Clapton when he got back in the rehearsal room with the Roosters, talking about the blues, honing his chops alongside fellow guitarist Tom McGuinness – who can take the credit for introducing Clapton to King.

“I was interested in the white rock ’n’ rollers until I heard Freddie King – and then I was over the moon,” Clapton told Guitarist. “I knew that was where I belonged – finally. That was serious, proper guitar playing and I haven’t changed my mind ever since. I still listen to it and I get the same boost now that I did then.”

Back then the gigs came easy. Clapton made his bones playing clubs, “his spiritual stomping ground”. They all did. There were not enough bands to go around. If you were good enough, you got a gig, and those who could really play could make a bit of money. As a student of the blues, Clapton operated as though he had secret knowledge, a deeper cultural wellspring to draw from.

He says it was the only education he got, falling down the rabbit hole, learning these cats’ names and their stories, and how blues and soul, R&B and jazz all fit together, knotted with the histories of those who created the sounds.

“I remember hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and not really knowing anything about the geography or the culture of the music,” Clapton told Guitarist. “But for some reason it did something to me – it resonated.

“Then I found out later that they were black and they were from the Deep South, and that started my education. In fact the only education I ever really had was finding out about blues. I took a kind of elementary fundamental education in art, but it didn’t rivet my attention in the same way blues did.”

As any teacher will tell you, a motivated student is a good student. Clapton applied himself. This education went hand in hand with learning to play the guitar, developing a musical vocabulary and playing style that would soon be turned lose on the Yardbirds, that great mid ‘60s petrie dish of percolating guitar genius from which Jeff Bech, Jimmy Page and Clapton all emerged.

“I wanted to know everything,” Clapton continued. “I spent all of my mid to late teens and early twenties studying this music; studying the geography of it, the chronology of it, the roots, the different regional influences, how everybody inter-related, how long people lived, how quickly they learnt things, how many songs they had of their own and what songs were shared around…”

Clapton found a place to put this knowledge in the autumn of 1963. The Yardbirds would be the perfect vehicle for his obsession with Chicago blues. It was a band who took this stuff seriously. They would play Willie Dixon, Billy Boy Arnold and Sonny Boy Williamson tracks, Clapton taking over on lead vocals for Williamson’s Good Morning, School Girl. They would jam out Bo Diddley’s I’m A Man, “rave-ups” as they called it then.

This was when Clapton acquired the sobriquet Slowhand. He’d break a string onstage and change it right there and then, and the crowd would treat it like a tennis pro challenging a line call, a slow hand clap would ripple through the audience.

Unfazed, Clapton got straight back at it. But he had itchy feet. When people actually started to really like the Yardbirds (the Graham Gouldman-written For Your Love went Top Ten) it was time to leave. The self-styled “anarchist” wanted to back underground, there he would find John Mayall waiting for him.

And more often than not, wait for Clapton is what Mayall did.

“I was so unreliable, so irresponsible,” recalled Clapton. “I would sometimes just not show up at gigs and that’s how Peter Green was asked to play with John – because I wasn’t there.”

Clapton was just 20 years old when he joined the Bluesbreakers. His Gibson Les Paul and Marshall amp sound was making waves all the way over the Atlantic.

The similarly minded Billy Gibbons’ ears pricked up. The Texan was moved by ‘the Beano Album’, and this being the pre-internet era he did what everyone else did at the time and scanned the back of the album sleeve to for idea on how Clapton got this thrilling tone.

“The sound was just so fierce and so attractive,” said Gibbons, speaking to Guitarist in 2021. “The appeal drew everyone’s curiosity to attempt to suss out where this sound was coming from. The photograph of Eric on the back cover was a clue. We said, ‘Ah, look in the background, there’s a Marshall, but it’s not very big, and ah, look at that. They don’t make those any more – but it’s one of those Les Pauls!’”

The Beano ‘Burst Les Paul became infamous. It helped establish the sound that everyone was chasing. Clapton had been searching for something to compete with Freddie King’s tone and had eventually found it in a cranked Marshall 2x12.

That alchemical combination was broken up after the Beano went AWOL, stolen from a church hall in ’66. Gibson only made these sunburst Les Pauls from 1958 to 1960.

There were not that many of them, making each and everyone precious in its own right. And yet this one, which had acquired mythical status in Clapton’s hands, was gone. That’s the thing when people think that you’re God, they all want a piece of you.

Speaking to Classic Rock, the Beano album’s producer, Mike Vernon, remembers Clapton as Clapton himself did; he was difficult. He was particularly uncompromising over how they would record. It had to be live, but at the volume he played at the guitar would bleed into mix.

“It took a while to get a sound that everybody was happy with, especially Eric,” said Vernon. “But everybody had to take on board that we were going into an unknown era, nobody had ever witnessed in the Decca studios somebody coming into the studio, set up their guitar and amp and play at that volume.

“People in the canteen behind the studio were complaining about the noise. Normally they would never hear it, but it was travelling round the studio complex. People were coming down to the studio to see what was going on.”

What was going on was a miracle. Mayall had called the tunes. He was the leader. Clapton applied is magic, heaving the blues into popular culture, inspiring generations of players. Nothing would be the same again. His successor in the Bluesbreakers, Peter Green, had a few ideas also how to take it further. The British blues boom had officially started.

For the record, Vernon believes Lonely Years, the seven-inch that Clapton and Mayall cut in ’65 for he and his brother’s imprint, Purdah, was Slowhand’s definitive recording.

“Lonely Years was the finest effort Eric ever put on record,” he told Classic Rock. “It just sums up exactly what Eric was about at that time – that real down-home feel. That record was the closest I came to a real Chicago sound.”

That was exactly was what Clapton was chasing. And if that made him an elitist with a god complex, so be it. At least it was with the best intentions.

“I thought everyone else was either in it just to be on Top Of The Pops or Ready Steady Go, or to score girls or for some dodgy reason,” he said. “I was in it to save the world. I wanted to tell the world about blues and to get it right. Even then I thought that I was on some kind of mission, so in a way I thought, ‘Yes, I am God; quite right‘.

“My head was huge. I was unbearably arrogant and not a fun person to be around most of the time because I was so superior and very judgmental. I didn’t have time for anything that didn’t fit into my scheme of things.”

Keep in mind his next project saw him team up with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce for a project he envisaged as a straight-up blues trio but was anything but.

Cream was another miracle, musically and existentially. How did they manage to hold it together for three long years?

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

After years trying to decide just what kind of act they wanted to be, the Pet Shop Boys eventually settled on a formula that would yield some the 1980s' most enduring hits.

Following the unsuccessful release of their first single West End Girls in 1984 the track was re-recorded and reissued the following year, rushing straight to number one in the UK chart with similar success in other territories. Pop fans were besotted by a winning combo of sharp lyricism, clubby energy, and vocalist Neil Tennant's charismatic presence.

This was just the beginning of what would soon grow into a truly exceptional career, which is still in rude health over 40 years later.

Tennant and keyboardist Chris Lowe were quick to embrace new gear and sampling techniques, utilising the most innovative electronic instruments of the day to create a slew of timeless pop anthems; Rent, What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Domino Dancing, Always on My Mind, the list goes on.

Their biggest tracks would have enormous audience appeal yet were imbued with an intelligence that outclassed their chart contemporaries.

A former music journalist, Tennant explored class, sexuality, politics and the intricacies of the human heart.

Their extensive use of the Emulator II (and accompanying library), Fairlight CMI, Linn Drum, with Roland Super Jupiter synth meant that their sounds too, were truly cutting edge for their day. But, the Pet Shop Boys weren’t just twiddling knobs for the fun of it.

They were transmitting the sounds of the most hyper-intense clubs into the living rooms of Thatcher's Britain.

We could pick any number of PSB’s top tier to examine musically, but their enormous and iconic hit It’s a Sin from 1987 is a particularly fascinating one to look closer at. It draws upon some well-known musical techniques, extending back hundreds of years.

When Neil and Chris started working together in 1982, Neil made use of some redundancy money to rent a small demo studio in Camden, where the two would work on Fridays and Saturdays.

This was the demo location for all of the songs on their critically-acclaimed first album, Please (1986) and many of the songs for the equally acclaimed second album, Actually (1987).

Tennant would man a four track mixer (presumably some form of Tascam PortaStudio) while Lowe would play synth and electric piano. Tennant would also play the odd bit of acoustic piano when required. But mainly, Neil's job was to create the toplines and the lyrics.

Studio owner, Ray Roberts, was very impressed with PSB's early demos, offering them use of the main studio, in return for a percentage of the publishing on the songs. This seemed like a fair deal - particularly given the duo’s lack of financial stability at the time.

Between the ages of 11 and 18, Neil Tennant had attended a Catholic school. In line with the orthodoxy that was instilled in all students, he was taught that sex (outside of marriage) was a sin.

This particularly draconian teaching resurfaced in Tennant’s head when he heard Lowe play a hymn-like chord progression. Suddenly, the basis of It’s a Sin's lyrical theme crystallised in his mind. Although its lyric was an honest admittance of the shame he felt for having absconded from his school's teachings, the music told another story. It was a bombastic rebuttal to the judgmental nature of such prudish restriction.

When I look back upon my life
It's always with a sense of shame
I've always been the one to blame
For everything I long to do
No matter when or where or who

A demo of the first version of the song was recorded with New York’s hi-NRG producer Bobby Orlando, but this version was ultimately shelved.

However, there was a sense that with the right hands and ears on the mix, It’s a Sin had the potential to be something special.

Working alongside producers Julian Mendelsohn and Stephen Hague, Tennant and Lowe transformed the song into a show-stopping pop epic. The re-worked mix was suitably dense, incorporating recordings of ambient sounds captured while visiting the Brompton Oratory, and even included elements of a sung Mass, which was recorded at Westminster Cathedral.

Strangely, they also included samples from an Apollo rocket launch - from the original commentary provided by NASA. Was there something slightly Freudian about that choice, we wonder?

The song sprawled out into a monster of considerable heft, maximising the hi-NRG feel of the original demo whilst daubing it in a dramatic gothic cowl.

“It’s a Sin at its heart is a heavy metal record,” Tennant told the Financial Times. “There is a huge link between hi-NRG music and heavy metal: the urgency, the chords, the slightly histrionic melody. You could do a medley of It’s a Sin with The Final Countdown by Europe; in fact, I don’t know why we haven’t done that.”

Upon release as Actually’s lead single on June 15th 1987, It’s a Sin became the band’s second UK number one after West End Girls. By the end of the year, it’d be the country’s eighth biggest-selling single.

Let's look under the hood at just how It’s a Sin works.

Set in the keyboardist’s favoured key of C minor, the main verse structure is pretty much entirely dependent upon a musical tool which relates back to the late 1600s…

The application of the circle of fifths is clearly evident in the song. This approach is based on the principle of one chord naturally leading to the next, with the distance between these natural shifts always being a 5th.

You can count an interval of a 5th by simply counting in a step-wise movement, with the notes you start and end on being notes one and five respectively. For example, if you are on a chord of C, count 5 notes upward and you reach the chord of G, and so on.

In the case of It’s a Sin, PSB use a descending circle of 5ths for each verse, so our chords follow a downward cycle with the sequence - Cm, Fm, Bb, Eb, and Ab - before breaking out of the cycle to use Fm and G, before repeating the sequence again.

It's worth noting that this song is not alone in its adoption of this musical device. You will hear it used in songs as diverse as the jazz standard Fly Me To The Moon and Gloria Gaynor's disco classic I Will Survive, alongside Basket Case by Green Day and Hey Joe by Jimi Hendrix.

That's quite a legacy for a theoretical trick first established in the 17th century!

Above and beyond its basic musical employment, the reason we continue to love this sequence is pure physics.

The ‘perfect 5th’ slots beautifully into the naturally occurring set of frequencies, which are described as the harmonic series. When these harmonics and overtones are used in a musical context, there is something very organic and ultimately pleasing from a listener’s perspective.

When blasted at volume into our ears - as they are in the context of It's a Sin's energetic arrangement - that feeling of inevitability is maximised. It's as if the song were always meant to be.

The chorus section is heralded by the arrival of trumpeting synth brass, which relates back to our home key of Cm, alternating with a chord of Ab/C.

We also hear alternating chords between Fm and G, which are slightly unnatural bedfellows, but add a beautiful sense of discordance, as a reaction to the verse.

Once we reach the bridge section, there is still a heavy reliance upon the key chord of Cm, which is held for two bars, before shifting to a chord of Ebm. This could be regarded as an unrelated chord, thanks to the presence of the note Gb, which is a tritone away from the note C. Its presence here adds angst and fury, before moving to Gm and back to Cm, and a turnaround using a chord of Bb.

Beyond this effective musicology, It’s a Sin’s true power comes from the impact of Tennant’s immaculate and distinctive voice - and, of course, the bravery of his religiously inspired theme.

Contending with this type of repressive, religiously-sanctioned prudishness in a pop context at a time of hyper-tension (and hyper-conservatism) wasn't something to be done lightly. It was a positively incendiary move.

It's a Sin's underlying rejection of imposed restraint had particular resonance due to the ongoing global Aids crisis, where once again the idea of sex - particularly gay sex - being shameful was asserted daily across sections of the British media.

The song’s righteous fire was perfectly visually articulated by the Derek Jarman-directed video, which featured Tennant facing the judgement of a church inquisition. It’d be the first of many collaborations between Jarman and the pair.

However, not everybody was a fan. Several newspapers were critical of the song’s seemingly anti-religious undercurrent, and the very school that had inspired Tennant's words - St. Cuthbert's Grammar School - criticised Tennant’s oft-repeated press mentions of the school’s strict orthodoxy as the basis for the song.

“It is very unfortunate that Neil has painted this distorted picture of his school days and the things he was taught,” the school said in a statement, published in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. “It is very hurtful. It is a long time since he has been here and there have been a lot of changes since then in the Church."

Years later, in a 2009 interview with The Atlantic. Neil reflected on a song that had grown into, for a certain generation, a more meaningful hymn than anything they’d had to learn in school

“When we brought out It’s a Sin, it was quite interesting, because people took it really seriously,” Neil said. “The song was written in about 15 minutes, and was intended as a camp joke and it wasn’t something I consciously took very seriously. Sometimes I wonder if there was more to it than I thought at the time, but the local parish priest in Newcastle delivered a sermon on it, and reflected on how the Church changed from the promise of a ghastly hell to the message of love.”

It happened 40 years ago, but Andrew Farriss, keyboard player and founding member of INXS, can still remember the moment when he and singer Michael Hutchence began working together on the most emotive hit song the band ever recorded.

Farriss tells MusicRadar: “I wrote the music for it on a piano at home, and some time later Michael heard me playing on it on someone else’s piano at a friend’s house. He said, ‘I like that. When we get home to Sydney let’s finish that.’

“So originally it was just a piano song with a vocal. A very simple song, really, in that sense. And Michael came up with a lyric and called it Never Tear Us Apart.”

There is, however, a third person whom Farriss acknowledges as a key collaborator on this song.

English producer Chris Thomas had begun working with INXS on the 1985 album Listen Like Thieves.

That album gave the band a major international profile outside of Australia, so Thomas was retained for the follow-up, Kick, which would yield five hit singles – Need You Tonight, New Sensation, Mystify, Devil Inside and Never Tear Us Apart.

Farriss recalls: “Chris Thomas and I had a conversation. We had a lot of them, actually, because we made three studio albums with Chris as a producer.

“But with that song in particular, Never Tear Us Apart, I’ll give a lot of credit to Chris Thomas, because we had recorded it first in a traditional rock style with mainly guitars. But Chris said to me, ‘Can you play what you’re playing on the keyboard with a string sound?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ So I experimented a bit with different sounds and things, and the sound that I came up with is what you can hear on the record.

“So it was really Chris’s suggestion as a record producer, and it was absolutely genius. Very clever.”

Farriss admits that he wasn’t entirely sure of this new arrangement of the song when they had finished the recording.

“It sounded like it was from outer space compared to what most bands were doing around that time,” he says. “I told Chris, ‘This song sounds nothing like the rest of our album.’ The rest of Kick was quite funky, which I really liked. We all liked all that.

“I said, ‘Never Tear Us Apart sounds like an old 1950s ballad with strings in the background. It really doesn’t sound contemporary.’ And Chris said, ‘Yeah, but that’s what makes it sound so great, mate!’”

The drama in this arrangement was matched by the emotional depth in Hutchence’s lyrics and lead vocal.

In 2019 – 22 years after Hutchence’s suicide – the documentary Mystify: Michael Hutchence included an audio interview, the date unspecified, in which the singer discussed the words he sang in Never Tear Us Apart and confirmed the identity of the song’s subject.

“It’s kinda personal,” Hutchence said. “I don't make up love songs, so… That’s definitely a song for a girl called Michele.”

Referring to the title of the song, he added with a laugh: “She knows, but we’re not together anymore, so it doesn’t work, does it?”

The woman in question was Michele Bennett, an Australian film producer, with whom Hutchence was in a relationship from 1982 to 1987.

It was reported after Hutchence’s death on 22 November 1997 that his last phone call had been to Bennett. Hutchence’s sister Tina believed that had her brother lived, he and Bennett would eventually have married.

Reflecting on all of this, Andrew Farriss tells MusicRadar: “I think it was a very important lyric for Michael.”

He recalls: “When we first met as school kids, Michael was much more interested in lyrics and poetry than in singing. I don’t think he was that interested at all in singing, but he was very interested in writing lyrics and poetry.

“At that time I was already in school bands. I was writing songs, I was writing lyrics. But I began to recognise with Michael that he really was passionate about writing lyrics. And he got so good at it as he went along.”

Never Tear Us Apart was released as a single on 13 June 1988. Surprisingly it only reached No 24 in the UK, but it was a top 10 hit in Canada, Netherlands, Belgium and the US. The song has been streamed more than half a billion times on Spotify alone.

On 27 November 1997, Hutchence’s funeral at St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney ended with Never Tear Us Apart playing as the coffin was carried away by Farriss and the other members of INXS along with the singer’s brother Rhett.

Farriss says now: “One thing about Michael’s lyric writing, one of the things I think that really stood the test of time with a lot of INXS songs, is that his lyrics were very poignant. He didn’t have to say very much, but you knew exactly what he was talking about.”

George Harrison is sitting in a vast soundstage at Twickenham Film Studios, explaining to Ringo Starr and film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg how a BBC2 sci-fi series called Out Of The Unknown, that he watched the previous evening, has inspired a new song. Harrison is sporting the same black fur coat he wears on the iconic rooftop concert and perched on his knee is John Lennon’s 1965 Epiphone Casino.

It’s mid-morning on Tuesday 7 January, 1969 and the next Beatle to arrive is Paul McCartney. “Good morning,” says the bearded bassman chirpily as he strides across the floor. “Do you wanna hear a song I wrote last night?” Harrison asks him. “It’s just a very short one, called I Me Mine”.

What follows is a beautifully plaintive and sparse rendition with Harrison’s voice sounding particularly pure. “Lovely” exclaims Lyndsey Hogg. McCartney, with hands in pockets, stands beside Harrison and stares down at his fingers on the fretboard, but says nothing. Then John Lennon arrives. Harrison, now standing, runs through the song again but speeds it up. “Run along son, see you later,” jokes Lennon. “We’re a rock and roll band you know”.

If one incident highlights the tortuous position that George Harrison found himself in as part of The Beatles then this is it. It’s just one of a number of incidents captured in Peter Jackson’s three-part 2021 documentary Get Back, in which Harrison employs impressive levels of tenacity and tact to push his own songs forward to Lennon and McCartney. Their songwriting partnership was a source of both inspiration and frustration for George. They are ostensibly the gatekeepers, two strong personalities locked into an even stronger autonomous partnership.

Only in the months leading up to The Beatles’ break-up was Harrison’s contribution and his songwriting abilities finally acknowledged by its two principal songwriters. “Until this year our songs have been better than George’s,” said McCartney bluntly in the Get Back film. “Now, this year, his songs are at least as good as ours."

In the years and decades following the break-up of The Beatles, George Harrison’s contribution to the band would be completely reassessed and his songs, such as Something and While My Guitar Gently Weeps, would be recognised as some of The Beatles’ greatest works.

As Frank Sinatra said of Something in his introduction to the song during a performance in 1982: “It’s one of the best love songs I believe to be written in 50 or 100 years… it really is one of the finest.”

Despite such accolades, Harrison possibly felt undervalued within The Beatles at times. Subsequent comments also suggest that he may have contributed to more Beatles songs than he is given credit for.

In a 1987 interview for the TV series W. 57th Street, the whole issue of songwriting credits came up when broadcaster Selina Scott asked Harrison for his reaction to a comment from John Lennon.

“In an interview before his death, John Lennon said he was really hurt by you, that you’d never mentioned in your autobiography any of the influences that he had on you,” said Scott.

“He was annoyed because I didn’t say that he had written one line of this song, Taxman,” replied Harrison. “Did you tell him that?” asked Scott. “Well I didn’t because he was already dead after that” replied Harrison, “but the point to that was that I also didn’t say how I wrote two lines to Come Together or three lines to Eleanor Rigby, you know, I wasn’t getting into any of that. I think in the balance I would have had more things to be niggled with him about than he would have with me.”

Scott then cited Lennon mentioning that Harrison had idolised him as a young boy. “Well that’s what he thought,” laughed Harrison. “I liked him very much, he was a groove, he was a good lad, but at the same time he misread me. He didn’t realise who I was and this was one of the main faults of John and Paul. They were so busy being John and Paul, they failed to realise who else was around at the time.”

In the same interview Harrison touched on the legacy of being a Beatle. “It just annoyed me that people got so into The Beatles. It’s not that I don’t like talking about them, I’ve never stopped talking about them… in the end it’s like ‘Oh sod off with The Beatles’ you know?’'”

By 1969, Harrison was feeling smothered by his existence as a Beatle. Things famously came to a head when Harrison said to McCartney: “I’ll play whatever you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.”

It took Harrison leaving the band on 10 January 1969, with the witty, parting riposte of “See you ‘round the clubs”, for McCartney and Lennon to really take stock of his contribution. Although as Paul McCartney says in Martin Scorcese’s documentary Living In The Material World, he and John were well aware of George’s talents.

“We didn’t underestimate George. We knew that he was peaking as we got to those records. He’d not been really interested in the beginning I don’t think. And because John and I did so much of the writing he could just leave it to us. But I think he realised you know that there was something in this, [that] artistically and financially it was a good thing to get into. At that time we realised that he was really coming up with the goods.”

Few issues will drive a wedge within a band faster than the subject of who wrote what on which song. And when that band is The Beatles, the creative and commercial stakes couldn’t be higher.

After the Beatles’ break-up, Lennon took a number of verbal swipes at his former band members, and uncredited songwriting contributions were a theme. In a 1980 interview with Playboy magazine, Lennon talks about the writing of Eleanor Rigby but refers only to McCartney. George’s own alleged contribution to that song is not mentioned.

"It's his first verse,” said Lennon about McCartney, “and the rest of the verses are basically mine. But the way he did it was... he knew he'd got the song, so rather than ask me, 'John, do these lyrics' because, by that period, he didn't want to say that to me, okay..."

But this is not how Paul McCartney remembers it. “John helped me on a few words but I'd put it down 80–20 to me,” McCartney said in Barry Miles’s 1997 biography Many Years From Now. “So what he said was, ‘Hey, you guys, finish up the lyrics', while he was fiddling around with the tracks or arranging it, at the other part of the giant studio and EMI.”

A number of accounts cite Harrison coming up with the intro/bridge line for Eleanor Rigby. In David Scheff’s book All We Are Saying, Lennon is quoted as saying: “I do know that George Harrison was there when we came up with ‘Ah, look at all the lonely people’. [Paul] and George were settling on that as I left the studio to go to the toilet, and I heard the lyric and turned around and said, ‘That’s it!’”

There is no firm evidence that George came up with the line, only that he was there when it was written. But it’s one of the Beatles songs on which all the band had an input. All were present when McCartney presented the first verse and melody, as was Lennon’s childhood friend Pete Shotton, who in Kenneth Womack’s 2014 book All We Are Saying, remembers Lennon’s contribution amounting to “virtually nil”.

In Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, George talks about writing credits for Lennon/McCartney songs and he uses Eleanor Rigby as an example of a track on which his name is not credited, despite having made the contribution.

Of course, ideas and suggestions often occur spontaneously and quickly. No-one is sitting there logging who has contributed exactly what and it’s often difficult to remember in retrospect who came up with a particular phrase, motif or chord. It’s clear from Peter Jackson’s film that The Beatles helped each other out with ideas, as is the case when George Harrison works with Ringo on Octopus’s Garden.

Similarly, it seems quite possible that Harrison could have contributed a line or two of lyrics to Come Together although there is no documented evidence to suggest that he did. When he mentioned in the 1987 interview that he contributed lines to Come Together, he may simply have been using a random song to demonstrate a broader point.

One song that George certainly did have a hand in though was She Said, She Said, the final track recorded for the Revolver album, inspired by an LSD-influenced conversation between John Lennon and actor Peter Fonda.

In The Beatles Anthology, Harrison recalled helping Lennon construct the song from "maybe three" separate segments that Lennon had. Harrison described the process as “a real weld”. In his 2017 book Who Wrote the Beatle Songs?, author Todd Compton credits Lennon and Harrison as being the song's true composers.

It’s been claimed that Harrison didn’t want a co-write credit. It’s also been claimed he became thoroughly disillusioned when he didn’t receive one. Whatever the truth, it demonstrates that on at least one occasion, George Harrison had a hand in co-writing a song for which he received no songwriting credit.

For George, the break-up of The Beatles signified creative emancipation. He was soon revelling in his post-Beatles life and the solo opportunities it brought him. He topped the UK and US charts with the hugely acclaimed All Things Must Pass triple album (1970) and his 1973 album Living In The Material World was a critical and commercial triumph.

Speaking on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, Harrison said he was overcome with relief when The Beatles’ broke up and compared it to leaving the family home.

“Some people can’t understand that, you know, because The Beatles were such a big deal. They can’t understand why we should actually enjoy splitting up, but there’s a time. People grow up and leave home or whatever they do. They go for a change, and it was really time for a change.”

It was a view echoed by Harrison in an interview with Musician magazine in 1987. “I just got so fed up with the bad vibes,” he said. “I didn’t care if it was The Beatles. I was getting out.”

• The 5 George Harrison post-Beatles songs you need to hear

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In 1991, Nirvana released the album that would propel them from burgeoning club-level favourites to The Biggest Band in The World. Nevermind, Nirvana’s major label debut, would apply a sleeper hold to glam/hair metal, knock Michael Jackson’s Bad off the Billboard top spot and kickstart the ‘grunge’ movement that shaped youth culture in every form. The catalyst for the album’s success? Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Released on 10 Sept, it was a slow burn, failing to chart — no surprises there, given that Nirvana were still relative unknowns struggling to pay their rent. But to discover the origins of Dave Grohl’s iconic drum parts, we need to rewind 18 months, before Grohl was even a member of the band.

During early April 1990, Nirvana — Kurt Cobain, Krist Novoselic and Chad Channing — drove from Olympia, Washington to Madison, Wisconsin to complete a five-day recording session with Butch Vig, then known for his work with Killdozer.

The sessions were scheduled to begin work on Nirvana’s Sub Pop follow-up to Bleach, with nine songs recorded (Breed, Dive, In Bloom, Stay Away, Sappy, Lithium, Here She Comes Now and Polly), before the band headed home with the intention of returning to finish the album’s session.

In the months that followed, however, came big changes. Drummer Chad Channing was out, and Dave Grohl, whose band Scream had broken up, found himself stranded in LA and gig-less when he got word from Melvins frontman, Buzz Osborne that Nirvana were looking for a drummer.

Osborne had previously taken Cobain and Novoselic to watch Scream featuring a young Dave Grohl on drums, hair flailing, battering his kit as if his life depended on it, impressing Cobain and Novoselic.

Buzz connected Grohl with the band — who were about to poach Mudhoney’s Dan Peters — and Grohl flew to Seattle to meet his potential new bandmates. “I remember getting off the plane, and Krist and Kurt meeting me at baggage claim. It was like having the Children of the Corn meeting you at the airport.” Grohl said in a 2018 interview with VisitSeattle.

Meanwhile, Nirvana’s popularity continued to grow, and the prospect of releasing another album with Sub Pop grew less appealing. Instead, Cobain and the band began shopping the ‘Smart Sessions’ tape to major labels, eventually landing with Geffen.

With Vig back on board, planning for recording the album reconvened, with Nirvana continuing to write and rehearse songs in a rented barn/outbuilding in Tacoma, Washington, recording their ideas and progress on a boom box.

Vig recalls receiving a tape from the band with an audio message from Cobain, “Hey Butch, it’s Kurt!” it began, “We’ve got a new drummer, his name is Dave, he’s the best drummer in the world!.”

At that, the recording launches into Smells Like Teen Spirit. “I could hear the riff, but as soon as the drums came in, it just distorted like crazy.” Despite the poor recording — overloading the rudimentary cassette recorder’s built-in mics — Vig knew they were onto something.

This was confirmed when Vig visited Nirvana at their rehearsal room, becoming one of the first people to ever hear the song played live, in the flesh. “They played …Teen Spirit, and it just crushed me how good [Grohl] was, and how good they sounded.” Vig told Howard Stern in 2022.

“I started pacing around the room - usually I take notes but I was just taking it all in. They finished the song and Kurt was like, ‘What do you think, Butch?’. I went ‘Play it again.’”

By the time the band arrived at LA’s Sound City Studios, Nirvana was a tight, well-oiled, and well-rehearsed machine. Sound City had been chosen in part for its low rates.

During an era where studios were rapidly swapping analogue tape machines for the glitzy new digital platform of Pro Tools, Sound City held firm. As well as this, the studio had two more jewels in its crown that appealed to Vig.

First was the live room, previously used to capture the likes of Tom Petty, Fleetwood Mac and Cobain favourite, Neil Young. The former Vox warehouse had a sprinkling of studio magic which lent itself to capturing a great drum room sound - magic which is now available to us as a plugin courtesy of Universal Audio's Sound City software.

Second, was the Neve 8028 console housed within the studio. The desk was one of only four made, loaded with classic Neve mic preamps and 1084 EQ modules. It would later go on to be purchased by Grohl and immortalised, along with Sound City Studios in Grohl’s 2015 documentary of the same name.

“That room at Sound City, it’s like a small gymnasium and it’s almost bulletproof." Vig told us in 2020. "But when you put up those room mics and hear the sound of that room, that’s part of what made that studio sound so good.

“It just had a really awesome tone to it. It was live, but not too splashy, the decay time on the high end of the midrange is very even. It’s the perfect room for drums, really. It also helped that Dave Grohl, one of the most kick-ass drummers in rock and roll was behind the kit!”

For the sessions, Grohl used a Tama Granstar (not Artstar II, as commonly reported), along with some additional gear, which was rented from Ross Garfield’s Drum Doctors company. Included in the hire list was a Ludwig Black Beauty snare, as well as a now-revered Tama Mastercraft Bell Brass snare.

Reissued in 2024, the Tama snare has gone on to become a ‘modern classic’, thanks to its supremely loud, aggressive attack and punchy, full-bodied response employed by the likes of Nirvana, Metallica, Rage Against The Machine and many more.

“It was a pretty simple setup.” Butch Vig told MusicRadar in 2020 of the mics he used to record Grohl’s kit. “I told the engineer that I wanted to default to mics I knew and was used to, so I used an AKG D12 on the kick, I think I used an SM57 on the snare and possibly an AKG 451 underneath.

“We used Sennheiser 421s on the toms, again because I was used to those Sennheiser mics. AKG 414s as the overheads, I had them at Smart and they’re great all-round condensers. I think the secret to that sound, is we had a couple of Neumann U87s [used as room mics] that were probably 15-18 feet back from the kit.”

When it came to mixing Nevermind, veteran mix engineer, Andy Wallace got the call. It’s here where some confusion over the resulting drum sound emerges. The album was recorded and mixed on analogue gear, but that didn’t remove the possibility of bolstering the drum sound with samples.

This now commonplace technique involves blending in additional sounds and elements that are deemed to be lacking from a recording in order to add cut and weight. It’s often misunderstood for editing and straightening out timing fluctuations (there’s no suggestion that Grohl’s drums required ‘fixing’ from a performance standpoint).

The use of samples is something of a staple of Andy Wallace’s mixes, as demonstrated by Rick Beato’s analysis in the video below. While Wallace has never explicitly confirmed whether or not he did or did not use samples to reinforce the sound of Grohl’s kit, he has conceded that there’s a possibility that samples were used to enhance the drum track’s ambient mics, ironic given that Sound City was chosen in-part for its fantastic drum room sound.

Whether he did or didn’t, the benefit of time has gifted us the opportunity to hear Butch Vig’s original mixes as initially submitted to the Geffen. These were included with the 20th Anniversary edition of Nevermind, and are labelled ‘Devonshire Mix’ and allow for interesting comparison.

Sonics aside, though, a huge part of Smells Like Teen Spirit’s hook comes from Grohl’s drum parts. Interestingly, it’s the first — and only song on Nevermind — where the songwriting credits are assigned to all three members of the band rather than Cobain.

Nirvana’s love for The Pixies, complete with the loud-quiet dynamic template informs a huge part of the band’s songwriting approach, something that Cobain wasn’t shy to admit, telling Rolling Stone in 1994, “I connected with that band so heavily that I should have been in that band — or at least a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.”

Grohl also maintains that at the core of Nirvana’s songwriting, sat a backbone of simplicity, on more than one occasion likening them to nursery rhymes . “I didn’t throw a bunch of drum fills in there. I tried to keep it as simple as possible.” Grohl says on the Classic Albums: Nevermind documentary. “That was kind of an unspoken rule. We almost wanted them to be like children’s songs.”

This approach is outlined from the get-go, with Grohl’s distinctive flams on the snare seemingly ushering in a simple four-count to casual listeners. But dig a little deeper and you’ll realise that he’s actually playing groups of even 16th-notes between the flams on the snare, bass drum and hi-hats.

Complex? Not really, but play it the layman’s way and it’s clear that the often-overlooked nuances of Grohl’s heavy-hitting, ‘neanderthal’ style require a little attention to discover.

But, as well as the influence of '90s indie-apathy, Grohl sought inspiration from some very different drummers when it comes to some of Smells Like Teen Spirit’s standout drum moments.

“If you listen to Nevermind, I pulled so much stuff from The Gap Band and Cameo, and Tony Thompson, on every one of those songs” Grohl tells Pharrell Williams in his Cradle to Stage series. “The big disco flam… I told Tony Thompson that. He came to my house for a barbecue. I was like, 'Man, I just want to thank you because I owe you so much, I've been ripping you off my whole life.' And he goes, 'I know.'"

There’s a James Brown-level of reliance on a foot-heavy first beat of every bar — accented with dual cymbal crashes — during the syncopated intro and chorus beat, with Grohl laying back beforehand, adding weight, anticipation and above all, groove to each cycle.

It’s a trick also used extensively by Liam Howlett of UK dance-rock titans, The Prodigy when programming and sampling drum parts, and could serve as just part of the reason why Grohl and The Prodigy have shown mutual respect for each others’ work in the past. Check out the drums on the band’s 1996 hit, Firestarter, and you’ll notice some similar traits, not least the Grohl-style quarter-note snare hits that are also present on the outro of Smells Like Teen Spirit.

The verses of Smells Like Teen Spirit demonstrate the Pixies influences, with Grohl removing the busyness of the beat, reverting to ‘2 & 4’ on the snare while the bass drum offers a simple ‘We Will Rock You’ 8th-note pattern, outlining Novoselic’s bassline to create a solid, straighter groove. Crucially, the hi-hats are closed spare a lift on ‘4&’ every fourth time round, adding to the loud/soft contrast.

Moving to the pre-chorus, and the pattern remains the same as the verse for the first half, with the hi-hats lifted open. For the second part, Grohl adds an additional 8th-note on the bass drum, pushing the song towards the chorus before he launches into the iconic machine-gun 16th notes on the snare, punctuated by another big flam.

But underneath one of Grohl’s career standout fills sits another reminder of his sometimes-subtle nuances. Grohl, a huge Beatles fan, employs Ringo-style continuity of the bass drum underneath his hands, keeping an 8th-note pulse underneath the roll.

This serves to keep the momentum of the song driving forward, and while Nirvana were never really a band whose music was intended for dancing, it highlights Grohl’s aptitude for arrangement in order to keep the pace and feel heading towards a crescendo.

So, would Smells Like Teen Spirit have been a success if, say, Chad Channing or Dan Peters had tracked the drums? It’s impossible to know, but obviously Cobain’s riff, melodies and the accompanying video all had their part to play too.

There’s no doubt that Grohl’s part (one of the few on the album that wasn’t cribbed from Chad Channing’s original demo tracks) contains more than a couple of important hooks.

Frankly, with a song where every element combines to create a near-perfect rock song, we’re not sure there’s any use in speculating.

Kirk Hammett makes no secret that he is a collector. He can’t help himself. He’ll buy guitars, he’ll trade them. If there’s something about an electric guitar that speaks to him then he’s an easy mark. It’s in the blood.

But he has an eye for this stuff. Hammett has acquired of the rarest vintage guitars around, such as the Bigbsy-equipped 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard that left the factory with a black finish. He had Joe Bonamassa to thank for that one, giving him a heads up text after he spotted it in Carter Vintage Guitars. There is only three of them in existence – with rumours that a fourth is out there somewhere, like Bigfoot.

Hammett also owns one of the most famous Les Pauls of all time, Greeny, the ’59 Les Paul Standard once owned by Peter Green then Gary Moore. It has quite literally become his signature guitar, with Gibson and Epiphone both releasing replicas of it.

But speaking in Dublin at one of his The Collection in-person events, sandwiched between Metallica’s performances on the latest leg of their stadium-packing M72 Tour, Hammett introduced one guitar of special significance, a Les Paul previously owned by one of his heroes, and is another super-rare Factory Black unicorn.

So why then did Hammett have mixed feelings about owning it?

“This guitar used to belong to one of my all-time star heroes, a huge source of inspiration, Neal Schon,” says Hammett. “And I got this in an auction, and I don’t know what was up, but I got this for, like, half the price that it was worth!”

Many players would be happy. It is not often you can get a bargain on the vintage market, doubly so if the guitar has an association with a platinum-selling artist. Hammett adores Schon’s playing. He loves Schon. None of this sat easy with him.

“I felt kind of bad about it because I should have paid a fair price,” says Hammett. “But I paid a price that was lower than it should have been.”

Who can say what was going on in Schon’s mind at the time. This was 2021, the Covid era. The auction was a big deal in the press. This was a huge consignment of guitars, some 112 in total, with some of the rarest – and most valuable – vintage guitars being auctioned off.

This was the auction in which Schon’s Grainger 'Burst 1959 Les Paul Standard sold for $350,000. His 1977 Don’t Stop Believin’ Les Paul went for $250,000. And there were some bona-fide vintage curios, too, such as his ’87 Superstrat prototypes that had a body like an upside-down Jackson Soloist. There was even a super-weird 1967 Coral Sitar Vincent Bell.

Hammett Schon’s P-90 loaded 1957 Les Paul Standard was unusual. It had left the Gibson factory with a custom black finish rather than its regular Goldtop. A unicorn, and at $87,500 from Heritage Auctions, a bargain. But it wasn’t the only unicorn to sell for what many believed was way under the estimate.

In his Guitarist column, Dave Davidson of Well Strung Guitars in NYC highlighted a 1960 Les Paul Custom in a Cherry finish, supposedly the last surviving instrument in a consignment of six that were custom-finished for Hägstrom.

He said Schon got really unlucky and “missed the boat” on the vintage guitar market boom. Schon should have waited until the pandemic was over.

“It turned out to be the worst time to do an auction because his guitars really undersold,” said Davidson. “I remember having a conversation with Joe Bonamassa afterwards, and he felt Schon should have waited. I was amazed he didn’t just get a storage place and put it off for a year or two, but nobody knew where the market was going to go at the time. It was a brutal auction to watch.”

All this was bothering Hammett, so he thought he’d do the decent thing. He’d call Schon up. If the Journey guitarist had been sweating over the auction, he didn’t show it. He was totally cool.

“So, I actually called Neal,” recalls Hammett. “I said, ‘Neal, do you want the guitar back?’ And he said, ‘No, man, you keep it. You buy it; you keep it.’”

This, says Hammett, is typical Schon. There were no hard feelings. A year later, Hammett joined Schon onstage to play Wheel In The Sky. He left the ’57 Les Paul behind though, taking Greeny along for the night.

“Neal Schon, he’s such a cool, cool guy,” says Hammett. “If you guys ever, like, really get to know Neal Schon, I mean, he’s an amazing guitar player. He’s amazing. He lives and breathes music. And to me, he’s just such a inspiration, ‘cos I see him, and I see how he conducts his life, and how he plays, and his commitment and dedication to music, and I was just like, ‘Yeah! That’s what I want to do, too.’ So I’m doing it.”

And he is. You can catch Metallica in London this weekend (July 3/5) before they head back to the US in for their residency at the Sphere, in Las Vegas, opening night October 3. See Metallica for ticket details. And you can watch the conversation about his collection in full above or at Kirk Hammett's YouTube channel.

Gibson The Collection: Kirk Hammett, written and edited by MusicRadar alumnus Chris Vinnicombe is available now via Gibson.

In 1979, British rock band Supertramp were on top of the world. Their album Breakfast In America held the No 1 spot on the Billboard 200 for six weeks, powered by a top 10 single, The Logical Song, that was also a smash hit back home in the UK and all around Europe.

By 1983, however, the wheels had come off, as the follow-up to Breakfast In America flopped and the group’s co-founder Roger Hodgson quit for a solo career.

Hodgson and Rick Davies were the twin engines of Supertramp, both playing keyboards, singing lead and writing the songs. They also had very distinct styles that merged perfectly, and it was Hodgson’s ear for melody, his pop sensibility, that brought Supertramp their biggest hits.

From the 1974 album Crime Of The Century, a progressive rock classic, it was Hodgson’s upbeat song Dreamer that put Supertramp in the UK two 20 for the first time. And in 1977, another Hodgson composition, Give A Little Bit, was the breakthrough hit in the US, Canada and beyond.

After relocating to California, the band created an album that was made for FM radio. They got everything right on Breakfast In America, but it was a long time in the making.

As Hodgson recalled in an interview with MOJO magazine: “Breakfast In America took eight months to record. I hated the songs by the end of it. Everything was very precisely orchestrated. Some would call it anal.”

He admitted: “The perfectionist in me is a blessing and curse.”

Four hit singles were lifted from the album. Rick Davies wrote Goodbye Stranger. Roger Hodgson wrote the other three – The Logical Song, Take The Long Way Home and the album’s title track.

Hodgson delivered an existentialist message in Take The Long Way Home: “The long way to find out who you truly are,” he said.

The Logical Song had a similar theme. “I went to boarding school for ten years,” Hodgson said. “I wondered who I was at the end of it.”

He explained: “Songwriting, for me, is finding answers to questions I’ve had since day one. The bottom line is: ‘Who the hell am I?’ It’s always been a primary focus for my writing.

“England is top of the list for holding it all in. You’re told to grin and bear it. There’s a noble, courageous side to that, but a lot of dysfunction comes from that. Growth comes from pain. It forces us to evolve.”

There was always a degree of tension between Hodgson and Davies. As the latter described it: “It’s like two people are painting a picture on the same canvas. And somebody wants to put red there and somebody wants to put a blue. You have problems. The picture doesn’t get finished.”

The success of Breakfast In America only added to the pressure building within the band.

“Everything changed towards the end of Breakfast In America tour,” Hodgson said. “The fun had gone, the spirit had gone.”

The following album, Famous Last Words, arrived in 1982, three years after Breakfast In America.

Hodgson told MOJO: “Famous Last Words was a final attempt to see if something could be salvaged, and it couldn’t.”

Inevitably, it was Hodgson who wrote that album’s solitary hit, It’s Raining Again.

When three more singles all bombed, the relationship between Hodgson and Davies broke down completely.

“There were a lot of conflicts,” Hodgson said. “He wanted to go one way and I wanted to go another. It was all so… illogical.”

Eventually, Hodgson bailed. “It felt like the right course of action for me to take – to leave the band.”

He had prepared his first solo album while still a member of Supertramp, but it was only after the left the band that he re-recorded the album. It was released in 1984, titled In The Eye Of The Storm.

Reflecting on his departure from the band, Hodgson said: “It took a few years to digest what had happened. After Famous Last Words, when I came off the road I built a home studio but I didn’t tour for about 16 years.”

Hodgson never returned to Supertramp, and never reconciled with Rick Davies, who died in 2025.

In addition, Hodgson never regretted his decision to quit the band that he and Davies had led to such heights.

“If I could have turned it around, Supertramp could have been something I believed in again,” he said. “But at that point there was something in my life that was way more important that I did believe in, and that was my family.”

He added: “Music is something that I love, but it’s not my total identity.”

Having previously claimed that Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter “couldn’t have got arrested” back in his ‘80s pop heyday, producer and songwriter Mike Stock has been fleshing out his argument in an interview with MusicRadar.

Stock, of course, was one third of crack music production outfit Stock Aitken Waterman, who had hits with Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley and many, many more. As he discusses how the industry has changed in the almost 40 years since then, though, it’s clear that Stock doesn’t believe that the current streaming-centric landscape is a hotbed for great pop music...

The music business has changed immeasurably since your hits started in the ‘80s. Do you think that now – living in a world of streaming – we’re in a better or worse place for making, finding and enjoying music?

“Well, you could ask this question first: How many artists in the last 10 to 20 years have achieved iconic status? That’s artists that are going to be around in 20 years. Is Taylor Swift that person? Is Ed Sheeran?

“The number of people achieving that ‘superstar’ status is always the same as it ever was – only one or two in any generation. And to be number one on the charts now is to be invisible. If you're a fan you’ll know if your artist is in the charts, but there's nothing now that we can focus on and so there’s nothing to measure your success against.

“For example, you see Harry Styles, and you say, ‘What a fantastic video. What a brilliant blah blah blah’, and it’s an interesting sound, it’s a bit art house, he's a bit this, he's a bit that, he's very… Harry Stylish. That's what he is. But that's all that he is. It's very superficial.”

“And I don't like Taylor Swift as an artist, I don't get that. I want to hear something that’s got the passion in it that deserves the love from the audience. That's what I want to hear, and I don't know many of those now. I can't remember the last time I heard one.”

Do you think that streaming has taken the magic out of making and discovering music?

“Back in the day, when you bought a record, you made an effort. First of all you would show your love for the artist by getting on a bus and going down to Woolworths and paying three quid for it. But that's an effort and who wants to do that nowadays?

“But we used to make records knowing that that's what somebody was going to have to do, and because of that we put love and passion into it, thinking that we want to make this exciting. We want you to love it like we love it. But these days… Who cares if the music just goes on Spotify?

“Most people use Spotify like it's a radio. They pick a list, they start it playing and go about the housework, or whatever. They don't lean forward. They're not going on to Spotify and typing, ‘I want this song’, playing it, and then being happy. They just lean back, put the thing on and let it run. So that means the passion for the music is less from the user, and that bounces back on the maker of the music, who's not that bothered either. Because if you don't have to work up any passion or thought or effort, then neither will I.

“Like, I hated the name ‘hit factory’ [used to describe Stock Aitken Waterman’s output]. I thought it made us sound like a sausage factory – that we were just churning them out – and that couldn't be further from the truth, because we always put the time and the hours and the effort in.”

Crazy Shot In The Dark by The Fizz and the long-awaited, self-titled debut album from Suzette Charles are out now.

Brandon Ellis and Jackson have unveiled the latest in their long-standing signature guitar collaboration, with the Cannibal Corpse touring guitarist’s Kelly getting a Gold Crackle glow-up, and a spec reworked to make it even more amendable to fretboard pyrotechnics.

That, of course, means that we have return of the now familiar 27-fret platform. Ellis is a big believer in extra fingerboard real estate for upper-register gymnastics, and five minutes one of these might convince you, too.

But he has also asked for some choice tweaks for this new Pro Plus model. If there is a Custom Shop vibe to the Pro Plus Series KE7, which pairs that Gold Crackle finish with a maple fingerboard, then that’s because it was inspired by a Maserbuilt Kelly in Ellis’ collection.

“This guitar is based off of the Custom Shop Kelly that Metal Joe Williams built for me some years back,” says Ellis. “I just thought that maple and gold would look really cool together. I thought it would be kind of a striking regal look that wasn't common, and [it] exceeded my expectations.”

This new model should feel a little different to previous Ellis Kellys. It has the 12” to 16” compound radius fingerboard, but we’ve now got stainless steel frets (these are the kinds of upgrades you get with the Pro Plus Series).

It also has a slightly shorter scale than the 25.5” you find on most Jackson guitars, and the R2 locking nut is slightly narrower, so the string spacing will be a little tighter up there as per Ellis’ preferences.

“I was gonna design a guitar that was for soloing, specifically, so I made it a 25.1-inch scale length, and that allows the strings to be bent a little bit easier,” says Ellis. “And it also affects just the sound of the guitar. There’s a maple fretboard.

“That has a nice, snappy, kind of sound to it that people know, and the body is nyatoh, which I find to be just a really well balanced, bold-sounding tone wood. It is not too bright. It’s not too dark.”

Speaking of too dark, there are the Luminlay side-dot markers that illuminate in low light situations, which is always helpful onstage. Fretboard navigation is a big thing with this guitar.

We’ve got the typical Jackson shark tooth inlays, black on maple, easily visible, but there’s a neat visual cue where they run as standard from frets 1 to 11, there’s a double inlay at the 12th, and all frets above that the inlays are reversed so there’s more inlay on the treble side.

Ellis says this makes it a little easier finding your way around, though we have never seen the former Black Dahlia Murder guitarist having any trouble with that.

As for the pickups, we’ve got his Seymour Duncan Parallel Axis Dyad humbucker at the bridge, a hum-cancelling Seymour Duncan Parallel Axis Stack single-coil at the neck position.

“This [humbucker] is unique because it features asymmetrically wound coils,” says Ellis. “So one of these coils is a lot hotter than the other one, and it opens up the sound of a humbucker when the two coils don’t perfectly cancel each other out. And we gave it gold magnets and gold logos to just match the cosmetic of the guitar, which is really cool.”

These are selected by a three-way switch, and there’s a single volume control with a push/pull function for series/parallel modes.

This would not be the über metal guitar it is without a double-locking vibrato, and so we have a top-mounted Gotoh GE1996T vibrato system here, in gold, because this is a classy guitar. Hey, a Kelly is a radical electric guitar, especially with that reverse six-in-line headstock and that shape, but this wears this gilded finery better.

“I’m just honoured that we’re able to present this product, and that people are gonna buy my guitar,” says Ellis. “It’s kind of insane.”

The Pro Plus Brandon Ellis Kelly KE7 is out now, priced £1,799/$2,199, and that includes a gig bag. For more details, head over to Jackson.

For many video game fans, the Silent Hill series holds a truly special place in their hearts. Not just a top tier horror franchise, but an emotive rollercoaster of character and drama, the franchise remains a key example of the unique storytelling abilities of the interactive medium.

Soundtracking close to every entry in Konami’s still-growing franchise, Akira Yamaoka is renowned for being a master horror-and-emotion sonic craftsman. One of the key creatives behind the series, Yamaoka has also been involved in Silent Hill’s cinematic spin-offs, most recently with the film Return to Silent Hill, which he also executive produced. Yamaoka’s scores have encompassed diverse instrumentation, blending industrial noise, chilling ambience, scintillating guitar and unforgettable melodies. Akira's chief creative goal is unchanging - serving the narrative.

Decades on from his initial work on the franchise, and Yamaoka continues to perform, celebrate and compose for the Silent Hill series, being intensely involved in a slew of modern remakes.

We caught up with Akira to find out more about the process behind one of video games' most the most iconic soundtracks.

MusicRadar: Can you take us back to the beginning of your journey Akira, how did you start making music?

Akira Yamaoka: “I became seriously interested in music when I discovered new wave as a teenager. I was heavily influenced by artists such as Yellow Magic Orchestra, Depeche Mode, and Japan.

“Their music felt completely different from anything I had heard before. It wasn’t just about writing songs - they seemed to be creating entire worlds through sound, technology, and atmosphere.

“That experience inspired me to start making music myself. I gradually began composing, and that interest continued while I was studying computer graphics and design at university.

“At the time, I wasn’t trying to become a musician. I was actually more interested in visual art and spatial design.

“However, creating images and spaces felt very similar to creating music. To me, both are about designing an experience - shaping how people perceive and feel something.

“Through playing in bands and later working in the video game industry, music gradually became the centre of my life. And somehow, that path led me to where I am today, still making music.”

MR: How did you end up becoming the composer for the Silent Hill franchise?

AY: “It happened quite naturally. When Silent Hill was first being developed, the team was relatively small, and it wasn’t unusual for people to take on multiple roles. Since I had already been making music, I was given the opportunity to work on the soundtrack.

“What made Silent Hill special was that there weren’t many rules about what the music was supposed to be. The entire team was trying to create something different from traditional horror games, and that gave me a great deal of creative freedom.

“Rather than simply writing scary music, I wanted to express loneliness, sadness, anxiety, and the psychological aspects of fear. I think that approach ultimately became one of the defining characteristics of Silent Hill’s sound.

“Looking back, I think a big part of it was being surrounded by talented people who were willing to try something new, and being fortunate enough to be there at exactly the right time.”

MR: There’s a notable difference between the sonic universe of that first Silent Hill game and the successive titles. Does composing for the series allow you to be quite diverse in approach?

AY: “Yes, I think so. One of the things that made Silent Hill interesting to me was that it was never defined by a single musical style. What mattered most was the emotional experience rather than the genre itself.

“The first game was much more industrial and aggressive because it reflected the technology, the atmosphere of the project, and my own interests at the time. As the series evolved, the stories became more emotional and character-driven, which naturally led me toward more melodic and intimate forms of expression.

“I never felt that I had to repeat the same sound from one game to the next. Instead, I tried to find what each story was really about and build a musical language around that. Because of that, the music could move between industrial noise, ambient textures, rock songs, electronic music, orchestral elements, or even silence if that was what the game needed.

“For me, diversity was never the goal itself. It was simply the result of trying to serve each game’s unique emotional world.”

MR: Your most recent project was the Return to Silent Hill movie, based on the game Silent Hill 2, of course. There’s some fascinating juxtapositions of emotions in that score. What was your intent when creating it, and is ‘nostalgia’ something you’re consciously trying to evoke from those legacy players?

AY: “For the film, my goal wasn’t simply to recreate the music from Silent Hill 2. A film and a game are very different experiences, so the music had to function in a different way.

“What interested me most was the contrast between beauty and discomfort, love and loss, reality and memory. Those emotional contradictions have always been at the heart of Silent Hill, and I wanted to explore them from a cinematic perspective.

“As for nostalgia, I don’t usually begin a project thinking, ‘I want people to feel nostalgic.’ If I focus too much on the past, it can become imitation rather than creation.

“That said, memories are an important part of Silent Hill itself. The story of Silent Hill 2 is deeply connected to memory, regret, and the inability to let go. Because of that, some of the emotions people associate with nostalgia naturally emerge from the material.

“So rather than trying to recreate a feeling from twenty years ago, I tried to be honest to the emotional core of the story. If players or viewers feel nostalgia through that, I think it comes from their own relationship with the work rather than something I intentionally inserted.”

MR: What is your typical compositional process? Do you score to picture or do you develop themes separately?

AY: “It depends on the project. For films, I usually work closely with the picture because timing, pacing, and dramatic structure are very important. The music needs to support what is happening on screen while also adding something that isn’t visible.

“For games, the process is often different. Sometimes I start by creating themes or textures before there are final visuals. In those cases, I’m responding more to the ideas, atmosphere, and emotional direction of the project rather than specific scenes.

“In general, I don’t think of music as something that simply accompanies an image. I’m more interested in how music can become part of the world itself. Because of that, I often begin by asking what kind of emotional space the work needs. Once I understand that, melodies, sounds, rhythms, and textures tend to emerge naturally.

“So whether I start from a picture or from an abstract idea, the goal is usually the same: to create an emotional environment rather than simply write a piece of music.”

MR: What technology is integral to how you work? And do you use many virtual instruments when composing?

AY: ”Technology has always been an important part of my creative process. I grew up listening to artists who embraced synthesizers, samplers, and new technology, so I’ve never really seen technology as separate from music. To me, it’s simply another instrument.

“These days, I use a combination of software and hardware, depending on the project. Virtual instruments are a big part of my workflow, especially during the composition stage, because they allow me to explore ideas quickly and experiment with different textures and emotions.

“As for favourites, I tend to use whatever helps me achieve the sound I’m imagining rather than being loyal to specific tools. That said, I often use Kontakt-based libraries, various synthesizers, and orchestral libraries. I also still enjoy manipulating sounds and creating custom textures from recordings rather than relying entirely on preset sounds.

“What interests me most isn’t whether a sound comes from hardware or software. It’s whether that sound creates the right emotional response. At the end of the day, technology is only a tool. The most important thing is still the idea behind the music.”

MR: How does composing for video games differ from composing for film? What are the major differences?

AY: “The biggest difference is that films are linear, while games are interactive.

“In a film, the audience experiences events in a fixed order and at a fixed pace. As a composer, you know exactly when something will happen and how long a scene will last.

“In games, you often don’t have that certainty. A player may stay in an area for thirty seconds or thirty minutes. They may explore, stop, fail, or do something unexpected. Because of that, the music has to be much more flexible.

“When composing for games, I’m often thinking not only about the music itself, but also about systems—how the music can evolve, react, and adapt to the player’s actions without breaking the emotional experience.

“That said, I think the fundamental goal is the same. Whether it’s a film or a game, the music is there to support the world, deepen the emotional experience, and help tell the story.

“The tools and techniques may be different, but ultimately you’re still trying to connect with people on an emotional level.”

MR: How has composing changed for you over the years, has more technology and choice made things easier?

AY: “Technology has certainly made some aspects of music production easier. When I started, we had far fewer tools available, and many things took much longer to create. Today, it’s possible to experiment with ideas almost instantly, and the quality of virtual instruments and software is remarkable.

“However, I don’t think creativity has become any easier. If anything, having access to endless possibilities can sometimes make decisions more difficult. In the past, limitations often forced you to be inventive. Now, the challenge is knowing which possibilities to ignore.

“What has changed most for me is probably my perspective. When I was younger, I was often excited by discovering new sounds and new technology. Today, I’m more interested in why I’m using those sounds.

“The tools continue to evolve, but the most important questions remain the same: What am I trying to express? What emotion should the audience feel? What does this project really need?

“Those questions have never changed, and I think they are much more important than the technology itself.”

MR: What are some other soundtracks that you personally admire - and have any other soundtracks influenced your approach?

AY: “There are many soundtracks and composers that I admire, but one composer whose work I have always loved is Anne Dudley.

“What I admire about her music is the way she combines orchestral writing, electronic elements, and strong emotional storytelling with such elegance. Her work never feels limited by genre, and there is always a unique personality behind it.

“More generally, I’ve been influenced by a wide range of music - not only film and game soundtracks, but also electronic music, experimental music, and artists who create their own distinctive worlds through sound.

“What inspires me most is when music has a clear identity. When you hear only a few seconds and immediately know whose work it is, that’s something very special.

“I’ve always been drawn to artists who aren’t afraid to take risks and follow their own vision. Those are often the works that stay with people the longest.”

MR: What track from across your work on the Silent Hill games do you regard as your favourite, and why?

AY: “I would probably say Theme of Laura. Partly because so many people have told me over the years that it’s their favourite piece. It’s always moving to see how strongly people connect with that music.

“At the time, I wasn’t thinking about creating something iconic. I was simply trying to express the emotional core of Silent Hill 2 through music.

"Looking back, I’m grateful that the piece has continued to resonate with people for such a long time. It’s taken on a life of its own in a way that I never expected.

MR: Are you worried about the development of AI encroaching into industries such as your own - or do you think people will always warm more toward human-made art?

AY: “I think AI is a tool, and like every new technology, it will change the way people work.

“I’m not particularly interested in debating whether AI is good or bad. What interests me more is how people choose to use it. AI can already help generate images, text, and music, and those capabilities will continue to improve. But for me, art is not only about the final result. It’s also about intention, experience, mistakes, contradictions, and the human desire to communicate something meaningful.

“I think people connect with stories behind the work as much as the work itself. They connect with the person, the life experiences, and the perspective that shaped it.

“So I’m not worried about AI replacing creativity. What I do think is that it will force us to think more carefully about what creativity actually means.

“In the end, technology will continue to evolve, but the human need to express emotions and connect with other people will remain the same.”

MR: What’s next on the agenda for you Akira?

AY: “I’m currently working on several different projects. Some are related to video games, while others involve film and my own personal musical work. In recent years, I’ve also been focusing more on live performances, and I really value the opportunity to connect directly with audiences around the world.

“What I always try to keep in mind is not repeating the past, but continuing to challenge myself with new forms of expression. I want to keep exploring new ways of communicating ideas and emotions through music.”

You can pre-order Akira's latest score for Return to Silent Hill on vinyl here. For more info on Akira's current projects and upcoming tour dates, check out his official website

As we approach the release of Foreign Tongues, the new album by the Rolling Stones, frontman Mick Jagger has been discussing Paul McCartney’s contribution to it.

Macca plays bass on an as yet unheard song called Covered In You, and Jagger has told the NME that he recorded his part in the same session that yielded Bite My Head Off, from the Stones' 2023 album, Hackney Diamonds.

However, in the case of Covered In You, he says that he had to seek assurances from producer Andrew Watt, who would go on to work with McCartney on his recent album The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, that the former Beatle was the right fit.

“Obviously, I've known Paul for ages – he’s not a stranger – but I mean, he’d never played bass with us before,” says Jagger. “It's a different thing, you know? I’d sung with him before, done harmonies and stuff. But you were thinking, well, it's a punk tune.

“I said to Andy, ‘Is he into this?’ Because it's really a punk tune, and it's going to go really fast, and I want it to do that, and it's going to be… I want overdriven bass. It's gonna be simple. No mucking about, you know.”

We’re guessing that means hammering away on the root note rather than taking the bassline ‘for a walk’, so to speak, but Jagger says that Watt set his mind at rest.

“He said ‘No, no, no. Paul can do that,’ and he did it,” he remembers. “He did exactly what was needed in like, 10 minutes.”

Also speaking to the NME recently, McCartney shared his own memories of that Stones studio experience.

“It was really exciting, because I normally don’t play as a session guy,” he said. “And it's really nice to just show up at a studio with your bass and say 'Right, where do you want me? Where do I plug in?’ And you start playing and they show you the song and I start thinking, ‘I’m playing with the Stones.’ And I’m well chuffed, you know? You could be a bit blasé and go, ‘Yeah, OK, so what?’ But for me, it wasn’t – it went the other way. It was like, ‘Wow, there’s Mick! Ooh, there’s Keith! Woah, there’s Ronnie!’ It was exciting. It was really good. And the great thing is all I had to do was play bass and not make mistakes, so it was good.”

Foreign Tongues is released on 10 July.

“I see so many DJs who have blown up and sold out immediately who aren’t here any more,” says DJ, label head and now producer Yung Singh. “I want to be creatively consistent while also being authentic when it comes to my cultural standing.”

“I’ve done it all backwards,” he continues. “I’ve moved from DJ to sound engineer, then built up a sample library before taking the plunge into production.”

While he has held back on releasing music, Singh’s rise across global dancefloors has been meteoric over the last five years, powered by a love for bass music, UK funky and the Punjabi sounds of his heritage.

From his much-hyped viral Boiler Room sets and Punjabi Garage mixtape to his EKTA label and latest chapter as a producer on debut EP Bloom, Singh is a vital musical force. Past attempts have been made to produce music, but a combination of global touring commitments and a struggle to discover the right studio workflow have thwarted his creative ambitions.

“This producer journey has been born out of necessity and the frustration to get my ideas out,” says Singh. “But I’ve been banking tracks since last year after I had these important sessions with Rohaan, Wilfy D and Bianca Oblivion. Seeing how Rohaan used Ableton made me think I should give it a proper go again and I’ve not looked back since.

“These sessions also acted like a proof of concept for me and for the idea behind EKTA - that intersection of cultures and sounds does indeed work in a studio setting. We ended up making a bunch of tunes that we were all happy with and have gone down really well in my DJ sets.”

Punjabi sounds and electronic music were both inspirations that ricocheted through Singh’s family home while he was growing up. Older siblings and cousins exposed him to UK funky and dubstep, while his parents were both into ‘90s electronica.

“House, rave, jungle were all sounds I’d listen to, my parents used to work on the markets back in the day and had a guy who would go to the Netherlands and bring back dance tapes,” Singh explains. “There was always Punjabi music in the house as a kid, plus hip-hop, rap and R&B, then that first era of dubstep from UK garage – these were formative years for me.”

As soon as Singh arrived at university, he immersed himself in nightlife, taking in as many garage, bassline and UK funky nights and clubs as possible. “DJ EZ is a hero of mine, you can hear his influence in my sets, there’s an element of fond nostalgia for those songs from the late ‘00s,” he says. “There was Annie Mac’s show, Skream and Benga’s Radio 1 residency, these were both major influences too.”

Singh’s debut Boiler Room set is still causing ripples within electronic music culture and opened a series of doors for him, its raucously energetic mix veering from Jersey club heat to Bhangra bangers. Curated by Singh and presented with Daytimers, Gracie T and SUCHI were among the DJs present at the event.

With an amped-up crowd and incendiary soundtrack, the energy feels like it’s almost pouring out of the screen. A second Boiler Room appearance in Australia cemented Singh’s position at the epicentre of this cross-cultural musical explosion, leading DJ Mag to name him as their Breakthrough DJ of the Year.

“A viral hit is a viral hit and I ended up with a lot of opportunities coming my way,” Singh says. “But I’ve turned down more things than I’ve said yes to during the last three or four years. People don’t get it but I want to be here in five or ten years, still making music and DJing rather than just being this flash in the pan.”

Since he first jolted electronic music culture, music from the South Asian diaspora has grown in profile, thanks in part to his sets, alongside the work of the Daytimers Collective and other influential artists such as Ahadadream.

In 2024, Glastonbury hosted its own Arrivals area dedicated to South Asian sounds, which grew into the Azaadi stage the following year. Amid this interest and energy, expectations have been weighted on Singh’s productions, but he has navigated this pressure by stepping back and taking the time to perfect his work before releasing anything.

“There are people who are keen for you to put out music as it’s easier to sell you as an artist, but I only wanted to start releasing when the time felt right,” Singh states. “I was busy working on developing EKTA as a concept and party series, and all the creative direction has come from me - the website, its visual identity and the resources hub, so I can give back to those who have inspired me from a Punjabi and underground music perspective too.”

After Singh ran his first EKTA series, organised a Fabric takeover, then played at Coachella he found himself heading towards burnout. While he refocused on DJing, he was also drawn back to the studio.

“I do straddle a few different worlds so my music is a conduit for some, there’s this educational element to it. I was so busy DJing and organising parties but there’s always been this creative sense that pushed me to go beyond playing parties - that’s what got me into production again.”

As a means of strengthening his craft in production, Singh set up a number of studio sessions with likeminded producers and artists that were influential in his creative development. He cites Rohaan, Bianca Oblivion, Wilfie D and Lamsi as important collaborators who have helped him on his way.

“Lamsi is a great DJ and producer and we’ve worked on three or four tracks,” says Singh. “He’s of Dutch and Surinamese heritage, I brought my Punjabi and British cultures, we forged these four cultures together.”

“I was explaining to Lamsi how a lot of the music and genres within Punjabi folk music are built around war ballads, what people would listen to before fighting so they have this very primal feel. I wanted to channel that energy into our collaboration and every time I play these tracks, they pop off.”

He also recalls a few sessions with other artists who are classically trained or have had some formal musical teaching, such as Amanda Sze and Pour La Vie, as being turning points in his production journey.

“I’m no good at writing melodies from scratch, to be honest,” Singh says. “My strengths lie in building drums and finding samples so it’s an ideal workflow to be able to bounce ideas off someone who can actually play those ideas. It gives everything a more human feel because of that swing, but also takes pressure away from me.”

Singh’s Bloom EP features tracks from the vast archive of music the DJ-turned-producer is currently sitting on, most of which was made in-the-box using a laptop, Ableton and Airpods. While he is at pains to point out how these tools are easily accessible, he says it’s his sample library that helps his music stay eclectic.

“I specifically avoid Splice as that's what everyone else has access to, I prefer to dig across the internet, collaborate with other artists who either send me samples or we make fresh ones and I make my own too,” he says “Sometimes this is with real instruments or with software instruments like Kontakt patches, sometimes I’ve ripped samples from old sample CDs, especially when looking for Punjabi sounds.”

Tabla Trouble is one of the EP’s more hypnotic and propulsive tracks, with vocal samples taken from Bloom KSHMR, a virtual instrument that blends Indian sounds with contemporary production, developed by Excite Audio in partnership with producer KSHMR.

“For Tabla Trouble, I wanted this harsh contrast between the reverby low end and the really in your face high end of the tabla,” Singh explains. “For the high end I increased the attack and brought it forward in the mix through compression and saturation, using 1176 and Magma BB Tubes [emulations in parallel. For the low end hits, there are loads of reverb and delay using Valhalla and Ableton stock plugins.”

Jaycen Joshua's God Particle is another plugin that Singh has relied on to craft certain elements of his sound as part of his mixing and mastering chain. “It’s all fairly basic from EQ to compression and saturation, then I adapt for each track,” he says. “But there’s nothing too weird in my setup, I’m still learning as I go along.”

Situationz also features on the EP and was made on Christmas Day, inspired by how Skream had come up with his iconic Midnight Request Line during the festive season. It features a rhythmic Dhol pattern used by the legendary Sukshinder Shinda for some of his most iconic song intros.

“I remember thinking how I needed another track for the club,” says Singh. “I had this Punjabi folk drum pattern that has this primal vibe similar to UK funky and wanted to get this into a song. The original vocal sample was almost like yodelling, it sounds like a baile funk sample with all the processing.”

Plugin presets also play a role in Singh’s process, particularly when he has a clear idea of what he wants something to sound like but is unsure of how to realize that vision sonically. At these points, he’ll flick through presets until one sounds right, before using that as a starting point to shape a sound.

“It makes life a lot easier and means I can save those settings and now have my own presets,” Singh explains. “The same goes for stock plugins, I use the Ableton stock plugins too. Y U Q T showed me [Ableton’s Auto Pan preset] Around the Head and I used it on Tabla Trouble with the intro to make it feel more expansive. It’s a cool way to manipulate stereo space, although having said that, I’m still very much learning on the job.”

There’s more to Singh’s creative side than his music. His EKTA platform has been set up to merge diverse folk traditions with dance music futurism while his website has a resources hub celebrating the story of Punjabi, Sikh and South Asian culture.

The artwork for Bloom stems from the visual identity of EKTA and how it’s inspired by a library of visual cues, ranging from the Indus Valley Civilisation to the Phulkari ("flower work") textiles, textiles of Singh’s own family, specifically pieces crafted by his mother and grandmother.

This Phulkari provides the literal and symbolic DNA for the EP, bridging these heritage patterns with its title. “Everything I do, I’m taking inspiration from Punjabi influences but I never want to be boxed in by it,” Singh says.

“That’s something I’ve had to deal with since my first foray into the global underground scene, journalists can be lazy. I played a varied DJ set and they just want to talk about one Punjabi song, that’s only a small portion of my set. I don’t shy away from it either, it’s walking a tightrope which forces me to be more creative. I'm inspired by the culture and want to input into it, rather than just taking from it.”

NUG46 opens the EP and first formed during an idyllic road trip to Whangārei Heads, New Zealand, the title taken from the registration plate of the vehicle. Weaving field recordings from the remote beach together with a hypnotic tabla line, Singh captures the ethereal side of Indian classical music while maintaining a club-focused momentum.

“NUG46 was one of the first proper tunes I wrote from start to finish,” he says. “It was inspired by a road trip listening to LTJ Bukem, floating away on these crystal blue waters. I almost treated the tabla like a vocal. I wanted it to be buttery smooth and welcoming, so I used an LA-2A and adjusted the EQ and envelope to remove resonance and harshness.”

As Singh drops his debut EP, he's already sketching out plans to lift the lid on more music that's ready for release, including further solo outings and a variety of collaborations. Opening the door to the next chapter of his creative journey, Bloom is just the beginning.

“We’ve got enough music stacked for the next 18 months,” Singh says. “It’s just figuring out how to place everything and ensuring it all has enough breathing room. But I don’t want to sit on music too much, it can start to stagnate, so we’ll need to get these tracks out there. It’s pretty exciting times.”

Yung Singh's Bloom EP is out now on EKTA.

Follow Yung Singh on Instagram.