Guitarist Johnny Marr still cherishes the memories he has of The Smiths’ glory days in the ’80s, when he wrote the music and singer Morrissey wrote the lyrics to a host of classic songs.

In an interview with Channel 4 News, Marr talks to presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy about the guitars featured in this week’s auction at Christie’s.

Marr also sheds light on the creative process that he and Morrissey enjoyed before The Smiths split in 1987.

“I was very excited about about us being a guitar band,” Marr says, before explaining how he developed a signature sound via prominent use of acoustic guitars and then layering.

He recalls: “On a lot of Smiths records, say Big Mouth Strikes Again and Half A Person, the acoustics are really loud on them, and that’s deliberate.”

He cites two key influences from his childhood. Eddie Cochran – specifically his 1958 hit C’mon Everybody – and The Everly Brothers.

“That was very much a deliberate agenda,” Marr says, “bringing acoustics back on the radio, loud acoustics, because quite often the way acoustics are – say, on a Simon & Garfunkel record, even – they’re very polite and in the background. But I was like, ‘Turn the acoustics up.’ So the acoustics are quite loud on those songs.

“And before the band formed I’d got into layering. There’s a tape machine that actually we put in the auction. It’s a little cassette machine that all the early Smiths songs were done on. But before the band was even a thing, I was experimenting with layering these guitars.”

Marr recalls how the Manchester music scene was dominated in the ’80s by Factory Records, famous as the home to New Order, and before that, Joy Division. Factory’s owner Tony Wilson stated his regret that he had not signed The Smiths, who opted to go with rival independent label Rough Trade.

“I was working in a clothes shop when the band was formed,” Marr says, “and other Mancunian musicians used to come into the shop, and most of them were on Factory Records. So because of the shop, I knew everyone on Factory, and it was the obvious thing to do to sign to Factory. And that became a narrative. Tony Wilson was like, ‘I wish I’d signed The Smiths.’ But I was never going to sign Factory. Personally I would never let that happen because it was just too obvious, and it wasn’t that kind of music either.

“So the Factory bands were my mates, but they weren’t guitar bands per se. They were doing other things with funk and keyboards... different, almost like non-guitar bands. So it was very deliberate that that we were going to be a guitar band, and that was my role in it.”

Marr also tells Guru-Murthy about how he and Morrissey wrote songs together.

He says of the early days of their writing: “We’d get together face to face, and I’d go, ‘I’ve got this.’ And then I’d record it on the tape machine and he’d take the cassette away. And then when I’d made a few hundred quid to buy what was called a Portastudio – which were brilliant and are quite collectible now – I would make these slightly more elaborate demos with a little drum machine and and about three or four guitars on top, and then I’d get on my motorbike and ride round because he lived around the corner 10 minutes [away], and I’d drop it through his letterbox.”

What Marr remembers most fondly is the creation of The Smiths’ third album, The Queen Is Dead, released in 1986.

He recalls how he and Morrissey would sit just a few feet apart with a Walkman cassette player between them.

“It was amazing,” he says. “It was magic. I’d literally have the guitar and I’d have the cassette machine between my knees and I’d go, ‘I’ve got this one.’ And I’d press record.

“I think when I pressed ‘record’ the two of us breathed in, and then when I finished we then breathed out. That’s what it felt like.”

Marr says of the creative process: “Any songwriter will tell you it’s the best feeling in the world.”

He says he liked to write songs in batches of three and loved to hear how each song would then be enhanced by the other members of the band – first Morrissey and then bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce.

“It was the greatest,” Marr says. “We’ve got three new Smith songs. I can’t wait to hear what the words are. I can’t wait to hear what the vocals are, what the bass is, what Andy does, and what Mike does.”

He ends with a smile: “Man, it was magic!”

No band has navigated the path from esoteric ’70s progressive rock to massively successful ’80s pop-rock with quite such conviction and aplomb as Genesis.

When drummer Phil Collins took over on vocals following the departure of Peter Gabriel in 1975, the band charted a course that was still very much in the prog rock vein.

But all that began to shift in 1980 with the release of their album Duke, the key transitional release and their first No 1 album in the UK.

By the follow-up album Abacab (1981) the prog leanings had diminished further as tighter new wave and rhythmic influences predominated.

The 12 album, titled simply Genesis, was their biggest commercial success at the time but it was their next album, Invisible Touch, that catapulted them to global superstardom.

The album yielded five singles and it was the first of these, the title track, that gave them their one and only US No 1 single.

Invisible Touch is a song that cemented Genesis’s place in the mainstream pop market, with its sleek high-gloss sound, catchy synth hooks, lush bass and propulsive electronic drums. It is stirring and insanely catchy, and captures Genesis at the absolute peak of their commercial prowess.

By the mid-1980s Genesis were attracting some serious flak from critics and fans alike. Phil Collins’ solo success had fuelled the feeling that Genesis had completely sold out. In a piece in the Los Angeles Times, music critic Robert Hilburn described the band as “flabbergastingly insignificant”.

Rarely have fans and critics seemed so polarised in their opinions of a band. Many who championed landmark early Genesis albums such as Foxtrot (1972) from the Peter Gabriel era seemed to detest the Collins-fronted incarnation of the band, while those drawn by the Collins-fronted line-up found albums such as Foxtrot tedious and bewildering.

“There are few groups in the classic-rock canon with a more divisive discography than Genesis,” wrote journalist Jim Allen in a piece for Classic Rock in 2017. “Good luck finding anybody out there who's equally enamoured by both sides of the band’s story.”

In an interview with Prog magazine in 2023, Tony Banks attempted to define the source of such division.

“We never had that definitive album the way Floyd had The Dark Side Of The Moon or the Eagles had Hotel California,” he said. “We haven't got that universality of somebody like Queen, who everybody likes to some degree. We were considered too fey to be street cred, so some like us, some don’t.”

By the time the three members of Genesis assembled in October 1985 to begin work on the Invisible Touch album, they had each spent an 18 month hiatus pursuing solo projects. Keyboardist Tony Banks recorded his solo album Soundtracks, while guitarist and bassist Mike Rutherford formed Mike And The Mechanics, whose single The Living Years reached No 1 in the US and No 2 in the UK.

Phil Collins, meanwhile, resumed his solo career and busied himself with the job of becoming one of the most successful and unlikely pop stars on the planet. In February 1985, Collins released his third solo album No Jacket Required, an upbeat, dance-orientated record, which shot to No 1 in the UK, the US and nine other countries.

Some observers pointed out that Genesis’s songs had become so pop-orientated that there was little to distinguish them from Collins’ solo material.

But Genesis themselves highlighted the strongly collaborative nature of the writing on the Invisible Touch album, particularly on its title track.

Collaboration was utmost in their minds when they returned from their 18-month break. They recorded at The Farm in Chiddingford, Surrey, the studio created by the band in 1980.

By then, Genesis were a massive live act, particularly in the US, and approached the sessions for the album with a greater sense of confidence.

They arrived at the studio with no preconceived ideas and the songs were developed by jamming, improvising and recording the results. This is how the song Invisible Touch came into being, as Phil Collins told writer Laura Barnett of The Guardian in 2014.

“Invisible Touch is my favourite Genesis song and it came more or less out of nowhere,” said Collins. “We would arrive in the studio every day and just start playing. One day Mike Rutherford played a riff on the guitar, with an echo, and I suddenly sang: ‘She seems to have an invisible touch – yeah!’ It came into my head fully formed.”

One of the real strengths of the band’s writing process, said Collins, was that they weren’t scared of making mistakes.

“I’m sure people have all kinds of ideas about how we wrote these songs they love or loathe, but really our writing process was close to jazz. We improvised.

“We weren’t afraid to make lousy noises. We knew each other well: if I started singing crap, no one would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Still, there was a good percentage of crap.”

Mike Rutherford recalled that Collins’ energy and organisational skills were key to the writing of Invisible Touch.

“The best songs tend to get written quickly. That’s how it was with Invisible Touch. We’d rock up, have a cup of tea, see what happened. On day one, we had no songs, no ideas, and a blank bit of paper. Phil was always keen to fill that bit of paper – he was very organised – and we let him. It’s a wonderful song: upbeat, fun to play, always a strong moment in any gig.”

In his 2016 autobiography, Not Dead Yet: The Memoir, Collins said that “large chunks” of the song were inspired by his first wife, Andrea Bertorelli.

Two years earlier he told Laura Barnett of The Guardian: “I wrote the lyrics about a person – and I’ve known a few – who gets under your skin. You know they’re going to mess you up, but you can’t resist.”

Collins said that while he was working on Invisible Touch he was heavily influenced by Sheila E’s 1984 hit The Glamorous Life, which was written and produced by Prince.

Collins reportedly built the drum track for the song by using a combination of a Simmons electronic drum kit, a Roland TR-707 drum machine and an E-mu Emulator sampler.

It is also reported that producer and engineer Hugh Padgham routed the Simmons kit through a mixer and then a studio PA system, playing it back at extreme volume to give the electronic sounds more presence and weight.

Keyboardist Tony Banks, meanwhile, upgraded his set-up for the album, replacing his E-mu Emulator I with the E-mu Emulator II+ and adding that most ubiquitous of ’80s synths, a Yamaha DX7, alongside his existing Synclavier II.

While Invisible Touch was created by all three members of Genesis, it has all the songwriting mastery and craft of Phil Collins at his very best. It’s a song rooted in R&B and soul influences and one that opens the album in all its full-on synth pop glory.

From the outset, it hurtles along with intense urgency across an F-Bb-C chord progression. Rutherford’s jagged, catchy riff dominates in the mix before the whole pulsating track drops down to Dmin for the start of the first verse.

“Well I’ve been waiting, waiting here so long,” begins Collins, his echo-swamped voice sounding soulful and resonant. “But thinking nothing, nothing could go wrong.”

The song rarely sits still and that’s part of its twitchy, compelling appeal. It’s a glistening, streamlined production, dominated by stabs of thick synth brass and densely-layered synth strings. The whole song screams its digital presence and these are big, beefy sounds, offset by sizzling, high-frequency percussion.

There’s a nifty emotive shift in mood into an G major before the lines, “Ooh now I know/She has a built-in-ability.”

Rutherford’s riff comes piling back in for the stirring chorus over an F-Bb-C progression.

It’s a powerful, soaring vocal performance from Collins. The hooks are strong and when the chorus hits the whole thing just flies. Unsurprisingly, Collins locks right in with his vocal, as the fretless-sounding bass flows beautifully within the groove.

At 2:09, the song lurches into eight bars of middle eight, which signals a flurry of rapidfire synth wizardry from Tony Banks, before segueing into the third verse.

The arrangement is tight and lean, with the whole single edit clocking in at 3:27. The song also features what writer Dave Fawbert of ShortList described in 2017 as “one of the greatest key changes in music history”. This occurs at 3:08 as the chorus shifts from F major to G major.

Invisible Touch was released on 19 May 1986. Billboard dubbed it an “uptempo dance-pop workout with a clear Collins signature” while another US music industry trade magazine, Cash Box, concluded it was a “hook-laden pop workout”.

In mid-1986, Invisible Touch was knocked off the US No 1 slot by none other than the band’s former singer, Peter Gabriel, with the song Sledgehammer. It was an irony noted by Collins in his interview with Laura Barnett of The Guardian in 2014.

“I read recently that Peter Gabriel knocked us off the No 1 spot with Sledgehammer,” said Collins. “We weren't aware of that at the time. If we had been, we’d probably have sent him a telegram saying, ‘Congratulations – bastard.’”

In 1996, Genesis released a live version of Invisible Touch as a single, which had been recorded in 1992 during the band’s We Can’t Dance tour.

While the original Invisible Touch single received some decent reviews, the album from which it came got some bad press.

“We hid in a ditch whenever we had a new record out,” Collins told The Guardian. “We’d been going more than 20 years, and by 1985 everyone had made up their minds about whether they liked us or not.”

Despite the reviews, the Invisible Touch tour was a huge success, as Mike Rutherford recalled in The Guardian.

“We toured the Invisible Touch album in 1986 and 1987, playing four nights at Wembley stadium. It was a beautiful hot summer. As we went out on stage, I remember thinking, ‘This is as good as it gets’. And I was right. The next album, We Can’t Dance, did pretty well – I think it was worth about £10m – but Invisible Touch was the pinnacle.”

Released during the run up to Christmas in 1986, (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!) became the Beastie Boys’ signature anthem.

As the fourth single out of seven from the hip-hop trio’s debut Licensed To Ill, this song reached No 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March the following year and would end up becoming their highest charting single and their only top 10 hit.

Broadly speaking, it would help establish hip-hop as a dominant force in popular music through its unusual mixture of rap with metal and punk, fusing together elements of attitude and anarchy.

Fight For Your Right was originally written for founding rapper Adam ‘MCA’ Yauch’s Brooklyn project with friend Tom ‘Tommy Triphammer’ Cushman (who makes an appearance in the video). The lyrics were a tongue-in-cheek reference to the party culture of its time, mocking the era of hedonistic excess being glorified on MTV.

In 1987 rapper Mike D, who started Beastie Boys with Yauch and Adam ‘Ad-Rock’ Horovitz, revealed how the song’s resonance within certain frat circles didn’t sit all that well with the group’s three members.

“The only thing that upsets me is that we might have reinforced certain values of some people in our audience when our own values were actually totally different,” he admitted. “There were tons of guys singing along to Fight For Your Right who were oblivious to the fact it was a total goof on them. Irony is often missed.”

Producer Rick Rubin was credited as a co-writer and was largely responsible for injecting the sound of rock into the Beasties’ music, given his success teaming Run-DMC up with Aerosmith for the updated version of Walk This Way in 1986. This is also why other tracks on the Licensed To Ill album ended up featuring samples from bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and The Clash.

“We wrote it in about five minutes,” Mike D once recalled. “We were in the Palladium with Rick Rubin, drinking vodka and grapefruit juice, and Fight For Your Right was written in the Michael Todd Room on napkins on top of those shitty lacy tables. I remember we made a point there of like, ‘Look, we gotta get shit done,’ and we sat at one table, really determined to accomplish something.”

1986 was also the year Rubin produced Slayer’s Reign In Blood, still widely hailed as one of the greatest metal albums ever made.

It was Rubin who contacted Slayer guitarist Kerry King about performing solos on two tracks from the Beastie Boys' debut – Fight for Your Right (with the title shortened for the album release) and No Sleep Till Brooklyn.

In an interview with Border City Rock Talk, King revealed that the “simplicity of it is what’s funny about it” given how Slayer and the Beastie Boys were both recording “in the same studio, like down the hall from each other”.

King also revealed that Rubin had initially approached Slayer's other guitarist, Jeff Hanneman.

“I think he asked Jeff to do the lead first,” King admitted on the Lipps Service podcast. “And that’s just not a thing Jeff would do. It’s not who that guy is. Then he told me, I think I got paid 200 bucks. I’m like, ‘I could use 200 bucks.’”

He continued: “So, I went down and heard the song, and it’s basically a parody of metal in general. So, I didn’t go in there with a mindset to make this awesome lead. I just went in there and made up some lead that sounds like I’m parodying myself and everybody else.”

Ultimately, he choice to do it because he felt the exposure could be “good for Slayer”.

The rhythm guitars on Fight For Your Right were performed half a step down, using basic power chords on the third and fifth frets.

King’s guitar solo is notably calmer and more bluesy than the frenetic approach he’s known for, though the extreme usage of a whammy bar on the two opening notes is a stylistic trademark of his work in Slayer.

The video for the song, directed by Ric Menello and Adam Dubin, ended up becoming as iconic as the music, beginning with a mother and father telling their two well-dressed sons to refrain from “getting into any trouble while mummy and daddy are gone”, warning them not to “make a mess”.

The pair then decide to throw a party and invite their friends over for “soda and pie”, hoping “no bad people show up”. Unfortunately for them, the three Beastie Boys kick the door in and bring along some questionable characters, resulting in punch-ups, smashed objects and a pie fight. The closing scene depicts the mother walking in and getting a pie thrown in her face.

Tabitha Soren, who later became an established broadcast journalist, appeared in the video and revealed that the whipped cream had been collected from supermarket waste bins to save money, which meant that “the smell in that room, when everyone was doing throwing pies, was like rotten eggs… you wanted to throw up”.

Having been covered by artists such as Coldplay, Mötley Crüe, N.Y.C.C. and Cara Quici, Fight For Your Right still stands as one of the definitive odes to teenage rebellion and reckless abandon in popular music.

Gillian Gilbert has revealed that it’s not her husband, drummer Stephen Morris, who is the seriously ill one in New Order – it’s her.

Earlier in the summer you may recall that the band announced that Morris and Gilbert would not be touring with the band “for the foreseeable future” due to “personal health reasons”. No more detail was given, regarding which of the couple was ill, nor what they were suffering from.

Then in a Rolling Stone interview last week about Eternal, the latest Joy Division archive release, Morris gave some more info - “I’ve got a bit of a health problem at the minute, which precludes leaving the country for any length of time.” Asked whether he would return to playing with New Order at some point, the drummer said: “I don’t know. I really don’t want to dwell on what this illness is, but it’s pretty serious. It’s not something that someone’s going to come up with a cure for.”

Now it turns out that the health problem Morris ‘has’ is something is supporting his wife through. Gillian has put the record straight in an Instagram post. “I would like to gently clarify a misunderstanding from the interview, in the course of which comments were misinterpreted, leading people to believe that Stephen is seriously ill,” she wrote.

She continued: “Thankfully, he is well. It is in fact me, who like many other people, is living with cancer. We completely understand how the misunderstanding arose and simply wanted to ensure that the correct information was shared.”

“We are enormously grateful for everyone’s kindness and support and would appreciate some privacy as I continue with my treatment.”

It does mean that it’s very unlikely that there will be a New Order reunion of any description when the band are inducted into the Rock N’ Roll Hall Of Fame in November. Estranged bassist Peter Hook has said he’ll be there though and at present might be the only member to accept the award.

Gilbert and Morris are, of course, one of the few couples in bands who have gone the distance. More than forty-five years after Gillian joined New Order as keyboard player, they are still together. And, one hopes, for many more years to come…

The big four of thrash metal – Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax – arguably created an entire genre between them. But who would make up a ‘new generation’ big four in 2026?

The Megadeth mainman was asked that very question by the Czech outlet Ocko and came up with some interesting choices: "Well, it wouldn't be a young generation, but I do believe that there are ways to do a new Big Four,” the guitarist said.

“I think that Testament, I think Overkill, I think Exodus, and maybe Trivium,” he decided. “I don’t know... Trivium's not really a thrash metal band, so I'd have to think about that. But I think those other three guys would be really great."

Some might be surprised that Mustaine didn’t mention his own group. The guitarist has, after all, never been one to hide his light under a bushel.

Anyway, he explained his choices thus: "Overkill is really important on the East Coast metal scene. Exodus, of course, I love Exodus. And I've been friends with Gary (Holt, the band’s guitarist) longest of all people that I've been friends with in the music industry. And Testament. Eric, Alex (respectively Mssrs Peterson and Skolnick, the Testament guitarists), those guys are really great guitar players. And I love when we get a chance to play with the band."

Mustaine is certainly entering a busy period in his life. He published his memoir, In My Darkest Hour, last week. It’s not the first time the Megadeth founder has put his life story down in writing, but this one apparently details his experience battling cancer.

In the book’s blurb, Mustaine describes it as “one of the most harrowing experiences of my adult life... this story is considerably more than just go to the doctor, get diagnosed and get treatment and hopefully I live happily ever after. This was a journey of me saving myself, staying alive, keeping my family together, and continuing to make music through it all.”

And in addition to promoting the book, Mustaine and Megadeth are still out on the road on what they’re promising will be their final tour. They’re in Hershey, Pennsylvania tonight, with US dates through to 29 September. After that there are shows in South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and Europe.

Apple Corps have dropped another taster from the upcoming Rubber Soul special edition.

We’ve already heard the early versions of Michelle and Daytripper that are included in the package. Now it’s time for the second take of Norwegian Wood

Recorded in October 1965, there were two versions of Norwegian Wood. This is the second and is closer to what eventually ended up on Side One of the album. You can hear John Lennon counting the band in, but the song opens with the double tracked sitar playing the bridge section, rather than the verse melody we all know.

This was the first time George Harrison had played a sitar on a Beatles track and in this Facebook post from the Beatles Cavern, the guitarist can be heard talking retrospectively about the track: “It felt very familiar to me to listen to that music,” Harrison says. “Around that time I’d bought a cheap sitar in a shop called Indiacraft in London.”

“It was just lying around. I hadn’t figured out what I was going to do with it. When we were working on Norwegian Wood, it just needed something and it was quite spontaneous.

"I picked the sitar up and kind of found the notes. I just kind of played it. I mic-ed it up. We put it on and it seemed to hit the spot and that was it.”

George’s words have been spliced with John Lennon talking about the track towards the end of his life: “I asked him ‘can you play this lick on the sitar? And it took him 20 minutes or half an hour to get the lick down.”

The Rubber Soul special edition comes out on 2 October, and as per usual features all sorts of alternative takes and demos from the Apple archives, as well as the band’s contemporary double A side single, Daytripper/ We Can Work It Out.

One of its main attractions is Little Girl, a John Lennon demo which up until recently no-one had any idea even existed, let alone that it was in releasable form. Perhaps Apple are holding that back until nearer the release date...

It’s official: after weeks of speculation. Oasis will be touring in 2027.

The announcement was made this afternoon. “START THE CELEBRATIONS!!!!,” said the band’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek statement. “After a period of reflection, ‘The Most Damaging Pop Cultural Force In Recent British History’ has declared itself fit for purpose and will once again return to lift the spirits of the people.”

They added, quoting Roots Manuva of all people: “Come witness the fitness. It shall be a sight to behold.”

(Incidentally, that ‘Most Damaging...’ reference is a nod to a disparaging article music writer Simon Price wrote in the Guardian around the time of their 2024 reunion. He’s not a fan, let’s say…)

Anyway, here are the details: Oasis will play five nights at Glasgow’s Celtic Park between May 21 and 29 and there’s a whopping 11 nights at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium in June. July sees the tour move to Europe, with dates in Munich, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Paris and Rome. August sees the Gallaghers take on the USA once more with three dates in Boston and Las Vegas apiece, whilst September sees them return to Europe with two nights at Slane Castle in Ireland and four Knebworth stretched across two weekends.

There may well be more dates added – spaces have been left in the itinerary for extra shows to be added.

In terms of tickets, the band have decided to stick with the model they used for the Live 25 shows. So fans must register before 17 September at 4pm in the UK/ 5pm Central European time/ 8am Pacific time in the US/ 11am Eastern time.

Those fans that are successful in the ballot will then be sent a unique non-transferable code to access an allocated on-sale window at a specific time. That on-sale time will take place on September 25, 26 and 27, with three windows each day.

At the moment it sounds like the controversial dynamic pricing tactic has been dumped. Apparently, ticket prices will range between £71.50 and an upper limit of £266.60 without fees.

Black Sabbath could have recorded one final album with the original lineup. But according to Tony Iommi, he passed on the opportunity.

That’s what the guitarist has said in a new interview with Classic Rock. The final Sabbath album, 13, did not involve Bill Ward after the drummer failed to reach an agreement regarding his contract. After its release in 2013, there had been talk about a follow-up, but nothing really happened.

Now Iommi has revealed that producer Andrew Watt – who had helmed Ozzy’s final solo albums Ordinary Man from 2020 and 2022’s Patient Number 9 – had approached him earlier this decade about getting the original line back for one more album.

"I'd met Andrew Watt when he was producing Ozzy," Iommi said. "He was very keen and a bit too excited. He also didn't know what it was like working with the original Sabbath, working with Bill. Also, we'd done 13, and I didn't like the idea of: 'Now here’s another album.'"

In other Iommi news, the guitarist has apparently signed up for William Shatner’s metal album, What The F is Heavy Metal? Well, according to Brian May he has.

May confirmed his friend’s appearance on Zoe Ball’s show on Greatest Hits Radio. Talking about Shatner, he said: “He's a very active man, and for him to step into... Well, it's not... I don't call it heavy metal; I call it rock, really. But it will probably be a heavy metal album because I think Tony Iommi's gonna play on it now as well. Tony's really my best mate, so it's easy for me to pick up the phone to him. And Tony's like me - he loves a challenge."

News about the 95 year old actor’s latest wheeze has filtered through gradually during 2026. We know that Rob Halford of Judas Priest, John Moyer of Disturbed and Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo have all put their names down for the project. May confirmed his involvement last week, and now it seems Iommi too. Shatner is set to preview some of the tracks at Chicago’s Riot Fest next week with a band that includes Phil Sossan (Ozzy Osbourne, Billy Idol) and Britt Lightning of Vixen.

“What a great guy,” May said of Shatner. “He's 95. And he's full of life and vitality and ambition and anger and all this stuff. He's like a kid. I really enjoyed meeting him... I mean, I've worked hard on it. He loves it, and I love the song 'cause you might think William Shatner... I mean, if you don't know Star Trek, it doesn't mean anything perhaps, but if you've lived like we did through all those editions of Star Trek, he's a hero, and he's, in later life, become a real luminary in the world. He does so much for children, so much for the outreach of science.”

The two remaining members of Queen seem to be considering an avatar show in the same vein as Abba Voyage.

That’s what Roger Taylor suggested during an appearance on Virgin Radio’s Breakfast Show. When the host Chris Evans asked about future Queen activity, the drummer replied: “Brian and I talk because we live near each other. There is a possibility of doing something...not quite sure what it is yet.”

“But technology has come on so far,” he mused. “Like the Abba show, for instance. It’s come on…”

At which point his host (and his production colleagues) became audibly excited. “So you’re going on tour with Freddie?” Evans said. “This is what’s happening! Is that what’s happening?”

“No,” said Taylor, sounding somewhat embarrassed at having raised the subject. “I wish it was.”

“It could happen, though, couldn’t it?” asked Evans puppishly.

“Sort of,” replied Taylor. “It sort of could.”

It’s not the first time Taylor and Brian May have publicly pondered the possibility of a Queen avatar show. Last year May told The Big Issue he was open to the possibility of using new technology to create such a spectacle: “It wouldn’t be just playing old footage or whatever. It would be creating Queen as if we were creating it today. I’m very taken with the idea that we can be the original Queen again.”

For such an idea to go from a ‘could’ to a ‘definitely will’, it would need to overcome some fairly considerable barriers. The two largest stumbling blocks are of course the non-availability of the other half of Queen. As we know, Freddie Mercury has been dead since 1991.

Meanwhile, John Deacon retired from public life in the late 1990s. It is very much doubtful whether the bassist would be willing to submit to the time-consuming motion capture technology necessary to create a digital avatar, or re-record his parts for such a project.

Aside from Abba Voyage, the only other ‘avatar show’ (scare quotes used deliberately) to make it from the drawing board to first night is Elvis Evolution. The dictionary definition of a damp squib, it consisted of a live band playing against projections of old footage of Elvis. It remains to be seen whether the Kiss avatar show – which is set to open next year – marks any sort of improvement.

If JRR Tolkien was the primary literary influence upon prog rock, there’s an argument to be made that Lewis Carroll served a similar role during the psychedelic era just a few years before.

John Lennon’s work during this era – I Am The Walrus, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Cry Baby Cry and more – is suffused by prolonged exposure to Carroll and his two Alice novels. And then there’s White Rabbit.

One of the signature hits of the Summer of Love, White Rabbit reached Number Eight in the Billboard charts, an extraordinary feat considering how unusual it was for its time – a Spanish bolero that doesn’t have a conventional verse or chorus but builds and builds until it reaches a strident crescendo.

Then there are the lyrics. It’s hard to believe that the song’s writer, Grace Slick, got away with a song that – on the surface at least – seems to celebrate experimentation with drugs. But White Rabbit got radio airplay and TV exposure despite its references to pills, mushrooms and “hookah-smoking caterpillars”. Not to mention Slick’s closing exhortation to “feed your head”.

Slick wrote White Rabbit in early 1966 whilst she was in her previous band The Great Society. In a 2016 interview with the Wall Street Journal, she recalled how she put it together. “I found a small upright piano for $80 at a warehouse in San Francisco. It was painted about 90 coats of bright red and was missing around 10 keys in the upper register. I didn’t play way up there anyway - the notes were too pingy - so I bought it. Jerry (her husband) and I put the piano in our living room.”

The Great Society were starting to get some press attention, and Slick gave a press interview in which she spoke in favour of marijuana and LSD. “(It) got back to my parents. It was painful for them, I’m sure, but I didn’t care whether they minded. Parents were criticising a generation’s choices while sitting there with their glasses of scotch.”

“They also seemed unaware that many books they read to us as kids had drug use as a subtext. Peter Pan uses fairy dust and can fly, Dorothy and her friends in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz cut through a poppy field and wind up stoned and fast asleep.”

“I loved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The stuff Alice drank and ate made her high (tall) or brought her down (small). There were all kinds of drug metaphors in there. The 60s were very much like that.”

One afternoon while her husband was out, Slick began work on a song inspired by Alice. First came the lyrics. Once those were completed, she moved over to her piano. “I worked on the chords, writing the names of the ones I liked over the phrases. I wrote the song in F-sharp minor, a key that’s ideal for my voice. Minor chords have a certain darkness and sadness.”

The music she came up with had a distinct Spanish flavour. A couple of years before, Slick had had a particularly intense experience listening to Miles Davis’s Sketches Of Spain whilst on LSD. She became obsessed with the album, playing it over and over. This all came out in White Rabbit.

“With the chorus - the Alice lines, like ‘Go ask Alice, when she’s 10 feet tall’ - I shifted to major chords for a release and to celebrate Alice’s courage following the white rabbit down the hole. Once down there, she didn’t have a Prince Charming. She had to save her own ass while going through all the insane hallucinogenic stuff.”

“I identified with Alice. I was a product of '50s America in Palo Alto, California, where women were housewives with short hair, and everything was highly regulated.

"I went from the planned, bland 50s to the world of being in a rock band without looking back. It was my Alice moment, heading down the hole. White Rabbit seemed like an appropriate title.”

“I always felt like a good-looking schoolteacher singing White Rabbit,” she reflected. “I sang the words slowly and precisely, so the people who needed to hear them wouldn’t miss the point. But they did. To this day, I don’t think most people realise the song was aimed at parents who drank and told their kids not to do drugs.”

A version of the song with a lengthy raga-like introduction quickly became part of the band’s live repertoire. But by the summer of 1966 the Great Society were falling apart: a recording session with producer Sylvester Stewart was a disaster that saw the future Sly Stone walk out in exasperation. Some members were talking about going off travelling. Meanwhile, another up-and-coming Bay Area band were eyeing their singer up with interest.

Jefferson Airplane had already recorded their debut album Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, but when vocalist Signe Toly Anderson left to raise her newborn child, they needed a replacement. In a 2021 Guardian interview, bassist Jack Casady explained why they chose Slick:

“One of the reasons I wanted to get Grace into Jefferson Airplane is that she walked to the edge of the stage to sing right to the audience and look right at you. Prior to that I’d only seen guys doing that.

"The chord structures that she wrote were really interesting and she allowed me to construct her songs in a different manner.”

Slick brought with her both White Rabbit and a Great Society B-side, Someone To Love, which was retitled Somebody To Love. In her first rehearsal she taught the former to her new bandmates. “The song is in F sharp, which is difficult for guitar players as it requires some intricate fingering, but (lead guitarist) Jorma (Kaukonen) and Jack are very good musicians so they were able to adapt to it and do it very well.”

Just two weeks after joining Airplane, Slick and the rest of Airplane were at RCA Victor Studios in Hollywood recording their second album, which would be titled Surrealistic Pillow.

In a 2021 interview with the website Happy Mag, Casady recalled the November afternoon they cut White Rabbit. “We recorded it out at Sunset and Ivar, in a huge room at RCA where they used to record A Hundred And One Strings. The room was massive, so we basically set up the instrumentation in the middle of this room and played it live onto four-track.

"It was very simple to record. I just led the song out as a bass part like Bolero, ripping off Ravel. It was all slow and slinky, it gave us the atmosphere we wanted.”

The lengthy introduction of the Great Society’s version was hacked off so the new version was a succinct two minutes 27: ideal for radio play. “After we recorded White Rabbit, we all went into the control room to hear the playback on the monitor speakers,” Slick said in 2016. “I was blown away. I wasn’t aware I sounded like that, with all that power. I was impressed.”

Surrealistic Pillow was released in February 1967 and, though well received critically, took a while to take off. It took the Top Five success of the new version of Somebody To Love to open doors for the record. Then the follow-up White Rabbit completed the one-two punch that took Airplane, the San Francisco scene, and the Haight-Ashbury counterculture all overground.

Speaking in 2016, Slick remembered that: “After the White Rabbit single came out, RCA told us each week where the record stood on the charts. I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t set out to write a hit single and I felt that radio only liked White Rabbit because it was short and they could get more ads in.”

Nevertheless, it reached Number Eight in August and would become one of the enduring aural mementoes of that epochal summer.

Jefferson Airplane too would become forever associated with the initial psychedelic explosion. Though they would never hit those commercial heights again, they carried on until they spluttered to a halt in 1973. Together with guitarist Paul Kantner, Slick then formed the successor band Jefferson Starship, remaining there even after they evolved into AOR rockers Starship.

Now 86 and retired from the music business, she’s still a curiously underrated figure in music history. Slick was one of the first women to play a creative role within a rock band, but her pioneering contributions have only rarely been acknowledged by those who walked through the doors she opened.

And White Rabbit not only pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in a pop song, but was a clarion call to a generation to open their minds in a more general sense. “Psychedelic drugs showed you that there are alternative realities,” Slick said in 2021. “You open up to things that are unusual and different, and, in realising that there are alternative ways of looking at things, you become more accepting of things around you.”

“The line in the song “feed your head” is about both reading and psychedelics. I was talking about feeding your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention.”

Tony Iommi has revealed that he seriously considered cancelling Black Sabbath’s farewell show with Ozzy Osbourne because he feared that the singer was too weak to perform on stage.

In a new interview with Classic Rock magazine, guitarist Iommi also says that he didn’t want Osbourne to perform a set of his solo material before Sabbath’s performance ended the show.

The Back To The Beginning event at Villa Park in Birmingham on 5 July 2025 saw Osbourne singing solo and with Black Sabbath while seated on a throne. Just 17 days after the show, Osbourne died at the age of 76.

Back To The Beginning also featured sets by a host of bands who were influenced by Black Sabbath, including Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Tool and Slayer.

Iommi tells Classic Rock: “I said to Ozzy: ‘I don’t think we should do it.’ I said: ‘We should just let the other bands play our stuff, and us come out at the end and say thank you. But it was for a good charitable cause, and eventually we said okay.”

Iommi explains that the band’s signature song Black Sabbath was dropped from their set because drummer Bill Ward had struggled to play it during rehearsals.

“We needed to rehearse with Bill, because it had been twenty years and he couldn’t remember how to play some of his stuff,” Iommi says. “We wanted to do the song Black Sabbath on the night but it was too difficult for him.”

When the members of Black Sabbath reunited to prepare for the Back To The Beginning show, it had been three years since Iommi had last seen Osbourne, and as he recalls now: “I hadn’t seen Ozzy for a bit, and it was difficult seeing him like that.”

Seeing Osbourne in such a frail condition, Iommi thought it would be best for Osbourne to cancel the solo set he had planned before Sabbath’s performance.

He admits: “I was concerned he was going to blow himself out, and by the time we came on he’d be struggling.”

In the end, however, Osbourne managed both sets, climaxing with four Sabbath classics: War Pigs, N.I.B., Iron Man and Paranoid.

“The adrenaline carried Ozzy through,” Iommi says. “And I’m so glad we did it. But of course we didn’t expect him to go so soon.”

Elsewhere in the Classic Rock interview, Iommi talks about his new solo album From The Dark, his first studio release since Black Sabbath’s swan song 13 emerged in 2013.

One of the key track on From The Dark is Death Watch, which features a guitar solo from Queen legend Brian May. “I’d already done a solo, but I took mine off,” Iommi says.

Iommi and May have been friends for decades, but even after all these years May was stunned when Iommi revealed how many riffs he has stockpiled on a number of CDs: “Five hundred, six hundred riffs,” he says. “Brian couldn’t believe how many I had.”

Iommi also recalls how, in the early 2020s, a famous producer tried to persuade him to make another Black Sabbath album with the others three original members of the band – Osbourne, Ward and bassist Geezer Butler.

The producer was Andrew Watt, who has recently made albums for Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones.

“I’d met Andrew Watt when he was producing Ozzy,” Iommi says. “He was very keen and a bit too excited. He also didn’t know what it was like working with the original Sabbath, working with Bill.”

Geese have responded to accusations that have been floating around for the past few months that they are ‘industry plants’ or part of a major label ‘psyop’.

Yes, daft as it may seem, this moderately successful New York indie band have been accused of being part of a dastardly psychological operation to use social media to create fake fans and thus a buzz around the band.

The allegations stemmed from Geese’s relationship with PR firm Chaotic Good. In a Billboard interview in the spring, a couple of members of the marketing company talked about how they performed ‘trend simulation’ via farmed social media accounts. “We know how to go viral, we have thousands of pages,” one of them boasted, somewhat unwisely.

Geese aren’t the only artists that Chaotic Good have worked with – other clients have included Coldplay and Travis Scott – but they seemed to get tarred by association. Then The Wire magazine published a news piece in April with the headline: ‘The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop.’

Now in a Rolling Stone interview, the band have suggested that they had their own doubts about the veracity of their sudden success. “I thought the same thing, I really did,” frontman Cameron Winter says. “That seemed like a reasonable explanation.”

It seems the accusations about astroturfing (or should that be indie-turfing?) caused consternation inside the band too. “We were just like, ‘Oh, my God. The whole fucking thing is fake.’ We were having a meltdown. Then we marched up to our label over email, the relevant team members, like, ‘How long have all our fuckin’ fans been fake, you sons of bitches?’”

Winter says that he and the band had a meeting with Chaotic Good and were assured that their marketing extended to nothing more than sharing and reposting live clips of their music. “It wasn’t comments or fake fans or bots or anything,” the singer said. “It was low-effort TikTok posts that were used to boost the algorithm. They showed us samples, and it made me feel better because they were so shitty.”

Anyway, whatever the truth behind the marketing, Geese seem genuinely popular now. Their fourth album Getting Killed has gone silver in the UK, and their autumn US tour of theatres and arenas is already nearly sold out.

And the group themselves seem to have few regrets about the controversy. “I’m glad that people have thoughts about our stuff at the end of the day,” Bassist Dominic DiGesu told Rolling Stone. “At least we’re not boring and mid.”

On 26 September 1969, The Beatles released their eleventh studio album Abbey Road. It was the last album the band recorded together and is widely regarded as a masterpiece.

Abbey Road was a triumphal swan song for The Beatles’ astonishing recording career. It also captured them still in their prime, capable of creating music that left most of their contemporaries standing.

Across its 47:03 running time, Abbey Road spans a dizzying array of styles, yet it is a stunningly cohesive work. It is also bold and innovative, as demonstrated by the song that opens the album, Come Together.

Come Together is a strikingly raw and direct song, written by John Lennon. It opens with one of the most iconic bass lines in rock and melds surreal stream-of-consciousness lyrics with a mean and gritty swamp-infused groove.

57 years since it was recorded, Come Together stands as one of the most distinctive songs in The Beatles’ peerless back catalogue.

The initial idea for Come Together was reportedly sparked when American psychologist, writer and early advocate for psychedelic drugs, Dr Timothy Leary, asked John Lennon to write a song. This was to be used for Leary’s campaign to become Governor of California in 1969.

Leary already had the campaign slogan ‘Come together – Join the party’, and Lennon attempted to create a track for Leary’s political bid.

“‘Come together’ was an expression that Leary had come up with for his attempt at being president or whatever he wanted to be, and he asked me to write a campaign song,” Lennon told author David Sheff in a 1980 interview, published a year later as All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon And Yoko Ono.

“I tried and tried, but I couldn’t come up with one. But I came up with this, Come Together, which would’ve been no good to him – you couldn’t have a campaign song like that, right?”

Lennon took the phrase ‘come together’ and created a heavily modified new song, which he brought along to the Abbey Road sessions. This was an upbeat blues composition, which allegedly took its musical cue from the 1956 song You Can’t Catch Me by Chuck Berry.

When Lennon played the song to the band in the summer of 1969, Paul McCartney instantly spotted the reference. “He originally brought it over as a very perky little song, and I pointed out to him that it was very similar to Chuck Berry’s You Can’t Catch Me,” said McCartney in Barry Miles’ 1997 book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now.

“John acknowledged it was rather close to it so I said, ‘Well, anything you can do to get away from that’. I suggested that we tried it swampy – ‘swampy’ was the word I used – so we did, we took it right down.”

Slowing the pace gave the song its power. But it was McCartney’s iconic bassline, with its long, undulating slides, that really stood out.

“I laid that bass line down, which very much makes the mood,” said McCartney in Barry Miles’ 1997 biography.

In late 1973, Lennon was sued by music mogul Morris Levy, who claimed that Come Together infringed the copyright on Berry’s You Can’t Catch Me, owned by Levy’s publishing company, Big Seven Music.

They settled out of court, with Lennon agreeing to record three songs from Levy’s Big Seven publishing catalogue for his next project. This ultimately led to Lennon’s 1975 cover album Rock ‘N’ Roll.

At McCartney’s request, engineer Geoff Emerick returned for the Abbey Road album, and Come Together was the first Beatles session he had worked on since he walked out of sessions for The White Album in 1968, exhausted by the arguments within the band.

Emerick helped create the dark, heavy sound of Come Together and captured its deep groove with extraordinary warmth and weight.

On the Revolver album, Emerick had pioneered close-micing and it’s a technique he used on Come Together to give Ringo’s kick and toms a real heavy physicality and presence

By the recording of Abbey Road, Ringo was regularly draping tea towels over his snare and toms in the studio to deaden the sound. “A terrific effect,” Emerick told Joe Bosso of MusicRadar. “Loud drums would have destroyed the song's spooky mood.”

Emerick also helped create the beautiful clarity and weight of McCartney’s bass sound, a crucial element in the song’s dark, swampy feel.

Abbey Road was the first Beatles album to be recorded on a transistorised mixing console, rather than the valve consoles used on previous Beatles’ albums.

“It delivered a bit of a softer sound,” Emerick told MusicRadar. “The guitars, the bass, the snare and the bass drum were all a bit softer and warmer. It took a little bit of time for the guys to get used to it.”

The Beatles recorded Come Together over six days – 21, 22, 23, 25, 19 and 30 July 1969. The sessions took place in Studio Three at EMI Recording Studios in Abbey Road – now known as Abbey Road Studios – and were produced by George Martin and engineered by Emerick and Phil McDonald.

On 21 July 1969, The Beatles recorded eight takes of Come Together. Take six was marked “best” and selected as the basis of the album and single version of the song, although the edit of the single version fades earlier and has different stereo balance and mastering on some releases.

Confusingly, take six was then designated as take nine. It was recorded on four-track and transferred over to eight-track tape in Studio Two at Abbey Road, ready for overdubbing and manipulation of EQ.

On 22 July 1969, Lennon re-recorded his vocal and added handclaps, with Emerick adding tape delay to both.

At one point in the song, Lennon adds “shoot me”, a phrase allegedly alluding to heroin, although as Emerick noted in the book The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions by Mark Lewisohn, “On the finished record you can really only hear the word ‘shoot’. The bass guitar note falls where the ‘me’ is.”

In his 1980 interview with David Sheff, Lennon described his lyrics for Come Together as “gobbledygook” but they reflect his liking for the nonsensical and surreal. For all their seeming randomness, there’s an exhilarating sense of liberation to Lennon’s scattergun word association.

“He wear no shoeshine, he got toe-jam football/He got monkey finger, he shoot Coca-Cola/He say, ‘I know you, you know me’/ ‘One thing I can tell you is you got to be free’.”

The overdubs on the recording included an electric piano solo but to this day, opinions vary about whether it was Paul McCartney or John Lennon who played the funky and percussive solo.

In a 1984 interview with Playboy magazine, McCartney said that he played the part.

“With Come Together, for instance, [John] wanted a piano lick to be very swampy and smoky, and I played it that way and he liked that a lot. I was quite pleased with that.”

But in his 2014 interview with MusicRadar, Geoff Emerick recalled that it was Lennon who played the electric piano solo used on Come Together.

“Initially, Paul played the electric piano part, but John kind of looked over his shoulder and studied what he was playing. When it came time to record it, John played the electric piano instead of Paul. Paul might have been miffed, but I think he was more upset about not singing on the choruses – John did his own backing vocals.”

Listening to Come Together almost six decades on, it’s striking how fresh and timeless it sounds.

Lennon’s flat, staccato-style vocal sounds compelling and intense, set against the dark, spacious murk of the backing track.

McCartney’s undulating bass predominates and he leaves heaps of space, moving between deep root notes and higher melodic motifs.

Unsurprisingly, it is Starr and McCartney that give the song its swagger.

As ever, Starr’s drumming is impeccably judged and understated. There are some inspired tom fills and his cymbal work helps keep the sound dark and spacious.

Ringo sits slightly behind the beat on Come Together. His drumming is loose and as always, he knows exactly when not to play.

George Harrison’s rhythm guitar is raw and gritty when it comes in on the chorus, and he provides some inspired lead guitar flourishes, such as the slide guitar after the keyboard solo at 2:15. Harrison also contributes some beautifully melodic lead playing on the outro, from 3:12 onwards, which is woven between Lennon’s ad-libbed vocal and the soulful keyboard vamps on the Fender Rhodes.

But what really stands out here is the strength of the band’s live performance in the studio. The tensions within the band still prevailed but this is the sound of The Beatles at the top of their game – raw, strident, assured and with an innate energy and feel.

It was a point highlighted by George Martin in the liner notes to the compilation album Love. Martin described Come Together as a simple song but one that “stands out because of the sheer brilliance of the performers”.

Come Together was released on a double A-side single with George Harrison’s Something on 6 October 1969. It reached No 4 in the UK and No 1 in the Billboard Hot 100 in the US.

Critics such as the New Musical Express concluded that Come Together was one of the funkiest songs The Beatles had ever recorded.

In 2006, MOJO placed Come Together at No 13 in its list of 101 best Beatles songs while four years later Rolling Stone voted it No 9 on their list of the band’s 100 greatest songs.

The listening public later rated it higher. When the Beatles catalogue became available on major streaming services on Christmas Eve 2015, Come Together almost instantly became the most streamed Beatles song. 11 years on, it is the second most popular Beatles song on Spotify, after Here Comes The Sun.

Numerous artists would cover the song, including Ike & Tina Turner a month after its release. Their soul/funk treatment became a highlight of their live set and they released it as a single in December 1969.

Other artists who covered the song include The Supremes, Joe Cocker, Aerosmith, Michael Jackson, Soundgarden, Arctic Monkeys, Eurythmics and Prince.

For John Lennon, Come Together remained a highlight of his work with The Beatles.

“It was a funky record,” Lennon told writer David Sheff in 1980. “It’s one of my favourite Beatle tracks, or, one of my favourite Lennon tracks, let’s say that. It’s funky, it’s bluesy, and I’m singing it pretty well. I like the sound of the record. You can dance to it. I’d buy it!”

Wind down for your weekend and test your mighty musical brain with our quiz on all that's been moving and shaking on the pages of MusicRadar this week.

We've 10 fiendish questions to fling your way, all set to test whether you're number one or failing to chart.

So who's been rocking what, where, and why? Let's start this up.

Queens Of The Stone Age were going at it until well after witching hour and yet were still getting no closer to what they were looking for.

As drummer Jon Theodore remembers it, they had been trying to finish one of the more aggressive tracks from their forthcoming album, Perfecth, and it just wasn’t happening.

They were trying too hard. Music is like that. It’s mercurial. But just as they were about to call it quits, they got back into position and started playing. Something called them back into the room, and whether it was exhaustion or the drinks they’d had to loosen up, there was a kind of magic happening right there on the floor of the studio.

As they called out ideas to one another, a song took shape. It would be titled Insignificant Other, and little did they know it at the time, but this lithe after-hours groover would become the centrepiece of their record, emotionally, spiritually and musically, especially in its embrace of imperfection.

“We recorded that song at the end of a full day of, like, hitting our heads against the wall,” says Theodore. “We were pretty frustrated. It was late. It was like two in the morning, a little drunk, just trying to blow off some steam. The lights were already out in the studio.

“We were all ready to leave. Some people had their jackets on. We went in there, and the riff started kicking around, and we just played a little and then, after a very short amount of time, we had a couple of parts.”

Frontman Josh Homme, who produced Perfecth alongside bassist Michael Shuman, has described Insignificant Other as “a song about distance”, a song about how relationships that were once the centre of your universe can just disappear, and what’s left of a person after that. It’s about “how someone can be your entire world only to simply vanish. And about the strange vertigo of being on the receiving end of that”. 

And the song does have a strange vertigo to it, a wooziness befitting its creation. It is a little reminiscent of the Rolling Stones’ Miss You, smoky and confessional, the kind of song that plays well in low-lit bars with tasselled lamps on the table, or in dive bars illuminated in neon, a Hopper-esque green colouring everyone with a shade of melancholy.

The key to finding it was not to overwork it, or to finesse it to the point of perfection. Insignificant Other is the kind of song that slips through your fingers if you try to hold it too tight. You can hear the freedom.

“There’s interplay. It’s free. It’s loose,” says Theodore. “We were literally calling out the changes as we’re taping it, and later, we went to New Orleans and we tried to do this with better sounds and we couldn’t beat it, because the best thing about that is that is actually hearing the interplay between the people.”

It is the sound of a band listening to one another. That sounds like it should be a given but it’s not always the case.

“We were all just reacting and moving as a unit, which is obviously the foundation of jazz and improvisational music,” says Theodore. “You’re listening and moving together. So it instantly became very special. We tried it a few times and we were just calling the arrangement out as we went. No one really knew what we were doing, and we ended up getting it.”

Insignificant Other reminds us that rock ’n’ roll is a nocturnal enterprise. There is a vampiric quality to the track; you can’t come up with something like this when the sun is up. Besides, they had almost given up for the day. The song didn’t even exist until they started calling out the changes. Theodore says they could play without the weight of expectation.

“We were like, ‘Oh, this sounds great.’ But when you listen to it, it’s definitely all of us doing what we look like without any pressure, or any sense of, ‘You have to do this right, and in a particular way,’” he says. “We just did what we did. And we were listening very carefully. Like, you can hear the glue between us.”

As guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen joins us, he says it was approached in the same way as the Stones would have in the early ‘70s.

“If you know anything about the recording process for Exile On Main St. [the Stones' 1972 classic], they just let the tape roll, and that was what we did with that song,” says Van Leeuwen. “I think we went over the arrangement once, it was late at night, and we were tracking to two-inch tape, and all five of us were in the room, and that’s the second take that you hear on the record. That feels like what the Stones might have done.”

Theodore describes Insignificant Other as a bridge between the past and present, where Queens Of The Stone Age have been, and where they are going. It’s the link to their “old life”. How could it not be, with its themes of estrangement and dislocation, and the black hole of relationship breakdown?

We’ve already heard the shambling, beautiful mess of Easy Street, a two-hander between Nikki Lane and Homme on vocals. Homme produced Lane’s last studio album, 2022’s Denim & Diamonds, and now she is repaying the favour. What comes next?

Well, those expecting Queens Of The Stone Age to make the same record twice have not been paying attention, but even so, Theodore promises Perfecth will catch many by surprise. “I would say this record is a pretty big departure in a lot of ways,” he says.

Expect the unexpected. But maybe in time we will look on Insignificant Other as the key to understanding this chapter in Queens Of The Stone Age history, a band haunted and inspired, who came out of the Catacombs beneath Paris somehow changed, with a greater appreciation of the liminal space between the living and the dead, and of how – all things considered – it is better to count yourself among the former.

“It’s a big part of the record for all of us,” says Van Leeuwen. “It says everything about our playing and it’s coming out of some of the dark personal and physical things that Josh had to go through. I think that we captured something really magical there – and there’s mistakes everywhere, and that’s part of it.”

Perfecth is available to pre-order and will be released on October 30 via Matador. In other QOTSA-related news, Troy Van Leeuwen’s signature Squier Telecaster XII has officially been released. It is one cool take on the Tele, and one of the coolest 12-string guitars you can buy for $599. See Fender for more details.

It’s now over a decade since Motörhead ended with the death of Lemmy. But the band are set to get an overdue tribute in the form of a special exhibition at the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas this October.

What do you mean, you didn’t know there’s a Punk Rock Museum? Yes, there is, and it’s been open since 2023. It regularly features luminaries from the worlds of punk and rock in general, providing guided tours for visitors as well as acoustic gigs and film screenings.

You may well raise an eye at Motörhead being mentioned as part of punk, but there was a crossover between the band and the late 70s punk scene. Lemmy played with a version of The Damned called The Doomed before that original band reformed in 1979. The bassist also wrote R.A.M.O.N.E.S, a tribute to that band, and later produced an EP for the New Yorkers.

The Motorhead exhibition will include items from Lemmy’s personal collection, including photographs and handwritten lyrics.

A must for every visitor will be a chance to actually play Lemmy’s bass through a stack he once also used.

According to the Motörhead website, which broke the news of the exhibition, visitors “will be able to plug in, pick up the bass and experience the gear that created Motörhead’s unmistakable sound. It’s a rare opportunity to interact directly with an important part of the band’s history.”

In addition, Motörhead albums will be available at Vinyl Threat, the Museum’s official record store, and band merchandise will be available in the gift shop.

The exhibition opens on Friday 2 October. As yet there’s indication of how long it will be open for – the Punk Rock Museum hasn’t yet added it to their list of events. Their website can be found at thepunkrockmuseum.com.

Perhaps best known for being the man who directed Britney Spears’ iconic Baby One More Time video in 1998, Nigel Dick has also shot promos for the likes of Guns N’ Roses, Oasis and Cher.

As you’d expect, this means that he’s got some stories to tell, and he’s about to tell them in his new memoir, Music Video Mischief, which is released on 15 September via Trouser Press Books.

Ahead of that, he’s been talking to Music Week about some of his many encounters with rock and pop royalty, starting with Guns N’ Roses as they began their era of world domination in 1987 with Appetite for Destruction.

Even in this early stage of their career, the band had got themselves a reputation for debauchery and a certain amount of bad behaviour, but Dick suggests that, when he first encountered them during the making of the Welcome To The Jungle video, they didn’t cause him too much trouble.

“Guns N’ Roses were meant to be ‘The Most Dangerous Band In The World’ but I’ve met worse – I’ve been threatened a few times! On some level, and certainly at the beginning with Axl Rose freaking out and disappearing to hide in a room for two hours they were far more nervous around me than I was around them.”

Dick also shot the video for Sweet Child O’ Mine, which would go on to become the band’s biggest hit. He admits, though, that he nearly made what would have been a mistake when he was putting it together.

“For Sweet Child O’ Mine, I thought Axl’s snake-like dancing wasn’t rock and roll, so I actually told the editor to completely cut all of that stuff out!” he remembers. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Oh my god, that’s so sexy!’ and suddenly you go, ‘I missed something here – put it back!’”

Guns N’ Roses might have been pretty amendable, but Dick suggests that he had a rockier relationship with Oasis – he directed the videos for Don’t Look Back In Anger and Champagne Supernova in 1996 – and one member of the band in particular.

“Noel Gallagher said my video for Don’t Look Back In Anger was a “bag of shite”, but it says more about Noel than anything else,” he says. “I’d have been shocked if he’d said, ‘I love that video, it’s so wonderful!’ I mean, the little time that I spent with Oasis, there was no sort of sense of joy around them, which I was quite sad about. I got the impression they hated making videos. But this is my job.”

Nigel Dick’s memoir, Music Video Mischief, will be released on 15 September via Trouser Press Books.

You could probably build a tower to the moon with all the books that have been published about the Beatles over the years. But the man who published the first and only authorised biography of the band – Hunter Davies – is still with us and still working at the age of 90.

And Davies has another Beatles book out. His fourth in total about the band, Get Back: The Boys Who Became The Beatles focuses on the lives of the four members up to 1962 and the author has given an interview to the Telegraph about his long career and his relationship with the band.

You’d think that Davies has used up all his good Beatles stories. But not so. When he was researching the original biography in 1968, Ringo visited his house and asked for some vegetarian food. “Margaret (Davies’s wife) did a very poncey Delia Smith aubergine dish,” he recalls. “Ringo went, ‘What’s this?’ By veggie, he meant beans on toast.”

And he drops a bombshell, of sorts, about Yoko Ono: “I believe she was in love with Paul first. But Yoko’s still alive, so I’ll say no more.”

Davies was in close contact with the band during the latter half of the career, and can remember Paul McCartney presenting Getting Better to John Lennon for the first time in early 1967. “They loved each other, but they really were competitive,” he says of the two friends. “Each one wanted the other’s appreciation.”

“I remember when Paul and I came back from a walk in Primrose Hill. Paul played the basic tune of It’s Getting Better, which he’d just written while I was with him. I can still see John’s face, National Health specs on, absolutely blank, betraying no emotion. Paul was waiting for him to say, ‘That’s great.’

“But he said, ‘That’s good. I’ll try to think of a second verse.’ And he came up with a very cruel one about beating his woman. That’s why it’s a brilliant song, because it turns dark. And that’s why they were the best combination.”

When Davies published the original Beatles biog he assumed they’d be forgotten about in ten years’ time. “But nobody else has come close to the Beatles in influence, or the creativity of their lyrics and music,” he reflects. “ The farther away we get from the Beatles, the bigger they become. Until the last syllable of recorded time, someone will be humming a Beatles song.”

The Oasis documentary hits screens this week, and the directors of Don’t Look Back In Anger have given an interview to the Guardian which reveal some interesting insights into the dynamic behind the Gallaghers’ reconciliation.

We already know that the pair - Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace - hid their cameras in the sound kit whilst the brothers ran through their set for the first time in 16 years. But they also had one trained on the door to capture Liam’s arrival.

The singer was late, you see. “Nobody knew exactly when he was coming,” says Southern. “There was a palpable tension. We knew we had these historically volatile characters, so you ask yourself, ‘Are they going to fight – or hug each other?’ And of course they do neither. They have a job to do. Apart from a very brief photoshoot, they hadn’t been in a room together for 16 years.”

“Then Liam walks in, drops his bag and goes, ‘Are we ready then?’ Two hours later, while they’re playing the outro to Champagne Supernova, he picks up his bag and leaves. He did that every single day. And then suddenly they were playing the gigs – and the tension started melting. You could see Noel and Liam getting closer every night.”

“The reconciliation didn’t happen in rehearsals,” the director says. “It started happening on stage and continued happening.” Lovelace adds: “They’re healing this enormous chasm not in private, but in public. And things were forgiven without saying a word. Maybe that’s part of what people are responding to.”

Both men reveal that back in the day they were Oasis fans themselves. Lovelace was still a teenager when Definitely Maybe came out and remembers thinking: “This is the first music that feels like my own.” Meanwhile Southern was lucky enough to catch them at the 200-capacity Hull Adelphi in 1994. Oasis “felt like our band”, he says.

And like so many people, they both initially failed to get tickets when the reunion gigs were first announced in August 2024. Lovelace was “in a car on my phone failing to get a ticket” while Southern “eventually gave up”. Don’t Look In Anger provides a happy ending in all sorts of ways...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gene Simmons didn’t believe that Bob Dylan would agree to write a song with him – but to his surprise, all it took to make it happen was a couple of phone calls.

In a new interview with Michael Moynihan of The Moynihan Report, Kiss star Simmons discusses various aspects of his career, including his relationships with former bandmates Ace Frehley and Peter Criss and his approach to songwriting.

Asked to name the best song he ever wrote for Kiss – the one he is proudest of – Simmons gives an unexpected answer. He picks We Are One, a track from the band’s 1998 album Psycho Circus.

Released in the wake of a hugely successful reunion tour, Psycho Circus was the first Kiss album since 1979’s Dynasty to feature all four of the band’s founding members – Simmons (bass/vocals), Paul Stanley guitar/vocals), Frehley (lead guitar/vocals) and Criss (drums/vocals).

It was later revealed that Frehley and Criss had only minor roles in the recording of this album, with session musicians assisting Simmons and Stanley across the majority of tracks.

We Are One was composed by Simmons alone.

“It was gonna be the single,” he says, “but it had too many harmonies and the lyrics were non-Kiss: ‘Everywhere I go and everyone I see/My face looking back at me/We are one.’ Kind of a cornball lyric that I believe in.”

In the same interview, Simmons refers to a story told by Paul McCartney about the writing of The Beatles’ classic Yesterday. McCartney said that when he composed the melody to Yesterday it seemed so familiar to him that he initially believed it was from somebody else’s song. Simmons had a similar experience when he wrote the song 1000 Dreams for his 2004 solo album Asshole.

“I’m not McCartney,” Simmons says, “but the same thing happened to me. ‘I dream a thousand dreams/I’d walk a million miles for you…’ The lyric and the melody came to me and I was convinced that this song [already] existed.”

That 2004 solo album also included the song Simmons wrote with Dylan.

He tells Michael Moynihan: “I always wanted to write with Bob Dylan. A crazy idea. Why would he pay attention to a peanut like me when he’s written iconic songs that were covered by Hendrix and The Byrds… everybody?”

Nevertheless, he made the call to Dylan’s then manger, Jeff Kramer.

“I call Kramer and I say, ‘I’d like to write songs with Bob.’ And he was about to say words to the effect of ‘Are you on crack?’ But guess what? The phone rang and it was Bob. ‘Where do you live? I’ll be up in a day or so.’”

Some days later Dylan duly arrived at Simmons’ home in Los Angeles.

Simmons recalls: “An unmarked car shows up, Bob gets out with an acoustic guitar and, ‘Hi, how are you?’”

He adds: “By the way, I recorded the songwriting session. I put out a box set, The Vault, 167 tracks, and one of the tracks is Bob and I exchanging ideas about how to write songs.

"The song we wrote together was Waiting For The Morning Light. I’m so proud of it. And I couldn’t get Bob to write the lyrics after we finished it.”

Simmons also confirms that he and Paul Stanley are continuing to create new Kiss music.

He reveals: “We wrote something with a world famous producer, I don’t want to mention his name, and it went okay, but Paul on his own came up with a thing we recorded, Kiss, and that will be coming out at some point.”

The Oasis documentary Don’t Look Back In Anger hits the big screens this week and we’ve already found out one eye-rolling nugget from the film.

According to the Daily Mirror, Liam Gallagher missed the final rehearsal before the band’s opening night of their 2025 tour in Cardiff and only rocked up to gig 20 minutes before show time.

One can imagine Noel’s reaction. Indeed, in the film the guitarist says: “We’ve got a chance here to change the narrative of the band. We have got a chance to fix all the shit that we have just let drift apart.

"The final run-through, the night before the thing. Didn’t see him. Ohh. The next thing is one of the biggest fucking moments of our lives, right? And he’s not rehearsed.”

“I am like, oh yeah? He turns up 20 minutes before the gig - ‘alright, what’s the catering like?’.

Noel continued: “I am like, how the fuck is this… what the fuck. And then he grabs my hand and I am like ‘what the fuck?’. And off he goes, sounding like he was 30 years young.

"Just rocked up and did it. And I am like ‘you absolute mad…’”

In other Oasis news, a treasure trove of recordings of the band, many of which have never been heard before, are up for auction, despite the objections of the Gallaghers.

The collection was amassed by Huw Richards, who worked as the group’s sound engineer between 1994 and 2001. It features over 100 hours of rehearsals, soundchecks and live concerts, including the only known recording of their 1996 gig at Loch Lomond. The auctioneers in question – Littleton Auctions of Evesham – have set aside a guide price of between £1.2 and £1.6 million.

However, the Gallaghers are said to be far from happy about the situation. Understandably so, given the tapes are likely to contain all sorts of arguments between Noel and Liam, just at a time when - publicly, at least – all is sweetness and light between the brothers.

Ben Homer, Littletons' managing director, has said in a statement: “The Oasis camp is aware of the auction and has expressed concerns, which is entirely understandable given the scale and significance of the material.”

Apparently, the tapes are in a good enough condition to be released. It should be said that they just cannot be put up on YouTube by whoever buys them. Oasis retain the intellectual property rights, meaning the audio collection cannot be commercially exploited without the band’s cooperation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He recalls his pitch to the other guys in Asia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tony Iommi has been talking about his upcoming solo album and, inevitably, Black Sabbath and the aftermath of the Back To The Beginning show.

That gig brought the curtain down on the band in the most satisfying, and emotional, way possible. As we know, less than three weeks later Ozzy Osbourne left us. "He was really happy with it, that we could do it, you know," Iommi said of the show, talking to Loudwire Nights.

"In fact, I spoke to him the night before he passed. He said to me, 'I really feel tired and really worn out.' I said, 'Well, you're bound to really, it's been a lot of stress and pressure and stuff like that.' And the next thing, the next day, (he's) gone."

The guitarist also admitted that he still struggles to believe that Ozzy is actually gone, so often is he reminded of him. "It still feels like he's there.”

That said, Iommi revealed that there were certain aspects of Back To The Beginning that he struggled with: “It was difficult because seeing Ozzy sitting in a throne is not the way I see him.

"Always (when) we've been onstage, he's been running around and he'd run up to Geezer (Butler) and pull a face jokingly and come over to me and pull a face or the drummer or whatever. We always had a little laugh onstage and enjoy when he'd run about.”

“But at Back to the Beginning, of course, he's in a throne and I couldn't see him, which felt very unusual. I stood back by Bill (Ward). But it was a great moment, and I'm really glad we could get the opportunity to do it, because I mean, God, we didn't know he was going to go that quick. But he did... There's memories that will remain there, from rehearsals to the whole thing... I am glad that we could do that gig."

Iommi’s solo album From The Dark is his first in over two decades. Most of the band he’s currently working with are local to Birmingham, although he did reveal that one of the guests on the record is a fellow guitar legend and old friend: Brian May. "We've known each other for 56, 58 years,” he reveals. “He's my best friend. And of course, Eddie Van Halen was. We always stayed in touch a lot. They were the only two I really did stay in touch with.”

“(Brian) came to my house and we always have a little fiddle about. I said, 'You're going to be playing on this track here.' He's great. I said to him, 'Play on some other tracks,' but he went, 'Oh no, it's your album.' That's the relationship we've had with each other for all these years. We've played a lot together. He is a great friend."

You can hear the full interview over at Loudwire Nights.

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

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

Think you know the score?

Let's rock.

Alex Van Halen has been knighted – or at least given the equivalent honour – in the Netherlands.

The drummer spent the first nine years of his life in the country, before his family moved to California in 1962. But the Dutch government certainly hasn’t forgotten the Van Halen brothers’ roots.

The honour, the Knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion (Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw), is one of the country’s highest civilian honours and is only given to those who have made “extraordinary contributions” to Dutch society and culture.

The 73-year-old was presented with the honour on Tuesday in the town of Nijmegen, where he and Eddie spent much of their childhood. The award was given to him by the city’s mayor Hubert Bruls, who spoke of Van Halen’s role in writing a “remarkable chapter in the history of rock music.”

Accepting the award, the drummer said: “My cousin organised most of this, but I’m very grateful. I think institutions like this are important in people’s lives because it adds a dignity and a gravity to what we do.

"Whether it’s actually deserved or not, that’s another question. But we can live up to it. That’s the whole thing, is you gotta have something to live up to.”

He also signed Nijmegen’s Book Of The City, which is reserved for very important visitors to the Dutch city. Previous signees include Bruce Springsteen and the King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands.

Since the publication of his autobiography Brothers, in 2024, we know a little bit more about Alex and Eddie Van Halen’s early years in Europe. As he wrote in the memoir, it made the siblings unusually close.

“I was with him from day one,” Alex recounted in Brothers. “We shared the experience of coming to this country and figuring out how to fit in. We shared a record player, an 800 square foot house, a mom and dad, and a work ethic.”

“Later, we shared the back of a tour bus, alcoholism, the experience of becoming successful, of becoming fathers and uncles, and of spending more hours in the studio than I’ve spent doing anything else in this life. We shared a depth of understanding that most people can only hope to achieve in a lifetime.”

The Neil Peart documentary No One’s Disciple is on its way and the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) has put a trailer up on YouTube.

The two-minute video opens with an extended Peart solo, followed by archive news reports of the drummer’s death in 2020, after which Geddy Lee laments that “After Neil passed away, we never really were able to pay tribute to him, and that weighed on me a lot.”

There are also archive interviews from Peart himself: “When I started to get around 11 or 12 years old I was banging around the house and smashing up pots and pans, and my parents got the idea that I liked to hit things with sticks.”

And Alex Lifeson and Lee reflect on their early days as a trio. “I remember thinking that there’s no way this guy’s cool enough to be in our band,” says Lifeson. “And he started playing triplets. Really cool, really fast,” adds Lee.

The doc also features contributions from a number of Peart’s contemporaries and, well, disciples in the drum world. “I once asked him how do you get the air drummers?” says Stewart Copeland. “They’re all doing it with him! I want that!”

“The drum parts are so iconic and… straight-faced,” says Chad Smith of the Chili Peppers. “He was a stone cold assassin!”

There’s also footage of Smith, Copeland, Danny Carey of Tool and Gavin Harrison of Porcupine Tree recreating some of Peart’s parts with Lifeson and Lee. “I thought I was fit,” remarks Copeland after his workout on the kit.

“Not so easy, is it?” answers Lifeson, tongue firmly in his cheek.

No One’s Disciple will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 16. After it’s shown on Canadian TV, it will presumably make its way around the world on various streaming platforms, though no details have been confirmed as yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He did, however, give some credit to Roth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mary Austin, the woman who was Freddie Mercury’s lover and later his confidante and ‘best friend ’, has decided to go public about her relationship with the rock legend. She’s publishing a book that features Mercury’s old notebooks and lyrics and has given an extensive interview to the Guardian.

When he died in 1991, Austin inherited Freddie’s Kensington house and half his estate, including four silver trunks filled with the singer’s lyrics and notebooks. “To say I was overwhelmed is an understatement,” she says now. “I couldn’t look at the lyrics. I felt as I did when I originally packed them – that they were his personal belongings and I was being offered an opportunity to delve into them, and I couldn’t do that.”

The interview reveals some interesting titbits about Mercury and Queen. We all know that the band’s name was Freddie’s idea, but it seems Brian May’s suggestion was the truly awful Build Your Own Boat. They asked what I thought,” she says. “I said I preferred Build Your Own Boat. I thought it was a terrible name. But Brian was my friend. I’d just met Freddie.”

In the 1970s, most Queen fans didn’t have a clue that Freddie was Farrokh Bulsara, a Parsi Indian who was born in Zanzibar. The singer deliberately covered his background, it seems.

“He hid that well,” says Austin, who thinks he was trying to pass as a white Englishman. “He’d stay out of the sun because his skin would darken, and he didn’t want that. With Freddie, you just saw what he wanted you to see.

"He’d get stopped in the street by police and they said, 'Where are you from?' and when he said Bombay they arrested him, because they thought he was taking the proverbial.”

The couple moved in together and Austin was the one who sourced the piano on which he wrote a number of Queen’s hits. “He’d suddenly say, ‘I need a piano. Where can I get a piano?’ … I’d say, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll try to find out.’ So, of course, I find the piano.”

Having a piano in their flat changed him, she says. “There was much more purposeful energy. He would sit at the piano, play the odd key, hum a bit and he looked very happy. Transported.”

Finding out he was gay was actually a relief, she says. “I wasn’t sure whether we were travelling in the same direction any more. Some time earlier I saw a dress and thought, that would be a really nice wedding dress. I asked Freddie, is it worth me buying it, and he looked at me and shook his head. So I knew from there on…”

Freddie Mercury: A Life In Lyrics is out now via Harper Collins.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brain on? Let's go...

Cast your mind back to the golden age of music criticism when formulaic was one of the ultimate pejoratives – the caveat to give us the ick. How times change.

Pop formulas are on the syllabus at music schools. Melodies and song structures are engineered to anticipate our expectations rather than confound them. To quote Computer Music’s 2021 tutorial on Songwriting basics: how to create a modern pop song using just 4 chords, individuality is welcome, but, “if you want your tunes to fit well against the current landscape, they’ll inevitably need to conform to some extent to what your audience is expecting”. That’s just how it is.

But the brothers Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks never bought into any of that. They exist, Sparks exists, to summon something new out of the ether. Probably something a little weird.

Sparks are tribunes of pop’s avant-garde wing, career subversives who will give you what you want just as long as it’s a sense of surprise. Who else would advertise their “first full concert album” as having been recorded “at the beautiful Taruntius Crater” on the moon, with Hollywood A-lister Cate Blanchett the LA duo’s emcee for the evening?

The glint in Russell Mael’s eye as he joins MusicRadar over Zoom suggests Live On The Moon has a more terrestrial provenance but where and when on their MAD! Tour that would be telling.

No, this is Sparks going once more unto the breach, going “beyond” the music and deeper into their own universe, daring the audience to follow.

“The people that we have always liked the most in pop music have like, it seems to me, a universe around them where you can’t separate the person, or the artist, from their work,” says Mael. “It’s one and the same, and I think that it’s not something that we ever set out to do, but it’s just the way we are as artists, wanting to create a universe through the music – the lyrics, the image, the videos, the album artwork…”

The brothers Mael have been a blur of reinvention since the beginning, when they were presenting glam rock as radical pop theatre, a medium for absurdist lyrics, and over the course of 28 albums their stylistic convolutions have augmented the rock-and-pop idiom, laying the ground for the ‘80s synth-pop explosion, reinventing the rock opera…

You have Russell, the whirligig master of ceremonies with a puckish stage presence and falsetto range. You have Ron on keys/synth, stoic and theatrically impassive, his Chaplin/Hitler moustache now clipped into a less troubling pencil profile redolent of old Hollywood.

Even after Edgar Wright made a documentary about them, the brothers still seem enigmatic, wired to a different grid.

Mael feels today’s pop lacks something else beyond the immediate.

“[With] a lot of artists now, there’s a lot of this confessional kind of pop music that seems to be, like, it’s literally about, ‘Oh, that guy, he left me. I’m gonna pay him back!’ It is a lot of that,” he says. “It’s this confessional stuff that is kind of one-dimensional. It just seems like it’s there on the surface, and it’s literally about that.”

“What I really like is people who have a craft, or a craft for their music, where you care about the lyrics going beyond [that], and hopefully the music is going beyond, and the music always being challenging, and that you have – like you said – created a universe, and the rules within that universe can be anything, because it’s your world that you created.”

This pop-auteur theory afforded Sparks the freedom to follow their musical curiosity to see where it might lead. Not everyone wanted to follow them on that journey. The universe Sparks created bewildered some critics.

Their reinventions were a little too far ahead of the game, like when their heads got turned by the futuristic sounds of Giorgio Moroder’s studio work with Donna Summer as the disco era embraced new synthesized sounds. Why couldn’t the disco ball shine light across Sparks’ expanding musical universe? They would do a Moroder record their way.

“And for us, it was all consistent,” says Mael. “But at the time, you know, some [people], especially critics, thought that we were being blasphemous to whatever they thought our cause should be, that ‘it’s not rock music anymore’, or whatever. ‘You’re using electronics,’ and all that. Just being able to shift and work – with any kind of backdrop – that’s what we really enjoy. It’s the freedom that, we have a band, but it doesn’t mean that you have to use the band in a traditional way on every song.”

This freedom took Sparks from the bombastic avant-rock theatre of their 1974 hit This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us to the ecstasies of the Moroder-produced studio album Nº1 In Heaven in just five years. Welcome to the future.

Electric guitars were temporarily decommissioned in favour of the synthesizer, and yet tracks such as Beat The Clock, Tryouts For The Human Race, and The Number One Song in Heaven were quintessential Sparks. This was the Mael brothers doing disco, even if stumbling out of Studio 54 in the wee small hours was never their scene.

“It’s never been, from our standpoint, a thing of being infatuated with club music, or dance music,” says Mael. “What we liked was the sound of what Giorgio was doing with I Feel Love, and that sort of thing, and so we thought that the marriage of electronics with what we were doing, and with our lyrics, and my singing and all, would be something really fresh and special.

“And so it wasn’t that we ever hung out at Studio 54 or anything. [Laughs] It’s probably about as far from our sensibility as you can get.”

In Moroder they had found a kindred spirit. Dan Wyman, who had just worked with John Carpenter on the Halloween score, was hired to program the synths. Keith Forsey, who gave Blondie’s Moroder-produced hit Call Me its propulsive beat, played drums.

Nº1 In Heaven was something new for Moroder, too. Here he was working with a band, with two brothers at the heart of it. It was a collaboration on a different scale.

“No matter how amazing Donna Summer was, it was a challenge for him to be working with people coming from a band sensibility,” says Mael. “And so I think that was something from his standpoint, too, that was exciting.”

Sparks came as prepared as they usually did, which meant that some material was written and the rest was “winged” in the studio as they went along.

“It’s kind of what we do, and I think that was also what made it interesting,” says Mael. “Nobody knew what the final outcome would be, and it came out like it did. And I think it’s just working with three really strong people – Ron, myself, and Giorgio – and each coming with our own strengths and abilities, and pooling those things together.”

The synthesizers and sequencers brought a different energy to Sparks, a relentlessness. Moroder’s electronic production had the transformative effect they were looking for. Repetition, especially in lyrics, has always been a leitmotif of the Mael brothers’ songwriting, vocal refrains repeated to the point of giddiness, but here there was an electronic accompaniment doing something similar with the instrumentation.

Looking back, Mael simply saw it as a chance for them to push themselves and come up with something different.

“We just like having challenges and being thrown into situations where we’re uncomfortable, and I think that that was a situation where we were uncomfortable because it was out of our normal element,” he says. “I think it’s always good to be thrown into situations where you are uncomfortable because hopefully something new will come of it.”

It is one of the reasons why Sparks have always been so keen on collaborating with filmmakers. Cinematic references abound in their discography, in paeans to Katharine Hepburn, Veronica Lake, Gone With The Wind, and Ingmar Bergman. Dramaturgy’s Fourth Wall would certainly be a challenge worth scaling, allowing the Maels to work both sides of the curtain with a knowing wink.

They famously came close to working with the late Jacques Tati on his Monsieur Hulot films, a picture titled Confusion in which the veteran French director considered killing the character off in an on-set accident with a prop gun.

Their title track for the movie ended up on 1976’s Big Beat, with Sparks performing two tracks from the album in the 1977 cult disaster thriller Rollercoaster. Sparks stepped in after Kiss turned it down and played Big Boy and Fill-er-up. A young Helen Hunt can be seen rocking out to them.

But Sparks had to wait until 2021 to really scratch their cinematic itch when they teamed up with director Leos Carax for Annette, the musical starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, with Carax co-writing lyrics alongside the band.

“It’s throwing you into a world that is not your normal world, and that there’s a whole other set of rules,” says Mael. “And you’re fresh coming into that with your own sensibility of how things should work. I think that’s why a movie like Annette was really special and unique, because it was not going at it with a kind of jaded knowledge of what you do when you’re making a movie – and especially a musical. Any situation like that where you’re forced to be in an uncomfortable environment is potentially good for the outcome.”

Live On The Moon opens with So May We Start, the curtain raiser from the Annette soundtrack, and dives deep into the Sparks catalogue.

There are lesser-performed tracks like Academy Award Performance (another Hollywood reference) and Whippings And Apologies from their 1972 sophomore album, A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing, and performing them alongside perennials such as The Nº1 Song In Heaven and Sparks’ calling card, This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us (hey, another Hollywood reference).

“It’s a special song,” says Mael. “It was special then. I think it’s still special and unique now. So it’s a song that we would be remiss, I think, not doing it – and we enjoy doing it, and the fans enjoy hearing it, too.”

When Mael looks out from the stage, he is seeing younger faces in the audience.

“Some of it – a lot of it – we owe to Edgar Wright with the documentary [The Sparks Brothers], because he introduced the band to a lot of people that weren’t aware of Sparks,” he says. “I think those new fans that were attracted from that movie, and also from Annette… They see the new albums, the latest albums as being the focal point, and then going back and discovering albums like Kimono My House [and] Nº1 In Heaven.”

The cinema can be a compelling recruiting sergeant. But maybe it’s also a question of the audience seeking out new thrills.

Sparks have always been ahead of their time but in an era of programmatic pop – and worse, an era in which AI programs have digested the pop formulas required to make music ex nihilo with no living human needed, maybe we need a band who is just too weird to be anything other than human. A band that invites us all to consider the absurdity of the human condition, and to rejoice in it.

• Live On The Moon is out now via Transgressive
• Catch Sparks live at Green Man Festival this weekend Aug 23, at York Barbican on Aug 25 and Cliffs Pavilion, Southend On Sea on August 26. See Sparks for ticket details.

In the ’80s, Aerosmith pulled off one of the most successful comebacks in the entire history of rock ’n’ roll. But the band couldn’t have done it on their own – and one of their key collaborators was songwriter Desmond Child.

Aerosmith’s career was in disarray in the early part of that decade. Drug and alcohol problems had affected the band’s live performances and personal relationships, leading to the departure of guitarists Joe Perry and Brad Whitford.

1982 album Rock In A Hard Place featured two new guitarists, Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay, alongside the band’s three remaining founder members – singer Steven Tyler, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer.

Rock In A Hard Place was the first Aerosmith album to fail to reach the US top 30 since Get Your Wings back in 1974. And even when Perry and Whitford returned for the band’s 1985 reunion album Done With Mirrors, their struggles continued. That album also peaked outside the top 30.

It was in 1986 that Aerosmith’s fortunes turned around – when their classic 1975 track Walk This Way was covered by hip-hop trio Run-DMC with Steven Tyler and Joe Perry as guest stars.

The revamped Walk This Way was a worldwide smash hit, reaching No 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. And in its wake, the post-rehab Aerosmith worked with three songwriters from outside of the band to create the 1987 album Permanent Vacation.

Those three songwriters were Jim Vallance (Bryan Adams’s collaborator-in-chief), Holly Knight (co-author of Pat Benatar’s Love Is A Battlefield and Animotion’s Obsession) and Desmond Child (the so-called ‘hit doctor’ who had worked with Bon Jovi, Cher, Bonnie Tyler and Kiss).

Child ended up co-writing three songs for Permanent Vacation – Heart’s Done Time, Angel and Dude (Looks Like A Lady). And he discusses the latter song in a new interview for Rock & Roll High School with Pete Ganbarg.

As Child recalls it, his introduction to Steven Tyler and Joe Perry happened as they were already working on this song.

He tells Pete Ganbarg: “I walked in, not even a hello, and Steven called me over to this corner where Joe was recording this backwards guitar that had like a boogie woogie kind of ‘na na’. Then Steven started singing ‘Cruisin’ for the ladies.’ And then they stopped and he said, ‘What do you think of that?’ I said, ‘That’s really bad.’ I don’t know why I was so bold that I said this: ‘I don’t think Van Halen would put that on the B-side of their worst record.’

“Steven said, ‘Well, when I first started singing that hook, I was singing ‘Dude looks like a lady.’ And I said, ‘That’s a hit title.’”

Child says that Joe Perry disagreed about the title.

He recalls: “Joe kind of crossed his arms looking at me sideways. And he said, ‘Well, we don’t know what that means.’ And I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I know what that means.’”

And as Tyler then revealed, that title was inspired by a chance meeting with a fellow superstar rock singer.

Tyler said it happened when the newly teetotal band members went to a bar where they would relax drinking soda.

As Child tells the story: “It was an empty bar and there was this long row of bar stools and at the very end was this vision of loveliness. Teased-up platinum hair, ivory skin, all curvy with black nails.

“They were like drawing straws. ‘Who’s going to say hello? Who’s going to go up to her?’ And suddenly she turns around and it’s Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe!

“So that’s when Steven said, ‘Oh, that dude looks like a lady.’ That’s how he came up with it.”

Dude (Looks Like A Lady) was the lead single from Permanent Vacation, released on 22 September 1987. It reached No 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, their first top 20 hit since Walk This Way in 1976. And with that, Aerosmith were very much back in the saddle again.

It might be one of the biggest songs of the century, but Killers frontman Brandon Flowers says that when he and his fellow band members first pitched Mr Brightside to the big record companies when they were trying to get signed, no one was particularly taken with it.

Reflecting on the 2003 song’s beginnings and legacy with BBC Radio 2’s Vernon Kay, Flowers says that it was only after the Killers had been signed to indie label Lizard King in the UK and Mr Brightside became a hit that the majors came knocking. What’s more, they were convinced that something had changed since they first heard it.

“I don't know if people think it's just like ‘lore’, or like something that I'm spinning along the way, but every single major label had said no,” says Flowers. “They said no, and then we started getting this attention over here [in the UK], and they literally would say, ‘When did you record this song again? What producer did you bring in?’ And it's like, ‘No, that's the same song. It's exactly the same recording that you heard before.”

Flowers says that the Killers always knew that they had something with Mr Brightside. In fact, it was the only song of the ones they’d written that they didn’t ditch when they heard the Strokes’ 2001 debut album Is This It and realised that they needed to significantly up their game.

“It's a powerful thing to me,” says Flowers. “I have a real gratitude towards them for the powerhouse that that record is – and the first few records. So good. They just raised the bar so much higher than it was at that moment, and it just changed. It changed everything.”

With Mr Brightside, though, the Killers had a song that they believed could compete in this new musical landscape.

“It was funny because it was in the same vein,” says Flowers. “You know, I knew something was happening. It was like, what? Who is this person that must have some of these same influences that I do? And I felt like that song, it just was reminiscent of some of the things that were starting to happen, and it just felt good. It felt right.”

Of course, Mr Brightside has gone on to eclipse anything that The Strokes have created in terms of its place in the wider public’s affections, but when they were working on it, all the Killers knew was that it was the best thing they’d come up with up to that point.

“We didn't know it was going to become what it's become,” says Flowers. “How can you know that? But I remember the hairs on my arm standing up when we were performing it early on, and so something was different about that one.”

As for the song’s enduring popularity – it appears to have taken up permanent residence in Spotify’s Top 50 Global chart – Flowers is happy to accept that he and co-writer Dave Keuning (Killers guitarist) no longer claim any real ownership of it.

“It's not ours anymore. You know, I'd heard people say that, you know, in interviews... maybe it was like Sting talking about Roxanne or something like that. But now I understand it. It’s almost like it doesn't matter who wrote it – I don't feel like ‘Oh I wrote that’. It just exists."

Brandon Flowers new solo album, Thrasher, is out now.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer were one of the greatest progressive rock acts of all time. But as drummer Carl Palmer tells MusicRadar, the album they made under pressure at the end of the ’70s was widely ridiculed – and its commercial failure prompted the trio to go their separate ways.

That album was Love Beach, and as Palmer says now: “To be honest, we were really tired when we made that record. I mean, we’d done a lot.”

This sense of fatigue was reflected in contemporary reviews of the album. As critic Michael Bloom stated in Rolling Stone magazine: “Love Beach isn’t simply bad; it’s downright pathetic. Stale and full of ennui, this album makes washing the dishes seem a more creative act by comparison.”

In a later interview, keyboard player Keith Emerson agreed with Rolling Stone’s assessment of Love Beach, dismissing the album as “an embarrassment against everything I’ve worked for”.

But Carl Palmer insists that this much-maligned record really isn’t so bad.

“It’s not my favourite album,” he says, “but there are some good tracks on it.”

He cites their interpretation of Canario, composed by Spanish pianist Joaquín Rodrigo, as a highlight of the album.

He also says that for himself, Emerson and bassist/guitarist/vocalist Greg Lake, the writing was on the wall even before the sessions for Love Beach began.

He explains: “Just so you get the complete story, we had basically broken up by the summer of 1978 when we started on that album. We weren’t like big friends, but we used to hang together. We used to go out to the odd restaurant together. And in ’78 we’d gone to Nassau in the Bahamas because Keith had got a house there.

“So we were just hanging out on the beach, and that’s where we were when Ahmet Ertegun from Atlantic Records called and said, ‘Why don’t you try once more in the studio?’ And at first we said, ‘Well, we’ve got nothing really written.’

“Keith was a little bit panicked because he would come up with a lot of the big ideas, and Greg hadn’t got any acoustic stuff. But Ahmet kept on and on and on about it. And then Chris Blackwell came into the picture.”

Blackwell, the founder and head of Island Records, owned the famous recording studio Compass Point on the island of Nassau.

Palmer recalls: “Chris told us all about the studio and said, ‘I’ve got some free time for you if you want it.’ So we realised that they [Ertegun and Blackwell] were ganging up on us behind the scenes. And in the end we went into the studio and gave it a go.”

Love Beach was comprised of two very distinct halves. Side one featured six short tracks of fairly simplistic pop rock material, written by Greg Lake with lyricists Pete Sinfield, plus the version of Canario. Side two had just one track, the 20-minute epic Memoirs Of An Officer And A Gentleman, composed by Emerson and Sinfield.”

Palmer names Memoirs Of An Officer And A Gentleman as another highlight, but remains embarrassed by the album's cover art.

“We called the album Love Beach because that was the name of the beach in front of the studio,” he explains.

This was the location for the album’s cover shoot, for which the three smiling musicians wore outfits that would not have looked out of place in a ‘70s discotheque.

“We had that dreadful picture on the cover with the three of us looking like the Bee Gees,” Palmer recalls. “I remember standing on that beach and thinking, ‘This is wrong.’ I thought: ‘We play nice acoustic songs sometimes, but we’re meant to be a progressive rock band.’”

He admits: “I didn’t like it, but I went along with it. And the album really wasn’t that bad, but we never promoted it. It might have sold more if we’d promoted it, but we were tired. We’d toured so much.”

Love Beach was released on 17 November 1978.

The album’s opening track All I Want Is You was released as a single and was performed by the group on Top Of The Pops.

But Palmer’s attempts to organise a farewell tour came to nothing.

In 2021 Classic Rock descried Love Beach as ELP’s grand folly, stating: “For all their magnificent prog triumphs – Tarkus, Trilogy, Brain Salad Surgery et al – ELP also had some terrible lows. The band reached their nadir with the ridiculous Love Beach. Released at the height of punk, and with the three members dressed like The Bee Gees on the cover, Love Beach contained several ill-advised stabs at commercial pop plus a tragic wedge of prog-rock pathos, Memoirs Of An Officer & A Gentleman. More than the efforts of Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer, Love Beach was the thing that killed prog in the ’70s.”

Carl Palmer says now: “People often crack jokes about that album. Maybe somebody should have stopped us before we ran out of gas.

“I can see why the band came to an end. But that was one album. There are all those really high-end albums that we made, and I’m still so proud of them.”

Frank Beard, ZZ Top drummer, has died, aged 77, at his ranch in Richmond, Texas, with his family by his side, the band's management have confirmed in a statement.

Just last week, the band's Hollywood Bowl gig was cancelled as Beard's health deteriorated.

Beard had performed in ZZ Top's classic line-up for more than five decades alongside guitarist/vocalist Billy Gibbons and bassist/vocalist Dusty Hill.

Following Hill's death in 2021, his tech Elwood Francis took over as the group's bassist as requested by Hill.

As sole surviving original member, Gibbons has paid tribute to Beard, writing, "Today, Elwood and I lost a great friend and collaborator, and the world lost one of the most naturally innovative drummers and a great and true son of Texas.

"His signature backbeat was key to keeping ZZ on top. The band of which he was part for six decades is going to keep on keeping on as he had wished."

While Beard officially rejoined the band last year following earlier health issues, he had been absent from recent outings, with dep Michael Monahan filling in.

ZZ Top emerged from the Texas blues-rock scene at the end of the '60s and, to date, have released 15 studio albums, selling an estimated 50 million records along the way.

As Gibbons himself told it in 1975, “We came together in 1970. I met Frank through a fella in Dallas and he came down and, after one, show he said he’d got a drummer that I had to meet. That was Frank and we teamed up there and then.

"Then the guy from Dallas quit so I needed a bass player, and Frank knew Dusty and that’s how he came to join us. I didn’t know it but Frank and Dusty had worked together for about five years before.”

Beard himself, who rarely spoke at length in interviews, recalled, "I met Billy through a guy in Houston who told me about this hot guitar player.

"When we got in the room together, we just started playing a basic shuffle. It felt so good, I wouldn't let him stop.

"I made him jam for eight hours straight until his tongue just fell out. By the time we stopped, we both knew we had a band."

The band has cancelled its next two shows, but will then, according to a management statement, "The band will resume its current The Big One! Tour this weekend with two dates at Austin City Limits, one of Frank’s favourite venues and in a city that had been something of a second home for him."

It’s one of the big talking points of 2026 – where you stand on Angine De Poitrine is increasingly a question every musician working in guitar rock has to have an opinion on.

And in the ongoing debate, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of Rush have come out firmly in support of their fellow Canadians.

Interviewed on Chile’s Radio Futuro about their current 50 Something tour, conversation soon got round to their polka-dotted countrymen: "Well, I think they're fantastic,” said Lee. “I love the fact that they've gone viral, because they're so unusual, peculiar, idiosyncratic. It's a sound that no one's heard before. They've taken Primus and a bit of Rush and all the complexities and sort of boiled it down to a two-piece band using an incredible array of technology."

"That's the most entertaining and exhilarating bits of music that I've heard for a long, long time. And I think most people that hear them find it somehow infectious, and I don't mean that like it's poisonous. I mean good infectious."

Meanwhile Alex Lifeson saluted the duo’s musicianship, saying: "There's something very hypnotic about their arrangements and how they write, how they present the music. You know, using the looping pedals to create a bass line, and then guitar lines over it, and keep building on it. And above all, they're just great players. They really play their instruments so well, and that whole microtonal approach just makes it sound so exotic, and and just mesmerising."

Lee then chipped in with: "And the drummer has a bigger nose than me, so I love it."

Many others have been equally effusive. In an interview earlier this year Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy said of them: “This is what I imagine the future of music sounds like." Meanwhile, Dave Grohl said that the duo, "absolutely blew my fucking mind".

Not everyone has been so positive. One naysayer has been Canadian guitarist Devin Townsend, who has taken issue with Angine’s costumes. "This makes me crazy, because it's 'the mask thing'," Townsend told interviewer Jorge Botas. "It's like, he's got a big polka dot nose, and so everybody really likes it. I mean, the music's really cool, right?”

"But because of the image, I find that very difficult. For me, it's difficult, because I just think image in general is really…I gotta choose my words properly here. But would they have that same attention if they weren't wearing big clown noses?”

There were embarrassed looks and much apologising backstage at a Matchbox Twenty gig on Sunday night after frontman Rob Thomas accidentally clobbered one of his bandmates.

The incident happened at the Illinois State Fair on Sunday night. Thomas was - as he does - swinging his mic stand around when he let go, and it hit his colleague Paul Doucette in the head. Footage from the concert shows the multi-instrumentalist, who was playing guitar at the time, having to leave the stage to seek assistance.

Needless to say, Thomas was mortified, telling the crowd: “Every night I’m over here, and I’m throwing this Goddamn thing around. It nailed him. It nailed him hard. My best friend in the world, and I think I almost killed him, and I feel really bad about this.”

“By the way, it felt like a really good idea right up until now,” he added, “I feel like an ass.”

After a short interlude, Doucette returned to the stage clutching what looked like a glass of wine, and jokingly said: “I don’t know how many times I’ve told you about swinging that f***ing thing. I knew it was only a matter of time. It’s been 30 years. Now, admittedly I’ve been in the back [meaning on the drums] for the first half of that and maybe I’ve gotta go back there because obviously it’s safer.”

Thomas then promised, “I think I know one thing I’m gonna stop doing.” Footage taken from later on in the gig shows the singer apologising once more to Doucette, saying: “I’m so sorry. I’m gonna keep apologising to you, like, all month.”

Doucette was clearly unhappy at the incident. Later on he posted a video to Instagram that shows him on the band’s tour bus with people examining his ear, using tweezers and the flashlight from a phone.

Doucette can be heard saying: “So here’s what’s happening right now, Rob took me the f*** out with his swinging the f***ing mic stand during that show, and I have bits of my in-ears - which he f***n’ smashed - in my ear,” Doucette said as someone removed a fragment from his ear. “Oh, I f***ing feel that. That is not fun. That is not fun. Please don’t move the bus.”

After the broken in ear piece was removed, Doucette shouted to the camera, “F***in’ Rob!”

Slipknot have confirmed that Sid Wilson, their DJ and keyboard player has left the band.

In an Instagram post that has now been taken down, the band have said: “Effective immediately, Slipknot will no longer be associated with Sid Wilson. We wish him the best in his future endeavours.”

The split was first floated by TMZ in late July. That same day, Slipknot guitarist Jim Root cautioned on Instagram that fans should take that report with a pinch of salt, writing: “Don’t believe everything you read. Stop. Think. Take a breath. Sit with it for awhile. Maybe. Just maybe even wait until there’s more information.”

And so departs another long-time member of the band. Wilson follows multi-instrumentalist Craig Jones, who left in 2023, and percussionist Chris Fehn who departed in 2019. Original drummer Joey Jordison died back in 2021 and, going further back, bassist Paul Gray passed away in 2010.

The band haven’t released an album since 2022’s The End, So Far and haven’t played live since July last year. As yet, they haven’t gone into any details about the reasons behind the split with Wilson or what it means for the band going forward.

Wilson has been embroiled in a turbulent relationship with Kelly Osbourne. The couple have a three-year-old son, got engaged last year before the Back To The Beginning Show in Birmingham, but broke it off in March. Since then Osbourne has posted on social media demanding child support from Wilson and revealing much about the pair’s relationship. It’s not known, though, whether Wilson’s domestic issues have been a factor in this latest fracture in the band.

Mr. Tambourine Man by The Byrds is one of very few cover versions to have arrived less than a month after the original.

The song was penned by Bob Dylan and released towards the end of March 1965 as the second single from his fifth studio album Bringing It All Back Home, with The Byrds’ version landing just three weeks later.

The Byrds used the song as the lead single and title track from their debut full-length, which was made of folk covers – mostly composed by Dylan – and originals either written or co-written by The Byrds’ principal writer Gene Clark.

There are some key differences between the original and the cover, however.

The Bob Dylan cut is notably sparse, with just an acoustic guitar and clean electric underneath his signature vocals.

The Byrds’ version is comparably thicker and wider-sounding, with a lot more going on in terms of instrumentation, and performed in a different key and tempo. It’s also a great deal shorter than Dylan’s version, clocking in at 2:18, which is less than half the length of the Dylan recording.

Unusually, The Byrds could only base their version on a demo made in 1964 during the Another Side Of Bob Dylan sessions, as Dylan’s final version had not been recorded when they started working on it.

The Byrds’ line-up featured Gene Clark (vocals, rhythm guitar), Roger McGuinn (vocals, lead guitar), David Crosby (vocals, rhythm guitar), Chris Hillman (bass) and Michael Clarke (drums).

It was the group’s manager Jim Dickson who brought the demo in and suggested they give it a try – though to begin with the band weren’t convinced.

“Kudos to Roger McGuinn for taking on Tambourine Man, which didn’t knock us out when we first heard it,” Chris Hillman admitted. “Bob Dylan had written it in a very countrified groove, a straight 2/4 time signature, and Roger takes the song home and works with it, puts it in 4/4 time, so you could dance to it.”

When the writer of the song heard what The Byrds had done with it, he gave it his own seal of approval. Hillman revealed that “Bob heard us do it and said, ‘Man, you could dance to this!’ – noting how their cover “really knocked him over and he loved it”.

Hillman himself did not appear on the recording, however, as only three of the group’s five members ended up performing, with session musicians being hired for drums and bass. This was mainly due to it being very early on in the band’s career.

The Byrds’ version of Mr. Tambourine Man begins with the jangly sound of Roger McGuinn’s Rickenbacker 360/12. He was the third person in the world to own one of the guitars, with George Harrison owning the second model ever made.

Larry Knechtel’s bass guitar comes in after one cycle of the opening riff, soon followed by Hal Blaine’s drums and McGuinn’s lead vocals, with Gene Clark and David Crosby responsible for the harmonies.

McGuinn once admitted that he was “shooting for a vocal that was very calculated between John Lennon and Bob Dylan” and “trying to cut some middle ground between those two voices”.

Jerry Cole contributed some electric guitar to the recording, adding in the staccato chords played on the ‘one’ and ‘two and’ beats of every bar. The triads were played higher up the neck and not allowed to ring, giving the guitars more of a keyboard feel.

In a 1975 interview with Let It Rock, a whole decade after Mr. Tambourine Man was released, McGuinn explained how changes in technology facilitated the group in achieving its highly influential production quality.

He noted: “To get that sound, that hit sound, that Mr. Tambourine Man sound, we just ran it through the electronics which were available to us at that time, which were mainly compression devices and tape delay, tape-sustain. That’s how we got it, by equalizing it properly and aiming at a specific frequency.”

McGuinn later confirmed to Guitar World that “the technique was to run one compressor into another – piggyback them – just to get as much compression as possible to get as much sustain as possible”. This was done “because the Rickenbacker is a very short-sustain instrument that’s good for rhythm, but not good for lead”.

The Byrds’ cover ended up topping the Billboard Hot 100 as well as the UK Singles Chart, making it the first Bob Dylan track to land at No 1 despite him not playing on it.

It would mark the beginning of the folk rock boom of the mid-’60s, with a wave of British and American acts using its template of jangly rock and contemplative lyrics as their recipe for commercial success.

Some have gone as far as saying it’s The Byrds’ version of the song that changed the face of rock music, giving birth to a whole movement of electrified and melody-driven musical introspection. It even convinced Dylan himself to “go electric” – as confirmed by David Crosby.

Crosby said of Dylan: “He came to hear us in the studio when we were building The Byrds. After the word got out that we were gonna do Mr. Tambourine Man, and we were probably gonna be good, he came there and he heard us playing his song electric.”

Crosby added: “You could see the gears grinding in his head. It was plain as day. It was like watching a slow-motion lightning bolt.”

We’ve heard about the preparation that new drummer Anika Nilles had to put in ahead of Rush’s 50 Something tour, but what about the other two? Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson have both had to get match fit after a decade’s absence from the live stage.

In a fascinating Rolling Stone feature, Lee has been talking about the vocal prep he’s had to put in. The bassist’s high-pitched voice is one of the band’s signature sounds and to access its full range at the age of 72, was a task that took a lot of work, hours of practice and, for the first time in his life, singing lessons.

His tutor was a fellow called Mitch Seekins who’s worked as a vocal coach for over 30 years and was also a Rush fan. Initially Seekins could see Lee was a long way from match fitness. “ It was shocking,” he says of the frontman’s voice before they started working together. “I mean, it was horribly out of shape. The muscles weren’t responding in the top end anymore.”

“I could hear that it was there, he just couldn’t do it yet. He wasn’t sure if he was ever gonna be able to do what he did when he was much younger… But there was no degradation at all, even due to age.”

Part of Seekins task was convincing Lee he could actually get there. “The hardest part of the repair part is the psychological end of the thing. Because it is subconscious, and if you’ve convinced yourself that you can’t do something, well, guess what? You can’t.”

Lee stuck to his task. “ It’s no different than going to the gym and getting strong,” he suggests.  ”You have to get this muscle strong, and that’s what I’ve worked on - and to take a more forensic look at how a voice makes a sound, and apply it.”

Gradually though, his confidence came back and colleagues began to notice. Dave Hislip who has directed the tour’s opening film remembers: “ We were just looking at each other like, ‘Holy crap,' Like, he has turned back time.”

Astonishingly, Lee has managed it and the band have even incorporated songs like the title track to Farewell To Kings, which push both Lee and Lifeson to the limit. ”You kick off the verse, and I have to sing in this fucking stratosphere,” says Lee. “There’s a lot of insecurity that comes with bringing back a song from that long ago… When you’re at this age, people expect you to be a lesser version of yourself, and that’s just not acceptable to me.”

Def Leppard were shooting for the stars with their fourth album. As singer Joe Elliott put it: “We wanted to push the envelope of what rock music was.”

That album, Hysteria, would become the band’s biggest seller, with more than 20 million copies sold worldwide. It was also the adventurous, big-production masterpiece that they’d set out to create.

But it was a long, hard struggle to get that album made. The entire process took three and a half years – from the first writing sessions in early 1984 to the final release date in August 1987.

On a human level, Hysteria also represented a personal triumph for the band’s drummer Rick Allen, who reinvented the way he played after losing his left arm in a car crash on New Year’s Eve 1984.

And it was during Allen’s initial period of rehabilitation that he was able to persuade the band’s trusted producer Mutt Lange to complete this album with them – after they had endured a disastrous spell with Jim Steinman, creator of Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell, in the producer’s chair.

Joe Elliott told the story of the ‘Leppard versus Steinman’ saga in an interview with MOJO magazine.

He began by describing how the first songs for Hysteria were written and demoed in Dublin – with Mutt Lange’s involvement.

This process started just days after the band had finished touring in support of their third album Pyromania, which had sold six million copies in the US, powered by the hit singles Photograph, Rock Of Ages and Foolin’.

“We finished the Pyromania tour in Bangkok on 8 February 1984,” Elliott reported. “We then flew directly from Bangkok to Dublin. We rented a house, 1 St Helens Road – which was off Rock Road!”

Here, the five members of the band – Elliott, Rick Allen, bassist Rick Savage and guitarists Steve Clark and Phil Collen – lived and worked together for several months.

“We set up shop in this house,” Elliott said, “and we turned the back lounge into a mini-studio. So, armed with Fostex 4-track machines, Oberheim DMX drum machines and a few smatterings of ideas, we set about writing our album. We then spent until August of that year writing – with and without Mutt. He came over from London and we’d do Mondays to Fridays and then he’d go back.”

Lange’s influence on Def Leppard’s sound, as producer and co-songwriter, was so important that he was considered their “sixth member”. He had produced the Pyromania album and its predecessor High ’N’ Dry. Moreover, on Pyromania he co-wrote all 10 tracks.

But in April 1984, after Lange had written several songs with the band in Dublin, he told them he was too exhausted to produce their new album, having worked flat out for years on end, making hit records for AC/DC, Foreigner and The Cars as well as Def Leppard.

“Mutt was going to do the album with us,” Elliott said, “but then he dropped the bombshell that he wasn’t ready to start work straight away. I think working on Heartbeat City by The Cars had drained him emotionally, and he just wasn’t ready to back in and do it all again. He’d been working non-stop and he needed a break.”

By this stage, many of the key songs for the album were taking shape.

“We had a load of ideas,” Elliott said. “I’ve got a cassette at home that’s got like a hundred bits on it, and nearly everything that’s on Hysteria is on that tape. They just needed gluing together.

“So by August we’d got about eight of the 12 songs that made the album written. We also had the stuff that eventually got elbowed off – things like Ring Of Fire and I Wanna Be Your Hero, which was originally called Love Bites before we stole that title for the other Love Bites.”

He continued: “We went to Holland in August ’84 to start working in Wisseloord [studios], armed with Women, Gods Of War, Don’t Shoot Shotgun, Animal, Ring Of Fire, the original Love Bites and a couple of others. And of course, Mutt had said no way was he doing it, so we’d sit down with him and think, ‘OK, who do we get?’”

One of the first candidates was Chris Thomas, famed for producing Roxy Music, Wings, the Sex Pistols and The Pretenders.

“We tried to get Chris Thomas, but he didn’t want to work with us,” Elliott shrugged. “To this day, I don’t know why. We’d sold six million records and he didn’t fancy it. Fine, fuck you then, Chris Thomas! I’m sure he’s a lovely guy, but, y’know, we were in a strange situation. We couldn’t think of anybody that we wanted to work with, and the ones that wanted to work with us, we didn’t want to work with.”

It was the band’s co-manager Cliff Burnstein who suggested Jim Steinman – much to everyone’s surprise.

Elliott recalled: “We all just went, ‘What?!’ Cliff says, ‘Think about it for a minute… Bat Out Of Hell!’ And we said, ‘But he wrote it – Todd Rundgren produced it!’”

Despite the band’s reservations, Steinman was promptly hired.

Elliott complained: “We were kind of press-ganged into using him, because of his name, I imagine. We weren’t really happy about it. But Mutt, to his credit, said, ‘You’ve got some songs, give it a go, and if it doesn’t work, get rid of the guy.’ And that’s exactly what we had to do, because he was less than useless!”

As Elliott reiterated to MOJO, Def Leppard were aiming high with Hysteria. Referencing The Beach Boys’ 1966 masterpiece, he stated: “We wanted a Pet Sounds for the ‘80s generation. We didn’t want to make an album that sounded like an Ozzy album or a Thin Lizzy record – where you just plug in and play. We wanted songs that were going to rock the way that [Queen’s] Tie Your Mother Down did, but we wanted Beach Boys harmonies on them.

“And we were the only rock band that I’m aware of that actually saw all the toys that Frankie Goes To Hollywood and the Pet Shop Boys and The Human League used, and went, ‘Why can’t we use that on a rock record?’ That’s what we were trying to do.

“We weren’t trying to make Appetite For Destruction. We wanted to make a Def Leppard record that was gonna be a bit more – I don’t want to use the word ‘clinical’ – but a lot more thought-out.”

Jim Steinman didn’t exactly see it that way.

Elliott recalled: “We’d run through Don’t Shoot Shotgun all kind of raw and swaggery, and I don’t mean in a good way – we’d be messing with the amps and changing the words – and Jim would say, ‘I think we’ve got one!’ Steve and Phil would be looking at each other going, ‘What planet is this guy on?’ Steinman wanted us to just plug in and play. It’s like, ‘Well, you got the wrong fucking band, mate!’”

For Def Leppard, working with Jim Steinman was an expensive mistake.

“He was a lovely guy,” Elliott said, “and certainly knew how to order every single piece of food off a menu! Our food budget for the Steinman sessions was probably as much money as The Dark Side Of The Moon cost to record. He once chartered a plane while he was working with us, and he flew to Switzerland just to go and eat in this one restaurant. That’s when we knew the priorities were upside down.”

It was also suspected that Steinman was covertly working on his next Meat Loaf project during this time.

Elliott claimed: “He was doing Bat Out Of Hell II in his head and in his hotel room till nine in the morning, and then getting up and turning up at the studio at two in the afternoon, completely knackered, and we’d been waiting for him since noon. We couldn’t put up with it for very long.

“He had a great engineer with him, Neil Dorfsman, who’d worked with people like Dire Straits. Neil was a saving grace. He was the reason we didn’t get rid of Steinman earlier.”

In the end it was Steve Clark and Phil Collen who called time on Jim Steinman.

As Elliott remembered it: “I came in to start banging some vocals down one day, and Phil and Steve called a meeting. They said, ‘He’s got to go.’ I said, ‘We haven’t even started doing any vocals yet!’ And they said, ‘Trust us, you don’t even wanna go there.’

“I certainly didn’t rate him as a producer. As a human being, he told great stories – but on our dime! Four hours of listening to him talk about Meat Loaf having his own piss injected into himself when he lost his voice is great, but not at $1500 an hour. So, fine, let’s get rid of him.

“We started with Steinman in August and he was gone by November. I think it was just over eight weeks.”

In Steinman’s absence, Neil Dorfsman stayed on for a short time as a favour to the band before they turned to Mutt Lange’s right hand man Nigel Green, who had served as engineer on High ‘N’ Dry and Pyromania.

“We thought that between Nigel and us we’d have a fair idea of what a pseudo-Mutt Lange would do,” Elliott explained. “So Nigel came in around mid-November, late ’84, and we did about two or three months with him.

“But what we got was an extremely clinical version of ourselves. That might sound ridiculous, but Mutt is a lot looser than everybody gives him credit for. There are certain things that he wants tight, but there’s other things that have gotta be very human.

“Nigel would be so scared with this ‘what would Mutt think?’ mentality that everything ended up being just way too perfect. We we got lost with Nigel. He’s a great guy and a good engineer, but it sounded like Pyromania. It sounded like a great record but it didn’t sound like any progress had been made.

“Mutt would come over for a day, or we’d play him some stuff down the phone, and he’d start saying, ‘Yeah, it needs to be a bit looser than that’, or ‘That bit needs to be a bit tighter.’ We’re like, ‘Come on, make your mind up! How come that’s too loose and this is too tight? How do you know the difference?’ We were still learning, we couldn’t tell what Mutt could tell, and Nigel was second-guessing it the wrong way. Everything was out of step.”

It was only in the aftermath of Rick Allen’s car crash that Lange made the decision to resume his role as Def Leppard’s producer.

As a frequent visitor to Allen in hospital, Lange was insistent that Allen could play drums again with the use of an electronic kit. During one of Lange’s visits, Allen made a plea on behalf of the band. He recalled: “I just said to him Mutt, ‘We really need your help. We’re not a good place at the moment. Would you spend some time with us and see if we can’t get this record made?’ I think it was a combination of things that pulled him back in. And it was the best thing that could have happened.”

With Lange’s return, and Rick Allen’s rehabilitation, Def Leppard created one of the greatest and biggest selling rock albums of all time.

As Joe Elliott said of Hysteria: “We wanted to apply the science of great pop and clever arrangements to the banality of three-chord rock ‘n’ roll. And we got that.

“We made a new kind of rock record that had never been heard before. And we couldn’t have done it without Mutt.”