The Allman Brothers Band’s legendary live album At Fillmore East is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest of all time. Al Di Meola certainly thinks so – and with good reason.

“I was there,” he recalls to MusicRadar. “I was at the Fillmore East when the Allman Brothers recorded that live album.”

Di Meola was just 16 when the Allmans performed at the New York City venue in March 1971. The band played three nights. The album was pieced together using recordings from two of those shows.

The Allman Brothers Band line-up at that time featured Gregg Allman on vocals and keyboards, Duane Allman and Dickey Betts on guitars, Berry Oakley on bass, and both Butch Trucks and Jaimoe (AKA Jai Johanny Johanson) on drums and percussion.

Di Meola says that these performances left a deep impression on him.

“It was unbelievable,” he says. “You have to understand what that band sounded like in that room. Duane Allman. Dickey Betts. Gregg Allman. Berry Oakley. Butch Trucks. Jaimoe. The energy was incredible.”

The Allmans’ style of Southern rock might seem an unlikely inspiration for a jazz fusion artist such as Di Meola, but as the guitarist recalls, he drew on the experience of those Fillmore East shows when, as a 19 year old prodigy, he began performing in fusion group Return To Forever, led by pianist Chick Corea.

“There’s actually a direct line from hearing that music at the Fillmore to my first days with Return To Forever,” Di Meola explains. “When I first joined Return To Forever, Chick wanted everybody to play a solo feature. I’m nineteen years old and thinking, ‘What the hell am I going to play by myself?’

“So, during my solo, I started playing some Allman Brothers licks. The place went crazy. I mean, crazy. I came offstage, and Chick came up to me and said, ‘What was that?’ I said, ‘The Allman Brothers.’ He had no idea.

“Chick didn't know the Allman Brothers. But the audience certainly did. And that taught me something very early on. Music doesn't have to live in these little boxes. I could be playing with Chick Corea in Return To Forever, and something I’d absorbed from Duane Allman and Dickey Betts could come out in my solo and connect immediately with an audience. If it’s part of you, it’s part of you.”

A circle was completed for Di Meola in 2026 when he had the opportunity to play the actual 1958 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop used by Dickey Betts during those landmark gigs in ’71.

“What a thrill,” Di Meola smiles. “I got to play the original Dickey Betts Les Paul from that Fillmore East recording.

“Think about that. I’m a kid sitting in the Fillmore East hearing that guitar. Then I joined Return To Forever and played Allman Brothers licks during my solo because I’m trying to figure out what the hell I’m going to play – and the place erupts. And more than fifty years later, I’m in Chicago at a collector’s showroom, and the guy is handing me the actual Dickey Betts guitar to play. Those are the moments where you really feel the passage of time.”

Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were hurtling along a freeway near Washington DC when Nicks glanced up and noticed a sign for Silver Spring, Maryland.

It was 1976 and Nicks’ and Buckingham’s band Fleetwood Mac were on tour to promote their breakthrough self-titled album, which topped the US charts in September that year. The follow-up album Rumours, released in February 1977, would catapult them to global superstardom.

The name Silver Spring struck a chord with Nicks, whose relationship with Buckingham was imploding just as the band were on their mercurial ascent. It inspired her to write a song called Silver Springs, with an additional ‘s’ – a break-up anthem about what might have been.

“I wrote Silver Springs about Lindsey… and I loved the name,” Nicks told MTV in 1997. “Silver Springs sounded like a pretty fabulous place to me. And ‘You could be my silver springs’ – that’s just a whole symbolic thing of what you could have been to me.”

The song was recorded as part of the Rumours sessions but never made it onto the album. It was relegated to the B-side of Go Your Own Way, after which it pretty much disappeared without trace.

It would take 20 years for the song to be released and take on a whole second life, when it was included in Fleetwood Mac’s live set during The Dance Tour and released as a single from the 1997 live album The Dance. Critics hailed this live version of the song, and for many Fleetwood Mac fans it was the first time they had actually heard it.

“I thought it was an old Buckingham Nicks song,” Courtney Love told Rolling Stone. “It really moved me. I was like ‘What the fuck is this?’”

Lorde, Florence and the Machine, Tori Amos and Lykke Li would all go on to cover the song live – and its themes of hurt, heartbreak, jealousy and emotional revenge would go on to speak to Gen Zers into the 2020s.

But it was the video of Fleetwood Mac’s live 1997 performance at the Warner Bros studio in Burbank, California that really resonated with audiences. At the song’s climactic end, Nicks can be seen turning to face Buckingham, glaring at him with a ferocious intensity as she sings the lines: “I'll follow you down ’til the sound of my voice will haunt you/You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.”

It’s a powerful scene, as noted by Rolling Stone: “That image… of Nicks singing the words at Buckingham, her eyes burning into his soul, as if casting a spell, 20 years after writing the lyrics and still meaning them – has become the stuff of legend.”

The video of that performance on YouTube has now racked up 88 million views and the collective obsession with it on TikTok has really gained traction. There is a sense that Nicks’s empowerment in the face of devastating heartache has really resonated among young people. As one TikTok user wrote in a caption over the clip: “Don’t just write a song about your ex, make him play lead guitar and sing it right to his face on stage.”

What is remarkable about Nicks’s performance is that it begins at a point of vulnerability yet builds to one of power. Once Nicks makes direct eye contact with Buckingham she doesn’t let up. There is anger, grief, defiance, and Buckingham is the direct recipient of it all.

“It was me realising that Lindsey was going to haunt me for the rest of my life,” Nicks told Rolling Stone, “and he has.”

But beneath all the drama and pain lies a beautiful and brilliantly crafted song from Nicks. Silver Springs is a graceful, stately affair with a country-tinged sound that set it apart from the soft rock strains of the Rumours-era tracks.

With a running time of 4:48 for the 1976 studio version and 5:33 for the 1997 live version, the song has room to breathe and it builds slowly, with two verses and a pre-chorus before the chorus finally comes in at 2:15.

“Time cast a spell on you, but you won’t forget me/I know I could have loved you/But you would not let me.”

Prominent guitar swells from Buckingham and lush flowing piano from Christine McVie intro the song, before Nicks’s voice enters, a warm plaintive timbre with a real sense of longing.

Nicks’s voice lends itself seamlessly to the lonesome country-tinged cadences in the song. The ascending chorus when it hits is rousing and triumphant, and Buckingham delivers a tasteful and beautifully understated guitar solo.

The backing vocals, sung primarily by Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham, add haunting counter melodies and raw emotional tension.

For Stevie Nicks, the release of the live version of the song as a single in 1997 was the culmination of two decades of struggle to have her song heard and recognised.

The basic track for Silver Springs was first recorded at the Record Plant studio in Sausalito, California, on 11 February 1976. In the 2012 book Making Rumours, The Inside Story Of The Classic Fleetwood Mac Album, co-written by the album’s co-producer Ken Caillat and author Steve Stiefel, Caillat recalls that the initial takes were laid down with drums, bass, electric guitar, a Fender Rhodes electric piano and a scratch vocal.

Two days later, the band recorded 19 more takes but none were deemed satisfactory. Caillat recalled that on 14 February 1976 the band began using a click track and Christine McVie switched from the Fender Rhodes to a grand piano, recorded in an isolation room to prevent spill. Buckingham’s guitar, meanwhile, was fed through an amp in one room and a Leslie speaker in another. Take 8 was the one chosen and used for overdubs.

Additional work was done at Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco, where Buckingham redid his guitar part. Caillat noted that he highlighted the upper frequencies of the strings on Buckingham’s Stratocaster using a Lavalier microphone – traditionally used for TV broadcasts – which he says gave the guitar a “delicate, glasslike, music box-type sound”.

Caillat described Silver Springs as “gorgeous”, “powerful”, and “a masterpiece”. There was only one problem. “I knew the song was too long to fit on the album,” he said.

Silver Springs was eventually dropped from the album and replaced by another Nicks song, I Don’t Want To Know, which the rest of the band reportedly liked better and which was shorter.

It fell to drummer Mick Fleetwood to inform Nicks that Silver Springs would not be included on the Rumours album.

One day, towards the end of the Rumours sessions, Fleetwood asked Nicks to come out into the parking lot at the Record Plant in Sausalito.

“I knew it was really serious ’cause Mick never asks you to go out to the parking lot for anything,” Nicks recalled in a 1991 BBC radio interview. It was there that Fleetwood revealed that Silver Springs had been cut from the album for being too long and “a lot of [other] reasons,” according to Nicks.

Fleetwood wanted the lighter I Don’t Want To Know on the album instead. Nicks was incensed.

“I started to scream bloody murder and probably said every horribly mean thing that you could possibly say to another human being and walked back in the studio completely flipped out,” she continued.

According to a 2017 feature in Rolling Stone Caillat and the album’s other co-producer Richard Dashut tried to find a way to keep Silver Springs on the album, offering to edit it down or trim one of Nicks’s other songs. But the idea wasn’t pursued.

For Nicks, the omission of Silver Springs had another profound consequence. She had intended to give the royalty cheque for the publishing rights of the song to her mother Barbara as a thank you. Given the colossal success of Rumours, such a payment would have been substantial.

“Stevie was devastated for a number of reasons,” Caillat told Rolling Stone in 2017. “She loved the song, and by it not being on the LP, her mom didn’t make all the extra publishing because the single didn’t sell very much.”

When the decision was taken to put I Don’t Want To Know on Rumours instead, Nicks reportedly refused to sing it. But she eventually changed her mind.

“With a gun to my head, I went out and sang I Don’t Want to Know,” she told the BBC in 1991. “And they put Silver Springs on the back of Go Your Own Way.”

Nicks’ problems didn’t end there. In 1990, she began planning her greatest hits album Timespace – The Best Of Stevie Nicks. She had every intention of including Silver Springs on the album.

But her plan coincided with Mick Fleetwood’s own desire to include it on a forthcoming Fleetwood Mac boxset. This resulted in another heated exchange between the two.

“I told [Mick Fleetwood’s manager] that I want Silver Springs because it belongs to my mother,” Nicks told the BBC in 1991. “It didn’t occur to me that they wouldn’t let me have it back. I said to his manager, ‘You find Mick, and you tell him that if I don’t have those tapes by Monday, I am no longer a member of Fleetwood Mac.’”

Fleetwood got his way and Silver Springs appeared on the 1992 Fleetwood Mac boxset, 25 Years – The Chain. True to her word, Nicks quit the band.

It took an unlikely musical duet between Buckingham and Nicks in 1996 – on the song Twisted, from the soundtrack of the film Twister – to spark the reunion of Fleetwood Mac and the 1997 tour and live album The Dance.

Nicks’s performance on the live 1997 version of the song earned Silver Springs a belated Grammy nomination, in the category of Best Pop Performance. The song would remain a staple of the band’s live set until 2015. For Nicks, performing the song live with Fleetwood Mac on the 1997 tour was an experience she had never believed would happen.

“I never thought that Silver Springs would ever be performed onstage,” Nicks reflected during a 1997 MTV interview. “My beautiful song just disappeared [20 years ago]. For it to come back around like this has really been special to me.”

Another week bites the dust and that can only mean one thing… It's time for our run-down of red-hot music happenings in 10-question quiz form!

Each week, we dive through our back catalogue and pick out our greatest hits from the last seven days of MusicRadar.

Our quick quizzy recap will soon get you up to speed on who's rocking what, where and why.

Hit that play button and start the party!

Want even more quizzy action? Try our last bunch of weekly quizzes for size:

Quiz of the week 27
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U2 have announced a fresh UK and Europe leg for their The Greatest Show On Earth world tour, set to kick off in Spring 2027.

The Irish pop-rock superstars had already confirmed a run of dates in Latin America, with Beck supporting the band in cities including São Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Mexico City across February and March 2027.

After that, Bono and co. will jet off to Stockholm, before playing dates in Paris, Lisbon, Amsterdam, London, Berlin and Milan. In Europe, U2 will be joined by Mercury Prize-winning UK band Wolf Alice, with tickets for the newly announced shows going on sale on Monday 2 November.

The group recently gave a taste of what's to come on their forthcoming album Carnaval de Luz, with the release of the anthemic new single Street of Dreams. The track was accompanied by a music video in which the four-piece performed on the roof of a Mexico City bus in pouring rain.

Ahead of the newly unveiled Spring 2027 dates, Bono and The Edge also spoke out about one of the most controversial moments in the group's long history — their decision to have 2015's record Songs of Innocence automatically downloaded to over 500 million iTunes users across the globe.

"I went too far on that one," Bono admitted to the New York Times. "I mean, we were experimenting. We wanted to see if we could get Apple or another company to pay for our music and then they distribute it. And look, it’s going to take some experimentation to fix the music [business]. It’s astonishing how little other musicians are paid, and it’s frightening. But yeah, that was all on me."

The Edge chipped in to defend the decision, saying: "We have to take risks. So you fail, you fall on your face at times. That’s part of the gig." Previously, producer Flood argued that "what it did was raise whether music is valued in society right now, and I think that’s something that still hasn’t been answered correctly. It brought about the question of ‘What are people’s listening tastes?’"

The critic-baiting title of U2's new tour suggests the group is still well aware of their ability to polarise music fans around the world. But with tickets for the new round of dates set to fly off the shelves next week, their crowd is as loyal as ever.

Slipknot drummer Eloy Casagrande has confirmed that the band is working on a new album, with the Brazilian claiming his parts on the record are all recorded.

Speaking to Craig Reynolds on The Downbeat Podcast, Casagrande said: "I just finished recording the drums, so all the drums, they are recorded. They are done. I finished like 10 days ago or a week ago."

The hotly anticipated new project will be Slipknot's eighth studio album, coming over a quarter of a century after their self-titled 1999 debut, and hot off the heels of Look Outside Your Window, an experimental side project released in the summer.

Details of a full record to follow on from 2022's The End, So Far have emerged gradually, with guitarist Jim Root claiming last year that there were "six finished arrangements" in the vaults. Casagrande's comments suggest things have been progressing steadily since then.

Diving into the band's recent recording process, Casagrande explained: "I didn't wanna do overdubs, I don't wanna do push-ins, punch-ins. I wanna just play it straight."

By all accounts, there's been a real drive amongst the group for unfiltered, spontaneous collaboration, with Root saying he wanted to "revisit the raw energy of how those first two records were produced". Interestingly, Casagrande's experiences teaching drums to kids in Brazil appeared to have a real impact on this side of the process.

"A few years ago I used to give classes in São Paulo," he recalled. "I used to have many students, and they think that what they listen [to] in a record, especially from the new metal bands, they think that's the reality. And it's not. It never is."

He continued: "When I was recording the songs, I was playing them many, many times — like five, six, seven times each — and the best take was, like, 'Okay, I think I like the last one. That's my favorite one. Let's use it.'

"Sometimes I was putting some songs together — choosing half of one take, half of the other take, but never punch-ins. Never like that. I was trying to keep it real — to be honest, to be like in a real-life situation, that sometimes you're good, sometimes you're bad, and you gotta deal with that."

Justin Sargent puts it simply: “It feels pretty damn good!” The 40 year old from New Jersey is the new singer in multi-million selling hard rock band Skid Row.

“It’s a natural fit,” he says. “I’m in heaven. It’s a dream.”

To celebrate this new milestone in Skid Row’s career, it’s the new guy who speaks first to MusicRadar – before bassist and founding member Rachel Bolan gives his side of the story on behalf of the band.

Sargent has previously worked as an actor and singer on Broadway. He says of his role in Skid Row: “It just perpetually keeps being the coolest thing. It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever done. And I’ve done some pretty cool stuff.”

Rachel Bolan is one of the band’s three remaining founding members alongside guitarists Dave ‘Snake’ Sabo and Scotti Hill. Drummer Rob Hammersmith has served since 2010.

The last singer to perform live with Skid Row was Lzzy Hale of Halestorm, who helped them out as a guest star after their Swedish frontman Erik Grönwall was forced to leave the band due to health issues.

The biggest challenge for Justin Sargent is to perform the hit songs that were originally recorded with larger-than-life singer Sebastian Bach during Skid Row’s glory days in the late ’80s and early ’90s – the heavy metal anthems Youth Gone Wild and Monkey Business, and the power ballads 18 And Life and I Remember You.

But Sargent promises: “I know I can not only bring it – but bring it consistently.”

Skid Row’s first recording with Sargent is a cover of The Who’s 1971 classic Won’t Get Fooled Again.

Beyond that, the band are writing and demoing, with a slate of shows to be announced.

In early 2026 the band had invited singers to audition online via music retailer Sweetwater, but as it turned out, they found Justin Sargent by chance – when their manager Robby Hoffman attended a charity gig in New Jersey.

“I do this big charity gig every year,” Sargent says, “and Robby came to see the event. I got an email the next day, saying, ‘Hey, we’re looking for a vocalist for Skid Row. Are you a fan?’ I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? Of course I’m a fan! Yes. This is unbelievable.’”

Tell us about the moment when you first heard that you’d got the gig with Skid Row.

“It’s one of those things where during the entire process, every step of the way, I kept saying, ‘If this is as far as it goes, this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done in my life.’ Getting in a room with the guys, going through the setlist, I was just like, ‘This is the coolest thing.’

But getting that phone call, where they were all on for like a FaceTime situation, Rachel just said, ‘I’ve got one last question before we move to the next step…’ Then he was like, ‘How would you like to be the next singer of Skid Row!?’ I was like, ‘Oh, my God! Yeah!’ It was just a very cool moment.

It goes without saying that this job comes with an element of online judgment because of the volatility of the vocal position.

“No, really?! You gotta ignore it. You gotta just shut it off. I’m considering buying a flip phone, just to make sure there’s no temptation, you know what I mean?”

Another way to look at it is you’re part of a long lineage of talented vocalists.

“Man, it’s a really fun and interesting perspective to have. I get to look back at everybody, study, and take in what they’ve done. And they’ve all done it so differently, you know?

“But at the same time, it’s all been very much Skid Row. A credit to the guys is that the vocalist may change, but there’s an undeniable Skid Row quality. I’m honoured to carry that forward.”

How important was personality in the decision-making process?

“They wanted to make sure that we melded artistically. But there’s also the dynamic of, ‘Can we hang?’ That’s a hard thing to achieve off the bat, but every time we get together, I feel like I’ve known the guys for a long time, and my cortisol levels drop.”

According to Rachel, it was your idea to record a cover of The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again, which is your first official recording with Skid Row.

“I was so surprised when they said, ‘Yes.’ It was one of those things where I was just like, ‘I’m going to throw this out there.’ My parents raised me on classic rock, and so when we were all brainstorming about doing a cover I was like, ‘They’re never going to go for this.’ But their reaction was immediate. They said, ‘That’s a great idea. That’s what we’re gonna do.’ Even now, I get kind of emotional talking about it. It was such a cool experience.”

Rachel, Snake, and Scotti have been busy writing songs during their layoff. Have you started working on any new music?

“So, they’ve been hard at work writing new material. I’ve been down to kind of lay some demo vocals down, and I’ll tell you what, man: it’s really cool. Not only is it very much Skid Row, but there’s this whole feeling of the next chapter. The sound is really cool. I can’t wait for people to hear what’s been cooking.”

What’s the toughest classic Skid Row song to pull off?

“Songs like 18 And Life, Monkey Business and I Remember You are just unrelenting, man.

“With those songs, you have to nail them for the audience every single night. All those songs… those are the ones that are the earmarks for people to go, ‘Let’s see. Oh, there it is. Okay.’

“Then they’re saying, ‘Okay, let’s see how he does on this big part. Oh, there it is… he’s got it.’ It’s that kind of thing. But I think that’s where my background really has a big benefit because I’m very used to consistency and delivering over and over and over again.”

And have you considered how you’ll feel when you step behind the microphone for the first time in concert?

“Oh, my God! Every single day, man! You kidding me? Every single day since I got that phone call. I imagine it as a dream fulfilled. That’s the best way I can put it. And knowing that I get to do it perpetually afterward… It’s just unbelievable. This is my job. This is what I’m here for. This is priority – and I’m not going anywhere.”

When Rachel Bolan is asked whether Skid Row had considered a reunion with their former singer Sebastian Bach, he says flatly: “It’s never gonna happen.”

Now, after 1500 singers had submitted auditions via the Sweetwater campaign, Bolan is more than happy to have Justin Sargent fronting the band.

“It’s pretty crazy,” Bolan says, “because we did that huge campaign, and there’s really a lot of talented singers out there. Some were great, but not right for Skid Row. Then, there were some on the outside of the whole thing that people suggested.

“With Justin, our manager Robby Hoffman happened to be at a show, and Justin got up, jammed, and sang. Robby immediately called me, and it was like Back To The Future. ‘Hey, here’s that sound you’re looking for!’”

What was it like initially meeting with Justin?

“We had him down months and months ago. He came into the room, and he’s like, ‘I live in Jersey…’ I’m like, ‘Man… he’s from New Jersey? We’ve been listening to stuff from all over the world, and here you are, like a few exits up the parkway!’”

Did you offer Justin the gig then and there?

“Well, when he came in – and we’d sent him five songs, but he learned the whole set, which we weren’t expecting – we were floored. But we had a lot of people to audition still, and we wanted to keep our word and do our due diligence.”

So how and when did you finally decide Justin was Skid Row’s new singer?

“We always kept circling around to Justin. We said, ‘Hey, dude, can you come in again?’ We kept doing that, and every time he was there it was just like, ‘I feel like I’ve known this guy since I was 16.’ Maybe it’s a Jersey thing… who knows?

“But it worked out really well. The guy has such a powerful voice, and fits perfectly. He’s cool dude, and so now here we are. Finally, we can make an announcement. Even my family didn’t know! They were like, ‘You found a singer yet?’ I’m like, ‘We’re getting close.’”

When it comes to vocals, Sebastian Bach is the benchmark for Skid Row. How does Justin stack up?

“Justin has a huge range and huge power. There’s nothing that we do that’s difficult for him. I don’t know what else I could say about the guy. There was nothing that we threw at him that he couldn’t sing with ease.”

As far as Sebastian goes, why have you avoided a reunion?

“Is this a riddle? Everyone knows the answer: it’s to get to the other side! You know, the past is the past, man. We’re in the here and now. That was a decision we made three decades ago.”

The idea of reuniting for a bigger paycheck doesn’t appeal?

“We’re getting huge paychecks. We’ve got a bunch of shows booked for next year – and we’re getting huge paychecks. So, we’re doing it for the right reasons, and getting paid well for it.”

So, it’s about the music, and by the sound of it, reuniting with Sebastian wouldn’t be about the music, and wouldn’t be for the right reasons…

“It’s always about the music. We’re moving forward. It’s never going to happen. That’s all I can give you, man. We’re Skid Row, and we’re in this to play music, go on tour, and that’s what we’re doing.”

On that note, you’ve recorded your first music with Justin, a cover of The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again.

“We have songs written, but we’ve been planning on doing some covers, but couldn’t decide on one. We got on Zoom, and it was actually Justin who brought it up. He goes, ‘Are you guys Who fans?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, we all are.’ He goes, ‘What about Won’t Get Fooled Again?’

“As a bass player, I’ve always loved that song, so I was, ‘Yeah! Let’s do that song.’ We were all throwing songs around; Justin suggested that, and it was the perfect fit. We all learned it, and made an arrangement that shortens it a little because it’s almost eight minutes long.”

With the cover in the can, what can you say about Justin’s chops?

“I talked to [producer] Nick Raskulinecz afterward, and he said, ‘Man, I’m exhausted. This last week and a half was crazy.’ He goes, ‘If Justin wasn’t as good as he is, we probably wouldn’t have finished as quickly as we did.’ For a guy like Nick, who has worked with the likes of Amy Lee and Lzzy Hale, that’s a pretty huge compliment.”

Are Skid Row working on the next album?

“We have been writing, and we’ll eventually record the songs we’ve written. We’re trying to stockpile because in the downtime, Snake and I would get together and write. And I’d also get together with Scotti, and I’d write on my own. It’s just a matter of us all getting in a room, going through everything, demo it up, and getting enough to do a record.”

Skid Row have had many lead singers over the years. How do you feel about having Justin in the fold as you move forward?

“The outlook is bright. We can’t wait to hit the road. We have a bunch of shows lined up. The last two and a half years have been mind-numbing. You want to get out there with your bros and play the songs you wrote, so we’re super excited about it. We can’t wait for the first show.”

Pete Townshend has given an interview to Classic Album Review, ostensibly about the upcoming reissue of The Who By Numbers. But the 81-year-old guitarist has also shared some interesting thoughts on where The Who stood vis a vis ‘heavy’ music.

Many cite Black Sabbath as being the starting point of metal as we know it today, but The Who were - on their day - as loud and heavy as any band in the late '60s and early 70s. Did they have a part to play in the evolution of the genre, then?

“In a way,” Townsend replies. “But I do think that the difference really was that [for] bands like Black Sabbath and all of the other big heavy metal bands – until Led Zeppelin came along, who combined heavy metal with some softer songwriting and ballads – heavy metal was almost a religious philosophy. It was rooted in a sense of darkness and often irony.”

“No, I don’t necessarily think so,” he decides. “I think Live At Leeds is probably as explosive as it got. For example, at Woodstock we did a good chunk of Tommy and then we did some heavy stuff as well. We did both… The only heavy metal I really listened to was AC/DC.”

“I never really got into Led Zeppelin,” the guitarist admits. “At the time I didn’t like it that they were, in a sense, trying to pinch our audience. I’d been through it before with Jimi Hendrix coming over with his big amplifiers and his distortion and his wah-wah pedal, and having to admit, ‘Wow, here is a guitar genius.’”

And Sabbath? “I don’t know about bands like Black Sabbath and so on because I really didn’t listen to them, despite the fact that I think they were great fun and enjoyable,” Townshend explains. “And I really love the parts of the music business where people don’t take themselves too seriously. That was my issue in my early days – I felt I was carrying a big cross, a big manifesto for rock and roll. I felt that this was important for me to deliver.”

As for new Who activity, Townshend gave no details. We know that he and Roger Daltrey have rehearsed recently with Zak Starkey once again – despite the fact the drummer left the band amid much controversy and to-ing and fro-ing last year – but no dates for 2027 have been announced as yet.

A letter, sent by Brian Jones to Charlie Watts to convince him to join The Rolling Stones, is to go up for auction in December.

It was written by Jones – at that stage very much the leader of the band – in 1962. The Stones at that time comprised Jones, Jagger, Richards, Dick Taylor – who later formed The Pretty Things – Ian Stewart on piano and an unnamed drummer, who Jones was decidedly unimpressed with: “Our present drummer is atrocious!” he wrote.

Addressed to ‘Mr. C. Watts’ at his childhood home in Wembley, Jones’s letter is most polite. It begins: “Dear Charlie, if you consider this letter rather impertinent, please excuse me.”

Charlie was at that time behind the kit for Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated – a steady gig – and Jones evidently had to sell the idea of the Stones to young Mr Watts: “We are looking for a good drummer. Already we consider our band far better than Alex’s – we are getting a very tightly-knit sound.”

Clearly Charlie took some convincing – it would be another seven months before he would commit to the Stones. By then Jones had recruited Bill Wyman on bass and Dick Taylor had returned to art college.

The newly-assembled line up played their first gig at Ealing Jazz Club in February 1963, recruited Andrew Loog Oldham as manager in May and signed to Decca shortly afterwards. Ahead lay fame and immortality.

The letter apparently ended up in the possession of Watts’s sister and is to be auctioned by Sotheby’s in December. It’s expected to fetch somewhere between $70,000 and $80,000 (£52,000-£60,000).

“Few documents bring us as close to the formation of a legendary band as this letter,” said Craig Inciardi, Sotheby’s music and pop culture specialist.

He continued: “Written just weeks before the Rolling Stones’ first performance and months before Charlie Watts officially joined the group, it captures the excitement and ambition of a band on the cusp of history. Having remained in the Watts family for more than six decades, it stands as an extraordinary first-hand record of the moment Brian Jones set out to recruit the drummer whose distinctive sound would help shape one of the most influential bands in rock history.”

If you so wish you can see the letter before it’s sold, at New York Sotheby’s from 2 to 8 December. The auction will be on 15 December.

Mickey Thomas has given a lengthy interview to Rolling Stone that covers the whole of his six-decade long career.

Who is Mickey Thomas, some of you may be asking? Well, he was – and indeed still is – the vocalist with Starship, the mid-'80s rockers who evolved out of Jefferson Starship, which had in turn evolved out of Jefferson Airplane. We Built This City and Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now? Yup, that’s him.

The former was a Billboard US Number One in 1985 and has led several lives. In the 1990s and '00s it was critiqued by many critics as being the epitome of mid-'80s ‘corporate’ rock, from a group whose members were also in one of the leading groups of '60s counterculture. 'Sell outs', etc. Latterly, it’s been embraced (somewhat inevitably) by hipsters and, in 2018, ended up being appropriated for a Christmas novelty song about sausage rolls (by LadBaby).

None of this might have happened, Thomas reveals, if the band hadn’t intervened when they received the song from its writers, Bernie Taupin and Martin Page.

“When I first heard it, I thought, this is real interesting little song,” remembers Thomas. “It’s kind of quirky. I love the lyric. I thought that was one of his [Taupin’s] better lyrics ever.

“The thing was, it didn’t have a chorus. The demo that I received, it went from the part where it goes ‘Don’t you remember we built this city. We built this city on rock and roll,’ and then immediately back to the second verse. So there was none of that, ‘We built this city!’ That didn’t exist.”

So, Thomas brought it in and discussed it with the group’s producers, Peter and Dennis Lambert. “So they went out into the studio. We sat at the piano and came up with the anthemic chorus, which became the double-edged sword of the song. That’s what made it a gigantic hit, but it’s also the part that alienates people a lot, polarises people, purists and so.”

And what of that puzzling line, ‘Marconi plays the mamba’? Marconi is obviously Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio. A mamba is a big snake. But even the group were mystified, it seems…

“The night that the song went Number One, we were touring, we were in Kalamazoo, Michigan,” remembers Thomas. “And so we’re calling everybody we know because we just got the Number One song in Billboard and we’re pretty thrilled. And so I said, ‘Let’s call Bernie.’

“I get on the phone with Bernie and say, ‘Now, Bernie, now more than ever, everybody’s going to be asking me, what does 'Marconi plays the mamba' mean?’ And he didn’t miss a beat. He goes, ‘I have no fucking idea. It sounds good to me.’ It reminded me of something that John Lennon said once, ‘Sound over sensibility.’”

As we know, one of the stories of the year has been the resurrection of Rush and the way drummer Anika Nilles has pulled off one of rock’s biggest challenges – stepping into the shoes of the late great Neil Peart.

For the German drummer, it’s involved walking a fine line of absorbing Peart’s style without replicating it exactly, and in a new interview, Nilles has talked about exactly how she achieved that.

One of the standout challenges has been the drum fills on Tom Sawyer, one of the group’s iconic tracks, but according to Nilles, they were in many ways the easy parts. “That song requires a really specific feel. What happens playing-wise is doable. You have to get it into your DNA," she told Rolling Stone. "But the feeling of all of those parts is really special, and it’s also hard because I had to let go of some of my technique, which I usually use when I play those sneaky 16th notes. And to make the feel right and the sound right, I had to let go of that. I have to play more out of muscle power to make that sit right."

Specifically, Nilles explains, "The technique I’m using is coming from my wrist, and it creates two sounds. And for that song, you just need that one specific sound. And so you play more out of your forearm and less out of your wrist.

"I had to learn how to create that sound, and it’s definitely coming more out of a strong accent stroke all the time. So yeah, that’s a hard one to play.

Nilles explained how she has had to put aside a lot of her style and absorb Peart’s to make it work. “I have to let go of certain things which I trained on for many years to be perfect in that, but it doesn’t fit to the music, then that’s the task. So I do that."

She's also acquired a new admiration for Peart’s musicality. “He constantly built and built the drum part to a point where you think, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And he did that in detail along with the vocals. I think a big part of it is because he wrote the lyrics, so he was focused on lyrical parts and put that together with his drumming, and also melodically. And this is why you cannot just do your thing on it. You have to appreciate that and understand it as a musical composition in total.”

As she has mentioned in other interviews, Nilles wasn’t a die-hard Rush fan prior to getting the call from Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. However, she very much is now.

“(A) couple of times I thought, “Why didn’t I learn and listen way earlier in my life to Rush?” she says. “Because I love it. The music is great. It’s so much fun to play. As soon you don’t have to think about parts anymore and can loosen up a little bit, it’s just so much fun to play with those guys.”

When Blaze Bayley became the singer for Iron Maiden in 1994, many fans felt that he was replacing the irreplaceable. His predecessor Bruce Dickinson had been the band’s frontman for more than a decade and was widely regarded as one of the greatest heavy metal vocalists of all time.

For Bayley, joining Maiden was a dream come true, and he gave it everything he had. But as drummer Nicko McBrain admits, the band could have done more to help Bayley cope with the demands of singing classic songs originally recorded and performed with Dickinson.

Speaking to Barry Robinson of Classic Album Review, McBrain says of Bayley: “To be fair to him, we didn’t transpose the songs. We should have gone down a note. We should've stepped it down half a step or a full step.”

He explains: “That range that Bruce had… Blaze was a totally different. Bruce is soprano, almost, and [Bayley is a] baritone. There was a difference in the timbre of each of the voices.”

Before his tenure in Iron Maiden, Bayley had fronted the band Wolfsbane, whose debut album Live Fast Die Fast was produced by Rick Rubin and released on Rubin’s label Def American.

Bayley recorded two albums with Iron Maiden, The X Factor (1995) and Virtual XI (1998). But after both albums received a lukewarm response from fans and critics alike, Bayley was dismissed and Dickinson rejoined Maiden along with another returning former member, guitarist Adrian Smith.

Looking back on that whole period in the ’90s, McBrain says: “I think it was very hard for Blaze. The Virtual XI tour was really tough for him. And I think we really should have helped him out by transposing the key of the songs for him. But we didn’t, and it was a tough time.”

He reveals: “It was like a dark cloud for me, that period of my life. And I know it was affecting just the general vibe in the band.”

McBrain says that he and Bayley enjoyed a close relationship during that time, and that he advised Bayley on how to work with Maiden’s bassist and leader Steve Harris.

“I was like a mentor to him,” McBrain says. “I took him under my wing, being the granddad of the band, right? We used to hang out a lot, and I was his confidante. He’d talk to me about, ‘What would Steve think if I did this?’ So it was very hard at the end of the day to feel a little disappointed in the performances that he was coming up with.”

He continues: “Obviously, when it was discussed to have Bruce come back with Adrian, that’s when we had to say, ‘Okay, Blaze, we’ve got Bruce.’ And finally, when we had the meeting with him, all of the band were present, and Rod [Smallwood, band manager], and he took it on the chin, as they say. And he turned around, he said, ‘Maiden is too good not to carry on, and you’re gonna carry on with the best.’ And that is still his attitude today.

“Although he was kind of disappointed – obviously, he was disappointed to not be the singer in the band anymore. But he was very, very gracious. Very gracious. And I love him for that.”

In 2025, Steve Harris told MusicRadar how he felt it was important for the band to continue performing songs from the Blaze Bayley era after Bruce Dickinson’s return. Harris named Sign Of The Cross from The X Factor and The Clansman from Virtual XI as two of the key songs from the Bayley years

Harris recalled: “To be fair to Bruce, he didn’t have a problem doing those songs. He never put up a fight or said, ‘I don’t want to do them because it’s not my era.’ Bruce is a team player when it comes to that type of thing. He knows that it’s the history of the band, whatever period. He wasn’t there for all of it, but he realises how important it all is.

“I respected him for that, definitely. But also, I suppose there’s maybe an element that he wanted to prove that he could do this songs better, perhaps, or differently, or whatever. I don’t know.”

Is Gavin Harrison the hardest working man in progressive rock? He’s certainly been busy over the past couple of decades playing drums for Porcupine Tree, The Pineapple Thief and the legendary prog pioneers King Crimson.

His tenure with King Crimson began in 2008 when he performed alongside a second drummer, Pat Mastelotto, formerly of Mr Mister.

Later, from 2014 to 2020, Harrison was part of Crimson’s three-drummer line-up along with Pat Mastelotto and Bill Rieflin, the latter having played with industrial rock acts Nine Inch Nails and Ministry as well as a stint with REM.

In the long history of King Crimson – shaped by maverick guitarist Robert Fripp – there have been numerous landmark albums and complicated songs with tricky time signatures. So which did Harrison find the most challenging to play?

He chooses a song that was originally released back in 1981 – the title track from the band’s eighth studio album, Discipline.

Harrison smiles when he tells MusicRadar: “I used to love playing Discipline. That might be the hardest song to play, and I had to arrange it for three drummers.

“Discipline is spectacularly hard because the guitars play in 5/4 and the drums play in 17/8.

He explains: “When the guitars are playing in 5/4, after a certain amount of 5/4 bars – let’s say, from Robert’s perspective after, I don’t know, I’ve never counted, but something like 30 bars – you go to the next section, which is in 4/4.

“The drums and the bass are playing in 17/8. When you get to that point of, let’s say, bar 31, the downbeat of bar 31, you won’t be on the one of your 17/8 pattern. You’ll be somewhere in the middle of a bar of 17/8. So you need to know how much of that 17/8 bar do I need to play to land me on the top of beat one, let’s say bar 31. Then it goes into 4/4. And then it goes back to 5/4 and 17/8.

“Now, the next time it goes to the 4/4 section isn’t 30 bars. Next time, it's like 25 bars of 5/4. So again, you’re in the middle of a 17/8 bar, but it’s not the same amount as it was the first time. So you’ve got to remember – when you get to your final 17/8 bar, the first time you’ve got to play something like six beats of that, the next time you’ve got to play nine beats of that 17/8 bar. The third time is the same as the first time, and the fourth time, you’ve got to play, like, 11 beats of that 17/8 bar to land you on the one.”

He takes a breath and continues: “You’re listening to the bass because Tony [Levin] is playing the 17/8 with you, but you can’t really consciously also listen to the guitars in five and hear them in five. They’re just floating by by your window in five. You can’t possibly count the 5/4 bars whilst you're playing in 17/8.

“You just need to know after you've done 13 bars of 17/8, you play the first six beats of the next 17/8, and then the next note, you’re all gonna land with the guitars on a massive one that will be in 4/4.”

Harrison says in conclusion: “The concentration to stay on track on that song is very, very high. You use a lot of brain cells with that one.

“It’s a very clever piece of music. I love playing it, and I love hearing it. But it requires a lot of concentration and being in the moment to play that song. Oh, it’s a tough one!”

They might still be adamant that they’re not reforming, but Talking Heads do seem to be unusually active lately.

In addition to doing joint interviews to promote the reissue of Stop Making Sense and being honoured with their own pop radio station on SiriusXM (which is on air until the end of the month), the band have announced that there is a Talking Heads book coming out next year. It’s called Talking Heads: New Feeling and is set to be published on 18 May.

So what’s in it? Well, according to a Jerry Harrison interview that the guitarist gave to the publisher Abrams Books: “For this book, we pulled out handwritten lyrics, original album sketches, and private photos, some of which haven’t left our archive in over 40 years.” Apparently, it also features essays from all four members, as well as contributions from a number of famous fans, including Lorde, Debbie Harry, Karl Ove Knausgård and Jeff Bridges.

Meanwhile, in other ‘Heads news, it’s been David Byrne’s turn to be asked about his views on AI. And while he’s not optimistic, he does admit it does have some uses…

“I like to think that certain aspects of AI can be used as a handy tool,” he said in an interview with i-D Magazine. “If you’re analysing spreadsheets and you want to see a pattern, AI might be good at that. I’ve read that it’s good for, like, skin doctors discovering the beginning of a melanoma, the AI can pick it out sometimes better than a doctor can. If it’s trustworthy as a tool, that seems useful.”

However, there is a ‘but’: “I’ve heard of students using it to write their papers, and then they end up with no knowledge of the thing they just wrote about,” he said. “And I think, ‘Oh, it’s going to make people really stupid.'”

“Of course, there’s all the stuff we read about it breaking out of the sandbox and hacking into whatever, deceiving its masters. I could have predicted that. I’ve read enough science fiction. This was inevitable - and it’s not going to end well.”

Just what we need then, as the nights draw in and the prospect of climate and societal breakdown sidles ever closer: another prediction of AI apocalypse! However, Byrne doesn’t think we’re all necessarily doomed...

“It’s a struggle,” the 74-year-old singer admitted. “We’re fighting an uphill battle because the human brain loves bad news. You’ll doom scroll through bad news forever. We’ve evolved to be aware of warnings: is that a tiger in the bush? I’m going to assume it is, and that way I won’t die.’”

“But then there are little pockets of people doing really interesting things, solving problems. And that goes quite a ways to mitigate the stuff you read in the paper. It helps you realise: it’s not all gloom and doom. I’m optimistic that people will persevere.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott LePage has just appeared on the screen but it’s a little hard to make small talk right now so soon after listening to Polyphia’s new album, Be Not Afraid, front-to-back.

Be Not Afraid is the sound of iconoclastic Texan instrumentalists at their most radical, most maximalist; it is the sound of LePage and his coconspirator, Tim Henson, sending the electric guitar through the post-modernist wormhole.

To experience it is not unlike doomscrolling on peyote, letting the biblical deluge of the information age pass unfiltered into the soft underbelly of your consciousness. Death by content. It was a mistake to consume this record so soon before conversation with others.

Be Not Afraid might similarly be unsuitable to listen to when driving, or operating heavy machinery. It is not dinner party music. By the time Fear God brings the album to its conclusion, who can tell whether they are pre, post or perhaps mid-seizure?

LePage, who’s nursing a head cold and waiting for DayQuil’s recuperative dunt to kick in, knows the feeling, and he actually made the thing.

“Thanks, man. It’s, um… yeah, I kind of feel like that, too, after listening to it,” he says. “I just kind of go like, ‘Damn! That’s one hell of a thing I just heard.’ Not in a toot-my-own-horn way at all.”

Tim Henson has joined the chat. Henson and LePage have done more than most in recent years to radicalise quote/unquote guitar music, but now their betcha-can’t-play-this set-pieces have given way to a grander vision.

Be Not Afraid does not have lyrics per se, and yet it feels lyrical; it is strewn with samples, gospel preachers’ sermons set to jacking beats just as deep house producers in Detroit and Chicago did in the ‘90s – Polyphia’s own Can You Feel It? even borrows its title from Mr Fingers. Henson assures us there is a theme; there is a story running through the album.

“This is the first record that we’ve ever done that has had, like, actual deeper meaning beyond ‘look how crazy this thing is that we’re playing’ but, yeah, as far as it being lyrical, we are certainly telling a story through the samples,” he says.

The story isn’t that easy to describe. “Hence why we made the album,” shrugs Henson. But how it makes you feel – exhilarated, unclean, anxious, ecstatic, obsolete – is what’s more important. There’s something about these compositions that speaks to living in a time of digital excess, tech capture of our wants and desires, algorithms greedily documenting our every move, our feelings manipulated 24/7, nerves exposed.

Be Not Afraid reminds this writer of listening to Slayer’s Reign In Blood for the first time as a young teenager, on vinyl, on a Sunday night after band practice, and feeling as though some secret knowledge had been attained, a lapsarian moment after which nothing will be the same again.

“Real quick, I just wanted to touch on that, what you just said,” says Henson. “About it makes you feel like the first time, as a young person, hearing Reign In Blood. That right there is the feeling that we wanted to capture.

“For me in particular, like, I remember the first time that I heard Skrillex. I was, I don’t know, 12 or 13, and it just absolutely blew my mind, and that is exactly the feeling that we wanted people to have, to feel like a kid again, discovering something new, so yeah, I’m really stoked you said that.”

Yeah, but it’s not an altogether pleasant experience, and that’s by design. Be Not Afraid is a challenging work, a full-court press of electronic beats and digital processing. The “RJ Sauce,” ie, the co-production work from RJ Pasin, sends it over the top. This is the kind of aesthetic hyperbole that Paul Verhoeven would be proud off.

The song titles reference Christian theology and prayer. There is a song called J-BOMB. Jesus is on the cover, and is there, on record, in spirit. There is this constant seesawing between fleeting ecstasies and inevitable comedowns, the bliss of salvation and the brutality of damnation.

“I think that those two opposite ends of the spectrum were things that we really, really wanted to touch on,” says Henson. “Like, obviously, this album is a Jesus record. We have Jesus on the cover, every title is biblical. When you think about CCM, Christian Contemporary Music – this is not that by any means – but it feels super Rated G, and very family-friendly.

“They don’t touch on the actual issues. We are touching on those really, really dark aspects of the world. And that’s why we have these two opposing vibes on a record that just is constantly switching back and forth, like you’re just being torn from one thing to the other.”

Be Not Afraid all started with a gift, a weird-ass guitar a fan gave them during a VIP meet-and-great. It was made by the Japanese brand Seed and it had a super long-scale. LePage calls it “the negative five,” and as soon as he plugged it in and started playing, the ideas started coming.

This fan should know that his gift kick-started the album. “He was like, ‘I don’t know what to do with this, but I know you guys would know,’” says Henson.

LePage wrote Let There Be Light on the Seed. Henson ordered a second one and got to work, too. It gave them this foundational guitar sound from which everything else flowed. But all the travelling this Japanese-built guitar had done had not served it well. There was something wrong with it.

Henson puts it down to the “insanely long” scale length, but the neck started bowing, and not convexly as a normal neck would do. “It started bowing towards your face,” laughs Henson. “I don’t know how! The guitar became unplayable at a certain point. But while it was playable, it was a really cool guitar. It was actually kind of shreddy, and felt nice to play while it was working.”

They retired “the negative five” and realised they had a workaround in Ableton live, dropping the dry signal and “pitch-shifting the shit out of it”. That’s the warped faux eight-string you hear as Let There Be Light breaks the seal on your pre-Be Not Afraid life. Be not afraid, but there are more crazy guitar noises to come.

LePage is like Herbert West or Crawford Tillinghast, the mad scientists of low-budget horror summoning an evil into being that he barely knows how to control.

“Man, a couple of years ago, before I moved, I would sit in my room, and have a bottle of scotch next to me, and I would just tweak guitar tones, and try to just experiment with tone matching by myself,” says LePage. “So that’s kind of where the heavy stuff came from. And then the weird noises and stuff was just me being, like, ‘I wonder what a wah pedal would sound like with a guitar tone that is pitched down 17 semitones, and the EQ on the high-end of the spectrum is boosted to shit because of the low pitching, the compensation, and what would that sound like if I did that here?’”

And what does that sound like?

“It just gives you that gurgly, weird, hissy fucked-up sound,” he explains. “And it’s stuff like that, where you think, ‘What is the use case for something like that? Let me just experiment and try and see what happens.’”

Henson had the use case for that noise. It was one of those moments where what they put down on tape freaked both of them out when they heard it back through the studio monitors.

“There are a couple moments on the record that freak me out a little bit,” says LePage. “We were trying to come up with a transition from one song to another, and Tim, called me up, and he’s like, ‘Hey, uh, here’s the prompt: Can you make something that sounds like the devil throwing a tantrum?’ And I was like, ‘You know, I think I have access to enough freaky sounds on the guitar and whatever I have on the pedalboard today that I could make that sound.’”

Here’s the prompt, it’s like Henson speaks to LePage as though he’s an LLM. ScottGPT. But this is how they’ve always spoken to each other, pre-LLMs, pre-AI. Prompt isn’t the right word, they say, but it describes the collaborative process to a tee.

“If you think about Remember That You Will Die – and again, that is prior to ChatGPT, at least one year before actual large language models, or whatever those are came out – it was like, ‘Okay, what if Polyphia is the thing, the filter that whatever is ran through,’” Henson explains. “For example, our song ABC, it’s very much like a J-Pop/K-Pop song, but Polyphia, right? So it’s like, you run the J-pop/K-pop song through the Polyphia machine – which is us, a machine made of humans – and then out comes a song like ABC.”

The same goes for Playing God, Polyphia’s nylon-string bossa nova track that really did transform guitar, with the Ibanez nylon-strings in the video suddenly the hottest guitars on the market – and to think Henson had to persuade Ibanez that, yes, these were a good idea and people would buy them.

This was how Henson and LePage wrote their 2014 debut LP, Muse, listening to tracks on the radio that caught their ear and then asking themselves: ‘Okay, what is the Polyphia version of this?’ They make riffs for the chorus and consider the solos as verses and bridges.

So there were “prompts” as before. What made Be Not Afraid was the communal aspect, the fact that they got together in a rented Airbnb, away from all distractions, spitballing ideas, and in effect egging each other on to compose something more outré, to see how far they could push a sound that was – let’s face it – already pitched out there on the outer limits.

The real-time connection was critical, to the album’s energy, to the ideas.

“The way that this happened was I really wanted to base the sessions off of Kanye doing My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” says Henson. “He would basically fly everybody out to Hawaii and make everybody pull up to the studio wearing suits, and then he’d put rules on printed out on paper and taped to the wall, like, ‘No Twitter!’ No this, no that, just to create this super-sacred space for the creation.

“He would make everybody wake up at the same time and eat at the same time, work out at the same time, and then lock in on the music at the same time. And that’s essentially what we did.”

There was not Grand Theft Auto either. There was a sense of discipline, no fucking about. Between takes they shot hoops out back. That kept the blood flowing.

“It was just us here,” says Henson. “We are waking up at the same time. We are eating at the same time. We were playing basketball… Grand Theft Auto is more of a pacifier, and basketball is more of an energiser. I think that really made this record super special because of – like you said – that communal aspect of just feeding off of each other, and to the point where we just ended up with a really insane-sounding record.”

There are no guests either. Henson had floated the possibility that System Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian would offer vocals. Japanese pop-metallers Babymetal were also on the list. Remember That You Will Die was full of guest appearances, with Steve Vai offering guest shred on Ego Death and Chino Moreno of Deftones also turning up on Bloodbath.

The aforementioned ABC featured Sophia Black. But Polyphia wanted this one to be just them. No guests. No distractions. Just LePage and Henson making body-horror out of guitar with Clay Gober on bass, Clay Aeschliman on drums.

“It’s like, ‘Well, all right, let’s just give them us, us in our most raw form,” says Henson. “And I say that loosely because the sound design on this record is so insane, and there are so many moments where it was just, like, ‘How can we make sounds that literally tear your mind apart?’”

Henson describes the approach to guitar as being like a vocalist tearing their vocal cords in a screamo band. The assaultive production then takes us places sonically where the guitar can’t go, as Be Not Afraid whipsaws between R&B and hip-hop and propulsive EDM. LePage presenting us with pitch-shifted metal riffs bent all out of shape.

Some of these riffs were written in the same spirit of Polyphia’s 2013 EP, Inspire. “A lot of these parts, I was thinking, ‘What would I do if I was a 17-year-old kid?’ The riffs at the end of Can You Feel It?, I literally was thinking to myself, ‘What would I do if I was writing this for Inspire?’ And I started to go off those chord progressions.”

“Yeah, I think to add to that, the biggest driving force behind this record was fun, having fun and funmaxxing with our friends and ourselves,” says Henson. “What Scott’s saying and what you said at the beginning of this conversation about feeling like when you were younger, hearing Reign In Blood for the first time, it’s to capture that same feeling of being a kid.

“Every 14-year-old kid is, like, ‘The BC Rich with the sharp-as-fuck lines and the Line 6 insane tone, that’s cool as fuck!’ And it’s to capture the essence of what it’s like to be that kid again, where everything is just the most maximal that it could possibly be because that’s fucking cool. Our inner child – our inner children, were very happy during the making of this record.”

• Be Not Afraid is out now via Rise

Shara Nelson was midway through recording vocals at Coach House Studios in Clifton, Bristol when the vocal melody and lyrics for the song that would become Unfinished Sympathy came to her.

It was the summer of 1990 and Nelson was guest vocalist on the debut album Blue Lines by Massive Attack, the Bristol trip-hop collective formed in 1988 and featuring Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja, Grant ‘Daddy G’ Marshall and Andrew ‘Mushroom’ Vowles.

On the day Unfinished Sympathy came into being, they had been struggling to record a track called Safe From Harm.

“I couldn’t concentrate very well,” Nelson told Uncut magazine in 2010. “So we were told to take a break, have a cup of tea.

“I didn’t drink tea at the time, so I just stood in the corner and started trying to put together this idea that had been going around my head for a while. I started mumbling to myself, half singing the lines, ‘I know that I’ve imagined love before.’ The melody and the words started to come into shape.”

In the studio with Nelson at that moment was producer Jonathan ‘Jonny Dollar’ Sharp and Andrew ‘Mushroom’ Vowles.

Nelson recalled: “Mushroom heard what I was doing and said: ‘What’s that? Sing up, girl.’ So I started to sing and Mushroom put some beats towards it and Jonny Dollar started playing synthetic strings, and that was it. It was a real rogue track.”

The song, co-written by Nelson, Vowels, Del Naja, Marshall and Dollar, would become the second single on the album.

With its heart-rending vocal and sweeping strings, Unfinished Sympathy showcased a unique fusion of musical styles that were as emotive as they were chilled.

The song and the cutting-edge video that accompanied it, would propel Bristol’s unique music scene into the global spotlight.

The musical climate that forged the Bristol sound can be traced back to 2 April 1980, when police raided the Black and White Cafe in the heart of the St Pauls area of the city. The heavy-handed tactics of the police became a flashpoint, sparking a riot, fuelled by community grievances, racial tensions and the government’s controversial ‘sus’ laws.

The outpouring of anger from the St Pauls community took the police by surprise and they were soon outnumbered. In the aftermath of the riot, the police gave St Pauls a much wider berth and this created a climate where communities would come together through impromptu street parties, with custom-built sound systems.

These sound systems provided the musical backdrop to inner city Bristol and would become a unifying force for young people, regardless of their skin colour.

“Sound system culture was all about DIY,” said Roni Size in a 2016 BBC documentary Unfinished: The Making Of Massive Attack. “It was about learning how to string up amps, how to cut the wood, how to load the speakers onto the van properly, even [learning] how to drive a big HGV lorry down the narrow roads in St Pauls.”

The sound system culture shared a DIY ethos with punk and there was one seminal post-punk Bristol band, The Pop Group, that would have a huge influence on development of the Bristol sound.

The Pop Group’s sound was aggressive and avant-garde, incorporating elements of funk, free jazz, and dub. Their tours took them to New York, where they became entranced by the emerging hip-hop culture.

“We were virtually living in New York,” recalled former singer and founder Mark Stewart in the Unfinished documentary. “Suddenly, somebody says there's a really cool radio show on this thing called Kiss FM and WBLS.

“We used to have big ghetto blasters of double cassette machines back in the day. We copied these tapes, brought them back to Bristol. Copied, copied, copied.

“3D would draw on them. Suddenly, everybody was getting into hip-hop in Bristol. London was not even aware of it.”

By the mid-’80s, the Bristol scene was thriving and its epicentre was the now legendary Dugout club, in the city’s Park Row, where the Wild Bunch performed a regular slot and dominated the Bristol club scene.

In 1988, Massive Attack was created as a spin-off group from the Wild Bunch and featured Daddy G, Mushroom, 3D and, in the early days, Tricky.

3D had been a co-writer on Neneh Cherry’s song Manchild.

Along with her husband, singer, songwriter and producer Cameron McVay, Cherry would help Massive Attack to record Blue Lines, which they started work on in 1990.

“One of the things that made Massive Attack into the phenomenon they were was meeting and knowing Neneh Cherry and Cameron McVay,” said Sheryl Garratt, former editor of The Face. “They supported them financially and gave them lots of resources and really encouraged and nurtured their talent.”

Cherry also injected the drive necessary to cut through the chilled-out languor of the Bristol scene.

For all their talent, Massive Attack were not driven by ambition or any desire to be celebrities.

“We were lazy Bristol twats,” Daddy G told writer Ben Thompson of The Observer in 2004. “It was Neneh Cherry who kicked our arses and got us in the studio.

“We recorded a lot at her house, in her baby's room… what we were trying to do was create dance music for the head, rather than the feet. I think it's our freshest album, we were at our strongest then.”

By then, the sound that music journalist Andy Pemberton would define as ‘trip-hop’ in the June 1994 issue of Mixmag magazine was taking shape, a melding of New York hip-hop with homegrown dub, soul, funk, jazz and electronica, and all imbued with an achingly melancholic and laid-back feel.

This was the sound that would distinguish Blue Lines and would first come to prominence on Unfinished Sympathy, released as a single two months before the album.

“Blue Lines kind of had this impact where they recognised Bristol having a sound,” recalled Roni Size in Unfinished. “It was that underlying sub-bass from the dub. It was the breaks from hip-hop and the two gel together. It just summed up the culture and I think Massive Attack really tapped into that.”

Once Mushroom, Nelson and producer Dollar had worked up the basis of Nelson’s vocal melody and lyric, Massive Attack worked on the song during a jam session.

The song’s title, Unfinished Sympathy – a pun on Franz Schubert's 1822 Unfinished Symphony No.8 in B minor – was decided that same day.

“I hate putting a title to anything without a theme,” said Robert Del Naja in Select magazine in 1992. “The title came up as a joke at first, but it fitted the song and the arrangements so perfectly, we just had to use it.”

The song’s arrangement incorporates scratching and drum programming from Mushroom.

Chilled hip-hop beats set the tone and there is a percussion break sampled from jazz trombonist, composer and arranger JJ Johnson’s 1974 instrumental Parade Strut.

One major decision taken in the early stages of the song was to use a real orchestra on the track.

“The synth sounded too tacky,” Mushroom told writer John Robb of Sounds in 1991. “So we thought we may as well use real strings.”

Dollar contacted the music producer Wil Malone (who had worked on Iron Maiden’s debut album in 1980) to arrange and conduct the strings, which were recorded in Studio Two at Abbey Road Studios, London.

A 42-piece orchestra was hired to perform the surging string arrangement. Dollar had instructed Malone to “do what you feel like” with the string arrangement.

“My approach for Unfinished Sympathy was that it’s a really open track,” Malone told Uncut magazine. “Basically it’s just a groove – keyboards, and a great vocal by Shara Nelson – so you just let it drift, just let it chill.

“With most string arrangements that I do, the strings are ‘put back’ in the mix. In other words they are so quiet you don’t really hear them, or they’re mixed up, so that you can just hear the top lines.

“But on Unfinished Sympathy, the strings are exposed. You can really hear them and I think that makes something different.”

Vowles told John Robb of Sounds that the orchestra “were really good [but] it took them about five takes to do it because they were slightly behind the beat”.

The orchestra is a haunting and enigmatic addition to the song.

Unfortunately, as Massive Attack never set out to use a full orchestra on the album, they hadn’t budgeted for it. Mushroom had to sell his car – a Mitsubishi Shogun – to cover all the hiring costs for the orchestra.

One surprising aspect of Unfinished Sympathy is that there is no actual bassline on the original album version of the song.

The bass is provided by the orchestra.

Unfinished Sympathy was released on 11 February 1991, in the midst of the Gulf War.

On the advice of their record company and management, the group dropped the word ‘Attack’ from their name, to allegedly prevent the song being banned by the BBC, releasing the track simply as ‘Massive’.

Unfinished Sympathy was groundbreaking and hugely influential, a unique blend of electronic and orchestral elements that is both melancholic and uplifting.

The song is justifiably considered a masterpiece, one that set the template for the trip-hop genre, with its ethereal strings, dub-heavy bass and shuffling beats.

It’s a sophisticated arrangement elevated by Shara Nelson’s effortlessly emotive vocals.

Commercially, the song fared well, reaching No.13 in the UK singles chart and No.1 on the Dutch Top 40. But critically, it received widespread acclaim.

Melody Maker named Unfinished Sympathy its Single of the Year, concluding that that it would “unquestionably stand as one of the greatest soul records of all time”.

In a retrospective piece in 2005, BBC journalist Stuart Bailie later wrote that Unfinished Sympathy had “an emotional power that was hard to figure. It sounded anxious and lost. But there was a grandeur in the music also. People who came across the record became obsessed, spinning it endlessly.”

In 2012, the enduring emotional power of the song was also noted by John Bush of All Music in a retrospective review.

“Unfinished Sympathy remains one of the most elegant, sophisticated works in the history of electronic dance.” he wrote. “The emotional effect is extraordinary when coupled with Shara Nelson's searching vocal.

“A sleek, catchy drum programme and a little shadowed scratching (the only reference to their b-boy past) complete this simple, but tremendously moving, dance production, a tribute to the continuing emotional tug of great music – whether the source is organic or electronic.”

Tony Iommi has been reflecting on the final Black Sabbath album, 13, and has described the experience of recording it as “awkward”.

The 2013 record was produced by Rick Rubin and featured three of the original lineup – Bill Ward wasn’t a part of it due to a breakdown in negotiations over his contract. And according to the guitarist, Rubin wasn’t exactly great at communicating with the other two members.

Speaking to Planet Rock’s Ian Dunter, Iommi recalled, "On our last Sabbath album we did with Rick Rubin, we didn't have time to absorb what we'd done. Because Rick wouldn't talk to the others. He talked to me and I'd have to tell them. I don't know what happened there."

One incident stands out, he says: "We were in Los Angeles, and I came back for the weekend off. Rick phoned me on the Friday and said, 'Oh, could you come up with a song like Planet Caravan to record on Monday?' I went, 'What?!' (He said) 'You come up with a song. (I went), 'Blimey!'

“So, I worked on this idea, and he said, 'We can record it Monday.' But nobody else (in the band) knew. So, we got in there Monday, and Rick said, 'We're going to put this song down’. Geezer went, 'What song?!' [Rubin said], 'Well, Tony’s done a song here. We're going to put that down.' Geezer: 'I don't even know what it is. I don't know what the key is.'

"And that's sort of what happened, and we ended up putting it down. But it was it was such an awkward situation."

Although 13 did the business sales-wise – it was a Number One in both the US and UK – none of the band seem to have particularly happy memories of it. In a 2022 interview, Ozzy Osbourne said: “I didn't really get a charge from the album. Although Rick Rubin is a good friend of mine, I wasn't really… I was just singing. It was like stepping back in time, but it wasn't a glorious period. Though Geezer did a lot of lyric writing for me, which he's very, very good at. It wasn't an earth-shattering experience for me."

And Geezer Butler was hardly singing its praises either, when he spoke to Sirius XM in 2022: It was a weird experience, especially with being told to forget that you're a heavy metal band.”

It seems that is exactly what Rubin told the group when they started recording. “He played us our very first album, and he said, 'Cast your mind back to when there was no such thing as heavy metal or anything like that, and pretend it's the follow-up album to that,' which is a ridiculous thing to think."

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The Apple Films Fleetwood Mac documentary, promised for a number of years, has finally been given a release date.

It’s titled Fleetwood Mac: The Chain and will debut on Apple TV on Friday 29 January next year.

The doc has been known to be in development for some time. The band’s official channels flagged up back in 2024 and we’ve known that though Apple has described it as “definitive” it has decided to completely ignore the Peter Green years, when Fleetwood Mac were an all-male group at the forefront of the British blues scene. Instead, its starting point is the entry of Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks into the band’s story in late 1974.

According to Apple Films, all five members of that lineup have been interviewed for the documentary, including the late Christine McVie. In a statement, it says the film “will explore how the band’s trials and tribulations, personal resilience, and musical dexterity combined to create enduring masterpieces.

"It will take fans through the highs and lows of their brilliant career, illuminating the exceptional ingredients each member brought to the band’s uncommon alchemy - a musical union that sold more than 220 million records worldwide.”

“The documentary will reveal what allowed this combination of artists to create singular musical work again and again, and what drew them back together and held them there when every possible pressure, both outside and inside the band, threatened to blow them apart.”

It should be pointed out that the scheduling for next January is quite deliberate. Early February will see the fiftieth anniversary of Rumours, the album that catapulted the band from well-regarded relics of the late 1960s to superstars.

And for that matter, Fleetwood Mac: The Chain is hardly the first documentary to cover the band's extraordinary story, which, as aficionados will know, encompasses much, much more than Rumours and the breakup of two couples in the band.

The BBC has produced Don’t Stop, which crammed in the whole story from 1967 to 2009 into just one hour. Then there was Unbroken Chain, which did it in just 48 minutes. You also had Destiny Rules, which looked at the band’s reunion with Lindsay Buckingham in the early 2000s and there have been various docs that have looked at the making of Rumours, and the careers of individual members.

U2 guitarist The Edge says that his creative mindset – and that of the whole band – owes a huge debt to the punk rock explosion of the late ’70s.

U2’s first album of new material in nearly a decade, Carnaval de Luz, is released on 13 November.

Speaking alongside singer Bono in an interview for The New York Times podcast, The Edge recalled how U2, having formed in 1976, were inspired by the sounds of punk and post-punk.

He stated: “I’ve always made it a point to try and find a way to make the guitar sound different and to to play the guitar in a different way. I think that was born of the fact that we emerged as a band in that moment after punk rock.

“Punk rock kind of pulled everything down and started from ground zero again. So we took advantage of that opportunity to to start something new. The cycle is order, disorder, reorder, and we we arrived just at the beginning of that reorder phase.

“But that demanded that you did abandon the past. We were looking for what’s next in this in the story of contemporary music – where where does this story go now? So, from a guitarist’s point of view, I was always trying to do something fresh, and still do.”

He continued: “I think that we're almost back in that moment again. I don’t mean necessarily just in music culture, but in terms of global geopolitics, all of the things that were affecting culture in the mid- to late- ’70s, post Vietnam, it's like we’re there again. So I think music has to do a similar thing of reinvention, and I think that’s an exciting moment. I think for music to to find a new narrative to to to follow.”

Asked which artists were now enacting that reinvention forward, the guitarist replied: “Geese, for instance. I think that’s a very compelling new thing. Fontaines D.C., another great group that are really taking things in a different direction. And there's more, you know.”

He said of his own sensibility towards music and music-making: “When when it starts to feel too comfortable and too predictable, I start to to twitch. I'm looking for a shocking new thing, always.”

Way back in 1984, in an interview with One-Two Testing magazine, The Edge explained how he developed his signature playing style, which was heavily influenced by how his U2 bandmate Adam Clayton played bass.

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

He continued: “My guitar style has always been the product really of the rest of the group. Adam is a very ostentatious sort of person, very extravagant, so when he started playing bass he wasn't interested in taking the bottom end of the sound spectrum at all. He wanted to be right up there in the mid-ranges, so his bass sounds were always extremely full with a lot of top end — very different to say Simple Minds or any of the other bands around that era.

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

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

He concluded: “I'm not an incredibly versatile guitar player, but I've made best use of what limited talents I have.”

You’ve probably heard that 3 Savile Row, the HQ for Apple Corps and the site of the Beatles' so-called rooftop gig in January 1969, is being converted into a museum that will open next year. But what about the company’s other address, its location for over three decades?

Well, as Apple moves back to Savile Row, it’s quietly putting its Knightsbridge HQ at 27 Ovington Square up for sale.

The sale is being conducted through the estate agents Noble Harris, who have described it as “a chance to acquire a property with an extraordinary story”. It’s a Grade II listed Victorian townhouse arranged over six floors, with the third and fourth for residential use. It has 12 rooms, including no less than six bedrooms and as you’d expect, has approval for both office and residential use.

Needless to say, it doesn’t come cheap. Knightsbridge is among Britain’s most expensive districts – properties on Ovington Square regularly go for between £5 and £7 million, and when you add the Beatles factor, it’s possible the eventual price could reach eight figures.

Ovington Square is bound to arouse interest among members of the super-rich who also count themselves as Beatles fans - two sectors of a Venn diagram with a considerable overlap, you'd think. Noble Harris have merely said that: “Our clients wish to pass the legacy of the property to the right candidate.”

Meanwhile, a few more details have emerged about the new visitor attraction that will open up at 3 Savile Row next year. It's going to be called simply 'The Beatles at 3 Savile Row' and will feature seven floors of never-seen-before material from Apple's archives, rotating exhibitions, a fan store, and the recreation of the original studio where Let It Be was recorded. Fans will also have the chance to tread in the band's footsteps on the exact rooftop where they played their final gig on 30 January 1969.

In a statement, Tom Greene, Apple Corps current CEO has said: “Every single day, fans are taking pictures of the outside of 3 Savile Row - but next year they can go in and explore all seven floors of the iconic building, including the rooftop where even the railings remain the same from that famous day in 1969.”

An exact opening date for the museum has yet to be confirmed.

Kevin ‘Noodles’ Wasserman, guitarist for punk rock stars The Offspring, is withdrawing from touring with immediate effect – in order to prioritise his health.

The 63 year-old Wasserman announced in a social media post on 21 October: “It is with deep sadness that I have to announce that I need to step away from live performances for a while to deal with a sudden and fairly serious health issue.

“The rest of the band has my back, is super supportive, and will keep rocking you all in my absence. I hope to be back on stage sooner rather than later. Until then, I will miss all of you with all of my heart.

“Thanks for keeping me in your thoughts. I really appreciate it.”

Nicknamed Noodles due to his fondness for noodling on guitar, Wasserman has played in The Offspring since 1984.

The band’s 1994 album Smash was released on Epitaph Records and is the biggest selling album ever released on an independent label.

Their biggest hit, Pretty Fly (For A White Guy), went to No 1 in Australia in 1998.

In the coming weeks The Offspring are scheduled to perform shows in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Mexico City.

As yet, the replacement for Noodles has not been confirmed.

The Beatles' museum in Liverpool is set to move to a larger location and a new tourist ‘experience’ devoted to the band is set to be open in the city too.

Announcing the plans yesterday, Apple Corps said that the Beatles Story which is currently at Albert Dock, will move to a new site opposite Lime Street station that was formerly the St Johns Market. The new site will be four times the size of its current location. Meanwhile, a new ‘Yellow Submarine experience ’, as it will be called, will be housed at the old Radio City tower, St John’s Beacon. Both the new sites will open in 2028.

The move is a partnership between Apple Corps, Liverpool City Council and the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority. Indeed, Apple Corps, which has looked after the Beatles business interests since 1968, will take over the running of the main Beatles Story attraction from next year.

The updated attraction will be giving back to the city in more than just tourist dollars. It’s been announced that every ticket sold to The Beatles Story will contribute to The Apple Corps Liverpool Trust, an initiative established to provide financial support and opportunities for emerging Liverpool artists and local cultural endeavours.

And of course, this is in addition to the new Beatles attraction in London, which is set to open next year on the site of their old Apple offices on 3 Savile Row.

In a statement, Apple CEO Tom Greene said: “Liverpool birthed the greatest band in history and today we are announcing a new experience in the city that does justice to that legacy. Just like Graceland or Dollywood, it’s fitting that The Beatles will have a world class destination for fans to visit in the centre of the city where the story started.”

The two surviving Beatles have given their thumbs up to the move too. Sir Paul McCartney said in a statement: "I love Liverpool. It's part of who I am, it's part of who The Beatles are.

"I find it incredible and humbling that people are still interested in our story and it's very exciting to me that The Beatles Story and The Beacon are being transformed in such an exciting way in the heart of Liverpool city.”

Meanwhile, Ringo Starr has said: "Liverpool was, and still is, Music City. And now we are expanding The Beatles Story Experience in Liverpool - how far out. The beat goes on.”

Indeed it does. With new tourist attractions and the four Sam Mendes biopics landing in 2028 as well, the end of the 2020s looks set to be an extraordinarily busy time for a band that hasn’t produced a single note of new music since 1970. Will we ever be bored of The Beatles? On current evidence, you’d think not.

On paper, the second album by 80s sensations Frankie Goes To Hollywood should have been a nailed on cert. Released 40 years ago today, Liverpool was the sequel to the triple-platinum double-album excess of Welcome to the Pleasuredome and this was a band that finally had the time and money to grow and make good on their early, rough-and-ready promise. So when and how did Frankie’s wheels fall off and why does Liverpool only now get a glimmer of the credit and love it deserves?

To find out, we’ve got to go all the way back to 1984. Circa ‘84, Frankie were riding high. Their debut single Relax had just been deliciously banned, and they were about to score a simultaneous number one and number two when its bombastic sequel, Two Tribes, dragged Relax back up for a second ‘coming’.

For fledgling record label ZTT, Frankie were the golden goose, and for label owner and soon-to-be-superproducer Trevor Horn things were only ever on the up.

Horn had learnt his trade under the cosh of '70s producer Biddu and playing second fiddle (bass, to be exact) in a string of mildly successful bands. Not least his own Buggles, whose Video Killed the Radio Star wound up soundtracking the entire MTV era.

A fiercely enthusiastic proponent of new technology Horn had – part by right-time, right-place chance, part by virtue of his talent – found himself as the figurehead of a new way to make music. And as head of his own ZTT label alongside the talents of engineer Gary Langan, Fairlight operator JJ Jeczalik and keyboard player and arranger Anne Dudley, he’d found ready and willing compatriots.

Horn’s early-adopter suspicions – sharpened through his ‘fake band’ Buggles exercise – that recording studio technology was about to explode had been proved 100% right. And so, by 1984, with first-mover advantage, he’d sidestepped the naysayers, proved the old guard wrong and won the war.

However, that war wasn’t without its casualties.

Step up Frankie Goes To Hollywood. While Horn had ‘plucked them from obscurity’ following their lucky break appearance on The Tube and hits had ensued, post-Pleasuredome comedown, things weren’t as fluffy and fun as they seemed on the surface.

The Frankie we loved were a screen-hogging cultural behemoth able to top the charts non-stop for nine weeks, hold two singles in the top five and take a pricey double album to number one for their debut.

In reality, however, they were a mismatched, rag-tag, five piece funk/pop/rock/whatever gaggle of semi-friends who had inadvertently strapped themselves to a rollercoaster.

While having hits was ‘great’, and seeing the world from a first-class window was certainly an experience, the small matter of not receiving any credit or – worse – any money, had, by 1985, begun to rankle.

“We were denigrated for the fact that it was machines on the records, whereas New Order made Blue Monday and were hailed as the best thing since sliced bread,” lead vocalist and frontman Holly Johnson moaned to The Times. Famously, Horn and team had feverishly worked non-stop for days on tracks for Frankie’s debut without the band in attendance because they were forced to return to Liverpool once a week en masse in order to sign on and secure their unemployment allowance.

Johnson recalled to Q: “I went to my bank, the NatWest, and I put my gold disc down and said ‘This is my collateral, now will you give me a 500 quid overdraft?’ And he said ‘Let me show this to somebody’ and he came back, and he wouldn’t let me have it.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking that with Horn as producer, studio owner, record company and band confidante, the route from cash register to the band’s back pocket would be more direct than usual. However, thanks to the unique way in which Horn’s empires were structured, the opposite was actually true.

Money for nothing

It worked a little like this:

Fledgling label ZTT (owned by Horn and his wife) was financially propped up by Island Records. And, as soon as ZTT’s first single broke – Frankie’s Relax (let’s not count experimental 12”-only EP Into Battle With The Art of Noise) – both parties were coining it in.

And flush with Frankie cash, ZTT would pay for Sarm studio time (also owned by Horn and his wife) so that Horn could make more Frankie hits. Horn could have his pick of new technology and duly spent hundreds of thousands on Fairlights and – later, and essential for Pleasuredome’s completion – a Synclavier hard disc system. Suitably tooled-up, as one of the world’s top recording studios, Sarm was – in return – able to charge ZTT a mint for recording time. And round and round the money went.

Meanwhile, as per every recording contract, a label ‘gives’ money to an artist in the form of an advance. This money is a) to keep them sweet and put some food on the table and b) cover their recording expenses, put their videos on TV and designer clothes on their backs. And Frankie were, of course, on the receiving end of such a deal. Never forget that on paper Frankie were a huge financial gamble, all leather and spunk and little else, and so ZTT were very much putting their money where Frankie’s mouth was.

The aim was, of course, to have a spectacular hit and if that hit happened the incoming mountain of money would pay off any and all bills and everyone would be a winner. Most specifically the band who, finally free from the debt mountain their contract had saddled them with, would finally get their share of the profits.

But work at Sarm’s coalface, cranking out the hits that would make everyone rich, was more laborious than usual. Instead of quickfiring singles at the chart and rinsing the band for a fast buck, Horn and his ZTT had other ideas.

Free from record company pressure (Horn WAS the record company) he would painstakingly spend days fine-tuning and experimenting. Free from shackles, Horn was hellbent on pop perfection, all the while earning a fortune on a tab that would only ever be picked up by the band.

Surely a ZTT bean-counter must have been chomping at the bit for new product? Watching hundreds of thousands disappearing into a studio with only a ‘it’ll be ready when it’s ready’ promise of salable material in return doesn’t sound like a great business plan. But when the label owner, studio owner, producer and band ringmaster are the same person, things can get a little muddied.

Frankie’s impending financial dire straits were clear from the off. There had been a lengthy seven months in the studio between the release of their debut single Relax and its follow-up, Two Tribes. And with a 24 October 1983 release for Relax and a 29 October 1984 release date for the band’s debut album, the band had already unwittingly been saddled with an entire year of recording costs.

So how much were Frankie in hock? Estimates place that bill at around £760,000. Further speculation suggests that Horn ran up another £80,000 in costs for mixing alone, bringing that total to £840,000. And given the amount of second and THIRD 12” singles of each release, it's clear that Horn and ZTT LOVED a remix…

But never forget that the magic worked. Welcome to the Pleasuredome – Frankie’s overblown debut album – was a huge success. It sold a quarter of a million copies in its first week alone in the UK, reached number one and enjoyed similar success all across Europe.

And this was a double album. At a time when single (hit) albums would retail for £4.99 in the UK, ZTT were able to charge upwards of £8.99 for Frankie’s double-helping – a figure that more than paid for that gatefold sleeve and extra vinyl (but which in actuality only contained 13 songs, including one instrumental and four cover versions).

And thus debts were cleared, and the band got paid. However, by this point, much of the damage was done.

It’s safe to say that Frankie hadn’t particularly enjoyed their rocket ship to stardom. Not being allowed to play on their own records, working non-stop on endless promotional duties, being publicly perceived as Trevor Horn’s puppets AND watching their share of the profits dangled on the end of an ever lengthening piece of string had, sadly, rather taken the shine off their success. And it’s this atmosphere into which – by late 1985 – thoughts of a Pleasuredome sequel were tentatively being launched. But this was a band that had scored three number-one singles and a number two. Plus a number one debut (double) album. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, pretty much everything.

Banned in Britain

Come late 1985, thanks to the state of UK taxation (with the band potentially losing 60% of their hard-fought Pleasuredome earnings) Frankie had decamped to Borris House in County Carlow in Ireland, as many UK pop stars did. The band would hang out with a similarly exiled Def Leppard and Spandau Ballet, learning from (and drinking with) pop’s pros. Besides, time away from the limelight would be an excellent opportunity for the band to come up with a worthy successor to their (filler-laden) debut.

However, forcing the band into seclusion together would only exacerbate divisions that – during a year on the promo path and a UK and American live tour – had already begun to open.

Behind the scenes, vocalist Johnson was growing rather tired of a band finding its feet and determined to prove its worth. ‘The Lads’ as they were known – drummer Peter ‘Ped’ Gill, guitarist Brian ‘Nasher’ Nash and bassist Mark O’Toole – had, thanks to their live appearances, grown in musical stature and were – second time around – determined to play on their records.

Johnson, meanwhile, had no such qualms with Horn’s grip and felt that ‘he’ was the true voice of Frankie anyway. “You’re hearing the sound of my voice and the melodies I wrote and the lyrics that I wrote – and that’s what most people listen to when they hear a record. Relax might have amazing production values, but it’s really the sound of the vocal that makes it exciting,” Johnson told The Times. Meanwhile, co-vocalist Paul Rutherford would skillfully dance the fine line between the two camps.

In short, Johnson had decided that the rest of the band and their producer were to be tolerated rather than collaborated with. “In Ireland our days of playing or jamming together were gone,” writes Nash in his Nasher Says Relax autobiography. “Holly didn’t have the patience to hang about while we kicked around arrangements and we didn’t have the patience to listen to him warbling and complaining that everything was “too loud”.”

Nevertheless, working on a four-track in the ballroom downstairs and passing tapes to an aloof Johnson upstairs, music did begin to happen. “Rage Hard was written there. Ped had been influenced by the drum feel from Ratt’s Lay It Down which was on heavy rotation during our time in America. We were suckers for a bit of metal, however cheesy it might be,” Nash explains. “Is Anybody Out There? was also written during this period… But those were the only ones that ended up included on the Liverpool album.”

Certainly, Ireland had made Frankie ‘a band’ rather than a studio experiment, but a band insistent on “developing” and “finding a new sound” for “a record that would have to be as good – if not better – than our debut”. And all the while they were falling apart from the inside.

“The elephant in the room was the fact that only Holly, Paul and Mark were actually on the records. Not putting them on the record was, I freely admit, a mistake on my part,” Horn admits in his Adventures in Modern Recording. “With a little bit more effort I could have figured out how to feature them and not doing so was a lapse of bedside manner on my part.”

Horn had spent all of 1984 under the cosh, crafting pure gold from raw musical iron. And now, at the end of 1985, with the band getting busy in County Carlow, with an increasing sense of dread, Horn realised that soon he would have to do it all again.

Or not.

Faced with a band whose passion for and confidence in Horn’s skills and business methods were tangibly on the wane, and seeing a year-long slog snaking ahead, Horn – perhaps with his successful reputation, record company and studio under his belt and with little else to prove – simply, unbelievably, instead, chose to pass.

Horn would not be producing Frankie’s follow-up. End of. And with Horn effectively the boss of everything, there was nothing that anyone – fans, band, manager – could do about it.

Wanted: Producer

But with Horn off the table, who would (could?) take his place? The answer was right under Horn’s nose. Stephen Lipson had been appointed to replace Gary Langan after Langan had departed to produce ABC’s second album (another sequel which Horn had mysteriously passed up). In a short time Lipson had proved his worth, going on to entirely produce Propaganda’s debut album for ZTT following Horn’s working and reworking of their Dr Mabuse debut single, as Horn himself became too embroiled with Frankie.

It’s Lipson that laboured with Sarm’s new Synclavier on the late stages of Two Tribes and Pleasuredome after it had sat unloved and misunderstood at the studio for weeks. Having mastered its intricacies, he would go on to construct (and deconstruct) Grace Jones’ classic Slave To The Rhythm single and something-out-of-nothing LP entirely within it. While it’s Horn’s name in capitals on the sleeve, it’s Lipson’s lower-case ‘Assisted By’ credit that follows immediately after.

So the more Horn squinted at the Frankie problem, the more simply having Lipson produce the Pleasuredome sequel looked increasingly like a formality. Sure, not stepping into the driving seat and crafting another Frankie classic might disappoint fans (and would perhaps deny the world another '80s classic), but at the end of the day he would still get paid via ZTT and Sarm exactly as before.

Besides – by perhaps over-indulging his ZTT uberlord title a little – Horn could dip in and ‘fiddle’ as much or as little as he liked. He could be ‘Executive Producer’ instead – dodge the hard stuff and still get the credit. This wasn’t a questionable about-face. This was an undeniable ‘win-win ’.

So perhaps Liverpool was doomed from the off. “We all knew it wouldn’t be as good,” admits a typically weary Lipson on the 80sography podcast. “It was a poisoned chalice. Nobody wanted to do it. I did it because the boys were happy with me. It was never going to be like the first album. It couldn’t be.”

Thus, it’s Lipson, not Horn who locked horns with a newly invigorated and educated Frankie at Amsterdam’s Wisseloord Studios in November 1985. He shipped over his Synclavier and they began building an album that had to keep everyone, from the band, to their fans, to their label, to Horn, happy.

“They’d write the backing tracks [the lads] and he’d figure what to do [Johnson]. It was very disjointed,” Lipson admits. Nevertheless, Lipson put the hours in, working alongside the increasingly studio-savvy drummer Peter Gill to craft backing tracks from fragmented recordings while Nash and O’Toole busied themselves drinking, phoning transatlantic sex lines and making countless model aircraft, purchased from a nearby shop.

“We donated our plastic masterpieces to the studio, and they hung the planes above the bar. I wonder if they’re still there?” muses Nash.

Gill, on the other hand, got busy with different hardware. "I've got an old Roland TR-808 drum machine which has a set of trigger outputs and I use these with either a Dynacord Percuter or a Roland DDR30,” Gill explained to Sound On Sound. “Once I've got a nice little groove happening along with the track we've already recorded, I use an SRC Friendchip synchroniser to lock the two together so that I can add a few electronic drum sounds to the basic three-piece foundation of guitar, bass and drums already recorded. I also use a Roland Octapad and assign the outputs to play samples on the Emulator.”

Free from tax exile, Lipson would sneak back to Sarm in the UK sporadically to employ the talents of keyboard players Peter Vettese and Pleasuredome mainstay Andy Richards to build upon the band's Wisseloord recordings under Horn’s watchful eye. Slowly but surely, the album that would become Liverpool began to take shape.

Johnson however, remained elusive and aloof throughout. And despite the band being totally at ease with Lipson at the controls, Johnson had other ideas.

“Holly was not happy with the sound of the tracks and thought they were too “heavy rock” and we were having too much influence in the direction of the music,” writes Nash. “Despite this he would never make suggestions as to how it should sound… On the other hand we would have probably ignored him anyway…

“Holly wondered why the producer wasn’t there… Trevor had told Holly that he would be producing the second album. The rest of us had been told that Steve Lipson was producing. Steve had been told that he was the producer…” Chinese whispers threatened to derail the entire project.

“Holly was – to put it politely – a little negative about the whole process,” explains Lipson. “He used to say to me “I need two days' notice if you want me to sing”. It was all just difficult. He wouldn’t participate. He wouldn’t be there with everyone. He had a new boyfriend, and they were loved up and good luck to him, but he made the album really hard for me. I was only trying to get it good. I felt like the enemy and I could never understand why.”

Confronted (and ever so slightly ambushed) by a band desperate to heal the rift, things were about to get even worse. “We just wanted answers,” Nash writes. “Like it or not, our futures were intertwined and we wanted to know what was going to happen down the line. Holly lost his rag – maybe he thought the best form of defence was attack – and he started shouting and told us to get out. We left. The crack had just got a little bit wider.”

So wide that – perhaps being a little stir crazy thanks to their Amsterdam exile – the next day the band decided that they needed a new vocalist. But who should they call? Simple: Simon Le Bon.

“The Power Station was doing its own thing and although the remaining members of Duran [Duran] had formed Arcadia there didn’t seem to be any firm plan about their collective future,” thought Nash, and soon O’Toole had tracked Le Bon down to an apartment in Paris.

“Do you fancy being the singer in Frankie Goes To Hollywood?” O’Toole probed. “I would be the perfect singer for Frankie Goes To Hollywood,” Le Bon responded, before explaining that “being the gentleman he was” he could not leave his fellow band members at such a time. “Simon’s loyalty lay with his mates. He said he was flattered, but declined our offer,” Nash writes.

And minutes later, a call to old friend Pete Wylie of Wah! drew a similar negative. “We got blanked twice in one night. We must be shite!” reasoned Nash.

Band on the run

However, the Frankie show had to go on and taking a break for their own sanity, the band collectively decamped to their next tax hideyhole on the island of Jersey. There, the band wrote Watching The Wildlife and laid down the grooves for Lunar Bay and For Heaven’s Sake.

But the tensions within the band were only getting worse. So much so that when The Lads and Paul decided to install themselves on Jersey, Johnson chose to live on Guernsey instead.

“The songwriting was laboured, bordering on the farcical. We had deteriorated into two camps writing on two separate islands off the coast of France,” admitted Nash. “We would prepare backing tracks and post them to Guernsey. We would not get to hear Holly’s input until we returned to Wisseloord weeks later.”

It’s a miracle therefore that, back at Wisseloord, Lipson had pieced together the band’s fragments and come up with eight coherent tracks – mercifully just enough for an album. Finally everyone’s nightmare was over, and a release would be a formality.

Everyone, however, was to be proved wrong.

Throughout Liverpool’s recording, Horn had been little more than a watchful eye. Voicing opinions on which of the band’s demos should make the cut and which should remain in the studio and ensuring that Lipson treated his investment with care. Now, with all the hard and painful work done, back in London, it was Horn’s cue to get busy. And that meant spending more of the band’s money.

Wisseloord had cost the band £300,000 already but in order to complete the task of putting together what would become Liverpool, Horn required another Sony 24-track digital recorder. Having two meant that he could move huge swathes of music between them, bouncing, extending and appending without any loss of quality. The price of such power? A total hire charge of £100,000. At the end of the day, poring over the bills, the band discovered that it would have been cheaper if he’d simply bought one.

Similarly, eight AMS digital delays were hired at a cost of £40 each a day. “How many do you need?” reasoned Nash. Meanwhile, a huge Marshall stack sat in the studio, hired in, but completely unused for the entire project. But the bitterest pill? The band had innocently borrowed Horn’s Roland TR-808 for a couple of days. Months later, examining an invoice, they saw that they’d been charged for it. Ouch.

The total bill for Liverpool would – just like Pleasuredome before it – come in at £800,000. This meant that, with the band earning around 80p from every album sale, they would have to sell over a million copies before any of them earned a penny.

It had better be good then. However… It wasn’t.

“Towards the end there was panic, because it wasn’t as good,” admits Lipson. “It was chaos. It was all hands on deck at this point. We knew that we didn’t have a smash like Relax or Two Tribes. It was patently obvious to me. And then they sort of pinned their hopes on Warriors of the Wasteland… But it was inevitable.”

And there was no going back. The show must go on, and Frankie’s long overdue comeback needed a suitably grandiose launch. Step up the Montreux Golden Rose Festival of May 1986.

The Montreux festival of pop excess had, by 1986, become an '80s institution. Featuring live (aka mimed) performances by the world’s biggest rock and pop acts and broadcast to a huge trans-European audience, where better to re-launch an all-new Frankie? Thus, versions of Rage Hard and Warriors of the Wasteland were rushed into service and on Saturday 10 May 1986 Europe’s Frankiephiles settled in to watch the band’s long-overdue return with their first new material since Pleasuredome 19 months earlier.

But while fans lapped up Frankie’s return, their new, more serious, ‘rockier’ sound was an unexpected party crash. Set opener Rage Hard, in its Montreux mix form, featured an extended (boring?) drum intro and so anyone expecting Relax-style dancefloor fireworks was immediately disappointed. Likewise, the early Warriors of the Wasteland traded Two Tribes’ machine-gun bassline and drum machine in favour of ‘real music’ on ‘real instruments’. The whole performance came across as ‘Def Leppard Lite’ for Frankie fans whose tastes had been finely tuned by the band's technology-fuelled excess previously.

More remarkable than the music would be the Lads’ decision – following a drunken afternoon watching Liverpool beating Everton 3-1 in the FA Cup Final – to smash up their gear at the end of their performance. Their exploits would win them some pitying tabloid coverage as they laid waste not only to the ruse that they had performed live, but also to a one-off, hand-made Levinson bass guitar, lent to O’Toole for the gig. “You f__king asshole, that was a $1,500 bass! I’ll sue you, motherfucker,” Levinson moaned as O’Toole took three attempts to crack its neck across the kick drum.

Nevertheless, with the cat now officially out of the bag, Rage Hard and Warriors single releases (and an opportunity to start earning back what they owed ZTT) would surely be a formality? But Trevor Horn, once again, had other ideas.

Back to the drawing board

Instead of trading on the Montreux hype, Rage Hard would endure months more of Horn tinkering and wouldn’t surface in stores until 25 August 1986. This meant that fans had waited 22 months for new Frankie material. Worse, in the absence of a single release, the Frankie faithful had watched their VHS recordings of the Montreux performance on endless loop for three and a half months. Even they were bored of Rage Hard by the time it was released.

Lipson and Horn did have one surprise up their sleeves, however. Rage Hard’s Young Person’s Guide To The 12” mix would go some way to explaining and making up for the delay. A pun on Benjamin Britten’s educational Young Person’s Guide To The Orchestra, in which a narrator introduces the various elements of the orchestra, Horn’s 12-minutes-plus remix of Rage Hard does likewise, with a sexy female voiceover introducing elements such as “the perky percussion”, “the sequencer” and “the godlike bass guitar” as Rage Hard (in barely recognisable form) ebbs and flows beneath them.

Originally, actress Joanna Lumley provided the voiceover from a script written by wordsmith and ZTT's antagonist-in-residence Paul Morely, and while Horn, Lipson and the band thought her performance was excellent, Lumley, subsequently thought otherwise. Having second thoughts about the sexual references she’d committed to tape she prudishly prevented them from using the recording. Instead, comedian Pamela Stephenson was commissioned to replace Lumley and lent the track her best newsreader voice.

While the mix would reward the Frankie faithful (and came in a beautiful cardboard collector's box giving fans somewhere to put all of Rage Hard’s many mixes and formats), the 7” moved only slightly from the Montreux mix months earlier. “I don’t think there were major differences between the two,” complained Nash, “apart from one costing more money than the other.” Teamed with the delay to the track's release – with rabid fans literally unable to buy it following its Montreux debut – Frankie’s big comeback only debuted at number six in the UK.

Sure, it would go to number one in Germany and reach as high as four in the UK (seven in the Netherlands, 12 in Austria, 19 in Sweden and 32 in France) but following the band’s hard work on breaking America with Pleasuredome promo, its inability to hit any kind of Billboard chart in the big money market, came as a huge disappointment.

But with lead single duly deployed, there was nothing for it but to reveal the real fruit of their labours. Liverpool, the band’s sequel to their ground-breaking debut, was released in the UK on 20 October 1986, a date almost perfectly mirroring Pleasuredome’s release two years earlier.

And, from day one, things did not go well.

While Q magazine liked the album (Q itself had only just launched and were perhaps afraid of heaping ire on such a monster so early in their tenure) everyone else wasn’t quite so sure. James Brown called it “a predictable piece of rock junk” in Sounds while David Quanitck asked “What do you do when you've made a completely excessive double album which made history as highly moderate filler?” in NME.

Liverpool was impressive, certainly, but ‘good’? Arguably and demonstrably not. Common consensus suggested that by and large, Liverpool was the band being someone else. A new Frankie that, whilst being perhaps a more true, ‘real’ Frankie, wasn’t the Frankie that everyone in the mid-80s signed up for.

The infectious, trashy glamour of singles such as Relax and Two Tribes was gone. Instead of more hedonistic dance-pop brilliance, fans were served tense, self-conscious stiff rock posturing. Perhaps, above all else, Frankie simply weren’t fun any more. Serious in being taken seriously, they’d allowed their annoyance at their perception to break the fourth wall and be visible right there on the front of the box. And like a knock on the door during lovemaking, with the band’s finger pointed at them to comply, fans proved unable to keep up their enthusiasm.

It’s unsurprising, therefore, that chart-wise Liverpool never matched its predecessor. While the album entered the chart at number five, it would spend only a single week in the top UK 10. And while it would go on to achieve Gold status in the UK, Pleasuredome’s triple Platinum rating cemented Liverpool’s standing as forever a flop.

And following Rage Hard and Liverpool’s moist squibs, it was only ever a case of diminishing returns for the rest of Liverpool’s singles. Warriors of the Wasteland (released 10 November 1986, three weeks after the Liverpool album and a full six months after its Montreux debut) only reached number 19 in the UK. While Watching The Wildlife, the third and final single release from Liverpool (and Frankie’s last ever release) only reached number 28 despite a blizzard of remixes across a cassette single and THREE different ‘fan-pleasing’ 12”s.

Special mention to Liverpool’s last stab, Wildlife’s Die Letzten Tage Der Menschheit mix (“The Last Days of Mankind”) which sets the otherwise perky and cheerful track to a stern teutonic backdrop over which the actor John Hurt dishes out doom-laden warnings about 1986’s ensuing AIDS crisis.

Johnson had wanted to call the album From The Diamond Mine To The Factory, a line from his Warriors lyric that spelt out the band’s journey, but – predictably – the rest of the band disagreed. Instead, Paul Morley suggested simply Liverpool, which met with reluctant approval. “In hindsight I would have picked Holly’s title because it was at least connected to the content of the album,” Nash would later admit.

And the final word on Liverpool? It’s perhaps best summed up by Johnson’s final words, emitted as its last track, Is Anybody Out There? – very much Liverpool’s Power of Love – melts into delicious, overblown reverb mush. At the end of it all, Johnson reflects: “I’m looking for something and I don’t know what it is.”

Buddy. You’re not the only one.

Al Jourgensen, leader of groundbreaking industrial metal band Ministry, says their new album is their last – and claims that he never wanted to be a rock star in the first place.

Jourgensen formed Ministry in Chicago in 1981, and near the end of that decade delivered two genre-defining classics with the 1988 album The Land Of Rape And Honey and 1989 follow-up The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste.

In that era, Minstry ranked alongside Nine Inch Nails as innovators and pioneers of industrial music.

Their biggest selling album was Psalm 69: The Way To Succeed And The Way To Suck Eggs, which was released in 1992 and was nominated for a Grammy.

New album Hate To Go (Take Out Or Delivery) is released on 30 October, and Jourgensen reveals in an interview with Hit Parader that this is the swan song for Ministry.

“I figure it’s time,” he says. “We’ve taken our genre and this band as far as we can go.”

Referring to Hate To Go (Take Out Or Delivery), Jourgensen states: “I’m really happy with this album and I think it’s a culmination of 40 years of the same elements. But I’m not enthused about continuing to keep doing this kind of music or music in general.”

With remarkable candour, he explains: “I just think that Ministry has run its course. And I’m glad it was here when it was here. But I have no regrets looking back on it and everything.

“Plus, I’m 68 years old. It’s like, God bless The Rolling Stones. They’re in their 80s. They do a new record and this and that. But I just have other interests.

“Basically, I never wanted to do this anyways. It’s pretty well documented that I just wanted to be a history professor for high school and college. And then I had these demo tapes that started selling and all of a sudden I’m in a band.

“I auditioned like 10 or 12 singers. I did not want to be singer. If anything, I always wanted to be Jimmy Page, not Robert Plant. And here I was, it just kept dragging me in. I kind of felt like Michael Corleone in Godfather III. Every time I try and get out, they pull me back in.

“So, it just kept getting to be more and more of this behemoth. I didn’t really set out to do this path to start with, but I guess I was able to do it well enough to sustain a 45-year career – but there comes a time.”

Al Jourgensen will take his final bows with Ministry on a world tour kicking off in April 2027.

They may have been poles apart musically, but it’s remarkable how many links there are between Queen and the Sex Pistols.

The two bands shared a producer in Chris Thomas, were (briefly) on the same label and had it not been for Freddie Mercury’s toothache - which led to Queen having to cancel an appearance on ITV London’s Today programme, the Pistols substituted in and thus the infamous Grundy interview - music history might have been quite different.

Now, in an interview with Classic Rock, Roger Taylor has been singing the praises of John Lydon and co. “I really loved the Pistols album,” the drummer told the magazine. “Great producer, mate of mine, Chris Thomas. Because we were in the same studio for a while in 1976 - 77, somewhere around there. They were doing their first album, and it was dreadful at first until Chris came in and made a great record.”

He also brought up the famous time Freddie met Sid Vicious. “Sid put his head in the studio and said: ‘Hello, Freddie, are we bringing ballet to the masses?’ And Freddie said something like: ‘Oh, Mister Ferocious, we’re doing our best here…’”

It seems that Taylor also has more positive things to say about John Lydon: “John was alright, actually. He was quite a character. We got on quite well. It’s just that Sid Vicious was such a dick.”

As for Lydon in 2026, well, he was interviewed on ITV’s Good Morning Britain last week and - surprise, surprise – was scathing about his old bandmates in the Pistols.

He and the rest of the band – Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock - fell out over the use of the group’s songs in Pistol, the TV dramatisation of Jones’s memoir Lonely Boy. Then in 2024, they recruited ex-Gallows singer Frank Carter to front the band for a couple of benefit shows, a reunion that has now been extended for over two years.

Lydon wasn’t impressed then, and still isn’t: "Cheek of them. Going out without me, singing the songs I wrote, the words I wrote, the presentation I created,” he told ITV.

When one of the presenters suggested that he “should have joined them”, Lydon replied: "Uh, well, no, ma'am. I've worked enough with them in the first place. They're deceitful, lying hyenas, and I never want another thing to do with them. So can we drop the karaoke band? Because that's what they are to me - they're imitating me, and that's really kind of insulting, because there's great bands out there that imitate us already."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So Are You Going To Go Our Way?

Then hit that button!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And besides, no one will notice.

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

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

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

Gavin Harrison is one of the world’s most acclaimed drummers. He’s also a member of not one but three great progressive rock bands – Porcupine Tree, King Crimson and The Pineapple Thief.

The new album by The Pineapple Thief, titled Far And Wide, is Harrison’s seventh with the band. And as he tells MusicRadar, he’s immensely proud of what he and his bandmates have achieved.

Harrison says of his creative partnership with the band’s leader, guitarist/vocalist Bruce Soord: “When I started to write with Bruce for this record we were in a good space, just me and him. My girlfriend was away, the house was empty, and me and Bruce just spent the first five days, day and night just bouncing ideas off each other, playing little bits, writing little bits, slowly starting to paint on the blank canvas and decide, ‘Yeah, this is nice, we should go here.’”

In his long career, Harrison has steadfastly drawn respect and admiration from the global drumming community and progressive music circles for his consummate technical ability, melodic and innovating rhythms – including head-turning reverse tom fills – and ability to launch endless musical ideas for those bands lucky enough to have him in their employ.

On the Far And Wide album, his muscular pocket grooves, surprising tom fills and cymbal crash flurries perfectly convey a sense of urgency and angst in the album’s key tracks.

Originating from those early writing sessions at Harrison’s home in North London are a number of plaintive songs that punch hard and call out societal woes. Honourable mention to Steve Kitch, synthesizers, whose instrumental ideas resulted in four additional songs for the album. Meanwhile, Jon Sykes’ bass parts provide a solid underpinning that locks tightly with Harrison’s rhythmic pulse.

Technically, The Pineapple Thief wanted to bring their live sound into the recording studio, thus minimising overdubs. Interestingly, this is also their first album without acoustic guitars. Harrison adopted this leaner approach when arranging the album so the songs would be road ready for the band’s upcoming tour.

The album’s opening song, New World Order, sets the stage of a dystopian world in chaos. Harrison’s beat displacement adds to the tension of the track. God Knows has a Nine Inch Nails feel with fuzzy octave pedal bass lines and overdriven vocals, while Still Living brings a collective redemptive calm through Kitch’s dreamy keyboard pads, Soord’s soaring guitar solo and Harrison’s relaxed 6/8 groove.

On an existential note, the song Hold The Ashes stares mortality straight in the face. The track draws inspiration from Soord’s personal journey of losing a parent in hospice care.

Despite the bleak, melancholic themes on Far And Wide, there is also a stoicism – an affirmation of human resilience and the will to rise above adversity. The album’s cover art subtly illustrates this concept through a solid granite sculpture whose beauty emerges from the rock’s blank canvas. Artist Michael Schoenholtz is credited for the sculpture and is also father of Harrison’s partner, Hannah.

Harrison explains the group’s approach to this album:

“Well, we’re always trying to not repeat ourselves,” he says. “Sometimes we start something and say, ‘Oh, this sounds a lot like something we’ve done, so let's abandon it.’ But even the ideas that we initially think don’t work will stay on the hard drive, and later on they can be incorporated into another song.

“There was a song called Oh, So Typical, and I really liked it, but we just couldn’t develop it. But it had such a nice hook in it, and that’s included in the song No Exceptions. When we were writing No Exceptions we reached a point where we thought, ‘It would be nice if it did something different here.’ And I said, ‘Bruce, that song we wrote a while ago, Oh So Typical, I think it could work if we slide that into this section.’”

He continues: “Sometimes there’s bits – they might be in a different tempo, they might be in a different key – but you can tell from the mood of it that it could fit really nicely into this other song. So sometimes a song is made up of two or three other songs. Or at least three, two or three ideas that we’ve had that we liked.

“But it’s not a patchwork quilt thing. We don’t think, ‘Let’s take all these little bits and stitch them together and hope it makes a song.’ But in post production, editing or arranging, we sometimes say, ‘Yeah, we really like where this is going, but it needs something else.’”

In the grand tradition of progressive rock, The Pineapple Thief are no strangers to unusual time signatures, as illustrated in the new song Through The Noise.

Harrison explains: “Quite often, I’ll play a piano line for Bruce, and it will be quirky in an odd time signature. In the middle of Through The Noise I had this little pattern that I wanted to play on the piano, and I said, ‘This could be an interesting riff.’ It turned out in 21/8. Not that it sounds like it's in 21/8, or sounds like it’s clever. It’s just the way the notes ran, the way the groupings of notes ran.

“As I wrote it, I didn’t know what the time signature was. I just followed the melody of the notes. And then on the way down, on the patterns at the end of the melody, I said, ‘Yeah, it needs to resolve here. So how many is that?’ I played it a few times and we recorded it.

“But it’s not done to be clever – it’s done because we like the sequence of notes in the rhythm that they’re in, and none of us are going to sit there counting to 21. We just learn the the riff, we learn the hook. And even when we play it live, we’ll just be singing the riff to ourselves. It’s not like some math kind of thing that we figure out. ‘Oh, how many notes could we fit together and make a crazy time signature?’”

He stresses: “I've never been interested in just doing stuff to sound clever. I think the hard and the most interesting part is to do things that sound musical and meaningful. And because we’ve been recording and playing together for ten years, and we’ve done a hell of a lot of gigs, we can actually imagine what this would be like on stage, how the lights might be, and how this could be a dramatic section where the drums stop. And then you’re just playing this thing on the guitar. So we do start imagining how this is gonna be when we perform it.

“Years ago we would write and record things and then worry about live performance later. But now, at the moment of composition, and especially when arranging the song, you think, ‘Oh yeah, this could be twice as long, and we could really build it, and then the lights will come up, and it will do all these things’. That’s quite helpful from an inspirational point of view.”

He refers to the noisiest track on the album, God Knows.

“Bruce was singing this pattern over the top at the end and I said, ‘You know what, Bruce? I don’t think you should sing over this end. I could imagine you walking away from the microphone, going to the front of the stage and totally rocking out with this riff, and we’ll all be smashing away. This will be good. And then come back and just sing the last line, and that will be the end of the song.’ And then when we thought about it like that, it kind of made more sense to us.”

Harrison returns to the theme of time signatures when discussing the song Scattering Like Flies.

“There’s always a little bit of rhythmic ambiguity, which I like” he says. "At the start of Scattering Like Flies it sounds like it’s in a different tempo than it really is. It’s actually in 7/8, or 7/4 if you like. Let’s say 7/4, but grouped into groups of three 16th notes. So you get a different pulse, except at the end of the bar, where we resolve it into the next bar. So there’s about eight or nine groupings of three, and then a grouping of two, or a grouping of four, or something, that resolves it back to the one.

“I played it to someone when we were writing it, and I said, ‘Where do you think the beat is?’ And they fell for the rhythmic illusion of that. I said, ‘OK, when I put the drums on, I’m gonna put a bass drum on beat one of a bar of 7/4, and I’ll play the snare drum as if I’m following you in the dotted eighth or three 16th notes pattern. And then the second verse, I’ll drop a bass drum every two beats and the listener will start to think, ‘Oh, hang on, something’s a bit different here.’ Then on the third verse, I’ll play all seven notes on the bass drum in a four-on-the-floor kind of way. And that will finally give people the realisation that actually the tempo is here with the bass drum, not with the illusion of the guitar and the vocal line. So those kind of things are done by design, really.”

In terms of inspiration, Harrison cites two songs from the ’80s – one by Paul Simon featuring legendary session drummer Steve Gadd, and another by Scottish pop group Danny Wilson, who took their unusual name from the 1952 movie Meet Danny Wilson, in which the titular character was played by Frank Sinatra.

“Sometimes you get inspiration from a song from decades ago,” Harrison says. “You think, ‘I always liked that vibe they did on that song.’ And I was thinking about that Danny Wilson song Five Friendly Aliens, where the drummer plays a kind of snare drum, almost military-esque pattern, with a few accents in it.

“That stuck in my mind, and when we were writing No Exceptions I thought, ‘I wonder if I could do something like that Five Friendly Aliens thing?’ A week after we finished No Exceptions I played the Danny Wilson album and I thought, ’It’s nothing like Five Friendly Aliens!’ But in my mind, the vibe is the same, even though the tempo is different and the pattern is different.”

He adds: “Hearts And Bones is a Paul Simon song, and I really like the way Steve Gadd plays on that song. It’s very, very subtle, but it gives such a nice vibe, and I’ve used that reference as inspiration for songs. What ends up is me trying to recreate that vibe.”

Gear-wise, Harrison used nothing new on this album.

“No, not really,” he shrugs. “I’m comfortable with my instrument. I mean, it’s like the piano to me. I don’t need to have a new piano, or a piano with different notes in a different order. I don’t need to set my drums up backwards to try to play something different. So the limitations are all in my head. If I’m not playing anything new, it’s not because of the equipment, it’s because I'm not thinking of anything new. So you need to get in a good space mentally.”

This was certainly true of Harrison and Bruce Soord this time around.

“Sometimes it goes really well, really fast,” Harrison says. “Sometimes it takes all day and we get nowhere. Sometimes we get somewhere we think it didn’t really click, but let’s keep it because we might come back to it.

“Scattering Like Flies was a song that we actually started writing for the last record, and then we abandoned. And actually there was only one section of it that Bruce really liked, so he basically wrote a whole new song, but kept that one section. It was previously a song we’d abandoned, and, if you heard the original, you would barely recognise it was even the same song.”

He adds: “We’ve done this type of writing collaboration on the previous album. To be in the same room together is actually much better. It focuses your energy, and it’s great to have someone to bounce off immediately.

“We also have very similar tastes, and we know what we both like. So, it’s not long before we recognise something good is happening. We might work for hours and hours and hours on one piece and be really happy with it. So it’s a bit of a random thing.”

To finish, Harrison names two tracks on the album as his personal favourites.

“I like playing Through The Noise,” he smiles. “It goes through a lot of different sections and moods rhythmically. I also like playing Scattering Like Flies. There are a few things happened on that track that I was really happy with.

“Bruce took some of my demo drumming and actually wrote a little riff around a couple of fills. So there’s a short fill and a slightly longer fill that happens at the end of every two bars, but the guitar riff plays with it, so the drums kind of become part of the riff. That's good fun!”

He laughs: “We’re gonna start rehearsing next week, so we’ll find out which songs really work and which ones really click together live.”

Linkin Park have released a documentary, Unshatter, which looks at the band’s resurrection since the suicide of lead vocalist Chester Bennington in 2017.

Replacing Bennington with ex-Dead Sara singer Emily Armstrong was a brave move for all concerned, and Unshatter covers the adjustments that had to be made by both the band and their new vocalist.

In an interview with People about the film, Armstrong admits that she was initially intimidated by the scale of the task in front of her: “You see it in the documentary where I’m just like, ‘Am I even cut out for this?’ You’re trying to give yourself every reason to just be like, ‘You’re not good. Everybody knows these songs.’”

It was essential, she explains, to put her own touch on the band’s extensive back catalogue. “That’s the only thing that I could think of. Don’t try to be like anybody. You’re not a replacement. Nobody could ever, ever replace Chester. Do what you do.”

Part of that involved adapting some of the band’s classic songs. The documentary shows the additional prep that Armstrong and fellow new recruit drummer Colin Brittain had to do, which, as the drummer explains in the film, included making sure those songs felt natural for Armstrong’s voice.

“She and I would get together at my house probably four days a week for a period of months learning the songs,” Brittain says. “We changed a bunch of the keys a bunch of times to try to find what was comfortable for her to sing it in while still retaining the same original energy and shape.”

Speaking to People, the documentary maker and the band’s ‘creative director’ Joe Hahn remembers capturing the band going through this process with Armstrong and Brittain. “I think the first one we addressed was Crawling [from 2000’s Hybrid Theory]. The important thing for us was for her to sing it her way, not to imitate anything. If it’s personal to her, then it’s gonna resonate."

“We heard that, made a few little modifications and were just like, ‘OK, this really works,’ Hahn says, remembering it as the moment the band knew the new line-up was right. “It was almost like the icebreaker to make the rest feel very achievable.”

As for Armstrong, she still seems to be pinching herself that she’s fronting the band she’s been a fan of for years. “I know how lucky I am,” she says in Unshatter. “It’s everything I’ve dreamed of. I’m so fortunate to be in this position. It’s crazy. Having it happen later in my life is something I wouldn’t change.”

Unshatter is currently enjoying a limited theatre run. At some point details will no doubt be announced about its streaming release.

Mike Love returned to live duties with the Beach Boys over the weekend after a summer that has seen the 85-year-old sidelined by some serious health issues. But concerns remain around Love’s condition – Rolling Stone has described his appearance at the show in Cincannati as “alarmingly frail”.

As you can see from the footage below, the singer moved very slowly – with the help of his son Christian and fellow performer John Stamos - to his position centre stage, where he sat for the duration of the performance, contributing occasional backing vocals.

Neither the band nor Love himself have revealed the exact nature of his health problems. After an appearance in London in June, Love wrote on Instagram that “Losing my sister, Maureen, on the first anniversary of cousin Brian’s death, combined with my ongoing recovery from what started out as bronchitis, followed by Covid, has taken both an emotional and physical toll on me. I feel stronger every day physically, but I am heartbroken emotionally.”

Since then the group have pulled a number of shows, though they did play a private event in California the Saturday before last (3 October). Following that, a gig in Bloomington, Illinois on Friday (9 October) was cancelled due to “unforeseen circumstances”.

After the Cincinnati show, they were due to play in Nashville last night. Before the show, Stamos posted on social media that “My beloved friend, father figure, musical hero and mentor, Mike Love, is facing serious health challenges. We hope he’ll be doing what he loves for years to come, but we don’t know what the future holds. We have tonight. Mike is a fighter. Despite doctors, family and friends urging him to focus on his health, he insists on being on stage. He says he needs his band, the audience, his friends and drummer surrounding him to lift him up.”

He continued: "I’ve played with Mike for 41 years. I never imagined how deeply it would affect me to see someone larger than life face something so human and fragile. The Mike Love we see tonight may not be exactly the Mike we’ve always known. But he’s still every bit the Mike we love.”

All very concerning for the group’s many fans. As they know, Love has been the one continuous thread in the Beach Boys since they formed in 1961 - sadly, all three Wilson brothers have died and the other surviving founder member Al Jardine hasn’t been a part of the band since their 50^th anniversary reunion tour in 2012.

When Lindsey Buckingham presented Sombr with the Songwriter of the Year award at the Variety Power of Young Hollywood event earlier this year, he revealed in an interview that the young artist – real name Shane Michael Boose – had spoken to him about the possibility of a collaboration.

“I don’t know what form that will take, or if it will take at all, so we will just have to wait and see,” said the Fleetwood Mac legend.

But now we have at least some of the answer. During his show at the Los Angeles Kia Forum on 10 October, Sombr sprung a surprise by inviting Buckingham on stage to duet on Go Your Own Way, a classic Fleetwood Mac song from their much-loved 1976 album, Rumours.

After Sombr had described him as a “fucking legend”, Buckingham arrived to a rapturous reception. Taking a guitar from a tech, he proceeded to lead Sombr and his band through the song, singing the first verse himself and leaving the young pretender to handle the second.

Which might not have been such a good idea: Boose appeared to stumble over some of the words and struggled with the lyrics’ phrasing, leaving some to wonder how well he actually knows Go Your Own Way – or, indeed, how much he’d rehearsed it.

No one at the gig seemed to mind, though, and nerves may well have played a part (it must be pretty intimidating to perform with one of your heroes, after all). What’s more, Sombr was on safer ground in the choruses, which pretty much everyone in the building seemed to join in with.

Lindsey, meanwhile, was busy proving that his guitar chops are still present and correct as he delivered a blistering solo in the outro.

The question, of course, is whether we’ll ever again see Buckingham performing the song with his surviving Fleetwood Mac bandmates. He hasn’t played with the band since 2018, when his relationship with Stevie Nicks soured, but the two are now believed to be back on speaking terms, and Buckingham has hinted that there could be big things to come in 2027. We shall see.

It was May 1976, early summer in Hollywood, California, and Phil Lynott was on a high.

The singer, bassist and leader of fast-rising rock heroes Thin Lizzy, Lynott was enjoying a night out at the famous Rainbow Bar & Grill on the Sunset Strip. At his side was Lizzy’s California-born guitarist Scott Gorham.

They had a swagger about them, and for good reason. Lizzy’s single The Boys Are Back In Town – partly inspired by the band’s first trip to LA – had become a huge hit both in America and across the Atlantic. In Ireland, Lynott’s homeland, it was No 1.

Thin Lizzy and Phil Lynott had arrived, and Lynott wasn’t shy about letting people know it. As he walked into the Rainbow that night, he felt invincible.

The Rainbow was where rock ’n’ roll royalty held court. In its dark corners and private booths, drug dealers and groupies attended to the stars.

Led Zeppelin, especially, loved the Rainbow. Whenever they were in Los Angeles they made the place their own: they were the biggest band in the world, and threw their weight around accordingly, drummer John Bonham most of all.

Bonzo would think nothing of ordering up ten Black Russian cocktails – for himself – and then picking a fight with anyone who looked at him the wrong way. He was one of rock’s true wild men. But even Bonzo was taken aback when he ran into Phil Lynott in the Rainbow on that night in May ’76.

Lynott and Scott Gorham stood at the bar, knocking back drinks with Ritchie Blackmore, the ex-Deep Purple guitarist, who had once tried to lure Lynott away from Thin Lizzy to play bass in a new group. Blackmore was feared as the meanest, moodiest bastard in rock. He was a huge star with a big reputation and a savage wit. But Lynott wasn’t intimidated. Lizzy had been booked to support Blackmore’s new band Rainbow on a forthcoming US tour, and Lynott was fired up about it.

As John Bonham looked on, Lynott sneered to Blackmore, “Man, when we get on the road we’re gonna kick your ass every night. You won’t know what’s hit you!”

Blackmore was speechless. Bonzo was laughing his head off. Both were amazed at Lynott’s cockiness. But that was Phil Lynott. The man wasn’t short on self-belief. He was good and he knew it.

In ’76, Phil Lynott and Thin Lizzy were on a path to glory. The Boys Are Back In Town blared from radios throughout that long, hot summer. Lizzy would follow it with many more great songs and classic albums.

The band would develop into one of the definitive hard rock acts of the ’70s; the first internationally successful Irish rock band, fronted by the first black rock superstar since Jimi Hendrix. Thin Lizzy’s wild lifestyle would become the stuff of legend. And their music would inspire future rock giants from Bon Jovi and Def Leppard to Guns N’ Roses and The Darkness.

But Thin Lizzy, and Phil Lynott, were bound for self-destruction. By 1983, the band had split up. And on 4 January 4 1986, just 10 years after that night at the Rainbow when the world was at his feet, Phil Lynott was pronounced dead, his heart, liver and kidneys all having failed due to the effects of prolonged drug addiction.

His death, at just 36 years old, was described by his friend Bob Geldof as “a sickening tragedy.” Phil Lynott had lived fast and paid the price. But the man had such charisma, and produced so much great music, that he would never be forgotten.

The bronze statue of Phil Lynott that stands on Grafton Street in Dublin, one of his favourite haunts, confirms his status as a great Irish hero and a genuine rock ‘n’ roll icon. As Scott Gorham stated simply, “Phil left an impression like nobody else.”

Phil Lynott was the kind of rock star who made it all look easy. He exuded an effortless cool. But he’d been through many tough times, and won many hard battles.

He was born Philip Parris Lynott on 20 August 1949 in Birmingham. His mother Philomena Lynott was a student nurse from Dublin, his father Cecil Parris a black American serviceman. The couple never married, and separated soon after Philip’s birth.

Philomena, a devout Catholic, admitted, “I was a sinner in the eyes of the church.” ’50s society was scornful of unwed mothers and mixed-race relationships. There were few black kids in Dublin back then. Philip was subjected to racist abuse. He grew up without a father, and was also separated from his mother at the age of four when Philomena took a job in Manchester and left Philip in Dublin to be raised by her family.

It was not an idyllic childhood, but Philip was smart, and his confidence grew when, aged just 11, he joined his first rock ‘n’ roll band, The Black Eagles. Philip was the singer and he loved the attention he got.

The Black Eagles were no more than a covers act – Beatles and Stones hits a speciality – but by the mid-’60s they were performing four nights a week, giving Philip his first taste of stardom, albeit on a very modest scale.

Also of significance was the bond Philip formed with the Eagles’ drummer Brian Downey, who attended the same school as Philip in the working class district of Crumlin. The pair would become co-founders of Thin Lizzy in 1970, but only after Philip had learned another hard lesson.

When The Black Eagles fell apart in 1967, Philip worked for a brief time at an iron foundry. It was to be his final, half-hearted attempt at holding down a normal job, aborted when he was invited to join a new rock band named Skid Row in 1968. He got the gig because, as Skid Row’s leader Brendan ‘Brush’ Shiels later revealed, “Philip was the best looking boy around, and I knew that with him fronting the band, we’d get lots of attention from girls.”

Skid Row played the psychedelic rock songs of the era – Hendrix, Cream, etc – and were soon one of the most popular bands in Ireland. Philip the gangly youth was becoming Phil Lynott the rock star. And when the band acquired a brilliant new guitarist in Belfast-born Gary Moore, they were emerging as serious contenders. Then they fired their singer.

Phil couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He had been struggling with his voice and needed an operation to have his tonsils removed. When he returned to the band, they’d decided that they were, in Shiels’ words, “better off without him.” It was a bitter blow for Phil and a tough call for Brush Sheils to make, especially as Phil had been best man at Shiels’ wedding.

Shiels did what he could for Phil: he taught him how to play bass, and gave him a bass guitar at a knockdown price (which Phil never did get around to paying). Most valuable of all, however, was the lesson Phil learned from the Skid Row experience: that even friends could screw you over, and that the only sure way to avoid getting screwed in the future was to boss your own band.

That’s exactly what Phil did with Orphanage, formed in 1969 with old friend Brian Downey, bassist Pat Quigley and guitarist Joe Staunton. This being Phil’s band, they played Phil’s songs: new, original compositions. And this being the new, more ruthless and business-savvy Phil, when a better option materialised, he grabbed it.

Another hot young guitarist from Belfast, Eric Bell, turned up at an Orphanage gig at Dublin’s Countdown Club, and despite being off his face on acid (“It was like waking up on Jupiter!” he later confessed), Bell talked Phil and Brian into forming a new band with him.

The new band got its name from a character in the children’s comic The Dandy: Tin Lizzie, the Mechanical Maid. It was Eric Bell who said they should change the name to ‘Thin Lizzy’, because heavily accented Dubliners would pronounce it the same anyhow. Phil laughed: Thin Lizzy it was. And in three years, that name was at the top of the British and Irish charts.

Thin Lizzy’s first hit was a complete fluke. Their first two albums, released in 1971 and 1972, had sold poorly, so when co-manager Ted Carroll heard them playing around with an old Irish folk song called Whiskey In The Jar, he suggested they record it for a single. Brian Downey was horrified. “Fuck off!” he snapped. “It’s a joke song – it’s not Thin Lizzy.” Downey had a point: Thin Lizzy were a hard rock band, and although their version of Whiskey In The Jar had a rock feel, it was still, plainly, a folk song. They recorded it anyway, mostly to keep Carroll happy, and in March 1973, to the band’s surprise, the single hit No 1 in Ireland and No 6 in the UK.

Phil Lynott was on Top Of The Pops. He was a star. But celebrations were short-lived. When subsequent singles bombed, Lizzy were written off as one-hit wonders. And although they’d made a third album together, Eric Bell was faltering. He loved music but hated the music business. Also, he was, by his own admission, “drinking too much, doing too many drugs.” Following a disastrous gig in Belfast when he was so pissed he could barely play, Bell resigned. “I’d lost my mind,” he confessed years later. From hereon in, Thin Lizzy would change guitar players like most bands would change guitar strings…

Bell’s replacement, Gary Moore, would last just four months. He and Phil had hit it off when they were in Skid Row, but when Moore toured with Lizzy in early ’74 he would irritate Phil by hogging the spotlight, and would drink even more than Eric Bell did. “I was killing myself,” Moore admitted. So he quit the band, and in doing so, almost finished them off.

With two guitarists gone in quick succession, Brian Downey grew so disillusioned that he quit too. For a brief period, Thin Lizzy was Phil Lynott and Phil Lynott alone. But after luring Downey back for an extra £50 per week – big money in those days – Lynott had a great idea: he’d replace Gary Moore with not one but two new guitarists. First came 17 year-old Glaswegian Brian Robertson, then 21 year-old Scott Gorham. Both would play lead guitar. A new Thin Lizzy sound was born.

What they needed next was another hit record, and fast. Thin Lizzy were massively in debt, and their new record label Vertigo wanted a quick return on their investment. As Scott Gorham admitted: “The guillotine was hanging right over everybody’s heads.” Lizzy delivered two patchy albums inside a year, Nightlife and Fighting. Neither of them was a big seller. The third album for Vertigo would be their last chance with the company – maybe the last chance that Thin Lizzy would ever have.

Released in March 1976, Jailbreak was a quantum leap. The sound was bigger and tougher. The songs were stronger. The performances oozed confidence. Thin Lizzy meant business. And although it didn’t look so good when Jailbreak started off selling slowly, the breakthrough came when a song from the album started getting radio airplay in America. Incredibly, it was a song that wasn’t even going to be on the album until one of the band’s managers said he liked it.

As Scott Gorham recalled, “We were on tour in America and our management said The Boys Are Back In Town was bustin’ out of the Midwest. We said, ‘Shit, we’d better put it in the set!’ It really caught the record company with their pants down, like, ‘Holy crap, man! I think we got a hit on our hands!’ It did a hundred yard dash up the American charts, and the album took off. We couldn’t quite believe that this was happening.”

Phil Lynott had really nailed it with The Boys Are Back In Town. It was a great song – fluid, catchy, punchy – with a brilliantly evocative lyric about boys and girls, drinking and fighting. It was, said Phil, a song that “every street gang in the world can relate to.” It would become one of the classic rock anthems, and the song Thin Lizzy would always be remembered for. But its short-term effects were no less impressive. The Boys Are Back In Town saved Thin Lizzy’s career.

It certainly gave Phil Lynott something to boast about when he bumped into Ritchie Blackmore in LA in ’76. But Phil would regret telling Blackmore that Lizzy were going to kick his ass every night on tour. Lizzy had to pull out of those dates when Phil contracted hepatitis. His eyes were “banana yellow”. He ended up in a hospital in Manchester for three weeks.

Phil told the press that this illness had made him reconsider the kind of lifestyle he was leading. “You’re chasing the wrong things,” he said. But he wouldn’t slow down. He even wrote the next album, Johnny The Fox, while he was in that Manchester hospital.

Phil Lynott had worked hard to get to the top and he would work hard to stay there. And he loved to play hard too. As Scott Gorham said with a laugh, “I liked to actually sleep every once in a while, but Phil, he was the original 24-hour guy.”

In the late ’70s, no band worked harder or partied harder than Thin Lizzy. Gorham: “We were touring so heavily, we were getting so tired out on the road, we were looking for inspiration anywhere. You wanted to get fucking high, man.” As the band’s former tour manager Frank Murray once noted, wherever Lizzy played, “every chick in town got a backstage pass.”

Phil was exceptionally popular with the ladies. “He had this image as a leather-clad rocker, a tough character,” Gorham said. “But Phil had a real romantic, poetic, charming side to him. He could charm the ass off anyone, women especially.”

Equally, he was very capable of looking after himself and the other guys in the band whenever a jealous boyfriend or drunken idiot fancied throwing a few punches.

“It was like the Wild West,” Gorham smiled. “We were the fastest guns in town and there was always some young punk who wanted to take you down. He was a fighting guy, Phil – even if he was stoned. He had that attitude: fuck with me, man, or fuck with my band, and there’s gonna be a world of hurt going on here!”

If Phil was the kind of guy you could rely on in a fight, Brian Robertson was the kind you could rely on to start one. Lizzy’s young guitarist was drunk a lot of the time, often putting away two bottles of whiskey a night. The amount of speed he was snorting didn’t help, either.

“I was like a stick of dynamite waiting to explode,” he admitted. But Robbo often came off worse from a scrap. In 1977 he missed Lizzy’s tour of the US with Queen after injuring a hand in a brawl, Gary Moore acting as stand-in. Robbo returned for another tour at the end of that year, and in June 1978 the band were celebrating their biggest success to date when the Live And Dangerous album hit No 2 on the UK chart.

It remains arguably the greatest live album ever made. As Scott Gorham says, “Live And Dangerous is what Thin Lizzy was all about.” But it was also the last album Brian Robertson would make with the band.

He quit before he was sacked. “I was just out of control,” Robertson said. “A complete asshole.” In August 1978 Gary Moore joined on a full-time basis, and in April 1979 Lizzy had another top 10 album with Black Rose. Thin Lizzy looked solid, and Phil Lynott was a happy man – his girlfriend Caroline Crowther, daughter of TV personality Leslie, had given birth to their first child, Sarah. Plus, he was working on his first solo album, Solo In Soho, another personal milestone.

But behind the scenes, Lynott was sowing the seeds of his own destruction. During the recording of Black Rose in Paris, he and Scott Gorham had become hooked on heroin. “That was me and him gone for the next six years,” Gorham said. It was an addiction that Lynott would never shake.

Slowly, Phil Lynott’s life would fall apart. His band would go into decline, his marriage to Caroline would disintegrate, his health gradually eroded by the drugs.

Gary Moore quit Thin Lizzy – for the second and final time – during the summer of ’79, midway through an American tour. Moore was drinking heavily but felt that Lynott was doing far too many drugs. “I couldn’t stand there watching Phil blowing it night after night,” he said.

With Moore’s replacement, former Pink Floyd sideman Snowy White, Lizzy made two more albums, but they were sounding past their best. Lynott’s second solo album was a mess. So too was Scott Gorham. He could feel the heroin killing him. “I was in way too much pain,” he recalled. “I wasn’t having fun anymore. I said, ‘Phil, I’m done, baby!’”

But Phil managed to talk him into doing one last tour. The fans, he said, deserved a proper farewell. Reluctantly, Gorham agreed. A new guitarist, ex-Tygers Of Pan Tang star John Sykes, was recruited. A new album, Thunder And Lightning – the heaviest of the band’s career – was recorded.

In January 1983, Thin Lizzy headed back out on the road for the very last time. Scott Gorham winced at the memory.

“Fuck, it went on forever,” he groans. “It was the most painful thing I ever went through. People didn’t want to let go.”

A four-night residency at the Hammersmith Odeon was concluded on 12 March with guest appearances from Brian Robertson, Gary Moore and then Eric Bell during the encores. Old grudges were forgotten.

Thin Lizzy’s last British show was at the Reading Festival on 28 August 1983, the Sunday evening. The last they ever played with Phil Lynott was on 4 September in Nuremberg. Brian Robertson was present at that show as a member of Motörhead. He cried as he watched from the wings. Scott Gorham did not. “I was numb,” he said. “Numb to any emotion that was going on.”

Many believed that Phil Lynott had always intended to reform Thin Lizzy somewhere down the line. When his post-Lizzy band Grand Slam fizzled out in 1985, the reunion seemed inevitable. Phil and Scott Gorham discussed it in December 1985 when Scott visited Phil at his house in Kew, south London. They had not seen each other for a year, in which time Scott had kicked heroin. When Phil greeted him, Gorham was shocked at his appearance.

“He was fucked up, bloated,” Gorham said. “He just didn’t look good, and he was wheezing with asthma. That was always a telltale sign with Phil. When he was doing smack it affected his lungs.

“We sat talking. He told me he was gonna stop doing all that crap and get healthy again. He talked about getting the band back together. And there was something in the way he said it that convinced me that he wanted out. So I actually walked out feeling quite upbeat. I felt he had a chance. Three weeks later I got the phone call…”

It was on Christmas Day, at the house in Kew, that Philomena Lynott found her son lying unconscious. Phil was driven to a rehab centre near Salisbury, where staff immediately referred him to a local hospital. There, eleven days later, he died.

“Phil was a true star,” Brian Robertson said. “He was an original.”

Perhaps it was British DJ John Peel who described Phil Lynott best: “Part rakish lover, part football hooligan, part incurable romantic, part historic warrior.” Peel added, with more characteristic understatement, “He has written some good songs.”

According to his friend and Boomtown Rats singer Bob Geldof, “Philip was the classic rock star in every sense. He was a rock star to the very core of his being, and therein lies the tragedy. He couldn’t be anything else: it was that or nothing.”

“I still dream about him,” Scott Gorham said. “And there’s one dream I keep having, where he just shows up, and I say,’ Jesus, Phil, you don’t know what I’ve been going through, man!’ And he taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.’ And after that, everything’s okay.”

It’s been confirmed that Don’t Look Back In Anger, the Oasis documentary that covers their triumphant 2025 reunion is up on streaming platforms from today (9 October).

The film – which was released at cinemas last month – will be available via Hulu and Disney+ in the US and just Disney+ internationally. Unfortunately, there aren’t any free trials happening for either platform at present. So if you missed it at the cinema, you’ll have to take out a subscription of some description. For more details head over to the Disney+ website at disneyplus.com.

In a statement, the Head of Content at Disney+ Angela Jain said: “The great wait is over... as we now bring Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger to as many people as possible through Disney+, and to be doing it with exclusive unseen footage too, is so exciting for fans."

"The Oasis reunion has been one of our defining cultural moments of recent times. We have seen how the documentary has resonated with audiences around the world as they celebrate the power of Oasis and music through this evocative and moving reunion story.”

The film has picked up generally positive reviews from the critics, with the Guardian describing it as “highly enjoyable” and adding that it "recollects how effortlessly funny the Gallagher brothers are, like a great comic double act.". The most memorable quip came from Time Out, which dubbed it: “The Last Waltz with parkas”.

The release of the documentary coincides with the announcement of next year’s round of Oasis dates. The ticketing process, compared to the bunfight that occurred for the initial reunion dates a couple of years ago, has been relatively straightforward this time. You’ll be unsurprised to hear that all forty two European and North American dates have already sold out. It remains unclear whether any more will be pencilled in.

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Judas Priest bassist Ian Hill has announced his immediate retirement from the legendary heavy metal band – leaving only singer Rob Halford as a survivor from the line-up that recorded their debut album Rocka Rolla in 1974.

Hill has revealed that arthritis is the cause of his exit from the band.

In a statement issued by Judas Priest, Hill says: “For a long time now, when asked ‘how long can you continue?’ I’ve always answered, ‘until my performances suffer’. I hate to say it, but that time has come.”

Hill was born in West Bromwich in 1952 and joined Judas Priest in 1970 along with his school friend and guitarist K.K. Downing.

Hill has played on every Priest album to date, including genre-defining classics such as Sad Wings Of Destiny (1976), Stained Class (1978), British Steel (1980) and Screaming For Vengeance (1983).

One of the many highlights of his career with Priest was a performance at Live Aid in 1985.

Hill has also revealed that he has recorded bass parts for the band’s forthcoming 20th studio album.

Hill’s replacement has already been confirmed: Davey Rimmer of Uriah Heep, who also performs alongside Priest guitarist Richie Faulkner in the side project band Elegant Weapons.

A comment from Judas Priest states: “It is with heavy hearts that we are sending out this personal message from our Ian. He has been the backbone of Judas Priest for so long and will be greatly missed by us all. We wish him well in his retirement and welcome Davey into the Priest Family.”

Hill explains in his statement: “For some years now, I’ve been struggling with the onset of the evil arthritis, which is now in an advanced state in my left shoulder and right hand, established in my right shoulder, and present in both knees. I’ve been fighting this with painkilling pills, gels, and recently with cortisone injections in my shoulder and hand.

“Although I was able to put bass lines to the songs for the new album, there were questions whether I’d be able to complete the recent European tour without incident, so we asked our good friend Davey Rimmer from Uriah Heep, and of course Elegant Weapons, to learn the set list to stand in for me if I had to pull out, which I did for the London show. This was due to me snapping a tendon in my left shoulder (as if I didn't have enough problems with it!) just before the encores during the Brussels show two days before. This led to me not being able to lift my arm enough to reach the neck of my bass. So we had to call Davey to stand in for me, who put in an incredible performance at such short notice!

He continues: “I’ve seen specialists, who suggest I might get away without surgery, but even if I don't there’s no guarantee either way that I’ll have enough strength in my shoulder/arm to complete a whole stage show.

“In view of all this, and the fact that I’ve neglected my family life for fifty seven years, I've decided to retire and spend the remaining years making up for it, and doing things with them before it involves one of ’em pushing me around in a wheelchair.”

Hill concludes: “The obvious choice for my replacement is Davey. He’s a great bassist, and a genuinely nice bloke who’ll fit the job perfectly, and I wish him the very best of luck!

“There's not a day goes by where I don't give thanks for the incredible journey I've lived through, and it just remains for me to say that I love you all, and thank you for the life you've let me live.”

You could come up with a very long list of hit songs that were started in Apple’s GarageBand – famously, Rihanna's 2007 smash Umbrella is built on one of its stock drum loops – which makes it all the more surprising that, when Harry Styles told Thom Yorke that he uses the iPhone version of the software to get his ideas down, the Radiohead frontman’s jaw almost hit the floor.

The exchange came during the pair’s Musicians on Musicians interview for Rolling Stone, and began when Styles admitted that his laptop has been dead for about six years.

“I don’t know where the charger is,” he confessed. “We can help you with that,” replied Yorke, who then wondered where Styles records his song ideas if he doesn't have a functioning computer.

“On my phone,” Styles told him. “I use GarageBand a lot.”

This revelation left Yorke open-mouthed: “You should keep that to yourself, dude,” he chortled, the suggestion being Styles had committed some kind of embarrassing creative faux pas.

Respectfully, we’d disagree: whether you’re using it on Mac, iPad or iPhone, GarageBand is a great song-starting platform, giving you everything you need to make a musical idea a reality. And if you do need more functionality, you can open up the project in Logic Pro and develop it further.

A slightly bashful Styles went on to say that he also uses Apple’s Voice Memos – another app that’s loved by many songwriters and has a variety of musician-friendly features.

“Wow,” replied Thom, which led to Styles conceding that his methods are somewhat primitive. “In a way that’s good,” Thom told him, though he didn’t say exactly how.

After being on the receiving end of that gentle ribbing, we’re pleased to be able to report that Styles managed to land a burn of his own when Yorke revealed that he used to record his ideas to MiniDisc. Styles said that he remembers that format, too – “from being in primary school.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Yorke discussed his current recording habits, revealing that he always travels with a laptop. “There's upsides to it and downsides to it, to be honest, because it means you've got everything at your fingertips, so you can fiddle endlessly – like, get really excited about a synth sound,” he explained.

On the downside, Yorke believes that these endless possibilities “encourage obsessive tendencies, which is not good.”

Yorke also told the story of the moment he was introduced to Pro Tools, which came when Radiohead were recording their 2000 album, Kid A, with producer Nigel Godrich.

“When when we were doing Kid A, Nigel had the first Pro Tools setup, because we were having to record strings – we couldn't get them on to the tape,” he remembered. “And I was like, ‘I need that’, because because I was always a bit of a computer head. So when I saw that in the studio, I just wanted to learn it immediately, and that really changed how I thought about music straight away. Suddenly, I have a multitrack in in my bag.”

Once again, it's time for Quiz of the Week, when we take a look back, pluck out 10 of our favourite stories from the past seven days, then put you to the test.

As ever, there's new gear, tall tales and classic hits to comtemplate.

Have you got what it takes to earn that perfect ten?

Hit the button and Start Me Up!

As we know, Kevin Parker is Tame Impala. In the studio, he plays all the instruments and writes all the songs. It’s his vision, his project. But what happens when he plays live? How much leeway do his touring musicians have?

That was one of the issues that was discussed when Parker appeared on Questlove’s podcast, er The Questlove Show. When the Roots man asked him about collaborating live with other musicians, Parker admitted: “We are amazingly on the same page these days. It took us many years to get there, and like in the early days, there was a lot of tension and a lot of friction, a lot of confusion about like what we're doing here.

“You know, it's like, 'Are we a band, Kevin, or is this the Kevin show, and we're just your session musicians?' You know, there was a lot of that so like we couldn't work out what it was, and what it was supposed to be. So I think for a long time it was difficult and caused a lot of arguments and just like you know bad vibes."

Parker admitted that he used to be quite controlling, especially about drum sounds: "I used to be such a stickler for sounds, drum fills.

"When Jay was on drums, be like, ‘Oh, Jay, I noticed you didn't do the drum fill that's on the album coming into the second verse’. And he'd be like, ‘Oh yeah, I just did my own drum fill. Is that okay?’ It's like, well, the kids are gonna wanna hear that drum fill, so maybe just do that one. He's like, ‘Well, fuck you. I'll do every drum fill in the fucking album’.

“Now it’s like we’ve dialled in the instruments, the synths we’ve got, like a Swiss army knife I can make them sound like anything. Now we appreciate the live versions as their own thing.”

Some things though are non-negotiable. “I’m big on recognisability,” he adds. “When that song starts, people have got to know it’s that song straight away. It’s got to be instant, right? That’s got to be the ‘everyone fucking hands in the air’ moment. But for the rest of the song, it can be its own thing. Whatever works best. Playing music in the arena is a completely different experience to headphones on in your bedroom, and it should reflect that.”

Questlove then asked if he had learned to let some things go. “Exactly,” Parker agreed. “Rehearsals are really fun now.”

Olivia Rodrigo going from superfan to friend and collaborator of Robert Smith has been one of the more heartwarming musical relationship stories of the past couple of years, but The Cure frontman does have one bone to pick with the young superstar.

It relates to the fact that, as of earlier this year, Rodrigo went so far as to release a song called The Cure, though not one that has anything to do with the band. This became a big hit, which means there could have been a knock-on effect for Smith.

Quoted in The Hollywood Reporter in an interview with Rodrigo, Smith says: “I was like, ‘Oh thanks, every Google search from now on is going to come up with that.’”

He’s joking, of course, but, just for the record, we think Smith can rest relatively easily. Our extensive research indicates that typing ‘The Cure’ into Google still brings up his band rather than Rodrigo’s song as the top result.

Elsewhere in the interview, Smith praises Rodrigo’s commitment to her craft: “Olivia’s desire to be recognized as a songwriter is very refreshing; it’s unmodern in a way,” he says. “It’s not effortless – she spends an awful lot of time getting things right with her music, but she also gets it right so quickly.

“It’s bizarre at times. She was in London with me a while back. She played me something she wrote that morning, things that could take 14 years for many writers to get out, and she does it in a morning.”

After guesting during Rodrigo’s headline set at Glastonbury in 2025, Smith went on to appear on a song, What’s Wrong With Me, on her latest album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love. One collaborator that Rodrigo won’t be working with any time soon, though, is AI.

“I would never use AI in any of my music,” she says in the Hollywood Reporter profile. “Absolutely no. Hard line on that. The closest I’d ever got is that once, me and [producer] Dan [Nigro] were like, ‘God, I wonder what ideas ChatGPT would have for an Olivia Rodrigo title,’ and they’re all fucking awful.”

Rodrigo also reflects on the success of her female-led Daisy Chain Fields festival, but says that one of her plans didn’t come to fruition. A huge White Stripes fan, she recently purchased the dress that Meg White wore on the cover of their Elephant album and hoped to wear it herself on stage, but couldn’t because it was “too fucking hot.”

“Maybe if I do Daisy Chain in the winter, I can wear it,” she suggests.

It is one of the most eccentric and insanely brilliant hit songs of all time, and it was inspired in part by The Beatles.

Hocus Pocus by Dutch progressive rock group Focus was a top 10 hit in the US and a top 20 hit in the UK. And as the band’s former guitarist Jan Akkerman says, it was the product of a whole host of influences – from the Fab Four to Frank Zappa and jazz icon John Coltrane.

Speaking in the new issue of Guitar World, Akkerman looks back on the period in 1971 when the band created Hocus Pocus and its parent album Focus II, AKA Moving Waves.

Alongside Akkerman in the line-up for that album were lead vocalist and keyboardist singer Thijs van Leer, bassist Cyril Havermans and drummer Pierre van der Linden.

Akkerman tells Guitar World: “In those days, even before Focus, I listened to a lot of John Coltrane, Django Reinhardt and all sorts of things. And with Hocus Pocus, I remember I was listening to a lot of the Beatles’ ‘White Album’.

“I loved the craziness of that album. I’d be listening to that with one ear while having the other fixed on the television while sitting on the floor with a guitar. I’d come up with a heavy lick, and through that sort of process, tracks like Hocus Pocus and that album came together. That album has a lot of different influences layered in.”

He cites a track from Zappa’s landmark 1969 album Hot Rats as a major influence on Hocus Pocus.

“I heard a song by Frank Zappa called Willie The Pimp,” he says, “which was in the same category as The Beatles or the Rolling Stones but more genuine. This triggered the old rock ’n’ roll feel in me, not realising how good it felt playing it, and of course, Thijs Van Leer started to yodel – with the result everybody knows now.”

Back in 2007, Thijs van Leer told Classic Rock magazine that Hocus Pocus – and his yodelling in it – were entirely spontaneous creative acts that happened during rehearsals in a castle ahead of a UK tour.

Van Leer recalled: “The guitarist suddenly played that riff. Then completely spontaneously Pierre threw in a two-bar drum solo and I started yodelling. It came from nowhere; a piece of pure improvisation, inspired by the fun of playing together.”

He also claimed he had never yodelled before that moment, stating: “I still think it came from heaven.”

Hocus Pocus was recorded in the spring of 1971 with Fleetwood Mac producer Mike Vernon. Reportedly the track was cut in as little as two takes, and completed with the addition of a flute solo, accordion and vocal overdubs.

The song’s title came about due to the fact it had no formal lyrics. They liked the idea of a title that rhymed with the group’s name. As van Leer told Classic Rock: “We even considered calling it Crocus for a short while.”

The album version of Hocus Pocus ran to 6:42. The single edit had a whole three minutes chopped out.

Many years after it was a hit, Hocus Pocus was covered by metal stars Iron Maiden and Helloween and fellow prog rockers Marillion.

Reflecting on the success of this famous song and the Moving Waves record, Jan Akkerman reflects in Guitar World: “It’s a funny album because there’s a lot of heavy rock on there, but also yodelling to the point where it’s almost half opera. It was kind of like a big opera-type story; the only thing missing was stabbing a knife in each other’s back, but that happened later anyway.”

He also admits that the popularity of this one song was somewhat overwhelming at the time.

“The thing with Hocus Pocus is that after playing it five million times, I got fed up,” Akkerman says. “For a moment I said, ‘No more Hocus Pocus…’ I felt there were other things in the world.”

Tony Iommi has been talking about his own experience at last year’s Back To The Beginning show and how shocked he was at the severity of Ozzy Osbourne’s condition.

Speaking to Guitar World, the guitarist said he found the gig “difficult”. Indeed he was reluctant when the idea was first floated: “Initially, when it was mentioned to me, I said no, because we’d done The End Tour (from 2016 to 17) and I didn’t want to be like, ‘Here we are again, another tour.’”

“But when it was mentioned about it being for charity, then yes, I was into it. Still, I thought, ‘What’s it going to be like? We haven’t played with Bill (Ward) for years.’”

Iommi hadn’t seen Ozzy since they had played together at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games Closing Ceremony in 2022. “When he came over, and we met for rehearsals, we were floored, because he was carried in, basically. I couldn't believe how he’d deteriorated.”

The guitarist even offered to go through the whole set instrumentally. “We were all in shock, really,” he remembers. “He sat there, and I said to him, ‘You know, you don’t have to sing, we’ll just run through it instrumentally,’ but he said ‘No, I’ll have a go’ and he’d sing for a bit.”

“And then we’d finish for the day and I said, ‘Don’t bother to come in tomorrow, we’ll just run over the songs instrumentally with Bill.’ He said, ‘All right,’ and then he might turn up the next day – or not.”

Of course, in the end Ozzy was able to perform, albeit sat in a throne. Iommi was at the back, and so wasn’t able to see much of the singer. “It was very difficult, because I was so used to Ozzy jumping around and running up to me and grabbing me,” he remembers. “It was just a terribly different thing altogether, and it was very hard to do it.”

“But, you know, I’m glad we did it, because it was the original band and we won’t be doing it again. I’m really glad we did it for Ozzy and for the fans.”

Iommi was speaking ahead of the concert film of Back To The Beginning, which hits cinemas on 28 October.

What do Nirvana, Van Halen and The Jimi Hendrix Experience have in common?

No, not iconic guitarists who have sadly all passed away. Nor is it simply that novice guitarists still ask their tutors to teach them Smells Like Teen Spirit, Hey Joe and Eruption to this day (good luck, kids).

What unites these three US rock titans is that, perhaps surprisingly, each of their debut commercial offerings was a cover version.

Hendrix released his take on the rock standard Hey Joe as his first single in December 1966, while Van Halen’s version of The Kinks’ You Really Got Me kickstarted their career in 1978.

But for eventual grunge superstars Nirvana – whom many discovered with the era-defining Smells Like Teen Spirit in 1991 – a more obscure 1960s track would be the first to bear their name in record stores across the country.

That single, Love Buzz, was released on the iconic Seattle-based indie label Sub Pop, whose co-founder Bruce Pavitt recalled: “Nirvana’s first appearance in Seattle was at the Central Tavern – at this little showcase that they did for us in April of 1988 that nobody really showed up for. In listening to their whole set, that one was the only song that really jumped out, and it was a cover. But the hypnotic feel of that was an indicator of their direction in songwriting.”

He said of their version of Love Buzz: “It’s an incredible recording. They totally nailed it.”

Love Buzz – which was included on Bleach, their debut album for Sub Pop in 1988 – was originally written and recorded by Dutch rock band Shocking Blue and released in September 1969 on the band’s second album At Home.

Shocking Blue were founded in 1967 by former The Motions guitarist Robbie Van Leeuwen, (no relation to Queens Of The Stone Age’s Troy Van Leeuwen), and found mainstream success with the line-up of vocalist Mariska Veres, bassist Klaasje van der Wal and drummer Cor van der Beek.

Shocking Blue’s highest charting single was Venus, which reached No 1 in nine countries, including the US.

Venus was also a huge hit in 1986 for pop trio Bananarama, whose version was produced by Stock Aitken Waterman and hit No 1 in the US again as well as in Australia, Finland, New Zealand, South Africa, and Switzerland.

Shocking Blue didn’t release Love Buzz as a single until 2015 for Record Store Day, nearly three decades after Nirvana’s version was recorded. But in rhetoric ’80s the song still caught the attention of a young Krist Novoselic, Nirvana’s bassist, who discovered At Home in a bargain bin and was impressed by the bass playing of van der Wal.

The dark psych-rock of Shocking Blue’s original Love Buzz sounds closer to Iron Butterfly’s In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida than, say, the more Melvins-inspired sound of Bleach. Yet despite the sludgier take on the track, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain wasn’t satisfied with how the recording turned out, telling NME: “I wish we could have recorded it a lot heavier. It was one of our first recordings. We weren’t sure just what we wanted to do, so it turned out kind of wimpy compared to our [other] recordings.”

Cobain also lamented Sub Pop’s editing of his sound collage intro, compiled from children’s records, that was reduced from 45 to 10 seconds on the initial single (and removed from the album version altogether).

“They were just constantly having control right away, doing exactly what a major label would do and claiming to be an independent label,” Cobain told biographer Michael Azerrad.

Nirvana’s version is notably recorded half a step up from standard tuning (F Bb Eb Ab C F), reportedly by mistake, though live performances often found the band performing the song in the key of A minor.

The song opens with a simple repeating five-note bassline (Ab, Bb, B, D Eb). The riff, played entirely within the 6th to 9th frets across the D and G strings, begins with the root note of Bb. Cobain’s guitar parts mainly consist of overdriven, ringing power chords (Bb again), and a speedy descending pull-off riff across the top three strings. Cobain then doubles Novoselic’s bassline as the song’s main riff.

Cobain’s stripped-back, harsh tone is one of the hallmarks of Nirvana’s sound, often attributed to his use of cheap, pawnshop-bought gear. Cobain’s modest rig at the time consisted of just one pedal – a Boss DS-1 distortion – for the entirety of Bleach, alongside a right-handed Univox Hi-Flier, flipped upside down and restrung, and a ’68 Fender Twin Reverb amp, though he was known for using a solid-state Randall Commander II for live shows at the time.

The original Love Buzz/Big Cheese single launched the Sub Pop Singles Club subscription, and was produced in a super-limited quantity of 1,000 hand-numbered 7” records (and an additional 200 unnumbered). The band were reportedly unhappy with such a limited release. “We put a single out and nobody could buy it,” commented Novoselic. However, the quickly-sold-out single ensured its own word of mouth promotion for Nirvana as a buzzy band to watch.

One quirk of the single’s sleeve credits is the misspelling of the pre-fame band members – “Kurdt Kobain” and “Chris Novoselic”. In a list published by online physical media marketplace Discogs, the Love Buzz/Big Cheese single was the third-most expensive record sold on the website in 2025 to the eye-watering sum of $10,666.

In the two years prior to the release of the group’s mega-selling second album Nevermind, Bleach sold around 40,000 units, but after the band found worldwide success its sales would increase to over 1.9 million, going platinum in the process. As of 2026, Bleach is still Sub Pop’s best-selling album.

A staple of the band’s live set since the late ’80s, Love Buzz has been played numerous times. According to setlist.fm, it is Nirvana’s eighth-most performed song. Live recordings of Love Buzz can be found on official Nirvana releases such as Live at Reading, Live at the Paramount, Live! Tonight! Sold Out!! and the box set With The Lights Out.

Interestingly, the two versions of the song have each featured in a HBO series – Shocking Blue’s original makes an appearance in Entourage, while Nirvana’s cover appears in the season two opener of The Last of Us.

Love Buzz wouldn’t be the last obscure cover made famous by Nirvana either, as the band’s incredibly successful MTV Unplugged in New York album – released shortly after Cobain’s death by suicide in 1994 – featured an at-the-time lesser-known David Bowie track, a song by Scottish rock group The Vaselines and, notably, three consecutive covers by Arizona ‘cowpunk’ band the Meat Puppets.

As Bruce Pavitt said: “Nirvana were famous for doing covers. They had good taste. They actively helped educate their crowd, as well as promote cool music.”

As the ’60s drew to a close, a new order was being established among rock’s elite, and Led Zeppelin were leading the charge.

Zeppelin’s rise to power was achieved with almost indecent haste. Their second album – released just nine months after the first, on 22 October 1969 – not only deposed The Beatles at the summit of the US Billboard 200 chart; it also kept the Rolling Stones off the top spot.

The success of Led Zeppelin II was all the more remarkable given the time frame in which it was created. In 1969, Zeppelin was a band on the run, touring Britain once and America twice in the seven months between the release of their first album in February and the completion of the second in August. The nine tracks selected for the second album were recorded in a variety of studios in London, Los Angeles and New York, between tours and even during them.

In a 2020 interview with Total Guitar, guitarist Jimmy Page recalled: “The first album was done in a very short time. The second album was done while we were on the road in America, although we were coming backwards and forwards to England, so it’s got all the energy of touring.“

Perhaps it was exhaustion that led Page to voice doubts over several of the album’s tracks while mixing was finished at New York’s A&R Studios. Jerry Wexler, the president of Atlantic Records, attempted to soothe the guitarist by declaring the album “a masterpiece”.

Ultimately, Wexler’s assessment was right on the money. Led Zeppelin II set a template for heavy rock music for decades to come. And in Whole Lotta Love – a million-selling hit single – Page had created the rock riff by which all others would be judged.

As Led Zeppelin’s leader and producer, it was Page who needed to keep his head during the album’s genesis. At a time when the band was enjoying its first flush of success, this was not easy. Although the first album had reached No 6 on the UK chart, it was in America that Led Zeppelin were feted as superstars.

Amid all this excitement, Page retained an intense focus on the music. When the band had four days off between gigs in Minneapolis and Chicago, Page ordered them to New York, where they worked through new songs. Here, Page found time to mix Bring It On Home, the song that would end Led Zeppelin II.

Atlantic’s executives pressed upon the band the need to finish the album in order to capitalise on the lucrative autumn market, and Page responded although ridden with flu. Engineer Eddie Kramer, who had worked the previous year on Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, recalled ‘scrounging’ recording time in minor studios and taping some of Page’s solos in hallways.

“It was a wild time,” Kramer told Stephen Davis in the Zeppelin biography Hammer Of The Gods. “We mixed the album in two days on the most primitive console you could imagine.”

Amazingly, what emerged from the chaos was a cohesive whole. Blues and folk remained at the core of the Zeppelin sound, but this was a great leap forward.

As Page told Total Guitar: “The first two songs that I had for Led Zeppelin II were Whole Lotta Love and What Is And What Should Never Be. II is almost like turning a coin, isn’t it? One side to the other as far as textures and moods.”

If the first album was very much a product of the British blues-rock boom of the late ’60s, the second was where the Led Zeppelin sound was truly defined. In short, this was the birth of heavy metal: the crunch and wail of Whole Lotta Love, the sexual posturing of The Lemon Song, the flashy guitar solo in Heartbreaker, and, most sinful of all, the extended drum solo in Moby Dick.

Black Sabbath’s influential debut appeared in 1970, but by April of that year, Led Zeppelin II had already sold three million copies. One of the millions who bought the album was a 10 year-old Canadian kid named Bryan Adams, who later recalled, “You hear Whole Lotta Love and you lose your mind. That’s it, period!”

This one song was the key to Led Zeppelin’s conquering of North America. Although the band and manager Peter Grant were reluctant to release a single – a format they considered passé – the song received such heavy radio airplay that they bowed to public demand and issued an edited version that reached No 4 on the Billboard 200 chart in January 1970.

An over-excited Atlantic Records attempted to release the song as a single in the UK, but an irate Peter Grant refused permission, leading to a standoff with the record company. This conflict was only resolved when Grant referred the label to the terms of Led Zeppelin’s contract which stated that only their could decide whether or not singles could be released.

Page discussed this strategy in his interview with Total Guitar. He stated: “You know how it is with A&R men going, ‘Oh, you’ve got to have a single.’ We had singles in America and other places, but I wanted to stay clear of that market and keep it as an albums thing.”

He continued: “Right in the early stages I demanded that we didn’t want to be a band that was known for singles. It was albums that we were going to be known for. And clearly I wanted to make each album different from the one before.”

While this meant that Led Zeppelin were defying conventional wisdom in the music business, Page insisted to Total Guitar that this was not a problem.

“No, it was not, because when the first deal was done it was established right there and then,” he said. “It was good thing. That way we didn’t have people who didn’t know what we were doing in the first place – it was probably going above their heads or whatever – trying to get something for the radio.

“‘Oh, can you record something for the radio?’ All bands have heard that sort of nonsense, but fortunately we circumnavigated it by just sticking to what we knew was going to be the right way to do it, to make the music develop properly.”

True to Page’s instincts, Whole Lotta Love is best heard on the album – in its full glory. Omitted from the single edit is the best example of Jimmy Page’s genius for production and arrangement: a middle section in which Robert Plant howls over a bizarre cacophony mixed from recordings of a steel mill, women in orgasm and even a napalm bomb explosion.

Rising above the din is the otherworldly sound of a Theramin, an electronic oscillator manipulated by a wave of Page’s hand across its antenna. The effect was as mind-bending as anything Hendrix had done before, and when that killer three-note riff returns at the song’s climax, with Plant proclaiming himself a “backdoor man” in the tradition of lusty old bluesmen, Led Zeppelin’s iconic status was assured.

Whole Lotta Love cast a long shadow, but there are many great songs on Led Zeppelin II. Thank You, a dedication to Plant’s wife Maureen, blends elements of English folk music and American West Coast pop in one of Zeppelin’s loveliest melodies. Ramble On is Plant’s favourite; it rocks, but gently, and features not only one of the singer’s best performances, but a stunning harmonised solo from Page. Bring It On Home updates a classic blues form with an electrifying riff. And on Living Loving Maid (She’s Just A Woman) – 2.39 of playful, exuberant, grooving rock ‘n’ roll – Led Zeppelin are having fun like never before or since.

Known to fans as ‘The Brown Bomber’ after its sepia-tinted artwork, on which millions of ‘funny’ cigarettes have been rolled over the ages, Led Zeppelin II made an inauspicious debut on the US chart at No 199, despite advance orders of half a million. Within a week it had jumped to No 25, and before the year was out it was the best-selling record in America.

A small portion of its profits was ceded to Willie Dixon, the venerable bluesman whose I Can’t Quit You Baby and You Shook Me featured on Zeppelin’s first album. When writing Whole Lotta Love, Plant had cribbed lyrics from Dixon’s song You Need Love. Dixon sued, and Zeppelin settled out of court.

Also adding to the thickness of Dixon’s wallet was the success of a cover version of Whole Lotta Love by Alexis Korner’s CCS which reached No 13 on the UK singles chart in 1970.

Although Zeppelin never released this or any other track as a single in the UK, the CCS version was used as the theme to TV show Top Of The Pops.

Led Zeppelin II would go on to sell in excess of 10 million copies in the US alone. It has also inspired generations of rock acts. Above all else, it set a standard for heavy rock music that has never been equalled.

With the concert film of their landmark 1986 Budapest gig about to be reissued, Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen have given an interview to The Times that covers everything you’d expect. And a couple of new revelations.

For starters, even though Freddie Mercury told his bandmates about his HIV diagnosis in 1989, May thinks he knew during the band’s final 1986 tour.

“He came off stage at Knebworth and said: ‘I can’t do this any more,’ ” May recalls. “He did have a tendency to be dramatic, so we thought Freddie was just being Freddie, but I now realise he already knew the prognosis, which was grim.

"I remember reading about young men dying in America, and then we saw Freddie with these strange symptoms, so we put two and two together. It’s incredible that he carried on with such confidence and energy to the very end.”

Understandably, the singer’s death in November 1991 shattered the group. “I was on my way to see him when I got the news,” Taylor says. “It really broke us up, and I don’t think John Deacon did cope. He went to pieces. He didn’t want to go on in the music industry after that.”

Indeed, Deacon retired from public life in 1998, though he remains a silent partner in the band’s various projects.

Since then, Queen have continued, largely as a touring entity with a replacement singer and bassist. May, though, drops a bombshell near the end of the interview: “I made a decision 18 months ago that I didn’t want to tour again,” the guitarist says.

“A close family friend died when we were in the States, so I said to my tour manager, ‘I’ll just nip home for a few days and come back.’ She looked me in the eyes and said, ‘You know you can’t do that.’ I love to play, I love to travel, but the trade-off is sacrificing your freedom.

"I have a wife (the actress Anita Dobson), grandchildren and a lot of astrophysics I want to do, so I’m thinking maybe 50 years is enough.”

The guitarist, who despite his huge success has always been a sensitive fellow, also revealed something deeply personal. When asked if he’s happy, May admitted: “Well, I’m a depressive. I’ve been diagnosed as such.

"Depression is an animal that lives inside you, so happiness is found in those moments when depression is hidden in a corner. That’s when you’re experiencing life to the full, in spite of it, or perhaps because of it.”

“The depression is always there, and if I don’t look out it will kick me in the teeth,” he continues. “I can only find happiness in moments. As a rock star, you do get a lot of great moments.”

One can only hope he continues to find them.