Could there be one more Genesis reunion? Despite the fact all the core members are now well into their 70s, Steve Hackett has suggested that it remains a faint possibility.

The guitarist – who left the band way back in 1977 - was speaking on the Word In Your Ear podcast with Mark Ellen and David Hepworth and mused: “I’ve always said that if they wanted me to reform, I would do it. I would even play harmonica or do a walk on.”

“But,” he asked, “What is a reformation? I don’t know. I’ve re-recorded some of the stuff. And I sometimes do it with orchestras. So there’s some sort of sense of development there.”

He suggested that it would also depend on what era of Genesis was being reformed – the five-man group of the prog era or the three-man post-Hackett line up? “When they were a three piece would they consider that to be the classic period when they had most of the hit singles? But then would it be the stuff that turned on musicians, the earlier stuff?”

Any reformation is at the moment highly unlikely. Genesis haven’t played live since 2022 when they completed their Last Domino? tour. Even then Phil Collins wasn’t in the best of health – his son Nic played drums – he’d caught COVID in hospital and has had five operations on his knee.

However in a recent interview with BBC Breakfast in May, Collins shared that: “I’m healthier now than I have been for quite a while.”

Meanwhile in the past week it’s been revealed that there has already been a Genesis reunion. Of sorts. But one that hasn’t involved Hackett.

Peter Gabriel, Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks and original guitarist Anthony Phillips reunited at Air Studios earlier this year to film and record their memories of the making of From Genesis To Revelation, their 1969 debut album which is to be reissued in October. The album, which sank without trace on its original release, is to be given the deluxe box set treatment and amongst the various editions available there will be a five CD/ Blu-Ray format, which will presumably include the interviews.

Hackett didn’t join Genesis until January 1971, when he replaced Phillips. He stayed all through their initial period of success until he quit in 1977, after the tour to support their Wind & Wuthering album.

Duran Duran are fast approaching their 50th anniversary as a band, and Nick Rhodes has given an extensive interview with The Independent that reveals one or two things you never knew about the debonair keyboard player and his new romantic colleagues.

First off, during the mid '80s, when Duran were on the verge of splitting, Mick Jagger played a role in convincing them to stay together. According to Rhodes: “Mick looked at me and said ‘You know you really do need to stick together, that is your future.’ He was right because it could all have fallen apart at that time.”

And whilst some of his colleagues – most notably John Taylor – have had their battles with drugs, Rhodes was apparently always abstemious. “It never appealed to me much,” he says. “My mind moved too quickly anyway. I can never slow down so the last thing I wanted was a pile of drugs. I tried some and it didn’t suit me. I am also somewhat of a control freak so the idea of taking something when you don’t know what is going to happen is thoroughly unappealing. I have been around plenty of it and seen the effects.”

Even in his mid-60s, Rhodes is still rocking the new romantic look: he still dyes his hair blonde, uses eyeliner ( “I like the routine of it. I can look in the mirror and go ‘he looks a bit tired.’ Stick a bit of eyeliner on and you can hide it all!”) and the idea of wearing jeans fills him with horror - “To me jeans are just laziness. I don’t like the cut.”

So it’s somewhat incongruous to discover in the piece that this poised, stylish individual has a geeky side to him in the form of a large collection of cheese labels. This sounds like the sort of nugget Smash Hits really should teased out of him at some point during the 1980s and doesn’t – if we’re honest – fit our preconceptions of the man. He did apparently inherit it from his dad, though: “He’d even done them by the weight of the cheese and the colours - there was something about it that was rather fabulous.”

Rhodes is the only member of Duran Duran who has been there continuously since their formation in 1978. The band completed a round of European festival dates in Switzerland two weeks ago and have a break now before another set of dates in October, which includes a Halloween show at London’s O2.

It looks like the saga of Soundgarden’s final album might be approaching its conclusion. Drummer Matt Cameron has revealed that the mixing is being done at the moment.

Cameron was appearing on the Let There Be Talk podcast with Dean Dalray and confirmed that “we’re just gonna try to get this thing mixed, get it over the finish line, and then hopefully we’ll have a better idea what’s gonna come next.” Apparently Joe Barresi, who has worked with Avenged Sevenfold, Queens Of The Stone Age and Bad Religion, is working the desk.

It’s just eight songs long: “That’s pretty much all there is with vocals. We have some instrumentals left over that [guitarist] Kim Thayil wants to work on. So maybe we’ll do some new stuff together, which would be fine by me.”

There is no confirmed release date for the album as yet. The drummer said that the surviving members of the band were “just taking it one step at a time ’cause it’s been kind of a long process just to get to here.”

That’s something of an understatement. The album – which has yet to acquire a title – started off from demos the band made around 2013/14 with Chris Cornell. “I sent him three tracks, and then he would sing on top of the instrumentals that I’d written and rearrange them and everything,” Cameron remembers. “And then we started getting together in, like, 2015, ’16 at a couple of different studios, so we were preparing to make another album before that last tour in 2017.”

Everything changed after Cornell died in May 2017. Those tracks became tangled up in a long legal battle between the remaining band members and Cornell’s widow, Vicky, regarding unpaid royalties and the rights to the unreleased material.

That was settled in 2023. Three years on, it seems the finished album is finally nearing completion. “I’m really looking forward to getting it done and putting it out there,” says Cameron. “And I’m hoping the reaction won’t be too intense for people, but I know that it will be because it has been for us.

“But I think at this stage of the game, we’ve been listening to it so much that I think we’ve built a little bit of a callus up to the emotional side of it, and we’re just trying to get all the tracks. And it sounds like Soundgarden.”

In the minutes and hours following the sad death of Christine McVie on 30 November 2022, obituary writers across the globe set about encapsulating the talents that made the prodigiously gifted singer, keyboardist and songwriter of Fleetwood Mac so special.

As a musician, McVie was exceptional, blessed with a soulful blues-infused keyboard style and a profound gift for melody. As drummer Mick Fleetwood once told The Guardian, McVie was “the finest blueswoman and piano player in all of England”.

As a vocalist, McVie stood out for her warm contralto voice, butter-smooth delivery and her raw, emotive blues-based sincerity.

And as a songwriter, McVie would prove pivotal to Fleetwood Mac. While Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham wrote some of the band’s most iconic songs and got the most media attention, it was the quiet McVie who contributed the lion’s share of the hits.

On the 1986 compilation The Best Of Fleetwood Mac, half the songs on it are written by her.

It was McVie who penned Say You Love Me, a No 11 US hit, which fuelled the ascent of the band’s eponymous 1975 album.

On the massively successful follow-up Rumours (1977), McVie contributed the soaring Don’t Stop, which reached No 3 in the US, and You Make Loving Fun, a No 9 US hit. And although it wasn’t released as a single, McVie also penned Songbird, the beautiful, stately ballad that stands as one of her most abiding and touching compositions.

Another high point in Christine McVie’s rich back catalogue was Everywhere, released as the fourth single from the band’s 1987 album Tango In The Night.

It is a shimmering, joyous composition. Almost 40 years since its release, Everywhere remains one of McVie’s finest and most enduring songwriting achievements.

Tango In The Night began not as a Fleetwood Mac album but as a Lindsey Buckingham solo project. The band had been on indefinite hiatus since 1982, following a world tour in support of the album Mirage.

By the end of ’85, Buckingham – working alone at his home studio in Los Angeles – had three songs finished: Big Love, Family Man and Caroline.

But while Buckingham was busy making music, Mick Fleetwood was busy making plans to get the band back on track.

When Fleetwood Mac reassembled to record their 14th album – the fifth for the Buckingham-Nicks incarnation of the band – the omens were far from good. Mick Fleetwood was almost totally consumed by cocaine addiction and bassist John McVie’s drinking was out of control, a situation that would lead to an alcohol-induced seizure. Stevie Nicks, meanwhile, had emerged from rehab and was free of cocaine yet would soon be addicted to a prescription tranquiliser.

By complete contrast, Christine McVie and Lindsey Buckingham were clean, sober and creatively sharp. Buckingham assumed creative control, devoting himself entirely to the album, which was recorded mostly at his home studio over an 18-month period between 1986 and 1987.

Nicks reportedly rarely showed up at the sessions and when she did, Buckingham was allegedly so horrified by her condition that he banished both her and Mick Fleetwood to the Winnebago parked in his driveway.

When Nicks did go to the studio, she often felt unmotivated, as she told Howard Cohen of the Miami Herald in March 2017. “I can remember going up there and not being happy to even be there. I didn’t go very often.”

Advances in recording technology meant that Buckingham had greater scope when it came to shaping the sound of Everywhere and across the album. He had recently acquired a Fairlight and its sampling capabilities opened up whole new vistas in terms of production.

“Most of the vocal parts were recorded track by track,” Buckingham told the New York Times in 1987. “The voices used in the textured vocal choirs were mostly mine. I used a Fairlight machine that samples real sounds and blends them orchestrally.”

For Christine McVie, working directly with Buckingham in his role as co-producer was liberating. “I loved working with him because he just brought phenomenal production ideas to my songs and improved them,” she said in the BBC Four documentary Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird: Christine McVie.

Everywhere is an absolute masterclass in pop songwriting, with its infectious melody, lush synths and warm lead vocals. In contrast to Stevie Nicks’ mysticism, McVie wrote simple, affecting love songs that brimmed with emotional resonance. She also wrote hits.

McVie reportedly wrote the song quickly in one session and said that the song practically wrote itself.

At its core, Everywhere is a love song and McVie created the track as a pure expression of falling deeply in love. She had recently married her second husband, musician and songwriter Eddie Quintela, and it seems likely that he was the inspiration for the song. Everywhere focuses on the pure, optimistic joy and commitment of wanting to be close to someone.

“That song is like that feeling when you’re walking on the clouds because you’re in love,” noted Nancy Wilson of Heart in the documentary Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird: Christine McVie. “She really has that romanticism.”

In the first verse, McVie evokes the giddy, nerve-shredding sensation of a new relationship. “Can you hear me calling out your name?/You know that I’m falling and I don't know what to say.”

On the second verse, McVie acknowledges that even her closest acquaintances don’t fully grasp the depth of her feelings: “Something’s happening, happening to me/My friends say I’m acting peculiarly.”

As with many great songs, the chord structure is deceptively simple: E-B-E-B/E-B-C#m-A on the verse shifting up to B-C#m-A-B-C#m-B-A-B on the chorus.

At which point the whole thing just soars, with McVie’s voice gliding seamlessly above the richly layered backing vocals. “Oh, I,” sings McVie in warm, blissfully airy tones, “I wanna be with you everywhere.”

It’s a stunning hook, as Jim Beviglia noted in American Songwriter magazine in 2023. “No matter what else goes on in the song, that moment alone is enough to sell Everywhere, as it epitomises Christine McVie’s ability to be the steadying musical force within a tempestuous band.”

Instrumentally too, the song is a tour de force, thanks primarily to Lindsey Buckingham’s prowess and inventiveness in the studio.

The glistening backing track is brimming with Buckingham’s deft production touches.

The twinkling sound in the song’s intro and middle section was created by Buckingham playing arpeggiated motifs on acoustic and electric guitars, recording them at half speed and then speeding them up.

“He slowed the tape down really slowly and played the parts slowly and then when it came up to the right speed, it sounded bloody amazing,” recalled McVie in the documentary Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird: Christine McVie.

The speeded-up guitar parts played a significant part in the open, spacious feel of the song.

“When you record something really slow and you speed it up, all the harmonics get shifted up,” said Greg Droman, engineer on the Tango In The Night album, in an interview with Salon in 2017. “You end up with this high end, this tinkly little high end, that wouldn't exist [otherwise]. There's not another way you could get that, at least back then.”

Buckingham underpinned the high-end speeded-up arpeggios with simple pads on synth brass and strings.

16 seconds in and the bass and drums enter the mix, a lean spacious groove from John McVie and Mick Fleetwood, which is bolstered by percussive pizzicato-style sounds on the Fairlight. There are some impromptu vocal cadences from Christine McVie before the first verse begins.

There’s a wonderful depth and richness to McVie’s vocal delivery and phrasing. It’s warm, blues-soaked and seeped in emotion.

Throughout the song’s 3:42 running time, there’s a real breadth to the sound. “Every note is surrounded by open airiness,” said Richard Dashut, the co-producer of Tango In The Night, in the documentary Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird: Christine McVie. “The space becomes as important as the actual notes in that song.

In many ways, Everywhere is a relatively straightforward composition, yet it’s the emotional nuances that McVie brings to the song that really make it fly.

“When you inspect it from a songwriting perspective, there’s nothing too fancy going on with Everywhere,” observed Jim Bevaglia in American Songwriter magazine. “There are some basic rhymes (shout/out and heart/start), as well as a one-line refrain that’s repeated twice in the chorus with the same melody. And yet McVie manages to sneak in notes of excitement, fear, anxiety, and vulnerability, all aided by the natural warmth and longing in her vocals.”

Everywhere was released in November 1987 as the fourth single from Tango In The Night. Critics lauded this dreamy, uplifting song from McVie, and its popularity would only grow in the ensuing years and decades.

In a retrospective review of the album in The Guardian in 2017, Alexis Petridis described the song as “peerless”, the result of “bulletproof songwriting” by McVie.

Ivy Nelson from Pitchfork concluded that Everywhere was the best song on Tango In The Night, and that it “responds with warmth, empathy, and buoyancy, describing a kind of devotion so deeply felt that it produces weightlessness in a person”.

Elsewhere in the publication, Everywhere was ranked among the 200 Best Songs of the 1980s, and praised for its “carefully crafted, spare, and meticulously-produced” sound.

After finishing work on Tango In The Night, Lindsey Buckingham quit Fleetwood Mac because he didn’t want to tour. It would be a decade before he returned, but he left on a real creative high.

Despite all the imploding trauma and chaos within the band, Buckingham’s intuitive use of synths and his tasteful, sparing production ensured that Tango In The Night was an outstanding album.

Everywhere is arguably its creative high point. And it’s a song whose joyous spirit and deep emotional yearning resonate strongly to this day.

There’s less of a link between successful movies and hit singles these days, but back in the glory days of the CD single, getting your song into a box office smash could make your career. Just ask Berlin (Take My Breath Away) or Wet Wet Wet (Love Is All Around) or for that matter Bryan Adams (Everything I Do) whose record-breaking 16-week stay at the top of the UK charts in 1991 has only recently been beaten by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean.

Or indeed Roxette. Their biggest hit, It Must Have Been Love, was another whose placing in a film – the Richard Gere/ Julia Roberts vehicle Pretty Woman – applied turbo boosters to an already successful career. The tear-jerking ballad is probably their signature hit. Indeed, it recently reached the landmark milestone of a billion plays on YouTube.

Marie Fredriksson and Per Gessle were both established artists in their native Sweden when they formed Roxette in 1986. The original intention was to see if could break out of their home market. “The whole idea with Roxette was that we wanted to go international,” Gessle explained to the Dutch web show Top 2000 a go go in 2021. “I’d had success with my band in Sweden, Marie’s solo career was going really well.”

Initially they were disappointed. The first Roxette album, 1986’s Pearls Of Passion, produced a couple of decent-sized Swedish hits but nothing more. At this stage, scoring US hits wasn’t on Gessle and Fredriksson’s radar – they had the more modest ambition of scoring a hit in West Germany. But EMI Germany turned its nose up at Pearls Of Passion and suggested that, in order to kick things off outside Sweden, the duo might try and write a Christmas single.

So Gessle set about that task. At home in Halmstad in the spring of 1987, he sat at the piano where he prepared all of his ballads.

“I always try to get the same temperature in the lyric and in the music,” he explained to Songwriting Magazine in 2020. “This music was really beautiful and it needed something reflective in the lyrics. It’s not about a specific event or a person, it’s a mood that I wanted to reflect. It was the music first and then the lyrics. With the best songs, you start writing the music and then you start writing the lyrics, then you continue with the music and you continue with the lyrics! They go hand in hand. I think that’s because I want to have them say the same thing.

“When I make demos, I keep them very simple. I’ll just play piano and sing over it. Then, of course, the big thing was to get Marie into the song. When she starts to sing it, you change the keys and you go from there. It’s also got a great opening line, one of my best: ‘Lay a whisper on my pillow’. That line just opens up a lot of things in your mind when you hear it. With pop music, you have to grab people’s attention with either a lyric or a hook that makes it interesting.”

Gessle added a line that references the time of year (‘it’s a hard Christmas day’) and gave it a title that made the connection obvious. Then it was time to go in the studio.

“A friend of our engineer had just bought a studio in Stockholm that had a Synclavier, one of the first digital-sampling synthesizers, so a lot of It Must Have Been Love was made by programming,” producer Clarence Ofwerman told the Guardian in 2025.

“Then we added drums and guitar in the EMI studios. I improvised the piano solo, the only time I’ve ever done that. It wasn’t a party tune, so we didn’t try to make it Christmassy, with bells or anything. Just after the solo, there’s a big key change where Marie suddenly sings much higher. It’s really difficult to sing like that, but she gave such a great vocal performance.”

It Must Have Been Love (Christmas For The Broken Hearted) duly was a big hit in Sweden that holiday season. Unfortunately, it didn’t cut any ice (or snow, for that matter) with EMI Germany. “They didn’t even release it,” remembers Gessle. “That goes to show how the music business works. It’s not enough if you have the right song, it has to be the right timing.”

But Roxette only had to wait another year. Their next album, Look Sharp!, was released in autumn 1988, and when the singles Dressed For Success and The Look were substantial hits at home, fortune smiled upon them: “This American exchange student who was in Sweden and became a big Roxette fan,” Gessle told the BBC. “When he went back to the States, a radio channel called KDWB had a show where the listeners can call in and request songs.”

“So he went up to the radio station and gave them the Look Sharp! album, and they kept it there for a couple of weeks. From what I heard, the programme director fell in love with the first song, so he played The Look. The phones started to ring and people wanted to hear the song over and over again. It was pure luck.”

And so Roxette broke America – both The Look and Look Sharp!’s ballad, Listen To Your Heart, were Billboard Number Ones. The rest of Europe fell into line soon after. Suddenly, Roxette were in demand.

“We had a lunch in 1989 in Los Angeles with EMI,” Gessle told Top 200 a go go. “They had just got the rights to a soundtrack to a movie called $3,000. It was a guy who hired a girl for a weekend for $3,000. They said they had David Bowie on board, they had Go West, Natalie Cole.... all those EMI artists. And they wanted us to write a song for the soundtrack.”

Gessle and Fredriksson were flattered, but were in the midst of promoting an internationally successful album. They simply didn’t have any spare time to come with a new song for a soundtrack album that was most likely destined for the bargain buckets. Then Gessle had a brainwave.

“But… I have a Christmas song,” he remembered. “I could very easily alter the lyrics to that song.”

And so It Must Have Been Love (Christmas For The Broken Hearted) was repurposed; upcycled, in modern parlance. The line about ‘a hard Christmas day’ was replaced by one about ‘a hard winter’s day’ and some minor touches were added. “The two versions aren’t that different,” says Clarence Ofwerman. “For the second one, though, the mixing engineer in LA put a load of gated reverb on the snare drum that he called his ‘lucky snare’, because it had already been on about 10 No 1 singles.”

“I remember when I received a telephone call from Garry Marshall the director of the film,” says Gessle. “And he said ‘Hey I just wanted you to know that I loved that song so much that I have given it a great place in the movie. There’s no dialogue over it because it speaks for itself – it just gives the whole movie a certain character’, and I was like [all nonchalant] ‘OK thank you very much.’”

Pretty Woman – as it had been retitled - became one of the biggest films of the 1990s and It Must Have Been Love’s prime spot in the movie guaranteed success for the song. It reached Number One on the Billboard chart in June 1990 and ended up becoming the second biggest seller in the US that year, behind Wilson Phillips’ Hold On. In the UK it was the group’s biggest hit, reaching Number Three, and it topped the charts in Canada and around Europe that summer – ironic, given that the song was originally meant to evoke the desolation of midwinter.

Its success cemented Roxette’s success around the world. The duo ended up selling over 75 million records, clocking up four Billboard Number Ones in total and hacing up 19 hits in the UK. They are quite comfortably Sweden’s most internationally successful act. Aside from Abba, of course.

They endured throughout the 1990s, but went on hiatus in 2002 after Fredriksson was diagnosed with a brain tumour. “After she became ill, she came to one of my solo shows in Amsterdam and I asked if she wanted to join me on stage,” Gessle told the Guardian last year. “She hadn’t sung in public for eight years but came on for the encore and sang It Must Have Been Love. I’ve never in my life seen so many people crying. Marie got so much energy from that that she wanted to make another album and go on tour, which we did. I think that gave her a couple more years.”

The singer died in 2019 from complications from the original tumour and that appeared to be that for Roxette. But the heritage pop industry abhors a vacuum and in 2024 Gessle teamed up with a new vocalist, Lena Philipsson, for a new iteration of Roxette. Inevitably, at their live shows, the song that’s dedicated to the memory of Fredriksson is It Must Have Been Love.

They don’t make guitar players like the late Brent Hinds anymore. But maybe they never did. The former Mastodon guitarist, who died in a motorcycle clash in August 2025, aged 51, was the Atlanta, Georgia prog-metallers’ wild card.

He was the player who brought countrified bluegrass virtuosity to metal guitar, and a little danger to Mastodon. He was their wild card and a wild man. That brought with it some tension. He was never one for an early night.

Hinds’ exit from the band in March 2025 was messy. There was acrimony. Hinds had a few choice words to say about his former bandmates online. Drummer Brann Dailor turning up in public with a black eye only added to the speculation.

But in a recent interview with The Guardian, Dailor, and Mastodon bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders, busted a few myths about Hinds’ exit, and reflected on their relationship with him.

For a start, there was no punch-up.

“Brent texted me when that was all stirred up, and he was like, ‘Dude, I can’t believe people think I punched you in the face!’” says Dailor.

That was one rumour put to bed.

Also, all that trash talk was just Hinds letting off some steam. Sanders says he “was trying to be funny”. Dailor admits that just the way he was. When he got the call that Hinds had died, he was “devastated” – and whatever was said or done in the heat of the moment was the last thing on his mind.

“Brent said a lot of things that he probably didn’t mean,” he says. “He liked to talk some shit and stir the pot and get people’s blood boiling, I guess. I feel like he felt he could control a situation if he threw a wrench.”

After 25 years together, Hinds and the rest of the band were on different planes. Hinds still out there partying hard when the rest of them had called time on it long ago. Guitarist Bill Kelliher famously had a health emergency in late 2008 when was hospitalised in London with alcohol-related pancreatitis. The band completed their tour as a trio.

“If any of us did half the stuff that Brent pulled off, we’d all have been dead years ago,” says Dailor.

As Hinds told MusicRadar in 2009, when the band’s magnum opus, Crack The Skye, was released, “If it ain’t about havin’ good times, I’m not interested.”

Hinds had just recovered from injury before starting work on the record. After a typically wild night out in Las Vegas he was assaulted, knocked unconscious and the risk of permanent brain damage was real.

Loud electric guitars were the last thing he wanted to hear after that, and so Hinds retreated to the comfort of his acoustic guitar, smoking weed, listening to King Crimson and letting his mind run free.

“My mind’s the most cosmic place I could ever visit,” said Hinds. “All I have to do is zone out and play the guitar, and before you know it, I've visited places unheard of. I put all of that into Mastodon’s music.”

Dailor says that checks out. There was no disputing his talent. Hinds wore his heart on his sleeve, was quick-tempered, intense and funny, and all of that was evident right there in his playing style. “He was the real deal, you know? His emotions were right there all the time and he could easily access them through his instrument,” he says.

Mastodon’s latest album, Marrow Deep, marks the debut of Nick Johnstone, who replaces Hinds on lead guitar. It was trailed by a lead single paying tribute to Hinds, Your Ghost Again. And its title, Marrow Deep, speaks to Dailor’s grief at the loss of Hinds and the death of his mother. “Those relationships are in the marrow, it’s as deep as you can get,” he told Kerrang!

Grief is the kind of thing that stays with you. It’s something you carry. But as Dailor notes in his Guardian interview it also serves as a reminder that you’ve got some living to do, too.

“Seeing Brent in his casket was so difficult to wrap our heads around, and it makes you want to feel fucking alive,” he says. “We’re still here, so we better get to it.”

The shortlist for this year’s Mercury Prize has been announced and – as ever – it’s eclectic.

Designed to celebrate the best in British and Irish music over the past year, the 12-strong list includes one bonafide living legend, several artists who are arguably at their commercial peak, a revitalised Britpop-era band and a number of up and coming names. And, for the first time, a various artists compilation album is included.

The living legend is Paul McCartney, who probably doesn’t have the space on the mantelpieces of all his various homes for another gong for The Boys Of Dungeon Lane. Neither, arguably, does Raye, after all those Brit awards she took home the other year. Nevertheless, her second album, This Album May Contain Hope, is nominated.

Traditionally, the Mercurys’ panel has been shy of giving the award to conspicuously successful artists, though they bucked that trend last year with Sam Fender. So Raye could be in with a shout, as could Olivia Dean for The Art Of Loving and Jade, with her solo debut That’s Showbiz Baby!

Two previous winners have been nominated – 2019’s victor Dave is in there again with his third album The Boy Who Played Harp – as well as the revived Suede, who won the second ever Mercury way back in 1993.

Both, you’d say, would have to be outside bets (only one artist, PJ Harvey, has won the Mercury twice) as are Florence + The Machine, who have been a consistent presence in British pop for a decade and a half. With Everybody Scream now being their fourth Mercury nomination, they're probably not getting their hopes up.

Nia Archives might be a good bet with her second album Emotional Junglist, as might Kojey Radical for Don’t Look Down. Outsiders, you’d have to say, are the only Irish nominee on the list – indie folk fella Dove Ellis – and Knats. The latter are a Newcastle-based jazz trio, who certainly sound intriguing. But given that Sam Fender won in the first year the awards were moved to Newcastle, would the panel really give the prize to a North East artist for the second year in a row?

And finally there’s that Various Artists album. Help (2) is nothing if not a deserved nominee and, given that the project lacked the cut through its predecessor achieved 30 years ago, could certainly do with the publicity.

Inevitably, there's also been some chatter in regard to the albums that have missed out. Lily Allen's critically-acclaimed West End Girl and Harry Styles' Kiss All The Time, Disco Occasionally are two of the more notable omissions from the shortlist, though Styles' album wasn't greeted as warmly as some of his previous efforts, so its absence is less of a surprise.

The Awards ceremony will be held in Newcastle’s Utilita Arena on Thursday 22 October, with live performances from “many” of the 12 artists promised. The BBC are to provide coverage of the event, which will presumably include a TV broadcast.

Mercury Prize 2026 nominations

• Dave – The Boy Who Played Harp
• Dove Ellis – Blizzard
• Florence + The Machine – Everybody Scream
• Jade – That’s Showbiz Baby!
• Knats – A Great Day In Newcastle
• Kojey Radical – Don’t Look Down
• Nia Archives – Emotional Junglist
• Olivia Dean – The Art Of Loving
• Paul McCartney – The Boys Of Dungeon Lane
• Raye – This Music May Contain Hope
• Suede – Antidepressants
• War Child Records – Help (2)

You wouldn’t think it, given the roasting temperatures outside, but autumn is not too far away. And with it, another Beatles reissue.

This year it’s Rubber Soul that’s to be given the boxset treatment. Apple Corps has announced that a Special Edition of the 1965 album is coming in early October.

So what’s on offer for this one? Well, it’s very much a question of ‘what’s your budget?’ If your wallet is large enough, you might want to invest in the ‘Special Edition Super Deluxe’, which encompasses five LPs or four CDs. These include sessions and demos, a new stereo mix of the album, the original mono master, the original US version of the album AND an 88-page hardbound book. Oh, and 7-inch of the concurrent Daytripper/ We Can Work It Out double A-side single.

One step down is the ‘Special Edition Deluxe’. For that you just get the new stereo mix and sessions on two CDs or LPs. Then there’s the ‘Special Edition Standard’, which is just a single LP or CD.

Or you could – if you wish – go for the Blu-Ray edition, which will include a new Dolby Atmos mix, “high resolution stereo audio”, and the promo films for both Day Tripper and We Can Work It Out. You pays your money, you takes your choice...

For oh-so-jaded Beatles fans who have now seen decades of this sort of repackaging there is but one genuine selling point. Buried among the sessions and demos disc is a previously unheard John Lennon demo called Little Girl. Up until recently, this song was “not even rumoured” to exist, according to Apple Corps. We don’t yet know what sort of quality it is, or even whether it’s an update of Hello Little Girl, an early Lennon song that was one of the first to be credited to the Lennon/McCartney partnership.

We’ll see soon enough whether it could ever have been a contender for the Beatles’ first really adult album. Rubber Soul was a determined step upwards from Help!, with several of the songs being openly influenced by Motown and other US soul records (hence the title, of course), and with their individual personalities shining through more in John, Paul and George’s songs.

In recent years, Abbey Road has been the hip Beatles album to namecheck. But after spells when Sgt Pepper, Revolver and the White Album have all been the connoisseurs’ choice, perhaps now it’s Rubber Soul’s turn in the spotlight. For what it’s worth, it was apparently always George Harrison’s favourite.

Pre-orders for the Rubber Soul Special Edition are being taken now.

Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott was just 36 years old when he died in 1986 – and right to the very end, his bandmate Scott Gorham never gave up hope that Lynott could survive the ravages of his wild lifestyle.

Thin Lizzy broke up in 1983 after a farewell tour featuring the line-up of Lynott on bass and vocals, Gorham and John Sykes on guitars, Brian Downey on drums and Darren Wharton on keyboards.

In a previously unpublished interview from 2010, Gorham reflected upon that farewell tour, its aftermath and the final days of Lynott’s life.

Gorham had, like Lynott, been addicted to hard drugs in the early ’80s, and in 2010 he said of Thin Lizzy’s breakup: “I needed for this thing to end to get my life back.”

He reasoned: “In hindsight, what we should’ve done and what I should’ve said – and I carry this with me always – is, ‘Phil, let’s give it a rest for a year, let’s both knock it on the head for a year, 18 months. Let’s go into rehab, let’s get rid of this shit, and then let’s reconvene all fresh and clear-eyed and clear-headed. Let’s get together again and start at that point.’ But I wasn’t thinking clearly. All I could think about was getting out.”

The band’s farewell tour followed the release of the album Thunder And Lightning. Gorham remembers that tour as an ordeal.

“Fuck, it went on forever,” he said. “It was the most painful thing I ever went through. It was like people didn’t want to let go. We knew the end was in sight, but I think it was Phil, probably who said, ‘No, no, let’s add on a few more shows.’

“It was really hard for me. That’s probably why I wasn’t thinking in the right direction – like, ‘Let’s take a rest.’ These days it’s the normal thing to do – whether you’re strung out on drugs or not. People do an album, do a tour and then take a year off. We never did.

“For so many years, we had it instilled into our DNA that if you ever come off the road, everybody’s gonna forget about you. Even for all the success we had, the gold and platinum albums and sold-out shows, we still had this fear that we were gonna be forgotten. That fear just permeated everything we ever did. That’s what drove us on.

“And maybe Phil was deluding himself a little bit all through those years – that next great song, that next great album, is right around the corner. But he wasn’t about to show any weakness, because I think he knew: ‘If I crumble, this whole fucking thing is gonna crumble, so I’m gonna show the strong front.’”

On the farewell tour, Lizzy headlined the Reading Festival on 28 August 1983.

The final show was on 4 September at a Monsters Of Rock festival in Nuremberg, Germany. By that time, Gorham couldn’t wait for it to be over.

He recalled: “That last show in Germany was a big fuck-off festival, and all the bands knew that it was the last show we were doing, so everybody who was on that show came out to the side of the stage to watch us play our last show.

“There were guys from other bands who were crying, big fucking tough roadies with tears streaming down their face. You looked in the audience and people were crying down there, and all I could think about was, ‘Man, I wonder if we could shorten up this fuckin’ set and get the hell offa here.’

“That’s how bad it was. I was numb – numb to any emotion that was going on. It was only later that I realised how emotional that scene was.”

At the tour’s end, Gorham had a plan in place to get clean of drugs and create a new niche for himself in the music industry.

“It took me another good year to stop taking drugs,” he admitted. “And then it took another year of rehabilitation – my own rehabilitation – to actually feel better, to feel like I could maybe pick up a guitar.”

He also believed that to move forward, he had to put distance between himself and Lynott.

“I had to get away,” he said. “That’s the first rule. To get better, you gotta lose the friends, the association, or you’re not gonna get better. That’s one of the reasons Phil never got better. He had all those people that kept hanging out with him, scoring him drugs and doing the drugs with him, staying high with him. I went the other way. I lost them all. I called Phil, but I certainly wouldn’t go over to his house.”

Gorham worked for a time in LA on a band project named The Western Front.

Returning to the UK, Gorham visited Lynott in December 1985 at Lynott’s home in Kew, on the outskirts of London.

“That was the last time,” Gorham recalled. “It was three weeks before he died. I’d just done some recording in Los Angeles and I really wanted his opinion on it. And more than anything I wanted to go see him again, and that was the excuse. Like, ‘Whaddaya think? Go ahead and hate it if you must.’

“Phil opened up the door, we went into the kitchen and he got a glass, filled it up with vodka and knocked it straight back and filled it up again. He said, ‘Oh, did you want a glass?’ ‘Uh, no thanks, Phil.’

“I think for Phil looking at me, being as healthy as I was, probably shocked him. He came straight out with, ‘Yeah, I’m getting my shit together, I’m gonna stop doing all this crap and get healthy again.’

“Then he said, ‘We should really think about getting back together and writing songs and getting the band back together.’ But I’m looking at him, knowing how tough it is out on the road anyway when you’re healthy. There’s no way that he could have made it out on the road the way he was.

“I said, ‘Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.’ I don’t know how convincing I was. I liked the idea. I wanted us to get back together again. But he had to get better. He had to.”

Gorham remembered how he felt when he left Lynott’s home that day.

“I thought he had a chance. I felt he actually meant what he was talking about. There was something in the way he said it that convinced me that he wanted out, he really did. So I actually walked out feeling quite upbeat about it. It’s gonna work out – he sounds like he wants to get better, this could be a very cool fucking thing.”

It was not to be.

As Gorham sadly recalled: “He wasn’t better. I think it had gone too far that point. Even if he had stopped taking drugs right there on the spot, I think it had still gone too far. He would have died anyway. There were too many things wrong with him.”

Phil Lynott died on 4 January 1986. It was only ten years earlier than his most celebrated song, The Boys Are Back In Town, had made Thin Lizzy famous.

In 1983, when Australian rock band INXS were on their first US tour, they received a surprise visit from a star of one of the greatest and most influential groups of all time.

Ray Manzarek had been the keyboard player for The Doors and was a hero to Andrew Farriss, the keyboard player for INXS.

What’s more, after performing alongside Jim Morrison during The Doors’ heyday, Manzarek knew a great frontman when he saw one. And he saw some of Morrison’s qualities in the singer of INXS, Michael Hutchence.

Farriss recalls to MusicRadar: “It was so exciting to be on our first tour in the United States, and one of the first shows we played was a live television show in Los Angeles called Rock ’N’ Roll Tonite. The other artists on the bill were Simple Minds and Eric Clapton. Simple Minds, great band, they played and it was awesome. Eric Clapton, of course, was brilliant. We played really well too.

“And when we came off stage and walked to the dressing room, suddenly Ray Manzarek from The Doors was standing right in front of me. In the back of my mind I’m like, ‘Oh fuck, that’s Ray Manzarek!’ But he was really friendly.

“He came into the dressing room and I heard him say to Michael, ‘I watch this show every week and there’s something about you and your band that really made me sit up and pay attention. I don’t think I ever saw another band that was so magnetic to look at. So I got in my car and I drove over here to meet you guys.’”

Manzarek was not the only famous musician impressed by Hutchence’s charisma.

Farriss reveals: “The first time I met Bono he said to me, ‘When I go out on stage I have to put on my sunglasses and and become this persona and do this thing, but your lead singer is just naturally like that.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I know. I get it.’”

He continues: “I think there was something about Michael’s energy and his personality. It’s hard to describe it. He was always a mover and a shaker on stage, a bit like Elvis Presley in that sense. If you watch Elvis performing, he never stands still for one moment. The really great front people of bands are usually very animated, they’re consistently moving.

“The funny thing is, we didn’t really begin to recognise it with Michael until we began to get on television or play bigger gigs. That’s when it got people’s attention, like, ‘Who’s this guy?’ Because Michael was one of those people who was naturally just incredibly magnetic as a personality.”

Farriss also believes that Hutchence was underrated as a lyricist.

“A lot of times, with the lyrics Michael would write, he was pushing people to think a little harder about things we all take for granted,” Farriss says. “I really like a song we wrote together called Who Pays The Price. It’s simply about who pays the price when we all want more in life.

“It’s an interesting lyric, because it can be applied to so many things in life. You might become reasonably successful, but after a while you have to be like Napoleon, where you have to be the king shit all the time, and that's where you lose it, don’t you? That’s the kind of lyric Michael wrote, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool.’”

Farriss remembers the power in Hutchence’s voice. “Michael never played a musical instrument,” he says, “so in that sense his instrument was his vocal performance, which got better and better every time we played live – and we played thousands of shows.”

For Farriss and his bandmates, some of the most memorable shows that INXS ever played were in 1986 when they opened for Queen at London’s Wembley Stadium.

These shows were part of Queen’s Magic Tour – band’s last tour with singer Freddie Mercury.

At Wembley Stadium, INXS were first on stage before The Alarm, then Status Quo, and then Queen.

Andrew Farriss recalls: “We’d already played some pretty big gigs as a band by then, mostly in the United States. We’d also played some festivals in Europe before doing the Queen tour.

“First of all, let me say that the members of Queen were really good people. Just because they happened to be one of the world’s greatest bands ever doesn’t mean they’re necessarily going to be great people, but they were, and they were very good to us.

“They were like friends, they encouraged us, and we would eat occasionally with them in a restaurant and I liked the way that they had no airs and graces. A pretty cool bunch of guys, really. So there was a lot of respect from INXS towards Queen, and I think that we had that from them as well.”

He admits, however, that Queen’s fans were somewhat less respectful towards INXS.

“It was such a big deal for us to play with Queen at Wembley Stadium, and people have asked me, ‘What was that like?’ Well, those fans weren’t there to see us. They were like, ‘We don't want to see you, we want Queen.’ And why wouldn't they? They're Queen fans!

“So they would throw things at us, like cigarette lighters, or shoes, or a loaf of bread or whatever. They just threw whatever shit they had on them, you know? Like car keys or something.”

But he adds: “We learnt a lot from that whole experience. Things change when you play at that level.”

From that point, INXS and their charismatic frontman continued to grow in stature. And on 13 July 1991, it was their turn to be the headline act at Wembley Stadium.

“It was a great feeling,” Farriss says now. “We played some really big gigs in those years. We played Texas Stadium in Austin in the United States to 75,000 people. And we played Rock In Rio, where our support bands were Billy Idol and Santana and Joe Cocker. I’m a big fan of all of those guys, and they were all standing side stage watching us play.

“At one point I was playing guitar and I could see Carlos Santana watching me. It was like, ‘No pressure!’”

It’s 40 years this summer since Queen’s final tour, and to mark the occasion, the band have announced the reissue of Queen Budapest, the film of their show in the Hungarian capital that summer.

The original footage has been restored by Peter Jackson (who’s fast becoming the go-to guy for this sort of project). It’ll be getting a limited cinema and IMAX release on 7 October, before editions on all formats – DVD, Blu-Ray, digital, LP and CD – become available from 30 October.

The show was one of the first by a Western act behind the then-Iron Curtain – though not the first, as Sony’s publicity material is insisting, as good ol’ Cliff Richard toured the Soviet Union in the mid 70s. Nevertheless, it was a big deal at the time. The tour film was shown in Poland, East Germany, China and Czechoslovakia, and after Queen came a deluge of rock stars playing the Communist bloc, including Bowie, Springsteen, Big Country and Billy Joel.

For Queen, though it was the end of the road. Or almost. The original four-piece only played five more gigs, and their final date on the Live Magic tour, at Knebworth in August 1986, would be the last time Freddie Mercury would be seen on stage with them.

Brian May has said of the Budapest show: “For years, fans behind the Iron Curtain had been able to listen to Queen music only on illegal cassettes. It was a forbidden thing to listen to rock bands like us, so to see them play in a live show would have been unthinkable. This concert, when they could finally come and see us live in person and interact with us, was a huge emotional moment for them and also for us. Perhaps the most memorable highlight of all was performing that beautiful Hungarian folk song, which Freddie and I had learned for the occasion. Not a dry eye!”

Roger Taylor adds: “I know Freddie tried to learn this folk song, but he had the words written phonetically on the back of his hand. When the audience just started singing, we realised, wow, music really can be a great cause.”

Fans who want to see it in the cinemas are being encouraged to sign up at the Queen Budapest website to be alerted to all the relevant information as to when pre-sale tickets are available.

“Peter Jackson’s team have done a magnificent job of restoring the original film footage, at the highest resolution ever," says May. "It's pristine and the quality is breathtaking. I think people will get lost in it and even forget they're watching a film.”

Progressive rock supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer were always prepared to go the extra mile. But the scale of their ambition almost resulted in an epic fail on a momentous 1977 tour.

Performances from that tour – featuring a full orchestra alongside the group – were recorded for ELP’s 1979 album In Concert, which was expanded into the double album Works Live in 1993 and is now expanded even further in a new reissue.

For the trio – keyboard player Keith Emerson, guitarist/bassist/vocalist Greg Lake and drummer Carl Palmer – touring with an orchestra was a hugely ambitious and expensive project.

And as Palmer now tells MusicRadar, it very nearly blew up in their faces.

He recalls: “We had the orchestra for three weeks, and during that time we made a video and recorded a live album. We had the orchestra booked for six weeks, but at the very beginning we weren’t sure if we were going to use all of that time. But we had to book a period, so we booked it.

“It was successful from the point of view that the orchestra was fantastic and Godfrey Salmon, the conductor, did a great job. But after we toured with the orchestra for three weeks it was better for us to stop with the orchestra and tour on our own.

“Now, the rumours came out that Emerson, Lake & Palmer were broke and they needed the money. Had to get rid of the orchestra. That is not true.”

Palmer admits that financial considerations did play a part in their decision.

He continues: “We got the recording done and we thought, ‘Well, this is great, but this is an incredible amount of expense. Maybe we should just hold back now.’ Because we weren’t making money. But we didn’t do it to make money. We did it to make a product, and we did that.”

However, the main reason for ditching the orchestra was to avoid any further drama following a near-disaster at the most high-profile show on the tour – at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal on 26 August 1977.

78,000 people were in attendance that night, and as Palmer reveals, there was panic backstage before the show started.

“This is what happened,” Palmer says. “The problem that we had – and we didn’t get a second chance – was when the album was recorded in Montreal.

“The orchestra had one 24-channel desk, and the group had another 24-channel desk. There’s only three of us, but we needed 24 channels. We did all the run-throughs, did all the rehearsals. But 20 minutes before the band was about to go on to the stage, the desk for the orchestra went down.

“We didn’t know what it was. Everyone was panicking, trying to sort this out, sort that out. We had things called multicore, where there’s lots of cables going through one very thick cable – one from the orchestra’s desk, one from the group’s desk. And we think maybe a forklift truck went over it and maybe broke one of the cables inside, because the multicore didn’t have the guard bevel on it.

“To tell you the truth, we could not trace it with all the technology, with all the people we had there, and we were panicking. So we flipped the orchestra over to our 24-channel desk. Some of the tracks were taken from the drums, like the electric drums that weren’t playing all the time. We used those tracks. And in the end we got everything. We got all the orchestra across eight tracks.

“So we recorded it on one 24-track instead of the two 24-tracks that we wanted. There was no way out of it because there was a curfew at the Montreal Olympic Stadium. You had to start on time, and you cannot go over. I think they’d throw you in prison if you did!”

He adds, laughing: “Anyway, long story short, we recorded it that way. So it was one of those scary, scary moments. But you know, we liked a bit of pressure. ELP always liked a bit of pressure! And we pulled it off.

“The sound was good, and then we took it to the studio. We doctored up whatever we could, and tried to improve the sound.”

It was in the immediate aftermath of the drama in Montreal that the decision was made for ELP and the orchestra to go their separate ways.

Palmer explains: “At that particular stage, because we were so panicked, we decided that we just wanted to carry on on our own because it was a calmer environment than having 64 extra people on the road with us.”

He adds: “When you carry that many people, you have to have some form of doctor or nurse along with you because it’s like moving a small village. So we had a doctor on the road with us, but we didn’t tell the orchestra until the last week. And of course no one was ill in the first two weeks, but the third week, I remember walking down the hallway to go down for breakfast, and outside the doctor's room there was a queue all the way up the hallway to the lift of people who got something wrong. So that's what it was like.”

All told, Carl Palmer remains proud of what ELP and the orchestra created together.

“It was a real travelling circus,” he says. “And the orchestra was fantastic. To this day, some of them are still in contact with me. There’s a few of them still playing. So yes, it was a great thing to do.”

Emerson, Lake & Palmer's new reissue of Works Live is out now

Dhani Harrison, musician and son of Beatles legend George Harrison, has teamed up with renowned Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich to form a new band called Dragonflies.

The duo will release their self-titled debut album on 18 September via Dark Horse Records, the independent imprint set up by George Harrison in 1974 and revived by his son in 2020.

"People naturally assume that the son of a rich, famous person spends his days hanging out and nights going to parties. I've always been a worker - like my dad," Harrison told MusicRadar back in 2009. He's toured extensively with his band Thenewno2, composed scores for films like Beautiful Creatures, and released numerous solo projects.

The first taste of the forthcoming Dragonflies' album — which was primarily recorded on tape at Godrich's Brixton studio — is new single Slower, a dreamy, trip-hop-esque track that speaks to core Dragonflies influences like Portishead's Beth Gibbons.

The track's release was accompanied by a striking video created by Bristol-based artistic director and animator RUFFMERCY.

Harrison and Godrich are longtime friends who first started making music together during the pandemic, when the Radiohead producer was asked for his thoughts on the project that would eventually become Harrison's 2023 record Innerstanding.

"He's a machine," Harrison said of the acclaimed producer, whose credits include pioneering Radiohead albums like OK Computer and In Rainbows, Travis' The Man Who, Beck's Sea Change and IDLES' Tangk. "He has strong opinions about what he wants to hear, and for me it's very humbling. That's why it's such a new experience."

On the meaning behind the band's name, he added: "Dragonflies are a symbol of spiritual enlightenment. When Nigel suggested the name I was like, 'yeah, sold, done'. Whenever I see a dragonfly, it's magical."

Emo math-rock band Daydream Plus have released an 8-bit chiptune remix version of their debut album Second Last Day of Summer that’s only available as a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) cartridge.

That means the only way to listen to the reworked album in its entirety is via a vintage games console launched in 1986. This comes after the original album was released in physical formats only, with fans of the group able to grab CD and vinyl copies of the project via music distribution platform Bandcamp.

The NES launch, titled Extended Forecast, is part of the band's wider push against less intentional modern forms of music consumption.

"I love owning physical media," Daydream Plus guitarist Payson Power told NME. "It's a sign of respect to the artist, especially in an age where things are so disposable. Nowadays, people consume at this voracious speed. I miss the days of building your collection bit-by-bit."

There's also a desire to counteract the growing trend of video games being released in download-only format, exemplified by PlayStation's recent decision to abandon physical releases completely.

"Digital means you only ever own a license to play and with Day One updates [that fix overlooked bugs] becoming more frequent, we all get an inferior product," Power said. "It just rewards greed and corporate bullshit."

Still, translating the album into NES format wasn't easy. Power spent countless hours watching YouTube tutorials on how to reprogram music for the NES' five available audio channels using 8-bit music tracker FamiTracker, and reached out to experts on vintage electronics for advice on how to make it work.

"It was a brutal experience," he said. "The NES is basically held together with chewing gum and paperclips. I've told my wife, when they put me in the crematorium oven, to make sure I'm clutching a copy of 'Extended Forecast'. It's my life's work."

Check out Daydream Plus on Bandcamp.

Some bands might let the fact they’ve got no label, no manager and no money get them down, but in 2001, when Jimmy Eat World were putting together the album that would change their lives, they just rolled with it and got down to work.

The Bleed American sessions of 2000 could be described as an exercise in financial brinksmanship and artistic freedom. Producer Mark Trombino, without whom there would have been no album, deferred payment. He believed so much in the band and their material that he could wait.

Frontman/guitarist Jim Adkins wasn’t sweating the money too much either.

“I think everyone is kind of flat on their ass in their early 20s,” he laughs, joining MusicRadar over Zoom alongside Jimmy Eat World drummer Zach Lind. “You’re in the gathering stage of everything. You’re not really concerned about retirement money. Most of your paycheque is going toward your cost of living and having fun.

“I felt like… It was lean. That’s for sure! But the amount of adventure in it all cancelled out any real stress, I feel. I dunno, I might have been the only one who felt that.”

On this Zoom call, Adkins really is the only one who felt that. Lind was the guy in the band who had just got married. He had the very real fear that the bottom was falling out of his bottom line.

“My wife and I had been married since the fall of ’99, and she was bringing home the bacon. She had a college degree, and she worked in finance, and we had enough money to buy a little house,” he says. “Right before Bleed American, we decided she quit her job, and then we decided to put our house up for rent, and we moved in with my sister-in-law.”

The fact that both are speaking to us now, on the 25th anniversary of Bleed American, with the album to be played in its entirety in the biggest shows the Arizona rockers have ever played in the UK, tells us that it all worked out. DreamWorks ultimately picked up the album, and that first cheque from the label kept the Lind household in the black.

“We were totally broke,” admits Lind. “When we got a cheque from DreamWorks after we signed, it was just in the nick of time. If that hadn’t happened, we would have been trying to figure something out, like maybe sell the house, or Holly going back to work.”

They had seen peers fall by the wayside in similar circumstances, bands whose paycheque did not come in. Life got in the way and they did other things. “For us, it was literally by a hair that we made it through and God for that,” says Lind.

It was strange that Jimmy Eat World should find themselves in this situation. They had been on Capitol, and while there had been tensions with the label, the release of 1999’s Clarity had created a buzz around the band.

The critics liked them. They were punk but melodic. They were alternative. They got lumped in with the emo scene but they never displayed emo’s appetite for overheated pop melodrama. There were just Jimmy Eat World.

Was that the problem at Capitol? That they label just didn’t know what to do with them?

“I don’t know about that. I think it was just a situation where we got signed to Capitol, we were really young, and we were also really stubborn,” says Lind. “So any sort of marketing ideas they had, we didn’t wanna do any of it. And granted, they would come up with dumb ideas but—”

“—to be fair, most of them were lame as fuck,” interjects Adkin.

This stubborn streak might have cost them their deal with Capitol but it was the bedrock for more long-term success. Lind says the label was never really all that invested in the first place – certainly not financially.

He says their deal would have covered “the budget of a marketing meeting catering spread” and little else. When DreamWorks picked them up, they had a label that was all in. It was life-changing.

But in the meantime, Jimmy Eat World needed to put together a record.

They had the songs. When the Bleed American sessions began in October 2000, it was all written, all demoed. Sweetness had been written for Clarity, but with the uncertainty surrounding their Capitol deal, to the point where they were not even sure that they were going to release the album at all, the band held the song back.

“Most of the material we had been performing live,” says Akdins. “Leading up to recording, and during recording, we took a break between recording the drums and everything else to tour to raise money, to finish making it. So a lot of it was road tested, explored somewhat. The heavy lifting with the songs – the arrangement, lyrics, general idea, approach – all of that, I feel, there was a great, rough plan for it all. I feel like we went into recording pretty confident that we had the songs – the songs were ready. It was just about exploring the concepts to make it better.”

They had to use their studio time wisely, choose their moment. Even so, some of these concepts they explored were pretty ambitious for a band without a label or management. Cautioners was one of those tracks.

“On Cautioners, we had an idea to get different drum sounds so that every hit of the beat that would be there is just some extra form of ear candy as it’s going by,” says Adkins. “Like, you can perform it as a piece, but the idea was we wanted to get unique sounds for every hit, and just cut and paste and slam them next to each other so it becomes even more jarring that these are individual and unique.”

“We didn’t have a lot of time to block out, ‘Oh, hey, we’re just gonna spend a month and figure it out.’ We wouldn’t have been able to afford that,” adds Lind. “But, to Jim’s point, there was just the right amount of wiggle room in the time that we had based on what we booked to explore some things, some targeted [sounds].

A song like Praise Chorus was pretty much like, if you listen to the demo and you listen to the song, it’s just a newer, better version of that. My Sundown, Your House, and Cautioners were three songs that we really spent a little bit of extra wiggle room to invest in those songs.”

It helped that Lind tracked his drums with some time to spare. That freed up a few days. Whenever they reached an impasse there was always another idea that made the song better. That was the case on Praise Chorus when Adkins had written a bridge that was too long to be instrumental, too good to be cut, and he couldn’t think of any lyrics that would work for it. He knew someone who would.

“We decided to just send that song off to Davey von Bohlen, who played it in a band called The Promise Ring, just to see what he would do,” says Adkins. “He came back with what you hear on the record, which is basically I sing something, ‘Come on, Davey, sing me something that I know…’ And he just basically used that as a jumping off point to reference a bunch of lyrics that he thought I might know. [Laughs] Literally, he just went with that.”

Von Bohlen went on a tear, referencing Madness, Bad Company, the Promise Wrong of course, Mötley Crüe, even Tommy James and the Shondells’ Crimson And Clover, and sent in his vocal from Milwaukee. It was like a patched-denim vest featuring of all the kinds of songs Adkins would have been listening to.

“Well sure, everything he references, if you’re our age and were interested in music at all, all those lyric quotes are stuff that’s just there in your mind whether you own those albums or not,” says Adkins. “Maybe the They Might Be Giants one is a little stretch, but, for me, like, yeah! [Laughs]”

No one had the time or money to be messing around with gear. They had just enough options. Adkins would lean heavily on his American Standard Telecaster. It was this through a Fender Champ that you hear on the solo to The Middle.

Now, there’s a track. Every classic album needs a hit and The Middle was it. It has had a Sasquatch-sized pop-cultural footprint, having been covered by Prince and Taylor Swift, the band performing it with the latter. But it was just another song that they liked at the time. They never saw that coming.

“No! Are you kidding me? No!” laughs Adkins.

“When I played it for people, like my friends, it got an immediate reaction,” says Lind. “There’s a little bit of a dysmorphia that I think every band has about their own music.

“Sometimes, there are some songs that we think are bangers. ‘Oh, this is gonna be a single!’ and, ‘The label is gonna fucking love this one!’ Then when they hear it, it’s like, ‘No.’ But with that song, when I played it for friends of mine, just the demo, it got a big response.”

It has a killer guitar solo, too. Inspired by Doug Gillard’s playing on Guided By Voices’ I Am A Tree, it finds Adkins chasing down a theme and a form – “Theme, repeat, theme, repeat, escalation, closing with more intensity!” – and playing around until he found the right modulation of hammer-ons and pull-offs, and he kept at it until it landed perfectly, the power-up the song needed.

Rolling Stone duly gave Adkins his flowers, placing The Middle 76th in the greatest guitar solos of all time.

Adkins was once a student of jazz and classical guitar but admits those booksmarts were not brought to bear on The Middle.

“Yeah, for guitar solos in general, I’m not the kind of player – like John Mayer – that just instantly can connect the dots without even thinking of where I’m taking something over what scale,” says Adkins. “I stopped studying jazz before all that really clicked.”

But something had clicked. Bleed American was the sound of a different Jimmy Eat World. They still had the energy and forward motion of punk rock, only these songs were bringing more of those heartland influences to the fore and the appreciation that simplicity in songwriting can yield some surprising results.

“Bleed American is definitely an album in our musical development that, coming from the more chaotic punk kind of playing, we were just being inspired by simplicity. Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen to some degree. I don’t know if that was totally conscious. There’s definitely a little bit of [Tom Petty’s] You Wreck Me on the beat for The Middle but it just seemed like it fit.”

The Middle is just one example out of many where Bleed American has instances of repeated lyrics, verses repeated because Adkins felt it was the “ultimate subversive thing” to do at the time.

They all learned you can subvert songwriting orthodoxy when the songs are strong – and they were. Adkins learned he could play the most simple guitar part or hook and it will work, because under it you've got Rick Burch's bass guitar and Tom Linton's rhythm guitar there too. It all adds up

“There’s something really powerful in making something very simple,” says Adkins. “There’s a feeling, an almost slightly demented feeling, of how far you can push a very simple set of restrictions on yourself, like how far between these boundaries can you take it?

“Repetition is definitely a sort of hook. I don’t necessarily know if it was a conscious decision at the time. Sometimes you can’t even quantify with words what is inspiring; you just instantly turn it around and do your version of it. If something that is like, ‘Oh yeah, this is awesome!’ now that’s part of the menu. Tom Petty was definitely one of those. Zach’s always been a big Tom Petty fan, but for me, too, Wildflowers was really clicking in a way that maybe hadn’t before going in.”

This was a weird time for the world and its popular culture. How we listened to music was about to change. Peer-to-peer file sharing was coming online, paving the way for the streaming revolution to follow. Jimmy Eat World used P2P platforms to their advantage, sharing rough mixes over Napster to prime the pump.

It worked. When they would play those songs live the crowd’s reaction told them that they had downloaded it. They had to think like this. They didn’t have the “formal infrastructure” to support them.

How could they have foreseen The Middle becoming such a hit when they had no one to lobby radio DJs to play it?

“Luckily, we ended up hiring the best rock manager in the world, and signing a deal with DreamWorks, a label that really believed in us, and that solved that problem,” says Lind. “But at the time, when we were making the record, I don’t think you can really let yourself think about, ‘Oh, this is gonna have this reach…’ when you don’t even know what that reach is gonna be. You don’t even know what label it's coming out on – even if it’s gonna come out on a label.”

Finishing the record, hiring John Silva as manager, and shopping the record around labels remains Lind’s favourite memory of the whole Bleed American cycle. Like anything in life, the hard times feel too real, and the good times take on a surreal air, like it's all just too good to be true. Silva had put together meetings in New York City with various labels – Elektra, RCA, Atlantic, and Lind could – finally – see the light, a sign their lives were never going to be the same again.

“I remember just flying into New York City, seeing the Manhattan skyline, the sun setting, and thinking, ‘Holy shit, this is crazy! It’s wild that we’re being flown to a place just to talk to people who are all wanting to put out our album,’” he says. “It was just a wild thought. It was a moment of whiplash, and that moment always sticks out to me for some reason.”

“Doing our own headlining show at Brixton Academy was definitely a highlight,” says Adkins. “Going from playing the Garage to Brixton Academy within a year was a pretty wild ride.”

• The Bleed American 25th Anniversary Tour is underway. See Jimmy Eat World for dates and ticket details.

Following the release of the Rolling Stones' 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, Technics has created a limited edition wireless earbud in collaboration with the iconic British band.

According to the Japanese audio brand, "this exclusive collaboration unites Technics' signature audiophile engineering with one of music's most iconic legacies," in a joint project designed to "deliver every note as intended".

The new Technics EAH-AZ100 wireless earbuds feature the band's legendary red Lips & Tongue logo on the rubber case, while the earbuds themselves are built for exceptional clarity across the full frequency range, and include new technology like a Magnetic Fluid Driver – supposedly the first of its kind in the industry.

The product enters the market two weeks after the release of the Rolling Stones' new album, which debuted at number one in the UK. It became the group's 15th chart-topping album, and their third consecutive number one LP after 2023's Hackney Diamonds and 2016's Blue & Lonesome.

Mick Jagger recently opened up about his experiences recording Foreign Tongues, explaining how producer Andrew Watt pushed them to use tape for Chuck Berry cover Beautiful Delilah.

"I said, ‘What does it matter? If someone listens to it on their phone, they don’t know it was cut on tape — it doesn’t make any difference,'" Jagger said. "[But] we cut it on tape and we did it live. That was old style."

Only a limited number of people will be able to experience the new record via Technics' new earbud collaboration, with just 5,000 units available to customers. And compared to other wireless earbuds on the market, they're not cheap: the EAH-AZ100 is currently available via Technics , Amazon and through Bravado for $299/£259.

Irish rockers U2 have teamed up with Dutch DJ and producer Martin Garrix to release Fireflies, a new single that was premiered during Garrix's headline set at Tomorrowland festival last weekend.

The show featured a surprise appearance from The Edge, who had previously collaborated with Garrix on U2 tracks such as 2019 hit We Are The People and Scars, which features on the band's latest EP, Easter Lily.

“We go back a long way with Martin, and there’s always a sense of adventure whenever we get together," The Edge said.

"Playing Fireflies for the first time at Tomorrowland, in front of one of the most passionate festival crowds anywhere, was such a rush... in fact I might have enjoyed it a bit too much. It reminded me of why I love playing outdoors. I like it better when there’s no ceiling."

The single comes as U2 gear up for the release of their first original new album in almost a decade. Timeline details are hazy, but rumours suggest a new record by the end of the year.

The band recently released a rousing music video for new track Street of Dreams, filmed in Mexico City with original drummer Larry Mullen Jr. back behind the kit having recovered from the major back and neck surgeries that caused him to leave the group temporarily.

It's unclear whether Fireflies will feature on U2's forthcoming record, but either way, it's clearly a meaningful release for everyone involved.

"Fireflies has a very unique mood. It's a special song we started working on six summers ago," Garrix said. "It felt electrifying and very surreal to finally debut it at Tomorrowland with The Edge."

He added: "I've worked with Bono and Edge before, but working with the whole band I got to get a glimpse of their chemistry and why U2 are who they are. It has been an absolute honour to work with them again."

Steve Van Zandt had an idea. Max Weinberg, the long-standing drummer of the E Street Band was double-booked, and with Conan O’Brien demanding his services for television he would have to sit out a Bruce Springsteen tour. The E Street Band needed a stand-in. Van Zandt raised his hand: what about Weinberg’s kid, Jay?

Weinberg’s kid, Jay, joining MusicRadar over Zoom, says he only found a couple of years ago that that it was the E Street Band guitarist’s suggestion that he should be the stand-in. It was a crazy idea. Max Weinberg had been in the E Street Band for decades. Jay Weinberg had only been playing drums for three years.

“I had started playing drums at 14 years old, and then at 17 years old was when I first played with them,” says Jay, now 35 years old. “It was a vertical learning curve. Steve was like, ‘What about his kid? He’s a drummer, and I’ve seen him play.’ It was funny, he told me that he told Bruce. Bruce was like, ‘Okay, that’s a wild idea – and keeps it in the family, but what are you talking about? Can he play? He’s a kid.’”

Weinberg was not as green as he looked. He had the rudiments down and applied himself behind the kit with the studied intensity of a teenage metal fan, weaning himself on Slayer, Slipknot and Mastodon. His style was a work in progress but already there were signs that he had learned much of Dave Lombardo, Joey Jordison, and Brann Dailor’s super-technical styles.

Van Zandt could see it. He told the Boss as much. Dancing In The Dark and Born In The USA were going to be easy to a kid who’s hammering away to Altar Of Sacrifice and Iron Tusk.

“Steve was like, ‘I saw this kid play once. Your music is gonna be like Mary Had A Little Lamb to this kid. He’ll be fine.’ But with that said, I had to learn decades of music,” says Jay.

He got to work. There were a lot of songs in those decades. He worked to a short-list of 200 songs, many of which he already knew. This was the music he had grown up with. He had been on tour, watching the E Street Band perform from the side of the stage, studying it, how the band interacted with Springsteen – how the Boss called the plays – not that he ever imagined that he would be the one up there behind the kit.

“I loved it so much, and I respected it so much, that when I was on tour with them, I'd be just digesting everything – not like I knew I was studying because eight years later I was gonna be filling in for my dad. That was not my train of thought. But I just wanted to learn as much as I could about it.”

And so Springsteen called, Jay Weinberg took the gig – maybe took a deep breath too – then began basic training.

If there had been a practice called for that day he knew enough to “hack away at it” – no question. But this required some deep learning.

“It definitely took some some active practice on it,” says Jay. “I mean, I’m playing along to my Slayer records. I needed to understand where Bruce’s music came from; I’m not completely embodying that style yet at 17 years old, so I had to really learn where it comes from – and what are the motivations between certain stylistic choices on the drums. It took a lot.”

Springsteen notoriously likes to switch up the set and keep it fresh. He had his young drummer learning five songs a day. They would soundcheck two or three then drop them into the set. Initially, he was tag-teaming the set with his dad, building up to take on a three-and-a-half hour set on his own. “Eventually, when the Conan show rebooted as The Tonight Show, and my dad was over there, my training wheels were off, and I was playing these full marathon concerts,” he says.

But before he got that far, Springsteen needed to be sure the kid was ready. Looking back on it now, the Boss was playing the role of frontman and coach, pushing Weinberg Jr to see what he could do.

“It was a wild situation that Bruce threw me into, and I think he knew what he was doing,” says Jay. “He’s the only actual genius I’ve ever played music with. The man has his eyes on so many different aspects of performance, and in a way coaching and motivating people. I’ve never met anybody who motivates quite like Bruce does, in unspoken ways.

“He was able to take a frightened 17, 18-year-old and make it so it was chill, and so I was able to go on and do it. He wanted it to go well, obviously. He didn't want this, you know, tour to be a bust, so he had ways of coaching me forward and pushing my abilities in ways where he knew how to get the best out of me.”

One particular night in Philadelphia stands out. This was the final test. It was an arena show at the Spectrum. The band had a lot of history there. Max Weinberg would be handling most of the set. Jay was scheduled to step up during the encore.

Springsteen announced that they would be closing the set with Kitty’s Back from his 1973 sophomore album, The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle. Jay knew the song but had never played it before – and he only had until the encore to learn it.

“It’s very, very complex. It’s not Dancing In The Dark, which is, like, one drumbeat the entire way,” he says. “This has jazz-influenced accents, and wild changes, and a swing shuffle beat – and it meanders through all these different styles. I had never sat down to the drums to actually play it, and I think Bruce knew that.”

Luckily, the set was long. There were a few hours yet to get it all mapped out. That’s not to see there wasn’t panic this whole time. It’s the set closer, they’ll probably stretch it out a bit, jam on it, and there’s a sold-out arena waiting.

“I know how complicated it is. I’m freaking out, knowing that there’s this expectation, just doing this crash course on the song,” says Jay. “I’m backstage with my headphones and writing out my charts of how to remember the changes of the songs.”

A penny for Springsteen’s thoughts? They would have been elsewhere. He knew it was going to be okay, or else he wouldn’t have called the tune.

“I got up to the drum set,” says Jay. “I tape that [chart] to my floor tom. I think we played a couple songs in the encore, and then went into Kitty’s Back, and luckily it went well. But I was deathly afraid because it was an iconic song from way back in Bruce’s catalogue to mark this iconic moment of playing a venue they’ve been playing for decades, that was to be torn down. I needed to hit the moment. That was a huge, huge moment – super difficult – but it went well.”

Jay Weinberg has scarcely taken a beat since, teaming up with NYC hardcore stalwarts Madball, with Against Me!, replacing the late Joey Jordison in Slipknot, playing with Suicidal Tendencies, then he has his solo project(s) and a new album with Massachusetts death metal ragers Fuming Mouth, The Ringing Bell, out now.

But the lessons from the Boss and that 2009 E Street Band tour haven’t left him.

“He would just ramp it up in intensity," says Jay. "That was very meaningful, him demonstrating to me that you should never be satisfied. When you feel like you’ve reached that place of consistency and flow, there are more ways to push yourself and keep ascending to whatever that abstract thing that we’re all chasing is.”

It ended up topping the charts in the UK and remains their best-loved song, but British band Razorlight say that they originally planned to give 2006’s America to another artist.

The revelation came last night, when Razorlight’s Andy Burrows and Johnny Borrell played an intimate show in central London and told the stories behind some of their biggest hits.

Of America, lead singer Borrell said: “My plan, which Andy probably didn't like, was based on when Prince wrote Nothing Compares 2 U and no one knew it was a Prince song until it became this big hit [for Sinéad O’Connor],” he explained. “I was like: Wouldn't it be so cool if we wrote this song and found some amazing artist to do it?”

It’s perhaps worth saying that Nothing Compares 2 U wasn’t written for Sinéad O’Connor – the original version was recorded by the Prince-backed band The Family, and featured on their one and only album in 1985. After O’Connor made it famous, Prince would reclaim it, performing it extensively right up until the time of his death.

Unfortunately for Borrell – but fortunately, in hindsight, for Razorlight – his plan to do something similar didn’t work. The song was shopped around, but there were no takers.

“Six months later, we still had this song,” says Borrell. “Don't get me wrong, I loved the song. I was living in the rehearsal studio at the time, and I had written this riff years ago. I think it was the first riff I ever wrote - for a really bad song about northeastern England when I was away on a very long camping holiday when I was 13.”

For some reason, Borrell thought that said riff could work now: “I never used guitar pedals, but I looked at this pedal on the floor and thought, ‘You know, I could put that with the 'Lost in America' song and see what happens.’”

Success happened, but there were soon bumps in the road. Burrows and Borrell fell out and didn’t speak for a decade, though they reconciled and reformed in 2021.

The duo are now celebrating the 20th anniversary of Razorlight’s eponymous second album, on which America features, and to mark their occasion, they’re released the original Lost in America demo, which is missing that guitar riff and has a slightly different groove.

Not quite as different as the one that Borrell originally proposed, though – the one from Billy Joel’s Movin’ Out, Anthony’s Song. “I sat down and said, ’Why don't we just write a song with a drop beat like that, but minus the trumpet?’” he recalls. Turning to Burrows, he adds: “You looked at me like, "Well, we could, but you wouldn't like it.’"

“They were so much better live than on record,” Gene Simmons says about the outrageous rock ’n’ roll band from New York City who were rivals to Kiss in the early ’70s.

In a new interview with Track Star podcast, Simmons and his Kiss bandmate Paul Stanley discuss a broad range of music – from their biggest influences such as The Beatles, Slade and The Who, to the stars of the New York rock scene from which Kiss emerged.

Some of their comments are bluntly dismissive. At one point, Stanley says of The Velvet Underground: “The music sucked!”

But both Stanley and Simmons have kinder words for the New York Dolls.

The Dolls’ self-titled debut album – produced by Todd Rundgren – was hugely influential, inspiring generations of rock ’n’ roll bands from the Ramones and the Sex Pistols to Guns N’ Roses and Poison.

The group’s classic line-up featured singer David Johansen, guitarists Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan.

Referring to the Dolls’ debut album, Paul Stanley tells Track Star: “I hated the cover, because they looked like housewives on the cover. But live they just exuded this flamboyant glittery rock ’n’ roll.

“Look, they weren’t the best band in the world, but they really put it across. They were stars.

“We would see them [play] in New York. They would show up late. They were never on time. They’d tell jokes on stage.”

But he says admiringly: “There was a camaraderie about them and that’s what I think you look for in bands. ‘Boy, I wish I was a member of that club.’ The Dolls were the club that every other band and everybody in the audience wanted to be in.”

Simmons recalls: “We did some shows together but it didn’t last long. We opened for them. We did about three shows together and that was it. After that, we exploded and the Dolls did not.”

Stanley adds: “I remember being at the Crystal Room – which was at the Hotel Diplomat where everybody did shows off Times Square – and I ran into Sylv Sylvain. I said to him innocently, but I had ulterior motives, ‘We should do some shows, we should play together.’ And he said, ‘You’d kill us!’ So he was pretty sharp.”

As for why Kiss made it big and the Dolls ended up splitting in 1976 having failed to make a hit record, Stanley suggests: “The Dolls were very much a New York band and when you went into Ohio or Indiana it was completely lost. We were going for something more universal. It wasn’t designed for a small clique of an area.”

He explains: “I think what happened was so much of what these bands were doing had no relevance or connection to middle America. We were Anglophiles. We loved Slade, we loved the Stones, The Who. And I think what we were doing was much more universal.”

It’s one of the great sibling enmities in rock, but the relationship between Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks appears to have thawed in recent years. Now, Dave has given an interview with The Times in which he talks about how art has drawn them closer.

“It’s miraculous, really, how we’ve become so bonded,” says the younger Davies brother. Things, it seems, changed after his 2004 stroke, which led to a return to painting for him. “Art saved my life, really,” he says. “It was very exploratory and I found I could do things I couldn’t do before. It was a real liberation.”

When Davies posted some of his abstract works on Instagram, Ray commented and, in the words of Dave’s partner, Rebecca Wilson, who is also interviewed: “It kind of brought them together.”

Now both brothers have collaborated with the artist Christian Furr on an exhibition, The Kinks: Brothers, which collects a number of paintings that Furr has made based on photos of Ray and Dave, which have then been painted on once more by Dave.

And it seems to have further eased the tensions in that fraternal relationship. “We enjoy each other’s company,” says Dave. “We were getting on great. We have fluctuated between getting on really well and not getting on at all over the years but there’s always been telepathy, since childhood.”

The animosity between Ray and Dave has always had several layers to it. Aside from mere sibling rivalry, there was the fact that, while Ray was clearly the better songwriter, Dave was more adept musically. “Music was always really easy for me,” Dave says. “I could work out harmonies really easily. I managed to weave in and out of what Ray was doing.”

But it was Ray who was seen to the leader of the band and the songwriting genius. Dave says it was “terrible” trying to escape that shadow – “But then I realised that he had to find himself [as a musician]. I was his help and I didn’t realise it. The horrible things that happened - it’s all there for a purpose. You need that bonding of difference.”

The Kinks may not even have had a career had it not been for Dave’s moment of genius. Famously, he created that serrated guitar tone on You Really Got Me by slashing his amp cone with a razor blade, arguably creating the template for hard rock, metal and punk in the process. “It’s nice to be recognised,” he says modestly of that innovation. “When we created it, nobody liked it.”

And that eternal question of whether Dave (79) and Ray (82) will ever return as The Kinks or even share a stage again? “I don’t know, but never say never,” is all the guitarist says.

Some records are odd because of a single factor, but the Crash Test Dummies’ Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm, a worldwide hit in 1994, is peculiar for all sorts of reasons.

That hummed chorus and title for starters. Of course, many many songs in human history have had banal onomatopoeic names – La La La, Ooh Wee, Um Um Um Um Um, for example. There have been five separate UK hits with the title Ooh La La alone. But the Crash Test Dummies' song was unusual in that the odd title was juxtaposed with lyrics about unspoken pain and the silence that envelops small communities. The effect was striking, and haunting.

Crash Test Dummies were formed off the beaten track, in Winnipeg, Canada in the mid-1980s, with frontman Brad Roberts emerging as the main songwriter. Roberts’ baritone-verging-on-bass voice was another unusual element.

“I never even intended to be a singer-songwriter,” Roberts told Songfacts in a 2018 interview. “I'm very happy to write songs, but I didn't hear myself singing them because I thought my voice was crap. I sounded like some guy who would be better off in a choir, singing the bass parts in a church somewhere. But I just couldn't get any of the people that I tried to get to be singers for our band to sing the songs the way I heard them in my head, so I ended up becoming the singer myself.”

The Dummies slowly built up a following and signed to BMG in 1991. Their debut album, The Ghosts That Haunt Me, was a significant success in their home country, producing a Top Five single in Superman’s Song, with the band scooping Group Of The Year at the 1992 Juno Awards.

Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm was released as the lead single for the follow up, 1993’s God Shuffled His Feet. For the song, Roberts dug deep into his own childhood memories.

“It was a composite of stories,” he told the Dutch TV documentary series Top 2000 a go go in 2021. “There’s a story about a guy who was in a boat and he was sailing near Niagara Falls and he got too close and he thought he was going to die and his hair turned from black to white as snow. And I just thought it was really intriguing that something that physical could manifest in that brief a period of time. And so I put it into the song.”

The second verse alights on a girl who didn’t want to change with her school friends because she was embarrassed about her birthmarks. “I have a birthmark at the base of my spine called a ‘giant hairy nevis’ – I looked it up later. I was extremely self-conscious about it as a child and when I went to swimming lessons I was teased for it. And anyway, it always stuck with me that I was this marked man. Once again - this physical manifestation.”

For the final verse, Roberts decided to describe the situation of a child whose strict religious upbringing marked them out as different. “This girl that I knew, her parents were Pentecostal Christians, and they used to take her to church every week and do what they call ‘speaking in tongues,’” Roberts told Songfacts.

“When Pentecostal Christians get together every Sunday, some of them are moved to speak spontaneously. They claim that the spirit has entered their body and what they are saying is simply a transmission of that spirit. It's not themselves speaking anymore, it is the holy word of God speaking through them. And the language that comes out, sometimes it's an ordinary language, but quite often it sounds like gibberish. For my friend, as a little child going to school, she found this terrifying, needless to say, because her parents were the people that ran her life. They seemed to just become different people. It made a big mark on her, emotionally. It was a scarring experience, I would say.”

And, most enigmatically, Roberts as narrator adds nothing to these stories. There is no chorus reflecting on these characters other than ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ hummed twice. The listener is simply left to fill in the gaps… and wonder.

“For many years many people would ask me (dumb voice): ‘So, er what’s the matter? Couldn’t you think of any words for the chorus’,” Roberts said in 2021. “And I’d say ‘oh no no no. Less is more. Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm is a way of reflecting on what has been said. So even though the chorus has no words it's a kind of commentary on the verses, which is what a good chorus should do.”

“But having said all that,” he added. “When I wrote the song I couldn’t think of any words for the chorus! And I handed the demo around to the band and said ‘listen the lyrics are all there for the verses, but I don’t know what I’m going to do about the chorus yet. We’ll just have to see. But let’s go with this for now.”

“And they all came back to me and said ‘What – are you crazy? It’s perfect as it is! You don’t want to add words!’ I was like ‘Oh, thank God!’”

So Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm went out as it is, with that gnomic humming as its chorus. Strangely, although they had already broken through in Canada, the single wasn’t a huge hit in their homeland, stalling at Number 14. Instead it started gaining attention south of the border, with its video - which featured a school theatrical production depicting the lyrics - becoming an MTV hit.

“It got big in America, starting from Atlanta, Georgia,” Roberts told Boom 97.3’s Behind The Vinyl podcast in 2020. “Clive Davis, once he saw it was doing well in Georgia, he committed to putting in money and people and time into us and all of a sudden at every gig we were at someone at the record label would show up and be interested and report back to the president. They really put us through the wringer, but it was a good wringer to be put through. I’ve never been so busy in my life. But I’m very grateful for that.”

Aside from its obvious novelty factor, the song had two other things going for it. The music, with acoustic guitars, piano and in particular those creamy dreamy harmonies after the second and third refrains, was intoxicating, with many making comparisons to REM’s then most-recent album Automatic For The People.

But Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm was also adjacent to the then dominant alt-rock sound. Roberts’ voice was a similar shade to Chris Cornell’s or Eddie Vedder’s and the Dummies themselves looked like a scrubbed up grunge band. They looked and sounded familiar, but the single was utterly unique: usually a recipe for success.

The critics certainly seemed to think so. Billboard said that it “marries a worldwise vocal with a textured arrangement that is chock full of aural goodies. Given justice (and promotional tender loving care), this one will soon blossom into the across-the-board smash it should be.”

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times described it as “a deceptively original work about how kids are often tormented for falling outside the norm.”

The UK was in the early throes of Britpop, but Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm was original enough to break through the lowering blinds of musical chauvinism. Terry Staunton in NME described it as “very good indeed… a melodic saunter through the weird Americana of John Irving or Garrison Keillor.” For then-Melody Maker scribe Caitlin Moran it was “delicate... like hope, and half broken like Nick Cave. I had forgotten things could be quite so beautiful”. The only dissenting voice was in Smash Hits for whom it was a “joke record for old people.”

Their loss. When daytime BBC Radio One jumped on it, it was a guaranteed hit and Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm reached Number Two in Spring 1994, stuck behind Prince’s The Most Beautiful Girl In The World. In the US it stalled at Number Four, though it went all the way in Australia, Germany and Belgium, keeping the band busy throughout 1994. They were also recipients of the dubious honour of a Weird Al Jankovic parody later that year when he released his own ‘take’ on the track, Headline News.

With its heavy novelty factor, it was always unlikely that Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm would lead to a glittering career for the Dummies and, indeed, the chart positions dropped away soon afterwards. The follow up single, the TS Eliot-referencing Afternoons And Coffeespoons was only a minor hit in both the US and UK and, after their 1995 cover of XTC’s The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead – which was recorded for the film Dumb And Dumber – their chart record ceased in many territories.

The band, though, continued to make albums, and in the years since have had the usual hiatuses, solo projects and reunions that groups of their standing enjoy. Their most recent resurrection came in 2024/25 when they toured internationally to celebrate the 30th anniversary of God Shuffled His Feet.

To most of the world outside Canada they are regarded as one hit wonders, but few wearers of that musical albatross have produced something as thoughtful, other-worldly and unusual as Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm.

Every musician has a moment in their young life when they connect with music in such a powerful way that they know this is what they were born to do. For Dan Hawkins, guitarist in The Darkness, it happened at the age of seven when he heard a Queen album for the very first time.

Hawkins recalls to MusicRadar: “My dad had gone to buy an MG sports car and I went with him. The car was a wreck but it had this amazing top-of-the-range Blaupunkt stereo – and on the journey back home, my dad played a cassette of A Night At The Opera and it blew my mind.”

He adds: “At that point, even at that early age, I decided pursue a career and a life rocking!”

More than four decades later, Hawkins is still living that dream. In addition, since 2015 he’s had Rufus Tiger Taylor, son of Queen legend Roger Taylor, alongside him as the drummer in The Darkness.

And the Queen connections don’t end there. The Darkness’s second album, 2005’s One Way Ticket To Hell... And Back, was produced by Roy Thomas Baker, who worked with Queen on A Night At The Opera and four other albums – Queen, Queen II, Sheer Heart Attack and Jazz.

Hawkins says of A Night At The Opera: “It’s the best album ever made! It’s so diverse, it transcends any sort of rock boundaries – even within the first two songs, from Death On Two Legs, an awesome rocking romp, to Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon, which is like a 1930s ode to boating! You’re thrown straight into the unknown.”

Hawkins picks two songs written by guitarist Brian May as highlights from this album.

“The Prophet’s Song is amazing,” he says. “Knowing a fair bit about production and having been friends with Roy Thomas Baker, I realise that the work that was put into that one song was more than most bands put into their whole albums.

“Obviously Bohemian Rhapsody is on there too, and it’s nice when a band’s biggest hit is on their best album, but I don’t think of A Night At The Opera as the album with Bohemian Rhapsody on it, I think of it as the album with 39 on it, which is my favourite Queen song.

“39 is one of those songs that grabs me emotionally, although for years I didn’t realise it was about travelling through time in deep space – quite obviously a song written by Brian May!

“When The Darkness were planning to play at Hyde Park with Queen and Paul Rodgers, just before the 7/7 London bombings [in 2005], I was going to play 39 with Brian. That would have been a dream, because that song, and the whole album, means so much to me.”

However, Hawkins did eventually get to jam with his hero. In 2011 May joined The Darkness on stage at London’s Hammersmith Apollo to perform a three-song encore of two Darkness songs, Bareback and I Believe In A Thing Called Love, plus Queen’s Tie Your Mother Down.

A very sad update on a story we brought you last week: L7 bassist Jennifer Finch, who had been suffering from an aggressive form of brain cancer, has died, aged just 59.

The LA grunge rockers announced the news on Saturday (July 18) via Instagram, saying: “With a very heavy heart we announce that our beloved bandmate, friend, and fellow troublemaker Jennifer Finch has passed away today."

“She had a long courageous fight with brain cancer and was loved by many wonderful friends, musical peers and fans worldwide. We love you Jennifer.”

The band later posted another statement, saying: “We are shattered by the loss of our beloved bandmate, sister and friend Jennifer Finch, whose fierce spirit, humour and boundless creativity helped shape L7 and changed all of our lives forever.

“Jennifer was a true original who lived entirely on her own terms, and the impact she made on music, art and everyone lucky enough to know her cannot be measured. We love her beyond words and will carry her with us always. Rest in power our dear friend.”

The extent of Finch’s condition was only revealed last week, when the band announced that they were launching a GoFundMe campaign for her ongoing care and medical expenses. In the week the campaign was live it raised nearly $400,000.

Finch wasn’t quite a founder member of L7 – she joined in 1986, after a stint in Sugar Babydoll, a short-lived band that also featured Courtney Love and future Babes In Toyland guitarist Kat Bjelland. She stayed all through their period of greatest success, including their Bricks Are Heavy and Hungry For Stink albums, from 1992 and 1994 respectively, before leaving in 1996, citing money and health issues.

The bassist then worked as a photographer, graphic designer and digital media professional though she continued to keep her hand in with music, playing in the bands OtherStarPeople and The Shocker.

But when L7 reformed in 2014, she returned to the fold. The group recorded one more album, Scatter The Rats, in 2019, and had continued to do what heritage bands of their vintage do: tour classic albums in full, reissue their back catalogue and enjoy a less-pressured second wind.

Earlier this year, L7 had announced The Last Hurrah 2026, which they were spinning as their final North American tour. Last week the band confirmed that that would go ahead with Finch’s blessing. It will now surely double-up as a celebration of both the bassist’s life and the fondly-regarded band she played in.

In 1984 a funny thing happened to INXS when they were performing in LA – and it led to their greatest success.

By that time the Australian band had started to make an impression in the US. The single Original Sin, produced by Nile Rodgers, was a minor hit, as was the parent album The Swing.

But the big breakthrough would come with the following album, Listen Like Thieves. And the producer of that album introduced himself to the band in a most surprising way.

Former INXS keyboard player and main songwriter Andrew Farriss recalls to MusicRadar: “In 1984 we played at the Palladium in Los Angeles. It was a good gig. There were 4000 people there. And right in the middle of the gig I see this bloke walking around on the stage as we’re playing.

“I’m looking around at our crew guys, like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ And all the while this bloke is walking around all over the stage, behind our gear, looking at the amps, everything.”

Eventually, Farriss says, the man disappeared from the stage and the gig finished without further incident.

Then, backstage after the performance, the man introduced himself to the band. This was Chris Thomas, the English record producer famed for working on a host of high profile albums by Roxy Music, Pink Floyd, the Sex Pistols, the Pretenders, Wings, Pete Townshend and Elton John.

Farriss recalls: “When Chris introduced himself to us I said, ‘Why were you walking around on stage?’ He said, ‘I don’t think anyone’s actually ever recorded your band properly.’

“Now we were on our fourth album by then. I told him, ‘We’re not exactly on a tricycle here, mate! You know, we’ve done a bit of recording.’

“But Chris said, ‘When I come and see your band live I’m overwhelmed by what you sound like. You sound just great live. But when I listen to your records there’s something missing. It’s not your songs – it’s the way they’re recorded.’

“So Chris told me what he’d done that night. He walked around on stage while we were playing live and he was listening to what we were all doing and looking at what gear we were using, even the monitor speakers.

“I thought that was a pretty weird thing to do, but that’s part of what makes Chris Thomas so clever. He said to himself, ‘I’m gonna find out what these guys actually sound like.’”

Thomas was promptly hired to produce the Listen Like Thieves album.

The location was Rhinoceros Studios in Sydney. But when the sessions began in August 1985, there was a problem.

Farriss explains: “When we got in the studio, Chris goes, ‘Where’s the gear that you were using in Los Angeles?’ We said, ‘Well, it’s in Los Angeles.’ And he goes, ‘I want to get that gear here.’

“So in the end we just tried to replicate exactly the kind of gear that we would have used in one of those concerts.”

Thomas found another way to replace the live sound he’d heard in LA.

“Most recording studios try to isolate all the musicians from each other,” Farriss says. “But instead of that he got us all to play together, exactly like we play live.

“So in a really weird way, Listen Like Thieves is one of the greatest live albums that wasn’t played live. We just set up our gear with the wedges, like we were playing live, and we recorded everything live as much as possible.”

Chris Thomas was proven right when Listen Like Thieves became a major hit around the world, establishing INXS as a truly international act. The album peaked at No 11 on the US Billboard 200 and also reached the top 50 in the UK.

“That record for INXS was really milestone for the band,” Farriss says.

Four singles were lifted from the album: What You Need, This Time, Kiss The Dirt (Falling Down The Mountain) and the title track. What You Need was the big hit, rising to No 5 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The album also had a huge impact on one famous fan.

As Farriss proudly states: “Giles Martin, George Martin’s son, said that Listen Like Thieves is his favourite album of all time.”

He might be pretty long in the studio recording tooth, but Mick Jagger admits that, during the making of new Rolling Stones album, Foreign Tongues, he didn’t see the point in going old-school and recording to tape rather than digitally.

The issue was raised when producer Andrew Watt suggested going analogue for one song in particular – a cover of an old Chuck Berry record. “We haven’t used tape for ages, but Andy wanted to use tape for Beautiful Delilah,” Jagger tells Billboard. “I said, ‘What does it matter? If someone listens to it on their phone, they don’t know it was cut on tape — it doesn’t make any difference.’”

Watt got his way, though: “We cut it on tape and we did it live,” says Jagger. “That was old style.”

Jagger’s fellow Stone Ronnie Wood also had a few words to say about Watt, all of which were complimentary. “He’s a great guitarist. He can play my parts better than I can,” he quipped.

Elsewhere, Jagger raised the possibility of the Stones releasing more music that features Charlie Watts, their late drummer. “We had a good track with Charlie [Hit Me in the Head, which is featured on Foreign Tongues] and we’ve got other tracks with Charlie. I keep reading this is Charlie’s final appearance – well, we’ve got other tracks with Charlie.”

Jagger also offered his thoughts on Gen-Z superstar Olivia Rodrigo, an artist who’s already received great notices from many of his peers. He was asked specifically about Rodrigo’s ability to make rock music, a genre that she’s explored extensively across her three-album discography.

“She’s really good at it,” he says. “Everyone thought she was a different kind of singer, but there’s quite a few female singers that have made that transition. It’s not a permanent transition necessarily, but the ability to change styles from what you think their original girly pop stuff is – it’s kind of interesting.”

To be fair to Rodrigo, she hasn’t so much ‘transitioned’ to a rock sound as specialised in it. Yes, her breakthrough hit (Drivers License) was a ballad, but right from the outset, she’s married heavy guitars to her pop sensibilities, and shared the stage with the likes of Weezer, No Doubt, David Byrne, Sheryl Crow and Billy Joel.

She’s also performed and recorded with The Cure’s Robert Smith, and has spoken of being a huge White Stripes fan when she was growing up (and yes: Jack White is a friend of hers, too).

It's Friday, and that can only mean one thing - it's Quiz of the Week time again!

With the week drawing to a close, we take a look back and pluck out our 10 favourite stories, then put you to the test to see if you've been paying attention (or not)…

This week we've got outrageous quotes, unlikely collabs and the end of music as we know it… So have you got what it takes to get that top ten?

Hit it!

NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert has become a pop-cultural staple of the internet era, a rite of passage for hot up-and-comers, a venue for the mega-stars to drop in and play in an intimate setting – like when Bono and the Edge swung by to rework U2 classics for acoustic guitar.

Taylor Swift has played one, as has Dua Lipa. The Wu-Tang Clan, IDLES, BTS, Alicia Keys, and the Foo Fighters have all done their bit. PinkPantheress played her first show without Auto-Tune on it.

But NPR Music broke new ground today; it just broadcast it’s most extreme performance ever, welcoming UK grindcore pioneers Napalm Death to the studio, to pitch up in support of public access broadcasting, and to maybe introduce some people to the restorative magic of the blast beat, brutal riffs, death growls and screams.

There was no stagediving. But then there was no stage, no wedge monitors to leap from. This, after all, is an office. But frontman Barney Greenway, guitarist/vocalist John Cooke, drummer Danny Herrera and touring bassist Matt Sheridan made themselves at home, and did what they always do, tore the place apart, and were nice about it, too.

“We are Napalm Death, for the uninitiated, just in case you might be wondering,” says Greenway, addressing the crowd out of shot. “So welcome one and all. Nice to see you. Let me say we are here to heartily support public access broadcasting. Unfortunately, it is under attack from all sides, in the UK as well as over here. And we have to take care of it – it’s precious. It has to be preserved.”

Greenway has given public access radio some iconic moments over the years, like when he gave the current UK Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, a lesson in death metal vocals.

Greenway’s vocal style is straight from the gut, a leonine roar in the classic death metal style. He made his full-length Napalm Death debut on 1990’s Harmony Corruption, when the Birmingham grind institution explored a more death metal direction under the watch of legendary producer Scott Burns at Morrisound Studios, in Florida. In this NPR segment Greenway is kind of like the MGM lion in a Crass T-shirt.

But public access radio has been good to Napalm Death, too. It has been good to grindcore. The late BBC Radio One DJ John Peel was an early champion. Napalm Death recorded a number of sessions that were later compiled in The Peel Sessions. And there were others; Carcass, Extreme Noise Terror, and Bolt Thrower all tracked at the Beeb (and there were other grind-adjacent sessions with Unseen Terror and others – check out the 2009 compilation Grind Madness At The BBC).

Today, Napalm Death brought the old classics to NPR, opening with Instinct Of Survival, the Side One classic from their 1987 debut LP, Scum, dropping the title track later in the set before closing with their one-second ur-grind track, You Suffer.

They’d call that something silly like "micro-grind" these days but back then it was just grindcore, and it was calling card that made Napalm Death notorious.

But not everything was head-down-and-blast.

“This next little ditty perhaps approaches the merest hint of musical beauty,” says Greenway, introducing Amoral from 2020’s Throes Of Joy In The Jaws Of Defeatism. Before pausing to add another qualifier: “The merest hint!”

He was as good as his word. Check it out at the top of the page.

And you can catch Napalm Death at this year's ArcTanGent Festival on 21 August. See the Napalm Death for full tour dates.

It was in 1975 that Kiss finally got their big breakthrough when Alive! – the band’s explosive double live album – climbed to No 9 in the US Billboard 200, and the extracted single Rock And Roll All Nite reached No 12.

After their first three studio records had bombed, this was the sweetest of victories. And it was followed by arguably the most powerful artistic statement of their career – their magnum opus, Destroyer.

In a 2021 interview for the launch of the 45th anniversary deluxe edition reissue of this landmark album, the band’s co-founders Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley spoke in depth about the making of Destroyer.

“It was a cinematic album,” Stanley said. “It was atmospheric, and visual when you heard that music.”

Simmons added with uncharacteristic understatement: “It’s one of our better records, for sure.”

Destroyer was originally released on 25 March 1976 and included songs that would become Kiss anthems – Detroit Rock City, God Of Thunder, Shout It Out Loud and Do You Love Me. It also included the hit ballad Beth.

Destroyer was recorded by the original and definitive Kiss line-up – with Stanley on guitar and vocals, Simmons on bass and vocals, Ace Frehley on lead guitar and backing vocals, and Peter Criss on drums and vocals.

Uncredited, guitarist Dick Wagner played on three tracks. The New York Philharmonic featured on Beth; the Brooklyn Boys Chorus on Great Expectations.

The producer, Bob Ezrin, had made his name working with Alice Cooper on the hit albums School’s Out (1972), Billion Dollar Babies (1973) and Welcome To My Nightmare (1975), as well as Lou Reed’s art rock cult classic Berlin (1973).

Destroyer was recorded in New York City, the band’s hometown, at two studios, Electric Lady and The Record Plant. The initial sessions were in September 1975, with final sessions in January and February 1976.

In 2021, when Stanley and Simmons discussed the creation of Destroyer, they began by explaining the commercial failure of the band’s first three studio albums – the debut Kiss (1974), Hotter Than Hell (also 1974) and Dressed To Kill (1975).

“I’ve heard that the first Led Zeppelin record was done in eighteen hours,” Simmons said, “but in hindsight, we never spent enough time in the studio. The great bands – The Beatles and so on – even though they could record fast, there was still a lot of rehearsal. We barely did that, because we were always touring, and it was tough to say no to another show. ‘They want us to play? Where? Let’s go!’

“And in those early days we were doing two records of new material a year – and touring the whole year. We just didn’t have time to stay in the studio more than two or three weeks.

“You’re touring, you write some songs, you get together, and just do a record. So with the first three records there was barely any production, hardly any overdubbing, it was just sort of bang it out. We didn’t spend enough time getting decent sounds.”

Stanley concurred: “I was quite frustrated with all of our early studio albums because frankly they didn’t come close to capturing what we were like live, and I wasn’t astute enough in the studio to know how to capture that. Live, we were bombastic, like a runaway freight train, and those studio albums were kind of like a garage band.”

Stanley paid tribute to Kiss manager Bill Aucoin for the success of Alive!

“Alive! was a turning point in that it really captured sonically the experience of being at a Kiss show and immersing the listener in the crowd,” he said. “Much to Bill Aucoin’s credit, that album became a mega success and a game changer for us as an international band.”

Stanley also said that it was Aucoin who set a high bar for Destroyer.

“Bill Aucoin was smart enough to say, ‘You’re going to have to follow Alive! with something amazing and credible, or you will go back to where you were before.’ That was pretty good foresight. And with that in mind we got in touch with the producer Bob Ezrin.

“Bob was a super talent. You only have to listen to the pre-Bob Ezrin Alice Cooper records versus the post-Bob Ezrin Alice records to hear what he did. And as we worked with him it became that much clearer how much he had to do with the parts and the orchestration in Alice’s songs.

“So we were on board to work with him, certainly. But we had no idea how – I don’t want to say regimented because it was a very creative process – but how structured and demanding Bob was.”

Simmons added: “We were lucky that Bob Ezrin was producing that record, because there was so much material and so many different ideas. With our previous records, either Paul or myself would come in with a finished song – Paul would show me one of songs and I might say, ‘How about this riff?’ In two or three hours it would be done and you’d record it.

“But Destroyer was the first one where we took a little more time. We started recording, then went out on tour, and then came back and finished the record. It was a new way of recording for us. And with Bob it was definitely a learning process. He actually taught us how to tune [guitars] a different way!”

Simmons said of the writing sessions: “We were at a small demos studio, a four track. Paul and I were there constantly. Ace and Peter didn’t participate. Sometimes they’d come down and help play a little bit, but other than that they never showed up. But Paul and I were constantly writing all kinds of stuff.”

As the primary songwriters in Kiss, Stanley and Simmons took the lead on Destroyer. Bob Ezrin had a share in the writing credits for seven of the album’s tracks. Ace Frehley co-wrote Flaming Youth with Stanley, Simmons and Ezrin. The ballad Beth was written by Peter Criss and Stan Penridge, the guitarist in Criss’s previous band Chelsea, with Bob Ezrin also credited as co-writer.

Criss sang the lead vocal on Beth, which became the album’s hit single by luck more than judgement. The lead single from Destroyer was Shout It Loud. The second single was Flaming Youth. The third was Detroit Rock City, with Beth as the B-side, but after DJs picked up on Beth it was released as an A-side in August 1976 and eventually peaked at No 7 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Simmons recalled: “There’s an interesting story about Beth. In the fall of ’75 we went to Cadillac, Michigan, where the whole town dressed like Kiss and it became ‘Kiss Day’ and all that stuff. And on our way over there, Peter and I were in a car and he started humming this melody. ‘What’s that?’ ‘Oh, that’s a song I wrote.’

“I mean, Peter never wrote a song in his life! But, he says, ’It’s a song called Beck.’ He sings, ‘Beck, I hear you calling…’

“I said, ‘Yeah, that’s pretty good, but why don’t you sing it to Bob Ezrin and see if we can come up with an arrangement?’ ‘Okay.’ And I said, ‘Before you play it for him, change it to Beth, because with Beck, first they’ll think it’s about Jeff Beck!’

“Also, Beck was supposed to stand for Becky, but that that ‘ck’ sound stopped the fluency. ‘Beth I hear you calling…’ – you can sing right through that. Beck didn’t move as easily. So that’s how Beth was born.”

As a result of Beth hitting the US top 10, Destroyer became the first Kiss album to be certified platinum.

“Beth was the key,” Simmons said. “Detroit Rock City was released as a single and the B-side was Beth, but then Beth became the big hit.”

Paul Stanley acknowledged Bob Ezrin as a key influence on Detroit Rock City.

“That was initially written as an homage and tribute celebrating Detroit,” he said, “but the direction that the verses took, although not specifically directed by Bob, was led by his idea to get away from the ‘fuck me, suck me’ lyrics and go for something deeper. So Detroit Rock City kind of became a contrast between the verses, which are about somebody trying to get to a concert and not making it, and equally celebrating Detroit as a rock ’n’ roll Mecca.”

However, Stanley admitted that he was distraught when Ezrin insisted that the song God Of Thunder – written by Stanley alone – should be sung instead by Simmons.

“Let me preface this,” Stanley stated. “We had understood and agreed that the role of the producer was to have final say and make decisions. And when I played God Of Thunder, Bob immediately said, ‘Oh, that’s great, that’s for Gene!’

“I knew Detroit Rock City was my song, but I also thought that God Of Thunder was going to be my song. I envisioned it almost like the son of Zeus and Apollo.”

Stanley said of Ezrin’s decision: “Let’s put it mildly – it was crushing and devastating! But I will say that Bob was absolutely right. It’s so much a Gene song.

“I also have the satisfaction or the joy of knowing that the song that personifies Gene is mine! And it would never have been as great a song if I had sung it. Never. It’s truly a highlight of who Gene is. Bob was right and Gene did a great job.”

Stanley claimed he never held a grudge with Ezrin over God Of Thunder.

“I was never fuming,” he said. “I was just so devastated. The idea of a song so quickly being passed off from me to someone else, it was difficult, and it remained a sore spot, although even when I heard it finished it was undoubtedly a song for Gene. It was just that initial deflating of this anticipation I had of singing this great song.

“I think part of it had to do with the feeling of powerlessness, of not having a vote or any room for discussion. Because that was the way we set things up, and again, it was the right thing to do, and it proved itself quickly. Ultimately, that song continued to be a staple in the show, and if I had sung it, I don’t think it would have had the gravitas or the longevity that it has.”

Simmons also sang lead on his own song, Great Expectations, a highly unorthodox track for a hard rock band such as Kiss.

“At the time, within the band, the verdict on that song was not unanimous,” Simmons admitted. “It was like, ‘Gee, it’s not really rock, is it?’ You’ve got a children’s choir singing, ‘You’ve got great expectations!’. There were keyboards and string quartet. It was certainly a leap – I don’t know if it was forwards or sideways or whatever.”

One notable cut from the album was the song Ain’t None Of Your Business, written by two country songwriters, Becky Hobbs and Lew Anderson. This was later recorded by the band Detective.

“We took a whack at recording that song with Peter Criss on vocals,” Simmons said. “But we just didn’t think it measured up.”

Stanley said he experienced a worrying moment shortly after Destroyer was completed.

“When the album was done and I played it for some people who were big fans, they weren’t initially crazy about it,” he said. “They didn’t find it heavy enough – and coming on the heels of Kiss Alive!, which really captured the rawness of the band, I understand. But we did what we needed to do.”

In the end, Destroyer was everything that Kiss set out to achieve. In the short term it was the hit the band needed to sustain the momentum from Alive! And in the long term, Destroyer has been widely acclaimed as the greatest and most ambitious album Kiss ever made.

Gene Simmons reflected: “It was a Kiss record but there were new elements in it. Because it had Beth, which appealed to a greater female audience, it was by some distance a more sophisticated record, instead of the straight meat and potatoes – or meat and two veg, as you say – stuff that we did before.”

Paul Stanley reckoned that Bob Ezrin brought out something deeper as well as bigger in Kiss music.

“Although Destroyer didn’t – sonically – have the power of Kiss Alive!, it expanded musically who we were,” he said. “It was musically and lyrically challenging.

“When we were making that record, it was thrilling because we were pushing the boundaries and Bob was really leading the charge into uncharted waters. It was very exciting to see what we were capable of doing. It was pivotal, in that it opened our eyes – certainly it opened my eyes – to what was possible.”

Mike D’s debut solo album arrives in August and ahead of it, the ex-Beastie Boy has sat down for an extended interview with Louis Theroux on the famed documentarian’s podcast.

Theroux – a long-time fan of the band – digs deep into the Beasties’ history and asks D about the fallout between the group of Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons. The two parties parted company after the success of the trio's debut album Licensed To Ill, amid allegations of withheld royalties and financial mismanagement (which, it should be pointed out, Simmons still disputes).

The fallout with Simmons didn’t just revolve around money, according to D. “He wanted us to immediately make another record [after Licensed To Ill] and he would've wanted us to make Licensed to Ill part II, right?”

“He didn't see any, sort of, long-term future either in us or us as a group. For him it was about immediate return on investment, and he was very honest about it. He didn't think rap music was ever going to turn into catalogue music. Which it has. But at that time, when it was being made, for him, that wasn't a possibility at all.”

It’s hard to remember now, but the ironic humour of the band circa Licensed To Ill went way over the heads of many at the time. “I would watch things about The Beatles, and they would talk about their relationship with Peter Sellers,” remembers D. “The Goon Show and that was very formative for them. And for us, we grew up on these very ‘fratty’ comedies, like these comedies that were being made in Hollywood sort of post Saturday Night Live. With Chevy Chase and Bill Murray.

“It starts to feel different once you put that out in the world and people think, ‘Oh, you actually are this.’ And then you realise, hold on, this was not the intention, it does not feel good in your own skin and thankfully we had each other and we could sort of all realise that together.”

At this point, Theroux brings up the hydraulic penis was that a part of the Licensed To Ill stage show (yes there was one – look it up on Google). “I remember the three of us thinking that it was an absolute stroke of genius that we'd just come up with the most idiotic idea ever,” says D. “It's one of those things where something is so absurd, it just feels great. Then there's the moment when that sort of thing becomes part of your reality. Then it's like, ‘Oh my God, what did we create?’"

Anyway, it’s an interesting chat. And that solo album? Thank You is out on August 28.

Queens Of The Stone Age have just shared their first new song since 2023’s Times New Roman, and it finds frontman/guitarist Josh Homme joined by the Highway Queen herself, Nikki Lane.

The song is called Easy Street, and it’s a majestic tangle of acoustic guitars, hand-claps for rhythm, seasick synth swirl and Homme and Lane playing Bonnie and Clyde, their voices riding off into the sunset.

““It’s kind of a funny song,” says Homme. “It’s like hitting your funny bone, where it’s funny because it hurts and it hurts because it’s funny. You’re serious, but it’s funny.”

QOTSA fans might already have heard Easy Street live. The band played it during their 2025 Catacombs tour. Lane is fantastic, returning the favour and guesting on a Queens track after Homme played guitar and drums on her 2022 studio album, Denim And Diamonds. He also handled production and mixing.

He does so here, too, sharing the credits on Easy Street with QOTSA bassist/keys player Michael Shuman. This is a shambling psych-country ballad. There was no need to overwork the production, and they didn’t. Homme says they played fast and loose with it. And that was the point.

“We made it the way you’d make a demo,” he explains. “No click track, mistakes left in. It speeds up, it slows down, the claps aren’t great, but they’re not bad, and a bad clap adds this human thing you can’t fake.”

Truth. Also, that disembodied skirl of synth is untethered to any grid. It’s an element of melodic anarchy that seems to have a similar effect on the rhythm. QOTSA want us to revel in the accidental happenstance of it all.

We live in a world of quantized metrics, truly weird shit like looksmaxxing, and people being conspicuously online, optimising their lives for the edification of strangers, people they will never meet – and for machines and bots too – and that seems weird.

Easy Street, says Homme, is a reminder to celebrate the messiness of being human.“It’s not just about silliness. It’s about understanding the imperfection of your life,” he says. “The song, like your life, is in the mistakes. Its imperfections are unbeatable.”

The video, directed by Tony Wolski and Christopher Gruse, is pretty cool too. You can check that out above, and save/buy the single here via Matador. Queens Of The Stone Age’s stadium-filling tour with System Of A Down and openers Acid Bath continues tomorrow night at Tottenham Stadium, London.

See Queens Of The Stone Age for full dates and ticket details.

Some awful news from the '90s grunge band L7 – bassist Jennifer Finch has been diagnosed with an ‘aggressive’ form of brain cancer.

Her bandmates – Donita Sparks, Suzi Gardner and Demetra Plakas - confirmed it in an Instagram post yesterday (13 July), with frontwoman Sparks adding in a separate statement: "We are all devastated by the news and are surrounding her with love, protecting her privacy and dignity, while helping raise the resources she urgently needs for the care ahead.

"Jennifer is family, and we want her to feel the full strength of the community that has loved and supported her for so many years.”

The band were to head out on their supposedly-final Last Hurrah tour in October. This will still go ahead, though without Finch, understandably. The bassist has given her colleagues her blessing to go ahead without her.

They have also directed fans to a GoFundMe page to help with the cost of her treatments and ongoing care.

“When she first heard the diagnosis, there was reason to believe that treatment, including a full course of radiation, would get her back to some version of normal living. Unforeseen complications led to multiple surgeries and a string of difficult setbacks,” the page explains. “The cancer and everything that comes with it have left her with significant physical limitations so she’s handling this the only way she knows how: one day at a time.”

Finch’s friends and family are no longer able to cover the level of around-the-clock care required for her and so donations will cover physical therapy, in-home nursing care and other home care, medical expenses, legal fees and more.

Among those who have so far contributed to the fund is Michael Stipe who has written on Bluesky: “Punk rock and alternative music would not be what it is or where it is without Jennifer Finch. We send loving energy to her. Please - if you can - every contribution helps. Thanks, xx Michael.”

L7 were formed in Los Angeles in the mid-'80s, with their greatest period of success coinciding with the grunge era of the early '90s. You’ll, of course, know them for Pretend We’re Dead, a pop/rock gem that hasn’t (yet) been ruined by over-exposure: it sounds as daisy fresh now as it did in 1992. They reformed in 2014, with their most recent album being 2019’s Scatter The Rats.

You certainly can’t accuse Mick Jagger of not promoting the Stones’ new album, Foreign Tongues. In addition to doing interviews with the New York Times and many major music and news outlets, the 82-year-old frontman has also done an hour-long sitdown with Conan O’Brien on his Needs A Friend podcast.

So what did we find out? Well, Jagger never met Elvis. How come? Because John Lennon convinced him not to bother.

This tale dates back to August 1965 when the Beatles stopped by to meet Elvis during their second American tour. It was, by all accounts, an awkward encounter, and one that Lennon found unsatisfactory. “Elvis – what a total anti-climax HE was,” he later told the NME. “Either he was on pills or dope... whatever it was, he was totally uninterested and uncommunicative.”

Lennon related his disappointment to his friend, Jagger: “I remember John telling me [gives passable Lennon impersonation] ‘yeah, you should never meet your heroes. I would never meet Elvis, Mick, if I were you.’

“So I didn't. I took John's advice. It was really stupid of me, really. I'd have loved to have met Elvis! Why’d I take John's advice? It put me off. I wanted to keep my Elvis to myself, my version of Elvis. I didn't want my version of Elvis shattered like John's was, but maybe my Elvis version would have been different.”

Later on, Jagger remembers another of his friendship/ rivalries, with David Bowie. “Yeah, we were competitive,” the singer recalled. “David was SO competitive, much more competitive. I was made competitive by David. I mean, had to be.”

“When he was doing like Jean Genie, he was very Stones-y, you know? That was a very Stones-y period. So he would come over and play me, Jean Genie, you know,” Jagger told O'Brien before slipping into character as Bowie: “‘I've got it, you want to listen?’ Yeah, of course. I said, 'God, you’ve nicked all my things.' ‘Yeah, I know, man. I know. It's like a homage to you.’”

O’Brien also asks Jagger about the recent story where he was spotted in an Oxford pub performing a turn at a folk evening. “Yes, I had dinner at an Oxford College. Very interesting people, very pleasant. And then one of the students that I was talking with said, ‘I play mandolin. I'm going down the road to play with an Irish band. So do you want to come?’ So I said, ‘sure.’”

Starting to chuckle, he continued: “So I took a couple of people that I was with and the provost of the college. It was a very small pub, very friendly people. And the band was doing fiddle pieces and the guy joined in with his mandolin. But no one was singing.

“So I thought, oh well, here's an opening. So I did a song that I'd actually recorded. And then I had to rehearse it just mentally because I hadn't sung it in years. And I remembered at least three verses. But it was fun.”

With both Phil Collins and Oasis set to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame later this year, the former Genesis frontman has been reflecting on his somewhat rocky relationship with the Gallagher brothers, and the potential for an awkward meeting with them at the ceremony.

It was Noel Gallagher who, back in the ‘90s, referred to Collins as “the antichrist of music,” and said that he hoped to have his “severed head in my fridge by the end of the decade”. In response, Collins described Oasis as “rude, horrible… and not as talented as they think.”

This all happened a long time ago but, speaking to Mojo, it’s clear that Collins still remembers the incident and has thought about what could happen if he crosses paths with Noel and Liam during the Hall of Fame festivities.

“The inductees have all been invited to a lunch before the ceremony,” he says. “Which will be interesting, as I’m sure to bump into Oasis.”

Collins also reveals that Lily, his youngest daughter, went in to bat for him when she ran into Liam Gallagher backstage at the Live Earth charity concert in 2007. “She went up to him and said, ‘Why do you hate my dad?’” he remembers. “And apparently Liam said, ‘I don’t hate anybody, love.’”

To be fair to the younger Gallagher, he wasn’t the one that made the antichrist comment in the first place, but Collins has gone so far as to come up with a theory as to why Noel – who would later say in an interview that he had gone to an ‘80s Genesis gig “completely out of it” and come out feeling terrified – used that term.

“Now I’ve thought this through,” says Collins, “and although Noel didn’t specify what song it was, I reckon it was Mama, where I go ‘Ha-ha-ha… Oww,’ with the light under my face. So I think Mama is why Noel called me the antichrist. But I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt here, and assuming he doesn’t really think I’m the antichrist.”

Let’s hope so, but we’re guessing that Gallagher’s real problem with Collins was that, by the mid-’90s, his name had become a byword for safe, middle of the road pop-rock music. “To many people, I’m just the ballad guy,” Collins admits, though his musical range stretches far wider than that.

That said, having recently been looking back on footage of himself from the ‘80s during the process of making a documentary, Collins admits that he comes off “as a little smug.” He insists that this was never his intention, though: “I think my enthusiasm came across as ambition – and it really wasn’t. It was honestly just schoolboy enthusiasm.”

The last few years have been far less kind to Collins: he’s suffered injuries and ill-health and says he’s been battling alcoholism. He hasn’t ruled out releasing more music in the future, though, revealing that he has a “strong idea” for something and a finished ballad.

First time around it flopped, but when The Police’s single Roxanne was re-released in 1979 it was the hit that set the band on the road to superstardom.

The song was written by singer/bassist Sting after walking around the Parisian red-light district close to the band’s hotel in October 1977, when they were performing at the nearby Nashville Club. An old poster of the play Cyrano De Bergerac was hanging in the hotel foyer and the song’s name was inspired by one of its main characters.

The play was written by Edmond Rostand in 1897 and was based on the life of 17-century novelist Cyrano De Bergerac. As the story goes, Bergerac falls in love with his distant cousin Roxanne but feels his oversized nose would prevent her from loving him.

Sting recalled to The Sun in 2019: “We were staying in a seedy fleapit of a hotel behind the Gare Du Nord, where I conflated the object of Cyrano De Bergerac’s romantic love with the working girls in the street below. The cadence in the bass began to tell me a story that would change my life for ever.”

In another interview for his YouTube channel, he revealed how the group had only one room between them, which they also shared with “les belles de nuit”.

“The song was inspired by the demimondes,” he explained. “But it’s a romantic song in a not very romantic setting. I’m very grateful for Roxanne, who I invented, but she changed my life.”

In 2023, Sting told People magazine how “those two conflicting ideas – of this beautiful name and this very, very elegant, courtly romance and what was going on in the hotel – just lit a torch under me”. He added: “I went to my room, picked up the guitar and imagined this woman into life.”

Lyrics like “Roxanne, you don’t have to put on the red light, those days are over, you don’t have to sell your body to the night” tell the story of a man who has fallen in love with a prostitute, in which he begs her not to “wear that dress tonight” and “walk the streets for money”.

This resulted in a ban from the BBC airwaves, with the broadcaster deeming it too explicit. This angered Sting who once stated that “there was no talk about fucking in it, it wasn’t a smutty song in any sense of the word” and argued that “it was a real song with a real, felt lyric, and they wouldn’t play it on the grounds that it was about a prostitute.”

The recording sessions for Roxanne took place intermittently at Surrey Sound Studios in Leatherhead over the course of six months with a meagre budget of £1500 – fronted by drummer Stewart Copeland’s brother and band manager Miles.

The song begins with Copeland’s hi-hat and guitarist Andy Summers’ Gmin triads on his heavily modded Sunburst Telecaster Custom.

During the recording session, Sting accidentally sat on the keys of a piano thinking the lid was closed, which resulted in the atonal chord heard four seconds in, followed by a burst of laughter.

“It’s a piano chord, but I played it with my arse,” Sting explained in 2016. “There was an upright piano right next to me, and I was singing, and I just wanted a rest, and the piano lid was open. So I sat, and I played that chord… it just made me laugh, so it’s on the record. Yeah, it was real.”

The song is in the key of G Minor and performed at 132 beats per minute. During the verses the guitar chords are played staccato in quarter notes and during the chorus sections Summers switches to eighth note power chords that are left to ring.

The track was originally conceived by Sting as a bossa nova, but it was Copeland who suggested turning it into more of a tango, thereby chancing upon one of The Police’s defining rhythmic trademarks.

“I believe the first song that had a taste of that was probably Roxanne,” the drummer told Drumeo in 2024. “He [Sting] had this bossa nova. We’re a fucking punk band, what the fuck? So I fucked that all up. He had a nice ballad, a poignant ballad about a prostitute. It was a real simple matter. Let’s play the rhythm backwards.”

Finishing up in top 20s and top 40s around the world upon release, Roxanne helped seal The Police’s stature as future stars in the making.

The song has been covered by an array of artists including George Michael, Lacey Sturm, David Garfield and Fall Out Boy – which shows just how many types of musician it’s gone on to inspire.

“I sing Roxanne every night,” Sting told Daniel Rachel for his 2013 book The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters. “There’s always a little inflection that is new or a possibility that opens it out.”

In reference to performing the track as a solo artist he added: “It’s not my job to reproduce a record that was made thirty years ago. I use that and I respect that, but it’s only a template. It’s that jazz mentality. You use the head of the song just as a starting point.”

Fleetwood Mac fans hoping for a rapprochement between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks have had much to keep them interested over the past year or so.

First came the 2025 reissue of their one and only duo album, 1973’s Buckingham Nicks. While promoting this, it emerged that the pair were back on speaking terms, following a 2018 fallout that led to Buckingham leaving Fleetwood Mac.

Then, earlier this year, Buckingham posted on social media about “a resurgence of connection between Stevie and myself,” adding that “what that translates to specifically, I wouldn’t want to speculate yet. But I believe with all my heart, it will translate to something good, and something wonderful, and something needed and something extremely appropriate.”

Positive vibes, for sure, and now Buckingham has thrown something else into the mix in one of his ‘Lindsey Reacts’ videos on YouTube, in which he listens along to a song with one or two of his children (Leelee and/or Will) and shares his thoughts on it.

In the new clip, both kids are present, and the song under discussion is John Mayer’s Stop This Train. The three Buckinghams are shown watching a 2008 live performance of the song, and Lindsey seems impressed.

“I have a lot of admiration for John Mayer,” he confirms. “I think he uses his guitar playing in a way which works into the fabric of the record making process and doesn't sort of dominate too much, even though he's got chops.”

It’s at the end of the song, though, that Buckingham says something potentially revealing. Conversation turns to Mayer’s role in Dead & Company, in which he performs with three former members of The Grateful Dead, and their past residency at the Las Vegas Sphere in particular.

After Will explains the concept of The Sphere, and the importance of visuals to performances there, a thoughtful Lindsey says that it sounds “interesting”. And after Will notes that “if you're there, you're going to try to make the graphic look as cool as it can be,” his father offers a cryptic “we’ll see”.

Of course, this might not mean anything but, for what it’s worth, Lindsey also spoke coyly about the Glastonbury Festival in a previous video, noting that “We’ve played some big shows in England, but I don’t know about that one”.

A Fleetwood Mac Sphere residency and Glastonbury appearance in 2027, then? Here’s hoping.

The Rolling Stones’ 25^th studio album Foreign Tongues came out last week and Mick Jagger has given a lengthy – and very philosophical - interview to the New York Times in which he talks about his long career with the band and raises the prospect, albeit playfully, that they might have already played their last show.

When asked by the interviewer if he will ever know if he’s walked off stage with the Stones for the final time, the singer replies: “Maybe I have! I could get run over by a bus outside of my house. You never really know, do you?

"You don’t know what’s going to happen to you in life. But I personally hope to be able to tour. I like going places. I like meeting people.”

Elsewhere, the interview visits places that few on-the-record conversations with Jagger have ever ventured. How fronting a band like the Stones has changed him: “It does affect you. You can become disassociated… from other people. You get disassociated from what people might call ‘real life.’”

Jagger says that he has fought against that by doing supposedly 'normal' things. “But, nevertheless, that’s only temporary because psychologically your actual state of mind is permanently damaged. Your late 20s and early 30s is a very tough time for people in this business because it’s a big ego trip, and you have to have a huge ego to do this.

"People that do this that don’t have huge egos have huge problems because they have to manufacture a completely different (personality).”

The NYT man also confronts the elephant in the room regarding the remaining Stones in 2026: ageing. “There’s nothing good about it,” says Jagger, who will turn 83 in two weeks’ time. “It’s not particularly pleasant. You can’t do things as quickly as you want to. Physically you’ve got to be more careful. You know, when you’re playing football, they put you in goal a lot. I’m not very good at it!”

The band’s last album but one, 2023’s Hackney Diamonds was their first of original material for 18 years, a gap that clearly peeved Jagger. “Obviously everyone has frustrations," he says. "I was very frustrated professionally for years that the Rolling Stones never made any new music. That was a huge frustration for me, and I solved it.”

And the philosophy? Apparently, there’s a reference to Plato on one of the tracks on the new album, Jealous Lover. “My interest in philosophy is superficial,” the singer admits. “But I find it a hard subject to educate myself into.

"I’ve recently read a couple of books, and I’m really finding it hard. They’re always having so many arguments, these philosophers, and always disagreeing with their masters...”

Five Finger Death Punch guitarist Zoltan Bathory is 100% certain that Wrong Side Of Heaven is the band’s most important song.

He tells MusicRadar: “It’s our biggest song, our most watched video. It had a huge impact on our career.”

Released in 2013 as the title track from the band’s fourth album, Wrong Side Of Heaven has achieved more than half a billion streams on Spotify, while the video has the same number of views on YouTube.

For all its significance, this song was also a long, long time in the making.

Bathory recalls: “Wrong Side Of Heaven started out as this little riff that I had for probably two decades. It was this nugget of gold. I knew that I got something special, but I had to wait until the time was right to record it.

“Other artists can associate and understand what I’m saying. When you have something really good, you tend to sit on that, you tend to not release it, because you don’t want to screw up a brilliant idea. You want to make sure that you’ve got the best possible treatment it can get.

“So for almost two decades I was sitting on that song and just playing around with it, and until finally it felt right and it became the title song of the fourth record.”

The songwriting credits for Wrong Side Of Heaven are shared by Bathory with singer Ivan Moody, guitarist Jason Hook, drummer Jeremy Spencer and producer Kevin Churko.

Bathory admits he was still unsure that the track was ready for release until he read Moody’s lyrics and heard his lead vocal.

He explains: “When you have a piece that you know can be brilliant, everything matters – the right melodies, the right vocals, the right mix. If you nail it all, this is a legacy piece. This is something that might change your entire career.

“I had the music, and once we were in the studio we played around with arrangement a little bit. But when it came to the recording, I said to the producer Kevin Churko, ‘This piece is very special to me, so let’s just see where it goes. And if it’s not what I think it should be, then I’m going to pull it, because it’s too important to me to just squander it. It’s a very important piece, and it needs to be what I think it can be.’

“So you have this protective feeling over the track, and I wasn’t really relaxed about it until Ivan came back with the lyrics and those vocal melodies. Once I heard the vocals, I was like, ‘Ah, okay.’ I mean, it was incredible. So Ivan did justice to the song.”

Back in the late ’80s, Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose famously said that if his ballad November Rain was not recorded to his satisfaction he would quit the music business.

Zoltan Bathory knows where Axl was coming from.

“I one hundred per cent understand that feeling,” he says. “The pressure is self-inflicted, but it’s my own expectations that I put on myself, so it doesn't necessarily affect me in a bad way. I’m not freaking out. I’m just very protective over the song.

“And I told that to the other guys. I said, ‘If it’s not perfect, we’ll hold it. If it’s not what it can be, we’ll hold it and work on it for another ten years or whatever. But this has to be right.’

“So yeah, I understand Axl Rose one hundred per cent. I understand that feeling. And once Ivan’s vocals were on it and Kevin start mixing it, we all knew, like, ‘Holy shit – this really is something!’”

The video for Wrong Side Of Heaven gave a new level of meaning to the song. It was directed by Nick Peterson and based on Bathory’s original concept.

“Another interesting thing about that song is that it wasn’t planned to be a single,” Bathory says. “But I went to the label and I said, ‘I have an idea. This song is very important to me, and also the lyrics. I think we can use it to support a serious cause.’

“So the video is about veterans, and how many homeless veterans there are. The idea was, ‘Let’s expose the facts, let’s put all the data on the screen of how many homeless people there are – especially veterans.’

He continues: “The words ‘veterans’ and ‘homeless’ should never be in the same sentence. These guys sacrifice too much.

“So in the end this becomes the most watched video we’ve ever done, and it had such an impact that serious politicians had to address this issue, serious newspapers had to address it, because we exposed data about homelessness and PTSD [Post-traumatic stress disorder]. And we also put our money where our mouth is, because we raised a quarter of a million dollars for these causes.”

He says in conclusion: “I’m proud that we gave this kind of support to veterans, and I’m proud that this song had such a huge impact on our career.”

Este Haim has been telling the story of how she came to be a bass player, a tale that involves sibling rivalry, parental encouragement, Talking Heads’ Tina Weymouth, and the frequently-kidnapped Nintendo character Princess Peach.

Este, of course, plays bass guitar in Haim, the band she ended up forming with sisters Danielle and Alana. However, as she recently revealed while taking Track Star’s Perfect Song Challenge, this wasn’t her first choice of instrument.

“I grew up hearing my mom sing and play guitar,” she explains. “So when I was eight and Danielle was five, my mom started teaching us how to play guitar.”

For Este, though, this turned out to be dispiriting. “Danielle, like, flew past me when it came to technical skill, musicality,” she remembers. “Like I, as an eight-year-old, was like, ‘My fucking five-year-old sister is better than me at guitar. Like, she's five. How is this even possible?’ She was like a savant.”

Enter Este’s father, who spotted that something was up with his eldest daughter.

“My dad saw this and was like, "My daughter is ‘Depr-Este’. That’s her new name.’ I was like walking around, moping around, like ‘I don't have any talent. What is my place in the world?’ At eight years old! Existential crisis. So my dad was like, ‘I got an idea. I think Este should try to play bass, another stringed instrument.’”

After assuring Este that it was easier to play, a second-hand bass guitar was purchased, but its recipient wasn’t keen. Recalling her reaction to her dad’s idea, Este says: “I was like, ‘I don't even know what that is. I don't want to do that. That sounds lame.’”

Mr Haim, though, came up with a plan: “My dad was like, ‘OK, I know what's gonna change your mind. Este loves Nintendo. Loves. Mario loves Princess Peach – I'm gonna show her [1984 Talking Heads concert movie] Stop Making Sense, and she's gonna see this magical, beautiful lady playing bass with her blonde hair, and she's literally like… the most ferocious, she's having the most fun.’”

And guess what? The plan worked.

“So my dad takes me to Blockbuster, gets the movie, puts it on, and I was literally, like, transfixed. I was like, ‘I get it now. I get it. This is for me. This is what I want to do. I want to be Tina Weymouth.’ And that's the start of my love affair with bass.”

Smart thinking from dad, then, who realised that what Este needed was a bass playing role model who she could relate to.

“He was like, you need to kind of see it to be it,” she says. “That was the correct way to go. And then, you know, from Stop Making Sense, then I started researching all the other music that she was involved in. Tom Tom Club being one of them [Este and Track Star host were sharing their appreciation for that band’s Genius Of Love]. And yeah, she's so cool and such a good bass player, and so tasteful. And again, I love the way she performs. She's having the best time.”

With any luck, Este herself will now have inspired the next generation of girls to start playing the bass, but she insists her father was wrong about one thing: that bass guitar is easier than guitar.

“Dad – that was incorrect,” she says. “Not true.”

Frank Ferrer, the man who sat behind the drum kit for Guns N’ Roses for nearly two decades, has been talking to Rolling Stone about his stint in the band. He’s also said some very nice things about Axl Rose. Who would have thought?

Rose’s reputation goes before him. But Ferrer paints a picture of a focused individual who looks out for his bandmates. When asked what the world misunderstands about the singer, Ferrer replies: “That he’s a mean guy. I think the world thinks that he’s a scary, mean guy. And he’s the complete opposite. He doesn’t suffer fools, so that might piss people off. But he’s generous and super funny, and worried about us all the time, worried about, ‘Hey, you guys, how you guys doing?’ ‘Hey, is Frank OK? Hey, Frank, are you OK?’ ‘I’m doing fine.’ He’s, ‘Oh, OK, cool.’ It’s that kind of stuff constantly.”

“I wish they could know him the way I know him. That’s the only way I could say it. He’s a great musician, great singer, all that stuff that goes in the pot, but he’s a good man.”

Ferrer joined GNR in 2006, replacing Brian ‘Brain’ Mantia, who had held down the drummer’s spot since 2000. He played on some of the Chinese Democracy tracks and had seen the pressure Rose was under to deliver the album - which by the mid-2000s had already acquired a mythic status – all whilst touring on his own, without the original members.

“He’s out there busting his ass, trying to make everything sound great, be great every night,” said Ferrer. “He’s under immense pressure, and he delivers. He would lead the way. We would go up there and even if you’re feeling like, ‘Oh, man, I don’t know if I feel that great tonight,’ and then he comes out and starts singing and, I don’t know, turning into the Hulk out there. You’re like, ‘Fuck this. I better get to where he’s at.’ And everybody would push. He loves being up there. He loves giving a good show. And we had to rise to the occasion.”

Ferrer stayed with the band until last year, when it was announced via social media that he would be leaving ‘amicably’. It was, the drummer explains, “nothing dramatic...We didn’t get into a fight or anything like that. No.”

“Everything comes to an end,” he reflects. “And I’ve said this before, I knew this thing wasn’t gonna be forever. I was just so happy I got to do it when I got to do it, and now I’m doing other stuff. It’s really that simple.”

Van Halen’s sixth album, 1984, is a hard rock masterpiece and a multi-million selling smash hit. It is also the last album the band recorded during their golden era with singer David Lee Roth. And it was the climax of a battle for creative control between guitarist Eddie Van Halen and the band’s producer Ted Templeman.

After 1981’s Fair Warning, Van Halen’s heaviest album, produced no hit singles, Templeman pushed for covers on 1982 follow-up Diver Down.

The policy worked – to a point. The band had a top 20 US hit with their version of Roy Orbison’s (Oh) Pretty Woman and a minor hit with a cover of the Motown classic Dancing In The Street by Martha And The Vandellas.

But Eddie Van Halen was unhappy.

“I would rather bomb with my own music than make it with other people’s music,” Eddie told Guitar World in 2014. “Ted felt that if you re-do a proven hit, you’re already halfway there.”

To wrest control from Templeman, Eddie and engineer Donn Landee converted a racquetball court at Van Halen’s house into a studio. They named it 5150, and the 1984 album was its first project.

Ironically, the album made entirely on Eddie’s terms became Van Halen’s most commercially successful effort.

Templeman resisted recording at 5150, but relented after he heard the song Jump.

“He didn’t care much about the rest of the record,” said Eddie. “He just wanted that one hit.”

With Eddie, a classically trained pianist, playing the main riff on synthesizer, Jump put a new twist on Van Halen’s sound.

Speaking to Total Guitar in 2022, virtuoso guitarist Joe Satriani explained why 1984 was a game-changer and why it stands tall as an all-time hard rock classic.

“Jump sounded really fresh,” Satriani said. “The simple major chords that we’ve heard a million times just for some reason sound new.

“I would say that’s like Mozart. There’s a history of amazing classical music before him, so what did he do? He used the same chords as everybody else, but the way he did it made you go, ‘Oh! I like the way he goes I-IV-V.’ Jump has that same thing. It’s just I-IV-V, but it sounds great.”

During the sessions for 1984, limited space at 5150 made for an unusual working environment. The Marshall Plexi sat in one corner behind isolation panels, and Eddie sat on a stool in front of brother Alex’s drumkit and did not even wear headphones.

There wasn’t space for cymbals, which were overdubbed later. Only the snare was live. Alex used electronic Simmons drums for everything else.

“Can you imagine what it sounded like in the room?” Satriani mused. “This is insane. He’d do a drum fill and where there should be a crash at the end, there’s nothing. How did they work that out? Just the monitoring, so that they could do something like Hot For Teacher and make it sound so perfect?”

The visual connection between the Van Halen brothers was essential. As Eddie recalled of Hot For Teacher: “I distinctly remember sitting in front of Al on a wooden stool and playing that part during my solo where it climbs. Well, I can’t count, so Al needs to follow me. I’d sit right in front of him, and then he’d look at me like, ‘Now!’”

Satriani was thrilled by this story. “No wonder it sounds like so much fun!” he enthused. “They were sort of autonomous and yet they were totally linked together.”

As Satriani saw it, the sound of the brothers playing live was essential to the Van Halen sound.

“That sound of Alex’s snare drum, I just hear that as something that pulls the whole album together,” he said. “There are a couple of drummers out there that do that.

“Watching the Get Back documentary, I realised The Beatles were not The Beatles until Ringo started playing. When he was off having a cup of tea, it just sounded like John, Paul, and George as individuals. It didn’t sound like The Beatles. Ringo starts to play and it’s this gigantic thing.

“Van Halen is the same way. We’ve all heard Eddie jamming with other people and it’s nowhere near the same.”

Satriani discussed the recording of 1984 with Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony when they worked together in the supergroup Chickenfoot.

Since 5150’s live room only had space for Eddie and Alex, Anthony overdubbed his bass later.

As Satriani recalled it: “Mike told me every song you’d have to find out where Eddie was tuned, because you never knew what take they used and whether anything was tuned at the time. What makes this album so interesting is the fact that there are guitars that are not totally in tune – but good luck trying to get a take as good as that!”

Eddie Van Halen’s 1984 tone is distinct from his early sound, but it used largely the same gear. The Frankenstrat was largely retired for this album in favour of the banana-headstocked Kramer 5150, but the magic Marshall Plexi was still his only amp.

Eddie did use his Eventide harmoniser on every song, but it was not as prominent as it would become on later albums. “I used it mostly to split my guitar signal so it came out of both sides,” he commented.

The guitars are still single-tracked with few overdubs, making it unique among rock albums of the time.

“There’s not like rhythm guitar left and right,” Satriani said. “I’m always adding a Tele and a Strat and a Les Paul, but because David Lee Roth’s voice was so charismatic in Van Halen, they didn’t really have to. They’re just leaving space for each other.”

Ted Templeman’s lack of concern for album tracks left Eddie and Alex free to stretch themselves creatively. One such deep cut, House Of Pain, was originally demoed in the late ’70s, and it is a favourite of Satriani’s.

He explained: “When you make albums, there are songs that the band likes, but from the production point of view it doesn’t have commercial potential, suddenly people start to work on it differently. Everyone plays differently. They say, ‘Well, it’s not gonna be a single so we can do this instead of having to edit that part.’

“I love House Of Pain so much. It’s not as complete as Jump or Panama, where you can tell they worked on it because it had single potential. The verses are so out there. When I try to imagine one of the four parts not being there, it doesn’t work. I remember just listening to that over and over again, thinking ‘This is a moment.’”

He continued: “What I really like about that first version of Van Halen was that they all seem to be playing separate parts with separate accents, yet they came together so well. Eddie never really went for that triple-tracked, all playing the same thing, the drums and bass are doing the same thing. It’s a different kind of music altogether. It’s both whimsical and deadly serious, and you just have to be so good to pull that off.”

Satriani recalled Van Halen’s seismic impact on America’s guitarists.

“When Eddie came on the scene it scared the shit out of so many guitar players,” he said. “I saw it as a total vindication of what I liked to play and what I liked to listen to, whereas people in other styles were feeling, ‘This is bad competition. I don’t want to have to deal with someone who can play that good.’

“I always thought Eddie is going to be great for guitar. I was keen not to copy something that Eddie had done. Like, ‘I’m not going to get in his territory. What’s my contribution?’

“When I wrote the two-handed piece Midnight for [1987 album] Surfing With The Alien I was thinking, ‘Guys like Eddie and other two-handed players—what did they not do?’”

For Joe Satriani, 1984 exemplifies great music.

“The music we listen to decade after decade is the stuff with character and love in it,” he said. “You can’t get that just by sitting down with the metronome and trying to get one click faster.

“The thing we should be practising is not called practising. It’s called playing music. Eddie and Alex jammed for hours and hours, day after day, week after week until they hit upon something so unique that is so perfectly natural. It jumps out of the album.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This song was featured on the All Shook album.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duffy tends not to focus on such things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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