As we know now, the first new U2 album in almost ten years comes out in November and the band have given a lengthy interview to Rolling Stone covering all aspects of Carnaval De Luz.

Aside from the group’s collaboration with Dolly Parton and their tribute to Rosalia, there’s the lowdown on Larry Mullen Jr’s injury, which at one stage threatened his place in the band and U2’s unbroken unity: famously, no other rock band has made it to fifty years without any line-up change.

It seems the drummer had been suffering from neck pain for some years before his 2022 – 24 layoff. It was the result of a congenital fusion in a facet joint and by the time Covid came around Mullen was in so much pain he couldn’t play. “I realised that I was physically damaged beyond repair… I shut down, and my body just went, ‘You’ve had enough.'”

He - like the rest of the band - had already agreed to play The Sphere in 2023. “ I signed up to do it. And then a couple of weeks later my physio said to me, ‘You won’t make it through rehearsals. So you need to undo that,’ which was very difficult, very complicated to undo it, ’cause I’d made a commitment.”

Watching U2 play with another drummer was difficult, he says. In fact, he didn’t even see them play with Bram Van Den Berg until their penultimate show at the Las Vegas venue. “There’s a certain amount of humiliation when you get injured, and you can’t get over it, and I felt humiliated,” he says, “And it’s my own - that’s my own shit.”

“I absolutely understood,” he says. “Business is business, and nothing can get in the way of the process, and I accept that 100 percent. So the unspoken rule (that a band member could be replaced onstage) “applied to me in that case. It could apply to somebody else in another case. And that’s the cost of doing business. It is complicated being friends, being friendly, being in business.

"So yeah, we all have feelings. So I’m not gonna lie that it wasn’t difficult, but nobody imposed it.”

For a while the future of the band seemed uncertain. “We didn’t know if Larry was gonna come back,” Adam Clayton says. “Could we keep going? Would we wanna keep going? That’s still an open question.”

Luckily, Mullen made a full recovery following surgery - a procedure which doctors warned him entailed a real risk of full paralysis - and U2 returned to complete their fifteenth studio album.

“I don’t think we would’ve made an album if Larry hadn’t been able to play,” The Edge admits. “We would’ve just gone, ‘Why? Why make an album without Larry Mullen on it? Doesn’t feel right.'”

Carl Palmer has earned his place in rock history as one of the greatest drummers of all time. But as the 76 year-old tells MusicRadar: “Time waits for no man, as we know.”

Palmer is currently on tour in the US with his An Evening with ELP show, with dates in the UK and Canada to follow in 2027.

“I don’t want to stop,” he says. “I don’t want to retire. I want to just carry on.”

But at his age he has made various lifestyle choices to keep him fit and healthy and able to continue performing at a high standard.

He explains: “You have to sleep more, you have to exercise in different ways, you have to have a certain diet. I mean, I’m a pescatarian now. I was a vegan for 13 years. I’ve had a few heart conditions, but we’ve managed to resolve those. Gone around all of that.

“I do a lot of yoga classes for the stretching. And I’m very careful about alcohol. I might have a drink once every couple of weeks. I’ve never drunk a pint of beer in all my life, by the way, or a lager, or even had a cigarette. I mean, I’ve smoked a bit of Bob Hope over the years, but not for the last 40!”

Palmer has one key routine to prepare for a concert.

“Contrary to some rumours, I don’t go to sleep,” he says. “What I do is I like to get my legs off the floor. I like to take the weight off my legs. If I can get my legs off the floor and lie on a sofa or whatever, that really helps me for about 15 to 20 minutes because I’m then really that much stronger when I go out on stage.”

He adds: “I do need to watch the diet. I don’t eat three to four hours before I play. I don't drink alcohol on tour. I sleep as much as possible, and I try to eat as well as I possibly can. And you know I have fish every other day. Apart from that, it’s like lentils, beans and vegetables and stuff. It’s not boring because I’m so used to it now.”

Palmer vows to continue performing for as long as possible.

“I don’t want to give up because I love what I do,” he says. “I’ve been doing it professionally since I was 16. So I’ve been doing this now 60 years professionally, and I started playing drums when I was 11, so I’ve been playing 65 years.”

He does, however, has one nagging fear about being out on the road.

He admits: “I don’t want to die in some cheap hotel, you know? And sometimes I don’t always stay in the best hotels. That’s all I’m worried about.

“It’s fine as long as it’s a Hilton or a Four Seasons, but if it’s one of those dodgy hotels, don’t tell anyone. That’s all I’m saying. Because it will be on the the obituary, won’t it? ‘He was found in a cheap hotel that was about to close down, and he had a cheap rate on the room.’ You don’t need that.

“My wife says to me now, ‘I might have to come out on tour with you more to make sure everything’s okay.’ You know, when you’re 76 you never know when something bad might happen.”

And when he says all of this, Palmer isn’t being morbid. He’s just being practical.

As he says in conclusion: “I even know where I’m going to be buried. It’s not a graveyard. It’s a kind of nature reserve.”

Queen drummer Roger Taylor has a new solo album out and as part of the promotion he’s been on BBC Radio 2 choosing his Tracks Of My Years on the Vernon Kay show.

Aside from picking ten favourite tracks, it involves an interview, and inevitably the subject of Freddie Mercury came up. Taylor revealed that when he first heard Freddie’s voice for the first time, “I thought, God, he'll never be a singer. He sounded like a strangled sheep.”

Taylor then elaborated: "It's really an indication of his strength of mind, because he really was, he invented himself, you know. He was a lovely shy guy really with a tremendous strength of character.

"He changed his name. He had this innate musicality, and his voice just sort of, as he sang more and more and more, it just became stronger and stronger and stronger, and better and better and better… He was loud. He was powerful."

In Queen’s early days, Taylor recalls it was Mercury who drove them on even when it looked as if nothing would ever happen for the band. "The music business is a tough business,” the drummer said. “I think you have to be single-minded and focused on what you want to achieve. We were very ambitious in Queen, and Freddie was very ambitious.

"He used to say, 'You know, talent will out, my dear,' etc. And it sort of drove us. And you have to have those kind of hopes."

Eventually, of course, Queen found success. On a huge scale. "We felt of ourselves as a people's band, yeah,” says Taylor, “And which was why we loved to encourage audience participation…singing, stamping, clapping. And Freddie was, of course, an incredible communicator at doing that, and we were lucky to have him."

Asked by Kay how often he thinks about the singer, Taylor replies: “Oh, every day. We never really had a cross word over those many years together. He was absolutely lovely.”

And the records that Taylor chose? Well, there are quite a few that aren’t much of a surprise - The Kinks’ You Really Got Me, My Generation by The Who, Bowie’s Space Oddity, plus a couple that stray outside the parameters of classic rock: Radiohead’s Creep and Hoppipolla by Sigur Rós.

Taylor’s Tracks Of My Years can be found on BBC Sounds now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Jupp – who was drummer with Elbow for over 25 years – has been talking about his battles with addiction and the reason why he quit the band in 2016.

In an extensive interview on the BBC website, Jupp said of his decision: "From the outside, I had everything you're supposed to want. I was travelling the world, making records and living a life I'd dreamed about since I was a kid. We were at an extraordinary point in the band's career.

"But I asked myself 'What is any of that worth if I'm heading in a direction that was no longer working for me'?"

Elbow formed in 1990 and so Jupp spent a long time immersed in a culture that until comparatively recently was soaked in drugs and alcohol. "I can only speak for my own experience - but it was kind of de rigueur. Less so now, but back in those days it was seen as some kind of rite of passage, it was normalised, and I did personally participate in that culture.”

"I've witnessed within the industry, people who are still partaking - outside of the band - people who are still perpetuating that myth of rock'n' roll."

Jupp said that he had reached the age of 40 and then quit the booze. For a year he remained in the band whilst sober but then realised he couldn’t do that and left the group.

"It was starting to get to a point where I could see that there was a problem," he said. "Choosing sobriety and choosing recovery meant being prepared to walk away from a life that had given me fame, success and financial security. That was not a small decision. It meant stepping away from an identity I'd carried for most of my adult life and accepting that my health, my family and my future had to come first."

Jupp hasn’t retired though. He’s put his skills to good use by teaching – he holds sessions at his Manchester Drum Studio and has worked at Liverpool’s Institute for Performing Arts and dB’s Institute Manchester.

"Since leaving the band, recovery has been one of the defining focuses of my life, and drumming has played a huge role in that," he said. "Rhythm, repetition, movement and focus help bring me back into the moment. It is about sharing something that has genuinely helped me stay grounded and well.

Ten years on from his decision, he says he has no regrets. "I know how significant that decision to choose recovery can be. Addiction is a disease and it's terrifying. And I was lucky enough to be able to make the decision of sobriety and be able to stand by it."

Could Zak Starkey reunite with The Who? That seems to be what Roger Daltrey is suggesting might happen in a new podcast interview.

The singer was speaking on LifeMinute with Joann Butler and the conversation turned to drummers, with Daltrey musing that things hadn’t really been the same since Keith Moon died in 1978.

“We were firing on all cylinders,” he recalled. “You could fire anything at us and we would make something of it. That kind of disappeared when Keith died.”

“But we found Zak Starkey. We tried Kenny Jones – who is a great drummer. A straight drummer just does not work with The Who. Just does not work. Zak Starkey is not Keith Moon, but he’s come very close.”

Starkey joined The Who in 1996 and stayed for almost 30 years – several times the amount of time Moon spent in the band – until his messy exit last year. You may recall that after The Who’s Teenage Cancer Trust gig at the Albert Hall in March, Starkey was sacked. Then reinstated. And then sacked once more.

The tit-for-tat via social media and various interviews between the two parties went on for months. Meanwhile, the drum stool in The Who was filled by Scott Devours from Daltrey’s touring band.

So with Daltrey talking so admiringly about Starkey’s talents, Butler asked the obvious question: is a reunion possible? “I don’t know. We did a rehearsal recently, and Zak was the drummer.

"We love Zak, but sometimes the road doesn’t like Zak. Sometimes it gets on top of him, and it becomes difficult.”

“He was drumming at the rehearsal, and we did the rehearsal to see if we can possibly do shows next year,” the singer explained. “Still hit the notes, still get the drive. Who music demands an incredible amount of drive, and without that, it would be Herman’s Hermits without the Herman.”

The Who toured North America last year, a jaunt that they said would be their last in that territory. But of course if they are bringing the band to a close in the live setting, that would suggest a final European tour as well, which presumably is what the rehearsal was for.

Daltrey didn’t say whether the rehearsal proved that he can still hit the notes. Or if Starkey passed his audition to rejoin. No doubt all will be revealed in the fullness of time...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anika Nilles has teamed up with TAMA to produce a new signature snare.

The manufacturers have been working with the Rush drummer for a couple of years, developing the AN1465 snare. According to TAMA, during the course of refining the drum, Nilles focused on three things: a deep low end “that enhances her expressive range”, clear snare wire definition that “preserves every note even in the most intricate passages” and a look “that reflects her lifelong love for vintage snares.”

The finished product is 14” in diameter, has an aluminium shell for added resonance and a 6.5” depth for increased low end. It also has a large inside muffler that’s toggleable to give you a generous amount of dampening.

Nilles and TAMA have put a video up on YouTube in which the German drummer explains the process of developing the drum. It involved testing out over 50 different snares in the firm’s distribution centre to identify the various traits she wanted in her signature model.

“It was very important to me to have a bigger range of tuning options so the snare works in different music styles,” she explains, “not just in my personal one. I also played for other artists so it’s important to me that this snare has a wide range of options. So it works for rock music and soul and funk and pop, for everything.”

In terms of its look, Nilles said that she was inspired by a vintage Imperial Star snare she owns. “We chose some lugs that have this kind of look. So it’s a modern-sounding snare but its look is vintage.” The Rush drummer also personally designed the badge, which she’s previously used on some of her drum heads and cymbals.

If that sounds like your bag, the AN1465 retails at $849.99 and is already available through Reverb.

Nilles is, of course, currently out with Rush on the band’s 50 Something reunion tour. Taking the place of the late Neil Peart, by all accounts she’s excelled in what most observers would describe as an exceptionally tough gig. The tour runs through to next April and in the last few days additional shows have been confirmed next month for Houston, Cincinnati, St Louis and Pittsburgh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Travis Barker’s new documentary, Louder Than Fear, has just been released on Disney+, charting the Blink-182 drummer’s epic career climb, alongside the life-changing plane crash that killed four of the six people on-board back in 2008. And last week it was announced an official Neil Peart documentary was coming to our screens next month.

Finally, some of the world’s most iconic drummers - so used to sitting at the back of the stage - are getting their props, and the triumphs and tragedies of their lives are being told with their blessing.

With that in mind, I started contemplating other drummers with stories that deserved telling, and came up with this list. From overcoming severe adversity and industry exploitation to battling stage fright, sexism, and sudden loss, these musicians aren't just the heartbeat of so much iconic music - they're complex human beings with stories that demand to be seen.

1. Rick Allen (Def Leppard)

Why I’d watch it: Witness one of the best comebacks in rock and roll history

With Def Leppard at the peak of their mid-’80s rise, drummer Rick Allen was involved in a high-speed car crash that cost him his left arm. That would have been game over for most players, but not Allen; against all odds and through tireless work with engineers, he created a custom kit combining acoustic and electronic drums and an array of foot pedals that enabled him to play with his remaining three limbs. He learned a new way to drum and returned to the band for his first live show less than 2 years later on 5 August 1986, followed in 1987 by the multi-platinum-selling album Hysteria. A true strength-through-adversity story that’s as inspiring as it is tragic.

2. John Bonham (Led Zeppelin)

Why I’d watch it: Because Bonham invented rock and roll drumming as we know it

The story of Led Zeppelin has been told countless times, but John Bonham deserves his own moment in the spotlight for his indelible contribution to rock and roll; his groove, thunderous triplets and giant drum sound laid the foundations for rock music to come. Then there’s the other side of Bonham: the home bird who battled with anxiety, hated touring and ultimately succumbed to alcoholism aged just 32. The juxtaposition of this giant on stage with the man who existed behind closed doors is a tragic tale of achieving iconic status, burning brightly and leaving too soon.

3. Karen Carpenter (The Carpenters)

Why I’d watch it: Because Carpenter was a far better drummer than most people realise

Most will remember Karen Carpenter for her distinctive vocal talents, but it was her skills behind the kit (often while singing) that really set her apart as a musician. Speed, chops, creative phrasing - Carpenter had it in spades and drumming heavyweights like John Bonham held her in high regard. I’d love a doc highlighting her passion for drumming against a backdrop of a music industry pressurising her into getting on the mic, and giving her due props for her percussive talents.

4. Clyde Stubblefield (James Brown's Band)

Why I’d watch it: Because the most sampled drummer of all time didn’t get enough credit when he was alive

Clyde Stubblefield’s iconic drum break on James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’ laid the foundation for so many hip-hop classics, being sampled by everyone from Public Enemy to Prince. Tragically, aside from a handful of awards, by the time of his death in 2017, and no thanks to songwriting credit loopholes, he largely went unrecognised - and unpaid - for his hefty contribution to music in the 80s and 90s. His story is a heartbreaking commentary on music industry exploitation, artistic influence and race.

5. Meg White (The White Stripes)

Why I’d watch it: Because Meg became a minimalist drumming icon, then walked away from it all

When Meg White first entered public consciousness on The White Stripes’ 1999 self-titled debut album, she got people talking: lambasted for her minimalist, primal playing, but in the other corner credited as the engine room behind the noughties’ greatest garage rock duo and for opening the door for countless female drummers. The relentless criticism and sexism, coupled with the scale of the band, led her to retreat from public life and she hasn’t been heard of since. Now time has passed, and through a modern lens, I’d love to know how she feels about that period of her life and the impact she’s had.

6. Taylor Hawkins (Foo Fighters)

Why I’d watch it: The ultimate modern rock icon who left his mark and occupied one of the most high pressure drum seats in history

Put simply, Texas-born Taylor was one of the greatest modern rock drummers of his generation. He had everything; looks, chops, hyper energy and the approval of none other than Dave Grohl. He went from Alanis Morissette’s touring band to forming a life-long brotherhood with Grohl, and between them they became the Foo Fighters’ grinning, dynamic duo, filling stadiums with the band’s radio-friendly enormo-rock. I’d love to see a doc charting his life, from his humble beginnings to global stardom, alongside his struggles with stage fright and the huge outpouring of love at the tribute concert following his untimely death.

7. Sheila E.

Why I’d watch it: She’s the ‘Queen of Percussion’ and broke music industry gender boundaries in the ‘80s

Born into a talented musical family (she was the daughter of Pete Escovedo), Sheila E. carved out a path with her virtuosic percussion playing, both as an expert tambale player and accomplished drummer, penetrating the worlds of pop, funk, and Latin jazz. A career highlight was earning the position of musical director on Prince’s Sign ‘O The Times tour in possibly her most iconic and funkiest era. Her story covers breaking down walls in the male-dominated ‘80s pop scene, surviving personal trauma early in life, and maintaining a vibrant music career that's lasted well over four decades.

8. Buddy Rich

Why I’d watch it: He wasn’t known as the greatest drummer of all time for nothing

If you’ve ever listened to the Buddy Rich bus tapes you’ll immediately understand why he was one of the most formidable and respected band leaders of his time. Despite the terrifying off-stage persona, on-stage he was simply unbeatable and rhythmically gifted. But his talent was clear from a young age. At just four years old he became known as Traps The Drum Wonder; it was obvious the self-taught drummer would spend a lifetime dazzling the world with his music. A documentary would give fascinating insight into his life, his talents and the lengths he went for musical perfection.

Today sees the release of Travis Barker's Disney+/Hulu documentary Louder than Fear, a no-holds-barred look at his career and the 2008 plane crash that changed his life.

Travis has been over this ground before, in his 2012 memoir Can I Say: Living Large, Cheating Death, and Drums, Drums, Drums. We spoke to him then...

Calabasas, California, 2012...

Upon entering the cool confines of Travis Barker's compound that houses his recording studio and offices for his Famous Stars And Straps clothing line, the first thing you see is drums, drums, drums.

The air con is a welcome change from the stifling heat outside as we are ushered into the main control room. When asked if the studio is ever rented out to other artists or projects, long-time engineer James Ingram replies, "Not really. It's pretty much all Travis, all the time."

As the photo shoot is winding down, rhythmic pulses of swing, with sporadic bursts of rolling triplets, emanate from the drum room of the studio. Even while pictures are being taken, Travis is practising.

After a brief pause, we sit in the coolness of the now-familiar control room for our chat. In addition to all of the various recording projects (with Antemasque, Transplants, Blink and a solo album) there is also his new autobiography.

It's a personal memoir that answers a lot of questions on topics that he has never talked about publicly. Travis' book pulls no punches and sugarcoats nothing. Graphic and brutally honest at times, it balances the moments of darkness with humour and hope.

It is however, real. He goes into painful detail of his plane crash and road to recovery that was fraught with more tragedy. In addition to co-writing it with Gavin Edwards (Rolling Stone magazine), Travis also has several third-party contributions from his family, friends, doctors, past and present bandmates, and his ex-wives, offering their honest perspectives.

It's as though having all of that bottled up in him, and finally releasing it in his own words in the form of his book, has strengthened his commitment to move forward and continue to involve himself in a diverse range of projects while still maintaining his devotion to his friends and family. He is still a man on a mission.

When did you first get the idea to write a book, and what made you decide that now was the time for it?

"I think it was after my plane crash. There was a lot of interest for me to go and talk to people about it. But the truth was, I wasn't ready. I still wasn't ready two years ago and it's been seven years.

"After that, I had a scare with a bunch of pre-cancerous cells on my esophagus. After looking death in the face a couple of times, I really want to get the first part of my story out.

"I'm sober now. I think a lot of people can learn from it. It deals with my growing up lower-middle class, being a kid not being fed with a silver spoon. There is a way to be passionate about what you love to do and, basically, saying 'no' to a plan B.

"My goal wasn't to be rich and famous, my goal was to make enough money to have somewhere to sleep, to eat and do what I love, which is playing drums. My goals were simple. I knew they were going to take a lot of hard work but they were in reach."

Did you work or collaborate with another writer putting the book together?

"There was a journalist named Gavin Edwards who wrote for Rolling Stone for many years. He joined Blink on our trip to Iraq when the war broke out. He was in Afghanistan and Bahrain with us.

"Every time we ended up working with him, he was always on-point. Obviously he's working for the publication, but he wasn't some sketchy journalist that was putting words into people's mouths. I liked how he captured things.

"When it came time, I interviewed some people and I loved the fact that he was rooted in music. He's a muso. He loves music. I thought it was really important that I get people that are actually in my life to be a part of this book.

"People like Skinhead Rob, Tim Armstrong, my good friend, Dr Brian Weeks. I got in touch with some people that I grew up with that I don't talk to so much anymore. Everyone has these stories, why not let them share them? I feel that really lets you in.

"There's stuff that's humiliating for me, but that's a part of writing it. If I'm not honest and sincere, why tell my story? For me, it was easier to tell it now because I am sober and there's nothing I'm ashamed of that I'm still doing. It's more of things that are in the past.

"I treated this book as if it was an album. I poured my heart and soul into it and it's relevant. It literally leaves off a month ago. It's right now.

"My goal was, get it out before I die [laughs]! If I live another 20 years, I'll hit everyone with part two!"

Were the people you approached to contribute onboard with the idea?

"Oh yeah. It wasn't like I had to twist anyone's arm to do anything with this book. It's all a collaborative effort. I don't really have anyone that I have bad blood with.

"Mark (Hoppus) and Tom (Delonge) are in the book. I don't talk to Tom at all, but I'm in the studio every day, or a couple of times a week, with Mark. The interviews with Mark and Tom all took place about six months ago.

"There's people all the way from my childhood to today. People in pivotal moments of my life and without them, I probably would have made different decisions."

Did you find that writing the book was therapeutic for you?

"Extremely therapeutic, yeah. There were some hard moments where Gavin and I were in tears. Other ones we were laughing our asses off, reading something one of my friends he interviewed said.

"I'm not even there when he does it. If you were there and Gavin's interviewing you, you can say whatever you want, Gavin's putting it in the book! My book is completely honest. It will shed a lot of light to people and inspire some people.

"Obviously, there's the whole survival aspect of my story. The plane crash is something I've never touched on. We really go through it, detailed. It's a wild adventure.

"I had to read it a couple of times recently before I had to wipe my hands clean of it. I'm touched. There are still parts that give me chills. It's my book. It's weird.

"I'll be the first person to say it sucks!"

"For drummers, there's a whole chapter called Drums Drums Drums. It talks about everything from my practice routine as a kid, to why I play the way I do. I explain that I could play as technical and hold my hands perfectly correct if I wanted to but I choose not to.

"I've always hated seeing drummers that look like they hate their job. Forgive me, I love to have fun behind the kit. I'm not there to impress you. I grew up marching, playing jazz, I can do that. But I'll bore me and you!

"My favourite drummers always look like they're having a good time. Buddy Rich, Keith Moon, Stewart Copeland, Dennis Chambers. Just love what you do. I've seen some great drummers that can't read music and maybe aren't technically correct.

"More power to them. I tend to enjoy them more. It doesn't have to be technical."

How did the project with Antemasque come about?

"In my Aquabats days, they were At The Drive In. We would almost cross paths, but we had never actually met. I first became friends with Cedric (Bixler Zavala, vocals) around the last show that DJ AM and I played before he passed away, which was in Las Vegas.

"Cedric and his wife were there. I got to meet them. Then, my ex-wife was friends with Cedric's wife. I've always kept in touch with her and three or four months ago we were talking, catching up.

"She said, 'Cedric wants to talk to you, can I give him your number?' I was like, 'Yeah, of course!' He hit me and we were talking about Dag Nasty and Hüsker Dü and all these bands we liked. We were just talking on the phone and I felt like I was talking to someone I've known my whole life.

"I'm thinking in my head, 'Where is this going?' So, he said, 'We have just recorded a new album with Antemasque and we had these ideas for it and we wanted to know if you wanted to play drums.'

"I told him to send me some stuff and I'd check it out. I got on the phone with Omar (Rodriguez Lopez, guitar) like a half-hour later. He was like, 'Are you down?' I said, 'Yeah man, let me hear the stuff.'

"I told him, 'I know what you and Cedric do, you guys are amazing. I have so much respect for you musically and everything you've done.' Sure enough, it was great f***king songs.

"A week and a half later, we made plans for them to come here, in North Hollywood. During that week and a half, they sent me some more ideas for songs. I studied the songs, we got in [the studio], we recorded the whole album in a day and a half.

"Now we have some shows in November that I'm going to play with them, some festival dates, like two weeks of touring. I had such a great time recording that album. It was really fun.

"I think it's being mixed now and it's going to come out the beginning of the year. But on these shows, we're playing the new album."

How did the collaboration work? Did they have specific things worked out for you, or did they just say, "Be yourself"?

"They're rooted in punk rock so they wanted things to be like, 'Push here, don't pull there.' They didn't want it to sound robotic. They wanted it to have that energy like the old bands we listened to. That same wild, spastic energy.

"We immediately hit it off. We had so much in common. They were the most easy-going guys ever. Every song on the album, I think I did in one take. Maybe I gave them a second take where I did a little bit more.

"Honestly, it was one of the most fun, easiest sessions ever. We recorded this cover called 'One More Time' that we did here live in 10 minutes! You know you love what you're doing when it never feels like work.

"Especially with those guys. And the songs are just great. They're technical at times but I love Cedric's voice, it's crazy. Omar's guitar playing is next-level. I think there are those bands that are technical and you hear it right away and it's stale."

Tell us about the next Transplants project, which is going to be a covers album.

"We had this idea before. Transplants would do covers. We know so many covers and have so many in our arsenal that we get to choose from when we play live. We don't usually play more than one live.

"We had this idea to do a covers album and every genre was open to everybody. It's all over the board. There's everything from Run DMC to Minor Threat.

"It's going to fk people up because it's not one genre and there's some really cool stuff on it."

What stage are you at for that project and is there a release date?

"We are going to release them separately. There's going to be a collection of seven songs first and then another collection of seven songs released later. I think, top of the year.

"It's a project where it's not a contest to see if we can get Number One on the rock charts. We couldn't care less about that. We have fun.

"We still have Transplants Tuesdays, where we come in and have about three or four hours with everyone's schedule. We say, 'These are the two songs we're covering today. How are we going to flip it? Are we doing like the original, or are we making it our own? Who's playing what?'

"And we knock it out. It's very raw. I'm very spontaneous and in some ways impatient. I like to keep things moving in the studio. Tim and Rob are the same way.

"We're responsible musicians. We know we're recording this song. On Monday, you know your part, let's do it. Luckily, I'm in great company."

There has been a strong resurgence in vinyl in the music scene. Are you going to release EPs or any other alternate formats?

"We're getting ready to re-release Haunted Cities on vinyl. We're a band that likes physical product. It will obviously be released digitally, but we will have limited vinyl and we'll make CDs.

"We even talked about making cassette tapes for some of the stuff! I still like the physical stuff. It's so difficult when you buy something on iTunes, or whatever, I want to know who produced it, where it was recorded.

"I guess as time goes on, that stuff matters less and less, but to me, I was raised on geeking out on albums."

You're recording new material with Blink-182 here also?

"Yeah. Blink was in here yesterday. Then, at night, I was in here making beats for my follow-up album to Give The Drummer Some. There's always something happening."

What's the chemistry like writing and recording with a new member in Blink?

"It's really cool. I wake up every morning to Matt Skiba (guitar/vocals, from Alkaline Trio) saying, 'Hey, here's a song idea.' A lot of them will start off like that. A really simple idea.

"Then, I come in and make all the ideas very different from one another. They give me the freedom to do something totally weird. I'm going for something interesting.

"Even though five minutes ago might be the first time I've heard it, I'm trying to make interesting drum parts. That's how it's been working. It's Blink. It's straightforward, but it's interesting in the same manner that it's always been.

"I think the last couple of times Blink attempted to record with Tom, maybe we had writer's block, I'm not sure. With Matt, we're knocking out a song a day.

"We're not saying what it is. It could be a double album, it could be an EP. Who knows? But right now it's fun, it's a good time, and everyone enjoys being here. We're writing cool songs.

"Everyone has to understand, Tom repeatedly kept quitting the band. In my eyes, we should have stayed broken up the first time. I was in the plane crash. It opened up everyone's eyes.

"Life is crazy, it can be gone in the snap of the fingers. So, maybe we should be a band. Tom contacted me. At that point, in my mind, I wasn't thinking about anything in the hospital.

"I was fking crazy and in a burn-centre for four months. The day before that, I was with AM playing shows. The week before that, we were playing the MTV awards and Coachella.

"I was really fine with the movement and what I was doing. So, I never expected him to come back. I felt like the plane crash had him feeling he did want to play in the band, but I truly thought he didn't.

"Fast forward to this past year. We had committed to playing the Musink festival. We were excited because it was going to be one of the only shows we did in 2015.

"The day before the practices, it was, 'I quit, I don't want to be in the band, I'm not doing any shows, I'm not recording an album.' Mark and I both still wanted to play it. I was like, 'Literally, the only person we could do this with, and continue with, is Matt Skiba.'

"He would be the perfect replacement for Tom to get through the show. He would murder it. Then, we were in the studio, rehearsing songs, just for this one show, and everyday Matt would be bringing songs, playing guitar with a smile on his face, having fun, jumping around, making jokes, being a nice person.

"It wasn't normal! Mark and I were like, 'Whoah, this is crazy!' It's actually fun. It hadn't been like that in so long.

"We ended up playing a couple of warm-up shows because we didn't think it was fair to Matt to throw him in front of 20,000 people the first day he plays with us. That's cold blooded.

"We played those shows and afterwards, just in the matter of time we were practising, there were four song ideas that Matt sent. Mark and I couldn't help but think, 'Maybe we should just get in the studio and see what it is.'

"People are excited about Skiba. When we played shows, people were yelling, 'Ski-ba, Ski-ba!' after encores, in San Diego. I think there's a huge amount of support for Matt."

Any idea of a possible release date?

"No. We have (record deal) offers every day. We have the same offers that we did when Tom was in the band. Mark and I are passionate about Blink.

"I see kids all the time and they're like, 'Trav, focus on Blink!' I can't make anybody do anything.

"If you see me in the studio with the Game or playing with Run The Jewels, or whoever, don't be mad at me. I love playing my instrument. I love playing the drums.

"I love every genre of music. When Blink is on and crackin', Blink is my priority, make no mistake. When it's not, and we are not working, I enjoy playing music with my friends.

"Every genre, every style. Do your homework, it's nothing new. I love playing the drums, it keeps me sane [laughs]! It is my drug!"

Any other current projects?

"No. The only other thing I'm working on is my solo album, but it's premature right now. I have a couple of different projects I'm going to put out over the next year, under solo projects.

"But this one is purely a follow up to Give The Drummer Some. It's basically the same idea.

"I have a track with Run The Jewels on this album called 'Forever'. Omar from Antemasque played guitar on it. It's bananas. It's so good.

"It's all a collaborative album. Mainly with different MCs and rappers. LP, who's in Run The Jewels, is a big fan of Omar and Cedric so it made sense. It was an easy pairing.

"They get it. Omar is a scientist on the guitar. He's amazing. He killed it. I have a record with Wiz Khalifa. I have one with Yelawolf that's crazy.

"Some of it has live drums in it, some of it is just me programming, with live shakers and stuff. I love producing music too. I just produced and played drums on this band Prayers' album that I put out on my record label, Lasalle.

"So, there's always projects like that that I'm doing, that I produce, play drums and help write. This is my home [motions around studio].

"Besides sleeping, I'm here more than any other place."

Besides the dates with Antemasque, do you have any other live shows or touring plans?

"I have my residency in Las Vegas, where I DJ and play drums. I perform an hour-set of songs that I play drums to and I DJ.

"It's very similar to what I did with AM, but I have the responsibility of both a lot of drumming and a little DJ'ing. It's pretty cool.

"I have a cocktail kit, so I'm standing up playing drums and my turntable is right next to me. I have that in October.

"In November I go out with Antemasque. Then I have a couple of dates I think with Run The Jewels."

You're always busy recording and producing music. Do you have time to listen for your own personal enjoyment and has anything caught your ear lately?

"Lately, I'll critique all my own stuff. I'll write in here, then I'll leave and I'll listen to it in the car. For three weeks straight, Omar sent me the mixes that Rich Costey did.

"It hasn't left my CD player [laughs]! I'm telling you, I loved At the Drive In and The Mars Volta. (As well as) being technical, great musicians, don't ever underestimate them for writing good, hooky songs.

"Even if I didn't play on the album, the album is amazing."

At your recent show in LA with Yelawolf, you were using a lot of stacked cymbals. Tell us a little about your gear choices over the years.

"On a project like that, there are guitars, but he is also a hip-hop artist. Sometimes, you can't have something ringing out for more than four counts. You want something really quick. I use those with him.

"On that stuff there's a tighter snare, the toms are tuned high so they cut. With Antemasque, not one stacked cymbal. Really big, downtuned snare. Larger cymbals.

"I think the new Blink stuff we've been working on has been in the middle. It's not a really high snare, but it's not low. My kit has never really changed.

"Sometimes I'll add an extra tom if I know the project that I'm working on calls for something more. I've gotten really comfortable having a four-piece kit because before I had a drum tech, or the money for a drum tech, I would have to set up my own stuff.

"I've always stuck with a small kit. At the end of the day, I've always liked drummers who could just murder a small kit rather than some guy with 12 cymbals."

You've talked about playing jazz when you slow down or retire (as if!), have you had the opportunity to jam with anyone or been approached for any projects in that style?

"It's always on my radar. If the opportunity presented itself I would. I think that's how Antemasque is going to be.

"People are going to be like, 'Whoah, I didn't know Travis could play like that!' I've never been given the opportunity. I grew up playing everything, even Latin!

"I'll always do something, a project, that I end up being passionate about. I don't see myself starting that project, but years from now, I'm there, I'm excited, and I'll kill it."

You mentioned being sober - how has that affected your outlook on playing and life in general?

"For years, I used other things. After the crash, the only thing I was using was weed. That was always my thing. It comes from the earth, man. It's all natural.

"Then, I have what's called Barrett's esophagus, from excessive smoking. I had what was basically pre-cancerous cells on my esophagus. It was my warning shot.

"My doctor was like, 'Any damage to the esophagus is irreversible. Damage could already be done. If I was you, I would stop (smoking) right now.' I stopped cold turkey right then.

"That was actually one of the harder things I had to do. It was difficult. For a number of years, it was stop one thing and start another.

"I was still working out, running five miles a day. I was the most in-shape drug-abuser in the world [laughs]! I wanted to do good and be in good health. I wanted to eat healthy.

"A lot of it stopped after my plane crash because I would highly medicate myself to get onto planes. I would take a handful of pills, have a drink, smoke a couple of blunts and continue medicating myself until that plane took off.

"I hated it. I hated leaving my kids, I hated getting in a big metal tube that was going to fly in the air. Even before my crash, I hated it.

"It was one of the things that I was most paranoid about. With what I did, travelling the world, playing the drums as a musician, it was something I had to do several times a week.

"I haven't flown and done drugs for seven years now."

Have your kids inherited your musical genes?

"I play music with my kids, they're both musicians. Landon's really good at drumming and DJ'ing and my daughter (Alabama) sings and plays piano.

"They're around for everything. They're in the studio. They know every Antemasque song. They know my hip-hop projects that I'm working on.

"We listen to the same music [laughs], which is really cool. When I was growing up, I had amazing parents.

"I learned to love my Pop's music because it was Johnny Cash, Buck Owens and Willie Nelson. He liked jazz, like Chick Corea. I learned to love all that.

"There's less of a gap between my kids and myself to where we actually like the same music, growing up on it. I think back then, people my dad's age were listening to country and jazz.

"Now, it's all over the board. I think even when I was a kid, the lines weren't blurred. Now, they're completely blurred.

"I f**kin' love it. It's the way it should be. Music is music."

Anika Nilles has been talking about her experience playing with Rush and her preparation for the reunited band’s 50 Something tour.

The German drummer has been much praised for not only taking on the immense challenge of replacing the late great Neil Peart, but also – by all accounts – excelling at it. But interestingly, she told Thomann’s Drum Bash podcast that before she started she wasn’t that familiar with their music: “I was familiar with Neil as a drummer, especially in combination with the song Tom Sawyer. That's a classic in the drum community, of course.

"But I haven't really listened to Rush music, even if I was growing up with rock music and progressive music. But for some reason I never stumbled into the Rush catalogue.”

Asked how she’s approached Peart’s original drum parts, she explained that: “I treat the music with great respect to the guys and also to Neil's parts, because Neil is a big part of the music. And so I try to make careful decisions with a great deal of sensitivity of what I'm playing original and where there is room for me to play more free or more me or more improvising. But I go from song to song and make these decisions.”

“I love to be challenged,” she continued. “I love to have challenges lying in front of me and see if I can manage it. But you also need to know what you can do and what you cannot do. You need to know your limits and opportunities also. And in this case, I was prepared and I was excited to play the music.”

Meanwhile, her bandmate Geddy Lee has opened up about a spooky occurrence that happened just after the start of Rush’s 50 Something tour in June.

Lee was being interviewed by Toronto Radio station Q107 when he was asked by the host if he had felt Neil Peart’s presence so far during the tour. “Well, it’s funny. I’ll tell you a little story,” he started. “After the opening night, we were staying in LA., and I was texting Al (Lifeson). We were in the same hotel, but we were texting each other.”

The poster promoting the tour features three birds, symbolising the three Rush members. Two are sitting on a wire, while another is flying away. Lee says that the door to his room was open a crack and he suddenly noticed a bird on the floor similar to the one on the poster.

“I was kind of shocked. And, you know, I love birds, so I approached it, and it flew by me and flew into my bedroom and sat on the edge of my bed. And when I approached it, it was like it was looking at me, and then it flew out the door. So, I quickly ran to the computer and was texting Al this crazy story that had just happened.”

“Now, I’m not a guy who believes in all that mumbo jumbo. But it was a kind of a remarkable moment, and as I was texting him, the bird returned and just stuck its head in the doorway, like to give me another nod. And then I said, ‘Okay, bye,’ and it flew away. It was crazy, crazy.”

Well… make of that what you will.

Travis Barker is the subject of a forthcoming Disney+/Hulu documentary about his career and the 2008 plane crash that changed his life, and ahead of its release, the Blink-182 drummer has given a long interview to the New York Times’ Popcast.

There’s lots of ground to cover, but one particularly interesting bit is when Barker talks about the physical toll his drumming style has put on his body. When asked whether the battle wounds had all been worth it, he simply says: “Scars are cool. I’ve never left a show when my hands are a mess and I think ‘I wish I didn’t play the way I did’.

Barker pointed out that he can keep playing in his trademark style partly because he keeps fit. He said he first started to see a link between the two “when I got tired... any time you’re out there and you think of something you want to do and you physically can’t do it because your skill level is not there to, you don’t have the stamina or the endurance, that’s a problem.

"I never want to be there. To not get tired, I need to run or box or sprint. And those are all the things that I replaced bad habits with when I got sober.”

Later on Barker explained how his versatility was in one sense Blink 182's secret weapon. “Tom (DeLonge, guitarist) and Mark (Hoppus, bassist) would just be playing chugs or a riff that was really linear and simple and then Tom would say ‘do that crazy shit that you do’. And that means play a weird latin beat over this and it becomes a signature drum part.”

Barker cited Dysentery Gary from 1999’s Enema Of The State album as an example. “I think it’s the pre-chorus where it goes into Latin world.

"That’s why playing jazz and playing in a marching band and having a drum instructor make me play latin patterns where I independently do something different with my left hand. That’s where that… it blessed me with different ways to approach punk rock or whatever music I was playing in my own unique fashion that became my signature.”

There’s plenty more in the interview ,that also covers how Barker overcame his fear of flying following a 2008 crash in which he was one of only two of six to survive, his entry into the world's foremost reality TV family (he’s currently married to Kourtney Kardashian) as well as the documentary itself.

That is entitled Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear and can be seen via Disney+/Hulu from August 13.

More good news for Rush fans. There’s a documentary on the way, specifically about the band’s drummer and lyricist, the late Neil Peart, who died in 2020.

Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple will debut on Canada’s CBC network on September 23 and will no doubt follow on to networks and streaming platforms around the world soon after. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson have been interviewed as part of the doc, as have a number of high-profile drummers about Peart’s influence.

Among those are Tool’s Danny Carey, Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Porcupine Tree and King Crimson's Gavin Harrison and Stewart Copeland. The Police drummer has always been a vocal fan of the Peart. “He never rated himself as highly as everyone else did,” he told Rolling Stone in 2020. “But he did very much feel the responsibility that he carried to be the God of drums. Kind of a burden, actually.”

Peart himself can be heard in the documentary via archive clips. “I think it matters for me to play better all the time, and to play my best all the time,” he says at one point, “to keep it fresh and changing. It’s kind of my responsibility, I see it, as a drummer.”

Lee and Lifeson are, of course, currently out on the road with new drummer Anika Nilles, on their 50 Something tour which will take them through to April 2027. After that there has been much speculation about a Rush residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas, though nothing has been confirmed as yet.

He may not require a jacket, but Phil Collins has always worn his love of Motown on his sleeve.

Back in 1982, he had a big hit with a cover of the Supremes’ You Can’t Hurry Love, and he went on to work with Lamont Dozier – one of that song’s writers – on the Motown-esque Two Hearts, which he sang himself, and Loco In Acapulco, which was performed by the Four Tops (both songs featured on the soundtrack to the 1998 film, Buster).

Then, in 2010, Collins gave us Going Back, a whole album’s worth of Motown and other ‘60s soul covers, so it’s fair to say that he’s studied the famous Detroit label’s back catalogue in some detail.

Speaking to BBC Radio 2’s Vernon Kay for his Tracks of my Years segment, though, Collins admits that, when he was recording Going Back, there was one famous Motown moment that he struggled to recreate: the opening drum fill from Martha and the Vandellas’ Dancing In The Street.

“When I did this Motown album, I listened time and time and time again to the records to try to get the parts right,” says Collins. “Obviously, I mean they had three drummers [Benny Benjamin, Pistol Allen, and Uriel Jones] and I tried to get all the drummers little quirks. You could tell one from another, you know?”

Picking apart that Dancing in the Street drum fill, though, proved to be next to impossible.

“We played that what must have been 1000 times to work out what it was, because it's very difficult to tell whether it's a tom tom then a snare drum or a snare drum and then a tom tom. It just sort of breathes, you know. It's like this little furry animal.”

In the end, says Collins, he had to settle on recording a close approximation of what’s on the original record.

“We kind of got it,” says Collins, though he admits that he “didn’t get that one” completely. Overall, though, he’s proud of how faithfully he and his band managed to recreate those original Motown arrangements.

“We nailed a lot of those little touches that only musicians would hear and people that love the records of those periods,” he says. “To me, it was just like we got to get it to sound like a record from then, not like a record from today."

Phil Collins has given an extensive interview to The Sunday Times. Not because he has anything to promote or sell, but seemingly to put the record straight on a few things.

For a start, he reveals that he’s made up with Paul McCartney following a feud that seems to have developed from a misunderstanding a decade ago. Collins gave an interview back in 2016 saying that Macca had always treated him condescendingly. The ex-Beatle emailed Collins, “saying, ‘I’m a bit disappointed, blah blah’. He said don’t be so … ‘sacrosanct’ was the word he used. I’m not sure what that means, but anyway it kind of left a bad taste in my mouth and obviously left a bad taste in his.”

Later, when Collins was organising a charity auction of memorabilia, McCartney caught wind of it. He called to say he’d find something to donate and the pair managed to talk the whole issue out: “I said, ‘Thank God you’ve brought it up.’ Because he’s part of my life, you know? And I wish I hadn’t said it, although it did happen. But we’ve made up, he’s happy about the fact that we discussed it, and I’m happy we discussed it, so it was just really lovely that it’s gone full circle now.”

McCartney and Collins are, of course, in an elite group of artists who have sold over 100 million records as solo artists and as part of a group (Michael Jackson is only other person to have achieved this).

The most shocking revelation in the interview is that the ex-Genesis man almost died as recently as 2024. We’ve known about his knee problems and diabetes for some time, but it seems Collins returned to the booze big time just a few years ago.

“I’d have wine when I woke up," he relates. "That was what I’d want for breakfast, a glass of wine. But I didn’t drink into the night, you know. So I wasn’t really aware of having a problem, to be honest.”

He was rushed into intensive care in January 2024 and ended up spending seven months in hospital. At one point his five children were summoned to his bedside: ”There were some decisions to be made about ‘Do we keep Phil on life support?’ kind of thing. My kidneys were packing up, my organs were just seizing up. People were coming to say goodbye. But I don’t remember them coming, I didn’t have no idea this was going on. They were all worried that they wouldn’t see me again. It could all have gone so terribly wrong.”

The 75-year-old drummer and singer-songwriter will be honoured later this year for his solo work when he’s inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame but it’s unlikely, given his ongoing health problems, that he’ll make one last live appearance there. “I wish I could play still,” he adds touchingly towards the end of the interview. “It’s been my life since I was given a drum kit at three. I’ve always wanted to just do that.”

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.”

The mid-’70s were the best of times for Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The progressive rock trio – keyboard player Keith Emerson, guitarist/bassist/vocalist Greg Lake and drummer Carl Palmer – performed to huge audiences and sold millions of albums.

In a new interview with MusicRadar, Carl Palmer recalls those golden years – a period celebrated on 24 July 2026 with the reissue of the trio’s classic live album Works Live.

“We had three years of being the biggest band you could ever imagine,” Palmer says. “We didn’t sustain it for long enough, but for three, maybe four years, the band was at an incredibly high level. There’s no doubt about that.”

The official announcement for the reissue of Works Live states: “Few bands defined the scale and ambition of progressive rock quite like Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The trio became one of the most commercially successful and influential acts of the era, pioneering a spectacular blend of virtuoso musicianship, classical reinterpretation and arena-scale rock performance.”

However, as Palmer readily admits, ELP’s music was routinely trashed by rock critics.

“We got slammed really hard,” he shrugs, “even though the music was good. The Americans didn’t hate us but we really got slammed in the UK. They said we were overblown, pretentious, sabre-rattling.”

In 1974, ELP co-headlined with Deep Purple at one of the biggest rock shows of all time, the California Jam at the Ontario Motor Speedway complex in Ontario, California. The bill also featured Black Sabbath and rising stars the Eagles.

Palmer recalls: “When we played California Jam, I think 120,000 people paid, and another 100,000 smashed down the fences and broke their way in.”

ELP played to another huge audience of 78,000 at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium on 26 August 1977. This performance was recorded and formed the bulk of the 1979 live album In Concert, which was expanded in 1993 under the new title Works Live.

In preparation for their 1977 North American tour, the trio had rehearsed in a basement area beneath the Olympic Stadium during the winter, as Montreal lay under heavy snow. This led to a novel idea for a video shoot to promote the hit single Fanfare For The Common Man.

“The video that was made for Fanfare was recorded in the winter before the concert in the summer,” Palmer says. “So the same venue, but different times of the year.

“We were rehearsing in Montreal and we got to know one of the people that represented the Olympic Stadium, and he was a big fan of ELP. We said, ‘Would it be at all possible if we could shoot a video in the stadium when there’s no one there and there’s six feet of snow?’ He said, ‘Well, we don’t get many requests like that. We’ll see what we can do for you.’ And in the end they said yes.”

He continues: “We didn’t actually play the song physically. It’s a mime. We had the song blasting through the speakers and we just played away as if we were doing it live. And we did it four times.

“We did it one time with the three cameras all on me all the way through. Then we did the same thing for Greg and for Keith, and then we played it all together.

“And we could only do it those four times because we were absolutely freezing. I think it was about 30 below at the time. We couldn’t take it anymore.”

Fanfare For The Common Man eventually reached No 2 on the UK chart.

“It became a big thing,” Palmer says. “And really it was one of the first classic rock ’n’ roll videos.”

Emerson, Lake & Palmer and BMG will release a new reissue of Works Live on 24 July. Pre-order your copy here: http://elp.lnk.to/WorksLive

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.”

Blur drummer Dave Rowntree has lost an appeal against the PRS in a case over the distribution of so-called ‘black box’ royalties.

What are ‘black box’ royalties? Good question. Well, they refer to the increasing number of live gigs where PRS takes a cut from the ticket sales but has not been able to allocate it to the appropriate songwriters because of a lack of information about a setlist. And it’s a growing problem – according to PRS’s own website, there are over 106,000 gigs where performance royalties have been collected but not distributed. Most of these are from small-scale gigs in grassroots venues.

The amount in the so-called black box is a substantial one too. According to a news feature in the Guardian last year, it amounted to £2.7 million for one year – 2019 – alone. PRS distributes them to its members according to market share.

Rowntree’s action claimed that PRS was handling the black box royalties in a way that was favouring publishers more than songwriters, who make up the vast majority of the PRS membership, and because of the lack of transparency over them, they were breaking UK and EU competition law.

The drummer’s action was thrown out by the Competition Appeal Tribunal last August and has now been rejected by the Court of Appeal. Lord Justice Miles said a "true" or "accurate" distribution of these royalties could not be known "because the root of the black box royalties problem is the absence of accurate information - and, conversely, if accurate information were available, the relevant royalties would be matched".

Essentially, because of the very lack of information, no PRS member can say they are entitled to any specific amount of the black box royalties.

"Once one accepts that the PRS has to adopt some rule of distribution for the black box royalties, the fairness of its chosen rule can only be assessed by comparison with some other rule," the judge added.

"In my judgment the reason why no counterfactual has been advanced, even in general terms, is manifest: it is that the very data failure problem which has given rise to the black box royalties means that there is no plausible basis for suggesting a more accurate, let alone fairer, distribution."

Rowntree has issued a statement saying he accepts the Court’s decision but said the action "succeeded in shining a light on the magnitude of PRS black box royalties".

He added: "I would welcome the opportunity to work with the PRS to find ways to shrink the value of black box royalties for the benefit of its 160,000 songwriter members. There must be better ways for royalties to be identified and paid to the correct songwriter, especially given the pace at which technology is evolving.”

Stewart Copeland has told Billboard that he “gets along fine” with Sting these days, despite the fact they are still in a dispute over royalties.

“We’re not [in court]. The bean counters are, somewhere over in London,” Copeland said. “For me it’s, ‘Lemme know how it works out…'”

The case has yet to resolved completely. Earlier this year it was revealed that Sting has paid Copeland and Andy Summers £800,000 of the royalties they were alleging were owed to them. They are still seeking the rest of the claim.

But away from the courtroom, Copeland says he still talks to Sting about “kids, Instagram memes, bullshit… I’m happy that we get along just fine.”

“We had a spell where our music universes overlapped and we created some incredible stuff,” the drummer reflected. “We really achieved everything we needed to achieve. Really, as I’ve been saying a lot recently, ol’ Sting-O and I, we make music for different reasons, and it has a different place in our lives. So we get along great as long as we’re not trying to make music together.”

Copeland says in the interview that he has “fully retired” from music, at least commercially: “Now I just do it for kicks and put [music] up on YouTube for folks to enjoy, without any agenda.”

He hasn’t stopped being creative though. He’s currently on a spoken word tour of the States, which is titled Have I Said Too Much? The Police, Hollywood and Other Adventures tour.

And he’s written a book. Not a straightforward memoir, but “a guide to living the life with people chasing you for autographs, with interviews asking you pointed questions, with all the stuff that goes with rock ‘n’ roll celebrity, all the weirdness. ‘Cause it’s a very weird place. It’s not normal; people don’t treat musicians the same way they treat dentists, even though dentists are far more important for their health. Inhabiting that weird world on that precarious pedestal is a strange thing.”

He’s interviewed therapists as well as artists like Gene Simmons and Carly Simon for the project and can’t resist dropping in a tidbit from his interview with the latter.

“I get into band dynamics [in the book], and I was talking to her about the phenomenon about romance in a band, like Fleetwood Mac, like ‘How does that work?’ And she says, ‘When I was recording (her 1971 album Anticipation) in London and feeling all the mojo and all the excitement… with these incredible musicians, staying at this beautiful house near Hyde Park and recording by day, and at night with all the musicians, I fucked them all.’ I said, ‘Can I put that in the book?’ ‘Sure’ - she didn’t use the F-bomb, but, I mean, it’s pretty amazing.

“And the dynamic was clear. By day they’re making music, which is very emotionally engaging, very tense, and the natural result of all that manifested itself by night, and then the next day they would make the music of love, and it was even bigger than her first album.”

It all sounds fascinating. Doubtless, they'll be more details on that in the fullness of time...

Rick Beato has sat down with Anika Nilles and found out a bit more about her preparation in the run-up to her big gig last weekend – the opening night of Rush’s Fifty Something reunion tour.

The first show in LA on Sunday was a triumph for Rush – and Nilles personally – with fans and contemporaries of the band such as Mike Portnoy queuing up to praise her performance.

Nilles started off by talking about the new Bubinga kit she’s using for the tour. “A Maple kit is more of an all-round kit so you have all the frequencies there which is really in balance, but with the Bubinga you have that bottom end, it’s more phat and depending on the tuning you can still really have that super punchy tone. It’s what I played on the Jeff Beck tour.

"For huge stages and big venues, the Bubinga works really good. It’s not my go-to choice when I play in smaller venues, because it’s too boomy. But for this kind of stage, it’s the perfect wood.”

Asked how she learned Rush’s extensive back catalogue, she admitted: “I have no idea. Sometimes I was sitting there and thought, 'I have no idea how I'm learning that,' but somehow it's working because I learned those songs in a completely different way. My preparation was so different to how I prepare myself usually.“

"Usually I just listen, then I make a quick chart for myself to have it visually in front of my eyes and then I just listen, read and play. And I figured with this, it doesn't work right. So sometimes you cannot really write it out because a lot of it is also kind of a feeling."

Writing it out would have just taken too much time, she said. “And I thought, I don't have that time. I just have to listen, make chunks for myself and just learn it step by step and then this is how I did it. But just memorizing all the parts is one thing and then learning the feeling is a different thing.”

Nilles got the gig via Geddy Lee’s bass tech John ‘Skully’ McIntosh, who also worked with Jeff Beck. Once she signed up to joining the band it was a matter of deep research. “I was diving directly into the Rush rabbit hole and just listened to everything I could catch – music, videos, live shows – everything you could find online, just to get to know the songs a bit better, because I just knew a bunch.”

She explained that in a way they were learning or re-learning together. After all, Lee and Lifeson hadn’t played as Rush for over a decade. “We all kind of started a little bit together from scratch,” she said. “I mean, they didn't really start from scratch, but as a trio, we had to find a way to come together.

"And it's one thing when you come into a band and everyone knows everything and it's just like playing, it’s smooth because they're doing it every day onstage and you're the newbie (who) has to adjust and learn all this. It didn't feel like that. So (that) definitely took the pressure a little bit off my shoulders.”

Mike Portnoy has given an unequivocal thumbs-up to Anika Nilles after the first show of Rush’s Fifty Something tour on Sunday night.

Nilles, of course, is stepping into some big, big shoes – Neil Peart’s no less. But the opening gig of the prog legends’ reunion tour at Los Angeles’ Kia Forum went without a hitch, and fellow drummer Portnoy was fulsome in his praise of her.

Writing on Instagram, Portnoy said: "What can I say that hasn't been written already by everybody online today…? It was magical! The setlist was absolutely PERFECT!! (and to think they still have around three other variations up their sleeves to come…) Anika absolutely KILLED IT in the best way imaginable. I was so happy for her…nailing all of the big Neil moments with a giant smile on her face the whole time! She really is the perfect choice for this!”

“The tributes to Neil throughout the show were so tasteful and emotional. (Yes I'll admit I cried at a few points) The production was absolutely INSANE... And most importantly of all, I am so happy for Geddy and Alex to be able to do this again! Seeing this tour come to life, it very obvious this needed to happen. As not only a proper tribute to Neil, but most importantly to honour the legacy of this band. Geddy and Alex deserve it. And the fans deserve it as well…"

Like countless other Rush fans around the globe, Portnoy caught the show via Youtube. "I'm still trying to figure out which show I will be able to attend (likely NYC or Philly),” he continued. “But I will be counting the days until I can witness this in person and soak up every single moment… Welcome back Rush!”

There had been rumours that the Dream Theater man might be the one to replace the late Peart, but in an interview with the Brazilian podcaster Regis Tadeu, Portnoy said that he had never been approached. “I'd be lying if I denied that, of course, playing with those guys would be a dream come true. Of course. And I love and respect not only Rush's music, but Neil Peart as a person and as a drummer.”

“But in a way I'm kind of relieved they didn't ask me, because that's a very tough role to walk into. I think for Anika, she's gonna have a lot of people making inevitable comparisons. There's no way around it. So that's gonna be a very tough gig to have.”

Tough gig or not, Nilles appears to have passed her biggest test with flying colours.

BEST OF MUSICRADAR: Rock music is riddled with examples of drummers who have emerged from the shadows to become prolific and profoundly talented songwriters: Grant Hart of Hüsker Dü; Josh Tillman of Fleet Foxes, who reinvented himself as Father John Misty; and stadium rockers such as Neil Peart, Roger Taylor, Phil Collins, Don Henley and Lars Ulrich.

Then, of course, there’s Dave Grohl, who rose to prominence as the dynamic powerhouse of one of the most seminal bands of all time before going on to front one of the biggest-selling bands on the planet.

For Grohl, drums were always at the forefront of his ambitions and it was the aforementioned Neil Peart’s band Rush that inspired his enthusiasm. "When I got [Rush album] 2112 when I was eight years old, it f****** changed the direction of my life,” he told RTT News in 2013. “It made me want to become a drummer."

But by the age of eleven he was also learning guitar and taking a keen interest in songwriting. The results would take at least a decade to really come to the fore. But from the outset, Dave Grohl’s songwriting, as much as his drumming, would provide the bedrock of his creative core.

For Grohl, songwriting became a vital outlet in his early teenage years. He grew up in Springfield, Virginia and had a difficult relationship with his father, James, an award-winning journalist who expected his son to take a conventional career route.

When his parents divorced, Grohl and his sister Lisa were raised by their school teacher mother Virginia, who instilled strength and a strong work ethic into her children.

“Growing up in Springfield, Virginia in a little house, with my mother working three jobs trying to make a public school teacher salary work as a single mother raising two children, we never had much,” he told American Songwriter magazine. “But we were always happy.”

From the age of eight, music became his obsession. “I realised that that was my lifeline, or that was my best friend, and I would do anything to keep it.”

Lack of money meant that Grohl drummed along to his favourite albums not on a drum kit, but on pillows in his bedroom. But he did manage to acquire a guitar, as he explained in a keynote speech at SXSW in 2013. “I had my first guitar, an old Sears Silvertone with the amp built into the case. It smelled like an old attic full of mothballs and burning wire… but it instantly became my obsession.”

Grohl was eleven when he began writing songs and he realised that his lack of formal music training might be an asset. “One of the blessings of not knowing what I’m doing is that I surprise myself,” he told Katherine Yeske Taylor American Songwriter magazine in December, 2021. “Like, I don’t know conventional scales. I don’t know the names of the chords that I’m making.”

Armed with Beatles songbooks, the young Grohl practised guitar intensely and began to plough as much energy into learning guitar as he was to his drumming. “After doing that for hours and hours and hours every day, you start to notice the subtleties in the arrangements, or the shape of a composition, or the different types of harmonies, and then the lyrical qualities of each song,” he told American Songwriter magazine. “So just through total obsession, I started to form this idea of how music is made or should be.”

He began to record the songs that he wrote and created a makeshift multi-tracking process using cassette decks.

“Eventually I figured out how to be a one-man band,” he said in that SXSW keynote in 2013. “I took my crappy old handheld tape recorder, hit record and laid down a guitar track. I would then take that cassette, place it in the home stereo, take another cassette, place that into the handheld recorder, hit play on the stereo, record on the handheld, and play drums along to the sound of my guitar.

"Voila! Multi-tracking! At 12 years old! To my chagrin, though, what I got was not Sgt. Pepper’s… rather a collection of songs about my dog, my bike, and my dad. Nevertheless, I had done this all myself. Therefore making the reward even sweeter.”

Grohl told American Songwriter magazine that the process of writing and recording his own songs became his “little secret”. His early influences were The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Rush and AC/DC although he also developed a fondness for 70s AM middle-of-the-road artists such as Gerry Rafferty, Helen Reddy and Andrew Gold.

His love of melody has never left him. “To me, that’s the most important part of a song,” said Grohl in an interview with Guitar World in 2021. “And that comes from growing up with Beatles records and sitting down with a chord book, trying to understand why those harmonies do what they do and why the melody moves the way it does and why the composition and arrangement is like this.”

But of all the songwriters who have inspired him, Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü remains the strongest influence. "When it comes to guitar playing and song structure,” Grohl told Classic Rock, “I think that Hüsker Dü might be my biggest songwriting influence.

"A lot of what I do comes from Bob. I’ve name-checked Hüsker Dü songs lyrically. Like In Times Like These it says: ‘I’m a new day rising’, which is one of my favourite Hüsker Dü records.”

In 1986, Grohl auditioned as drummer for Washington DC band Scream and landed the job. He dropped out of high school and headed out on the road. “I was 17 and extremely anxious to see the world,” he told Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad, “so I did it".

When not touring with Scream, Grohl would perform with the band Churn alongside future Foo Fighters producer Barrett Jones on guitar and vocals, and Stafford Mather on bass. In 1990, he wrote and recorded his first major song, Gods Look Down, on which he played all the instruments.

In an outtake from the 2014 documentary miniseries Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways, Grohl listens back to the song, which was recorded at the Laundry Room Studio. “I sound like a girl,” he whispers as his vocal enters the mix on the playback. It’s a raw, visceral track with a deep, dark groove.

Grohl spent four years in the band Scream, before they disbanded in 1990. During that time, he befriended members of Washington state band The Melvins, whose guitarist Buzz Osborne introduced him to Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Kris Novoselic. Later that year, Osborne informed Grohl that Nirvana were looking for a drummer and he flew to Seattle to audition and promptly landed the gig. The band’s debut album Bleach (1989) yielded positive reviews, yet noone could have predicted the success of its follow-up, Nevermind (1991).

Grohl was suddenly in a position he never dreamt he would be in – drummer with one of the most revered and respected new bands on the planet. He hadn’t abandoned his own songwriting activities but as he told CBS Sunday Morning “I was in a band with one of the greatest songwriters of our generation, so I didn’t really want to rock the boat.”

But Grohl certainly contributed. He co-wrote Endless, Nameless, the hidden, final track on Nevermind, that appears approximately 10 minutes after the end of the album’s final listed song, Something In The Way.

Grohl also co-wrote the song Gallons of Rubbing Alcohol Flow Through The Strip, another hidden track that closed the non-US pressings of follow-up album In Utero. He also came up with the gargantuan riff that powers that album’s second track Scentless Apprentice.

At the same time Nevermind was scaling charts, Grohl was compiling and recording his own material, which he released on a cassette called Pocketwatch in 1992, on indie label Simple Machines. During a break from touring, Kurt Cobain overheard Grohl working on a song called Color Pictures of a Marigold, and they subsequently worked on it together.

In a 2014 episode of the documentary series Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways, Grohl recalled Cobain’s reaction after hearing a demo of the song Alone + Easy Target, that Grohl had recently recorded.

“I'd told him I was recording and he said, 'Oh, I wanna hear it, bring it by’. He was sitting in the bathtub with a Walkman on, listening to the song, and when the tape ended, he took the headphones off and kissed me and said, 'Oh, finally, now I don't have to be the only songwriter in the band!' I said, 'No, no, no, I think we're doing just fine with your songs’.'"

Nirvana would jam the song on soundchecks during the 1991 European tour and it would eventually be included on the Foo Fighters debut album.

During the sessions for In Utero, Nirvana took the decision to re-record Color Pictures of a Marigold and released this version as a B-side on the Heart-Shaped Box single, entitled simply Marigold.

Prior to Nirvana’s 1994 European tour, the band booked three days of recording sessions in Seattle to work on demos. For most of the sessions, Cobain was absent so Grohl and Novoselic worked on demos of their own songs. These included Grohl’s songs such as future Foo Fighters tracks Exhausted, Big Me, February Stars and Butterflies.

Cobain arrived on the third day, and the band recorded a demo of You Know You’re Right. It was Nirvana's final studio recording. On 8 April 1994, Kurt Cobain was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Lake Washington Boulevard in Seattle.

In the months that followed, the stunned Grohl went into isolation, winding up in County Kerry, Ireland, and unsure what to do next. But it was ultimately his work and his songwriting that would help him to push through and move on.

In an interview with Guitar World in 2021, Grohl ruminated on the subject of songwriting and how, for him, “the complicated puzzle” of weaving a song’s various elements together remained the biggest challenge.

“That’s the Rubik’s Cube right?.... It’s like, ‘Okay, great, I’ve got a groove – that’s cool. I’ve got riffs – that’s cool. But none of it’s going to work unless there’s a f****** melody.’

"And then you realise nobody’s going to care about any of it unless you’ve got a lyric. So now you add your words. It’s like baking a cake backwards.”

He may be one of the most renowned drummers in the world and led one of the planet’s biggest rock bands of the last three decades, but Dave Grohl has admitted he can’t count time signatures.

The lead Foo Fighter was appearing on the Tape Notes podcast when he let slip this somewhat startling revelation. “I know it sounds horrible. I’m a drummer. It’s funny because people count things… differently,” he told host John Kennedy, before illustrating it with a story.

It seems that he only found this out when he guested on a Nine Inch Nails session. “The riff was like [mimes complicated time signature] and I’d go in and do a take and Trent (Reznor) and Atticus (Ross) were there and they’d say ‘ok let’s do one more take but make sure you hit a crash on the one’.

Grohl said ok and performed the drum pattern again. “Then I’d do another take and they’d be like ‘ok great, just one more but get the crash on the one’”.

It was only on the third take that both parties realised they were communicating at cross purposes.

“They’re like ‘come in here’. (I) walk in the control room and they’re like ‘tell me where you think the one is?’” Grohl tells them and Reznor and Ross start laughing. “(They said) ‘That’s not the one. The one’s here’. And it was on some weird side note thing that f***ed me up. Like I was so confused.”

“And so I was like, that’s not my one. As long as I recognise the pattern, just tell me where to put the cymbal, I’ll put it there. But I’ve got my own one.”

Grohl no doubt survived Nine Inch Nails’ derision; his own approach to time signatures hasn’t exactly proved an impediment during a long and illustrious career. “You know it’s hard to un-see something; it’s also hard to un-hear something,” he reflected to Kennedy. “So it’s hard to un-hear the one. It’s hard to put it somewhere else.”

Jorge Garrido, the Spanish drummer and social media presence known as El Estepario Siberiano has posted a lengthy – and very entertaining rant - against Suno and AI music in general.

Garrido started his last missive by announcing that he’d been run over by a car “yesterday” and didn’t feel like playing especially. So, instead, he went off on one about Suno. He said that he didn’t think it would take off in the way it had. “Usually with AIs,” he said. “There’s a company making decisions. But in this case the people making that decision are musicians, producers and people that work in the industry and that choice is killing the industry that they work in. I thought that’s bullshit. No-one’s going to use that. I was WRONG.”

It seems he’s disappointed that fellow musicians are promoting Suno “for insane amounts of money, one could assume.” He addressed his comments at younger musicians who are just starting out on the road.

"That’s what they do, tech giants just lie. What they actually did was steal all the music that our race has ever produced and they fed it into a machine that now can generate tracks based on my job, and your job, and the job of every musician that ever lived.

"They didn’t ask for permission. And they did it for profit, not for you.”

He implored his fellow musicians not to work with colleagues who use Suno. “You wouldn’t work with a racist. Don’t work with somebody that’s destroying the job that allows you to feed your children. And for all the people that are promoting it, just don’t follow them any more. And make them go back to the place where they actually can suffer from the problems that they are creating.”

Harsh words. But Garrido means it. He’s even selling anti-AI T-shirts, with the acronym SUNO, spelling out Stealing Until Nobody’s Original, but with the ‘O’ depicting a coin.

Had it been an O, instead he’d be facing legal action, he pointed out: “Transformative copyright, I think it’s called,” he said sarcastically. “Loopholes? Who doesn’t love holes?”

For more of this, but generally just astonishing drumming, please do follow El Estepario Siberianoh

Dave Grohl has recalled the moment he put his foot in it and managed to inadvertently insult David Bowie.

The lead Foo Fighter was appearing on the podcast Dish From Waitrose (yes, a food podcast. Evidently, that’s where global rock stars promote their new albums these days) alongside Nick Grimshaw and chef Angela Hartnett, when conversation turned great gigs. Grohl mentioned that one of the best he’d ever seen was Bowie at a festival back in the 1990s.

“I had just seen him perform at a, like a V Festival – or something like that,” Grohl explained. “It was like Prodigy, David Bowie and we happened to be on the bill. I was standing in the photo pit and he was right there, he was right above me singing. It was otherworldly. I mean, it was like a religious experience. I was just like, ‘He's an angel, this is amazing’.”

A short while afterwards Grohl met Bowie in person. This must have been around 2001 when he was invited to play guitar on a cover of the Neil Young song I’ve Been Waiting For You that ended up on Bowie’s Heathen album. “I told him when I met him in the studio, I said, ‘I just saw you, like, it was such a trip to see you in human form right there, right in front of me.’ And he says, ‘What did you think? What did you feel?’ And I'm like, ‘Oh f***.’”

He recalled: “So, the first thing to come out of my mouth, like an idiot, I said, ‘Well, the first thing I noticed was all of your imperfections’. I backpedalled so fast. I don't know how I got out of that one. But I was like, what did I just ... I would never say that to anybody. Isn't that horrible?”

Grohl didn’t say how Bowie reacted to his faux pas, but evidently, he didn’t send the Foo Fighter on his way. Instead, Grohl got to see how the great man worked in the studio and was suitably impressed: “I swear to God, he’s one take — his voice, it’s the voice, there’s no effect. It’s just exactly like this. You get chills. You’re like, ‘Oh my God, that’s the most reassuring, beautiful thing, this is real’.”

And that new Foo Fighters album? In case you’d forgotten, Your Favorite Toy drops this coming Friday (April 24).

It was in 1993 that The Smashing Pumpkins made their big breakthrough with their second album Siamese Dream. It reached the top 10 on the US Billboard 200 and eventually sold in excess of four million copies.

But sudden fame wasn’t easy to handle for the four members of the band – lead vocalist and guitarist Billy Corgan, bassist D'arcy Wretzky, guitarist James Iha and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin. As Chamberlin says: “You have no tools and no skill set how to manage that level of success.”

In a new interview with the Go With Elmo Lovano podcast, Chamberlin looks back on that landmark year and describes his relationship with the most high profile band of that whole era – Nirvana.

“We played with Nirvana probably four or five times,” he says. “They were incredible.”

He recalls having a good connection with fellow drummer Dave Grohl. “We became tight. We had a lot of fun back then.”

But he admits that his interaction with Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was more problematic.

“You know, I don’t think Kurt really dug me,” Chamberlin says. “I think he kind of stayed away from me back then, because… I was a pretty high octane individual, you know? And I don’t think Kurt really wanted to be around somebody who was resonating at such a high frequency.”

Chamberlin describes Cobain as “very introverted and introspective”.

He adds: “He was always nice to me, and I knew I knew him and Courtney. And we were friendly, but I wouldn’t say we were tight.

“I had a huge respect for him as a musician, and I wanted to be, you know, compassionate – to not be, like, inserting myself into his orbit like everybody else was. Because, honestly, it was like we were all peers. So it wasn’t a big deal.”

The making of Siamese Dream was complicated by difficulties in the personal lives of the four band members, with Chamberlin struggling with substance abuse problems. But this album transformed The Smashing Pumpkins into one of the leading bands of the alternative rock era, with powerful hit songs including Cherub Rock, Disarm, Rocket and Today.

Chamberlin says now that he treated Kurt Cobain with the same respect he afforded to other musicians he admired and toured with, such as Black Francis of the Pixies and J. Masics of Dinosaur Jr.

“There was a lot of people that we held in high regard,” he says, “but they were just in the same circus we were in, right?

“It doesn't matter if you were flying private or you’re taking a van – you’re still in the circus.”

Ringo Starr has a new album out this week – Long Long Road – and he went on Jimmy Kimmel’s show last night to promote it.

The ex-Beatle trotted out onto the set, looking slim, stylish, and more agile than an 85-year-old has any right to be, and, of course, was hit by a wave of audience affection commensurate with his status as a living piece of shared cultural history.

What do you ask the most famous drummer in the world that he hasn’t been asked fourteen thousand times already? Incredibly, Kimmel found a few things.

When was the last time Ringo was asked to show ID to prove he is who he is? Incredibly, “two tours ago,” he said. “We were touring America, and I didn’t bring my passport or anything, and we got to one airport and they wanted identification.” The drummer simply said to ask any passing punter. “And all these people said ‘IT’S RINGO!!!!’”

Apparently, that wasn’t good enough for the officials in charge, though in the end, they let Ringo on. “They said ‘we’re going to let you on the plane but you’re going to have to be sniffed by the dog. So the dog sniffed me and I got on the plane.”

Aside from his new album, he’s also on a track on the new McCartney album, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, which is out in late May. It’s a duet between the two old pals, which was started when Ringo jammed with Andrew Watt at the producer’s studio. “Paul got the song and then put everything else on it. So it was like in reverse – the drums were on first. But it’s really great. It’s amusing, and it’s very real, cos that’s where we come from.”

Kimmel also asked about the upcoming Sam Mendes Beatles biopics. Last year, Ringo met up with Mendes and corrected a couple of things in the script, as well as Barry Keoghan who plays him. “I think he’ll do a really good job,” he said of Keoghan, before adding: “You know the thing I really had to do? I was looking at it like it was a documentary and once I finally said, ‘it’s not a documentary, it’s a film, I could relax.”

As for Long Long Road, it’s another country album after last year’s Look Up and Beaucoups Of Blues from 1970. At a time in life when most artists – most people in general – slow down, Ringo appears to be speeding up: it’s his tenth album of the 21^st Century.

Tributes have been pouring in over the Easter weekend for legendary drummer James Gadson. Known for his work on classic records including Lean On Me and Use Me by Bill Withers in 1972, Diana Ross’s Love Hangover and Dancing Machine with The Jackson 5, Gadson also became a regular touring member of Marvin Gaye’s band.

Gadson sadly died at the age of 86 on April 2nd. His wife Barbara confirmed his passing to Rolling Stone, saying “he’d had some health challenges recently including surgery and a bad fall that hurt his back.”

“He was a great husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather, and one hell of a drummer.”

Beck, whose albums Sea Change and Morning Phase featured Gadson was amongst those paying tribute, writing, "My heart is heavy at the passing of my old friend the legendary drummer James Gadson. He played drums on many of my records over the decades, from midnite vultures on and has been a significant part of the sound of so many of my songs.

"He had become an irreplaceable part of our musical family for years. I feel fortunate to have known this gentle giant of a man who was such a musical force and left his mark on so much classic music, from bill withers to I will survive.

"He was a soft spoken humble soul who had the most inimitable feel and personality to his playing. I have great memories of playing opposite him in the studio, always with a toothpick in his teeth grinning wide because he knew he was bringing the heaviest deepest groove you'd ever heard."

Primus’ John Hoffman posted on Instagram “Rest in power one of the funkiest drummers that ever lived, Mr. James Gadson. 1939 - 2026. He had a storied career, but was best known for being the drummer for Bill Withers (who is one of my favorite all time R&B artists).

"Nobody had a groove like James, mixed with a truly authentic 70’s swag that can seldom be duplicated. He will be missed!”

Two-time Grammy Award-winner and drummer for Jack White and Pete Rock, Daru Jones said, “Around 2015, when I was in Nashville, I got the call to come in and record on a Sturgill Simpson project. That session turned into one of the most unforgettable moments in my journey. I was invited to double drum with the legendary James Gadson.

"Man… what an experience. We were in the room for at least an hour and a half, just tracking live beats for the producers. One minute I was laying down grooves while he played on top, and the next, we switched roles. It was pure musical conversation energy, feel, and respect all flowing at once. James captured a vibe that stuck with me ever since.

"Every time we crossed paths after that, we’d bring up that session. It was one of those moments you never forget.

"Man, I wish I had access to that hard drive with all those breaks… there was some magic on there. I believe the great Vance Powell was tracking us, but I don’t even know what the producers ended up doing with it. Still, I’ll never forget that feeling in the room.

"We’re truly going to miss him. James Gadson drummer for Bill Withers and so many more was one of the greatest to ever do it. His legacy lives on through the countless classic records he helped shape. Much respect to a legend. Rest easy, James”

Bill Withers sadly passed in 2020 but the @realbillwithers Instagram account paid its respects to Gadson saying “The beat goes on, but the pocket will never be the same.

"Today we find ourselves reflecting on the incredible life and legacy of James Gadson. More than just a legendary drummer, James was the heartbeat of so many of Bill’s most iconic tracks. If you’ve ever tapped your foot to “Use Me” or felt the soul of “Lean on Me,” you’ve felt the magic of James Gadson.

"He didn’t just play the drums; he felt the music in a way that moved us all. His warmth, his unparalleled groove, and his kindness left an indelible mark on everyone he touched.

"Rest in Power, James. Thank you for the rhythm that will live on forever. Our hearts go out to his family, friends, and the global community of musicians who looked up to him”

Drummer for Michael Jackson, Madonna, Elton John, Stevie Wonder just to name a few Jonathan “Sugarfoot” Moffett paid a heartfelt tribute, calling Gadson family, a mentor, and a "real one" who was "the groove".

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson had this to say, "Some drummers are soulful. Some drummers are funky. Some drummer are a rockin. Some drummers are swinging——but NO drummer, has impacted the art of breakbeat drummer (danceable drums) like James Gadson."

"James Gadson is breakbeats defined. These are just a fraction of 60 years of quality drumming——even in the last 20 years he did some of his best work (Dangelo (that’s him doing the handbone on “Sugar Daddy”)/Lana Del/Corrine Bailey Rae/Beck/Kelly Clarkson/Jamie Cullum/Norah Jones/Florence & The Machine). The Beat Will Truly Go On…..& On…..

"Rest In Beats Legend!”

Drummer Vinny Appice has been talking to Loudwire Nights about the various bands he played in with Ronnie James Dio: Black Sabbath, Dio and Heaven And Hell.

The latter were something of a metal supergroup. Comprising Appice, Dio, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler, they were the post-Ozzy Sabbath lineup that recorded the band’s 1981 album Mob Rules, though they named themselves after the previous Sabbath album that had been Dio’s debut as vocalist.

The band toured between 2006 and 2009 and recorded one new album – 2009’s The Devil You Know. Sadly, any further activity was cut short by Dio’s early death from cancer in May 2010.

Appice though, has fond memories of those years. "We were having a good time playing together and making music and we were intending to continue for a bit, to do another tour in that summer in 2010 and possibly maybe another album,"

"But that's when Ronnie got ill and we couldn't continue. It's kind of a sad ending ... I'm glad we got to do it.”

He also talked about his early years playing with Dio, especially around the time of Holy Diver, the band Dio’s 1983 debut: "We didn't sit there and go, 'Let's make an album that's going to last 45 years or become a cornerstone of some rock music.' We were just having a great time. We'd go to Sound City Studios at 7 o'clock, we'd all drive in, we'd smoke a lot of pot and we were just creative, you know? We did creative things. It was like a club, a boys' club. We're going to hang out tonight, 7 o'clock."

"Everybody was happy, Ronnie was happy," he said.

"We used to jam with Ronnie sitting there. He'd sit there and roll a joint. He'd stand there by his music stand, rolling a joint and we're just jamming then writing some lyrics down. He'd get up and sing. We never heard what he was going to sing until he got up and sang, so it was very organic. Anything could go. It was a fantastic time."

The drummer also revealed that he honours the anniversary of his friend’s death every year. "I just think of Ronnie. He's always in my heart and we were like brothers at certain points. I always think about him - and maybe crank up a Dio song or something. He was just amazing and an amazing person… I'm just fortunate to have been able to be in that position to make music with Ronnie.”

Just another day in Los Angeles: the rapper, producer, singer-songwriter and drummer Anderson .Paak was spotted earlier this week riding through the city's suburbs on a drumkit on wheels.

The sight was captured (of course) on social media. USA Today put it on their Instagram, captioning it: “Los Angeles is full of surprises! This time, rapper Anderson .Paak was spotted zooming through a neighborhood on a wheeled drum kit while also expertly playing on it.”

Several commenters raised the obvious question of how Paak is actually driving the contraption whilst drumming at the same time?

We’re not sure. But as you can see, judging by the way he veers across the road, it could be that he’s controlling the movement of the vehicle with his feet. Either that or it’s one of those new-fangled self-driving drumkits…

It seems that Paak wasn’t just riding on the kit because he was bored one morning and felt like providing some drive-by entertainment. According to one local resident, Elissa, who captured the footage, the musician was filming a commercial for Visa, which we will doubtless see in the fullness of time.

And as you can see above, there were some priceless responses to the Instagram footage. One wag said: “That thing’s got great breaks”, whilst another came out with: “You can’t park there, but you can paak anywhere.”

It’s been almost a year now since it happened but the rumpus over Josh Freese’s firing from the Foo Fighters continues to rumble on.

In the Guardian over the weekend, the band were interviewed and Nate Mendel suggested that the hazy reasons that were given for Freese’s exit last year were, well, hazy deliberately.

“Yeah. We made a decision that it was best for all parties,” the bassist explained. “To get into the personal details (with Freese), of why that didn’t necessarily sync up, just didn’t seem like it was going to benefit anybody.

"Some things are OK to be like: this is what’s best for us, and we’re going in a different direction.”

However, Mendel did praise Freese for “coming into a situation and doing exactly what needs to be done musically to make it work” after the sudden death of the previous drummer, Taylor Hawkins, in 2022.

As for Freese, in an interview he gave last month to Modern Drummer, he insisted that he’s living his best life right now, back behind the kit with Nine Inch Nails: “Someone recently said to me, ‘Man, you’ve had a tough year.’ And I thought, Really? So the Foo Fighters thing is over. Big deal, that was a blip.”

“The fact that I’ve been touring with Nine Inch Nails and A Perfect Circle again, playing some shows with Weezer, working in the studio with everyone from Danny Elfman to Billy Idol. I feel like I’m back where I belong. Trust me… no one should feel sorry for me.”

However, Freese did admit that the day the axe fell last year, he felt “in shock”.

“The day it went down I was hanging out on a day off with A Perfect Circle and the Primus guys,” he recalled. “Everyone was in shock and asking me what the hell happened. I just remember thinking that I was really grateful to be out there on tour with my friends and with a great crew… playing music I liked with people that I’ve had a long history with.”

A drummer in Australia has been telling the Guardian how he has broken the record for the most bpm – despite having lost his arm in an industrial accident.

His name is Jason Barnes and he was a keen amateur musician, in two bands, and with a place at the Atlanta Institute of Music lined up, before he was electrocuted at work.

“I had lost my job,” he remembers. “I moved back in with my mother and spent day after day watching TV or playing video games with one hand, thinking about everything I might never do again: play the guitar, piano, drums. Even with a standard prosthetic, it felt impossible to imagine holding a drumstick again.”

One day, he decided enough was enough. He dragged his kit out of his mum’s attic, and taped a drumstick to his amputated arm. “Playing was incredibly painful, but I could still keep a groove. For the first time since the accident, something shifted.”

He started to build his own drumming prosthetic. After a couple of attempts, he made one that worked well enough to play once more with his bands. Incredibly, a year after the accident, he had recovered enough to take his place at Atlanta.

Over in the US, he hooked up with the students from the nearby Georgia Tech who were working in the field of robotics. Since then, they and Barnes have developed a prosthetic that uses cutting-edge tech. “For the current prosthetic, one of the engineers suggested filming my intact arm in slow motion to study how I strike the drum, and trying to replicate that through sensors and motors.

"The prosthetic has six electrodes that read the electrical activity in my remaining muscles. When I think about moving my hand, those muscles contract and the prosthetic responds. The accuracy is almost perfect.”

The prosthetic has “opened doors I’d never have imagined,” says Barnes. “I can play timbres and speeds other drummers can’t – up to 20 hits per second.” In 2019, he broke the World Record for most drum beats per minute using a prosthetic. “Technically, it’s the record for most drum beats per minute ever, but that felt misleading – I clearly had an advantage.”

Barnes isn’t, of course, the first drummer to lose their arm and bounce back in style – we’re all familiar with the incredible story of Rick Allen of Def Leppard. But Barnes’s prosthetic sounds like a step down the road to a genuine human/ drum machine interface. “What motivates me now is making these tools cheaper and more accessible,” he says. Indeed, he’s started a non-profit organisation, Limitless Sound, to help develop prosthetics for other disabled musicians.

Since David Bowie’s death a decade ago, his long time producer, Tony Visconti, has talked at length about his friend, their working relationship and the work they did together. You may have assumed that these days, there’s not much more to know.

Not so. In a new interview with Spin, in which he talks about his role in Bowie’s 21^st Century work, Visconti lets slip a couple of titbits about the guests on 2002’s Heathen. First, there’s Dave Grohl – who played on the Neil Young cover I’ve Been Waiting For You - and his eye-popping invoice.

“The Grohl story is interesting,” says Visconti. “He played acoustic guitar, remotely from California, and sent us a file. His drumming would’ve been better, but that didn’t happen.

"Afterwards, he sent David an invoice for $10,000. Sure, he was on top of his game, but that was ludicrous. I don’t know if David actually paid him that much.”

Meanwhile, Pete Townshend had been in turns an influence, rival and - eventually – friend to Bowie. After they had met again at a 9/11 memorial service in 2001, the singer invited him to play on the track, Slow Burn.

“Townshend dropped in for a visit when we were recording in Philip Glass’s studio, Looking Glass,” Visconti remembers. “They had a long chat, and I could see camaraderie between old friends. David asked him to play. He did, but we asked him to play a bit more aggressively, and he said, ‘Oh, do you mean Townshend Windmill Chords?” He nailed it in one take. Two of his right-hand fingers were bleeding afterwards.”

The producer is also asked about Bowie’s taste in guitarists. For an artist who once said he was merely “using” rock, Bowie employed a lot of out-and-out rockers: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Adrian Belew, Peter Frampton, Earl Slick and, of course, Mick Ronson.

“He probably viewed them as ‘flavours.’ He knew specifically what each of their special talents were. I know he loved David Torn because he was just out there.

"He loved Slicky because he could shred as soon as the guitar came out of his case. I loved his tone, too. When David worked with Mick Ronson, he found the perfect foil for his live shows. But when Mick went solo and made his own records, David didn’t like that.”

The last of the boxsets covering Bowie’s various eras (I Can't Give Everything Away, covering 2002 - 2016) came out last year. But with another significant Bowie anniversary looming next January, Visconti hints that there may be more to come: “It will be David’s 80th birthday. I’m sure the estate might have surprises even I don’t know about.”

Genesis keyboard player Tony Banks put it very simply: “Some of our ’70s stuff is rather deep and difficult music,” he said. “Technically, it’s quite hard to play. Really!”

Banks was talking to MOJO magazine in 2007 as Genesis rehearsed in Brussels for a series of stadium and arena shows billed as Turn It On Again: The Tour.

For these shows the Genesis line-up featured Banks and fellow founding member Mike Rutherford on guitar and bass alongside Phil Collins on drums and lead vocals.

This trio were joined by drummer Chester Thompson and guitarist Daryl Stuermer, veterans of Genesis tours since the late ’70s.

The original plan for this tour had been to reunite the band’s early ’70s line-up of Banks, Rutherford, Collins, guitarist Steve Hackett and singer Peter Gabriel.

This was the line-up that recorded landmark albums that helped to define progressive rock – albums such as Foxtrot, Selling England By The Pound and The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.

But when Gabriel and Hackett stalled on the reunion, the other three decided they’d go ahead without them. “It was just too good an opportunity to miss,” Collins said.

The setlist for the Turn It On Again tour included just two complete songs from the Peter Gabriel era – I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) from 1973’s Selling England By The Pound and The Carpet Crawlers from The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway – plus excerpts from three other Gabriel-period tracks, Firth Of Fifth, In The Cage and The Cinema Show.

Speaking to MOJO, Collins said that this early material would be performed again “for the anoraks, if you want to call them that – the camp that thinks I fucked it up when I started singing!”

The bulk of the set was comprised of what Collins called “the Genesis that people know”.

Apart from Abacab (dismissed because, as Banks explained, “We couldn’t get into it”), all the big hits were performed – from Follow You Follow Me, the band’s first UK top ten single in 1978, through to 1992’s I Can’t Dance.

However, there was a night in 2005, just two years before that tour, when Phil Collins joined a Genesis tribute act on stage to play one of the band’s longest and most complex early tracks. And as he recalled to MOJO, this was no easy task.

That tribute act, The Musical Box, was named after the opening track from the 1971 album Nursery Cryme, the first Genesis record to feature Collins and Hackett.

The Musical Box invited Collins to jam with them when they played on 24 February 2005 in the Swiss city of Geneva, near to Collins’s home.

He agreed to sit in on the band’s customary encore of The Musical Box. But this was a song he hadn’t played for nearly 30 years. And just as Tony Banks said, that old Genesis stuff is rather tricky to play.

“I thought it would be fun,” Collins told MOJO. “That was a big mistake. I underestimated just how difficult it would be.

“I listened to [the song] on the morning of the gig and thought, ‘Shit, I wonder if I can still do that?’”

His worries increased when he got together with the band at the venue in Geneva.

“The drummer said, ‘My kit is exactly the same as yours’, but when I got on it felt nothing like mine. We ran through the song six or seven times and I know that they were all thinking, ‘I thought he’d be better than that!’

“It was horrible!” he admitted. “But it got a little bit better by the time we did the gig. Well, the fans liked it!”

Immediately after this show, Collins was interviewed by Swiss radio station DRS3 and said generously: “I thought The Musical Box’s performance tonight was extraordinary. They nailed every physical movement, and Martin, the drummer… I don't know if I’ve ever played that well. Maybe I have, but he played fantastically and he had everything I had.

“What I played, all the left and right hand stuff, it’s very personal and he copied it in a way that made it very interesting. So it was great for me and I really enjoyed it.”

In the interview with MOJO, Collins bemoaned what he perceived as a lack of respect for Genesis from music critics.

“When TV and magazines do those ‘Top 100 albums’ things, we’re never in there,” he sighed. “We don’t have a Dark Side Of The Moon. In the same way that Queen were, we’re very popular with the man on the street and never popular with critics.”

But he did at least have heartwarming story about a compliment he’d received from a fellow drummer, and a legendary one at that.

While Genesis were rehearsing in Brussels, so too were The Rolling Stones – and Collins had been delighted to meet up with Charlie Watts.

“He’s a lovely guy, Charlie,” Collins said. “He told me once, ‘I bought one of your records. You Can’t Hurry Love, on 12-inch – nice.’

“I’m thinking, ‘Bloody hell, a Rolling Stone buys one of my records!”

Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers surprised a few drum students when he turned up at their lesson one morning as their substitute teacher.

The episode was captured by Drumeo, and of course, it’s now on Youtube. There are a number of memorable moments, most notably when the young student is asked by Smith what sort of music he likes and replies “punk rock”. He then names his favourite punk bands as “Blink 182, Green Day and the Red Hot Chili Peppers,” whilst clearly not having a clue who he’s speaking to.

“Red Hot Chili Peppers, they’re not really punk rock, but okay,” Smith replies, before he tells the kid, “Well, do you know I drum with Red Hot Chili Peppers?,” as the youngster’s eyes open wide in shock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86WVogU8FbQ&t=275s

A little later Smith listens as the same student starts up a beat whilst he’s reading off a sheet. “You’re a good reader,” Smith compliments him. “Are you reading the Chili Peppers songs?”

“Nah, they’re too hard,” the young kid answers.

To the nervous young mom who has only just started drum lessons, he advises: “Ignore the cameras, and ignore the Hall Of Fame drummer sitting next to you.”

And when asked by another student what it’s like being in the Chili Peppers, Smith gave a pretty succinct summing up of their strengths as a band: “Anything that we do ends up sounding like us. Each guy has a very strong personality on his instrument.

"Like, Flea has a very distinct style and sound and Anthony when you hear him sing, his voice is very unique. So whenever we apply that to whatever – fast, slow, hard – it ends up sounding like us and it’s really satisfying for a drummer. That to me is the best thing about being in the band.”

“But, like, the chicks and the money is awesome,” he adds jokingly, turning to see his young student nod in agreement.

Eventually, Smith meets the real teacher he was covering for and ends by telling him to “keep up the great work.”

Remember that Cadburys ad from... ooh, around 2007 in which a gorilla plays drums to Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight? How could you not? The calm patience of the ape, waiting for his cue is etched upon our collective memory. It had little to do with chocolate but that really didn’t matter: it was, by most folk’s reckoning, a brilliant TV ad.

You may well have assumed that that ape was CGI-ed. Not so. An actual actor – in a gorilla suit – thumped those drums. And now he has given an interview with the BBC about his experience.

Garon Michael was already a die-hard Phil Collins fan when he got the gig. He remembers hearing In The Air Tonight, aged 16, in a restaurant he was working in back then. “Back in the kitchen they would have the radio going and I would just stop working and I couldn’t leave the room until the song was over. That song is a particularly powerful song and he became the soundtrack of my life.”

Years later, Garon saw an advert in the LA Times asking for actors with a gymnastic background. Eventually Garon twigged it was an “ape thing”. Luckily, he had some experience in such a role, having played primates in not one but three previous films: Congo, Instinct and the 2001 remake of Planet Of The Apes. “(Then) we went through five and a half months of training to be a gorilla. People called me and asked me if I played the drums.”

He didn’t but still got the part. “They got me a drum instructor. When I heard that the song (for the advert) was going to be In The Air Tonight, I was just like ‘this is amazing’. And then to go and get paid to learn how to play the drums to play this commercial, it was a dream job.”

Gorilla, as the advert became known, was an instant hit. So much so that it propelled In The Air Tonight back into the UK Top 20 that September. To date, it’s Phil Collins’ last appearance in the UK singles charts.

Most actors are embarrassed to varying degrees about their early work in adland. But not Garon. “It was definitely one of the biggest highlights of my career,” he reflects.

Dave Grohl has broken his silence on Josh Freese and the reasons for his departure from the Foo Fighters last year.

It comes after an interview with Modern Drummer in which Freese expressed bafflement over his firing in May 2025. Even nine months down the line, he said “the whole thing” was “even more of a mystery... I think I'm a pretty good read on people, and I did not see that coming.

"One day it was nothing but laughs, we're on stage and Dave's looking at me every night like, 'You're killing it, dude!!!' And then it was just – over."

Now in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple 1, Grohl said: “The thing about Foo Fighters is that we’ve had four drummers in 30 years, but with the Foos, we had Taylor Hawkins as our drummer for 25 years, and beyond being an amazing drummer, he was this incredible spirit, this incredible human being, he was our brother, he was our best friend.”

Grohl admitted that replacing Hawkins would have been “complicated” for any drummer. “With Josh Freese, Josh is a consummate professional. He has a storied career of playing with everyone from Michael Buble to The Offspring; he’s had thousands of studio recordings.”

“So he came in, we went out on tour, and we had such a blast. We had a great time. It was like a year-and-a-half of touring, the shows were great and we had a lot of fun. And, the last show that we did, I think it was in September 2024, we did our last show, and all stepped away from the band.”

After that, Grohl explained that the decision about Freese’s future didn’t happen immediately but over a six-month period. “In those six or seven months, as a band, we talked about what to do next, a new direction, and thought, ‘Okay, let’s call Josh and let him know that we are going to move on with a different drummer.’”

He also clarified that: “We called, as a band, all of us called, it wasn’t just me.”

The frontman continued: “Basically, we called Josh, and were like, ‘Hey man, that was awesome. That was such a blast, thank you so much, but we are going to move on and find another drummer.’ After that, we didn’t make a press release, tweet anything or do interviews. We didn’t say anything.

"Since then, there’s been a lot of talk about it, but I think Josh said it best when he said that he didn’t feel our music really resonated with him, and that’s really important.”

In other words, it was nothing personal. Freese’s face just didn’t fit.

Anyway, the Foos move forward. Grohl told Lowe that with Ilan Rubin now behind the kit, “we feel like a band again.” Last week they announced that a new album, My Favorite Toy, will be dropping on April 24. The first single - the title track - is already up on streaming platforms now.

Josh Freese says that he’s still mystified as to why the Foo Fighters gave him the heave-ho last year.

The 53-year-old drummer was first recruited to the band after Taylor Hawkins' passing in 2022. He stayed with them during the entirety of the Everything Or Nothing At All tour in support of the But Here We Are album, but was abruptly let go in May 2025, saying on Instagram: "In my 40 years of drumming professionally, I've never been let go from a band, so while I'm not angry – just a bit shocked and disappointed.”

Nine months on, it seems he’s none the wiser. In a new interview with Modern Drummer, he said: "The Foo Fighters are such a big, mainstream band that everything I say gets taken out of context, reposted, and blown out of proportion. People created headlines from one quick, simple comment I made on a podcast not long ago - it's crazy. I've got to be careful about what I say about it. But I've got a lot to say about it and I've been just trying to figure out how and when, to go about really articulating it."

Asked why he thought he was fired, he said: "I have a couple small theories, but I can't really go into them right now. I did really enjoy the two years I spent with those guys, however, and they were good to me… until they weren't.

"I enjoyed being around those guys, they were generous and good to me… and that's what makes the whole thing even more of a mystery. I think I'm a pretty good read on people, and I did not see that coming. One day it was nothing but laughs, we're on stage and Dave's looking at me every night like, 'You're killing it, dude!!!' And then it was just – over."

Previously, in an interview with the New York Times, Freese suggested his sacking could have been connected with business issues: "Looking back, it was probably more an issue with their management," he said, adding, "It wasn't music that I really resonated with."

Anyway, as we know, Freese fell on his feet as he’s now rejoined Nine Inch Nails, with their drummer Ilan Rubin going the other way and joining the Foos.

It looks like Tool are one of the names lined up for a Sphere residency next year, with drummer Danny Carey saying that the band are “in talks” with the Las Vegas venue.

Carey was talking to the Spiral Out Network when the subject of new material came up: “(We’re) working on a lot of new Tool songs right now,” he confirmed, saying that the band were looking to release a new album next year.

When the interviewer pointed out that Tool were a very “cinematic” band, Carey agreed, saying: “Yeah, we’re very much into that. We’re hoping when we release the new record, maybe do a stint at the Sphere ’cause I think we’re the perfect band for that. We’ve been talking to those guys.”

Carey said that the “preparation” involved in a possible Sphere residency was “pretty intense... It’s a very expensive endeavour, and it takes a while to get into the black,” he suggested. “I think (you have to play) quite a few shows before you make any money.”

He said the band have been shown around the venue: “I just took a tour of it. I haven’t actually seen a full-on show, but they took [us around the venue] to show it off. It’s incredible, man. I almost got vertigo [just looking at it].”

Tool are not the only band looking into a possible residency at the venue. A few weeks ago The Sun reported that Metallica were “90% done” with a deal to play there in 2027 and are just waiting to sign the final contract.

The venue opened two and a half years ago now, back in September 2025, and though many artists have been expressed an interest in playing there, not many – so far – have taken the plunge. Dead And Company, U2 and The Eagles have all performed over 40 times there, with Phish completing a shorter nine show residency. The artists lined up for 2026 at the Sphere are Phish (again), No Doubt, the DJ Illenium and Mexican singer songwriter Carín León.

Sad news reaches us that Andrew Ranken, drummer with The Pogues, has died, aged 72.

Ranken joined the band in 1983 and played on all seven of the band’s studio albums, from 1984’s Red Roses For Me through to their final recordings on 1996’s Pogue Mahone. A cause of death has yet to be announced, but it is thought that he had been in ill health in recent years and had been suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

The surviving founder members of the band, Spider Stacy, James Fearnley and Jem Finer announced the news on Instagram, saying: “It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of Andrew Ranken, drummer, founding member, and heartbeat of The Pogues.”

“Andrew, thank you for everything, for your friendship, your wit and your generosity of spirit, and of course for the music, forever a true friend and brother. Our thoughts and love are with his family at this sad and difficult time.”

After the Pogues broke up in 1996, Ranken formed The Vendettas with Stacy and bassist Daryl Hunt. When the Pogues reformed in 2001, he joined and stayed with them until their final gigs with Shane McGowan in 2014. He later played with The Mysterious Wheels, a blues, country and rock n’ roll band.

So now Ranken becomes the fourth Pogue to pass away. Guitarist Philip Chevron died in 2013, bassist Daryl Hunt in 2022 and of course we lost Shane McGowan in 2023. But The Pogues are still active and for live purposes the remaining three members have compensated for the loss of McGowan by utilising a number of different vocalists.

McGowan’s sister Siobhan has paid tribute to Ranken, posting on Instagram that: “Andrew was such an important part of the story. A band brother and unbelievably talented and unique drummer. May he rest in peace.”

Carl Palmer has been talking to Rolling Stone about his long career – about Emerson Lake and Palmer, Asia and the prog era as a whole.

Palmer is the last survivor of ELP – Keith Emerson committed suicide in March 2016 and Greg Lake died of pancreatic cancer at the end of that year. But the drummer is still playing and honouring his bandmates – he’s been playing as Carl Palmer's ELP Legacy since 2021.

During a long interview, he lets slip one interesting nugget – that he wasn’t the first choice of drummer in ELP. “The first drummer was Mitch Mitchell. I was quite surprised that they didn’t take him. I ended up being called up. And the second time I played with the guys, I thought, ‘Wow, this is magical.’”

ELP’s second ever gig was at the Isle Of Wight festival in 1970 and it set them up for a decade when they became one of the core groups of the prog movement. But after touring 1973’s Brain Salad Surgery they took two years off before regrouping for the Works albums. When they returned everything had changed.

“I think a lot of people got knocked off their perch,” Palmer says of the punk era. “We were a little bit affected by it, and it sort of hurt a bit towards the end of it.”

“We took it very personally, and we shouldn’t have done,” he says. “We should have just stuck at it, but we didn’t. You have to understand that ELP, as a group, they were born with a silver spoon in their mouth. Instant success, instant karma out there, instant new art form, instant everything.

"So anything that came in our way, we weren’t like a normal group that’s ready to take a knock. We couldn’t fight back.”

Instead, they recorded 1978’s Love Beach, which saw them torn to pieces by critics, not least for the laughable sleeve which sees the tanned trio pose - on a beach - in open-neck shirts like they’re about to head off down the disco. Palmer describes the album as “a complete disaster… we were absolutely shattered.”

“So, we said, 'Let’s do it in the Bahamas.' That was the first mistake. You can’t write a prog album when you’ve got fishermen bringing in conch and salmon and sand and sun.

"You can only write a prog album if you’re stuck in the traffic jam on the Brooklyn Bridge. You know what I mean? That’s where that shit comes from.”

“Making that album wasn’t a career move. And then the album sleeve, we looked like the Bee Gees on the front. How can you call an album Love Beach that’s a prog album?”

Don’t expect to hear much from it when Palmer hits the road in April. The tour, entitled Welcome Back My Friends – An Evening with Emerson, Lake and Palmer, starts in Las Vegas on April 8 and winds up in Hidalgo, Texas on May 1. For the full list of tour dates and tickets, click here.

A music icon – drummer, producer and one half of the greatest rhythm sections of all time, Sly Dunbar – has died aged 73.

The news was confirmed yesterday (January 26) by his wife Thelma, who told the Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner: “About seven o’clock this morning, I went to wake him up and he wasn’t responding. I called the doctor and that was the news.” It’s thought that he had been suffering from ill health for some time.

Dunbar first appeared on record way back in 1970 on Dave and Ansil Collins’ Double Barrel, one of the first big reggae hits in the UK. His life changed forever in 1972 when he linked up with bassist Robbie Shakespeare, bonding over a shared love of Motown, Stax and of course reggae. The pair became the rhythm section for Peter Tosh, playing on five of the ex-Wailer’s albums. Their reputation soon grew.

It’s been estimated that the pair played on over 200,000 recordings down the years, but what stands out is the sheer range of music they were involved in. They were the core of the Compass Point All Stars, playing on a succession of albums recorded in that studio by Grace Jones, Gwen Guthrie and Joe Cocker.

They played on Bob Dylan’s Infidels album, on the Rolling Stones’ Undercover and Dirty Work albums. They backed Serge Gainsbourg when he decided to turn his hand to reggae, Ian Dury on his confrontational single Spasticus Autisticus, and worked with Jackson Browne, Yoko One, Sinead O’Connor, Bootsy Collins and Simply Red. They also began releasing albums under their own name and scored a UK hit in 1987 with Boops (Here To Go).

Fast forward to the 1990s and they found the time to put their stamp on a new generation of reggae. They produced Murder She Wrote by Chaka Demus and Pliers which became one of the most successful dancehall records of all time and spawned a small legion of similar riddim tracks.

Tributes have been coming in today. Ali Campbell from UB40 has posted on X: "Words cannot describe how heartbroken I am to hear of the passing of my friend and legend, Sly Dunbar". David Rodigan has described Dunbar as a: “true icon … one of the greatest drummers of all time who played on literally thousands and thousands of recordings”.

And so he now rejoins his partner, Robbie Shakespeare – who died in December 2021 - in musical eternity.

Here’s something that wasn’t on our collective bingo card for 2026 – Chuck D has made a collab album with Doors drummer John Densmore.

The album is called No Country For Old Men – well, they’re 65 and 81 years old respectively – and it comes out under the name doPE, taking the first two letters of Doors and the initials of Public Enemy. It’s out on Record Store Day, which is April 18 this year, and the lead single Every Tick Tick Tick has been made Record Store Day Song Of The Year for 2026.

And indeed, RSD was the reason this unlikely pair got together in the first place. Chuck and Densmore found themselves on an RSD panel together in 2014. Later that year D emailed the drummer, saying "You’ve got the beats, I’ve got the rhymes, let’s make doPE." Now a decade later they’ve finally made good on the idea.

The project began by D and Densmore trading ideas and lyrics between them, with a phrase of the ex-Door’s - "Everybody gets older, but not everybody gets elder” providing the theme and inspiring the title of the album.

In a statement, the pair called the album “a meditation on responsibility, legacy and the bond between generations” with Chuck adding that "John Densmore’s beat isn’t just rhythm, it’s history talking. He's been scoring moments of our culture for decades, and that wisdom hits different when it meets the now. This collaboration is about locking generations together and pushing sound forward."

Chuck D has, of course, a long history of collaboration and has appeared on records by artists as varied as Anthrax, Sonic Youth, Isaac Hayes and Meat Loaf. He was also a part of rap/ rock collaborative projects Prophets Of Rage and the brilliantly-named Confrontation Camp earlier this century.

And incredibly this won’t be the first time there’s been a hip hop/ Doors collaboration. Back in 2013, the rapper Tech N9ne released an updated version of Strange Days, keeping Jim Morrison’s vocals but adding new instrumentation from Densmore, Robbie Krieger and Ray Manzarek. Few will remember it, but it was certainly… different.

Phil Collins turns 75 at the end of this month and to mark the occasion the ex-Genesis man has sat down with Radio 2’s Zoe Ball for an interview that will broadcast that week.

The interview is part of a longer podcast series Eras: Phil Collins, four episodes of which are already on BBC Sounds. Aside from talking to Collins, Ball also spoke to his son, Nic, who played drums in place of his dad on the final Genesis tour, The Last Domino?

Now 24, Nic made his big time debut playing on his dad’s Not Dead Yet tour in 2017, at the tender age of 16, and he remembers a tender moment from the Hyde Park gig on that jaunt “He (Phil) would come by the side of the drum riser on some of the instrumental bits. At first I was like, oh God, what is he gonna critique me on afterwards?

"And actually he just kind of wanted to be there once I figured out that he wasn't sitting there to kind of judge me.”

“It was a really nice moment every show when he'd sit there and it was just kind of having that kind of unspoken moment between each other was really nice, and I'm grateful that he felt confident enough in my ability to go on stage with 'em and to play these parts.”

“I mean, he surprised the shit out of me,” his dad adds. “I tell you. I mean, when I was living in Miami I guess Nic was 16. But I knew he'd been playing, I mean, him and Matthew actually, they've had two drum kits and my drum kit down in the playroom and we all used to play together and then they played together and Nic just got better and better.

"We talked about Genesis going out again. And, but we didn't, we wanted to do something different, think it was at the Albert Hall when I saw Mike and Tony Banks. I saw, I said, ‘you saw Nic. He was very good, isn't he?’ I said, ‘Yeah, he is. He's fantastic.’ So I think they eventually had the idea.”

Collins Sr has been in poor health in recent years, with knee and back problems and kidney issues, but he told Ball that he hasn’t entirely given up on the idea of making new music. “The things that are ahead for me would be, apart from just being back to being totally mobile and healthy, is go in there and have a fiddle about and see if there's more music 'cause you know, you tend to sort of feel, that's it, I've done that.

"But you've gotta start doing it to see if you can do it. Otherwise, you don't do it. So that is something on my horizon.”

Sad news from down under: it’s been announced that Midnight Oil founder Rob Hirst has died, aged 70.

The drummer revealed last year that he had been diagnosed with stage three pancreatic cancer. On Monday, the band announced that he had lost his battle, leaving them feeling “shattered”.

They put out a statement on social media, saying: “After fighting heroically for almost three years, Rob is now free of pain – ‘a glimmer of tiny light in the wilderness’"

In a further post, they added: “We are shattered and grieving the loss of our brother Rob. For now there are no words but there will always be songs. Love Always from Jim, Martin and Pete.”

Midnight Oil formed way back in 1972, initially under the name Farm. They released their debut album in 1978 and took the best part of a decade to gain international success with their 1987 album Diesel And Dust and the breakthrough hit Beds Are Burning.

Hirst was much more than just the drummer. He co-wrote and contributed lyrically to many of the band’s biggest hits, including Beds Are Burning and his precise hard hitting drumming style shaped many of their most recognisable tracks. On top of this he also contributed backing vocals.

Tributes have been coming in from contemporaries of Hirst’s. Stalwart Aussie rocker Jimmy Barnes has posted on Twitter/X: “Rob Hirst has had a massive impact on Australian culture.

"He was the engine driving one of the greatest live bands of all time. RIP, dear Rob. You are irreplaceable, one of a kind, and myself, my family, and all the rest of this great country will miss you so much.”

Midnight Oil played a huge role in bringing to prominence issues such as climate change and indigenous land rights in Australia and an indication of how seriously they were taken is the fact that Australia’s Minister For Home Affairs, Immigration and Citizenship and the Arts, Tony Burke, has paid tribute to Hirst, writing: “For me, Rob Hirst was characterised by three words: genius, generous and genuine.”

“Whether I saw him performing to stadium sized crowds with the Oils or at the back of a festival with The Break he never stopped giving. He was forever generous to his audience and would push his values without fear.”