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.”

NAMM 2026: Josh Freese is to be honoured by the Drum Workshop with a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ for his “invaluable contributions” to the music industry.

The drummer, who has worked with an incredibly long list of people down the years, is to receive the award at the NAMM Show at the DW/Roland booth next Friday (January 23).

In a statement, Drum Workshop said: “The award is a fitting tribute to a career that has seen him play DW drums on hundreds of albums, across an array of musical genres, with the world’s biggest bands and artists.”

Now 53, Freese’s secret power is his versatility. He started his career as a 16 year old in Californian punk band The Vandals and has since had long term stints in Devo, Guns N’ Roses during the late 90s, A Perfect Circle and more recently, Foo Fighters, with whom he played for three years until joining Nine Inch Nails in what was in effect, a drummer ‘swap deal’: NIN’s sticksman Ilan Rubin joined the Foos.

He’s also worked as a session drummer, playing for a vast array of names, from Michael Buble to Weezer to Sting, Avril Lavigne, M83, Katy Perry, The Offspring, Evanescence, Kelly Clarkson, Good Charlotte and many others. One of those clients, Sting, once said of him: “There’s a truism that ‘a band is only as good as its drummer’. Any band that Josh graced with his presence on the kit was fortunate indeed.”

In a statement, Don Lombardi, Drum Workshop Founder, said: ‘I’ve known Josh since he was a young teenager and have had the privilege of witnessing all the accomplishments he has achieved throughout his lifetime. Receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award is well deserved, as he has made an incredible contribution to the music industry and drummers around the world.’

Chris Lombardi, DW President and CEO, added: “Josh has been a true member of the DW family for over 40 years, and I have had the privilege of calling him a friend throughout his entire tenure as a DW artist. It is a true honour to present him with this prestigious award.”

BEST OF 2025: Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that topped MusicRadar's charts in 2025.

The Who might be known for their rock operas, Quadrophenia and Tommy, but the saga of drummer Zak Starkey’s drawn-out exit from the band over the past couple of months has been worthy of a soap storyline.

Having been in, out, back in and then out again, it seems that Starkey’s exit has finally been confirmed, though in his latest interview, he didn’t altogether rule out making yet another return.

Whether this is the end of the story or not, guitarist Pete Townshend has now had his say on the matter in an interview with The i Paper: “It’s been a mess,” he admits.

Asked about the incident that apparently resulted in Starkey’s initial dismissal from The Who - he says that he was accused by Roger Daltrey of ‘dropping beats’ during a show at the Royal Albert Hall, but continues to insist that it was the frontman who made a mistake rather than him - Townshend suggests that he was oblivious to the drama unfolding around him.

“I couldn’t see anything wrong,” he says. “What you see [in the footage of the gig] is a band who haven’t played together for a long time. But I think it was probably to do with the sound. I’ve lost my sound man as a result.”

That said, Townshend does also seem to imply that he believes that the blame for what happened on stage doesn’t rest with Starkey.

“I think Roger just got lost,” he says. “Roger’s finding it difficult. I have to be careful what I say about Roger because he gets angry if I say anything about him at all. He’ll be sacking me next. But that’s not to say that he sacked Zak. It’s a decision Roger and I tried to make together, but it kind of got out of hand.”

That’s one way of putting it but, in case you were thinking that Starkey was always ‘Townshend’s guy’, he also points out that it was Daltrey rather than him that brought him into The Who in the first place (he’s actually been playing with the band for almost 30 years).

“I didn’t invite him in, right? Roger invited him,” says the guitarist. “And at that time, I don’t know quite why he chose Zak, but Zak is another Keith Moon. He comes with real, real bonuses and real, real difficulties.”

Townshend doesn’t elaborate on what these difficulties were but, even after everything that’s happened, he suggests that losing Starkey comes with its downsides, and that he’s still not entirely sure why he had to leave.

“I will miss Zak terribly,” he says. “But quite what the story is, I don’t fucking know. I really don’t know.”

Josh Freese is one of many great drummers to have featured in Guns N’ Roses over the years – and as far as he’s concerned, nobody could ever play the way Steven Adler did on the band’s legendary debut album Appetite For Destruction.

Freese joined Guns N’ Roses in the late ’90s as the replacement for Matt Sorum, who had taken over from Adler in 1990.

Freese’s two-year contract with the band (1997-1999) was the result of friend and colleague Paul Westerberg of The Replacements nudging Freese to go for it.

Freese performed on the GN’R single Oh My God, which appeared on the End Of Days film soundtrack in 1999. In addition, he was credited as co-writer on that track.

During his two years with the band, Freese recorded an estimated 30 tracks for what would eventually become the storied Chinese Democracy album. He was also a co-writer of that album’s title track along with singer Axl Rose, guitarists Paul Tobias and Robin Finck, bassist Tommy Stinson, keyboard player Dizzy Reed, producer Caram Costanzo and engineer Eric Caudieux.

However, when Chinese Democracy was finally released in 2008 after 14 years in the making, Freese was credited only for ‘arrangements’. His performance on the title track was replaced by a new recording by Frank Ferrer, while the remainder of Freese’s drum parts were re-recorded by Bryan ‘Brain’ Mantia.

Speaking to MusicRadar, Freese says of his role on one of the most expensively recorded albums of all time: “All I know – and that I am happy about – is that the song I wrote ended up being the title track of that album. So if you look at the album credits, my name’s always attached to that record.

“It's not ‘Josh Freese the drummer’ on that record. It’s like, ’Oh, Josh Freese wrote the music to the title track?’ That's kind of cool.”

Freese has his own take on why his drum parts were replaced by Bryan ‘Brain’ Mantia.

“I think that Axl was wanting Brain to feel a part of the project,” he says. “So when he came in, Axl’s like, ‘You know, hey, let’s redo the drums!’

“I think there’s also an excuse – at least in the Guns N' Roses thing, since they were taking so long to do everything – to prolong things by another month or two. You know, sometimes you do stuff and you want to feel like you're busy. ‘Oh, we gotta re-record these drums, you know?’ But do you really have to re-record those drums?”

Freese says he enjoyed the experience of working with Axl Rose, despite the singer’s reputation for being somewhat difficult.

“It was great!” he says. “I think that people, a lot of times, want to hear horror stories about Axl, and I really don't have any. He was always real generous with me, and easy to get along with.

“I really don't have anything bad to say about him! I enjoyed working with him, and I liked the fact that he was open to other people writing and open to me as the new drummer.

“If I had a good idea, he'd want to use it, and he did. And I had other songs that were kind of in the running, so to speak, that didn't end up on the A-list, but that's fine. I mean, the fact that I've got the title track, it's kind of cool, you know?”

During Freese’s time with Guns N’ Roses, it was reported that a new version of the band’s classic debut Appetite For Destruction was recorded using more modern Pro Tools techniques with producer Sean Beavan.

Freese tells MusicRadar that the magic of the original album could never be recreated – in part due to the unique feel of Steven Adler's drumming.

Freese says of Adler's performance on that record. “It had a swing and a weird swagger to it that can't really be duplicated, and it was of a time. I don't even know if Steven Adler could do that again. Honestly, it's just kind of the way it worked out, kind of like lightning in a bottle.”

Guns N’ Roses’ 2008 album Chinese Democracy was 14 years in the making at a reported cost of $13m – and a small part of that gigantic budget was spent on hiring drummer Josh Freese.

In stark contrast, Freese’s new solo album Just A Minute Vol.2 was recorded as cheaply as possible, and partly created while he was touring as a member of Foo Fighters, a role he has since vacated.

Speaking to MusicRadar, Freese says of his low-cost recording process: “It’s always in a bit of a DIY fashion. I’m never spending too long getting drum sounds or worrying what microphone I’m singing into.

“I’ll give you a perfect example. There’s a song called Electric Saxophone Is Fun (We Want Drugs), and it was done all on GarageBand.

“It had this funk drum loop, which sounded kind of goofy, but I liked the drum machine aspect of it for some reason. But the samples were bad, so I tried to replicate the loop with a different drum machine, and it didn't sound good.

“Then I decided to play drums on it and see how that goes. And in the end, it’s live drums, but over the GarageBand recording that I’d done on my laptop out on tour.”

He says of another track, Skeletons In The Wall: “I'm singing into the laptop, using the microphone on my Mac AirBook or whatever. It’s not even a real microphone on my voice.”

Just A Minute Vol.2 is Freese’s second collection of one-minute songs.

“It’s become this nutty, wacky little project,” he says, “and my joke’s always been that the song is so short, if you don't like it, by the time you go to push skip, it's done anyway, so just let it roll. This record is for the short attention span, ADHD population out there, which encompasses almost everybody at this point.”

Across the 25 tracks on Just A Minute Vol.2 there are echoes of other bands Freese has played in, notably punk rock group The Vandals and new wave icons Devo.

He explains: “One thing I heard Rick Rubin say that I really liked is, ’No matter what art you’re doing, whether you're doing a painting or writing a song – you be the audience. Make the things you like. Make it the way you want to hear it.

“Some of my stuff sounds like Devo, and some of it sounds like The Vandals, and some of it sounds like Ween. That's the stuff I like – punk rock stuff, quirky stuff, pop stuff, and pretty stuff.”

In addition, there are two tracks influenced by other famous drummers.

The first is If You Know, You Know, which has a similar sound and energy to a 1980 song called Don’t Care by The Police’s drummer Stewart Copeland, which Copeland released under the alias Klark Kent.

“I’m a huge Stewart Copeland fan,” Freese says. “When I heard Klark Kent as a teenager I was already a big Police fan, so I was already drinking the Kool-Aid.

“My friend Scott Thunes, who later played bass in Frank Zappa's band for years, he told me about the Klark Kent thing. He was like, ‘That’s Stewart Copeland's solo record he made on an 8-track, and he’s playing all the instruments!’ And I was like, ‘Holy Shit!’

“At that point, I was probably 16 or 17, and I had started kind of writing music and recording my own weird stuff at home, so it was such an inspiration. It was another guy doing what I wanted to do, or what I was starting to do. And not only a guy doing it, but a drummer that I already was a big fan of.”

Freese also admits that his song Cybertruck LOL is influenced by a heavy-hitting Queen track written by drummer Roger Taylor and released in 1977.

“I didn't realise it when I was doing it,” Freese says, “but when I added that third harmony – there’s the main vocal, then the second harmony, and the third harmony on top of that – I remember going, ‘God, what does this remind me of?’

“I said, ‘This stacked harmony is making me think of something.’ And then a friend of mine said, ‘That’s Queen’s Sheer Heart Attack!’

“It's just the same vibe. It was kind of an accident. And oddly enough, that's a Roger Taylor song – a drummer song.”

An original member of punk band The Vandals and alternative rock supergroup A Perfect Circle, drummer Josh Freese has also performed on the biggest stages during high profile tours with Guns N’ Roses, Nine Inch Nails, Sting and – most recently – Foo Fighters.

In addition, Freese’s session discography is dizzying. He has appeared on more than 400 albums by a diverse array of artists including Lana Del Rey, Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry and Michael Bublé.

But when you’re doing so many sessions, it’s not easy keeping track of it all. Which explains why Freese’s new solo album has a song entitled I Didn’t Know I Recorded With Avril.

“That’s a true story,” Freese tells MusicRadar. “When I worked on Avril Lavigne’s first record, I’d never heard her name before, because no one had heard her name.

“I think I was more worried about just knowing the contact name I was gonna bill on Monday at the record label, because I was like, ‘I don’t know what this music is, or who this artist is. And chances are, no one’s going to.’

“Maybe the producer told me her name. He said the artist’s name, and it went in one ear and out the other. We were in the studio with a Pro Tools rig one evening. No-one else was there.

“They already had these tracks done, either with a drum machine or guide drums they didn't like. And I knocked out four or five songs in an evening."

Freese was credited for playing on five tracks from Lavigne’s debut album Let Go, including the opening number Losing Grip.

Freese wasn’t involved in the album’s two huge hit singles – Complicated and Sk8er Boi. But when the album took off, he was pleasantly surprised when friends told him that he’d played on it.

“That was eight months later,” he laughs. “People were going, ‘Hey man, I saw you’re on that Avril Lavigne record.’ And at this point, I knew who she was, because everyone at this point knew who she was.

“I went, ‘Nah, I didn’t play on that record.’ They go, ‘Your name's on it!’ So I went and looked online and I’m like, ‘Holy shit! My name is on it!’”

He shrugs: “This has happened multiple times with different artists. I need to click around and see a trigger word that’s going to let me know what my connection was.”

He says that the song I Didn’t Know I Recorded With Avril was inspired by the avant-garde art rock of one of America’s most mysterious groups.

“It's me trying to sound like The Residents,” Freese says. “It’s a weird drum loop thing.”

I Didn’t Know I Recorded With Avril is a highlight of Reese’s album Just A Minute Vol.2 – the sequel to his Quickies album, and likewise comprised entirely of 60-second tracks.

He explains of this bizarre concept: “What I decided to do just for the fun of it – as an exercise – I started writing some one-minute songs, because it was so much less daunting than saying, ‘I have to write a song that’s going to have an intro and a verse, and a pre-chorus, and a chorus, and an outro.’

“Plus, The Residents made a record called The Commercial Album [in 1980]. It’s all one-minute songs. It just goes: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, done, right?

“It's almost like they're poking fun at the formula of commercial music. The changes literally just went A, B, A, B. Anyways, I started doing that.”

Just A Minute Vol.2 is also a testament to Reese’s multi-instrumentalist skills.

“95% of it is all me,” he says. “There are a few guitar players on it, but nothing was planned out ahead of time.

“I wasn't like, ‘Well, I need to get a hold of so-and-so because they are a famous guitarist, and maybe I’ll see if Adrian Belew will play on it.’ I know Adrian, but I didn't even have time enough to reach out to him. I just had friends of mine that were nearby.”

These friends include Robin Finck (Nine Inch Nails), Warren Fitzgerald (The Vandals) and Pete Thorn (Don Henley, Melissa Etheridge).

Freese adds: “My brother Jason plays sax on a couple songs, and my friend Petra Haden, daughter of the late great jazz bassist Charlie Haden, plays strings and sings backups on two tracks.”

The album is out now on Loosegroove Records, the label run by Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard.

“Stone is my friend,” Freese says, “and this record is a labour of love. We printed up 1,000 or 1500 pieces, and it’s just really fun for me and Stone.”

In 1972, legendary British guitarist Jeff Beck formed one of rock’s supergroups with two American musicians who had played together in Vanilla Fudge – bassist/vocalist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice.

This formidable power trio – named simply Beck, Bogert & Appice – made just one studio album before imploding after a fistfight between Beck and Bogert.

For Carmine Appice, the demise of this dynamic group was a sad case of what might have been – but as he now tells MusicRadar, it was an unforgettable experience.

Appice first met Beck in London in the late ’60s.

“I met him during my first trip to England,” he says. “He was just coming out of the Yardbirds and didn’t know what he was going to do. We talked and became friends, and I think we might have jammed at the Speakeasy club in London.”

They connected again when the guitarist was leading The Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart on vocals and Ronnie Wood on bass.

“Vanilla Fudge was doing a Coke commercial,” Appice says. “We had the same attorneys as the Jeff Beck Group and Rod Stewart, and when Rod and Ronnie came down to watch us record, our guitar player Vinnie Martell was sick, and our manager said, ‘What about Jeff?’

"So we paid Jeff Beck $300 for the session for the Coke commercial. And at that point, Tim [Bogert] and me both said, ‘Wow, we’d love to play with Jeff.’ Things were changing, and music was all about guitars, and we really wanted to play with him.”

They also fancied getting Rod Stewart involved.

Appice recalls: “We said, ‘What if we got Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart?’ But Rod didn’t want to work with Jeff [again]. So finally, in 1972, we got together with just the three of us.”

Appice never knew why there was a problem between Beck and Stewart.

“Business-wise, something was going on,” he says. “Maybe he [Stewart] felt like he got ripped off. But I don’t know because I never talked to Rod about it. I would just always say, ‘Hey, it’s too bad that we never got together…’ But since 1968 and until 1983, they were enemies.”

Appice claims he eventually acted as peacemaker for Beck and Stewart when he was part of the latter’s backing band.

“I actually helped them get together and work it out in 1983,” he says. “We were in a hotel in Australia, and so was Jeff. I went up and knocked on his door, and we ended up partying a little bit.

“I had a show with Rod the next day, and I said to Jeff, ‘Why don’t you come to the show?’ Jeff said, ‘I know Rod won’t want me there.’ I said, ‘No, come on, man. It’s been fucking years. You guys are adults.’

“I said, ‘Come to the show. It’ll be cool. Don’t worry about it. I’ll be there with you.’ So the next day, we’re in the dressing room, and the roadie says, ‘Jeff Beck is here…’ I said, ‘Have him come in.’

“I walked Jeff in, and when Rod and Jeff looked at each other it was almost like time stood still. Everybody was quiet, and I said, ‘Come on, say hi to Rod…’ Jeff goes over and said, ‘Hi, mate’, and they gave each other a hug.”

Beck, Bogert & Appice’s self-titled album was released in 1973 and featured a version of the Stevie Wonder song Superstition. A year earlier, Beck had played on Wonder’s album Talking Book.

Appice says of Superstition: “Stevie wrote that song for Jeff for playing on his album. And we had heard the demo that Stevie did and we said, ‘Well, we’re gonna change that…’

“We changed it to the version on the BBA album, and while we were doing that, Motown heard Stevie’s demo and said, ‘This is a number one record!’ So they released it – and by the time our version came out, Stevie’s version was number one already.

“It looked like we did a cover, but we didn’t. That song was actually written for Jeff.”

The Beck, Bogert & Appice album was in part recorded at the legendary Chess Studios in Chicago.

“That was Jeff’s idea to go there,” Appice shrugs. “I couldn’t care less about Chess Studios! But we did get a killer drum sound there.

“We just did in the studio what we did live, and kept putting tracks together. It was cool, and we had a good time there.”

As for Beck’s reasons for splitting such a promising group, Appice has a straightforward answer:

“Probably because Tim punched him in the face!” he says. “It was always the same thing with Tim because Tim was not your usual bass player. Tim was always the lead bass player. Tim was right up the ass, you know?

“He would be right up your ass, so you didn’t just get a groove out of him. He would be totally amazing, like Billy Sheehan. So that’s what happened. And then one day Tim punched Jeff in the face.”

He explains: “ Tim was sick as a dog. He wasn’t feeling good. And then Jeff said something derogatory, and Tim just punched him in the face. And then we had to go on and play the second show at the London Rainbow, which came out on the recent box set.”

Simon Phillips likes big drums – and lots of them.

His double bass drum set and generous cymbal array is a throwback to powerhouse fusion drummer innovators Lenny White and Billy Cobham – both sometime Tama endorsers (Billy Cobham is a current Tama artist), renowned for playing left-hand lead.

As a right-handed drummer, Phillips developed his signature open-handed technique by watching Cobham and White on stage in the ’70s.

Here, Phillips explains to MusicRadar how it all happened.

Was learning left-hand lead a deliberate decision?

“Well, it was a physical scenario, too, because in 1974, I started playing double bass drums. And, I also used two rack toms and two floor toms. I was always fascinated by these large tom-tom setups. Like, the Ludwig Octa-plus [8 suspended toms with additional floor toms], ‘How does that sound, you know?’

“So, I got a chance to use a Ludwig Octa-plus on my first visit to New York City. At that time, I was touring with a blues singer, and they had to get me a drum kit, so of course, I wanted an Octa-plus, which I couldn't use, because the clubs were too small, but I rehearsed with one of these kits, and it was just stunning.

“And that was it. I converted to a multi tom-tom setup. I loved the tonality. So I added an extra rack tom, which now was three racks, two floors. And I saw Billy Cobham play around the end of 1974, and I saw his kit. He had four racks – and it just looked and sounded so amazing.

“I was like, ‘That's what I want to do.’ But I also noticed he was playing left-handed. I was like, ’What is he doing? Oh, wow!’

“So, beginning in 1975, when I was in a band called Chopin, I added a fourth rack tom. In those days, it would have been a 12-inch tom, because we couldn't get 10-inch tom, unless it was a single headed concert tom. And the problem with having all these toms was using the hi-hat. How do I fit it in, playing right-handed?

“And so I took the hi-hat off, and I set the drum kit up the way I wanted it to look. Remember, I was 18 years old. Looks are very important.

“And I thought, ‘Right, now, what do I do with this hi-hat?’ So, luckily I had a second hi-hat [stand]. I got a hacksaw, and I chopped it down, and put the hi-hats down [lower], and went, ‘That's brilliant!’

“But – there's one problem. I can't play my drum kit anymore. How am I going to do this?

“And then, we were touring, supporting Return To Forever. I saw Lenny White play, and I thought, ‘He's playing lefty too. What is this?’

And so…

“I decided: I’m going to learn how to play left-handed. And then I went back to doing session work, which was all disco in 1975. Pretty simple. So I started setting my hi-hat a bit lower, but I still had a right-hand ride cymbal, and I started doing all these sessions left-handed.”

Going forward, you played the hi-hat primarily with your left hand?

“Yeah. It just kind of went from there. When you're 18 years old, you can do anything. Now, though, it was hard to use your right hand to cross over with all the toms. It was just awkward, because it meant your hi-hat had to be high, and your tom-toms had to be high, and it didn't look very good. I did it all for looks, actually. I just wanted it to look cool!”

You play left-handed patterns so effortlessly and naturally for being right-handed.

“Yeah, well, that's basically it. Also, it's really important if you're playing straight ahead, too. You've got to have that tone, and you've got to have that dexterity. Now, I would say still that my right hand is stronger, and also, that's how I started playing straight ahead. So, there's an in-built kind of thing, even now.

“If I play jazz, like bebop, I use a small kit, and I have good ride cymbals, because a lot of it is right-handed, because that's what feels very natural. But I still have a certain amount of control with the left hand, so I can do that. I can play left-handed.”

So you can swing left-handed, too?

“See, that's the important thing, that's the delicacy that you need to have. But it's not just the tone – you've got to have the touch. It's all in the touch that gets the tone out of the cymbal.

“It's not just playing the beats, it's getting the tone and all the different sounds you can get out of the hi-hat. Very important.”

Your descending single tom fills using only your right hand is kind of a Phil Collins style. You’ve stated that leading with your left hand on either the hi-hat or ride cymbal also allows for unbroken tom fills integrated into the groove with your right hand.

“That's true. You know, it doesn't break up the groove. But I had to saw down the hi-hat tube, because I had these concert toms, and the tube was right up by the drum head.”

Jazz drummer Ralph Peterson used a technique for maintaining fast ride cymbal patterns by controlling the stick rebound with a torque action of the wrist.

“Yes, definitely. That's kind of a French technique. I have a friend who is an incredible keyboard player, and he's also a mallet player, but he plays drums, and he uses that technique. It's hilarious. I'm like, ‘How the hell do you do that?’

You are a talented keyboard player and composer. Drummer Gary Husband is also an accomplished piano player and plays keys with John McLaughlin. Have you ever thought of a project where you focus solely on your keyboard playing?

“Well, on my first album, Protocol, I played all the instruments. And I guess this is the problem with the advent of the sequencer. I kind of gave up playing. So, I just do little runs here and there, a few chords, and, I have to do it very slowly, and short bits at a time, but I get out what I want to do. I mean, I do all my own demos.

“I'm working on new music right now for the next Protocol album. Yeah, I've got to get in the studio and get going on that.”

The ex-Smiths drummer, Mike Joyce, publishes his memoir, The Drums, this week, and he’s been talking to the Guardian about life in the band, their sudden split and his broken relationships with Morrissey and Marr.

Joyce initially got the Smiths gig through a friend of Marr’s and explains that in the band’s early days, he was in awe of his new bandmates. He paints an evocative image of the guitarist as a young man: “Every day, you’d go round the house and he’d play some riff sat having a spliff in his jimmy-jams. You’d be like, ‘That’s amazing. What’s that?’”

As for Morrissey, though Joyce says that although there was a distance between him and the singer, his lyrics were: “Unique. Nobody writes like that. The introduction of gruesome, handsome, vile, charming elements. A brilliant voice. Stage performance interesting, intriguing, incredibly skilled. It’s a potent brew.” And Andy Rourke? “I’d heard bass played like that, but I’ve never seen it played like that.”

Joyce admits that all this was enough to make him feel slightly intimidated. “I struggled because Andy and Johnny were miles ahead of me.”

Though the Smiths’ lawsuit over recording royalties is not covered by the book, the drummer was told as early as 1984, at a meeting with the Smiths’ accountant, that he and Rourke were essentially hired hands. “I just said, ‘That doesn’t sound right.’ It was never mentioned again.”

Joyce and Morrissey last saw each other in 1992, and he hadn’t spoken to Marr for decades until they met at the memorial service for Rourke in 2023. “It was good to see him. Because it wasn’t about court cases or who did what. It was about Andy.” He says that despite these severed friendships, he’s still glad he went through with the court case. “I didn’t take Julian Cope to court, and I haven’t spoken to him for 30 years (Joyce played on Cope’s 1988 My Nation Underground album).

"To not be in touch with people you’ve been in bands with isn’t that strange.”

Despite all this, his memories of his time as a Smith seem to be positive. Joyce talks about how very often – after 1985, at least - when Morrissey recorded his vocals it would be the first time he’d hear his lyrics.

“He never had any light in the studio. It would always be pitch black so we couldn’t see him.” Joyce describes the experience as: “Mindblowing. When he did I Know It’s Over for the first time? Tears.”

The Drums is out this Thursday (November 6).

Carmine Appice is not a Pink Floyd fan. Simply put, he “doesn’t get it.” But that didn’t stop him sitting in for Floyd drummer Nick Mason on the track Dogs Of War from Floyd’s 1987 album A Momentary Lapse Of Reason.

Looking back on it, Appice tells MusicRadar, “I was happy to be on it. I got the gold and platinum records.”

He explains how he ended up recording with Floyd on this track, starting with a phone call from producer Bob Ezrin.

He recalls: “I came home one day, and I had a message on my answering machine from Bob Ezrin. He said, ‘Hey, Carmine, it’s Bob. I’m recording an album, and I want to put you on it. It’s just screaming for Carmine drum fills.’

“I called him, and I said, ‘Cool. Who’s the band?’ He said, ‘Pink Floyd.’

“I said, ‘Pink Floyd? What happened to their drummer? What happened to Nick?’

“Bob said, ‘Oh, he’ll be there. But he’s been racing his Ferraris, and his callouses are soft. And this song is screaming for your kind of drumming.’ I said, ‘Okay!’”

Appice says that he received no instructions on how to play on this track – no words of guidance from Ezrin or the members of Pink Floyd.

“Not at all,” he says. “They hired me to be Carmine, you know?

“I had my own drum kit, my own roadie, and he brought my drums and set them up. I had my Pearl kit, which was a big kit. And we did it at A&M Studios, so it was a big room, and we had mics all over the place, so it was a big sound.”

Appice also recalls that Nick Mason was completely unruffled by it all.

“He didn’t seem upset. He was walking around, having a good time.

“We had Tony Levin there, and he played bass, which was great. That was the only time I’d ever played with Tony, and man, he was awesome.”

Many critics and Pink Floyd fans disliked A Momentary Lapse of Reason, claiming it was not a legitimate Floyd album without the involvement of the group’s departed founder member Roger Waters.

Appice tells MusicRadar he doesn’t care either way.

“I’m not really a Pink Floyd guy,” he admits. “I never understood why they got so big. I think they were boring most of the time. That’s why they asked me to do the song, you know?

“I said, ‘Oh, man, we’re gonna kick some ass on a Pink Floyd record!’ But otherwise, there’s nothing to them.

“I mean, drum-wise, it’s like a flat, pillow sound that you can get in any studio. If you hit a pillow, it sounds just like Nick Mason. I gave it that killer live sound.”

As for what he thought of Mason’s attempt at Dogs Of War once Floyd took their show on the road, Appice says: “I saw them touring. It was on MTV, and they were doing tracks from the new album, and Dogs Of War was one of them."

“I saw Nick playing it,” Appice smirks. “I got a kick out of that because he tried to play it, and he did okay. He did good. He didn’t do the fills just like I did, but he did a pretty good job of imitating me.”

When drummer Simon Phillips joined The Who for their 1989 Tommy reunion tour, he was no stranger to guitarist Pete Townshend.

Phillips had played on Townshend’s solo albums Empty Glass (1980), All The Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes (1982), White City: A Novel (1985) and The Iron Man: The Musical (1989).

Phillips had also studied The Who’s previous drummer – the man who had replaced the seemingly irreplaceable Keith Moon.

And when Phillips speak to MusicRadar about his time in The Who, he is keen to pay tribute to his predecessor.

“I think it's very important to mention this,” Phillips says. “People seem to forget this. Journalists forget this. There was a drummer in The Who before me and after Keith Moon – and that was Kenny Jones.”

Kenney Jones made his name with The Small Faces and then the Faces before joining The Who in 1978 following Keith Moon’s death aged 32.

Phillips recalls: “I saw The Who live with Kenney, and he was fantastic, absolutely fantastic.

“I loved the way he played with the band. It was a very different thing. He knew he was not gonna play like Keith. I mean, no one plays like Keith! I don't think Kenney was given nearly enough recognition for what he did in the band.”

Kenney Jones did receive widespread acclaim for his drumming on The Who album It’s Hard and particularly the song Eminence Front, of which Phillips now says: “Great pocket.”

But he adds: “People would ask me, ‘What’s it like to replace Keith Moon?’ I said, ‘I didn't replace Keith Moon. I replaced Kenney Jones!’

“You know, I don't think Kenney gets enough recognition, and I think it's very important. He was the bridge.

“The Who is always Keith. He’s such a big part of it, character-wise.

“Kenney and I, we joined already as professionals and with a very professional band. But when they started, as most bands of that era, they were just kids playing.”

Phillips says he recently saw The Who on their farewell tour in the US. “I went to the show in LA, at the Hollywood Bowl.”

There, he reconnected not only with Townshend and singer Roger Daltrey, but also with British percussionist Jody Linscott, who performed alongside Phillips on the Tommy tour.

“I've known Jody since 1974,” he says. “A long time. We both played on the Robert Palmer album Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley. We did a lot of studio work back then.”

Ultimately, Phillips is proud of his role with The Who.

He also applied lessons learned with that band when he later joined Toto.

“It’s important that the time that you have in a band is great,” he says. “And I took the same approach with Toto as I did for The Who – to serve the music.”

It’s been announced that a true jazz great – drummer Jack DeJohnette – has passed away at the age of 83.

DeJohnette played with an array of iconic names, including Sonny Rollins, Alice Coltrane, Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock, but it’s for his work with Miles Davis that he is probably best known.

He joined Davis’s band in the late '60s as the trumpeter was moving into jazz fusion. He played on the Bitches Brew, Live-Evil and On The Corner albums and contributed to Davis’s Jack Johnson soundtrack.

DeJohnette later described what it was like working with Davis during that period: “I’d start something and if it was OK he wouldn’t say anything and it would continue, then he’d cue each instrument in and get something going. When it would start percolating, then Miles would then play a solo over that and then let it roll, let it roll until he felt it had been exhausted.”

He left the Davis band in 1971, explaining that: “I wanted to play a little freer. Miles was moving into a more specific thing that he wanted from the drums, not as much freedom to elaborate.”

He went on to release albums with Keith Jarrett (Ruta and Daitya), and with a series of his own aggregations - Compost, Gateway and New Directions, as well as those under his own name. And he made regular appearances on Sonny Rollins’ albums.

DeJohnette was said to have a unique dynamic style, which was in part a result of a long period studying classical piano as a child growing up in Chicago. Certainly, he did a lot more than provide a mere backbeat. “I am hearing orchestrally,” he once said. “I guess one example would be the cymbals are to my drum set what the sustain pedal is on the acoustic piano. So I am hearing colours.”

He won two Grammys during his long career. The first, in 2009, was for Best New Age album of all things, for Peace Time. He managed to bag Best Jazz Instrumental album in 2022 for Skyline, a series of recordings with Ron Carter and Gonzalo Rubalcaba that were inspired by the city of New York.

Anyone who knows about drumming will acknowledge that Carmine Appice’s influence is towering.

New York-born Appice’s powerful style has been the engine behind Vanilla Fudge, Cactus, Rod Stewart, Blue Murder, Ozzy Osbourne, King Kobra and more.

And across the years he has inspired many other drummers – including the man widely acclaimed as the greatest rock drummer of all time, John Bonham of Led Zeppelin.

Appice tells MusicRadar that he was aware of his influence on Bonham in the early ’70s, but claims he never spoke about it at the time because he feared a backlash.

“I did notice it then,” he says, “but for a long time I couldn’t say that, you know? I couldn’t because everybody would have thought I was an egomaniac!

“But then, there’s been some books released that talk about how John was raving about me to Cozy Powell [former Rainbow/Whitesnake/Black Sabbath drummer]. So there was definitely some influence there.

“There were other influences with him [Bonham]. He had the same influences that I had, like Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Max Roach. But it wasn’t until I came along that he put it into the rock thing, from what I could see.

“John Bonham went on to become one of the most famous rock drummers because of Led Zeppelin. But I know my place in rock history. I know what I started. I know who listened to me. I could tell.”

The fourth Vanilla Fudge album, Near The Beginning, was released in 1969 and features a version of the Junior Walker song Shotgun.

In the climax to Shotgun, Appice played licks that were echoed by Bonham at the end of the Led Zeppelin classic Rock And Roll, which was included on Zeppelin's fourth album, released in 1971.

Appice tells MusicRadar that he never spoke to Bonham about the similarities between their performances on the two tracks.

“No, I never talked to him, but he knew," Appice smiles. "I’m sure he knew because if you listen to the end of Shotgun and the end of Rock And Roll, it’s almost the same thing. He’s playing my riffs, you know? But it’s cool – because it’s not the only time that it’s happened to me.

“I actually went to see Jason Bonham [son of John], who was doing some Led Zeppelin stuff, and I went with Nicko McBrain from Iron Maiden. After the show, we got together and Jason laughed, saying, ‘How many Carmine licks did I do tonight?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, I didn’t count them.’ And then Nicko said, ‘I counted nine!’"

Appice goes on: “When I was touring with Ozzy [Osbourne], and Mötley Crüe was the opening act, Tommy Lee would twirl a stick, hit the cymbal, grab it, and twirl the stick like I did by going forward, not backward. And he’d hit the cymbal and grab it with his whole arm.

“Now, I was the only one who did that until John Bonham came along. So I said to Tommy Lee, ‘Where’d you get that?’ He goes, ‘From John Bonham.’ I said, ‘Well, indirectly, you got it from me.’

“He said, ‘No, dude. I got it from John Bonham.’ I said, ‘Okay, after the tour, come over to my house, and I’ll show you some videos…’

“So he did, and I showed him the two Ed Sullivan videos [featuring Vanilla Fudge], and he was blown away. He said, ‘Wow, dude! I can’t believe it. John Bonham got this stuff from you.’ I said, ‘I told you.’ And the Ed Sullivan thing was from before Zeppelin was ever around.”

There’s more. There is Van Halen’s Hot For Teacher, which has an intro similar to that in the song Parchment Farm by Cactus, the band formed by Appice after Vanilla Fudge broke up.

“Alex Van Halen told me they listened to Parchment Farm and they loved the intro of the song," Appice says. "So that’s another blatant influence right there. I mean, there are so many, you know?”

Appice maintains that he is not bitter about all of this.

“Oh, there have been so many stupid things on the Internet,” he sighs. “I saw one thing about the supposed five drummers that I hate the most – it’s ridiculous!

“I’ve seen people say that I hate John Bonham because he stole my stuff. Yeah, right! I don’t hate anyone! Knock on wood, I’m still here to enjoy it all.

“I could use more credit. But he [Bonham] gets a lot of credit because he was in the biggest band, you know? I mean, look at Ringo [Starr] and all the credit that he gets!

“But really, I get enough credit. I have a drum book that sold half a million units and I was the very first one to do a rock clinic out of anyone in the music business.

“But what can I say? Maybe I’m not credited the way John Bonham is, but I know what I did, and so do a lot of other people. I am where I am.”

Jeff Porcaro was one of the greatest drummers that ever lived: as the session musician who played on hundreds of hit records, including the biggest selling album of all time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller; and as the driving force in Toto, the LA rock band that crafted classic radio hits such as Africa, Rosanna and Hold The Line.

But after Porcaro’s death at the age of 38 in 1992, his band was able to continue – with the help of one of the few drummers capable of replacing the seemingly irreplaceable.

London-born Simon Phillips was a friend of Toto guitarist Steve Lukather, having backed Lukather on a solo tour.

However, when Phillips was approached about joining Toto he was still the drummer for The Who, having toured with the British rock legends in 1989 and recorded with singer Roger Daltrey and guitarist Pete Townshend for their respective solo projects.

It wasn’t easy for Phillips to juggle his commitments to the two bands. Nor was it easy fitting into Toto as their token Englishman.

But he stayed with Toto for 21 years before giving up his position to Keith Carlock in 2014.

And as he now tells MusicRadar, he remains hugely proud of his work with the band...

If Steve Lukather hadn’t called you in ‘92 to join Toto, would you have remained as The Who’s drummer?

“Oh, yeah, definitely. Because, even at that time after I moved, I was always going to move to California. That was nothing to do with Toto at all. My plans to move were hatched a couple of years before that.”

And the plan was to set up your own studio in LA?

“Yes. I had a studio in England. To me, having a studio was very, very important. But I didn't know quite how to do it, or how it was going to happen.

“I was still playing with Pete [Townshend], after I moved to the US. We did the album Psychoderelict together.

"I also did ‘Daltrey Sings Townshend’, which we did at the Carnegie Hall. And then they called me for The Who’s Quadrophenia tour in ‘96.

“So at that point I was definitely the drummer of The Who. It was only Roger who used drummer Zak Starkey for his solo gigs, but when it came to The Who, I was always going to be the drummer.

“But then I joined Toto. And I was only able to work with The Who when Toto weren’t on the road or doing a record.

“In 1996, we were doing a tour to promote Toto’s album Tambu. So I kept having to say to The Who, ‘Um, well, I can’t make it. I can't do this until our tour’s over.’ And eventually they said, ‘Well, we've got to get going.’ And that was it. Roger probably said, ‘Come on, let's just bring Zak in, and let's do it.’”

When you joined Toto, what was your approach to playing Jeff Porcaro’s drum parts?

“Before joining the band I used to listen to Jeff on records and I thought, ‘How old is he?’ He sounded much older than he actually was. He was always a very mature player.

“People loved him and still do love his playing, and it's just perfect. I remember hearing one of the last records that Ray Charles did, and it was one of the last records Jeff did, too. He played beautifully on that record.

“Everybody knew Jeff was a great drummer, but I think the first thing I've always done – it was the same when I joined The Who to replace Kenney Jones – and with Mick Jagger to play the Stones tunes that Charlie [Watts] played – I approached it from the music point of view, the musical way. I just played the tunes.

“The tunes have a particular groove, so you know what to play, but in terms of concept, I play the music.

“I'm not there to copy the drummer, and that is the reason why Toto asked me to play. They didn't want somebody to come in and try to imitate Jeff – because, frankly, it would be second best. It would never be as good as the real thing.

“So I've always gone for playing the song, because I grew up in studios playing songs. And that’s really the only way I know how to do it.

“And it was very, very different. Although the songs are still the same, and they still sound the same, my approach is different, my sound is different.”

What guidance did you get from Steve Lukather and the other guys in Toto?

“They just felt: ‘We've lost Jeff. We can't get him back. And we don't want to be on stage thinking it's not sounding the same.’

“They wanted somebody who had already a following and a style – a strong style. So that's how that happened.

“I came in, and obviously, it's not just respecting Jeff, it's respecting the music. I think that's what people don't really get sometimes. You've got to respect the music that you're playing.

“Now on the personal side, I met Jeff a few times, but didn't really know him very well. I got to know him in the 21 years that I was with Toto. I got to know him very well, actually. Not personally, but about him.”

Even so, did you feel like an outsider in that band?

“Toto was a very tight-knit family, and I was kind of the fly in the ointment. I was a complete outsider.

“I didn't grow up in the valley, in Los Angeles. I grew up in London. We speak differently, and the first few years were hilarious. With pretty much everything I said, they were going, ‘What?’

“The other issue was that I didn't want to just be the drummer. I was also doing a lot of production, a lot of engineering. I wanted to be very much part of the whole thing, not just playing drums, because I would have got bored real quick.

“I think as we got to know each other, they realised, ‘Oh, wow – you know how to do this!’ So I ended up mixing stuff. I ended up recording two albums for Toto [1999’s Mindfields and 2006’s Falling In Between].

"I did a live mix of one of the tours that we did on DVD, mixed it in surround. So that to me was very much the crux of being in a band. That's what I wanted to do, so I became a co-producer of the band, which is great, and I think it also gave the band a lot more longevity, too.”

And how would you sum up that whole period with Toto?

“It was always with respect to Jeff, and mainly with respect to the music, especially the older music. And, then I became part of the new music and a co-writer as well, so, it was great. It really worked out.”

Metallica have a documentary coming soon about the impact their music has had on their fans, and at a festival screening last week, Lars Ulrich and director Jonas Akerlund took part in a post-show conversation about the film.

The film – entitled Metallica Saved My Life - was screened as part of the California Film Institute’s Mill Valley Film Festival and in amongst the questions you’d expect about its making, one attendee asked Ulrich what advice he would give to young artists looking to follow in Metallica’s footsteps.

"Stick with it. Focus,” the 61-year-old drummer said. “You've gotta put the time in. There are many different ways you can put the time in it.

"It could be in book form or at the receiving end of teaching or whatever. But you can also literally play guitars or drums or whatever you're doing and listen. There's no right or wrong path."

He continued: "I think it's pretty clear that with anything, you've gotta put the time in. Whether you're making films or running movie festival, film festivals or whatever, you've just gotta put the time in. And then maybe be honest with yourself about your motives.

"Now, again, there's no right or wrong motives. Do you wanna play music because the passion burns inside you? Do you wanna play music to get famous? Do you want to play music to get wealthy? There's nothing wrong or right with any of it.

"But don't bullshit yourself what your motives are, if you know what I mean, because that will also lead you to wherever it is you wanna go with probably fewer forks in the road or fewer obstacles."

Rather than a straightforward band doc, the film tells Metallica’s story through their fans and their own stories of identity, loss and redemption through the band’s music. It’s an interesting approach. The idea, Ulrich told the San Francisco Chronicle was to celebrate "the diversity and the depth and the dedication and the passion of Metallica fans.”

"We kept seeing the same faces in the front rows, and so getting an understanding of their back stories, that was the most eye-opening thing for me,” the drummer said.

At present, Akerlund is still trying to secure a distributor for Metallica Saved My Life. Ultich indicated at the event that it’s likely to have a theatrical release some time around spring 2026.

Courteney Cox – the actress best known for her role as Monica in Friends – has been impressing folk online with something she’s hitherto not been renowned for: her drumming skills.

The 59-year-old uploaded a video of her playing along to Smells Like Teen Spirit, on a fairly basic drum kit, and it has gone viral.

“I like seeing actors having hobbies and enjoying themselves,” said one commenter on Reddit, whilst another wrote: “I love how women just get cooler and cooler with age.”

Others were in agreement: “Love Nirvana… Courteney sounds pretty good on the drums.” “That’s great! She looked like she was having a lot of fun. I love the drums on Teen Spirit,” another said.

Smells Like Teen Spirit is a pretty good song to focus on if you want to improve your drumming skills. Its beauty is that you can play it no matter your skill level. If you’re a beginning you can play the intro with just a snare and a kick drum. Intermediate drummers can add hi hats and quarter notes, and so on up through skill levels until the differences will be in feel and a slight drag on the cymbal crashes.

We’re not sure where Courteney is currently on the skill chart, but she’s surely getting there.

No word yet on what Dave Grohl thinks of her efforts...

Simon Phillips has enjoyed being ‘first call’ drummer for recorded performances by rock royalty – Jeff Beck, The Who, Asia, Toto, Mike Rutherford, Jack Bruce, Jon Anderson…

With such a wide-ranging musical palette from which to choose, does he have a favourite recorded performance?

Indeed he does.

Phillips tells MusicRadar: “I think one of the performances that I'm certainly really proud of – and also one that has got recognition for being, you know, a pretty good drum track – is Give Blood by Pete Townshend. But the funny thing about that session was that it was actually full of problems.

“I turned up a week before the session because people scheduled me the week before I was supposed to turn up!

“And I didn't know who the guitarist was because the British are not very good at introducing themselves to people. I didn't recognise him, because he had really short hair. I just thought he was some friend of Pete's, like a session guy, you know?

“And what I found out later was this guitarist who I didn't know was Dave Gilmour!”

Phillips says he found it difficult working with Townshend's producer Chris Thomas.

“Before I turned up, my drum roadie delivered all my drum cases, and Chris Thomas asked, ‘Why are Simon's drums coming? He's supposed to come next week’.

“Pete said, ‘Oh, shit! I think I gave him the wrong date.’

“Then at the session, Chris wanted me to play everything separately. And I went, ‘What? What do you mean, separately?’

“And, because he wanted it for the sound, we kind of got into a bit of an argument, actually. It was hilarious, this whole scenario.”

Give Blood was used as the opening track on Townshend’s 1985 solo album White City: A Novel.

Townshend and Phillips have different accounts of which musicians featured on the track.

Townshend recalled: “Give Blood was one of the tracks I didn't even play on. I brought in Simon Phillips, Pino Palladino and David Gilmour simply because I wanted to see my three favourite musicians of the time playing on something.”

Phillips now tells MusicRadar that Pino Palladino was not present. “There was no bass player,” he says, “because Pete hadn't booked one.”

Instead, Phillips says that Townshend brought in John ‘Rabbit’ Bundrick, a former member of rock band Free. He also reckons that Townshend did play on the song.

“Rabbit was able to come by and play some keyboards,” Phillips says. “So it was just Pete on acoustic guitar, Dave on electric guitar, Rabbit playing some chords, and me on drums. And it just kind of came together.

“It was also around the time that Herbie Hancock’s Rockit came out. I really loved that song for some reason.

"I'm not a big fan of programmed drums and stuff, but I loved it. And I actually stole one of those fills. And I know, it's so weird, and yet it really suited the track. It's just one of those things."

“Also, for some reason I had set myself up a right-handed ride cymbal, which I didn't do for a long time [Phillips typically uses one ride cymbal on his left]. So I had two rides.”

Phillips recalls that after all the problems leading up to that session, the recording of Give Blood was straightforward and super-fast.

“We only did two or three takes and it was done," he says.

"It is immortalised, and it is one of the best."

Simon Phillips is known throughout the music world as an amazingly ambidextrous musician. He’s also comfortable moving from the drum stool to the producer’s chair, utilising decades-deep technical know-how.

Phillips’ growth both as a musician and engineer began simultaneously in the early ’70s as he entered studio session work at the BBC and beyond.

When the call to join Toto occurred in 1992, Phillips became a US citizen and California resident. He also established his own studio – Phantom Recordings – in LA.

Phillips is also a driving force in the progressive rock supergroup DarWin, whose new album Distorted Mirror has him multi-tasking as drummer, keyboard player, engineer and co-producer.

This new album continues the tradition of superior musicianship and blazing technique from Phillips and other core band members – guitarists DarWin and Greg Howe, bassist Mohini Dey and keyboard player Derek Sherinian.

Singer Matt Bissonette delivers rich vocal harmonies over unexpected odd meter underpinnings like 7/4, 12/4 and 15/4.

Phillips’ crisp drumming and shimmering cymbal accents do not get lost in the mix. Instead, his signature propulsive rhythmic energy shines throughout.

Here, Phillips tells MusicRadar why he is equally comfortable behind a recording desk or his signature double bass Tama drum kit.

You’ve worked with musician and producer DarWin for 10 years now.

“Yeah, we started around 2015, working together. Basically, he asked me to produce his record.

“I'm known as a drummer, and obviously I'm a drummer first. But if anybody asks me, ‘Well, what do you do?’ I say, ‘I make records.’ Because it's something I really love to do.

“I've been engineering for a very long time, I think 43 years now. All thanks to Mike Oldfield, whom I began working with in 1983. He fired his engineer and then brought me on to replace him. Oldfield taught me everything I know about engineering.

“It was something I was always interested in, and that's kind of where my drum sound came from – because I really wanted to learn how to get these drums to project. In a recording scenario, I was often not very happy with the way my drums were being recorded.

“Plus, I love the sound of records. Good-sounding records. I'm fascinated by it.”

So, thanks to Mike Oldfield, your engineering and the drumming took a parallel path?

“Oh, definitely. I started working almost the same amount on engineering as I was drumming. It was quite weird, and it was often kind of a battle, because once you get into a project, which may be recording and then mixing, it can be maybe two months of not playing a drum kit.

“It was tricky, but engineering is something that I really enjoyed, and it also became a profession, too. And out of that, of course, came the production side.

“So really, that's when DarWin approached me. One of his favourite records was [Derek Sherinian's solo LP] Inertia, which I co-produced with Derek, and I engineered that record.

"DarWin heard Inertia, and he thought, ‘I love this – I want to get that sound.’ So out of the blue he sends me an email, and I have no idea who he is!”

Will DarWin ever disclose his real identity?

“No. Absolutely not. Let's put it like this: he's not a leader of a country!”

There's certainly a beautiful clarity in your recordings. And the harmonies sit nicely in the overall mix. There's compression, yet the music still breathes. And, it doesn't feel like things are buried – your drums are right up in the mix, but they're not overpowering. So what is your production style?

“I'm quite old-fashioned. I grew up playing in studios from 1971. In the BBC studios I worked with a lot of older engineers who were engineering records in the ’50s. So, that’s my background, and I would say it’s fairly classically-trained.

“I embrace some of the new methods that we use, but the art of recording has really not changed. It’s still a microphone, a cable, and a mic amplifier. That hasn't changed in nearly 100 years. It's beautiful, and I love all those recordings and how amazing they sound for the time.

“I think one of the best sounding records of that era – the early ’60s – is Chick Corea’s Now He Sings Now He Sobs. It's just a beautiful recording, and there's many, many more.

“I would say my producing idol was Phil Ramone. And I only got to work with him on one album.”

That album was Billy Joel’s The Stranger – and you played on the track Scenes From An Italian Restaurant.

“It was wonderful working with Phil on that album, and that’s the production style I love.

“As a producer, your job is to set up a great atmosphere for the artist and the musicians. Choose the right studio, choose the right musicians, plan it all, then basically just sit and listen.

“That's the thing that Phil would do. We'd just get on with it and make a record, and then if he needed to say something, he'd say something. And I love that approach.

“To me, as a producer, you're not making your solo album with someone else's budget, which is what a lot of producers think. The idea is for you to let artists realise their dreams.

“And how much help they need varies from artist to artist. Somebody like Nik Kershaw, for example, he doesn't really need a lot of help. He's got it all there, it's amazing. But he needs a very good engineer. And he needs a good listener. And I think that's what a producer really should be. So that's the style that I like to go for.

“And from the technical side, I've never liked the ‘volume wars’. It’s absolute rubbish. Sounds awful.

"I don't care about the level on radio. It doesn't matter, because if you're doing pop music, fine. And most of the pop music is just rubbish now. There’s no composition – and about nine people just to think up a few words.

“But we can get back to the way that records were made back in the day, which have dynamics, and are pleasurable listens.”

On the Distorted Mirror album, the opening track Rising Distortion has some wonderful playing from Greg Howe – his guitar lead melodically just keeps ascending. All of the musicians involved in this project share this ability to be equally technical and musical – without compromising in any way.

“It's a wonderful project, and it's such a pleasure to be involved, and to be involved in a major way, too, because at the end of the day it all ends up in my room, in my studio, when I'm mixing it. And that's when it all comes together.

“Then, you've just got to try to create something that has the energy, but also has the dynamics and the clarity. And it's tricky to do, especially with the density of the music. There's a lot of stuff going on there.

“The way we record is a very important issue too. A lot of records these days are made all separately. I think that's disaster for music. You've got to have at least a core group and the core recording needs to be live.

"So, Mohini, DarWin and myself, we go to a studio. DarWin, Matt Bissonette and myself are the composers. And I'm pretty much the chief arranger of the tracks. “Matt's already done all the demo vocals, which we worked with very early on – so we're always listening to the vocals, which is very important.

“I chop stuff around and get very surgical with it, just to make the arrangement work. But then, we go into the studio, and we play. And we will get a live track.

“And that might mean saying things like, ‘Hmm… this needs to be just a couple of clicks faster.’ Which is something that doesn't happen very often in recording these days, because somebody's already recorded their tracks at 120 BPM and then it goes around all these different musicians, and nobody can change the tempo.”

So to be clear – you are using a click?

“Oh yeah, we're using a click, absolutely. It just makes life easier. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

“But the way I use it, the click is not God, you know? It's just a guide.

“And if I want to lag behind the click, or push in front of the click, that's fine. It's music – it's got to breathe.

“It's so lovely to be able to say, ‘OK, let's speed this up or slow this down a little bit.’ And sometimes when I do sessions for other people, I'm playing the track, and I go, ‘This is not the right tempo for this tune.’

“You know, the sequencer plays anything at any tempo perfectly. Humans don't. So I often will write an email, or pick up the phone, or however, and say, ‘Look, in my opinion this track is not at the right tempo, it's just not sitting. Do you mind if I change the tempo and time expand?’

“The working audio files are not final things. And, nine times out of ten, they will say, ‘Oh, absolutely, go ahead!’

“So I'll change the tempo, and I might try a couple of tempos, and then you know pretty much that the track needs to go two clicks down, or three clicks down.

“Then it’s so much easier to play and and the song breathes. These are the things that you can do instantly when you've got the core trio to make the record with. And I think that's so important.”

The seventh and final Soundgarden album is coming. But it looks unlikely that you’ll hear it this year, and certainly not before the band’s induction into the Rock N’ Roll Hall Of Fame in November.

That’s according to Matt Cameron, anyway. In an interview with Billboard the drummer gave an update on the record fans have been waiting on for over a decade. “There’s not a set release date or anything as of yet. There were a couple schools of thought, like, ‘Hey, let’s put out a single.’ I think eventually we decided we want to make sure the whole thing is completed before we start releasing singles. I’m excited for people to hear it.”

The delays are believed to be largely as a result of the legal wrangling that took place between the three surviving members of the band – Cameron, guitarist Kim Thayil and bassist Ben Shepherd - and Chris Cornell’s widow, Vicky Cornell. The band had been working on new material – seven new tracks, reputedly - prior to Cornell’s suicide in 2017, but were only able to return to the tapes once the legal issues were resolved in 2023.

The drummer said that recording the album had been emotionally draining for the remaining trio. “It’s been extreme highs and extreme lows,” he summarised. “Hearing [Cornell’s] voice on these powerful hard rock songs is the most empowering thing in the world for me. Then I listen to his voice solo-ed up when I’m working on stuff, or if Kim or Ben is working on something, and it all comes back to the fact that he’s not with us and he left us in a way that has so many questions. It’s been gut-wrenching but at the same time very empowering.”

Cameron quit his other band, fellow grunge legends Pearl Jam, in July, and told Billboard that it was an amicable parting of the ways. “I definitely gave them a lot of notice,” he said. “I’ve spoken with Jeff [Ament] and Stone [Gossard] a little bit… It’s been fine. Hopefully we’ll get back together at some point and have a beer or something.”

“I’m at a point in my life where I want to redirect my time and energy in a way that is a little bit based on what I want to pursue as an artist at this point,” he said. That, in the short term, includes a new band, Is This Real?, in which he’s stepped forward from behind the kit to provide vocals and guitar.

“I was having some issues with [Pearl Jam’s] three-hour shows and constant touring and stuff,” Cameron added. “That’s definitely an art form unto itself, to be able to do those types of shows… I’m at a point now where I want to do a face-melting 70-minute set, and that’s kind of what I’m focusing on right now.”

Jack White joined Ringo Starr on stage for a version of With A Little Help From My Friends over the weekend in Louisville, Kentucky.

Ringo was performing with his All Starr Band at the Bourbon and Beyond festival that White had played earlier on the same day. For the encore, the White Stripes man scrambled on stage and, together with Starr’s bandmates - Patrick Keeler, Bobby Emmett and Dominic Davis - provided the familiar ‘do you need anybody’ backing vocals Lennon and McCartney sang in the original. There’s also a bit of half-hearted tambourine action from White.

Meanwhile, Ringo can be seen jigging up and down, jumping about and looking in incredible shape for a man who turned 85 in July.

The song was the last of Ringo’s set. “I want to thank everyone for joining me on stage this evening,” he said at the end. “It’s been really great. Thanks for being a great audience. Remember the music. Peace and love! I love you all.”

White wasn’t the only guest star during the show. Starr also brought on Steve Lukather of Toto fame, Colin May of Men At Work and Hamish Stuart from Scottish funk legends The Average White Band and being the generous soul that he is, Ringo allowed them to play some of their signature hits - Rosanna and Hold The Line (both Toto), Down Under and Who Can It Be Now? (both Men At Work) and the AWB’s ageless classic Pick Up The Pieces.

The Foo Fighters played their first gig with new drummer Ilan Rubin this weekend at a 900-capacity venue in San Luis Obispo, California.

It was very much a last-minute booking. The band only announced the gig on the Saturday, telling fans via social media that tickets would only be available in-person at the venue itself – The Freemont Theater – from 8am on the day of the show.

And with it being Rubin’s debut show with the band, Dave Grohl took the opportunity to introduce the new drummer to fans, saying: “Everybody else has said it, I finally get the opportunity to say, ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome, the most badass motherfucker, Ilan Rubin, is playing drums in the Foo Fighters. It’s official.”

The gig was the first Foo Fighters show for over a year, but their second is coming hot on its heels. In fact it is tonight (September 15). It’s at The Observatory in Santa Ana, California.

The band are utilising the same method for distributing tickets, which are $30 each with a maximum of two per person. So, if you are in the vicinity of Santa Ana and are at a loose end tonight…

The gigs come a week after the band posted a pic to social media of the six band members’ feet standing together in a circle. “Foo Fighters Assemble!!!” the band captioned the snap, before they hinted at an imminent announcement, writing: “Make sure you’re subscribed to the newsletter for info you won’t want to miss… just sayin’…”

So is it just these two shows, or are there more in the pipeline? Fans would be advised to stay tuned to the Foos’ socials.

It’s been confirmed that ex-Baroness drummer Allen Blickle has died at the age of 42.

Though Blickle left the Georgia metal band in 2013, the band announced the news on social media on Sunday. Frontman John Dyer Baizley wrote: “It breaks my heart to have to share the news that my dear friend, creative partner and former bandmate Allen Blickle passed away a few days ago.”

Baizley continued: “I’m still in shock that he’s gone. We ask for understanding as his family and this band process his passing and grieve his loss. Allen, I love you and miss you. I treasure every moment we shared.”

We don’t yet know a cause of death, although a tribute posted by Laura Pleasants of Kylesa - another band on the Georgia metal scene - suggested that Blickle had been suffering from an illness of some description.

“I was so heartbroken… finding out how the past month was. I am just gutted, dude. We all thought you had this thing beat. Fuck, we were supposed to hang out when i got back from tour… Gone too soon my friend. I’m glad you are at peace and no longer in pain.”

Blickle was one of the founding members of Baroness and played on the band’s initial run of colour-coded albums: Red (2007), Blue (2009) and 2012’s Yellow and Green.

Later that year, the band were involved in a bus crash when their touring vehicle fell over 30 feet – Blickle and bassist Matt Maggioni both sustained serious injuries – and in Blickle’s case he fractured his vertebrae.

The accident marked a turning point for the drummer and he left the band in 2013. Speaking to The Fader that year, Blickle admitted that the crash had forced him to re-evaluate his life and strained relationships within the band: “After the accident, there was space put between us that I regret to say was mostly my fault.

"I was in some way pushing myself in another direction. I didn’t know how to handle the horrible situation we all went through, but who does?”

In the last decade, Blickle had played with Romantic Dividends, Alpaca and A Place To Bury Strangers. More recently, he had begun to carve out a name for himself as a TV and film composer – he worked on the 2020 Netflix series We Are The Champions.

Limp Bizkit have teased a new song in a rather novel way, by involving a young drummer best known for being a social media star.

That drummer is one Kristina Rybalchenko, who is better known as Kriss_Drummer on TikTok. She's shared a new video of herself playing along to what sounds like it could be a Limp Bizkit track.

It certainly has Fred Durst on it, singing a chorus that consists of: ‘Hey Ladies!/ When you’re hot you’re hot/ When you’re not you’re not/ Hey Fellas!/ When you’re hot you’re hot/ When you’re not you’re not’.

Kristina does her thing. The track ends, Kristina quietens her cymbals and then it cuts to a door through which who should appear but...Fred Durst! Looking like he might be Kristina’s grandad about to complain that he can’t hear the telly because of that infernal racket from upstairs, he turns to the camera and says "Kristina, that's our new song. It's not out yet. How did you get that?"

He then points in her direction and says: "Please don't put it on the internet."

Yes, it’s cheesy as hell. But it’s kinda fun too.

As for a new Limp Bizkit album, there’s no news yet on when it might drop. We know they’ve been working on a follow up to 2021’s Still Sucks album. Late last year, Durst posted an update on the band’s Instagram Stories with drummer John Otto that read, ahem: “Oh shit, in the studio with John Otto … we ’bout to lay it down with those drumsticks dawg. Let’s get that funky funky. Let’s get that Limp Bizkit popping off.”

As for Kristina, over at her TikTok account she has amassed a collection of videos of her drumming along to tracks by the likes of Blink 182, Korn, Green Day, System Of A Down and The Offspring.

DRUMS WEEK 2025: Playing live, for a lot of people, is the ultimate goal of taking up an instrument in the first place, and it can be one of the most exhilarating experiences you’ll have as a drummer. However, while on paper it’s just a case of moving your gear to a venue, setting up and doing what you’ve practised, all those hours spent in the rehearsal room are just part of performing your music in front of an audience.

Here, we’re taking a look at 11 common problems that can derail any drummer’s live show, and crucially, how to avoid or rectify them when they do occur. This writer has been gigging for well over 20 years now, and has experienced - and learned from - each and every mistake on this list!

1. ETA: long before you play!

You’re due to start playing at 20:30, so you’ll get there about 20:00, right? Wrong! Often, most of the main concerns and problems when gigging have very little to do with the actual playing part itself. Depending on the gig and its location, you’re going to need to factor in traffic, unloading, parking (if the venue has none), getting your kit set up, soundchecking…

Drum kits require a bit of space to set up, as you’re going to need somewhere to place your cases and so on while you do it. All of this is made significantly easier if you aren’t navigating an assault course of guitar amps, cables, pedalboards, stands and other instruments just to get set up. So, speak to the rest of your band, find out what time they plan on arriving and try to get there earlier – or at least on time. This way you can get everything set up in plenty of time, have a break beforehand and be ready to count-in Valerie before the brawling starts.

2. Kit-sharing is kit-caring

This one is for the kit-share gigs, which throw up a lot more logistical questions. We’ve written a full guide here, but in a nutshell there are a few things you can do to make playing on a multi-band line-up with a set backline run smoothly. First, if you’re just bringing breakables, it’s polite to get in touch with the drummer who is providing the kit ahead of the gig. This way you can thank them, but also get an idea of any other peripherals you might need on the night if you’re not familiar with their set-up.

When you get to the gig, introduce yourself, and find out where your gear can be stored until it’s time to play. Keep things tidy, and have as much of your gear set up before you get to your change-over to keep things speedy, and give the previous drummer plenty of space to pack their stuff away before you start trying to add your gear to the kit. At the end of the night, you could even offer to help pack the kit away!

3. Spares: a thought

Chances are, you have a stick bag with at least a few pairs of drumsticks in them, because your hands don’t sound anywhere near as good as hickory when you snap your last pair of 5As… So similarly, take a look at your set-up and identify any potential gig-stoppers that you can’t live without.

We’re not saying you need to take a Noah’s Ark approach (see the next point) and bring two kits and a fleet of backup hardware, but is a spare snare going to weigh your car down? If you can’t bring additional drums, consider putting some spare heads inside your gig bags, just in case the worst does happen. Similarly, an emergency kit of snare tapes/cords, tension rods, bass drum patches, gaffer tape, cymbal felts and a spare clutch can get you out of a jam, so that the jamming can continue. If you use electronics, it’s worth thinking about spare power supplies and cables too.

4. Take what you need

What do Terry Bozzio, Neil Peart and Mike Portnoy have in common? None of them are squeezing their Mission Control stations into the back room of The Arse & Feather of an evening. You are, and a common problem – particularly on ever-decreasing stage sizes – is too much gear. While it’s great to have that aux snare, tree of splashes and a bank of pads, every piece of gear you add to your kit requires setting up. That means more stands and clamps (even if you’re using a rack), and less space on stage.

Give your set-up an audit before you leave for the gig, if something is only required for one part of one song, can you live without it? If so, you’ll shave considerable time off your setting-up/packing-down, meaning you won’t hold the rest of the band up, and the bassist won’t be muting that fifth crash cymbal for most of the set. If you’re sharing a kit, there’s every chance you’re going to need to adapt to someone else’s sizes, set-up and placement anyway. Try not to let that be a problem – instead, you might discover new tunings, hardware settings and positioning that you might never have otherwise tried!

5. Silence is golden

We get it, you’ve fine-tuned your snare sound to reach sample-level quality: those replacement hoops really made a difference, and you could talk for hours extolling the virtues of the brass snare wires, sweet-spot on the strainer, and how you raided your nan’s jewellery box for that ‘unique’ cluster of dampening materials. But for the love of god, please stop hitting it between every song while the guitarist is trying to tune. The same goes for that Copeland hi-hat lick, Instagram-worthy linear groove, and the round-the-kit quads you haven’t quite perfected yet. Trust us, the band and audience will thank you.

6. Cold Start

One of the biggest pieces of advice pro drummers will give is to hit the stage warmed up. Except there’s a problem: we aren’t playing in an international touring band with a backstage jam room and techs to assemble a kit to limber-up with. Nope, in our world, the only facility for ‘warming up’ is the hand dryer in the venue, which looks like it could have been the origin of COVID-19.

But, that doesn’t mean you have to warm up during the first three songs. Pack a practice pad, find some space (even if it’s in your car), give yourself 10-15 minutes to work on some basic rudiments and you’ll feel the benefit immediately. If it’s really not possible, try doing some ‘silent stretches’ with your sticks to get your arms freed up.

7. Not quite my tempo

There’s only one thing worse than another member of the band starting a song at the wrong tempo, and that’s when you get it wrong yourself. It can happen easily, particularly if you have a large number of songs in the set. Everyone’s perception of what speed is correct can vary too, and of course when you’re playing in front of (hopefully) a large group of people, there’s always the danger of ‘gig tempo’ setting in.

“Yes, but I don’t want to use a click!” That’s fine, a simple way around it is to note down the tempos from recorded versions of the songs beforehand using your metronome’s tap-tempo function. Or, if there aren’t recorded versions, agree the right tempo with your bandmates during a rehearsal and write it down. Then, when it comes to the gig you can mark the tempos on your setlist and remind yourself using a metronome before you start the song. Obviously, this is best done using headphones, but with a few bars of the click in your ears you should be able to start the song at the right speed, and the best bit is that nobody can argue that it’s wrong!

8. Don’t forget the Six ‘P’s

“Proper Preparation Prevents P**s-Poor Performance”. Yes, it sounds like a quote from your Monday morning ‘Battlecry’ meeting, but in essence, it applies perfectly to playing gigs. There are plenty of things you can’t control when it comes to playing live, but get on top of the ones that you can and everything will be a lot easier, of course, and that should start with the music you’re playing.

Hopefully by the time you’re ready to play your finely crafted set to an audience, you’ll be on top of the music, but if not then give yourself the best chance. Make notes on your set list, prepare cheat sheets for any songs that you frequently make mistakes on, know how a song starts and ends, pay attention to the rest of the band and keep the gaps between songs to a minimum and you’ll come across as a much slicker operation.

9. Rug Life

The sight of a smooth, hard stage floor is the gigging drummer’s red flag. Why? Because by the third song your bass drum will be skating forward like an Olympic curling stone. Next, you’ll probably find it starts to turn, and before you know it your bass drum pedal is starting to detach, your foot is at a 45-degree diagonal, the microphone is now pointing at nothing and none of your bandmates can hear your pitiful cries for help.

You can combat this by using the spikes on the feet of your bass drum spurs, pedal and hi-hat stand to anchor everything, but the venue probably won’t thank you for leaving claw marks on their floor. So, invest in a drum rug and you’ll never need to experience bass drum-creep. Better still, you can mark out your kit placement with tape, or buy some markers such as Protection Racket’s Mat Markers, making set-up and perfect placement even easier!

10. Trigger, Happy

Electronics have become a very common part of our live set-ups, but they do add an additional layer of consideration, as well as potential errors if you’re not paying attention. The main thing is to be organised with your sounds, settings and pad/trigger placement. If you’re using tracks, it’s important to make sure that you have your signals routed properly (so that you hear the click, and the audience doesn’t). Likewise, switching off dynamics for triggered phrases/loops/tracks, linking pads to your click track (if necessary), and making sure you have the sample set to play back in the way you intend are all crucial. For a multiple-pad or trigger set-up where you’re assigning playable sounds or samples (percussion, electronic drum sounds, effects etc), you’ll want to keep track of which sound is assigned to the respective pad and playing surface.

Otherwise that trouser-flapping sub-drop could very easily become a staccato cowbell! Think about the physical placement of pads within your kit so that they’re accessible and playable without tying your arms in knots. Be consistent with your workflow, if necessary use a template patch for each application, and give yourself time to check everything before your set starts.

11. Play what you can, not what you can’t

We’ve all seen the ‘Drummer at the wrong gig' video. Now, we’re not saying that you should avoid chops and play every song like it’s AC/DC, but you should try and make it appropriate to the style of music. Likewise, it’s important to play within your abilities – that crossover fill you’ve been working on will be great, but if you don’t have it down yet then it’s going to have the opposite effect to what you’re looking for when the whole band loses the ‘one’ count.

If you’ve never tried recording yourself, a gig presents the perfect opportunity. it doesn’t have to be a pro recording (your phone will do just fine), as long as you can hear everything clearly. This way you can listen back and hear what works, what doesn’t and where you can make tweaks to improve overall as a band.