Guitar Center and Eric Clapton have teamed up once more for an exclusive collection featuring limited edition electric and acoustic guitars from Martin, Fender, and PRS – plus a special signature set of electric guitar strings from Ernie Ball.

This long-standing collaboration supports the Crossroads Centre, in Antigua, with a portion from each sale going to support the addiction recovery unit. And there are some special guitars in the lineup. Special? Clapton prefers “sacred”.

“Music has always been my most reliable source of inspiration, or salvation,” said Eric Clapton. “These guitars are sacred things to me.”

He might have a point. The Blind Faith Telecaster fits that description, and here it is makes a welcome return. So-called after the hybrid Telecaster with the Stratocaster neck that Clapton played with the short-lived supergroup, it was last released in 2019, a Custom Shop dream machine made by Fender Master Builder Todd Krause, marking the 50th anniversary of the band that only existed in 1969.

This one does not have the aged lacquer on the neck like its predecessor but it is replete with Custom Shop detail, right down to the slight gap in the neck pocket.

Clapton put this guitar together on his kitchen table, swapping out the original Tele neck for a Strat neck, he took it out with Cream. But then decided to take the neck off of his Brownie Strat, that soft-V profile just perfect for this Tele. The Strat’s neck is a smidge thinner, hence the gap.

This comes fitted with a pair of Alnico 2 ’63 Telecaster pickups. You’ll find the ashtray bridge cover in the guitar case, plus instructions on how to return it to ‘50s wiring. It’s amazing, and there are only 130 of them, each priced $4,999.

Gabe Dalporto, CEO of Guitar Center spoke of the gear retail giant’s long-standing support for the Crossroads Festival and the addiction support centre it helps fund.

“For more than two decades, we’ve partnered with Eric Clapton and the Crossroads organisation to create iconic instruments, with powerful stories behind them, and put them in musicians’ hands,” says Dalporto. “The 2026 Crossroads Guitar Collection continues that tradition, with every one sold supporting a cause Eric has championed for decades.”

Think of Clapton and you think Martin guitars, and this year’s collection does not disappoint – not least because, at $1,899, the Martin 000-13E Eric Clapton represents a more affordable option, and a very nice guitar it is too, with its 24.9” scale, the Golden Era 42-style snowflake inlays on ebony, Slowhand’s signature on the fingerboard.

It has a solid spruce top, Ziricote fine veneer on the back and sides, and lots of MTV Unplugged mojo.

At $9,699, the Martin Custom Shop 000-42 Eric Clapton Ziricote is the first of his signature Martins to be made from ziricote. It looks incredible with that shade top 1935 Sunburst finish. Brand-new pre-War stylings for the serious player.

Last but by no means least, we have Martin making a withdrawal from its premium tonewood bank, putting together a $24,999 000-42 with Brazilian rosewood on the back and sides. It does not get any better. They’re only making five of these, for obvious reasons. Clapton has signed the soundhole label and the COA, and this, well, this is the ultimate Clapton acoustic. “See if you can spot this one… [plays Layla].”

John Mayer is among the special guests at this year’s Crossroads Guitar Festival, which takes place over the weekend of September 26 to 27 and also features the Tedeschi Trucks Band, Julian Lage, Joe Bonamassa, Buddy Guy, Billy Gibbons… The lineup is incredible.

When you see Mayer take the stage he might possibly be sporting this new-look PRS Silver Sky in Incline Blue. This augments the traditional birds inlay with the Crossroads logo at the 12th fret. It has a commemorative neck plate, too. PRS has only made 70 of them and they’re priced $3,750.

And if you’re not in the market for a new guitar, that’s okay, too, because Ernie Ball has got in on the action with Clapton signature packs for that Stratocaster (or Tele/Strat hybrid, SG, Les Paul etc) in your life, gauges 10-46 as per Slowhand’s preferences, three sets in a tin for $29.

These are all available from Guitar Center and historically all of these limited run guitars sell out in no time. Head over to Guitar Center for more.

Ronnie Wood is a good guy to have in the Rolodex. He is a good guy, period. When the phone rang on a November’s afternoon in 1979, Al Anderson from the Wailers was on the other end of the line, and he was in a jam.

Bob Marley and the Wailers had a gig in Oakland, California, and someone had stolen his guitar. He asked Wood if he could help and sure enough he could. That the Rolling Stones guitarist was in a different city entirely didn’t matter. Consider it done. He didn’t need to think about it twice.

“Al Anderson called me up when I lived in LA, and Bob was playing in Oakland,” recalled Wood, on Sky Arts’ The Ronnie Wood Show. “Someone had stolen Al’s guitar. And he said, ‘Ronnie, what can I do!?’ I said, I’ll bring you one out. So I flew up to San Fran. He said, ‘I’ll introduce you to Bob’ – because I had never met him.”

Bob Marley was not a big talker. There was not much conversation. “He didn’t say much at all,” said Wood.

Writing in his new book, the superlative Fearless: The Anthology, Wood takes us backstage at the Civic Auditorium, in Oakland, the latest stop on the reggae icon’s Survival Tour of the US.

As with many of the stories in Fearless, a stolen guitar is the inciting incident that sends our protagonist on an adventure. Sometimes he’d end up with a new guitar.

On November 30 1979, he got smoke in his eyes and the offer of a lifetime.

“I jumped on a plane, got up there, went into the dressing room,” writes Wood. “And I was asked if I’d like to play with Bob. I said, ‘Are you kidding? Of course I would!’”

Marley was as yet unaware that the night’s show would have a special guest, and Rolling Stone or not, all things considered Marley was a little circumspect.

“His people took me in to meet him,” continues Wood. “The room was full of smoke, drifting out through the door, and Bob was just moving around, not really acknowledging anyone.”

We all know what Ronnie Wood is like. He’s got an infectious enthusiasm. He’s good with people. He took it upon himself to break the ice.

“I said, ‘Bob, my name’s Ronnie…’ and he just looked through me,” recalls Wood. “I told him, ‘You’re the only member of the band who doesn’t know I’m playing with you tonight.’ He said, ‘You know – you’d better be good then.’”

This was the Some Girls era. The previous year, you would have seen Wood onstage been playing a sunburst Firebird VII – three mini-humbuckers, vibrola, reverse headstock, gold ‘top hat’ knobs with silver inserts… Classic.

He and Keith Richards had also adopted the Mesa/Boogie in the late ‘70s, playing through Randall Smith’s MkI 100-watt tube amp combos with cherry wood cabinets and wicker grilles.

These are what we hear at the legendary EL Mocambo 1977 recording, when the Stones turned up at the Toronto nightclub billed as the Cockroaches and brought the house down for an audience of 300 people.

We can’t say for sure what Wood played through on the night with Bob Marley and the Wailers but bootleg footage has him with a Fender Stratocaster. Also, when they said he would be playing with Marley, they really meant it.

“Bob said I could come on for the encore so I waited,” writes Wood. “Then onstage he gave me the nod, as if to say ‘You passed. Don’t worry. You’re all right.’ It was great, and the encore lasted about an hour and a half!”

Wood is only exaggerating a little; there were six songs in the encore. After closing out the set with Exodus, Marley returned onstage to play Is This Love. Cue Ronnie Wood. Then there was Jamming, Ride Natty Ride… Roots Rock Reggae was up next then Natty Dread.

The songs kept coming. If Wood had bought a Bob Marley tablature book in 1978 it would have been money well spent. But Wood could sit in with anyone. They closed the night out with a storming rendition of Get Up, Stand Up.

Marley was a good judge of a player after all. Wood did not let him down, not before the show, and certainly not during the show.

Fearless: The Anthology is out now via Genesis Publications. The print run was limited to just 1,000 copies.

The Deluxe box set has sold out but the Collector box sets are available to pre-order now for £325, regular price £355, with each hand-signed by Ronnie Wood and numbered 351 to 1,000.

See Genesis Publications for more.

Following the news that British actor Tim Curry has died at the age of 80, fans have been fondly remembering some of his greatest performances, including roles in films such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Home Alone 2, Annie and The Hunt for Red October.

What's less well-known, though, is that Curry also had a sporadic music career, releasing his debut album, Read My Lips, in 1978. Tucked away on side 2 of this record is a song called Sloe Gin, written by producer Bob Ezrin and Michael Kamen, and this was later made famous by Joe Bonamassa on his 2007 album of the same name.

As such, it was no surprise to see Bonamassa paying tribute to Curry on Instagram yesterday: “Rest in Peace Tim Curry,” he began. “Many do not know that Tim cut the original version of Sloe Gin on his debut album Read my Lips in 1978. The song was composed by Bob Ezrin and Michael Kamen.

“20 years ago, [producer] Kevin Shirley rang me and said he found the perfect desperate blues song for me. He was right and our version changed my career trajectory forever. Tim's version was bold, beautiful and featured the mastery of Dick Wagner on guitar.”

Back in 2024, MusicRadar reflected on the making of Bonamassa's version of Sloe Gin – which he also played in his tribute to Curry – and you can revisit it below.

By the time his Sloe Gin album was released in the summer of 2007, Joe Bonamassa was already well on his way to becoming the undisputed master of 21st century blues rock and heir to the '60s blues boom throne. With five solo studio albums already tucked neatly under his belt – including a smattering of No.1s on the Billboard Blues chart – the NYC-born bluesman's talents were being heralded the world over.

Sloe Gin’s 11 tracks are a heady mix of out-and-out blues-rock stompers and folk-tinged acoustic cuts. Sitting at the record’s epicentre is the title track: eight-plus minutes of down-and-out angst, haunting organ and some of the greatest heartfelt soloing you’ll hear this side of ol’ ‘Slowhand’ Clapton himself.

While the album has gone on to be one of Bonamassa’s best-loved and best-selling platters, Sloe Gin as a song has taken on a life of its own and is still the highlight of his jaw-dropping live sets. “It’s a close call between that one, The Ballad Of John Henry and a few other songs,” pondered Joe when writer Matt Frost caught up with him for Total Guitar back in 2011 on a rare day off, “but I think Sloe Gin is probably my biggest song!”

In the 11 years since then, he's notched up even more contenders in his ever-expanding discography. But Slow Gin has some curious origins; the track was penned by Bob Ezrin and Michael Kamen and first recorded in 1978 by Rocky Horror Picture Show star and English actor extraordinaire Tim Curry, who was dabbling with a semi-successful musical career at the time. It was Bonamassa’s producer, Kevin Shirley, who first played the song to Joe.

“[Kevin] was like, ‘If we do this correctly, I think this could be one of the best blues songs ever!’” Bonamassa revealed. “I listened to it and thought it was great. Tim’s playing that role of this destitute, down-on-his-luck, I’m-down-to-my- last-swig-of-sloe-gin kind of character. When I first heard it, I was really stricken by the guitar playing, and I was really taken by the whole vibe of it.”

Sloe Gin was recorded at the Document Room Studios in Malibu, and the first version featured vocalist Doug Henthorn, the singer on Joe’s version of Tea For One. This early cut remained faithful to the lyrical expletives present in Curry’s original.

“The original words to the original song were: ‘I’m so fucking lonely!’” explained Joe. “And we played [the Henthorn version] to a few people and the two comments were: (a), ‘You know, you’re a nice guy… I dunno if you can get away with that!’ and (b), ‘This seems well within your range – why don’t you sing it?’ So I was like, ‘OK’. We went back into the studio and I just changed the lyric to: ‘I’m so damn lonely’.”

Guitar-wise, Bonamassa was using a ’59 reissue Les Paul. A guitar he would later own more than one original example of. As he explained: “It predates my signature model, but it’s the one we based it on. It’s got a Bigsby on it and we used all the contours and neck shape for the signature, although it’s an Iced Tea Sunburst.

Then I used my Two-Rock Custom Signature Reverb, the Marshall Silver Jubilee and a small pedalboard with, like, a DD-3 delay, a wah and maybe a TC chorus box, and EV [Electro-Voice] speakers. The real magic, that really big tone where it sounds like it’s distorted but it’s really clean and clear? That’s the EVs… The EVs give you that feeling.”

Joe and co were able to lay down the track in just a couple of days as well. “The first section with the first solo, the verses and the bridge section were all done on a single day,” explained Joe. “Then, on the second day, we went in and decided to make this long, big solo at the end after the siren. ”

When it came to the solos on the track, Bonamassa was his usual improvisational self. “I very rarely work out parts in advance,” he told Total Guitar. “My very first take on things is usually the best and I’ve always kind of stuck to that. And the solos were done live… But the sort of Jimmy Page bits, those were overdubbed. I had the hardest time doing those. For some reason, I couldn’t get the timing. I was hearing it the way Jimmy Page would play them and I couldn’t get it, but finally I got there.”

Joe first played Sloe Gin to an audience back in early 2007 and it’s formed the key part of his live shows ever since. “The first time we played it was in Amarillo, Texas, and it got a standing ovation!” explains Bonamassa. “The record hadn’t been released and only a very few people had heard it. But when Rick [Melick], my keyboard player, went into it, we got applause like they’d heard the song! It’s just one of those familiar-sounding riffs.”

So did Mr Bonamassa have any tips for players eager to tackle his killer take on Sloe Gin? “The key is in the tone,” he advised. “The sound has to be clear. You need to resist that temptation to make it more distorted, especially on the end solo. If you play it cleaner, it’ll come across a lot better. The other thing is that I switch positions a lot from low positions to high positions and back… So it really teaches you how to find the octaves pretty quick. But man, it’s pretty simple; it’s not rocket science or anything!”

Yeah, whatever you say, Joe!

• Joe Bonamassa: the 10 guitarists that blew my mind

Dolly Parton is still in the thoughts of many in the music world, and in the last 48 hours, a number of artists have been paying tribute to her in the live arena.

During John Mayer’s concert at Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett, New York, the guitarist played I Will Always Love You as the intro to his 2006 hit Gravity, which was his final song of the night. As you can see below, it’s a particularly tender and soulful version of the song that Parton released back in 1974 and which later became a blockbuster hit for Whitney Houston.

Prior to the gig, Mayer reflected on Parton's death with SiriusXM's Andy Cohen, calling it a "huge loss", but also took the positives from the collective outpouring of warmth since her passing.

"While the world is paying tribute to one person and one soul, which feels good on its own, we're all connected while that's happening and I haven't felt connected like that for a long time."

Mayer went on to say: "This is one human being who's left this incredible testament to love throughout their whole life and you can feel it. This is what a life well-lived looks like, feels like, sounds like, and you take apart every layer of herself and career, and it's a brilliant, classy, talented, fully artistic rendering. That is how you give your life to the thing you love."

Elsewhere in New York, Harry Styles was playing the first night of his residency at Madison Square Garden and took time to share his thoughts about the singer: “I just wanna give a proper thank you to all the musicians who have inspired me over the years. Dolly, we love you. Thank you so much.” Later, her original version of I Will Always Love You was played over the venue’s speakers as the sold-out audience sang along.

Meanwhile at a concert in Pittsburgh, the singer Kesha covered a slightly more obscure Dolly hit Old Flames (Can’t Hold A Candle To You). The song was originally released by Joe Sun in 1978 with Parton’s version coming two years later. Kesha revealed to the audience that the song has a family connection to her – her mom was one of its co-writers.

“I’m sure many of you all know that we lost Ms Dolly Parton,” Kesha told the crowd. “We literally lost an angel. But through her art and through her kindness and through her love, she will live forever. And I want to talk about her a little bit. For those of you who don’t know, I come from a long lineage of songwriters and before I was born, my mom wrote a song for Dolly Parton. And that song bought us a house. That song put me through school.”

In 2017 Kesha recorded a cover of Old Flames with Dolly herself while she was embroiled in a legal battle with her ex producer Dr Luke. “I was making that album in the middle of a very scary litigation,” she explained to the audience, "and I was in the MeToo movement, and having such a legendary woman do this song with me and stand beside me, it made me feel like God was on my side.”

Over the next few days there will doubtless be more tributes to an artist who drew admiration and warmth from across every music genre.

Alex Warren has revealed that John Mayer is a guest on his upcoming second album, Wildchild.

The 25-year-old singer-songwriter has posted a clip to Instagram that shows him miming a guitar part that is apparently Mayer’s contribution to the new record. He’s written across the clip: “My dad’s favourite musician was John Mayer… so I put them on a song together.” Presumably, there is a recording of his father somewhere else in the song.

Warren has captioned the post: “Dad you would have loved Wildchild.”

The singer’s father died from kidney cancer when he was just nine years old. It’s fair to say the lad’s had quite a difficult upbringing – his mother, who he has previously described as an alcoholic, kicked Warren out of the house when he was 18 and he often ended up having to sleep in friends’ cars.

Warren is probably best known for Ordinary, the monster hit that topped charts all over the world last year and in the UK spent 13 weeks at number one.

It’s been a busy week for him. A few days ago, he was forced to cancel a concert in Auckland’s Spark Arena due to illness just hours before the doors opened.

Warren apologised profusely on social media, saying: “I never have to do this and it breaks my heart to even write this but I have to cancel tonight’s show.

“I have tried everything to be able to make this show work and I’m sadly bedridden sick at the moment. I can barely talk let alone sing and it sadly isn’t possible to play tonight’s show. I understand what it takes to be able to attend concerts and the fact so many of you travelled for this one has made this decision even more difficult. I love you so much and hope you understand.”

Anyway, Wildchild – featuring John Mayer and all – is set to come out this coming Friday (28 August).

This was always going to be something completely different – Sleep Token guitarist IV, and bassist III, working in collaboration with Jackson and Charvel on a signature guitar and bass.

This is their first-ever signature models. The masked and numbered enigmas were never going to just pick something out of the catalogue then slap a signature on it.

But even so, these are pretty darn radical, with IV and Jackson cooking up a Pro Plus Series Monarkh that is tuned down a whole octave, has an EverTune bridge with custom saddles to accommodate this madness, and an extended 30” scale.

And that’s just the half it – wait till you see the pale moon ebony fingerboard, or that headstock shape for that matter. It's all kinds of radical, a true 21-st century metal guitar.

The Charvel Sleep Token III Signature Pro-Mod San Dimas Bass V might have a little bit more of what you’d call a classic silhouette – it has the licensed Stratocaster headstock, albeit reversed – and yet with it’s 34.4” to 35.5” multi-scale design, the caramelised maple neck and the custom-voiced Fishman Fluence Bass pickups with 2-band EQ and, y’know, the question mark inlay on the fingerboard. It’s like something the Riddler might play.

Needless to say, these will offer something quite different from your typical built-for-metal high-performance electric.

Justin Norvell, chief product officer, at Fender, who owns both Jackson and Charvel, says they are purpose-built for Sleep Token’s sound – a sound that booby traps celestial electronic pop arrangements with over-sized djent-muscle riffs.

“Sleep Token’s sonic and visual identity is so distinctive, and the Jackson and Charvel signature models are a huge part of shaping that sound,” says Norvell. “These instruments let players tap directly into that tone… We’re always looking for artists who redefine what a signature instrument can be, and Sleep Token does exactly that.”

There are some familiar elements to these guitars. The Pro Plus build and specs are evident on IV’s Monarkh, from the Luminlay side markers to the stainless steel jumbo frets, the truss rod adjustment wheel nested at the top of the fretboard and so forth.

It has a bound mahogany body, its chunky singlecut profile topped with a quilted-maple veneer and the three-piece set neck carved from caramelised maple. It all makes for one of the strangest electric guitars we’ve played this year.

It might be built primarily for low-end work but it has the compound radius fingerboard to invite some lower-register shred. It sounds monstrous, those Fishman Fluence humbuckers doing the business.

Obviously, the appeal is there for Sleep Token fans – and the aesthetics might put some off – but it would be interesting to hear what some extreme metal players would do with with in the studio. It could be the doom metal Excalibur the world has been waiting for.

As for the Charvel bass, we have a poplar body, a bolt-on construction, and it too has the Luminlay side markers and 12” to 16” compound radius fingerboard found on most instruments from Fender’s high-performance brands – Charvel, EVH Gear and Jackson.

There are heaps of tone options here, with each pickup offering a trio of modes from a toggle switch.

You can watch IV and III demo these instruments above. Just don’t expect them to do much talking. They’re not much for conversation.

The Monarkh will set you back £1,949/$2,199, while the Charvel five-string bass is priced £1,399/$1,699.

Head over to Jackson and Charvel for more details.

Some songs stop you dead in your tracks the second you hear them. They seem to change the molecules in the air.

The Sound Of Silence, the breakout hit that announced Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel as a powerhouse songwriting duo, is one of them. But it took its time to work its magic on a wider audience.

When it did, Simon & Garfunkel were on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Their 1964 debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3AM, had flopped and they were doing what twenty-somethings did in the mid ‘60s. Simon headed across the pond and was living in England, working on his debut solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook, working the local folk circuit. Garfunkel was still at Columbia University where he was studying art history.

At Columbia Records, the phone was ringing off the hook. There was a song off Wednesday Morning, 3AM that radio audiences across the Eastern Seaboard couldn’t get enough of.

“From a radio contact business in Cocoa Beach, Florida, it became a call-in favourite,” said Garfunkel, speaking to MusicRadar in 2012. “It made the promotion man call the home office in New York and say, ‘It’s been a year now, and they won’t quit over this one folky song from a group called Simon & Garfunkel. The album isn’t selling, but this one tune just won’t quit with its appeal.’”

It wasn’t just Florida. Audiences in Boston were entranced by it, too. The Sounds Of Silence, as it was originally titled, was speaking to the youth of America, haunting the airwaves with its minimalist folk presentation, just two voices and an acoustic guitar. This song had potential.

Columbia had recognised this when Simon & Garfunkel first auditioned for them. As did Garfunkel when Simon first showed it to him.

“It was the sixth song Paul ever wrote,” said Garfunkel. “He would come to my apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, where the roaches were in the kitchen, and he’d play me his songs. When he got to this one, I said, ‘Best one yet! If that’s not a commercial hit record, I don’t know what is.’”

The Sound Of Silence was such a good song that Simon was initially going to give it away. He was exploring his post-college options once his degree in English at Queens College was finished, and took a job in music publishing.

“I had either graduated from college, or I was in my last year, and I was working part-time for a publisher in New York, trying to get songs from their catalogue recorded by other recording artists,” said Simon, speaking to NPR in 2003. “A job that I was completely unqualified to do.”

But the job paid in other ways. It was there Simon met Tom Wilson of Columbia Records, the producer who had worked with Sun Ra and had just been picked up to work with folk’s new superstar, Bob Dylan. Wilson could have used a song like this.

“He had a group that he was recording called The Pilgrims. The only great artist that he had was Bob Dylan,” continued Simon. “I said to him, 'Well, I have a song that I wrote that I think might be good for The Pilgrims', and I played the song, The Sound Of Silence.

And he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I’d like to record that with them.’ And then I said, ‘Well, you know, I sing. I sing with a friend. Could we come and sing this for you?’ So, he said yes, and he arranged an audition for us.”

Wilson had Dylan. He had the Pilgrims. After Columbia president Goddard Lieberson liked what he heard, Wilson now had Simon & Garfunkel. Although there was still some disagreement over what they should call themselves.

The duo had been operating under the name Tom & Jerry back when they were high-school kids signed to Big Records, scoring a hit with Hey, Schoolgirl and appearing on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.

That was a real-life American Graffiti scene, and the name would never have worked with this new folk direction. And the record companies back then discouraged to Jewish artists from using their own names.

“There was a duo called Art and Paul, a folk duo, so that was out,” said Simon. “So then, they were tossing out different names that they might come up with to give to us. And it was never a consideration to call the group Simon and Garfunkel, because it was ‘too ethnic.’ It was just nobody did that. Nobody did that then.

“Bob Dylan was called Bob Dylan; he wasn’t called Bob Zimmerman. So, when they came to a stalemate and couldn't find the name, it was Goddard Lieberson, who said, ‘Call the group Simon and Garfunkel.’”

Wilson handled production duties for Wednesday Morning, 3AM. The engineer Roy Halee, who had recorded the audition tapes, was in the studio to work his magic. He had a burgeoning reputation as a genius in the studio and would be a regular collaborator of the duo’s, with arguably his greatest production feat coming in 1986 when he produced Simon’s Graceland.

The album was recorded in spring ‘64, released in fall, forgotten by winter, and by the summer of ’65 Garfunkel considered himself “a veteran of failure”. At least that’s how he remembered it when speaking to NPR.

He had gone out to visit Simon during his summer vacation and upon returning to the States, he discovered The Sound Of Silence had been remixed by Wilson for a new single release scheduled for September 12. Wilson played it for him.

“I was just, you know, amused,” said Garfunkel. “I was not so invested in whether it’ll be successful or not. I was feeling like a veteran of failure at that point. So I was just amused – and then I watched my life change over the ensuing months.”

Wilson had an ear for the zeitgeist and the electric 12-string guitar was becoming the sound of the mid ‘60s. Roger McGuinn’s playing on the Byrds’ Mr Tambourine man transformed the sound of ‘60s guitar. That jangle and chime was in. So too was reverb, and Halee applied it generously to this remix.

Wilson had just finished up recording Like A Rolling Stone with Bob Dylan and rehired guitarist Al Gorgoni and drummer Bobby Gregg, adding Vincent Bell on guitar and Bob Bushnell on bass guitar. They were going to give it the Byrds treatment.

Garfunkel told MusicRadar that he had no bargaining power to persuade the label to think twice about it.

“The home office overdubbed electric bass, drums and the electric 12-string guitar, which was the sound of the era if you know The Byrds and Mr Tambourine Man,” he said. “We were using electric 12-strings that season. They did this while we were away in Europe. I had no power, no creative leg to stand on, so by definition I was just a bemused listener: ‘Whatever the label is going to do, OK, cross your fingers…’ It’s not like I could have a point-of-view like, ‘How dare you! You ruined my record’ – I could never go down that path.”

We can look back and say this proto-psychedelic treatment of this folk arrangement was just what it needed, Messrs Simon and Garfunkel’s vocals hanging disembodied in the mix, ethereal, godly. The problem was the original was just two voices and the guitar and naturally the rhythm did not sit on the grid. They did the best they could but there’s no question, it sounds a little off.

“I heard it and thought, ‘OK, the rhythm slips a bit between the fourth and fifth verses, the overdubs aren’t exactly in sync, but the sound is commercial. Who knows?’ You can’t figure out the market,” said Garfunkel. “Now it becomes a giant world-wide hit. What can I say? I knew the song within.”

Great songs are rugged. They can be remarkably resilient to reinterpretation. Even so, Garfunkel thought that the 12-string guitar stepped on the vocal a bit.

It is a feeling that informs how he performs it to this day, almost as though he is singing it for an audience who is hearing those lyrics clearly for the first time, even if the truth is those lyrics could well have accompanied them during the most significant, maybe the toughest, moments in their lives.

But it matters little; the emotional temperature of the remix is little different to the original recording, and the chord changes still effectively betray Simon’s prodigious genius. He was just 21 when he wrote it.

The fact that Halee cloaked it in reverb, this great splash of ambient melancholy, is more than appropriate – not only was it consonant with contemporary production styles, it was just as Simon had originally written the song.

In his NPR interview, Simon explained the kind of at-home setup he would put together to get him in the zone, and it is quite funny to picture, maybe a little melodramatic, but just ask any guitar player who has played acoustic in the bathroom. There’s a natural reverb there that makes for an echo room that some studios would pay thousands to install in their facility.

“I wrote it in the bathroom of our house in Queens, with the lights off and the water running,” said Simon. “That was the atmosphere that I liked. If you put a candle in there, then, you’ll immediately understand what it’s like.”

We can’t say for sure what guitar Simon used to write it. Likely it could have been one of the big-bodied Guild acoustics that were favoured by that generation of folkies, and later when he came to perform it live he would typically rely on his Martin D-18. Those are guitars of considerable boom, but Simon tamed that, capoing his at the sixth fret for the recording.

What makes the chord progression so genius is how it sits in conversation with the lyrics. It opens with an Asus2 shape, neither major nor minor, then an open G major then back to A minor on “again” – and in just two lines, three chords, and the audience is right where they want them, and the whole song unspools as some gentle, dark night of the soul.

Even after all this time, it still hits Art Garfunkel hard. He says his appreciation of it has only increased as the decades rolled by.

“Ahhh, what a tune! Sound Of Silence has more melodic genius, and simple power than I ever realised,” he said. “As the years go by, there’s something extraordinarily hooky about that simple melody – I didn’t know that. I knew it was a good-sounding record when it emerged.”

“Well the passing of four decades has given the lyrics an extraordinary power simply because they have endured for such a long time,” Simon told NPR. “Again, for me, I am always aware of the fact that I was 21 years old when I wrote it, so I am kind of amazed that I wrote that. Although at the time I just thought that I was writing better. But now when I look at it I think, ‘Well, that was really something extraordinary that I wasn’t aware of at the time.’”

The Sound Of Silence is a “serious song” but what is it about? Simon is coy. It’s about “many things”. To explain it would be to rob it of its magic. We can assign our own meaning to them. That’s what makes them endure between the melody sticking in our head.

What The Sound Of Silence meant to nu-metal band Disturbed when they covered it will have been different to the kinds of things that were percolating in Simon’s mind when he wrote it in late ’63, early ’64, when the US was roiling after the assassination of a sitting president and the civil rights movement was working for a better union, an end to segregation.

Simon, for what it’s worth, had rerecorded it in the UK for The Paul Simon Songbook but that always sounded incomplete, like a demo. Art Garfunkel’s vocal makes it transcendent.

Purists might cite the original 1964 recording as the definitive take, others Wilson’s remix. We don’t have to choose. But in remixing it and rereleasing it in ’65 Wilson helped Simon and Garfunkel on their way to their first number one – and there was more where that came from.

Brian Setzer says that he feels “98 per cent” and is playing as good as he ever has after recovering from an autoimmune condition that left him unable to play the guitar.

Speaking to Guitar World, the Stray Cats frontman admitted that his career was hanging in the balance, after losing the use of his hands in late 2024.

““It was the strangest thing…before you knew it I was having trouble holding a toothbrush, a fork. I couldn’t button my pants,” he said. “There was no pain, but my hands just wouldn’t work. Of course, there was no way I could play the guitar, which was pretty scary.”

Worst still. There was no off-the-shelf cure, no magic pill to make him better. What worked was his doctor’s “Plan A”.

“When my doctor diagnosed my condition, he told me there was no real cure, so it wasn’t a slam-dunk that I would see results,” he said. “But his plan A was to get me playing again.”

Setzer announced he had the condition in February 2025, and first noticed it during the Stray Cats’ tour, when his hand would be cramping up. “It feels like I’m wearing a pair of gloves when I try to play,” he wrote on Instagram. He was in the early stages of his treatment but had recuperated to the point of being able to tie his shoelaces and hold a pen.

Setzer received treatment for almost a year, undertaking a programme of infusions at Mayo Clinic until he regained the ability to hold a Gretsch guitar in his hand and fret some notes – and regain it he did.

The Stray Cats have returned with their first new material in six years, with two singles, Stampede and Teenage Heaven – and Setzer is on blistering form. The latter is an old Eddie Cochran tune, and the former has an interesting back story. It’s technically a cover, too – though a reimagining/rewrite might be a better descriptor. It was originally a super-short, sub-two-minute surf-rock instrumental by the Scarlets, which was put out on 7” by Prince Records in 1959. There was not much there but it planted the seed in Setzer’s mind.

“I heard the song and thought the guitarist was so good,” he tells Guitar World. “I said, ‘I want to play that!’ There wasn’t enough of a song there, but I loved the riff, so I basically wrote a song around it.”

That Scarlets riff is a doozie. Setzer gives it a different treatment, a little rawer and more overdriven and throaty than the splish-splash spring reverb soaked original. But it’s a strange riff, with a little something about it that reminds us of something – one YouTube commentator said Master Of Puppets.

And it is an important riff. Pete Antonio and John Sanzone laid this down in 1959. Could they credibly claim to be the first surf-rock band, beating Dick Dale to the punch? Dale did not release Let’s Go Trippin’ until 1961.

Besides his peerless rockabilly playing, this is another of Setzer’s gifts – he unearth’s classics from rock ’n’ roll history that are ripe for rediscovery.

Jack White and the country star Charlie Crockett’s war of words, which began about a tussle over a support act, has now got really personal.

It all began last month when Twin Temple, the duo who blend doo wop and theatricality with (supposedly) Satanism, were thrown off a couple of dates they were due to support Crockett. The duo broke the news on social media, saying: “We are sorry to everyone who was planning to see us. We’re grateful for your support, not only of Twin Temple, but more importantly of artistic freedom. HAIL SATAN! 93/93.”

At which point, White steps in and, writing on Instagram, offers the pair a support slot at a date next month: “Twin Temple, Would you like to open my show in L.A. on September 29th at the Hollywood Palladium? Let me know. Get in front of me Satan!”

White’s intervention seems to have irked Crockett, who in an Instagram post he later deleted said: “Fuck Trump, fuck Epstein, but Hail Satan? Not me, Jack.”

In a further post, he aimed another catty remark at the ex-White Stripe: “I wonder why he wasn’t so outspoken back when he was in the White Stripes 20-something years ago? They purposely avoided political issues. Maybe he was worried about losing audience back when it was all on the line and he needed all the help he could get.”

Then White volleyed back, posting: “I never said nothing about this young buck before but since he’s trying to drag me into this here rodeo again, here’s my official response to Cowboy Charley’s accusations.” He then added the lyrics to Rappin’ Duke, a novelty 1984 track that includes the lyrics: ‘So you think you’re bad, with your rap, Well I’ll tell ya, pilgrim, I started the crap, When you were in diapers and wetting the sheets, I was at the Ponderosa rapping to the beat’.

Are you keeping up? Now, Crockett has fired back and, in another Instagram post that he’s evidently had second thoughts about (it’s no longer there) wrote a lengthy screed lambasting White. “Lemme guess, you got Che Guevara and Malcolm X on your shelf, maybe even Fred Hampton, but at the end of the day you get in the Lamborghini and put your kids in private school,” he wrote before accusing White of playing “to your base”.

Boys… Boys! This really does feel like we’re back in the playground...

Jam Pedals and Stu Mackenzie have joined forces for an overdrive/distortion pedal that unlocks the small-amp magic of his King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard electric guitar tone.

The Tiny Amp Destroyer is inspired by Mackenzie’s utterly unorthodox setup, in which he drives a 30-dollar pawnshop guitar amp with a boost pedal and cleans it up by rolling his volume knob back. It’s the sound you hear on albums such as Flight b741, where these poor little amplifiers – in various stages of distress – yield hot yet boxy tones that sound great on a record.

In a sense, Mackenzie’s approach is straight out of the Recording Guitar: 101, in which a small amp, typically a compact tube amp combo such as the Fender Champ, would play a starring roll. Stick a mic in front of it and your good to go. Well, Mackenzie’s amp choices are not a champ.

He got the idea for using the cheapest, nastiest, and smallest solid-state practice amps he could find when giving guitar lessons.

“I used to teach guitar. I used to teach kids and teenagers when I was a teenager myself,” he told Total Guitar in 2024. “People would always come in with these tiny amps, just the classic thirty-dollar amps you can buy at the pawnshop. It’s just the cheapest way to get started with electric guitar, and sometimes these things would sound amazing if you cranked them up loud enough.”

Mackenzie went down to the shops and got himself around eight of these little amps, paying between 20 and 30 dollars for each of them. Turning them up until they suffer is how you get them to play nice. If they break, well, that’s 30 bucks. No biggie.

“You crank them up to a place where they are not supposed to go, and they are distorting when they are on the clean channel… That is awesome to me,” he continued. “A lot of the time it’s the speaker that’s distorting, and there’s something rattling that is not supposed to be rattling, but it’s all harmonics and everything. I am hugely into that.”

The Tiny Amp Destroyer is not an amp in a box in the strictest sense, like how Peavey put the Decade into a preamp pedal to tap into the rush to nail Josh Homme’s tone. “TAD is not an amp in a box,” explains Jam Pedals. “It is the sound of the box losing the fight.”

But it combines the sounds of these transistorised budget amps with a treble booster, presenting them as two independent but stackable drive stages, with a third footswitch activating a treble booster that’s voiced after Jam Pedals’ Rooster.

“It tightens the low end, sharpens the attack and changes how both drive stages respond,” says the Greek effects brand.

There are all kinds of controls for shaping your sound. It might have been inspired by Mackenzie’s rig but it does a lot more. Think of it has two gain voicings, both unruly, one hotter than the other, with Magic and Notch controls for allowing you to dial up the instability or dial in some more conventional drive.

"It makes your massive amp sound tiny, and it's just way better," says Mackenzie.

The first batch of these pedals is sold out — as is the second batch. But more will be coming in late August, early September.

Priced £319/$399, the Tiny Amp Destroyer is available now. Head over to Jam Pedals for more.

Deep Purple fans are waking up today and wondering what just happened. Was it just a dream, too much cheese before bed, or did Ritchie Blackmore really take to the stage with the band for the first time since ’93 to play Smoke On The Water?

For generations of players weaned on Blackmore’s playing with Purple and later with Rainbow, he was the player with magic in his hands, who could all but walk on water.

It might just have been a one-song cameo, the stars following the moon and sun’s lead to align for one night only, but it felt like a seismic moment in rock history – and an occasion to revisit Blackmore’s catalogue in search of inspiration.

The question is: where do you start with Richard Hugh Blackmore, a man so preternaturally gifted with the electric guitar that one suspects he was not so much born but summoned onto our earthly plane?

There has always been a whiff of the Arthurian about the erstwhile Deep Purple and Rainbow guitarist; the enormodome his Camelot, the Fender Stratocaster his Excalibur.

Nonetheless, the Ritchie Blackmore legend was built on earthly pleasures – rock ’n’ roll, Marshall stacks, treble boosters, riffs, the good stuff – and it assumes the form of one of rock’s most formidable discographies from one of its most combustible protagonists.

Maybe we should start with Smoke On The Water, the song Deep Purple wrote as they looked across Lake Geneva to see after affects of the Montreux Casino inferno after a Frank Zappa fan fired a flare into the ceiling. It’s a classic in the quintessential Deep Purple style, with a righteously groovy 70’s rock verse supporting the Blackmore’s stark monolith intro/chorus riff. But most of us already know that one.

That’s the first thing you learn on guitar, right? And if you work in a guitar store, there are very few treatments to disentangle that genius riff from the post-traumatic association with a long Saturday afternoon on the shop floor. So to that end, we are not including Smoke In The Water here. That’s the first disclaimer.

Also, Blackmore recorded dozens of tracks with Deep Purple and Rainbow that should be listened to, studied, celebrated and played loud on a Friday night, and we can’t get to them all. We are restricting ourselves to five here… mostly.

But first we should probably run through some of the most notable omissions.

Those who grew up with Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman’s Saturday Rock Show on BBC Radio One might sue for Black Night to make the cut. It features one of Blackmore’s largest riffs (inspired by the bass line in Ricky Nelson's Summertime) and a low-end boogie groove that reverberates still in the stoner and doom metal scenes. Essential.

From the same period, Speed King, a go-faster rock song and setlist perennial that was lapped two years later by Highway Star. Then there is the bluesy doozy Mistreated (more notable as a David Coverdale showcase? And besides, Rainbow’s version was better), and the psychonautic trip of the The Mule, a highlight from 1971’s Fireball, plus the late ‘60s floor-filler Hush remains vital and fresh.

We've excluded Stargazer from this list, but only for editorial expediency — we have an entire article dedicated to Rainbow's Stargazer.

From Blackmore’s time with Deep Purple alone, there are too many to mention. Then Blackmore’s proclivity for the neoclassical became heightened after he quit Purple and formed Rainbow in 1975.

In the company of Ronnie James Dio, and with the thunderous power of Cozy Powell on the drums, Blackmore trained his fire on arrangements that were more aggressive, stretching that little bit further as though to compensate for not having Jon Lord’s organ/keys playing to trade off (he did have the likes of Tony Carey, but Jon Lord was one of the few musicians who could pull focus from Blackmore’s guitar playing).

As a result, Blackmore and Rainbow forged a sound of most precious metal. For guitarists looking for a lodestar of what classic steel should sound like, Rising (1976) is essential listening, so too its successor, 1978's Long Live Rock ’n’ Roll.

Blackmore would later become the Renaissance man of rock, the Man in Black writing medieval compositions in the company of his wife, Candice Night, in Blackmore’s Night, but it’s in the psych-grooves and super-sized riffs of Deep Purple where his real genius lies.

And it's in the blazing blues-through-neoclassical-and-back-again of his lead playing. It’s in his ear for combining the instinctive with the exotic, and using Rainbow to colour rock and metal in new shades.

And the following five tracks have got plenty of that genius…

1. Space Truckin’ – Made In Japan (1972)

This live version of Space Truckin’ will take you through the wormhole. We can’t guarantee your safe return.

Like many Deep Purple jams it has a deceptive groove. The verses ride along on the back of a brass-plated honky tonk blues guitar riff, all up-tempo momentum and a breezy psychedelic vibe that bottoms out with the super-sized chorus riff and Ian Gillan’s call to arms.

There are so many lessons to take from this. The first and most important one is of songwriting, and it instructs us that if you lay down a riff that’s simple over a groove that’s tight and infectious you’ll carry the audience with you. Just keep building and the release at the chorus is all the more liberating.

It seems so simple, and Space Truckin’ is so simple for the audience, its magic easily digested, but listen to Blackmore’s guitar on subsequent verses; he switches up the groove, adding in some syncopated muted chords, heightening the energy in the song.

Everything is building and building in this song, and this tension is all the more irresistible because we know we are getting to the mother of single-note chorus riffs – and there is nothing cooler on record than the dimension-altering alliance of Blackmore, Roger Glover’s bass and Lord’s Hammond organ working in unison to make a simple motif totally cosmic.

The studio version on Machine Head is perfect but let’s take the extended Made In Japan version as the gold standard. A great band playing live at the height of its powers… Well, there’s nothing like it.

As on record, here Space Truckin’ builds and builds, and that goes for Blackmore’s lead playing too, with his first solo playing it straight – at times he’s almost choking the notes in those super-aggressive blues-rock runs – before the improvised final stages and the descent into the untamed chaos of the aforementioned wormhole.

2. Lazy – Made In Japan (1972)

Another from Made In Japan, an album recorded over three nights at Osaka’s Koseinenkin Hall and the legendary Budokan in Tokyo. The year was 1972, so of course there is a little throat clearing in the set – Louie, Louie! – before Jon Lord kicks the jam off, but even just that little taste of blues vamping that Blackmore offers before the track begins in earnest is just exquisite.

Blackmore never confined his musical ambitions to the blues, nor to blues-rock, but it under-pinned everything that he did and offers some of strongest examples of his on-point phrasing – not to mention the ability to groove in lockstep with Lord and Purple's redoubtable rhythm section, led by drummer Ian Paice.

Again, the studio version of Lazy is great, but this finds Deep Purple in heavy jam mode, under the lights and dialled in. It really gets going just over four minutes in. There are no overdubs, none needed.

There are heavier Deep Purple grooves and there are faster, but this turbo boogie-woogie blues features the ultimate shootout between Blackmore at his most playful and Lord, who ran his Hammond C3 through Marshall heads as to give them enough hair, teeth and muscle to take on Blackmore.

We’ll call it a draw. Lazy might be a left-field choice but it’s awesome and it makes the cut as a showcase for Blackmore’s blues chops.

3. Gates Of Babylon – Long Live Rock ’N’ Roll (1978)

Rainbow's Gates Of Babylon picks up where Stargazer left off on Rising, or at least it expands open the idea that rock and metal could assume the so-called exotic eastern scales and use the double harmonic scale (or Arabic or Gypsy major scale) to extricate itself from the blues-rock idiom, and make complete sense despite being in an alien environment tonally.

After leaving Deep Purple, a band in which Jon Lord’s genius at the Hammond organ was the perfect foil for Blackmore’s guitar, he would soon be complemented by a different kind of genius in the form of Ronnie James Dio’s voice. They were made for each other.

Check out Blackmore’s solo work here. It’s off-the-hook, and while it is attacked with a similar aggression and precision (the aggression always making sure that Blackmore’s technicality is never too clinical) it is a million miles away from his style on the likes of Mistreated and Lazy.

4. Man On The Silver Mountain – Rainbow: Live In Munich 1977

Some purists decry this live version from that febrile night in Munich, all because it's quicker than the studio recording. And they’ve got a point, it is quicker. The tempo is almost brisk, but not so brisk that the riff loses its swagger, its armoured-played Americana – if anything, it’s the studio recording that is too slow.

Blackmore had more than his share of groovers with Deep Purple, some were loosed-hip boogie, others head-nodding, but Man On The Silver Mountain… Well it’s for wrestling minotaurs to the ground and all the more appropriate for its more ostensibly metal setting.

So that’s the meat of the song; the riff. But the potatoes are in the inventive ways Blackmore complements it. He knows when to set it down and let Dio’s vocal’s lead, sprinkling that 16th-note pre-chorus angel dust all over the place so the chorus groove reestablishes itself like it's the third act in a superhero movie.

The expanded live version gives Blackmore a bit more time to play and Rainbow a bit more space in which they can build those dynamics and carry the audience with them. Again, the solo’s lyricism seems inspired by Dio.

5. Kill The King – Long Live Rock ’N Roll (1978)

Kill The King feels of a piece with Speed King and Highway Star, each meeting the gold standard for turbo-rock anthems. Perhaps this was the logical conclusion for that creative direction, a song of such straight-ahead power that it might even have been too much for Deep Purple, but it sure suits Blackmore’s kinetic animalism to a T.

You’ve got everything of Blackmore in this. There’s his sense of drama, opening with a flurry of Gmin arpeggios before one of those super-fast blues riffs that lend themselves to hybrid picking and a verse that is constructed and performed in such a manner as to endow the rest of the song with an unrelenting double-time feel. It’s another illusory act of rhythm guitar from Blackmore, and it’s very clever.

As for the solo, you’ve got your first proto-shred lesson right here. A short passage reprises the arpeggios from the intro, as though to set the scene again, and then going into a helter-skelter act of picking that eschews melody and is played hard as to not let up on the intensity that’s been so carefully crafted before.

Then you’ve got some minor pentatonic pyrotechnics and a license to go off-piste live, bring out the slide (compare and contrast this studio version with that of Live In Munich 1977 above) and holding it down hell for leather until its conclusion. Just listening to this makes you breathless. Play along to it and that’s your workout done for today, and no one need question your rhythm or lead chops again.

Honourable mention: Child In Time – Deep Purple In Rock (1971)

Wait, honourable mention? This should be number one. Well you could say that and you wouldn’t be wrong, and where was Burn, where was No No No? And so on...

Anyway, quick mention of Child In Time because it has arguably Blackmore’s finest solo.

Not that he gets too much else to do here as Jon Lord and Ian Gillan carry much of this track, but when it comes it is a tour de force in rock guitar, starting as ever in something relatively conventional, raw meat animalism, gathering steam with a dizzying flurry of notes and a sense of the psychedelic.

Genius.

Joe Bonamassa and Martin have teamed up for a pair of signature acoustic guitars based on the blues star’s 1937 00-18.

One is a straight-up replica 00-18, a meticulous, forensic feat of reverse-engineering. The other is a Road Series Retro 00-10E, which shares the shade-top finish but comes with an onboard acoustic guitar pickup and a more approachable price tag of $1,299 (expect to pay $3,999 for the 00-18).

The fact that there are two at all still blows Bonamassa’s mind.

“If you told me when I was a kid that I’d be sitting here in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, with not one but two signature guitars, I’d be like, ‘You’re out of your mind.’ I never thought that it would be possible,” he says. “And it’s such an honour to do this. Truly, as a bona fide guitar nerd, this the epitome, this is the high-water mark for me, because it’s a Martin! It’s a Martin, so many years of history going back to 1833, in this town since the 1850s. It’s amazing.”

The original pre-War Martin that these guitars was based on was one of Bonamassa’s great vintage finds. It had been in the same family ever since it was bought in 1937. They even had the photos to prove it. Bonamassa’s buddy John Shults of True Vintage Guitar, out in Birmingham, Alabama, picked it up in Ohio. He knew just who to call.

“He sent me a picture of it, and he goes, ‘You’ll never guess, I found this Martin, and it’s got the picture of the guy who owned it originally,’” says Bonamassa. “There’s a picture of him with it, with the rope strap and a big old cowboy hat, playing this guitar in the ‘40s. And they kept everything: the original catalogue from 1937, where they went and circled ’00-18’ and didn’t know it was a shade-top, and it has the original price tag. It has the C.F. Martin logo on it, and the original price of this guitar was $45.”

Bonamassa’s 1937 00-18 is a stunning instrument, and it’s not just the age that makes it an uncommon find. Those shade-top finishes were not as common as the natural finishes. This replica has a solid spruce top, mahogany on the back and sides. There is GE scalloped X-pattern bracing, faux tortoiseshell binding, open-gear tuners and Old Style 18 inlays. It is a golden era instrument, and has been aged – but not the usual way.

Rather than wearing in the finish, the top is printed to replicate weathering on Bonamassa’s original.

The 00-10E is a spit of the original, too, only it swaps out the solid mahogany for solid sapele, it has the Martin E1 electronics, and was made at Martin’s factory in Navojoa, Mexico. It comes with a soft-shell guitar case.

Those electronics came in handy when Bonamassa tested it out the old-fashioned way, onstage, playing with a rock icon.

“The electronics sounded great,” he says. “First time I tested it, was trial under fire. I had this gig in New York with Slash, and we were doing an acoustic opener, and I didn’t have an acoustic guitar at my house with a pickup. And Martin had just sent over these two, and I was like, ‘Oh, cool. Its got a pickup.

“And I plugged it in. I was like, ‘Great! And so much so, I brought this one back so they could put that pickup in there ‘cos it sounds that good.”

The 00-18 Joe Bonamassa is available now, priced £4,195/$3,999 street. The Retro 00-10E Joe Bonamassa is priced £1,329/$1,299.

For more details, see Martin.

A little bit of rock history was made last night as Ritchie Blackmore took to the stage with Deep Purple for the first time in more than 30 years, performing Smoke On The Water during their show at the Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, NY.

His cameo was the first time he had played with the band since 1993, and was a well-kept secret until Blackmore and his wife, Candice Night, revealed the news during a livestream. It transpired that Blackmore, who co-founded the band in 1968, had reached out to Deep Purple frontman, sent his “AI pigeon” with a message to him asking if it would be okay if he could come up and jam for a bit.

This is how Blackmore described his pitch: “I said, ‘How would you feel about if I got up just for an encore? You know, just one of the songs. I don’t want to intrude.’ And I said, ‘No pressure, just for old time’s sake. I’m 81 now.’”

Gillan was all in.

“He seemed to love the idea, put it to the band, got a thumbs up, and it looks like we might be doing that,” said Blackmore.

And that he did. He was playing through a 50-watt guitar amp. We know this because Blackmore had revealed he had sent his tech a day in advance to set up his rig. This was a big deal. Not only was it forever since he last played onstage with the band, he had mostly been playing acoustic guitar around the house. His Fender Stratocaster, looking a nice light shade of custard yellow as he joined the band, was in desperate need of some TLC.

“It’s been a while,” he said. “I changed my strings on my Strat, which I haven’t done in over 25 years. So I did that.”

So with all precautions taken – including a steroid injection to his lower back – Blackmore was ready, and was called onstage to plug in and join forces with Deep Purple guitarist Simon McBride on a storming rendition of Smoke On The Water.

As Candice Night said ahead of the show, “It’s going to be the riff heard around the world.”

That it was. Just look at all those camera phones capturing the moment for posterity.

It’s strange. Smoke On The Water is one of the first, if not the first, riff that anyone learns on electric guitar but it always sounds different when Blackmore performs it, when it comes something monolithic, as mysterious and extra-terrestrial as Kubrick’ monoliths.

Blackmore need not have worried. If he was one of the forebears of shred, the first to put bring neoclassical tonalities to rock’s animalistic idiom, he dialled it back last night, working both pickups on his modded Strat (stacked humbuckers at both neck and bridge positions, middle pickup removed), and just going with it.

This was Blackmore on home soil. He only lives down the road in Long Beach.

Ian Paice on drums was the only other original member of Deep Purple onstage – though Roger Glover has been with them on bass guitar since ’69 and is good as an original. Don Airey was on keys, as he has been since assuming Jon Lord’s spot in 2002.

Gillan described the occasion as “a great pleasure”, and Blackmore as immortal.

“I’m falling over,” joke Blackmore as Gillan addressed the crowd. “How come you’re getting much taller than me?”

“It’s the other way ‘round, mate,” laughs Gillan. “You’re shrinking!” Before continuing.

“I’ve got to say something. A couple of days ago I got a message from a local lad, ‘I only live ‘round the corner – do you mind if I come and jam with you?’ And it was an absolute pleasure to have back onstage the founder member, the great legend, the immortal Ritchie Blackmore! Thanks, Ritchie. I have to say it was a great pleasure. I’ll see you at the bar.”

And with that, the man in black takes his bow….

Brian May has said that “we don’t actually need AI” and to prove a point he’s ‘created’ an appallingly-bad version of an old Queen album sleeve using the technology.

Posting on Instagram, the 79-year-old guitarist shared that he had used Meta AI to create a version of Queen’s 1980 album The Game. The original, you might remember, features a black and white image of four band members side by side, dressed in black leather jackets and looking mean, moody and determinedly modern for 1980 - Freddie is clean shaven, May is wearing shades and Roger Taylor folds his arms and scowls at the camera.

However, in the AI version, three of the band have moustaches, a cheery-faced Freddie resembles a suburban estate agent on dress-down Friday, and it’s impossible to tell which member is supposed to be Brian. Most unforgivable of all, Meta’s AI seems to have decided that Queen had five members, not four.

As you can imagine, May was not impressed. “I just had to share this with you guys,” he wrote. “I asked Meta AI to show me what the cover of THE GAME album looked like. This is what it gave me! Good job, eh?”

“So this is the kind of intelligence that will soon be ruling the world??! Well, great. Maybe this is the time to realise WE ACTUALLY DON’T NEED AI!!”

Then he got serious and delivered a message to the new British Prime Minister, Andy Burnham: “I believe the price we are about to pay for this 'inevitable' development is way too high. We must not allow these hideous Data Centres to be built in the UK. They will destroy our beautiful country, like they are already destroying beautiful America. Dear Andy - you must stop it now. Before it's too late.”

Queen’s guitarist has never been afraid of voicing his opinions. His anti-blood sports stance is well known, and indeed he recently said that Queen would never headline Glastonbury because of “they [presumably meaning Michael Eavis] like killing badgers”. He has also criticised Brexit, and in a 2023 interview with The i said that he thought the then Conservative government had “wrecked Britain”.

AI data centres, though, are going to be an issue for communities throughout Europe and North America and something it’s likely everyone will have to have an opinion on pretty soon.

Willie Nelson has already lambasted the proposal to build one near his hometown of Abbott, Texas, saying: “The last thing we need is a loud, water thieving, light polluting, data center anywhere near our town (or any others for that matter).”

Punk rock shows can be raucous. Stage diving, crowd surfing and the like are all par for the course. But being injured by a flying instrument is, thankfully, less common.

However, one guitarist, Yoyoyoshie, who plays with Japanese punkers Otoboke Beaver, has gained quite a reputation for chucking her instrument into the crowd. It seems that her signature move hadn’t ever been a problem. Until the gig when it was.

Back in April, Otoboke Beaver played a show at Osaka’s Umeda Club Quattro, Yoyoyoshie threw her guitar into the crowd, and this time it did injure a punter. In fact, they ended up having to go to hospital and receive seven stitches in their forehead.

Belatedly, Otoboke Beaver have issued a statement apologising for the incident and apologising for taking four months to acknowledge it, a delay which is not really adequately explained. “To the person who was injured in the accident, we accept the incident seriously and deeply apologise,” they begin.

“After the incident, we and the staff were not prompt in cooperating and establishing a post-fact response, resulting in a delay in direct apology and publication. I’ve reflected deeply on the overwhelming burden and heartache I have caused this person due to the inadequate response.”

“We deeply apologise to everyone who came to the venue on the day and all involved for the disruption caused in the venue and the overwhelming inconvenience and concerns.”

“Our members and crew are taking this situation extremely seriously. In future performances, we will try our best to ensure it never happens again,” they promise. “Once again, I sincerely apologise for the overwhelming concern and inconvenience caused. I am very sorry.”

Lesson learned, you’d hope. Flying guitars hurt people and fans ending up in hospital isn’t a good look for any band...

Ritchie Blackmore will take to the stage with Deep Purple for the first time since 1993, when he joins the legendary British rock institution for their encore at tonight’s show at the Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, NY.

The surprise announcement came during a livestream with his wife, Candice Night, when it was casually slipped into conversation that the 81-year-old guitarist had reached out to Deep Purple frontman Ian Gillan and asked if it would be okay.

“Well, it is a secret, and I don’t want anybody to know, but I’m probably going up to do an encore with the band Deep Purple. But you can’t tell anybody. And I know that this is gonna be kept a secret,” joked Blackmore.

But why not, right? Blackmore lives in Long Island. The band were passing through. It just made sense.

“I sent my AI pigeon to Ian Gillan in Portugal, where he lives at the moment,” Blackmore explains. “And I said, ‘How would you feel about if I got up just for an encore? You know, just one of the songs. I don’t want to intrude.’ And I said, ‘No pressure, just for old time’s sake. I’m 81 now.’ And so he seemed to love the idea, put it to the band, got a thumbs up, and it looks like we might be doing that.”

Less of the might. This is happening, and it will be a historic moment for anyone who has a ticket for the show.

Mindful that guitarist Simon McBride is “a very good guitar player” and that it has also been a minute since he last played with the band, Blackmore has sent his people to the venue already to get his rig in order – even if it will “probably just be the one number” that he plays on the night.

“Yeah, I have my roadie there now, setting up my amplifier. I’ll be using a small amplifier, but it’s very loud,” said Blackmore. “That’s what I use when I record. I hope I can compete with the guitar player, because I can see that he has very big amplifiers behind him. It’ll be a 50-watt [amp]. I hope the guy out the front can turn me up.”

He is even going to the bother of changing the strings on his Fender Stratocaster.

“It’s been a while,” he said. “I changed my strings on my Strat, which I haven’t done in over 25 years. So I did that.”

It is just for one song – and we surely all know which song it will be – but Blackmore is taking every precaution. He has his tech sorting his amp out, the Strat is ready, and he has even seen the doctor to make sure he will be able to stand with his guitar.

Blackmore has four herniated disks in the lower back and has had to receive a steroid injection to get him fit for the show.

“I did have my injection in my lumber area yesterday, a special injection I have that enables me to stand in one spot,” said Blackmore. “Because if I’m playing a Strat onstage, I have a hard time with the shoulders and the lumber area. But I do have a stool there just in case I start toppling over or something. But I know that Ian Gillan has his maladies, too, with his eyesight, I think. As you get older, you collect these….”

Blackmore might have needed a steroid injection for the lower back, but he might also need someone to show him some footage from his 2019 tour with Rainbow. He insists he hasn’t played rock music in over 20 years (perhaps a little self-deprecating humour).

He even says he is not used to the electric guitar now that he only plays acoustic in the house. Don't believe a word of it.

“I have not played rock music in 25 years,” he said. “It’s going to be interesting. It depends what I’m drinking, though. So I hope people enjoy it. It will be good to see the old guys again. It’s kind of frightening.”

And by Ticketmaster’s seat map, there are still tickets available. Kansas are supporting. Deep Purple headlining. If you’re going, definitely stick around for the encore. See Deep Purple for more.

“It’s going to be the riff heard around the world,” says Night.

Online guitar lessons are brilliant. They are convenient. Oftentimes they are great value. But never underestimate the influence of a good guitar teacher. They can change your life.

If you ever find yourself on the guitar internet watching wackadoodle Quebecois math-rock duo Angine de Poitrine wondering how they got like this – y’know, how they got so weird – then maybe one brilliant, eccentric, maverick guitar teacher is to blame.

In a new interview with Guitar World, wielder of the guitar/bass doubleneck Khn de Poitrine described what it was like to learn from a true oddball who was a stickler for musical commitment, a lover of blues guitar, and a Frank Zappa superfan.

From day one, this man made an impression.

“This short and highly strung man in cowboy boots lit a hand-rolled smoke in a little room, asking me to play something,” recalls Khn. “He stopped me after 15 seconds, visibly irritated and disgusted by my shit, before grabbing my hand and filing down my nails to a good angle.”

This physical incursion into the young Khn de Poitrine’s personal space was not the last. His teacher wasn’t through with him yet.

“He then proceeded to install an old taped-up metal ring to keep my right hand’s pinky close to its neighbour,” says Khn. “He made me play a variety of finger-picking patterns on open strings while heavy-handedly correcting my posture and bombarding me with information.”

So much for strumming through a Green Day tune or playing the riff to Smoke On The Water. This teacher was setting a bar. Throwing down the gauntlet. In the Angine de Poitrine origin story, this is where Khn worked up an appetite for the discipline that microtonal instrumental rock needs to sound listenable. He left that first lesson chastened – and for the better.

“I came out of that class with a strong feeling of mediocrity, which pushed me to practice a lot,” he says. “Eventually, we had a very pleasant relationship. Those kinds of teachers will kick the living crap out of your ego if they feel like you don’t push yourself, because they feel strongly about music. But when it becomes obvious that you’re putting in the work and applying the principles being taught, they become the most generous teachers ever.”

This teacher also had the personality and the musical sensibility to shape Khn’s aesthetic appetites.

We’re not saying that these guitar lessons are why Agine de Poitrine would choose to mummify themselves in polka-dotted papier mâché, but Khn would definitely graduate with an appreciation of just how outré the electric guitar could sound. His teacher brought Zappa’s wild imagination into the classroom.

“He made simple arrangements of songs like King Kong, Son of Mr. Green Genes and My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama and had us form bands to play those songs live in front of our parents,” says Khn. “He made us improvise noisy, chaotic, atonal transitions between the songs, directing with hand signals.”

This teacher had connections, too. He’d open the classroom up for masterclasses (where is this guy, what’s his name and is he still teaching?) from touring musicians. And he got Khn de Poitrine onto the stage, booking the students’ band to play Zappa covers in restaurants in downtown Quebec – taking St. Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast to the pancake house – and getting them used to playing under stage lights.

“He told us stories about life on the road in the ‘70s,” says Khn. “Outside of his school duties, he pushed us into our first gigs where we were getting paid to play to a real audience. It made us feel proud, but also self-conscious, opening for 50-year-old fellas with experience. I keep strong memories of those years.”

There are all kinds of guitar heroes in this world. Some tear apart their fireplace and make their own guitar with the wood. Others invent an entirely new way of playing the guitar. For Khn it was that highly strung teacher in cowboy boots with rolling tobacco in his pocket.

“Someone passing down knowledge and sharing a passion with such generosity would be my definition of a guitar hero,” says Khn.

For a generation of a math-rock heads with a taste for the theatrical, Khn de Poitrine might well have invented a new kind – the player who made microtonal guitar mainstream?

Agnine de Poitrine have described their sound as a ‘mantra-rock dada Pythago-cubist orchestra’, some have called it alien, but MusicRadar has broken down the musicology behind Fabienk, from their Vol. II EP, and what it is is “pure maths”. That teacher sure taught Khn how to count.

You can buy the latest issue of Guitar World here – better still you can subscribe and save a heap of money.

Bootsy Collins, be-shaded bass legend who has played with James Brown, George Clinton and a list of people far too long to go into here, has a funk/metal concept album out about mental health called, er, Metal Health.

As you’d expect from such a keen collaborator, it features a number of big names, including Eric Gales, Metallica’s Robert Trujillo and the actor Samuel L Jackson, but his main foil on the project is Buckethead.

In an interview with the Appetite For Distortion podcast, Collins has explained what the eccentric guitarist, best known for his stint in Chinese Democracy-era Guns N’ Roses, is really like.

"He is the most pleasant person you could ever be with," Collins insisted. "He's so humble. You can't say enough good things about him. And he really can't help the fact that that's where he's at and that's where he's been at. And then if you come up with words to call him, then that's on you."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPrwjxeSA0A

Buckethead’s reputation for oddness goes before him – there’s the fact he’s never seen without his mask and the bloomin’ great KFC bucket on his head, for starters. But he’s also rarely given interviews and when he has done them he’s preferred to speak ‘through’ his guitar. He and Collins go back to the 1990s and the bass icon seems to be among the few people in the music industry who know him personally.

Invariably, Collins says, people pre-judge Buckethead. "Because he's not trying to be a rock star, he's not trying to be anybody else. He's not trying to do that. He's found himself early, and people called him a freak.

"So, he's had enough time to get used to that, because I'm like, 'Bucket, how are you gonna walk around looking like this and don't expect people to call you a freak?' And then we laugh about it. But getting over that hump, it just takes time. And it's a spiritual thing, as well."

The pair have established a firm friendship over the years. "It's like, I know when he's talking a little sideways and he knows when I'm talking a little sideways. And that's a good feeling for somebody to know what you mean – without doubting you or questioning you or calling you crazy. We face that every day every single day."

"Imagine what Bucket faces every day, because he don't talk to people. We talk, but I'm talking about just people in general. But that's not a gimmick – he talks with his guitar. And that's pretty much it."

We don’t often hear Mick Jagger provide an in-depth breakdown of a Stones song. But that’s exactly what he – with the help of producer Andrew Watt – has done on a new Behind The Song video for Variety.

It’s not about an old classic, but Mr Charm from the current Foreign Tongues album.

Apparently, the track started from a riff that Jagger asked keyboard player Matt Clifford to add a beat to. The singer then recorded a demo that he shared with Keith Richards: “Then my riff is still in the song. It’s not the dominant riff of the song anymore, because Keith came up with a really good riff.

"He made it so much better. So that’s his job, ha ha!”

“I think it’s really amazing how Keith hears grooves,” adds Watt, playing the bassline that the guitarist came up with for the song. “It wasn’t what the demo was. He’s turned it into something else.”

One of the most fascinating parts of the breakdown is where Watt talks about how Keith and Ronnie Wood’s guitar parts complement each other. “In this song in particular, (you can hear) the thing that they do so well, when they’re weaving together and listening to each other and responding to each other is alive and well.”

“Ronnie’s guitar part came from hearing Keith’s riff,” the producer says, before playing the guitarists’ isolated parts.

Steve Winwood guests on the track, playing his Hammond B-3 and Watt remembers the ex-Traffic man bringing in some congas into the studio that Jimmy Miller – producer of the Stones run of classic albums in the late 60s and early 70s – had gifted him.

The pair then get talking about percussion and Jagger - looking more spry than an 83-year-old has any right to - recalls how he was taught to play maracas by Bo Diddley’s player Jerome Green.

Anyway, it’s an intriguing look at one of the new album’s standouts, and up on YouTube now.

Don’t be alarmed by that lightning on the horizon, by the peel of thunder in the skies overhead, that’s just the gods alerting us to the new that Yngwie Malmsteen – the latter-day Mozart of neoclassical shred guitar – has announced a new album.

This record is called Hell Or High Water. Mr Malmsteen has shared the video for its first single, and it will hit stores worldwide on November 13 via Music Theories Recordings/Artone Label Group.

Malmsteen is not someone who typically enjoys the easy life. He's always got a Stratocaster in hand. Right now he's preparing for the road again, with September dates upcoming in China and Japan. He has a work ethic all right, but even so, Hell Or High Water was a significant undertaking.

He went to the mattresses for this one, holing up in his studio as the seasons passed, and… Well, he wrote a lot of songs.

“I realised it was better to focus completely uninterrupted, so I stayed at home to write this album over the course of eight months,” he says. “I had around 80 or 90 tracks finished, and then I had to decide which ones were the strongest.”

Nine made the cut. Among them is lead single Now Or Never, which is a typically orchestra-coded work of power metal (or plain old capital H, capital M ‘Heavy Metal’ in old money) that finds Malmsteen back on the mic.

We talk about Malmsteen’s solos tearing the fabric of time, or metaphorically bombarding the nucleus with neutrons in search of some kind of baroque atomic epiphany. Such creative energies can be hard to marshal into musical ideas, at least for us mortals, but Malmsteen says they’re always just there within reach.

“Even without a guitar in my hands, the music just comes to me,” he says. “It’s like that movie Amadeus.”

Not that he is explicitly comparing himself to Mozart. There are some crucial differences in how these ideas arrive.

“Mozart was getting music given to him in complete form,” explains Malmsteen. “I understand the building blocks and can therefore build you anything you like.”

Consider him your very own shred jukebox. He can compose to order. No request too tough.

“If you asked me to write you a death metal song, call me back in five minutes, and I’d have it ready for you,” he promises. “You want country and western or reggae? No problem. I can give you whatever you want.

“The language of music is simple. There are certain notes that belong together in whatever stylistic direction and sound pleasant to the ear. The ideas don’t come all the time, but when they do, it’s like an avalanche. The pieces I choose for my records are like gifts that I capture because they amaze me. I’m very lucky in that sense.”

Some of these songs speak to Malmsteen’s preoccupations with the classics, such as Antikythera, a track referencing the analogue computer built of bronze and found in Greece 200BC, or Beyond Zeta Reticuli, which casts Malmsteen’s gaze to the heavens, and a star system some 39 light years from Earth.

Others are more personal, such as Father, which was written and recorded as a tribute to his dad, who died last year – and to whom the entire album is dedicated.

“He was an amazing man,” says Malmsteen. “I was proud to have him as a father, and I loved him. I wanted to dedicate all of this to him, and that one particular track is for him. I wanted others to feel what I felt when they hear it.

“Nicola Paganini once said, ‘One must feel strongly in order to make others feel strongly’. It’s one thing to be a typewriter and another thing to be someone who writes stories that can touch people. That was always the point.”

For more information, head over to the official Yngwie Malmsteen website.

Slash has revealed that he and Ozzy Osbourne had discussed getting into a studio together and making music after the late Black Sabbath frontman made his bow at the band’s epic Back To The Beginning show at Villa Park.

That historic metal all-dayer brought the curtain down on Ozzy and Sabbath’s career, with the Double O holding court from a specially constructed throne. His health issues forced him to perform seated.

Just 17 days later, Ozzy had passed away, aged 76. But speaking to Rolling Stone Australia & New Zealand, Slash says that he and Ozzy had spoken after the gig and had agreed that they should do something together once he got back from his Guns N’ Roses commitments.

“I talked to Ozzy. Ozzy and I have been buddies for a long time, and I recorded with him a bunch of times, and performed with him and stuff,” says Slash. “And so we talked on the phone about getting together to do it. He said, ‘Yeah, we should get together soon.’ And that was the conversation we had on the phone. I guess it was maybe a week after the gig.”

Slash and Guns N’ Roses performed at Back To The Beginning, playing as a five-piece for the first time since 1990, with keys/synth players Dizzy Reed and Melissa Reese sitting it out (initially, it was only going to be Slash and GNR bassist Duff McKagan playing).

“I’ve never witnessed anything in my career so far that was this special, as that particular event,” says Slash.

They played four Black Sabbath tracks – a shortened version of It’s Alright segueing into Never Say Die, Junior’s Eye then Sabbath Bloody Sabbath – before closing their set with the one-two punch of Appetite For Destruction classics Welcome To The Jungle and Paradise City.

Slash says he made a point of going backstage to see Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi. But he also had the honour of introducing GNR frontman Axl Rose to Ozzy for the first time. Remarkably, they had never met.

“Everybody wanted to go back and pay homage to Ozzy,” says Slash. “I got Axl back there to meet Ozzy for the first time, ‘cos they never met each other. And Axl, obviously, was always a fan of Ozzy, but what Axl didn’t know was Ozzy was a huge fan of his, and so it was nice to see them actually meet.”

This was the last time Slash saw Ozzy. Speaking on the phone, he just assumed that they would see each other again, and put something in the diary for the studio.

“I was sort of like, ‘Okay then, at some point we’ll converge on a studio somewhere.’ And that was it!” says Slash. “Then I went off. I was on the road with Guns, so we went off and finished what we were doing. And then, all of a sudden, I got that fucking phone call. I was like, ‘Jesus Christ!’ It was unbelievable.”

Ozzy and Slash had were both guests on Alice Cooper’s Hey Stoopid, and on Motörhead’s I Ain’t No Nice Guy, with each showing up on the other’s albums.

Ozzy sang on Slash’s Crucify The Dead, from his eponymous 2010 solo album. Slash played on two tracks from Ozzy’s 2020 studio album, guesting on Straight To Hell and joining Elton John on the title track.

Epiphone and Marcus King have teamed up for a super-cool signature acoustic guitar based on his first ever guitar, the El Dorado – the gift from his father that he started his playing career on, and the guitar he named his debut solo album after.

This one is a doozy. It is a limited run, so get it while it’s hot. It has an all-solid build, with spruce on top, rosewood on the back and sides, with a soundhole-mounted LR Baggs Element Bronze acoustic guitar pickup system making it ready for the stage – and a custom pickguard and Antique Natural finish that makes this guitar ready for its close-up.

Now, the Gibson/Epiphone acoustic family tree is not short of photogenic pickguards. There’s the Dove, the Hummingbird, the SJ-200… But King’s El Dorado is something else.

“This guitar means the world to me,” says Kind. “My first El Dorado was a gift from my father, and it carried me through some of the earliest and most important moments of my musical journey. It has always represented family, home, and the songs that shaped me.”

King’s guitars are like an extension of the family. Just think of Big Red, the 1962 ES-345 that was passed down from his King's grandfather to his father, then onto him.

Gibson made a Custom Shop signature guitar from it, then a stripped down King signature ES-345 that removed the Varitone and “fixed” the Maestro Vibrola that was installed incorrectly on the original model.

Playing Big Red was a way of King carrying on his grandfather’s legacy. Those picking up this El Dorado are invited to write their own legacy on the instrument.

“I hope this guitar inspires people to write their own stories for years to come,” says King.

But what about the El Dorado itself? Historically, this is an Epiphone acoustic with some DNA related to the Gibson Hummingbird. That square-shouldered dreadnought shape is similar.

And yet the El Dorado has a 25.5” scale, whereas the Hummingbird has the more commonly found Gibson scale of 24.75”.

Also, there are some other interesting details to note here. Look at the headstock.

One of the most welcome developments in the contemporary Epiphone catalogue has been the return of the Kalamazoo headstocks on the Inspired By Gibson lineup. We do not have this here – and that’s cool by us.

The headstock on King’s El Dorado matches the spec of his Japanese-made original, and there is a volute on the neck.

This has the look of a high-end build, from the four-ply binding on the body’s top to the MOP Tennessee and South Carolina inlays on its ‘belly down’ rosewood bridge – not to mention those soft block inlays and three-ply binding on the fingerboard.

Elsewhere, you’ve got a compensated bone nut, Epiphone Deluxe tuners with nickel buttons, King’s signature on gold on the back of the headstock, and the price also includes a signature hard-shell guitar case.

Speaking of which, King's El Dorado will set you back £949/$999, which seems like a pretty sweet deal. This is one fine-looking instrument.

Find out more at Epiphone.

Corrosion of Conformity guitarist Pepper Keenan has let slip that he auditioned to dep James Hetfield for Metallica back in the early 1990s.

We know that he was one of the many names that were tried out when the group were searching for a replacement for bassist Jason Newsted in the early Noughties. But it seems that ten years earlier, Keenan was in the frame to handle six-string duties. This was when Hetfield had second-degree burns after an incident when he stepped on a pyro whilst they were on tour with Guns N’ Roses.

Keenan spoke about this episode on the Garza podcast. "We were on tour with the Rollins Band, CoC was," he recalled. "My phone rang in my hotel at three in the morning and it was fucking Q Prime [Metallica's management]

"They were putting the feelers out and trying to find guitar players who could come in and play guitar.”

"I was like, 'Bro. For one thing, it's a fucking stadium tour. Metallica's never been tighter in their entire fucking lives and you want some yahoos to come jump in and try and be Hetfield? Is that what you're saying?' And they're like, 'Yeah'."

And so Keenan broke off from Corrosion’s tour with Rollins and flew to Denver, Colorado, to audition for the thrash metal superstars, who were facing a significant financial loss if they cancelled or postponed the rest of the tour.

"My suggestion was that we split it in half with one of the Sepultura boys, split the set in half,” he remembers. “This was crazy talking - they're losing a million bucks a fucking day each day they ain't playing. This was real shit, and I'm a fucking 20-year-old dude, sitting in the place in Denver, top secret bunker and they got the gear in there and shit.”

Sepultura’s Andreas Kisser also auditioned for the role, as did a few other guitarists. But in the end, it was decided to reschedule just six of the shows. Hetfield returned though he had to wear a thick bandage on his arm and his guitar parts were played by Kirk Hammett’s guitar tech John Marshall.

A decade later, Keenan auditioned for bass, though as he told Guitar World earlier this year, that didn’t quite work out either: “There was one part in the movie where they made me play bass on a new song,” he revealed. “I guess they were trying to stump me with something I’d never heard before… St Anger or some shit like that. It was a drop-tuned song and I hit the blower knob on my bass and just blasted through.”

“They were like ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ It sounded as heavy as lead to me, totally ripping from all the overdrive on my short-scale SG bass set to the front pickup. I can still see them shaking their heads. I knew I’d lost the gig right there.”

Albert Collins did not take any prisoners. The master of the Telecaster was blues guitar’s Iceman. Collins was also one of its great iconoclasts, tuning his guitar to open F minor and using a capo.

He would pick at the notes with his thumb and index finger and when he really went for it the audience would know all about it. Everyone would. Joe Bonamassa says there is no better example of a guitar player who knew how to wield his instrument “as a weapon” – and he learned at first hand just how powerful this was.

Appearing on the superlative No Cover Charge podcast, hosted by Jared James Nichols and Tyler Larson of Music Is Win, Bonamassa recalled a formative experience onstage with Collins. He was no older than 13 but Collins showed him no mercy.

“Guitars are great, ‘cos you can use them to coddle people, but you can also use them as a weapon – and I love using guitars as a weapon,” says Bonamassa. “You know who the best at that? Albert Collins. That was a weapon. They didn’t call him the Iceman for nothing. I mean, I was on the receiving end when I was a kid. I was, like, about 12 or 13 years old, and I got asked to sit in with Albert, at the Silver Lake New York Blues Festival and Hog Roast.

“The year prior, I met Danny Gatton, and so I got asked back to come sit in, and they convinced Albert Collins to let me sit in. And he taught me the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned onstage.”

The previous year’s festival had been one of the pivotal moments in Bonamassa’s career. He recalls playing half of the set with the Cold Shot Blues Band, and seeing this guy in a John Deere hat watching him. Bonamassa thinks nothing of it. It’s probably just the sound guy, is what he’s thinking. But it’s not. It was Danny Gatton. And Gatton liked what he saw.

He would become a mentor to the young Bonamassa – who was then just 11 years old, soon to 12. Bonamassa has credited Gatton with broadening his musical horizons.

Bonamassa would play onstage with Gatton at Silver Lake, and get invited out to play with him at clubs, learning how it all worked under the lights.

He would do so again with Collins. It didn’t get much better than this. Bonamassa’s choice of guitar for the show speaks to the influence of Eric Clapton.

“At the time, I worshipped all those records; the Showdown! record, Ice Pickin’, Frosty... All that,” says Bonamassa. “I got up on stage, and I had my little, USA Strat with Lace Sensors, and my Sunn Beta Lead solid-state 4x12 amp.”

Bonamassa puts the year at 1990 or ’91, “prime-time Albert Collins” when he was backed by the Icebreakers featuring Debbie Davies on guitar. He had his stagecraft down to a tee.

“He had that Tele and a [Fender] Quad Reverb and about a 150-foot cable, ‘cos he would go out into the crowd,” recalls Bonamassa.

Collins did not just play a note and let it sit there. He worked it until it worked the crowd. And it also did its work on the young Joe Bonamassa. Who, let’s remember, has got all these prodigious chops but in terms of life experiences, he is up onstage with a real-life superhero in his pomp.

“He stung a note like [plays note]. He did all that Albert Collins shit, but he kept stinging the note,” says Bonamassa. “I mean, he pointed the Tele like this at me. Joe was like, I'm like this little kid in the cowboy hat. I'm like, you know, it was him going, Welcome to the big leagues, kid. Yeah. I don’t care how old you are. To be up here requires a certain amount of intestinal fortitude and I’m testing you to see if you had it.’”

Collins knew what he as doing. He knew Bonamassa would have it too. Over the years the blues greats have always relished bringing on the next generation. Collins did something similar to Australian blues-rocker Nathan Cavaleri when he jammed with him in ’92 at the San Francisco Blues Festival. Quinn Sullivan says jamming with Buddy Guy at the age of eight was a life-changing experience.

Sure they all felt some panic. Bonamassa did too.

“The only thing I could think of was [plays note] do my best Albert impression but his thing was awesome, because he tuned to open F, and had a really primitive capo, kind of gnarly, and I don’t know how he was able to the strings from moving. He would bend and not have the strings just move into another position. I don’t know how he did it.”

It wasn’t just the capo and the open tunings. Look at the pictures and the video footage of Collins playing guitar and he notably left the bridge cover on his Telecaster on. Most players take this cover – the “ashtray” on the ashtray-style bridge – off, so they could palm-mute the strings. Collins didn’t do that, and it meant he had to address the strings from a different angle.

Bonamassa says he conducted a “deep dive” experiment into this back during Covid, getting a Tele, an old Fender amp, leaving the cover on the Telecaster bridge and playing fingerstyle Albert Collins licks. It made audible difference to the tone.

“When you put the cover on it, it sounds more like there is some kind of resonance that gave it more... And it was also a lack of being able to palm-mute. It’s all about the gear that you choose, but most importantly, it’s the technique that you use with your hands, the tactility of it.”

In other Bonamassa news, the blues superstar recently sat down with MusicRadar to discuss his Damascene conversion to the merits of digital guitar amps, with his live rig now featuring all-digital Fender Tone Master Twins alongside his battery of vintage and rare tube amps.

“When I first plugged into it, I realised this shit’s good,” he said. “I wanted to dislike it, I really wanted to dislike it! But I couldn’t. My production manager, my sound tech, even my other guitar player Josh Smith – they were all telling me it sounds better and feels right. And I was like, ‘I know!’”

• Joe Bonamassa's new live album The Spirit of Rory Live From Cork is out now via J&R Adventures.

Chris Payton is one of the pop world’s first-call session pros. He has played with Katy Perry. He has played with Jay-Z. And right about now he is surely kicking back after just completing the epic European leg of Bruno Mar’s The Romantic Tour, which packed out stadiums night after night.

There were six nights at Wembley Stadium, two at Milan’s San Siro, two at the Metropolitano in Madrid… Payton and Mars’ summer schedule was more Champions League than Soul Train. But what does Payton have on his rig to play these shows?

Ahead of his shows in Milan, we got a look thanks to Planet Guitar, who shot a rig-rundown with Payton, and with his tech, who is overseeing a rig that’s got one seriously expensive wireless systems, three Kempers, and some super smart routing.

But it was Payton’s electric guitars that caught our eye. His choices here – and the mods he has made to them – are pretty darn imaginative, but practical too.

It’s like he says, he needs these guitars to be versatile.

“Well, we have an array of guitars, because Bruno’s style, it’s so vast,” says Payton. “It goes from pop to funk to soul, R&B and all that stuff, so you want to be able to cover as many bases as you possibly can.”

The first guitar he shows us is a Fender American Elite Stratocaster HSS from 2016. This guitar is already one versatile design, not only with its pickup configuration, but you’ve got the S1 switch offering all those alternate tones, and you have the push-push Passing Lane button for the Shawbucker bridge humbucker, bypassing the guitar’s tone and volume pots for a brighter tone with more output.

Payton’s, however, doesn’t work quite like that. For a start, he’s got Lambertone pickups in it. Secondly, there’s a clever mod on the S1 switch.

“Okay, a little secret I like to do on a lot of my guitars, is I like to wire it to where I can have these two guys [bridge and neck pickup] at the same time – almost like a super switch, but not,” he says. “So that’s what the S-1 is doing; the S-1 activates the bridge in any position. And [the Passing Lane button] is just a coil tap for the humbucker.”

And this is just his backup Strat. His number one is a sunburst S-style made by the Californian boutique guitar company, Iconic Guitars.

“This has become my favourite over time,” he says. “Man, these guys are pretty special, because they pretty much hand-make everything. They’re out of California, a little custom shop kind of thing, but, man, they just make really, really good quality guitars.”

Again, there’s a mod. That 5-way pickup switch is not what it appears to be.

“My other little secret is, this right here, this position, that’s supposed to be the neck, right? It’s not. It’s my middle pickup – just because I’m always in this position for the set, going from lead stuff to main stuff, it makes it easy.”

This being a Payton rig, there are of course some PRS Guitars, whom he has endorsed since 2011, including Mark Lettieri’s Fiore signature guitar – “ this guitar, it just speaks for itself” – and the Special Semi-Hollow.

“Man, this guitar can do anything,” says Payton. “With the middle pickup, the dual splitting humbuckers, I can get any tone I want out of this guitar. If I just had to take one guitar, that would be the guitar. But I don’t have to!”

There’s also a Heritage H-535, left stock, and a stunning Collings I-35 semi-hollow that was a gift from Mars (one thing we learned from this is that Mars is a superfan of Wayne Collings’ high-end builds – he owns several).

But again, it goes back to the Stratocaster HSS, with a circa ’21/’22 American Ultra with a Seymour Duncan Exciter humbucker at the bridge. Payton kept the wiring stock, and leaves this in Eb for Runaway Baby. But it’s the modded American Elite that

Check out the video for more on these guitars and, crucially, where what their signal gets sent through. It’s indicative of just how challenging it is to put a rig together for a stadium production when you’re playing a two-hours set split into three acts, with songs from across an artist’s career.

Tony Iommi has confirmed that Brian May will guest on his forthcoming solo album, From The Dark, with the Queen guitarist contributing a solo to one of its doomiest tracks.

The Black Sabbath guitarist and godfather of heavy metal announced his long-awaited solo album last week with a livestreamed event and a new single, World Alone. From The Dark drops on October 23 via BMG. and finds Iommi accompanied by Jorn Lande on vocals, Becky Baldwin on bass guitar, and Karl Brazil on drums.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Iommi reveals that May plays on a track called Death Wake, a track with a “weird riff” and solo hot from the Red Special – and May had the option of playing more on the album, but politely refused.

“I did say to him, ‘Do you want to play on something else?’ He said, ‘No, no. Your solos are good. I don’t need to play,’” But it was great that he did,” says Iommi.

Iommi says May is the only high-profile guest on the album. He wanted to keep the project “like a band”. He did, however, want Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler to play on it but he was unavailable. And time was marching on.

“I wanted him to play on this album, but he couldn’t do it,” says Iommi. “He’s doing his own album, I think. Or at the time, something happened there, so he couldn’t come to England. I wanted to get it done and finally get it out, really.”

Iommi says Baldwin, who is both A) a Geezer Butler superfan and B) from Sabbath’s hometown Birmingham, was the perfect choice. Her style is heavily informed by Butler’s playing. “I thought let’s give it a try. And she was good,” he says.

So, too, was May. Though he needed a bit of reassurance.

“It was great that he did,” says Iommi. “I just played him a couple of things, and [he] done it here at the studio in my house. Then of course he’d play something and go, ‘Oh, I don’t know about it.’ I go, ‘I like it.’”

May guested on Iommi’s 2000 self-titled album, playing alongside the Cult’s Ian Astbury on Flame On, and with Dave Grohl on Goodbye Lament.

But the pair go way, way back.

“In the very early ‘70s, he was in one studio, and I was in another. And we just hit it off,” Iommi tells Rolling Stone. “We’ve been friends for, God, nearly 60 years. We stay in touch all the time. He’s played onstage a couple of times with me, and then we’ve done a couple of album tracks we played on together. He’s a very, very close friend.”

Check out the video for World Alone above, and find out more at Iommi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richie Sambora has used what some might see as a slightly unfortunate analogy when asked for his advice for aspiring guitarists.

This came in a video posted on Sambora's own YouTube channel, in which the ex-Bon Jovi guitarist answered questions from fans. Sambora began by saying: "Good listening habits… Try to have one in your hand as much as possible, maybe more than girls. Because if you really look at a shape of a guitar, it's really like a woman, you know what I mean?"

Sambora isn't the first person to refer to the guitar in feminine terms – you'll find plenty of Reddit threads out there lampooning the many others that do, too – though there's a certain irony in the fact that the standard guitar shape is one that many women actually find uncomfortable to play. This actually inspired St Vincent to design her Ernie Ball Music Man to better fit the female body shape, and this found a fan in Olivia Rodrigo, who used it on her Guts world tour.

“I read an interview about it, and she made a guitar that's specifically designed for women, because she plays her guitar really high up,” Rodrigo told the Music Makes Us podcast last year. “And it's cut so that you can have boobs and play guitar, which is so awesome.”

Anyway, back to Sambora, because fortunately, the rest of what the 67-year-old guitarist had to say was rather more interesting. “`Just play. Learn the fundamentals first,” he said, before talking about his main inspirations.

“For me Jimi Hendrix was the epitome of improvisation. That was what I wanted… I listened to those records, especially the live ones like Band Of Gypsys over and over and over again. Then I moved on to Texas blues with Johnny Winter and the Allman Brothers. And then moved backwards to Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, Albert King, BB King.”

Moving off the subject of guitarists, Sambora also found time to praise Rod Stewart. “I went to see him the other night and we were catching up and we had the greatest time. I looked at him and said: ‘every time I hear your voice, every time… it just makes me happy.'”

The guitarist hasn’t released any new music since Radio Free America, his 2018 collaboration with Oranthi under the name RSO. In recent years, though, he has had a good excuse – he spent a period of time caring for his octogenarian mother, and in 2025 sustained a double fracture of his hand after playing touch football with his neighbours, an injury which required surgery and a lengthy recovery.

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

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

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

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

For a start, there was no punch-up.

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

That was one rumour put to bed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The life of a guitar tech is not all glamour. They get to travel but there’s too much going on to go sightseeing. They hang out with the band but there’s too much going wrong to goof off. And the job has only grown over the years as live rigs grow more complicated, stage shows more professional.

But back in the day it was a riot. You did not know what might happen next – especially when Jimi Hendrix was your client.

In an extract from his forthcoming book, Experienced: On the Road with Jimi Hendrix and Beyond, published in The Times, the legendary tour manager Eric Barrett remembers his time as Hendrix’s guitar tech and the adventures – and misadventures – that this entailed.

There are are drug stories, tales of when Hendrix met Paul McCartney, and what the world’s greatest player was like when he was away from the stage, his generosity and humour, and how uncomfortable he was with his burgeoning star status. The Hendrix Barrett knew is the Hendrix we imagine; he was most happy when he had an electric guitar in his hands.

Not that this did not come without the occasional near-disaster, and one incident at the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s incendiary performance at the 1970 Isle Of Wight Festival stands out – when Barrett not only saved the set, but well… We’ll let him tell the story. It is one of the few times the tech gets the glory, when a few songs into his set, Hendrix found himself in need of some help.

“He looked over and gestured at me. It wasn’t a gesture I recognised, not part of the wordless lexicon we’d developed,” recalled Barrett. “Jimi moved over to the side of the stage as he played and said, ‘Can you get me a safety pin and a towel?’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘I’ve split my pants. And I’m not wearing any underwear.’”

Hendrix was playing in front of a phalanx of Marshall Super Leads, full stacks, head, and stacked 4x12s. That would give him enough cover to fix his trousers. Hendrix, writes Barrett, wore his velvet bellbottoms everywhere, even on the beach.

Hendrix was still playing when Barrett got to him, towel and pin in hand, and he had no intention of stopping the song. Barrett would have to step up.

“He was in the middle of a song, so he placed my fingers on the fretboard and shouted in my ear: ‘Grab the whammy bar, vibrate it back and forth,’” writes Barrett. “With his hands free, Jimi wrapped the towel I’d given him around his waist and dropped his trousers.”

What an image. The audience were blissfully unaware. But Hendrix and Barrett did have an audience. There was the crew, the other bands looking on. Pete Townshend from The Who was one of those at the side of the stage, buckled with laughter at the scene in front of them.

“With his trousers around his knees, Jimi paused repairs to take over playing the guitar for a few moments,” continues Barrett. “Then he placed my fingers back on the frets to shape a new chord and let me go to town on the whammy bar again. I got so into the feedback coming out of the amps, I started smacking the guitar with my fist.”

Hendrix got his trousers back together, got back out front, finished the show. Barrett could sit back and bask in the afterglow.

“For a few glorious moments I’d played lead guitar for the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the largest music festival yet staged,” he writes.

Three weeks later it all came crashing down. Hendrix was dead, aged 27.

Experienced: On The Road With Jimi Hendrix And Beyond is out August 4 via Diversion Books.

Black Sabbath fans, assemble, our lord and master of the riff Tony Iommi has just announced a new solo album. Titled From The Dark, it drops on October 23, but you can check out the first single, World Alone, now.

This is vintage Iommi. He has the Norwegian vocalist Jørn Lande on the mic, whom some will know from his eponymous hard rock project, or from fronting power metallers Pentakill. Others will remember him from when he stepped in to take Ronnie James Dio’s spot to fulfil Heaven & Hell’s 2010 touring commitments after the death of the legendary metal frontman. Here, Iommi gives him plenty to work with.

Thematically, the video follows The Believer through a retro-futuristic dystopia in which, like Jeff Bridges in Tron, he is thrown into a videogame, and has to save his own life and find salvation in the process.

Iommi has made mention that he has a solo album percolating in the background but he has had a full schedule. There have been his Black Sabbath commitments, with the Birmingham metal godfathers bringing down the curtain on their career at Back To The Beginning last year, the metal all-dayer to end all metal all-dayers. Just 17 days later, Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne died.

Iommi had been working on perfume lines, in ballet, too, when he teamed up with the Birmingham Royal Ballet to rework Sabbath’s early work in dance. Then there was the Gibson documentary and the reissue of his signature Gibson pickups. Finally, the album is ready.

“It’s an album we’ve really enjoyed making,” says Iommi. “We’re not trying to prove anything – it's a great album, it rocks!”

From The Dark was produced by Iommi with his long-standing tech, cowriter and engineering whiz Mike Exeter. Becky Baldwin of UK thrashers Fury and Mercyful Fate plays bass guitar. Karl Brazil, who played on Iommi’s 2024 single, Deified, returns on drums. Deified, however, does not. It remains a standalone single. Lande handles the album’s lyrics. Expect existentialism, “nautical metaphors” and downtuned riffola. World Alone is more uptempo but you can be rest assured there will be some low and slow doomy groovers.

Iommi is unveiling From The Dark in his hometown Birmingham, in a livestreaming event. Check it out above – and check out the video for the single above. Iommi will be releasing World Alone on foil-sleeved 7” vinyl, with an instrumental version on Side B. Gibson is adding it to the catalogue of songs you can learn on the Gibson App. From The Dark will be released in various formats, including deluxe gatefold vinyl.

See Iommi for more.

There are all kinds of things that make a song heavy but it’s never just about high-gain electric guitar, tuning down and turning up. If it was then it would be easy. And heavy music doesn’t come easy.

Kirk Hammett knows this. Metallica has had their share of heavy tracks. The Thing That Should Not Be and Harvester Of Sorrow are front-to-back heavy. Sad But True perfects the art of heaviness in box-office stadium metal.

As an album, the impenetrably dense …And Justice For All has something to it that is undeniably heavy – this great wall of guitars, James Hetfield’s stentorian bark delivering über-bleak verse, while Lars Ulrich’s biscuit-tin snare hammers through a cold and hostile mix almost wholly absent of Jason Newsted’s bass guitar.

And then there are those moments; the bridge in The Four Horseman, ditto Creeping Death, the shock and awe as For Whom The Bell Tolls heaves itself into a groove. It says something that here the tempo is dialled back. Heaviness can prove elusive when the tempo is frantic. Aggression takes over.

So yes, Metallica have had their moments, but when Total Guitar caught up with Hammett in 2020, he said that he was still trying to write the perfect heavy song, to summon the very quintessence of heavy in a riff. And he had just spoken to a man who did just that way back in 1969.

Hammett was on the phone to pay tribute to the late Fleetwood Mac co-founder Peter Green, whose famous Les Paul Standard, Greeny, is now in his possession. Some months before Green died, Hammett visited him, Greeny in tow, to pay his dues to one of blues-rock’s founding fathers.

The visit is a story for another day but the conversation with Hammett moved to a Fleetwood Mac classic that he was scheduled to play with Billy Gibbons at the Peter Green Tribute Concert at the London Palladium – and it is a song that has possessed him ever since he first heard it.

When we sift Green’s discography for inspiration, we can hear what is being done, but how? That’s the question. Green’s writing would seesaw between light and darkness, between the briny calm of Albatross and the urgent fury of Oh Well, the invigorating electric slide on the Elmore James cover Shake Your Moneymaker, the crestfallen Man Of The World. Towards Green’s final days in Fleetwood Mac, the darkness was winning.

That’s when fame, among other things, was warping everyone’s perspective. LSD enters the picture, ultimately overwhelming Green, but not before he had written The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown) – the song that captured Hammett in its spell, and, he argues, showed metal what heaviness sounded like.

The Green Manalishi was written in 1969, supposedly inspired by a lysergic nightmare about an undead dog that kept barking, and the song came to Green in the immediate moments after waking up. It’s quite the story; there are shades of Son of Sam to it. Green later revealed the themes were more about the corrupting influence of money, the root of all evil.

The backstory only goes some way to explaining the darkness in Green’s arrangements, in his haunted poetry and a riff that teaches us many lessons, chief among them that heaviness is not contingent on a Peavey 6505 head and tuning down to C. That it is about atmosphere and feel, a morbid sensibility.

“You’re so spot on with that song,” said Hammett. “To me, that song is so incredibly heavy. High-gain amps, high-output pickups, none of that stuff existed. That song sounds so incredibly dark, and so incredibly heavy, and it is atmospheric and it gets straight to the darkest parts of one’s psyche. That’s what happened to me.”

Hammett sounds like he’s getting goosebumps just talking about it.

“It just goes so deep in me,” he said. “And that song has so much voodoo in it. It sounded like it was written under a full moon, in a circle with candles, with him and the candles lit all around him, just him and the guitar…”

Hammett discovered the song as many metalheads did, through Judas Priest, who covered it on 1979’s Killing Machine (released as Hell Bent For Leather in the US), and most famously on the Metal Gods’ essential live album, Unleashed In The East, which was released later that year.

KK Downing and Glenn Tipton’s twin-guitar treatment transform it. If Green’s was nightmarish and psychedelic, rooted in the blues mythos, Judas Priest reinvented The Green Manalishi with a polished-steel production, dialling up the tempo and placing Rob Halford’s peerless vocals front and centre. It would become a staple of their live show.

In the punishing heat and humidity of the 1985 Philadelphia summer, Chevy Chase introducing them to the stage at Live Aid as Judas Priest performed it in a three-song set. The darkness cooked that day.

Priest superfans Corrosion Of Conformity covered it as a secret track on their 1984 debut LP, Eye For An Eye. Pantera used to play it during soundcheck.

The Melvins covered it, too, lacing it with a knowing venom as they stretched it out to nearly seven minutes, performed lower and slower but more in the spirit of the original.

It finds Buzz Osborne going full nocturnal vampire (was King Buzzo channelling the dog that visited Green in the night?), the Washington state alt-rock institution leaning into the uncanny vibe and latent avant-gardism of the original, reimagining Green’s ghostly vocals as a squall of noise to conclude the track.

Great songs endure reinterpretation. In Judas Priest’s hands, The Green Manalishi is chromium-plated, total metal. The Melvins drew out its weirdness and the weight of the riff.

For Hammett, the fact The Green Manalishi could be performed in a Fleetwood Mac set alongside blues standards and not be out of place just demonstrates how short the distance is between blues and metal.

“That song should have been the soundtrack to Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil,” said Hammett. “Green Manalishi reminds me of the darkest Robert Johnson songs. It is right up there with Hellhounds On My Trail, Me And The Devil Blues. It’s just right there and it is so heavy and it contributed to the blueprint that so many people jumped on.”

The Green Manalishi came together as the original Fleetwood Mac were coming apart. Green was regularly taking LSD. He was checking out. They were playing it live before they got around to tracking the single. Guitarist Jeremy Spencer sat out the sessions; he didn’t appreciate Green’s didactic manner in the studio, though later admitting to Classic Rock that he should have been “more accommodating”.

“Peter would invite me to the studio with parts mapped out for me,” said Spencer. “But I thought he should just go ahead and do them himself.”

Danny Kirwan was the opposite. He relished working on Green’s compositions. The Green Manalishi was not an easy song to record but Kirwan went the distance. It took 28 takes. Martin Birch, who produced it, was similarly inspired by the material, engineering the intro guitar tone by placing speakers in an underground car park and miking it up for the natural reverb to swallow it, the ambience a proxy for the dream logic that inspired Green in the first place.

The Green Manalishi was Green’s last hurrah with Fleetwood Mac. The song, and everything that had gone into it – everything that had inspired it – had left him drained and spent. “It took me at least two years to recover from that song,” Green said in Martin Celmins’ 1995 biography. “When I listened to it afterwards there was so much power there – it exhausted me.”

The ‘60s came to a chaotic and bloody end. By ’69 the Summer of Love felt like a lifetime ago. The war in Vietnam was ongoing, with no end in sight. There was the Manson Family murders, the carnage at Altamont. The hippie dream was dead and heavy metal was looming on the horizon.

The Beatles’ Helter Skelter and the acid-rock freakouts of Blue Cheer foreshadowed what was to come, before Black Sabbath officially inaugurated it in 1970, just a few months before Fleetwood Mac released The Green Manalishi as a single. Of all the proto-metal of the era, Hammett sees The Green Manalishi as being without equal.

“There wasn’t really much of a precedent for a song like Green Manalishi,” said Hammett. “There was dark stuff that Jimi Hendrix was writing. For sure, Sabbath. But nothing quite like Green Manalishi. Green Manalishi, Oh Well, Black Magic Woman – all blues-rock that later on contributed to hard rock and heavy metal.”

That is where Hammett really jives with Peter Green as a player – a virtuoso who knew the value in economy, in expressing a mood and letting the audience fill in the gaps. As a horror movie obsessive, Hammett can’t get enough darkness, and that is what he hears in Green’s best work.

“You think about those three songs, the subject matter, the content, the arrangements, the atmosphere, how things just switch on a dime, the heaviness and the change of moods, it’s all there,” says Hammett. “It’s all there for heavy metal to eat up and turn into a completely different plate of jello, and thank god, thank fucking God for Peter Green because, for me, his contribution to heavy metal, to the music I play, is so huge, so huge.

“It just took years and a couple of generations for it to filter into heavy metal as we know it today. But still, he put out the blueprint. I can only hope to compose a song like Green Manalishi. I can only hope to. I aspire to do that.”

The debut album by The Jimi Hendrix Experience is many things. As contemporary blues guitarist Samantha Fish said: “Are You Experienced is historically important, innovative, and just such a creative album. Hendrix took us to different places that I don’t think music had been.”

But if anything, Fish slightly understated it. Beginning with this album, Hendrix reinvented guitar.

It’s easy to miss the extent of his genius because many of his innovations are now taken-for-granted guitar techniques, but guitar playing pre-Hendrix was a markedly less interesting world. And no one could sound like him.

We don’t just mean this in the boring sense that every player is unique. Literally no one could sound like Jimi, because Hendrix’s playing required impractical volume levels.

In 1967, that type of amp distortion and feedback couldn’t happen any other way. The Jimi Hendrix Experience were kicked out of recording sessions because of noise complaints, or else producers didn’t know how to record such intense sound pressure levels.

An engineer for John Mayall’s Blues Breakers had described Eric Clapton as “unrecordable”, and that was only a 30 watt combo. Hendrix used a 100 watt stack.

It was only when they moved to Olympic Studios that they found Eddie Kramer, a collaborator with the talent and will to capture Jimi’s full sonic fury.

As Samantha Fish explained in an interview with Total Guitar: “I can’t make a Strat sound like Jimi Hendrix. When I think of Stratocasters in general I think of Stevie Ray Vaughan, and that’s the kind of twang that I get out of it when I when I pick it up.

“Jimi’s tone was so aggressive. It screams in a way that I can’t make a Stratocaster scream, and I think a lot of guitar players might agree with me.”

There were precursors to Hendrix. Buddy Guy had been performing live with distortion and feedback for years, but his label chief Leonard Chess refused to record that way. Hendrix, a veteran of ‘chitlin circuit’ blues clubs, would have seen the likes of Guy at their unfiltered best.

In his session days, Jimi worked as a sideman to Curtis Mayfield, who particularly influenced Jimi with his clean playing and his signature take on chord-melody playing. But none of this detracts from Jimi’s status as a visionary.

Growing up in Kansas City, Samantha Fish was a fan of Hendrix’s songs before she even knew who he was.

She recalled: “Like most kids in the ’90s, I heard Jimi Hendrix on the radio. We didn’t really have a big record collection, but I had heard all the hits. As I got older I realised, ‘Holy hell, all these songs are from the same album!’

“I can’t imagine being 25 and putting out something so prolific. I just think about myself at 25 and the tone he has, the presence he has, the command he has over the guitar – the songs are just so well thought-out.”

Fish’s career began at blues jams, and when she performed Red House, a cornerstone track from Are You Experienced, audiences groaned because the song had been covered so often.

“I would hope that he’d be tickled by that,” she laughed.

Like Hendrix, Fish is rooted in the blues but crosses genres.

“I just write songs and the blues the blues part of it comes through my playing and singing,” she said. “It comes from my foundation and how I learned how to play guitar. If I write a progression that’s kind of poppy I’m going to try and bring this other element to make it something else. I can only imagine Jimi was just writing good songs and putting them out there.”

As to whether Are You Experienced is a blues album, she stated: “It’s blues and beyond. Jimi was paving his own way and creating his own sound. I don’t think genre can really can really confine him or describe him.

“He has some blues licks, some blues phrasing and feeling the way he sings, but he was writing the book on rock’ n’ roll. There have been so many prolific guitar players in the blues historically and I think I think he fits into that too just by way of being so damn beastly on the guitar.”

Are You Experienced was notable for the number of new sounds Hendrix pulled from his guitar. The title track has a noise that sounds like record scratching, a full decade before hip-hop DJs were around, and Third Stone From The Sun has a solo that barely sounds like conventional music, with Hendrix manipulating and controlling feedback using his Strat’s tremolo.

This is an inspiration for Fish’s approach: “He was so innovative with the guitar,” she said. “Even today people aren’t doing the things that he was doing, even via recording and how he was utilising the instrument as a pure effect. Like on the title track [Are You Experienced], it sounds like a remix. Using the guitar not in the traditional sense. He’s putting a texture and a tone on there that gives the song a certain vibe that you can’t get from a solo or riff or guitar chords. He was using it in different ways and making it talk.

“I think every guitar player spends a fair amount of time trying to figure out how the hell he did that. That’s something that I really like to do, and Jimi Hendrix is kind of like the godfather of doing stuff like that.”

Another example was Hendrix’s pioneering backwards guitar.

“He wasn’t the first to record backwards guitar solos,” Fish said, “but he did it in a pretty iconic way.”

George Harrison had beaten Hendrix by a year with I’m Only Sleeping from The Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver, but it had been a painful process. In his memoir, Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick says of the nine-hour session: “We all wished we had never come up with the concept of backwards sounds.”

Hendrix, by contrast, had spent time listening to his guitar recorded backwards to learn how it would sound, and put the Are You Experienced solo together with apparent ease.

Samantha Fish grew up with the US release of Are You Experienced, which added three classic singles – Purple Haze, The Wind Cries Mary and Hey Joe – which were omitted from the UK release. She admired Hendrix’s way of weaving lead lines around chords.

“I think The Wind Cries Mary is one of the most beautiful songs ever written,” she said. "It’s just so delicate and well put together. He’s not just throwing licks out there. He’s playing really melodically and delicately through different chord structures and building memorable melodies. That’s definitely something I strive to do with my solos.”

As a singer-guitarist, Fish recognises that much of Hendrix’s genius was in the interplay between his voice and guitar.

“It’s the way that he arpeggiates chords, like in The Wind Cries Mary,” she said. “He’s sliding up to different chords and his voice is this kind of counterpart to these really intricate guitar patterns.

“On some of his rougher songs there’s so much call and response between his singing and his playing, it’s like two voices talking to each other. BB King is the king of that, but Jimi did it in such a bombastic way that I think goes over a lot of people’s heads. The amount of work he’s doing and the amount of energy he’s putting out by singing and playing in that fashion together – it’s kind of mind-boggling how he was able to do that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sophie Lloyd has marked the first anniversary of Ozzy Osbourne’s death with a full-shred YouTube tribute to the late Prince of Darkness.

If you are familiar with the English virtuoso’s treatment of the popular canon of rock and pop, then you know the drill. This is Lloyd, backed by Marshall and Randall half-stacks, her Kiesel signature guitar in hand, reworking a classic as a guitar instrumental.

She has done Oasis, Pink Floyd, Bon Jovi, Iron Maiden and Metallica – she’s reimagined the Pokémon Theme Song, too. Now you can add Black Sabbath’s Paranoid to the list.

It’s been a minute since Lloyd has posted one of these Shred videos. There has been a lot filling up her calendar, not least her touring schedule as Machine Gun Kelly’s guitarist. Yesterday, one year after we lost Ozzy, was a fitting time to return.

“In loving memory of the Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne,” writes Lloyd. “Thank you for being such a huge inspiration to me from such a young age. Thank you for everything.”

Lloyd’s version is far removed from the eponymous single from Sabbath’s 1970 sophomore album, Paranoid. Her guitar assumes Ozzy’s role as vocalist. Her style is more pyrotechnic than Iommi’s. But as Lloyd explained to MusicRadar in 2022, her process always preserves the melody.

“It’s like having reference points to go back to,” said Lloyd. “I’ll venture out and then go back so the melody is still there. We did Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd, and I really stripped back my shredding and played a lot more melody stuff, and I’ve been playing more with harmonies as well, so that’s been quite fun. It’s something new I’m trying out a little bit because, you know, a lot of those things you don’t want to oversaturate with shred, even though it’s fun.”

Lloyd wasn’t the only player to post a solo guitar tribute on social media. Alex Skolnick of Testament performed a medley of Randy Rhoads’ classical piece Dee and Ozzy power ballad Goodbye To Romance for solo nylon-string guitar, performing it on his Cordoba Iberia GK Studio through a Henriksen Bud 6.

Lloyd is one of the most high-profile YouTube guitarists to have landed high-profile gigs after building a huge audience on the platform.

Her advice to any young player looking to grow their online following: find your own niche and go for it. Posting your first video is the hardest part.

“My first videos look like they were filmed on a potato and the audio quality is awful,” she said. “You’ve got to start somewhere, so I’d say, just go for it as much as you can and have fun with it. Try and develop something unique to you. Look for some sort of gap in the market and try and fill that.”

Lloyd released her debut album, Imposter Syndrome in 2023. You can join 1.27 million others and follow her on YouTube.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wayne Charvel, the legendary luthier who kick-started the hot-rodded electric guitar movement, has died, aged 85.

He leaves behind a formidable legacy. In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Charvel made guitars for Deep Purple, ZZ Top, the Who, Dave Murray of Iron Maiden, Warren De Martini of Ratt, and a young man by the name of Eddie Van Halen. It was Wayne Charvel who built EVH the original yellow-and-black Bumblebee guitar from the cover of 1979’s Van Halen II.

In a statement, Charvel Guitars described its founder as a “visionary whose creativity and craftsmanship helped shape the sound of modern guitar culture”. And that’s no understatement.

Charvel might have long left the company that bears his name but his design aesthetic is writ large across its contemporary catalogue. And his hot-rodding of the Fender Stratocaster – retooling it as a high-performance instrument spec’d for hard rock, heavy metal and the burgeoning shred scene – gave birth to the Superstrat.

Guitar was in the blood. Charvel started playing them when he was five years old. He got his start at the Fender factory in the mid ‘60s.

“After I got married, I quit playing in bands,” said Charvel, speaking to NAMM in 2010. “A couple of my good friends at Fender knew that I was painting guitars, so they hired me to do all the auto warranty repairs. They didn’t want to take guys off the line when a guitar came in, scratched up, and take them off and stop production to refinish and sand them down.”

This was the perfect grounding for Charvel, refretting guitars, repainting and refinishing them. There he got the idea that these production line Fender guitars could be improved upon. With their bolt-on construction, swapping out the neck would be easy.

Fender didn’t just use him for guitars. He could recover guitar amps, a skill that came in handy when a Rhodes piano came in “all scratched up” for repair.

“It was great for me,” said Charvel. “I was swamped, and I’d go down to Fender at least twice a week.” Back then, Charvel had been using nitrocellulose lacquer. The Fender plant was using “easy buff” poly from Dunn-Edwards. It was an education.

“They used overhead pin routers. Everything was made by hand. They didn’t have CNC machines in those days,” said Charvel. “And it was just great to see all those guitars. It was just so exciting, so motivating.”

By 1974, Charvel was ready to go into business, opening the doors to Charvel’s Guitar Repair in Azusa, California. The Valley was about to become the epicentre of a guitar revolution. The shop was set up to repair Fender guitars that were out of warranty but its brief soon evolved.

Modding, hot-rodding, custom appointments? Charvel was your man. He was making up custom builds using replacement bodies and necks made by his old friend Lynn Ellsworth up at Boogie Bodies, based out of Puyallup, Washington. And it wasn't just Strats. He's soup up your Telecaster, too. This would be the Charvel Type 2 body shape.

The word spread. The late Alan Rogan – legendary guitar tech for the Who – was a client. Deep Purple dropped by. They started sending their friends, too. Charvel was making these rock guys something that no one had ever seen before, putting humbuckers in a Strat-style body, flattening out the radius of the fingerboard and installing jumbo frets. “In those days, you couldn't buy a Fender guitar other than just completely stock,” said Charvel.

He learned how to make the bodies himself from working with David Schecter. Over the course of one weekend, the pair made a hundred bodies at Schecter’s shop in Reseda, California. Charvel was acquiring new skills every day.

He also had an eye for a good luthier. Charvel Guitar Repair was an incubator for talent. Hiring Grover Jackson was one of Charvel’s masterstrokes, introducing another maverick builder. Jackson took over the Charvel company after it went bust in 1978.

That didn’t stop Wayne Charvel. Some of his builds just got wilder, such as the custom electric and bass guitars he made for Dusty Hill and Billy Gibbons for ZZ Top’s 1983 Eliminator Tour. They had onboard pyro.

“Billy turned us onto a lot of people, and we just got busy and busy and busier,” said Charvel. “It was a lot of fun work with a lot of nice people.”

He would go on to work with his friend Bernie Rico at B.C. Rich, working on artist relations, building guitars and helping them modernise production. “My job was to set up routers so they could just whiz around those guitars. And we did that,” he said.

He even designed a guitar for Gibson, the WRC, a mid ‘80s HSS S-style with a string-through double-locking vibrato and a configuration of switches. That kind of thing was pure Charvel, totally on-brand. The guitar he made for Michael Angelo-Batio? Not so much.

When Steve Vai appeared on the scene with his triple-necked Heart Guitar (made by Ibanez’s Ibanez Mace Bailey), MAB’s label was pushing him to duel Vai, like some live-action scene in Crossroads. He wasn’t into that but the thought of Vai with his triple-neck inspired him to ante up and get a four-necked guitar. He knew just the man to make it.

“As it happened, Wayne Charvel was building all my guitars,” Angelo-Batio told Guitar World. “I said to him, ‘Can you do this?’ I have a good engineering mind for guitar design, so I designed the Quad. I told him how I thought it should be four separate guitars, and that was that. It was the wildest thing. There was no limit to what we were trying to do.”

No limits was the spirit in which Wayne Charvel approached guitar design. A guitar could always play faster, play better. He later built them under his own name, Wayne Guitar. The history page on its site reads like a who’s who of guitar greats, all of whom have reached out to Charvel to make them a guitar over the years.

Charvel Guitars was right. Wayne Charvel was a visionary.

“Wayne’s ideas sparked a movement that influenced countless players and builders, and his passion for innovation set a foundation that still guides the industry today,” reads Charvel Guitars’ tribute. “Those who knew him remember his kindness, his curiosity, and the way he inspired others to push their craft further. His impact lives on in every guitar that carries his name, and his legacy will continue to resonate with musicians around the world. Our hearts are with his family, loved ones, and every player who keeps his influence alive.”

Pete Townshend would be the last person you would lend your electric guitar to.

No offence to the great man but he does have a bit of a reputation, and it goes right back to the beginning of his career and those explosive performances with the Who during which instrumental destruction was de rigueur.

Simply, Townshend relished in smashing guitars, in speaking 4x12 speaker cabinets with the headstock of a Fender Telecaster, in relieving a Rickenbacker of its structural integrity. It was part of the show. In a sense, it was Townshend’s attempt to make the Who viral in an analogue era – and it works.

“The guitar smashing was basically marketing,” he told Guitarist magazine in 1990. “I knew it was going to work, but I had to use real guitars and that was because I am primarily a musician and I wanted it to be real.”

This, he explained, was a form of art – performance art, art as destruction or vice versa, a convulsion in “vengeance” at consumerist society.

Townshend learned early on not to get too attached to his musical instruments after saving up all the money from his paper round for his first “real guitar” only for it to get stolen after he lent it to the late Who bassist John Entwistle, whose mother compensated him with £3. “I think I swore then that I would never get attached to another instrument as long as I lived,” said Townshend.

Though Townshend would sound a note of regret that his Gibson J-200 acoustic guitar got ruined during the making of his 1989 musical, The Iron Man, he was as good as word. He admitted that he even smashed them out of the public eye, fury getting the better of him.

But where did Townshend get the idea? That urge to destroy – that volatility – was in him. That seems sure. He was an experimentalist.

The Who’s high-volume show embraced feedback almost as a means of provocation, drowning out the boors at the back of the show who had been drinking pints and were wanting to hear Cindy’s Birthday or some other chart-bothering fare. They were pushing the envelope.

Townshend’s guitar-smashing epiphany arrived one afternoon when he was a young student at Ealing Tech, watching a guest lecture from the late Malcolm Cecil, who was then a player with a growing reputation on bass guitar, but who would go onto become a longtime collaborator of Stevie Wonder’s and help introduce synthesizers to popular music in the ‘70s.

“[He] beat me to the punch,” recalled Townshend. “He went on to co-produce Innervisions for Stevie Wonder and he was bass player with the Johnny Scott Quintet. A girl in my class went out with the flautist and she invited Cecil to come and give a talk. Halfway through the talk he started to get carried away, saying, ‘There are lots of different ways you can play the bass; you can play it like this, or like that.’ And then he started to bang it.”

This was an early indication that Cecil would know what works for a crowd. His blood was up. He started looking around to see what else was at his disposal to underline his point that how you play an instrument does not need to have been mandated by what you read in the Mel Bay Modern Guitar Method series.

“Somebody had been doing something on the stage with a saw, and it was still there,” continued Townshend. “He picked it up and said, ‘You can even saw at the bass’, and he started to saw through his strings and we all stood up and cheered! It made a fantastic noise, and the fact that he was sacrificing his strings! And he just carried on sawing, right through the strings and through the belly of the bass!”

Townshend and his classmates were smitten. The campus was electrified by this display, by all these new possibilities. All bets were off. Things would never be the same again.

“The whole college was full of it, so that wall had been broken and it seemed perfect, natural for me, a couple of months later, to find myself doing the same thing.”

If someone would have told Sammy Duet in 1993 that Acid Bath would be stepping onstage to play in front of more than 60,000 people at a stadium show he would have told them they were tripping. Or he would have thought that he was the one who was tripping.

More often than not he would have been. When the Louisiana sludge pioneers were workshopping their sound, jamming wherever anyone would have them, they were often “chemically enhanced”. Sure you’ll see frontman Dax Riggs wearing a Roky Erickson T-shirt onstage but Duet says the psychedelic influences you are hearing on record were more literal.

“The psychedelic thing just came out, because we were, uh, how can I say this? We were on a lot of psychedelics at that period of time in our lives,” he says with a chuckle. “We were, literally, nine times out of 10 on psychedelics.”

But Acid Bath’s triumphant second act is no trip, no flashback. They got back together in 2024, played a string of festival shows, then booked some headlining dates and found themselves playing the biggest gigs of their lives. They were hand-picked by System Of A Down to open their stadium tour with Queens Of The Stone Age. This comeback is very much real even if it is one of the most unlikely stories in underground metal.

Acid Bath recorded just two albums before splitting in tragic circumstances when bassist and co-founder Audie Pitre was killed by a drunk driver in 1997. Pitre and Duet were friends since childhood.

Pitre’s bass guitar was integral to Acid Bath’s volatile sound, the mercurial complement to Duet and Mike Sanchez’s guitars, alternating between fuzzed out (Cheap Vodka) or with that bright tri-chorus modulation (Scream Of The Butterfly). They hired Pitre’s friend Joseph Fontenot on bass and tried to continue but soon called it quits and went their separate ways.

Riggs and Sanchez formed Agents of Oblivion. Duet formed New Orleans black metal stalwarts Goatwhore and joined up with Crowbar for a trio of albums. And that was it for Acid Bath, until 2024, and the death of keyboard player Tomas Viator brought home that they had to do this now or never. Former Crowbar bassist and longtime Acid Bath fan Shane Wesley stepped into the fold. Goatwhore’s Zack Simmons took Jimmy Kyle’s spot on drums. And it was all systems go.

“Yeah, it started because we just realised that we’d better do it sooner than later because we’re not getting any younger,” says Duet. “So while we’re still physically able to do this, that was the catalyst for doing this. Because there was always talk about us doing it, but other things came up, all that stuff, so I guess the timing was right this time.”

Acid Bath’s audience had grown in absentia. Thirty-two years since their seminal debut LP, When The Kite String Pops, their notoriety and influence grew over the years to the point where we have to raise the question as to why they weren’t swept up in the major label boom of the ‘90s, when grunge broke the glass ceiling for ugly guitar sounds, when somehow the Melvins ended up on Atlantic for three LPs – and as Duet notes, Morbid Angel were on a major, Cannibal Corpse were in the movies.

Maybe the suits were spooked because Acid Bath were so hard to categorise, or because they had an illustration of serial killer John Wayne Gacy in his killer clown suit on their debut album’s cover. For its follow-up, 1996’s Paegan Terrorism Tactics, they used artwork by Jack Kevorkian.

They were too raw for the mainstream. Still, Paegan Terrorism Tactics proved that When The Kite String Pops was no fluke. It was heavier, and yet Acid Bath retained the capacity for surprise, opening the record with a salvo of low-end sludge, closing it out with the aggro riot of 13 Fingers and New Corpse then the acoustic closer, Dead Girl.

Acid Bath could change styles on a dime. Duet names Tom G Warrior, Tony Iommi and KK Downing on his Mount Rushmore of players but he says they would listen to all kinds of styles, and it all seeped in.

“Yeah, man, it’s like, at the time, there were no bands like us at all, anywhere,” says Duet. “I hate to make this comparison but the only thing that even came remotely close to what we were doing was some of the more experimental death metal.

“We were listening to a lot of different stuff. We were listening to death metal, doom metal, any sort of psychedelic music, all kinds of goth music. At the time, I was listening to a lot of death metal, and a lot of black metal, a lot of doom. The first Cathedral album was on repeat for a very long time on my stereo. Anything that was dark, we were into. It didn’t matter if it was metal or whatever as long as the music was dark.”

Of course, some things are not a mystery; we know why Acid Bath didn’t end up on Roadrunner. The label’s legendary A&R Monte Conner couldn’t hold his drink.

“Monte came to see us,” says Duet. “I guess he had been drinking with the Exhorder guys before the show, and he fell asleep during our set, so that’s why we didn’t get signed to Roadrunner. So that blew that fucking idea right there, you know? It’s like, well, the head of the record company fell asleep during your set, you’re probably not impressing him much. That’s what happened.”

That gig became something of an underground legend, that the fans tore the place up, that the staff at the venue were injured. It was like a hurricane blew through it. This was par for the course with Acid Bath; they were born in the post-storm devastation of a Cat 5 hurricane that devastated the state.

Where better to inhale everything that was being passed around underground – proto-sludge, hardcore punk, death metal, doom and gothic rock – then set nihilistic poetry to riffs to come out with a sound that was totally unique? Houma, Morgan City, the whole of Louisiana was in a mess. Acid Bath played around in the wreckage.

“Oh, man, we never really had a set practice room. Every time we jammed, it was always in a different place,” says Duet. “Hurricane Andrew hit Louisiana and devastated the state, and there were these bikers that lived in a trailer park. So they got their money from the hurricane and they had one nice trailer.

“All the rest of the trailers were just fucking fucked up! One of the trailers had electricity in it. They would let us practise in this abandoned trailer. It was falling apart but it had power, so we practised there for a while.”

That’s where their sound came together, on the trailer park, in whatever practice space was available, and some of these locations were pretty gnarly, or just plain weird. That had to have had some effect on their aesthetic disposition.

“It was just wherever we could find a spot,” says Duet. “In Morgan City, there was an old abandoned porno theatre, and we would practise in there. I think one time we practised in a church. Wherever anybody would let us practise, that’s where we would go.”

Acid Bath cut a pair of demos in ’93 before heading into the studio to track their debut with Greg Troyner at his studio, and Spike Cassidy of crossover champs DRI.

For a band with two guitarists, both of whom were maximalists with gain, tuned down to C standard or lower, When The Kite String Pops is a miracle of sound engineering. There is space between the instruments. It’s wide open and dynamic.

“It was a combination between Greg and Spike, because Greg had the studio, and he had put out a bunch of records from some New Orleans bands,” says Duet. “But we didn’t want it to sound like that, we wanted to have our own identity as far as the production goes, and that’s where Spike came in and helped out, and kind of made it sound – like you said – not squashed and just big and open.”

They knew the material inside and out. They had played these songs for years. In the time between recording the demos and the album sessions, the songs had evolved onstage. “It was just like they took on a life of their own,” says Duet.

But then these songs had come straight off the floor in the rehearsal space. What we are hearing came together on the trailer park, in the derelict porno theatre, the church, from minds addled by all that subtropical swamp air and humidity, LSD and pot. They just played until they found something.

“It was all accidents!” says Duet. “No one ever really came into the rehearsal room and said, ‘I have this song, or I have this idea for this song.’ It was always a spontaneous jamming. Very seldom, somebody would come in with a riff or something and we’d build a song around that. But the majority of the time we would just be getting stoned and jamming. The music just came out of us. That’s just the way we wrote.

“When the five of us got in a room together to write, the music just came out. There was no pre-planning or anything. We were just jamming and having fun and writing music that we liked to hear. We were just going with the flow, letting the music flow out of us.”

These days, Duet plays his ESP/LTD SD-2 signature guitar through a Lichtlaerm Audio Prometheus head, with “too many pedals” but always his MWK Audio Dybbuk signature overdrive in the mix, plus chorus, reverb, wah.

Back when Acid Bath were cutting their teeth, Duet’s rig was more rudimentary. He used his Ibanez Rocket Roll II V-style for the Kite String sessions, modded with EMG humbuckers and running through a Marshall JCM800. Duet recalls a Randall RG100ES solid-state head in the mix, too. Sanchez was playing through a Peavey Butcher. They didn’t have the money for anything better.

“We just played whatever we could get our hands on, whatever worked, and whatever we could afford,” says Duet. “We wanted nice stuff – don’t get me wrong – but we couldn’t afford the nice stuff. We had to play what we could find at a pawn shop for 50 bucks.”

And that never really changed while they were together. Acid Bath never made it rain during their first act. They would pack them in on home soil. They would do well below the Mason-Dixon, but the rest of the US – the rest of the world – wasn’t quite ready for them.

Their influence travelled after they split. Those two records had a second life. System Of A Down were fans. Slipknot’s Corey Taylor was a fan. You can hear how all that whipsawing from sludge riot to hypnotic down-tempo reveries might influence both.

Now it’s time to collect some dues and give these songs an airing again. Acid Bath is taking this chaos to stadiums and Festivals across Europe, and has just extended its US headlining tour, with Neurosis just announced as support for its Asheville, NC, date. Two great bands, two great comeback stories, both on one bill. Duet says there’s no question Pitre would give his blessing to all this.

“Absolutely, I mean, wherever he is right now, he’s probably smiling at us,” says Duet. “And it’s more of a tribute to him. Me and Audie grew up together, since we were kids, and I know how he was. He would probably be pissed if we didn’t do it.”

• See Acid Bath for dates and ticket details.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blackstar Amplification have taken Doug Aldrich’s super-juicy, super-hot 100-watt signature Ruby head and turned it into a compact five-watt tube amp combo that’s loud enough for the studio and small stages, quiet enough that you can crank at home without bothering the dog.

If you need any more proof that pets – neighbours, spouses, sensitive houseplants, too – will not be bothered by the new DA5 Ruby, just look at the picture at the top of the page; Aldrich’s magnificent dog endorses this new amp, too.

Aldrich insists the new amp might be smaller but it has all the same electric guitar tone as its larger sibling.

“I’ve always believed that great tone shouldn’t be reserved for the big stage,” he says. “The DA5 Ruby changed everything for me – all the character, all the punch, all the attitude of my live rig, but something I can plug in at home and just play.”

Blackstar has retained the same push-pull tube architecture of the larger head, using a using a 12BH7 power valve to give you the same dynamics, feel and compression as the larger amp. And there is onboard power scaling for those late-night sessions (and anyone who is woodshedding in an apartment block).

“Combined with Blackstar’s Power Reduction, players can enjoy authentic valve performance all the way down to 0.5 Watts without sacrificing tone,” says Blackstar, who describes the “core signal paths” of the DA5 as being directly based on Aldrich’s touring amp, the DA100.

The speaker, however, might well be the star of the show. This 50-watt 12” driver was co-designed with Aldrich, with the former Dio and Whitesnake guitarist involved with voicing it. It allows the DA5 Ruby to punch well beyond its weight.

“The speaker is the secret weapon,” says Aldrich. “It just has this size and weight to the sound that you don’t expect. That’s the magic.”

The DA5 has two channels with four switchable voices. You have Blackstar’s patented ISF feature, its onboard CabRig DSP simulator with three user presets for direct recording. You can record direct via USB-C or balanced XLR.

There is also a stereo headphones output for silent practice. And Ruby by name, ruby by nature; it shares the same red vinyl aesthetic as its sibling. Each amp ships with a footswitch and a COA hand-signed by Aldrich.

“It’s killer,” says Aldrich. “It’s got all the tones from the original DA100 Ruby but in a five-watt combo and I love it so much.”

The DA5 Ruby is priced £669/$849 and is available now. See Blackstar Amplification for more details.

Periphery’s Jake Bowen has officially been announced as a Strandberg artist, with the Swedish headless guitar specialist promising that they are now working together on something – stay tuned for more, “artist-driven projects” are underway.

Bowen has been a long-time Ibanez artist, with three signature guitars in the current catalog, all high-performance S-styles (the JBM9999 a particular favourite around these parts). But of late he has been playing various Strandberg’s onstage.

Periphery superfans who have been barnacled on reddit threads, monitoring the progressive metal institution’s movements and gear choices, would have told you this was coming – Bowen’s bandmate, Misha Mansoor, said as much. But still, this is a big coup for the brand, and it is fascinating to see what comes next.

Strandberg does not have a large artist roster. It has the Australian prog virtuoso Plini, Swedish metal stalwart Per Nilsson, and of course that bright yellow five-string that it co-developed with Jacob Collier. Bowen is pictured playing the Sälen Jazz NX 6 semi-hollow in Strandberg’s official announcement, but has been playing other six, seven and eight-string models.

Presumably he would want to bring his signature DiMarzio Mirage humbuckers to the Strandberg platform – would a modified Boden be in the works? The internet is already calling a prospective signature model the Strandberg Bowen. It’s just one consonant of a difference, an easy lift for the Strandberg marketing team.

The market for headless guitars has been heating up in the past few years. This is not the ‘80s. They are a mainstream option. They're just so light. Strandberg has plenty of selling points: including the body shape, hardware, the super lightweight, but especially the EndurNeck profile, which exemplifies the brand’s ergonomics-first approach to electric guitar design.

But when more brands are making their own headless models, maybe Strandberg needed to add a high-profile player just to keep things interesting. Strandberg describes it as “a natural alignment between Bowen’s creative requirements and Strandberg’s design philosophy”.

Bowen says it was love at first sight.

“A great guitar should be inspiring the moment you pick it up – they almost beckon you from across the room to play them – and when I picked up a Strandberg for the first time I knew it was going to be special,” he says. “As a guitarist for 34 years, I’ve had a lot of time to discover what works in the studio and on the road. Strandberg guitars offer a lightweight, ergonomic solution without giving up tone, playability, and most importantly that instant source of inspiration.”

Watch this space. In other Periphery signature guitar news, Jackson released Misha Mansoor’s EverTune-equipped eight-string Juggernaut in May, an extended-range monster that evolved out of a Custom Shop build.

“It’s just a very useful tool to have,” Mansoor told MusicRadar in 2025. “I have a Custom Shop one that I use live. It allows me to dig into the guitar a bit more... It does allow me to have a little more fun onstage.”

Marshall has unveiled its first signature guitar amp in 14 years with the launch of the Billie Joe Armstrong 1959BJA.

This is one tube amp we did see coming; everyone saw it coming after the Green Day frontman used it onstage during the Super Bowl LX show. Who couldn’t fail to notice that alongside those oversized Marshall stacks there was a Super Lead finished in baby blue vinyl, with a badge on the front that looked very much like a signature plate. Even Marshall shared the image.

Well, the amp is here, and while it is a Super Lead, built from the same cloth as the 1959HW, it arrives with the so-called “Dookie Mod” – which gives you a master volume on what would have traditionally been a non-master volume head, and an under-the-hood tweak that gives you Armstrong’s signature tone, namely more gain, and a bit more meat on the tone.

This is for overdriven power chords that have been down the gym, and it is the sound that Armstrong and long-time Green Day producer Rob Cavallo were chasing when recording Dookie.

“Billie Joe’s guitar sound is instantly recognisable,” says Steph Carter, culture marketing director at Marshall. “From the moment you hear those opening chords on Dookie, you know exactly who it is. Working with Billie to create an amp that captures that punch, aggression and clarity was an incredible project for our team.”

It’s a tone that a lot of people want to nail. Though they will need the space to play this thing; at 100-watts, with a quartet of EL34 power tubes, this amp will be loud.

Definitely, it is worth considering if you have been booked for, y’know, a sports stadium or similar.

The 1959BJA has a trio of ECC83 preamp tubes, the control surface – is your classic Plexi with the aforementioned twist, with controls for Presence, Bass, Middle, Treble, Master and Gain, the latter two marked in red.

Other aesthetic updates include the Dookie signature plating on the front, the BJA designation on the control panel, and that baby-blue finish matches Armstrong’s Blue, the Fernandes Stratocaster copy he has played since he was a kid. Right now Armstrong is feeling a little like a kid with this new amp hitting stores worldwide on 21 July.

“I’m so overjoyed to have my own signature Marshall amp,” he says. “These amps have been a part of my musical life, from my heroes down to little old me. Turn it the f**k up! …This amp is my ride or die. Play fast! Die trying.”

The Billie Joe Armstrong 1959BJA is priced £3,099/$3,999. See Marshall for more details.

Marshall says this is its first signature amp in 14 years, but it has released a few artist tie-ins recently, including the Sex Pistols 50th Anniversary JCM800, all pink and yellow like the Never Mind The Bollocks cover art, and the Jimi Hendrix 60th Anniversary Collection, which comprised a hand-wired head and amp in black and purple, and a matching Dunlop Fuzz Face.

A shy 16-year-old Thai musician stunned the America's Got Talent audience and blew away judges, including Simon Cowell and Mel B, with an explosive rendition of The Cranberries' '90s hit Zombie.

The video of Nene Royal's performance, posted on YouTube, has already gathered over 2 million views in just a day, with viewers in awe of the teenager's incredible guitar shredding, vocal range, and stage presence.

Within a minute, she had a packed-out Pasadena Civic Auditorium (the arena where AGT auditions are filmed) singing every word with her, while host Terry Crews went wild to the side of the stage.

The song she chose to deliver has a fascinating backstory of its own. One of the biggest alternative rock anthems of the 1990s, Zombie was inspired by the violence of The Troubles, which at that point had plagued Northern Ireland for decades.

“A lot of people were very surprised at the dramatic change from Dreams, which was the last single they’d heard from us,” the band's guitarist Noel Hogan told MusicRadar. “Dreams and Zombie were completely different types of songs. But look – it worked." (MusicRadar).

Since its release, Zombie has developed into an unstoppable cultural phenomenon, with over 1.8 billion Spotify streams and enormous global reach — as this particular talent show audition proved.

"You are a rock star, young lady, you really are," said Howie Mandel, one of the four America's Got Talent who voted Royal through with a unanimous 'Yes'.

Simon Cowell added: "The tone of your voice is really authentic. Even the fact that it was all a bit messy made the audition for me really good." Meanwhile, ex-Spice Girl Mel B commented: "You've got really good vocal control and you can kill it on the guitar. You're like a match made in heaven. You're brilliant."

The 16-year-old guitar prodigy had travelled all the way from Phuket, Thailand, with her father to audition for the show. The 3,000-cap venue auditorium was by far the biggest stage she had ever performed on. (Loudwire)

"I started playing guitar since I was seven and my biggest dream is that I really want to be a superstar on tour," she told the judging panel. Their response suggests she's well on her way.

"You have a real chance to do very good in this competition," Sofia Vergara said. "That was spectacular."

People often speak about left and right-hand technique but for Carlos Santana playing the guitar is an act of mind, body and soul.

He made his bones in the San Francisco music scene of the late ’60s, his cresting genius consecrated with a legendary afternoon performance at Woodstock, whereupon he leaned into the psychedelic dimensions of an ill-timed acid trip to deliver a jaw-dropping set, bejewelled by a helter-skelter jam during Soul Sacrifice that opened up rock’s third eye to musical possibilities beyond blues-inspired sounds.

You can spot his guitar playing within seconds – the warm, quasi-horn tones of saturated overdrive, the conversational phrasing and instinctive modulation between major and minor. And yet it it somehow accommodates all who collaborate with him – a trick he pulled off to brilliant effect back in 1999 with the star-studded, multi-million selling Supernatural.

African rhythms, Spanish guitar, Miles Davis and John McLaughlin, Hendrix and Beethoven – for Carlos, it is all one continuum.

A true artist, he says, takes inspiration from it all. “As a musician, you have the nutrients and ingredients of many things in one note. In one note, you hear infinity’s breath.”

He might speak in spiritual allegories but the inference is clear. If you can put your heart and soul into one note you can do it with all of them.

In a 2021 interview with Total Guitar, he discussed his singular approach to music and life.

Collaboration is a spiritual thing

“When I was in the studio, in 1972, with John McLaughlin doing Love Devotion Surrender, it dawned on me that he trusted me, and he saw something in me that I was trying to see in myself. He saw something in me that Miles Davis saw in him.

“So there is a spirit in you that can complement anything that gets in front of you. It seems that the intangible becomes the tangible around me.”

Learn to take inspiration from all art, not just music

“Some people might scratch their heads and say, ‘What the hell’s he talking about!?’ But the best music that I ever heard is outside of time. Whether it is Beethoven or whether it is Jimi Hendrix or John Coltrane, time and gravity disappear when you hear that frequency, sound and vibration from those musicians.

“And you can’t practise that. You can only get out of the way and let the spirit take over your fingers and your mind, and articulate a language of light.”

Look beyond the guitar

“While everybody was experimenting with pedals I was getting closer to Aretha Franklin. I was playing my guitar to [Aretha’s classic album] Lady Soul, or Mahalia Jackson, or Billie Holiday, or Dionne Warwick. I wanted it to sound like a female. I wanted my guitar to sound like the voice of my favourite singers – Nina Simone, Etta James, or Tina Turner.”

Do what Miles Davis tells you

“One day, I was in an elevator with Miles Davis, and he said, ‘Hey, do you got a wah wah yet?’ ‘No, I don’t play a wah wah.’ He says, ‘I got one!’ I say, ‘You’ve got a wah wah pedal?’ ‘That’s right! You gotta get a fuckin’ wah wah!’ Miles is the one who told me to get a wah wah pedal.”

Chase melodies if you want to your music to last

“That comes from following and learning African music, call and response – y’know, like church music. ‘Somebody say Amen… Amen! Hallelujah!’

“So, yes, I learned to respect the singer, never to step on the phrasing of the vocals. While some people practise what they want to practise, which is either chords or theory, or harmony, I practise making melody become eternal, because when you go home after a concert, what you are going to remember is how that melody made you feel.”

Talent borrows, genius steals

“There are times when I hear my brother Sting quote Spartacus: ‘Do-dee-do/do-dee-do/do-dee-do-dee-do-dee…’ And that’s because the theme from Spartacus is very, very haunting. Great musicians quote other melodies that make time stand still.”

Free your mind and the rest will follow

“I grew up in San Francisco around ground zero for consciousness revolution! Which was Jerry Garcia, The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and a lot of bands like that.

“Me being a teenager growing up in San Francisco, I also discovered Mongo Santamarìa, Miles Davis, Bola Sete. The way that Michael Bloomfield and Jerry Garcia articulated East-West by Paul Butterfield, this was like hippie music, like The Doors. It was like discovering Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan, and blending it with John Lee Hooker.

“And so I thought, this is fascinating! This is like alchemy – combining John Lee Hooker with John Coltrane? What a concept!

“Discovering Spanish music, or discovering Segovia, Paco de Lucìa, and many more of course, there is something very masculine about Spanish music. It is very masculine! Which, for me, is a perfect blend because I grew up listening to Aretha and Dionne Warwick, and so the perfect blend of feminine and masculine is very sexy!”

Find a guitar that works for you

“Paul Reed Smith convinced me that he was on the crest of creating something. At that time, there was only two, maybe three guitars that I liked – Gibson, Fender, and I never, with all respect, got into the Gretsch guitar sound. I didn’t feel like I wanted to create melodies with that, but it was easier for me to articulate with Gibson and Fender.

“Paul convinced me that he was creating another element, that it was a different voice, and God bless his tenacity to pursue something with such passion because he became, right there, in the middle of those three – Gibson, Fender, Paul Reed Smith, Gretsch. There are other guitars, such as Yamahas, but the top three are Gibson, Fender and Paul Reed Smith.”

Bruce Lee was right – you’ve got to be like water

“The more you focus on your spirituality, the easier it is for you to complement anything that gets in front of you. I don’t want to be anything but water, like [martial artist and actor] Bruce Lee said, because water quenches the thirst and it goes with everything.

“Sooner or later, you’ve got to drink water. You can drink whisky, bourbon, Scotch, tequila, but sooner or later you’ve gotta drink water. Water is pure and is life.

“Living water is spirituality, so with John McLaughlin we both focused on spiritual discipline. It is more exciting to become happy and forever young – like Bob Dylan says! – with purity and innocence, pursuing The Doors, and pursuing John Coltrane, and pursuing John Lee Hooker. If you stay like that then you will achieve your goal to be eternally relevant.”

Not everyone can play at high volume

“I was looking for a sustain like Peter Green on Supernatural. I was looking for a voice. It always comes down to a voice.

“I have only heard one person outside of Jimi Hendrix that could play with that volume with Marshalls. Cream was there. Led Zeppelin was there. Jeff Beck was there. But with respect to all my brothers, only Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray [Vaughan] found another way of articulating with this galactic sound!

“It’s not easy to sculpt beauty at that volume. It’s kind of like John Coltrane, when he starts scaring people, with sheets of sounds. Sometimes, it’s almost like it’s too much for your brain to take in. That’s why they say, ‘It blew your mind.’ That’s where that came from. Jimi Hendrix blew everybody’s mind.”

Use the energy in the room

“Tension is always a good thing, especially when you create vibrant energy. Vibrant energy gets rid of boringness, and predictability.

“Only boring people are bored. All the people who are bored are boring people. People I know are never bored because they are always striving and searching for a new way to enter the unknown and unpredictability.”

To thine own self be true

“What I have learned is that I am always teaching what I need to learn, and what I need to learn is always honesty. Be truthful, be sincere, be authentic, be individual, and play music to bring hope and courage.

“Anybody can learn from books, scales and chords and all kinds of things, but the thing you cannot teach is something that you have already but you have to learn how to bring it out. It’s like John Lee Hooker said, ‘It’s in you and it has to come out!’”

A good example of what Carlos Santana means when he alludes to Bruce Lee and being like water is the ability to inhabit different musical styles at the same time, taking a magical mystery tour through electric blues, through Latin and jazz styles. One way he does that is augmenting traditional blues and rock pentatonic scales with the Dorian mode, and using this to inform his chord progressions and solos.

You can hear how he uses this in action on his signature cover of Tito Puente’s Oye Como Va and Evil Ways.

Santana will often use a I-IV minor to major chord progression; for instance, in A minor, he might play an Amin7 then follow it with a D major.

Indeed, grab your guitar and alternate between those two chords and you’ll start to make sense. Or as Carlos says, the spirit will take over your fingers, and will hopefully do the rest.

Santana’s rig is pretty simple and yet pretty much impossible to replicate. Even if we had the money, there’s no guarantee we could find the amplifiers, because he runs his signature PRS into some bona-fide unicorn amps – a Dumble Overdrive Reverb, Bludotone Universal Tone heads, not to mention his original Mesa/Boogie.

Typically, there’s not much on his pedalboard, maybe a Real McCoy Custom RMC4 wah pedal – in case Miles is checking in on him on from on high – and a custom line driver from Pete Cornish.

It’s all about the sustain. How can we replicate this?

Well, the guitar is not too much of a problem. The PRS SE Carlos Santana is widely available for around 700 bucks, and it is superb.

Amp-wise, we’d say get an affordable tube amp such as a Laney Cub-Super12 (we’re talking £399 street) and stick a boost or overdrive pedal such as a Fender Santa Ana (£149) in front of it until you have just enough saturation for that warm, trombone-like sustain.

Don’t forget a decent tuner. Santana is meticulous about his, and uses Peterson Strobe tuners.

U2 were already a big deal in 1984 - 1983's War LP and its global tour, which also spawned the band's well-regarded live album Under a Blood Red Sky, had made the Irish band one of the world's hottest, if not hippest, tickets.

But it was The Unforgettable Fire that pointed the way to the band's record-breaking future as Steve Lillywhite's upfront rock production gave way to Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno's more nuanced soundscapes.

Eno, in particular, seems to have struck a career-chord with The Edge during the album's Slane Castle sessions. "He's not a great keyboard player, he doesn't write great songs really, he doesn't have the craft that say Bowie has to write a song, or Paul McCartney,” he told One-Two Testing magazine in 1984.

"His engineering and technical abilities are limited as well. In fact, he knows very little about an awful lot, but it's how he applies that knowledge.

"I suppose it's down to confidence, too."

That pragmatic creativity was something The Edge took confidence and inspiration from, as he'd told Hot Press the year before:"I could see how Eno had shaped his career not around any one particular overriding talent but through a collection of, I suppose you would say second-rate, abilities.

"But the way he used them, that he'd been so determined to follow the areas in music he found stimulating to create a career - that must be totally unique.

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

There were other, similarly pragmatic forces behind the U2 man's signature style, which was well in place pre-Eno, though.

Back with One-Two Testing: "My guitar style has always been the product really of the rest of the group. Adam is a very ostentatious sort of person, y'know, very extravagant, so when he started playing bass he wasn't interested in taking the bottom end of the sound spectrum at all.

"He wanted to be right up there in the mid-ranges, so his bass sounds were always extremely full with a lot of top end — very different to say Simple Minds or any of the other bands around that era, the Bunnymen or anybody like that.

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

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

"Then we started making a bit of money on gigs so I bought an echo unit and various other boxes, and most of the other boxes I discarded very quickly. I hate effects, the kind of things that jump out at you."

"I'm not an incredibly versatile guitar player, but I've made best use of what limited talents I have. I think my talent is possibly applying my abilities in a new way, so that could be production, it could be songwriting, it could be guitar playing, it could be anything. I enjoyed Eno because I could see he did that as well."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are guitar players, and then there is Joe Satriani, a man for whom the epithet ‘virtuoso’ is something of an understatement. Satch – or as he is more ridiculously known, Professor Satchafunkilus – is the guitar player’s guitar player.

In a varied career, he has made 18 solo albums, performed with singer Sammy Hagar in and out of rock supergroup Chickenfoot, played as a touring guitarist with Mick Jagger and Deep Purple and worked as a tutor for a number of famous rock guitarists, most notably Steve Vai and Metallica’s Kirk Hammett.

In a 2010 interview with Classic Rock, Satriani told some of the funnier stories from his life in music, and began by discussing his attitude towards vintage guitars.

He laughed: “Don’t you hate that, when someone starts telling you they’ve got the original screws for a ’62 Esquire? Actually I keep pretty tight-lipped about all that stuff. I just want to play. I’m more concerned about writing a good song.

“Having said that, I do appreciate the idea that only a special tool will work for a special job, and sometimes you do need that ’66 electric Fender 12-string! If you’re reading an article about Jimmy Page and he happens to let slip the guitar he used on a song that you think is the Holy Grail, you have to play that thing!”

Satriani recalled the guitar lessons he gave to Kirk Hammett – first, when Hammett was a raw and undiscovered teenager, and later when he was an established star with Metallica.

He explained: “In the beginning, Kirk knew exactly what he liked, which is so important. He was into Stevie Ray Vaughan, Hendrix, Uli Jon Roth, Michael Schenker.

“I taught him music theory and it was up to him to decide what to use – that was the key to my lessons.”

Asked why Hammett was still taking lessons from him in 1988, four albums into Metallica’s career, Satriani replied: “Kirk is a very smart individual. He always acted on what he felt he needed to do.”

He talked about the importance of finding your own identity as a guitarist.

“Really, personality has so much to do with what you play,” he said. “The one thing I can do that nobody else can is be myself, and write those weird songs that I write. I don’t know if that’s a good thing.”

Satriani also confessed to two of the most embarrassing moments in his career.

He recalled – in detail – the worst review he ever had.

“I remember this so vividly,” he said. “It was 1987, and Surfing With The Alien [his second solo album] had just come out. Every morning I’d go for a cappuccino at this little café, and I read a review of my album in a magazine.”

He elaborated: “This guy did not like me, did not like my guitar playing, and did not like the music. He said it was the worst record he’d ever heard, and finished by saying that if you’re one of those people that likes to fill up the back of a pickup truck with a case of cheap beer, drive into a parking lot alone, turn up the music and get drunk, then this is the record for you. When I read that I peered over the top of the magazine to see if anyone knew that I was the culprit!”

He also admitted to one major artistic failure during the sessions for his classic 1989 album Flying In A Blue Dream.

“There was a song I wrote for the Flying In A Blue Dream record,” he said. “I spent hours in the studio, went through three bass players, pummelled it to death! I just couldn’t make this song work until finally I realised it was the worst piece of crap ever.

“I probably spent $10,000 trying to get it to work. That’s a lot of money!”

In May 1988, LA hair metal band Dokken set out on the biggest tour of their career - but it would prove disastrous.

Monsters Of Rock was a travelling festival playing 30 dates in stadiums across the US. Van Halen headlined. Below them, in descending order, were Scorpions, Dokken, Metallica and Kingdom Come.

At the end of 1987, Dokken had released their most successful album to date, Back For The Attack, which hit No.13 in the US. They’d also had an MTV hit with the song Dream Warriors, which was on the soundtrack to horror film A Nightmare On Elm Street 3 (the video features its star Robert ‘Freddy Krueger‘ Englund).

But on the Monsters Of Rock tour Dokken had a problem. They had to follow Metallica.

Dokken were a melodic hard rock band with some punchy songs and a genuine guitar hero in George Lynch. But in 1988 Metallica were the fast-rising kings of thrash metal with a fanatical following.

At the Monsters Of Rock show at the LA Coliseum, a near-riot ensued during Metallica’s performance.

It was a hard act to follow, and Dokken didn’t stand a chance.

As singer Don Dokken recalled to Classic Rock: “After Metallica went out and played Master Of Puppets, we sounded like the f**king Partridge Family!”

As the tour progressed, Don asked Cliff Burnstein, co-manager of both Dokken and Metallica, if the two bands could swap places on the bill.

Don said: “I told Cliff: ‘I know we’re making twice the money as Metallica, but can you please put ’em on after us, because they’re killing us?”

Burnstein said no, and Dokken’s humiliation was complete following a show at Giants Stadium in New Jersey.

“There was this huge review in the New York Times,” Don recalls. “It said that Van Halen kicked ass, the Scorpions were super-amazing, Metallica are the new upstarts just breaking out in America, Kingdom Come was good… and there was just one line about us. It said: ‘During Dokken’s set a record number of hotdogs were sold.’ It was horrible.”

Eric Clapton was on a mission from the start and there was no time to waste. He joined the Yardbirds in ’63, left in ’65 to join up with John Mayall and his Bluesbreakers, and within 12 months he had co-founded Cream to establish a new paradigm for blues-rock, the power trio.

He had reconfigured guitar in just three years. Little wonder it would go to his head. When some oik spray-painted “CLAPTON IS GOD” on a wall in North London the list of suspects was long but most definitely included Clapton himself. “I thought it was quite justified to be honest with you,” he told Guitarist in 1994. “I suppose I felt I deserved it for the amount of seriousness that I’d put into it.”

Clapton was serious.

His mission was to spread the gospel of blues guitar. He had been weaned on early rock ’n’ roll just as his peers were. That’s what made him aware of the electric guitar as an instrument, seeding its potential in his mind. He found his calling after hearing Freddie King for the first time.

“Listening to him had an effect on me similar to what I might feel if I were to meet an alien from outer space,” said Clapton, in his 2007 autobiography. “It simply blew my mind.”

The record in question was the 7” for Hideaway. The B-side, I Love The Woman, contained an “earth-shattering” moment, a guitar solo in which King demonstrated just how rich and wide and musically literate the blues could be. Clapton said it took his breath away.

“It was like listening to modern jazz, expressive and melodic, a unique kind of playing in which he bent the strings and produced sounds that gave me the shivers,” he said.

Eureka! The electric guitar could be the lead instrument, on an even keel with the vocals.

There were other formative influences. George Barnes’ playing on Connie Francis’ Lipstick On Your Collar made an impression. James Burton’s countrified styled jived with Clapton’s sensibility, too, and it fit in with this recognition that it was all interconnected, and the blues held it all together.

Not that the world was paying attention. A four-piece modern beat combo out of Liverpool was having much success. They were making the weather. Clapton thought this was “despicable”. Seeing all these young people succumbing to Beatlemania was a ‘hello, sheeple!’ moment. How could the music buying public at large confer godlike status upon them when Clapton’s heroes went to their graves unsung?

We shall allow ourselves a wry smile at Clapton taking umbrage at people deifying another artist then move on.

This pique played its part in refocusing a young teenaged Clapton when he got back in the rehearsal room with the Roosters, talking about the blues, honing his chops alongside fellow guitarist Tom McGuinness – who can take the credit for introducing Clapton to King.

“I was interested in the white rock ’n’ rollers until I heard Freddie King – and then I was over the moon,” Clapton told Guitarist. “I knew that was where I belonged – finally. That was serious, proper guitar playing and I haven’t changed my mind ever since. I still listen to it and I get the same boost now that I did then.”

Back then the gigs came easy. Clapton made his bones playing clubs, “his spiritual stomping ground”. They all did. There were not enough bands to go around. If you were good enough, you got a gig, and those who could really play could make a bit of money. As a student of the blues, Clapton operated as though he had secret knowledge, a deeper cultural wellspring to draw from.

He says it was the only education he got, falling down the rabbit hole, learning these cats’ names and their stories, and how blues and soul, R&B and jazz all fit together, knotted with the histories of those who created the sounds.

“I remember hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and not really knowing anything about the geography or the culture of the music,” Clapton told Guitarist. “But for some reason it did something to me – it resonated.

“Then I found out later that they were black and they were from the Deep South, and that started my education. In fact the only education I ever really had was finding out about blues. I took a kind of elementary fundamental education in art, but it didn’t rivet my attention in the same way blues did.”

As any teacher will tell you, a motivated student is a good student. Clapton applied himself. This education went hand in hand with learning to play the guitar, developing a musical vocabulary and playing style that would soon be turned lose on the Yardbirds, that great mid ‘60s petrie dish of percolating guitar genius from which Jeff Bech, Jimmy Page and Clapton all emerged.

“I wanted to know everything,” Clapton continued. “I spent all of my mid to late teens and early twenties studying this music; studying the geography of it, the chronology of it, the roots, the different regional influences, how everybody inter-related, how long people lived, how quickly they learnt things, how many songs they had of their own and what songs were shared around…”

Clapton found a place to put this knowledge in the autumn of 1963. The Yardbirds would be the perfect vehicle for his obsession with Chicago blues. It was a band who took this stuff seriously. They would play Willie Dixon, Billy Boy Arnold and Sonny Boy Williamson tracks, Clapton taking over on lead vocals for Williamson’s Good Morning, School Girl. They would jam out Bo Diddley’s I’m A Man, “rave-ups” as they called it then.

This was when Clapton acquired the sobriquet Slowhand. He’d break a string onstage and change it right there and then, and the crowd would treat it like a tennis pro challenging a line call, a slow hand clap would ripple through the audience.

Unfazed, Clapton got straight back at it. But he had itchy feet. When people actually started to really like the Yardbirds (the Graham Gouldman-written For Your Love went Top Ten) it was time to leave. The self-styled “anarchist” wanted to back underground, there he would find John Mayall waiting for him.

And more often than not, wait for Clapton is what Mayall did.

“I was so unreliable, so irresponsible,” recalled Clapton. “I would sometimes just not show up at gigs and that’s how Peter Green was asked to play with John – because I wasn’t there.”

Clapton was just 20 years old when he joined the Bluesbreakers. His Gibson Les Paul and Marshall amp sound was making waves all the way over the Atlantic.

The similarly minded Billy Gibbons’ ears pricked up. The Texan was moved by ‘the Beano Album’, and this being the pre-internet era he did what everyone else did at the time and scanned the back of the album sleeve to for idea on how Clapton got this thrilling tone.

“The sound was just so fierce and so attractive,” said Gibbons, speaking to Guitarist in 2021. “The appeal drew everyone’s curiosity to attempt to suss out where this sound was coming from. The photograph of Eric on the back cover was a clue. We said, ‘Ah, look in the background, there’s a Marshall, but it’s not very big, and ah, look at that. They don’t make those any more – but it’s one of those Les Pauls!’”

The Beano ‘Burst Les Paul became infamous. It helped establish the sound that everyone was chasing. Clapton had been searching for something to compete with Freddie King’s tone and had eventually found it in a cranked Marshall 2x12.

That alchemical combination was broken up after the Beano went AWOL, stolen from a church hall in ’66. Gibson only made these sunburst Les Pauls from 1958 to 1960.

There were not that many of them, making each and everyone precious in its own right. And yet this one, which had acquired mythical status in Clapton’s hands, was gone. That’s the thing when people think that you’re God, they all want a piece of you.

Speaking to Classic Rock, the Beano album’s producer, Mike Vernon, remembers Clapton as Clapton himself did; he was difficult. He was particularly uncompromising over how they would record. It had to be live, but at the volume he played at the guitar would bleed into mix.

“It took a while to get a sound that everybody was happy with, especially Eric,” said Vernon. “But everybody had to take on board that we were going into an unknown era, nobody had ever witnessed in the Decca studios somebody coming into the studio, set up their guitar and amp and play at that volume.

“People in the canteen behind the studio were complaining about the noise. Normally they would never hear it, but it was travelling round the studio complex. People were coming down to the studio to see what was going on.”

What was going on was a miracle. Mayall had called the tunes. He was the leader. Clapton applied is magic, heaving the blues into popular culture, inspiring generations of players. Nothing would be the same again. His successor in the Bluesbreakers, Peter Green, had a few ideas also how to take it further. The British blues boom had officially started.

For the record, Vernon believes Lonely Years, the seven-inch that Clapton and Mayall cut in ’65 for he and his brother’s imprint, Purdah, was Slowhand’s definitive recording.

“Lonely Years was the finest effort Eric ever put on record,” he told Classic Rock. “It just sums up exactly what Eric was about at that time – that real down-home feel. That record was the closest I came to a real Chicago sound.”

That was exactly was what Clapton was chasing. And if that made him an elitist with a god complex, so be it. At least it was with the best intentions.

“I thought everyone else was either in it just to be on Top Of The Pops or Ready Steady Go, or to score girls or for some dodgy reason,” he said. “I was in it to save the world. I wanted to tell the world about blues and to get it right. Even then I thought that I was on some kind of mission, so in a way I thought, ‘Yes, I am God; quite right‘.

“My head was huge. I was unbearably arrogant and not a fun person to be around most of the time because I was so superior and very judgmental. I didn’t have time for anything that didn’t fit into my scheme of things.”

Keep in mind his next project saw him team up with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce for a project he envisaged as a straight-up blues trio but was anything but.

Cream was another miracle, musically and existentially. How did they manage to hold it together for three long years?

The Lord works in mysterious ways.