Polyphia guitarist Tim Henson has some explaining to do when he talks to MusicRadar about his band’s new album, Be Not Afraid.

Last year, Henson intimated that this album would feature guest appearances from System Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian and Japanese pop-metallers Babymetal.

But once you play Be Not Afraid front to back, once your ear has surfed its breakneck changes between Polyphia at their most apocalyptic and most ecstatic, and your brain has processed this information as best it can, you’ll realise there are no guests.

Henson shrugs: “Yeah, well that came from our last record [2022’s Remember That You Will Die]. Half of the tracks on it had guests, and I know there’s a large portion of our listeners that really only fuck with half of the record, because the other half is different genres of vocalists.”

Previously, Polyphia had operated an open-doors policy when inviting guest musicians to collaborate on their recordings. Over the years, the Texan instrumentalists have drafted the likes of Yvette Young, Mateus Asato and Ichika Nito as pinch-hitters on guitar.

Early recordings featured stunt shred from Jason Richardson, Aaron Marshall and Jakub Żytecki, as Henson and fellow guitarist Scott LePage shuffled through their contacts book to seek out complementary talents – players whose style could be subsumed into their radically unorthodox whole. Virtuosity is the common thread.

Remember That You Will Die featured a cast of guest vocalists. Chino Moreno appeared on Bloodbath. Pop/R&B vocalist Sophia Black starred on ABC. Killstation, $NOT and Lil West brought the rhythm, and, most famously, Steve Vai brought his own brand of electric guitar genius to Ego Death.

A little help goes a long way when you’re taking progressive metal guitar, math-rock, hip-hop and R&B and EDM experimentalism through the looking glass.

But as Henson says, this time around they decided: “Let’s just give them us – us in our most raw form, and I say that loosely because the sound design on this record is so insane.”

Henson is not not exaggerating either. Be Not Afraid is the sound of Polyphia everythingmaxxing, splicing together those preacher samples so loved by Chicago and Detroit house producers with extended-range metal guitar riffs, pitch-shifted into glitchy squawks, setting all this to jacking beats. There is just so much sound.

“There are so many moments where it was just, like, ‘How can we make sounds that literally tear your mind apart?’” says Henson. “But in an effort to express raw emotion, it’s like the equivalent of tearing your vocal cords as a screamer in a screamo band, I guess, but on guitar.”

Henson says going all-in with a maximalist production allowed them to take their sound places their guitars couldn’t go.

“The sound of you literally snapping your string isn’t pleasant, and you can’t really do anything musical with that, so let’s use sound design to kind of express that same raw emotion,” he says. “That’s the thing.”

But then then the guitars are pretty nuts, too, with Scott LePage putting together a rhythm part that sounds like “the devil throwing a tantrum” and spending hours nursing a Scotch while putting together some of the wildest tones he can imagine.

So yeah, no guests might be a change of pace but Be Not Afraid is still the sound of Polyphia taking guitar to the frontier. Who knows how they're going to recreate this live when, but it's Scott LePage told us in 2022, “There is a small aspect of, ‘Okay, this needs to be performable.’ But sometimes we just do cool shit for the sake of doing cool shit and worry about it later.”

You can read all about the making of Polyphia's Be No Afraid in full, coming soon to MusicRadar.

• Be Not Afraid is available to preorder via Rise.

Jackson has unveiled the Legend Series, a limited edition run of signature guitars based on some of metal’s most iconic instruments.

The collection includes a replica of Randy Rhoads’ original Concorde, the asymmetric V-style that would become a mainstay of the Jackson catalogue to this day.

There’s a recreation of Scott Ian’s ‘NOT’ Rhoads, the single-pickup guitar he used across the first five Anthrax records.

And there are a pair of signature models that relive Megadeth’s Rust In Peace era; the Marty Friedman Kelly KE-1 and the five-string David Ellefson Concert Bass, both in black-on-black, with that unimpeachable six-in-line Jackson headstock that is one of the most aesthetically pleasing silhouettes in metal guitar design.

These four instruments are freighted with the weight of history. The significance of seeing the Concorde taking flight once more in the Jackson lineup was not lost on the late Randy Rhoads’ sister, Kathy Rhoads D’Argenzio.

She says her brother and the former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist would approve. “There is no doubt Randy would be so honoured to know the impact he has had on Jackson Guitars and on the world of rock and metal guitar,” she says.

Jackson has had quite the impact on some of the other players who have put their names to these instruments. Scott Ian has been a Jackson endorsee since the start. He says the NOT Rhoads played a fundamental role in shaping his super-aggro tone.

And long-time Anthrax fans will immediately recognise the graphics, the ‘NOT’ sticker, the anarchy logo… But look closely, that NYHC sticker has been changed to NYSI, the only aesthetic update to recognise Ian’s connection to the Big Apple despite moving out west to California many moons ago.

“My Not Rhoads was such an important part of my journey,” says Ian. “I discovered my tone with it. It’s been used on every Anthrax record – it was the main guitar on those first five albums in the ’80s. It’s the guitar that kind of made my life. I love that people connect with it.”

Part of the appeal of Ian’s NOT Rhoads is its simplicity. It has a single Seymour Duncan JB-1 humbucker, or technically its TB-4 trembucker-sized version to accommodate the string spacing on the Floyd Rose 1000 Series vibrato. It has an alder body with maple neck-through construction, built to shred, but as Ian’s right hand has proven over the years it is a bona-fide chug machine too. The blue Jackson logo on the white painted headstock is so cool, too.

Speaking of iconic single-pickup shred machines with a single Seymour Duncan JB-1 at the bridge position and some history in a Big Four thrash band, the Marty Friedman KE-1 Kelly, complete with the “1” graphic and the Kahler 7330 fixed bridge, is possibly the quintessential Megadeth guitar – the one you’re only allowed to plug in once you have posted a passable cover of Tornado Of Souls on TikTok.

Again, like the NOT Rhoads, it has the alder wings, maple neck-through construction, the 12” to 16” compound radius ebony fingerboard (those dimensions are almost ever present on today’s Jackson range), and is so recognisable that it doesn’t need many more signature details.

Friedman’s signature is on the back of the headstock. He says the devil is in the detail.

“The KE-1 represents living the dream to me,” said Marty Friedman. “When I had the opportunity to create my own signature guitar, I went all out with Jackson to build the ultimate heavy metal guitar. No expense was spared, from the pickup and bridge to every detail and dimension.”

Friedman’s former bandmate’s signature five-string bass guitar similarly takes us back to that halcyon era, Hangar 18, Vic Rattlehead presiding over a fetus in a jar, the Clash Of The Titans Tour… Great times.

This is also a neck-through build, with an alder body, quartersawn maple neck, plus EMG pickups and a HiMass bridge. All in black. There’s a radiation symbol on the headstock. Very Rust In Peace.

But it all started with Randy Rhoads and that Concorde, and this with the ivory finish and black pinstripes, the gold hardware and gold Jackson logo on the black painted headstock, and the block inlays on the ebony fingerboard, this limited edition CD-1 just too cool.

We’ve got one of the all-time great metal/rock pickup combos, with a Seymour Duncan JB-1 at the bridge, a ’59 at the neck. Note the positioning of the three-way pickup selector switch.

The simple non-locking tremolo unit might not have the same travel as a Floyd Rose but it’s a more fuss-free proposition. Well, it’s also more faithful to the original design.

Interestingly, all of these signature models are neck-through builds. All of the guitars feature Seymour Duncan humbuckers. Four players, four instruments, and we see the steady evolution of Jackson’s artist builds.

The Legend Series Marty Friedman KE-1 Kelly is priced £1,849/$2,299. The Scott Ian Rhoads RR22 is priced £1,849/$2,199. The Randy Rhoads CD-1 will set you back £1,899/$2,499, while the David Ellefson CB V Concert Bass is £1,899/$2,499.

Get them while they’re hot. Those prices include a Jackson Foam Core guitar case.

See Jackson for more details.

A while back, John 5 took to Instagram to post an explainer on how he was able to play Mötley Crüe songs without needing his right hand. Guitar players knew what was what. But it was interesting all the same.

It was in response to online accusations that Mötley Crüe had been using backing tapes in their performances. This controversy, in and of itself, invites further questioning; who among us is sober enough at a Mötley Crüe concert to notice such details?

Nonetheless, the accusations had clearly stung John 5, a player who is ridiculously gifted to the point where it is hard to imagine any piece giving him difficulty.

But nowadays, John 5 takes the opposite view. He sees these accusations as a sign that he and Mötley Crüe are doing something right. “It’s a compliment,” he tells MusicRadar. “It’s such a compliment. Like, it makes me so happy.”

In concert, John 5 plays a game with himself that is probably unhealthy but nonetheless keeps him honest; whether performing his solo material or tearing through Mötley Crüe’s back catalogue, he dares himself to play it as close to perfect as possible.

He is joining us to talk about the Fender John 5 Telecaster Collection, which was launched last week, and how his Custom Shop Phantom is so on-point that the prototype he has been touring with these past few years makes nailing the little nuances in former Mötley Crüe guitarist Mick Mars’ parts that bit easier.

“In Home Sweet Home, the solo, there’s all these pinch harmonics, and they have to be just right,” he says. “You have to be just right. You can go online and watch [this]. Everybody records it! I just hit that pitch harmonic perfectly on that because those guitars are set up so nice and perfect.”

This drive for perfection might be part of the problem, like it’s too good to be true.

“This is so strange, but I don’t really talk about this,” he says. “I’ll play just a ton of shows, a ton of shows, and people are like, ‘Oh, don’t you ever get tired of it?’ And I say, ‘No.’ This is why. I’m such a perfectionist. I always say it’s like Steely Dan. Like when Steely Dan were in the studio, it took them six weeks just to pick out a chair. But that’s how I am live. What I do live is I try to make it so perfect.”

Not everyone appreciates this. Some people want to hear him mess things up, or to hear something different from the records. But remember when John 5 took the gig. He promised that he was going to play Mick Mars’ solos just as they were recorded, because they were part of the song.

People don’t really like this,” he admits. “They don’t! Like, ‘Oh, it’s not rock and roll.’ There’s gotta be [mistakes]. But I try to make it so perfect where everything’s on time, in pitch, hit correctly, and that’s what I do with my instrumental shows. And when I got into Mötley Crüe, same thing. I will see how perfect I can get it, and it’s so much fun. I mean, I love playing shows and playing concerts, but it’s so much fun to see how close you can get.”

It doesn’t always work. At Mötley Crüe’s show in Salt Lake City, Utah, disaster struck, technical difficulties, and John 5 had no idea where he was in the song.

“I won’t forget it. It was in Utah, and it just happened,” he says. “We were playing Take Me To The Top, and my battery pack died, and these stages are so big. I was way out to the front. Tommy [Lee], our drummer, is way in the back. ‘Cos there’s like this ego riser. Vince [Neil] and Nikki [Sixx] were all out in front, and my pack died, and when you have those in-ears in, you can’t hear anything when that thing dies. So I was like, ‘Oh my God!’”

He wasn’t alone. They were all out of whack. And John 5 insists the ensuing “train wreck” is material evidence that they’re not playing to a tape. There was no safety net.

“I got lost and Vince got lost, and I had to run back to Tommy to get back on, to hear the acoustic of his drums,” he says. “And if that doesn’t prove [it’s real]… Because I got off and it was a train wreck for 10, 15 seconds, 20 seconds!”

Mötley Crüe frontman Vince Neil has copped some flack online, too. His performances have been put in the dock. But John 5 leapt to his defence, arguing that the vocalist’s delivery would be impossible to sync up with a tape.

“Vince is singing so well now, and it just drives me crazy,” he says. “Because sometimes he’s behind the beat, or ahead of the beat, but do you know how, not even difficult, impossible it would be to lip-sync if something was behind the beat!? It would be impossible! [Laughs] But, I don’t know. I take it as a compliment when people say, ‘Oh, they’re playing to a track,’ because we work so hard now to make it sound as amazing as possible. So, it’s wonderful.”

That said, bassist Nikki Sixx admitted that Mötley Crüe has used backing tracks to recreate the sound from the albums, taking the lead from Queen, and using the tracks for other instrumentation that the four of them could not replicate.

“Since we saw Queen using some to help during the song Bohemian Rhapsody live, we understood that we could bring in elements that we could not do live like orchestras, saxophones, etc etc and sync them up with what we are playing and we do play 100 per cent live. And it’s better for the fans and we enjoy being able to do what we did in the studio live. It’s a win win for us.”

Sixx's point was that they were not miming along to backing tracks of their own performances. When asked why they don’t play 100 per cent live, Sixx replied, “We do. You were lied to. Sorry.”

John 5 marked the release of the Phantom Telecaster with an eponymous new instrumental track featuring Joey Aguirre on drums, a riff that’s kind of Jake E Lee-era Ozzy, and all kinds of blazing arpeggios and lead-guitar fireworks. He can play anything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And besides, no one will notice.

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

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

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

Al Di Meola has always loved to surround himself with the very best musicians. In a stellar career dating back to the early ’70s, the virtuoso guitarist has recorded and performed with prodigious talents such as bassist Jaco Pastorius, drummers Steve Gadd and Phil Collins, pianist Chick Corea, keyboardist Jan Hammer and fellow guitarists John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía.

As Di Meola explains to MusicRadar: “I didn't want anonymous great players. What’s the point of that? I wanted personalities.”

Di Meola’s big break came when he joined jazz fusion group Return To Forever, led by Chick Corea and also featuring bassist Stanley Clarke and drummer Lenny White. Di Meola’s debut solo album Land Of The Midnight Sun, released in 1976, featured Jaco Pastorius and Steve Gadd along with guest spots from Corea, Clarke and White. The follow-up album Elegant Gypsy (1977) included Di Meola’s first collaborations with Paco de Lucía and Jan Hammer.

1981 saw the release of the legendary groundbreaking live album Friday Night In San Francisco, performed by Di Meola with Paco de Lucía and John McLaughlin. And on his 1983 studio album Scenario, Di Meola was assisted by two famous drummers with roots in progressive rock – Bill Bruford and Phil Collins.

Di Meola is full of praise for these fellow musicians as he looks back on the first decade of his recording career.

JACO PASTORIUS

“Jaco was unbelievable. He had this thing where he’d walk up to other musicians – great musicians – and say, ‘I’m the best bass player that ever lived.’ And we’d all kind of look at each other like, ‘Yeah, that’s probably true.’

“There really wasn’t anybody like him. Jaco played on my first solo album, Land Of The Midnight Sun, on Suite Golden Dawn. This was before the whole world knew Jaco as Jaco, but everybody around him knew.

“You couldn’t hear that guy play and not know something unusual was happening. He didn’t think like a traditional bass player. He heard melody, harmony, and rhythm all at the same time. He could hold down the entire bottom of the music and then suddenly become another lead voice.

“That was Jaco. He had unbelievable confidence, thinking, ‘I’m the best bass player that ever lived.’ It sounds incredibly arrogant – except he could back it up. And the funny part was, nobody really argued with him.”

STEVE GADD

“You didn't need to spend a month teaching Steve Gadd a drum part. You showed him the music. Steve got it.

“There’s a reason everybody wanted him. I used Steve on Land Of The Midnight Sun, then on Elegant Gypsy, Casino, Splendido Hotel, Electric Rendezvous, Tour de Force. I was using musicians who could walk into a studio, look at very difficult music, understand it, and play it.

“When Steve plays a groove, you don’t have to think about where the time is. It’s there. And Steve could read anything. That’s something people don’t always understand when they hear those records.

“Steve is just unbelievable. You can give Steve something extremely complex, and he doesn't make it sound complex. That’s the genius. His time is so deep that everybody else can sit inside of it.”

PACO DE LUCÍA

“Paco was like a brother. I miss him. I still miss him.

“What Paco did took tremendous courage because flamenco was a very closed world at that time. There were people who didn’t want him playing with jazz musicians. They didn’t want him moving outside of the tradition.

“But Paco was curious. He wanted to grow. He respected where he came from, but he wasn’t going to let tradition put him in a box.

“Rhythmically, he was frightening. And he couldn’t read music. Think about that. We had some very complicated arrangements, and Paco learned everything by ear. His memory was unbelievable.

“People know the serious Paco with the guitar and that incredible intensity. But there was another side of him. There was a sweetness to Paco. We spent so much time together. I loved him.”

JAN HAMMER

“Jan is one of my favourite keyboard players – a monster. People who know Jan mainly from Miami Vice may not understand what kind of player he was. Jan could make the synthesizer function almost like another lead guitar. There was aggression in his phrasing. Attack.

“So, when Jan and I traded things, it wasn't guitar with a keyboard behind it. It was two strong voices coming at each other.

“He played on Elegant Gypsy, and later we worked together on Scenario, when I was getting very interested in sequencing, synthesizers and all this new technology that was coming in. We were experimenting. That’s what you're supposed to do.”

JOHN McLAUGHLIN

“I knew John’s playing long before I knew John. Miles. Bitches Brew. Tony Williams. Then Mahavishnu. I saw Mahavishnu when I was still basically a kid, and it blew my mind. Nobody had heard anything like that.

“The energy. The odd meters. The level of musicianship. It was almost frightening. Then, years later, I’m sitting next to John, playing acoustic guitar with him. John is competitive. So am I. Paco was too. And I think that was good for the trio.

“There was this healthy competition where you'd go onstage, and somebody would do something, and you'd think, ‘Okay, I heard that. Now watch this!’ Not in a nasty way. It elevated everybody. And the audience got the benefit of it.”

CHICK COREA

“Chick changed my life. There’s really no other way to say it. I was 19 years old. I was at Berklee [College of Music] and Chick heard a tape of me playing with Barry Miles. Then I got the call. Return To Forever. Suddenly I’m with Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White. These were my heroes. And I’m 19. It was insane.

“Chick taught me an enormous amount without ever sitting me down and saying, ‘Okay, Al, today I’m going to teach you this.’ You learned by being around him.

“His time. The syncopation. His writing. His discipline. And his attitude toward music. Chick could write music that was incredibly sophisticated and still have joy in it. That’s hard.

“He had a massive influence on me as a composer. I wouldn’t have had the career I had without Chick. Period.”

PHIL COLLINS

“Phil was on Scenario. That was 1983, and I was fascinated by what was happening with technology – sequencing, synthesizers, drum machines, the Fairlight. All these things that were completely new. That record had Jan Hammer, Tony Levin, Bill Bruford and Phil Collins.

“Think about those personalities. You don’t call Phil Collins because you need somebody to hit a snare drum. You call Phil because you want Phil Collins. He had a sound. He had a feel. You knew it immediately. That’s what I always wanted from musicians on my records.”

Slash received another prize to put on his mantlepiece last week, and a special one at that: he was honoured with the Les Paul Spirit Award at a ceremony in Hollywood.

The award is given annually by the Les Paul Foundation. But it’s not just dished out to any old guitar hero. Recipients have to exemplify “the spirit of the late Les Paul through innovation, engineering, technology and music”. Previous winners have included Bob Weir, The Edge, Steve Miller, Nile Rodgers and Peter Frampton.

In a statement, Michael Braunstein, the Executive Director of the Foundation said: “We are honoured to present the Les Paul Spirit Award to Slash this year. He and Les shared a special friendship and often jammed together when they could.”

“Not only does Slash exemplify the creativity and curiosity Les had during his life, but he is also an extraordinary talent and a wonderful supporter of the Les Paul Foundation. If Les were still alive today, Slash and he would be jamming onstage together somewhere regularly.”

Interestingly, the actual physical award is slightly different every year. It’s fashioned from hand-carved acoustic boards that Les Paul himself built and used in his home studio, so no two awards are exactly alike. Presumably, at some point they’ll run out and have to use some other material...

Anyway, Slash himself was understandably pleased about the accolade. “Les was so much more than a great guitarist and innovator,” he said of receiving the award. “He was an actual inventor who changed the instrument itself, built groundbreaking recording equipment and completely reimagined how artists could record music. I feel incredibly lucky that I got to know him, hang out with him and play music with him. I cherish the relationship we had, and receiving an award that carries his name and spirit is a tremendous honour.”

Prior to the ceremony, selected members of the media were treated to a sneak preview of new material by the Guns N’ Roses man. He’s got a new album early next year under the name Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators and those guests heard four new tracks – Good Time Girl, One Of Your Kind, Flying Blind and Looking For A Miracle. All four are set to appear on the album, also titled Flying Blind, which is out in February.

Few musicians worked as closely with Prince than Levi Seacer Jr. A co-founder of the New Power Generation, he was headhunted from Shiela E’s band to play bass guitar, later making the move to six strings.

In a way, this was what Seacer had in mind all along. He originally auditioned for Prince on guitar, got the part, only for Prince to have a change of plans two days later. Rotating back to Sheila E’s backing band, it would not be long before the pair would cross paths again.

When Prince saw him playing bass with Sheila E, he was intrigued. Wasn’t that the kid who auditioned for the Family on guitar?

They first collaborated together in 1985 for the sessions for The Flesh, an instrumental jazz-funk projected headed up by Prince and Eric Leeds. Sheila E was there on drums and percussion. Lisa Coleman was on keyboards. Wendy Melvoin was on guitar, with Jonathan Melvoin on percussion. Seacer was on bass.

Those sessions at Sunset Studios told Prince everything he needed to know about Seacer. He could play. He was also cool, and that mattered.

“Prince, he judges you on your work ethic,” says Seacer, joining MusicRadar over Zoom. “Or he judges you in a real working environment. Like, ‘Okay, you funny, whatever, but how are you going to be if I work next to you?’ Because he's working all the time. So he can’t have some crazy person working next to him.”

When you think of Seacer onstage with Prince and the New Power Generation, you think of him with the powder blue Epiphone Sheraton. But he had to wait for the next band reshuffle before picking up the electric guitar. Seacer smiles at the memory. Sonny T was coming back in on bass. He was getting his big chance.

“I’ll share a story with you,” he says. “Before I went to guitar, Prince had a talk with me. He said, ‘Okay, well, we’re bringing Sonny Thompson in, so if you want to go back to guitar, you can.’ And I said, ‘Oh, yeah!’ ‘Well, our first rehearsal is tomorrow. And so I was so excited.”

Seacer describes his rig as “super simple” in the New Power Generation days, and there’s a very good reason why. It goes back to this first ever rehearsal as Prince’s guitarist.

“I brought every pedal you can imagine to the rehearsal,” he says. “And we started playing. I swear, this is a true story. The stage was about maybe five feet off the ground. It’s pretty high, and we’re in the big room at Paisley. Prince was across the room. He said, ‘Okay, Levi, take us home.’”

Mission accepted. Seacer was ready to bring it on home. This was his big moment. And it was a big moment, just not quite how he imagined it.

“I’m like, ‘Oh yeah!’ I cracked my knuckles. I’m getting ready to go in,” he says. “So, I’m soloing with my head back. I’m all into it, man. This is in another world! And I feel something tapping my toes and I’m like, ‘What the hell?’ And I opened my eyes, came out of my zone, and I looked down.

“Prince was looking at me from the floor of Paisley – y’know, because [the stage is] five-feet higher. He was looking at me, tapping on my toes, and he said, ‘I do the rock thing. You play the funk and jazz. Got it?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I got it.’”

The next day, his rig was a lot simpler, and it would stay that way, and all things considered Seacer didn’t have much to complain about. He knew where he stood. And besides, in the months to come, Prince was going to give Seacer ample opportunities to show the world what he could do on lead guitar.

“I told my sound techs, I was like, ‘Take all this stuff away. Take all my pedals away!’” says Seacer. “I didn’t mind, because I like playing clean – but he set the record straight, what we were gonna do. He was gonna do the lead stuff or whatever. But you know what was funny? Later on, he gave me a lot of lead parts.”

Next up on MusicRadar, we’ll bring you the story of one of those solos, when Seacer was asked to provide the “chicken grease” to Sexy MF. He did that and then some.

• Timeless is out now via Legacy Recordings and comprises 10 tracks of rare and unreleased studio recordings from the Prince archive.

They questioned his methods at first. They called him obsessive. But now almost everyone has copied a production trick from the Mutt Lange playbook at one time or another. Lange’s rock and pop productions changed everything.

Recording each note of an electric guitar chord separately then processing and mixing it for maximum effect? Lange was undoubtedly a radical, unquestionably fastidious. But he was ahead of the curve. His attention to detail gave Def Leppard the blockbuster sound they needed, and to this day, guitarist Phil Collen remains in awe of Lange, and not just for how he records a band. As a musician, no one can touch him.

“He’s always the best singer in the room,” says Collen, joining MusicRadar over Zoom from his home in Orange County. “Whoever’s in the room, he’ll come in, it’s all one take, different voices and everything, it’s incredible. He’s like this chameleon with this level of excellence that’s beyond anything you’ve ever seen before. It’s really cool.”

Collen is joined by Tommy Henriksen of the Hollywood Vampires and Alice Cooper’s guitarist/MD. Collen has just guested on Thunder Love, the new single from Henriksen’s band, Crossbone Skully. Henriksen managed to coax Lange out semi-retirement to produce their debut, Evil World Machine, and has somehow got Lange to return for their sophomore album, Condemned To Rock N’ Roll. And he can’t believe his luck. Henriksen and Lange work remotely, sharing tracks over the internet and collaborating on FaceTime, and every day is a school day.

Henriksen describes a typical exchange with Lange: “He’s like, ‘We need to concentrate on the hi-hat.’ I was like, ‘Wow! okay.’ He would take my vocals, and I’d have all of these melodies, and it would just come back chopped. I’d be like, ‘What happened?’ He’s like, ‘Space, you need more space.’ Then he’s like, ‘Figure it out. Now try and tell the story with less words.’”

Henriksen did just that. When Lange gives him a note, he takes it as gospel. Whatever it takes to get the song done, even if it will require take after take.

“We go back and we’d do – I’m not exaggerating – 60, 70 versions of the song, dude,” says Henriksen. “And then he doesn’t even say, ‘We’re done.’ He just says, ‘Okay, carry on.’ So, it was never, like, ‘Great job, done!’”

When Henriksen records the band, he is trying to second-guess Lange, to make a recording that he would put his name to.

“I try. Every time I try to do a record I do my best Mutt Lange,” he says. “I go, ‘I think I got it this time.’ Never happens! So I send him it, and he’ll pick it apart, and then he’ll send it back to me, and he’ll be like, ‘Give it a go, tell me what you think. If you don’t like anything, just leave it.’ Everything that he changes, I listen to him, ‘cos everything that Mutt Lange does is always right. I don’t care what anybody says. Any time he changed something, I did it. Because it’s Mutt Lange.”

Lange is credited with many things in rock production. There’s that sense of space, exemplified best on his production jobs for AC/DC’s Highway To Hell and Back In Black, where the guitar seems to dance around the bass and snare drum in the mix.

He knows exactly where the vocal should land, too.

But there is an interpersonal aspect to producing records. Lange also knows his artists better than they know themself, and just how far he can push them. When recording Def Leppard’s 1987 magnum opus Hysteria, Lange pushed them all hard.

“It’s the most amazing thing – he gets you do things you can’t actually do,” says Collen. “The Pour Some Sugar On Me thing, on the chorus, you sing it, you go, ‘Pour some sugar on me!’ But he’s like, ‘No.’ He said, ‘You got to do that voice, that other voice we do.’ We call it Mr Shouty, and it hurts your throat, and it’s really not good. Singers will tell you, ‘Oh, don’t sing like that, that’ll mess you up. But Mutt’s going, ‘Yeah, you could do that.’”

What Lange can’t do is take no for an answer. Because he knows. Collen would protest but Lange would have an answer waiting for him.

Collen recalls: “I said, ‘I can’t hit that note properly!’ He said, ‘Yeah, you can. I’ve heard you do it today. You’ve done it earlier.’ I’m like, ‘Okay…’ So we’d done four tracks on that, and it’s the throat – ‘Pour some sugar on me!’ – it’s that…” Collen’s vocal demonstration is truly disturbing – the noise from his throat has Henriksen is doubled over in hysterics.

“All of that stuff, it actually comes out!” laughs Collen. “I wouldn’t normally have done that. He gets you to do things that you would never, ever do – especially in the vocal department. Stuff that’s physically impossible for you, he makes you do it. It’s very inspiring, I gotta say.”

Lange is just as exacting when it comes to directing guitar players in the studio.

“Same deal with guitar playing,” says Collen. “He’s like, ‘Yeah, you can do it. This is how it goes.’ I’m like, ‘Ehh…’ And you’ve got, like, one bar to do a shred part and that’s it!”

Def Leppard knew what they were doing. Having Mutt Lange in the studio, it would have been crazy not to get him involved with some backing vocals on 1983’s Pyromania and Hysteria. But Henriksen had to ask if Lange would sing on his record.

“It’s cool, because I got songs with him singing,” says Henriksen. “You hear the voice, you go, ‘Oh, my God, dude! It’s like, I said to Mutt, ‘We should be making a Mutt Lange solo record!’ It’d be so good. You hear his voice, and you just go, ‘Oh, my God!’ Because he can do anything. It’s crazy.”

“Anything,” says Collen. “And the cherry on the cake is he’s so humble. He will never say – like I would – ‘Yeah, check that out!’ He is the most humble person I’ve ever met. The most intelligent and talented. It’s crazy.”

It begs the question why Lange never fronted a band. He played in bands at school. He can play. He can write. He knows how to arrange a song and he can perform to. We’ve established he can produce. Why didn’t he play in a band or have his name in lights?

Collen can explain.

“That was never his thing,” says Collen. “He always said – even with interviews – he said, ‘Oh, I ain’t doing that.’ He said, ‘That’s what you’re for. You’re a rock star. You’re the band. That’s not me. I’m not that guy.’”

Everyone has their own idea of what creative fulfilment looks like. Henriksen and Collen come alive under stage lights. Lange is at his best in the control room, in front of the console, calling out the plays. “It was creating these masterpieces,” says Collen, who knows Lange better than most. Those Def Leppard production jobs were seminal. It has been said Hysteria was to do for hard rock what Thriller did for pop. It gave Collen a new perspective on what perfection might look like.

“With everything he does, he always has a level of excellence,” says Collen. “He won’t half-ass anything. It always has to be done to the full extent. So, sometimes it becomes difficult, but I love working with him. It was always totally inspirational, like totally, and you’d learn so much, and what’s cool and what’s not, and timing-wise and space.”

Again, it goes back to the recording of Pour Some Sugar On Me. Lange was more than happy to temporarily ruin Collen’s throat in the search for the perfect backing vocal, so of course he was going to tear his riff apart if it was going to step on that most precious of commodities in his rock arrangements, space.

“When we were first were writing the song, I had this riff that was kind of like a hip-hop thing,” says Collen. “But it was, like [hums riff]. He’s like, ‘No, you gotta have the snare drum poking through. You gotta have space, so chop that up. [hums riff] So, all a sudden, you go, ‘Ohhh, okay.’ It’s all about space, excitement, and context. He’s the best.”

We’ll all hear what Lange has done with Henriksen’s arrangements when Crossbone Skully’s Condemned To Rock N’ Roll drops on January 29, 2027, via earMUSIC. But that promo clip for Thunder Love offers some clues.

With Phil Collen playing the Jackson X-Stroyer that was modelled on his Ibanez Destroyer from the Photograph video, there’s more than a little of Lange’s Def Leppard circa ’83, Pyromania and all that.

In other Phil Collen news, Jackson recently unveiled the PC1-E, a Mexican-made Pro Plus version of his S-style signature guitar, complete with an active Sustainer/Driver, Collen's DiMarzio pickups and a heavily distressed nitro finish.

• “Mutt said, ‘Give it a go, and if it doesn’t work get rid of the guy.’ And that’s exactly what we had to do, because Jim was less than useless!”: Why Def Leppard couldn’t make their monster hit Hysteria with Jim Steinman as producer

Tony Iommi has been talking about his own experience at last year’s Back To The Beginning show and how shocked he was at the severity of Ozzy Osbourne’s condition.

Speaking to Guitar World, the guitarist said he found the gig “difficult”. Indeed he was reluctant when the idea was first floated: “Initially, when it was mentioned to me, I said no, because we’d done The End Tour (from 2016 to 17) and I didn’t want to be like, ‘Here we are again, another tour.’”

“But when it was mentioned about it being for charity, then yes, I was into it. Still, I thought, ‘What’s it going to be like? We haven’t played with Bill (Ward) for years.’”

Iommi hadn’t seen Ozzy since they had played together at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games Closing Ceremony in 2022. “When he came over, and we met for rehearsals, we were floored, because he was carried in, basically. I couldn't believe how he’d deteriorated.”

The guitarist even offered to go through the whole set instrumentally. “We were all in shock, really,” he remembers. “He sat there, and I said to him, ‘You know, you don’t have to sing, we’ll just run through it instrumentally,’ but he said ‘No, I’ll have a go’ and he’d sing for a bit.”

“And then we’d finish for the day and I said, ‘Don’t bother to come in tomorrow, we’ll just run over the songs instrumentally with Bill.’ He said, ‘All right,’ and then he might turn up the next day – or not.”

Of course, in the end Ozzy was able to perform, albeit sat in a throne. Iommi was at the back, and so wasn’t able to see much of the singer. “It was very difficult, because I was so used to Ozzy jumping around and running up to me and grabbing me,” he remembers. “It was just a terribly different thing altogether, and it was very hard to do it.”

“But, you know, I’m glad we did it, because it was the original band and we won’t be doing it again. I’m really glad we did it for Ozzy and for the fans.”

Iommi was speaking ahead of the concert film of Back To The Beginning, which hits cinemas on 28 October.

Scott Holiday has a black hole where his memory should be. All the Rival Sons guitarist remembers was cycling home just after midnight, on a souped-up electric bike but not doing “anything crazy”, when he hit a car coming out of a parking lot and bang!

He woke up in hospital and in a whole world of hurt.

“I broke six ribs on this side, and three of them were broken on both sides, so I had floating ribs,” he says. “They had to put titanium plates on those. The pain from that was just insane.”

The following weeks of his life were to be spent sitting at a 45-degree angle, in various degrees of agony, and trying not to laugh.

“Dude, this was a real thing! I love to laugh. We love to laugh. I literally had to turn off movies,” he says. “I couldn’t watch anything like The Office. I couldn’t look at memes from my kids. Then the idea that I can’t laugh just sends you into a thing, like you’re trying to hold it back so you start laughing more. I’m like, ‘I can feel things tearing!’”

That was bad. But it’s the memory loss that worries Holiday the most. It worries him still. He’s used to being on-point, setting the agenda for Rival Sons, being a dad, being in command of his faculties, taking responsibility, and all that grown-up stuff. But his head hit the ground and he was out cold, and your guess is as good as his as to what happened in those moments after impact.

“It is a little bit of a blank spot, which is by far the most uncomfortable thing of the whole accident,” he says. “To not be able to be in control of that blank moment is difficult for me. It’s just like, ‘Oh, wow! What happened there!?”

What was happening at the time was Holiday’s solo album. It was happening, and he was some way through writing it when the accident occurred. It left him with plenty of time to think about it as he recuperated, with nothing but his thoughts to keep him occupied.

Weirdly – foolishly? – for a man with broken ribs, he decided that he was going to sing on the record. When it came time to finish up writing and recording it he let it all pour out, like “releasing a valve”.

Topology, which Holiday has released under the name HOl1D4Y, will strike some Rival Sons as a strange trip. It’s a heady, spaced out record, hard to age, and it makes perfect sense when Holiday tells us that a lot of the ideas for it came to him in a dream.

“I have a guitar next to my bed, and I’ll play it into my phone. ‘Okay, there it is. That’s it. Now I have it.’ I’m kind of half-awake, half-asleep,” he says.

Constellations was a track that came together like this, Holiday’s note choices more guided by dream logic than music theory. Automatic writing carries with it no small measure of risk. It can all fall apart. It’s a little like fishing for good ideas with no expectation that you’ll find one. And yet, if you can commit to it then it can yield some remarkable results, giving recorded music the unpredictability of improvised composition.

“I have guitars and instruments around me, and keyboards, synthesizers, and I have my drums in here,” says Holiday. “I’m just grabbing things and kind of like, ‘This is what I need, an eight-bar section.’ I made it very automatic writing, and very quick like that, because I find when music is written this way, it is exciting. It’s exciting when I can write quickly and off-the-cuff. I feel like people end up having to be hanging on in the song in the same way.”

Holiday chose three electric guitars that could handle all the tones he was looking for. He had his 1961 Gibson ES-345, a 1965 Firebird with a Platypus headstock, and a 1966 Gibson ES-330, and played them through a bunch of small Supro tube amps.

“I used this beautiful Martin OM-42 that I've been using a lot with Rival Sons, too, and it’s like a 000 body size, and really, really, really beautiful sounding,” he says. “And I have a 12-string that I use for Constellations, the big Guild [acoustic].”

One of the themes in Topology is how about how humankind is wrestling with technology, and what AI means for our flesh-and-blood selves. Are we writing ourselves out of existence? Or usefulness? That would be bad enough. Holiday, sounds bullish on all this, argues that it’ll all make us the best version of ourselves, and that if we are making an all-new species that wants its own autonomy then so be it – “I feel like we’re going to have to just accept that full Blade-Runner style”.

With that in mind we shouldn’t be so surprised that he’s embraced guitar’s digital transformation and used Universal Audio’s suite of amp modelling plugins to record direct and complement what he had coming out of those little 1x8 combos.

“I know this isn't everyone's favorite thing to hear, but man, nowadays, the stuff that UA’s doing… Their amp modeling is really beautiful,” he insists.

There are all kinds of strange sounds and textures on Topology, with Holiday reversing fuzz guitars through Holotropic, all skronky and squirrelly and drowned in reverb. Equanamity calls to mind the Apocalypse Now soundtrack, all that up-river synth squelch, while Love Of Separation plays out like a little study on acoustic guitar.

“I’m playing a lot of rock and roll on the road, so when I come home, it’s a lot of bebop, it’s a lot of jazz, it’s a lot of freak-out, textural, experimental music,” says Holiday. “With a song like Constellations – or any of these – these are just the textural colours that I’m thinking of, and the places I am on the guitar, or the synthesizer, or whatever. This is just what’s there for me, and it’s not too premeditated.”

There’s something about the healing process that awakens the creative impulse. Maybe it has something to do with your body putting itself back together again, the mind follows, or that something gets jogged loose in the tumult. “It made me think about everything else, all this very metaphysical stuff while I was lying still,” says Holiday.

Or maybe you’ve just got to lie still to give the mind permission to roam, and when the mind cuts loose, it’d be a fool to stop it from wandering, not when you’ve got a record to write, broken ribs or no broken ribs.

• Topology is out now via Sacred Tongue Records.

With the concert film of their landmark 1986 Budapest gig about to be reissued, Brian May and Roger Taylor of Queen have given an interview to The Times that covers everything you’d expect. And a couple of new revelations.

For starters, even though Freddie Mercury told his bandmates about his HIV diagnosis in 1989, May thinks he knew during the band’s final 1986 tour.

“He came off stage at Knebworth and said: ‘I can’t do this any more,’ ” May recalls. “He did have a tendency to be dramatic, so we thought Freddie was just being Freddie, but I now realise he already knew the prognosis, which was grim.

"I remember reading about young men dying in America, and then we saw Freddie with these strange symptoms, so we put two and two together. It’s incredible that he carried on with such confidence and energy to the very end.”

Understandably, the singer’s death in November 1991 shattered the group. “I was on my way to see him when I got the news,” Taylor says. “It really broke us up, and I don’t think John Deacon did cope. He went to pieces. He didn’t want to go on in the music industry after that.”

Indeed, Deacon retired from public life in 1998, though he remains a silent partner in the band’s various projects.

Since then, Queen have continued, largely as a touring entity with a replacement singer and bassist. May, though, drops a bombshell near the end of the interview: “I made a decision 18 months ago that I didn’t want to tour again,” the guitarist says.

“A close family friend died when we were in the States, so I said to my tour manager, ‘I’ll just nip home for a few days and come back.’ She looked me in the eyes and said, ‘You know you can’t do that.’ I love to play, I love to travel, but the trade-off is sacrificing your freedom.

"I have a wife (the actress Anita Dobson), grandchildren and a lot of astrophysics I want to do, so I’m thinking maybe 50 years is enough.”

The guitarist, who despite his huge success has always been a sensitive fellow, also revealed something deeply personal. When asked if he’s happy, May admitted: “Well, I’m a depressive. I’ve been diagnosed as such.

"Depression is an animal that lives inside you, so happiness is found in those moments when depression is hidden in a corner. That’s when you’re experiencing life to the full, in spite of it, or perhaps because of it.”

“The depression is always there, and if I don’t look out it will kick me in the teeth,” he continues. “I can only find happiness in moments. As a rock star, you do get a lot of great moments.”

One can only hope he continues to find them.

Queens Of The Stone Age have a new album at the end of this month and in the run up to the release of Perfecth, Josh Homme has sat down with Rick Beato for a chat.

Homme’s long-time compadre Dave Grohl is one of the guesting musicians on the record and, inevitably, Beato brought up the Foo Fighters man. "He's so easy to play with, it's kind of – it's so easy that it's really addictive,” Homme explained. “Because It doesn't really matter what he sits behind. Of course, when he sits behind the drums it's so musical. So, whatever you play on a song, he just does it back here and that feels so comfortable."

"You play him a riff, and he'll play that riff back at you on the drums. And then he'll play a drum counter-melody that would have been a harmony going on, that's being beaten out of it. That's where the stuff is so inspiring. It's sick."

Talking about his drum style, Homme said: "He does this very strange thing where everything is the same hardness. He can make a floor tom as loud as a snare and I'm always like, 'What the fuck?'"

"Someone could say, 'Well, he hits them all hard', except when he's doing it soft it's the same too. So there's this sonic consistency across all boundaries. He can just dial it up and dial it back."

“One of my favourite things to do with him is push him until he’s almost frustrated,” Homme said. “Because all you have to do is go ‘well you could do that (part), you could add those (parts) together’. Watching him go ‘fuck’ and then (mimes just getting on with the job). I know if he goes ‘just give me five minutes’…” Homme then mimes being excited at the prospect of something really good.

There’s loads more that the two men cover: the sad demise of regional scenes in the US, how Homme made Songs For The Deaf a really loud album and how he gets his signature guitar tone.

Anyway, Perfecth, a nine-track album and Queens’ ninth album thus far, comes out on October 30.

Metal guitarist, songwriter and producer Devin Townsend has opened up about why he’s returned to the stage just 18 months after he said he would take an “indefinite” break from touring.

Talking to the Sixty Scales And The Truth podcast, the ex-Strapping Young Lad founder was blunt about the reasons for the sudden about turn: “Financial armageddon.”

It turns out that touring The Moth, his ambitious rock opera, blew a huge hole in his finances. “Yeah, we lost a ton of money off of The Moth show, for a number of reasons, which we're still trying to remedy, but it's been over a year. But the company I did a lot of the work for went bankrupt, and so we lost what our projected revenue was for that year. So I just found myself in a situation where the options for me to do other things for money just seemed limited.”

It has been a trying time for the Canadian guitarist in more ways than one. "My dog passed away. I split up with a partner of 36 years. I mean, it's like all these things have been fucking devastating. And you're up on stage. So I think that the one thing that I've recognised through this is it's, like, well, I have to do this, just on a practical level. But on another level, it's funny how these things force you into a position where you have to contend with yourself."

So Townsend has set out on a solo tour of Europe entitled Metamorphosis this autumn. “It really seems to be because I think that just as a result of having to do this, I'm different. It's just different. And I found that by putting myself into this, the fringe benefit of it is it seems to carry over to the audience to a certain degree.”

He elaborated: “There's a certain amount of - I don't know if it's vulnerability or just the raw nature of where I find myself as an entity right now.

"But you see a tangible reaction from the audience where it seems to be, like… I don't know if it's gratitude or if it's just, like, 'Okay, well, at least he's not full of shit,' or whatever it is.

"And again, it's, like, I need a job, and if I'm gonna have a job, I want it to help rather than hinder. And it seems to do that, so I'm grateful."

When everyday folks bring up the truly ‘great’ work of David Bowie, the usual subjects are typically trotted out. Yes, Hunky Dory, Ziggy Stardust, Station to Station, Low, Heroes and Scary Monsters are all incredible albums, but - as any true Bowie-head will tell you - closer examination of his ‘90s work can yield similarly extraordinary rewards.

After David Bowie’s mid to late- ‘80 creative struggles, the ill-fated Tin Machine project found Bowie re-aligning both his creative direction and his sense of self - deflating himself from the bombast of his pop persona and getting down and dirty with the mechanics of music-making once again.

Although derided at the time, many now see that era as a vital step in regaining his mojo.

Starting with 1993’s Black Tie White Noise and the more sonically captivating Buddha of Suburbia soundtrack, the reinvigorated Bowie thrust himself wholeheartedly back into peculiar waters.

1995’s Eno-collaboration, 1.Outside was a particular triumph on both a musical and conceptual level - but its lack of radio hits (aside from the unrepresentative Pet Shop Boys remix of Hallo Spaceboy) meant his star plummeted from the view of the mainstream. Let’s Dance it was not, but artistically dense it most definitely was. Retrospective reappraisal has been very kind to this most crazed of Bowie albums.

1997’s more club-angled Earthling fared better. Often described as Bowie’s ‘jungle’ record by dint of its Prodigy-inspired lead single, Little Wonder, closer examination revealed the record to be actually quite a progressive and quite audacious piece of work.

A few years back we spoke to Earthling’s co-producer, Mark Plati. Mark, who shared the studio desk with Bowie and versatile guitarist Reeves Gabrels, recalled how David’s spirit of wild experimentalism (which had previously spawned the high watermark of the Berlin trilogy) was back in rude health;

“I wasn’t even a bass player or guitar player on Earthling, which is what I really am,” Plati told us by phone not long after learning of Bowie’s passing, as we first recounted in a lengthy compilation of interviews with many of Bowie’s sidemen back in 2022.

“I was the engineer, mixer, programmer and actually a producer and writer, even… It just fell out of the sky and I ran with it, as one should, I guess. The best part was that I got to really watch the writing process, and be involved in it, which was unbelievable, really. I don’t think anything has ever surpassed that.”

Initially purely focussing on the technical side of things, that soon changed when Bowie turned to Mark for new ideas.

“He and Reeves had asked me to come up with some tracks to play with,” Plati remembered. “We went through what I brought in, and Reeves had his own demos. David had riff ideas that weren’t that worked out. So we pooled a lot of things together. A lot of times they’d take something of mine and they’d write a whole new chord progression on top of it. But it was different every time, and it was amazing how quickly it all happened.

“We’d get a structure going and David would be in the back with Post-it notes, writing lyrics. He’d be ready really quickly, and he’d be done on the first take. No guide vocals. It was absolutely mind-boggling.”

One particularly noteworthy moment came during the creation of Earthling’s second song, Looking For Satellites. This pulsing, driving track featured some hypnotic vocals from David, and a particularlly vivid winding guitar solo, conjured by Gabrels.

It transpired that Bowie had very specific (possibly Eno-inspired) instructions for Reeves when cutting the track at New York's Looking Glass Studios…

“He told Reeves to do the solo on one string, only on one string. That was the limitation he gave him. It was really a great thing to set up. And Reeves pulled it off.”

Plati, who went on to work with Bowie on Earthling’s follow-up Hours as well as 2002’s exceptional Heathen and ’03’s Reality, was overawed by Bowie’s questing nature…

“It was a tremendous experience for me in terms of opening my mind to any sort of possibility, because you’d never know what was going to work or where it would lead. And sometimes his idea wouldn’t quite work out, but it would lead somewhere else that was better. It was amazing to be in that process with him.”

During the lull between the making of Earthling and 1999’s more acoustically-driven Hours, Plati was unsure as to whether their relationship would continue.

“I had heard some of the [Hours] demos and they were far more acoustic. I could tell stylistically that it was really a change and I figured that he must have assumed that I wasn’t the guy for that. But he kept me on.

“For me, it was amazing that he did that. He knew instinctively, I think, that I would be able to move with him and run up whatever tree he was going to run up. To me, that really says something about him.”

Bowie continued to be a vital part of Plati’s career and life. “He was always reaching. It was never rote to him. You always felt like you were on this amazing journey with this amazing performer who was a real, bona-fide artist. That’s so hard to come by. And it was always hysterical. So good-natured. Just a joy.”

Read more from our interview with Mark Plati and a range of David Bowie’s other trusted side-players here.

Joe Bonamassa has given his five cents’ worth on the whole AI in music debate, in a very measured, nuanced way.

The guitarist was talking to Blue Rock Review at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads festival in Austin, Texas, when the interviewer brought up the subject. JoBo immediately threw some questions back at his interlocutor: “You’re Blues Rock Review – have you reviewed an Eddie Dalton record? Do you know who Eddie Dalton is? Ever seen an Eddie Dalton show?”

When the interviewer admitted he hadn’t heard of Dalton, Bonamassa said: “But he’s on Billboard’s Blues Chart every single week. Never seen him play live. Never met him.”

Dalton is, of course, an AI creation. “He’s a legitimate artist in the eyes of some,” Bonamassa said, his voice dripping with disdain.

In his eyes, it’s simple: “The fans will respond to what they respond to,” he said. “When people want to zone out, and they want to put music on in the car, if they like AI music, that’s 100% their right.

"There’s nothing wrong with that. If they want to put on a Marcus King record, if they want to put on an Eric Gales record or whoever, that’s their right.”

“Whatever they particularly enjoy, that’s 100%. This is a supply and demand business. Should those artists be in the same category as living people out there? No. That’s a horrible thing.”

Regarding the use of programs like Suno, Bonamassa had more sympathy, especially for up-and-coming artists who might be tempted to give it a go. “There’s cats calling people out for using Suno to write lyrics. There’s going to be the ones who say ‘I don’t even know what Suno is’. That’s BS.

"Everyone knows what it is and everybody's seen what it can do. Now, do I hear it in some music? Absolutely. Did I just listen to 200 blues records and heard it a few times? Absolutely.”

“We’re in the entertainment business,” he reflects. “If someone uses Suno to write a lyric, it’s not a high crime or misdemeanour. When you’re on your way up, you’re in 2026 and you’re trying to get noticed… they want to be known, they want to be famous, they want to be rich.

"All of that stuff gets checked out the door when they go ‘if I can use this program to get a leg up and maybe I get a few more people out of my show’. You know that’s happening. We’d be very remiss to just bury our head in the sand, say it’s not, because it is.”

Eric Clapton has admitted that watching two of his most famous electric guitars go under the hammer at Christie’s in 2004 was a momentarily gut-wrenching experience, and that the first thoughts going through his mind were that he was making a “big, big mistake”.

The Crossroads Guitar Auction was ahead of its time. Here was one guitar god parting with the holiest of holies – some of the most revered guitars in the world. There was a whole consignment of Martin guitars (including ‘the Longworth,’ the 1966 Martin 000-28 you see on the back of the 461 Ocean Boulevard cover).

Then there were the superstars of the auction, such as Blackie, Clapton’s Fender Stratocaster put together from 1956 and ’57 parts, for which his love is written all across the wear on its maple fingerboard.

Blackie changed hands for $959,500. The guitar Clapton considered, “the star of the show” was his 1964 Gibson ES-335TDC went for $847,500.

This was the second electric guitar he had ever bought, had it all through his time with the Yardbirds and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, and it was the one we all recognise from that night at the Royal Albert Hall as Cream played their farewell shows. Bang! Just like that. The hammer came down and they were gone. Ouch.

But speaking to Guitar Center, Clapton explained his thinking, and why he has no regrets about selling these instruments when the money raised was going to support the Crossroads rehabilitation unit in Antigua.

“When I became an acknowledged alcoholic, and realised I was an alcoholic, I took onboard and still adhere to this thing they call the Preamble, which is my primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics choose sobriety,” he says. “Believe it or not, it’s above me being a musician or a husband or a father. It’s the number one thing, so when the auction was going on I had to keep saying, ‘This is for your purpose. You are an alcoholic and if you don’t stay sober you are not going to help other alcoholics choose sobriety. So this is all for that purpose.’”

So no regrets, even if it was a little bittersweet to these instruments go. At least he can still see Blackie. Guitar Center, who is a long-standing partner of Clapton’s all-star Crossroads Guitar Festival, actually bought Blackie and keeps it on display.

Also, at this year’s festival, the ES-335TDC made an appearance, albeit in a very different guise. Gibson was unveiling its new Epiphone replica at the festival, with the release scheduled for summer 2027.

A collaboration with the Gibson Custom Shop, this Epiphone guitar comes will come with a Gibson USA pickups, the mismatched hardware of the original and with a special custom hardshell guitar case.

Clapton might be at peace with where the 335 and Blackie have ended up, but he acknowledged just how important they were to him. They are not just a tool for making music, they can be a source of “salvation”, too.

“That’s what they represent to me, and that’s what music represents to me,” says Clapton. “It’s the most reliable source of inspiration, and salvation.

“If you’re in a bad place, and you pick up a guitar, there’s a strong chance you will get out of that. You’ll transcend whatever the problem is, if you can keep it up… Find a way to express yourself to the instrument… They are very sacred things to me, these guitars.”

Last month, Guitar Center unveiled its limited edition Crossroads 2026 Collection, featuring a reproduction of Clapton's Blind Faith Telecaster, plus Martin acoustics, Ernie Ball electric guitar strings and a PRS John Mayer Silver Sky in Incline Blue.

Every band eventually reunites these days. But few reformations have been as unlikely, nor as successful as Dinosaur Jr’s. The indie rockers, who very much played John The Baptist to Nirvana’s messiah, didn’t much like each other during their initial burst of late '80s/ early '90s success, but since reconvening in the mid '00s have released six very good, well-received albums.

Now. in an extensive Pitchfork interview, the trio have told their whole story. Back in the day, much of the tension in the band was due its imbalance. Guitarist J Mascis wrote all the drum and guitar parts, and had firm ideas about how the bass should sound.

Mascis was originally a hotshot drummer but switched to guitar and became equally accomplished on his new instrument. “People will be like, ‘How did you learn guitar so fast?’” Mascis explains. “I was only writing what I could play at the time. I couldn’t do bar chords, so I had to just move my fingers around until something would sound good. And then I could play faster than I knew what to do with.”

It was Mascis who convinced bassist Lou Barlow to play the instrument high up on the neck so it followed the guitar’s lead. “The way I play bass to J’s guitar was something that J masterminded, and I completely believed in it,” Barlow says. “I’ve never had musical differences with J. The quality was super high, and the personal parts mattered less to me than that quality.”

The trio released three critically acclaimed albums and a genuine indie rock anthem in Freak Scene, before Barlow left in 1989. Around this time Kurt Cobain asked Mascis to join Nirvana, who at this stage were still signed to the cult indie label Sub Pop. He turned him down: “I had just graduated to being able to stay in motels and not on floors, but they were still in the floor phase. I’m not going back to the floors.”

Mascis kept a version of the band going until 1997. But when the original trio reconvened a decade later, miraculously it seemed to work and they decided to keep going. Older and wiser, they seem to be able to tolerate each other these days. “It’s annoying, because you’re saddled with these guys - God dammit, what the fuck? But it sounds better, so what are you going to do?” says Mascis.

“We came up together, learned how to play together, have a certain sound that is interesting. When we play now, kids are into it, because they haven’t heard anything like this. And maybe they don’t know why.”

If anyone questions whether Robin Trower is 100 per cent badass then just consider how he got his sound. After leaving Procol Harum in 1971 in search of a more suitable vehicle for his burgeoning guitar talents, he was one of the early adopters of the Marshall Super Lead.

There was no master volume control on those things. He had a Fuzz Face in the mix, too. Trower was working with a lot of decibels. And he played a Fender Stratocaster, invariably inviting comparisons with Jimi Hendrix after he too incorporated the heady swirl of the Uni-Vibe in his rig.

Taming all this with single-coil pickups is a fool’s errand or a job for the unnaturally gifted. Like Hendrix, Trower was in the latter camp, and as MusicRadar catches up with him at his Friday morning rehearsal, he is still as bullish about guitar volume as ever; he still has that dragon under his thumb.

“Well, I mean, it comes natural to me to be able to control that volume,” he says. “During a performance and maybe sometimes in the studio as well, I do use the volume control on the guitar.”

But, wait, didn’t he worry about the single-coils and 60-cycle hum?

“Yeah, I mean it was a real problem. There’s no doubt about it,” he says, like a seasoned trawler man talking about a little chop. “I mean, some gigs I have to go to the in-between pickup setting to get rid of the RF.”

That, however, is the extent of Trower’s precautionary measures for reducing the noise floor. The rest is technique, and there is plenty of that on show on his latest solo album, Shine. Trower reveals himself from the first notes of The Missing Piece. There’s no mistaking him. He is, as Paul Gilbert described him, “one of the best warbly guitar players” of all time. You hear that tone, that phrasing, and it’s like a fingerprint, identifying who’s responsible.

As Gilbert said in praise of Trower in a MusicRadar interview from 2019: “In Day Of The Eagle he’s got this looping riff, and when he hits those open top two strings and it warbles – he might have like double-tracked it and bent one with the whammy a little bit – the whole world just comes unglued. When he hits that note, it’s so cool.”

Trower says now: “There was no thinking about it. It’s just feeling it. That’s all it is. It’s just, ‘I like playing this. I am going to play it, and I’m going to give it everything I’ve got. That’s really all it is. I don’t think I ever tried the Leslie. That was the Uni-Vibe was the first thing that gave me that vibe.”

It might tickle Trower to know that listening to his hugely influential 1974 sophomore album, Bridge Of Sighs, made Gilbert feel like someone who had partaken in some of what was being passed around the festivalgoers at Woodstock ’69.

“I never did drugs as a kid but to me it was what I imagined that drugs would do,” said Gilbert. “It was sort of like the whole world was resonating in an unusual but attractive way, and Robin Trower would have that.”

He still has it. Now 81, Shine finds Trower playing in his preferred power trio format, handling guitar and bass guitar, and all of the production duties. Chris Taggard joins him on on drums with Richard Watts on vocals, with British blues/soul singer Jess Hayes providing a guest turn on Truth.

“When I’m writing songs for the new album, I’m hearing the vocalist in my head, so for the songs that Richard sings, I’m writing to hear him sing,” says Trower. “I always put it in a certain key register where his voice is, where I like it best. I know where that sweet spot is. The guitar – especially the lead – is very much my voice.”

Working as a producer might give Trower a different perspective on his work but the goal hasn’t changed. He is always in search of a live take in the studio. If it sounds live, then he has done his job, and the plan worked.

Listening to some of the arrangements on Shine – the vampish late-night groove of Live Your Time, the smoke-show wah of The Race – they sound like they could be extended and jammed out.

Without You is like that, too, and you might find yourself quietly daring Trower to keep it going, or at least take a few more bars for the outro solo, take the song over the horizon (when the song finishes, it even feels like it’s past midnight).

Trower says we’ve got it back to front. He cut these songs down –“so it’s not just all whanging about! [laughs]” – to give them some “form”. The years have taught him a little restraint. He’s also treating that weather-beaten signature Stratocaster of his with a firm hand.

“Well, I think the main thing compared to the ’70s is I have a lot more control of what I’m doing now,” he says. “It was all a bit wild in the ’70s.”

The brand names are different but the main ingredients to Trower’s sound have changed little since the ’70s.

His pedalboard is exclusively Fulltone, with Mike Fuller’s Deja Vibe providing the chewy swirl of the Uni-Vibe, the FullDrive providing the grit, and the Clyde Wah V2 replicating the vintage Vox wah pedal circuits that were designed for the American jazz trumpet ace and magazine publisher Clyde McCoy. And all this stuff sounds really good together. Guitarists sometimes invite ridicule for how obsessive we can get about our tone and yet it’s critical – this is where it all starts for Trower.

“All of my song ideas come from sitting and playing the guitar at home, and that tone is very, very important – it’s inspirational,” he says. “Someone famous once called the guitar ‘the little orchestra,’ so it’s limitless, really.”

Trower is a blues player at heart. He heard BB King’s Three O’Clock Blues and that was him hooked. You can hear the influence. Discovering James Brown was another revelation. When Trower talks about the “power soul” on Shine, it’s coming from the Godfather of Soul.

“The main things that I would play during the ‘60s would be BB King Live At The Regal and James Brown Live At The Apollo,” says Trower. “And I think the other big album for me – well, there’s a couple – Moanin’ In The Moonlight, by Howlin’ Wolf, then later on in the ‘60s, Albert King’s Born Under A Bad Sign. It was simple but very, very powerful. I think that’s the whole thing about it, it had real potency to it.”

Trower was blues but he was no purist. He was among a cohort of players who were changing the form of the blues throughout the ‘70s, plays such as Frank Marino, Jeff Beck Rory Gallagher and Freddie King, who would flavour it with psychedelic rock, fusion, folk, R&B and soul.

“Well, I wasn’t really intellectualising it. I was just doing what comes natural,” says Trower. “The most satisfying music I come up with is always where the heart leads the head, definitely.”

Of all the parallels to be found between late ‘60s and early ‘70s society and the present day – the sociopolitical upheaval, the economic hardship, and the sense that the centre will not hold – the music is not one of them, at least not to Trower’s ear. These days, Trower finds himself listening to movie soundtracks.

He argues that the sounds he hears from contemporary pop lacks “depth”.

“Most of what I hear now seems very thin to me. It’s thin, just no real depth to it,” he says. “For instance, if you listen to Help! by the Beatles, there’s nothing in pop music today that’s as strong as that – it’s very potent stuff – and I’m not even a Beatles fan, though I recognise talent when I hear it.

“With all those early Beatles tracks, you know, there’s something happening there! There’s something going on! It’s a recording of a happening, which you don’t really get today. It’s like I said to you earlier, that’s exactly what I’m trying to recreate in the studio.”

But how do we create a happening in the studio? Musicians have never had so many tools at our disposal, plugins that give us digital versions of studio kit that was hitherto only available to bands booked in at EMI Studios or Sound City. These sounds are now available at the click of a mouse.

This is only a good thing, so long as we remember as Trower does, that if you are going to record electric guitars, the magic happens when you introduce an scarcely controllable element to the controlled environment of the studio.

We’ve got to turn the volume up.

• 5 guitar tricks you can learn from Robin Trower

On 5 December 1980, three of the most gifted guitar players of all time performed together at the Warfield Theatre, a 2500-capacity venue in San Francisco.

The recording from that night turned into what is arguably the most famous and influential acoustic guitar album ever released. Its title: Friday Night In San Francisco. Its creators: Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía.

Friday Night In San Francisco was released in 1981. Now, 45 years on, Al Di Meola tells MusicRadar how this legendary collaboration was conceived and perfectly executed.

“The funny thing about Friday Night In San Francisco is that nobody could have planned what that record would become,” Di Meola says. “Nobody was sitting there saying, ‘We’re going to make one of the biggest acoustic guitar records ever.’”

He explains how he first encountered Paco de Lucía, a master of Spanish flamenco guitar. This was in 1973, when Di Meola was a member of groundbreaking jazz fusion group Return To Forever alongside pianist Chick Corea, bassist Stanley Clarke and drummer Lenny White.

“My connection with Paco actually goes back several years before the trio,” Di Meola says. “I was 19 years old, touring Europe with Return To Forever, and when we were in Spain, I started hearing about this guy Paco de Lucía.

“Then I heard him. The rhythm was the first thing that got me. I already had this huge attraction to Latin music and rhythm, but Paco had something I’d never heard before. The articulation, the right hand, the rhythmic power. It was unbelievable. I remember thinking, ‘I’ve got to play with this guy.’”

Di Meola’s wish came true when he was recording his second solo album, Elegant Gypsy, which also featured appearances from Jan Hammer on keyboards and Steve Gadd on drums. The album was recorded at Electric Lady Studios in New York, and de Lucía played on the landmark track Mediterranean Sundance.

Before the trio of Di Meola, de Lucía and McLaughlin came together, the latter pair had performed in a different trio with Larry Coryell, the guitarist hailed as ‘godfather of fusion’.

As Di Meola recalls: “John had already been playing with Paco and Larry Coryell before John, Paco and I became the trio. Larry, by the way, had been very important to me when I was young. I followed him around and took some lessons with him when I was about 15. So, there were all these connections already there.”

He continues: “When I came into the trio, you suddenly had three guys from completely different musical worlds. Paco came from pure flamenco. John had Miles Davis, Tony Williams, Mahavishnu Orchestra, jazz, Indian music, and all of those rhythmic concepts. I had Chick and Return To Forever, Latin music, rock, The Beatles, and my own compositional thing.

“What connected the three of us was rhythm. And there was competition. Absolutely. We wanted to impress each other. If Paco played something unbelievable, believe me, John and I heard it. If John did something, I heard it. And if I played something, they heard it.

“There was a healthy competition every night where you wanted to make the other two guys turn their heads. People sometimes have this romantic idea that we just walked onstage and magically played this incredibly complicated music. No. We worked our asses off.”

He recalls how they worked together in the build-up to the San Francisco show.

“That first tour was roughly two months. There were no cell phones. No computers. Nobody was sitting in a hotel room for five hours looking at Instagram. We played. We rehearsed in the hotel rooms. We’d do the concert. We’d play some more.

“So, by the time we reached the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco on 5 December 1980, we had developed something you couldn’t have created by putting three guitarists into a recording studio for a couple of days. We knew each other. When we got to San Francisco, the three of us were playing at an incredibly high level because we had been living with that music every night.

“The arrangements were very tight because they had to be. At those tempos and with those rhythmic figures, three acoustic guitars can become a train wreck very quickly. But once we were inside that structure, there was tremendous freedom. That’s where the excitement came from.

“And there was nowhere to hide. No drummer. No bass player. No keyboard player. Nothing underneath us holding it together. Just six hands.”

Di Meola says that the three players took great care in their choice of guitars for this project.

“The guitars themselves were important because the three of us didn’t sound alike,” he notes. “I was playing my Ovation steel-string. Paco had his Conde Hermanos flamenco guitar. John was playing an Ovation nylon-string.

“On the recording, you can actually locate us. Paco is on the left, John is in the centre when all three of us are playing, and I’m on the right.”

He adds: “The material reflected our different personalities too. Mediterranean Sundance was mine and Rio Ancho was Paco’s, and putting those two together became this incredible vehicle for Paco and me.

“Short Tales Of The Black Forest was Chick’s composition, which John and I played as a duo. John and Paco played Egberto Gismonti’s Frevo Rasgado. Fantasia Suite was mine and became the big three-guitar piece. And then there was John’s Guardian Angel.

“One thing people don't always realise is that Guardian Angel on the original album wasn't recorded at the Warfield that Friday night. We recorded that later at Minot Sound in White Plains, New York.”

For Al Di Meola, a part of the magic in the Friday Night In San Francisco album is the audience’s reaction.

He advises: “Listen to the record with headphones. They’re going crazy. It sounds like a rock concert. Think about that. Three guys sitting in chairs with acoustic guitars in 1980, and the audience is reacting like they’re watching a rock band.”

As for the stature of this album in the canon of guitar music and jazz, Di Meola says cautiously: “That's difficult for me to answer because I’m on the record. I’m not going to sit here and tell you where my own record belongs in history. But I can tell you what happened. It became far bigger than anybody thought an acoustic guitar album like that could become.

“Suddenly, guitar players all over the world were wearing out the record trying to figure out those parts and who was playing what. And what I’m proudest of isn’t the speed. Everybody talks about the speed. It’s the interaction.

“You had these completely different musical cultures colliding – flamenco, jazz, rock, Latin music, Indian rhythmic concepts, composition, improvisation – and somehow we found a common language. And 45 years later, people are still talking about that night. That’s pretty amazing to me.”

Johnny Marr’s fifth solo album, The Age Of Everything, comes out on Friday and the guitarist has given an interview to the NME about the new record.

What did we find out that was new? Well, it seems the guitarist has long been an admirer of Robert Smith, which is interesting given that the Cure man has never had much good to say about The Smiths.

When the interviewer mentions that the track Fire With Fire has a ‘Cure vibe’, Marr agrees. “There were a couple of Cure-y moments on (previous album) Fever Dreams too, like Aerial,” he says.

“When The Cure came out, I thought of Robert Smith as a guitar player. He’s a frontman, but what he was doing on Seventeen Seconds was really very much on his own and really on point. That was a few years before I came out. I saw them a couple of times when I was 16 or 17 and really liked them.”

Expanding on a theme, he continued: “I’ve actually covered Depeche Mode’s I Feel Love, and when I did The Tracers on (his 2018 album) Call The Comet, I woke up to Maxine Peake praising me because it sounded like Sisters Of Mercy. That was great. They were the first big band that The Smiths supported, so it is in my DNA.”

Much of The Age Of Everything, though, sticks to the guitar pop that Marr has long traded in. “I’m able to write catchy tunes, and there’s nothing wrong with that. There will be times for me to write my acoustic opus where I get miserable. I’ve taken the liberty of sounding like other things over time and I always get, ‘Oh, that sounds a little bit like what you were doing with Electronic’ or, ‘Oh, that’s a bit Smiths-y’, but really it’s no more complicated than, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’”

And conversation also turned to a current politician who seems (unlike some) to be utterly genuine in his love of Marr’s old band. Last month British Prime Minister Andy Burnham was caught on camera playing Rusholme Ruffians (from The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder) on guitar with a Ukrainian soldier during a visit to Kyiv. “It’s heartening to see any Labour leader last six weeks without getting absolutely piled in on by everyone,” is Marr’s considered take.

“Some people are alright,” he added. “I understand cool by association when I see it, do you know what I mean?”

George Lynch is one of the most acclaimed and influential rock guitarists to have emerged in the ’80s.

He could have been Ozzy Osbourne’s right hand man. He lost out on that gig twice – first to Randy Rhoads and later to Jake E. Lee.

But Lynch’s brilliance eventually made him a star with Dokken, one of the leading hard rock bands of that decade.

Dokken sold millions of albums despite the hostility between Lynch and the man whose name was on the covers of those albums – singer Don Dokken.

In an interview with Rock Candy magazine, Lynch looked back on his career with Dokken and recalled the years before he joined the band when he was first making his name on the Los Angeles rock scene.

He began with his early influences.

“I was ten when The Beatles emerged,” he said. “That was good timing. I identified with George Harrison quite a bit due to the name. Later, the guitar hero appeared – Hendrix, Clapton, Page.

“My dad was a traveling salesman, so we moved around the country a lot. My guitar was my solace and my friend. But around the age of 14 I started getting in trouble, drinking and drugging and being defiant. I was constantly running away from home.

“I wanted to get out into the world, ride the rails. So my guitar was taken away, my head was shaved and I was shipped off to live with my very strict godparents in a little place in southern California, just a lumber mill and not much else. That straightened me out, and I got my guitar back.”

Lynch recalled his experiences with his early bands.

“I moved to northern California and we had a band called Sgt. Roxx – glitter rock, very influenced by Kiss and the New York Dolls. We had a band room with egg cartons all over the walls, and we’d do full rehearsals in there with pyro. One day it caught fire and burned the whole place the ground, with all our equipment. That was the end of that band!

“Then I formed The Boyz with [future Dokken drummer] Mick Brown. I was the singer and lead guitar player, and we played covers – Montrose and Deep Purple. Eventually we decided to give it a go in Los Angeles.

He continued: “We got a singer, Michael White, a Robert Plant lookalike, except he played flute like [Jethro Tull frontman] Ian Anderson. I don’t know how, but he would blow fire out of his flute. We weren’t crazy about it, but he said, ‘If the fiery flute solo doesn’t go over like gangbusters I’ll drop it.’ And he wore these see-through stretchy pants, with no underwear. It was really hard to watch, so we ended up getting rid of him and got Greg Sanford, whose brother was Rick the singer in Legs Diamond.”

It was after The Boys morphed into a new band, Xciter, that Lynch first encountered Don Dokken, who was then singing with a group named Airborn.

“When the band became Xciter we wrote Paris Is Burning and some others that became Dokken songs,” Lynch said.

“We played a gig with Airborn at the Starwood, and they were playing one of our songs. I asked Don about it and he said it was one of his songs that he’d written. ‘Oh, okay.’ That should have been a big red light.”

He added: “Don wasn’t like a normal guy you could talk to. It was strained and weird. He had to control the conversation in the room. All eyes had to be on him. There was obviously a little bullshit going on.”

Despite his reservations, Lynch accepted an offer to record an album with Don Dokken in Germany in 1981. Mick Brown was the drummer. Juan Croucier, later of Ratt, was the bassist.

That album was initially released as a Don Dokken solo album but was subsequently released as the Dokken band’s debut, Breaking The Chains.

Lynch admitted: “We had no idea what was going on business-wise. It was Don who was handling it. In Germany, Don took care of himself. He had a woman he was seeing, and he lived at her flat right on a lake, eating good food. We were all stuck in a Czechoslovakian hotel in an attic with no door on the shower.

“Don told people that he paid us, but to get home from Germany I had to sell some equipment to get a plane ticket and I also very fortunately got a last minute job writing songs and playing guitar for Udo Lindenberg, a German artist. I made eight hundred marks and I was able to get myself home.”

In 1982, following the death of Randy Rhoads, Lynch auditioned for Ozzy Osbourne’s band for the second time. Lynch was heartbroken when the job went to Jake E. Lee, but in the wake of that disappointment he rejoined Dokken alongside Brown and bassist Jeff Pilson, and by 1984 the band had achieved a major breakthrough with their second album Tooth And Nail.

“We were full of piss and vinegar and wanted to show the world we had what it took,” Lynch said. “We dedicated ourselves to taking it to the next level, which we managed to do with Tooth And Nail, which went gold.”

Dokken’s rise continued with the million-selling albums Under Lock And Key (1985) and Back For The Attack (1987). Lynch acknowledged the role that the band’s management played in that success.

He recalled: “If you have to give one element of the machine the most credit for the success that Dokken had, it would be Cliff Burnstein and Q-Prime. These guys got us on radio and MTV, on these giant tours, and in all the magazines. So we owed our success to them. And to Don’s bullshit and perseverance, and maybe some of our talent and chemistry as well.”

The tension between Lynch and Don Dokken was exacerbated by the fact the singer felt isolated in his own band, unwilling to embrace the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle in the manner enjoyed by Lynch, Brown and Pilson.

As Lynch put it: “We had our little clique because we were partying together. Don wasn’t.”

It was after a disastrous spell on the Monsters Of Rock stadium tour in 1988 that Dokken split up.

Lynch subsequently formed the band Lynch Mob, whose debut album Wicked Sensation was released in 1990, featuring Mick Brown on drums.

“It was an equal four-way split in Lynch Mob,” the guitarist said. “We found a great singer with Oni [Logan], and we had a real chemistry while it lasted.”

Lynch rejoined Dokken in the mid-’90s, but the grunge-influenced 1997 album Shadowlife was his last studio recording with the band. He left the band after a tour opening for Alice Cooper.

“I had no intention of quitting Dokken,” he said. “I was hopeful that we could evolve and get to a better place. But when we finished the Alice Cooper tour I got a fax telling me I was fired. No explanation, just a cold, one-sentence statement. I was owed quite a bit of money, but later I got a letter saying if I wanted to get paid I had to sue them. ‘Oh, great!’”

There was one last reunion of the classic Dokken line-up in 2016 when the quartet performed live in Japan. Across the years Don Dokken has carried on recording under the band name with an entirely different line-up. Lynch has had various projects in recent years, including a band named The End Machine with Brown, Pilson and another ex-Lynch Mob singer Robert Mason.

In his interview with Rock Candy, Lynch reflected on what might have been.

He stated: “We are definitely different animals, Don and I. We really aren’t meant for each other. In any band there are complicated, triangulated emotions. Egos. And Don’s ego was just gigantic.

“He built himself up and tried to crush everybody else. He always had to be right and everybody else was wrong. He had to be the absolute alpha male top dog. And I guess my lack of diplomacy didn’t help. I didn’t have the patience or I wasn’t mature enough to really think before I said something. I would just say things that were true, but probably pretty hurtful.”

Lynch ended with a confession.

“I’m not pointing fingers,” he said. “Dokken had more success that anything else that I’ve done in my life, so maybe there is something there. I’m as much to blame as anyone else.”

For the rock artists who defined the 1980s, the early '90s were tough. Hair metal was out, grunge was in and for guitarists such as Steve Stevens it meant a necessary period of adjustment.

That’s what the man best known for his work with Billy Idol has been reflecting on in an interview with the VPR Rocks podcast. Stevens recalled working on Exposed, the solo album by Mötley Crue singer Vince Neil, when grunge broke in 1991 and feeling the change in the air. He defended the record, suggesting it was just released at the wrong time.

"I think a lot of people like it,” he argued. “I've seen it come around (and) it gets the recognition, and also the Mötley record they did with John Corabi, because that was a really great record. You know, it just so happened that the whole Seattle thing hit right at that same point, and the tides were changing."

Of course, Stevens was old enough to remember this happening before during punk: "I'd seen the sea change in guys that were listening to Emerson, Lake & Palmer suddenly having to cut their hair and like New Wave."

“It's healthy, you know. You know, music every decade has to belong to the kids, the youth of that decade. They have to make their own music and believe in it. I didn't want to listen to the music my older brother listened to, or he didn't want to listen to music that my parents listened to. So, I was never frightened by the change."

He recalls a session he did during this time which summed up the shift. "You know, I just found it really funny. I remember going in to do a session in the '90s for somebody, and they said, 'That's great, Steve. But could you play not so well? And less vibrato'. And I just laughed.

"I knew exactly what they were saying, you know, play more like the grunge thing. But, you know, that was cool."

"I loved Soundgarden right from the moment I heard them,” he added. “And I never attached a lot of those bands to a name, you know? I think names get thrown at bands; you can't pigeonhole the great bands.

"So, I think that it's really healthy. It's good to challenge what you already know. And I look for the good in everything. I don't know. That's just my nature."

Jonny Greenwood has admitted that back in the early days of Radiohead he was “clumsy” and “lazy” as a guitarist.

This somewhat surprising confession came in an interview in the i. Greenwood – who is the youngest member of the band and was the last to join – told the paper that he plays the guitar every day now: something he never used to do.

"It's funny. It's something I kind of never wanted to do,” he said. “I used to distrust any sort of fluidity and think that was somehow part of that thing of technical playing. But now I just feel different about it. And it feels lucky that my fingers do these things. I've got a certain facility with it, so I've decided to accept it, and have realised that I really love playing the guitar."

He admitted: "In the early days of Radiohead, I always felt like a clumsy guitar player and was always lazy, but now, just through repetition, I've got hooked. I've just got addicted and want to play all the time."

Of course, Greenwood has come a long way. These days he’s as well known for his film soundtrack work and his various side projects as he is for being the floppy-haired Radiohead guitarist, though he evidently remains humble.

“I don't feel I've learnt enough” he continued. “I'm always sort of torn between wanting to greedily consume all this stuff and understand it. But also knowing that it's a mistake to just have a kind of jack-of-all-trades approach to it all, because it just means you don't really get a deep understanding of any of it. I just permanently feel like I'm in a kind of panic between the two things."

Greenwood was being interviewed ahead of a gig he’s participating in this weekend. Steve Reich at 90 celebrates the esteemed minimalist composer and features Greenwood and the London Sinfonietta at London’s Royal Festival Hall.

As for Radiohead, they have another series of residencies lined up for next May and June in Australia and Japan. The Australian tickets are now all sold out, but you can still register for the five Japanese dates at Saitama by heading over to radiohead.com.

Brian May has no doubt in his mind when naming the greatest guitarist of all time. As he says in a new interview: “Jimi Hendrix, for me, will always be the ultimate guitar god.”

Speaking on BBC2’s The Rock Show with Shaun Keaveny, the Queen legend recalls the impact that Hendrix had on him as a young hopeful.

He tells Keaveny he was, and remains, “completely a fan of Jimi”.

May says of the moment when he first heard Hendrix: “It blew me away so badly I remember thinking to myself, ‘Either I have to give up guitar playing or really take this a bit more seriously.’ Because he just changed the vocabulary of the guitar. Made it a different instrument.”

May has frequently hailed Hendrix as one his key influences. As reported by Guitar Player, May described the experience of witnessing Hendrix perform live as humbling and awe-inspiring.

He recalled: “When I saw Hendrix, I thought, ‘Oh my God. This guy is doing everything that I was trying to do.’ He just made me feel like I couldn’t play. It makes you feel very uncomfortable when you thought you knew everything that was going on, and then suddenly somebody comes along who seems to be doing all sorts of things you hadn’t even thought of.”

In 2020, May said in an interview with Total Guitar editor Chris Bird that he continued to find new inspiration whenever he returned to Hendrix’s music.

He stated: “Jimi is, of course, my number one. And I’ve always said that. To me, he’s still something superhuman. It’s like he really did come from an alien planet, and I will never know quite how he did what he did.

“And every time I go back to Hendrix, I’m thrilled and stunned, and I get that feeling all over again, like either I’m going to give up playing guitar, because I can’t face up to this, or I’m gonna really have to get into it in a big way and try and do what is in my own body and soul.”

He concluded: “I never stop learning from Jimi. Strangely enough, these days I very seldom play his stuff but it’s kind of inside me anyway.”

There isn’t much that Phil Collen’s new Jackson PC1-E can’t do. It has DiMarzio’s nuclear option as the bridge humbucker, the active PC1 Sustainer Driver at the neck, with Collen’s signature stacked ‘bucker in the middle position...

And there is a push/pull coil-split and a five-way selector switch for making full use of its HSS format.

You half expect that there’s a cigarette lighter push-pull on the volume pot, or that if you point it at the TV you could change the channel. Presumably the electric toothbrush is inside the case. And just look at it. The PC1-E comes fresh out of the Jackson facility at Fender’s Ensenada plant with a distressed nitro finish that makes it look like it has been in active service since 1986, the year the Def Leppard guitarist started playing Jackson's hot-rodded electric guitars.

And for a list price of £1,699/$2,199 it might just stop people complaining to Collen that his USA model is too expensive (well, it is not cheap), which is something he gets all the time. So does it get any better at this price?

“No, it absolutely doesn’t,” says Collen, joining MusicRadar from his home in California, because new model, the PC1-E, is a chip off the old block. It does everything the US model that he’s been playing since the ‘90s does

“I’m actually playing it on tour, actually. It’s just great,” he says. “You can do anything on them. On Hysteria we used EBows, but these things have Sustainers, and you can replicate all of that stuff. And then it’s got a Floyd on it. It’s got…”

Everything?

“Everything you could ever, ever want!” he says. “I’ve used mine and it sounds like a Les Paul. It can sound like a Strat. It can sound like a Tele. You can do all this stuff.”

The fundamentals of the PC1-E are as follows. You’ve got a classic Jackson Dinky body, which of course means that we’ve got a bolt-on build, with a caramelised maple neck reinforced with graphite and topped with an ebony fingerboard.

There are 24 stainless steel frets. The fingerboard is carved into the 12” to 16” compound radius so preferred by Fender’s portfolio of high-performance brands – Jackson, Charvel, EVH Gear – and a truss rod adjustment wheel is conveniently located at the top of the fretboard.

The reverse Stratocaster headstock is very cool. Indeed, Collen is too cool to be bothering with fret markers. There’s one pearloid sharkfin inlay at the 12th fret and that’s that (but fear not, Luminlay side dot markers are available along the edge of the fingerboard).

The hardware is gold, which is kind of fancy but offset by the fact that all that mahogany is poking through the black paint. Collen is 100 per cent okay with that.

“I love relic guitars,” he says. “They feel totally worn in, and you put them on, you go, ‘Ahh, okay!’ And they breathe a bit better. Guitars with brand new paint and all of that stuff, they tend to not sound as comfortable or whatever. This thing, just straight off the bat, you plug it in. It’s like, ‘Yep, woo-hoo! Here we go.

“I know there’s some people don’t like relic guitars – ‘you’ve got to do it yourself’. I’ve done it myself through a lot of my guitars, and they’ve got really worn in, but this one sounds and feels like one of those. So it’s amazing. I love them.”

But the electronics is where this thing really distinguished itself from the rank-and-file in the Jackson catalog. The PC-1 Sustainer unit is driven by an 18V preamp with switches so that it can either infinitely sustain the fundamental note or the harmonics.

As Collen says, if you’re the kind of player who has been frustrated trying to nail those sweet volume swell sounds on Hysteria and can’t be bothered with an EBow, the Sustainer is a godsend.

It would be an amazing tool for the soundscaper, too, and of course those hesher players who’ve long tried to nail Slayer’s Dead Skin Mask intro riff and failed. The Sustainer unlocks all that stuff.

“It’s incredible,” says Collen, who sounds a little like Dirty Harry talking about his magnum when he gets onto his electric guitar pickup choices.

“I’ve got a DiMarzio X2N, which is the most powerful pickup they do,” he say.s “My ones, I actually have a coil split, so you can actually make it sound like a Strat. I mean, it’s crazy the different tones you can get. I’m blown away with some my PC-1s, but yeah, this one actually does it all.”

That DiMarzio Sugar Chakra in the middle position – a pickup co-developed with Collen – is a stacked ‘bucker but it too can pull a double-shift and give you some spankiness.

“Again, it’s really powerful, but you can also split that as well,” says Collen. “The combination of those two, the X2N and the Sugar Chakra, is actually amazing. I’ve done that on some of the Def Leppard albums, and I think it was on was the last one, Diamond Star Halos where I’ve done that, and it has such a unique sound – especially when you keep the Sustainer on for some of the clean stuff.”

That’s right, try sustaining those in-between sounds with a clean tone, with an expensive reverb, maybe, some delay too, or maybe. Rockman X100 to fully embrace the spirit of this guitar. Collen promises that all kinds of things will pop out the speaker.

“It’s like, ‘Whoa!’ Again, a sound I’ve never heard before, so I use that a lot,” he says. “So, yeah, pretty cool stuff! It’s lovely. And especially if you jam it between the two pickups, like on that five-switch type of thing, just between the two, really clean, it’s just incredible. It’s beautiful stuff.”

There is one major difference to the actual PC1s Collen likes to play. The neck will be a lot thinner. Collen has thing for fat necks, and got his tech, John Zocco, to swap his out. As Jackson players go, he’s in the minority on that score.

“Well, the one that I had initially was pretty mainstream,” says Collen. “But the one I play is, yes, it’s a fairly monster neck.”

The Pro Series Phil Collen PC1-E is available now. See Jackson for more details.

WIth the demise of the monoculture it’s hard to have a bonafide hit, but try telling that to Ella Langley. Her 2025 single Choosin’ Texas has just broken the record for the most weeks spent at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 – 23 and counting – beating the previous mark set by Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You.

Of course, there will still be those who protest that they've never heard of either Langley or her omnipresent song, but her achievements are staggering. As well as breaking the Hot 100 record, she recently became the first country artist to top the UK singles chart for more than 20 years, and Choosin’ Texas’s streaming numbers and TikTok views run into the billions.

Langley co-wrote the song with Luke Dick, Miranda Lambert and Joybeth Taylor, and speaking to Billboard, she said that she knew immediately that it was going to be included on Dandelion, her second studio album.

“When we wrote it, I knew it was going on the record,” she recalls. “I honestly knew it was gonna be the lead single.”

Despite her confidence in Choosin’ Texas, though, Langley admits that its massive success is beyond anything she could have dreamed of.

“We love that song, but I don’t think I could have ever imagined what’s happening with it right now. Every day I wake up and it’s doing something that I didn’t even know was a goal that I could have had. And it’s just, it’s nuts. It’s crazy to see the ownership that the fans have taken over it, and the different demographics of people listening to the song is so cool. Just nuts to see everything happen.”

Choosin’ Texas was written on a writers’ retreat, and was born after Miranda Lambert had been telling Langley a story about once owning a pet kangaroo.

“She was telling me this story about how she got pulled over once. She had the kangaroo in the passenger seat, dog in the back, and she said she got pulled over and the kangaroo ended up getting her out of a ticket, but she’s like, ‘Of course, I had Texas plates on too.’ And I went, ‘Well, she’s from Texas. I can tell.’”

Bingo: “Just from that phrase, it kinda all hit us and the melody fell right out of me,” says Langley. “I went: ‘She’s from Texas, I can tell by the way he’s two-stepping round the room.’ Just like that. And Miranda was like, ‘Like the one he went with, the girl he went with.’ And 45 minutes later we had that song written.”

45 minutes well spent, we’d say, though there’s more to Choosin’ Texas’s success than the lyrics and melody. The introduction to the song features a distinctive twangy electric guitar lick, and that was played by renowned Nashville session ace Tom ‘Uncle Larry’ Bukovac.

Earlier this year, Bukovac discussed his contribution with the song’s engineer, Dave Clauss. “Ella came in and she was saying, ‘I want this vibe to be like an '80s country thing,’ he explained.

Addressing Clauss, Bukovac continues: “We all gathered in the control room and Charlie Worsham was there [acoustic guitar player on Choosin’ Texas] and we got a couple of acoustics and I just started coming up with that lick, and I thought it'd be cool to record it direct like the guys used to do in the '80s. So I said to you, ‘Can we just get a cool direct sound like a clean kind of Strat vibe?’ And I remember, I had my old Jeff Senn Strat and I ran the guitar into the pedalboard into the direct rig.”

“I think it went straight into the desk, which is an API, and then pretty slamming on the 1176 [compressor],” adds Clauss. “It's amazing – now it's almost like this iconic lick, direct.”

Not that this came as a huge surprise to Bukovac: “I remember saying on the session when we recorded it – and I never say this – I remember saying, ‘this song is going to be a fucking smash,’ and then when we got together months later to do another session, the first thing Ella said to me was like, ‘You called it. You knew it was going to be a hit.’”

Turning to the isolated guitar parts, Clauss reveals that the main lick is actually two tracks – a lead and a harmonised double – and that Bukovac added a third rhythm part underneath. There are also a lot of effects: “I was probably my EarthQuaker Dispatch Master and the Line 6 – I use a lot of Line 6 M9 digital reverb,” says Bukovac. Clauss added plenty of plugin “sauce” on top of that, too.

Listen to Choosin’ Texas carefully and you’ll notice the subtle guitar parts that fill the gaps between Langley’s vocals, which were recorded as the band played. This meant that Bukovac was able to make them respond perfectly to each line of the song, and helps to give it a ‘live’ feel.

Choosin’ Texas has definitely ‘connected’, and its cross-generational appeal is a rarity in this day and age. It’s worth saying, though, that Langley’s time in the Billboard record books could be short-lived: with the festive season looming charge and Mariah Carey going back out on tour to celebrate, surely it’s only a matter of time before her evergreen Christmas hit reaches the top spot once again…

Paramore singer Hayley Williams has written a moving tribute to her ex-husband, New Found Glory guitarist Chad Gilbert, on social media.

Gilbert sadly lost his battle with brain cancer earlier this week. He was diagnosed with the illness six months ago and passed away on Sunday at the age of just 45.

Williams, who was with Gilbert for a decade, posted on Instagram that: “Chad is indeed a legend in the scene and my time connected to him taught me a lot. He introduced me to people that continue to shape my life in beautiful ways, and to music and culture that has made life a lot richer.”

“There isn't much that hasn't already been said about what he contributed to the musical world a lot of us grew up in. His influence and attitude guided the genre forward. His passion for fostering the community was inspiring and sticks with me.”

She continued: “I will forever be grateful that from him I gained a deeper understanding and a reverence for the community and the culture of hardcore. Sending love and my sympathies to his family, NFG fam, and all his friends.”

Gilbert and Williams were something of a poster couple for the Noughties punk/emo generation that came to prominence during the early social media era. Williams appeared on New Found Glory’s 2015 single Vicious Love. The pair began dating in 2007, married in 2016 but divorced the following year.

New Found Glory have cancelled their appearance at the Aftershock Festival in Sacramento, California, but the group have said they’re going ahead with a scheduled six appearances at the Eat To The Beat event at the Epcot theme park in Disney World next week. It seems, Gilbert was a huge Disney fan.

In a statement, the band have said: “Our shows at Epcot were dates he was so excited for and he was actively planning to be on stage with us there. He had already worked on the setlists with us and was practising as much as possible to be ready. Because of how much he wanted to play these shows, taking the stage at Epcot feels like the right way to honour him, and what he would want us to do.

"Our plan from the beginning with him was to announce our Epcot sets ahead of time, so we feel it’s only appropriate to share them with you now as we prepare to play in his memory.”

“Every note we play and every word you sing at Epcot is for Chad. Thank you all for wrapping us in so much love, understanding, and support as we come together to honour his legacy.”

PRS Guitars has teamed up with Jaguar Land Rover for a special limited edition run of John Mayer’s Silver Sky that refinishes his signature guitar in paint jobs taken from the Defender four-wheel drive.

Mayer is a big fan of the Defender. He doesn’t just use it to do the Friday Big Shop down at Whole Foods, he collects them. This collaboration is a “dream come true” he says.

“I’ve always chosen colourways based on objects and materials that inspire me in the world, and as a collector and lover of Defenders, this collaboration is the perfect crossover between two great passions of mine,” he says Mayer.

Did we see this collab coming (besides the teasers on John Mayer’s Instagram account)? No. But is it altogether bonkers, from way out of left field? Not really, because it’s very much in keeping with the history of electric guitar design.

Guitar manufacturers have long drawn influence from automobile design. Just think of all those classic Fender paint jobs. Or the fact that Gibson hired Raymond Dietrich, whose portfolio was all Chrysler cars and things on four-wheels to design the aerodynamic lines of the Firebird.

The Silver Sky Defender Color Collection Limited Editions comprises four US-made core models in Arles Blue, Willow Green, Portofino Red and Sandglow Yellow – all heritage colours for the 4x4 – and another four Indonesian-made SE modes in Petra Copper, Sedona Red, Carpathian Grey and Woolstone Green.

The SE line is particularly unique in the sense that you’ve got black pickguards and knobs for the very first time on a Silver Sky. The Core models come with the standard white pickguard – but with painted headstocks.

Both editions feature a custom neck plate, and they are limited. There is no figure put on the SE but they are only making them until mid-way through 2027, while 500 of the US model in each finish will be available.

If you are liable to run into Mayer at Whole Foods – perhaps you often find yourself jamming Gravity in the parking lot – then maybe the Core model in Arles Blue is the one for you. That’s the same colour as the Defender Mayer has owned for over 20 years. Just don’t use Turtle Wax on it when it’s time to give it a clean.

There will also be a special version in British Racing Green that are not for general sale, but will be used to raise funds for Jaguar Land Rover’s Defender Service Awards and Mayer’s veterans’ health charity, The Heart and Armor Foundation.

The Silver Sky key specs are the same as before – it’s just a new look. You can find out more over at PRS Guitars.

James Hetfield has been singing the praises of Tony Iommi, describing the Black Sabbath guitarist as “the riff lord”.

The Metallica frontman appeared on his own show, James Hetfield’s Riff Life, on Sirius XM’s Maximum Metallica and spoke about what the Sabbath guitarist means to him. “Tony Iommi is the riff lord, in my mind,” he declared. “He is the one that has inspired me the most out of any guitar player for my rhythm guitar playing and songwriting."

He continued, making reference to the track Children Of The Grave. “Obviously, Tony is the riff lord and everyone starts the song together on the one riff…. Basically, Tony plays off that riff, goes in to hit the big giant chords, which opens the song up.

"I really love the drum overdub that they did to help with that percussion of the riff and the real cool ghostly guitar sounds at the very, very end."

Metallica have long given due reference to their metal forebears. They inducted Sabbath into the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame in 2006 and have sung their praises in countless interviews over the years. And of course they appeared at last year’s Back To The Beginning event at Villa Park, Birmingham.

Talking of which, a concert film of Ozzy and Sabbath’s final show will be out next month. It’s been confirmed that Ozzy And Black Sabbath: Back To The Beginning will open worldwide on October 28.

The movie is produced by Mercury Studios and while it’s certain to feature the full sets of its main attraction, it’s not known yet what other excerpts from that day will be included. As you know, the one day event featured virtually every prominent name in the world of metal and hard rock, including Alice in Chains, Anthrax, Guns N’ Roses, Lamb of God, Mastodon, Pantera, Slayer and Metallica.

In a statement about the film, Sharon Osbourne has said: “Back to the Beginning came about because I asked Ozzy what would really make him happy. And he said the only thing that would make him happy was if he could perform again and say goodbye to his fans. That’s all he wanted to do. He wanted to say goodbye and thank you.”

Tosin Abasi surprised Joe Satriani and Steve Vai with a pair of custom eight-string electric guitars to celebrate the end of the their Surfing With The Hydra Tour.

The Animals As Leaders guitarist presented the two guitar icons with two of Abasi Concepts’ monster ēmi 8s, each with a signature twist. Abasi teamed up with long-time Satch and Vai collaborator, and all-round guitar art and finish wizard Dave Bonvillain to present Satch with an ēmi 8 with a finish inspired by his Ibanez Chrome Boy signature, and Vai with one that sports a similarly psychedelic swirl finish to the Ibanez Universe 77 7-string guitar from the Passion And Warfare cover – and the early ‘90s JEM 77s.

“David Bonvillain took on the challenge of translating that palette and character onto a one-of-one ēmi8, while keeping the guitar distinctly its own,” says Abasi Concepts.

For Satriani, this was something altogether different. His Chrome Boy ēmi 8 is his first 8-string guitar. When Abasi presented it to him backstage at the Filene Center in Wolf Trap National Park, Virginia, Satch could barely contain himself.

“I figured you needed an 8-string guitar,” says Abasi.

“Oh wow! Oh my God,” says Satch, taking his jacket off as to not scratch this lustrous beast. “Oh, it’s light! What’s it made of?”

That’ll be the okoume, and the judiciously contoured shape. There’s something of the 21st-century sportscar to Abasi Concepts’ designs, and the ēmi 8, sibling to the the brand’s Larada 8 flagship model, is surely a bit lighter for its double-cutaway design. It certainly suits a pair of players show play next-gen turbo S-styles to a tee.

For Satriani, the multi-scale fanned-fret setup is going to to take getting used to. He says it has been some time since he last tried one.

“Ralph Novak [of Novax Guitars], does that ring a bell? He was the one that was trying to get me to [play them]. He made me a guitar,” says Satriani. “A JS guitar, but Ibanez wasn’t interested. I didn’t feel like it made anything better for a six-string. It’s great to solve the whole B-string thing. You need it for this. I don’t know any chord shapes!”

This generosity to his touring buddies is something we have come to expect from Abasi. In 2023, he gave John Petrucci an ēmi 8 with a custom finish based on his Ibanez JPM 100 from the ‘90s, with that rad multi-coloured Picasso graphic. Abasi sure has an eye for these cult classic Ibanez guitars.

Steve Vai was similarly blown away.

“Are you serious? Holy shitting hell!” he says. “I wanted one of these guitars so bad. I never wanted to ask but this is beyond… Tosin! You really did this.”

It will be interesting to see what these two come up with on guitar whose scale runs from 25.5” to 27.5” scale, with a 16” to 21.5" radius on that ebony fingerboard.

As Satriani admits, it might take a little getting used to the new chord shapes but that oviform + - neck profile is might inviting, and Satch and Vai have never been shy about trying out something new.

In other Satch/Vai news, the pair’s first collaborative studio album, The Sea Of Emotion, has been announced for November 6 via earMUSIC.

Epiphone has some very good news for fans of Eric Clapton; there is a new signature guitar on its way, and it is a replica of the 1964 ES-335TDC that he played during the latter days of Cream, most notably the 1968 farewell shows at the Royal Albert Hall.

There is a catch. Clapton’s Epiphone guitar is not out until the summer of 2027, but anyone who is heading to next week’s Crossroads Guitar Festival 2026 in Austin, Texas, will be able to check it out in person, and they’ll be able to enter a prize draw to win one.

Gibson has announced that it will have a presence at Clapton’s long-running festival, with more than 30 guitars – Gibson and Epiphone – on display at its booth, where you can try them out. You can also sit on the Westeros-inspired Gibson Guitar Throne and get your photo taken. And what the heck – Guitar Center is an official retail partner, you could take home a new electric guitar while you’re there.

There will also be a clutch of Gibson and Epiphone signature artists on the bill. Clapton, of course, will be playing both nights, and you’ll also find Sierra Hull, Marcus King, Keb’ Mo’, and Gary Clark Jr onstage, plus young up-and-comers Billy Gibbons and Joe Bonamassa. The bill is stacked. The Tedeschi Trucks Band, Buddy Guy, Julian Lage, Taj Mahal, and Tommy Emmanuel will be performing, too.

Epiphone has released no more details of the Eric Clapton 1964 ES-335 TDC but looking at the picture from the Gibson Gazette above, the signature hardshell guitar case offers a few clues as to what’s in store. This is another collaboration between the Gibson Custom Shop and Epiphone, so expect some top-class pro-quality specs, such as Gibson USA pickups. Maybe we will see something similar to the Epiphone 1962 Inspired By Gibson Custom 1962 ES-335, which has a pair of Gibson Custombuckers.

But looking at the preview pic, we can also see that this release replicates some of the idiosyncrasies in the Clapton’s 335. He famously swapped out the factory tuners for a set of gold Grover Rotomatics, and with the chrome ABR-1 bridge that makes for a mismatched look.

The Gibson Custom Shop has already made a replica of Clapton’s 64 ES-335. Launched in 2005, we’ve seen this listed for crazy money, which we might expect given that Gibson only made 175 of them, and indeed the original sold at auction via Christie’s for $847,500 in June 2004.

Clapton bought the ES-335 in ’64, and used it throughout his career with the Yardbirds, John Mayall, Cream and Blind Faith.

As Christie’s notes in its lot description, Yardbirds fans might have thought it was Chris Dreja’s guitar – it was always him pictured with it in. the pictures. But it would come into its own over the years, with Clapton playing it until the mid ‘90s, and using it onstage when he’d play a Freddie King number.

If anyone is going to Crossroads Guitar Festival, do check it out, and report back ASAP. We want to know if it has the “Hare Krishna!” postage stamp on the back of the headstock.

For more details, head over to the Gibson Gazette. The Crossroads Guitar Festival 2026 takes place over the weekend of September 26 and 27, with proceeds supporting addiction recovery at the Crossroads Centre, Antigua.

In other Epiphone news, the Gibson-owned brand just refreshed the Joan Jett Olympic Special with an all-new Vintage Sunburst look.

One of Britain’s premiere heavy metal outfits, Bullet For My Valentine have more than earned their place in the halls of the 21st century pantheon of rock gods. Touring with Metallica, Iron Maiden and Slayer, BFMV merged classic rock archetypes with a more modern melodic sensibility, paving the way for a new generation of acts.

We spoke to the band’s chief vocalist Matt Tuck and lead guitarist Michael ‘Padge’ Paget back in 2018, on the heels of their sixth LP Gravity. We dug deep into the genesis of their coruscating sound, and how they shifted their stylistic approach to make this more radio-leaning record.

“[Gravity] is a lot more simple and foundation-based, rather than the crazy riffs and solos and technical stuff, which we’ve done to death,” Matt told us. “It ended up being an enjoyable process tracking the guitars, rather than a stressful one.

“Being a guitar nerd you really want to get into nuances and put your own identity into it all. But that brings stresses, so this time round a lot of it was more straightforward chords and riffs and clean patterns. It was much more relaxed way of recording guitars.”

Tuck also explained how the band didn’t overdo the layering of the guitars for the album;

“There’s one on the left and one on the right, that’s it! We didn’t double-track anything. I think [third album] Fever was the last time we quadded the guitars up, with two on two one side and then the same on the other.

“On [2013 album] Temper Temper we decided to put less in, which in a weird way – depending on the song – makes it actually sound bigger. Plus the process is twice as quick; it’s only half the work!”

As the two last remaining original members of the band, Tuck and Paget reflected on their enduring chemistry…

“It probably comes from the time we’ve spent together. I’m a keen watcher! All the years we’ve been together means we know each other well,” said Padge. “We filmed a playthrough video in New York the other day, just the two of us without the band, and it blew me away when I heard how f**kin’ tight we were. Without nothing else going on around, we were both just hearing guitars – it’s quite magical whenever it sinks in.”

Matt added, “It’s the time and effort we’ve put into this career and this band. We kinda have the same job technically – that only adds to the yin and yang thing. We’ve both progressed massively over the years; we both want what’s best for the song rather than the individual.”

One of our final questions to the pair related to the guitar tones they personally felt were the most iconic of all time. For Matt, there was only one answer: the tone of the late Pantera legend Dimebag Darrell on one of metal gods' most celebrated records.

“The most iconic guitar tone of all-time for me is on Pantera’s Vulgar Display Of Power. It’s just crushing… though not a regular sounding tone, it’s very honky and scooped. The lead tones that Dimebag had on that album were beautiful and so individual. No-one else sounded like that, which made him very rare.

“Players don’t usually have that much identity. You could give someone else his guitar through his amp and it would sound like dogs**t – a lot of it was in the hands. That’s the holy grail of guitar playing… identity over anything else.”

Read our full 2018 interview with Bullet For My Valentine here.

The 1980s was a period of radical reinvention and Eric Clapton wanted a piece of it. This was the former Yardbird, the graduate of John Mayall’s seminal Bluesbreakers, a dyed-in-the-wool blues purist and ‘70s rock survivor, and yet by 1985 he was playing a Roland guitar synth on a song produced by Phil Collins.

Clapton had not given up on blues guitar but he was becoming more open to new sounds and ideas. No one put a gun to his head and told him to play guitar synth on Never Make You Cry – this was Phil Collins producing, not Phil Spector. But Collins was having an influence. He was giving Clapton’s sound a contemporary glow-up for 1985 studio album Behind The Sun – and at the time, nothing was more contemporary than the electronic keyboard and synthesizer.

Clapton was also open to all this. He was open to direction. Clapton understood what Warner Bros could do for him. So when they told him to drop the track Heaven Is One Step Away from Behind The Sun and record a trio of tracks written by Jerry Lynn Williams, he was always going to entertain that suggestion.

Clapton always spoke kindly of Williams, the Texan songwriter who also supplied material for BB King, Bonnie Raitt and Robert Plant. He couldn't fault the label's logic. Nonetheless, looking back, the notes he got from the higher-uppers at Warner Bros stung.

“In hindsight, it’s worked out to everyone’s satisfaction. I had a lot of resentment at the time, and I still harbour a little bit,” Clapton told Guitar World in 1988. “[But] they have the best distribution and best promotion in the world, so if I want to get my music out, and it’s not too much of a hardship to play ball with them, I’m quite happy to do it.”

When it was time to record a follow-up to Behind The Sun, Clapton had found a new band, with Collins on drums and Nathan East on bass guitar, he had a formidable rhythm section. Greg Phillinganes was hired to play keys.

Clapton’s next record would be titled August. Martin Scorsese can take some credit for the opening track, It’s In The Way That You Use It. He got Clapton and Robbie Robertson to co-write it for The Color Of Money soundtrack, where it made its debut.

It’s In The Way That You Use It was an outlier on August. Clapton and longstanding collaborator Tom Dowd produced it, and it was recorded with a different cast of players. The remaining tracks would fall under Collins’ auspices, and it would present us with a very different side to Slowhand.

Here his Fender Stratocaster waded through the splash of gated reverbs and expensive compression, and all the various studio tricks that Collins had perfected. Clapton had new toys of his own. He was playing prototypes of his signature Strat that would debut at NAMM 1987. It had the Lace Sensor pickups and the TBX mid-boost circuit. There was one in Pewter, as seen on the cover of the single It’s In The Way That You Use It, and one in Torino Red.

August had its box-office collaboration. Tina Turner guested on Tearing Us Apart, a bombastic power-soul workout that spoke to Clapton’s marital problems. It also had some serious session talent on horns, with jazz session ace Michael Brecker on saxophone and Randy Brecker on trumpet.

Collins gets the credit for all this futurism and yet August's most out-there moment takes us back to the burgeoning electronic music scene of late ‘70s Tokyo: if the blues had Robert Johnson then synth-pop and techno had Ryuichi Sakamoto of Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO).

Remarkably, Clapton would bring these worlds together, via Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson.

Sakamoto originally wrote Behind The Mask for a Seiko TV commercial but that synth motif was too good waste on selling watches. YMO commissioned British lyricist Chris Mosdell to write English lyrics for it and rerecorded it for their 1979 sophomore album Solid State Survivor. The sounds YMO were putting together were revolutionary, siring a whole new scene – and a new era of experimentation.

Quincy Jones was the kind of man who would be interested in such developments. On a trip to Japan, he met with Kuni Murai, the president of YMO's label, Alfa Records, who suggested Behind The Mask might be a good fit for Michael Jackson.

Jackson was interested. He was writing for Thriller, and Behind The Mask captured his imagination – only the arrangement needed punching up. Jackson rewrote the lyrics, too. Mosdell's lyrics were inspired by WB Yeats and a traditional Japanese wooden Noh mask, and how that related to society. Jackson had something more intimate in mind and rewrote Behind The Mask as a love song.

Speaking to Guy Pratt and Gary Kemp on their Rockonteurs podcast, Phillinganes – who would play on Thriller – says he’ll never forget when he first heard Behind The Mask.

“For some strange reason – I have no idea why but I am so thankful he did – Quincy had me join him and [songwriter] Rod Temperton to go to Michael’s house to listen to demos,” recalls Phillinganes. “I go to Michael’s house and that’s when we got our own private world premiere of Billie Jean, Beat It, and [Wanna Be] Startin’ Somethin’ – we heard those demos, and then we heard several other ones, including what he added to Ryuichi’s track. He added the melody and the lyrics. The first time I heard it was at Michael’s house. [sings] ‘Who do you love?’ He did all that stuff.”

It was to no avail. Jackson’s management reached out to YMO’s management and to Mosdell to thrash out a deal. The song’s copyright issues were a sticking point. That Jackson had rewritten the song, embellishing not only the lyrics but the music, too, meant that both Mosdell and Sakomoto’s parties would need to be satisfied.

Sakamoto recalls it being a negotiation made tougher by the fact he hadn’t heard the revised version.

“That track was going to be on the Thriller album, so we got a letter from Michael’s office and it said, ‘We covered your song Behind The Mask and we’re going to put it on the new album and we need 100 per cent of the writer’s share,’” said Sakamoto during a Red Bull Music Academy Lecture. “We wanted to listen to what the music was like. Without hearing the music I cannot judge if 100 per cent of writer’s share is fair or not, so we refused it.”

Sakamoto sounded a note of regret that at this. After all, Thriller did go onto enjoy some commercial success. An agreement over royalties might have been life-changing. “If we said ‘yes,’ probably I would have ten different houses all over the world,” he said.

Jackson had demoed Behind The Mask but that is as far as he was going to take it. Phillinganes loved the song. He was working on his second solo album, Pulse, and knowing that there was some doubt over including Behind The Mask on Thriller, he asked Jackson if he could use it instead. “He went, ‘Yeah, okay.’ He sent it to me, and I recreated that, and put it on my record,” said Phillinganes.

Behind The Mask was duly released on Pulse, then as a single the following year. Phillinganes thought this was going to be the track that made him a star. It was an obvious choice for a single.

“I had great, high hopes for it, because I thought, ‘This is a slam dunk.’ First of all, it’s co-written by Michael Jackson. It’s got all the elements. It’s got funk. It’s got electronica. It’s got pop. It’s everything!’” he said. “It’s the complete package, right? So I basically can’t lose. Well, I did.”

Phillinganes’ version of Behind The Mask made a dent in the dance and R&B/hip-hop charts but little else. He wasn’t all that disappointed, though. He got to make a video for it, and for a short while it was on MTV, and there was just enough juice behind it for Phillinganes to perform it on American Bandstand with Dick Clark – a bucket-list item that Phillinganes could now tick off.

This is where Clapton enters the song’s story. Some accounts have Phillinganes presenting Clapton with the track, but he remembers it differently. Clapton had liked what Phillinganes’ did with Michael Jackson’s arrangement of this seminal Japanese synth-pop classic. It was his idea. And Phillinganes was more than happy with that. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is cool.’ It was kind of a double full-circle moment,” he said.

The response from critics and fans was mixed. Not everyone appreciated what Clapton was going for on August. Those who looked upon Clapton as this mythical cultural sherpa guiding them through the history of blues were aghast. This was not Elmore James or Robert Johnson.

But for Clapton, Behind The Mask was transformative. He had spent much of the ‘70s in retreat, his addiction to heroin and alcohol diminishing him to the point of nullification, as though he wanted to erase himself. As the ‘80s dawned, Clapton seemed defeated, until rehab and the release of 1983's Money And Cigarettes got him back on his feet.

Even if he had yet to outrun his demons by the time August was released, Clapton was nonetheless confronting them. He would enter rehab for the final time in ’87.

He was looking better, too. A good tailor helped. The Clapton of the ‘80s was a man of sharp suits, and Phillinganes was more than happy to be Crockett to Clapton’s Tubbs: “I wore them well, baby! [Laughs] Because Eric didn’t play around, man. He was Versace and Armani, and we followed suit, baby. We came out like gangsters!”

Behind The Mask would enjoy a second life. Ryuichi Sakamoto would rerecord it and release it in 1987, and Michael Jackson's version would eventually see the light of day when his 1982 recording was bundled with the 2010 posthumous compilation Michael. The Human League covered it in 1993. Orbital remixed it.

Clapton addressed August's critics in an interview with Rolling Stone. The complaints focused on Collins' contribution, that he was the album's real auteur. And it's true to an extent. Collins’ input is all over the record; the studio sheen is all his, and also co-wrote Hold On. But that, argued Clapton, was what collaboration is all about.

“I don’t like to compete musically. If you put me onstage with another guitar player and he starts showing off, I won’t compete. I’ll let him go,” he said. “When it’s my turn, I’ll play what I’m going to play anyway. That’s how it is in the studio. At the end of the day, people will say that Behind The Sun and August are really Phil Collins records. Fine, if that’s all they can hear, they’re not listening properly.”

There were plenty of people who were listening properly. If Clapton had lost some of the Bluesbreakers superfans along the way, there was a new generation of players who were just discovering him through records like August – and especially its successor, Journeyman, which Phillinganes described as “the pinnacle” of Clapton’s renaissance era. John Mayer would surely agree to that.

But more importantly, Clapton had rediscovered himself. It took Behind The Mask to get his game face back.

The auction of Johnny Marr’s guitars has fetched over £3.6 million – more than three times their estimated value.

In a statement, the guitarist said: "The auction has been a great experience and has exceeded all my expectations. I'd like to thank everyone who made bids and special thanks to Christie's for making it so memorable."

Amongst the more iconic instruments that went were a 1982 Rickenbacker 330 Jetglo that Marr played on the Smiths’ debut album that he later lent to Noel Gallagher to use on Definitely Maybe – it can be seen on the cover of Oasis’s first single Supersonic. That went for £358,400.

Then there was his 1960 Cherry Red Gibson ES-355. The story goes that Marr promised Sire boss Seymour Stein that the Smiths would sign to his label if Stein bought him a new guitar. Stein obliged and Marr and Morrissey signed on the dotted line. The guitarist played it on Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now. It sold for £204,800.

In a statement, Amelia Walker from Christie's hailed Marr's "groundbreaking and unparalleled musical influence", adding that: "It has been an absolute honour to work with him and to share these amazing instruments and their stories with so many fans, collectors and fellow musicians around the world.

"We are also delighted to have been able to support Johnny in raising valuable funds for his chosen charities."

Marr is currently looking forward to the release of his fifth solo album, The Age Of Everything, in a couple of weeks on 2 October. Later this autumn, the 62 year old guitarist plays a short Latin American tour taking in dates in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile.

One of the main things that Radiohead’s recent in-the-round live return has absolutely demonstrated is the vital importance of each and every member to the band’s aural universe. Although the central vocal powerhouse, Thom Yorke, gets most of the limelight - and the flailing ferocity of perennially young-looking lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood pulls an equal amount of focus - Philip Selway, Colin Greenwood and, of course, Ed O’Brien’s contributions are every bit as vital in making Radiohead what it is.

MusicRadar has spoken to Ed a few times over the years, but perhaps one of the most revealing interactions we had with him was back in 2017, when he was explaining to us how he co-designed Fender’s EOB Stratocaster. However, during that conversation, O’Brien also shared with us how his role in the revered band had developed over the decades, and how they had navigated the rougher periods together.

“Thom also plays great guitar as well,” Ed told us. “On the first album [Pablo Honey], particularly, he’s driving it with his rhythm playing, so my role was never to drive it rhythmically. I might arpeggiate and fingerpick stuff, but he would drive it as he sings it. So it was never difficult for me in that sense.

“What’s always been the hardest thing and used to be the most daunting was that Thom and Jonny used to write together a lot. So when we got to rehearsals, they had their parts worked out and I used to be like, ‘Where do I fit into this? Where do I find my space? You have that initial thought and then you think, ‘The song is great, okay, how do I work my way into this?’ And it was challenging. But that challenge is good because it forced me to think in a different way.”

O’Brien told us that Jonny and himself would often joke that there were very few songs where the three guitarists actually all play through to the end without stopping.

“I totally understand about accompaniment, I understand about layering stuff, and I also like light and shade in a song - Jimmy Page always talks about this. I like quiet and loud. Jonny and I used to joke that there are very few songs where we play all the way through. Whereas most guitarists in a band, that’s their modus operandi. I guess there’s an orchestral sentiment to what we do that’s all about the songs.

“So I might change sounds three times in a song. And at the start of a tour it’s like tap dancing and it’s not really like playing.”

Beyond talking us through his then-new EOB Strat, and some of his favoured pedal choices, Ed explained how Radiohead’s darker moments were worked through to produce some of the greatest records of the last three decades.

“The worst thing that happens as a band, and we always do this is, we get into a rehearsal room to start a new record and everybody plays through everything. It’s f**king rubbish!” Ed told us.

“Again, it’s about the light and shade in music. Let the drummer and bass player do the work, let the singer. Andy Summers was a master of where and when not to play. Space. My favourite guitarists know when not to play. Then you make more of it when you do play. Make it count.”

O’Brien also remembered recording some of OK Computer’s most compelling cuts completely live.

“[Climbing Up The Walls and Let Down] were [whole] songs and because of our, shall we say, somewhat limited palette at that stage, we played them live. But it was enough; our palette was sated.

“I remember when we did Climbing Up The Walls it was just like, ‘F**k! We made that sound just playing in that room all together.’ It was the same experience with Let Down. It was like they were real moments of magic. And that’s probably the last time we’ve done it like that in the studio, which is kind of a shame, really. But I don’t think you can repeat yourself.”

Read our full classic interview with Ed O’Brien here.

Epiphone has resurrected one of its most-loved signature guitars as the Joan Jett Olympic Special returns to the lineup, featuring an fresh finish and a subtle but welcome upgrade on its predecessor.

Where the 2022 model had an Indian laurel fingerboard, we now have rosewood. That’s not bad for starters. The other updates are mostly aesthetic, with Vintage Sunburst replacing Aged Classic White, and the pickup now has double-white bobbins.

But does that matter? The Olympic Special is a simple recipe: one asymmetrical double-cut plank of mahogany, a glued-in mahogany neck, one pickup, one volume control, and no fancy stuff.

There’s no coil-taps or switching to worry about. Turn it up and play. That’s its appeal. Don’t mess with it.

Besides, Jett’s take on the Olympic Special does come with a twist. As per the 2022 model, we have a toggle killswitch, located adjacent to the bridge and volume knob, everything within reach of the right hand.

Her signature can be found on the back of the headstock – speaking of which, that 3x3 headstock has got a lot of mojo.

Elsewhere, it’s as simple as an electric guitar gets. The design DNA is quintessentially Gibson/Epiphone, with the 24.75” scale length and the 12” fingerboard radius. The fingerboard is unbound and has dot inlays, betraying its lineage as an affordable electric.

There is one PowerHammer Pro humbucker at the bridge position, high-output, gutsy, voiced for playing power chords and if you want to clean your sound up roll back that volume knob.

It’s a CTS pot so should have a nice taper to it, and that black ‘Speed’ knob has been modified with rubber grips to make it more tactile and easier to grip.

The single-ply black pickguard is present and correct. The MTB605 wraparound bridge is neat and tidy, and helpfully has adjustable saddles. There are sealed die-cast tuners, too.

Would this Epiphone guitar look better with vintage Kluson-style tuners with white buttons a la the Gibson Les Paul Junior? Maybe. But there’s something about this guitar that is perfect as it is, a budget option to beat up onstage, or to fix up.

Young players picking this up could always install a more high-end aftermarket electric guitar pickup over time, or indeed install a new set of machineheads if that’s your bag.

Oh, there is a gig bag included in the price, which, at $599/£499 is very inviting. And you can find out more over at Epiphone. In other recent Epiphone artist model news, the Gibson-owned brand launched a very cool (and quite high-end) limited edition replica of Marcus King's El Dorado.

Think of Joe Bonamassa and you don’t necessarily think of the blues guitar maestro as a P-90 player. Sure, he owns electric guitars with P-90s, but his tone is more commonly associated with the sound of PAF humbuckers, or golden era Stratocaster single-coils.

Well, it turns out that it did take a little bit of time for Bonamassa to find his ultimate P-90 – a pickup that Seymour Duncan has meticulously replicated for a limited edition set that is one of the most exciting electric guitar pickup releases of 2026.

And when we say meticulous, we mean it. These Custom Shop winds even have the period-accurate dimpled baseplates of the originals.

Got an Epiphone guitar you want to upgrade? Read on. Got a Gibson Les Paul and fancy swapping them out for the hot, wild and rock-and-blues-friendly sound of the P-90 single-coil? Read on. They'll fit many a guitar. As Bonamassa says, these pickups might be modelled on his SG’s pickups but they’re not “SG-centric”.

“You can put them in the ES guitars,” he says. “You can throw these in a Les Paul. You can throw these in a Fender. It’s not just for an SG Special.”

But it was an SG Special in which he found the inspiration for this new Seymour Duncan signature set. The SG Special was a guitar he had his eye on ever since seeing Pete Townshend playing them with the Who.

“I’m a huge fan of Pete Townshend, those great clips of him playing those SG Specials. Even Carlos Santana at Woodstock, he’s using an SG Special,” says Bonamassa, in a video shot for Seymour Duncan. “That’s what really got me into P-90s, the way they clean up really well but they would roar.”

Bonamassa and Seymour Duncan were in conversation about where their longstanding collaboration might go next. They had done the 1950 Broadcaster set, the 1960 ‘Bolin Burst’ Les Paul set. Pre-CBS Strat tones were back on the menu with the “Greenburst” and Cradle Rock ’63 Strat sets. Seymour Duncan also recreated the pickups from his 1955 “Bonnie” Strat, “The Blonde Dot” 1960 PAF humbucker set and Amos humbucker.

What next? What about a P-90?

Bonamassa did a little bit of inventory and pulled out just the very thing, a 1961 Gibson SG Special that was a truly miraculous find in a most unlikely location.

“Very rarely do you find a special guitar in a pawn shop,” says Bonamassa. “Well, one day in 2010, I was playing the Embassy Theatre, Fort Wayne, Indiana. It was in the middle of winter and I heard that there was a pawn shop around the corner that had an interesting SG in it from one of the crew guys. I walked in and this was hanging on the wall, a 1961 Gibson SG Special in Polaris White with the tilted bridge.”

Bonamassa made the deal and brought the SG back to the venue to put it through its paces. It was a revelation. All the other P-90s he had played were either too bright, or too dark. Even though the P-90 sounded great when players like Townshend and Santana used them, Bonamassa was not sure if he’d ever click with them

“I plugged it in, and these particular P-90s were the P-90s that I was searching for in my head over the years,” says Bonamassa. “This was the beginning of my love affair with P-90s. The light finally went off in my head, going, ‘Okay, this is really strong.’”

So, that was the guitar – and these are the pickups. Seymour Duncan is making a limited edition run of them, based around an Alnico IV design, and they are wax-potted to help cut down on unwanted squeal.

The 610 sets currently available in this run all come with a signed COA (by Bonamassa and Seymour Duncan), and assorted case candy, including an inventory tag marked #001, because when the Mayor of Nerdville first took a census of his six-stringed citizens the Pawn Shop SG Special was the first one he logged.

The Pawn Shop Special set is available now, priced $375. See Seymour Duncan for more details.

Toto guitarist Steve Lukather is renowned as one of the all time great session musicians, having played on a huge array of hit records – including the biggest selling album of all time, Michael Jackson’s Thriller. And as Lukather reveals in a new interview, a highlight of his career was working with Joni Mitchell in the ’80s.

Speaking to Guitar Player, Lukather discusses various aspects of his musical life outside of Toto. He recalls how he helped create Michael Jackson’s mega hit Beat It with producer Quincy Jones. He also talks about playing with Ringo Starr & His All Star Band and his longstanding friendship with Eddie Van Halen.

Lukather has fond memories of working with Joni Mitchell on two albums, Wild Things Run Fast (1982) and Dog Eat Dog (1985). But he admits that those albums – the first one especially – did not connect with Mitchell’s fanbase.

He tells Guitar Player that he was first introduced to Mitchell’s music by a girlfriend in high school who was “obsessed” by the singer-songwriter’s classic 1971 album Blue. He developed a deeper interest in Mitchell’s work when he heard her 1974 album Court And Spark, on which star session guitarist Larry Carlton featured prominently.

By 1982, Lukather was himself well established as a session player. He had also made four albums with Toto, the last of which – Toto IV – would win multiple Grammys and yield the huge hits Rosanna and Africa.

Nevertheless, when he was approached to work with Mitchell on Wild Things Run Fast he wasn’t sure he was the right fit.

“When I got to work with Joni, I was really excited to get the call,” he says. “But I was like, ‘Wow… what am I going to bring to this, man?’”

He recalls his first impression of Mitchell: “I walked into the studio, and she was sitting at the piano, playing the song that we were going to cut that day. She was going through it on her own, and singing, and man… it’s hard when you’re in a room with greatness like that. It’s hard not to be affected by it in a visceral way.”

He continues: “It was so naturally wonderful and beautiful, and I could immediately hear a part in my head because that’s the job. You have to have a ranger’s ears and be able to listen to somebody play a song and hear the parts that you can add to make it something. But you don’t want to get in the way, you want to enhance the hooky part on the arpeggio or add to what she’s already got going on.

“So we started working on the tune, and it was beautiful. I had a nice little lick I came up with that she really liked, and that set the tone for it.”

Mitchell assembled a stellar cast of musicians for Wild Things Run Fast, with Larry Carlton on guitar along with Lukather and Michael Landau, plus bassist Larry Klein, saxophonist Wayne Shorter and drummers John Guerin and Vinnie Colaiuta.

James Taylor provided backing vocals on the track Man To Man, and Lionel Richie sang co-lead on You Dream Flat Tires.

Lukather played on the album’s title track and three others – Chinese Café/Unchained Melody, Love and Man To Man.

As Mitchell’s first album of that decade and her first for a new label, Geffen Records, Wild Things Run Fast also marked a shift away from the jazz-influenced direction of her late-’70s period towards a more mainstream sound inspired by The Police and Talking Heads.

As Lukather recalls: “Believe it or not, she wanted to rock and roll it up a little bit. It was the early ‘80s, and all that shit was happening.

“I kind of laughed at first, but it took her out of her normal place, which some of her hardcore fans didn’t dig. And of course, I take all the shit for it. But that was a fun record to do. She was so nice and fabulous.”

Brian May has said that he has “changed his mind” about AI – now he’s firmly in the anti camp.

In an interview with Absolute Radio, the Queen guitarist said that at first he thought that it was “just like the Industrial Revolution” and thus inevitable. Now he feels “we have to resist, and we have to limit its scope. We have to control it very, very seriously and very quickly."

A large part of his antipathy is to data centres and their potentially destructive effect on the environment - May has long been something of a conservationist. "I hate the business of these data centres coming and destroying our countryside,” he continued.

“This is a big threat, in my opinion, and it will only get bigger and bigger and bigger. The more you give, the more they'll take, and they destroy communities. They destroy the environment. We cannot have this happening in our country. It's already been destroying communities in America.”

“So my message to Andy Burnham is: please, this is your job now. You have to put a moratorium on these data centres right now before it's too late."

But that's just one of May's AI worries. "AI has a lot more issues than that," he continued. "To me, there are inherent dangers in creating an intelligence which is able to possibly eventually control us. It's a very real threat.

"Unfortunately, they will have a lot of power, though, because they will be able to — well, reverse the control, and it's already happening. They're already breaking out. So we've got to think very seriously, in my opinion."

And it seems May’s opposition to AI may end up quashing any faint possibility of a Queen avatar show ever happening.

“Yes, we looked at it very seriously, particularly after I saw the Sphere and what The Eagles did (there), which I thought was amazing. And I spent a lot of time planning out what I thought could be a Queen show. I've kind of backed off now because you can't do it without massive use of AI, with all the consequences of that.”

“Now, in some ways, I don't wanna be stealing the work of other people,” the guitarist mused. “If you're stealing your own work, I'm not quite sure where I stand on it, 'cause you would be stealing from the Queen oeuvre, you know, which maybe is okay because that's ours.

"But at the same time, you're adding to the stresses that AI is putting on the world. So, I don't know. I'm not so keen as I was. I think it would be great to have a permanent place where people could go and feel like they're seeing us play live in our peak, maybe all over the world, maybe at all points in time. The doors are open, but I don't know if we're gonna walk through."

Brian Fallon gives you everything of himself on Not Bad For New Jersey. Heart, body and soul, and a guided tour of all the musical preoccupations that have kept the Gaslight Anthem frontman chasing down songs and melodies all these years.

His first solo album in more than five years, it is the sound of Fallon going all in with the unguarded melodic power of ‘80s rock, the forward-motion and urgency of punk, the blue-collar drama of country-folk arrangements and the neon-lit romanticism of FM rock balladry.

All that and more is here. Not Bad For New Jersey is Fallon 101.

Before writing the album he put together a playlist of all the songs that would get him closer to what he was looking for – and he listened to it obsessively, letting it all sink in.

“I was listening to a lot of the ‘80s stuff,” he says, joining MusicRadar in central London, sounding pumped. Because even though it’s a Monday morning, the music he’s talking about brings with it decades’ worth of Friday-night memories. This is the kind of energy he was looking for.

“Born In The USA, Bryan Adams for sure, and we were listening to like Def Leppard and Siouxie and the Banshees, the Cure and the Smiths, and all that kind of stuff,” he says.

The list goes on. Dire Straits were a big one, too, not so much their Money For Nothing era but So Far Away and Romeo And Juliet. These songs resonated with the emotional tenor that Fallon was looking for. The Police and the guitar playing of Andy Summers was another influence.

“Big one. The Police was huge for us,” he says.

Skid Row is another band Fallon brings up repeatedly in conversation (his party piece is playing the solo to I Remember You on a short-scale Fender Mustang). St Elmo’s Fire and The Breakfast Club, and everything from the ‘80s cinema all helped create this vibe, establishing its emotional push and pull. Fallon absorbed it all and he the ideas just poured out of him.

“It’s like a Gaslight Anthem record for me,” he says. “That music is just in my soul, and it’s who I am, so when we go out there and write a song like [The] Patient Ferris Wheel or 45, that just comes right out of my guts, and so does this, because this is the other half of my musical being.”

The title track opens the record in a fever, a battery of snare drum and the clang of big open chords, with Butch Walker’s production super-sizing everything. Better Before follows, and it makes good on Fallon’s promise that he and his backing band, the Painkillers, won’t be pulling their punches.

“We just said, ‘You know what? Let’s not be shy about what we’re doing because none of this music was shy,” says Fallon. “It’s got to be heart-on-your-sleeve. You got to go all in. That’s why I did the cover in pink. That’s why I put the leather jacket [on the cover], pull my collar up, because I was going all in.

“I was like, ‘This is my tribute to all these guys and girls who I don’t think I would have gotten where I got without. I’m telling you, Tina Turner, Lita Ford, Bryan Adams, Def Leppard – these people were crucial to me.”

Speaking of the Painkillers, they feature the ridiculously talented Nathaniel Murphy on guitar, whom many will recognise from Chicago Music Exchange’s social media content.

Murphy is one of the few players who could stop you in your tracks with a gear demo; he’s one of the few who could listen to the ripping guest solo from Def Leppard’s Phil Collen on Somewhere You Shouldn’t Be and totally nail it. “I guarantee you, come see this band live and they will blow your mind,” says Fallon.

Pearls lets everyone catch a breath, taking the tempo down for a woozy ballad that’s got this really gnarly tremolo guitar intro, and it’s the kind of small detail that seems silly to talk about among all these big, bold brushstrokes of bittersweet yearning and heartache, and all this serious emotional content. It’s like going for a nice meal and talking about the tableware...

But to guitarists – and especially to guitarists like Fallon – these details really matter, and that tremolo sound is one sweet electric guitar tone.

“The thing is, I got it from Aretha Franklin,” he says. “She does this really good cover of The Dark End Of The Street, and in the beginning of the song, her guitar player just – it’s probably just live – but he strums a chord, and it’s with the tremolo on it, and it’s on the whole time, and for some reason I caught that and I was like, ‘This is really something for me.’ And I kept it in the back of my mind. But I like that pulse, and even even when it’s exaggerated, I am really enjoying that in any kind of music now.”

We can probably credit Muscle Shoals session ace Eddie Hinton for that Aretha Franklin guitar part. The pulse, that steady tempo that runs through Fallon’s work, once more goes back to the Bruce Springsteen influence. With Fallon, you can’t avoid talking about the Boss. He suspects “that heartbeat thing” probably arrived via osmosis from listening to Born In The USA on repeat, tracks such as I’m On Fire programming Fallon’s rhythmic sensibility, and perhaps also his feel for the dynamics of pop-rock songwriting.

Fallon is a sucker for old Marshall tube amps, a “diehard” about these things, and likes to pull amps apart and build them. That he uses the Silver Jubilee speaks to his reverence for John Frusciante's tone, but it also has everything he is looking for from a Marshall.

Even when he is using Fender amps, as he did on Gaslight Anthem signature track, The '59 Sound, there’s still something Marshall about it. Then, he used a tweed Bassman 4x10 and played through a compressor, adding tape echo to taste – given the similarity between the JTM45 circuit and the Bassman, it was like he was constructing a Marshall sound from Fender elements.

“That’s exactly what I was doing,” he says. “So with the Silver Jubilee, most people who like [JCM] 800s and those kind of amps, they turn up the gain. But I turned down the gain. I play them almost clean, but it really does a thing where it’s like a compression that kind of helps you play.

“It’s an empty canvas where you’ve got this rhythm tone and you’re like, ‘This is great. Whatever I do from here is going to be good because the foundation is good.’ So if you like a Fuzz Face, cool. If you like a Big Muff, cool. It just stacks so nicely on top of it.”

And yet despite his affinity for all things analogue, Butch Walker would grab sounds from his Fractal Axe-Fx and patch them in, and it kind of blew Fallon’s mind.

“I could not believe how good it sounded,” he says. “It inspired me. When you have a good tone, I feel like everything lights up.”

Not Bad For New Jersey finds Fallon leafing through his contacts book and drafting in some guest appearances. Longtime friends and writing partners Lori McKenna and Donovan Woods appear on the album. McKenna co-wrote On Good Terms. Woods joins Fallon on The Big Sleep.

Fallon has his publisher to thank for Collen’s guest solo. He introduced the pair. When Fallon pitched the song to the Def Leppard guitarist, he jumped at the chance.

“He was on tour, doing a residency with Def Leppard in Las Vegas, and he just did it in his hotel room,” says Fallon. “He brought his whole rig over there and he just ripped this crazy solo.”

Marc Ribot might seem like an unorthodox collaborator on a Brian Fallon record but they were tracking Wolf By The River and were needing a lead part that sounded “a little bit mangled”. Fallon was going to do it himself but drummer Eric Slick had a better idea.

“I’m like, ‘I kind of want like a J Macis thing or like a Marc Ribot thing,’” says Fallon. Slick piped up and suggested they just asked Ribot directly. He knew him via Dr Dog. “Within a half hour, I was on the phone with Marc’s manager, and she’s like, ‘Yeah, he’ll do it. He’s totally into it,’ and then he just sent back the coolest thing,” says Fallon. “It’s awesome! [Laughs] But that’s my style, that’s how I would approach being a lead guitar player, a little anarchy in there, a little Neil Young/Kurt Cobain in there.”

Brandon Flowers cowrote Love At The End Of The World, a love song for the apocalypse that plays fast and loose with the conventions of song structure, leaving us without a chorus, and without the need for one either. “Brandon is probably one of the most exciting people to be around because his energy is wild,” says Fallon. “He is just brimming with pure songwriting and pure love for music. He loves music.”

Fallon’s wife introduced him to Flowers. They bonded over Depeche Mode and CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, and arranged for Fallon to fly out to meet the Killers’ frontman in a studio in Utah, where they put together the song.

“He was on the piano. We were sitting there. I was on an acoustic, and we were in the studio that they use, and it was just like fiddling around,” says Fallon. “Then I think Brandon played that riff on the synthesizer that starts the chord progression for the song “It’s a very unusual chord progression. It’s not something that you would write on guitar. You would not write that on guitar.”

They started putting some words to it. They wrote the lyrics in Flowers’ truck, with Fallon finishing it up in his hotel room. Now they had to fit it all together.

“[Brandon] was like, ‘You know what? Let’s not do verse/chorus, verse/chorus. Let’s do two verses, throw a bridge in there and maybe another verse, and then a bridge, and then that’s it,’” explains Fallon. “I was like, ‘What? That’s insane! That’s not real song structure.’ And he was like, ‘Yes it is.’”

A little rule-breaking was in the spirit of the album. That’s how Fallon felt back in the day when he was growing up, gripped by punk rock, wanting to fit in and cutting his hair into a mohawk, putting the spikes on his jacket, only to get beat up by the punk kids. Eventually, by the time they did accept them into his company he was not so sure he wanted to hang out with them anyway. Too many rules. That wasn’t how he was brought up.

Hackettstown, New Jersey, was not the centre of cultural happenings. It was a town, not the city. Nobody Likes You In New York City speaks to Fallons sense of being an outsider. The bright lights of NYC was where everything happened. That was the scene. His cultural awakening came via the television and reading liner notes on his record collection. “MTV was all we had,” he says.

In hindsight, this was a blessing. It was Skid Row one minute, Pet Shop Boys the next, or Fine Young Cannibals. Soon, Nirvana were to upend genre conventions, partially dismantling the tribalism around punk.

For Fallon, who was “always walking the balance between the punk guys and the guitar hero guys”, this was a period of liberation, with Kurt Cobain a tribune of the musically curious, this great cultural figurehead who’d talk about Crosby, Stills and Nash and L7 in the same breath.

Stylistically, Fallon was gravitating to players who had the gift of playing simple, or at least making the complicated sound simple

“I grew up in such a mix of the Ramones and the Replacements and then also like Skid Row, or the Police,” he says. “The guitar players in these bands were phenomenal. If you listen to the live takes from the Replacements, Bob [Stinson] was an incredible guitar player. He really could shred, and same with Andy Summers.

“Andy Summers, when you try to play Message In A Bottle you find out how difficult it is, and that’s really the beauty about why I like these guys – and John Frusciante – because they make things sound so simple that are maybe very complicated and take a lot of skill and finesse to do.”

Fallon admits he was still a little jealous of New Yorkers, who had Interpol and the Strokes. They had the glamour. They were there while Fallon had to watch it from afar on the tube.

“It was just so cool, and everybody looked cool, but I couldn’t get there because I didn’t have a car,” he says. ‘And then I probably wouldn’t have fit in. Whatever. But it was definitely a sense of being an outsider, and you can either get bitter as an outsider or you can get creative, and I chose to be creative. And I said, ‘If I can’t get in that world, then I’m gonna make my own world.’ And that’s where Bruce Springsteen really spoke to me, because he invents these worlds to live in.”

And Springsteen’s world where everything was going on, all of humanity’s dramas, big and small. There, life was happening. It was, as Fallon says, not bad for New Jersey.

• Not Bad For New Jersey is out now via Lesser Known Records
• Catch Brian Fallon and the Painkillers live on tour – see Brian Fallon for dates and ticket details.

The big four of thrash metal – Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax – arguably created an entire genre between them. But who would make up a ‘new generation’ big four in 2026?

The Megadeth mainman was asked that very question by the Czech outlet Ocko and came up with some interesting choices: "Well, it wouldn't be a young generation, but I do believe that there are ways to do a new Big Four,” the guitarist said.

“I think that Testament, I think Overkill, I think Exodus, and maybe Trivium,” he decided. “I don’t know... Trivium's not really a thrash metal band, so I'd have to think about that. But I think those other three guys would be really great."

Some might be surprised that Mustaine didn’t mention his own group. The guitarist has, after all, never been one to hide his light under a bushel.

Anyway, he explained his choices thus: "Overkill is really important on the East Coast metal scene. Exodus, of course, I love Exodus. And I've been friends with Gary (Holt, the band’s guitarist) longest of all people that I've been friends with in the music industry. And Testament. Eric, Alex (respectively Mssrs Peterson and Skolnick, the Testament guitarists), those guys are really great guitar players. And I love when we get a chance to play with the band."

Mustaine is certainly entering a busy period in his life. He published his memoir, In My Darkest Hour, last week. It’s not the first time the Megadeth founder has put his life story down in writing, but this one apparently details his experience battling cancer.

In the book’s blurb, Mustaine describes it as “one of the most harrowing experiences of my adult life... this story is considerably more than just go to the doctor, get diagnosed and get treatment and hopefully I live happily ever after. This was a journey of me saving myself, staying alive, keeping my family together, and continuing to make music through it all.”

And in addition to promoting the book, Mustaine and Megadeth are still out on the road on what they’re promising will be their final tour. They’re in Hershey, Pennsylvania tonight, with US dates through to 29 September. After that there are shows in South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and Europe.

Noel Gallagher wrote two of Oasis’s best-loved songs on a guitar sold to him by Johnny Marr – but how much is Marr offering to buy it back for?

The two legendary guitarists joined up recently to discuss the collection that Marr is auctioning via Christie’s.

This auction – titled Marr’s Guitars: The Johnny Marr Collection – takes place on 17 September.

And yes, the Sunburst '65 Fender Stratocaster that Marr sold Gallagher comes up in conversation.

One of the most fascinating exchanges between Marr and Gallagher happens when they start talking Strats. Marr has a thing for white Strats. Gallagher reveals that the only guitar he has every had stolen was an Olympic White Strat.

“I think there's something about white Strats,” Marr says, citing two iconic Strat players – “Hendrix and Bolan.”

Gallagher replies: “I had one which got nicked. It's the only guitar that I've ever had stolen, and the neck was like a ’50s Les Paul, it was amazing, it was just the fucking bollocks…”

The stolen Strat had what Gallagher describes as a “dead fat neck”. He adds: “It sounded amazing, and there was just something about that guitar that looked cool.”

Marr suggests the neck thickness contributes to a Strat's tone. Many players will argue a fat Strat neck is more comfortable to play but Marr says it “makes ’em sound loud as well”. Furthermore, one of the Strat's special powers is that it cover a lot of ground sonically.

“Well,” Marr adds, “the thing with Strats is that you can make a Strat sound like pretty much anything, but you can’t make anything else sound like a Strat.”

Gallagher then mentions the Strat he bought from Marr.

“The one you sold me, the Strat which I played on Wonderwall and all that, it’s a pre-CBS, I think, because it's got the three-way selector switch on it.”

Marr asks what else was written by Gallagher with that Strat.

Gallagher answers: “Don’t Look Back In Anger, She’s Electric. Wonderwall.”

Another song he recalls writing on the Strat is AKA... What A Life!, which he recorded with his post-Oasis outfit Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds.

Gallagher says that this guitar is “all over” the second Oasis album, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?

Marr asks: “You used it on Wonderwall?”

When Gallagher says yes, Marr smiles and suggests: “I might try and buy it back off you. Same money. You don’t mind, do you? Give you exactly the same, 800 quid!”

Black Sabbath could have recorded one final album with the original lineup. But according to Tony Iommi, he passed on the opportunity.

That’s what the guitarist has said in a new interview with Classic Rock. The final Sabbath album, 13, did not involve Bill Ward after the drummer failed to reach an agreement regarding his contract. After its release in 2013, there had been talk about a follow-up, but nothing really happened.

Now Iommi has revealed that producer Andrew Watt – who had helmed Ozzy’s final solo albums Ordinary Man from 2020 and 2022’s Patient Number 9 – had approached him earlier this decade about getting the original line back for one more album.

"I'd met Andrew Watt when he was producing Ozzy," Iommi said. "He was very keen and a bit too excited. He also didn't know what it was like working with the original Sabbath, working with Bill. Also, we'd done 13, and I didn't like the idea of: 'Now here’s another album.'"

In other Iommi news, the guitarist has apparently signed up for William Shatner’s metal album, What The F is Heavy Metal? Well, according to Brian May he has.

May confirmed his friend’s appearance on Zoe Ball’s show on Greatest Hits Radio. Talking about Shatner, he said: “He's a very active man, and for him to step into... Well, it's not... I don't call it heavy metal; I call it rock, really. But it will probably be a heavy metal album because I think Tony Iommi's gonna play on it now as well. Tony's really my best mate, so it's easy for me to pick up the phone to him. And Tony's like me - he loves a challenge."

News about the 95 year old actor’s latest wheeze has filtered through gradually during 2026. We know that Rob Halford of Judas Priest, John Moyer of Disturbed and Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo have all put their names down for the project. May confirmed his involvement last week, and now it seems Iommi too. Shatner is set to preview some of the tracks at Chicago’s Riot Fest next week with a band that includes Phil Sossan (Ozzy Osbourne, Billy Idol) and Britt Lightning of Vixen.

“What a great guy,” May said of Shatner. “He's 95. And he's full of life and vitality and ambition and anger and all this stuff. He's like a kid. I really enjoyed meeting him... I mean, I've worked hard on it. He loves it, and I love the song 'cause you might think William Shatner... I mean, if you don't know Star Trek, it doesn't mean anything perhaps, but if you've lived like we did through all those editions of Star Trek, he's a hero, and he's, in later life, become a real luminary in the world. He does so much for children, so much for the outreach of science.”

When Buddy Guy emerged from the clubs of the Chicago blues scene at the dawn of the 1960s as one of its most electric performers, charismatic and a not a little wild, something had changed. And it was he who was doing the changing.

Chicago was the proving ground for a generation of blues guitarists who had grown up in the South. Guy was not the first. He got there in the fall of 1957. The likes of Muddy Waters, BB King and Otis Rush were already doing their thing. It was Rush who introduced Guy to Waters at the legendary Bronzeville blues institution, the 708 Club, down on Chicago’s South Side.

Even now, aged 90, Guy often speaks as though he is still the outsider in the scene, the shy boy who had to be invited onto the stage to show folks what he was about. “I didn’t go there thinking I’d be good enough to play,” he said, speaking to Total Guitar in 2015. “I just wanted to watch these greats playing – Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy [Williamson], all those guys – and I got stranded.”

But Buddy Guy, the world’s greatest living bluesman, was not stranded. He was simply out there on his own.

Music history resists grand proclamations. It’s too messy, too unwieldy. But there is a case to be made that Guy – this unassuming man, born George Guy, in Lettsworth, Louisiana, to sharecroppers Sam and Isabel – is the most influential guitarist of all time. This is the player whom Eric Clapton, the original guitar god, described as his Elvis.

Guy had made a name for himself in Chicago but it was time to plant his flag in other territories. Blues guitar was having a tough time breaking through the US. But maybe the UK would be more receptive. In 1965, he crossed the Atlantic to take part in The American Folk Blues Festival tour.

Eric Clapton was watching as Guy took to the stage at London’s Marquee Club. For Clapton, this was like watching the King play Hound Dog on The Milton Berle Show – it was the performance that changed everything.

“All in all, everything about that night was deeply profound for me,” said Clapton in 2005, when he and BB King inducted Buddy Guy into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “The blues was clearly alive and well and it looked good too, for as well as being the real thing, musically Buddy was a star. His suit, his hair, his moves, his sunburst Strat, everything was sharp and perfect. He was for me what Elvis probably was for most other people.”

Within a couple of weeks of Guy’s Marquee set, Clapton quit the Yardbirds. He joined up with John Mayall and his Bluesbreakers to spearhead the British blues explosion.

But Buddy Guy’s performance stuck with him. When Clapton grew frustrated under Mayall’s charge, it was Guy’s performance – with only bass and drums backing him – that planted the idea to hook up with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker and form Cream.

“That was what did it,” said Clapton in 2005. “What it said to me was ‘this was possible.’ If you were a good enough guitar player – like Jimi was when his time came round – you could just do it as a trio. I thought, ‘Oh?’ And also, it seemed to be so free. You could go any way and change directions. If you were the soloist, you could do whatever you like. You can dictate.

“So I think with Jack in my filing cabinet, in a fairly rigid structure like John Mayall’s band, where we had a set that we played every night, I was thinking about that as a way of breaking free.”

Guy was only getting started. His Marquee performance was two years before he would release his debut album, Left My Blues in San Francisco, and he had already blown Clapton’s mind and played a pivotal role in the creation of Cream. Guy had also converted Clapton’s fellow Yardbirds alumni, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck.

His choice of guitar, a Fender Stratocaster, challenged their preconceptions, too. That was a country-and-western guitar, the “Roy Orbison-type thing” that all those cats in Nashville played.

“They all were telling me they didn’t know a Strat could play the blues and I laughed and said, ‘What do you mean!?’” Guy told MusicRadar. “Because they were all looking at the Gibson guitars and when they saw me, I went in there with a Strat and was playing them in a kind of wild and crazy way, and I was doing some of the things that I would do like throwing it up and catching it.

“I was amazed for them to tell me that they’d sat there and watched me and didn’t know the blues could be played like that on a Stratocaster.”

The Strat was the perfect vehicle for him. It would sustain. He could dig in and it would sting a note, and you could drop the thing and it wouldn’t break.

“If you’d see me play, I wanted you to say, ‘He’s playing his guitar like he don’t care whether tomorrow comes.’ Because if people come see you, I think you should give them every damn thing you’ve got,” he said. “I knew the Strat could give me that and I’ve been in love with it ever since. It just stuck to me.”

Guy’s live show was becoming the stuff of legend. He would walk the guitar right up to the edge. He always said he wanted to play like BB King but perform like Guitar Slim.

“In the flesh, he was earth shattering,” said Clapton at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony. “His style on every level was fantastic. Doing all the things we would later come to associate with Jimi Hendrix, playing with his teeth, his feet, and behind his head. He brought the house crashing down.”

Guitar Slim might have influenced Guy but his style, his physicality with the instrument, was all his. Who else was doing this before him? Guy did to his guitar what Little Richard did on his piano. Would Jimi Hendrix have played a Strat with his teeth without Guy? Would he have set fire to one?

“He transcended blues and started becoming theatre,” Jeff Beck told Louder. “It was high art, kind of like drama theatre when he played. He was playing behind his head long before Hendrix. I once saw him throw the guitar up in the air and catch it in the same chord.”

There was no question Guy was the player Hendrix looked to. They first met in 1967. But they played together in 1968. It was an occasion that stuck in Guy’s mind; he remembers it as the night Martin Luther King Jr was killed.

“I was playing a little place in Greenwich Village called the Generation,” Guy told Billboard in 1993. “I was up there with my guitar behind my head and people started hollering, ‘Hendrix! Hendrix!’ He came right up to me and said, ‘Pay them no mind. Can I tape what you play?’ He was always so nice to me.”

When they played together at Steve Paul’s The Scene, Guy recalls it was the first time he ever saw a wah pedal. It would later become part of his live rig. He would put it to good use when covering Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile (check out his incendiary 1993 performance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival below, which also features a cover of Cream’s Strange Brew).

Guy is too humble to accept the role he played in shaping Hendrix’s artistic sensibility. When out on the Experience Hendrix Tour in 2014 with Zakk Wylde, Dweezil Zappa, Eric Gales, Eric Johnson and others, Guy described Hendrix as “one of a kind”.

“I don’t want to take credit for someone like Hendrix,” he told Guitar World.

But Zakk Wylde saw it differently. The blues was the source. Buddy Guy was the source.

“That’s what Jimi Hendrix was doing,” he said. “He was copping Buddy’s licks before me and everybody else on this tour. That’s where it all comes from. If you’re a rock guitarist, blues is your foundation.”

Kenny Wayne Shepherd agrees. He was on that Experience Hendrix Tour, too.

“This guy is one of Hendrix’s biggest influences! I think one of the things that Hendrix got from Buddy Guy was the ability to just unleash on your instrument,” he told MusicRadar in 2016. “I mean, Buddy Guy, you can see him today and he’s 80 but he plays ferociously!

“It’s like his signature thing: he just unleashes on his instrument, and that’s something I think Hendrix learned from him. He’s another legendary player that has inspired so many people.”

The multi-generational reach of Guy’s influence lends further support the theory that he is the most influential player to have done it.

If BB King was the undisputed King of the Blues, its centre of gravity, Guy spun threw the blues out of its axis with his bold electric guitar radicalism, feedback, distortion, high volume – all that stuff that Chess Records used to give him grief about in the ‘60s is what today’s players seek him out for now.

“BB was the good guy and Buddy Guy was the bad boy,” Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram told the Boston Globe. “He’s the one I immediately wanted to be like, and I’ve definitely emulated him.”

Gary Clark Jr is another contemporary blues phenom whose imagination was lit up by the fire in Guy’s playing.

“My biggest tricks came from people like Buddy Guy, who would overbend his strings and exaggerate the hell out of it,” he told Guitar World. “It’s ridiculous how far that guy can bend a string! I learned how to do things like that in order to evoke emotion.”

Jonny Lang, who was also on the 2014 Experience Hendrix Tour, sees Guy as the player from that OG Chicago Blues generation who brought some danger to the art form.

“I remember seeing him play at some point early on in my career, just watching him go crazy onstage,” Lang told MusicRadar. “He wasn’t thinking about it at all. That’s what made me realise it’s okay to be reckless when you play music. That’s perfectly fine. It can actually help push you into a different place – that guy is the master of that. He’s amazing.”

Study Buddy Guy’s back catalogue, watch him onstage over the decades, and you’ll find a player who’s challenging orthodoxy and daring others to follow him there.

Gary Clark Jr gets frustrated by people who talk about keeping the blues alive yet fail to recognise that players like Guy – and pioneers such as Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters – were great because they sounded like no one else.

They put themselves into their art, and found a way to expand blues guitar’s vocabulary in the process.

“If you’re trying to do Muddy Waters, that’s some big shoes to fill, and I don’t really want to spend my time trying to be that guy,” Clark told Total Guitar. “People used to tell me all the time, ‘Just play the blues, you gotta preserve the blues!’ And I’d think, ‘Yeah, but look at Buddy Guy with a record like Sweet Tea – what the hell is that?’

“Why would people want me to sound like Buddy Guy’s old records when even Buddy Guy doesn’t sound like that anymore?”

But keeping the blues alive is also about staying at at, and persevering. Buddy Guy is still persevering. He still plays his club in Chicago, Buddy’s Legends. Didn’t he announce his retirement, embarking on the The Damn Right Farewell Tour in 2023? Well, that was a bit of kidology, because he’s still going.

He’s on the BG90 Tour right now, a run of dates that terminates in Midtown Manhattan on October 1st when he plays Radio City Music Hall.

This will be quite the evening. Buddy’s Got The Blues: A 90th Birthday Concert will feature an all-star cast of guest players including John Mayer, Gary Clark Jr, Joe Bonamassa, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, Eric Gales, Billy Gibbons, Bobby Rush, Robert Randolph, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and more.

Eric Clapton will be there, too. But it’ll be another night in which all eyes will be on Buddy Guy, our greatest living bluesman, the puckish raconteur with the polka-dot Strat.

Who knows who might be watching in the audience, and what they’ll do with their guitar when they next pick it up.

• Head to Buddy Guy for dates and ticket details for the BG90 Tour.

Queens Of The Stone Age were going at it until well after witching hour and yet were still getting no closer to what they were looking for.

As drummer Jon Theodore remembers it, they had been trying to finish one of the more aggressive tracks from their forthcoming album, Perfecth, and it just wasn’t happening.

They were trying too hard. Music is like that. It’s mercurial. But just as they were about to call it quits, they got back into position and started playing. Something called them back into the room, and whether it was exhaustion or the drinks they’d had to loosen up, there was a kind of magic happening right there on the floor of the studio.

As they called out ideas to one another, a song took shape. It would be titled Insignificant Other, and little did they know it at the time, but this lithe after-hours groover would become the centrepiece of their record, emotionally, spiritually and musically, especially in its embrace of imperfection.

“We recorded that song at the end of a full day of, like, hitting our heads against the wall,” says Theodore. “We were pretty frustrated. It was late. It was like two in the morning, a little drunk, just trying to blow off some steam. The lights were already out in the studio.

“We were all ready to leave. Some people had their jackets on. We went in there, and the riff started kicking around, and we just played a little and then, after a very short amount of time, we had a couple of parts.”

Frontman Josh Homme, who produced Perfecth alongside bassist Michael Shuman, has described Insignificant Other as “a song about distance”, a song about how relationships that were once the centre of your universe can just disappear, and what’s left of a person after that. It’s about “how someone can be your entire world only to simply vanish. And about the strange vertigo of being on the receiving end of that”. 

And the song does have a strange vertigo to it, a wooziness befitting its creation. It is a little reminiscent of the Rolling Stones’ Miss You, smoky and confessional, the kind of song that plays well in low-lit bars with tasselled lamps on the table, or in dive bars illuminated in neon, a Hopper-esque green colouring everyone with a shade of melancholy.

The key to finding it was not to overwork it, or to finesse it to the point of perfection. Insignificant Other is the kind of song that slips through your fingers if you try to hold it too tight. You can hear the freedom.

“There’s interplay. It’s free. It’s loose,” says Theodore. “We were literally calling out the changes as we’re taping it, and later, we went to New Orleans and we tried to do this with better sounds and we couldn’t beat it, because the best thing about that is that is actually hearing the interplay between the people.”

It is the sound of a band listening to one another. That sounds like it should be a given but it’s not always the case.

“We were all just reacting and moving as a unit, which is obviously the foundation of jazz and improvisational music,” says Theodore. “You’re listening and moving together. So it instantly became very special. We tried it a few times and we were just calling the arrangement out as we went. No one really knew what we were doing, and we ended up getting it.”

Insignificant Other reminds us that rock ’n’ roll is a nocturnal enterprise. There is a vampiric quality to the track; you can’t come up with something like this when the sun is up. Besides, they had almost given up for the day. The song didn’t even exist until they started calling out the changes. Theodore says they could play without the weight of expectation.

“We were like, ‘Oh, this sounds great.’ But when you listen to it, it’s definitely all of us doing what we look like without any pressure, or any sense of, ‘You have to do this right, and in a particular way,’” he says. “We just did what we did. And we were listening very carefully. Like, you can hear the glue between us.”

As guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen joins us, he says it was approached in the same way as the Stones would have in the early ‘70s.

“If you know anything about the recording process for Exile On Main St. [the Stones' 1972 classic], they just let the tape roll, and that was what we did with that song,” says Van Leeuwen. “I think we went over the arrangement once, it was late at night, and we were tracking to two-inch tape, and all five of us were in the room, and that’s the second take that you hear on the record. That feels like what the Stones might have done.”

Theodore describes Insignificant Other as a bridge between the past and present, where Queens Of The Stone Age have been, and where they are going. It’s the link to their “old life”. How could it not be, with its themes of estrangement and dislocation, and the black hole of relationship breakdown?

We’ve already heard the shambling, beautiful mess of Easy Street, a two-hander between Nikki Lane and Homme on vocals. Homme produced Lane’s last studio album, 2022’s Denim & Diamonds, and now she is repaying the favour. What comes next?

Well, those expecting Queens Of The Stone Age to make the same record twice have not been paying attention, but even so, Theodore promises Perfecth will catch many by surprise. “I would say this record is a pretty big departure in a lot of ways,” he says.

Expect the unexpected. But maybe in time we will look on Insignificant Other as the key to understanding this chapter in Queens Of The Stone Age history, a band haunted and inspired, who came out of the Catacombs beneath Paris somehow changed, with a greater appreciation of the liminal space between the living and the dead, and of how – all things considered – it is better to count yourself among the former.

“It’s a big part of the record for all of us,” says Van Leeuwen. “It says everything about our playing and it’s coming out of some of the dark personal and physical things that Josh had to go through. I think that we captured something really magical there – and there’s mistakes everywhere, and that’s part of it.”

Perfecth is available to pre-order and will be released on October 30 via Matador. In other QOTSA-related news, Troy Van Leeuwen’s signature Squier Telecaster XII has officially been released. It is one cool take on the Tele, and one of the coolest 12-string guitars you can buy for $599. See Fender for more details.

Brian Fallon can thank his wife Stacy for the fact that the Killers frontman Brandon Flowers is on his new solo album.

She was producing the Killers’ concert film of their 2022 Madison Square Garden show when Bruce Springsteen joined the Sin City band for the encore. They played Badlands, A Dustland Fairytale and Born To Run. It was a real event. But not all the Fallons were having the time of their lives. Brian Fallon had FOMO.

“Funnily enough I didn’t get invited – and it was Bruce Springsteen and the Killers at Madison Square Garden!” he says with mock outrage. “I was like, ‘How come I’ve got to stay home with the kids!? Those are my friends!’ She obviously says, ‘Bruce says hi!’ Whatever. I didn’t get to go.”

But it brought Flowers into Fallon’s orbit. When the Killers swung through Atlantic City, he went along for the ride.

“I went to the Jersey show, and my wife was going to talk to the band and talk to the crew, like, ‘Hey, how are we going to do this? What shots do you want?’ I was just tagging along,” he says. “This was strange. I was going as my wife’s plus-one. That’s not usually the way it goes [but] my wife has got her own thing going on. She gets emails from Mick Jagger!

“So I was tagging along and then Brandon was like, ‘Hey, how are you doing, Brian from the Gaslight Anthem?’ I was like, ‘Hey! How you doing?’ And we just hit it off, exchanged numbers, and the rest is history.”

They had a lot of shared interests. Both of them love Depeche Mode. They share a love of CS Lewis. “The Screwtape Letters! Both of us have the same favourite book,” says Fallon. “Brandon is probably one of the most exciting people to be around because his energy is wild. He is just brimming with pure songwriting and pure love for music. He loves music.”

Fallon’s first solo album in more than five years, Not Bad For New Jersey, has a lot of guests. There’s stunt guitar from the venerable Phil Collen from Def Leppard, of whom he is a longtime superfan. Marc Ribot plays a wicked solo on Wolf By The River.

And there are some old friends too, such as Canadian country-folk star Donovan Woods, who joins Fallon on The Big Sleep, and Lori McKenna, who is on On Good Terms. “Donovan, Lori and I are kind of a team,” says Fallon. “We write together a lot.”

Fallon dropped Flowers a text to see if he would be up for writing something. When he said yes, he took off to meet him in a studio in Utah. However this song was going to turn out, it was going to be an adventure.

“He was on the piano. We were sitting there. I was on an acoustic, and we were in the studio that they use, and it was just like fiddling around,” says Fallon. “Then I think Brandon played that riff on the synthesizer that starts the chord progression for the song.”

This caught Fallon’s ear. It wasn’t like anything else that he had for the record – and it certainly wasn’t something he would have come up with there and then.

“It’s a very unusual chord progression,” he says. “It’s not something that you would write on guitar. You would not write that on guitar. I was like, ‘Oh that’s cool. What’s that?’ He was like, ‘Nothing, I thought it was another song.’ ‘That’s nothing? Let’s use that.’ So we started a little melody, and we had a title and a few lyrics, maybe a chorus, and then we started working on a structure.”

And that is when things got weird. Much of Not Bad For New Jersey is Fallon on home turf musically, with the triumphant Friday night feeling of ‘80s FM rock, blue-collar power-pop that leans hard into the chorus, and then there is the punk-rock energy of Nobody Likes You In New York City. Love At The End Of The World is not like anything else on the album.

It tumbles out as though under a spell, roots-y folk acoustic guitar and the caw of something – electric slide guitar and maybe wah – in the upper registers. And then there’s the verse and it just keeps going until its three minutes are up. It’s like the All Along The Watchtower principle of foregoing a chorus, because maybe there’s too much going on in the verse, or because maybe it’d break the audience’s concentration.

Fallon says that was Flowers’ idea.

“He was like, ‘You know what? Let’s not do verse/chorus, verse/chorus. Let’s do two verses, throw a bridge in there and maybe another verse, and then a bridge, and then that’s it,’” explains Fallon. “I was like, ‘What? That’s insane! That’s not real song structure.’ And he was like, ‘Yes it is.’

“We wrote the lyrics together – honestly – just talking together in his truck, and just worked it together. I get to the hotel room, I put it together as lyric structure, brought it back to him the next day, we worked on it, he came up with the vocal melody and that was it.”

Neither of them had that much left in the tank. Both had been out on the road for a long time when they wrote it. Maybe that’s why it came out like it did, like, as Fallon says, “a conversation”, without a chorus and all forward momentum. But it’s also a love song for the end of the world and how do you write a chorus for that?

“It was incredibly freeing,” says Fallon. “I think that’s what we were both trying to do, because I was fresh out of The History Books Tour with Gaslight Anthem, and he was just finishing up the Killers tour, so we were both kind of exhaling. Phew! No pressure for a second, because we were like, ‘If nothing happens with this, who cares?’”

Not Bad For New Jersey is out now digitally via Lesser Known Records, on all formats tomorrow (September 11).

While we caught up with Fallon to discuss the making of the album, he also told us about the time Bruce Springsteen gave him a guitar tip and taught him an old Roy Buchanan trick.

Tame Impala mainman Kevin Parker has announced that he’s had it with signing autographs. In fact, he’s not going to do it any more.

The Aussie musician has explained in an Instagram Stories post why he’s made the decision. “Hey guys quick PSA to say due to the rise of aggressive autograph hounds I won’t be signing anything or doing photos out the front of hotels or at airports at all anymore, so if you happen to catch me please don’t be offended if I say no,” he wrote.

“I wasn’t that passionate about it before but they’ve started using kids which I think is all kinds of wrong. Love you guys.”

In a later post, Parker also added that he wouldn’t be meeting fans in venue car parks before shows either “for the time being” because of the “obvious security risk.”

It seems this is something he has previously been happy to do but “the numbers were getting out of control and we don’t have the security to manage it … so my team has asked me not to. So please have the best time at the shows and get home safe!”

Parker is, of course, not the first musician to have publicly declared he’s sick of signing stuff. The rather more famous Ringo Starr declared in 2008 he wouldn’t be signing any more autographs, partly due to the fact that he invariably saw the same items for sale online.

Likewise, Billie Eilish cut out signing autographs in 2019 for similar reasons. “(I) realised all anyone did was sell everything that I signed, so I stopped doing that”.

Still a teenager at the time, she had already witnessed the dark side of fandom. “They wait outside for you and then immediately they don’t get what they want, and they boo you, and fucking curse at you. I’m like, ‘Bro, I’m 17’.”

Perhaps Parker (and others) might want to adopt the same tactic as Steve Martin. The comedian didn’t like signing autographs either, but when asked he would give out a card to fans that read: “This certifies that you have had a personal encounter with me and you found me warm, polite, intelligent, and funny.”

William Shatner might not have been able to lay his hands on a real Gibson Les Paul Standard for the promo shoot for his forthcoming all-star metal album – the electric guitar he is holding is monstrous AI-creation – but he is having no problem signing up human talent for the project.

Among a reported 35-strong cast of guitarists, Queen’s Brian May has now been announced as one of the actor and musician’s special guests. He even mixes the track he is appearing on.

On the face of it, it’s an unlikely collaboration. But these two have a lot in common. They have both spent considerable time among the stars; Shatner as Star Trek’s Captain James T Kirk of the USS Enterprise, May as an astrophysicist. Both have asteroids named after them; as the press release reads, “Asteroid 52665 Brianmay, meet Asteroid 31556 Shatner”. Quite. Asteroids are all well and good. But this project is going to be a very different kind of rock.

Shatner says the project was inspired by former Megadeth guitarist Chris Poland and the work he is doing now in Nuclear Messiah.

“When Nuclear Messiah came to life, something clicked,” said Shatner. “It wasn’t just a track – it was a doorway. It made me want to go all the way in, bring in the best metal players I could find, and create something fearless.”

May is the first guitarist to be confirmed for the project – though we would expect Poland to turn up, and given that Zakk Wylde gifted Shatner an electric guitar, then surely the Black Label Society frontman will drop in, too.

Shatner isn’t short in some serious players, though. We’ve got a bona-fide Metal God contributing vocals as Rob Halford signed on. There is one of metal’s greatest drummers, Dave Lombardo, formerly of Slayer. John Moyer from Disturbed will play bass guitar.

The production team includes Adam Hamilton and Brian Perera of Cleopatra Records, whose label is releasing the album.

Shatner, who will be performing in Chicago at this year’s Riotfest, promises some original material – plus a few classics from the old masters.

“I’ve spent a lifetime exploring in both reality and fiction,” said Shatner. “Now I am stepping out into the unknown once again with my new project in heavy metal. I am covering Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden as well as a number of new songs written by my team. The whole project is destined for this year. I hope you will join me in the exploration.”

Angus Young has gone viral in a YouTube clip from AC/DC’s August 31 performance at the Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas. The reason? He seemingly lost his bearings during his solo to Whole Lotta Rosie.

The clip is titled “Angus Young forgets the solo and gives AC/DC a different Whole Lotta Rosie” and it has nearly half a million views in under four days – but is that what really happens here? We beg to differ.

And Accadaccaologists – of whom there are many in the comments – would tend to agree with us. This is Angus Young doing what Angus Young does when deep into an AC/DC set; he takes the solos to the edge then he walks it back.

It’s performance, a little drama, electric guitar as theatre. It’s the kind of thing he would have learned from watching his hero Chuck Berry,

And we are deep in the set here. AC/DC have already played Back In Black, Thunderstruck, Highway To Hell and You Shook Me All Night Long. The hits had been coming thick and fast. There were deeper cuts too. They opened with with If You Want Blood (You Got It), played Sin City and Riff Raff. Whole Lotta Rosie was the second-last song of the night.

There is often a subtext to these kinds of videos. If the artist is a legacy artist, i.e. a veteran act, and AC/DC are that – Angus Young is 71 – then there can be a whiff of condescension around their performance. You’re past it. And all that unsavouriness. We’ll give this video the benefit of the doubt. It comes via an AC/DC superfan account, Marco’s HIGH VOLTAGE Music Channel. And Marco is right; Young gives us something different, but that’s rock ’n’ roll, and that’s oftentimes how he handles this solo as the band back off and he takes the spotlight.

The only concession here to age is that he keeps his shirt on. But c’mon, he’s still in uniform. Yes, he throws in a sour note, or at least one off-menu note, or maybe he is just vamping and momentarily lose the run of it – it doesn’t matter. All this, and yet what he does play effectively signposts the denouement of the solo, when he gives it that same ripping pentatonic/blues scale treatment, a punk energy brought to bear on barroom boogie-woogie blues-rock.

As one commentator on Reddit writes: “Are you going to post the clip of him messing up?”

Was this the definition of styling it out or throwing in a red herring to keep the audience guessing? Jury’s out. But Angus Young can play what he wants is the consensus.

You can watch the clip above and judge for yourself.

AC/DC's PWR/UP Tour continues apace. See AC/DC for full dates and ticket details. Tonight they rock St Louis, Missouri.

It was the worst kept secret in guitar, but now it’s official: Troy Van Leeuwen and Squier have unveiled the latest addition to the Fender-owned brand’s Paranormal series, a 12-string reimagining of the Telecaster, replete with signature details and a price tag that puts it within reach of a wider demographic.

The Telecaster celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. There have been some sweet-looking Teles in that time. But finished in a metallic Copper Age paint job, with a tortoiseshell pickguard, Squier’s Troy Van Leeuwen Telecaster XII could hold its own with any one of them.

There’s a lot to like; there is a lot to tune. Just look at that 6x6 headstock, outfitted with vintage-style machine heads. But we have been lucky enough to play this unorthodox and quite brilliant guitar, and the best compliment we can pay it is that it’s well worth the effort of tuning a dozen strings before playing. Its wider 1.6875mm nut gives your fretting hand a bit more room.

Also, Squier has made it a little easier than most 12-string guitars with a very user-friendly bridge that is configured for top-loading and stringing up through the body – it’s a design that takes some of the pain out of string changes (and helps tuning stability).

This Telecaster XII has a solid nyatoh body, a bolt-on maple neck, an Indian laurel fingerboard, and has an origin story that takes us all the way back to Queens Of The Stone Age’s …Like Clockwork era. Fender was working on Van Leeuwen’s signature Jazzmaster, but they had other irons in the fire, too.

Speaking to MusicRadar in July, the morning before Queens Of The Stone Age took to the stage at London’s Tottenham Stadium in support of System Of A Down, Van Leeuwen reveals that it all started when he commissioned Master Builder Paul Waller of the Fender Custom Shop to make him a double-necked electric guitar.

There was only one problem: it was going to take some time. Waller said it would be six months, maybe even a year, before the double-neck was finished.

“I was working with Paul Waller because I was like, ‘I need a double-neck for this record, because there’s 12-string and six-string everywhere,’” says Van Leeuwen. “In the process of making that double-neck – which I’ve been playing a lot during this tour – he was like, ‘I really, really want you to play a Fender, so can I make you something in the meantime while you’re waiting for your double-neck?’ And I was like, ‘Sure! I’ve always wanted a Tele 12-string.’”

Waller was well up for the challenge.

“I love him,” says Van Leeuwen. “He’s like, ‘Well, let me just make you a Fender Tele, a simple Tele with a 12-string neck.’”

A 12-string Telecaster is a rare sight indeed. Bruce Springsteen has played one, as has Robin Zander of Cheap Trick. The Fender Custom Shop made a run of them for a short while in the late ‘90s. But you don’t see them every day (little wonder Squier considers it weird enough to release Van Leeuwen’s Tele XII as part of its Paranormal Series).

Van Leeuwen had some requests for his Custom Shop model. He had a Burns 12-string that he really liked, and wanted Waller to copy the neck.

“I’ve had this Burns Double Six for ever,” he says. “Man, it’s a really great sounding 12-string guitar, and the cool thing about it is that the neck is super wide, and you can really get in there and play it like… like the ham-fisted guy that I am. [Laughs] I was like, ‘For that guitar, please copy the neck of the Burns.’ And so I’ve been playing that guitar onstage – and Dean and I share it for different songs – for the last 14 years.”

Fender and Van Leeuwen launched his signature Jazzmaster in 2014. It is still on the market, and has history been a unit-shifter for Fender. Van Leeuwen says it still sells “pretty well”.

When Fender reached out to him to see if he was interested in doing something new they could put out, he had just the idea. The market isn’t over-saturated with affordable 12-strings. What about the Tele?

“I’m like, ‘I’ve always wanted to do a Squier.’ Just because I have that thing where it’s like, when I was a kid, I didn’t have money, and every guitar that I’d have to just scrounge up for was like a Squier,” he says. “Or some cheap pawn shop guitar. And so I just wanted something affordable, ‘cos not many people play 12-string guitars and they’re usually really expensive. Maybe we could do a Squier. It’s a very much a simplified version of that same Custom Shop [Tele].”

It’s a fixer-upper too. If you were of a mind to buy one, there’s also scope for upgrading the Fender-designed Alnico single-coil pickups if you wanted a more premium pairing. But Van Leeuwen is kind of tickled by the fact that you don’t need to do that. It sounds good as it is. He didn’t see any need to do anything to it before playing it live onstage – and on television, too.

“Yeah, I mean, it’s funny because I played on this show, the Jimmy Kimmel show, the other night with Michael Stipe,” he says. “Andrew Watt asked me to jump up there and play, and I was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna break this thing out. See what it does.’ So that was the debut of the Troy Van Leeuwen Squier Telecaster XII. So cool.”

And with that, the cat was out of the bag. Van Leeuwen posted about it on his Instagram page. There would be a new 12-string Telecaster on the market – officially for the first time as a regular production model – and it would bear his signature on the neck plate. It might well be the pick of the litter from this year’s Paranormal Series.

Maybe it’s time Fender took a leaf out of Squier’s book and launched its own Paranormal range. Van Leeuwen agrees. But he argues you don’t need Fender on the headstock to make a guitar roadworthy. His Telecaster XII has already proven it’s one tough beast. This is a 12-string that cannot be killed.

“Well, here’s a funny story,” says Van Leeuwen. “They sent me a prototype, the first of them. Maybe it was the first sort of factory test. And they sent it to my house, and the guy who delivered it, he ran over it on the way out of the driveway, in the box. [Laughs]”

Now, this kind of thing is not considered best practice in quality control, but it does go some way to proving that the hardiness of the Fender Telecaster translates to the 12-string format.

Van Leeuwen says it just needed the twist of an Allen key and it was good to go.

“Yeah, I picked it up, and I didn’t know it until I opened it up,” he says. “And I was, like, ‘I mean, the action’s really high,’ but it didn’t break or anything! [Laughs] It was just like maybe the truss rod needed to be tweaked a bit.

“But I always like stuff like that because it’s definitely roadworthy. I love that. More than anything, I like guitars that are roadworthy. I leave all my vintage stuff at home. Anything that I can just take on the road and it works is something that I will always want.”

The Troy Van Leeuwen Telecaster XII is available now, priced £509/$599. See Fender for more details.

Queens Of The Stone Age’s new album, Perfecth, is out October 30 via Matador.