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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collaboration is a spiritual thing

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

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

Learn to take inspiration from all art, not just music

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

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

Look beyond the guitar

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

Do what Miles Davis tells you

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

Chase melodies if you want to your music to last

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

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

Talent borrows, genius steals

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

Free your mind and the rest will follow

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

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

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

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

Find a guitar that works for you

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not everyone can play at high volume

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

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

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

Use the energy in the room

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

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

To thine own self be true

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eno, in particular, seems to have struck a career-chord with The Edge during the album's Slane Castle sessions. "He's not a great keyboard player, he doesn't write great songs really, he doesn't have the craft that say Bowie has to write a song, or Paul McCartney,” he told One-Two Testing magazine in 1984.

"His engineering and technical abilities are limited as well. In fact, he knows very little about an awful lot, but it's how he applies that knowledge.

"I suppose it's down to confidence, too."

That pragmatic creativity was something The Edge took confidence and inspiration from, as he'd told Hot Press the year before:"I could see how Eno had shaped his career not around any one particular overriding talent but through a collection of, I suppose you would say second-rate, abilities.

"But the way he used them, that he'd been so determined to follow the areas in music he found stimulating to create a career - that must be totally unique.

"Now I don't think I'm a particularly talented guitar virtuoso. My talent if it's anything is my approach to the guitar by the use of effects, by non-acceptance of the usual approaches to the guitar".

There were other, similarly pragmatic forces behind the U2 man's signature style, which was well in place pre-Eno, though.

Back with One-Two Testing: "My guitar style has always been the product really of the rest of the group. Adam is a very ostentatious sort of person, y'know, very extravagant, so when he started playing bass he wasn't interested in taking the bottom end of the sound spectrum at all.

"He wanted to be right up there in the mid-ranges, so his bass sounds were always extremely full with a lot of top end — very different to say Simple Minds or any of the other bands around that era, the Bunnymen or anybody like that.

"In order to give the group any sort of clarity, therefore, I had to stay away from the bottom end of the guitar as much as I could. So I tended to work around those high chords, that ringing sound...

"So when we started writing our own songs it just developed, this style of using high chords with that sort of ringing quality, not particularly rhythmic but more just a harmonic wash over little hook lines picked out within the songs, essentially very much as it is now.

"Then we started making a bit of money on gigs so I bought an echo unit and various other boxes, and most of the other boxes I discarded very quickly. I hate effects, the kind of things that jump out at you."

"I'm not an incredibly versatile guitar player, but I've made best use of what limited talents I have. I think my talent is possibly applying my abilities in a new way, so that could be production, it could be songwriting, it could be guitar playing, it could be anything. I enjoyed Eno because I could see he did that as well."

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are guitar players, and then there is Joe Satriani, a man for whom the epithet ‘virtuoso’ is something of an understatement. Satch – or as he is more ridiculously known, Professor Satchafunkilus – is the guitar player’s guitar player.

In a varied career, he has made 18 solo albums, performed with singer Sammy Hagar in and out of rock supergroup Chickenfoot, played as a touring guitarist with Mick Jagger and Deep Purple and worked as a tutor for a number of famous rock guitarists, most notably Steve Vai and Metallica’s Kirk Hammett.

In a 2010 interview with Classic Rock, Satriani told some of the funnier stories from his life in music, and began by discussing his attitude towards vintage guitars.

He laughed: “Don’t you hate that, when someone starts telling you they’ve got the original screws for a ’62 Esquire? Actually I keep pretty tight-lipped about all that stuff. I just want to play. I’m more concerned about writing a good song.

“Having said that, I do appreciate the idea that only a special tool will work for a special job, and sometimes you do need that ’66 electric Fender 12-string! If you’re reading an article about Jimmy Page and he happens to let slip the guitar he used on a song that you think is the Holy Grail, you have to play that thing!”

Satriani recalled the guitar lessons he gave to Kirk Hammett – first, when Hammett was a raw and undiscovered teenager, and later when he was an established star with Metallica.

He explained: “In the beginning, Kirk knew exactly what he liked, which is so important. He was into Stevie Ray Vaughan, Hendrix, Uli Jon Roth, Michael Schenker.

“I taught him music theory and it was up to him to decide what to use – that was the key to my lessons.”

Asked why Hammett was still taking lessons from him in 1988, four albums into Metallica’s career, Satriani replied: “Kirk is a very smart individual. He always acted on what he felt he needed to do.”

He talked about the importance of finding your own identity as a guitarist.

“Really, personality has so much to do with what you play,” he said. “The one thing I can do that nobody else can is be myself, and write those weird songs that I write. I don’t know if that’s a good thing.”

Satriani also confessed to two of the most embarrassing moments in his career.

He recalled – in detail – the worst review he ever had.

“I remember this so vividly,” he said. “It was 1987, and Surfing With The Alien [his second solo album] had just come out. Every morning I’d go for a cappuccino at this little café, and I read a review of my album in a magazine.”

He elaborated: “This guy did not like me, did not like my guitar playing, and did not like the music. He said it was the worst record he’d ever heard, and finished by saying that if you’re one of those people that likes to fill up the back of a pickup truck with a case of cheap beer, drive into a parking lot alone, turn up the music and get drunk, then this is the record for you. When I read that I peered over the top of the magazine to see if anyone knew that I was the culprit!”

He also admitted to one major artistic failure during the sessions for his classic 1989 album Flying In A Blue Dream.

“There was a song I wrote for the Flying In A Blue Dream record,” he said. “I spent hours in the studio, went through three bass players, pummelled it to death! I just couldn’t make this song work until finally I realised it was the worst piece of crap ever.

“I probably spent $10,000 trying to get it to work. That’s a lot of money!”

In May 1988, LA hair metal band Dokken set out on the biggest tour of their career - but it would prove disastrous.

Monsters Of Rock was a travelling festival playing 30 dates in stadiums across the US. Van Halen headlined. Below them, in descending order, were Scorpions, Dokken, Metallica and Kingdom Come.

At the end of 1987, Dokken had released their most successful album to date, Back For The Attack, which hit No.13 in the US. They’d also had an MTV hit with the song Dream Warriors, which was on the soundtrack to horror film A Nightmare On Elm Street 3 (the video features its star Robert ‘Freddy Krueger‘ Englund).

But on the Monsters Of Rock tour Dokken had a problem. They had to follow Metallica.

Dokken were a melodic hard rock band with some punchy songs and a genuine guitar hero in George Lynch. But in 1988 Metallica were the fast-rising kings of thrash metal with a fanatical following.

At the Monsters Of Rock show at the LA Coliseum, a near-riot ensued during Metallica’s performance.

It was a hard act to follow, and Dokken didn’t stand a chance.

As singer Don Dokken recalled to Classic Rock: “After Metallica went out and played Master Of Puppets, we sounded like the f**king Partridge Family!”

As the tour progressed, Don asked Cliff Burnstein, co-manager of both Dokken and Metallica, if the two bands could swap places on the bill.

Don said: “I told Cliff: ‘I know we’re making twice the money as Metallica, but can you please put ’em on after us, because they’re killing us?”

Burnstein said no, and Dokken’s humiliation was complete following a show at Giants Stadium in New Jersey.

“There was this huge review in the New York Times,” Don recalls. “It said that Van Halen kicked ass, the Scorpions were super-amazing, Metallica are the new upstarts just breaking out in America, Kingdom Come was good… and there was just one line about us. It said: ‘During Dokken’s set a record number of hotdogs were sold.’ It was horrible.”

Eric Clapton was on a mission from the start and there was no time to waste. He joined the Yardbirds in ’63, left in ’65 to join up with John Mayall and his Bluesbreakers, and within 12 months he had co-founded Cream to establish a new paradigm for blues-rock, the power trio.

He had reconfigured guitar in just three years. Little wonder it would go to his head. When some oik spray-painted “CLAPTON IS GOD” on a wall in North London the list of suspects was long but most definitely included Clapton himself. “I thought it was quite justified to be honest with you,” he told Guitarist in 1994. “I suppose I felt I deserved it for the amount of seriousness that I’d put into it.”

Clapton was serious.

His mission was to spread the gospel of blues guitar. He had been weaned on early rock ’n’ roll just as his peers were. That’s what made him aware of the electric guitar as an instrument, seeding its potential in his mind. He found his calling after hearing Freddie King for the first time.

“Listening to him had an effect on me similar to what I might feel if I were to meet an alien from outer space,” said Clapton, in his 2007 autobiography. “It simply blew my mind.”

The record in question was the 7” for Hideaway. The B-side, I Love The Woman, contained an “earth-shattering” moment, a guitar solo in which King demonstrated just how rich and wide and musically literate the blues could be. Clapton said it took his breath away.

“It was like listening to modern jazz, expressive and melodic, a unique kind of playing in which he bent the strings and produced sounds that gave me the shivers,” he said.

Eureka! The electric guitar could be the lead instrument, on an even keel with the vocals.

There were other formative influences. George Barnes’ playing on Connie Francis’ Lipstick On Your Collar made an impression. James Burton’s countrified styled jived with Clapton’s sensibility, too, and it fit in with this recognition that it was all interconnected, and the blues held it all together.

Not that the world was paying attention. A four-piece modern beat combo out of Liverpool was having much success. They were making the weather. Clapton thought this was “despicable”. Seeing all these young people succumbing to Beatlemania was a ‘hello, sheeple!’ moment. How could the music buying public at large confer godlike status upon them when Clapton’s heroes went to their graves unsung?

We shall allow ourselves a wry smile at Clapton taking umbrage at people deifying another artist then move on.

This pique played its part in refocusing a young teenaged Clapton when he got back in the rehearsal room with the Roosters, talking about the blues, honing his chops alongside fellow guitarist Tom McGuinness – who can take the credit for introducing Clapton to King.

“I was interested in the white rock ’n’ rollers until I heard Freddie King – and then I was over the moon,” Clapton told Guitarist. “I knew that was where I belonged – finally. That was serious, proper guitar playing and I haven’t changed my mind ever since. I still listen to it and I get the same boost now that I did then.”

Back then the gigs came easy. Clapton made his bones playing clubs, “his spiritual stomping ground”. They all did. There were not enough bands to go around. If you were good enough, you got a gig, and those who could really play could make a bit of money. As a student of the blues, Clapton operated as though he had secret knowledge, a deeper cultural wellspring to draw from.

He says it was the only education he got, falling down the rabbit hole, learning these cats’ names and their stories, and how blues and soul, R&B and jazz all fit together, knotted with the histories of those who created the sounds.

“I remember hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and not really knowing anything about the geography or the culture of the music,” Clapton told Guitarist. “But for some reason it did something to me – it resonated.

“Then I found out later that they were black and they were from the Deep South, and that started my education. In fact the only education I ever really had was finding out about blues. I took a kind of elementary fundamental education in art, but it didn’t rivet my attention in the same way blues did.”

As any teacher will tell you, a motivated student is a good student. Clapton applied himself. This education went hand in hand with learning to play the guitar, developing a musical vocabulary and playing style that would soon be turned lose on the Yardbirds, that great mid ‘60s petrie dish of percolating guitar genius from which Jeff Bech, Jimmy Page and Clapton all emerged.

“I wanted to know everything,” Clapton continued. “I spent all of my mid to late teens and early twenties studying this music; studying the geography of it, the chronology of it, the roots, the different regional influences, how everybody inter-related, how long people lived, how quickly they learnt things, how many songs they had of their own and what songs were shared around…”

Clapton found a place to put this knowledge in the autumn of 1963. The Yardbirds would be the perfect vehicle for his obsession with Chicago blues. It was a band who took this stuff seriously. They would play Willie Dixon, Billy Boy Arnold and Sonny Boy Williamson tracks, Clapton taking over on lead vocals for Williamson’s Good Morning, School Girl. They would jam out Bo Diddley’s I’m A Man, “rave-ups” as they called it then.

This was when Clapton acquired the sobriquet Slowhand. He’d break a string onstage and change it right there and then, and the crowd would treat it like a tennis pro challenging a line call, a slow hand clap would ripple through the audience.

Unfazed, Clapton got straight back at it. But he had itchy feet. When people actually started to really like the Yardbirds (the Graham Gouldman-written For Your Love went Top Ten) it was time to leave. The self-styled “anarchist” wanted to back underground, there he would find John Mayall waiting for him.

And more often than not, wait for Clapton is what Mayall did.

“I was so unreliable, so irresponsible,” recalled Clapton. “I would sometimes just not show up at gigs and that’s how Peter Green was asked to play with John – because I wasn’t there.”

Clapton was just 20 years old when he joined the Bluesbreakers. His Gibson Les Paul and Marshall amp sound was making waves all the way over the Atlantic.

The similarly minded Billy Gibbons’ ears pricked up. The Texan was moved by ‘the Beano Album’, and this being the pre-internet era he did what everyone else did at the time and scanned the back of the album sleeve to for idea on how Clapton got this thrilling tone.

“The sound was just so fierce and so attractive,” said Gibbons, speaking to Guitarist in 2021. “The appeal drew everyone’s curiosity to attempt to suss out where this sound was coming from. The photograph of Eric on the back cover was a clue. We said, ‘Ah, look in the background, there’s a Marshall, but it’s not very big, and ah, look at that. They don’t make those any more – but it’s one of those Les Pauls!’”

The Beano ‘Burst Les Paul became infamous. It helped establish the sound that everyone was chasing. Clapton had been searching for something to compete with Freddie King’s tone and had eventually found it in a cranked Marshall 2x12.

That alchemical combination was broken up after the Beano went AWOL, stolen from a church hall in ’66. Gibson only made these sunburst Les Pauls from 1958 to 1960.

There were not that many of them, making each and everyone precious in its own right. And yet this one, which had acquired mythical status in Clapton’s hands, was gone. That’s the thing when people think that you’re God, they all want a piece of you.

Speaking to Classic Rock, the Beano album’s producer, Mike Vernon, remembers Clapton as Clapton himself did; he was difficult. He was particularly uncompromising over how they would record. It had to be live, but at the volume he played at the guitar would bleed into mix.

“It took a while to get a sound that everybody was happy with, especially Eric,” said Vernon. “But everybody had to take on board that we were going into an unknown era, nobody had ever witnessed in the Decca studios somebody coming into the studio, set up their guitar and amp and play at that volume.

“People in the canteen behind the studio were complaining about the noise. Normally they would never hear it, but it was travelling round the studio complex. People were coming down to the studio to see what was going on.”

What was going on was a miracle. Mayall had called the tunes. He was the leader. Clapton applied is magic, heaving the blues into popular culture, inspiring generations of players. Nothing would be the same again. His successor in the Bluesbreakers, Peter Green, had a few ideas also how to take it further. The British blues boom had officially started.

For the record, Vernon believes Lonely Years, the seven-inch that Clapton and Mayall cut in ’65 for he and his brother’s imprint, Purdah, was Slowhand’s definitive recording.

“Lonely Years was the finest effort Eric ever put on record,” he told Classic Rock. “It just sums up exactly what Eric was about at that time – that real down-home feel. That record was the closest I came to a real Chicago sound.”

That was exactly was what Clapton was chasing. And if that made him an elitist with a god complex, so be it. At least it was with the best intentions.

“I thought everyone else was either in it just to be on Top Of The Pops or Ready Steady Go, or to score girls or for some dodgy reason,” he said. “I was in it to save the world. I wanted to tell the world about blues and to get it right. Even then I thought that I was on some kind of mission, so in a way I thought, ‘Yes, I am God; quite right‘.

“My head was huge. I was unbearably arrogant and not a fun person to be around most of the time because I was so superior and very judgmental. I didn’t have time for anything that didn’t fit into my scheme of things.”

Keep in mind his next project saw him team up with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce for a project he envisaged as a straight-up blues trio but was anything but.

Cream was another miracle, musically and existentially. How did they manage to hold it together for three long years?

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

George Harrison is sitting in a vast soundstage at Twickenham Film Studios, explaining to Ringo Starr and film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg how a BBC2 sci-fi series called Out Of The Unknown, that he watched the previous evening, has inspired a new song. Harrison is sporting the same black fur coat he wears on the iconic rooftop concert and perched on his knee is John Lennon’s 1965 Epiphone Casino.

It’s mid-morning on Tuesday 7 January, 1969 and the next Beatle to arrive is Paul McCartney. “Good morning,” says the bearded bassman chirpily as he strides across the floor. “Do you wanna hear a song I wrote last night?” Harrison asks him. “It’s just a very short one, called I Me Mine”.

What follows is a beautifully plaintive and sparse rendition with Harrison’s voice sounding particularly pure. “Lovely” exclaims Lyndsey Hogg. McCartney, with hands in pockets, stands beside Harrison and stares down at his fingers on the fretboard, but says nothing. Then John Lennon arrives. Harrison, now standing, runs through the song again but speeds it up. “Run along son, see you later,” jokes Lennon. “We’re a rock and roll band you know”.

If one incident highlights the tortuous position that George Harrison found himself in as part of The Beatles then this is it. It’s just one of a number of incidents captured in Peter Jackson’s three-part 2021 documentary Get Back, in which Harrison employs impressive levels of tenacity and tact to push his own songs forward to Lennon and McCartney. Their songwriting partnership was a source of both inspiration and frustration for George. They are ostensibly the gatekeepers, two strong personalities locked into an even stronger autonomous partnership.

Only in the months leading up to The Beatles’ break-up was Harrison’s contribution and his songwriting abilities finally acknowledged by its two principal songwriters. “Until this year our songs have been better than George’s,” said McCartney bluntly in the Get Back film. “Now, this year, his songs are at least as good as ours."

In the years and decades following the break-up of The Beatles, George Harrison’s contribution to the band would be completely reassessed and his songs, such as Something and While My Guitar Gently Weeps, would be recognised as some of The Beatles’ greatest works.

As Frank Sinatra said of Something in his introduction to the song during a performance in 1982: “It’s one of the best love songs I believe to be written in 50 or 100 years… it really is one of the finest.”

Despite such accolades, Harrison possibly felt undervalued within The Beatles at times. Subsequent comments also suggest that he may have contributed to more Beatles songs than he is given credit for.

In a 1987 interview for the TV series W. 57th Street, the whole issue of songwriting credits came up when broadcaster Selina Scott asked Harrison for his reaction to a comment from John Lennon.

“In an interview before his death, John Lennon said he was really hurt by you, that you’d never mentioned in your autobiography any of the influences that he had on you,” said Scott.

“He was annoyed because I didn’t say that he had written one line of this song, Taxman,” replied Harrison. “Did you tell him that?” asked Scott. “Well I didn’t because he was already dead after that” replied Harrison, “but the point to that was that I also didn’t say how I wrote two lines to Come Together or three lines to Eleanor Rigby, you know, I wasn’t getting into any of that. I think in the balance I would have had more things to be niggled with him about than he would have with me.”

Scott then cited Lennon mentioning that Harrison had idolised him as a young boy. “Well that’s what he thought,” laughed Harrison. “I liked him very much, he was a groove, he was a good lad, but at the same time he misread me. He didn’t realise who I was and this was one of the main faults of John and Paul. They were so busy being John and Paul, they failed to realise who else was around at the time.”

In the same interview Harrison touched on the legacy of being a Beatle. “It just annoyed me that people got so into The Beatles. It’s not that I don’t like talking about them, I’ve never stopped talking about them… in the end it’s like ‘Oh sod off with The Beatles’ you know?’'”

By 1969, Harrison was feeling smothered by his existence as a Beatle. Things famously came to a head when Harrison said to McCartney: “I’ll play whatever you want me to play. Or I won’t play at all if you don’t want me to play. Whatever it is that will please you, I’ll do it.”

It took Harrison leaving the band on 10 January 1969, with the witty, parting riposte of “See you ‘round the clubs”, for McCartney and Lennon to really take stock of his contribution. Although as Paul McCartney says in Martin Scorcese’s documentary Living In The Material World, he and John were well aware of George’s talents.

“We didn’t underestimate George. We knew that he was peaking as we got to those records. He’d not been really interested in the beginning I don’t think. And because John and I did so much of the writing he could just leave it to us. But I think he realised you know that there was something in this, [that] artistically and financially it was a good thing to get into. At that time we realised that he was really coming up with the goods.”

Few issues will drive a wedge within a band faster than the subject of who wrote what on which song. And when that band is The Beatles, the creative and commercial stakes couldn’t be higher.

After the Beatles’ break-up, Lennon took a number of verbal swipes at his former band members, and uncredited songwriting contributions were a theme. In a 1980 interview with Playboy magazine, Lennon talks about the writing of Eleanor Rigby but refers only to McCartney. George’s own alleged contribution to that song is not mentioned.

"It's his first verse,” said Lennon about McCartney, “and the rest of the verses are basically mine. But the way he did it was... he knew he'd got the song, so rather than ask me, 'John, do these lyrics' because, by that period, he didn't want to say that to me, okay..."

But this is not how Paul McCartney remembers it. “John helped me on a few words but I'd put it down 80–20 to me,” McCartney said in Barry Miles’s 1997 biography Many Years From Now. “So what he said was, ‘Hey, you guys, finish up the lyrics', while he was fiddling around with the tracks or arranging it, at the other part of the giant studio and EMI.”

A number of accounts cite Harrison coming up with the intro/bridge line for Eleanor Rigby. In David Scheff’s book All We Are Saying, Lennon is quoted as saying: “I do know that George Harrison was there when we came up with ‘Ah, look at all the lonely people’. [Paul] and George were settling on that as I left the studio to go to the toilet, and I heard the lyric and turned around and said, ‘That’s it!’”

There is no firm evidence that George came up with the line, only that he was there when it was written. But it’s one of the Beatles songs on which all the band had an input. All were present when McCartney presented the first verse and melody, as was Lennon’s childhood friend Pete Shotton, who in Kenneth Womack’s 2014 book All We Are Saying, remembers Lennon’s contribution amounting to “virtually nil”.

In Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, George talks about writing credits for Lennon/McCartney songs and he uses Eleanor Rigby as an example of a track on which his name is not credited, despite having made the contribution.

Of course, ideas and suggestions often occur spontaneously and quickly. No-one is sitting there logging who has contributed exactly what and it’s often difficult to remember in retrospect who came up with a particular phrase, motif or chord. It’s clear from Peter Jackson’s film that The Beatles helped each other out with ideas, as is the case when George Harrison works with Ringo on Octopus’s Garden.

Similarly, it seems quite possible that Harrison could have contributed a line or two of lyrics to Come Together although there is no documented evidence to suggest that he did. When he mentioned in the 1987 interview that he contributed lines to Come Together, he may simply have been using a random song to demonstrate a broader point.

One song that George certainly did have a hand in though was She Said, She Said, the final track recorded for the Revolver album, inspired by an LSD-influenced conversation between John Lennon and actor Peter Fonda.

In The Beatles Anthology, Harrison recalled helping Lennon construct the song from "maybe three" separate segments that Lennon had. Harrison described the process as “a real weld”. In his 2017 book Who Wrote the Beatle Songs?, author Todd Compton credits Lennon and Harrison as being the song's true composers.

It’s been claimed that Harrison didn’t want a co-write credit. It’s also been claimed he became thoroughly disillusioned when he didn’t receive one. Whatever the truth, it demonstrates that on at least one occasion, George Harrison had a hand in co-writing a song for which he received no songwriting credit.

For George, the break-up of The Beatles signified creative emancipation. He was soon revelling in his post-Beatles life and the solo opportunities it brought him. He topped the UK and US charts with the hugely acclaimed All Things Must Pass triple album (1970) and his 1973 album Living In The Material World was a critical and commercial triumph.

Speaking on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, Harrison said he was overcome with relief when The Beatles’ broke up and compared it to leaving the family home.

“Some people can’t understand that, you know, because The Beatles were such a big deal. They can’t understand why we should actually enjoy splitting up, but there’s a time. People grow up and leave home or whatever they do. They go for a change, and it was really time for a change.”

It was a view echoed by Harrison in an interview with Musician magazine in 1987. “I just got so fed up with the bad vibes,” he said. “I didn’t care if it was The Beatles. I was getting out.”

• The 5 George Harrison post-Beatles songs you need to hear

Kirk Hammett makes no secret that he is a collector. He can’t help himself. He’ll buy guitars, he’ll trade them. If there’s something about an electric guitar that speaks to him then he’s an easy mark. It’s in the blood.

But he has an eye for this stuff. Hammett has acquired of the rarest vintage guitars around, such as the Bigbsy-equipped 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard that left the factory with a black finish. He had Joe Bonamassa to thank for that one, giving him a heads up text after he spotted it in Carter Vintage Guitars. There is only three of them in existence – with rumours that a fourth is out there somewhere, like Bigfoot.

Hammett also owns one of the most famous Les Pauls of all time, Greeny, the ’59 Les Paul Standard once owned by Peter Green then Gary Moore. It has quite literally become his signature guitar, with Gibson and Epiphone both releasing replicas of it.

But speaking in Dublin at one of his The Collection in-person events, sandwiched between Metallica’s performances on the latest leg of their stadium-packing M72 Tour, Hammett introduced one guitar of special significance, a Les Paul previously owned by one of his heroes, and is another super-rare Factory Black unicorn.

So why then did Hammett have mixed feelings about owning it?

“This guitar used to belong to one of my all-time star heroes, a huge source of inspiration, Neal Schon,” says Hammett. “And I got this in an auction, and I don’t know what was up, but I got this for, like, half the price that it was worth!”

Many players would be happy. It is not often you can get a bargain on the vintage market, doubly so if the guitar has an association with a platinum-selling artist. Hammett adores Schon’s playing. He loves Schon. None of this sat easy with him.

“I felt kind of bad about it because I should have paid a fair price,” says Hammett. “But I paid a price that was lower than it should have been.”

Who can say what was going on in Schon’s mind at the time. This was 2021, the Covid era. The auction was a big deal in the press. This was a huge consignment of guitars, some 112 in total, with some of the rarest – and most valuable – vintage guitars being auctioned off.

This was the auction in which Schon’s Grainger 'Burst 1959 Les Paul Standard sold for $350,000. His 1977 Don’t Stop Believin’ Les Paul went for $250,000. And there were some bona-fide vintage curios, too, such as his ’87 Superstrat prototypes that had a body like an upside-down Jackson Soloist. There was even a super-weird 1967 Coral Sitar Vincent Bell.

Hammett Schon’s P-90 loaded 1957 Les Paul Standard was unusual. It had left the Gibson factory with a custom black finish rather than its regular Goldtop. A unicorn, and at $87,500 from Heritage Auctions, a bargain. But it wasn’t the only unicorn to sell for what many believed was way under the estimate.

In his Guitarist column, Dave Davidson of Well Strung Guitars in NYC highlighted a 1960 Les Paul Custom in a Cherry finish, supposedly the last surviving instrument in a consignment of six that were custom-finished for Hägstrom.

He said Schon got really unlucky and “missed the boat” on the vintage guitar market boom. Schon should have waited until the pandemic was over.

“It turned out to be the worst time to do an auction because his guitars really undersold,” said Davidson. “I remember having a conversation with Joe Bonamassa afterwards, and he felt Schon should have waited. I was amazed he didn’t just get a storage place and put it off for a year or two, but nobody knew where the market was going to go at the time. It was a brutal auction to watch.”

All this was bothering Hammett, so he thought he’d do the decent thing. He’d call Schon up. If the Journey guitarist had been sweating over the auction, he didn’t show it. He was totally cool.

“So, I actually called Neal,” recalls Hammett. “I said, ‘Neal, do you want the guitar back?’ And he said, ‘No, man, you keep it. You buy it; you keep it.’”

This, says Hammett, is typical Schon. There were no hard feelings. A year later, Hammett joined Schon onstage to play Wheel In The Sky. He left the ’57 Les Paul behind though, taking Greeny along for the night.

“Neal Schon, he’s such a cool, cool guy,” says Hammett. “If you guys ever, like, really get to know Neal Schon, I mean, he’s an amazing guitar player. He’s amazing. He lives and breathes music. And to me, he’s just such a inspiration, ‘cos I see him, and I see how he conducts his life, and how he plays, and his commitment and dedication to music, and I was just like, ‘Yeah! That’s what I want to do, too.’ So I’m doing it.”

And he is. You can catch Metallica in London this weekend (July 3/5) before they head back to the US in for their residency at the Sphere, in Las Vegas, opening night October 3. See Metallica for ticket details. And you can watch the conversation about his collection in full above or at Kirk Hammett's YouTube channel.

Gibson The Collection: Kirk Hammett, written and edited by MusicRadar alumnus Chris Vinnicombe is available now via Gibson.

Brandon Ellis and Jackson have unveiled the latest in their long-standing signature guitar collaboration, with the Cannibal Corpse touring guitarist’s Kelly getting a Gold Crackle glow-up, and a spec reworked to make it even more amendable to fretboard pyrotechnics.

That, of course, means that we have return of the now familiar 27-fret platform. Ellis is a big believer in extra fingerboard real estate for upper-register gymnastics, and five minutes one of these might convince you, too.

But he has also asked for some choice tweaks for this new Pro Plus model. If there is a Custom Shop vibe to the Pro Plus Series KE7, which pairs that Gold Crackle finish with a maple fingerboard, then that’s because it was inspired by a Maserbuilt Kelly in Ellis’ collection.

“This guitar is based off of the Custom Shop Kelly that Metal Joe Williams built for me some years back,” says Ellis. “I just thought that maple and gold would look really cool together. I thought it would be kind of a striking regal look that wasn't common, and [it] exceeded my expectations.”

This new model should feel a little different to previous Ellis Kellys. It has the 12” to 16” compound radius fingerboard, but we’ve now got stainless steel frets (these are the kinds of upgrades you get with the Pro Plus Series).

It also has a slightly shorter scale than the 25.5” you find on most Jackson guitars, and the R2 locking nut is slightly narrower, so the string spacing will be a little tighter up there as per Ellis’ preferences.

“I was gonna design a guitar that was for soloing, specifically, so I made it a 25.1-inch scale length, and that allows the strings to be bent a little bit easier,” says Ellis. “And it also affects just the sound of the guitar. There’s a maple fretboard.

“That has a nice, snappy, kind of sound to it that people know, and the body is nyatoh, which I find to be just a really well balanced, bold-sounding tone wood. It is not too bright. It’s not too dark.”

Speaking of too dark, there are the Luminlay side-dot markers that illuminate in low light situations, which is always helpful onstage. Fretboard navigation is a big thing with this guitar.

We’ve got the typical Jackson shark tooth inlays, black on maple, easily visible, but there’s a neat visual cue where they run as standard from frets 1 to 11, there’s a double inlay at the 12th, and all frets above that the inlays are reversed so there’s more inlay on the treble side.

Ellis says this makes it a little easier finding your way around, though we have never seen the former Black Dahlia Murder guitarist having any trouble with that.

As for the pickups, we’ve got his Seymour Duncan Parallel Axis Dyad humbucker at the bridge, a hum-cancelling Seymour Duncan Parallel Axis Stack single-coil at the neck position.

“This [humbucker] is unique because it features asymmetrically wound coils,” says Ellis. “So one of these coils is a lot hotter than the other one, and it opens up the sound of a humbucker when the two coils don’t perfectly cancel each other out. And we gave it gold magnets and gold logos to just match the cosmetic of the guitar, which is really cool.”

These are selected by a three-way switch, and there’s a single volume control with a push/pull function for series/parallel modes.

This would not be the über metal guitar it is without a double-locking vibrato, and so we have a top-mounted Gotoh GE1996T vibrato system here, in gold, because this is a classy guitar. Hey, a Kelly is a radical electric guitar, especially with that reverse six-in-line headstock and that shape, but this wears this gilded finery better.

“I’m just honoured that we’re able to present this product, and that people are gonna buy my guitar,” says Ellis. “It’s kind of insane.”

The Pro Plus Brandon Ellis Kelly KE7 is out now, priced £1,799/$2,199, and that includes a gig bag. For more details, head over to Jackson.

If you're Paul McCartney, picking favourites is a thankless task – the sheer breadth of his seven years of writing songs with the Beatles would be enough to dodge the question. But he does have a special place in his heart for one particular Revolver creation, and it showcases why his songwriting could be so different… and yet familiar.

As he admitted with the remarkable dream state account that conjured up the song Yesterday, the influence of the previous generation would often seep into McCartney's creative mind. This was the music of his parents and music-loving family that were embedded in his childhood memories.

"One of my favourite songs because of its structure is Cheek To Cheek," revealed McCartney of the 1930s influence of American songwriter Irving Berlin in the podcast McCartney: A Life In Lyrics. "As sung by Fred Astaire. And I liked it very much before it starts off, 'Heaven, I'm in heaven… then the middle eight, 'Will carry me through to… heaven…' It's just like, yes! The way it just resolves up its own tail I always found wonderful. And I think somebody said I do it in this.

This being Here, There And Everywhere. This is a cornerstone moment in McCartney's rapid evolution as a songwriter in the 1960s, and a frankly staggering piece of work for a musician who was just 24 years old when Revolver was released in 1966.

McCartney likens the song's structure to a journey with an unexpected destination. "I like the fact that we think that we're on a path on the Moors, and we think we're going for a walk and then suddenly we've arrived where we've started," he explains in the podcast. "And it's not like we've gone around in a circle, it's more magical than that – we've come to another beginning of the path."

"It's this trick where you're suddenly where you were but it's surprising – you're where you were, but you're not. Because you can see back where you came from and you're definitely not there. You're at a new place, but it's tricked you and it's got the same scenery again."

Nevertheless, the song has a defined introduction before its verse in eight measures that are never repeated. And again, it's the influence of the past that's very clearly being referenced by its writer.

"John and I were fascinated by this idea that in the old days they did this complete ramble that didn't appear to be like [the rest of] the song at all," explains McCartney of his and John Lennon's mindset. So while much is made of the Beatles' revolution in pop music in song and production approach, it was also partnered with clear nods to the past at times.

It was Lennon who indirectly facilitated Here, There And Everywhere in the first place. "I remember writing this song while waiting for John one day," recalled McCartney in the podcast. "I'd gone out to his house in Weybridge for a writing session and he wasn't always up so I would have 20 minutes, half an hour while someone told him I was here, and he would get up."

And that's seemingly all it took for McCartney to start the ball rolling, alone with an acoustic guitar. "I remember sitting out by his swimming pool at his house in Weybridge and I had my guitar because I was ready for the writing session. And so I sat out and started something… I just went nice and smoothly so by the time I came to write with John, by the time he deigned to get up and have his coffee, I would have something to go on. "

Lennon is also credited on the song, but it's a McCartney composition… as far as he remembers.

"It does sound like something I might have done by the poolside and just sort of delivered to him," he told Muldoon. "Because it doesn't sound like anyone else's work – it sounds like one head."

So why the credit for both musicians?

"Paul and I made a deal when we were 15, Lennon told Playboy magazine in an interview three months before his murder. "There was never a legal deal between us, just a deal we made when we decided to write together that we put both our names on it, no matter what." Notably, Here There And Everywhere was a song Lennon also deeply admired. In 1 1972 interview with Hit Parader he confirmed the song was written by McCartney alone, and described it as "a great one of his." But unusually, he also told his bandmate similar in person.

"I was rooming with John… in the hotel we were staying at," McCartney told Howard Stern in 2018 about filming skiing scenes around Obertauern in Austrian Alps during March 1965 for the film Help! with the other Beatles. "And we had – it was a cassette I think, in those days – of the album [demos]! And we play Here There And Everywhere and he said: 'Wow! That’s a really great song!'"

That would place the song's writing to when McCartney was only 23 years-old, and it's surprising that the demo was in existence over a year before the song was recorded at Abbey Road for the Revolvr album in mid-June, 1966. By his own admittance, this kind of direct compliment was a rarity amongst the members of the band ("Because we're guys!"), but coming from McCartney's main songwriting partner/rival it was a huge moment.

"It was really nice! I remember it to this day, you know, exactly where I was when he said it! Uh, it was great, yeah! It really gave me a lot of confidence in that song, and in my writing."

McCartney spoke about the incident before in the Beatles Anthology book from 2000. "John and I shared a room and we were taking off our heavy ski boots after a day’s filming, ready to have a shower and get ready for the nice bit, the evening meal and the drinks," he recalled. "We were playing a cassette of our new recordings and my song Here, There And Everywhere’ was on. And I remember John saying, ‘You know, I probably like that better than any of my songs on the tape.’ Coming from John, that was high praise indeed."

Even McCartney himself is somewhat fascinated with his own work on this song in retrospect. "I like the line 'Changing my life with the wave of her hand. I look at those kinds of lyrics now and think, where did that come from? What was I thinking of – the queen, waving out of a royal carriage or just my love [who] can just do it by hardly doing anything… it says a lot in a line."

Here, There And Everywhere remains McCartney's favourite song he's written, when under pressure to answer, running Yesterday to a close second. "I'm often asked what my favourite song I've ever written is and I don't ever really want to answer it," McCartney told Muldoon. "But when pushed I'd go to Here, There And Everywhere."

• Rubber Soul: How The Beatles raised their game in 1965 to create a masterpiece that "broke everything open"

That the late Steve Albini knew how to get a gnarly electric guitar tone down on tape goes without saying. His reputation as underground rock’s most reliable chaperone for uncompromising sounds preceded him.

He had the audio engineering knowledge to capture all the dynamics in a band’s performance. He could give a snare hit a three-dimensional force, summon feedback out of thin air.

Albini’s ability to apply his analogue magic to the electric noise of a rock ’n’ roll band was exactly the reason why Nirvana hired him for In Utero. What better way to subvert the mainstream than to achieve mass appeal then drop a noise-rock record on an unsuspecting public? Who better to record it?

But the fact that bands returned to him time and time again spoke to the kind of relationship he struck up with them. He knew what they were looking for.

When Neurosis called on Albini in October 1998 to record the follow-up to the epic Through Silver In Blood, they soon realised that their widescreen sound – post-metal, atmospheric sludge, experimental metal or however you want to describe it – could be recorded just like a punk band would. Which was fitting, because this was where they came from, evolving out of the Oakland, CA hardcore and crust scene.

Joining MusicRadar over Zoom, guitarist/vocalist Steve Von Till recalls the band still being a little raw in the studio when they first met Albini.

“Well, when we were younger, we just didn’t know that much about recording,” he says. “I mean, I’d done a lot of home recording. We knew the basics. Noah [Landis, synthesizers/samples] had studied recording in school, but, yeah, what we learned from Steve was just that there’s no nonsense and just don’t overthink it.”

Neurosis can be a difficult band to describe. You can hear their influences – Swans, Melvins, Black Sabbath, old-school anarcho punk and Throbbing Gristle — and yet the only bands who sound like them, or try to, are the bands who they influenced. Over the years, their sound would blossom and expand, growing more dynamic.

Apocalyptic guitars were always in the air, the storm clouds on the horizon, but Neurosis also traffic in slack air, seeding moments of menace and beauty in the near silence, and in psychedelic noises that are hard to attribute to guitar or synths, in the explosive release of the riff. But this evolutionary zeal never took them that far from their roots. Albini’s workflow was perfect for that, allowing them to track live from the studio floor.

“We’re a band. We rehearse in a room. We don’t do this modern fucking one guy at a time, shit. We all set up and we play,” says Von Till. “We overdub the vocals – ‘cos then we’ll play guitar better if we’re not trying to sing and play guitar at the same time. [Laughs] Plus, you can sing into a nicer, more sensitive microphone. But we set up as a band and record as a band, in a good sounding room with good microphones, put in the right spot – and there’s no bullshit. And with Steve, we learned [that].”

That was one lesson. Another was that a Neurosis album could be recorded and mixed in a week. This came as a shock to Von Till.

“When we first recorded with him – Times Of Grace was the first thing we recorded with Steve – we booked way too much time, ‘cos we were just used to all these techniques that wasted time,” he says. “These were these kind of bad habits that we learned in our other studio experiences.”

Not that those experiences were all bad. On the contrary. Neurosis had shed their skin by the time they met Albini. They had harnessed the great low-end power of sludge riffs, applied them to hypnotic rhythms, making albums such as 1993’s Enemy Of The Sun play out as great trippy nightmares, like the acid’s gone bad and they’d attained this great fevered second sight into the post-atomic spiritual rot that has divorced humankind from the natural world we belong to.

“Looking back on it, Enemy Of The Sun was really gratifying to work with Billy Anderson, because we thought we were just quickly recording an EP, and we accidentally made a record, because it was just quick and natural,” says Von Till. “It felt great, not fucking around. With Steve, again, [it’s] very natural. There’s no studio tricks. There’s no bullshit. It’s a band in a room. It’s a good sounding band in a good sounding room, with good mics, put in the right spot.”

Neurosis recorded six albums with Albini. They were not the only band to call upon Albini time and time again. The Jesus Lizard, Mogwai, The Wedding Present and Low had many collaborations. But only defunct Montana indie-rockers Silkworm, who briefly reunited for a tribute concert following Albini’s death in 2024, and venerable Japanese noise-rock band MONO recorded more music with Albini than Neurosis.

Since 2004, MONO had recorded all of their albums with Albini. MONO’s guitarist and principal songwriter Takaakira ‘Taka’ Goto describes Albini as a “friend and teacher”.

Electrical Audio held such an emotional pull for MONO – and practical, they have made so many connections there – that they returned to Chicago to track their new album, Snowdrop, their first since losing Albini.

“I could feel a lot of Steve Albini during the recording session,” says Goto. “The sound of the studio is his legacy, and each tone, each sound – everything – it’s like Steve is here. It’s like Steve is always there.”

Neurosis’s comeback album, An Undying Love For A Burning World, was released without warning on the Spring Equinox through Neurot Recordings. This surprise release also unveiled the band’s new lineup, with Aaron Turner [Sumac, ex-Isis] replacing co-founder Scott Kelly on guitars and vocals. Kelly had been fired in 2019 after it emerged he had been engaged in the abuse of his wife and children. Neurosis announced a hiatus in 2022 when this news was made public.

No one saw this record coming. The story of this triumphant second act is one for another day – we spoke to Turner and Von Till about it – but Von Till says the choice of producer was influenced by those experiences with Albini. They wanted someone with a similar ethic, and they found him in Scott Evans of Kowloon Walled City.

“We love the way his records sound,” says Von Till. “Aaron had worked with him with Sumac a bit. I did a little bit of solo recording with him on my piano. And he’s cut from the same cloth. He’s not, like, studio tricks and nonsense, you know? It’s very natural. It’s just a natural capturing of rock music.

“You want to hear Jason’s [Roeder] snare drum like it’s Jason’s snare drum in your face. You don’t want to fix it later. You don’t want to record your guitar direct and put it through a bunch of digital bullshit to try to make it sound better later. Just catch it! We spent a lot of time getting our tones right in a room, in practice. Just catch it.”

Von Till argues there’s a time and a place to use the studio and all its tool kit. There’s a time and place to track the parts separately, to apply some post-production to them later and then stitch it all together. For Von Till’s solo projects, both under his name and as Harvestman, he might need to have someone send him a part.

He lives out in rural Idaho, under the shadow of the firs. He says it can be hard to get a cellist to drive all the way out there. But rock bands? Show up rehearsed, plug in and turn it up. And find someone like Albini, who knows where to put the microphones.

“I love multi-tracking, and I love the art of multi-tracking records, so I’m not against the whole concept of piecing records together,” says Von Till. “But rock bands – rock bands that play together – I just like that idea of catching the performance. And, of course, yeah, if you flub a note, punch it, old-school style, play over the riff and fix your wrong note.

“But it’s a performance, and it’s a vibe, and it’s a take. And sometimes the accidents, and the mistakes add to it. Sometimes the way that feedback accidentally came up between those two notes could never be replicated again.”

That's part of the art of it all. Being alive and aware and open to these accidents is one of the essential skills of any musician or producer. We have to recognise when something great has happened even if it wasn’t what were looking for at the start of the session.

And just hope someone has put the mics in the right place and the tape is rolling.

“For sure. I mean, we have these kind of epic grand soundscapes but we’re still rock and roll,” says Von Till. “We’re rock and roll. It’s a rock and roll band. We want that fucking dirty Motörhead/MC5/Stooges fucking shit in there! [Laughs]”

• An Undying Love For A Burning Planet is out now via Neurot Recordings.

Chic legend Nile Rodgers is one of the world’s most famous and influential guitar players. And when he talked about the guitarists who had the greatest influence on him, the two names at the top of his list were Jimi Hendrix and Wes Montgomery.

Rodgers revealed in Q magazine: “My whole style is Wes meets Hendrix. All R&B guitar playing – funk, soul, everything – is based on Hendrix. Not the soloing, but the rhythm parts. But I learned most from Wes.”

Indianapolis-born Montgomery was just 45 years old when he died of a heart attack in 1968, but his recorded work had a huge influence on the development of jazz fusion and smooth jazz. And it was Montgomery’s 1962 live album Full House that blew Nile Rodgers’ mind.

Full House was recorded at Tsubo Hall in Berkeley, California on 25 June 1962, with Montgomery leading a quintet featuring Johnny Griffin on tenor sax, Wynton Kelly on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums.

One of the album’s cornerstone tracks is Blue ‘N’ Boogie, a jazz standard originally written in 1944 by trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and his pianist Frank Paparelli. The song was also recorded by Miles Davis in 1954.

Rodgers named Montgomery’s version of Blue ‘N’ Boogie as his favourite guitar track of all time.

He told Q: “The first time I was over-impressed with guitar playing was when I heard Wes Montgomery’s Full House. It’s so good it’s just fucking ridiculous! The whole album is amazing but the track that really stood out for me was Blue ‘N’ Boogie. Ba da ba da da dee dah!

“I guess I was around 12 or 13 when I first heard it. I can’t remember exactly. When you’re that young, time blurs. Plus, I was a huge glue-sniffer back then!

“I was a hip young black kid living in South Central, LA, with a haircut like Malcolm X. We called it a ‘front’ – cropped on the sides with a peak at the front. It was cool. And when I was at the local skate rink the song I always heard was Wes’s Bumpin’ On Sunset.”

For Rodgers, the impact of Montgomery’s playing was profound.

He explained: “It was Wes that made me realise that the guitar was something unique and special. I had hipper-than-hip parents who were into modern jazz, so I was hearing Miles, Coltrane… but not many guitar players.

“When I heard Wes, it killed me. The guy played with his thumb, and it’s all downstrokes, which means it’s twice the effort, but he was still so fast it just smoked me!

“My old guitar tutor was actually Wes’s room-mate back in the day, a cat called Ted Dunbar. And it was Ted who taught me the chordal style I used in Chic. ‘Chucking’ – that’s what we call it in New York.”

He added: “I’m still as awestruck by Blue ‘N’ Boogie now as I was back then. It’s not just technically amazing, it’s full of soul, it’s so clever, and there’s riffs in there that would become jazz staples. Listen to George Benson and you’ll hear what I’m saying!”

They already had John Petrucci, Tim Henson, Cory Wong, Tom Morello, Gojira among others on the books. Neural DSP’s Archetype guitar plugin game was strong.

But then in December last year, the Archetype series dropped the motherlode with John Mayer, all his über-boutique tube amps, the pedals and his custom Gravity Tank right there in the box, a signature plugin suite for the ages.

For legions of Mayer fans who spent their days – and their cash – chasing after his gourmet electric guitar tones, the ship had come in. They had the Silver Sky; now they had the amps and the effects to go with it.

In a new demo walkthrough, shot for Neural DSP, Mayer has been sharing how he uses his plugin, discussing how it has transformed his workflow, and offered some tips on how we can use it in our own setup, either in standalone or in our DAW, and he has an interesting take on how to think of these digitalised presentations of classic hardware gear.

He also reveals that we’ve already heard this plugin in action – and that is one of 5 things we learned from the demo video.

1. John Mayer has used his Archetype plugin on record

Or should we say, records, plural. Perhaps this should not be so surprising. When Mayer recorded 2021’s Sob Rock, he of course had his reliable mainstays in the studio, the high-end tube amps we would associate with him, as he alternated plugging the Silver Sky into Dumble and an old Fender combo. The speed of the attack was what he was looking for.

For the Eric Clapton Journeyman-era vibe, he also used the Soldano SLO-100, admitting to Guitar World in 2021 that it was too good an opportunity to pass up when recording Last Train Home.

“I always wished that I could have a song that was on Eric Clapton’s Journeyman album. I loved him so much that I’m not afraid to go, 'I just want to feel what that’s like…’” said Mayer. “Like, the experience of plugging a Strat with noiseless pickups into a Soldano with a chorus pedal. And to hear that back on your own song is funny, poignant, touching, exciting, titillating. I mean, it feels a little bit wrong.”

But he crossed the Rubicon with digital, using a Fractal Axe-Fx unit during the sessions. He was no digital sceptic.

Here, Mayer tells us that he has used his Neural DSP and we won’t be able to tell.

“If I was in a pinch, I will always use this plug-in, and I have already on records,” he says. “I’m just not gonna tell you which ones they are, and I don’t think you’ll know.”

This begs the question, which records? Could there be an early prototype plugin on Sob Rock? The only other track we can think of is his guest spot on Lainey Wilson’s Phone, Keys, Wallet. He debuted a custom T-style on that record; might he also have used the plugin?

Or is Mayer referring to a release in the future – hinting that he’s already got some new material in the can?

2. His home setup is pretty much just a laptop, interface and monitors

Mayer is using the Archetype plugin as the first stage of the signal chain and then can pile sounds on top of that to taste, and this, he argues, is way easier.

“At home, all I have is this laptop with the plugin on it, an interface, and two studio monitors,” he says. “And as someone who’s been playing guitar for so many years, has had patch cables, 9V batteries, different pedals… You forget to unplug the pedal. You take a little break [from] playing at home, you go into the other room, then you hear, ‘Eeeeeeeeeee’ the delay pedal’s dying – and all these different things.

“I’ve had amps where the reverb circuit was messed up, and you’d turn it on, and it’d go, ‘Whurrrrrrrgh.’ You have to put the reverb down to zero.”

In short, this new setup simplifies everything and makes it more reliable. Save the Dumbles, the vintage Fender amps and the Two-Rocks for the road.

“I’ve looked forward to the year I would be able to simply have one cable, a laptop, two speakers, and have that be the whole rig,” he says. “It’s what I use at home.”

3. Mayer says the plugin solves the problem of losing ideas before he could record them

This is true of the Archetype plugins – and it holds true for all digital setups where you can just hit record and track the part. It beats grabbing your iPhone and recording to Voice Memos.

“I used to take out my iPhone and hit the voice recorder and put it on a table and try to turn the thing up so the voice recorder could catch it, and it was a lot of me messing with the iPhone,” says Mayer.

It even beats the Philips cassette recorder Keith Richards used to record the Satisfaction riff. Because when using the plugin in your DAW, what you record can actually be used on a finished recording. Just record it as a DI and you can gussy up the tone later on.

“I cannot recommend this enough,” says Mayer. “If you use this in Pro Tools, all you have to do is hit record if you have an idea. It’s brilliant.

“You could get a guitar part you really liked, use it on a record. You could be at home messing around, and your guitar riff could make it on a record, because you have the printed direct signal, and you have the plugin that’s saved inside of the chain, all from the same experience of picking up a guitar and just playing through what feels like an amp.”

4. Want to get more from a plugin? Stop scrolling presets and use it like an amp

Yes, the plugin lets you A/B different sounds in double-quick time. Yes, there are options. But don’t let that distract you from the actual act of playing guitar, and learning to play with the sound of a certain amp.

Mayer will use the same sound for weeks.

“I think this has been the same setting for a couple of weeks now,” he says. “It’s the same sound for two weeks. How am I playing inside that sound? How does the guitar feel inside of that setting?”

Mayer says the best way to make the most of this brave new digital world is to treat it as though each sound was a piece of hardware.

“Because the plugin is created to replicate amps, I think about these, just like I would an amp,” he says. “I don’t play for a second on an [Vox] AC30 and go, ‘Wheel in the Bad Cat.’ I don’t say, ‘Wheel in the Marshall.’ You get a piece of gear, and you get to know it.

“If you take just one and make it your amp, build your sound around that. As you move through all these patches, any one of these could last you a month. And you could write song after song after song. For so many years, people wrote records using one amp.”

5. Mayer says he’s “comfortable sucking for four or five minutes” to find a great idea

We’ll finish on one that’s relatable and practical. When Mayer picks up the guitar, he’s not worried about playing well, playing something that feels good. The freedom is in allowing yourself to play bad as you search for an idea.

Also don’t pick up the instrument and noodle around on your warm-up licks just to make yourself good. Go in fresh. Mayer doesn’t have any go-to licks. He’ll just start playing, and who cares if it sounds bad in that moment because it’s part of the process.

“What I want to show you is I don’t have a set thing I play,” he says. “I don’t have a set thing that I play when I pick up the guitar. I purposefully don’t have a set thing that I play.

“I’m okay sucking for four or five minutes to find something… I don’t mind being wrong. Doesn’t matter. We’re all just playing. Just play.”

• "I love that you don’t have to be a Mayer mega-fan to enjoy what’s on offer here": Neural DSP Archetype: John Mayer X review

Look at the valve amps behind Joe Bonamassa on any given night and you’ll most likely see a mixture of vintage Marshalls and Fenders as well as highly collectible Dumbles.

You might even find a Van Weelden or something made by Fuchs, like the signature JB-ODS he launched with them last year. And, going back even further, he’s been seen on stage with boutique models made by contemporary visionaries such as Suhr, Friedman, Budda and Bogner.

In any case, these are typically hand-wired crème de la crème specimens that live up to the sonic vision he has in mind. Given the overall value of the rig he chooses to tour with, you could say Joe Bo is not one to settle for second best.

What you don’t expect to see next to one of the world’s most deeply admired blues musicians and prolific collectors is anything remotely digital, aside from the trusty Boss DD-3 digital delay pedal that’s been with him since forever.

But that’s precisely what happened back in April, when he shared a photo of his signature Fender 59' High Powered Twin – made for him in black instead of the factory tweed, with three premium 12AX7 preamp valves and a matched quartet of 6L6 output tubes – next to a fully digital Fender Tone Master Twin.

The new Tone Master line of amps was launched back in 2019 to faithfully model the circuitry and power output of the world-famous originals, to the point where they are, according to Fender, “virtually indistinguishable”.

Speaking exclusively to MusicRadar, Bonamassa – someone who has been openly critical about the flaws in modelling technology as a dyed-in-the-wool tonal traditionalist – is finally holding his hands up and admitting defeat.

“I’ve got to be honest with you and admit when I’m wrong,” he explains, a few weeks after two sold-out nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall. “I still have my other tube amps behind me. It’s just that the high-powered Twin is now a Tone Master.”

He continues: “When I first plugged into it, I realised this shit’s good. I wanted to dislike it, I really wanted to dislike it! But I couldn’t.

“My production manager, my sound tech, even my other guitar player Josh Smith – they were all telling me it sounds better and feels right. And I was like, ‘I know!’”

It does make you wonder – what is it about the Tone Master that managed to convince the old school purist that this kind of equipment could indeed find a place in his rig?

It all comes down to the air being moved. Even if the amps are running digital technology, make no mistake: their physical presence in the room is very much real.

“I think the trick at this point is to be physically pushing out sound,” he shrugs. “You have to be moving air. By having the right speakers, the Tone Master works. It’s not like I’m plugging into a direct box, which I could, but I don’t think that would sound good.”

And in order to find the sound he’s happy with, that air being pushed from the speaker cones is almost as important as the air going into his chest.

He reasons: “That’s where a lot of this digital modelling stuff can start sounding a little generic. With a lot of the things out there, you’re not moving air and the dynamic range is limited. For me, moving air is essential, just like playing loud.”

• Watch Joe Bonamassa give Nerdville’s noisy neighbours a taste of their own medicine with a high-volume rendition of Smoke On The Water through a cranked Dumble

The release of the 25th Rolling Stones studio album, Foreign Tongues, is just three weeks’ away, which means rounds of interviews for the three remaining core members of the band. And, right on cue, Keith Richards has been sharing his thoughts on where the Stones are at in 2026, his relationship with Mick and technology.

So, what do we find out? Well, regarding the latter, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that Keith is not a fan of modern tech. The 82-year-old guitarist says he's “had it up to here with technology… I mean, personally, I think the world would be better off without the damn phone. AI is killing me, you know. Do I fear for the future of music? I fear for the future of everything. They don’t know what the hell it does, so now we all dangle and wait.”

His relationship to tech extends to “an electric kettle and that’s about it, pal”.

He and Jagger don’t cross swords as much these days either, he suggests: “There’s not as much jousting. He’s broken his sword, he’s broken his lance. It’s another thing that Mick and I gave up, probably down to age. Or at least he hasn’t come at me for a while, so I presume we have.”

“Mick’s been very prolific lately,” he says, “which is one reason this album has come out so quick, because he won’t bloody stop. And the momentum from Hackney Diamonds was such that this is basically carrying on in the same breath. I was just letting it roll – we had enough stuff if we wanted to keep pushing, and so Mick and I gave each other the usual wry look and said: ‘Yeah, let’s keep pushing.’”

Hilariously, Keith seems to have no idea Robert Smith of The Cure is one of the guests on Foreign Tongues: “How did it happen? Don’t know. I wasn’t there. Andrew [Watt, producer] said: ‘Do you mind if I put in so-and-so?’ And I said: ‘No, man, if it’s a piece that’s necessary, do it.’ So that’s how he got slipped in.”

He’s more at ease waxing lyrical about Chuck Berry, whose Beautiful Delilah the Stones cover as the album’s closing track: “There’s something about those early records of his,” he says. “They have an ease about them and a sophistication in a way, particularly in the lyrics, which always made me think that rock ’n’ roll didn’t always have to be the way that everyone used to think about it.”

“I loved his naturalness when he was playing, the way he moved – his whole body became part of the guitar. He made me focus on what was possible for me, at the time, which made my mother shell out for an electric guitar. I just felt a natural affinity for him, even though he was a cussed bugger.”

“He punched me once, years ago, in the 60s, I think,” he reveals. “We were in his dressing room, I was having a peek at his guitar and I was just about to stroke it, and he went: ‘Nobody touches it!’ And bam! Quite right, Chuck! I would have done the same.”

It takes a brave guitarist to step into a role previously played by Ritchie Blackmore and Tony Iommi – but that’s exactly what Vivian Campbell did when he joined Dio in 1982.

At that time, he was just 20 years old.

Now, at 63, a member of Def Leppard since 1992, Campbell tells MusicRadar: “Dio was a great band, you know? It really was. And maybe I didn’t even realise it at the time.”

The leader of that band, Ronnie James Dio, had made his reputation as one of heavy metal’s greatest vocalists in the late ’70s alongside Ritchie Blackmore in Rainbow and in the early ’80s alongside Tony Iommi in Black Sabbath.

The original line-up of Dio featured two of the singer’s old bandmates, ex-Rainbow bassist Jimmy Bain and ex-Sabbath drummer Vinny Appice, plus guitarist Jake E. Lee. But after a short period of rehearsals Lee jumped ship to join Ozzy Osbourne’s band as the replacement for the recently deceased Randy Rhoads.

Lee’s defection heightened the sense of rivalry between Osbourne and Dio – a rivalry born when Dio replaced Osbourne in Sabbath.

But Dio’s frustration didn’t last for long. What he found in Vivian Campbell was a perfect foil.

Campbell had made a name for himself in the Belfast-based band Sweet Savage during the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. Sweet Savage’s 1981 song Killing Time would later be covered by Metallica as the b-side for 1991 single The Unforgiven.

Campbell’s audition for Dio happened in London at the famed rehearsal studio John Henry’s. Jimmy Bain was absent, so Dio played bass as he and Appice jammed with Campbell. And the first piece of music they played together was a rough draft of a song that would be pivotal to the band’s career – the title track of the debut album Holy Diver.

Campbell recalls: “That night at John Henry’s, my audition, when I first met Ronnie and Vinny, that’s what we played – Holy Diver. Ronnie didn’t play guitar, but he played bass, and he picked up Jimmy’s bass and showed me the arrangement of it.

“It wasn’t a completed song at that point, but it was pretty much there, and that’s what we played. We just played it over and over a bunch of times.”

According to Campbell, it was immediately after this audition that Ronnie James Dio made a promise that he failed to keep.

“I didn’t smoke dope,” Campbell says, “but they all got stoned, and that’s when Ronnie talked about the band – how we were going to do three albums, and then we’d have equity after album three.

“Maybe I was the only one that remembers it, because I was the only sober man in the room, but that’s what I remembered from that night, and that’s what got me fired in the end.”

Campbell was dismissed by Dio after the band’s third album, 1985’s Sacred Heart.

Back in 1982, however, Campbell was thrilled to be working with such a famous and hugely talented singer.

Having passed his audition, he travelled to Los Angeles to work on material for the Holy Diver album.

“Ronnie had the Holy Diver song, and he had most of Don’t Talk To Strangers, he was finishing that. And then everything else we knocked together at Sound City rehearsal rooms.”

The album was recorded in early 1983 at Sound City studios in Van Nuys, California. It was produced by Ronnie James Dio and engineered by Angelo Arcuri.

Campbell co-wrote five of the nine tracks on the album – Gypsy, Caught In The Middle, Invisible, Shame On The Night and the anthem that would become Dio’s most celebrated song, Rainbow In The Dark.

Remarkably, his solo in Rainbow In The Dark was a first take.

“I’m a very, very nervous performer,” he says. “Or I was at that stage a very nervous performer. Certainly, I didn’t want people being in the room with me when I was doing it.

“And I didn’t plan out my solos then. So it’s not like I went into the studio knowing what I was going to play. I was leaning heavily on inspiration just coming at the right time, and it was weird, because Rainbow In The Dark was the very first solo we did, the solo that’s on the record is the very first take, and I had no idea what I was doing!

“I’d been playing all day, and I was going to record Rainbow In The Dark that night, and it’s in A minor, so I just I played in A minor all day. And I used to smoke Marlboros back then, so I was smoking, drinking coffee… I was so hyped up!

“Sometime in the evening Ronnie and Angelo [Arcuri] came in and we got a guitar sound and we spent an hour or so faffing around, getting a sound and mic placement and all that, and then it’s like, ‘Okay, let’s try one.’ And that’s what came out.

“Ronnie immediately said, ‘Wow, said that’s brilliant! Do you want to try another?’ And my immediate thought was, ‘Fuck, what’s wrong with that one?’

“So when they roll for the second one I’m thinking, ‘Well, first time I started up there, I can’t do that.’ So then it becomes a mental thing, and I’m starting to think, ‘Okay, I got to do something completely different’ – and it was shit!

“I did the second one and it was shit, and Ronnie said, ‘Okay, we’ll just keep the first one, let’s move on to the next song.’

“Because I got the first one in the first take it was a false sense of security, because then, moving forward, it wasn’t always like that. I’d go in there and think, ‘Well, as long as I’m warmed up and I’m up to speed, I’ll hit something in the first two or three passes.’ And it didn’t always work.”

That said, Campbell nailed another great solo in the album’s title track.

“I’m pleased with it,” he says now. “I really like the structure of it, and I think Ronnie did too.

“The note that I end on is like the minor third. I’m sounding clever here, I think it’s a minor third, and it’s a bendy bit, like I’m bending into it. And Ronnie asked me, ‘Did you mean to end on that note?’ I said, ‘Why, don’t you like it? Is there something wrong?’ And he says, ‘No, no! That’s really interesting. I just didn't expect that.’

“So I felt very pleased about that – in terms of the structure of the solo. I’m never happy with the performance, but I’m happy with the structure of it. Like, I listen to it now and it sounds like a 20 year-old kid playing guitar, which it was.”

Campbell admits that his nerves got the better of him during the recording of the second Dio album, The Last In Line, at Caribou Ranch studios in Colorado.

He recalls: “By the second album I was so feeling so much pressure about Ronnie and Angelo being in the room that I literally had them set me up so I could hit ‘play’ and ‘record’ – this was still on two-inch tape – and I would say, ‘You guys go play pinball, go have a drink, come back in like 30 or 45 minutes or something.’

“I mean, the smart thing would be to figure it out beforehand, but I was never accused of being smart! Nowadays, if somebody called me tomorrow and said, ‘Hey, can you come into recording studio and put a guitar solo on a song for blah blah’, I would absolutely map it out and go and prepare it and just try and capture the performance and not go into that situation expecting that inspiration is going to walk into the room with me.”

He explains: “A lot of it comes from experience. That’s how you know how you want to structure a solo. You can imagine where it’s going to go and how it’s going to flow and where it’s going to end.”

After his three-album run with Dio, Vivian Campbell went on to play with Whitesnake and with ex-Foreigner singer Lou Gramm in the band Shadow King before finally finding a permanent home in Def Leppard.

He never reconciled with Ronnie James Dio, who died in 2010. But in 2012 Campbell reunited with Jimmy Bain and Vinny Appice to perform classic Dio songs with singer Andrew Freeman under the name Last In Line. This band also went on to make three albums of original material.

40 years since he was fired from Dio, Campbell is proud of what he achieved with the band.

He recalls: “I knew we we were strong, obviously, but I always felt like I was the weak link in the band. I always felt that my guitar playing was was too raw and too unpolished, so I always listened to it with that hyper critical ear.

“But it was great, you know? I feel very privileged to have been a part of that, even though in the moment I didn’t realise just how great it was.”

Released in 1993, Beck’s Loser ended up being the ‘slacker anthem’ that Gen-X had been casually waiting for. But, perhaps appropriately, its creation was a long, drawn-out process that drew on failure, self-doubt, and a stubborn streak that ultimately paid dividends.

Beck has now been telling the story of “the first real song I’d ever recorded” to Mix With The Masters, and he says that it starts in or around 1991.

“I was playing at a coffee shop club called Jabberjaw, which was one of the main spots to play in Los Angeles at the time,” he begins. “And it was the kind of place where you'd see Nirvana or you'd see the Melvins. Everybody who came through town played at the Jabberjaw.”

Beck, though, wasn’t having a huge amount of success. “I was mostly playing acoustic guitar solo without a band. And the audience pretty much cleared out and would go outside and smoke. And so, out of desperation, I started stomping my foot for a beat, freestyling, like a rap song.”

Watching Beck play was Tom Rothrock, who would end up being one of Loser’s producers.

“It got, like, small applause, and this tall, skinny guy with long hair and a goatee comes up and he says, ‘Hey, I like your rapping,’” says Beck. “And I don't think I'd ever done that before. So I said, ‘Thank you. Yeah, yeah, I'm a rapper.’ And he said that he knew this kid who made beats. I said, ‘What kind of stuff does he do?’ He says ‘He works with this band called the Geto Boys.’”

Formed in Houston, the Geto Boys were a US hip-hop group, and the ‘kid’ in question was Carl Stephenson. Rothrock introduced Beck to Stephenson, and the two agreed to meet at Stephenson’s home studio, with Beck pondering the concept of what would eventually become Loser.

“I had this idea in my head for years: What would it sound like with a delta blues slide guitar over a hip-hop rhythm?” he says. “So, here I was at this guy's apartment. He starts making some beats and I pull out my guitar with my slide and I start jamming to it and it sounds pretty good.”

Beck says that he tried a few riffs, some more complicated than others, but settled on one of the more basic ones. A very basic one, in fact: “Just the most simple slide riff you could possibly play.”

Enter a classic ‘90s sampler – the Ensoniq ASR-10. “I don't think we had a bass. So, he got a bass sound on the ASR-10.”

We then hear Loser’s familiar bassline, but Beck wasn’t too sure about it. “I remember the part he came up with I thought was so happy. And I was trying to make the song kind of be heavy,” he says.

This was the first time that he and Stephenson had actually met, though, so Beck held his tongue. What’s more, he soon warmed to it. “I think it’s great because it adds a buoyancy and it's a nice juxtaposition with the slide guitar,” he says now.

Stephenson had only one other instrument in his room – a sitar – and Beck had spotted it as soon as he arrived.

“I had been fascinated by Indian music,” he recalls. “You know, obviously, I grew up with Beatles records [that] had all the psychedelia. I had never seen one in person.”

Inevitably, a sitar part was added, played by Stephenson. “He started to play it and he basically plays the same melody as the bassline,” says Beck.

When it came to writing the Lyrics, Beck remembers that he was inspired by Public Enemy’s Chuck D. “He was taking a lot of disparate imagery and using it to create a bigger emotion, a bigger picture. I wanted the lyrics to have that feeling where it's just this stream of images that create a world.”

After recording his vocals, though, our would-be rapper realised that he wasn’t quite on the same level as the hip-hop legend. “When I heard that back, it did not sound like Chuck D,” he says. “It was pretty nerdy.”

Rather than feeling crushed, Beck decided to embrace the geekiness and added the “soy un perdedor” line – Spanish for ‘I’m a loser’ – and the song was completed.

And then… nothing happened.

“I didn't hear anything for a long time,” says Beck. “I forgot about it. Never saw Carl again. It must have been nine months or a year or something go by. Tom said, ‘Hey, that song we did with Carl, that loser song, it's kind of cool. I think we should do something with that.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, OK.’”

By this point, Beck was back working in a video rental store thinking that his music career wasn’t going to happen, but the song started to attract the attention of some people in the business who were intrigued by it.

“I sat in these rooms and they looked at me. I was probably like 21 or 22. They said, ‘This is interesting. It's got potential but I don't think it'll work. We'd have to redo it. We have to make it more production. You probably have to get a haircut.’”

Beck wasn’t keen, though, and, rather than agree to their requests (“I just couldn’t be bothered”), decided to keep the song as it was – and in storage.

“The song ended up languishing for several years because of that,” he says. “It sat for another year and finally, two years later, we decided we're going to put it out ourselves. Tom Rothrock had started a label called Bong Load, and they were going to print 500 copies on vinyl.”

Beck still wasn’t sure about it, though, as he felt like the cultural zeitgeist may have moved on.

“I remember at the time I was a little embarrassed ‘cos I felt like this idea of Loser was sort of played out. Right at the same time Radiohead came out with a song called Creep. There was a Sub Pop Records t-shirt that said Loser on it. To me, it felt like its moment had already passed. It was going to be considered kind of corny at that point.”

Obviously, he was wrong: Loser became a hit and kickstarted Beck’s career. And, looking back, the star thinks that its long gestation period might have been to its benefit.

“I think actually, in fact, the song sitting around for a few years before being released, it came out at the exact perfect time,” he says. “And I hope it inspires some people to go out and make some weird things. You don't need to wait for permission. You can just go ahead and do it.”

Subscribers can watch the full Loser track breakdown series on the Mix With The Masters website.

Johnny Marr has announced that he’s got a new album coming out this October.

The Age Of Everything will be his fifth solo record and his first since 2022’s Fever Dreams Pts 1 – 4. The first single, Spin, is out now.

In a statement about the album, the ex Smiths guitarist said: “This is the record that’s been the most cathartic. The title came to me early in the process and became an inescapable idea. It seemed to sum up the way I think a lot of people are feeling. It’s all encompassing, but it's not necessarily a negative statement. There’s a sense of overwhelm in the culture brought about by technology, but looking at it with a different light, there could also be a sense of possibility.”

(Everyone seems to be writing about technology these days, don’t they? In much the same way that everyone had a song about nuclear war in the mid-'80s…)

The album was apparently written in London, developed live on his tour of the East Coast of the States last year, and recorded in Manchester.

And Marr will be back in his hometown for a massive show at the Castlefield Bowl on 9 July. To warm up for that he has a couple of smaller dates at the Leeds Stylus on 6 July and Liverpool’s O2 Academy on 7 July.

After that he and his band head over to Europe for a string of Italian shows and a couple of festival appearances. Then it’s back to the UK for a show at Wembley Arena on 24 October.

As is the way with these things, The Age Of Everything will be in a number of collectors’ formats, as well as good old CD and vinyl. There’s also red and “limited edition 3 colour splatter” vinyl. For more information on those head over to the Johnny Marr website.

The Age Of Everything will land on October 2 via BMG.

EarthQuaker Devices has unveiled an all-new version of its cult classic Life Pedal, offering the Sunn O))) signature octave fuzz and boost pedal in a more compact housing, and adding it to the production lineup for good.

That’s right. No more searching on the resale market for one of the original three variants, the HalfLife is officially part of the EQD lineup for good, and EarthQuaker Devices Founder and President Jamie Stillman has even made a few refinements to the pedal that has become the must-have stompbox for fans of Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley’s electric guitar tone.

As before, you have a fuzz/distortion circuit with a blendable analogue octave-up effect and a a discrete MOSFET-driven clean boost for smashing the front end of your guitar amp – “harmonic saturation and feedback bliss” await you.

Again, you can use these effects independently. There are switchable op-amp, asymmetric and symmetric clipping modes, too. For many metal guitar players – certainly those who don’t have the space or budget to amass Sunn O)))’s formidable backline – this is the ultimate doom pedal. But the HalfLife has a refined octave effect; Stillman’s modifications should make it more noticeable without losing any low end frequencies.

The circuit has been reworked; one of the reasons the original Life Pedals were limited run was because EQD was making them with NOS components. Here, we have modern components and – touch wood – a steady supply of them.

And the HalfLife is just that; it’s approximately half the size of the Life Pedals. Owing to this, you cannot switch the octave and fuzz separately as you could on the originals. But EQD says the control surface is more intuitive now that the Amplitude and Octave knobs have swapped places.

There were many signs that EQD’s Life Pedal was a success. Firstly, it sold out immediately. Secondly, it was not just being used by drone and doom guitarists. Musicians were using it on bass guitar, with synthesizers, and it became a staple in studios.

It is also EQD’s most-cloned pedal. The general public were not slow in letting EQD know that they wanted more of them. “At one point I felt like people were genuinely angry that we didn’t make more,” recalls Stillman.

What players were jonesing for was something quite different. The original Sunn O))) Life Pedal was designed to recreate O’Malley and Anderson’s front-end signal chain when they were tracking Life Metal under the auspices of the late, great Steve Albini.

The fuzz is inspired by pure stompbox unobtanium, rare circuits from vintage Japanese Shin-Ei FY2 and FY6 units. This then is fed into a “brutal take” on a Rat-style distortion.

Thereafter you have the boost, and on your pedalboard, the means to level the first few rows. You can add an expression pedal to control the octave. You can blend the octave effect to taste.

As per all EQD pedals, the HalfLife is made in Akron, OH. It has a lifetime warranty, and ships with EQD’s Flexi-Switch Technology.

“I’m ecstatic for the continuation of this LIFE-affirming collaboration with EarthQuaker Devices,” says Anderson. “May the sounds you create from the HalfLife be as deep as the forests and massive as the mountains.”

O’Malley says the pedal is steeped in Sunn O)))’s audio and visual aesthetic preoccupations, and urges those who add one to their ‘board to “enjoy this filthy pleasure”.

And you can do just that now. The HalfLife Octave Distortion + Booster is available now, priced £265/$259. Head over to EarthQuaker Devices for more.

How Tony Iommi got his electric guitar tone in Black Sabbath is the stuff of legend. It is the origin stories of origin stories.

There was the brutal machining injury to his fretting hand, requiring the use of thimbles to play again. If Django Reinhardt was an inspiration, the determination to continue came from within. Iommi sized down his electric guitar strings, mixing them with super-light banjo strings to go easier on his fingers. He would arrive at his downtuning epiphany soon enough...

Initially, Iommi played a Fender Strat. He had tracked Wicked World with one before it crapped out and he switched to the SG. Happenstance, a quirk of fate, and lo, Iommi would go on to become one of the most famous SG players.

Like most players, Iommi was an early adopter of Marshall amps. But a local amp builder by the name of Lyndon Laney made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. There began a lifelong collaboration and lifelong friendship until Laney’s passing in April 2026.

“I think I was using Marshall early on, and then Laney on the first album, but when we first wrote [Black Sabbath] songs I was using a Marshall 50-watt,” Iommi told MusicRadar in 2010. “I switched to Laney because they started up around the same time as us and they’re a Birmingham company. To be honest, they offered to give us all this gear when nobody else did. What do you say to that? ‘OK!’ So I used them.”

He had found the Gibson SG. He had found a way of playing that circumvented his injury. He now had the amp. What tied it all together was a piece of kit he was introduced to in 1968, the year before Black Sabbath formed, when he was cutting his teeth in Mythology. A drugs bust over some hashish in their practice space brought fines upon on Mythology. The band soon split.

We have to remember that this was a different time. When you went into a guitar store, there was no pedal cabinet. Okay, you might have been able to pick up a Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone, but most players faced the similar conundrum; if you wanted distortion, you got it the old-fashioned way, you turned your amp up.

But someone turned Iommi onto a unit that sat on top of your amplifier and worked some magic with it. Enter, the Dallas Rangemaster…

“When I lived in Cumberland, when we did the Mythology thing, there was a guy up there and I used to use his treble booster called a [Dallas] Rangemaster to give my sound a bit more oomph,” recalled Iommi. “A guy from another band up there said, ‘I can make that sound better for you’. So he took it off me and brought it back the next day.”

This was a febrile era for homespun guitar electronics. If something didn’t sound quite right, there was always someone who had a soldering iron, a handful of spare transistors and capacitors, and some ideas on how the circuit could be improved.

In this case, Iommi had the guitarist of Spooky Tooth, Luther Grosvenor, on hand to give him exactly what he needed. It worked gangbusters with his Laney tube amp, and better still, no one had one like it.

“I don’t know what he did to it, but it was really good,” said Iommi. “I used that treble booster on all the early Sabbath albums and put it into the Laney because it boosted the input and gave it the overdrive I was looking for, which amps in the early days didn’t have.”

Other gizmos would enter the picture. In 1970, when he tracked the solo to Paranoid under the watchful eye of producer Rodger Bain, Iommi applied a ring modulator to the solo. Iommi would become a fan of the Tychobrahe Parapedal wah pedal. His touring rig grew, and for the post-reunion Sabbath shows it is monstrous, controlled by a custom Pete Cornish routing and control unit. But this this modded Range Master was the secret sauce to Iommi’s sound.

Not everyone appreciated it. Iommi’s good friend Brian May of Queen also used the Rangemaster, having watched Rory Gallagher use one. He understood its appeal and urged Iommi to stick with it even if other people in the band and crew would complain about its eccentricities. It wasn’t unknown for the Rangemaster to have a Spinal Tap air base moment onstage.

“I used to rely on Brian a lot because I’d constantly have problems with people saying there was too much interference coming through my booster,” said Iommi, speaking to Guitar World in 2024. “I’d have to explain, ‘I know, but that’s part of my sound!’ In them days, you’d pick up bloody taxis and everything. There was no isolation. Brian would back me up and say, ‘That’s the sound – don’t change it.’

“Sometimes you’d get some boffin come along telling me, ‘I can get rid of that for you,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, can you?’ But it would always change the sound and I didn’t want my sound to change. The only person who understood how I felt in those days was Brian, because he had the same problem. We both had a bit of noise but were ultimately getting the sound we wanted.”

Iommi used that same modded Rangemaster right up into the Heaven And Hell era, when Iommi started experimenting with Marshalls in his rig, with the late John ‘Dawk’ Stillwell working on his amps.

Stillwell famously designed Joey DeMaio of Manowar’s bass guitar, and had worked with Ronnie James Dio in his Elf days before doing jobs for Rainbow and Deep Purple.

Stillwell knew his stuff but made a grave mistake with Iommi’s rig.

“I used that treble booster up until 1979 when I had a guy come in to build me some Marshalls,” said Iommi, in his 2010 MusicRadar interview. “They gave me a whole stack of Marshalls and this guy came in and rebuilt them. In the meantime, while he was building these things, he threw my treble booster away. I didn’t know until it came to the time when I was looking for it and he said, ‘Oh that? I threw it away. It was crap.’”

Iommi was devasted.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I’ve never seen it from that day on and my amps didn’t sound right without it.”

There are no shortage of treble booster clones. In 2001, Analog Man’s Mike Piera sent Iommi the company’s first Beano Boost. Iommi’s signature Laney amps have their own boost section.

But the Rangemaster behind Iommi’s Black Sabbath tone has long been consigned to landfill, and only one man knows the real secret of what went in that Dallas Rangemaster all those years ago…

Graham Coxon has been talking to the Sun about his new/old album and his songwriting heroes.

The album in question is Castle Park. There are, of course, numerous Castle Parks around the globe – in California, Doncaster and Bristol to name but three – but the one Coxon’s album is named after is in Colchester and was a regular haunt of the Blur guitarist during his teenage years.

“There were a few occasions when me and a group of friends would stay in the park rather too long, get locked in and have to climb over the fence,” he recalls. “I remember being slightly inebriated and dancing around the bandstand - and then, of course, there was the statue.”

He's referring to the bronze Angel Of Victory which stands at the southern entrance to the park. “I had some dangerous moments when I climbed up and gave that statue a kiss,” he says. “I used to do it regularly - she was very beautiful.”

The album has been residing in the Coxon vault for well over a decade. It was originally recorded around 2011, but got postponed after a burst of fresh Blur activity during 2012: “I’m really not sure what happened. Maybe it was lack of confidence. Maybe I thought these songs weren’t fashionable and who would give a sh*t?” Fans though got wind of its existence and would often ask him about it. “They even knew the name of the album,” he says.

The interview briefly alights on Coxon’s influences, which close followers of his work will know all about: “Ray Davies is the best songwriter we ever had, followed closely by Paul McCartney, and The Jam was a huge band for me. I thought that being a Jam fan elevated me as a person.”

With Blur on the back burner once more after their 2023 album Ballad Of Darren, the guitarist’s main gig these days is as one half of The Waeve, with his partner Rose-Elinor Dougall. They’re working on a third album at the moment that Coxon promises will be “a lot less hard-edged” than their 2024 effort City Lights.

“It’s more floaty and summery,” he reveals. “Lyrically, there’s a lot more affection. Rose and I go through life together and, sometimes, saying things in lyrics is the nicest way to show affection away from our normal hectic lives.”

In the meantime, Castle Park is out next week via Transgressive and Coxon has got some solo UK dates lined for November. There’s more information at www.grahamcoxon.co.uk

Alex Lifeson has been a paid-up member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame since 2013. He has sold over 40 million records over five decades with Rush. He’s been immortalised on South Park. And it’s not like he is a stranger to Best Guitarist of All Time lists.

And yet some people will tell you he is underrated. Rush’s bassist and frontman Geddy Lee is one of them. Joining MusicRadar in a London hotel ahead of Rush’s triumphant return to the stage on their Fifty Something Tour – a historic reunion that sees Anika Nilles assuming the late Neil Peart’s place on drums – Lee believes Lifeson doesn’t get his due, that some of the stuff he would come up with would blow his mind.

“I’m a big Alex fan,” says Lee. “I think he’s the most underrated guitarist in rock history. People don’t realise how inventive he was, because he refused to conform sonically, his chordal use.”

Paul Gilbert knows just what Lee is speaking of. When we caught up with Gilbert to talk about his latest studio album, WROC, Gilbert wasn’t so sure of where the critical consensus stood regarding Lifeson. “I don’t know about that,” he said, but he was sure of what made Lifeson stand out from his peers.

Like Lee, Gilbert remains in awe of Lifeson’s chord choices.

“Well, there are so many things,” said Gilbert. “But first of all, his chord work is so unique, and the chords themselves, and the way he arpeggiates them and the way he makes riffs out of them – there’s just so many cool rhythm parts. Clean ones, distorted ones, acoustic ones, there’s always something really creative with the rhythm stuff – it’s super-musical.”

Lifeson can tear up the fretboard if needs be but he’s never been a shredder. It did not fit with Rush’s sound. As expansive as the Canadian prog trio took their sound, that kind of individualism left unchecked might well have pulled focus from the grander concepts behind the music, like the dystopian sci-fi of 2112, the fever dreams of La Villa Strangiato.

Lee credits Lifeson with giving Rush a sound that was would have been beyond most power trios.

“I mean, we were three people, and he made it sound like there was more than one guitar player playing when there was one guitar player playing,” says Lee. “He invented chords.”

Lee says some of Lifeson’s best work came when he actively looked for alternatives to the traditional guitar solo.

“Listen to a song like Red Sector A, for example, to speak of Grace Under Pressure. I love the guitar work in that song,” says Lee. “He’s taken a song with this repetitive, sort of mind numbing arpeggiation coming from the pulsing of the keyboards, and he’s floating on top with these really interesting chord progressions – and that whole solo!”

That whole solo is audacious. Red Sector A needed that. It is a heavy song that speaks to the experiences of Lee’s parents as Holocaust survivors. Lee does not play any bass guitar on the track, just synth and vocals.

Lifeson’s lead playing on Red Sector A could be described as rhythm-lead, in how he used chord voicings, but it’s more experimental than the typical Hendrix/Stones sense of rhythm-lead. It is almost an abstraction of what lead guitar is supposed to do.

“You know, he was kind of anti-solo at that period,” says Lee. “And yet he created a solo that wasn't a solo that’s made up of sounds and chordal structures and emotion. That’s just one example [of this].”

Rush’s pop-cultural footprint is such that countless guitarists would fall under Lifeson’s spell. They, too, would reconsider the fretboard after falling into these immersive worlds created in tracks such as Cygnus X-1 – two-parters too epic for one album – and riffs that subverted the powerchord paradigm upon which rock was built.

One such guitarist is John Petrucci of Dream Theater.

“I love Alex’s choices,” Petrucci told MusicRadar in 2012, “the way he plays power chords with open strings on top. And when you combine that with the way he uses the chorus effect – to this day, I apply all of this information to my own style.”

Those open strings Petrucci speaks of transformed regular powerchords into something more exotic, as on the opening to Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres, where Lifeson plays a an F# powerchord with the high E and B strings left open, making it an F#11. He would move these shapes around, mining them for fresh harmonic intrigue.

And then there was Lifeson’s electric guitar tone, which became an exemplar in how to deploy a dual amp setup, with chorus pedals, tape echo and various delay pedals to make one guitar occupy a wider bandwidth. He was no stranger to the wash of flanger or the Leslie rotating speaker.

But when you strip all that away, Lifeson was fundamentally a blues-rock player. That’s what he cut his teeth on. As Rush grew more adventurous, so too did Lifeson. But his foundational influences would still erupt when the occasion required it.

“You listen to the solo of Kid Gloves if you want to hear a blistering guitar solo,” says Lee. “La Villa Strangiato, his playing there is is true to his blues-rock roots – that’s borne out of it. He was a great blues guitarist at a very young age. And that is sort of reflected in La Villa.”

La Villa Strangiato came together out of Lifeson’s dreams. Each morning he would come down for breakfast and tell Peart and Lee about his dreams.

Once they had stopped groaning, wishing that Lifeson would lay off the cheese – or the pot – before bedtime, Rush realised they had enough ideas for an epic instrumental to be delivered in 12 acts (and subtitled “An Exercise In Self-Indulgence”).

It has long been one of Lifeson’s favourites to perform live. What he had to say about it tells us much of how Lifeson thought about his solos. It was always about complementing his bandmates.

“It’s quite emotive, and it's got a very bluesy, almost minor-ish feel to it,” Lifeson told MusicRadar in 2010. “Also, the music that surrounds the solo – everything Geddy and Neil are doing – is incredible. It feels great to play it on my [Gibson ES-] 355, which is the guitar I recorded it with. All in all, it’s a wonderful moment.”

For Gilbert, it was the phrasing and the note choice that elevated Lifeson’s lead playing. Lifeson was unconventional but not at the expense of the song.

His solos adhered to Rush’s credo, that this might be high-information music – arrangements stretched out to accommodate big ideas, cross-album narratives – and yet it would give the audience hooks, ear candy that made it digestible and human, maybe even accessible

“His soloing, it’s just really memorable and unusual, and that is hard to do,” says Gilbert. “I mean, on the first album, if you listen to the solo on Working Man, that’s like straight-ahead Zeppelin-style, ‘I got it cranked up through a Marshall stack, and I’m just playing my cool pentatonic licks, and I’m playing them great!’ That was a great way to come charging out of the box.

“But then, as time went on, [listen to] the solo on Limelight – it’s so unusual, and it has to be that, like, it is part of the song! It’s not one where you go, ‘Oh, it’s in G#, I’ll just improvise that.’ No. It has got to be that solo. It’s thematic.”

Limelight is a great example of Lifeson being Lifeson. He loves that solo. He loves playing it. He loves how it sounded on record. It’s one of the highlights on Moving Pictures, a record that is front-to-back highlights.

“I’ve always enjoyed the elasticity of that solo, particularly the way it sounds on the record,” Lifeson told MusicRadar in 2010. “It has a certain tonality I just love. I do like playing the solo live, but I think I prefer listening to it on the album. On record, it has a magical quality to it – it really conveys the pathos of the song and the lyrics.”

Lifeson admits that even he has struggled to perform the Limelight solo live just as it was recorded. Maybe it is that search for perfection that keeps things interesting.

“I’ve never been able to recreate that live,” he said. “I get pretty close, but it’s never exactly the way it is on record. I’ll keep trying, though.”

Lifeson will do just that as Rush continue on The 50 Something Tour. See the official Rush site for dates and ticket details.

• “No one was more deserving of a life to himself than he was… We were torn, and sympathetic. At the same time, we felt we had unfinished business”: Geddy Lee on honouring Neil Peart and why he and Alex Lifeson are getting back together as Rush

The (men’s) World Cup is starting today – you might have just heard something or other about it – and Noel Gallagher has been sounding off about it. You’d expect nothing less.

The Oasis guitarist was appearing on Talk Sport when the subject of the Final Half Time show came up. Yes indeed-y, there is going to be such a thing in 2026 and it’s being curated by Chris Martin of Coldplay, who has enlisted his great mates Madonna, Shakira and BTS. And the Muppets.

When asked by the host whether he’d been asked to play in the show, Gallagher quipped: “I’m doing the half-time raffle… for a leg of lamb.”

(Older listeners may well have chuckled at this, for that was exactly the sort of glamorous half-time entertainment you could have stumbled across at a lower division ground in the 1970s, around the time Noel first started going to games.)

“No, I don’t like changes in football. I’m looking forward to these new rules about corners and time-wasting, that might be a good thing for the game, but I don’t like the razzmatazz of football; it’s been functioning perfectly for hundreds of years,” Gallagher said, before returning to the subject of the Half Time show: “They’re not really football people who are performing anyway, are they?”

He also revealed that he'd once been invited by the FA to get involved in an official England team song. “It was back in the '90s,” he remembered. “It was… Ocean Colour Scene were involved and Ian McCulloch (of Echo and the Bunnymen). I’m not sure what the tune was, (but) it got swamped by Three Lions anyway.”

(That would have been How Does It Feel To Be (On Top Of The World), the 1998 song credited to ‘England United’, a motley crew that included the aforementioned McCulloch, Ocean Colour Scene, Space and the Spice Girls. And yes, it was somewhat overshadowed by both Three Lions and Vindaloo by Fat Les.)

Anyway, to Gallagher’s doubtless delight, there will be more non-football people performing at the opening ceremonies – and yes you read that correctly: there are going to be three opening ceremonies, you lucky people.

There’s one tonight at the opening game in Mexico City, another at the first Canadian-hosted game on Friday and a further one on Saturday in Los Angeles. Among the artists involved will be Shakira (again), Burna Boy, Katy Perry, Tyla, Alanis Morissette, Future and Michael Buble.

By the summer of 1977, Mark Knopfler had jacked in his job as an English lecturer in Essex and moved in with his guitarist brother, David. They lived with bassist John Illsley in a flat in Deptford, way down south, London town.

One cold, rainy evening they stepped into a local pub where a group of old boys were playing Dixieland jazz music in the corner to the complete indifference of the patrons. Their set closed, and they signed themselves off as the Sultans Of Swing. The exotic majesty of their name clashed beautifully with the drab reality of their surroundings, and Mark Knopfler was inspired.

Back at the flat the lyrics came quickly, and the music was composed on his trusty National steel guitar. It was when he plugged his 1961 Strat into Illsley’s Fender Vibrolux amp that he knew he had something.

Honed over months of gigging at small venues from Deptford to Covent Garden, Sultans Of Swing was one of five songs Dire Straits recorded on their first demo. When that was picked up by legendary Radio London DJ Charlie Gillett, the phone began to ring.

Manager Ed Bicknell recalls that A&R men were “leaping out of their baths” to sign them, and Muff Winwood was one of them. Formerly a member of The Spencer Davis Group with his brother Steve, he had become a talent scout and occasional producer for Island Records. “Someone tipped me off about this great band,” he recalled, “so I went to see them in Aylesbury. I loved them and wanted to sign them, but I was too late – they’d already shaken hands on a deal with Phonogram for their Vertigo imprint.”

Winwood was unaware that he happened to be top of the band’s list to produce their debut album. Island head Chris Blackwell consented, and so the band entered Island’s London studios in Basing Street in February 1978. “My first thought,” remembers Winwood, “was that I don’t have to change a lot or fiddle about.

They’d been playing Sultans live for a year or so, so they knew it inside out. Like all good bands they’d made all the mistakes, knew the good bits and chucked out the bad. John and Pick [Withers, Straits’ drummer], were a great rhythm section, so I concentrated on getting the bass guitar and bass drum locked in tight together. Mark took care of himself; you just had to say go and off he went.”

Through constant rehearsal and live performance, the left-handed Knopfler had built up what he called his “little store of licks”. Some had become part of the furniture of the song, such as the fleet-fingered arpeggios outlining the Dm, Bb and C in the outro. Despite the complexity of his technique, he has often claimed he didn’t really know what he was doing. He was just “doing his thing”. His parts on Sultans were played on his Strat, and while there’s no clear record of the amp, at the time he was gigging with a Music Man HD-130.

“Every guitarist has his own sound,” says Winwood. “You start off with that, call him into the control booth and say, ‘We can do this to improve it’, then twiddle a knob and ask if that’s better. We got the guitar hire company to bring a pile of different amps and effects boxes in and dump them in the studio, and said, ‘Plug into that and see how that sounds’.”

Preferring a sparse sound, Knopfler’s guitar was treated with just compression and reverb. Winwood contends that the sound comes from the man. “At the end of the day, what makes a piece of music get to your heart is the touch of the player. It’s human. If there weren’t any effects on there Mark would’ve made it sound brilliant. It’s not to do with gear, it’s all to do with the way the brain sends signals to his fingers. That’s what makes him so special.”

When the record company opted for Sultans as the lead single, Muff, for one, was incredulous. “I said, ‘You’ve got to be joking! You can’t put out a record about a trad band playing in a pub and expect it to sell!’”

But they did, that May. Radio 1 deemed it too wordy and declined to add it to their playlist – a crushing blow in those days. Although it faltered at home the song travelled well, becoming a hit first in Holland, then across the rest of Europe and as far as New Zealand.

With the album recorded, Winwood himself had moved on to CBS Records, to head up their A&R department. “But occasionally I’d meet Phonogram people who said, ‘You’d never guess, that Sultans Of Swing is getting played all over Holland, all over Germany’. Strangest of all, the Americans liked it, which I couldn’t believe! It was such an un-American song.”

Nevertheless, US radio did latch onto the song. Bicknell negotiated a deal with Warner Records, and Sultans Of Swing landed at No 4 on the Billboard Chart in early 1979. In a delicious twist, Radio 1’s Paul Gambaccini then played it on his weekly round-up of US Top 40 hits: the ‘over-wordy’ single finally made the UK’s biggest radio station. Re-released, it went Top 10, and Dire Straits became the best-selling UK debut album since Led Zeppelin.

Sultans would become Dire Straits’ signature anthem, making Mark Knopfler’s reputation as a world-class guitarist and pointing the way to the band’s incredible future success. “There was very little interest in them at first,” smiles Winwood, 33 years on. “Then all of a sudden it just went bang.”

5 tips to help you play guitar like Mark Knopfler

When it comes to writing music for sci-fi films, Brian May has a fair bit of history. As part of Queen, he played a crucial role in creating the soundtrack for Flash Gordon, the camp classic from 1980, and the band also provided several songs for the original Highlander film, which was released in 1986.

May has now returned to the land of fantasy by contributing to the soundtrack of the new Masters Of The Universe movie, and Travis Knight, the movie’s director, says that he always had Queen in mind when it was being created.

"The big musical touchstone was Flash Gordon," he tells Polygon. "I loved Flash Gordon as a kid and I think one of the many reasons was that incredible, iconic score that Queen famously did. It was amazing. It had such joy, such spirit, such theatricality – this operatic, larger than life feel – but it also had real sincerity at its core.”

Knight says that, having been delighted when May agreed to be part of the project, he would have been grateful to get just a couple of hours with him. However, he and his team – including Daniel Pemberton, the film’s composer, presumably – actually ended up spending a whole day at his house.

“We're in Brian May's home recording studio, and I'm just sitting there watching him on his Red Special playing with his sixpence,” he recalls. “It was a surreal moment."

Not quite as surreal, though, as the moment that came at the end of the day, when May paid a visit to his loft.

"At the end of the session, he disappears," says Knight. "I thought he was just tired, but then he shows up a handful of minutes later and he's carrying two giant boxes of He-Man toys that he still had in his attic from his son Jimmy. He put them on the ground in his recording studio. He pulled out the characters. He knew who they were. It was a crazy bizarro moment for me to be sitting there with Brian May as he's talking about Skeletor and Man-E-Faces. It was so weird and also so cool."

Whether May actually started playing with the toys isn’t confirmed, but we can only hope that he did, and that the words ‘By the power of Grayskull, I have the power!’ passed his lips from time to time.

Speaking of Masters Of The Universe lore, in a separate interview with Variety, Daniel Pemberton says that, as he watched May getting busy on his Red Special, it called to mind He-Man wielding his own mighty weapon.

“As he was playing it, I was like, ‘This is actually the equivalent of the Sword of Power from the Master universe because it’s an instrument forged in flame,’ so to speak,” he remembers. “He’s the only person who can play it and has the power to play it, and it’s a tool that has saved many people’s lives, I think. If you look at it as a weapon, it has put so much hope and love in the world.”

You can hear May’s playing on Eternia, the opening theme from Masters of the Universe, which Pemberton says was designed to let the audience know exactly what they’re in for.

“I wanted something that had the weight and seriousness of a hard-rock track mixed with the color, campiness and slight cheese of a poppy Euro song,” he confirms. “The influences around were very pop-driven. I wanted it to have that sensibility that as soon as you start the movie, it tells you you’re in for something fun. That’s the most important thing about this film – it’s unashamedly fun.”

When your first recording session involved playing a guitar solo on the title track from Kiss’ Creatures Of The Night, there is no way your career was ever headed to Dullsville, and so it came to pass that Steve Farris would lead a life less ordinary.

He didn’t get the Kiss gig full-time. He might sound a note of regret about it (he never did learn how to sing). But things worked out okay. He made his bones with Eddie Money, before joining Mr Mister and making it big, and being called in for high-profile sessions with the likes of Diana Ross, Kenny Loggins and Celine Dione, and playing live with Whitesnake and Rod Stewart.

This week Farris welcomed Mason Marangella of Vertex Effects to his Nebraska home for a career-spanning conversation (and a meal of slow-cooked wild goose), and shared some of the stories behind those career highlights, and the gear he used to record them. Much of these sessions exist on record. Some were captured by photographers. But there was one particular memory of which Farris would dearly like to see the tape back, and that’s when he jammed with Eddie Van Halen.

Farris had met the late guitar icon before, back when in 1982 when he was playing with Eddie Money.

“We were up in Fresno, and we played a big club there. I don’t know the name of it. Van Halen was playing in the arena the same night,” he says. “Eddie Money knew Van Halen because they used to open for Eddie when he was bigger and they hadn’t gotten there yet.”

At Money’s suggest, they head over to the Hilton to visit Van Halen. They go up to Van Halen’s floor. They had biker guys on security detail. Money is rapping to all and sundry trying to get in until he catches David Lee Roth’s attention and he waves them on in.

“Eddie Money goes to David Lee Roth’s room. This is so classic,” says Farris. “He has got a stereo and he’s listening to Tres Hombres, ZZ Top, and he’s in front of the mirror, posing with his muscles, and he’s with his trainer, and they’re working out.”

Roth keeps on talking. His blood is up. He’s enjoying the company.

“He’s a very entertaining guy,” continues Farris. “He’s very gregarious. There’s three girls sitting on the bed. They never said a word the whole time I was there.”

Eddie Money and Diamond Dave had frontman business to talk about. They were deep in conversation, so Farris and Van Halen’s lighting engineer Pete Angelus decided to occupy themselves with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. They duly polish it off.

“By the time we’re leaving, I am shitfaced,” admits Farris. “I’m walking down the hallway to leave, I’m at the elevator, and Eddie Van Halen pops out of his room.”

Again, Eddie Money shouts, “It’s the Money Man!” and disappears into EVH’s room. Farris is left out in the hallway. Eventually he knocks. Eddie Van Halen’s then-wife, Valerie Bertinelli, opens, is real sore at him, at everyone, and just wants everyone out for a bit of peace and quiet. Only Farris is pulled into the room and Eddie Money is talking again and telling Eddie Van Halen how brilliant Farris is, and how he had played with Kiss, and all Farris can say to EVH by this point is, “You’re a fucking great guitar player”. And that was it.

Years later, though, things were different. It was NAMM, 1992. Both were on the Peavey artist roster and scheduled to play together. Farris was playing a few songs with Randy Jackson, Jonathan ‘Sugarfoot’ Moffett on drums, and Rick Seratte on keyboards.

“We were playing at their booth for those three days,” says Farris. “We were playing some instrumental songs that I wrote, but then we were going to play with Eddie Van Halen over [at] the Marriott on one night for the Peavey invites. It was a big ballroom, maybe a couple of hundred, maybe more.”

Farris distinctly remembers the moment Eddie Van Halen showed up for rehearsals with his guitar tech, Zeke Clark, in tow.

“We rehearsed. We were in there playing and then Zeke comes in with Eddie Van Halen,” says Farris. “Zeke’s preparing his guitar and Eddie’s carrying a six-pack of beer, and he’s drinking. And we meet Eddie Van Halen and he’s a super-nice guy. He’s very smiley. He’s Eddie Van Halen! We get to talking, we get to playing, he’s got his rig there and I’ve got my rig, and he wants to play Superstition, the Beck, Bogert & Appice version. And so we learned that. We played that.”

But they kept on playing. Farris was about to get a first-hand appreciation of how EVH could mimic another player like it was nothing. They started tossing around Led Zeppelin riffs, and it was clear that Van Halen had been paying attention to Jimmy Page’s work.

“We ended up playing Led Zeppelin songs. He and I switched guitars. I started playing his rig. He’s playing mine,” recalls Farris. “We’re playing Led Zeppelin songs, and he was like, ‘Steve, is this Jimmy or what?’ And he’d imitate Jimmy Page, play a solo, complete with a few mistakes. I mean, he had it down, everything – which, also, Eddie can play anything. He was crazy on guitar, which we all know but I might as well tell you he was all that.”

The next day is show day. And this is is when Eddie Van Halen, the lead guitar player for Van Halen, the definitive guitar-playing rock star of the ‘80s arrives.

“I think we played one song without him and then, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Eddie Van Halen… And he comes walking out side of stage, guitar out, smiling that million dollar smile, walking across the stage,” says Farris. “There was times when I was with those guys, – like David Coverdale – you’re like, ‘Rockstar. A fucking rockstar!’ So, Eddie comes in and he’s smiling and just larger than life, and we end up playing Superstition. We did that and then he looks at me kind of like, ‘We need to play an encore. What should we do?’ I said, [plays riff] ‘We’ll play Tush. So we starting playing Tush together, we traded solos, the whole fucking thing.”

This was one of those occasions in life that you don’t forget. It was a moment to cherish, especially after Eddie Van Halen’s passing in 2020. But Farris has one regret from the evening. He didn’t call Eddie to do it all again sometime – and no one thought to tape the whole performance.

“This is me. I’m boneheaded about it sometimes,” he says. “I was a very good networker, still am, but I still chose to be an idiot. Like, Eddie said at that point, ‘We gotta hang out! We gotta hang out!’ Did I ever call him? No. I’m just a dipshit sometimes. But anyway, I got to play with him.”

Check out the full interview with Farris above and subscribe to the Vertex Effects YouTube channel here.

Another huge auction went down in Beverly Hills, California, and by the end of it some legendary acoustic and electric guitars found new homes.

This was another blockbuster Music Icons event from Julien’s Auctions. Eddie Van Halen’s Charvel Art Series Strat-style guitar went for $112,500. The 1956 Martin D-18 acoustic guitar that Johnny Cash played on his Grand Ole Opry debut sold for $192,000. But the star of the show was the 1975 Les Paul Custom that the late Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley played at the B Budokan, which sold for $512,000.

For a generation of Kiss fans, this could be the Ace Frehley guitar. The fact that he had many Les Pauls – some notably modded to fire rockets, others fitted with onboard smoke machines – might mean everyone has their own idea of what the ultimate Ace guitar is but if you were in Tokyo in 1977 for any one of Kiss’ four epic shows at the Budokan then this Cherry Sunburst model, complete with three double-white humbuckers, would be the one.

It doesn’t need the pyrotechnics; it’s already 100 per cent smokeshow, with that sunburst lacquer, gold hardware and all the inlays and Custom livery that comes as standard.

Frehley used it extensively throughout the late ‘70s. Once the Rock and Roll Over Tour of ’76 was wound up, Kiss entered Record Plant in New York City to track Love Gun with the help of producer Eddie Kramer, and this guitar was there.

So, too, were the after effects of Frehley’s onstage mishap the previous year, when, on December 12 1976, a grounding issue electrocuted him – just as he was standing on a wall of Marshall amps.

“I should have been dead that night,” Frehley told MusicRadar in 2025. “The fact that I got electrocuted and didn’t fall forward was a godsend. There must have been angels pushing me back. I had a heavy Les Paul around my neck, and my body should have fallen forward – but I didn’t. If I fell forward, I would have broken my f**king neck. But I fell back, and the road crew dragged me back off of the staircase. I had no feeling in my hands for five to 10 minutes.”

But he lived to tell the tale. He finished the show, too, and the feeling would return to his hands. Frehley he got the idea for Shock Me from the incident, which became the first Kiss track that he sang lead vocals on.

The Les Paul Custom would soon be supplanted as the '80s dawned. Other guitars entered the fray. Frehley made some modifications, installing a Washburn Wonderbar vibrato. But the guitar had been restored to its original spec for the auction.

Gibson has made a number of Ace Frehley signature guitars based on this Les Paul Custom, giving it the VOS treament in 2011, complete with the 'pancake body' and rash on the top. While it has always been billed as a 1974 model, Julien's says there is a date stamp visible via the neck pickup routing placing its build at August 13, 1975.

The way Ronnie Wood describes it, his home in London in the early ’70s was an open house for musicians – the famous and the not-so-famous. And it was in this house, in 1974, that the guitarist played his part in creating a classic song for the band he was about to join – The Rolling Stones.

Speaking on the BBC Radio 2’s programme Tracks Of My Years, alongside singer Mick Jagger, Wood recalls the years he spent living in The Wick, a four-storey Georgian mansion overlooking the River Thames in Richmond.

Wood bought The Wick in 1971 when he was a member of the Faces, and had a home studio installed.

He recalls: “My house, The Wick, in Richmond, back in the day, was the hub of musical activity. They were all queuing up down the stairs, you know – everyone from Gregg Allman to Paul McCartney.”

Wood lists other notable musicians who were regular visitors to his place, including his Faces bandmate Rod Stewart, session drummer and ex-Sly And The Family Stone member Andy Newmark, and two acclaimed bassists – Ric Grech (of Blind Faith and Traffic fame) and Willie Weeks (who performed and recorded with George Harrison, Stevie Wonder, David Bowie, Randy Newman and many more).

“There were so many people and so much fun over the years,” Wood says.

Talking to Tracks Of My Years, Wood recalls The Wick as “a hub of vibes” where he once gave an impromptu guitar lesson to not one but two legendary drummers.

As he relates the story: “Keith Moon was playing there. Ringo [Starr] was playing there at the same time, and they were going, ‘We’re fed up with this, Ron, where’s the rest of the band?’ And I was like, ‘Well, I don’t know where they are, and they said, ‘Well, let’s do guitar lessons.’ So it was me teaching Ringo and Keith Moon the chord of E for a few hours…”

In 1974, when Wood was still with the Faces, he recorded his debut solo album at The Wick. He gave it the tongue-in-cheek title I’ve Got My Own Album To Do.

This was a star-studded project that featured guest appearances from George Harrison, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Rod Stewart and another member of the Faces, Ian McLagan.

Harrison sang and played slide guitar on Far East Man, a song he wrote with Wood.

On the album’s opening track I Can Feel The Fire, Wood was joined by Willie Weeks, Andy Newmark, Jagger and Richards and Bowie. And at the same time this session was recorded, Wood also became involved in the creation of the Stones’ song It’s Only Rock ’n Roll (But I Like It).

In a previous interview excerpted on the StonesData fan site, Wood recalled: “Mick and I worked out I Can Feel The Fire and after we’d done that he said, ‘Help me with this song, It’s Only Rock ’n Roll, ’cause I wanna see how it turns out.

“So, say on a Tuesday evening: two guitars – Mick and I – and Mick singing lead vocal and David Bowie and myself on backup vocals.

“Then I overdubbed the rest of the instruments last and it sounded like a good demo. So the next night, we wanted to put it in a more presentable shape, so we got hold of Kenney Jones who plays the drums on the actual record. I ended up with just my acoustic guitar that I laid originally. Keith replaced – rightly so – the guitars that I’d done electrically.”

Wood says on Tracks Of My Years: “There’s only me and Mick and David Bowie and Willie Weeks, Kenney Jones on it, the basic track.”

Reportedly, this basic rhythm track recorded at The Wick was used as the basis for the final version of the – the title track of the Stones’ 12th studio album. That album was released on 18 October 1974.

It’s Only Rock ’n Roll, the song, was credited to Jagger and Richards only.

In December 1974, the Stones’ lead guitarist Mick Taylor quit the band, and while other guitarists were considered and auditioned, Wood was always the leading candidate for the job.

As Wood says now: “Oh, it was easy for me to slide in there. Yeah, because I’d known them on and off for years.”

In 1975, while still with Faces, he recorded and toured with the Stones, and in 1976 – after the Faces disbanded – Wood was made an official member of the Stones.

He eventually moved out of The Wick, but what started there is a journey he is still on today.

The Jesus and Mary Chain – William and Jim Reid – have never been short of opinions, and they have kicked up the proverbial hornets’ nest with some comments about shoegazing and Eddie Van Halen.

The Reids were interviewed by Stereogum before an appearance at the New York festival Total Bummer and conversation soon got round to shoegaze, a word that was originally a UK music press-derived pejorative for the second generation of shy guitar effects-heavy indie bands of the early 1990s, but has been retrospectively used as a general term for any group operating even vaguely in that ballpark, including the Mary Chain.

"Shoegaze, I've got a problem with that just because it doesn't actually exist. 'Cause it was some clown at the NME made that up,” Jim Reid pointed out. “I suppose the bands that have now come under that umbrella – the likes of Lush and Ride and some would say the Mary Chain – the thing that you would say that would be similar and all those bands have in common is that they all felt kind of awkward onstage. And I guess that’s where the shoegaze thing came from.”

The brothers were children of punk and though they lacked technical ability (at least initially) more than made up for it with their groundbreaking use of feedback. “Not having a lot of equipment actually forces you to be more inventive,”said Jim.

“I can play guitar, but only just. It's kinda deliberate. I play guitar to the level that I need to play guitar. And sometimes knowing too much about making music gets in the way, and it ends up back to Eddie Van Halen again, do you know what I mean?”

At this point William chips in with: “I think guitar players should never learn scales. I think the worst guitar players in the world...like Eddie Van Halen - I can't stand Eddie Van Halen's guitar playing. I think he ruined rock guitar all through the '80s and '90s 'cause so many people copied him. And I just couldn't get any of that playin' as fast as you fuckin' can and crammin' as many notes in one second as you could. And I listen to Peter Hook's bass riffs, and I think that's a thousand times better than anything Eddie Van Halen could ever conjure up.”

They might not be partial to Van Halen, but the Reids are teaming up with another band of rock legends later this summer when they support the Hollywood Vampires on their UK tour. The Vampires consist of Alice Cooper and Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, as well as Johnny Depp. The Jesus and Mary Chain will be supporting them at Wembley Arena on August 12, before gigs in Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham.

Back in the beginning, before his break-out with Winger and being tapped up to replace George Lynch in Dokken, and long before he got the call to join David Coverdale in Whitesnake, Reb Beach was just another Berklee grad with stars in his eyes.

He was a hot-shot player all right, knew which end was up on the electric guitar. But he needed a gig. He would do what many aspiring musicians would do and hang out, looking for any word of an audition. As luck would have it, something turned up.

“The story is that I was a singing reader in New York City, and I would hang out at music stores, and I heard about an audition for Fiona, on Atlantic Records,” said Beach, speaking to MusicRadar in 2019. “And so I went to Long Island on the train, and walked into the audition, and I was dressed exactly like everyone else in the band.”

These things don’t go unnoticed. It is more common to hear the story that a session player didn’t get the gig because they didn’t look right. Paul Gilbert admitted to us recently that he thinks him not maintaining his “Whitesnake haircut” was a barrier to career progression. But when Reb Beach walked in as Fiona was looking for a guitarist for her 1986 sophomore album, Beyond The Pale, he fit right in.

“I was the only guy who was dressed like that,” he said. “Everyone else had teased up hair, wearing Spandex, the whole deal. So I got the gig.”

He admits he was still naive to the ways of the session circuit. The producer, Beau Hill, had got himself a bargain.

“At the end of me doing that Fiona record, after I did the whole album the producer said, ‘Look, I don’t want to insult you but it’s time to pay you, and how does $500 sound?’ I was like, ‘$500!? Wow!’ I was so excited,” recalled Beach. “He started using me on everything else he did because I was so cheap. I didn’t know any better!”

Beach was selling himself short but it paid off in the long run. It got his foot in the door at Atlantic Records, and Hill would pass his contact around.

“He turned me on to other producers. ‘Look, I have this kid. He’s a nice kid and he plays great… And he’ll do it for 500 bucks!’ [Laughs] So I was getting all these sessions,” said Beach. ‘I was the go-to rock guy at Atlantic Records.”

And he wasn’t on the intern wages long.

“Of course, I learned quickly that there was a thing called the union, and I started getting paid what everyone else got paid,” he said.

Howard Jones was up next – 1986 was turning out to be a breakout year for Beach as he joined the likes of Chic’s Nile Rodgers to play on the synth-pop star’s One To One. Then there was Chaka Khan. He played on the R&B/funk icon’s sixth studio album, Destiny, laying down a solo on So Close. Whenever a solo needed doing, it was Beach whom they’d call.

“Doing sessions, I was the rock guy. I didn’t play any different styles of music,” he said. “I would just come in and play a rock solo with Chaka Khan. I’d come in and play… I did a rhythm for Kenny Loggins one time, and they ended up not using it.”

But even if the track didn’t make the cut, it was still an invaluable experience. Beach was rubbing shoulders with some elite musicians. And he might have had the diploma from Berklee on his wall back home, but school was still in session. He was learning all the time.

“I got to cut the tracks live with Marcus Miller, so that was incredible,” said Beach. “He taught me how to play funk. He told me I was doing it all wrong, ‘cos I was doing it all ‘Djinga-djink-ah-djink/Djinga-djink-ah-djink…’ And he was like, ‘No, man! It’s like, ‘Djeenk!’ [Laughs] ‘Just dkeenk! A little bit.’ So that taught me something for sure.”

If you needed a rock solo, Beach was your man. And as it turns out, Arif Mardin, who produced Khan’s Destiny, needed a rock soloist for his next project, the Bee Gees’ long-awaited comeback album, ESP. The Bee Gees needed a change of fortunes.

They had lost momentum in the ‘80s. The disco era was over. Reuniting with Mardin could change all that. It was Mardin who was credited with discovering Barry Gibbs’ falsetto when producing Nights Of Broadway, from 1975’s Main Course. They duly called Beach. He got a shock when he got there.

“They flew me out to put me up at the Doral, in Miami,” said Beach. “There were bags of weed everywhere. Those guys just smoked and smoked, and that’s all they did! [Laughs]”

Maybe this accounted for their slow start to the decade. Something had to. As Beach recalls it, the brothers Gibb – Barry, Robin and Maurice – were ridiculously talented, and he was going to witness it at first hand.

“There was a track I played on that didn’t have a vocal yet, so they all got around in a circle around me, and sang the vocal, what it was going to be,” said Beach. “It was the most incredible thing because they all had perfect pitch, so it was perfectly in tune. There was no track going, they just sang for me a capella...

“It was riveting, all these voices that I’ve heard on the radio for all these years, standing around me, in stereo, and singing perfectly. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience.”

Beach played on the title track and on Overnight. You Win Again was the big hit from the record but Beach can say he was there when a little bit of history was made. He had to have been maybe the first person to have heard the Bee Gees perform ESP.

“I guess so, yeah!” he said. “Well, it wasn’t Saturday Night Fever or anything. I don’t know how well ESP did.”

Matteo Mancuso’s 2023 debut album, The Journey, was a vindication. This showcase for the coltish Sicilian’s breath-taking fingerstyle approach to electric jazz-rock fusion justified all the hype that had been coming from the great and the good of guitar.

Tosin Abasi, Joe Bonamassa, Steve Vai et al knew what they were talking about when they were calling Mancuso “the future of guitar” – and that future had officially arrived.

But Mancuso was a little bored of the material by the time The Journey was released. Having put it together over a number of years, he had this feeling that he had outgrown it, that he had become a better musician. Next time it would be different.

Joining MusicRadar from his hotel room in Germany, Mancuso says he had a few goals when he was making its follow-up, Route 96. He wanted more compositional audacity, a more experimental flavour. He wanted it to sound more instinctual. And when he heard it being played back through the studio monitors he wanted to hear more of himself in it.

“It represents me way better compared to the first one,” says Mancuso. “The main difference was that I wanted compositions where the arrangement was a little bit more complex and advanced.

“The first album is a little bit more jazzy sounding. This one is more experimental. There’s jazz, for sure, in the sense that there’s always improvisation in it, and there’s a jazz vibe in everything because I have a strong jazz background – this will never fade in whatever I do. But the difference was that I was forcing myself to listen to music that was not guitar-oriented.”

There is nothing quite like trying to work out a horn or piano part on guitar for making you see the fingerboard anew. It’s humbling, too, the physical challenges making it feel somehow unnatural. But the chances are you want end up regurgitating something that you already heard some other guitarist do.

“We guitar players tend to listen too much to our colleagues,” says Mancuso. “And that’s great for learning the instrument because you are listening to your own instrument, and you are able to dissect it and learn faster. If you copy from saxophone or piano players, it can be a little bit more tricky, because it’s not your instrument, and you have to decode things in a different way.”

Even the way Mancuso addresses his instrument, his hybrid fingerstyle approach developed from two contrasting classical guitar techniques, feels uniquely radical. There is a growing cohort of high-profile players who are option for finger over pick, yet none do it like this, combining an appoggiato technique, his thumb resting on the pickup, with tocco libero, where he can pick with his thumb, too.

Mancuso uses the latter for three-note-per-string runs, ripping scalar phrases, while appoggiato allows him to execute string skips and arpeggios that would be physically impossible with a guitar pick.

“The advantage is you can build more unusual patterns for electric guitar because you can skip whatever string you want,” he told MusicRadar in 2023. “You can start a pattern from whichever string.”

Even the greats can’t believe what they are seeing. We asked Eric Johnson recently who was exciting him on guitar and with no hesitation he said Mancuso. Many argue he is the best guitar player in the world right now. We would not be of a mind to argue.

And Route 96 is the sound of Mancuso stretching out and testing himself, playing in the company of Steve Vai, who guests on Solar Wind, and modern-day Gypsy jazz maestro Antoine Boyer, who illuminates Isla Feliz with his own brand of genius, and following his musical curiosity over the horizon.

Here he tells us why we are living in a golden age of technical virtuosity, a fact to be celebrated, but explains why he hates the idea of the “guitar battle” and urges all of us to follow Steve Vai’s advice as a rule.

You have spoken before about being a big believer in listening to as many different styles as you can. How did that influence Route 96?

“I was listening to a lot of different stuff, especially South American music, and I think it was great for my compositional skills because I was able to bring elements that were not there on the first album.

“If you listen to Isla Feliz or Warm Sunset, they are very Latin-sounding, and that’s because I started listening to different things – even a lot more classical guitar. That’s something you can hear on the record.”

Absolutely, especially on a track like Fire And Harmony. That could be your signature track. It has everything that makes you sound like you.

“Thanks! Yeah, Fire And Harmony is the track with the most guitars on it, together with Solar Wind, with Steve Vai. These two are the tracks with the most guitars. Solar only has electric guitars, though. Fire and Harmony has an acoustic solo and acoustic guitars on it, plus all the electric ones. So I think it’s the more complex one.

“I borrowed a lot of elements from that world. I wanted an environment where I can play with acoustic and with electric as well, and I thought the chord progression of the theme was great to play on acoustic, and the final part was more suited for electric.”

How did it come together?

“It all started with a chord progression that I liked. Everything was in A, and then it started off with different chords. It’s always about experimenting with different stuff. I don’t have a plan when I start songs. It’s always following the flow.”

And it starts simple. No matter how complex these arrangements get, there’s always something simple the listener can grab onto.

“That’s something I try to do with every song. If there's a complex element and a simple one at the same time, it is usually something that I like, musically speaking.

“The three pillars of music are melody, harmony, and rhythm, if all three are hard, or complex, it will be hard for the listener to follow. So if I have a simple melody, maybe I can have a complex arrangement behind, or I can have multiple elements behind that can add slowly to the song.

“Or maybe if I have a complex melody, I can add a simple harmony. It needs to be a complex element and a simple one at the same time, to have this kind of balance.”

How did your Steve Vai collaboration on Solar Wind come about?

“It all started at the Steve Vai Academy in Orlando, Florida, January 2024. That was the first time I met Steve in person. We played a lot there, almost every night. I was one of the teachers at the camp, and every night, there was a different teacher on the stage.

“The last night was the night when he told me that if I had something, like a song or something to work on, he would be happy to collaborate. So I immediately started to work on the song. In fact, Solar Wind was the first song I finished on the record. I believe it was ready on November 2024, I think. And he recorded his at the beginning of 2025, January or February 2025.”

And you wrote it with him in mind. Solar Wind was always going to be Steve’s song?

“Yeah, I knew from the start that this song was Steve’s song, so that’s why I wanted to have the most Steve Vai song possible on the record. That’s why I’m even playing some stuff that you'd associate with Steve. Some legato runs or some of the sounds that I used on that song in particular are very Steve Vai-sounding.

“I wanted to build an environment where Steve was comfortable to play on it. That was very important to me, because the solo section is – I don’t want to say strange but – it’s simple and complex at the same time, because he has odd-time signatures and chord changes going on, not too complex but still chord changes, and then it goes to 7/8 on the next section. But I knew that Steve was going to like it.”

That’s the secret to these collaborations. You have to write something in which both styles can express themselves in.

“Yeah, I didn’t want it to be the classic guitar battle. If you listen to the song, I don’t do any solos. I only do the main melody. I have just one fast run at the start of the song, but I didn’t want to solo over that song, because I didn’t want any comparison between me and Steve. I just wanted a song where Steve was playing, and that’s it. And it’s the same thing I did to Isla Feliz with Antoine. I didn’t want to have a comparison between me and him.

“That’s why I have a solo there on the electric guitar, and he’s playing acoustic. Because they are different instruments, you don’t have the comparison. I don’t want to do this kind of, like, guitar battle thing. It’s one thing that I really don’t like about the guitar world. And Solar Wind, for example, is already a great development, and it’s already a long song, so if I added another solo, maybe a solo of mine, it would really be too long.”

Now you have to work out how to play this song live?

“It’s a challenge. First of all, because you always have Steve’s solo in mind, and of course, when I have to play it live, I have to do Steve’s solo section. I don’t play exactly the same notes as Steve. I try to play something different every night, but that’s the challenge. I like to have these kinds of challenges, especially when I’m playing live. It’s good to always try to stretch and improvise over these sections.”

What did you learn from working with Steve and from being at that camp with him?

“Well, there was one thing that told me, I think it was at the end of the camp. It was ‘play what excites you the most about the instrument’. And it’s one thing that I always think about it, because guitar has so many ways you can play it.

“You can play like Tommy Emmanuel, you can play like Yngwie Malmsteen. You can play like Allan Holdsworth. There are so many different techniques. You have tapping legato. You have sweep. And that’s why it’s such a personal instrument. You project a lot of your personality into it because you can play in a really personalised way.

“One thing that Steve said to me, because we live in the internet era, where you have everything available, you have tons of inputs available, sometimes it’s better to just shut down everything, grab your guitar, and be alone, just you and your guitar, or your instrument, to really go into an introspective journey to really get to know what excites you the most about music and the guitar.”

That’s very much a process, isn’t it?

“That’s something I'm still working on because it’s hard to discover things on guitar. The more you play, the more you know about yourself, and not only as a musician, also as a human being. It’s always a journey to discover yourself at the best of your possibilities. The more you know yourself, the more your music will be personal and not derivative.”

Look at guitar culture now. Like you said, there is so much of it everywhere, and yet the electric guitar is still a young instrument as well. I still think that it’s full of secrets.

“There are so many things to discover. Look at what happened in the last 10 years. The technique level raised up so much. I think the technical level now is comparable to classical guitar players, where you have a lot more history behind it, a lot more books and technique that was discovered through time.

“Now we are getting close to that level where you have the technique, where you know every detail about the technique you need to use, you know how to hold the pick properly, you know how your left hand should be, how to tap things, picking – all that information is available now. So you have no excuses to have bad technique nowadays.”

Is there an aspect of your playing that frustrates you, that you would like to be better at?

“Oh yeah, of course, there are a lot of things I would like to improve! First of all, I always try to improve my vocabulary, try to come up with new licks. It’s always a challenging process because I have all my go-to licks that I always use. But sometimes I get bored, and so it’s challenging to expand your vocabulary. Sometimes it can be tricky.”

How do you avoid all the usual patterns? Allan Holdsworth went so far as to invent his own scales.

“That would be a great idea. Allan Holdsworth is one of my favourites, and he had such a wide vocabulary that he’s unpredictable when he improvises. That’s a big influence. And to me, it’s basically like speaking. Right now, I’m improvising in English, and my vocabulary in English is way smaller compared to my vocabulary in Italian. But I always try to deliver the message as good as I can!”

What's the first step in building that vocabulary?

“We need to go through this process of knowing the fretboard; that is essential in order to play the right notes, and then when we get through that we can slowly build our vocabulary. And that’s why guitar is a hard instrument to improvise on, because we have this visual thing that we need to understand.

“And we don’t use symmetrical tuning. We have this major third between the G and B string that screws everything up. Because we don’t have symmetrical tuning, sometimes it can be tricky to visualise things on guitar.

“We have to learn the same shape, or the same chord can have completely different shapes depending on the area of the neck you’re playing. It’s gonna be the same notes, but the shape is gonna be different, and that applies with scales, arpeggios, chords, everything. You need to learn the same thing on different areas of the fretboard.”

And then it's a question of being able to access these notes and chord voicings without even thinking.

“The music I like always needs to have an element of instinct in it. I always want to have an element of improvisation. Especially for instrumental music, it’s going to sound better if there are some parts that are improvised – because you can project your personality in it, and you are more free to experiment with whatever comes to your mind in that moment. It sounds way more alive.”

Tell us about Antoine Boyer, who is a really fantastic guitar player. This is another great collaboration. His gypsy jazz style is really incredible.

“He’s an amazing player. Antoine is such a great player. I wanted to experiment with a song where I have acoustic, classical and electric at the same time, and I wanted to have them be the protagonist of the song in different parts of the song, and that’s why I called Antoine.

“I wanted to have a proper Gypsy jazz player on the song. He was the perfect choice, because of course he’s a Gypsy Jazz player, but he’s open-minded enough to play all different kinds of stuff, not only Django Reinhardt. Because there are a lot of Gypsy Jazz players that are incredible but they only play Django. Antoine is a really clever guy. He’s really curious about all kinds of music.

“He played an incredible solo on that song. Isla Feliz has Latin elements. There’s a Latin vibe to it, there is percussion, classical guitar, but at the same time, there’s the rock element that comes at the end of the song, and that’s kind of an odd combination, but I really like it because it’s something that happened almost by accident.

“At the start it was more like I wanted to do just an acoustic song, classical and acoustic, and then it came to my mind that, maybe, if I add electric, it would be more unique sounding. That’s why, right now, it is probably my favourite song on the album.”

Did you get a chance to use the SA2200 on this record? Because I know you’ve been mixing up and using the Pacifica a bit more lately.

“I mostly used the Revstar and Pacifica on this album. I've used the semi-hollow but not on this record.”

Before you go, what is the benefit of recording at 96kHz? I know Steve said you should but can you hear the difference at that higher sample rate?

“Well, I will be completely honest with you, the reality is that I only switched to 96kHz because Steve told me to do it. And I never questioned it. I don't really hear that much of a difference, to be honest. Maybe the stereo image is a little wider, maybe it’s just a feeling. I don’t really know. The thing is that because Steve told me to do it, I just did it, because I wanted to record like Steve."

Well, if Steve Vai tells us to do something, we do it, right?

“Yeah, that’s my philosophy!"

• Route 96 is out now via Music Theories.

Jack White has become the latest rock star to exhibit his own art and has been talking about it in an interview with The Sunday Times.

As many fans know, before the White Stripes took off, White was an upholsterer and it’s with these same skills that the guitarist has created his works of art – he apparently calls it “hardware store art”.

Among the exhibits at the show, which runs at London’s Newport Street Gallery until September, is a ‘sonic bench’ which includes an aperture where you can plug an instrument into the base of the seat. There’s also a collage of his dad’s old tools and a wall unit with gold trimmings, which the interviewer suggests would match the current interior of the White House.

“I would be overjoyed if it ended up there,” White said. “I used the exact same gold paint that Trump did, bought from the Home Depot website. He says it’s real gold, but it’s not.”

The exhibition came about after White showed Damien Hurst some of his pieces. “I showed Damien some of my work and he said, ‘When’s your next exhibition?’ I said, ‘I’ve never had one. I’ve never been asked.’”

Despite all his success, there’s clearly a part of White that hankers after the simple craftsman’s life: “It’s therapeutic because when you’re working with power tools, you’re feeling all kinds of different emotions,” he explained. “It’s nice to have this opportunity to get involved in this art form because it’s literally hands-on: it’s sawblades and sanders and epoxy-pouring.”

“It makes me feel, like, ‘Oh, I wish people didn’t know me at all from anything else right now. I wish I could wipe the slate clean just for this show.’ It’d be nice.”

Asked whether he’d choose music or art, White came over all modest: “I’ve never felt that I can do one thing very, very well. I’m not the greatest carpenter, but I do it a bit; I’m not the greatest musician, but I can do it a bit. I think I exist in the punk realm, where it’s better to not be perfect at something. It’s more visceral and more emotional when it’s raw. The rawness is where I get a great feeling.”

Anyway, the exhibition is called Jack White: These Thoughts May Disappear and it’s on at the Newport Street Gallery, London SE11 until September 13. And, what’s more, admission is absolutely free.

Nobody needs to explain to Jared James Nichols the appeal of a vintage guitar. He has an appreciation of the kind of magic an a electric guitar’s history gives it, the scars in the finish, the cigarette burns and buckle rash, maybe even the wonkiness of its electrics that make it scream when the amp is dimed.

And he understands the collector’s mindset, even if he doesn’t share it. He also knows you need deep pockets to go shopping for Golden Era Gibsons, pre-CBS Stratocasters, all that stuff. But as he sees it, people have lost the run of themselves when it comes to these instruments, obsessing over their value, the kudos that comes from owning them.

As a guy who plays one of the first Les Pauls ever made, a 1952 Goldtop destroyed in a tornado then restored and named Dorothy, and Ol’ Red, a ’53 Goldtop refinished in red, Nichols believes people are forgetting what made these old instruments special in the first place.

“This is almost clickbaity but it’s like a lot of people lost the plot with the vintage guitar thing,” he says. “It went [away] from being a tribute to the music, and an honour to the music, and the sounds that you love, and the sounds that are timeless in your life. Like, literally, when I pick up Ol’ Red, or Dorothy, or any of these guitars, and I plug them in, I go, ‘Oh my gosh! That’s the sound’ You know what I mean? It fills my heart but it is also inspiring.

“But I think a lot of people started to say to themselves, ‘Well, do you know how much this one’s worth? Do you know how rare this is?’ Then it almost got like trading cards, or coins, where it didn’t really matter about the sound. It was, ‘Oh, that one, someone broke the headstock…’ To me, ‘Okay! Awesome, they broke the headstock? Let me play it. What does it sound like?’”

Joining MusicRadar from the front seat of a beat-up Chevvy Suburban, Nichols says this old wagon of his tells us a lot about his taste in guitars.

“Everything I own is a beater, and I know that sounds funny,” he says. “Right now, I’m in an old Suburban. I have an old [Chevrolet] Chevelle, and all of these things that I own, the guitars – everything – they have a story way before me. And you can see that, and they’re weathered, and they’re honest… I just think all my stuff, it has a story. And Dorothy? Forget about it, that’s the vibiest guitar I’ve ever come across.”

Nichols releases his fourth studio album, Louder Than Fate, on June 5, via Frontiers. Recorded with Jay Ruston, it saw him rock up at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606 and tear the paint off the walls with a 100-watt ‘68 Marshall Plexi that was so loud he they had to remove two of the power tubes to knock it down. “It was shaking the walls so bad that you were able to hear it in the tracking,” he says.

And this is very much his style, the ‘Blues Power’ sound as Nichols calls it. Its muscular. Its physical. There’s more than a little pro wrestling to this style of playing, as though he’s trying to choke out the strings with those bends. Some collectors like the idea of lending Nichols a vintage guitar for a show and having the pictures that go with it. He’s particularly juiced about the prospect of playing the late Leslie West of Mountain’s Flying V’s when he plays New York.

Nichols says he gets collectors turning up at shows with golden era Les Pauls and asking if he wants to play them onstage. But all this holy grail business has him saying no a lot of the time. Things have gotten too strange.

“I don’t really feel comfortable playing people’s guitars, anymore, unless they’re friends, like Joe [Bonamassa] or whoever, because it’s a little bit… it just gets a little weird with me now,” he says.

Nichols is no Pete Townshend. At the end of the song, he’s not going to send the guitar through the kick drum. He’s going to respect the instrument, whether it’s off-the-shelf new or a pristine survivor from the late ‘50s. But some of these guys who turn up with their ’59 Les Paul Standards for him to play just don’t understand the full implications of what it’s like to actually play rock guitar under the lights.

“I was in Florida, and a guy had one, and he wanted me to play it for a song, and he was emailing us, emailing us, and he wanted me to play it,” says Nichols. “Totally cool!”

Only it gets less cool as the show gets closer.

“They go to hand me the guitar, and he looks at me and goes. ‘No rings!’ I’m wearing a ring,” says Nichols. “He’s like, ‘Don’t wear a ring when you play my guitar.’ And I’m literally about to take it onstage, and I look at him, and go like this [shakes head], ‘Oh no, I can’t. We’re not having this conversation right now.’ [Laughs]”

This minor diplomatic incident gets smoothed over. Nichols takes to the stage with the ’59 ‘Burst, and it’s a typically aerobic activity, all that pentatonic jiu-jitsu on the fingerboard, and those lights… Those stage lights are hot.

“I play the guitar, and man, like you know, when I’m onstage, I’m kind of a sweaty beast,” continues Nichols. “I’m doing my thing. I don’t ever, ever beat up guitars. I respect them, and I love them – and especially a guitar like that. I play it, and I just have a little bit of sweat. I finish the song, and the guy is LOSING it! Because there’s now sweat on the top of his ’59 Les Paul.

“Afterwards, he’s over there and he’s wiping it down and everything, and I went, ‘Are you all good?’ And he goes, ‘Well, I didn’t realise you were gonna sweat on my guitar.’ And I just said to him straight up, ‘Man, what do you think this is? You want to get pictures of me playing your guitar to tell your friends or whoever, and then I sweat on your guitar because I’m literally in a performance?’ So, all I’m saying, is just people lost the plot a little bit.”

And this is the thing about vintage guitar collecting and an inflated market that makes one of these instruments more valuable than both of Nichols’ Chevvys put together, we’re quite far removed from the culture that gave them the allure in the first place.

We’re a million miles from Eric Clapton using the string tree of his Stratocaster as a cigarette holder. No one is chill. People need to be cool again.

“Yeah, dude, you nailed it,” says Nichols. “These things were meant to be used, and I believe that no matter how expensive they get – I get it, it’s collecting – I just love to use them as intended, and that isn’t an abuse thing, or whatever, it’s just to hear those guitars and a loud amp going for it, it’s beautiful, and when I think about Dorothy, or Old Red, or any of these guitars, I go, ‘That’s what I’m into it for.’”

Louder Than Fate is available for pre-order via Frontiers, and is out June 6.

Wes Borland has been playing King Vs onstage for years but today the Limp Bizkit guitarist officially joins the Jackson artist roster, making his debut with a signature guitar that offers a quietly radical take on one of the high-performance brand’s most iconic shapes.

Silhouetted against the light, the Pro Series Wes Borland King V KV looks regular enough.

In contrast to the Jackson Rhoads, this has that more symmetrical V shaped body, and we have a reverse headstock, too – always a welcome sight on a metal guitar. But look closely at that headstock. The Jackson logo is upside down.

This feels like the kind of subversion of the typical metal design that we could firmly get behind, and it’s subtle enough that it won’t alienate the wider metal community.

Limp Bizkit and nu-metal, all that jazz divides opinion but in the cold light of day Borland’s King V, with its white bevels on black finish reminiscent of the recently released Christian Andreu Rhoads EverTune, the stripped-down single-pickup platform, and the highly respectable Floyd Rose 1500 Series double-locking vibrato unit, this is an electric guitar with everything you need for any style of metal – and, for that matter, nothing that you don’t.

That, says Borland, was the idea.

“It’s taking me a long time to figure out what I need as a guitar player. For me, you just need volume, pickups, locking tremolo system and 24 frets, that’s it,” says Borland. “Live, it just needs to be as bulletproof as possible. You know, I’ve been very rough with guitars over the years. I’ve come to realise that the more streamlined our guitars are, the less problems we have on stage.”

And this is stripped-down. We have a single Seymour Duncan SH-8 Invader, a bona-fide haymaker and as hot a passive humbucker as you could find, and a single volume control. It’s the pragmatist’s shred machine, even if it was built to an exhibitionist’s specifications.

“ You know Jackson is fun, the over the top, shred-a-copter shapes and my outrageous stage costumes pushing the boundaries, this fits in more with that,” says Borland. “The way people dress, it affects how you behave, and I think it also changes how I play guitar.”

As per the King V’s style, you’ve got a neck-through build. A lot of tonewood real estate. It takes a while to get used to playing them seated, wedged on your leg. But it’ll be a ripper.

The only question we have is what’s going on with the headstock? This, as it turns out, is kind of a weird accident.

“When our artist rep Mike Tempesta introduced Wes to some Jackson Custom Shop guitars, he picked a left-handed King V and modded it for his right-hand playing, which left the headstock logo upside down,” says Peter Wichers, product development manager, Jackson Guitars. “He loved it, so we kept it. That happy accident became one of the most iconic details of the whole build.”

You can see all the details of this build over at Jackson. The Pro Series Wes Borland King V is available now, priced £1,199/$1,299.

We are not even half-way through 2026 yet so it’s a little early to be talking about the electric guitar tracks of the year, but if we could be so bold as to make a prediction, let’s just say that Matteo Mancuso’s Solar Wind, featuring Steve Vai, is going to be right up there by the year's end.

The opening track on Mancuso’s bravura sophomore album, Route 96 – a title that just so happens to be inspired by Vai – brings together two greats of the instrument, one who has been extending guitar’s musical possibilities ever since he joined Frank Zappa’s outfit in 1980, the other who is only just getting started, having released his debut just three years ago.

But then Mancuso is on some sort of elevated trajectory right now. He is blowing everyone’s mind; Tosin Abasi, Eric Johnson, Joe Bonamassa, and yes, Steve Vai, too, and the young Sicilian has jammed with the likes of jazz-fusion icon Al Di Meola and acoustic guitar virtuoso Tommy Emmanuel.

With Vai declaring that the evolution of guitar was safe in Mancuso’s hands, it was only a matter of time before they worked on something together. And, as Mancuso reveals, joining MusicRadar from his hotel room in Munich, it was initially Vai’s idea, and he pitched it to Mancuso when they were playing together at the 2024 Steve Vai Academy in Orlando, Florida.

“That was the first time I met Steve in person. We played a lot there. We played almost every night,” says Mancuso. “I was one of the teachers at the camp, and every night, there was a different teacher on the stage.”

On the last night of the event, Vai had a proposal.

“He told me that if I had something, like a song or something to work on it, he will be happy to collaborate,” says Mancuso.

He did not. But there is nothing like the offer from one of instrumental guitar’s O.G. figureheads to inspire you to pick up the guitar.

“I immediately started to work on the song,” he says. “In fact, Solar Wind was the first song I finished on the record.”

By November, Mancuso had the music together and sent it to Vai. In the confines of the Harmony Hut, Vai tracked his parts remotely in the New Year 2025. Unlike his Polyphia collaboration, Ego Death, which Vai provided a solo for before Scott LePage and Tim Henson had actually finished the song, and ended up editing into place, this was all laid out just waiting for Vai. And Mancuso had left plenty of room for him to manoeuvre.

“I immediately knew from the start that this song was Steve’s song,” he says. “I wanted to have the most Steve Vai song possible on the record. That’s why even I’m playing some stuff that maybe you can associate with Steve, some legato runs or some of the sounds that I used on that song in particular are very like Steve Vai-sounding in a way. I wanted to build an environment where Steve was comfortable to play on it. And that was very important to me.”

Solar Wind is an exercise in restraint and audacity. It’s is the most Steve Vai tune Mancuso could have written, and yet it has his fingerprints all over, that leitmotif of always contrasting something super complex with something super simple, and vice versa.

And there is some sleight of hand with the time signature that makes if feel like the melody is being ferried atop a gust of electrons and protons, this great heliospheric phenomenon beyond our ken, a cosmic realm where Vai’s most at home.

“The solo section is… I don’t want to say strange, but it’s simple and complex at the same time,” says Mancuso. “Because he has odd-time signatures and chord changes going on, not too complex but still… then it goes to 7/8 on the next section. It was complex and simple in some ways but I knew that Steve was going to like it.”

What you won’t hear is Mancuso cutting lose. Whenever he has a guest guitarist on the record, as on the Latin-inspired gypsy jazz freakout Isla Feliz on which Antoine Boyer plays with this preternatural speed and grace on the acoustic, Mancuso doesn’t want it to turn into this two-hander between soloists.

On Isla Feliz, he plays his lead guitar on electric to contrast Boyer’s fleet-fingered acoustic. There was no way Mancuso was soloing on Solar Wind.

“Yeah, I didn’t want it to be the classic guitar battle. And if you listen to the song, I don’t do any solos,” he says. “I only do the main melody; I have just one fast run at the start of the song, but I didn’t want to solo over that song, because I didn’t want any comparison between me and Steve. I just wanted a song where Steve was playing, and that’s it. I don’t want to do this guitar battle thing. It’s one thing that I really don’t like about the guitar world.”

Also, Mancuso is showing a little mercy to the audience. He didn’t want the arrangement outstaying its welcome.

“I think Solar Wind is already a great development, and it’s already a long song,” he says. “I added another solo, maybe a solo of mine, it will be really too long, so that’s why I kept it like that.”

The challenge for Mancuso now is how to play Steve Vai’s parts live onstage with his trio. Because [spoiler warning] Solar Wind is in the setlist.

“Oh yeah, yeah, it’s a challenge,” says Mancuso. “First of all, because you always have Steve’s solo in mind, and of course when I have to play it live I have to do Steve’s solo section.”

Just don’t expect the same thing night after night. Mancuso comes from the jazz guitar school of fusion; he likes to leave some room for improv.

“I don’t play exactly the same notes as Steve,” he says. “I try to play something different every night. But that’s the challenge. I like to have these kinds of challenges, especially when I’m playing live. It’s always good to try to stretch and improvise over these sections.”

Time spent in the company of Vai is always an education. He might give you some rock history, share an old war story from his Frank Zappa days. He might give you a guitar playing tip. But he always gives you something.

Spending a few days in Florida with Vai taught Mancuso a valuable lesson.

“Well, there was one thing that told me at the end of the camp, and it was, ‘Play what excites you the most about the instrument.’ And it’s one thing that I always think about,” says Mancuso. “Because guitar has so many ways it can be played. You can play like Tommy Emmanuel. You can play like Yngwie Malmsteen. You can play like Allan Holdsworth.

“There are so many different techniques. You have tapping, legato. You have sweep [picking]. And that is why it’s such a personal instrument. You project a lot of your personality in it; you can play it in a really personalised way.”

And it wouldn’t be a conversation with Vai if there wasn’t a little philosophical wisdom being imparted, too, a way to think about life itself, the whole creative endeavour of making music. This might be the best advice we’ve heard all year.

“And another thing that Steve said to me, because we live in the internet era, where you have everything available, you have tons of inputs available, sometimes it’s better to just shut down everything, grab your guitar, and be alone,” says Mancuso. “Just you and your guitar, or your instrument, to go into an introspective journey to really know what excites you the most about music and guitar in general.

“That’s something I’m still working on because it’s a hard thing to discover things on guitar, and the more you play, the more you know about yourself, not only as a musician, also as a human being. It’s always a journey to try to discover yourself; the more you know yourself, the more your music will be personal and not derivative.”

Oh, and one more thing, if Route 96 sounds particularly hi-fi through your speakers, again, we’ve got Steve Vai to thank. It was Vai who told Mancuso to mix and master it in 96kHz (hence why it’s called Route 96).

Does it make a difference? The jury is out. Mancuso wasn’t going to argue with Vai, though.

“Well, I will be completely honest with you, but the reality is that I only switched to 96kHz because Steve told me to do it,” he says. “And I never questioned it. Like, okay, sometimes I really listen to things in 44, and I don’t really hear that much of a difference, to be honest. Maybe the stereo image is a little bit more wider, but… The thing is that because Steve told me to do it, I just did it, because I wanted to record like Steve.”

And if Steve Vai tells us to do something, well, we do it, right?

“Yeah! That’s my philosophy,” says Mancuso.

Route 96 is out now via Artone Label Group/Music Theories Recordings.

This whole idea of moving fast and breaking stuff gets a bad reputation these days but musicians have been doing it for the longest time and Oliver Ackermann can testify that it gets results.

He didn’t get where he is today without breaking some stuff. Ackermann fronts Brooklyn noise-rock trio A Place To Bury Strangers and is the founder of Death By Audio. And the demarcation between these two roles is beyond blurred. Each informs the other, and the breaking of stuff – rules, guitar amps, recording equipment, noise limits et cetera – has been a through line of his career so far.

It’s the ethos behind some of Death By Audio’s most out-there designs, and it came from being exposed to hardcore, shoegaze and noise-rock in the ‘90s that presented a new frontier of electric guitar tone to explore. Ackermann was hooked.

“When I got into noise music and extreme noise music, that just seemed like, ‘How can I deconstruct these instruments to create other new sounds?’” he says, joining MusicRadar from Death By Audio’s HQ in NYC. “That’s when I started tinkering and pulling apart amps, and trying to build my own guitars, and build microphones, recording equipment and all this stuff. Eventually, you start to figure that stuff out.”

This conversation was meant to be about A Place To Bury Strangers new album, Rare And Deadly, a compilation culled from unreleased tracks and rarities that never found their way onto an album, and so the trio decided to do something a little differently and release it but make the tracklisting different for each physical release. “There were too many songs to put on one record,” says Ackermann. “I really didn’t want to do some giant triple-disc thing. So we broke them apart into different bits.”

But like we said, the supremo of Death By Audio and frontman/guitarist of A Place To Bury Strangers is the same guy. There’s no changing in the phone booth. The sounds Ackermann cooks up on the breadboard are the sounds we hear on record. Though, as he explains, we should not get too hung up on the gear itself. Don’t get to precious about it. Much of it is interchangeable. All of it is just a tool, to be used, or misused if that’s the sound you’re looking for.

Rare And Deadly is technically speaking a compilation and no two editions of it are alike, with you switching up the tracklisting. Is there a case to be made that it’s actually a great introduction to A Place To Bury Strangers?

“Yeah, it's one of those things where it’s just the pure essence of all of these years of recordings and things that we’ve done. You’re constantly writing songs – at least that’s what I’m always doing.

“This is a collection of all that leftover stuff, but maybe it was never finished and polished further, and really taken to that point of being, like, ‘This message that we want to make.’ It’s a real raw snapshot of all of these years.”

Where do you get the time, Oliver? Are you making pedals by day, tracking at night? Do you ever have spare time?

“I don’t know! [Laughs] I’ve filled up my time with all of the sorts of things that I love to do. I’ll always be trying to start some random bands with friends and do all sorts of crazy things, and start companies, or other different art projects, and build furniture, all sorts of stupid stuff! [Laughs]

“One of those things that’s really fun to do is record music and write songs. I’ve just got more proficient over the years at being able to connect and express myself in songs, from start to finish.”

You were originally from Virginia. Did you have this romantic notion of New York before you arrived? A song like Out Of Place has got that sort of romance for a New York that doesn’t exist anymore – the NYC of Scorsese’s After Hours

“Yeah, for sure. It’s all chasing that romance of Where are these nights going to go? But we still go out and have fun and do crazy things here in New York. It’s just that it does seem more tame and not like those old movies in a way.

“I still think that there’s a seedy underbelly of neat, cool stuff that’s happening. I try to keep that stuff alive. Music is one of those great things that can take you to so many different places, where it’s like you drift off into a dream of your reality.”

You were a hardcore kid growing up. Who were your New York influences? Was the no wave movement big for you?

“Yeah, big time. When I feel like really fell in love with the music was around that transition, of transitioning out hardcore and punk, and that kind of stuff. I was really open to exploring all kinds of music.

“I lived in Providence, Rhode Island, and it was the time when there was a noise scene that was going on. That really opened up my eyes to all sorts of different stuff, and this lifestyle of just smashing things and doing whatever the hell we wanted, deconstructing music, and exploring what was up with these cities and these environments. I fell in love with that stuff, and that was why I moved to New York.

“It seemed like another city which was lawless, and you could do whatever you wanted. There’s still people here that remember that, and still try to embrace it, but it’s like all these people sort of had to start following the laws as they got older. That’s what I gravitated towards, the idea that there’s no rules. You build your house. You make your art – whatever it is – and share it with the community.”

That’s the thing with all these revolutionary cultural movements, like punk, they become kind of conservative in their own ways.

“I think people see money and they get comfortable, and then they like things like good food and stuff, and then they get complacent. Fuck all that shit, you know? Yeah, just push forward and consume some art [laughs].”

Who were your guitar tone heroes growing up?

“It was bands like My Bloody Valentine, Jesus and the Mary Chain, Slowdive, and that was at a time where I just had no really idea of what sounds they were making. That was just such a mystery and so interesting. Or bands like Curve.

“It was right at that time in the mid ‘90s, when you’d listen to this music and it sounded like someone could have been driving a car into a wall, or smashing something or cutting something with a chainsaw. Or the sound of whales, or space aliens shooting through the sky… I had no idea what that was, and that really intrigued me to be like, ‘How do these people make these sounds?’

“And then knowing that they were guitar bands it was like, ‘Oh well, what can you even do with this instrument!?’ Plugging it into an amplifier and cranking it all the way up, hearing the sounds and the feedback, it just made me think that maybe this was something that I could do. They were not necessarily playing complicated songs or anything. It was all just about these atmospheres and soundscapes, and so I chased all of that stuff down.”

The only rules you really have to follow are the rules of physics, which way the electrons are flowing.

“I think a lot of people were so concerned with what those rules were, and the laws of physics, they lost track of what their goal was, which was making sound. I always came at this stuff from the perspective of a musician. So when when you’re trying to design a circuit, I’m always thinking, ‘Well, what else can this do? What other things can we do to break this?’

“Sometimes you’ll see people on forums and they’re like, ‘Oh, you can’t do that.’ Then you do it and you’re like, ‘Wow! This sounds even cooler than it did before.’ And maybe there’s some sort of issue with it where it’s gonna blow up, or burn up, or create sounds that could blow up your amp, but as a musician, you can use these sounds and create more interesting sounds.

“That seemed like where my interests were, creating pedals that would totally deconstruct music and sound waves, yet be like an interactive way in which someone could be there, on the lever, pushing it over, and destroying their own music. It’s beautiful.’”

There is a beauty in destruction. Everyone loves an explosion. Is there anything from the early days of designing pedals that you would love to bring back, or something that you have forgotten the schematic for?

“There is always those things. I will always look back on that stuff. There’s this pedal that I use right now all the time, Armageddon. It was the prototype, super-big distortion pedal, and it’s got all these circuit boards inside that are all glued together with wires and tape and stuff, and I’m constantly changing the parts out and glueing it back together, but it's so mangled on the inside it’s too hard to tell what is going on… [Laughs]”

You’ve glooped your own pedal!

“Yeah, I think it’s something that will rebuild again, but it always just seemed out of range because some of these circuits were so complicated and so complex, and everything was built all point-to-point.

“Now we can do things with easier processes, building on machines, and so you could do way more complicated circuits, way easier. We didn’t have the ability to share these things that you would spend a month building that [now] some machine can spit out all the transistors and resistors and everything in seconds. Welcome to the future.”

Meeting Richard Fortus was important for you as a builder. He was a real early champion of your pedals. But so too was Lou Reed.

“Lou Reed, totally! I had no idea. Many people were like, ‘Lou Reed told me to get this!’ And I was like, ‘Holy shit! That’s fucking nuts.”

What is it that Lou Reed uses? You should put that on the box.

“I don’t know! Yeah, I should definitely have that on the box. Definitely.”

Are there any of your pedals that are pretty misunderstood?

“Yeah, I mean, that stuff happens kind of all the time, but also there’s pedals that we have that I don’t even understand why anybody likes them. Sometimes they’re so insane, and you hear people like, ‘That’s my sound!’ And they use it on everything. And you’re like ‘Wooft! ...not a good idea.’ But it’s all subjective.”

There are no bad tones.

“You see some dope band who play some terrible pedal all the time and that’s their sound, and that can be awesome. Things that are useful for me are not necessarily for other people.”

Exactly. And it’s so dependent on people’s rig and how they’re using it. A lot of this tone-seeking involves being at one with volume.

“Totally! And some people aren’t with that. When I play a show, I’ll have my hands on the amps, dials on everything that you could possibly control, and whatever you can do in the space. Move your amplifiers around. Take the vocal microphone and put it on the kick drum, or whatever.

“You have this chance – in this space – to mould these things and do whatever you possibly can. You need to be able to adapt your sound. Your pedals are gonna sound different in some other place, and it’s important to know how to use them, to know how to create the sounds that you want – go for it and figure that stuff out.”

Was the Echo Master vocal effect a success for Death By Audio?

“It’s freaking insane. It’s so popular. It’s so nuts. My buddy has this music festival in New York where it’s like 300 bands, 400 bands, and I saw so many shows and, seriously, more than half of the people were using that pedal. It’s just so easy to use. It just sounds so good. You could instantly sound like Suicide and that’s fucking awesome.”

The Echo Master made me think of Deicide’s debut album in which Glenn Benton stated no effects were used on the vocals. There are so many death metal vocalists who’d love this thing!

“Dude, totally! So many people. I was always surprised playing with hardcore bands and seeing all those vocalists playing through all those pedals and all those racks and stuff, and getting like the octave-down vocals. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool.'

“I thought it was just some dude without his T-shirt on, running around, yelling into a microphone, but he’s all super-processed and doing all this crazy vocal distortion shit. That made me see that more people could do it themselves and make that sound.”

That’s what makes Death By Audio so exciting. Your pedals are not for polite company. If I am looking for some tidy reverb pedal to do a job and be out of the way, I’m not going to buy it from you.

“Yeah, I think that that’s important. I don’t feel like there are people who are doing this stuff and totally into pushing those boundaries, and doing something kind of dangerous.

“That was the music that I fell in love with, people who were spitting into the crowd, and doing something fucked up, and you felt sick from eating acid or whatever. Those nights and that insanity, and that stuff was what was thrilling and exciting about music – especially at a live concert.

“I want pedals that you can turn on and it sounds different – you can instantly hear what the hell is happening, and so the artists can use that to have those moments where things jump out all of a sudden, that it increased the dynamics in their show and gave them something that they can paint with, create their own sound, and have it be different.”

And in concert, it can be different from one moment to the next. The show is where we can create those experiences and memories and reintroduce the danger in sound.

“Yeah, at least right now that stuff is so interesting and live music is just so great to go to. When you go see a band and there’s someone sweating onstage and they’re barely making it happen, and they’re hanging on for dear life, it’s bliss. It’s just awesome.”

• Rare And Deadly is out now via Dedstrange
• Find out more about Ackermann's pedal designs at Death By Audio.

Join us for a holiday weekend look back at some of MusicRadar’s greatest hits...

BEST OF MUSICRADAR: Jimmy Webb was driving through the high plains of north-west Oklahoma when the inspiration for his biggest-ever song came to him.

It was a scorching summer afternoon and as the Grammy award-winning songwriter drove, vast swathes of grassy landscape stretched for as far as the eye could see. The terrain was flat and featureless, except for telephone poles positioned at the side of the road all the way to the horizon.

In the distance, Webb noticed a man perched near the top of one of these poles. As Webb got closer he could see the man was holding a phone and talking into it. The image of this anonymous lone figure toiling in searing heat in this vast landscape stuck in his mind as he drove on.

Webb knew this utility worker was a ‘lineman’, employed to check the telephone lines. But he began to wonder if the man might actually be talking to his girlfriend far away, and what was going through his mind as he worked in total isolation out on the high plains.

“It was such a curiosity to see a human being perched up there,” he told Blender magazine in 2001, as reported by Michael Hann in the Financial Times, in “an area that’s real flat and remote, almost surreal in its boundless horizons and infinite distances”.

This image would inspire Jimmy Webb to write Wichita Lineman, a haunting, mercurial ballad that would become a massive mainstream hit for country crossover star Glen Campbell. The song, with its sweeping melancholy, is one of the most perfectly realised pop songs of all time. Almost six decades on from its creation, it has a powerful and enduring legacy.

It was February 1968 when Jimmy Webb received a phone call from Glen Campbell, a singer, songwriter and former session guitarist with the ‘Wrecking Crew’, the loose collective of gifted LA session musicians who played on hundreds of Top 40 hits in the 60s and 70s, such as Be My Baby by the Ronettes, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin by the Righteous Brothers, California Dreamin by The Mamas & the Papas and Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys.

They also played on By the Time I Get To Phoenix, a Jimmy Webb composition that was a hit for Glen Campbell in 1967. When Campbell called up Jimmy Webb in February, 1968, he was midway through recording an album and looking for his first Top Ten hit.

“Do you think you could write us another By The Time I Get to Phoenix?” Campbell asked, according to Neely Tucker at the US Library of Congress. Webb liked a challenge. “Okay,” he said. “Let me see what I can do.”

By then, Webb was living high in the Hollywood Hills, in an old mansion that he shared with numerous friends and a green baby grand piano. He was still basking in the success of Up, Up and Away, his Grammy-award winning song, recorded by the 5th Dimension.

Webb went to his piano and decided that a geographical reference in the title might work again. He recalled the image of the lone telephone worker on that long, lonely stretch of road in Oklahoma. Over the next two hours he sketched out a song and asked Campbell and De Lory to drop by his house that evening to take a listen. “It’s not finished yet,” said Webb as they sat down. “There’s no third verse.”

When Webb played them the song, Campbell was bowled over. He knew in an instant that it was a hit. “When I heard it I cried,” he told BBC Radio 4 in 2011. “...It’s just a masterfully written song.”

At its core, Wichita Lineman is a story of desolation and longing: “I hear you singing in the wire / I can hear you through the whine”. As Neely Tucker of the US Library of Congress puts it, the song “spoke to the human condition, the universal need for love. The imagery about the singing in the wires and searching in the sun for overloads was out of this world”.

The song has just sixteen lines and lasts three minutes and six seconds but it says more in that time than many authors manage in a lifetime. It also includes a couplet that author Dylan Jones, in his acclaimed 2019 book The Wichita Lineman: Searching in the Sun for the World’s Greatest Unfinished Song, calls one of the most exquisite romantic couplets in the history of song: “And I need you more than want you / And I want you for all time”.

“I was trying to express the inexpressible,” Webb told Jones in September 2019, in an interview published in the Literary Hub, “the yearning that goes beyond yearning, that goes into another dimension, when I wrote that line”.

Within days, Campbell and De Lory had assembled top session players from the Wrecking Crew in the Capitol Studios’ vast ground floor Studio A in the iconic 13-storey Capitol Tower building, just north of the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.

On drums was Jim Gordon, who had played on Pet Sounds and would go on to work with John Lennon, George Harrison, Traffic, Steely Dan and Frank Zappa.

Jimmy Webb played keyboards and on rhythm guitar was Al Casey, who had worked with artists such as Gene Vincent and Carl Perkins. Also on guitar was Glen Campbell himself.

Completing the line-up was legendary bassist Carol Kaye. As the session started, Kaye looked at the charts De Lory had handed out and felt something was missing at the beginning of the song. She suggested a six-note descending bass riff as an intro and in that moment created one of the most iconic intros of all time.

Kaye used a hard pick on medium gauge flat-wound strings and the instrument that she used was a six-string solid body Danelectro bass. The trebly tone of the Danelectro lent the track a distinctive sound and segued perfectly into the lush, sweeping strings.

Jimmy Webb discusses the impact of Kaye’s bass intro in Dylan Jones’ book. “Now that’s an intro,” says Webb. “It has a function. There’s a reason for it. On the radio, it lets people know, ‘oh, it’s that one, it’s that story that I like, I’m going to listen’.”

Kaye repeated the same bass motif throughout the song and kept things simple, as she explains in Jones’ book. “It was amazing to create a nice bass line for it, but everybody makes out that that lick I played was so good. They asked me to play a lick so I played a lick. You keep the bass line simple when the tune is especially good and add a few nuances here and there as a framework. You’re there to make the singer and not to over-shine them.”

Campbell liked the sound of the Danelectro so much that he asked Kaye if he could borrow it for the guitar solo he had in mind for the middle section that Webb had yet to deliver. It was an inspired decision.

Campbell’s simple solo, with its tremelo-soaked sound, follows the top line vocal melody, accentuating the song’s lonely, melancholic feel

One of producer Al De Lory’s contributions to the track was the sweeping violins that evoke the vast, empty space and the loneliness of the lineman. De Lory used some of Carol Kaye’s bass improvisations for the string arrangements.

The sonic icing on the cake though was Jimmy Webb’s Gulbransen electric keyboard, which emulated the sound effect of a telephone signal travelling along a wire. Webb showed Campbell what this instrument could do up at his house in the Hollywood Hills.

“Glen said ‘Here at the end I want it to sound like that record Telstar by The Tornadoes…’,” recounts Webb in Dylan Jones’ book. “...I just held two notes down and the organ automatically takes these two notes, either a fourth or a fifth, and it cycles them up and down the keyboard… it’s a very shivery, icy, almost like outer space kind of sound. Glen went crazy and said ‘We have to get that, we gotta put that on the fade’.”

The instrument was duly hauled over to Capitol Studios. “We recorded it and that’s the sound people associate with this record,” said Webb. “... it was just me holding down two notes, which was exhilarating.”

When Jimmy Webb originally showed Campbell and De Lory the song, he was convinced that it still needed a third verse. He certainly felt it wasn’t finished and said so in the note he enclosed with a tape of the song that he sent over to the studio. To emphasise his point, Webb drew a skull and crossbones on the note.

Webb heard nothing back and then a few days later, he bumped into Campbell on the set of a commercial for General Motors. Webb invited Campbell back to his house in the Hollywood Hills to hear some other songs. Webb asked about Wichita Lineman, reiterating that it wasn’t yet finished. “Well it is now,” replied Campbell, pulling an acetate of the song out of his holdall.

When he put the acetate on a turntable Webb could not believe what he was hearing. From Kaye’s intro to the sweeping strings and Campbell’s stunning vocal performance, his song sounded sublime. As verse three rolled around, the one that Webb had yet to write, he realised they had simply added a solo. “Glen had detuned a guitar down to a ‘slack’ key, Duane Eddy style, and simply played the melody note for note, which was an extreme compliment,” said Webb in Dylan Jones’ book.

Wichita Lineman was released on 26 October, 1968 and reached No. 3 in the US and No. 7 in the UK charts. In the years and decades that followed the song’s appeal has transcended genres and generations. As BBC Radio 2 put it in 2011: Wichita Lineman is “one of those rare songs that seems somehow to exist in a world of its own – not just timeless but ultimately outside of modern music”.

Bob Dylan reportedly called it “the greatest song ever written”, as noted on the cover of Dylan Jones’ book.

In 2020, Webb spoke to Allen Morrison of American Songwriter magazine about the enduring power of the song. “Billy Joel came pretty close one time when he said ‘Wichita Lineman is a simple song about an ordinary man thinking extraordinary thoughts’. That got to me; it actually brought tears to my eyes. I had never really told anybody how close to the truth that was.”

We are truly living in an age of abundance when it comes to guitar gear. We live in the golden era of guitar effects pedals, a digital era of amp modellers and hybrid designs, and with that we have all kinds of tones available at our fingertips.

We also have never been better informed about gear, about which pedal does what, and how to find the perfect overdrive pedal. And in this online information eco-system, it is only natural that some items of gear attain a certain cachet – especially when the gear in question happens to be rare. In short, there is a lot of cork-sniffing going on.

But the lesson from Khemmis’ bravura new album, a self-titled capital H, capital M heavy metal epic with an über-metal concept (complete with a full-on story arc, demons, madness and all that cool stuff), is that you don’t need to break the bank in search of a tone that inspires you.

The Denver-based doomsters’ sound could be attributed to the Orange Rockerverb tube amps that both Phil Pendergast and Ben Hutcherson play through. It could be attributed to their Dunable electric guitars, and the Bare Knuckle humbuckers they use.

But Pendergast reveals that the secret sauce in his rhythm guitar tone on the record was a pedal so cheap that you could go into a guitar store and buy a round of them for your friends. You have probably paid more for a takeaway pizza.

“My secret weapon for this record was the cheapest possible guitar pedal that you can buy, the Behringer SF300 fuzz pedal,” says Pendergast, joining MusicRadar over Zoom. And what he finds especially amusing is that he doesn’t even use the SF300 as a fuzz.

“In the Boost mode, it is the entirety of the guitar tone for my main rhythm tones on the record,” he explains.

The Behringer SF300 Super Fuzz is one of those cult classic pedals, loved for its super-cheap retail price – Pendergast's was $28 and you can literally pick one up for just over 20 quid (currently £21.30 at Thomann or $28.90 from Sweetwater) – and mocked for its plastic enclosure.

But it's pedal whose tones speak for themselves, offering players two fuzz modes and a boost, and a fuzz circuit that performs very much like a Boss FZ-2 Hyper Fuzz.

Pendergast only bought it because he wanted to sound like Jus Oborn and Liz Buckingham, then realised that, actually, this was doing a job for him.

“I mean, I bought that pedal just so I could play Electric Wizard-esque riffs, just to try it out, ‘cos it was $28 or something,” he says. “Then I just went to the Boost mode and I was like, ‘That sounds pretty damn good.’ It’s just a really good pedal for preserving the sound of the pickups that you’re using, and then letting you sweeten it a little, and you have quite a bit of control over how, because there is an EQ. There’s a low and higher mid-range tone knob on it. It just worked. I mean, it just was the right fit.”

Pendergast had been using an Xotic Effects EP Booster. That’s what we hear on 2021’s Deceiver. And there are no complaints to be had about that. It’s a single-knob boost pedal inspired by the preamp in an EP-3 tape echo machine, and as such it has become an industry standard tone-sweetener. Pendergast had plenty of options in the studio, too, and yet none could beat the Behringer.

“We had, probably, at least close to a hundred different drive pedals that we brought to the studio [laughs], and we tried a lot of them,” he says. “This was the first pedal that I tried, because I was like, ‘I think it’s gonna be this.’ And then we were like, ‘There’s no way it’s gonna be that. Let’s try other things.’ And then we were like, ‘Yeah, it's that.’

“It just worked really well for what we were going for on this record. So there’s this cheap-ass plastic fucking fuzz pedal that we’re playing – not in fuzz mode – that is all over the record and I just think it’s hilarious. That is very funny to me.”

Hutcherson used The King In Yellow, a parallel blending overdrive from Lichtlaerm Audio that’s inspired by a Tube Screamer, and the two tones mixed worked gangbusters, each offering a slightly different midrange response.

Hutcherson says there is a lesson to be had in all this, and its one that some in the doom scene needs to learn.

“I mean, gear fetishism exists in every genre,” he says. “But anything remotely doomed related – or adjacent – suffers from it in a particularly nauseating way, where people think, ‘Oh, you have to have a first-generation [Sunn] Model T. You have to have this…’”

This is not how Khemmis got their sound on any of their albums.

“Dude, some of the best tones we got in this band – until we started working with Orange – was with a Carvin X-100B and a dirt pedal in front of it, an amp that you can still get that amp for, like, 400 or 500 bucks,” explains Hutcherson. “Phil and I, at one point, we each had two! We paid 200 bucks per head. They’re incredible amps. They take pedals great. The graphic EQ is the secret.

“But at the end of the day, it’s like there is so much totally fine gear, and you hit the point of diminishing returns so quickly.”

All that time spend gear hunting could be spend practising, or better still jamming, and writing. Hutcherson and Pendergast get it; they understand the gear obsession. C’mon, Hutcherson’s Zoom mise en scène finds him sitting next to a Peavey 6505 (just because he likes having it around) and a holy grail Ampeg V4 head. But you don’t need to go overboard.

“Find gear that opens up creative possibilities for you, rather than chasing some imagined tonal perfection,” says Hutcherson. “I guess, find joy in that hunt for the new exciting piece of gear – to a reasonable extent – but a new pedal won’t make you a better player. It won’t make you a better songwriter.

“The ideal, for me, is to have gear that gets as many roadblocks out of the way between getting the ideas from up here [taps head] and then out my fingertips. Like, whatever that needs to be. It doesn’t have to be the most sought-after whatever. It just needs to be something that you play through and you feel electrified when you play it.”

Khemmis’ self-titled LP is available to preorder via Nuclear Blast, dropping 12 June. You can read more from Pendergast and Hutcherson – including about that gnarly concept – coming soon to MusicRadar.

• Buy the SF300 pedal from Thomann (UK/Europe) - £21.30
• Buy the SF300 pedal from Sweetwater (US) - $28.90

PRS Guitars and Ed Sheeran have teamed up once more to add his hollowbodied baritone signature guitar to the regular SE lineup.

You might remember the PRS SE Ed Sheeran Hollowbody I Piezo Baritone from January. This was a limited edition version of the electric guitar he had custom made for the F1 soundtrack, featuring on the video for Drive and used on Sheeran’s live performance of the track on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

It was finished in a graphic finish designed by Sheeran himself, with custom inlays on the fingerboard.

These new SE models have a similar build. You’ve still got the an electric guitar pickup pairing of PRS 85/15 “S” humbuckers, the long 27.7” scale length, the piezo pickup for acoustic guitar voicings, and once more you have the full hollowbody design with centre block to kill the feedback – only this time they are offered in PRS exclusive finishes Kaleidoscope and Pink Ombre, and in Orange Tiger Smokeburst.

Also, PRS enthusiasts will be glad to know, we have birds returning to roost on the fingerboard inlays.

This is a guitar that might confuse some. Who is it designed for? Sheeran urges us to think of it as a blank canvas. He used it for the F1 soundtrack. He plays pop music.

But the invitation is there to use it as a jazz guitar, a blues guitar, or even as a metal guitar.

“Metal guitarists will absolutely shred on this, jazz guitarists will love this, and it will be able to fit into so many great scenarios,” says Sheeran. “For all the guitar people out there who look at me as not an electric player, don’t let the person behind the guitar fool you. This is an incredible instrument and will fit in many, many guitar players’ collections.”

If the longer scale puts you off, PRS has also announced a regular 25” scale SE Hollowbody I Piezo, which similarly has the PRS x LR Baggs designed piezo system, the same pickups, and will be a similarly versatile platform.

It is a little different to the superlative SE Hollowbody II Piezo, with these new models featuring a carved top and a “slimmer, contoured ‘flatback’ design” on the player’s side.

“This guitar is a fantastic example of what happens when you have real partnerships with 100 per cent of the group like-minded and on a quest to do something special,” says Jack Higginbotham, COO, PRS Guitars. “Everyone involved at every level has the goal to deliver to musicians an experience that we would want as a player.

“We are trying to give somebody a thing that we would want to get. It’s all about what’s best for the instrument and the player. That’s a big reason why our partnership with LR Baggs is working,”

The release of these two electrics is joined by a refresh of the SE guitar amps, with PRS offering the Sonzera 20 combo and HDRX 20 amps, and the matching HDRX 1x12 cabinet, in limited edition new coverings, Indigo, with wheat grill cloth, and Black Paisley.

The PRS SE Ed Sheeran Hollowbody I Piezo Baritone is priced £1,499/$1,499. The SE Hollowbody I Piezo is priced £1,449/$1,449. For more details, head over to PRS Guitars.

Misha Mansoor and Jackson have unveiled the latest evolution of his Juggernaut signature guitar series and the Periphery riffer-in-chief has taken the concept to its logical conclusion with an 8-string monster equipped with an EverTune bridge.

A limited edition drop, the Pro Plus Series Misha Mansoor Juggernaut ET8 arrives in a Nardo Gray finish, and makes history in being the first Jackson 8-string to be equipped with an Evertune, the bridge that does not go out of tune.

Mansoor has teased that something like this might be in the offing. For some time now, he has played a Custom Shop 8-string electric guitar with an Evertune. Speaking to MusicRadar this time last year, he explained the thinking behind it.

“Oh! We are not supposed to know about that or talk about that!” he said. “No comment! [Laughs] That was the only thing I didn’t have, an EverTune eight-string. It’s just a very useful tool to have. I have a Custom Shop one that I use live. It allows me to dig into the guitar a bit more... It does allow me to have a little more fun onstage.”

It also allows Mansoor to get really bang-on intonation and tuning in the studio, and when playing in a band with three guitarists, that matters.

“It is [about] picking the right guitar for the part,” he explained. “If you feel like it’s more important for that part to be really in tune, we can reach for the EverTune. If the tuning stability doesn’t matter quite as much and we want the tone, we go for the regular bridge in the studio. Sometimes we do both and A/B them to see if one sounds better than the other.”

The 8-string Juggernaut might take you way down into those lower registers but it is still recognisably a Juggernaut. It has the same aerodynamic silhouette, with a 4x4 arrowhead headstock. It has a 27” scale, a solid poplar body and bolt-on caramelised maple neck. Mansoor likes his fingerboards flat. This ebony fingerboard as a 20” radius, and seats 24 stainless steel frets.

We’ve got all the Pro Plus pro touches such as the rolled edges on the fingerboard, the oiled finish on the neck and the Luminlay side dot markers, plus the heel-mounted truss rod adjustment wheel for making set-up changes on the fly. Mansoor says it has been a long time coming.

“I’m so excited to finally have an eight-string signature model, and it’s a special one, too,” he says. “We have been working on the design for a while now, and I think the Evertune was the final piece of the puzzle. Periphery uses eight strings quite a bit, and both live and in the studio, the Evertune has made it so I can focus more on my performance and tone and let the bridge handle the tuning stability.”

You also have a lot of onboard tone-shaping capabilities. As per previous Juggernauts, we have a pair of Mansoor’s signature Jackson humbuckers, both left uncovered, and here they are hooked up to a five-position blade selector switch, volume and tone, with a push/pull on the tone pot for alternate voicings.

The Juggernaut ET8 ships with Jackson-branded locking tuners and Dunlop dual-locking buttons so your guitar strap won’t let it fall and hit the ground, and it is available now, priced £1,699/$1,899.

For more details, head over to Jackson.

Just like George Lucas, Rush had their heads in “a galaxy, far, far away” in 1976 as they put together a sci-fi epic that would change their lives.

But while Lucas turned the clock back to a distant past, the Canadian prog-trio were imagining a dystopian future in the year 2112. All roads led to Megadon.

At that stage of their career, Rush badly needed a hit. They needed something, anything – some gift from the cosmos to reverse their fortunes. And in 2112 they had something.

Its predecessor, 1975’s Caress Of Steel, was an audacious statement of intent. Rush’s progressive mores were coming to the fore – not least on The Fountain of Lamneth, which occupied the entirety of Side B.

In hindsight, the critical consensus says that Caress Of Steel was the sound of Rush stretching their wings musically and flying a little too close to the sun. They had the ambition but hadn’t quite shed their influences and become themselves. These things take time.

The touring cycle brought forth the unedifying prospect of total failure, though not without a little gallows humour. Rush called it the ‘Down the Tubes Tour’ and even had it printed on the passes.

Guitarist Alex Lifeson admits he was considering strapping on his tool belt and becoming a regular working man again.

“That was a very difficult tour. We were already extremely in debt, and it was just getting worse and worse,” said Lifeson, speaking to Guitar World in 2013. “The crowds were getting smaller and there didn’t seem to be much interest in the album at the time. Everybody around was concerned about what the future was going to be. So there was a lot of reflection. I thought, Well, you know, I guess I could be a plumber again if I had to…”

But that is not how this story ends. Rush had ideas and they were letting them cook night after night on tour, writing whenever they could.

Drummer and chief lyricist Neil Peart always had something stirring in his brilliant mind, and as the tour rolled on, the songs rolled out – the concept for 2112 was taking shape. And the concept was pretty far out.

Peart had been reading a lot of Ayn Rand. With its neo-Dark Ages theme, Rand’s 1938 novella, Anthem, seemed to have catalysed something brilliant in his mind.

“As the record was coming together we all truly were very excited about it,” Lifeson told Guitar World. “I don’t know if we thought we had quite what we ended up with, but we did feel it was something special.”

The 20-minute title track, partitioned into seven movements, imagines a dystopian future that had been roiled by interplanetary warfare.

The Red Star of the Solar Federation now rules a union of planets, and by the time you stick the needle down on the album there is peace under the iron grip of totalitarian rule. The Priests of the Temples of Syrinx rule every aspect of life in the city of Megadon. All art is created by the temple.

The story’s anonymous hero is about to make a discovery that changes all that. Speaking to MusicRadar in 2016, bassist/frontman Geddy Lee explained how the narrative – and the music – flowed, once the Overture, the last piece of music to be written, welcomed us into this world.

“The Temples Of Syrinx sets the scene, because 2112 is about a totalitarian society that controls everything about your life, including the music that you hear,” said Lee. “It manufactures it all, so that’s what we wanted to say with this track. It sets up the hierarchy in this futuristic world that we’ve arrived in.

“Discovery is where the hero of the story finds a device in a cave. It’s a guitar, but he doesn’t know it because they don’t exist in his time period. So he picks it up and realises that it’s a device that can make music and create sounds. Previous to that point, everything he’d ever heard had been provided to him by the people that run his world.”

And this is just three songs/movements in...

“And the meek shall inherit the earth”

News that Rush were making a high-concept prog record was not received with the popping of champagne corks at the record label. It was widely reported that the band’s long-time producer Terry “Broon” Brown and their manager, Ray Danniels, were engaged in the urgent business of managing expectations as the record was being made.

Fast-forward 50 years and Geddy Lee is sitting in a London hotel with MusicRadar and laughing at the memory.

“We told the record company people to back off,” says Lee. “They didn’t understand that record. They didn’t understand Caress Of Steel, but Caress Of Steel didn’t break through because it was ultimately a record of experiments, not all successful. We managed somehow to correct that with 2112, and make a more cohesive, powerful statement.”

It says a lot of Rush’s confidence in themselves and the material that they doubled-down on those experiments. This was just the kind of creative derring-do that generations of Rush fans were weaned on. The record company sat back and waited. What else could they do? “And so they said, ‘Well, we don’t know what it is you’re doing, but just fucking keep doing it!” says Lee.

It didn’t take long. The album was written over six months on the road, workshopped at soundchecks, and so by the time they entered the studio they were well prepared. The songs were all but done. There was no time to waste. There was no money to waste. The album was all but done in a month, much of it recorded live in the room.

Lifeson’s main guitar was his Gibson ES-335 but he had borrowed a Fender Stratocaster and a Gibson Hummingbird for the sessions. Amps were his usual complement of Marshall heads plus a Fender Twin. He had a Tom Oberheim-designed Maestro Phase Shifter, an Echoplex tape echo, and a Dunlop Cry Baby wah pedal. All classic Rush gear.

There was a weird kind of Stanislavski method to the madness – can actually hear Lifeson tuning up his Strat at the beginning of Discovery, just as the anonymous hero of 2112 finds his guitar in the story.

Lee played his 4001 Rickenbacker bass guitar through Ampeg or Sunn amps. Hugh Syme provided the cover art; he also played on the record, too. Syme operated the ARP Odyssey synthesizer on the title track, and returned to play Mellotron on Side B’s Tears.

“This song marked the first time we used a Mellotron,” said Lee. “The gentleman that does all our album covers is called Hugh Syme, and it’s actually him playing Mellotron here.

“Tears is a romantic ballad to give the album even more variety and depth. Mellotrons are very unique-sounding; they sound sorta electric, but also kinda stringy, they have this real resin-y sound to them, which is very cool and unique to that period.”

With Side A housing 2112, Rush put together five tracks for Side B, all with a very different vibe. “We made it so you’d flip the record over and then you’ve got five individual songs that are stand-alone,” recalled Lee. “Back in the day of vinyl, it was very normal to have a different experience on side two.”

Passage To Bangkok kicks it off with a paean to smoking pot, written as a “travelogue” to the various terroirs of marijuana cultivation across the world. “It’s sort of comic relief in that sense,” said Lee. “All kinds of places get mentioned – the first stop is in Bogota in Colombia then you’re in Bangkok, Thailand.”

It could also be taken as a commentary on the writing and recording process. Rush were no strangers to the leaf. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2016, Lifeson testified to its inspirational properties in the studio. Rush were having the time of their lives making the record.

“When we worked on Discovery, I think it was honey oil [marijuana] that was around at the time, so that was a wonderful inspiration,” said Lifeson. “And I do remember working late nights ’til six or seven in the morning with our feet up on the console and suddenly all of us waking up to the flapping of the reel going around and around on the tape machine. It was just the feeling of being in a wonderful place.”

The Twilight Zone came together late. They had room for one more song and wrote it in the studio as a tribute to the TV show. Apart from Lessons, which was written completely by Lifeson, and Tears, written by Lee, all the lyrics came from Peart’s notebook and it is a heroic achievement of world-building with rock music.

2112 inspired many to follow in Rush’s footsteps. Dream Theater’s John Petrucci was one of them.

“Beyond his incredible drumming, there’s Neil Peart as a lyricist. I would say he’s been the biggest influence on me in that respect,” he told MusicRadar in 2019. “The way the tale evolves is astonishing, using the guitar as an actual part of the story – that really drew me in. To this day, 2112 is one of the greatest albums I’ve ever heard.”

How Lifeson plays guitar was also not lost on Petrucci. He has studied it closely, and like all responsible artists has borrowed/stolen where appropriate.

“I love Alex’s choices, the way he plays power chords with open strings on top,” said Petrucci. “And when you combine that with the way he uses the chorus effect – to this day, I apply all of this information to my own style.”

If there is a secret to Rush’s sound it can surely be found on 2112. It could be the rosetta stone for understanding everything; how they transform a rock song into a work of sci-fi theatre; how play what Steve Vai likes to call “high-information music” and yet present it as digestible and human, shifting through styles as though you’ve turned the dial on the radio.

The band themselves were a little split on where 2112 stands in their catalogue. Peart thought Moving Pictures was the album on which Rush truly found their sound. Lifeson could see that, but argued 2112 was the one

“Really for me it was on 2112 that I felt that we were becoming us,” he told Guitarist in 2010. “Our influences were less obvious and we were thinking in our own terms.”

Would Lee change anything about it now? He’s not sure.

“If I was gonna change anything in 2112, I would change some of the, y’know, the whole record goes up and down and up and down,” he says. “I maybe wouldn’t have so many down, and more ups, but other than that, it’s kind of a fool’s errand to try to reimagine a record that was made so long ago.”

It was written, recorded and released 50 years ago and yet 2112 retains its fizz. It is animated by the electric possibilities of a band just hitting its straps, the weight of a bleak future imagined, and the release after you turn the record over.

Great recordings have a strange magic; they store the energy from the room like a battery. They build a world that the audience will return to in search of answers.

“Rush are my biggest influence and favourite band,” said Petrucci. “Just the idea of this concept album, of a story being told and songs as vehicles to tell the story – it’s unbelievable. I would get lost in this album. I wanted to know what they were talking about. ‘Who’s this guy? What’s happening?’ It took you to another world.”

And it got Rush back in the game; 2112 was proof of concept that their musical adventurism applied to Peart’s novelistic lyrics could reach a wider audience. It took them to another level, laying the foundations for the experiments in synthesizers to come.

From Megadon, Rush beat a path to Xanadu, road high upon Lifeson’s fever dream en route to La Villa Strangiato.

Having proved the record label wrong, Rush would have the confidence to dream bigger, to close 1977’s A Farewell To Kings with sci-fi epic that is concluded on the opening track to 1978’s Hemispheres. Tune in for the next thrilling instalment…

Rush’s concepts would become too big for one record. Prog legend status was unlocked.

This was what 2112 did for them – multi-album storytelling arcs, freedom, longevity. Attention all planets of the Solar Federation, Rush have assumed control, and there was no letting go.

“There would not be Rush, a long history of Rush, without that record, so I owe sort of everything to it,” says Lee. “It was the record that changed our lives. It was the record that gave us, won us freedom of creative expression, or, shall I say, reinforced our right to creative freedom.”

In late 1993, Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash was mentally and physically exhausted after the band finally got to the end of a tour that had lasted for more than two whole years.

He also feared that his relationship with singer Axl Rose was broken beyond repair.

And in that moment of crisis, Slash turned to man who knew pretty much everything there is to know about life in a famous rock ’n’ roll band with a larger than life singer.

In a 2004 interview with MOJO magazine, Slash recalled how he had returned home to Los Angeles in July 1993 after Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion tour had ended with two shows at the River Plate Stadium in Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires.

No matter how bad Slash was feeling after those two years on the road, he was at least in better shape than bassist Duff McKagan, who travelled to his hometown of Seattle after the tour and promptly had a near-fatal medical emergency when his pancreas exploded.

But Slash was not in a good place mentally. Most of all, he felt disconnected from Axl Rose, who had become increasingly isolated from the rest of the band.

Slash needed some help in dealing with it all, and that help came when he was invited to dinner in LA with The Rolling Stones’ guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood.

Slash recalled to MOJO: “The Stones were recording the Voodoo Lounge record up at [producer] Don Was’s house. Ronnie and Keith and their wives and myself and my wife at the time all went down to a very famous Beverly Hills restaurant that all the movie stars loved to be seen at.

“I was sitting at the bar with Keith and we were talking, funnily enough, about drugs. Then he asked me what I was doing with Guns, and I told him about the situation with Axl. And Keith said, ‘You never leave’. I thought a lot about what he said.”

Slash continued: “One of the things about Keith that I love so much is that he hangs in there – thick or thin, he hangs in there. He’s a hero to me because he’s one of the few people that is completely un-bendable when it comes to what it is that he does, so I look up to him.

“And so when he said that to me, I was like, ‘Yeah, fuck.’ So I got the wherewithal to be able to go back to rehearsal the next day with a fresh attitude. That kept me in there for as long as humanly possible until it finally got to a point where it’s not gonna go anywhere.”

He went on: “I don’t know what relationship Keith and Mick have, or fucking Joe and Steven from Aerosmith have, or any of the other lead singers and lead guitarists, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. All these bands I grew up listening to. The one thing they all seemed to have in common, though, is the singer wants to do his thing.”

He claimed: “I was dealing with somebody who didn’t want to do anything in particular except to keep fucking dragging the ship down. So finally I did leave and I talked to Keith later after that, and he said, ‘There was nothing you could fucking do.’”

It was in 1996 that Slash’s exit from Guns N’ Roses was confirmed, but in that 2004 interview with MOJO he said that his decision to leave the band was made in 1994. Coincidentally, this happened as Guns N’ Roses were recording a version of a classic Rolling Stones song, Sympathy For The Devil, for the soundtrack to the movie Interview With The Vampire.

Slash told MOJO: “Axl was killing us – slowly but surely. I’d been depressed, but I used to drown that with alcohol and keep going.”

He referred to the departure of the band’s rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin in 1991.

“Even after Izzy left, we patched it up and kept it going. But when we were trying to get this record [Sympathy For The Devil] made, the whole process was just such hell.

“Axl wouldn’t show up at the studio until two or three o’clock in the morning. The band was spinning its wheels, and there was no way to get it back on track.”

Slash said of his decision to leave Guns N’ Roses: “Everybody thought I was nuts, but I knew what I had to do. And I can honestly say it was one of the smartest decisions of my whole fucking adult life.”

12 years after that interview, Slash was reunited with Rose and Duff McKagan as Guns N’ Roses embarked on their wryly titled Not In This Lifetime tour.

It’s been reported that Pete Townshend has sold his image rights, including that of his name to a group called Primary Wave. It also, according to the Variety, includes “certain music rights.”

The details of the deal have yet to be confirmed, but it looks like Spirit Music, who bought Townshend’s publishing rights in 2017 for over $100 million, no longer holds the rights to the likes of My Generation, Won’t Get Fooled Again et al. Variety suggests these are all part of the Primary Wave deal.

The idea, it seems, is to continue to mine the Townshend back catalogue for the archival releases, synchs, and various creative projects that the Who guitarist is so fond of. The band’s two concept albums, Tommy and Quadrophenia, have been re-interpreted many times over the years, as films, musicals and even last year, in the case of the latter, a ballet.

In a statement, Townshend said: “Moving forward with my creative and performative work with Primary Wave, at this time of my life when most creatives might be slowing down, is a joy for me. Their entire team exhibits an energy that is truly stimulating. Challenging too. I need that.”

He also made clear that this creative work will continue to include The Who: “Then there is Roger (Daltrey) and all my friends and colleagues in and around The Who. We are always trying to come up with SOMETHING special, and God Willing will continue to do that, hoping one day we can astound you the way we used to.”

“I have always been something of an ex-art student, and that means my work spans a lot of genres. Primary Wave span even more genres than I do, and I know we will have a lot of fun working together. Our first few meetings have been wonderfully inspiring moments of shared adventure.”

Adam Lowenberg, Primary Wave’s chief marketing officer, added in their own statement. “There is no rock music without the genius of Pete Townshend. An artist, innovator and songwriter who stands alone in his own category of icon and legend. We are extremely honoured to partner with Pete on his future endeavours.”

Townshend turns 81 next week. Last year’s tour of North America was supposed to be The Who’s last in that territory, but that, of course, doesn’t preclude one-offs or indeed further dates in Europe. At the very least, the Primary Wave deal suggests that even after more than 60 years there won’t be any let-up in Who-related activity any time soon.

We’ve had the release of the Noel Gallagher signature guitars, from Gibson and Epiphone alike. There have been the auctions, the 1960 ES-335 that Liam smashed when Oasis split in 2009, the ‘Be Here Now’ Les Paul Florentine, etc. Now Gallagher tone obsessives have the opportunity to complete the next part of the jigsaw as the Chief’s pedalboards have gone up for sale.

The ‘boards were put together by touring gear and guitar effects guru Mike Hill, one of which was featured on That Pedal Show in 2023, and are on sale from Denmark Street Guitars, in London.

There are three ‘boards in total. Each comes with a certificate of authenticity and is road-ready, shipping in its own flight case. Prices and more details are available upon enquiry. There will be some speculation as to what is on these ‘boards.

Would Gallagher to be willing to part with his SIB Echodrive, the tube-driven holy grail overdrive pedaldesigned by Rick Hamel that sells for megabucks online, if, and only if, you could ever find it?

Well, take a close look at the Instagram post from Denmark Street Guitars [below]. It would seem that the answer to this question is yes (and is probably explained by the fact that Gallagher has no doubt got some spares).

For the longest time, Gallagher never used many pedals. Speaking to That Pedal Show, he said that, in the beginning, Oasis was just the guitar, the amps and a Roland Space Echo tape delay.

But over the years, both with Oasis and High Flying Birds, Gallaghe caught the pedal bug, even if he isn’t completely sure of the science behind them.

“I never, ever used a compressor with Oasis, ever,” he said. “I didn’t know what… I still don’t know what they do…”

But nonetheless, the Keeley Compressor is on his ‘board (and remained on his touring ‘board for the Oasis reunion shows). Also, there are some pedals that Gallagher really loves. His ‘That Pedal Show’ ‘board includes some of his favourites.

“That Page [by] Kingsley boost is one of the best pedals in the history of music,” he says. “It has been on everything I have ever recorded since the day it came out.”

Again, prices are TBC, but for a Gallagher-owned pedalboard, featuring a modern classic from Kingsley Amplification that sells for over 750 bucks online, don’t expect this to be a budget purchase.

The gourmet picks continue with a Pete Cornish Soft Sustain (for live solos), but there are some familiar favourites. There is no need to spend 750 bucks for a great digital delay pedal when the Boss DD-3 is around (this and a Boss guitar tuner “on a piece of plywood” was his pedalboard for Knebworth). Elsewhere, there’s a Boss GE-7 Equalizer, a Strymon TimeLine, and a four-button pedal switcher.

You’ll notice that this particular ‘board isn’t one of those great acts of real estate management in which every square millimetre of space has been used. This is by design.

“It’s very spread out. I’ll admit it’s not very compact,” said Gallagher. “And that’s because I just don’t want to be thinking about it. I don’t want to be looking and playing and singing at the same time.”

To enquire, head over to Denmark Street Guitars or email justin@londonvintageguitars.com.

If you’re on a budget and you’ve got a gig coming up this weekend at Knebworth or whatever, then it should reassure you to know that you can pick up a piece of plywood, some pedalboard tape, a Boss TU-3 Chromatic Tuner and DD-3 Digital Delay for just over 100 bucks secondhand.

Marshall has unveiled a special commemorative collection to celebrate Jimi Hendrix plugging into its guitar amps and changing the course of music history – and the fortunes of the brand itself.

The Hendrix 60th Anniversary Collection comprises a hand-wired 1969 JMH Super Lead-style tube amp head, partnered with a matching hand-wired 4x12, featuring a commemorative badge and a black-and-purple cosmic swirl finish, to which you can put a matching limited run Dunlop Fuzz Face fuzz pedal in front of and have at it.

The collection also includes a special cosmic purple swirl Hendrix signature edition Acton III Bluetooth speaker.

“We built the amps, Hendrix made them scream,” says Marshall. “From the moment Hendrix plugged into a Marshall guitar amplifier in ’66, they became an unstoppable creative force.”

Look at any archive footage of Hendrix – at Woodstock, Maui, Monterey, Atlanta – and behind him would be a this black tower, the Marshall Super Lead head sitting on a pair of 4x12 speaker cabinets.

It is an indelible image, and it helped put Marshall on the map.

“Jimi was a formidable musician, a real force of nature,” says Terry Marshall, co-founder, Marshall Amplification. “He took everything to a new level and carried everybody with him. When he played, it was an emotional time for everybody because everyone was thinking, if he can do it, I could maybe do it.”

Seeing Hendrix inspired new players to pick up the electric guitar. Seeing Hendrix with banks of Marshall stacks behind him, well, that made players want a Marshall, and Terry Marshall believes there can be no questioning how important Hendrix was to the Marshall story.

“It was a really special time for us all and there’s no doubt that we grew with him and his fame, it was a natural tie-up,” he says. “The rest is history as they say.”

The tones (and the volume) coming out of the 1959 JMH and its matching speaker will be familiar. It is built in the same spirit as the original Super Leads that Hendrix et al played back in the day. But it looks very different.

The black-and-purple swirl on the control panel and matching grill cloth speak to Hendrix’s psychedelic sound (and his love of psychedelics). The LED even illuminates purple.

“From his fashion to his lyrics and of course, his music, there are so many different stories we could tell when it comes to Hendrix,” says Emma Rydahl, senior industrial designer, Marshall Group. “We started with materials and pattern exploration, looking at different fabrics and running test prints with a psychedelic track in mind. We spent a lot of time adjusting the final design to get it just right across the whole collection.”

The Acton III speaker, which is officially available to order from 14 May, priced $299, even has a plush crushed velvet covering – it's like they made it out of an old jacket from Jimi Hendrix's wardrobe.

The rest of the Hendrix 60th Anniversary Collection is available to now, with the half-stack and Fuzz Face bundle priced $4,999. See Marshall for more details.

Jared James Nichols wasn’t looking for a new guitar amp but the amp found him anyway. A longtime endorsee of Blackstar, with whom he had worked on a range of signature amps, he had no complaints.

“The thing with the Blackstar stuff is there’s literally no – how do I say this right? There’s no drama,” says Nichols. “No, like, ‘Oh, I’m going to leave!’ I’ve had an amazing relationship with Blackstar for almost 15 years, which is crazy.

“It’s crazy to say! And those guys, before I was doing any touring, they were letting me play amps, and they were letting me borrow stuff, and then eventually giving me amps. So, like, my whole tone, truly, was built with these Blackstars.”

And yet, lately, Nichols had been curious. He had been curious about Marshall amps. He felt there was “a taboo” about even speaking about this with friends. Blackstar, after all, was founded by Marshall alumni. Maybe it felt like cheating. But he couldn’t escape the fact that when presented with a vintage Marshall tube amp – specifically a non-master volume (NMV) 100-watt 1959 Super Lead ‘Plexi’ that he used alongside its contemporary descendants to record his latest studio album, Louder Than Fate – it brought out something in this playing that he hadn’t fully heard before.

“I was trying other things, and in my heart, every time I would plug into a Plexi, I’d be like, ‘God, man, this is just that thing,’” he says. “Because, as a fingerstyle player, and as someone that plays this dynamic range, I could always hear my fingers with a Plexi. No matter if I put on a Tube Screamer, or a Klon, or a wah, or a fuzz, I could still hear my fingers under it.”

It also got him thinking about electric guitar tone in 2026, when there are so many options available to us, many of which are great, and this great agglomeration of stuff, transparent this, high-gain that, multi-channels with different modes, onboard cab sims and MIDI-controllable electric toothbrushes. It all gets a bit much.

“In my gut, I kept going back to these old, non-master volume Marshalls, because there’s just something so pure, and they’re so raw,” says Nichols.

And they really are so raw and so gnarly. These amps were originally designed as public address systems. The volume is… Well, let’s just say, the vintage Plexi is not for everyone. They are a challenge.

“They’re almost scary in a way to a lot of players, because it’s like riding a fucking bronco, man! It’s like you really have to harness this amp,” says Nichols, who gets noticeably louder when talking about the Plexi. “It’s not an easy amp to just plug into and be like, ‘Oh yeah!’ It’s bone clean, and then it’s like you have to figure out how to almost be at one with the amp in order to make it really work.”

Amps like that are like an MRI scan. Nichols found the Plexi articulated every detail in his playing, good and bad.

“When I started to really dig into it – like I said, when I got that ’68 – I just noticed that something changed in me as a player,” he says. “Something was being a little more honest, something was not shying away from any note I was playing – it wasn’t shying away [from anything]. Even when I’d hit something wrong, I’d be like, ‘Oof!’

“Even when I’m simply hitting a single note line with the band, it’s just the physicality of it and the weight of the tone. It does something to me psychologically as a player where it puts me somewhere else. When I’m playing through these amps, I can’t lie, because I always have to deliver, because it’s not like I have this über-delay setting, or, there’s this built-in reverb.”

Such amps reward expert players and punish sloppiness. Not all are like that. There are some amps – and every experienced player will have a preference – that flatter your playing, with a natural compression and a feel that is forgiving. A little spring reverb can be the elixir you need, a way of letting a bit of air into your playing. There is nothing wrong with that.

It was only when Nichols went in for a session with Joe Bonamassa that he realised he might have been hiding behind his amp, and he was paying the price.

“With the Blackstars, man, I got so used to, playing with so much reverb and so much compression,” he says. “I remember, one time I was playing – and I was playing with Bonamassa – and he plugged in, and he was playing a Dumble-modded Twin, but he just plugged it in, and he hit a low E, he went ‘BONK!’ And he went, ‘WAH WAH WAH’. And then I hit something, and it was almost like his amp was punching me in the face, and it felt like mine was in the corner in the back.”

So, Nichols bit the bullet. He made the change. And when he rocked up to record Louder Than Fate under the watchful eye of producer Jay Ruston, he had the ’68 Plexi, and he got to work, and it was a learning curve.

There is a golden rule of recording guitars in the studio that small amps are worth their weight in gold. Turn them up, stick a good microphone in front of them and it can be the sound that unlocks the session. You will find a Fender Champ in every recording facility for this very reason.

Nichols was recording an album titled Louder Than Fate. He went in the other direction.

“Ooh, man! [Laughs] It’s funny. I’m smiling and I’m laughing because I’m thinking about the absolute domination of big amps I used,” he says. “It was so insane. Okay, so here’s the thing. I’m with you; a Champ, a Supro, a Deluxe, a little Tweed, whatever it is, you turn those things up, man! You put a good compressor on in the studio – even live, man – and there’s nothing you can’t do with them. They’re just incredible amps, right?

“But what I noticed, especially for this record, was I had this ’68 Marshall Plexi alongside these newer Marshall Modified Super Lead Plexis. Dude, those are my jam, man. Those are the amps. Out of all the new stuff that I was able to try – and Marshall’s been amazing letting me try all this different stuff, a lot of great stuff – what hit me right away was those modified Plexis. So a lot of this record, you hear a ’68 and these Modified Plexis.”

There are a few key differences between the original late ‘60s vintage tube head Nichols was plugging into and their modern counterparts. The new models ship from the the factory with Clip and Bright switches.

The biggest difference, however, is the addition of the master volume. Nichols’ ’68 belongs to a more innocent time, the NMV era, and it was a real grizzly bear in the studio. They had to take two of the power tubes out the back to run it at 50-watts and it was still, to use a technical term, “insanely loud”.

“I mean, all the amps I used were huge, 100-watters, man!” says Nichols. “We had to kick the ’68 down because it was so rowdy, bro. It was so rowdy! We had it in a room, like, in a booth, and it was shaking the walls so bad that you were able to hear it in the tracking, and I was like, ‘This amp is a monster.’”

This is the kind of anecdote that will have digital advocates showing up in the comments, reasoning – not unreasonably – that the amp modeller can put a choice of tube amp tones at your feet and it won’t take the paint off the walls. Nichols gets that. Totally.

But he’s looking for a very particular experience. He’s like a storm chaser hauling ass in a pickup across an Oklahoma highway in pursuit of a twister.

He believes there’s something magical, quasi-epicurean from all this volume

“There’s something really, really beautiful that happens – especially when you’re using unpotted pickups, old-school stuff guitar-wise,” he says. “And I’m not saying just vintage guitars, but when you have volume, and you have these pickups that are reacting to what’s coming out of the speaker that’s hitting you.

“Obviously, we know there’s this whole debate of digital versus tubes. The thing that I feel is the digital cannot produce in a certain way is that power of a tube amp absolutely screaming through a speaker, just hitting you and hitting your guitar. And in turn, that’s making these guitars react and do different harmonic stuff that they wouldn’t do at a lower volume – or with a smaller amp. A lot of these tones I’m getting, and these overtones, did come from the amp.”

And that takes us back to why Nichols made the switch and nailed his colours to the Marshall mast.

“When I hit these Marshalls, man, it just literally gets me closer to the sun, if that makes sense,” he says. “It’s closer to the sounds that literally keep me up at night, which is, honestly, it’s exactly where I want to be.”

And even in this day and age, of sound limits onstage, in-ear monitors, all that pro audio stuff, Nichols argues that the old-school ways – an amp that turns 70 in a couple of years – still has a place in the modern rock player’s backline, and it still has the power to make guitar playing an act of transcendence.

“I played a Plexi onstage with the band. I’d already been playing it in the studio. I’d already had all of this knowledge of the way it was going to sound, so there was no surprises,” says Nichols. “And I’m telling you, man, I felt like I was levitating off the ground, because I was just going for stuff. I felt like I was in Cream in 1968. Like, the tone was so raw, and I just said, ‘This is exactly where I want to be. And sometimes, what’s the phrase? The heart wants what it wants. That’s what I wanted.”

Louder Than Fate is available to preorder, shipping 5 June via Frontiers. You can read more from Nichols coming soon to MusicRadar.

Jared James Nichols has announced that he as officially joined the likes of Slash, Billie Joe Armstrong and Yngwie Malmsteen on the Marshall artist roster.

There had been rumours that the burly manger of electric guitar strings, the resurrector of vintage Gibson Les Pauls, had made the switch. When photos emerged of Nichols with the unmistakable sight of the gold-panelled tube amps behind him, video footage on social media too, the affable blues guitar maestro, took to his Instagram to confirm the news was true.

“Over the past 24 hours I’ve received hundreds of messages about my current amplifier situation,” wrote Nichols. “So yes, it’s official: I’ve made the move to Marshall amps.”

Nichols had hitherto been a long-time endorsee of Blackstar Amplification, developing a range of signature guitar amps with the British amp company, including the JJN-20RH MkII tube head and matching cabinet in racing green, and a combo amp version, then a signature JJN 3 practice amp, and the daddy of them all, the St James JJN50H, a 5o-watt head complete with Blues Power boost circuit.

Blackstar, which was launched in March 2007 at Musikmesse Frankfurt by alumni of Marshall amps, had been providing Nichols’ backline for over 14 years. And Nichols has always relied on the amp to be doing a lot of work. He’d close mic a Blackstar Artist 100, stick a Klon in front of it, add a little tape delay from an Echoplex and have at it.

Clearly, he felt the need for a change – or was it all that vintage gear he has been playing through lately that has turned his head

“Simply put, my heart beats for the roar of a cranked Plexi and a Gibson guitar,” he explained. “It just had to be.”

Time will tell whether Marshall is spec’ing him up a signature amp – but could there be a new signature guitar on the way from Gibson? A teaser video on Instagram suggests we might know the answer to that question on the 16th June. If it's not a guitar, it's going to be something coming soon to GibsonTV.

What we can say for sure is that Nichols’ new album, Louder Than Fate, will be out 5 June via Frontiers, and there are some smoking tones on it.

We’ll soon find out what he was playing through in the studio for, but judging by the video for Running Out, he’s got some sweet vintage Gibson electric guitars on the album. That three-humbucker Les Paul Custom with the Bigsby is a beaut.

And still, he’s ripping on them with no guitar picks. Nichols describes his fingerstyle approach – his brawny, ursine style – as akin to being a boxer.

“I came from that school of Leslie West, Stevie Ray Vaughan, early Clapton, all of that where it was very grab-you-by-the-throat guitar playing,” he said, speaking to MusicRadar in 2021.

In other words, it's going to get physical. Little wonder he took the Klon Centaur off his pedalboard.

Julian Lage has announced his first ever guitar masterclass. The jazz guitar maestro has assembled a faculty, booked out the Wilson Center in Brookfield, Wisconsin, for 19 to 23 August, and has extended the invite to players looking to take a deep dive into the instrument.

Lage will be joined by folk and bluegrass guitar phenom Chris Eldridge of the Punch Brothers, progressive fusion and jazz ace Tim Miller, his longstanding collaborator and bass player Jorge Roeder, the songwriter/producer Margaret Glaspy (who is Lage’s wife), and the esteemed drummer, percussionist and teacher Rudy Royston (Bill Frisell/David Gilmore).

Coming from Lage, expect this to be a little different to your typical masterclass. This is the same Julian Lage who had some time to kill in Switzerland and thought he would devote a week to practising. He bought a medical stethoscope and attached it to his Telecaster so he could hear everything.

“I had to play really quiet because stethoscopes are designed to pick up your heartbeat through your muscles, tissue, blood and everything,” he said, speaking to MusicRadar in 2021. “But I wanted to hear what that under a microscope thing was like and it was so revealing. I could only handle it for about a day and then thought, ‘This is abusive!’”

This coming masterclass was inspired by some of the teaching Lage has received in guitar. He is a Berklee grad, and studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

“It has long been my dream to present a guitar masterclass in the spirit of the lineage of teachers and teachings I feel so fortunate to have grown up with,” says Lage. “At their core, these traditions are based on the idea of taking things slowly, incrementally, over as long a period of time as needed, but always with a sense of urgency – focusing and cultivating skill sets that ground us in order to liberate us as artists and storytellers.”

That skill set goes beyond chord vocabulary and learning a few licks, though Lage, no doubt, will have some of those to share. Lage might be known as a jazz player but the masterclass welcomes players of all stripes, and it will be a collaborative learning experience, with lectures complemented by small, intimate performances and various group sessions.

“Through deep listening, learning, sharing, and playing, we are able to experience a sense of connection and place within this wonderful community of artists,” says Lage.

Players can get passes to the masterclass only, a package which includes commemorative merch plus daily lunch and dinner, or the with hotel and transport included. This comprises four-nights at the Sheraton Milwaukee Brookfield Hotel, breakfast, lunch and dinner, $100 Uber credit and transfers between the hotel and venue.

By the end of it, you might not just be a better player, you may well have learned how to give your practice sessions more direction. Lage, who has taught at the School of Jazz and Contemporary Music, The New School New York, says he is not going to just teach you how play guitar, but more importantly, how to learn guitar.

“At the end of the day, we are really self-taught,” he says. “We want to dive deeply into the ways we can cultivate creative practice and support you.”

Lage is currently touring Europe in support of his latest Blue Note studio album, Scenes From Above. He continues his US/Canada tour in October. See here for dates and ticket details, and head over to Julian Lage for more details on the masterclass.

Gear shopping with Jake Kiszka is not for the fainthearted. It’s not that he’s a high-roller but by his own admission his tastes skew towards the pricier end of the market.

Hand the Greta Hand the Van Fleet guitarist a bunch of electric guitars and nine times out of 10 he will pick the most expensive one – and he doesn’t even mean to.

“I’ve done lots of these sort of shootouts, in many music stores,” he says, joining MusicRadar over Zoom ahead of launch of his new signature Gibson SG Standard. “And someone will put me in a room full of guitars, and say, ‘Tell me which one you like the most… give me some feedback.’ I’ll play through whatever, 15, 20 guitars, and I’ll always, almost every single time, pick the most expensive guitar.”

What Kiszka is unsure of is whether or not the vintage ’61 Les Paul SG he calls his number one, aka The Beloved, is to blame for all of this, for giving him a taste. “I guess I don’t know,” he sighs. Because that was a pretty expensive guitar – eye-wateringly so for a young kid coming fresh out of Michigan.

At $25,000, he couldn’t afford it. But as the story goes, Chicago Music Exchange CEO Andrew Yonke was friends with Greta Van Fleet’s manager, loved the band, yadda yadda yadda he lent Kiszka the $25,000 '61 SG for a tour and said pay him back when he could. And the rest is history (and Kiszka did pay him back).

But what about guitar amps? Having established his tastes for vintage electrics, what about the holiest of holy grail tube amps, the Dumble, has he crossed the Rubicon and tried one?

“Yeah, you know, yes, I have,” he says with a wry chuckle.

Kiszka, however, admits that he is in no position to be bidding on them, and he remembers the moment he learned that when he went amp shopping in Osaka.

“There’s a few scenarios where we were travelling and doing some shows in Tokyo and Osaka,” he says. “And this is an interesting one, because, yes, I’ve run into Dumbles, in Nashville, and in New York – and Chicago Music Exchange has them – and they’re rare, few and far in between. But this particular time in Japan was interesting. We were in Osaka, and I saw that there was a little music shop up the way, and I heard from some friends that there’s some really valuable stuff up there.”

If you know, you know. Osaka is a repository of vintage US culture. In Amerikamura you might find pristine vintage Levi’s shrink-wrapped and retailing at Murphy Lab Les Paul prices. You might also find the kind of sight that would empty Joe Bonamassa’s checking account. Something brought Kiszka out in a cold sweat – and it wasn’t the humidity.

“I walked up the hill and and this guy had everything that you could think of,” says Kiszka. “American amplifiers and pedals – and British as well – like some of the most rarefied ‘60s Plexi Marshalls, Klon pedals, and all kinds of stuff.”

But that wasn’t the good stuff. The really fancy stuff was kept out of sight. As Kiszka explains…

“He’s like, ‘Would you come with me? I’ve got the reserves in the basement. I guess he might have recognised me – he might have just trusted me. I don’t know. But he let me into the basement with all his sort of secret stuff and he had, like, 10 Dumbles down there. It was the biggest collection I’ve ever seen in person!”

If the store owner was thinking that Kiszka was going to be tempted to buy one, he’d be right. But he might have over-estimated what kind of budget the GVF guitarist was working with. That cold sweat returned to Kiszka’s brow once they started talking dollars and yen.

“He was like, ‘Would you like to buy one?’ And this was probably before me really knowing the value that’s associated with those amps [laughs]. Because I was like, ‘Well, yeah! How much? How much which is one of these?’ He’s like, ‘Well, you know, this guy over here,’ whatever model it was, he’s like, ‘It's not as expensive as the rest of them, so I probably could go 60, 70K on that, 60, 70,000 USD?. I was like, ‘Jesus, man! Yeah, no.’ I’ve run across them, but I am not in that area yet?”

Maybe when Greta Van Fleet’s fourth studio album hits record store shelves, Kiszka might be in a position to say yes when in Osaka. If not, well, at least we know his credit is good at Chicago Music Exchange.

“Yeah, that’s it! They’ll hold me up there! [laughs]”

The limited edition Jake Kiszka SG Standard is available now – see Gibson for more details.