Nuno Bettencourt reveals he quiet quit his set with Jake E Lee at Black Sabbath tribute show Back To The Beginning in order to let the former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist take the limelight.

Speaking to Guitar World, Bettencourt said they were playing Shot In The Dark, or at least he was scheduled to be playing on it, when the Extreme guitarist decided that, all things considered, Lee had it covered. This was a moment the spotlight could belonged to him

“ I didn’t tell anybody I was doing it – but I just walked off the stage,” says Bettencourt. “I wanted Jake to have his moment without another guitar player stealing his thunder.”

Whether it was Lee, Randy Rhoads, Zakk Wylde, Gus G or whoever, the Ozzy Osbourne gig was always a single-player game. Coming from a band like Extreme, in which Bettencourt’s electric guitar has the run of the place, he understood that implicitly.

“We all came from one-guitar bands. We didn’t want rhythm guitarists,” says Bettencourt. “I wanted Jake to have his one moment up there by himself, so I just left. And Jake nailed it.”

If Back To The Beginning was the all-star all-dayer to end them all, then Lee’s performance was one of redemption – it was the ultimate comeback. It was only in October 2024, when Lee was shot three times while out walking his dog, Coco, in Las Vegas. He is lucky to be alive. He also hadn’t been in contact with Ozzy for a number of years but when Back To The Beginning’s musical director Tom Morello called the answer was always going to be yes.

That said, it wasn’t easy. Not only was Lee recovering from being shot, he is dealing with arthritis. Like former Deep Purple guitarist Steve Morse, Lee has had to reimagine his playing in recent years. His self-confidence has taken a knock.

Bettencourt says that Morello contacted him saying that Lee was not sure he wanted to play the solo to The Ultimate Sin – would he do the honours instead? But there was no way Bettencourt was going to agree to that.

“We all know that, as legendary as Jake is, he’s struggling a little bit, as we all do as we get older and don’t know what’s going to happen to our hands and bodies,” he says. “I told Tom, ‘Give me his phone number right now.’ I texted Jake and told him, ‘You are fucking Jake E. Lee. There’s no way in hell I’m taking that solo. You’re going to play that solo. And not only that, I’ll double it with you, and we’ll do it together. Whatever happens, it’s going to be fucking incredible,’ and that’s what we did.”

Bettencourt and Lee got on like a house on fire. Game recognises game. But Bettencourt did have a bone to pick with Lee. He was “so fucking humble” for a player who took on the hardest job in rock-and-metal, following Randy Rhoads.

“I told him, ‘You’re fucking Jake E. Lee!’ Not only did he replace Randy, but he took Ozzy to another place,” says Bettencourt.

You can read Bettencourt’s interview in the latest issue of Guitar World – subscribe and save.

Nuno Bettencourt has launched his own guitar company, unveiling two new electric guitars, and promising that his iconic N4 signature guitar will live on under the new brand.

Announcing the news on Instagram, the Extreme guitarist said that this was a venture that he had wanted to purse for a “long, long time” – and it puts an end to the speculation as to the make and model that he was filmed playing en route to perform at Villa Park in July for the Black Sabbath and Ozzy farewell show, Back To The Beginning.

There are few details as to the specs and minutiae of Nuno Guitars’ first offerings, but we do know their names, and the equestrian nomenclature explains why Nuno was sitting in a field flanked by them. They literally put the ‘horse’ into workhorse.

“My new models, the Dark Horse and the White Stallion, lead the launch of Nuno Guitars, along with continuing the legacy of the N4,” says Bettencourt. “These are true workhorses built with the same passion I’ve put into every note I’ve ever played.

“What I’m most excited about as the Founder and CEO of my new company is, communicating directly with players and fans who will get to play the exact guitars that I play on stage and in the studio.

“Together we’re forming a new community where I can personally engage with you about a mutual passion…OUR guitars. Once you own a Nuno guitar, you are part of my family. LET’S RIDE!”

Let’s ride, indeed. Nuno is officially pumped. We are officially pumped. And it is good to see that the N4, one of the most playable S-styles and some of the most fun you can have with your clothes on – or half-on if you’re Bettencourt during the second half of an Extreme live show – will remain in production.

We also love that Bettencourt calls these high-performance S-styles “workhorses” when they will inevitably be platforms for some of the most preposterously brilliant virtuosity we’ll see in rock guitar.

It is the beginning of a new era. It is also the end of an era. Bettencourt and Washburn’s artist collaboration was remarkable, lasting some 35 years, and the Extreme guitarist made sure to thank them. He says one of the motivations behind the move was the chance to engage with his fanbase and the wider guitar-playing community directly.

“I’ve been wanting to do for a long, long time. I had a great run with Washburn and a good 35 years, I believe, which is pretty insane. I love Washburn,” he says. “[But] it was a time for me to do this. I really wanted to do it for like I said, a long time.

“One of the main reasons is, I wanted to be able to deal directly with y’all, with guitar players and fans that purchase any of my guitars, I wanted to build this community now and be able to engage with you on a deeper and a closer level, which is going to be really fun for me.”

You can engage right now by signing up for updates at Nuno Guitars.

Teenage blues-rock virtuoso Taj Farrant will have been on the radar of a lot of players ever since his appearance on Australia’s Got Talent, aged nine, but it might not be long before he is a household name in electric guitar.

Nuno Bettencourt certainly thinks so. Describing him as the reincarnation of Eddie Van Halen and Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Extreme guitarist says Farrant is “dangerous, inspiring” and could well be the world’s next guitar hero.

Reposting footage of Farrant performing the solo to Mumma Raised A Man, taken from his debut album, Chapter One, Bettencourt said he had “chills” watching it, and said he had rewatched it “a dozen times”. That Farrant was playing like this live was the difference.

“Yes, the internet is littered with great players, especially jaw dropping technical players,” wrote Bettencourt. “But rarely, do you get that technical prowess that shoots straight through the heart with pure emotion.

“We may be witnessing a true future guitar hero in our midst. Shreds the blues… but more importantly he does it with soul, passion and fire. And this is unleashed live on a fucking stage … not in the safety of a bedroom or studio.”

Farrant was tickled by Bettencourt’s post. He replied, telling Bettencourt that it was on his bucket list to jam with him – just so long as he gets a shot of his Washburn N4 signature guitar – and thanked him for the inspiration.

Bettencourt might have to get in line to get some jam time with Farrant. By the age of 10, Farrant had already jammed with Carlos Santana and Orianthi. He had been on Ellen DeGeneres' show. Heck, is almost a regular on the Norman’s Rare Guitars YouTube channel after making his debut, aged nine, playing a poo brown 1968 Gibson Melody Maker for Mark Agnesi.

So, is Bettencourt right? Now aged 15, with his debut album coming in at number one in the iTunes Blues chart, Farrant is on his way. He has played Lollapalooza 2024. And his style, says Bettencourt, combines two of the world's greatest ever players.

Bettencourt says it’s like God was doing weekly reincarnations and decided – “just to fuck with us” – to put EVH and SRV in one body, “and just for fun he threw in Michael Jordan’s fingers”. Time will tell. But Bettencourt has long been on the lookout for the next player to change guitar in the way Eddie Van Halen did.

That was part of his motivation going into Extreme’s comeback album, Six – and why he really swung for the fences, particularly on his solo to Rise.

Speaking to MusicRadar in 2023, Bettencourt said Eddie Van Halen’s death left a void that needed filling.

“Even him passing away. It gave me this sense of responsibility and fire, like, ‘Fuck, man! There’s not a lot of people left in this generation of people who I work with,’” he said. “There are a lot of great guitar players but not so much that we are in a band and write songs, and play the solo within a song, and got creative within the tone of a song, and I almost felt this responsibility to fucking carry that torch.”

“I told the guys, ‘I wanna go for blood on this album, in the sense of I want to make it fun, and I want to make it fun with the guitar, so that there are things within the rhythm playing. To bring joy into it, to bring passion into it, is what I have always done in the past, and it comes from that Edward Van Halen school, and Brian May and Jimmy Page.”

Maybe sooner or later that torch will be passed. You can judge for yourself. Farrant is touring the US right now, playing Nashville's 3rd and Lindsley tomorrow (26 February) night. See Taj Farrant for full dates and ticket details.

The latest episode of Kylie Olsson's interview series Life In Six Strings finds Nuno Bettencourt revisiting Hudson in Massachusetts – where he grew up as the youngest of ten children in a Portuguese family. It's an insight into where Nuno is coming from as a musician – and it's emotional. 

The Extreme guitarist takes Olsson back to his old childhood home and the bedroom where he wrote More Than Words and other key songs. But before he even steps into the kitchen he's visibly choked up. The memories are overwhelming – Nuno's mother has since passed away. 

"Everything happened here," he reflects. "Anything that was important – the first 20 years of your life, it's all here. Anything that shapes you – family stuff, the good, the bad and the ugly – all of it. It's not just a bed of roses… wow."

It's a moment of genuine reflection for the guitarist. "It was mayhem, but in a really amazing way," Nuno remembers of the house filled with his brothers and sisters growing up. "It was heaven in that you were never alone – in a good way. And everything that we did with family, whether it was eating together, a party or it was Christmas, jams… I didn't realise how lucky I was with the music."

Nuno came from a musical family with "instruments everywhere". 

"There was a Fender Rhodes there," he remembers of the living room. "And sometimes a drum kit in the corner, then there were guitars everywhere. That seemed like normal furniture. So there was always somebody playing music somewhere."

Nuno shared his bedroom with three siblings, and was exposed to new music through his older brothers and sisters. It was an education with "Van Halen 1 coming from one brothers' bedroom and walking and hearing Joe Cocker in another one and hearing the Bee Gees down here and The Beatles elsewhere. There was an array, a generational wealth of music happening that I learned from and I sponged. I'd wait for my brothers and sisters to leave to start going into their record collection, start putting of stuff like Zep IV and Van Halen I and just be like, 'Wow – what is this?'

"That's where it all started and why it's so important – this was my university, this is where I learned everything. Every note that I ever played, every chord change I ever did was learned in this house. Period."

The basement still has the 'Extreme rulz' graffiti Nuno sprayed on the wall. "There's not one thing that's changed here," he marvels.  And when he goes back to his old bedroom the memories become even more vivid.

"This bedroom here is where everything happened guitar-wise," he reveals. "It's where I became a guitar player – started playing guitar. It's so funny, post-Pornograffiti I was still here. I remember writing Midnight Express right on the edge of that bed over there. I had a record player over there with a cassette player in the corner when I was learning everything. I would just sit here for days. I remember my mom at the bottom of the stairs screaming at me to come down and eat – 'Yeah, yeah I'll be right down' and then another six hours would go by. I wouldn't sleep – all I did was play.

Nuno's dedication to guitar meant he missed the high school parties of his teenage years. "I was shy," he reveals. "I didn't know anybody. I had the same two, three people that were friends in junior high. They were musicians and the most I'd leave this house for was to play sports."

Journalist, author and director Olsson then recounts how her first attempt at learning guitar as a 19-year-old stumbled when the person attempting to teach her Extreme's More Than Words claimed she had no ability. Charming. So who better than Nuno to put that right with a lesson in the house where he wrote the song. 

Check the full episode above and watch more Life In Six Strings episodes at Kylie Olsson's YouTube channel.  

• Nuno Bettencourt interview: “I told the guys, ‘I wanna go for blood on this album.’ I wanted to make it fun with the guitar... to bring joy into it, to bring passion into it”

The debate about AI in music continues to rage and this week members of two very different heritage bands have been sounding off about the challenges and opportunities it presents to musicians.

Extreme main man Nuno Bettencourt has told Spanish magazine Metal Journey how he believes AI is unlikely to be a game changer in the field of rock.

"Everybody's worried and everybody's scared, about how it's gonna change anything. I love it, man. 

"You know why I love it? I'm, like, bring it on. Do more of it. Because what that does, the people who do that and use it and think they can emulate emotion, the bigger, to me, rock and roll is gonna get.”

“Because rock and roll, if you notice - look at all the technology that's happened since the 1930s, everything from telephones to television, to cell phones, to computers...what has changed in the guitar? Nothing. What has changed in a drum set? Nothing. What has changed in a bass guitar? Nothing. A microphone."

He argues that as rock n’ roll is ‘broken’ as an artform, AI is unlikely to be able to replicate its glorious imperfections.

"Rock and roll, to me, is always there because it's broken. It's not artificial. It's not perfect. It's all the imperfections, is what makes us shine. It's the danger of it. AI can do all you want - write lyrics, write songs, even record, to do whatever - but it's always gonna sound sterilized, even when they try…”

Meanwhile Dream Theater keyboard magus Jordan Rudess has been talking AI in an interview with Devin Townsend on the prog metal guitarist’s podcast.

"I think that there's a lot to be said about not only the creation of music through artificial intelligence but maybe even more so about being involved in it... if you know about it, you're deep inside of it, you have information, then you can actually embrace it and become emotional, maybe even more emotional with it."

He explained about his own experience working with a programmer and finding an AI application that successfully replicated his own playing style.

Rudess did add though, that even though he found this "scary", that “in doing it, it was a chance for me to really look at my style, and really study what it is that I am doing. 

"What happens when I play a little arpeggio, and then I come down in a blues scale? Where do I go usually, what kind of intervals do I play, even why do I do that?"

"So, I think this was a learning process for me. I think it kind of made me a better player. I get to really study what's going on."

Power ballad was a derogatory term by the time funk metal band Extreme released More Than Words in 1991. A well-deserved pat on the back, then, for guitarist Nuno Bettencourt who dropped the ‘power’ bit and in the process turned a generation of guitarists onto the noble art of fingerpicking on acoustic guitar. 

His tasteful playing and harmonised vocals with the band’s singer Gary Cherone helped make this song timeless; it’s tough to nail it to a specific era like you can with '80s stuff like Poison’s Every Rose Has Its Thorn or Skid Row’s I Remember You. The song also picked up some unlikely fans.

“I remember being on a plane and seeing Andrew Stockdale from Wolfmother,” Nuno told Ed Mitchell for Total Guitar in 2011. “I walked over and said, ‘Hey man, I just wanted to introduce myself. I dig your stuff’. He said, ‘I know who you are. More Than Words was the first song I learned to play on guitar’. Everyone has a story about More Than Words. It was their wedding song, or the song they lost their virginity to in the back of a car…

“It wasn’t purposely written,” continues Nuno of the moment that More Than Words first appeared. “I think I was sitting on a porch somewhere. It might have been at Gary’s house. When we were first starting out I was crashing at his place a lot. The song came pretty quick. I was singing and hearing this melody and doing the chord changes. I ran into the house and grabbed a little Fostex four-track recorder and threw the song down as quickly as possible.”

Nuno was obviously intrigued by this quirky little tune that was quickly revealing itself to him, but he wasn’t quite sure what he had yet. “At the time I didn’t know if it was good,” he recalls. “I knew it was interesting and a different sounding song. But it wasn’t like I was sitting there thinking, ‘I just wrote a hit.’ 

"The melody was dictating where the chords were going. I remember telling Gary, ‘Look, I’ve got something pretty interesting here.’ We quickly attacked it lyrically. It all came together in a half-hour period.”

More Than Words was around when Extreme recorded their self-titled first album in 1989. In retrospect, the fact that it didn’t make it onto that poor-selling debut was a lucky break. By the time they were preparing to record their second release, the breakthrough Pornograffitti in 1990, at Scream Studios in LA with producer Michael Wagener, they were finally convinced they had a potential monster hit on their hands.

The song could have ended up as a big production number, but Nuno’s instinct led him to keep the arrangement simple. “I fought for that,” he says. “In fact, I probably fought myself for that. I think when we were recording it I thought it would get bigger with strings and drums. It was really tempting, trust me. But I think that was probably the best decision I ever made, to keep it as naked as possible. It’s one of those songs that people don’t get too tired of. Maybe the simplicity of it kept it tolerable.”

For Nuno, memories of recording More Than Words are vague over 30 years down the line. “Usually when you remember recording a song it’s because it was a pain in the ass,” he explains. “With More Than Words I don’t really remember recording it. That’s probably because it went down as easy as it sounds.

“I think we did it all live,” he continues before pondering our question about whether or not he used a click track. “I usually use a click because I’m really married to tempo, that’s really important to me. But I probably didn’t on that song. I should put the record on and run a click to it. That would soon let you know if I used a click or not!”

Nuno played a black shallow bodied Washburn Woodstock in the promo video for More Than Words, but not on the recording. 

“No, it wasn’t the black one,” he says. “It was an all natural finish Washburn with a fuller body. You can hear on the record that it’s pretty beefy. That guitar is still sitting in one of my relative’s houses somewhere. I keep thinking, ‘I’ve got to find that guitar’.”

The guitar in question was tuned to Eb on the recording. Whether that was by choice or accident has also been lost to the sands of time. “Often when I knew I was going to be playing on my own I wouldn’t even bother tuning up. So that might have been a mistake. Chances are whatever felt good is what I tuned to.”

What is written in stone is that the guitar was mic’d up, not DI’d to the mixing desk. “It was definitely a mic, for sure,” he confirms before adding: “I’ve never recorded an acoustic guitar plugged in. It’s a shame when you do that because it never sounds like an acoustic.”

What continues to makes this track intriguing to successive generations of guitarists is the way Nuno plays it. He has a distinctive style that’s part fingerpicking, part percussion. “Many people have told me through the years that the fact I was tapping the backbeat on the strings gave it a unique feel and made the song a bit more difficult to play,” he says. “I didn’t realise that until they brought it up. That’s just how I always kept rhythm when I played.” 

• Interview: Nuno Bettencourt talks revisiting Extreme's Pornograffitti

We recently reported on comments made by guitarist Nuno Bettencourt in a Planet Rock interview where he seemed to suggest that some of the guitar players he admires, including Slash, would struggle with the diversity demanded by his role as Rihanna's live guitarist. Since then Slash's Guns N' Roses bandmate – and Rihanna's live guitarist himself before Nuno in 2008 and 2009 – Richard Fortus has stepped in to air his own views on the subject – prompting Nuno to respond in kind. 

"When somebody like Rihanna reaches out to you to perform everybody thinks 'Oh, that's cute. It's a pop artist, whatever,'" Bettencourt originally told Planet Rock. "Let me tell you something, what I had to do night after night… put on a reggae hat [for one song] with a reggae feel, and go into R&B, then go into some punk rock and pop rock that she did, and then club tracks. All sorts of [things], all those different feels.

"I'm sorry, most of the guitar players who I admire could not in their lifetime play that gig," he added. "I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.

"Slash is one of the greatest rock guitar players of all time but I guarantee — and he'd be the first to tell you — that if he jumps up and he's got to play a clean intro to 'Rude Boy' from Rihanna, it ain't happening," Nuno added.

Things took a turn when Fortus shared a report featuring Nuno's comments to Instagram a couple of days later, and added his own thoughts.  "I have to respectfully disagree," he wrote. "@nunobettencourtofficial is one of the greats, for sure. However, there is very little @slash couldn't do on guitar (if he wanted to). I toured with Rihanna prior to Nuno and I've spent a lot of time playing with Slash. This gig wouldn't be a struggle for him."

Fair and polite enough? Fortus certainly seems like he's well-placed to offer an opinion on the subject. But by Saturday (22 July) Nuno was none too pleased by Fortus's response:

"Welp… I knew this was eventually coming," Nuno began. 

"You can't be blessed and be on multiple guitar magazine covers at a shocking 56 years old, get this much attention for your playing and new album as a rock guitarist without another guitarist stirring up some shit.

"I'm responding to this not cause I give a s##t about what this guitarist thinks about me but, instead, because I'd hate to think my few words offended a hero of mine, @slash and possibly f**k up my relationship with him.

"@4tus I've 'respectively' never heard you play one note in my 56 years of being alive and only know your name from the Rihanna camp and as a replacement player in Guns," Nuno continued.

"I'm sure you're a decent player, but did you really need to repost a headline that made me look like I am badmouthing a fellow player, Slash.

"As if I'd ever think Slash isn't capable of playing any Rihanna song in his sleep.

"Let's get something f*****g straight. To me, Slash is one of the greatest rock guitarists of my generation and of all time. PERIOD. And @4tus if you knew me at all and where my heart is you'd know that what I meant in this statement was not about Slash or his capability, It was about Rock guitarists like myself or Slash switching genres and the awkwardness of playing these feels.

"No S***T Slash can play these songs, thank you so much for pointing that out as if we didn't already know that. But for me as a predominant ROCK guitarist, I'm obviously not as talented as you and found it a challenge to nail all the different pockets and guitar tones of genres like reggae, r&b, electronic dance, trap and pop.

"As far as you shining a light on my ridiculous statement that Slash would 'struggle', yes a poor word choice on my part, I personally would hope that Slash who is a peer and influence would be more mature enough to understand what I truly meant as a guitarist by that comment.

"In mentioning Slash as an iconic Rock example, I meant in general a rock guitarist would find it, NOT A STRUGGLE, but feel like a fish out of water as a player. THAT'S ALL I MEANT.

"I've had NOTHING but respect and admiration for @gunsnroses and @slash.

"Apologies if I've unintentionally offended anyone."

A spirited response from a passionate player, and hopefully everyone is clear that no  disrespect was intended towards Slash. 

Nuno Bettencourt says that anyone who thinks taking on a pop gig with Rihanna is an easy night’s work has no idea what they are letting themselves in for, and says that even rock’s greatest players would struggle to get through a set with the Barbadian superstar.

Bettencourt first toured with Rihanna on the 2009 Last Girl On Earth run, and has been on call ever since, and on 12 February he joined her for the half-time show at the Super Bowl LVII at the State Farm Stadium, Glendale, Arizona.

Speaking to Planet Rock, the Extreme guitarist said that even his electric guitar heroes – even Slash – would not be be able to take it on. 

“I’m sorry, most of the guitar players who I admire could not in their lifetime play that gig,” he said. “I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Slash is one of the greatest rock guitar players of all time but I guarantee – and he’d be the first to tell you – that if he jumps up and he’s got play a clean intro to Rude Boy from Rihanna, it ain’t happening.”

Bettencourt’s rock chops are beyond question. There is a case to be made that he is the best hard-rock player in the world right now. But that’s not where the Rihanna gig will test you. It’s in the variety, the different styles you have to play.

One minute it’s reggae, the next R&B, or a dance tune, all the while the guitar has got to be on-point. Bettencourt said playing with Rihanna give him the ability to sit in with anyone. But listening to everything growing up gave him the sensibility to adapt to Rihanna’s set. 

“I believe that if I wasn’t that diverse musically and accept everything I grew up on, there’s no way that I would have been in these rooms,” he said.

It’s also one of the reasons why Extreme sound they way they do. It is the reason why they can write a drop D up-tempo rocker – yes, with a ripping solo – like Rise, or play summertime ska-pop of Beautiful girls. All of these influences are percolating in Bettencourt’s head and whatever comes out on the day is the song. 

“We don’t do it to be different. What we do is, whatever fucking time we are doing an album, we are in a bubble and we are doing what we love, and it is as simple as that,” said Bettencourt, speaking to MusicRadar about Extreme’s long-awaited return with new album Six. “We are not trying to do what’s happening now. We might be influenced by what’s happening now. We were influenced by what happened in the ‘90s. We were influenced by what we are always influenced by. 

“But I’ve never sat down to write a song, like X Out, and it’s going to be something, and it’s gonna do this. Or I am going to write a song like Hurricane. Every day you write selfishly, self-centredly.”

Nuno Bettencourt speaks fast when he is excited and right now he is speaking pretty fast. Everything is happening fast. After 15 long years, Boston rock institution Extreme has announced a new album, Six, and lead single Rise is blowing minds of players the world over with one of the most ridiculously entertaining guitar solos in recent memory.

It is the pop-cultural electric guitar moment of the year. Hands down. It’s the solo every aspiring shredder wants to play, the coruscating highlight of a track pitched in a drop-D hard-rock groove. The YouTubers have broken it down, Rick Beato has offered us his considerable insights, and yet its animal magic still seems elusive, a sleight of hand we’re all missing. 

Rise has clocked up over 2.6 million views and counting since its debut on 3 March, surely sending similar numbers of players back to their practice spaces to workshop their game. There is a feeling that Bettencourt – one of the most kinetic and dynamic players of his generation – has just upped the ante again. 

That was one of the animating principals behind Bettencourt’s approach to Six. As he explains, Six was all about throwing things down with energy, with commitment. The words fire and passion routinely crop up. The word “fuck” and variants thereof are used as punctuation and for emphasis.

The band have shared three tracks so far, #Rebel and Banshee supporting the theory that says, as guitar albums go, Six is as good as 2023 will get. But this being Extreme, the album is not all foot-to-the-floor hard rock. 

There’s an elasticity to their sound, some flex that allows for the stylistic audacity of X Out, on which Bettencourt breaks out the 7-string guitar for the first time, or for the the summer pop of Beautiful Girls. There are the ballads, the anthems too. But of course, you know all this. Because as Bettencourt says, this is Extreme, and with Extreme you have got to “expect the unexpected.” 

Expect the guitar spectacular, the intimate melodies; expect the sort of thing that no one else had thought of. Bettencourt, who produced the album, says he pushed his bandmates like never before. Gary Cherone's vocals have never sounded better. But everyone was pushed; Pat Badger on bass guitar, Kevin Figueiredo on drums. Bettencourt pushed himself.

Here Bettencourt discusses the making of Six, the philosophy behind his playing, the importance of performance, what people get wrong about a Marshall Dual Super Lead, and the things that make them tick as songwriters. But there's only one place a conversation about this album should start...

We have to talk about Rise, and the reaction to that song, and to that solo.

“It is wild. The reaction itself. Look, egotistically, confidently, you always go into every album – Porno, III Sides, whatever – you always go into it with a passion and a fire that you believe that it should get some sort of response, right? Or else you wouldn’t do it. And you hope that people connect with it. But I have to say, at 56, and the band putting this album out now, 15 years of no music? Hell no we did not expect this response. 

“It’s really exciting. It makes me kind of giddy. [Before] when you put something out you would have to wait months before if you knew people liked it or not. You would go to radio and wait to see if people liked it. You’d sell tickets to see if people wanted to come, and you would look at the charts. All that takes time. Now you release something and within 24 hours, 48 hours, they’ll tell you that they love you or you’re full of shit or whatever!”

That was a moment, a pop-cultural moment. Everyone was talking about it. 

“Extreme getting a million views in 10 days, now at almost two million views since it has been out? Hell no did we expect that, and we are so thankful and grateful. Then I am getting hit up by peers, guitar players, people like Steve Lukather, or even Brian May, and getting responses that are not like ‘Hey buddy, good job. I love your new stuff!’ Like you’re supposed to say. Like we’re supposed to say to each other! [Laughs] This was different. 

“These were, like, long text messages. ‘No, you don’t understand…’ And I started realising that, I believe, that the response has got to do with… it is a decent solo and it is a decent song. But more importantly, I think the response is coming from – and maybe people don’t know it – for the last eight, 10 years, the majority of really great guitar players, who even I follow, players I see who make my jaw drop, they are sitting in a room like this, y’know.”

And you are on a stage. The energy is different.

“They’re sitting in their studios and they are making our jaws drop while playing guitar. Difference is, you have a band coming out, and there is someone playing guitar but it’s not just technical. It’s emotional. It’s physical. It’s watching somebody in a band, in the middle of a song, with harmonies and vocals and lyrics, and arrangements, and a bridge, and – by the way – all-in, passionately. That to me is the recipe for making people excited again.”

Because it is being performed. They are watching a performance.

“It’s not just the guitar playing, or the song. I remember somebody hit me up and the majority of texts I get are thank yous. They’re not like, ‘Oh this song’s amazing!’ It’s, ‘Thank you for fucking bringing us some rock ’n’ roll. Listening to a song, and getting excited, when was the last time we watched the guitar player in a video be that excited about playing a fucking solo? [Laughs] Or excited about performing a song! Or a singer that’s all in, character, like we have always been doing for the last 40 years onstage. 

“I think that is what’s exciting people. They might not even know it. They can say it’s the fucking guitar solo, and they can sit there and break the fucking thing down, but in my mind it’s this: if I did that sitting down, and I played you that same solo, people would be like, ‘Okay. Cool. He’s doing something interesting there.’ But it would have been so fucking boring, and so fucking, like, a lack of an event, because it is out of context. 

“I don’t play like that. I play for a song, for the excitement of the song, and just, like you’ve heard the album, you’re gonna hear the Other Side Of The Rainbow, and people might not be as excited about that solo even though it is one of my favourites.”

The other point to make is that Rise is arguably not even the best solo on the album…

“I agree with you. I agree. First thing I said, the first thing I said when people said, ‘Oh my god!’ Whether its my peers, like Steve Vai, who said, ‘Is there other stuff on the record like this?’ I go, ‘No. And it’s not even the best solo.’ But you know what it is? It’s the best solo for the song.”

And it is a great solo.

“The bends at the beginning! There is a bend in one of the first three notes I play where I missed the whole string. I missed the whole fucking string. And I hit the next three strings, and it made a sound like, ‘Braaaaang!’ I couldn’t tell you what note it is doing because it is not a note.

“Fifteen years ago, I would have fixed that, like, ‘Let me redo that fucking note.’ But it hit something in me. I nailed it, meaning – woah! – it was sounding like a kick drum mixed with a couple of notes mixed with a car crash, and those are the things that touch people. What they are hearing and seeing is somebody who is saying, ‘Fuck it! Fire! Let’s fucking go!’”

It’s the texture of the notes, too. Those imperfections give us something to grab onto…

“Something to grab onto! And it’s passion. It gives you emotion.”

One of the great things about your guitar solos is you write them like a dance. They are danceable, and rhythmically physical.

“You’re right about that and right for one reason only; it’s because I am basically a frustrated drummer on guitar for the day. I started on drums. Drums are everything to me. Every time someone gets me to jam they fucking hate me because I’ll be be like, ‘Yeah, I’ll play drums if you want!’ But that is everything on my instrument. I play percussively. 

“Even when I play a solo it’s a rhythm to me, and it’s got a feel and a bounce. I feel like it I play it like another level of rhythm guitar on top of rhythm guitar. [Laughs] You know what I mean!? It’s like I drummed the whole thing out and you could write out all the patterns – not on purpose. Not on purpose, but even when I bend the note at the beginning of Rise, believe me, there is a flow that I don’t even realise until afterwards that is rhythmic and waltzy and all sorts of stuff is going on.”

Because there is a rhythm to the bends as well. Extreme has always had this quality where you can have an ‘80s vibe, a ‘90s vibe, whatever, and also be so present. And you have this dynamic where you can play so heavy, and yet you can bring it right down to tracks like Small Town Beautiful. Have you sold that one to a movie yet?

“It needs to be, right? There is a lot of cinematic tracks on this album that could belong on some sort of soundtrack to a movie. Every time that I have written a song – and this is no bullshit – while I am writing it, whether it is pen and paper or I am on my computer, that is the first thing I do in the moment. I see things. I see the visuals they bring out, and I literally write that next to it, like what a possible visual is, what a possible video is, what I am seeing, and what is the emotion of it? 

“Once you see The Other Side Of The Rainbow video that we shot, it is so ‘other side of the rainbow’ [laughs] in terms of the location. For us, the location is aways a character, just like Rise was. There were no lights. There was just that cross. It was just us being raw like the song was, and it was about the rise and fall of fame, and that’s all it was.”

You talked explicitly about upping the game for guitar. Did you try out new techniques for this album? Are you on the edge of your ability when writing this?

“It’s interesting, because from a guitar perspective I was telling one of my guitar player friends how the guitar itself, you have a relationship with it, like a person. It’s not just a block of wood that you pick up and put down. Sometimes you are excited to hang with that friend, and sometimes you’re not. 

“Sometimes you go away for a while but like an old friend that you trust, and everybody has those one or two friends that no matter what, you might not see them for one or two years but when you pick up and have lunch with them it’s like you never left, and you have this bond and this understanding.

“I always looked at guitar that way. It is okay to walk away for while, that you need a break from somebody for a while. And sometimes you are obsessed, and you hang out for six months straight, and that is how it is [now].”

And you have to make the most of it when you’re in that zone.

“I think we hit a period on this album where I was like, ‘We’re good’. Doing the Generation Axe Tour inspired me a little bit, too, I have to say. Playing with all these amazing guitar players and heroes lit my fire a little bit again. Even as I was doing the album and Edward [Van Halen] coming to my house and almost listening to the album. 

“He was outside at one point and I was like, ‘Oh my god I want to play him it back.’ And then he passed away and never had the chance. All those things. Even him passing away. It gave me this sense of responsibility and fire, like, ‘Fuck, man! There’s not a lot of people left in this generation of people who I work with.’

“There are a lot of great guitar players but not so much that we are in a band and write songs, and play the solo within a song, and got creative within the tone of a song, and I almost felt this responsibility to fucking carry that torch.

“I told the guys, ‘I wanna go for blood on this album, in the sense of I want to make it fun, and I want to make it fun with the guitar, so that there are things within the rhythm playing. To bring joy into it, to bring passion into it, is what I have always done in the past, and it comes from that Edward Van Halen school, and Brian May and Jimmy Page.

“They just got creative, even when they were playing rhythm, and there were sections, and chordal things underneath. We’re not doing jazz, right? We’re still doing rock ’n’ roll, and it’s still a three-and-a-half-minute song, and songs are supposed to be simple, but there’s nothing wrong with the genius of doing stuff. The great bands that we love, the Queens of this world, they still wrote simple rock songs, but there was a complexity if you wanted to look deeper.”

There were layers.

“There were layers that you could peel back, and things that you could discover, so what I call it is ‘simplexity’, y’know!? [Laughs] It’s the search for simplexity in a song Someone cracked me up the other day, a guitar player was doing one of those things where they break it down and they listen to song, and they react – it’s all these reaction videos now! – and one guitar player cracked me up. 

“I was crying in tears. He was like, ‘The chorus comes in, and where have I heard this before?’ And he cuts to a Kesha song, and she’s doing this yodelling thing! I fell off my fucking seat! He nailed it. It is exactly what it is. Not that I took it from there but holy fuck it is a Kesha fucking hook. I couldn’t believe it. It is [all] pop, man.”

We can over-intellectualise the whole enterprise.

“Everyone likes to think that rock ’n’ roll and rock bands, that we’re so fucking intricate, and we’re so fucking intellectual, whatever it is, I’m sorry, we’re writing fucking nursery rhymes for adults at the end of the day. That’s what we are doing. And we all sing along with it, and it’s anthems. 

“What’s the difference from ‘The wheels on the bus go round and round’ to ‘Oh-woah-oh!’? It’s all the same shit, but it’s just the lyrics and the melodies are just a little more for grown-ups. But! If you wanna have some poetry, if you wanna have some shit that you want to do on guitar, and you want to go at the borders of this Simple Mountain to this Simplexity world, you can! 

“Radiohead does it as a fucking art form. Y’know, they are singing these things, and it’s droney, and it’s nothing complex – it’s not jazz – but man, there are some lyrics, and some melodies, and some fuckin’ weird harmonies, and production, and still, okay, we call it alternative because it is a little smarter. I got you. But at the end of the day, come on!

“They fucking hate the song Creep but that song changed my life because it was the epitome of simplexity. The lyrics on Creep blew my head wide open and it changed my life. And the fuckin’ angst of the song!? Kuh-chung! And the fuckin’ angst of the guitar! It changed the game for me, and then I don’t think they even like playing the song live. They hate the fucking song. But it is a work of art to me because it is the epitome of simplexity.”

You have always been quite subversive in that sense in being able to give us all these big ideas within the context of a pop and rock song. You have loads of songs that can soundtrack Friday night with beers, then on Monday morning with headphones you can pick out all these details.

“You’re absolutely right. Music is mood. Even to the point of, technically speaking, when you get up in the morning your heart rate is so much fresher, and so much going on, and you want to get going in your day, that when I listen to those same songs that we’ve worked on, picking a tempo is a nightmare for me. 

“A tempo? Okay, we’ve got the song, but what is the fucking tempo of the song!? And I am talking two clicks faster, two clicks slower, it can change the whole motherfucking thing. The feel of it, the riff. It changes.” 

These are big decisions and they’re not easy.

“The reason this is so hard is because you are in the studio and your heart rate changes, and your perception of what you hear when you write the song, like Rise, with the [hums riff] changes. 

“When we write that, I think, ‘Oh my God. This feels good. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon and this feels good.’ By the time I’m fucking exhausted at 11, or one in the morning, the songs all [frantic]. Like, ‘Oh my God! I fucked it all up. We fucked it all up. We gotta recut everything; it’s too fucking fast!’ And I’m like, ‘Let’s listen to it in the morning.’ I’ll come in and it’s like [hums riff]. It's okay. What the fuck is going on? 

“Your frame of mind, your heart rate, your adrenaline, when it changes, you hear songs differently. You go to a show and it’s like, ‘What the fuck? Is this band flying right now?’ It's because they are so excited. I’ve seen Prince and Michael Jackson songs I don’t even recognise [hums Wanna Be Startin' Somethin’]. What happened? You can’t even dance to it. In his head, it is [as recorded].

“We recorded Extreme shows just to see that. We played the first four songs so fucking fast, and when we asked Kevin to do a click so we could control it, we were like, ‘Oh my fucking God. Decadence [Dance] is like…’ It’s wild. You’re right. You’ve got to find the push and pull with what you want to do. The mood is huge. We try to get it into a place where you can listen to it at all times. [Laughs]”

What are you like as a producer? What’s your approach? What did you learn when you worked with the likes of Michael Wagener?  

“Well, let’s get one thing fucking straight, I produced all of those albums. I love Michael Wagener, and the reason I worked with Michael Wagener was because I loved his production, so we went out to him. But the reason I ended up hiring him is because he came back after he heard the demos that we had – which actually weren’t demos, they were the album – he told the label, ‘Wow! This is fucking great. I’ll do it. But what do they need me for?’ 

“I said, ‘Hire him!’ Because, you know why? He was somebody that recognised all the work that I was doing, how important it was to the songs and the arrangements. He recognised that. He wasn’t in the studio when we recorded Pornograffitti. Eighty per cent of Pornograffiti was done before we went to LA.

“A good producer like Michael Wagener knows when to do 99 per cent and knows when to do one per cent. That’s why he was genius during Pornograffitti, not because he let me do my thing, but because he knew when you’ve got to get out of the fucking way of what someone is doing.”

Recognising that is the talent. 

“Butch Vig! I saw this article where he was about to do Smells Like Teen Spirit, he is about to do Nevermind, and he says they sent him a cassette from a boom-box in rehearsal and he got it sent, and he panicked, because it was already there. ‘How the fuck do I get out of the way of that?’ And that’s a good producer. That’s a good producer, getting scared and thinking, ‘Oh my God. This is good. How do I recapture this?’ And not going, ‘Well I’m going to put my fucking stamp on it’ or whatever. 

“What am I like as a producer? [Six] is probably the best job I have ever done. I was always a better producer arrangement-wise, sonically, what I wanted, playing, technically. All that. This was one of the first times that I tortured everybody as an emotional producer, and I am kind of upset with myself that it took me that long to get here.”

You’ve got to be comfortable enough with that. It takes years to build that relationship where you can do that.

“It takes years to learn about emotion and things like that. Gary will tell you, I think this is Gary’s best album he has every sung in his entire fucking career, and one of the reasons is the producer, the asshole, me! 

“Back in the day I’d be like, ‘Wow! Let’s sing this.’ And when he nailed it, it was like, ‘You nailed it. Listen to that fucking pitch. Oh it’s there. It’s you, Gary. It’s you!’ Whereas this time around, Gary sings it. ‘You nailed it. I don’t believe it. I am not buying it. It’s perfect. But where is what we wrote about? Where is what we sang about? Where is the character of what we did?’ 

You need something deeper, maybe even less perfect.

“It is the same thing with the guitar playing. It is the same thing with everything else. Sometimes, yeah, don’t get me wrong, the emotion is there because it comes from us, from how we are performing, but a good producer fucking pisses you off when you need to. A good producer is like, ‘Hey, Small Town Beautiful, man. You’re singing it beautifully, but where is the emotion? 

Because all this is not a technical exercise. It's like what you said about Rise, and why people reacted the way they did to it.

“I got together with a bunch of my friends – Tom Morello and Steve Vai, and DB Weiss from Game Of Thrones – and we are sitting there in the studio, and I caught a couple of people fucking tearing up during Hurricane. That’s what a producer does, meaning sometimes I am singing a few lyrics on there and it’s not the best vocal but, man, I was like, ‘Okay, I nailed that.’ Not technically, not pitch, but I was cracking. It was hard to sing because it was about my best friend who passed away.”

We’ve got to ask you a bit about the gear. You found your thrill early on with the N4 and nothing’s changed there, but did you use anything different this time out?

“When it comes to gear, anyone who has talked to me over the years knows I am boring as fuck. I am a creature of habit. I have my Rat pedal filtering things out. I have the Marshall DSL [JCM] 2000. When people go get a DSL they’re like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? A fucking DSL. The thing sounds like shit usually.’ 

“Whatever. A lot of people tell me that. But when you have the treble at two, and you have the midrange at two, and then you have the bass at four and the presence at two, and you turn it way up, that’s what that is. Whatever that is, to me, that is the key to it. 

“I used the Nele for Small Town Beautiful, some places where you can tell it is a little bit of a different tone, a Tele/Nele tone, and that’s it, man. I used an N7 7-string for X Out for the first time in my fucking life! The first time in my life that I was using a 7-string.”

Now, that’s a cool track with a cool riff. Extreme has this internal logic that makes nothing off limits. You listen to that, and then you have Beautiful Girls, and it makes me think of David Byrne’s Something Wild soundtrack. It’s like anything goes.  

“Someone asked me recently, ‘Man, y’know, Rise is different.’ I go, ‘Yeah, it’s an Extreme album. It’s expect the unexpected.’ We don’t do it to be different. What we do is, whatever fucking time we are doing an album, we are in a bubble and we are doing what we love, and it is as simple as that. 

“We are not trying to do what’s happening now. We might be influenced by what’s happening now. We were influenced by what happened in the ‘90s. We were influenced by what we are always influenced by. But I’ve never sat down to write a song, like X Out, and it’s going to be something, and it’s gonna do this. Or I am going to write a song like Hurricane. Every day you write selfishly, self-centredly.

“Write what you want and then you pick the best fucking songs you have for the album, and that’s it. Sometimes you’re like, ‘Oh fuck! Beautiful Girls, what the fuck!? Okay!’ But every song you hear on the album – say, it’s Rise – and it is a heavy song, there are three or four other heavy ones that are fighting for that position, and we go, ‘Fuck, we can’t take that off. That’s the song.’ And two, three, four, five, six, seven songs that are fighting for those two positions.

“We pick the songs we think are the best. It’s as simple as that, and they are so different, and they are so whatever, but we don’t give a fuck. We don’t give a fuck! An Extreme album is an Extreme album. You’ve got to stay true to yourself and do what you do, like Queen. We are not like Queen, but we are a lot like Queen philosophically.”

Well, speaking of Queen, you do finish the album with We Are The Champions in reverse. Here’s To The Losers, indeed!

“Here’s To The Losers, it’s an anthem. We need an anthem for… Crystal Palace! [Laughs].”

• Rise is available to preorder and is out 9 June through earMusic.

Nuno Bettencourt has been tearing it up with Extreme on the Monsters of Rock Cruise and doing things at sea that surely contravene maritime law, because there’s surely no way you can drop something as hot as the solo to Rise live on a ship and then leave this vessel seaworthy. But he has, and it is a potentially historic moment for electric guitar. 

How will people talk about this maiden performance of Rise in the years to come? Will the excitement be lost in the shuffle or is this the sort of moment that will be searched out and bookmarked for reference like those 1978 performances of Eruption when Eddie Van Halen opened the door for this style of super-expressive, high-performance rock guitar?

No one can say. Our 24/7 always-on media environment makes it harder for epoch-defining moments to take hold. What is for sure is that Rise is the guitar solo of 2023 (the track itself has had 2.5 million views in two months) at least until the rest of the world hears the new Extreme album, Six. 

There is a strong argument that it is not even the best solo on the album – a position that Bettencourt himself agrees with – but it has been a long time since a piece of guitar playing has stopped the world like that, with Rick Beato shooting a special episode to break down what Bettencourt is up to on that solo.

• Nuno Bettencourt explains his secret to playing difficult guitar solos… it involves getting his leg up

So many ears and eyeballs have been on Rise that its every secret is out, Even when YouTuber Mike G from The Art Of Guitar identified – correctly – that Bettencourt had accidentally referenced a Kesha melody in the song, the solo, in its perfect dynamics, remains undiminished. “I fell off my fucking seat!” said Bettencourt. “He nailed it. It is exactly what it is. Not that I took it from there but, holy fuck, it is a Kesha fucking hook. I couldn’t believe it. It is [all] pop, man.”

That Kesha reference really tickled Bettencourt. What really got his attention was the messages he was getting from his peers. These weren’t the usual “good job” texts – “like we’re supposed to say to each other! – but long messages. “No, you don’t understand…” People were blown away, and Bettencourt has a theory that makes sense when you watch the Rise promo video and then that performance on the high seas on the Monsters of Rock Cruise.

“It’s a decent song and a decent solo,” said Bettencourt, when discussing the reaction to the track for a forthcoming MusicRadar feature about Extreme’s return, a conversation in which he talks tone, production and explains why rock songs are just nursery rhymes for adults . What makes it is you are seeing is a performance, not just from him but from the band. That’s the difference.

“There is someone playing guitar but it’s not just technical,” he said. “It’s emotional. It’s physical. It’s watching somebody in a band, in the middle of a song, with harmonies and vocals and lyrics, and arrangements, and a bridge – and, by the way, all-in, passionately. That to me is the recipe for making people excited again.”

Extreme’s new album, Six, is out on 9 June via earMusic. And check out his Monsters of Rock Cruise performance above.

Nuno Bettencourt has recalled one of the most nerve-wracking playing experiences of his life when he played guitar for an audience that featured Prince in the front row – and how it was all worth it when the late pop icon paid him the ultimate compliment.

The Extreme guitarist was playing at an all-star tribute concert to Earth, Wind & Fire. Steve Lukather was there among a number of hot-shot guitar players and “a bunch of sick musicians” and when Bettencourt’s name was introduced, he walked onstage only to see Prince walking down the aisle to take his seat at the front. 

Speaking to SiriusXM, Bettencourt says he was doing Higher Ground (presumably Stevie Wonder’s Higher Ground). The sight of Prince sent him to pieces. “I’m like, ‘Fucking great! This is just great. Prince has probably never seen me play before, now I am going to be doing this,’” says Bettencourt. 

Sitting beside Prince was a producer friend of Bettencourt’s and Nikka Costa, who just so happened to be coming to Bettencourt’s house the following day because their kids all had a play date.

“So, all of a sudden, he’s sitting next to one of my best mates, and Nikka, who is at my house tomorrow,” he continues. “I start playing and I can’t help with sweating that Prince is in the front row, and I am trying my best to be as cool as fuck to have him like me, and then all of a sudden he does this – he leans over and he [whispers], he leans over to Nikka and he says something, and he goes back. Like, ‘Oh my God! He just told her how much I suck. He told her I am not playing it right. He told her whatever.’

Sure enough, Bettencourt comes home the following day and Costa is there, and it is a moment. 

“I walk by and I’m like, ‘What?’ ‘You don’t want to know what Prince said to me?’ ‘No, I don’t,’” says Bettencourt. I went in the kitchen and I walked away, and I come back 30 seconds later [laughs] like, ‘All right! What did he say!? What did he say!?’ She said, ‘Well, are you sure you want to know?’ ‘All right, fuck this!’ And she said, ‘He said, Right there, that’s one of the top three guitar players in the world.’”

Ever since Extreme shared the video to Rise, the debut single from their first studio album in 15 years, Six, Bettencourt has been getting all kinds of compliments. That Rise solo blew the minds of not only the guitar playing public but his peers, too. Rick Beato broke down Bettencourt's Rise solo in a video and was left astonished by the technique, the composition, the performance. We all were.

Not many would disagree with Prince’s assessment; top three guitar players? In rock, he has a strong case. Who in the world right can get more out of the electric guitar?

Speaking to MusicRadar, Bettencourt admitted that the death of Eddie Van Halen had given him a sense of “responsibility and fire” to light it up on 6. 

“There are a lot of great guitar players but not so much that we are in a band and write songs, and play the solo within a song, and got creative within the tone of a song, and I almost felt this responsibility to fucking carry that torch,” he said. “I want to make it fun, and I want to make it fun with the guitar.”

Extreme will release Six on 9 June through earMusic. The full interview with Nuno Bettencourt, in which he confesses to being a frustrated drummer, talks tone, and why rock songs are all just nursery rhymes for adults is coming soon to MusicRadar. 

Nuno Bettencourt is totally down with the idea that we can intellectualise rock music till the cows come home, but when they do come home and it's time to pick up the electric guitar and write something, it does us all some good to realise that rock operates on the same level as a nursery rhyme.

Speaking to MusicRadar head of the release of Extreme’s first studio album in 15 years, Six, which is out 9 June through earMusic, Bettencourt said that rock bands can have a certain aura or mystique around them, and that’s fine, but there’s a simplicity to writing rock music that goes way back to the fundamentals.

“Everyone likes to think that rock ’n’ roll and rock bands, that we’re so fucking intricate, and we’re so fucking intellectual,” he said. “I’m sorry, we’re writing fucking nursery rhymes for adults at the end of the day. That’s what we are doing. And we all sing along with it, and it’s all anthems. What’s the difference from ‘The wheels on the bus go round and round’ to ‘Oh-woah-oh!’? It’s all the same shit! But it’s just the lyrics and the melodies are just a little more for grown-ups.”

Where he sees the real genius, however, is when you take the simplicity of the nursery rhyme and put something complex inside it. That’s what Queen did. That’s what Led Zeppelin did. That’s how Eddie Van Halen wrote rock music that was instantly accessible but with a playing style that was inventive and tricksy.

“They just got creative, even when they were playing rhythm, and there were sections, and chordal things underneath,” said Bettencourt. “We’re not doing jazz, right? We’re still doing rock ’n’ roll, and it’s still a three-and-a-half-minute song, and songs are supposed to be simple. But there’s nothing wrong with the genius of doing [simple] stuff – the great bands that we love, the Queens of this world, they still wrote simple rock songs but there was a complexity if you wanted to look deeper. 

“There were layers that you could peel back, and things that you could discover. So what I call it is ‘simplexity’, y’know!? [Laughs] But! If you wanna have some poetry, if you wanna have some shit that you want to do on guitar, and you want to go at the borders of this Simple Mountain to this Simplexity world, you can!”

Some of the simple ideas can come from anywhere. We consume pop melodies by osmosis all the time. Bettencourt says he was in tears of laughter when guitarist and YouTuber Mike G from The Art Of Guitar called his attention to a moment in Rise that referenced a melody straight out of Kesha’s catalogue. Bettencourt noticed it immediately. 

“Someone cracked me up the other day, a guitar player was doing one of those things where they break it down and they listen to song, and they react – it’s all these reaction videos now!” said Bettencourt. “I was crying in tears. He was like, ‘The chorus comes in, and where have I heard this before?’ And he cuts to a Kesha song, and she’s doing this yodelling thing! I fell off my fucking seat! He nailed it. It is exactly what it is. Not that I took it from there but, holy fuck, it is a Kesha fucking hook. I couldn’t believe it. It is [all] pop, man.”

Also, simple musical ideas – sorry, simplexity – doesn’t need to mean happy. By Bettencourt’s estimating, there is no band that better exemplifies his principles of simplexity than Radiohead. How they manage to engage with complex themes in more simple contexts changed his life.

“Radiohead does it as a fucking art form,” he said. “Y’know, they are singing these things, and it’s droney, and it’s nothing complex – it’s not jazz! – but man, there are some lyrics, and some melodies, and there's weird harmonies, and production, and still, okay, we call it alternative because it is a little smarter. I got you. 

“But at the end of the day, come on! They fucking hate the song Creep but that song changed my life because it was the epitome of simplexity. The lyrics on Creep blew my head wide open, and it changed my life.”

Bettencourt has covered Radiohead on a number of occasions. A couple of years ago, he hooked up with Julian Lennon to cover Karma Police, at a time when hooking up with other artists and jamming on tracks remotely was as close as bands could get to touring. And he and Phil X have been known to join forces and jam Creep live.

Extreme will release Six on 9 June through earMusic. The full interview with Nuno Bettencourt, in which he discusses the reaction to that Rise solo, explains why he is till a frustrated drummer, and reveals what everyone gets wrong about the Marshall DSL, is coming soon to MusicRadar. 

Sometimes the biggest hits have the most unorthodox beginnings, and so it was with Extreme’s Hole Hearted. Taken from the Boston rockers’ sophomore album, Extreme II: Pornograffiti, Hole Hearted is a dreamy track led by 12-string acoustic and loosely inspired by Led Zeppelin III that captured the imagination of the record-buying public. 

Extreme tracked Pornograffiti at the legendary Scream Studios, in Los Angeles, where all mod cons were available to them. But in conversation with SiriusXM’s Eddie Trunk, guitarist Nuno Bettencourt has revealed that what we are hearing on the record was a cassette demo tracked in frontman Gary Cherone’s basement. 

And he says the experience taught the band a valuable lesson: that sometimes you just can’t replicate the magic that happens the first time you track a song to tape. Demo recordings, they decided, are counterproductive.

“We don’t do demos,” said Bettencourt. “I hate demos, because you can never recapture the magic from the first time we record a song, so we just go all in, and if it works, it goes on the album. There is no cutting a demo and them, ‘Oh, let’s do another version and speed it up.’ We go in, and it works. If not, it’s out.”

Bettencourt and Trunk discussed Extreme’s forthcoming album, Six, the long 15-year wait for the band’s fans, and how he has gradually taken on all production duties just as Jimmy Page did with Led Zeppelin when the conversation turned to the subject of demos, and the remarkable story of how the acoustic guitar riff for Hole Hearted was as lo-fi as you could get, but ultimately perfect for the recording.

“Hole Hearted was recorded in Gary’s basement,” said Bettencourt. “I had a little four-track, or an eight-track cassette thing going on, and had this idea going on with a 12-string at the studio. I wrote the riff, and then go back to his house and I am in the basement and everything is pouring through – it’s coming out, the melodies – and I’ve got nothing to record it with.”

In recording, there is always a workaround. This one is a doozy.

“It was a headset, like a McDonalds/Burger King headset that you people like Janet Jackson used to use live,” he explains. “I literally taped it to my knee with duct tape to record the acoustic guitar. And then I just did some percussion. We did the BVs [backing vocals], everything there. Gary cut the vocal.”

That was it. Extreme had what they thought was the demo. They had a great track, too. And they were soon to realise just how great once they got to the studio, where they could avail themselves of the best audio tech, the best microphones for recording, the world an oyster with their name on it, and yet something was amiss.

“Recutting it, we could not recapture the spirit of it,” said Bettencourt. “So we literally had to ship the whole recorder over and transfer those tracks onto two-inch tape. And what it goes to show you is that the new one that we recorded is better, technically, sonically, performances, perfect, amazing. But lost the magic the first time you record it as you are writing it. It goes to show you that even if a song is done on a little recorder on your basement at home, it can still go Top 5 worldwide.”

It remains to be seen whether the success of Bettencourt’s improvised headset mic recording setup will catch on in the audio engineering space. Guitar playing home recording enthusiasts might well be tempted to take home a headset and send an open chord through it to see how it fares.

But Bettencourt’s studio nous has certainly appreciated over the years, with the six-string virtuoso assuming all production duties for new album, Six, which was recorded at his home studio. Extreme shared the album’s first single, Rise, with Bettencourt telling fans to expect the unexpected.

“Whatever you think an Extreme album is after two or even three songs, it’s not,” he said. “That goes for every record we’ve ever done. True Extreme fans know to ‘expect the unexpected.’ I feel like we need a good old school rock album. Six is definitely modern, but you can put on headphones and go on a journey from top-to-bottom. It’s like ‘Extreme 2.0’.” 

Six is released on 9 June on all all formats through earMUSIC. You can check out the first single, Rise, above, in a video directed by Bettencourt. And check out his full interview with Eddie Trunk at The Eddie Trunk Podcast.

Extreme have announced their long-awaited return with the release of new single, Rise, and a new studio album titled Six, which hits stores and streaming on 9 June. But right now it is all about Rise, a track that offers a reminder, if needed, that there are few players more capable of manipulating the electric guitar than Nuno Bettencourt.

That looks to be a theme of Six, their first album in 15 years, with Bettencourt promising “a lot of fire” and no shortage of fretboard spectacle, revealing that his mindset going into the record was influenced by the death of Eddie Van Halen, and what that meant for hard-rock guitar playing in the 21st century.

“When Eddie Van Halen passed, it really hit me,” said Nuno. “I’m not going to be the one who will take the throne, but I felt some responsibility to keep guitar playing alive. So, you hear a lot of fire on the record.” 

Bettencourt might be too modest to admit it, but there are few who contest his stock as heir to the EVH throne. When it comes to hard-rock guitar’s preeminent stylists, Bettencourt is right up there. 

Rise is case in point. Favouring his tradmark Washburn N4 signature guitar, Bettencourt's solo two-and-a-half minutes in leans on the vocabulary established by Eddie Van Halen, with whammy bar scoops and prestissimo lead lines presaging a headlong dive into that hyper-kinetic yet elastic style of his. And those arpeggios that take us back to the chorus are certifiably mind-blowing.

Also, with frontman Gary Cherone having enjoyed a stint fronting Van Halen in the late ‘90s, releasing one studio album with the band, Van Halen III, in 1998, there is an argument to be made that Extreme are best placed to occupy a similar place as rock guitar’s most box-office spectacle.

Bettencourt’s fingerprints are all over Six. He directed the video for Rise, which was shot on location in Los Angeles, and he produced the album, with the band decamping to his home studio in LA for the sessions.

“Whatever you think an Extreme album is after two or even three songs, it’s not,” said Bettencourt. “That goes for every record we’ve ever done. True Extreme fans know to ‘expect the unexpected.’ I feel like we need a good old school rock album. Six is definitely modern, but you can put on headphones and go on a journey from top-to-bottom. It’s like ‘Extreme 2.0’.” 

“With Extreme, there’s always a lot of passion and a little piss and vinegar,” added Cherone. “We’re not in competition with anybody else, but we strive to outdo ourselves. There are some moments on this album where we did. We’ve managed to stay together after all these years. We feel like we have something to prove when we get on stage or in the studio. Because of that, I believe some of these songs are among the best we’ve written.” 

Six is available for preorder and ships 9 June via earMUSIC.

Apart from the fact Nuno Bettencourt doesn't seem to age, his talent as a guitarist is timeless; today's contemporary players like Rabea Massaad grew up worshipping his chops with Extreme. And he's still out there with the band – and with Rihanna's band – doing it. But even Nuno sometimes has to rely on a foolproof trick to deliver, and this one surprised us.

In an entertaining Shred Talk with Dragonforce's Herman Li below, Nuno fielded questions from fans and straight off the bat things got interesting… after some discussion of hair brushes. Nuno revealed the secret of playing his most difficult guitar solos live.

"As guitar players the real secret is the lower you go, the more you suck – the sloppier you are," said Nuno on the topic of strap height and the price you pay for looking cooler with a low strung guitar. "When you sit down it's heaven."

After joking that his fellow Generation Axe alumni Tosin Abasi's higher strap height is referred to as the "Berklee Setting," Nuno got to his real trick; how he gets around delivering the goods with a low strung guitar strap.

"It's not even a joke but I decide, I make a conscious decision, to play at least 20-30% worse just from having the guitar look like that," Nuno begun. "You know how I know I'm right? Go look at any Extreme footage where you see me rocking out and then a solo comes up and you say, 'Why is Nuno putting his leg up on the monitor and then having his guitar up?' It's not because it looks cool like Iron Maiden with your leg up on the monitors. It's because it's easier to play the  damn solo, that's why.

"So the harder ones I put my leg up there on the monitor," he confirmed in the video above. "I gave my secret away - dammit!"

But as you'll see below, Nuno does very well without using his trick. Still, next time someone chastises you for posing at your next gig, just tell them Nuno said it's essential for note delivery. 

• Nuno Bettencourt tells the story of Extreme's More Than Words