Raye has had some pretty big moments over the past few years, but we’re guessing that last week was a standout even for her.

After winning the Mercury Music Prize up in Newcastle on Thursday for 2026 album This Music May Contain Hope, she was back in London the following night for her eagerly-awaited one-off gig at the Royal Albert Hall, and she had some pretty impressive company.

In keeping with the show’s title – This Symphony May Contain Hope – Raye was joined on stage by London’s Heritage Orchestra, with the Flames Collective providing additional vocals. And there was another special guest, too: the Royal Albert Hall’s official organist, Anna Lapwood.

Lapwood first came to mainstream attention when she performed alongside Bonobo during his Albert Hall run back in 2022, and went on to join Raye on her song Escapism during her show at the grand old venue in 2023. On Friday night she was back, this time adding organ elements to Click Clack Symphony.

Following the show, Lapwood posted a photo of herself alongside Raye on social media, and followed this up with a video of her big moment during the performance. “Getting to add organ to the song that kept me going this year,” she wrote in the caption. “I literally had tears streaming down my face while I was playing this.”

That wasn’t the end of Lapwood’s night, either – she popped up again for the encore, playing Felix Mendelssohn's Wedding March prior to the inevitable show-closing performance of Where Is My Husband!

In another post-show social media comment, Lapwood said: “I don’t know how to describe the feeling of getting to play this live with Raye at the Royal Albert Hall, or to describe what a phenomenal artist and human being she is. I will never ever forget this night.”

In an interview with MusicRadar that took place prior to the performance, Lapwood made it clear just how much she rates Raye, and This Music May Contain Hope in particular.

“It's extraordinary, and I think, like, what an inspiration in terms of following the music that she feels is most authentic to her,” she said. “She's not let herself be restricted by genre, and I find that really really inspirational. But also musically, it is just so clever and so advanced and so mad and also it has such a deep emotional heart. And when it first came out, I listened to it something like 16 times in the first week, cover to cover. And I've never done that with an album, ever.”

We’ll bring you the full interview next week. Anna Lapwood's new album, Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost, is released on 13 November on Sony Masterworks and she tours the UK in October next year.

It might have been penned more than half a century ago, but Jimmy Webb’s Wichita Lineman remains a source of fascination for listeners and other songwriters.

Made famous by Glen Campbell when it was released in 1968, the song has become a fixture on ‘greatest of all time’ lists but, as Webb reiterates in a new interview with The Guardian, Campbell actually recorded it based on an incomplete demo.

“I said, ‘But Glen, it isn’t finished,’” Webb told Campbell when he found out that he’d already cut the song. “He said, ‘It is now.’”

Webb also recalls the moment that the idea for Wichita Lineman hit him, which came as he was driving through the plains of Oklahoma.

“Nothing out there except endless railroad tracks and telephone poles. Then suddenly there’s a guy at the top of one of the poles. He’s got his phone, he’s talking to somebody and then … whoosh! He goes by. I never saw him again, but I never forgot him.”

A lot of time has been spent dissecting the lyrics to Wichita Lineman and trying to establish exactly what it’s about, and everyone is entitled to find their own meaning in the song. Webb admits, though, that some interpretations have been far removed from his own.

“You wouldn’t believe what some people thought it was about,” he says. “One guy who wrote to me thought it was about a football lineman, and a woman thought the young man in the song gets electrocuted because ‘the Wichita lineman is still on the line.’”

Webb can laugh about this, but other dissections of the song have hit him very differently – such as Billy Joel’s deconstruction at the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

“He said, ‘And I need you more than want you … that’s divorce, right?’” Webb remembers. “The audience were roaring. Then he got to ‘and I want you for all time’ and said, ‘Ultimately Wichita Lineman is about an ordinary man thinking extraordinary thoughts.’ And I got tears, you know.”

At his creative peak, Webb – now 80 – was writing so many songs that not all of them ended up being recorded, but some of these are now seeing the light of day on his new album: Yours For The Taking: The Found Songs of Jimmy Webb. Some of these are sung by Webb on his own, while guests on others include Graham Nash, Michael McDonald, Marc Cohn and Amy Grant.

Beyond that, Webb has also written songs for another album, so how does he keep doing it? “By listening to other people’s songs and trying to copy them,” he says, which seems like as good a piece of advice as any.

It was all going so well. Prince and the freshly assembled New Power Generation had put the finishing touches to Diamonds And Pearls album. They had performed a live set for Warner Bros and its staff at the Burbank lot in Los Angeles. Everything in the garden was rosy.

Then the phone rang. There was a call for Levi Seacer Jr, the New Power Generation’s guitarist and Warner Bros’ designated Prince whisperer. The legendary Mo Ostin, chairman and CEO of the label, was on the line.

Seacer was perplexed. What did Ostin want? Prince had done his bit.

Seacer recalls to MusicRadar: “When Prince was done with his version of Diamonds And Pearls, he sent it off to Warner’s. ‘Okay. Great songs, great music. We like it.’ We flew out to LA to do a patio show. And so they were like, ‘Oh, man, this is incredible!’”

But something must have happened after the show. This wasn’t a straight-up Diamonds And Pearls playback. Prince played a bunch of his earlier songs – Alphabet St., Purple Rain, Partyman, Let’s Work for the first time since 1983 – plus a cover of the Ohio Players’ Skin Tight.

This set featured just three tracks from Diamonds And Pearls – Daddy Pop, Jughead and set closer Get Off.

Seacer thinks the execs had got together again, and had gotten into each other’s heads. They wanted a radio-friendly single.

“As soon as I got home, I got a call from Warner Brothers, and it was Mo Ostin,” says Seacer. “He said, ‘Levi, we got a problem.’ I’m saying, ‘What’s going on?’ He said, ‘We need a first single. We got a solid record, but all the radio guys don’t feel like they have the first single.’ And I said, ‘Well, why didn’t you say something? We just left there!’ [Laughs]”

Well, Ostin and the higher-uppers at Warner Bros had their reasons. They also already had their lead single – they heard it on the lot when Prince played Get Off. But at that moment, clearly, they wanted more, another option. What else did the diminutive pop genius from Minnesota have squirrelled away at his Paisley Park HQ? Ostin would have asked himself, but you know how artists can get, it’s better they hear it from a peer.

“He said, ‘Well, you know, you’re close to Prince, and you have a way of talking with him, and you guys talk your music talk. Because if I say it to him, he probably won’t hear it the right way,’” says Seacer.

He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

“I said, ‘Oh, man, you’re his president! What can I do? I’m just a weasel! What can I do?’” laughs Seacer. “I’m like, ‘Man!’”

Ever the good soldier, he said okay. He accepted his mission but not with any relish.

“That was a hard one,” he says.

Seacer and Prince had struck up a good relationship. Seacer was exactly the type of player Prince liked having around. He could be in the studio for hours on end with no complaint. He could hang out. He also could play.

Initially, Seacer was drafted to play bass guitar for Prince as he put together a new backing band after the Revolution disbanded in 1986.

As the story goes, Seacer was playing bass in Shiela E’s band. He auditioned for Prince when he was looking for a guitar player for The Family, and he got the gig. Two days later, Prince changed his mind and Seacer is back on bass with Shiela E.

Upon their next meeting, Prince remembered Seacer and noted his surprise – not only at seeing Seacer again but seeing him on bass.

Seacer had been keeping himself busy in Prince’s rhythm section, but there was to be a change. Prince was bringing Sonny T back in on bass. He asked Seacer if he wanted to play guitar.

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

The rehearsal didn’t quite go to plan for Seacer, but that is another episode that shines a light on his working relationship with one of pop’s most enigmatic personalities. Seacer, if anything, was over prepared.

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

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

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

Seacer knew who was in charge. And there he was, with Ostin’s words ringing in his ears, giving Prince the bad news. Historically, things do not go well for the messenger.

“The next day, Prince was in the studio working, and I just kind of popped in,” says Seacer. “He said, ‘Hey, Levi, what you doing here?’ I said, ‘Uh, we need to talk about something right quick. I said, ‘I talked to Warner Brothers… I talked to Mo, and, umm, they love the album, but they don’t feel like they have a first single.’”

Prince was incredulous.

“I said, ‘I didn’t go behind your back. They called me.’ And he knew I had a relationship with them, and every now and then I would talk to Mo,” Seacer adds.

Prince understood this. He could trust Seacer. Nonetheless, he was not best pleased. Which artist would be?

“He was kind of hot about that,” says Seacer with a chuckle. “‘What? What do you mean? We just left there – and we slayed them!’”

Some reports put the numbers of Warner Bros employees in attendance at 400. That’s a memorable afternoon at work. These days, table football, fruit bowls and a fridge full of pop is the sign of a cool office. This was ’91. Labels had money, and money means clout. Warner Bros could call in Prince to play for the rank-and-file. And now this? So much for gratitude.

Prince said he didn’t believe it. Seacer did his best to explain. He told Prince: “The radio guys listened, and they loved it. They love it! But they need a lead-off signal. I’m just a messenger!’”

Having duly delivered the news, Seacer made good on his exit.

“He was a little frustrated,” Seacer admits. “I just left. I don’t think I even said goodbye to him.”

Prince was left to stew in the studio. Seacer didn’t have to wait long to hear from his boss again. The phone went the following morning at 7am. The New Power Generation were many things but they were not morning people. They were used to playing through the night if the session demanded it.

“I was just waking up,” says Seacer. “It was a lot earlier than we normally do sessions.”

But the day previous, Prince was steamed. He wanted Seacer’s ears on something fast. Prince had a track to play him.

“I said, ‘Okay.’ I came in. I’m tired,” says Seacer. “ I sat in the chair and he played Cream for me, on 10. It was loud. I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ He said, ‘Well, what do you think of that?’ I said, ‘Oh, man, they gonna love that.’ I mean, I knew it right when I first heard it. I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, they gonna be happy!’”

The story of Cream, or at least the order of events that led to its creation, has a whiff of the apocryphal. There is an interview with Billboard which NPG vocalist Tony Mosely is quoted as saying that they wrote it on tour in Europe, but that timing doesn’t quite fit.

Seacer’s own accounts have differed over the years. He told Rolling Stone that Prince wrote it in six or seven hours, and Wax Poetics that he sent the band out of the room as he scribbled on something and needed an hour to get his head straight and the idea for the song down on paper.

But we've got to appreciate that everything happened so fast with Prince. Seacer said that the basic tracks for Diamonds And Pearls came together in a week-and-a-half. They tracked Money Don’t Matter 2 Night, Willing And Able, and Horny Pony all in one night. Paisley Park was open all hours to contain this great efflorescence of Prince's creativity.

One thing is certain. When Seacer heard the propulsive funk by way of glam-rock stomp of Cream, he knew they had a hit. He could feel it in his bones.

“Yeah, I just knew. You know when you. You can tell,” says Seacer. “You’re like, ‘Yeah, whatever that is, that’s the magic. I mean, it hit all the check marks when you listen for a hit. When Prince comes out with something, the first thing fans are listening for is for something kind of funky, something up-tempo, something with slight religious or spiritual twist to it, and something with nice lyrics and catchy. And that song checked off all the boxes.”

And it ended up in a box. This was the analogue era. They stuck a recording into a package and sent it via FedEx to California. Then they waited.

“Today, you can just email stuff. We couldn’t do that,” says Seacer. “So we had to wait a day. And when Mo got that heat, oh man, they were jumping up and down.”

As ever, the critics were divided on Cream; it was often the way of it with Prince. But champagne was getting opened in Burbank. “You could hear all the corks coming out the bottles,” laughs Seacer. “Pop, pop, pop!”

Cream had the magic. It would become Prince’s his fifth (and final) number one hit on the Billboard Hot 100, a classic cut in a discography full of them, and Mo Ostin and Warner Bros got their hit.

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

As it builds to its euphoric coda, you’d never imagine that Harry Styles’ 2026 single Aperture was born in a moment when the energy in the studio had fallen flat.

Speaking to Spotify for its Songlore series, though, Styles’ long-term collaborator Kid Harpoon (Tom Hull) says that was indeed the case. He’s been breaking down how the song was made, and remembers that the seeds of Aperture were sown when both he and Styles were feeling creatively spent.

“I guess the moment for me when it came together was, I'm standing in one room. Harry's in the live room of the studio,” says Hull. “He's playing on the piano. I'm stood there. We're both exhausted. The energy was low, and when the energy gets low in the studio, the songs get slower, the music gets slower. Things become a lot more introverted. You’re tired at work, and you've got to get through the day, but your day and your job is to go and make something creatively. I'm also in the same zone, and I was like, ‘I don't know what to do.’”

For Hull, the solution was to dig out his trusty Roland TR-909 – a drum machine he describes as a “work of art” – and bang it through a classic ‘80s Eventide digital effects box – the HS3000 SE Ultraharmonizer.

“Aperture started with the 909 and an Eventide delay, and I was like, I'm just going to program something up,” Hull remembers. “I'm just going to play around with some sounds and just try and see if this can bring us some energy.”

We get to see Hull recreating the hypnotic Aperture groove using the same hardware he used to produce what you hear on the record. He recalls that, once he had that initial drum groove, he decided to develop it.

“Start hitting a synth. That's kind of cool. Then I've got my modular setup. We're patching all these cables. I was like, I'm going to dick around with this and see what happens. 20 minutes [later] I had something kind of going, and then Harry came in from the other room. He's like, ‘What are you doing? This is quite good.’”

Soon enough, they were off to the races, with Styles riffing off what his producer was doing and coming up with vocal ideas. “The next thing, I look up, and he's already singing, and he's written some melodies,” remembers Hull. “And around this moment, he goes, [sings] ‘We belong together.’ Then we're sort of pointing at each other, saying, ‘Yep, that's good.’ And he's like, ‘Yeah, that's good.’ A couple of hours later, we kind of have it.”

As Hull tells it, all of this kind of came out of nowhere. “I don't necessarily believe in this ‘divine inspiration,’” he admits. “I think it's just, ‘some good things happen, some bad things happen.’ But if there was any point in my career where I go, that was a sort of divine moment, it was that.”

Hull also says that it felt like a “hands-off-the-wheel moment” that he wasn’t really in control of, but he is proud of his contribution to one part of the song in particular.

“There's a bit that sounds like an electric guitar part. But it's my modular synth, and I was so proud of it. And when I watch the live show I'm so proud because I'm like, everyone thinks it's guitar, but actually, they don't know it's my modular synth.”

Hull says that it was Styles who encouraged him to go against his concise pop instincts and stretch Aperture’s running time out to more than five minutes; at times it feels more like a formless electronic music jam than the number one single it would become. Both men were keen to retain a human element to the production, though – hence the addition of London’s House Gospel Choir towards the end, and the decision to play the synth bassline in a longer section rather than simply creating a loop.

Although Aperture ended up being the lead single from Styles’ 2026 album, Kiss all the time. Disco, occasionally, Hull also reveals that it was the last song that they made for it. It was only when it was done, though, that the project felt complete: “It suddenly became the touchstone – it made everything else make sense,” he says.

Billy Corgan has been defending his friendship with Marilyn Manson, despite the numerous allegations of sexual assault and domestic abuse his ex-partner and others have accused him of.

The Smashing Pumpkins mainman, and now podcaster, was appearing on another podcast, the New York Times’ Popcast, when he was asked about his relationship with Manson. “I think that ultimately, as a Christian person… you have to stand by your friends,” he maintained. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t have an opinion, and that doesn’t mean you’re not critical.”

He continued: “In his case – and I’m not here to adjudicate it – the DA looked at the case for five years. In some cases, I knew personal things behind the scenes that are not in the public sphere. I personally didn’t feel that he was guilty of the things he was being charged with, and ultimately, the fact that the DA didn’t pursue it.”

“But, I wasn’t there,” he added. “I can’t be there for everything. But it’s one of those things where I don’t want the world to tell me who my friends are and who I should associate with. That’s politically, socially, and in Brian’s case, we have a relationship that goes back close to 30 years.”

Indeed they do. Corgan and Manson (real name Brian Warner) go back decades. The lead Pumpkin gave Manson his very first guitar. In 2015 they co-headlined the End Times tour, and more recently, Corgan was among a number of prominent faces at Manson’s 56^th birthday party in Los Angeles last year.

There’s also the little matter of a family connection. Manson’s wife’s twin sister is married to Pumpkins' guitarist James Iha. As Corgan said in the NYT Popcast interview, Manson is “basically a part of our family”.

Corgan is not the first established name in the rock world not to shun Manson post-abuse allegations. Slipknot received a fair amount of criticism after they announced that he would be supporting them on their 2027 tour.

Manson has been accused of sexual assault and verbal, physical and psychological abuse by his former assistant Ashley Walters – the civil case is set to be heard next year. His one-time fiancée, Rachel Wood, also accused him of abuse during their relationship, as have several other women, as detailed in the 2025 Channel Four documentary Marilyn Manson: Unmasked.

It should be noted that Manson continues to deny all the allegations.

Stevie Wonder’s four-album run in the early ‘70s is widely considered to be one of the greatest in music history, but he didn’t create these records in isolation.

Working alongside Wonder were Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil, who brought their now legendary Tonto synth to the party, a huge composite instrument that featured parts from multiple manufacturers.

Cecil died in 2021, but Margouleff is still around to tell the tale of that time. In fact, he got the whole endeavour down in his book – Shaping Sounds: Stevie Wonder, Devo, The Synth Revolution – And My Life Behind the Music.

“For three years, I lived in Stevie’s world,” Margouleff told The Telegraph. “I’d wake up in the morning, Stevie would come to the studio around five o’clock, and we worked until the dawn’s early light. I didn’t think about anything else. I lost my mind, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

Given that level of intensity, it’s perhaps inevitable that the working relationship would burn out before it faded away, and so it proved. Margouleff suggests that Cecil in particular began to feel disgruntled about the pair being credited merely as ‘associate producers’ on those classic albums, and says that, despite Wonder inviting them in on the promise of being made creative directors of his company, it was never made official.

“We just went on a handshake,” he remembers. “It went on like that for three years.”

Tensions were raised further, says Margouleff, when Wonder failed to mention him and Cecil during his acceptance speeches at the 1974 Grammys, at which he won five awards.

And then came the straw that broke the camel’s back. As Margouleff remembers it, some of Wonder’s friends were partying in the studio control room, and Cecil had to ask them to be quiet.

Wonder wasn’t happy about it: “He said: ‘Don’t you talk to my friends like that,’” recalls Margouleff. “That’s the only time I ever heard Stevie say anything in anger. I say that with the deepest respect, because I love Stevie. But when that happened, the angels left the building. It was really over.”

The trio’s indelible mark on music history had been made, though. What’s more, Margouleff says that he reunited with Wonder a few years ago, and would be happy to work with him again if he ever wanted to revisit some of the unreleased material from their golden era.

“Some of it will never see the light of day,” he says. “Whatever happens, I can’t control it. Nor do I want to.”

Margouleff does have some advice for today’s musicians, though: stop being so rigid with your tempo.

“The problem with pop music today is we have no rubato,” he argues. “We never used click tracks. If you listen to Superstition, you’ll hear it speeds up and slows down. That imperfection is what made the music compelling.”

It’s 20 years since Amy Winehouse released Back to Black, her career-defining second album.

For those who knew her, the milestone will doubtless feel bittersweet. The record was hugely successful and won countless awards, but Winehouse seemed ill-equipped to cope with the pressures of global fame, and died in 2011 at the tragically young age of 27.

Someone who knew Winehouse better than most was Dale Davis, her live bass player and musical director. He began working with the star in 2003 and, speaking to The Times, he’s been discussing the final conversation he had with her on the night before her death.

“She rang up, she said, ‘I’ve been watching YouTube clips of myself. I can sing, can’t I?’” says Davis. “I went, 'Yeah, of course you can sing, you’re the best.'”

Davis says that he planned to see Winehouse the next evening, when she was going to take his son to see Toy Story 4. “She said, ‘Well, I’m going now,’ and I went, ‘All right, Amy, I’ll see you tomorrow, love you.’ And she went, ‘Love you more,’ put the phone down. That was the last thing I heard from her.”

The Times also interviewed some of the other people involved in Back to Black, including songwriter Paul O’Duffy. He co-wrote Wake Up Alone, the album’s eighth track, and revealed that he bonded with Winehouse over a shared love of jazz singer Sarah Vaughan.

O’Duffy says that he played Winehouse an album that she hadn’t heard before – Sarah Vaughan with Michel LeGrand – which intrigued her. “One track, Deep in the Night, had a rhythm to it which was quite interesting,” O’Duffy remembers. “And I said, ‘well maybe we should try something that has a feel like that.’ She was quite engaged with that. I came up with a beat similar to that and then found some chords that I felt would work with it. And then she played the guitar and I’m thinking, ‘We’re going to get something. Something’s coming.’ And she said, ‘I’ve got something… just put the mic on.’”

It sounds like O’Duffy wasn’t fully prepared for what Amy did next: “She sang Wake Up Alone from beginning to end,” he says. “It was just like magic.”

To mark its anniversary, an expanded 20th anniversary edition of Back to Black was released today (23 October), and its legacy was also celebrated earlier this week at a special concert at London’s Roundhouse. The album was performed in full, with producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi among those joining Dale Davis and The Amy Winehouse Band on stage.

Guest singers included Baby Rose, Corinne Bailey Rae, FLO, Jessie Reyez, Jorja Smith, Lianne La Havas, Nia Smith, Sasha Keable, Skye Newman, Terri Walker and Yebba.

For those in the UK, the concert will be broadcast on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer on Saturday 24 October at 9.35pm as part of a night of programming celebrating Amy Winehouse’s life and career.

Many artists with careers spanning decades will at some point in their lives have had to make major stylistic changes to adapt to shifting trends.

The ’80s in particular saw a number of artists from the ’60s and ’70s completely reimagine their sound.

Steve Winwood realigned his R&B, soul and blues roots into a sophisticated, synth-driven pop sound with polished digital production. Tina Turner also transformed her visceral R&B and soul sound into a sleek, high energy blend of pop, rock and contemporary R&B.

And then there was Elton John, who in 1983 released the album Too Low For Zero, his first album to feature synths, drum machines, electronic textures and modern production techniques alongside his classic acoustic piano sound.

The song from that album which really thrust him into the public consciousness was I’m Still Standing, a thumping, driving and exuberant rocker with defiant lyrics and infectious hooks.

I’m Still Standing introduced John to a whole new generation of fans and gave him a fresh, energetic pop identity for the ’80s. The song would go on to become a highlight of his live set for decades to come.

By the time Elton John started work on the Too Low For Zero album, his career had experienced a significant lull. His previous five albums had failed to yield any international hits and sales were disappointing compared to his string of hit records in the first half of the 1970s.

For the first time since the Blue Moves album in 1976, John reunited with lyricist Bernie Taupin, to work on Too Low For Zero, his 17th studio album.

“We both knew that we wanted to work together again, but we had to wait until it just fell into place,” Taupin told Music Connection magazine in 1989. “We knew that when the time was right it would just happen.”

John also reunited with his backing band from the early ’70s, featuring guitarist Davey Johnstone, drummer Nigel Olsson and bassist Dee Murray.

“It was such a great buzz playing with those guys again,” said John in an edition from the 1983 Rock Star Interviews series, entitled Elton John: Reflections On A Decade Of Hits. “And that was the most successful band that I ever had, with David, Dee and Nigel. And I just thought if we were going to do an album it would be a great idea to just do one with Bernie and go back to that formula again and record an album how we used to record it. That is to say we did the album more or less in two weeks, written and recorded. It really worked.”

George Martin’s AIR Studios in Montserrat was the studio chosen to record the album and this was where John and Taupin wrote the ten songs that made it onto the album. “It was like a little factory again down in Montserrat,” said John in the Rock Star Interviews series.

The producer selected for the album was Chris Thomas, who had worked with The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols among numerous others. It was Thomas who reportedly encouraged John to use synths.

“All the songs were written on synthesiser," John told Paul Gambaccini in 1984.

“My biggest hang-up has been writing rock ’n’ roll songs. I’m not very good at it, because if you’re a pianist it’s a totally different concept [compared to] playing guitar. It’s very hard to write three-chord songs on a piano. So I get this synthesizer, which sounds like a guitar on some parts, and I can write three-chord songs all of a sudden.”

While I’m Still Standing has become synonymous as a song about Elton John’s resilience and his triumph over adversity, Bernie Taupin actually wrote the lyrics as a message to a former girlfriend.

“It's perhaps one more example of the original idea being interpreted by everyone into something quite different,” Taupin told Smooth Radio. “I think people see it as an anthem based on Elton’s strong sense of survival in the face of adversity. Which, believe me, is perfectly fine by me. In fact, it’s probably infinitely more interesting, perhaps, than what it was initially written about. Which, if my memory serves me correctly, it was a sort of kiss-off to an old girlfriend. You know the sort of thing, ‘Don’t you worry about me, I’ll be perfectly fine.’ Unlike George Jones’ She Thinks I Still Care, where, in fact, he really did, I really didn’t.”

In his 2019 memoir, Me, John explained how Taupin’s title for the song took on a whole new meaning for him.

“I’m Still Standing sounded like the whole album’s calling card,” he wrote. “The lyric was about one of Bernie’s exes, but I also thought it worked as a message to my new American record company – who were, quite frankly, turning out to be a terrible pain in the arse.”

John’s label, Geffen Records, had reportedly been disappointed by the sales of his previous two albums, The Fox (1981) and Jump Up! (1982) and were allegedly extremely open with him about their level of disappointment.

“I didn’t like the look of any of it,” John wrote in his 2019 memoir Me, “and thought I’m Still Standing sounded like a warning shot across their bows. It was a big, swaggering, confident fuck-you of a song.”

From the first few bars, I’m Still Standing has a driving, infectious intensity. It’s also irrepressibly catchy. Bright, brassy staccato synths, bouncy piano and punchy slap bass predominate in the mix of this high energy pop-rock track. It’s a big, bold sound and the production is glistening and crisp.

The core refrain on the line “I’m still standing better than I ever did…” is anthemic and uplifting while the counterpoint backing vocal chants of “yeah, yeah, yeah” in the chorus provide classic singalong fare.

Structurally, there’s a real authority to the individual sections and John’s rapid-fire rhythmic phrasing bolsters the song’s breakneck 177 bpm delivery. It’s a powerful, soulful vocal performance from John, who belts out the lyrics with real conviction, backed by the flawless harmonies of guitarist Davey Johnstone, bassist Dee Murray and drummer Nigel Olsson.

It’s uncanny how Taupin’s lyrics inadvertently lend themselves to John’s own narrative of surviving against all odds, as Lindsay Planer of AllMusic observed.

“Taupin’s lyrics perfectly capture the behind-the-scenes struggle that was concurrently going on between the artist and his relatively new label Geffen Records,” wrote Palmer. “The chorus contains a perfect example of the duality within John’s defiance and insecurity.”

1:55 into the song there’s a searing rockabilly-tinged guitar solo from Davey Johnstone – with double-stop licks and sliding sixths – that cuts right through the piano- and synth-driven mix. The solo lasts just 15 seconds but it re-energises the song and sets it up perfectly for the chorus that follows.

There is an irrepressibly joyous, life-affirming feel to I’m Still Standing, which is reflected by the video.

This was shot in and around Cannes and Nice although the bulk of the shoot took place outside the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, a town well accustomed to lavish spectacle.

It’s a witty, vivacious video in which John performs alongside various body-painted dancers on the Carlton Hotel’s sun-baked private beach and along the Croisette. It is ’80s excess at its finest, but there’s a likeable tongue-in-cheek feel to the whole thing, thanks to Arlene Phillips’s inventive choreography.

The video shoot wasn’t without its drama. Things allegedly got out of hand when John happened to meet Duran Duran, who reportedly introduced him to vodka martinis.

“Depending on who you believe, I had either six or eight more of them in the space of an hour,” John wrote in his 2019 memoir Me, as reported by Ultimate Classic Rock.

Later that evening, John allegedly trashed the hotel room of his personal assistant Bob Halley. The following day, he woke and saw the damage, as he recalled in his memoir. “‘Fucking hell,’ I said. ‘What happened?’” he wrote. “Elton,” replied Halley after a long pause, “you happened.”

The drama continued when the video’s director Russell Mulcahy accidentally fell into the sea with a camera after walking backwards while filming. This meant that much of that day’s footage had to be reshot.

But despite such incidents, the song and the video enhanced each other seamlessly. The video showed that John was willing to embrace the new format, unlike some established stars at the time. And pivotally, it introduced him to a whole new, younger fanbase.

I’m Still Standing was released in April 1983 in the US and on 22 July 1983 in the UK. The song was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic, reaching No 4 in the UK and No 12 in the US. It topped the charts in Canada and Switzerland and went top five in Australia, Ireland, Israel and Luxembourg.

John had re-emerged with a thumping rocker of a song and in the process reignited his career.

“Both the lyrical content as well as the driving tempo heralded a return in spirit to John’s rock and roll icon status, which had been wavering since the late ’70s,” noted Lindsay Palmer of AllMusic,

On 13 July 1985, almost exactly two years after the UK release of I’m Still Standing, Elton John strode out onto the Wembley Stadium stage at Live Aid and kicked off a killer set with I’m Still Standing. It has remained a staple of his live set for the rest of his career.

On 30 January 2018, artists such as Miley Cyrus, Ed Sheeran and Lady Gaga paid tribute to John by covering his songs at the Madison Square Garden concert, Elton John: I’m Still Standing. The show ended with John and the other artists performing the song.

In many ways, the song became a brand of sorts for Elton John, conveying his struggles, his triumphs and his endurance. Ultimately though, it remains a timeless anthem, whose empowering lyrics and infectious melody have energised and uplifted audiences across the globe.

Raye has won the 2026 Mercury Music Prize, for her second album This Music May Contain Hope.

The 17-track, 73-minute opus, which in old money would have surely been classified as a double, was certainly ambitious. Mixing big band jazz, funk and pop, it’s divided into four parts and, for full effect, very much needs to be listened to from start to finish. And yet there’s nothing difficult or obscure about it – it also contained an internationally successful lead single in Where Is My Husband?

Raye herself was at last night’s ceremony in Newcastle to accept the award. Referencing her early years on a major label, before she went independent, she said: “Albums are so important, and not to be bitter – because I feel like I’m mostly at peace with my past – but to come from a place where it’s all about singles and chasing the next thing, I just feel so grateful to be recognised.”

She also addressed the central theme of the record: “Hope is a very cheesy word, especially for us British people; we don’t do that deep stuff like that, but hope is something we all need… so I hope that message comes across to anyone who needs it.”

It’s the second year in a row that the Mercury panel – which contains a motley collection of broadcasters, writers, music consultants and some musicians themselves – has given the prize to an established mainstream artist.

One could argue that like Sam Fender last year, Raye hardly needs the Mercury to fit alongside the six Brits and sundry other awards on her mantelpiece. You could also argue that some of the, er, less illustrious winners have often promptly disappeared into obscurity, which hardly reflects well on the Mercury – whatever happened to 2015’s winner Benjamin Clementine? Or Speech Dabelle (2009)?

Anyway, the judging panel said of This Music May Contain Hope: “Raye displays real imagination and scope in showing what an album can be, going beyond any one style or genre to realise her vision. The judges agreed that Raye’s superb album will serve as a huge inspiration for years to come.”

Raye came out on top over albums by Paul McCartney (The Boys Of Dungeon Lane), and previous winners in the shape of Suede (for Antidepressants) and Dave (The Boy Who Played Harp). Spare a thought, though, for Florence Welch and her machine. One of the UK’s most consistently successful artists over the past two decades, the South Londoner has now been nominated for the Mercury five times and has yet to win. Maybe next time?

Tributes have been coming in for the country music singer John Anderson, who died yesterday, aged 71.

The news was broken by his family on social media. “It is with the heaviest of hearts that we share the passing of our beloved husband, father, grandfather, and best friend."

They continued: “To the world, he was a gifted country music singer whose voice and songs touched countless lives. To us, he was so much more. He was the heart of our family, the one who made us laugh, loved us fiercely, and made every ordinary moment feel special. We are completely heartbroken.”

No cause of death has been given as yet.

“I am completely heartbroken by his passing,” wrote Tim McGraw, who said that he had spoken with Anderson at the Country Music Hall of Fame ceremony in Nashville just last week. “There will never be a stylist in music, any music, that was so defining as his. It’s just devastating. All of our love goes out to his family and the country music community. He was and is one of the defining voices in country music.”

Writing on Instagram, Blake Shelton said: “I am sick and I am stunned. But I am a very lucky man. I got the opportunity to find out that my hero wasn’t just the guy I hoped he’d be. He was so much more than that. John was my friend. I got to see him last Sunday and I don’t even know why but I told him I loved him. That is what fills my heart in this moment. My love and prayers go out to John’s family. This one really hurts.”

Meanwhile, another country stalwart Reba McEntire, said of Anderson: "One of my favourite people in this business. I sure will miss you, John. Love you and your music always." Rather more surprisingly, Gwen Stefani put her own thoughts about Anderson on social media, saying: "We loved him!! His music is part of our family's hearts forever!! Gx."

Though his records rarely troubled the main Billboard charts, Anderson was highly regarded within country music. His career probably peaked in the 1980s and early 1990s and he chalked up five Billboard country chart Number Ones during that time, including Wild And Blue, Black Sheep, Straight Tequila Night and Money In The Bank. He was belatedly inducted into the Country Hall Of Fame in 2024.

You could easily make the argument that Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s songwriting partnership is the greatest in rock and pop history. The other obvious contenders would be Lennon and McCartney, but they only worked together for a dozen years, while Elton and Bernie have been in each other’s creative pockets for more than half a century.

Taupin has now been reflecting on his work with Elton in an interview with Rick Beato. Famously, the two men were brought together in 1967 when they both responded to an ad placed by A&R manager Ray Williams, who was looking for songwriters, in the New Musical Express (NME). The story goes that Taupin’s envelope of lyrics was almost randomly chosen from a stack of them and given to John, so they could easily never have met.

Taupin, though, suspects slightly less serendipity: “Ray Williams says and Elton says that he had a stack of lyrics that people had sent in, and that [Williams] just pulled these out and he said, ‘Well, take a look at some of these,’ and Elton said, ‘Well, these look really interesting.’

“I don't actually go along with that – I mean, they'll deny it, but do you really think that a lot of people sent lyrics in? I don't think so. Maybe a couple, but there wasn't a stack of them. You know, he wasn't like fanning through them and going, ‘Well, try these,’ you know, and ‘Oh, these are interesting – I'm going to take these.’ But if public opinion wants to go along with that, I'm not going to argue with it.”

One thing that Taupin definitely agrees with John on is that Skyline Pigeon, which they wrote in 1968, was one of their first great songs, and the one that started to get them noticed. “It kind of went underground for a while, but the interesting thing was that when we wrote it, we got three covers on it within a week,” he says.

Elton’s first version of Skyline Pigeon appeared on 1969’s Empty Sky, and is played on a harpsichord. The song deserved more, though, and a fleshed-out arrangement was recorded and first released as the B-side to 1973 single, Daniel.

Written from the perspective of a younger brother, Daniel is believed to tell the story of a Vietnam war veteran leaving for Spain after coming home injured, but this is never explicitly mentioned. It’s long been known that a verse was cut from the song, leading to speculation that this fully explained its meaning, but Taupin says that this is nonsense.

Asked if Elton ever used to change his lyrics – or ask him to change them – he replied: “No – he would make everything work. He might take an ‘and’ or ‘but’ out, but that's about it. I mean, the only only thing he would do is if I overwrote something, if he felt it would be too long, we'd take out a verse or something or a few lines – or maybe he'd say ‘there isn't enough’ and I'd put something in. Hence the urban myth about the song Daniel – that he took a verse out that really explained the song – which is absolute rubbish. You know, it didn't make it any different. It was just more of the same. It's a good story, but it's not true.”

This slightly contradicts what Taupin told Billboard in 1997 – “I don’t remember what the last verse was, so I don’t know whether it [changed what the song was about] or not” – but even then he was saying that “I seriously doubt” if it did much to change Daniel’s meaning.

Elsewhere in the interview, Taupin discussed another great lyric he wrote in that period – 1972’s Rocket Man. He explained that, while he used to write some songs “top to bottom” in less than an hour, this one took a lot longer. Its opening lines, though, arrived fully formed – and at an inopportune moment.

“The initial three lines of that song came to me when I was back visiting my parents in the north of England before I moved them to the States,” he recalls. “I was driving to their house, and I didn't have any paper or pencil or anything. And the first three lines, you know – “She packed my bags last night, pre-flight, Zero hour, nine am, and I'm gonna be high as a kite by then” – came straight into my head. So I'm driving like at 70 miles an hour along these little back roads, because my parents lived out in the middle of nowhere, and I'm repeating this to myself over and over and over again, and I kind of screech into their driveway, run into the house – ‘Give me a pen,’ you know – and write it down.”

Another singer has bemoaned the effects of vaping on her voice.

This time it’s the ex-child star, Selena Gomez. Writing on Instagram, the 34-year-old vocalist admitted: “I vaped nicotine a lot, and just so everyone knows, that's somewhat vaped. Nicotine is so hard to quit. And I think I just wanted to say if you're going through it, or if you're even trying to vape, it's just not worth it.”

“It's so stupid and… it changed my voice. So, if you guys don't like listening to my voice, that's totally understandable. I don't mind. Just don't listen to it. Just don't listen."

However, it seems that Gomez has actually done the sensible thing and kicked her habit: “I am really excited because I stopped and I just hope I can keep it up. It's really hard, but I know if you are going through something you can get through it too. It sucks.”

She is the second female artist this month to admit to a vaping habit. A couple of weeks’ ago Lola Young revealed, again on Instagram, that: "My lungs feel like they're battery powered, like they're just one big battery. Breathing feels like a chore, it feels like hard work, it feels like I should be paid for breathing. It feels like there will be no tomorrow."

Gomez also suffers from the chronic autoimmune condition lupus, which may also be a contributing factor. In an Instagram Q&A last year, when asked about lupus affecting her voice, she said: “Sometimes things happen. I get weird. My throat kind swells inside sometimes. That’s all.”⁠

Fans have undoubtedly noticed the changing nature of her voice. Indeed, one posted a video on on YouTube (above) that charted its evolution from teen star squeak to something slower, more considered and definitely lower.

But hey, that’s also what happens to human voices as you grow older. Even if you don’t have a chronic illness or you vape...

She might have been a jobbing pop star for a decade or more, but it’s only in the past couple of years that all the pieces of Zara Larsson’s career have finally fallen into place.

After TikTok discovered her 2016 hit, Lush Life, Larsson was able to capitalise on her growing profile with 2025’s Midnight Sun album, and the title track served as a glorious day-glo manifesto for her new era.

Alongside songwriter/producer MNEK and songwriter Helena Gao, Larsson has been sitting down to discuss the making of the song – a pulsating blend of pop, drum ‘n’ bass and just a little bit of Jersey club.

The concept came from Larsson herself – “I just wanted to capture the feeling of what it feels like to be in the countryside at the peak of Swedish summer,” she says. MNEK then imagined her being “in the sun, in nature, hands in your hair.”

Musically, this led the producer to a ‘90s influence: “My first thinking was Ray Of Light, Madonna – that ethereal major key feeling,” he remembers. Later on, this was also a reference point for the video.

And so the song began to take shape: “I had these ideas for these chords – sometimes I'll hear the music in my head, but maybe don't know how it's going to be executed,” says MNEK. It was fellow producer Margo XS who suggested that these could be arpeggiated – “And then Helena got on the keys, and played something that's a constant across the song,” adds MNEK.

One other element of Midnight Sun that was “totally inspired by Ray Of Light” was the long, wavering ‘Sun’ that Larsson sings in the chorus, becoming one of the song’s main hooks. This wasn’t sung as you hear it, though: “We chopped that shit,” admits Larsson, referring to the editing process in Logic Pro. “And I was scared. I was, like, ‘how am I going to perform this live?’”

Fortunately, she’s been able to manage it: “Something happens when I go on stage and I hold the mic,” she says. “Then I'm just like, ‘Oh, I can really sing this.’ But in the studio, we really had to [be] like, ‘let me take a breath.’”

It’s underneath this sustained note that Midnight Sun has its ‘Jersey moment’ – there’s a lot going on in terms of production. When it came to vocals, though, Larsson was keen to keep things simple.

“I remember when we were finishing the record, one of Zara's main points was, ‘I don't want too much double tracking, I don't want too much left and right. just give me a little plate reverb – make it direct, and keep it hot,’” says MNEK. “And I was like, ‘that's great, but I'm gonna need a little harmony.’”

We get various little vocal flourishes that all help to add to the buoyant atmosphere, and Larsson also got the chance to hit a big note.

“The highest note Zara reaches in the song is an E5,” says MNEK, and he feels that this is something that helps Midnight Sun to stand out in the current music landscape.

“The way pop is right now, it's like there's such minimalism,” he argues. “No one is singing an E5 on a record no more. You know what I mean? That's the truth of it all. Everyone is a lot more chill and not as imposing or not trying to take up too much space.”

“And this song is loud,” interjects Larsson. “Like, it is taking up space.”

In fact, she feels like Midnight Sun is a perfect encapsulation of what she’s about as an artist. “It's amazing,” she says. “Like, I don't know – it just speaks to me, and if it speaks to me and to all of us, it has to speak to some other people. I felt really, really excited to play this track for people because I just felt so secure and confident in the song. I just knew what it meant to me and how I felt listening to this. And if they didn't like it, they wouldn't like me. That's how I felt. If you don't like this song, you don't like me.”

It was an emotional night at Nashville’s CMA Theater on Sunday when Tim McGraw was inducted into the Country Hall Of Fame.

McGraw was there with his wife, fellow country superstar Faith Hill, and his three daughters, and yes, tears came when he was invited up to speak: "I’m going to cry because I cry all the time,” he said. "There’s a lot of oestrogen in my house."

Addressing Hill, McGraw said that the only thing that would make the evening better would be if she were admitted too: "The only thing that can beat this night is when you’re standing here, and I’m sitting there" – and took time to speak about his daughters: "You’re the best thing we’ve ever made. Nothing in our careers even comes close."

The 59-year-old singer-songwriter also spoke about one of his heroes, Keith Whitley. He pointed out that Whitley had died at the absurdly young age of 34 in 1989 on exactly the same day (Tuesday, 9 May) that McGraw arrived in Nashville from his hometown of Start, Louisiana. One of his biggest hits was When You Say Nothing At All (which later became a significant hit for Ronan Keating), and the writer of that song was Paul Overstreet, who just happened to be one of McGraw’s fellow inductees on Sunday night.

“I don’t believe that’s coincidence,” McGraw said from the podium. “I believe that’s country music.”

Clearly in a reflective mood, he also talked about his difficult upbringing in Start. "I spent a lot of years wondering where I really came from,” he explained. “Turns out I had two dads.

"The one who raised me was my stepdad, Horace Smith. Now, he would have never won any awards for how he treated my mother or us kids.”

"And that house was a hard fire, but hard fire is how you make steel. When I was 11, I found my birth certificate in the name that I already knew from baseball. In fact, I had the card on my wall, McGraw. We met once that year, and I never saw him again until I was 19 years old."

Aside from McGraw and Overstreet, the other inductees this year were the sibling duo, The Stanley Brothers. Sadly, they were not able to attend, having died in 1966 and 2016, respectively.

Miley Cyrus has delivered an on-stage riposte to those who claimed that she appeared to be disinterested in some of her older material during the first of her two Hollywood Bowl shows at the weekend.

The gigs were scheduled in support of Cyrus’s new album, Bass Persuades, which was released last month. The setlist for the shows leant heavily on that record’s tracklisting, and she also paid tribute to her godmother, the late Dolly Parton, becoming emotional as she prepared to sing her classic hit Jolene.

When footage from Friday’s gig surfaced online, though, Cyrus was accused by some of appearing to be less than fully engaged during some of her own older hits – the likes of Wrecking Ball, Party in the USA, We Can’t Stop and The Climb – leaving the audience to sing some of the lyrics.

Cyrus didn’t take this lying down, though: in fact, she addressed it head on during her second show on Sunday, delivering an impassioned defence.

Hitting back at the suggestion that she hadn’t “put her heart” into parts of the first show, Cyrus said that she wasn’t “even going to entertain that”. She did, however, say that it’s becoming more difficult for her to get up on stage: “It is hard for me to stand up here and do the show. It does not come as natural as it once did to me before because, like all of us, we change, we evolve, we grow.”

Cyrus has been open about the challenges she faces when performing live. In a 2025 interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, she explained: “I have this very large polyp on my vocal cord, which has given me a lot of the tone and the texture that has made me who I am, but it's extremely difficult to perform with because it's like running a marathon with ankle weights on.”

She added some more context to her decision not to tour at the moment when she spoke to Variety earlier this year. “I actually miss and love live shows,” she said, “but me being on the road for six months out of the year and leaving my family and my normalcy and my routine is just not best for me.”

In her speech at the Hollywood Bowl, though, Cyrus was keen to stress that she still values her audience just as much as she always did. “You are more to me than an experiment – that is absolutely not what this is. This is not an experiment of you – this is an experience for me. And you all make the experience possible.”

Suggesting that she’d been stung by some of the criticism, Cyrus admitted that part of her didn’t want to perform the second show. “I had already told myself that I wasn’t going to come on stage, that I was going to run away,” she told the crowd, “but never would I leave you all sitting in these seats. I can take a lot, but one thing I will not stand is any question about where my heart is when I’m on the stage. I am fully present.”

Cyrus also referenced the furore during recent single Bass Persuades: “Oh, I forgot I’m supposed to sing every fucking line!” she joked.

Fans singing along at gigs has become surprisingly controversial over the past few years, particularly in the pop world. While some wear it is a badge of honour that know every word and like to prove it by singing every line at the top of their voices – sometimes even criticising those who choose not to – others are of the opinion that it’s the artist they’ve come to hear, not the person sitting or standing next to them.

It wasn’t always this way, though: in a 2023 interview with Total Guitar, Brian May of Queen – an audience participation band if ever there was one – admitted that he used to get annoyed when people sang along at their early gigs.

Remembering those days, he explained: “We were a group which was doing quite well, we had a good following, and we had this thing where people insisted on singing along to our songs. And I think we were quite irritated by it! Because we thought, ‘People, just listen. We’re working really hard, so bloody well listen!’”

Instead of continuing to get annoyed, though, May decided to embrace the fans’ behaviour. “I said to Freddie, ‘Maybe, instead of fighting this, we should be encouraging it. Maybe we should be harnessing this kind of energy which seems to be happening.’ And we all agreed that this was something really interesting that we should experiment with – letting the audience be a bigger part of the show.”

This led directly to May writing We Will Rock You, possibly the most audience-friendly song of them all.

Harry Styles has announced that he’s got a tour documentary in the works and has the acclaimed filmmaker John Wilson on board behind the camera.

Wilson is known for his offbeat style and is best known for his HBO comedy docu-series How To With John Wilson, and, more recently, his box-office hit The History Of Concrete. An intriguing choice for Styles, he’s been filming with the ex-One Direction star throughout his Together, Together tour, which is currently on its New York leg at Madison Square Garden.

The idea, apparently, is to mix live performances from the tour with a look into Styles’ world. One source, mentioned by Variety, described it “as featuring authentic human stories of everyone involved in the tour - from the singer and his fans to countless others behind the scenes.”

Universal, Peanut World Pictures and Styles himself are said to be producing the film. A full cinema release is expected for the picture, though nothing is confirmed at this stage.

Meanwhile, last month the 32-year-old singer recently confirmed that the Together Together tour will continue into 2027. He’s announced mini-residencies at North American cities for the spring in Arlington, Texas and Glendale, Arizona, as well as Chicago, Toronto, Pasadena and Atlanta.

Following those, he’ll be back in Europe for multiple shows in Berlin, Madrid, Nanterre in France, Rome and Dublin, before the tour ends up back in London for three more dates at Wembley Stadium on 25, 27 and 28 August next year.

Andrew Watt, the producer of Ozzy Osbourne’s last two albums, has confirmed the existence of previously unreleased Ozzy tracks and revealed details of the last hours that he and the singer spent together.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Watt also talked about how his work with Ozzy opened the door for him to produce other high profile rock artists including Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones.

Watt’s comments suggest that the unreleased Ozzy tracks were recorded with a particular project in mind.

He told Rolling Stone: “There are some songs that we made for a specific reason. And, yeah, that’s all I can say.”

He added: “They’re hard for me to listen to.”

Watt had worked with Ozzy on the 2020 album Ordinary Man and the 2022 follow-up Patient Number 9. The latter turned out to be the final album released in Osbourne’s lifetime.

Osbourne died on 22 July 2025 at the age of 76. He had given his farewell performance on stage at the Back To The Beginning concert in Birmingham just 17 days earlier.

Watt revealed that he spent time with Ozzy and wife Sharon Osbourne on the eve of that show.

He recalled: “The night before the concert, I actually went in Birmingham with Sharon and a couple of people to go get a curry, and I was texting with Ozzy. He was in his hotel room, and he was, like, ‘Come to the hotel, come to the hotel.’

“I was sitting with Sharon and we were both like, ‘He has a big day tomorrow. Maybe I shouldn’t go, ’cause he’ll get excited and everything.’ But [Ozzy] was, like, ‘No, you’re coming to the hotel. You are coming.’ So I went. I brought a curry with me and sat with him. And he was drawing like he usually does, and we sat and we listened to the stuff that we’d made, and made notes.

“That and the next day were the last times I got to see him. But we had a beautiful listening session and talked about a lot of stuff.”

In the Rolling Stone interview, Watt also acknowledged how his connection to Ozzy transformed his career, in much the same way that Ozzy had given a platform to guitarists from Randy Rhoads to Zakk Wylde.

Watt stated: “If Ozzy Osbourne chose you, he gave you a career. I always loved rock music, but I was a pop producer before he chose to let me stand next to him. And then I got to do all these amazing things after. But he was the first one. And… he chose Randy Rhoads, He chose Zakk Wylde [and] Jake E. Lee.”

We might be more than a year into Taylor Swift’s The Life Of A Showgirl era, but live performances of any of the songs on the album have been conspicuously absent.

No longer, though, because at Saturday night’s Academy Museum Gala, Swift performed a four-song set that included The Fate of Ophelia, The Life of a Showgirl’s opening track.

Swift was invited to the stage by talkshow host and comedian Conan O’Brien, who referred to her as “John, Paul, George, and Ringo all in one”. Backed by a band, she began with Blank Space, from 2014 album 1989, before giving The Fate of Ophelia its live debut.

This was followed by I Knew It, I Knew You, Swift’s song from 2026’s Toy Story 5 soundtrack, and the set was wrapped up with 2008’s Love Story, which became one of her first crossover pop hits.

Swift hasn’t performed a full concert since she wrapped up her Eras tour in December 2024, but there’s speculation that she may return to the fray next year as one of the headliners at the 2027 Glastonbury Festival.

Her Academy Museum could be viewed as part of a concerted push to win a Best Original Song award at next year’s Oscars, and comes as first-round voting is taking place for the 2027 Grammy Awards, nominations for which will be announced on 16 November.

When you’re an up-and-coming artist, it’s safe to say that you’re going to take any work that’ll keep the lights on. But always bear in mind that when fame does eventually strike, your top priority will become making sure that your skeletons in the closet stay there.

So the story goes for Madonna Louise Ciccone, an up-and-coming singer/dancer/whatever who thought she’d finally found her lifeline when just-ahead-of-the-curve Was (Not Was) came looking for a vocalist who could seal the deal on their first real hit.

The track in need of a front was called Shake Your Head (Let’s Go To Bed) and despite Madonna’s subsequent best efforts to ensure that you never heard it, it remains alive, well and a still-gossiped-about '90s hit across Europe – if only on account of it having one of the most tortuous musical backstories ever.

Let’s take a step back.

Back in 1983, rising pop funk curio Was (Not Was) were on the cusp of greatness. Garnering major record company attention following their 1981 self-titled debut album, brothers Don and David Was were able to court sizey backing for their follow-up, Born to Laugh at Tornadoes.

So much so that despite having tracks already in the can, the perfectionist pair went into overdrive to ensure that every track was a big hitter.

One such effort was their amiable groove, Shake Your Head. Stuck for a vocalist, the track’s producer Stephen Bray had put his girlfriend in the booth – an as-yet undiscovered, pre-fame Madonna – and while Madonna’s performance was perfectly suited to the track's sass and charm, the Was brothers had bigger ideas than giving Bray’s girlfriend a break.

What if they could get someone bigger, they pondered? What about… Ozzy Osboure? After all, putting Ozzy on Shake Your Head has got to be better than… Er… What was her name again?

“She did a great job… but it didn’t sound like Was (Not Was) to me anymore,” Don Was told Rolling Stone, opting to have Ozzy rework the song as more groove-based rap.

And incredibly – through a multitude of machinations and string-pulling – it is indeed Osbourne who voices the first public airing of Shake Your Head as track four, side one on Born To Laugh At Tornadoes, an album which also features such vocal talents as Mel Tormé, Mitch Ryder and Doug Fieger… And which only ever peaked at number 134 on the U.S. Billboard chart…

Third time lucky

Back to the drawing board for album number three then. And – finally – some hits! Walk The Dinosaur, Spy In The House of Love and Anything Can Happen fired up 1991’s What Up Dog album, and with the band finally in the spotlight, their prodigious and powerful (but by-and-large unknown) previous output was ripe for re-release.

Thus came the compilation, 1992’s Hello Dad, I’m In Jail – a crude mash-up of the best of the band’s unknown work thus far, with one track garnering particular attention. Who was that girl on Shake Your Head again?…

With Madonna by now at the height of her powers, Was (Not Was) were effectively now in possession of an unreleased vocal by a megastar and their label couldn’t believe their luck.

“We realized about eight years later that we had Ozzy and Madonna on parallel tracks," explained Was. "So we gave it to a remixer.”

However, its release would require the newly minted Madonna to sign off on her pre-fame performance from almost a decade earlier, and with memories of being snubbed in favour of Ozzy Osbourne still living large, she unsurprisingly opted to exact her revenge.

A Shake Your Head single featuring the Queen of Pop? Forget it.

Nevertheless, undeterred, and knowing that they had a hit on their hands, the band typically flipped to an unlikely plan B. It was time to call Kim Basinger.

Batman star Basinger was midway through a relationship with the creator of its soundtrack, Prince, who, after becoming smitten, had written and recorded an entire (unreleased) album for her.

With the pair keen to kickstart a second coming as a music star, Basinger stepped into the studio for Shake Your Head and – perhaps a little green as to what was required – dutifully copied Madonna’s vocals syllable for syllable.

Time for the finishing touch – a remix by the so-hot-back-then Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley who gave it the luxe house treatment he’d been serving all over hits like A Little Bit More for Kim Sims and Got Love For You for Jomanda. And Hurley produced an awesome mix… With one small problem. He used Madonna’s vocals rather than Basinger’s…

“When they sent me the vocals and all their master parts, I didn’t know the backstory, so I just thought that Kim Basinger sounded like Madonna,” Hurley told S+S Chicago. “So when I sent them the remix, they loved it but I used the wrong vocals. So I had to get the new vocals from them and create the mix over again with Kim’s vocals.” And Hurley didn’t stop there.

With Osbourne’s 1983 vocals still on the multi-track, Hurley turned the track into the most bizarre duet ever… “But all the extra time put in was worth it,” Hurley reckoned. “It ended up being Was (Not Was)’s biggest record, reaching number four on the UK singles chart.”

Incredibly, despite its all-star line-up and European and Australian success, the track never earned a US release and to this day remains a much-whispered about Ozzy anomaly in the country that took him to its heart.

And thanks to one more mix-up – in which Hurley’s original, top secret, Madonna-blocked remix was accidentally sent to, and included on UK dance compilation Now Dance 92 – Doh! – we can all enjoy the track as everyone (except Madonna) intended below.

We know that the songwriters Dijon and Mk.gee have been close buddies for some time, but last week the pair took their relationship to another level by teaming up to form a wedding band to perform at the nuptials of screenwriter and producer Jack Karaszewski.

And this wasn’t your standard wedding band setlist: no Dancing Queen or Mr Brightside for starters. No, for the first dance the duo played Big Star’s Thirteen. Other covers they played included Let Me Roll It by Wings and Cat Stevens’ Trouble. All very tasteful, you have to say.

How did they get the gig? Well, Karaszewski worked with them both on Dijon’s 2021 debut album Absolutely – he produced and co-wrote a couple of the tracks, and Karaszewski’s bride, Danica Kleinknecht, has directed videos for both artists, including the acclaimed visuals for Mk.gee’s album Two Star & The Dream Police.

Other than the odd one-off gig, it’s been a quiet year for both artists. Mk.gee has been working on the follow-up to that 2024 debut album, and the pair did team up briefly earlier on in the year when they played together at Dijon’s Coachella set. Expect to hear much more from both of them in 2027...

Billy Joel has been pretty open about the “brain disorder” he was diagnosed with in 2025 that forced him to cancel all of his upcoming performances, while also being at pains to reassure fans that his condition isn’t quite as scary as its label sounds.

It doesn’t seem like there’s any guarantee that he’s ever going to fully recover from it, though, or that he’ll be able to resume playing shows in the way that he used to.

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Joel confirmed that he’s still living with the condition, known as hydrocephalus. “It used to be called water on the brain, so it affects your balance, it affects your memory, it affects your vision, your hearing,” he said. “But I’m OK. They call it a brain disorder, but it’s not that serious. It’s just something that affects your balance mostly.”

Asked if he’s ever going to be able to tour again, Joel added: “I don’t know. I have to take a series of tests before I know, but I can’t drive right now. I’m not allowed to drive. And I can’t do performances because what the neurologist told me, every time you do a show, it’s like you’re getting a concussion.”

Joel further explained that it’s not just the volume of playing a rock ‘n’ roll show that’s the problem: “It’s the lighting, the sound, the stress of the show, the audience, the energy of the performance. There’s a lot going on when you’re onstage. And they said, ‘Well, you really shouldn’t be doing that right now.’ So they have to test me further to see if I can go back and do performing again, which I would like to be able to do.”

Joel was speaking as he prepares to auction off 70 of his motorcycles at Christie’s. Asked whether he’d ever had an accident while riding one, he said that he had, back in 1982.

Discussing the injuries it caused, he said: “I still have no bone in my left thumb. And my right arm, the wrist got pulled out of its socket on my right hand, and my left hand got smashed and my leg got broken.”

Sounds rough – so did that mean that the Piano Man had to relearn how to play the piano. “No,” says Joel, before quipping: “I was never that good to begin with.”

The weekend is very nearly here, but there's one last thing we need you to do… And that's prove that you've been all over this week's music news.

At the close of every week we devise 10 fiendish and fun questions to test whether you've been paying attention. Or not…

So Are You Going To Go Our Way?

Then hit that button!

Brandon Flowers’ love of Bruce Springsteen is well documented. In fact, when his band, The Killers, released their second album, 2006’s Sam’s Town, critics noted the sonic similarities to The Boss’s classic 1975 LP, Born To Run.

After that, some sort of collaboration felt kind of inevitable, and it duly happened in 2009 at the Pinkpop festival in the Netherlands, where Flowers joined Springsteen and the E Street Band onstage to duet on Thunder Road, Born To Run’s opening track.

For Flowers, we’re guessing that this remains a career highlight, but even though Springsteen was one of his heroes, he still had to prove his knowledge of the song he was going to sing.

Speaking to The Standard, Flowers remembers what Springsteen did backstage in his dressing room before the show: “He put a piece of paper down and a pencil, and it was almost like, ‘how well do you know the song? Write out what you’re going to sing, what I’m gonna sing.’”

Fortunately, Flowers was able to rise to the challenge and demonstrate his Bruce-loving credentials. “I knew every word,” he says now. “We sang it together alone in his room, and that is about as close to heaven as you can get.”

Speaking of collaborations, Flowers also revealed that he was forced to raise his game when he recorded his new solo album, Thrasher, with a group of top-notch Nashville session musicians.

“I was humbled, because I went there feeling like I was hot shit, but I didn’t know how good these guys were,” he admits.

Glenn Hughes, the former Deep Purple and Black Sabbath star, has undergone a successful open heart surgery this week.

In August 2026 he announced he was retiring from touring after nearly 60 years as a recording artist and performer.

Known to his fans as ‘The Voice Of Rock’, Hughes has sung lead vocals and played bass in an array of bands including Purple, Sabbath, Trapeze, Black Country Communion, California Breed and The Dead Daisies.

On 14 October Hughes revealed via Instagram: “Now home after an eight day stay, and a 10 hour open heart surgery, operation, at UCLA, Ronald Reagan, Medical Center. Gratitude beyond.”

Back in August, when he broke the news about his retirement from live performance, he stated: “This past year, I’ve had some health issues. The results from numerous MRIs, CT scans, and an echocardiogram have alerted my medical team, that I need another open-heart surgery. I really have no option and no choice as health is my number one priority.”

Sadly, a small percentage of Hughes’s followers posted negative messages following this announcement, to which Hughes replied: “99.9% of you understand my predicament, but a very small minority of you think it’s OK to joke, trying to get attention… [this] is not the way to live & breathe.”

He continued: “All my social networks have been a safe place, with a great camaraderie between myself and all of you. At this time in my life, I have lived and done it all musically, and have surrounded myself with family and friends, who are all on the same page. Be kind to one another…”

The last time Hughes performed live was on 1 August when he appeared with rock supergroup Kings Of Chaos at the Agua Caliente Casino in Rancho Mirage, California. That night he shared the stage with former Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora and current Bon Jovi guitarist Phil X as well as REO Speedwagon frontman Kevin Cronin and ex-Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver drummer Matt Sorum.

Of all the hundreds of performances in his long career, arguably the most iconic was on 6 April 1974 when Hughes was a member of Deep Purple. The band headlined the Californian Jam festival at Ontario Motor Speedway on Ontario, California. This show was co-headlined by Emerson, Lake & Palmer and drew an audience estimated at more than 300,000.

Rockstar Games has confirmed French electronic duo Justice as the soundtrack composers for Grand Theft Auto VI, the most eagerly anticipated videogame of the year.

In fact, scratch that: GTA VI is probably the most eagerly anticipated release of anything this year – movies and music included. As such, being tasked with writing the music for it is a considerable feather in Justice’s cap.

The announcement coincides with the release of Flower in a Hurricane, Justice’s new single, which also features Tame Impala, SZA, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard.

This features in the new Grand Theft Auto VI launch trailer, which has also landed and, for the first minute at least, has the vibe of Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing. The nuts and bolts of the music might differ, but the atmospheric synths, scattergun drums and chugging riff – played on an overdriven synth rather than a guitar, we think – definitely feel like an intentional nod. Have a listen and see what you think.

Flower in a Hurricane will also be included on Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album, the official game soundtrack, which can currently be pre-saved on streaming services and pre-ordered on CD and vinyl.

This 34-track collection will, presumably, feature more of Justice’s music, along with confirmed tracks by the likes of Yung Lean, Travis Scott, CA7RIEL and Paco Amoroso (with PinkPantheress, Fred Again and Etienne de Crécy) Morgan Wallen, Rauw Alejandro and even still-Rolling Stone Keith Richards.

Whether Cliff Richard’s Devil Woman will be included remains to be seen. It was featured in an earlier trailer for the game, but isn’t in the new one.

Grand Theft Auto VI will be released on 19 November on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

The Finnish symphonic metal outfit Nightwish have parted company with their vocalist Floor Jansen.

The group claim it was a mutual decision. In a statement, they have said simply that: “Nightwish and Floor Jansen part ways.”

They continue: “After careful consideration, we have, in mutual agreement, decided to part ways. This decision is necessary and important to us and our future ambitions. Thus, we will now pursue those goals in our own separate ways. We wish each other nothing but the very best on our respective artistic journeys.”

“For you, dear listener, and indeed for us, this marks the end of a truly great voyage. Nightwish will continue. We will move forward and enter the studio in 2027 to record a new album. As we celebrate 30 years of Nightwish, we couldn’t be more excited about our music and our future.”

Jansen doesn’t seem to dispute this version of events. In her own statement on social media, she says: “Endings create new beginnings, and even though it was a hard decision to make, I believe there is a bright musical journey ahead of me.”

”I invite you to follow along on this path, as you were with me in all the great years before. Thank you for your support through the rollercoasters of life. My solo career will now get all of my attention and gives my new upcoming album Hytress (out 2027) and the tour all space to grow. Hope to meet you on the road again in a near and happy future.”

The Dutch singer has been with the group for thirteen years. Indeed, she is the third lead vocalist the group have had in their 30-year history. She replaced Anette Oizon in 2013, who herself replaced Tarja Turunen in 2005.

The band haven’t played live since 2023, but revealed recently that they have been working on their next album, the follow-up to 2024’s Yesterwynde. Speaking to Metal Hammer in August, keyboard player and songwriter Tuomas Holopainen said that he had already written six new tracks for the new album, which will presumably be recorded with a new vocalist, for release next year...

It’s one of the biggest hit songs of the 1980s, but its story begins way back in the 1890s.

In the small rural community of Elmore City in Oklahoma, a ban on public dancing had been imposed in 1898 – in an effort to curb heavy drinking. The ban remained in place until 14 high school students decided that enough was enough and that they wanted a high school prom.

In 1980, they persuaded the school’s board to overturn the antiquated legislation, so that they could dance. And when an aspiring screenwriter and songwriter named Dean Pitchford chanced upon this story in a newspaper, he knew it had all the elements of a powerful musical drama.

The screenplay Pitchford wrote would become Footloose, a film that would become box office gold when it was released in 1984, making $80 million in ticket sales and turning its star Kevin Bacon into a household name.

But it was the title song, released five weeks before the film, that seared itself into the public consciousness and kickstarted interest in the film.

Co-written by Pitchford and Kenny Loggins, the song rocketed to No 1 in the Billboard Hot 100 when it was released on 11 January 1984. Over four decades on, it remains a quintessential ’80s classic.

When Dean Pitchford came up with the idea for Footloose he was working as a staff songwriter for Warner Brothers Publishing. Intrigued by the newspaper story, he visited Elmore City to interview high school students and their parents.

While Pitchford had never written a screenplay before, he had worked as an actor before moving into songwriting and had an abundance of talent and an impressively diverse skillset. In 1980, he and composer Michael Gore wrote three songs for the Alan Parker-directed film Fame, including the title song, for which they won an Oscar.

Pitchford’s working title for his new screenplay was Cheek To Cheek, but he decided to change it once he had attracted interest from some major film studios. In an interview with Songwriting magazine in 2012, Pitchford said he filled page after page of a yellow legal pad with ideas for a new title.

“When I went back over the list, I think I had four that I thought might be good ideas. But Footloose was by far my favourite,” he said.

One of the studios that was interested in his screenplay was 20th Century Fox. For a meeting with Craig Melnick and Dan Zadan, two producers at Fox, Pitchford typed up four hypothetical title pages and deliberately placed Footloose on the bottom of the stack.

He recalled: “I took them into a meeting with Craig and Dan and I said, ‘Here are some ideas for the title.’ They looked at number one, they went, ‘Okay, alright.’ And they flipped it over, and number two, and they flipped it over, and number three, ‘Okay’. And then they flipped over the last one, which was ‘Footloose by Dean Pitchford’, and they lit up like a Christmas tree.

“They felt what I felt, which was it was just such an interesting looking word and it didn’t mean anything but it did. And all those ‘o’s gave it a visual kind of punch. We all just went for it. It sort of sold itself.”

In the end, Paramount was the studio that acquired Footloose. Pitchford’s plan was to create the film around a nine-song soundtrack, and he had an ace up his sleeve when it came to the person to co-write the title track with him.

Pitchford was good friends with Kenny Loggins, a major star at the time after having written the song I’m Alright (1980) for the film Caddyshack. In 1982, Pitchford had co-written the song Don’t Fight it with Loggins and Steve Perry, the singer from Journey, recorded as a duet by the latter pair.

Pitchford realised that a commitment from Loggins would carry real weight when it came to Paramount moving the project forward. In an interview with US journalist Dan Rather in December 2018, Loggins recalled the moment that Pitchford approached him to ask for his help.

“My best friend, Dean Pitchford, had written a screenplay, and he said, ‘Would you read my screenplay and check it out?’. And I read it, and he says, ‘I need a couple songs for this’. And I said, ‘Well, it's not Gone With the Wind, but…’”

Loggins then went on to explain to Dan Rather just how common screenplays are in Hollywood.

“People don’t realise,” he said. “In Hollywood, the cab driver has a screenplay. It’s not unusual to have somebody hand you a screenplay and say, ‘Would you write a song for it?’ But Dean was a friend of mine, so I did. So a favour to a friend becomes a favour to me. A year later, this is the biggest movie of the summer.”

With Loggins on board, Pitchford started to arrange a writing session. Creating a title song was the priority. But Loggins had tour commitments. When he fell off stage at one show and had to take time off to recover from his injuries, the project looked under threat.

There was only one possible opportunity for them to get together to write – at Lake Tahoe, Loggins’ last US show before the Asia leg of his tour.

“Paramount was chomping at the bit,” Pitchford told Songwriter magazine. “They wanted to know that Kenny Loggins was going to be doing the title song, and if he wasn’t then we had to move on and get somebody else. So it became absolutely vital that as soon as Kenny was back on his feet, I had to go and seal the deal.”

Pitchford flew to Lake Tahoe despite having a bad case of strep throat and a high fever, which he reportedly attempted to conceal from Loggins when they sat down to write in Pitchford’s hotel room.

“I think it was two or three days we kept up this charade with him showing up on his painkillers and me on my painkillers, and us getting the gist of the song,” Pitchford told Songwriter magazine. “We wrote the verses and the chorus melodies, we wrote the first verse, and we knew what we were going to do for the chorus.”

When Loggins left for his tour of Asia, Pitchford wrote the rest of the lyrics, except for the bridge. They finished the song when Pitchford visited the returning Loggins at his home in Los Angeles.

With a running time of just 2:55 in its single format, Footloose is an impressively lean and punchy track. It’s a pacy slice of high energy pop-rock, fuelled by feelgood vibes and a sense of joyous freedom.

The song boasts a big sound, with hefty thwacks of snare, jagged synths, punchy compressed bass and stabs of overdriven guitar. It kicks off with a thumping 4/4 beat, which hurtles along at 174 bpm.

In an interview with the YouTube channel The Professor of Rock, Loggins noted that the groove on the song was based on David Bowie’s song Modern Love.

He said that he got the idea for the chorus melody from the 1966 song Devil With A Blue Dress On by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.

Loggins also highlighted how Nathan East’s bassline in the song shared a similarity with a Little Richard classic. “Basically, he took Lucille out to the next level,” Loggins said.

There are other nods to ’50s rock ’n’ roll, such as the deep Duane Eddy-style bottom E twang that kicks in ten seconds into the song.

Loggins’ vocal on the song is gritty and powerful but it has a nice lilting cadence to it. His phrasing is impressive and he sits right in the groove with a tight, rhythmic delivery.

Structurally, the song is straightforward and mirrors the pent-up frustrations of the film’s central character Ren McCormack (Kevin Bacon), a native of Chicago who moves with his mother to a small town in Utah, where he attempts to overturn a ban on dancing enforced by a local minister (John Lithgow).

There are nifty compositional elements throughout the song, such as the second half of the pre-chorus, which builds with an ascending bassline before the stop, when the whole track shifts into the chorus.

At 2:20, guitar, bass and keys drop out, leaving drums, percussion and chants, with each instrument then gradually reentering the mix as it builds towards the climactic stop at 2:55 as Loggins unleashes the final line “Everybody, cut footloose!”

Footloose was released on 11 January 1984, five weeks before the film was released. But the official video, directed by Brian Grant, featured a montage of clips from the film and fuelled anticipation for the movie launch.

In his 2018 interview with journalist Dan Rather, Kenny Loggins highlighted the parallel promotional power of the song and the film.

“The movie thing is an interesting synergy because the movie lifts the song, the song lifts the movie, and back then that hadn’t been done,” said Loggins. “Pop music and movies were not necessarily symbiotic, and all of a sudden it was working. And MTV was a new thing, and MTV was playing the videos from the movies, and it was killing all the other videos.”

Footloose shot to No 1 in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Colombia and South Africa and reached No 6 in the UK Singles Chart. After his success with the film Caddyshack, Footloose bolstered Loggins’s growing reputation as the ‘King of the Movie Soundtrack’.

Dean Pitchford would go on to co-write all nine songs of the colossally successful Footloose soundtrack, which included other massive hits such as Let’s Hear It For The Boy by Deniece Williams and Holding Out For A Hero by Bonnie Tyler. Loggins also contributed another track, I’m Free (Heaven Helps The Man), which peaked at No 22 in the US Billboard Hot 100.

When Loggins co-wrote Footloose with Pitchford, he had no idea how prominent the song was going to be in the film. It first appears in the striking opening scene, which features a succession of people’s feet, moving to the beat.

In an interview with The Professor of Rock YouTube channel, Loggins spoke about watching the film for the first time.

“We wrote Footloose for that scene in the middle of the movie, where they go out of town and the first time they go dancing,” said Loggins. “And so when I went to the premiere of the movie and it opens with the shoes dancing and the song comes on, I turned to my wife and said, ‘Holy shit, this is a home run!’ It was so good.”

You wouldn’t think Paul McCartney – one of the rare individuals for whom that cliché ‘living legend’ doesn’t feel out of place – would ever feel shy about approaching any of his peers.

But there’s one that he, apparently, still feels nervous around.

When asked by Amy Poehler on her Good Hang podcast who he would most like to collaborate with Macca admitted: “I always think Bob Dylan. But I’m too nervous to ring him up.”

Poehler joked that he couldn’t exactly see Dylan on the phone, McCartney quipped that he was more likely to be “in some bush, in a sleeping bag, maybe.”

Dylan and McCartney have, of course, met on many occasions – famously, it was Dylan who introduced marijuana to The Beatles in 1964, thus altering the course of their career.

Speaking to BBC Radio Two earlier this year, McCartney describes another meeting backstage at the Desert Trip festival in 2016: “I came in to see him and it was like, ‘Wow.’ It was just him and me in this massive, big tent backstage and he was very complimentary,” he recalled. “It was funny ‘cause… A little bit embarrassing, he said, ‘You’re a star.’ I thought, ‘What do you say to that?’”

In the same Poehler interview, McCartney also revealed he’s a bit upset at the way he’s portrayed in the numerous biopics that have come out in recent years. Primarily because they depict him as shorter than he is.

It started with the 2009 Sam Taylor-Wood-directed Nowhere Boy, which depicted John Lennon during his teenage years. “The John character, he’s bigger than me in the film. My character is kind of wimpy, smaller than John. John knocks me to the floor. It’s like, Sam, this is not true. She said, ‘This is a movie; it’s not a documentary.’ And I thought, Well, I don’t like that explanation. But I couldn’t do anything.”

Now, he claims that Sam Mendes is doing the same thing in his quartet of Beatles biopics, in which Paul Mescal plays McCartney. “And guess what? He’s smaller than the guy who plays John,” he said of Mescal.

It seems Macca contacted Mendes about this very issue. “I said, ‘Sam, I’ve got just one thing that I need to say to you.’ I don’t know how Sam is going to deal with it. He sent me a picture, a still, from the filming they were doing and they’re crossing the Abbey Road crossing. And the Paul character is markedly smaller.

"I texted him, ‘Sam! Smaller! Don’t do this. You said you wouldn’t do it!’ He said, ‘No, it’s okay, it’s just the stride pattern.’”

There's a fine pop songwriting tradition of using the phrase ‘love song’ ironically. The Damned’s rumbustious punk-era hit Love Song was about as far removed from a traditional love song as it was possible to get in 1979.

Bon Jovi’s 1995 single This Ain’t A Love Song was – guess what? – actually very much a love song. And Sara Bareilles’ 2007 breakthrough hit? Well, reputedly, love was very far from the subject Bareilles had on her mind when she wrote it.

The singer-songwriter from Eureka, Northern California, had signed to Epic in 2005, and the story goes that during the year-long gestation period before the release of her major label debut Little Voice, Bareilles was being pressured by her new record company to come up with a hit.

Love Song, with its insistence of ‘I’m not going to write you a love song cause you asked for it, cause you need one,’ was her rebellious response. In 2007, Bareilles explained that “I got mad at myself for letting those doubts creep into my brain and swore I would write something totally honest, whatever it may be, good or bad. And I did. Love Song was my response to all that, my little stick it to 'em".

So a simple tale of a dastardly record company forcing an artist into a box they don’t want to go in, then? Well, the story is a little bit more complicated than that, though it took a few more years to emerge.

In a 2021 interview, Bareilles said that "The song wasn't a specific response to my record company. Nobody sat me down and said, 'I need this kind of song from you.' There was more of a subtle, nuanced… withholding. I was getting ready to release the first record, and I had a whole boatload of songs, so I was like, 'What's the deal? Let's get in the studio. Let's make the record.' There was a withholding of the green light."

It seems that Epic were unconvinced that Bareilles had the requisite songwriting chops and needed outside help. They set up some co-writing sessions, which the singer described as “a total disaster... devastating on every level. I felt invisible and unimportant and manipulated.”

“I was so stubborn, especially at that age. I was so protective of myself - I wasn't going to do what they asked me to do. I wasn't going to wear the sparkly dress, I wasn't going to wear the high heels. I was so concerned with losing myself, somehow, in the process."

In a 2015 Huffington Post interview, she was in a more reflective mood. Speaking of the co-writing sessions: “I think for me, they came at a time where I was still so unsure of my own edges. In a way, I was still sort of discovering who I was as an artist at that time. And while I don’t think that any of those collaborators had any bad intentions, I just don’t think I was ready to collaborate."

Love Song was, then, a frustrated response to those sessions, composed in her rehearsal room, on her own. By this point, Epic had recruited producer Eric Rosse to the project – he and Bareilles started working together midway through 2005.

In her record company biography for that album, Bareilles wrote that: “Eric Rosse and I spent countless hours deliberating, fighting, and seeking compromise on what would make this music the best it could be. I'm not proud to say it, but I feel like in many ways I walked in with my dukes up.” Speaking to Sound On Sound in 2008, Rosse admits that it was difficult at first: "Yes, she did need a bit of convincing.”

For five months Rosse and Bareilles worked through stories of songs, arrangement ideas and song structures. “She came up with a lot of material,” he recalled, “And we would demo stuff, just piano and vocal, and send it off to Pete Giberga (the A&R on the album), who was getting excited about the project.”

Both artist and A&R knew that they needed a single to launch the album and, luckily, halfway through these sessions, Love Song landed.

"Sara came in one day with the initial musical idea which included the phrase 'I'm not going to write you a love song,' and the rest was sort of la-la-la,” remembered Rosse.

“Structurally it was a bit different from the final version: there might not have been a bridge and I can't quite remember how she did the pre-chorus. But there definitely was a basic structure to the song, with most of the music, the main hook line, and several verse ideas.”

“We discussed where the song could go, thematically and structurally, and she went away and came back with more or less the finished song. I think that for Sara the idea of a love song was synonymous with a commercial hit, so she was taking poetic licence with the term.”

Now they had a potential hit single, both Rosse and Bareilles put all their energies into making the track count. The pair recorded three different versions of the song, though each had the same lead vocal.

"The first step of recording the backing tracks for the album was that Sara and I drove around LA for a day, trying out pianos for her in four or five different studios,” Rosse explained in 2008.

“We felt that a Yamaha seven-foot grand at NRG studios suited her music the best, so we did the basic tracks - piano, drums and bass - at NRG. The remainder, Yamaha CP80 electric piano, Mellotron, guitars, backing vocals, were overdubbed at my own studio, Squawkbox.”

However, the initial overdubs for the song didn’t seem to fit with the main vocal, so artist and producer had to have a re-think. “The issue was mainly one of feel,” Rosse reasoned. “A four-to-the-floor feel can easily sound heavy and laboured, so I wanted to make sure that the rhythm had enough movement. It had to drive the song forward, and not feel plodding, but also not feel so happy or poppy that it would make the song sound silly.

"We used two drummers on the song, and the final drum take took place at Sunset Sound. The piano was tracked twice, because it had to match the new feel of that last drum overdub. We also did a number of different approaches with the guitars, and there's a very subtle drum loop, programmed by Jake Davies, that you sort of hear rather than feel, but that helped drive the song forward."

Once these issues were ironed out, the mixing was relatively straightforward. "I wanted to make the song as driving and aggressive as I could, and feature Sara's voice as much as possible, squeezing every ounce of energy out of it,” Rosse said. “By the time it came to mixing, the issues we had during tracking were entirely resolved, and I was only looking at minor things, like how many backing vocals to use, and how much of a vocal double there should be.”

“Sara associates lead vocal doubling with slick-sounding pop music, so we had to come to various levels of compromises on that. But in general the heavy lifting had been done on this song, and it was just a matter of making it sound and feel really good.”

The finished single was helped massively by its video, the sort of sumptuous creation that you rarely see in 2026. Installed in a Wes Anderson-esque fantasy world in which she is a performer in a jukebox-like machine that dispenses love songs, Bareilles (wearing a dress and heels, natch) sings to order whenever a punter places a coin in the machine. She rebels, wedging a coin in the wheels of the contraption to give herself a break. It’s a brilliant metaphor for the ‘official’ story of the song, and one that Epic seemed only too keen to greenlight.

It did the trick. Love Song made Number Four in both the US and – more surprisingly – the UK charts. Following this, the album Little Voice was a Top Ten hit in both territories and went double platinum in the States.

It set Bareilles on a trajectory that has seen Broadway success in the form of her Waitress show soundtrack, which led to a second career in film and musical theatre. And all but one of her four albums have reached the Billboard Top Ten.

Sneaking in just before the close of music’s physical era, you couldn’t imagine Love Song being a hit in 2026. Even at the time, with its attention to detail, melodic richness and refusal to descend to cynicism, there was something very old skool about it, which Bareilles picked up on in that 2015 Huffington Post interview, in which she revealed that actually it was a love song, after all.

"It was a love song to my craft,” she argued. “It was a love song to my intention, to my heart and soul. I was fighting for the essence of some truth inside of me, which to me is a beautiful love song. It just wasn’t a duet between Peter Cetera and Amy Grant.”

We’ve had the vinyl, cassette and CD revivals, but we’ll admit that we weren’t quite ready for the second coming of reel-to-reel tape. There’s definitely some buzz (or maybe even some hiss) around the format, though, because it’s been confirmed that Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark is getting the R2R reissue treatment.

Duplicated in real-time from a 1:1 copy of the original stereo master tape, this is said to deliver “a master-quality listening experience that captures the full dynamics of the recording.” The 15 ips, half-track 1/4-inch tape is produced to the IEC equalization standard on premium RTM LPR90 tape stock and stored on a 10.5-inch metal reel.

Only 350 copies have been made, and it should go without saying that you’ll also need a compatible tape machine if you want to play one of them.

This could be a pretty desirable item for the Joni Mitchell obsessive, particularly as Court and Spark remains one of her finest albums. Released in 1974, it’s often viewed as the record on which she started to fully embrace her love of jazz; she was aided and abetted by LA Express, a jazz-fusion group that featured Max Bennett (bass guitar), Larry Carlton (electric guitar), Joe Sample (electric piano), John Guerin (drums, percussion) and bandleader Tom Scott.

The result was Mitchell’s highest-charting LP, while Help Me became her only Top 10 single. Mitchell and Tom Scott also won a Grammy for their arrangement work on the beautifully complex Down to You.

Despite digital recording technology offering far more convenience and flexibility, reel-to-reel tape is still viewed as a sonic gold standard by many music makers, who seek to emulate its warmth and character using emulation plugins.

The Court and Spark reel-to-reel reissue comes via Rhino High Fidelity, which has previously released albums by Black Sabbath, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Van Morrison, Fleetwood Mac, ZZ Top, Yes and T Rex in the format. At $300, it’s certainly a luxury item, but we’re pretty sure 350 analogue-loving Joni aficionados will consider that a price worth paying.

Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan fans are convinced that the two stars could be about to release a collaboration – almost certainly a reworked version of a song from Rodrigo’s recently released third album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love.

The rumours stem from Rodrigo’s Instagram Story, which currently features a short video of a Pro Tools project for a currently unconfirmed song. We only get to hear the very beginning, which features a voice that sounds very much like Roan’s saying: “Ooh, Olivia does remixes now.”

The pause button is pressed right at the moment when the beat is about to drop, but the solitary kick drum we get to hear sounds very much like the one from Expectations, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love’s penultimate song.

Eagle-eyed viewers will also notice the audio file labelled Jupiter, possibly a reference to the Roland synth line of that name. Expectations kicks off with a grizzled, vintage-sounding synth part, so we’ll take that as another clue.

Rodrigo has yet to get on board with the trend of pop artists following up new albums with remixed versions – Charli XCX did it with Brat, PinkPantheress did it with Fancy That, and Zara Larsson did it with Midnight Sun – though she did announce earlier this year that she’d recruited some of her favourite artists to cover songs from her debut album, Sour, which was released in 2021. The project kicked off with David Byrne singing Drivers License, her breakthrough hit, but seems to have stalled somewhat since.

A Rodrigo/Roan match-up has the potential to usurp that, though: the two artists are known to be friends – Roan has contributed backing vocals to several Rodrigo tracks in the past and they’ve also performed live together – and both have collaborated extensively with producer Dan Nigro.

Since Rodrigo uploaded her teaser, The Sun has reported that the new version of Expectations will be released this Friday, with Roan providing a new second verse. Let’s see.

As Elton John’s collaborator-in-chief, Bernie Taupin has written lyrics to some of the most popular songs of all time – Rocket Man, Candle In The Wind, Your Song, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, I’m Still Standing and many more. But nobody’s perfect, and as revealed in a new interview, Taupin still cringes at the mention of one hit song he co-wrote in the ’80s.

Speaking to MOJO magazine, Taupin discusses his whole career, from his early days with Elton all the way through to his new solo album The Sea Has No Mercy.

He talks about several of the key songs that made Elton a superstar, saying of the breakthrough hit Your Song: “It wasn’t written about anybody in particular, but Elton at the time thought it was. I wrote it when I was 17, 18. It came from a very idealistic place. A very virginal place, because I was. My experiences were absolutely nil. But I remember he took that lyric and, wearing his dressing gown, sat down and wrote the music.”

Taupin also paints a picture of how he and Elton worked together on the classic 1972 album Honky Chateau, recorded at the residential studio at Château d’Hérouville near Paris.

“There was a piano in the canteen,” he recalls, “and as I completed the songs I took them down and stuck them on the piano. Elton would come in the morning while the band was having breakfast and he’d write two songs within the space of that time.”

However, when asked about a song he co-wrote for American rock band Starship, Taupin laughingly says: “Oh, please don’t go there!”

The song in question is the soft rock anthem We Built This City, which hit the No 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1985.

In all the years since, We Built This City has been the butt of many jokes, and Taupin himself can certainly see the funny side of it.

He tells MOJO: “I wear it as a badge of honour that it was voted the Worst Song of All Time by several periodicals. At the same time, as I always say, people don’t understand that the original song was much different. But that song has paid the rent for many decades.”

The writing credits for We Built This City are shared by Taupin, English singer-songwriter Martin Page, American musician and producer Dennis Lambert and Austrian producer and arranger Peter Wolf.

And Taupin is not the only person embarrassed by their participation in this song.

In 2025, Starship singer Grace Slick talked to The Guardian about We Built This City, saying of Taupin’s lyrics: “I thought they were ridiculous.”

She added: “Stupid song. But our producer said, ‘Yeah, but it’s a hit.’ And he was right.”

Asked why she would sing material she disliked, Slick replied: “I kind of had to because I was trying to make it up to the band. I’d been this wild, crazy-ass drunk. So to make up for it I was sober all through the ’80s … which was a mistake!”

Over the course of a six-decade long-career, songwriter Don Black has done it all, from extensive work in musical theatre to writing lyrics for everyone from Meat Loaf to Quincy Jones to Robbie Williams.

He’s also penned the words to no less than five Bond themes - Diamonds Are Forever, Thunderball, The Man With The Golden Gun, Tomorrow Never Dies and The World Is Not Enough - and in a new interview in the Telegraph, was asked about the possibility of being asked to do the new one. Now, aged 88, he’s realistic about his chances.

“I’d be thrilled,” he says. “But lately, it’s always gone to whoever’s popular. So I’m sure the next one will have Harry Styles or Taylor Swift or something. That’s probably how it’ll go.”

Indeed. Billie Eilish and Finneas wrote the No Time To Die theme in 2021. Before that, Spectre was given to Sam Smith and Skyfall fell to Adele.

Black also bemoaned the royalty rates he gets from streaming services, describing what he receives as “a terrible rate, there’s no question about it”.

Talking in general, he cited the example of a friend and colleague, the late Herbert Kretzmer, who wrote the lyrics to I Dreamed A Dream from Les Miserables.

Describing the song as a Number One “everywhere”, Black said: “I said to him, ‘You must be making a fortune.’ It was a billion hits or something silly like that. And he got £1,500. That’s all you need to know.”

Black worked with John Barry on three of his Bond themes - Man With The Golden Gun, Thunderball and Diamonds Are Forever. Regarding the latter, he remembers Bond producer Harry Saltzman initially raised objections to his lyrics: “He thought it was too sexy. Well, he thought it was filthy – ‘touch it, stroke it and undress it,’” Apparently, it was Barry who defended his colleague, asking Saltzman “What do you know about songs?”

Linkin Park have released a documentary, Unshatter, which looks at the band’s resurrection since the suicide of lead vocalist Chester Bennington in 2017.

Replacing Bennington with ex-Dead Sara singer Emily Armstrong was a brave move for all concerned, and Unshatter covers the adjustments that had to be made by both the band and their new vocalist.

In an interview with People about the film, Armstrong admits that she was initially intimidated by the scale of the task in front of her: “You see it in the documentary where I’m just like, ‘Am I even cut out for this?’ You’re trying to give yourself every reason to just be like, ‘You’re not good. Everybody knows these songs.’”

It was essential, she explains, to put her own touch on the band’s extensive back catalogue. “That’s the only thing that I could think of. Don’t try to be like anybody. You’re not a replacement. Nobody could ever, ever replace Chester. Do what you do.”

Part of that involved adapting some of the band’s classic songs. The documentary shows the additional prep that Armstrong and fellow new recruit drummer Colin Brittain had to do, which, as the drummer explains in the film, included making sure those songs felt natural for Armstrong’s voice.

“She and I would get together at my house probably four days a week for a period of months learning the songs,” Brittain says. “We changed a bunch of the keys a bunch of times to try to find what was comfortable for her to sing it in while still retaining the same original energy and shape.”

Speaking to People, the documentary maker and the band’s ‘creative director’ Joe Hahn remembers capturing the band going through this process with Armstrong and Brittain. “I think the first one we addressed was Crawling [from 2000’s Hybrid Theory]. The important thing for us was for her to sing it her way, not to imitate anything. If it’s personal to her, then it’s gonna resonate."

“We heard that, made a few little modifications and were just like, ‘OK, this really works,’ Hahn says, remembering it as the moment the band knew the new line-up was right. “It was almost like the icebreaker to make the rest feel very achievable.”

As for Armstrong, she still seems to be pinching herself that she’s fronting the band she’s been a fan of for years. “I know how lucky I am,” she says in Unshatter. “It’s everything I’ve dreamed of. I’m so fortunate to be in this position. It’s crazy. Having it happen later in my life is something I wouldn’t change.”

Unshatter is currently enjoying a limited theatre run. At some point details will no doubt be announced about its streaming release.

When Lindsey Buckingham presented Sombr with the Songwriter of the Year award at the Variety Power of Young Hollywood event earlier this year, he revealed in an interview that the young artist – real name Shane Michael Boose – had spoken to him about the possibility of a collaboration.

“I don’t know what form that will take, or if it will take at all, so we will just have to wait and see,” said the Fleetwood Mac legend.

But now we have at least some of the answer. During his show at the Los Angeles Kia Forum on 10 October, Sombr sprung a surprise by inviting Buckingham on stage to duet on Go Your Own Way, a classic Fleetwood Mac song from their much-loved 1976 album, Rumours.

After Sombr had described him as a “fucking legend”, Buckingham arrived to a rapturous reception. Taking a guitar from a tech, he proceeded to lead Sombr and his band through the song, singing the first verse himself and leaving the young pretender to handle the second.

Which might not have been such a good idea: Boose appeared to stumble over some of the words and struggled with the lyrics’ phrasing, leaving some to wonder how well he actually knows Go Your Own Way – or, indeed, how much he’d rehearsed it.

No one at the gig seemed to mind, though, and nerves may well have played a part (it must be pretty intimidating to perform with one of your heroes, after all). What’s more, Sombr was on safer ground in the choruses, which pretty much everyone in the building seemed to join in with.

Lindsey, meanwhile, was busy proving that his guitar chops are still present and correct as he delivered a blistering solo in the outro.

The question, of course, is whether we’ll ever again see Buckingham performing the song with his surviving Fleetwood Mac bandmates. He hasn’t played with the band since 2018, when his relationship with Stevie Nicks soured, but the two are now believed to be back on speaking terms, and Buckingham has hinted that there could be big things to come in 2027. We shall see.

Olivia Rodrigo’s third record, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love, is most definitely an album of two halves. While Side A documents the start of a relationship and its subsequent blossoming, Side B covers themes of doubt and rejection as it starts to fall apart – though there is some optimism towards the end, too.

You could probably argue that the album reaches peak sweetness on track 3, Honeybee, and alongside producer Dan Nigro, Rodrigo recently sat down with Mix with the Masters to discuss its writing and production.

“I remember writing it in like, an hour – just feeling like it sort of captured this feeling of intense romantic love and also the fear that comes with that,” says Rodrigo. “This song was just such a piano ballad to me – I wrote it on the piano with these arpeggios and I was so tied to this idea; I just loved how it sounded ‘acoustic’ in my living room.”

This presented Nigro with a slight problem: “The sad part of being a producer a lot of times is the artist coming in and being like ‘I just like my demo. I just like the way it sounds when I’m singing it and you’re not doing anything to it.’”

This being the case, Nigro had to be careful with his production choices, and we’d say that he managed to retain the sense of purity and innocence pretty well.

Honeybee does contain one element that ended up being slightly divisive, though – the synthetic choir backing that you hear in the second verse, which was played on a Mellotron.

In fact, even the person who the song was written about – presumed to be Rodrigo’s now ex-boyfriend, British actor Louis Partridge – didn’t quite get it. “When I played the song for the person who it's about, they were like, ‘Oh my God, I love it so much!’” she remembers. ‘“ But that weird choir bit in the second verse…’”

“It was really polarising to people, the fake choir,” concedes Nigro, but it sounds like both he and Rodrigo fought for it and it ended up staying.

This isn’t the only Mellotron moment in Honeybee, either. In fact, the parts played on the tape-based keyboard instrument – including the delicate flutes, which Nigro says are one of his favourite parts of the song – were there pretty much from the start.

Addressing Rodrigo, Nigro says: “The first thing that happened, besides laying down a demo the first day, I think you and I sat together and I started just messing around with the Mellotron, and so a lot of the sounds from the original day 1 demo are still in the song.”

Subscribers can check out the full six-part Honeybee video series on the Mix with the Masters website.

You could come up with a very long list of hit songs that were started in Apple’s GarageBand – famously, Rihanna's 2007 smash Umbrella is built on one of its stock drum loops – which makes it all the more surprising that, when Harry Styles told Thom Yorke that he uses the iPhone version of the software to get his ideas down, the Radiohead frontman’s jaw almost hit the floor.

The exchange came during the pair’s Musicians on Musicians interview for Rolling Stone, and began when Styles admitted that his laptop has been dead for about six years.

“I don’t know where the charger is,” he confessed. “We can help you with that,” replied Yorke, who then wondered where Styles records his song ideas if he doesn't have a functioning computer.

“On my phone,” Styles told him. “I use GarageBand a lot.”

This revelation left Yorke open-mouthed: “You should keep that to yourself, dude,” he chortled, the suggestion being Styles had committed some kind of embarrassing creative faux pas.

Respectfully, we’d disagree: whether you’re using it on Mac, iPad or iPhone, GarageBand is a great song-starting platform, giving you everything you need to make a musical idea a reality. And if you do need more functionality, you can open up the project in Logic Pro and develop it further.

A slightly bashful Styles went on to say that he also uses Apple’s Voice Memos – another app that’s loved by many songwriters and has a variety of musician-friendly features.

“Wow,” replied Thom, which led to Styles conceding that his methods are somewhat primitive. “In a way that’s good,” Thom told him, though he didn’t say exactly how.

After being on the receiving end of that gentle ribbing, we’re pleased to be able to report that Styles managed to land a burn of his own when Yorke revealed that he used to record his ideas to MiniDisc. Styles said that he remembers that format, too – “from being in primary school.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Yorke discussed his current recording habits, revealing that he always travels with a laptop. “There's upsides to it and downsides to it, to be honest, because it means you've got everything at your fingertips, so you can fiddle endlessly – like, get really excited about a synth sound,” he explained.

On the downside, Yorke believes that these endless possibilities “encourage obsessive tendencies, which is not good.”

Yorke also told the story of the moment he was introduced to Pro Tools, which came when Radiohead were recording their 2000 album, Kid A, with producer Nigel Godrich.

“When when we were doing Kid A, Nigel had the first Pro Tools setup, because we were having to record strings – we couldn't get them on to the tape,” he remembered. “And I was like, ‘I need that’, because because I was always a bit of a computer head. So when I saw that in the studio, I just wanted to learn it immediately, and that really changed how I thought about music straight away. Suddenly, I have a multitrack in in my bag.”

On the evening of 6 July 1972, an event took place that would have an electrifying, life-changing impact on legions of young music fans who witnessed it.

At 7:25pm that evening a television audience estimated at between 12 million and 15 million people tuned in to watch the UK’s biggest weekly televised music show, BBC TV’s Top Of The Pops.

That week’s edition was hosted by the perennially upbeat DJ Tony Blackburn and kicked off with a promotional film of Dr Hook & The Medicine Show, performing their new single, Sylvia’s Mother. Five minutes into the broadcast, as the soft-rock strains of Dr Hook faded, a camera honed in on the bright blue body of a 12-string dreadnought guitar.

The camera panned out to focus on the person playing it – the strikingly flame-haired David Bowie, wearing a body-hugging multi-coloured jumpsuit and red knee-length astronaut-style boots.

Bowie was flanked by three musicians from Hull – guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Bolder and drummer Woody Woodmansey – all kitted out in shiny jumpsuits and platform boots.

Together they made up Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and the song they were playing was Starman, the lead single from Bowie’s fifth album.

That album was titled The Rise and Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. Ziggy was Bowie’s androgynous, intergalactic rock star alter ego.

Earlier that evening, after the dress rehearsal, Bowie and the band had dropped into the BBC bar, where they reportedly caused a stir among company staff who assumed they were extras from the Doctor Who TV series. Back on set, they looked for all the world like glamorous, impossibly cool, aliens.

The cultural impact of their performance that evening was massive. Artists such as Robert Smith, Boy George, Siouxsie Sioux, Morrissey, Bono, Ian Curtis, Gary Numan, Ian McCullough and Gary Kemp all reportedly cited this performance as a life-changing moment. In the drab, grey austerity of early ’70s Britain, it was like someone turning the lights on.

“I remember sitting on my couch at home with my mother, watching this spectacle unfold,” recalled Lol Tolhurst of The Cure in his 2016 memoir Cured: The Tale Of Two Imaginary Boys. “And at the point where Bowie sang the line, ‘I had to phone someone, so I picked on you,’ he pointed directly at the camera, and I knew he was singing that line to me and everyone like me. It was a call-to-arms that put me on the path that I would soon follow.”

Gary Numan was 15 years old when he watched Bowie and the band’s performance that evening. “I think it stands as one of the pivotal moments of modern music, or, if not music, certainly a pivotal moment in show business,” said Numan in Marc Spitz’s 2009 book Bowie: A Biography. “It must have taken extraordinary courage and/or a monumental amount of self-belief. To say it stood out is an epic understatement. Even as a hardcore T. Rex fan I knew it was special.”

One minute into the performance, a moment occurred that was an epiphany for many, as Ronson joined Bowie at the microphone and Bowie casually draped his arm around him.

"That was like the gay moon landing,” wrote Caitlin Moran in The Times. “That was where suddenly, being gay, people knew what it was. It outraged the older generation. The younger generation were going, ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s how I feel.’”

Marc Almond performed Starman as a tribute at the 2016 BBC Proms. Almond recalled that watching Bowie perform the song on Top Of The Pops was “a life-changing moment for so many teenagers, such as me. David Bowie made us look at the world through different eyes.”

When Bowie released Starman on 28 April 1972, it was his first hit single since Space Oddity in 1969, back when he was an earnest folkie with a bubble perm.

Ziggy Stardust was light years away as a concept and was an audacious, brazen concoction, inspired by influences such as ’50s English rock ‘n’ roll singer Vince Taylor, Iggy Pop, A Clockwork Orange and Japanese Kabuki theatre.

Trident Studios in the heart of London’s Soho was the studio of choice for the recording of the album that became The Rise and Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. Ken Scott, who produced Bowie’s 1971 album Hunky Dory, was back behind the desk and the album was completed by the end of January, 1972. But when RCA executive Dennis Katz heard it, he wasn’t happy.

“We’d finished recording the Ziggy Stardust album at that time and it went into the record company,” drummer Woody Woodmansey told The Quietus. “They said: ‘We can’t release this. It doesn’t have a single on it.’ So, we came out of the studio and in about a month he had written Starman… It was an obvious single. I think Mick [Ronson] and I went out in the car after David played it for us the first time, and we were already singing it, having only heard it only once.”

Bowie and the band recorded Starman on 4 February 1972, along with Suffragette City and Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.

At the time, Bowie, his wife Angie and their eight-month old son were living in a flat in Haddon Hall, a grand yet decaying Victorian mansion in Beckenham, Kent. This is where the band jammed and rehearsed.

For Bowie, honing his vision for the Spiders from Mars took relentless tenacity. Convincing the three plain-speaking Yorkshiremen in his band to wear shiny jumpsuits and make-up had been a particular challenge.

“At first we were very reticent about the outfits and the make-up,” Woody Woodmansey told Rob Hughes of Uncut magazine in 2009. “Mick Ronson hated the outfits. In fact, he packed his bags and left. David asked me to go after him and handle it. I spent a good hour or so on Beckenham train station with him.”

Lyrically, Starman focuses on the extraterrestrial character of Ziggy Stardust, conveying a message of hope to the Earth’s youth through the radio. Bowie outlined the lyrics in an interview with William S. Burroughs for Rolling Stone magazine in 1973.

“Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes Starman, which is the first news of hope that the people have heard,” said Bowie. “So they latch onto it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the Earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black-hole jumping.”

Sonically, there is a full and warm, almost folk-like foundation to the sound of Starman, with Bowie’s 12-string strumming dominating in the mix. Bolder and Woodmansey were a formidable rhythm section. On Starman, Woodmansey created a real bounce of a groove while Bolder’s tasteful bass playing injected melody and dynamism.

Mick Ronson reportedly used his 1968 Gibson Les Paul Custom on the song, his primary instrument with the Spiders from Mars. The soulful melodicism of Ronson’s playing really comes to the fore on the lead solo and the outro, where he blends glam rock power with a glittering spaciousness.

Ronson had also become a gifted arranger and he created the string parts on Starman, which bring a cinematic grandeur to the song. He also played Mellotron.

One of the defining features of Starman is the Morse code-like pulses that feature on the stops before the chorus.

“That Morse code sound is actually a piano and two guitars, an octave apart, then we bounced them all down together to make one track,” Ken Scott told Uncut magazine in 2009. “It seemed to make sense in that there was this idea of something coming from some distant planet. So we then put it all through a phaser.”

Then, of course, there is Bowie’s vocal performance, which is enigmatic, intimate and otherworldly. Born in Brixton and raised in Bromley, Bowie harnessed the vowel sounds of his native south London, a nod to artists he admired such as Anthony Newley and Syd Barrett.

At the same time, he peppered the lyrics to Starman with American slang – such as “boogie”, “that’s far out” and “some cat was laying down some rock ‘n’ roll” – which add a hip exoticism to the track.

The first lines of Starman are laidback and conversational in tone: “Didn’t know what time it was, the lights were low/I leaned back on my radio…”

But on the lift into the chorus, it opens up and soars, with Bowie’s higher register imbuing the song with a sense of wonder.

In the 2012 book The Man Who Sold The World: David Bowie And The 1970s, author Peter Doggett suggests that the chorus of Starman is loosely based on the song Over The Rainbow from the 1939 film The Wizard Of Oz. Doggett alleges that the octave leap on the word “Star-man” is identical to that of Judy Garland’s “Some-where”.

It’s a connection noted in the 2016 book The Complete David Bowie by Nicholas Pegg, who recalled that Bowie changed the chorus to “There’s a Starman, over the rainbow” during his performances at The Rainbow Theatre, London, in August 1972.

Starman was released on 27 April 1972 as the lead single from The Rise and Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. The song reached No 10 in the UK Singles Charts and helped propel the album to No 5 in the UK Albums Chart.

That performance on Top Of The Pops in July 1972 made Bowie a star overnight and embedded Ziggy Stardust in the nation’s consciousness.

The single remained in the UK charts for 11 weeks yet peaked at No 65 in the US in August of that year.

In many ways, the message that Starman conveyed was mirrored by the colossal cultural impact and influence that it had on a whole generation of young people, desperate for new beginnings and a sense of identity.

At the time they recorded the song, Woody Woodmansey and the band feared that it might be too poppy. “It might seem strange, but we just hadn’t done anything that commercial before,” he told Uncut magazine. But they soon came to recognise the importance of what they had helped create.

As Woodmansey said: “Starman was along the same lines as Space Oddity and Life On Mars, two other favourites of mine. It’s the concept of hope that the song communicates. That we’re not alone, and ‘they’ contact the kids, not the adults, and kind of say, ‘Get on with it – let the children boogie.’ It made the future look better.”

A Thousand Miles is the 2002 debut single that kick-started pop singer Vanessa Carlton’s career in music – but it might have been a different story if she had stuck with her original title for the song.

Carlton wrote the main piano riff as 17 year-old in her parent’s sunroom four years prior to its release and was told by her music teacher mother that it had all the makings of “a hit song”. However, at this stage it was only partially complete and a period of creative uncertainty led to her leaving it unfinished for half a year.

“I was frustrated with writer’s block, so I put the song aside for six months,” Carlton revealed to MTV News. “Later that year I was doodling on the piano and I played the beginning of what we now call A Thousand Miles for a producer.”

Much like Carlton’s mother, the producer was convinced it was a hit in the making. As Carlton recalled: “He stopped me in the middle of the song and asked me what it was,” she added. “I said, ‘Nothing.’ He said, ‘You have to finish that’. So I finished the song that Saturday night in an hour.”

The song made its way onto her demo tape, which was sent out to key names in the music industry with the hope of landing some influential figures to help her. Some labels were on board, though nobody but Carlton herself liked her title for the song.

“If I had it my way, that song would be called Interlude,” she told Marie Claire magazine in 2020. “The little riff in there just sounded like a little interlude between songs. Maybe that’s a shitty idea, but whatever.”

In the end it was Ron Fair, head of A&M Records, who signed her up after hearing the Interlude demo on his morning run. The pair teamed up behind a piano to work on a new arrangement, “so the heartbeat came in a different way,” he later explained.

Fair also had to put his foot down when it came to the song’s title.

Speaking to MTV he explained : “I had to say, ‘Look, I’m the president of the label, we’re not calling it Interlude.’” He went on to say how he was very happy with how the song turned out because “it made me weep”. “That’s usually my litmus test,” he said. “If I cry, I know it’s a hit.”

Taking no less than 14 sessions to finish, it would be the first song recorded for Carlton’s debut album Be Not Nobody.

Fair was responsible for finding the band to record with her and ended up approving Paul McCartney drummer Abe Laboriel Jr., bass session legend Leland Sklar and television/film composer John Goux on guitar.

Fair also wrote, conducted and recorded the orchestra section, though the one thing he didn’t touch was Carlton’s lyrics.

“They’re all hers,” he said, while also explaining the music “has a lot of starts and stops to it, which makes it hard to achieve a flow, but I wanted to make a really dramatic record… the song is like a mini musical of its own.”

The lyrics touch on the idea of unrequited love, though Carlton has never revealed the identity of the person in question.

“I’ll never tell,” she once shrugged, after admitting the subject of the song is now a famous actor. “He never knew and never will. Actually, I don't even crush him anymore.”

The music is in the key of B major and played at 95 beats per minute.

A Thousand Miles spent 41 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No 5. It topped the singles chart in Australia and ended being a top five hit in Ireland and Poland, as well as a top 10 hit in the UK, Italy, France and the Netherlands.

It earned her three Grammy Award nominations in 2003, and she performed the song live at that year’s Grammy ceremony at Madison Square Garden.

Billboard magazine even named it “one of the most enduring songs of the millennium”.

As well as appearing in Reese Witherspoon box office hit Legally Blonde, the track also featured prominently in 2004 movie White Chicks, in which Shawn and Marlon Wayans star as FBI agents who go undercover as white girls.

When asked about what she thought of the song’s usage in the comedy, Carlton said she “thought it was hilarious” because “you can’t profile who’s going to like the song” despite the irony that “people associate it with a white girl playing the piano”.

At Coachella in 2026 Carlton performed A Thousand Miles with Teddy Swims.

Almost a quarter of a century on, Carlton feels rightly proud of the song that changed her life.

“My favourite part of the song is the melody of the piano,” she once revealed. “It’s an ode to my love of classical music ... well, my version of classical anyway.”

Olivia Rodrigo going from superfan to friend and collaborator of Robert Smith has been one of the more heartwarming musical relationship stories of the past couple of years, but The Cure frontman does have one bone to pick with the young superstar.

It relates to the fact that, as of earlier this year, Rodrigo went so far as to release a song called The Cure, though not one that has anything to do with the band. This became a big hit, which means there could have been a knock-on effect for Smith.

Quoted in The Hollywood Reporter in an interview with Rodrigo, Smith says: “I was like, ‘Oh thanks, every Google search from now on is going to come up with that.’”

He’s joking, of course, but, just for the record, we think Smith can rest relatively easily. Our extensive research indicates that typing ‘The Cure’ into Google still brings up his band rather than Rodrigo’s song as the top result.

Elsewhere in the interview, Smith praises Rodrigo’s commitment to her craft: “Olivia’s desire to be recognized as a songwriter is very refreshing; it’s unmodern in a way,” he says. “It’s not effortless – she spends an awful lot of time getting things right with her music, but she also gets it right so quickly.

“It’s bizarre at times. She was in London with me a while back. She played me something she wrote that morning, things that could take 14 years for many writers to get out, and she does it in a morning.”

After guesting during Rodrigo’s headline set at Glastonbury in 2025, Smith went on to appear on a song, What’s Wrong With Me, on her latest album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love. One collaborator that Rodrigo won’t be working with any time soon, though, is AI.

“I would never use AI in any of my music,” she says in the Hollywood Reporter profile. “Absolutely no. Hard line on that. The closest I’d ever got is that once, me and [producer] Dan [Nigro] were like, ‘God, I wonder what ideas ChatGPT would have for an Olivia Rodrigo title,’ and they’re all fucking awful.”

Rodrigo also reflects on the success of her female-led Daisy Chain Fields festival, but says that one of her plans didn’t come to fruition. A huge White Stripes fan, she recently purchased the dress that Meg White wore on the cover of their Elephant album and hoped to wear it herself on stage, but couldn’t because it was “too fucking hot.”

“Maybe if I do Daisy Chain in the winter, I can wear it,” she suggests.

Producer Andrew Watt has worked with a head-spinning number of rock legends over the past few years – everyone from Ozzy Osbourne and Iggy Pop to the Rolling Stones, Elton John and Paul McCartney.

As such, it seems inevitable that things he did on one project would bleed into the next, and he’s confirmed as much in an interview with Mixonline.

Watt made specific reference to going straight from the Rolling Stones’ 2023 album Hackney Diamonds to producing Pearl Jam’s Dark Matter, which was released the following year.

“Keith Richards had just showed me so much about open tunings and playing different inversions, so my hands were in that mentality,” he explains. “Then there was a song that ended up being on the Pearl Jam album [believed to be Wreckage] that was in Open G tuning. I think those kinds of things can carry over.”

Having produced his well-received 2026 album, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, Watt also discusses the influence of Paul McCartney.

“Every time I’m lucky enough to share a couch with Paul McCartney, I become ten times the musician I was before, just learning about chord movements and passing chords from him,” he admits. “If I get to go work on something else soon after I’ve been in the studio with Paul McCartney, the desire for passing chords and chords that are a little deeper, and going from major to minor and modulating, is sharp!”

Elsewhere in the interview, we learn that Watt’s Minimoog Model D once belonged to David Bowie, and was used nightly on the 1972 Ziggy Stardust tour.

Watt has also been talking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, describing the death of Ozzy Osbourne as “brutal," and saying that "I miss him every day.”

“The thing about Ozzy Osbourne is, if he chose you, if he chose to bring you next to him, your life changed,” he added. “And that has been true so many times in history. Look at Randy Rhoads, right? Zach Wylde? Every guitar player he ever had had a career after that.”

Lowe also addressed the fact that, despite the fact that he’s friends with the band and has played with them, Watt is yet to make an album with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

It could only be matter of time before it happens, though: “I’m open to it,” says Watt. “They're heroes, and a foundation of how I know how to play instruments, make sound.”

It’s been announced that the US soul singer Freddie Jackson died on Monday. He had just turned 70 last week.

The singer’s family has issued a statement, saying: “Freddie was more than a legendary voice. He was a kind, generous soul who loved his fans, his family, his friends, and his music with everything he had. For decades he gave us the songs that became the soundtrack to our love stories, our celebrations, and our most treasured memories. That gift will live on forever.” No cause of death has yet been given.

Jackson came to prominence in the 1980s. He sang back up to Melba Moore on the singer’s early 80s material and also appeared on Full Moon, the 1982 album by the novelty magic/disco outfit Mystic Merlin (yes, such a group did actually exist - they even scored a UK hit in 1980). Jackson went solo and signed to Capitol in 1984. His first four albums for the label all topped the Billboard R n B charts.

Though not as successful as contemporaries such as Luther Vandross or Alexander O’Neal, Jackson was highly rated by soul aficionados. His biggest hits, Rock Me Tonight (For Old Time’s Sake) and You Are The Lady, are the epitome of the smooth romantic style that reached its apogee in the mid-'80s.

The hits dried up in the 1990s, but he was never entirely forgotten. Outkast name-checked him on 2001’s So Fresh So Clean, with Big Boi pointing out he is “cooler than Freddie Jackson sipping a milkshake in a snowstorm.”

Moore has been one of those who have paid tribute to him. “My heart is broken over the loss of a great singer and even a greater friend, Freddie Jackson,” she has said in a statement. “When we worked together on songs such as our hit, A Little Bit More, his sense of humour had me laughing during the sessions. We had such a special relationship. I will forever miss my dear friend. Rest peacefully, Freddie.”

Jackson’s romantic style was a throwback, something he admitted as far back as 1989, when he told The Times: ”My music is for people who like to hold hands in concert… it’s intimate. With all the racial tension going on today, all the hate, my songs, which are about love, make more sense than ever. If people could diminish some of their hate, the chaos and trouble in life wouldn’t be so strong.”

To which, many of us in 2026 will surely be saying ‘Amen’.

Jean-Michel Jarre has announced a 50th anniversary reissue of Oxygene, the album that turned him into a global electronic music superstar.

Oxygene was released in France in 1976, and in the rest of the world a year later. Famously, Jarre recorded it in his kitchen using an eight-track tape machine, homemade mixing desk and a small collection of synths and drum machines. These included the ARP 2600, the EMS VCS3 and Synthi AKS, a Farfisa organ, a Mellotron, and a Korg Mini-Pops.

The anniversary edition is bolstered by a stereo remaster, along with a Dolby Atmos version that was mixed by David Kosten, Steven Wilson and Jarre himself.

“When I created Oxygene, I was working directly with analogue instruments and tape, and the sound had a particular depth, movement and life of its own,” says Jarre. “For this anniversary edition, we returned to the original tapes with the aim of preserving that character rather than changing it.”

As music critic Alexis Petridis writes in his new liner notes, Oxygene sounded like “a curious transmission from the future” when it was released. “Jean-Michel Jarre managed to capture and tie together every extant aspect of electronica into 40 minutes of music,” he notes.

German writer Torsten Groß, meanwhile, says that “the foundation for this unique career was laid in that kitchen – with a broken Mellotron and ideas for eternity.”

The 50th anniversary edition of Oxygene will be available on half-speed vinyl, limited-edition coloured eco-vinyl, CD and digital platforms. There’s also a ‘Blu-ray mediabook’ that includes Dolby Atmos and new 5.1 mixes, the stereo remaster and archival material.

Prior to the album’s release, on 20 November, Jarre will appear as guest of honour at the Amsterdam Dance Event on 21 October. He’ll not only be performing there, but also speaking on the history of electronic music and its future in the age of AI.

Let’s not forget that Jarre has a book on the way, too. Machines: A History of Electronic Music will be released on 24 November.

The problem with being an artist who’s grown up in public is that every misstep – whether musical or otherwise – remains on the record/YouTube for all to see, and can come back to haunt you when you least expect it.

For Justin Timberlake, it appears that the misguided move was beatboxing, and the moment of judgement is right about now.

For the benefit of those not in the know, we should say that, in the early part of his career, Timberlake was known for his occasional beatboxing, both in the studio and on stage.

One person who definitely remembers that era is Hannah Young, whose video recalling JT’s mad beatboxing skills recently went viral.

“We don’t talk about Justin Timberlake beatboxing enough,” she began. “Because there was a moment in time where that man would be in the middle of a song and just ‘boots and cats, boots and cats’”

She’s not wrong: Timberlake’s beatboxing can be heard on both NSYNC’s Pop, from 2001, and Rock Your Body, the smash hit single from his 2002 debut solo album, Justified.

At the time, though, it passed largely without comment. “We were like, ‘Yes, there he is,’” continued Hannah in her reel. “Nobody questioned it. Nobody said, ‘Justin, you know, we have drums. This is a professional recording studio. There are instruments available to you.’ But no, Justin Timberlake wanted to make space noises with his mouth.”

He did it live, too, and there’s lots of video evidence to prove it.

“You couldn’t stop him: awards shows, live performances – you gave that man a microphone and there was always a chance,” quipped Hannah. “And we liked it. That’s what I need to sit with.”

Happily, Timberlake appears to have taken Young’s remarks in the playful spirit they were seemingly made in, and has replied in the comments.

“I often look back on that time as well,” he wrote. “I still haven’t come up with any answers. I don’t know how to apologise enough for whatever those ambitions were. Too many boots. Too many cats. I hope you can forgive me.

“Also, I can’t promise I won’t do it again. God help us all.”

Good to hear, but if it does happen at a show at some point in the future, there can be only one reasonable question: is it going to ruin the tour?

Tributes have been coming in for the Canadian blues rock singer Sass Jordan, who has died, aged just 65.

News of Jordan’s death was announced in a statement yesterday on social media: "On Oct 2 2026, surrounded by her loving family, Sass Jordan peacefully crossed over to the other side. She remains in our hearts, an inimitable force of nature. An irreplaceable being of light and joy!"

The cause of the singer’s death is not yet known, though we do know that last month she announced she was stepping away from her professional commitments due to an “undisclosed medical condition.”

Jordan’s PR Eric Alper has added in a statement: "Over four decades, she gave Canadian rock one of its most recognisable voices, carved out space for women in a genre long dominated by men, and opened doors for the young musicians who came through her band."

The singer was born in Birmingham in the UK, though her family moved to Montreal when she was just three. Her career took a while to get going – she released her debut album Tell Somebody in 1988. The title track was a hit and Jordan was a consistent presence in the Canadian charts for a decade.

She later became a judge on Canadian Idol in the Noughties and tried her hand at acting, playing Janis Joplin in the off-Broadway hit Love, Janis. More recently she joined The Bowie Celebration Alumni Tour, a tribute to the late star put together by Mike Garson.

Garson has been one of many to post his tribute to her, saying: "I’m heartbroken to hear of the passing of Sass Jordan. She was an extraordinary singer, but what I remember just as much was the person behind that unmistakable voice.”

"She had a great heart, a wonderful spirit, an incredible feel for the music, and a wicked sense of humour. She was an absolute joy to work with, both onstage and off.”

Meanwhile, Deep Purple man Glenn Hughes has written: "Gab and I are totally in shock, RIP my dear friend Sass. A true friend. We had so much love, joy and laughter, and music together. RIP My Sasseroonie Girl."

And fellow Canadian rock singer Lee Aaron has posted: "Oh man… unexpected and crushing… my heartfelt condolences go out to Sass Jordan’s family, bandmates and loved ones. The world has lost a formidable talent. RIP sweet rock’n’roll sister…I thought we’d have many more years of making music and getting silly backstage together."

It’s been described by Dave Grohl as “the most beautiful piece of music ever written” and “maybe one of the most melodically sophisticated songs I’ve ever heard in my entire life”.

The Foo Fighters frontman’s comments were made during a 2013 WTF podcast with Mark Maron and the composition he was referring to was Never Let Her Slip Away, the 1978 soft-rock classic by Andrew Gold.

It’s not a song you might single out as a potential Grohl favourite, but he recognised it for the masterpiece that it is, a composition that melds melancholy and yearning with upbeat sun-soaked production and a refined melodic structure.

Never Let Her Slip Away was released in the US in June 1978, but juddered to a halt at a rather uninspiring No 67 position on the Billboard Hot 100. In the UK, however, it was a whole different story. When it was released in March that year, it became a massive hit, climbing to No 5 in the UK Singles Chart.

In that markedly cold and wet early Spring in the UK, Never Let Her Slip Away was seemingly everywhere, a smooth, freewheeling sound with an infectious melody, which stood out amid the disco-saturated UK Singles Chart of the time.

Given his family background, it was no great surprise that Andrew Gold pursued a career in music. Born in Burbank, California in 1951, he was immersed in the industry from an early age. His mother was the singer Marni Nixon, who provided the singing voice for numerous stars in major Hollywood film productions, most notably Natalie Wood in West Side Story, Deborah Kerr in The King And I and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.

His Austrian-born father, Ernest Gold, won an Academy Award for his score for the 1960 film Exodus, an epic historical drama about the founding of the state of Israel, produced and directed by Otto Preminger.

Andrew Gold once recalled living in Laurel Canyon with his parents when he was a teenager and waking up to the sound of his father writing film scores in his home studio.

Andrew began writing songs at the age of 13 and landed his first recording contract with Polydor at the age of 16, while at school in the UK for a year. The deal resulted in the single Of All The Little Girls, recorded with his friend and collaborator Charlie Villiers and released in 1967 under the name Villiers and Gold.

By the early 1970s, he was working full-time as a session musician, songwriter and record producer. He played with a number of groups, including the folk-rock band Bryndle. But he really rose to prominence as multi-instrumentalist and arranger on Linda Ronstadt’s breakthrough album Heart Like A Wheel (1974) and her two-follow-up albums.

By then, Gold was a major LA session musician and arranger, adept on an extraordinarily diverse range of instruments, including guitar, bass, keyboards, accordion, synthesiser, harmonica, saxophone, flute, drums and percussion, as well more esoteric instruments such as ukulele, musette, and harmonium.

In 1975, he played most of the instruments on Art Garfunkel’s hit I Only Have Eyes For You, which reached No 1 in the UK.

Also in 1975, Gold released his debut self-titled solo album, which was critically acclaimed. In a review headlined ‘Andrew Gold Is Fab’ in Rolling Stone, writer Stephen Holden concluded that “not a note or beat is wasted”, adding that the album was “one of the year’s most melodic”.

Gold’s music was at the forefront of the California soft-rock/pop sound so favoured by mainstream AM radio in the mid-’70s. He demonstrated a real maturity in his songwriting, creating an alluring, extremely polished sound forged by impeccable songwriting and studio craft. His songs spanned the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter style and Beatles-style melodic pop.

Follow-up album What’s Wrong With This Picture? (1976) yielded mixed reviews. But it did feature the single Lonely Boy, which reached No 7 in the Billboard Hot 100 and spent five months in the US charts.

Then, in 1978, Gold released his third album All This And Heaven Too, a record brimming with strong melodic hooks and featuring a warm, sentimental piano-and-guitar driven soft rock sound. This was the album that produced the single Never Let Her Slip Away, Gold’s biggest-ever UK hit.

Gold was inspired to write Never Let Her Slip Away one week after meeting and falling hopelessly in love with actress Laraine Newman, who was a cast member on the then-hip TV comedy sketch-show, Saturday Night Live.

“I was really in love with this woman,” he said. “I thought she was absolutely it for me. It was August, we’d been going out for at least a week at that point, and I wrote a song kind of to impress her.”

Gold and his co-producer Brock Walsh reportedly created the rhythm track for the song by banging on the walls of the studio and clapping, then using overdubs to create a loop.

“That was a fun thing,” Gold recalled in a radio interview. “Back then it wasn’t so easy to get interesting effects on things. So you would just do stuff and that made it a little more fun. In that particular case Brock and I hit our hands against a wall to make a thud, and we did that like 22 times and then we clapped 22 times and then made a loop out of it.”

There were just two musicians on the track. Gold sang lead and backing vocals and played synths and percussion, while revered session musician Ernie Watts played the saxophone.

Gold’s prominent synth parts created the main melodic pads and backing texture for the song.

While Gold and Watts were the only two musicians playing on the song, there were additional backing vocalists. Bassist Timothy B. Schmit had recently joined the Eagles when he laid down his backing vocals on Never Let Her Slip Away, but he was uncredited.

Singer-songwriter J.D. Souther, who had co-written massive hits for the Eagles such as Best Of My Love (1974) and New Kid In Town (1976), also contributed backing vocals on Never Let Her Slip Away and he is credited in the liner notes.

Another artist who is widely reported to have sung backing vocals on the song is Freddie Mercury. The Queen frontman was reportedly a good friend of Gold’s and was recording in a neighbouring studio. The story goes that Mercury allegedly agreed to sing backing vocals but remained uncredited due to contractual restrictions.

Mercury’s presence on the song has become so exhaustively reported that it has become entrenched as fact. For example, a 2011 obituary of Andrew Gold in The Guardian states that Mercury sang backing vocals on the song.

The problem with this version of events is that there is no firm evidence to back it up. Finding a primary, definitive source that proves or disproves Mercury’s presence on the song seems an impossible task. And there is seemingly not one interview with Andrew Gold himself in which he said that Mercury sang on the record. Yet the story prevails.

Coincidentally, when Gold talked in a radio interview about the recording of Never Let Her Slip Away he made a joke by singing the chorus to Queen’s 1977 anthem We Will Rock You – a song built from a similar rhythmic intro. And in that same radio interview he also noted the similarity between the intros to Never Let Her Slip Away and the Eagles’ 1979 single Heartache Tonight.

Gold stated: “I may want to point out that while we were there [in the studio] one Eagle and one Eagle good friend, J. D. Souther and Timothy Schmit, came to the session and they sang one line: ‘On a school day afternoon.” And then [a year later] I’m listening to Heartache Tonight and I’m going, ‘Hey!’”

Listening to Never Let Her Slip Away almost five decades after it was released, it’s easy to dismiss it as bland West Coast pop, with little creative merit or bite. But that is to downplay Gold’s sophisticated songcraft and his easy, assured performance.

A jaunty 4/4 soft shuffle propels the 114 bpm song forward. The first few bars consist solely of Gold and Brock’s percussion loop, constructed from their spontaneous wall-pounding and handclaps. This is swiftly followed by a fat, squelchy synth melody over rhythmic chords and then Gold’s vocal enters the mix, 22 seconds in.

“I talked to my baby on the telephone long distance/I never would’ve guessed I could miss someone so bad.”

There’s an effortless feel and looseness to his voice, with its warm, smooth tones and slight huskiness. At no point do you get the sense that this is a ‘performance’. Gold sings with restraint, a wholly relaxed performance with a slight sadness and vulnerability that underpin the sweetness of the top line melody.

At 1:06, Ernie Watts’ saxophone makes its first appearance. It sounds massive but the sax’s warm and rounded tones inject a smooth jazz feel and add emotional depth.

Watts had an impressive R&B and jazz pedigree but here he does what all great session players should do – he plays for the song. In the process, his expressive phrasing and melodicism injects colour and sensuality to the track.

Melodically, there’s a real McCartney-esque feel to the song, with its graceful melodic structures encapsulated within an infectiously catchy pop song.

In the decades that have followed the release of Never Let Her Slip Away in 1978, numerous artists have covered the song.

In 1984, Trevor Walters released a reggae version of the song, which reached No 14 in the UK Singles Chart. Billy Crawford included a soulful R&B rendition of the song on his 2009 album Groove.

But the best-known and most successful cover of the song was released in 1992 by UK band Undercover, who released a Euro-dance pop rendition of the song.

This matched the success of Gold’s original when it reached No 5 in the UK Singles Chart.

Andrew Gold would go on to have more hit singles and numerous successes after his ’70s output, but Never Let Her Slip Away remains one of his most abiding and memorable songs.

Nearly five decades on from its release, Never Let Her Slip Away sounds like a timeless balm from another age. With its lush, freewheeling West Coast vibe and impeccably conceived songcraft, it remains an alluring and deeply enduring classic.

British star Olivia Dean is being accused of copying the melody from Bill Withers’ 1981 hit Just The Two Of Us in her song I’ve Seen It, the final track on her 2025 album, The Art Of Loving.

A legal case has been filed in California by the publishers of Withers’ catalogue, Mattie Music Group, and names Dean’s label Capitol Records and its parent company Universal Music Group as defendants.

According to legal documents obtained by the BBC, Mattie claims to have hired a musicologist to compare the two songs, and they’ve concluded that "the works contain substantial similarities".

Most notable is the charge of “repeated copying” of Just The Two Of Us’s melody, which likely refers to one specific section in I’ve Seen It’s verse. This occurs twice: at 0:35 and 1:39.

As musician David Bennett notes in a YouTube video, the melody here is indeed very similar to the one used throughout Just The Two Of Us's verses, but the chords and lyrics are different. In each use case, it only lasts for two bars.

It remains to be seen if Withers' publishers try and argue that other parts of the two songs are similar, too, but if the case goes to court, Withers’ publishers are likely to claim that it’s very unlikely that Dean or her co-writers Bastian Langebæk and Max Wolfgang weren’t aware of Just The Two Of Us, with the court papers referring to its "extraordinary and sustained" success and “decades of radio play”.

Commenting on the case, Kirsten Gilbert, Partner and Head of Brand Exploitation, Protection and TM Litigation UK at IP law firm, Marks & Clerk, said, “What is likely to come up again is the extent to which similarities between songs should be considered copyright infringement.”

“The debate has been around since Ed Sheeran publicly criticised what he described as baseless claims in circumstances where there are ‘only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music…coincidences are bound to happen,’” added Gilbert.

Sheeran successfully defended plagiarism claims relating to two of his songs – 2017’s Shape Of You and 2014’s Thinking Out Loud.

Gilbert also speculated that the claim might have been brought “on the basis that a settlement will be reached, as neither party actually wants to fight the matter in court.”

Whether that happens remains to be seen: “Ed Sheeran took a stand and was successful in defending claims brought both in the US and UK,” Gilbert points out. “It will be interesting to see how Olivia Dean’s legal team approach this claim.”

Just The Two Of Us was originally released by saxophonist Grover Washington Jr with Withers, who co-wrote the song with Ralph MacDonald and William Salter – listed as a featured artist.

He might not be making a musical comeback, but as he prepares to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame next month, Phil Collins has certainly been making his presence felt on the interview circuit.

His latest chat was with Piers Morgan on his Uncensored show. Inevitably, Morgan was keen to hear Collins’ thoughts on fellow Hall of Fame inductees Oasis – Noel Gallagher once referred to Collins as “the antichrist” – and to hear about the former Genesis man’s falling out and subsequent reconciliation with Paul McCartney. However, the pair also got around to discussing Collins’ music, including some of the songs he’s most proud of and one that he has a title for but hasn’t written yet.

As far as the Genesis back catalogue goes, Collins was happy to agree with Morgan that 23-minute 1972 opus Supper’s Ready would be a great introduction to the band for anyone who wants to know what its early iteration was all about.

While not specifically saying that it’s his favourite Genesis song, Collins did agree that it’s “up there in the top 15, top 20,” and described it as “lots of little songs strung together”.

“It's got some pieces on it which I still love very much to this day,” he added. “There's a thing called Apocalypse in 9/8, which is an instrumental thing, and then the end, a very triumphant, very elegant piece of music. Those two pieces are, and they're joined together in the song, amongst my favourites.”

Turning to his solo work, Collins named 1993’s I’ve Forgotten Everything as a standout. “It was on Both Sides, which was my most personal album, written during a great sorrow,” he recalled. “That song, I remember very distinctly, I'd been to see Harry Connick Jr at the Albert Hall, and he sang a Hoagy Carmichael song, I Get Along Without You Very Well. It's a beautiful song, and I went back home – I was living on my own because… you know, my divorce, we were separate… and that song just came, and I didn't even write the words down. I just sang them.”

What about the song he wishes he’d written, though? The answer to that one seemed to come pretty easily to Collins: Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin’s I Can’t Make You Love Me, which was first recorded in 1991 by Bonnie Raitt.

“She had the best version of it,” said Collins.“Bruce Hornsby's on piano. Beautiful, beautiful piano player. That is my favourite song that I wish I had written. I mean, there's probably half a dozen Beatles songs I wish I'd written, too, but that.”

I Can’t Make You Love Me is undeniably a modern classic, and has since been covered by the likes of George Michael, Prince, Adele and Bon Iver.

Whether we’ll ever hear Collins’ take on it remains to be seen, but those hoping for new material from him may be disappointed, as he says he no longer writes songs and – now that he’s unable to play – no longer has a drum kit at his house, either.

“I don't even have a stereo at home,” he told Morgan. “I listen to things on my phone. I don't listen to music that much at all.”

That said, Collins does the title for one potential new tune: “I've got a song that's waiting to be written called Fat People With Guns, which is about America. I just wrote that phrase down so I don't forget it. And at some point, I might write a song around it.”

In virtually every interview he’s given since 1970, Paul McCartney has been asked about his relationship with John Lennon. You might well ask what else is there to discover about the friendship that changed music history? But, just occasionally, Macca reveals something we weren’t aware of.

The occasion this time was a conversation with the filmmaker Judd Apatow that followed a screening of the Wings documentary Man On The Run in Los Angeles earlier this week. The two men dug deep into McCartney’s early 1970s, when, after the long, drawn-out pain of the Beatles split, Macca gradually got his mojo back again.

Apatow asked him how he felt about John Lennon’s then-irritation at his old friend’s more light-hearted approach in Wings - “Was it a joyfulness to it while he's doing primal scream and you're having fun? What do you think got under his skin about it?”

McCartney replied: “Well, I don't know. I think maybe he expected more from me. He expected something different from me, and I wasn't doing that.

"I was just doing ‘madcap’. I always thought John was very cool, and I still do. But he could be a complete idiot, over some things.”

“And the thing is, if you look at his life, there’s reason for him to be crazy,” he explained to Apatow. “A lot of bad things happened to him. His father ran away from home when he was three or something, so he never knew his dad until we got famous and his dad came back and was working at the pub down the road near where John lived.”

“And John’s mum, who he idolised and I idolised, was a beautiful lady called Julia. And she got run over and killed outside the house… So he’s had to deal with all of that, you know, and so he had a lot of anguish and a lot of this is why all the primal scream and everything - he had a lot of stuff to get out.”

Apatow also asked the ex-Beatle why there were so few photos of Wings from the time they were making Band On The Run in Nigeria. It seems that Linda McCartney had shot several reels of film (along with some McCartney demos) that were lost forever when the couple were mugged at knifepoint in Lagos.

“You think there’s some guy in Africa and his entire house is filled with all those photos?” Apatow asked.

“They stole Linda’s camera, all the cassettes, and we always wondered… We all said, ‘I bet they recorded over them.’” McCartney said, adding that he’d always imagined the thieves putting the cassettes into the player and wondering, “Oh, what’s this shit?”

Given his propensity for self-deprecation, Oli Howe would probably say that he puts the ‘harm’ into ‘reharmonisation’. His stock in trade is to take popular songs and use his jazz chops to bash them into sometimes almost unrecognisable forms, pairing the isolated vocal tracks with post-watershed chord progressions.

Hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers and countless professional musicians, though, are in on the joke. Howe has gone viral multiple times – including with muso-skewed reinterpretations of songs by the likes of Backstreet Boys, Destiny’s Child and Dua Lipa – and received likes and comments from many of the artists he’s covered.

The deadpan persona that Howe created has probably helped: each video has him staring blankly at the camera as he plays, while a painfully self-aware set of captions is displayed, entertainingly acknowledging the ridiculousness of the whole enterprise. Imagine the reharmonisation skills of Jacob Collier, but deployed by a man who’s approximately 99% less excitable.

Howe’s musical journey began at the age of three, when he started entertaining himself on the electric organ in the family home.

“My mum took me to a birthday party, and when she picked me up, one of the mothers told her that I played Happy Birthday on the piano with two hands, and that was before I was four years old,” he tells us. “So she was like, ‘OK, I’ll take him to a piano teacher and see what he’s like.’"

By the time he became a teenager, Howe had reached Grade 7 piano and Grade 8 cello, but classical music was never really his thing.

“I always enjoyed learning piano by ear from TV, films, records, tape cassettes and stuff much more than learning classical from sheet music,” he says.

At the time, Howe didn’t really connect with traditional music theory, either. “I knew my way around the piano, and my ear was good enough to hear most things and pick it up very quickly, but I didn’t really have the explanation for it,” he says. “I failed my Grade 5 theory at least two or three times. It just wasn’t something I really understood. It wasn’t taught to me in a way that made sense.”

It was when Howe went to college and was given a Real Book – a compilation of lead sheets for jazz standards that had chord symbols in it – that things started to make sense, but he never did a jazz degree or a formal course.

Instead, he developed his own method: “I’d been learning jazz through transcribing from a very early age,” he tells us. “I discovered jazz CDs and I was listening to a few different artists, but not a huge variety because back in those days there was no streaming, there was no YouTube or anything like that. So it was just the CDs and records that I had. I listened to them over and over and over again, and started to transcribe them bit by bit, making my way through as much of it as I could.

“By listening to them so often, a lot of the vocabulary and chord shapes were being memorised, then when I would try and attempt to play it, it became a lot easier to translate directly to the piano, because I never physically transcribed, you know, to paper. So I started to pick up the voicings, vocabulary and how these different genres sound.

“Then later, in my mid-20s and early 30s, I really started to go deeper into the theory and study using YouTube videos about how jazz harmony works, what scales and modes people use for soloing and that kind of thing. That really started to piece together with what I’d transcribed from all these records years ago. So I was like, ‘OK, now I have these formulas for what I’ve already been playing for a long time, and now I know how to recreate it in every key.’”

Howe says that he set about learning the history of jazz, going decade by decade, watching documentaries and listening to music through the ages, while playing with as many musicians as he could around Brighton, where he was living. Alongside that, he was still taking influence from the hip-hop and R&B that he listened to as a child.

“I grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, so hip-hop and R&B were growing massively at that time, me and my friends at school were hugely influenced by it. There’s a big tradition of sampling back then, and a lot of it was sampled from jazz, soft rock, smooth jazz, yacht rock and stuff like that.

“Any music that had any kind of flavour of jazz or complex harmony for me was really appealing. Like early R&B in the ‘80s and ‘90s. En Vogue, SWV, all the pop artists and soul artists like Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Prince and Chaka Khan. There’s just tonnes and tonnes of really advanced harmony in that stuff, and the way it was packaged into this commercial thing was super appealing to me. It had a really advanced sound because there’s beautiful and complex harmony involved, really amazing modulations, yet it’s mainstream music.”

Alongside this musical education, Howe began to develop his production chops. “As part of the college course, I was doing music technology on a very early Mac system with Logic 3, which is a long time ago. At that time, Fatboy Slim was a huge artist and I discovered how to sample and put these funk breaks with various samples that I could find, so I really started getting into music production. And by the time I was 19, when I left college, I bought myself a PC and started producing at home as much as I could, and from then on I was hooked.”

“I did a video – I think it was titled ‘Jazz musicians on a wedding’ – and it was a keyboard player and bass player playing Bruno Mars’ song Treasure, and the kind of back and forth while the keys player is massively overplaying. He’s bored, having fun and enjoying himself a bit too much, and the bass player doesn’t know where he’s going with his harmony. So the back and forth musical conversation between us was kind of funny. I put the text on the screen and had this conversation between the two players, and that went viral.”

Keen to capitalise, Howe started reharmonising other songs – The Killers, Stevie Wonder, Chaka Khan, Oasis, Queen, Amy Winehouse and the Spice Girls all got the treatment. After a bit of a break, he had another success with his smooth jazz version of Kenya Grace’s Strangers, but it was when he posted his reharm of Pharrell’s ‘Happy’, in 2025, that things really started to snowball.

“That one got a lot of attention from some really big names in the industry, and it went really viral at the time,” says Howe. “I think my account grew by maybe 10,000 followers in a week or so. I did a few more and out of the three that I’d done, two of them went viral, so I was like, ‘OK, I’m onto something here, and the consistency of posting every week is helping as well.’ So I carried on doing them, and yeah, I’ve done about 85 reharms in total now.”

Howe has also picked up some celebrity fans along the way, with many of the artists whose songs he’s covered responding with likes, shares, comments and even shared post collaborations.

“It’s the ultimate compliment, showing their approval like that,” he says. “It’s an honour to get that kind of feedback from them. I usually DM them on Instagram afterwards to thank them and get a conversation going and, more often than not, we do.”

This means that Howe has had some pretty surreal text encounters: “Yeah it’s wild, I’m chatting to people that I’ve grown up listening to and have been massive influences on my musical identity. People like Lenny Kravitz following me was such a huge one. I mean, not a guy that I see posts much on social media, and somebody whose albums had a huge impact on me when I was growing up. Somebody like him, who is a multi-instrumentalist and plays the majority of the stuff on his albums, I just found him to be a hero, one of my heroes, and people like that following me was massive.”

And then there was Justin Timberlake, who responded to Howe’s reharm of his 2016 smash, Can’t Stop the Feeling!, taken from the animated movie Trolls, by saying “Of all the ones in my catalogue… of course he picks the song I wrote for a children’s animated film to completely body!”

“Justin commented on a couple of videos, and then just continued to support, liking posts here and there, and then we started talking,” reveals Howe. “It’s amazing to be chatting with these people.”

Howe has also managed to get onto the radar of music industry legend David Foster, famed for his work with everyone from Earth, Wind and Fire to Whitney Houston and Celine Dion: “He commented and then he sent me a DM saying, ‘Where did you come from?’ And I was just like, ‘Oh my God, what do I say to that? Brighton?’”

Aside from his excellent musicianship, some of Howe’s success has undoubtedly come from his work rate. He’s supercharged his reharm output over the past year or so, so what’s his secret?

“I have a template which I’ve loaded with all my sounds, everything that I like to use – all the drum kits, all of the synth sounds, effects and everything – everything is mixed to a certain level so that I can just jump in and start writing,” he explains.

“That helps me to get straight into songwriting – I’m not held up by thinking, ‘right, what sound do I need here?’ I’ve got all of the keys loaded in – Rhodes, piano, synths – everything that I could possibly need is already in the template, ready to go, and that makes my workflow much faster.”

This means that Howe can now write and record a reharm in just two or three days, but there are exceptions.

“Most of them take a few days, but some can take six months,” he admits. “There are songs that I knew I wanted to do, like Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi, for instance. I knew that would be such a huge song to do, and I must have made about seven or eight versions of it, with different starting points and I was just like, ‘I’m not happy with any of these,’ until I found a version where I finally thought, ‘OK, I think I can pursue this one’. That’s happened quite a few times where I knew it was such a big song, I really wanted to do it justice.”

Musically, Howe says that the core of his reharmonising formula is jazz and gospel harmony, which crosses over into R&B, funk and many other genres like neo-soul. “The defining characteristic of my reharms, if I was to give you the secret sauce, is that I don’t reharmonise the melody, I reharmonise the key,” he explains. “The melody is important to a point, and if there are notes that stick out, then I’m gonna pay attention to them, and in places I might make a point of choosing to play outside the key in a different way than my usual formula does. But essentially, I’m reharmonising the key because the melody is in the key.”

As for those dry-as-a-bone captions, Howe says: “I try to portray a sort of uncomfortably self-aware version of myself. I’ve done a lot of therapy in my time, I’ve gone through quite a lot of things that have made me quite self-aware about a lot of issues that we all face and might not fully understand, and, especially the early reharm videos, I was using a lot of that humour to kind of explain what it’s like to be human and go through things, using the song lyrics to play off that as well.”

Inevitably, Howe’s success has led to requests for him to share his secrets: “Over the last year, a lot of people have asked for lessons, and they all want to know the same thing: how do I think about reharmonisation? How do I get from this chord progression to the new chord progression that I’ve written? Over the course of, maybe six months to a year of teaching people what my methods are, I’ve developed a system which I can now explain to people quickly and easily. I’ve put that into a course called the Reharm Group Sessions, which I started in March this year.”

Howe now has a new website where you can book onto one of these live group sessions: “In the sessions I show people how I move in and out of the key seamlessly, using tension and methods that feel like they’re a lot more complicated than they actually are. It’s stuff that, if you’ve played jazz standards, or if you’ve played certain types of music, like Stevie Wonder’s music, you’ll notice that there are a lot of similarities that I’m using in these reharms.”

Fans of his work may be disappointed to hear that Howe doesn’t plan on being ‘the reharm guy’ forever, but at a time when making a career out of being a musician is becoming increasingly difficult, he’s hoping to use the profile he’s built and the contacts he’s made as a springboard.

“One of my goals is to write more with original artists,” he says. “I had a song come out with an artist a couple of months ago, and I’ve got at least three or four other reproductions, or reharmonisations that I’ve done of artists’ music that will be released this year. I’m also writing with other artists, and my general plan is to release music and tour again, so over the next six months, you’ll see a little bit of a shift in how my content looks, and it will be more of an insight into what’s going on with me, where am I taking this, and what’s coming up in the future.”

Whatever comes next, Howe has certainly left his mark on Instagram – check out his profile to enjoy all his reharms – and as our conversation comes to a close, he has some advice for any musician who wants to make a similar impact.

“On social media, it’s very common that people think that for short form content you must use a hook. Your videos must be 30 seconds to a minute long maximum. Your watch time needs to look like this, or you need to sort your hook out or your content sucks.

“It’s utter rubbish, to me anyway, because I’ve broken all those rules. I’m making three-minute-long videos, I never use hooks and I don’t follow any of the rules the content creator gurus tell you is the successful strategy to go viral in 2026. I think it’s completely individual, and the strategy is you. You know, you are the strategy. The strategy is being authentic and connecting with people rather than trying to grab attention or make content for an algorithm. The key is to grab your own attention and present the content you really like. If you like it, somebody else will like it, and you can then connect with your audience over time.”