As he prepares to release Ride Lonesome, his 15th studio album, Beck has been reflecting with The Times on his unlikely early success and the frequent left turns he’s taken throughout his career.

The singer-songwriter’s breakthrough, of course, came with 1994’s Loser, but prior to that, he was struggling to make an impact on both first the New York and then the LA folk scenes.

“I really didn’t have much of a following at all,” he says. “People weren’t ready for deconstructed folk music featuring fingerstyle guitar with surrealist lyrics. In fact they hated it.”

All that changed, though, when Beck switched things up and Loser became a hit: “I had no idea what I was doing, it was a giant experiment,” he admits. “Previously I’d been writing 30 different versions of Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row for solo acoustic guitar and suddenly I had a hit with Loser, which is a rap song.”

It seemed entirely possible that Loser would be a flash in the pan, but two years later, Beck’s fifth album Odelay would sell more than two million copies. “Everyone was as baffled as I was,” he says. “I remember the president of my record label doing a toast to the success of Odelay, saying that he had no idea why it worked but he was happy it did.”

At this point, it seemed that world domination was on the cards, but Beck says that this was never on his mind, despite encouragement from rock royalty. “I remember Bono sitting me down and saying, ‘What are you doing? We were all waiting for you to take over!’ I didn’t have the stomach for it.’”

And so Beck continued to be Beck, just sort of doing what he fancied. After Odelay, he released the decidedly more downtempo Mutations, and then came Midnite Vultures, which saw him move towards funk and R&B.

One of the most memorable songs on the record was album closer Debra, which sounded almost like a pastiche of a classic Prince ballad.

“It was an ode to the R&B songs I was hearing on the radio at the time,” says Beck. “I was fascinated by how sexless alternative rock was while the R&B songs were full of it, so I imagined a working-class guy with a normal job, in his cheap car, trying to embody that spirit of seduction.”

If that was Beck playing a character, it sounds like Ride Lonesome comes from a much more personal place. It was written during the aftermath of his divorce, when he says he was “navigating difficult waters.”

“The album is about those moments when everything is stripped bare and you’re without the things you care about the most,” he explains. “You’re trying to find your faith again.”

Ride Lonesome is released on 18 September.

Lil Wayne has become the latest artist to get involved in the wonderful world of Fortnite.

The New Orleans rapper is set to join the game as part of their Icon series, which has already featured the likes of Sabrina Carpenter, Travis Scott and EsDeeKid amongst others.

What does the collab involve? Well, a pair of Lil Wayne skins and three of his biggest songs have been added to Fortnite Festival. There are also a number of accessories that fans will be interested in.

There’s a Lil Wayne outfit that includes gold graffiti glows and toggleable sunglasses, a Weezy outfit with toggleable tank top, hat and shades; Weezy Board back bling in the form of a flaming skateboard, a Weezy Boardbreaker pickaxe and a Young Money Stage glider, which sees pyrotechnics flare out when deployed.

And if you’re left utterly baffled by that last paragraph, clearly you’re not au fait with either the rapper born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr, nor the video game that has enraptured a generation. Or perhaps both.

Fortnite has also uploaded a trailer that features the Grammy winning rapper (or a computerised simulation of him, anyway).

Anyway, the Lil Wayne – Fortnite collab goes live tomorrow (12 September). Players will be able to compete in the Weezy Icon Cup in either Solo Battle Royale or Solo Zero Build.

“Top regional performers will earn the Weezy Outfit and Weezy Board Back Bling before they hit the Shop, and everyone who competes earns the YM Emoticon,” Epic Games announced in a blog post.

It’s not been confirmed yet how much the Lil Wayne Fortnite bundle will cost. However, given the number of cosmetics it includes, it will likely be one of the game’s larger Icon Series bundles.

Understandably, Billy Joel has remained pretty tight-lipped about the brain disorder he was diagnosed with in 2025 that forced him to cancel all upcoming shows.

At the time, he said that the condition, known as Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH), was being treated with physical therapy, but he’s now confirmed that he’s undergone surgery in a bid to improve it.

NPH is caused by excess fluid building up in the brain’s ventricles. This leads to greater pressure, which compresses brain tissue and can lead to issues with hearing, vision and balance.

When Joel announced that he’d been advised to take a break, it was widely assumed that his performance schedule was making the condition worse, and he’s now confirmed this while speaking on SiriusXM’s Billy Joel Channel.

“The doctors told me because of my job, which is playing rock and roll music very loud, that it was giving me something like a concussion every time I did a show,” he explained. “It was causing damage to my brain nerves and I could be losing more brain cells the more shows I did and I realised that means I shouldn’t be doing this right now. I got to improve. They don’t want me to stress too much.”

Joel went on to admit that he was reluctant to go ahead with surgery, which involved the fitting of a device called a ‘brain shunt’, which helps to drain the excess fluid away, but ultimately decided that it was the best way forward for him.

“I read up on it and I realised it can help improve your balance and can help your memory,” he said. “You know, I don’t want to lose my marbles. It’s hard to tell what’s age and what’s a condition, so I agreed to do the shunt and I had a surgery, and they implanted a shunt in my brain and it actually improved things. My memory got better, my balance got a little better, my ability to function was better.”

All of which is great to hear, though 77-year-old Joel still isn’t committing to any kind of permanent return to the stage. He did make a comeback of sorts earlier this year when he surprised fans by playing two of his songs with a Billy Joel tribute band, but he hasn’t performed any full-length gigs of his own.

He does want to reassure his fans that he’s on the mend, though. “I’m OK,” he says. “I want people to know, don’t worry about me. I’m still here.”

It might be more than 10 years since the world lost Prince, but thanks to regular posthumous music releases and frequent remembrances from those that knew him, it can sometimes feel like he’s still around.

To illustrate these points, the latest Prince album, Timeless, was released just a couple of weeks ago – not without a little controversy, it should be said – and now R&B star Jill Scott has been telling the slightly surreal story of the time that Prince and Stevie Wonder came into her dressing room after she’d played a show at The House Of Blues on Sunset Strip on 2011.

The gig had already been a memorable one for Scott, as she’d performed a new song, And I Heard… (Do You Understand), that she’d written the day before when it came to her, fully formed, in a dream.

“It woke me up and I sat straight up in the bed,” she tells Scott Evans. “I got some paper, and I just started writing, and it didn’t stop. I didn’t have to question. I didn’t have to go back and erase. I didn’t have to do anything. It came out as a fluid, 100% fact.”

So taken was she with the song that Scott decided to play it at her House of Blues show, teaching it to the band at the venue. It sounds like it went down a storm; the biggest thrill, though, was still to come.

“I was in the dressing room after the show and Prince comes in in a white pant suit,” Scott remembers. “It looked like it was made out of angel hair.”

“I’m talking to Prince and the people who are in the parking lot outside of the House of Blues are still singing [the new song],” Scott continues, “and then who should walk in but Stevie Wonder.

“And he’s like, ‘What’s going on?’ and Prince says ‘Jill sang a song tonight – it’s a new song.’ And Stevie Wonder was like ‘Oh, how does it go?’”

According to Scott, Prince immediately started singing the song, with Stevie providing rhythmic backing.

“Stevie Wonder is beatboxing and Prince is singing this song verbatim. What? How? How?” wondered Scott. “Prince is singing the words that came to me last night like they came to him. He is singing it word for word. Stevie Wonder’s beatboxing and Prince is singing this song. I think I just had my mouth open. Like, this is amazing.”

The night didn’t end there, though: after everyone had left, Scott got a call from Prince’s assistant saying that he wanted her to hang out with him. At first, she turned him down – she had to travel to the next show – but Prince then ended up calling her personally.

“He calls me himself and he’s like ‘I want you to come dance with me,” says Scott. “So, I go to the Roosevelt Hotel and he has rented out this disco room in there. And that man twirled me around like I was nothing. When I say smooth, I mean so smooth. I danced with Prince until four o’clock in the morning.”

Scott described the evening as “the best night of my life,” and, to be fair, it does sound like it would take some beating. She would later release tAnd I Heard… (Do You Understand) in its live incarnation – check it out below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This caught Fallon’s ear. It wasn’t like anything else that he had for the record – and it certainly wasn’t something he would have come up with there and then.

“It’s a very unusual chord progression,” he says. “It’s not something that you would write on guitar. You would not write that on guitar. I was like, ‘Oh that’s cool. What’s that?’ He was like, ‘Nothing, I thought it was another song.’ ‘That’s nothing? Let’s use that.’ So we started a little melody, and we had a title and a few lyrics, maybe a chorus, and then we started working on a structure.”

And that is when things got weird. Much of Not Bad For New Jersey is Fallon on home turf musically, with the triumphant Friday night feeling of ‘80s FM rock, blue-collar power-pop that leans hard into the chorus, and then there is the punk-rock energy of Nobody Likes You In New York City. Love At The End Of The World is not like anything else on the album.

It tumbles out as though under a spell, roots-y folk acoustic guitar and the caw of something – electric slide guitar and maybe wah – in the upper registers. And then there’s the verse and it just keeps going until its three minutes are up. It’s like the All Along The Watchtower principle of foregoing a chorus, because maybe there’s too much going on in the verse, or because maybe it’d break the audience’s concentration.

Fallon says that was Flowers’ idea.

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

“We wrote the lyrics together – honestly – just talking together in his truck, and just worked it together. I get to the hotel room, I put it together as lyric structure, brought it back to him the next day, we worked on it, he came up with the vocal melody and that was it.”

Neither of them had that much left in the tank. Both had been out on the road for a long time when they wrote it. Maybe that’s why it came out like it did, like, as Fallon says, “a conversation”, without a chorus and all forward momentum. But it’s also a love song for the end of the world and how do you write a chorus for that?

“It was incredibly freeing,” says Fallon. “I think that’s what we were both trying to do, because I was fresh out of The History Books Tour with Gaslight Anthem, and he was just finishing up the Killers tour, so we were both kind of exhaling. Phew! No pressure for a second, because we were like, ‘If nothing happens with this, who cares?’”

Not Bad For New Jersey is out now digitally via Lesser Known Records, on all formats tomorrow (September 11).

While we caught up with Fallon to discuss the making of the album, he also told us about the time Bruce Springsteen gave him a guitar tip and taught him an old Roy Buchanan trick.

Cliff Richard will be 86 in a few weeks’ time and Britain’s original rock n’ roller is still working and releasing records. In fact, he’s announced that he’s got a new covers album later this autumn.

And it has a theme. Only Number Ones features twelve songs by other artists that have reached Number One in the UK singles charts. In a statement Cliff said: "I suggested to Warner Music that I record an album of songs that made it to number one. Thank heavens they agreed! I listened to dozens of songs and chose 12 of my favourites.”

"This record is my tribute to fabulous artists who had recorded wonderful tracks that achieved the number one position."

So with 1457 different songs to choose from, what has the singer gone for? Well, he’s included tracks by his contemporaries: Return To Sender by Elvis, All I Have To Do Is Dream by the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison’s Oh Pretty Woman. The most recent inclusion is Harry Styles' 2017 chart topper Sign Of The Times.

There are also a few choices that nod towards Cliff’s own spiritual beliefs - Spirit In The Sky, I’m A Believer (made famous by The Monkees) and George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord - as well as a song that you cannot believe has never elicited a high profile cover until now: David Soul’s 1977 chart topper Don’t Give Up On Us.

In other Cliff news, his 1976 hit Devil Woman has been included on the soundtrack to the much-anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6. This time around the series which, among other things, is known for its hipper-than-hip soundtracks, has decided to include a few selections which might leave some older gamers open-mouthed.

Along with Devil Woman, mid-1970s MOR duo Captain and Tennille are in with their 1980 deep cut But I Think It’s A Dream, as are the Bellamy Brothers with Let Your Love Flow and Wang Chung with Everybody Have Fun Tonight.

Many of those have already received huge boosts in terms of Spotify plays just by being included in the GTA6 trailer, which is up online now. Devil Woman has increased its plays on the platform by 325%. Another surprise inclusion, Prefab Sprout’s 1988 single Cars And Girls, leapt by 530% and the Captain And Tennille track went up by a whopping 130,730%.

Proof, if proof were needed, that among Gen Z at least, musical snobbery is increasingly a thing of the past.

Concert films are big business these days – just ask Taylor Swift – so it’s perhaps not surprising that Janet Jackson is choosing to celebrate the 40th anniversary of her breakthrough album Control by releasing one.

Rather than being built around archive footage, though, this will be based on a multi-camera recording of Jackson’s upcoming show at the Amerant Bank Arena in Florida on 12 December, which will see her perform not only Control in full but also other songs from her extensive back catalogue.

“It will be a whole new show – new costumes, new stage and maybe a little glimpse into the making of the album,” says Jackson. “It’s going to be filmed for a movie, which means that our time together will be remembered for decades.”

Released in 1986, Control was actually the third Janet Jackson album, but it was the one that marked her commercial breakthrough. Its tracklist reads like a greatest hits set – What Have You Done for Me Lately, Nasty, When I Think of You, Control and Let’s Wait Awhile were all smash hit singles – and its influence on other artists, particularly female stars, was felt for years to come.

While the title of the album makes it clear that this was Jackson setting her own creative agenda, it wouldn’t have been made possible without co-writers and producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who worked across the record. But, speaking to MusicRadar in 2021 about how the collaboration came about, Jam admits that it was kind of by chance.

“There was another artist that we were supposed to be working with and - at that time - that artist didn’t want to work with us!” he explained. “So John McClain, who was A&R at A&M calls and says ‘Sorry, the artist doesn’t want to work with you. Guys, I’m really embarrassed. Is there anyone on the A&M roster that you’d like to work with?’

“So we said ‘Send the roster,’ and this was before the internet, so he had to literally send the roster, and we were going down it and we said ‘Janet!’. And he said ‘Oh wow, that’s cool. Do you want to do two songs? Three songs?’ And we said ‘We want to do the whole album,’ because we felt like we knew what we wanted to hear Janet Jackson sound like.”

This was around the time that Jam and production partner Terry Lewis were working with Cherrelle, who had scored a 1984 debut hit with I Didn’t Mean To Turn You On. During this time, Jam and Lewis’s engineer walked out on them, but rather than hire another one, they decided that they were going to become self-sufficient and do the job themselves.

The problem was that they didn’t have any experience: “Cherelle was the guinea pig of our experiments,” admitted Jam. “We were blowing speakers up. Blowing headphones up… plugging the wrong thing in. She was so understanding. We learned to use the studio doing [1985 single] Saturday Love [a duet with Alexander O’Neal], and Control was the album after that and we ended up engineering it all ourselves.”

The duo were still kind of making it up as they went along, though, so decided to record in the way that they’d seen Prince do when they were working with him as part of The Time.

“When we recorded with Prince, Prince would always record in the red, on the VU meter,” Jam told us. “So we were like ‘We need to record like Prince records,’ so we recorded everything in the red. We were so proud of ourselves!”

The mood changed, though, when they took what they’d done to mixing engineer Steve Hodge.

“When Steve Hodge came up to mix it, he put the tape on and says ‘Who engineered this!?’ And we were so proud, we said ‘We did!’ And he said ‘Everything is recorded way too loud.’ We said ‘Yeah, we meant to do that - that’s the way Prince records.’ And he was like ‘Yeah, but what kind of machine does Prince use? An Ampex? On Prince’s machine zero is zero… Your machines are set to plus six… Zero is already six dB above… and you’re pinning the needles…’ And we were ‘Can it be saved?’ and he was ‘Yeah, yeah. But I’m going to have to come up and teach you guys how to record.’

There was an upside to Jam and Lewis’s technical naivety, though – their ‘mistake’ actually contributed to the way that Control ended up sounding, and made its songs jump out of the speakers.

“The way Control sounds is an accident because we didn’t know what we were doing and then Steve just basically saved us,” said Jam. “He made it sound great. But it made the record sound frantic. That’s what Prince always said. When your ear hears distortion, it thinks something is loud. He always wanted his records to sound loud and a little bit frantic on the radio. That was what Control had.”

Tickets for the Control 40 show are on sale now. A release date for the movie has yet to be announced.

Billy Joel has announced the death of an early colleague and bandmate: Jon Small.

The 77-year-old singer-songwriter posted a brief message on Instagram, simply writing: “RIP Jon Small”. He didn’t mention a cause of death.

Who was Jon Small? Well, long before he found solo fame, Joel was a member of a late-60s psychedelic rock group called The Hassles. The band released a couple of albums on United Artists before Joel and Small, Hassles’ drummer, left and formed a hard rock duo, Attila.

Attila lasted just one album, and it wasn’t just a lack of commercial success that caused their split: Joel had begun an affair with Small’s wife.

In the 2025 documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes, Small and Joel discussed the subject in some detail. “Elizabeth was very important to me, but I think I was not the guy she hoped I would be,” Small said. “I kept seeing that Billy was not the same guy. Something was the matter.”

“And Billy one day came up to me, became a little honest, and said to me, ‘I’m in love with your wife.’ So it was a very devastating thing for me, because these were basically my two best friends.”

Joel, for his part, admitted in the doc that he felt deeply guilty about what happened. “They had a child. I felt like a homewrecker.” In fact, he felt so upset that he attempted suicide by drinking furniture polish. In a scene straight out of a novel, it was Small who saved the piano man’s life and drove him to hospital, an episode Joel depicted on the song Tomorrow Is Today from his 1971 debut album, Cold Spring Harbor.

Small went on to become a renowned video director and incredibly he and Joel patched up their friendship. In fact, the videos for two of Joel’s signature hits, Uptown Girl and Tell Her About It, were both directed by Small and he was later nominated for a Grammy for his work behind the camera on Joel’s Live At Yankee Stadium concert film.

The director also worked on videos by Whitney Houston, Kenny Rogers, Reba McEntire and Garth Brooks, as well as the Run-DMC/ Aerosmith promo for Walk This Way that was one of the defining videos of the 1990s.

In a Facebook tribute that has been posted by a friend, it was noted that “his behind-the-camera impact on popular music goes far beyond just one artist. As one of the first music video directors and producers of the MTV era, Small helped define the format with landmark videos and live concert recordings.”

There are some people whose advice is worth listening to and, if you’re a musician, legendary keyboard player Greg Phillinganes is probably one of them.

Alongside synth programmer Anthony Marinelli, Phillinganes has recently been in the studio recording a bang-on recreation of Baby Be Mine, a song from Michael Jackon’s Thriller that was written by Rod Temperton. Both Marinelli and Phillinganes worked on said album, and it was during a discussion about that time that Greg dropped his truth bomb.

It came as they recalled what producer Quincy Jones used to tell them: “You’re never more of a musician than you are a human being”. This is something that Jones was himself told by Nadia Boulanger, his famous music teacher, and Phillinganes suggests that it’s still as valid today as it ever was.

“That comes in the music,” he says. “That’s infused in the music.”

Explaining further, Phillinganes argues: “You have to respect the groove, and there’s certain musicians that understand that and there’s certain ones who don’t. And you can tell – you can tell if they’re respecting it or not. No question. It’s painfully obvious.”

Reiterating what he’s just said, Phillinganes adds: “Respect the groove – by any means necessary, respect the groove. Or else, stay home. What’s the point?”

Addressing the camera and wagging his finger, he says: “Yeah, I’m talking to you. Stay home. If you can’t respect the groove, just stay home. Wash dishes. Sell shoes. What’s the point if you can’t respect the groove? [If] You can’t respect the groove, you can’t respect people. If you can’t respect people, what’s the point. Yeah, I said it.”

Consider us told.

Phillinganes’ respect of the groove is certainly evident during his runthrough of Baby Be Mine. He plays a variety of synths, including the actual Minimoog and Prophet-5 that were used on the original recording.

The drums and synths were programmed by Marinelli, and the guitar played by Jarrett “Bueno” Goodly. Ray Monteiro, Jesse McGinty and Garrett Smith made up the horn section.

Dolly Parton’s younger sister has issues a plea on social media for people to “show more compassion”. It seems that since Dolly died two weeks ago, there has been a wave of AI slop – much of it in dubious taste – posted about the late singer-songwriter and all-round cultural icon.

Writing on Instagram, Stella Parton thanked genuine fans for their best wishes and support, before turning her attention to more unsavoury matters.

“Sadly, because of the way our lives have been in front of the public, we have no choice but to be subjected to incredible pressure and insensitivity from strangers,” she continued. “There is a tremendous amount of AI and endless garbage being posted everyday and it’s been challenging to absorb and/or ignore.”

“As time passes, those who are in the business of exploiting the loss and tragedies of others on a daily basis will move on to the next stampede of endless misinformation.”

Stella didn’t detail any specific examples of the AI slop she was referring to, but she reminded people that her sister always strove to see the good in everyone, which was one of the reasons she always steered clear of politics: “She knew as well as anyone what a negative vortex that could turn into, which is nothing but a huge waste of positive energy.”

“Finally,” she wrote, “I ask that you show more compassion and wisdom as we move forward in life. Use my sister’s life as an example for tolerance and respect to towards others.”

“It’s not about the most clever comments, fake AI garbage or snarky tweets. At the end of the day or the end of a life, how will you feel about yourself? It’s not about what other individuals you will never meet think of you!”

Aged 77, Stella Parton is a singer-songwriter herself, though her long career has never hit the heights of her sister’s. The two sisters remained close until the end and after her death two weeks ago, it was Stella who revealed that while she was battling cancer, Dolly had been willing to try to experimental drugs so that she could help others in the future. She described her big sis as “one of the most generous, thoughtful and kind people I’ve ever known.”

It happened in Los Angeles in 1968 – the moment when the life of a young rock ’n’ roll singer named Vincent Furnier was transformed.

Just turned 20, Furnier and his band Nazz had only recently left their hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, lured by the bright lights of Hollywood like so many dreamers before them. One night, the new kids in town were hanging out with a local all-girl band, The Weeds Of Idleness, when the talk turned to a group from Philadelphia, also named Nazz, led by rising star Todd Rundgren.

Furnier’s band had used other names back in Phoenix – first The Earwigs, then The Spiders. Now they needed another. In that moment, Furnier said: “We gotta have a name that people listen to.” And as he later recalled: “The first thing that popped into my head was Alice Cooper.”

The name appealed to Furnier’s wry sense of humour. It sounded, in his words, “like some sweet little old lady that made cookies for everybody.” It was so perfectly wrong for a band of longhaired rockers playing loud rock ’n’ roll. And as he quickly realised, it was also perfectly suited to something else he had in mind. As he explained, “I was a little bit shy. I needed something I could hide behind. A character.”

A former art student, Furnier would make this character a living work of art – a singing, dancing, mischief-making, kohl-eyed cartoon bogeyman. Naming it Alice Cooper had a delicious irony, and the added bonus of gender-bending shock value.

“I created Alice to be my favourite rock star,” he said. “Back in the ’60s, there was no rock star that made me go, ‘Wow, I gotta see what happens next!’ So Alice was born out of necessity. And I didn’t want him to be a hero. I wanted him to be a villain...” His stated mission: “To drive a stake through the heart of the Love Generation.”

It was the birth of a legend. With Furnier playing this role to brilliant effect, Alice Cooper became a superstar in the ’70s.

Furnier had a simple strategy: “Pure showbiz with great rock songs.” His gift for satire was channeled into hit anthems including School’s Out, Elected, and No More Mr. Nice Guy. And on stage, he was a master showman, hailed by Gene Simmons of Kiss as “the prophet of the outrageous, the messiah of theatrics.”

Alice was acclaimed by Bob Dylan as an “overlooked songwriter”, and acknowledged by Salvador Dali as a fellow surrealist.

He also had his detractors. To the British pro-censorship lobby of the early ’70s, he was an affront to decency. America’s right-wing Christians branded him a Satanist.

Equally, in the bizarre double life he made for himself, Furnier has had his troubles, including a long battle with alcoholism that had him admitted to a sanitarium in 1977. But as with all the best horror movies, the monster he created has kept coming back from the dead.

Alice Cooper’s storied career has now spanned seven decades. His music, image and OTT stage show have inspired generations of artists, from Kiss and the Sex Pistols to Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, Slipknot and Lady Gaga.

What happened on that fateful night in ’68 has defined the life of Vincent Furnier ever since. As he stated in an interview with Rock Candy magazine: “Alice is the mask I put on every night. I couldn’t do it without him.”

Born in Detroit on February 4, 1948, Vincent Damon Furnier was raised to be a good, God-fearing American. “My dad was a pastor,” he said. “My grandfather was a pastor. I grew up a Christian.”

As a child he suffered with respiratory illness, a condition that led his father to relocate the family to the warmer climate of Phoenix in 1961. And it was there, at Cortez High School, that the teenage Vincent started singing in a rock ’n’ roll band, The Earwigs, backed by four fellow students – Glen Buxton and John Tatum on guitars, Dennis Dunaway on bass and John Speer on drums.

At a time when Beatlemania was at its height, they played mostly Beatles covers and drew plenty of girls to their shows, although Furnier admitted: “When I was in high school, people messed about in the back seat, but nobody ever really did it. If someone went all the way it was a real talking point.” He did, however, develop a taste for alcohol while still underage. “I didn’t know anybody that did drugs,” he said. “Not even a joint. But we all drank beer.”

After a change of name to The Spiders, the band cut a couple of singles for local indie labels, and brought in a new guitarist, Michael Bruce, in place of Tatum. Their music got heavier, influenced by other British Invasion groups, most notably The Who and the Yardbirds. In 1967 they became Nazz, made one single, found a new drummer in Neal Smith, and moved to LA. And in the following year, with the band and singer rechristened Alice Cooper, the freak show was up and running.

“The audience thought that they were going to get a blonde girl folk singer and they got us!” he recalled. “We already had that really strange kind of Baby Jane thing, the smeared make-up.”

They also knew how to work an angle. “We said that Alice was a 13^th Century witch. That was a story we let out – that one of the guys’ mothers was a medium and when she asked a Ouija board who Alice Cooper was, it said, ‘Vincent Furnier’. And she didn’t know my name. I thought, ‘Great press release!’ It all got very mystical. We had no one to answer to and everyone believed everything.”

The band’s kookiness caught the attention of rock’s maverick genius Frank Zappa, who signed them to his vanity label Straight Records because, as he dryly remarked, “I don’t get it.”

In 1969 came the debut album Pretties For You, a psychedelic rock blowout that was famously described by one critic as “a tragic waste of plastic.”

Lesser bands might have wilted in the face of such hostility. Not this one.

“We loved that quote,” Furnier said. “It might have hurt a little bit, but at the same time it was a quote that I remembered forever. We always made fun of ourselves, but maybe that was something that spurred us on to make better records.”

Pretties For You duly bombed, as did the follow-up, 1970’s Easy Action, another example of what Furnier called “very experimental rock’n’roll”.

But if hit records were hard to come by, notoriety came more easily. In September 1969, Alice Cooper made headlines in national newspapers – accused of killing a chicken on stage at a festival in Toronto. The story was not entirely true. As Furnier later explained: “Somebody threw a live chicken on stage, and I threw it back, thinking it would fly. It didn’t, and the audience tore it pieces!”

But for Alice, there was no publicity like bad publicity. It fitted Furner’s act. “The stage character created itself,” he said. “Alice developed. I was a little more Alice with each show. Pretty soon there was this character who was outstandingly inhuman, who stood for all the wrong things. He was crippled, a victim.”

In 1971, with a young Canadian producer named Bob Ezrin at his side, Alice nailed the sound that would make him a star.

He explained: “You get to a point where you want to have your records played on the radio. So you get a guy like Bob Ezrin, who listens to a song and says, ‘Keep these two parts and get rid of all this other crap.’

“Here were five guys that never listened to anybody. But we listened to Bob because was a longhaired kid like us, and that was the key. Bob was the one who just stopped everything and said, ‘We have to start all over, re-learn how to write, re-learn what Alice is about.’”

There was another significant change on the album Love It To Death. According to Furnier, “I became a lyricist. I said, ‘The lyrics need to mean something now.’”

This was evident in I’m Eighteen, an anthem for disaffected youth, written when Furnier was, by his own admission, “smashed on cheap wine.”

It was Alice’s first hit, reaching No 21 on the US chart, and it made a powerful impression on Gene Simmons, who in ’71 was still just a wannabe, performing in the band Wicked Lester with Paul Stanley, two years before they formed Kiss.

Simmons said of I’m Eighteen: “That song immediately got me with a sucker punch in the kidneys. “I’m a boy and I’m a man…” It killed me. It had guitars. It had a raw vocal quality. And it said something.”

The success of I’m Eighteen and Love It To Death, which made the US top 40, led to a deal with major label Warner Brothers, on which the band’s fourth album, Killer, was released in late ’71.

Again produced by Bob Ezrin, the album delivered straight-shooting rock ’n’ roll in Under My Wheels, shades of progressive rock in the epic Halo Of Flies, and macabre drama in Dead Babies.

“Dead Babies was an anti-child abuse song,” Furnier said. “But as in most cases, controversial songs are misunderstood.”

In concert, Alice would sing the song while chopping up baby dolls with an axe, and on the cover of Killer was the singer’s live stage prop, a boa constrictor named Kachina.

Furnier called Killer “my best pure rock‘n’roll album.” Former Sex Pistols singer John Lydon hailed it as the best rock album of all time. And with that, the monster that Vincent Furnier had created was set to become famous all over the world.

The Prince Estate has issued a statement in a bid to end the confusion surrounding changes made to a song called Calabama. This is included on a new collection of previously unreleased Prince music called Timeless.

According to Prince Vault, Calabama was originally recorded by Prince on 21 January 2003. In a previously leaked version, when Prince calls “horns” in the bridge, the response is played on a synthesizer; in the Timeless version, these spaces are filled by a real horn section.

So, what’s the problem? The controversy stems from an answer given by Charles Spicer, Jr, a representative of the Prince Estate, when he was discussing the Timeless album at a recent release party at Paisley Park, Prince’s former studio complex.

Asked if anything on Timeless had been “changed, edited, completed, or remixed,” he replied that “contrary to what people may be saying, those recordings, all these recordings were taking off the formats that they were originally recorded on. Nothing was added, nothing was edited.”

When Prince fans studied the credits on the album, though, they saw that Greg Boyer, Adrian Crutchfield and Lynn Grissett were listed as horn players on Calabama. Although they did play with Prince while he was alive, Crutchfield and Grissett are not believed to have done so until 2012 – almost a decade after Calabama was originally recorded.

This led many to wonder if the horn parts were in fact added after Prince’s death, and it turns out they were right. Trombonist Greg Boyer confirmed as much on Facebook this week, telling a fan that the horn parts were “recorded a couple of months ago in my basement studio.”

Charles Spicer Jr then took to X to clarify his earlier statement, saying: “I want to correct something I said earlier. I stated that nothing had been edited or added to Calabama. I’ve since confirmed that the released version includes additional horns, so that statement was not accurate, and I will take responsibility for what I stated.”

The new Instagram statement from ‘NPG Records and The Prince Management Team’ confirms this, but adds a little more context and detail. “At the bridge of Calabama, Prince’s vocal calls out twice for “horns,” but the archived multitrack featured a synthesizer filling that space,” it says. “Consistent with Prince’s songwriting and production approach on numerous previous recordings, a group of horn players who played with Prince were assembled to overdub Prince’s synthesizer track with the intended horn line, and this version was released in Timeless.”

The statement notes that “all of Prince’s recorded parts remain intact,” and that the horn players used – Greg Boyer, Adrian Crutchfield and Lynn Grissett – had “close ties” to Prince and are fully credited. It also stresses that no other overdubs were used on Timeless, and certainly no AI.

While this might all seem like a storm in a teacup, it does highlight the potential problems associated with releasing an artist’s previously unreleased music after their death, with some asking if this is really what Prince would have wanted, and others simply seeking more transparency in the future.

On the latter point, the Prince Estate seems to be in agreement: “Going forward, we plan to provide even more details regarding the release of the music,” it says. It seems adamant, though, that even incomplete work that’s currently in ‘The Vault’ should see the light of day: “The recordings come in a variety of forms, many of which are simply unfinished. This should not prevent them from being released.”

The statement acknowledges that not everyone will agree with the additions in Calabama, or the way that the Prince archive is being handled more generally. However, it also says that “While it is fair to ask probing questions and assert your sentiments and perspectives on matters related to Prince, it is best done with kindness and respect.”

Whatever your feelings on all this, the flow of ‘new’ Prince music is unlikely to stop. Indeed, the statement ends with the promise that there’s “more to come and soon”.

Art Garfunkel turns 85 in November but is still very much an active artist. Back in 2024 he released an album with his son Art Jr, called, well, Father and Son, and next month he heads out on another world tour.

He’s also given an extensive interview with the Guardian, which covers his long career and, of course, his relationship with Paul Simon.

The pair, of course, go way back to high school. Garfunkel describes them at the time as “really tight, laughing all the time”, and recalls recording their harmonies in the basement of his parents’ home in Queens, New York, on a wire recorder. “This is before tape. We’d record our harmonies and then put another layer on top. We were very young, but learning to produce.”

They were both just 16 when, billed as Tom & Jerry, they had their first hit with Hey, Schoolgirl and performed on American Bandstand. “We followed Jerry Lee Lewis, who did Great Balls of Fire,” Garfunkel says.

“He was a wild man. I remember going to the urinal before going on. One of the dancers asked: ‘Who have we got on today?’ And someone else said: ‘Some jerks calling themselves Tom & Jerry.’ I just stood there, saying nothing.”

The duo’s career only took off in the mid-'60s when The Sound of Silence became their first US Number One. For Garfunkel, the 1960s were “wonderful…. He remembers “social evenings with each of the four Beatles. George Harrison took me to his castle, which had a four-storey papier-mache model of the Alps in the back yard. I think the person he’d bought the place from was a bit eccentric.”

The singer says that back then he was “a workaholic who lived in the studio”. Indeed, for Bridge Over Troubled Water he recorded no less than 300 takes: “Whatever you do, you gotta do it well. Why not try to be the best in the world, just for the fun of it?”

What about the current state of his relationship with Simon? Well, the friends met over dinner in 2024 and made plans to catch up again soon after. “That was about a year ago, and I haven’t seen him in the last year,” says Garfunkel.

“But yes, we got together. Who knows what the future will bring? Life is a surprise. I don’t know what happens next month. I don’t know what happens after we die.”

Stella Lefty’s originality is under the spotlight again – it’s been alleged that her song Why Wouldn’t We from her recently released debut album Long Way Home bears an uncanny resemblance – both musically and in subject matter - to a country hit from nine years ago.

That song was Blake Shelton’s I’ll Name The Dogs and social media users have pointed out the similarities. See what you think..

It’s not the first time the 24-year-old singer-songwriter has got into trouble for (presumably, unknowing) plagiarism. Her first big hit Boston, which reached Number Two in the Billboard charts earlier this year, sailed too close to Stick Season. Hardly an obscure cut that Lefty could justifiably claim ignorance of, Noah Kahan’s monster hit has been one of the biggest songs of the decade thus far. To make matters worse, videos then emerged online of Lefty covering the song, and since then Kahan has had to be added to Boston’s credits.

After that came Summer You Were Mine, another Long Way Home album track, which interpolates The (Dixie) Chicks' 1998 hit There’s Your Trouble. Embarrassingly, the original writers were missing from credits of the streaming version, though Lefty’s record label, Atlantic, blamed this on a “streaming platform error” and has since rectified the problem.

All in all, it’s not a good look for an artist whose background, let’s say, doesn’t throw a sympathetic light upon her. Lefty is the daughter of a multi-billionaire tech bro: Eric Lefkofsky, the co-founder of Groupon and the current CEO of health tech firm Tempus AI. Phrases like ‘nepo baby’ have been bandied round about Lefty. Some might say that moving fast and breaking stuff probably runs in her blood…

As yet, Shelton and the interested parties regarding I’ll Name The Dogs have yet to comment on the comparisons between the two songs, though you suspect someone will eventually.

We often hear of artists saying that they had a clear vision of how a song was going to end up sounding as soon as they wrote it, but sometimes, things can take a detour along the road to completion.

No lesser singer-songwriter than Taylor Swift recently gave us an excellent example of this during her Icon Sessions interview at the Grammy Museum. It came as she was discussing the 2012 song I Knew You Were Trouble: taken from the Red album, this was one of the singles that signposted Swift’s move away from her country roots to a more pop-orientated sound.

In this case, though, it wasn’t just pop – there were dubstep influences, too. But, as Swift explains, these couldn’t have been further from her mind when the song was being written, and it was only when she brought it into the producers she was working with, Swedish pop maestros Max Martin and Shellback, that they came into the picture.

“I wrote this really sad piano ballad called I Knew You Were Trouble,” she remembers. “I was really excited to bring it in, and I played them this really, really sad ballad, and I was like, ‘I think just no drums,’ and they're like, ‘What if it's dubstep?’”

That’s quite the switch-up, and Swift wasn’t convinced. “I don't know, guys… Let's give it a run,” she told the producers, without a great deal of confidence. But rather than walking back on the idea, Martin and Shellback were apparently keen to stray as far from her original vision as possible.

“What if it's electric guitar and dubstep? We're not putting a piano in this,” they told Swift, and looking back, she agrees that their changes “ended up being the best thing for it.” In fact, Swift dialled-up the dubstep wubs even further when she performed the song live - check out the breakdown in this performance from the 2013 Brit Awards.

Speaking more generally, Swift says that their refusal simply to do what she wants marks Martin and Shellback out as the kind of producers she likes to work with.

“As a collaborator, my favourite people to be in the room with are yes and people,” she says, with the emphasis on the ‘and’ indicating that she doesn’t just want to be surrounded by ‘yes’ people. “So why not try it? If they heard it and they thought dubstep, and I came to them specifically because I didn't want to be making lateral moves creatively, why wouldn't we go down that path? Like, why wouldn't we? And I really think that enthusiasm in the studio, it can really make or break what you end up creating.”

Looking back on Red as a whole, Swift also says that it marked the moment when she decided that she was going to work with as wide a range of producers as possible, which goes some way to explaining the variety in the album’s sound.

“Red was where I decided I'm gonna try to find myself by exploring all the edges of all the different producers I could work with – everyone from Dan Wilson to Jacknife Lee to Max Martin to Nathan Chapman to Jeff Bhasker,” she says. “I was like, ‘I want to work with everybody I like – everybody whose music I like I want to see what they're like in the studio. And that album was very much like changing channels, back when we used to do that. When I look back on that album, that was what made it exciting, the variation of it.”

Several songwriters over the decades have spoken about feeling as though they didn’t fully write the iconic songs for which they are known. Their sense is that these songs already existed and that songwriters act more like conduits than creators, channelling or uncovering works rather than writing them from scratch.

It was a view reportedly put forward by Bob Dylan in an interview with Sing Out! Magazine in 1962, as quoted in Howard Sounes’s 2001 book Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan. “The songs are there,” Dylan reportedly said. “They exist all by themselves just waiting for someone to write them down. I just put them down on paper. If I didn’t do it, somebody else would.”

Some songwriters allude to the feeling there is a higher, spiritual force at work. This was allegedly the experience of Carole King in January 1971 when she wrote You’ve Got A Friend, the song that opens side two of her classic 1971 album, Tapestry.

In a 2007 interview with MOJO magazine, King said the song “was as close to pure inspiration as I've ever experienced.” She stated: “The song wrote itself. It was written by something outside of myself, through me.”

You’ve Got A Friend is a song viewed by some as the emotional epicentre of the Tapestry album. It is an impeccably-crafted composition offering comfort, reassurance and hope. It is also a song that still resonates across the generations, 55 years after it was released.

By the time Carole King embarked on a solo career, she was already a hugely successful songwriter as one half of the songwriting team Goffin-King, with husband Gerry Goffin.

Together, they penned hits such as Will You Love Me Tomorrow by The Shirelles, (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman by Aretha Franklin, One Fine Day by The Chiffons and Pleasant Valley Sunday by The Monkees.

Goffin and King divorced in 1968 and King moved to the West Coast with their two young daughters, settling in the now legendary creative enclave of Laurel Canyon, tucked away in the hills above LA’s Sunset Strip.

By the time she began recording Tapestry, King had already released two albums – Now That Everything’s Been Said (1968) with folk-rock band The City and her first solo studio album The Writer (1970). Neither set the world on fire and there was no expectation that Tapestry would perform any differently.

“The tunes were extraordinary, there was no question about that,” guitarist Danny ‘Kootch’ Kortchmar told writer Graeme Thomson of Uncut magazine in 2016. “But the tunes on her previous two albums were extraordinary, too. We just thought, ‘Yeah, this is Carole. She writes great songs, that’s what she does.’”

King wrote You’ve Got A Friend in January 1971, during the sessions for Tapestry in Studio B at A&M Studios, on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and La Brea Avenue in Hollywood.

At the same time, across the hall in A&M’s Studio C, Joni Mitchell was recording the album Blue. Meanwhile, seven blocks away, at Crystal Sound Studios at 1014 N. Vine Street in Hollywood, James Taylor was recording his hit album Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon.

According to Danny Kortchmar, the relationship between King, Mitchell and Taylor was friendly and relaxed, with all three playing on each other’s records and using the same musicians, such as Kortchmar himself.

“We were all hanging out together, everybody knew everybody else,” recalled Kortchmar. “We all recorded with each other, but it was spontaneous. Joni or James would pop in and it was, ‘Let’s go!’ It was a utopian way of making music.”

James Taylor was integral to the story of You’ve Got A Friend. In an interview with Stephen Colbert on The Late Late Show in February 2026, Taylor recalled first meeting King and hearing You’ve Got A Friend before it had been recorded.

“When I finally got to meet Carole out on the West Coast, she and I just clicked,” said Taylor. “She played piano on my Sweet Baby James album, beautifully. It was just a great collaboration. And I played on Tapestry.

“We were playing a job together at The Troubadour, a dive really in Los Angeles, but an important gig to play. On the second or third engagement at The Troubadour, she broke the seal on this brand new tune. And I was sure I knew the song already because it was such a classic immediately and I literally ran to find my guitar so I could play it.”

Two weeks later, Taylor and his band were recording the album Mud Slide Slim And The Blue Horizon. One day, they had a couple of hours left at the end of a session.

“So that typically is the time when someone will think of a cover,” Taylor told Colbert on The Late Late Show. “In this case I had learned the song of Carole’s and said, ‘Let’s play that song of Carole’s.’ It’s just spur off the moment… we do a quick arrangement and, boom!’”

Which is how James Taylor came to record You’ve Got A Friend before Carole King herself did.

“Of course she wants to record that song,” said Taylor. “It’s the best song written by a human being. So I blithely go and record the song and then we really liked the way it sounded. So I had to go to Carole and say, ‘I sort of cut your hit.’”

This could have presented a problem, but King welcomed the news. As Taylor recalled: “She said, ‘That’s great.’ It was typically generous.”

While he didn’t know it at the time, it was a line from Taylor’s own song Fire And Rain that had inspired You’ve Got A Friend in the first place.

As Taylor explained it: “She said, ‘You know that line in Fire And Rain – ‘I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend’? She said, ‘That’s what inspired that song You’ve Got A Friend’. She said, ‘I heard those lines and I was thinking to myself, I’m going to tell him he does have a friend.’”

Taylor’s version of the song was released as a single in May 1971. It was a colossal success, reaching No 1 in the US and No 4 in the UK.

King never released her version of You’ve Got A Friend as a single.

At the start of 1971, Taylor was a much bigger name than King, but all that changed when Tapestry was released on 10 February 1971. The album reached No 1 in the US, Canada, Spain and Japan and No 3 and No 4 in Australia and the UK respectively. The album went on to sell over 25 million copies worldwide and spent more than six years on the Billboard 200 chart.

Tapestry is an intimate and emotionally honest album that really tapped into peoples’ desire for authenticity and depth from singer-songwriters at the onset of the turbulent ’70s.

You’ve Got A Friend is one of its stand-out tracks. There is a universal appeal to the song’s core message of friendship without boundaries. It is a life-enhancing message of emotional reassurance, comfort and support.

“When you're down and troubled/And you need some lovin' care/And nothin’, nothin’ is goin’ right/Close your eyes and think of me/And soon I will be there/To brighten up even your darkest night.”

The lyrics had particular resonance for Taylor, who had just emerged from a depression when he first heard King play the song at the Troubadour.

There was widespread praise for Taylor’s sincerity and interpretation on You’ve Got A Friend, but critics seemed to favour King’s version, highlighting its soulfulness and the vulnerability and warmth of her vocals.

Modern critical opinion is particularly favourable to King’s version of the song. “King’s voice brings ‘gravity to every note’, noted Jenn Pelly of Pitchfork in 2019. “It makes You’ve Got A Friend an exquisite ode to friendship, interconnectedness, and mutual inspiration. King’s superior take amplifies its hope almost to a shout.”

In a review of the song in AllMusic, writer Stewart Mason concluded that Taylor’s version of You’ve Got A Friend “lacks the plainspoken intimacy” of King’s version. “King sings her song with a certain shyness that sounds as if the singer is making her promise at some personal expense to herself,” wrote Mason.

Such views are of course subjective. For many, James Taylor’s version of You’ve Got A Friend evokes a real sense of loneliness and vulnerability, while the intimacy of his fingerpicked acoustic guitar is a huge part of its appeal.

Numerous artists would go on to cover the song, such as Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, Barbra Streisand, Michael Jackson, Anne Murray, Tom Jones and Al Green.

In 1997, British acid jazz and funk group Brand New Heavies released a critically acclaimed cover of You’ve Got A Friend and in 2005, English pop-rock band McFly released the song as a double A-side with their own song All About You. This became the official single for UK-based charity Comic Relief.

For Carole King, You’ve Got A Friend remains a definitive song. In an interview on CBS Sunday Morning in 2005, King was asked if there is a particular song that she could “put her finger on and say, ‘That is a Carole King song.’”

“Well, acknowledging that I had help,” replied King, casting her eyes heavenwards, “You’ve Got A Friend. Absolutely quintessential, I think. It’s just a feeling. It’s uplifting. That would be it.”

Still buzzing from the success of her Daisy Chain Fields festival at the weekend, Olivia Rodrigo had another engagement on Tuesday evening: a Q&A with director and sometime rock writer Cameron Crowe at the Grammy Museum in LA.

The event coincided with the launch of an exhibition at the venue that features sets and items from the video for The Cure – one of the standout songs from Rodrigo’s latest album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love.

According to Variety, Rodrigo described this as “my favourite song on the record,” before going a step further and saying “It might be my favourite song I've ever made."

Rodrigo also touched on Stupid Song, another hit from the album, revealing that it was a tricky one for her and producer Dan Nigro to put to bed.

“Stupid Song, I swear to God, we were working on for a year and a half,” she admits. “It was such a hard one to pull off. We just kept editing production and melodies, and we didn't finish it until maybe one week before we had to turn the album in. But I'm really happy with where it ended up, so it was worth it.”

Relatedly, Rodrigo revealed one of the tricks that Nigro uses in the studio to get the best possible take from her: “I was a child actor when I was younger, and so I'm very used to being in front of a camera. And so sometimes when I'm not giving an emotional enough performance, Dan will actually just set up the camera on his phone and film me, and I'll always do a better job, for whatever reason. Muscle memory, I guess.”

As well as being interviewed, Rodrigo also performed stripped-back versions of some of the You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love songs – Drop Dead, Stupid Song, Maggots for Brains, Less and The Cure.

Of the heartbreaking ballad Less, she said: “This is known within my inner circle as the saddest song on the record. Making this album, I was really interested in the grey areas of love. Not only the breakup song and love song, but the stuff that's in between them. So this song was kind of about that, and it's about how you could be breaking up with someone but still have really fond feelings for them at the end of the day and still love them. So, it's a pretty sad one."

Fittingly, given that she was being interviewed by a man some 45 years her senior but who’s still a fan of her music, Rodrigo also attempted to explain why her fandom crosses generations, using her debut hit, Driver’s License, as an example.

“To this day I'll meet a 50-year-old dad from Omaha, Nebraska who's like, 'When I went through my divorce, that's exactly how I felt,'” she revealed. “And I'm like, 'Whoa. Our lives are so different!' But at our core we're all the same and we all experience these feelings of insecurity and heartbreak and love, and I think music is the most distilled form of that.”

David Byrne has written a song for Alex Gibney’s forthcoming feature-length documentary about Elon Musk, using lyrics entirely comprised of quotes from the world’s first trillionaire.

The track is called Let Me Sell You A Dream and has been co-written by the film’s composer Daniel Pemberton. The lyrics, it seems, were easy for the ex-Talking Head to source. “I asked for good quotes from the Martian, and found more of them online,” Byrne told Variety in an interview. “I’m sure he loves dropping these wild statements, and those became the lyrics. All his own words. No editorializing. Straight from the man’s mouth to mine.”

Gibney sounds elated to have bagged Byrne for the soundtrack. “I was thrilled when David agreed to write (with our composer Daniel Pemberton) and perform the final song in the film,” he said. “I am a huge fan of his. My wife and I were at the Pantages for the filming of Stop Making Sense, so I sensed that he would find a musical way into what the film is trying to say. And he did.

"Let Me Sell You a Dream is kick-ass. And, in writing the lyrics, David dug deep into the sayings of Musk himself to get to ‘extremely hard core,’ foot-tapping sardonic poetry.”

Musk premieres at the Venice International Film Festival next week and is set to hit cinemas in October. It’s a bum-punishing 235 minutes (that’s nearly four hours long) and you’d have to assume is a weighty, as well as lengthy, examination of the curious individual who has ended up as the world’s richest man.

Musk himself seems to have already decided he doesn’t like it. When news of the project broke in early 2023, the Tesla boss predicted on his social media platform Twitter/ X that it would be a “hit-piece”. Gibney responded by asking the not-unreasonable question: “How would you know?”

Miley Cyrus is on the cusp of a new era – in more ways than one. With the release of Bass Persuades, her tenth studio album, she’s dropping her surname and will be known simply as Miley.

At the same time, a short teaser video indicates that she could also be about to make some kind of musical pivot. This features Miley wearing an Elvis-style jumpsuit while playing a mystery custom black Fender Stratocaster, leading some fans to speculate that she could be about to ‘go rock’.

We’ll find out soon enough if that’s true – Miley has since posted a further teaser for the title track from the album, which will be released later today as its first single. This also has her wielding that black Strat as she walks towards the camera.

It should be said, though, that Miley has been a fan of the guitar right from the start of her career. As long ago as 2008, when she was only 15 and most famous as the star of Hannah Montana, she told the Mirror: “My guitar is like my best friend. My guitar can get me through anything. If I can sit down and write an amazing song with my guitar about what's going on in life, then that's the greatest therapy for me."

Discussing her love of songwriting with Seventeen that same year, Miley said: “I write anytime I get a chance. I figure it out. I play my guitar and I stay up until like 2 in the morning. I actually have a melody on my guitar right now. You know when you start you just can't stop.”

What’s more, we learned in 2014 that, even during her backstage downtime, Miley didn’t want to put the guitar down - sort of.

"My tour rider used to ask for Guitar Hero and Frosted Flakes,” she told the Evening Standard. “Now I just kind of want the Guitar Hero."

As if further proof were needed that Miley has always been a rock star at heart, let’s not forget that, when performing live, she’s also covered a string of classic songs by the likes of Led Zeppelin (Black Dog), Metallica (Nothing Else Matters), Pink Floyd (Comfortably Numb) and The Cranberries (Zombie).

There’s evidence of Miley’s rock leanings on her records, too: 2025 single Secrets featured both Lindsey Buckingham and Mick Fleetwood, and Billy Idol appeared on the ‘80s-inspired Night Crawling, from 2020’s Plastic Hearts.

Explaining why she called her new album Bass Persuades on Instagram, Miley wrote: “Music takes hold of us. We feel it, sing it, sometimes dance to it, let it out and carry on. It is powerful, vulnerable, sweet and strong.

“Heart full, heartache, every part of life in between. That’s what the title means to me.”

The album will be released on 18 September. Miley will also be playing two live shows at the Hollywood Bowl on October 16 and 18.

One of America’s premier jazz singers, Cassandra Wilson, has died, aged just 70.

Her manager Robert Torre broke the news to the New Jersey radio station WBGO yesterday that Wilson “transitioned peacefully at home, surrounded by family, close friends, and her manager.” He did not mention a cause of death.

A two-time Grammy winner, Wilson came from blues-based jazz, but her work touched upon many other genres, including folk, pop, country and R&B.

Wilson was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and was something of a musical prodigy, playing piano at 6, guitar by 12 and singing professionally in her late teens. Moving to New York, she joined Steve Coleman’s M-Base Collective and eventually became its main vocalist.

She released her solo debut album Point Of View in 1986, which included her own original compositions and versions of Miles Davis’ Blue In Green and I Wished On The Moon, which was made famous by Billie Holiday. Subsequent albums explored jazz funk (1990’s Jumpworld) and acoustic music (Blue Light til Dawn and New Moon Daughter, from 1992 and 1995 respectively). “I continue to choose the path I take musically,” she explained to the New York Times in 1994. “And it’s not motivated by becoming famous or having a lot of money, or any other pop motivation.”

Her first Grammy came for her 1997 album New Moon Daughter. Twelve years later she repeated the triumph in the Best Vocal Jazz album category for Loverly. Her final album, 2015’s Coming Forth By Day, was an explicit homage to Billie Holiday and around this time Wilson gave a special concert at Harlem Apollo to commemorate what would have been the 100^th birthday of the iconic singer.

A number of tributes have come in for Wilson in the past 24 hours. In an Instagram post, the bandleader and producer Jon Batiste said: “She had an unmistakable vocal tone, phrasing and her approach of weaving folkloric, R&B and diasporic music together with experimental and popular genres had a major impact on me… Her Mississippi heritage was always present in everything no matter how expansive her artistry evolved.”

Meanwhile, the mayor of her hometown, John Horhn, has said that Jackson “has lost an extraordinary native daughter, and the world has lost a singular musical voice.”

“Cassandra Wilson carried the sound, spirit and history of Mississippi with her wherever her music reached. Her work had rare depth of character and a profound understanding of how music moves people, tells stories and connects generations.”

On this occasion, it’s very much more than ironic. In fact, it sounds shocking and somewhat bizarre. Alanis Morissette is suing her ex-tour manager, accusing her of blackmail, fraud and extortion.

The Canadian singer-songwriter has filed the suit in a Californian court. It alleges that Keren Urinov, the tour manager in question, attempted to blackmail the singer over drug trafficking charges.

It all dates back to last year when Urinov was caught by British authorities bringing marijuana and the animal tranquiliser xylazine through customs. Apparently she carried the marijuana on an Israeli medical permit, and the xylazine had been prescribed. However, later on that tour Urinov confessed to Morissette that she’d once been arrested in Latin America for smuggling drugs in a surfboard.

After the tour wrapped up, things got even stranger. According to the filing, Urinov then started sending “increasingly extortionate letters” to the singer, threatening to report the drug trafficking to the British authorities unless Morissette employed her on a 15-year contract, with raises and bonuses and access to a US attorney so Urinov could work regularly in the US.

“Alanis Morissette is the victim of a calculated blackmail campaign orchestrated by a disgruntled former tour manager,” the filing reads. “Morissette will not agree to work with an incompetent blackmailer for the next 15 years or pay her a ransom under the gun.”

“Morissette is not interested in employing Urinov for 15 years… Not only because she is a blackmailer, but also because she was a terrible manager of the 2025 tour.” It seems Urinov just wasn’t very good at her job – on one occasion she erroneously booked a hotel that cost the singer $70,000.

The singer is apparently pushing for a jury trial and requesting that Urinov pay $75,000 as well as a fine. The by-now very much ex-tour manager has not as yet responded to the lawsuit.

Olivia Rodrigo has been expressing what it meant to pull off her festival Daisy Chain Fields over the weekend. In an emotional Instagram post, she said that seeing the event come together was “the greatest joy” of her life.

Organising any festival is a massive undertaking, and Rodrigo was personally involved in the event. It was her vision to revive the spirit and the format of the all-female Lilith Fair fest of the late 1990s and, like that event, Daisy Chain Fields was also a fundraiser for non-profit organisations working with women and girls. Rodrigo put the bill together and personally made the calls. All at the same time she was putting together her own album.

“I am still in a bit of disbelief that it happened,” she posted, “and I still feel incapable of properly expressing the gratitude that I feel for every person who believed in this vision and fought so hard to make it a reality.”

Performers included Chappell Roan, Doechii and Bikini Kill, though Rodrigo’s own set was memorable for a number of reasons. The singer brought out Sarah McLachlan, the Lilith Fair organiser, and the pair duetted on Angel, which was dedicated to Dolly Parton.

Later on. Stevie Nicks joined Rodrigo for a version of Nicks’ own Landslide, and Alanis Morissette (a late replacement for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O) came on to perform Ironic with the singer.

Over $10 million dollars was raised for non-profits including Baby2Baby, which distributes supplies to children and parents in need, and the National Women’s Law Center. Appearing later that night, Melinda French Gates joined Rodrigo on stage and announced that she was matching that amount to make the final total raised $20 million.

But by all accounts, Daisy Chain Fields wore its activism lightly. In her post, Rodrigo said that one of her own highlights was hanging out at Yoko Ono’s ‘Wish Tree’ installation after the crowds had gone home. It was here that punters were encouraged to write their deepest desires.

“By and large almost every tag said the same thing,” said Rodrigo. “Everyone hoped for the world to be more peaceful, they all hoped that the people they loved were happy, they all hoped to make a difference.

“It made me so emotional and I realised that was exactly why Daisy Chain meant so much to me. The artwork reminded me of how we are all much more alike than we are different and how deep down, we all just want to help each other and make the world a better place. Yesterday, Daisy Chain felt like just that: a collective hope that things can get better and a reminder of how much we really care about people at the end of the day.”

Sam Smith has said that they regret not getting back to Tom Petty after the Heartbreakers singer wrote to them, pointing out the alleged similarities between Smith’s 2014 hit Stay With Me and I Won’t Back Down.

Smith and his co-writers James Napier and William Phillips ended up having to give a 12.5% cut of the royalties to Petty and co-writer Jeff Lynne, due to a three-note figure in the song that was a mite too close to the one in Petty’s 1989 hit. A decade down the line, Smith admitted during an appearance on the Alchemy With Anthony Mason podcast that they have regrets about what happened.

The singer still maintains that they had never even heard I Won’t Back Down before writing Stay With Me. “Regretfully, actually, I, as a young kid, just didn’t listen to men, if I’m honest. The only male singers I ever listened to were Stevie Wonder and George Michael. I was a kid that just loved the divas. And girl pop. So I’d never heard it.”

Stay With Me won Grammys for Record Of The Year and Song Of The Year at the 2015 awards and the night before the ceremony Smith received a letter from Petty, which at the time left him peeved. "I was so pissed off when I read it, that's the truth… We're talking about three notes. When it all kicked off it was my first album, my first chance of success, or changing my life, of being able to finally achieve my dreams and do what I wanted to do. And then when I heard what was happening I was like, 'That's crazy, that's awful that that can happen.'”

They continued: "He said it himself in the letter to me – that there are only so many notes on the piano – and that's why I was annoyed. Because when he said that I was like, ‘You get it, so why is this happening?’ Now as I’m older I understand why, I understand that it wasn’t just him".

Asked what they think Petty was trying to say in his letter, Smith replied: “I think he was trying to say that I see you and I understand what you’re going through right now and I’m sorry that this is all happening. Which was actually very, very sweet and kind of him. I’m so deeply regretful that I never responded to him. I never wrote back to him. I was just a little sassy 22-year-old queer kid. But I definitely should’ve written back to him."

Petty died in 2017, aged just 66, so Smith never got the opportunity to straighten things out with him, but the singer says that since then they’ve opened up to the lead Heartbreaker’s oeuvre.

“Since that happening, I have listened to his music. There's a song called It Will All Work Out, which just moves me, and has become a song I turn to in my darkest moments."

Mary Austin, the woman who was Freddie Mercury’s lover and later his confidante and ‘best friend ’, has decided to go public about her relationship with the rock legend. She’s publishing a book that features Mercury’s old notebooks and lyrics and has given an extensive interview to the Guardian.

When he died in 1991, Austin inherited Freddie’s Kensington house and half his estate, including four silver trunks filled with the singer’s lyrics and notebooks. “To say I was overwhelmed is an understatement,” she says now. “I couldn’t look at the lyrics. I felt as I did when I originally packed them – that they were his personal belongings and I was being offered an opportunity to delve into them, and I couldn’t do that.”

The interview reveals some interesting titbits about Mercury and Queen. We all know that the band’s name was Freddie’s idea, but it seems Brian May’s suggestion was the truly awful Build Your Own Boat. They asked what I thought,” she says. “I said I preferred Build Your Own Boat. I thought it was a terrible name. But Brian was my friend. I’d just met Freddie.”

In the 1970s, most Queen fans didn’t have a clue that Freddie was Farrokh Bulsara, a Parsi Indian who was born in Zanzibar. The singer deliberately covered his background, it seems.

“He hid that well,” says Austin, who thinks he was trying to pass as a white Englishman. “He’d stay out of the sun because his skin would darken, and he didn’t want that. With Freddie, you just saw what he wanted you to see.

"He’d get stopped in the street by police and they said, 'Where are you from?' and when he said Bombay they arrested him, because they thought he was taking the proverbial.”

The couple moved in together and Austin was the one who sourced the piano on which he wrote a number of Queen’s hits. “He’d suddenly say, ‘I need a piano. Where can I get a piano?’ … I’d say, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll try to find out.’ So, of course, I find the piano.”

Having a piano in their flat changed him, she says. “There was much more purposeful energy. He would sit at the piano, play the odd key, hum a bit and he looked very happy. Transported.”

Finding out he was gay was actually a relief, she says. “I wasn’t sure whether we were travelling in the same direction any more. Some time earlier I saw a dress and thought, that would be a really nice wedding dress. I asked Freddie, is it worth me buying it, and he looked at me and shook his head. So I knew from there on…”

Freddie Mercury: A Life In Lyrics is out now via Harper Collins.

We’re just a few weeks away from the 20th anniversary of Back to Black, the second album from Any Winehouse and the one that turned her into a global superstar.

As you’d expect, this occasion is being marked by a deluxe reissue of the record, but if you’d rather celebrate Winehouse’s legacy in a live setting, her former band are also heading out on a UK tour to perform both Back to Black in its entirety and other songs that she recorded.

The shows are being led by Winehouse’s long‑time musical director and bass player Dale Davis, and the band features guest vocalists and members who both toured and recorded with Amy throughout her career.

“I can’t believe that it’s the 20th anniversary of Back To Black this year,” says Davis. “When I congratulated Amy on the success of this incredible album, she said to me, not with any arrogance: ‘I knew what I was doing’, and at that moment, I realised that she knew exactly what she had created.

“It’s still an honour, pleasure and privilege to be performing these songs, from this timeless classic.”

With new shows announced in England and Wales – joining the previously confirmed gigs in Scotland – the tour will now take in more than 50 dates. Beginning on 20 October in York, the 2026 run will reach a fitting conclusion in Camden, London at the Roundhouse on 18 December – Camden being the place where Winehouse lived and tragically died in 2011. The 2027 tour will then kick off in February.

Tickets are available via the Amy Winehouse Band website.

Almost 30 years after he was killed, finally somebody has been found guilty in court of the murder of Tupac Shakur.

A Las Vegas jury has found that South Side Compton Crips leader Duane Keith Davis is the person responsible for gunning down the rapper, thus bringing to an end one of the longest-running music-related mysteries, one that has spawned several documentaries and countless conspiracy theories.

Shakur was one of the world’s highest-profile rappers when he was shot four times in a car near the Las Vegas strip in September 1996. Death sells, and Shakur’s legend only grew as a result of his murder – he would continue to have posthumous hits for many years after.

The jury took only three hours to reach its guilty verdict in a case that relied on Davis’ own confessions, including a description of the killing that he included in his 2019 memoir Compton Street Legend.

Davis’s attorney Michael Sanft tried to persuade the jury that those stories were deliberately exaggerated and embellished, and painted a picture of a man who had hoped to benefit from public interest in the notorious case. Ultimately, they didn’t buy it.

Davis had written about what happened on the evening of 7 September 1996. He said that he had hatched the plan to retaliate against Shakur after the rapper’s entourage beat his nephew, Orlando ‘Baby Lane’ Anderson, in the lobby of the MGM Grand Hotel earlier that night. Anderson, who died two years later in an unrelated shootout, was a member of a rival gang in South Central LA.

Why did it take so long to bring Davis to trial? A Los Angeles Times investigation in 2015 revealed that the police failed to investigate Anderson even after the brawl between him and Shakur’s entourage became known. For their part, investigators maintained that it was challenging to prove because they struggled to produce physical evidence and faced strong resistance from potential witnesses, including some members of Shakur’s entourage. Even now, some resisted participating in the case and had to be compelled to come to court.

Ultimately, though, Davis brought the case to them on a plate and ended up being the lead witness as well as defendant. “Had he decided to never write the book,” the Clark County district attorney Marc DiGiacomo pointed out during the trail, “he would not, probably, have ever been prosecuted for the crime.”

Many tears were shed over a song Dolly Parton wrote in the mid-’70s – an emotive ballad that ended up being a global hit for another singer.

I Will Always Love You was originally released on Parton’s 1974 album Jolene, and was a No 1 hit on the US Hot Country Songs chart. It was 18 years later that Whitney Houston’s version of the song became one of the biggest hit records of all time.

But as Parton revealed, I Will Always Love You was not the simple love song that its title implied. Instead, it was a farewell message to one of the most important collaborators in her career.

Missouri-born country singer Porter Wagoner was so successful in the late ’60s that he hosted his own syndicated TV show.

It was in 1967 that Parton first appeared on The Porter Wagoner Show, and for the next seven years the two singers regularly performed together.

By 1974, however, Parton felt the need to spread her wings and focus on her solo career. She would also admit that she and Wagoner had often butted heads during their long working relationship.

I Will Always Love You was her way of saying goodbye.

As Parton recalled in an interview with The Bobby Bones Show: “I was trying to get out, go out on my own… and the fact that we had one of those love-hate relationships, it was just hard to move on.”

She said of Wagoner: “He wasn’t listening to anything I had to say. So I went home and wrote that song, took it back the next morning and said, ‘Sit down. I need you to hear something.’ I sang it and he was crying, so he said, ‘Okay, you can go provided I can produce that record.’ So he did.”

As it turned out, Bob Ferguson was credited as the producer of the Jolene album, but Parton and Wagoner delivered two more collaborative albums in 1974 and 1975 – Porter ’n’ Dolly and Say Forever You'll Be Mine.

Parton herself ended up in tears when she had to make a tough decision about I Will Always Love You.

Not long after the release of the Jolene album, Parton was approached by Colonel Tom Parker, the manger of Elvis Presley. Parker told her that Elvis was interested in recording I Will Always Love You, but there was a catch. When Elvis recorded a song he would claim part – usually one half – of the publishing rights.

In a 2021 interview with W Magazine, Parton recalled her conversation with Parker: “I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t give you the publishing.’ I wanted to hear Elvis sing it, and it broke my heart — I cried all night. But I had to keep that copyright in my pocket. You have to take care of your business!”

Whitney Houston’s version of I Will Always Love You – featured in the soundtrack for the 1992 film The Bodyguard – was a No 1 hit all around the world and spent 14 weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100.

Speaking to CBS News in 2012, Parton said of Houston’s version: “She just took it worldwide and made it the most special song in the whole world for a long period of time.”

But Parton was taken by surprise when she heard Houston’s version for the first time. She knew that the song was being used in The Bodyguard but had no idea which singer had recorded it.

In her interview with The Bobby Bones Show, Parton recalled how she was driving when she first heard Houston’s version on the radio, and was initially confused by the intro in this new arrangement.

“I just heard Whitney singing the acapella part,” Parton said. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s weird.’ You know, something caught my attention. It was only when she went into the chorus of ‘I will always love you’ that I realised what I was listening to.”

She continued: “It was so overwhelming I almost wrecked. Just the greatness and the bigness and the fact that that was my song, it was just so out of nowhere. And I have to honestly say that it was one of the biggest thrills and one of the most overwhelming feelings I’ve ever had about anything in my life.”

In the wake of Dolly Parton’s death on 25 August, Priscilla Presley, Elvis’s former wife, paid tribute in an emotional statement in which she described her own attachment to I Will Always Love You.

“Dolly brought so much joy, kindness and beautiful music into the world,” she stated. “I will always remember our conversations, and especially the connection we shared through a song that holds such a personal place in my heart – I Will Always Love You.

“After Elvis and I left the courthouse following our divorce, he sang that song to me as we walked down the steps together. Years later, I shared that memory with Dolly.”

Whatever else British director Nigel Dick does in his career, it’s doubtful that he’ll ever make anything more famous than his video for Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time.

Released in 1998 as Britney’s debut single, the promo has now been viewed on YouTube more than a billion times, but Dick is happy to admit that the idea to set the video in a school wasn’t his.

Speaking to Music Week, he says: “My original treatment for Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time video was set in a boxing ring. The label came back and said, ‘Look, this isn’t working, but speak to Britney; she’s got an idea.’ The schoolgirl thing was hers, and it’s good it came from her. At the time I made that video, I was a 40-year-old British guy – I had no idea what was going through the mind of a 16-year-old American girl!”

Such was the strength of the song, Baby One More Time might well have been a hit even without that video, but the two remain inextricably linked, and its success followed Dick around.

“Afterwards, I would always be on the set of a video and the manager or record company would come up and say, ‘So, is this going to be iconic, like Britney?’” he says. “It was like, ‘I haven’t got a fucking clue, pal.’”

Dick also admits that, when he first met Spears, he wouldn't have predicted that she would soon become the most famous pop star on the planet.

“I didn’t know Britney was a superstar right away. I just thought, ‘Wow, she’s really good in front of the camera,’" he says. "She nailed it, was a very hard worker, and I was very impressed by her. She told me that by 23 she wanted to be as big as Madonna and I was going, ‘Yeah, right, good luck with that…’ – and she was!”

Dick would end up directing four of Spears’ videos, the last of which was for 2000 single Oops!... I Did It Again, which featured another memorable Britney look. However, he says that this was another example of the star going in a different direction to the one he originally had planned.

“For Britney’s catsuit in the Oops!… I Did It Again video, the one that we picked had a bit more character to it, rather than just being like they’d spray-tanned her with red plastic paint,” he remembers. “Of course, when she appeared on the morning of the shoot and it wasn’t that, you couldn’t have a discussion about it. But yeah, history has proven her right to switch it and me wrong!”

Indeed – Oops!... I Did It Again has now surpassed more than half a billion views. A good job, too, because it didn’t come cheap.

“That video cost $750,000 – I’ve done hundreds of videos for less than the cost of just renting that stage!” says Dick. “But the fact we’re talking about it 26 years later means that, obviously, it paid for itself!”

Nigel Dick’s memoir, Music Video Mischief, will be released on 15 September via Trouser Press Books. It will tell the story of his work with not only Britney, but also the likes of Guns N’ Roses, Oasis, Cher, Céline Dion and Band Aid.

In an era of the featured artist when everyone is nice about everyone else, it’s refreshing to find someone who isn’t afraid of being honest about what they don’t like.

That someone on this occasion is Doja Cat, who on a Twitch livestream tuned into Ella Langley’s monster hit Choosin’ Texas. The rapper, it seems, is not impressed by the song, which has now clocked up nineteen weeks at the top of the Billboard charts. She stopped it before the chorus.

“Yeah, this is not my vibe, but she has a very pretty voice,” she said. “If this is, like, number one on the charts, it's cos people are like putting on their radios and shit. I'm sure it's like on the radio. I can see them playing this shit on the radio. I don't like it, but that's fine.”

“It's very earwormy,” she mused. “It's like [a] catchy melody. I get it. And she's pretty. I get it. Also, singers are just fucking pretty. That's just kind of how that works, I don't know why.”

The rapper then appeared to scan the comments, which seemed to be criticising her for dismissing the song.

“Are people saying that I'm spreading hate?” she chuckled. “I mean, out of respect, I could play the whole thing? Let's play the whole thing. Will that make you feel better if I play the whole thing?”

However she only gave the song a few bars more, before pulling the plug: “The song's not bad. It's literally not bad. The music isn't bad. I just don't fucking like it. Just cos I don't like something doesn't make it bad. I'm sorry. I can't do more than like a minute and 17 seconds of that. I'm not going to play the whole song. I'm sorry, I'm not sorry… Let me play some motherfucking Chingy.”

The livestream came after Doja Cat was interviewed by Caleb Pressley on her Sunday Conversation podcast. Pressley asked her whether she liked Ella Langley and the rapper professed to not have heard of her - “I don’t what that is. Ella Langley? Ella Langley?” she asked.

Not unreasonably, you’d have to say. After all, the days when we all knew who was currently Number One in the charts are long gone and, nineteen weeks or not, Ella Langley is still some way from being a household name.

Jay-Z’s music career has taken something of a backseat to his various business interests in recent years – his last solo album 4:44 was released way back in 2017. But he’s dipping back into that world in a new eight-part documentary series that starts in September.

It’s called Jay-Z In 8 – or perhaps, given that he’s now officially added an umlaut to his name and capped it, that should be JAŸ-Z In 8. However you choose to pronounce that, it’s directed by Rick Rubin and features eight conversations between the two men about creativity, influences and the experiences that shaped the rapper’s three decade plus career.

According to the synopsis of the show it involves: “Travelling song by song through JAŸ-Z’s extensive back catalogue... Rick Rubin curates an expert playlist as a means of examining the creative process of a music legend. Across eight episodes, the pair discuss key influences, formative experiences, and his singular approach to artistic innovation.”

The series will be shown via HBO in the States and Canada and on MUBI everywhere else in the world. The first two episodes will debut on Saturday 19 September with the rest of the series coming in two episode portions every Saturday until it concludes on 10 October.

The rapper has been playing some live shows this summer on his JAŸ-Z 30 tour, which commemorates the fact that it’s three decades since his 1996 debut album Reasonable Doubt. Next week he has two shows at the Tottenham Hotspur stadium in North London, followed by a date at the Stade De France in Paris. Then there are another two shows at LA’s SOFI Stadium in October.

As for a new album, aside from a few one-off tracks and the occasional feature there’s been no indication that the rapper is planning another full-length record.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UMG and Apple Corps have released a fascinating titbit from the upcoming Rubber Soul reissue.

It’s an early version of Day Tripper, but without the famous riff that provides the song with its spine. Instead, the a two-minute piece features Lennon and McCartney working on the song at Lennon’s home in Weybridge, Surrey.

This version is slower than the finished track we all know. At several points the two Beatles can be heard cracking up and laughing, Lennon gets the words of the chorus wrong - ‘one way driver, yeah’ - but their harmonising is already spot on and the fun that they had in each other’s company in moments like these is evident even on this short excerpt.

In a sense, the song was written to order. Parlophone needed a new single for the end of the year and in the UK the custom in 1965 was that singles and albums were kept entirely separate. So, on a spare day between the sessions that had already started for Rubber Soul, the two songwriting partners set to work. In the end, McCartney came up with an equally strong track in the form of We Can Work It Out a few weeks later and both songs were released as the Beatles' first double A-side single in December.

Day Tripper (Songwriting Work Tape) is one of a number of unreleased home demos and takes that are included on the upcoming release. Apple Corps have already shared Michelle Take 1 but for the moment are holding back the big selling point of the reissue – a John Lennon demo called Little Girl, which up until recently Beatles scholars had no idea even existed, let alone was in any kind of releasable form.

The Rubber Soul Special Editon comes out on 2 October and is available in a variety of formats to fit your budget and the fervency of your fandom. This version of Day Tripper will be included only on the Deluxe and the Super Deluxe editions, which you can already pre-order.

Tributes have been cascading in for Dolly Parton, who died yesterday at the age of 80.

A huge range of figures have paid their respects: from every music genre you can think of, from the fields of entertainment and film, and right across the political spectrum. Few public figures had the reach of Dolly Parton, or were regarded with such genuine warmth, love and affection by so many.

Beyoncé collaborated with Parton on a version of Jolene on her recent Cowboy Carter album and has written on her website: “Dolly, you were the barometer. The north star. Bold and brilliant. Talented and tenacious. You taught so many lessons on how to be uniquely oneself. I am grateful for your art, your heart, your generosity, your humour, your entrepreneurship. I’m honoured that I had the privilege to work with you.”

Paul McCartney has written on Instagram: “Her songwriting, her singing and her philanthropy were unrivalled in the world of country music and it is hard to imagine living in a world without Dolly... There was no greater honour for me than to have her sing my song Let It Be and, even though I only made a small contribution to it, I am so honoured that she did it. I am so proud to have known her and admire her unique talents.”

In a press statement, Taylor Swift has said that: “A world without Dolly doesn’t feel possible, real or right. But because of the eternally generous way she spent her time on this earth and the countless lives she changed for the better, her legacy will be an everlasting one.”

Barack Obama has written on Twitter/ X: “It’s hard to imagine many people having a bigger impact than Dolly Parton. Born in a one-room cabin, she earned 11 Grammys and an Emmy, built a business empire, helped millions of kids learn to read, and – as if that wasn’t enough – helped accelerate the research that led to the Moderna Covid vaccine. What a life.”

Eminem has shared a letter that the singer sent to him after he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame that said: ‘Even though I don’t know a lot about rap music, I’ve come to know you are the very best of it’. The rapper added: “Getting this note from Dolly really had an impact on me. She definitely didn’t have to take the time to do it. Even for a kid who mostly listened to rap music, she was an icon.”

Meanwhile last night at the Hammersmith Apollo, Jack White covered Jolene for the first time in nearly 20 years (the song used to be a feature of early White Stripes setlists). Footage of the performance has already gone online - at the end of the song White points to the sky and makes the sign of the cross.

His label Third Man Records has already paid tribute, issuing a statement: “Dolly’s legacy goes far beyond the music. For decades, she’s used her voice, her success, and her heart to make a difference. From the Imagination Library putting millions of books into children’s hands to supporting education, literacy, disaster relief, and communities in need. An incredible artist, philanthropist, advocate, and human being.”

It has been hailed by critics as one of the most expressive songs in the country genre and has been recorded by artists such as The White Stripes, Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus and Olivia Newton-John.

Lyrically inspired by Dolly Parton's worries that a certain red-headed bank teller was getting too familiar with her husband, Carl Dean, it is also the song that launched its writer into the mainstream pop market and became her first big crossover hit, encapsulating in two minutes and forty-one seconds her straight-talking Tennessean roots with a storyline and hook that would resonate with millions across the globe.

Jolene was the song that made Dolly Parton - whose death was confirmed earlier today - transforming her into a household name. It’s also a song that she regarded as one of her crowning achievements.

“The one that’s most recorded is Jolene, that seems to be the favourite,” said Parton in a Q&A with The Guardian on 31 October 2024. “Do you know that song has been recorded, somebody told me, 450 times in the last 52 years? I’m so proud of it."

The whole story of how Dolly Parton rose from a dirt-poor background in the Tennessee hills to become a global superstar has become the stuff of legend.

The fourth of 12 children, she was born on 19 January 1946 to sharecropping parents in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon river in East Tennessee.

When Parton was a young child, the family moved to a farm in the Smoky Mountains. Parton attributes her musical abilities to the influence of her mother Avie Lee Carlin (née Owens), who entertained her children with ancient ballads from her Welsh immigrant ancestors, brought to southern Appalachia in the 18th and 19th centuries.

At seven, Parton started playing a homemade guitar. One year later, her uncle, Bill Owens, bought her a proper instrument, and by the age of ten she was appearing on The Cas Walker Show on WIVK Radio in Knoxville Tennessee.

At the age of 13, she appeared on the Grand Ole Opry, where she met Johnny Cash for the first time.

The day after she graduated from Sevier County HIgh School in 1964, Parton moved to Nashville. She landed a publishing deal and co-wrote several singles with her uncle, including two Top 10 hits for Bill Philips and Fuel To The Flame (1967), a No. 11 hit for Skeeter Davis.

In 1967, she released her debut album, Hello I’m Dolly, and was invited by country music entertainer Porter Wagoner to join his weekly TV variety show The Porter Wagoner Show. It launched her career. Her natural onscreen persona suited the show’s informal feel.

While singles such as Just Because I’m A Woman were only moderate hits, her recording of the Jimmie Rogers’ song Muleskinner Blues in 1970 yielded a No 3 hit in the Country Chart, followed by a No 1 hit with Joshua the following year.

Her signature song, Coat Of Many Colours reached No 3, and heralded a series of hits.

By the end of 1974, Parton had parted from Wagoner, formed her own band and launched her solo career. But not before she had written and recorded the song that would become her biggest hit. That song was Jolene and it was immediately clear she had created something special.

In a 2008 interview with Washington DC-based public broadcasting organisation, NPR, Parton said she first got the idea for a song called Jolene back in the late ’60s while signing autographs after one of the Porter Wagoner live shows.

"One night, I was on stage, and there was this beautiful little girl – she was probably eight years old at the time," Parton recalled. "And she had this beautiful red hair, this beautiful skin, these beautiful green eyes, and she was looking up at me for an autograph. I said, 'Well, you're the prettiest little thing I ever saw. So what is your name?' And she said, 'Jolene.' And I said, 'Jolene. Jolene. Jolene. Jolene'. I said, 'That is pretty. That sounds like a song. I'm going to write a song about that’."

This touching encounter would take on a more adult tone when Parton sat down to write the song in 1973. According to Parton, the song was ultimately inspired by a red-headed bank clerk who flirted with her husband, Carl Dean, at his local bank branch around the time they were newly married in 1966.

It’s hard to recall a celebrity spouse who so successfully maintained their privacy (Dean passed away in March 2025).

“I’ve never seen Carl Dean, nor never met him,” recalls session musician Lloyd Green in the BBC documentary Dolly Parton: Here I Am. “I know he exists [but] I don’t know anyone who’s ever seen Carl Dean.”

One person who clearly did see Carl Dean was the red-headed bank teller who became immortalised as Jolene.

“She got this terrible crush on my husband,” Parton told NPR. "And he just loved going to the bank because she paid him so much attention. It was kinda like a running joke between us – when I was saying, ‘Hell, you're spending a lot of time at the bank. I don't believe we've got that kind of money!’ So it's really an innocent song all around, but sounds like a dreadful one.”

It’s also a story that Parton recounted thousands of times from the stage when introducing the song. “She was trying to take care of my husband while I was out on the road,” said Parton in a live clip in the BBC documentary. “Well that didn’t go over too big with me. I fought that red-headed woman like a wildcat. She took my wig off and almost beat me to death with it! But I kept my husband.”

Simplicity is key to the song’s appeal. “It’s just the same word over and over,” Parton told NPR. “Even a first-grader or a baby can sing, 'Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene'. It's like, how hard can that be?"

The lyrics of Jolene are essentially an exchange between two women and as author and musicologist Lydia Hamessley points out in the BBC documentary, the man is noticeably absent throughout. “In Jolene, Dolly is singing a song about a cheating man. But she doesn’t address the man at all. In fact, he seems not to be relevant to the story. She’s really engaging with this other woman. It may seem that she doesn’t have very much power in that dynamic but in fact she’s the one who speaks all the lines.”

Parton has said that Jolene is a song that “fits a lot of people”, because it is fuelled by our insecurities. “We all are insecure,” said Parton in the BBC documentary. “There’s always someone that could take that person from you and you’re vulnerable.”

The song is instantly evocative. “I can see Jolene walking down the street,” says Kylie Minogue in the BBC documentary Dolly Parton: Here I Am. “I can see Dolly bristling. It’s a real art of storytelling. How to say a lot and paint a picture in a three minute song.”

Jolene was recorded in RCA Studio B in Nashville, in October 1973. Written and recorded in the key of C#min, with a capo on the fourth and the chord shapes of Am-C-G-Am-G-Am, it skips along at a pacey 111bpm. “It’s a great chord progression,” Parton told NPR.

What first draws the listener in, though, is the song’s infectious guitar lick.

“The thing I remember most was all the musicians when I came up with the little guitar lick, the Jolene lick, saying: 'Damn, that’s so good. That’s the coolest little lick,’” Parton told The Guardian. “I was playing guitar pretty seriously back then, before I had all the long nails. I remember all the guys learning to play it and everybody thinking how cool a rhythm it was. It was a little out of the norm for the things we’d been doing up to that time. I remember everybody in the studio just loving that song.”

The lick is a one measure, four-beat riff played in the Am shape, which is repeated throughout the track and gives the song a real skip and groove. This lick was played in the studio by the late Nashville session guitarist chip Young, a revered player renowned for his thumb-style, or Travis-picking style.

The other Nashville session guitarist who played on Jolene was Wayne Moss, handling the steel-string part that complements Young’s primary riff, which Young played on a gut-string classical guitar.

"It's a great chord progression, people love that 'Jolene' lick,'" Parton told NPR in 2008. “It's as much a part of the song… as the song [itself].”

Jolene was released on 22 May 1973 and reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Chart, peaking at No 60 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2024, in Rolling Stone’s poll of 200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time, Jolene was placed at No. 1.

Parton re-recorded and re-released the track a number of times, as in 1995, when it appeared on her 33rd album Something Special.

In 2000, The White Stripes released the first of a number of covers of the song, raw and visceral renditions that elevate the core sentiment of the song to one of yearning desperation.

On 29 March 2024, Beyoncé released her version of Jolene. “With similar instrumentation but fresh lyrics, Beyoncé has taken the age-old concept and breathed new life into it,” wrote Lauren Boisvert in American Songwriter magazine. “Beyoncé employs a smoother guitar sound backed by a pulsing beat to tie the song into her pop/R&B roots.”

Such covers are a testament to the enduring power of the song and yet Parton’s original 1973 recording still resonates across the decades, thanks largely to her effortlessly heartfelt delivery and simple restraint.

“Staying true to her intentions, Parton fortunately chooses not to decorate the song with vocal harmonies, additional instruments and pop hooks,” wrote Barry Webber of AllMusic in a retrospective review. “The song is stripped down to guitar and Parton's vocals. The melody itself is immensely catchy, and the lyrics are simple enough to avoid melodrama in favour of raw, blunt emotion.

“Jolene… continues to stand as not only one of her best songs, but one of the great country ballads of the 20th Century."

Incredibly, it’s 20 years this October since Amy Winehouse released her second album, the multi-platinum Back To Black. And with it being a significant anniversary, it's no surprise that there is a reissue planned for the record that sent the North London chanteuse’s career into the stratosphere.

So what are the deets? Well, this time you can purchase a triple vinyl edition. In addition to the original album, there’s a record of B-sides and demos and another that features a live set she played at the Amsterdam Paradiso in February 2007. There is also a triple CD edition with extra tracks on each disc.

Both of those editions features brand new alternative cover artwork, with Amy looking upwards instead of straight at the camera as on the original. There is also an image from the producer Mark Ronson’s archives of Amy’s handwritten lyrics, never-before-seen photos by original album photographers Mischa Richter and Alex Lake, ands liner notes from Ronson and Salaam Remi.

A ‘Chalkboard Marble’ colour vinyl version of the album is also on offer, as well a webstore exclusive ‘Zoetrope’ version that includes moving footage of the late singer.

The original Back To Black sold a now mind-boggling 20 million copies, going 15 times platinum in the UK alone and becoming the country’s second biggest selling album of the 21st Century (Adele’s 21 is first). It truly was a different era.

It’s hard now, perhaps impossible, to disentangle the songs from that album from the whole tragic story of Amy Winehouse. Whatever the whys and hows behind her early demise, the facts are plain: the runaway success of the record kept the singer on the road for the next two years and she had only just started recording a follow-up when she died in July 2011, at the age of – yes – 27.

These days, anniversary reissues get churned out for all sorts of albums that barely merit them, but Back To Black was a cultural blockbuster that truly deserves to be memorialised. All the new editions of the album come out on 23 October, and are available for pre-order now.

It’s 40 years this month since Paul Simon’s Graceland was released, and in an era when the sun is slowly setting on the long playing record, it’s hard to recall the dust kicked up by that one album.

Much of the discourse revolved around Simon’s breaking of the cultural boycott of South Africa and whether its immense success (16 million copies sold) and the exposure it gave to Ladysmith Black Mambazo, South African music and so-called ‘world music’ (a term that itself is now viewed as anachronistic) as a whole justified Simon’s original offence.

For better of worse, Graceland became known as his South African album. But it was only partially recorded inside the country. Indeed, its lead single You Can Call Me Al, was put together entirely at the Hit Factory in Simon’s home city of New York.

The lyrical idea for the track came from a party that the singer and his then-wife Peggy Harper had attended. The French conductor Pierre Boulez was at the same gathering and mistakenly addressed Simon as ‘Al’ and Peggy as ‘Betty’. This amused Simon no end and was the spark for a song that alighted on a man experiencing a midlife crisis of some sort.

Simon didn’t have far to look for inspiration. The early 1980s were a tough period for him. His previous album, 1983’s Hearts And Bones, had flopped completely, his marriage to Carrie Fisher had disintegrated and - like many of his generation - his music was increasingly seen as all a bit old hat in the fast-moving, go-getting 1980s. Speaking in 2010 to his biographer Marc Eliot, he recalled: "I had a personal blow, a career setback, and the combination of the two put me into a tailspin."

Al’s first two verses feature a character dealing with some sort of personal disappointment. The man wants ‘a shot at redemption’, asks ‘why am I short of attention’ (note the double meaning), laments that ‘my nights are so long’ and asks‘where’s my wife and family?'

In a 1990 interview with Song Talk magazine, Simon broke the song down: "You Can Call Me Al starts off very easily with sort of a joke: 'Why am I soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?' Very easy words. Then it has a chorus that you can't understand. What is he talking about, you can call me Betty, and Betty, you can call me Al? You don't know what I'm talking about. But I don't think it's bothersome. You don't know what I'm talking about but neither do I. At that point.

“The second verse is really a recapitulation: A man walks down the street, he says... another thing. And by the time you get to the third verse, and people have been into the song long enough, now you can start to throw abstract images. Because there's been a structure, and those abstract images, they will come down and fall into one of the slots that the mind has already made up about the structure of the song.”

Of course, the third verse is where the character finds his redemption on the street ‘in a strange world’. Here he is a complete outsider but is enchanted by ‘the sound, the sound’ and decides to surrender to it: ‘Amen and Hallelujah!’

It’s hard not to link this to Simon’s own experience early in 1985 when he travelled to Johannesburg and played jam sessions with a number of SA bands. He and his long-standing engineer Roy Halee developed melodies, built up grooves and laid the foundations for Graceland.

Back in New York, Simon and Halee edited the material and began to shape the album. Several of the South African musicians were flown in to the Sound Factory, as were established session players such as Adrian Belew.

The guitarist was specifically asked to bring his latest gadget – the Roland GR-700 guitar synth: cutting-edge mid-'80s tech that could store sounds like a Fairlight.

Speaking to the Music Aficionado blog in 2020, Belew remembers being baffled when he heard what Simon had recorded in South Africa: “I honestly thought Roy had mistakenly put up the wrong master tapes because what I heard confused me. It was obviously some sort of South African music, not Paul Simon music. As usual there was no singing on the tracks yet. I sat there quietly listening, slightly embarrassed for Roy, but just then Paul arrived.”

Simon then sang along to the music that had been recorded: “He began singing phrases right into my ear, so close to me it gave me chills! It was a remarkable experience having Paul Simon singing quietly in my ear. I realised then he had made a major transition in his work.”

Belew agreed to offer his bank of sounds for use on the project. “We spent four days, just Roy, Paul, and me pouring over my 200 synthesizer sounds to find things which fit the songs. Paul was very detailed and painstaking in the parts he asked me to play.”

For You Can Call Me Al, Belew’s synth contributed a saxophone section. “I had written a variety of saxophone emulations from baritone to alto which had a realistic yet unorthodox quality. He spelled out each part exactly as he wanted them for the iconic beginning of the song. They may have added real saxophones later but my synthesized saxophones are definitely there as well. I’m sure very few people realise that.”

One problem was the fact that, like many of the songs on Graceland, You Can Call Me Al has a very complex vocal, which when combined with the busy, detailed backing, spelt trouble. Which is where Roy Halee came into his own. Speaking to Sound On Sound in 2008, Halee recalled thinking: "We've got to make this work."

"What I came up with was a tape delay feeding the left channel and a different delay feeding the right," he says. "All of a sudden his vocal receded into the track, at least to some degree, and we could understand the words! Don't ask me why, but it worked, and I couldn't have done that with an echo chamber or EMT 140. In fact, remove that tape delay from You Can Call Me Al and, what with all of the sibilance, pops and other little mouth noises against what was going on in that track, the vocal would be unintelligible.

"It's about the material being well recorded and using the leakage to your advantage. How many times throughout my career have I heard, 'Oh, that's OK, we'll fix it in the mix'? In a lot of cases you can't fix it in the mix."

One of the song’s most memorable features was the two note fretless bass solo that gives way to the coda. This came courtesy of South African bassist Bakithi Kumalo, who had travelled to New York to play on the album in May 1986.

When the group reached the breakdown in the song, Kumalo asked if he could improvise a little. "I said, 'Paul, it's my birthday today. Can I just play a little bit more on the part where there's a break?'" he recalled to For Bass Players Only in 2012. "And Paul said, 'Go ahead. If it's good, we'll keep it.'"

On the spot, the bassist came up with a snake-like lick that adds a cherry on top of what is already an infectious song. "I just played, and they loved it. It was one take," he said. "Listening back, I didn't know what happened; I thought it was from God, you know? I never planned it."

Then Halee reversed the first part of Kumalo’s lick and spliced it to the second half, creating a figure that was impractical for the poor bassist to replicate live. "People have tried to copy those licks," Simon mentioned to Guitar World in 2023. “But it’s impossible.”

The lead single from the album, You Can Call Me Al was released in the July. In the US initially it could only reach a disappointing 44. It was in the UK – where it made Number Four and was Simon’s biggest hit since Bridge Over Troubled Water - that it piqued listeners’ interest, helped enormously by its playful video. All of us above a certain age remember Chevy Chase lip-syncing Simon’s vocals whilst the song’s author plays various instruments featured on the track.

It was the key to Graceland's success. Released at a time when non-western music was also making inroads into the consciousness of the mainstream media, and pressure on the South African apartheid regime was ratcheting up, the album became a sensation – one of the cultural talking points of 1986 and 1987. Eventually, after winning the Grammys for Record and Album of the Year and reaching Number One around the world, Al finally showed up in the Billboard Top 30, peaking at Number 23 in May 1987.

In an era when we’re all familiar with the phrase ‘cultural appropriation’, controversy still dogs Graceland. Aside from the breaking of the cultural boycott, there were allegations that Simon failed to sufficiently credit other guests on the album, most notably Los Lobos and the zydeco band Rockin' Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters. But at its best – on the title track, The Boy In The Bubble and indeed You Can Call Me Al - Graceland transcends all that and turns one rich man’s midlife crisis into a joyful knees-up: no mean feat.

At the end of 1974 Glen Campbell’s career was on the slide. He hadn’t had a hit single for years. The movie offers had dried up. His network TV show The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour had been cancelled in 1972 and even a reunion album with Jimmy Webb, the songwriter who had provided him with Wichita Lineman and By The Time I Get To Phoenix, hadn’t reversed this decline – it could only reach an embarassing 166 on the Billboard charts.

He was now in his late 30s and it looked as though the best years of his career were behind him.

Larry Weiss also had cause to worry that he’d passed his peak. In the 1960s he’d written Bend Me Shape Me, which had been a hit for The American Breed and Amen Corner. He’d also penned Hi Ho Silver Lining, which had been a hit for Jeff Beck. Both were now years in the rear view mirror.

He’d tried to launch himself as an artist with his 1974 album Black And Blue Suite, but it hadn’t been a success. Weiss was seriously considering quitting music and opening a furniture store.

The lead single from the album was a quasi-autobiographical song called Rhinestone Cowboy. The lyrics tell the story of a character who is down on his luck and refuses to be beaten down by fate or the elements.

The verses depict this person’s struggle – the hours spent walking in vain, the compromising that is so often essential in order to get to your destination, whilst the chorus is one great crescendo as Weiss describes their dream: to be the star attraction, a cowboy in a ‘star-spangled rodeo’.

Speaking to the Guardian in 2013, he remembered how he came up with the image. “I had heard the phrase ‘rhinestone cowboy’ somewhere, and it stuck. When I moved to Nashville 20 years ago, I finally found out that it meant rhinestone-studded country singers of the 50s and 60s. But I gave it my own spin.

“When I was a kid, I'd loved cowboy movies: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and Hop-Along Cassidy. To me, the singing cowboys were the rhinestone cowboys.”

Weiss was also probably thinking about a singer called David Allan Coe. This country artist – who died earlier this year – had adopted a gimmick early on in his career.

Performing at the Grand Ol’ Opry, he’d wear glistening rhinestone suits that at a distance gave the impression that his stagewear was more expensive than it actually was, and thus he was a star.

Coe would even sign autographs as ‘The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy’, a phrase he used as the title of his album, which was released in June 1974.

Still, Weiss was undoubtedly thinking too of his own situation. "The idea for the song was also a crying out of myself,” he told American Songwriter in 1984. “It was the spirit of a bunch of us on Broadway where I started out - Neil Diamond, Tony Orlando - we all had dreams of making it."

The imagery for the chorus was directly inspired by the 1944 western Buffalo Bill. “In the last scene, he rides out on a white horse, in a white outfit, with long white beard and hair, and he thanks everybody for giving him such a great life.

“There's another scene where he's at his lowest point, sat on a stuffed horse in a penny arcade holding his hat in the air.”

The song was released as a single in August 1974, but could only reach Number 24 in Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart. But despite this Weiss was convinced of its potential.

He offered it to Elvis Presley, who turned it down. He even gave David Allan Coe the chance to sing his own theme song. “I thought it was a great song,” Coe said in a 2004 interview with The Review magazine, “but I thought it would be too egotistical to record since I was calling myself the Rhinestone Cowboy at the time.

However, it did reach the ears of Glen Campbell. The singer had heard it on the radio whilst out driving one day and was so moved by it, he had to pull over to the side of the road.

As it happened, Campbell’s record label, Capitol, was already one step ahead. Dennis Lambert was brought in to A&R for the singer.

In a 2013 Guardian interview, he remembered the sequence of events that led to the singer recording the song. “Glen was a product of the LA recording system and understood what went into making hit records.

“We'd been talking about his feelings, writing and bringing him songs, when Larry Weiss came to play me some tracks from his recent album. One of them was Rhinestone Cowboy.”

“I said, ‘Larry, this is amazing,’ and my mind was racing, because I was already thinking about Glen. Larry wasn't that excited to hear that we were going to be producing Glen, I think because he was more concerned about his own album, but he gave me permission to play him the song.

“At the same time, (Capitol Vice President) Al Courey had somehow got a copy. A whirlwind happened within the space of a few days.”

Campbell said he loved the song and so he and Lambert went down to Sound Labs in Hollywood to record it in February 1975.

“We didn't copy Larry’s version, but took the essence of it, which was right on the money,” remembers Lambert. “Why fix something that isn't broken?”

The producer convinced the singer to play acoustic guitar on the track. “His (Campbell’s) pitch is impeccable; he's got the soul of a true musician.

“He doesn't read music, but he is a virtuoso guitarist, and it transfers to his voice. In the studio, he didn't wear headsets: he liked a little speaker instead.

“When he started singing, he'd drown out the track, and that's how he was able to finesse his vocal. He'd give you one or two great takes, and you knew you had it.

“For Rhinestone, I made him play guitar because I knew the other musicians [one of whom was future Toto man David Paich on piano] would be excited to be sitting there playing with Glen Campbell.”

The single was released in May 1975 and instantly rebooted Campbell’s career. It gradually rose up the Billboard charts and reached the top in September that year.

Indeed, it pulled off the feat of topping both the Billboard country charts and the Hot 100 simultaneously, which hadn’t been done for 14 years.

It also hit big all over Europe – reaching Number Four in the UK and going Top Ten in Belgium, The Netherlands and Ireland. It would become the second most played song on American radio that year, second only to Captain and Tennille’s Love Will Keep Us Together.

Why did it hit so big? Well those lyrics are something so many of us can relate to, but in Campbell they found their supreme interpreter.

His background, of growing up poor in rural Arkansas – his family were, literally, cotton-pickers and there was no electricity in the house – meant he was able to deliver them sincerely and with authenticity.

“He understood it as a metaphor for anyone trying to make it,” Lambert said in 2013. “He'd expressed disappointment with the way life was unfolding for him.

“He was recently divorced, estranged from his family, drinking, and involved with drugs a little too much – and yet he was this beautiful soul who we got to know and really love.

“That song became his signature tune. When you can make that happen, it's very powerful.”

Over the years, there have been numerous covers. You’d expect country artists to have tried their hands at it – Charley Pride, Slim Whitman and Loretta Lynn all recorded their own versions - but Rhinestone Cowboy has such a universal message, it’s garnered covers from the unlikeliest of places.

It was a feature of Radiohead’s early live sets, and it’s also cropped up in Belle and Sebastian’s setlists too. David Hasselhoff recorded a faithful version on his Sings America album.

There have been versions in French, Danish and Flemish and the song has not been immune to the Europop treatment either - in 2002, a terrible dance version reached Number 12 in the UK charts credited to Rikki and Daz featuring Glen Campbell. Campbell even appeared in the video.

But as a song, Rhinestone Cowboy is sturdy enough to withstand any such indignities. One of Campbell’s last public performances of it was surely the most poignant.

The singer had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when he appeared at his own tribute section at the 2012 Grammys and brought the house down.

“My only regret is not going to there, for its tribute to Glen,” remembered Weiss in 2013. “I watched it, of course.

“When Glen walked out singing in a rhinestone outfit designed by my dear friend Manuel Cuevas (who created the outfit for the song's original video), the place just blew up.

“I suddenly realised: ‘My God, I've written an American anthem.’"

The song was written and recorded by British glam rockers Arrows in 1975 – but it was the Joan Jett version released as a single seven years later that turned I Love Rock ’N’ Roll into the world-conquering hit it’s known as today.

It served as the opening title track from Jett’s second studio full-length, which ended up being the most commercially successful album of her career.

As fate would have it, Jett was touring the UK in 1976 as guitarist/vocalist in all-girl band The Runaways when she saw Arrows performing the song on their weekly television show.

This led to the Runaways learning how to play the song the following year, though ultimately they didn’t release it as they had already covered a track with a similar name – The Velvet Underground’s Rock & Roll.

For Jett, I Love Rock ’N’ Roll became a mission statement.

She told Rolling Stone: “I think people have to understand that rock ’n’ roll is not just rock ’n’ roll. It’s more than that. It can be a message sender. It is something that is powerful and strong. And it is something that can be used to fight, people have injustices, and you can declare them and fight for it.”

She continued: “I think rock ’n’ roll is a brash sort of medium, so you’re allowed to say what you want and what you mean.”

These words are deeply insightful into the mind of someone who acted as a trailblazer for female musicians in the music industry.

Instead of playing up to the gender stereotypes being normalised at that time, she chose to express herself unconditionally – raw and uncut – in the process redefining the very definition of what it means to be feminine and helping carve out space for women in male-dominated circles.

She has been referred to as the Godmother Of Punk, the original Riot Grrrl and the Queen Of Noise – the latter being a reference to The Runaways’ second album Queens Of Noise.

“There’s nothing more threatening than a girl with a guitar,” she famously stated back in 1999.

Following the breakup of The Runaways, Jett recorded her first rendition of I Love Rock ’N’ Roll in 1979 with guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols, released on vinyl as a B-side to her single You Don’t Own Me.

But the definitive version of the track came into fruition two years later with Jett’s new band The Blackhearts, recorded at Kingdom Sound Studio in Long Island with producers Kenny Laguna and Ritchie Cordell.

As it turns out, The Rolling Stones were partly responsible for the song being written in the first place.

Arrows singer Alan Merrill revealed in 2009: “That was a knee-jerk response to The Rolling Stones’ It’s Only Rock ’N’ Roll. I remember watching it on Top Of The Pops. I’d met Mick Jagger socially a few times, and I knew he was hanging around with Prince Rupert Lowenstein and people like that – jet-setters.”

He went on to describe the song as “an apology to those jet-set princes and princesses” – a way of saying to the stuffy aristocracy of that time that there’s nothing wrong about loving loud music.

So when it came to writing his own version of that kind of track, he certainly did a good job with it.

“You have to write a three-chord song with a lick that people remember, and it has to build,” Merrill explained. “So I had the chorus, which to me sounded like a hit. And I thought, ‘I’ll do something really unusual. I’ll write it that this is a song separate from the verse.’

“So the actual chorus is something that’s coming out of a jukebox, and the two kids in the disco who are flirting are hearing this song that’s a hit. It felt like The Twilight Zone.”

Joan Jett And The Blackhearts’ version of I Love Rock ’N’ Roll starts with eight dramatic snare hits before its iconic riff comes in – based around E, A and B power chords which are commonly followed by a quarter note bend on the third fret of the low E-string. This means the note travels from G to somewhere in between G and G#.

The album liner notes state that Joan Jett performed lead vocals and rhythm guitar while Ricky Byrd was responsible for lead guitar and backing vocals, joined by fellow Blackhearts Gary Ryan on bass and Lee Crystal on drums.

During the verse sections, there’s a lower riff being performed by Jett that is matched an octave up by Byrd using the first position pentatonic shape up at the twelfth fret. Jett’s part is performed using completely fretted notes, while Byrd adds a degree of fluidity by incorporating bends.

It was this version of Love Rock ’N’ Roll that ended up topping the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks. It also made No 1 in Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand and South Africa, and peaked at No 4 in the UK charts.

When Jett appeared on Australian music television show Countdown in 1982, she confessed that “not many people get to be involved with an anthem in their life” and “if people want to call the song an anthem, I think it’s wonderful, I think it’s great”.

She admitted: “I know everyone says it sounds silly – I love rock ’n’ roll. But that is what I feel. I love rock ’n’ roll. I love to go out and perform in front of people. The whole band does. And that, I think, is the secret.”

The old adage is that if you work hard enough you will – eventually - make it. But a 26 year old singer songwriter is intent on testing that theory to destruction.

Derby-based musician Isaac Neilson is the fellow in question and at the time of writing he’s 235 gigs into a bonkers challenge that will see him play live every day in 2026. And almost bankrupt himself in the process.

In a feature in the Guardian, Neilson explains why on earth he’s doing it. “I was in a position where I could maybe put a deposit on a house or I could do this crazy experiment. I chose to go all in on the music.”

He’s set himself two rules – he has to perform every day and busking doesn’t count. To his credit, he’s kept it up so far. His gig list for 2026 so far includes more than 60 gigs in Derby alone, a support slot with Cast and some deserted rooms during the recent men’s World Cup. “Christmas Day is going to be difficult but I have a plan,” he says.

Part of his objective, it seems, is to see if it’s possible to make it the old-fashioned way, by working hard on the live scene and building up a genuine following. “Virality is overrated,” he says. “People are yearning for community and looking for a connection. Numbers on a screen don’t represent the impact you can make in the world if you actually go out and meet people. My marketing budget is the time I spend in a room with you.”

So far he says he’s had “two major mental breakdowns and six minor ones.” Almost as serious is the sheer cost of the undertaking. Neilson estimates that he had £30,000 in savings at the beginning of the year and will probably end 2026 with about £3,000. It costs around £400 a week to keep going with fuel costs not surprisingly the biggest expense.

His music? The sort of indie-rock that there could be an audience for... somewhere out there. Will he be able to find it by the end of the year? Will he get through to 31 December with his sanity intact? “Regardless of the outcome of this year, I can die knowing I threw everything at it,” he says.

For more details about his upcoming gigs, head over to Neilson’s Instagram.

When the teenage Jackson Browne was just starting out as a singer and songwriter, he received some blunt career advice from an older and wiser musician.

Monte Dunn was a guitarist who played with Canadian folk duo Ian & Sylvia. In the mid-’60s, after hearing some of Browne’s songs, Dunn told the young hopeful: “You know, they already got a Bob Dylan. And a really good one.”

Browne recalled this moment in an interview with MOJO magazine in which he looked back on his early years and his defining work created in the ’70s.

“It’s easy to talk about how records are made,” he said. “But what makes you write what you write, that’s just a big mystery.”

Browne was 14 years old when he started writing songs. It was 1962, and his family had recently moved from Los Angeles to nearby Orange County. His biggest influences were Dylan and other folk singers such as Mississippi John Hurt and Dave Van Ronk, and his first attempt at composition was inspired by a version of You’re No Good from Dylan’s self-titled 1962 debut album. Browne named his song Happy Woman Blues.

“It was not very good,” he said. “I think that was kind of a folk posturing stance. Most of my early songs were a little mawkish, and very derivative.”

Even so, there was one song from this early period that would stay with Browne for his whole career and define his signature style of sombre introspection. He was still only 16 when he wrote These Days, a world-weary lament which ended in defeat as he sang: “Don’t confront with my failures… I had not forgotten them.”

Browne explained: “I wasn’t a sad kid. It’s been remarked a couple of times by therapists: ‘What the hell happened to you?’ I can’t honestly tell you that there was anything that should have resulted in my feeling as if, to quote the song, ‘I’ve been losing so long.’ My entire life – all sixteen years of it! I don’t know where I got that. Maybe from The Beatles’ song, I’m A Loser.”

While still in high school, Browne was gigging regularly at an Orange County club called The Paradox. He was briefly a member of local ragtime group The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and signed a contract with Elektra Records as a songwriter.

After graduating in 1966, he travelled to New York City with the intention of making his name on the Greenwich Village folk scene. What he found there was a job as a backing musician for Nico, the German singer/model/actress who was then working with The Velvet Underground. After a brief affair between them, Nico recorded three of Browne’s songs, including These Days, for her 1967 solo album Chelsea Girl.

Browne had his songs recorded by a number of artists: another version of These Days, by Tom Rush, followed in 1968. It was only after Browne returned to California, however, that he established himself as a singer-songwriter.

He had felt burned when Elektra signed him as a recording artist and then quickly dropped him. David Geffen was different. He became Browne’s manager and then his label boss when he formed Asylum Records in 1971. Browne described Geffen as the perfect ally. “He was letting artists find themselves in the studio.”

Browne’s first two albums – his self-titled debut (1972) and For Everyman (1973) – peaked outside the Billboard 200. It was with his third album, Late For The Sky, that he achieved a commercial breakthrough in 1974.

It was this album that Bruce Springsteen referred to when inducting Browne into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2004.

“In ’70s post-Vietnam America,” Springsteen said, “there was no album that captured the fall from Eden, the long slow afterburn of the ’60s, its heartbreak, its disappointments, its spent possibilities, better than Late For The Sky.”

In 1976, Browne followed Late For The Sky with another masterpiece, The Pretender, recorded in the wake of a personal tragedy – the suicide of his wife, actress Phyllis Major.

In 1977 Browne delivered one of the most unorthodox records ever made by a mainstream rock artist. Running On Empty was essentially a concept album: the diary of a rock ’n’ roll star on the road, recorded in concert, at sound checks and in hotel rooms, with songs about women, songs about drugs, and throughout it all a sense of ennui encapsulated in the album’s title.

“Running On Empty was a rather imperfect banner to fly,” Browne conceded. “It’s not exactly what you want to tell people about your career or anything.”

The album’s title track was a driving rock song, but the lyric reflected Browne’s uncertainty about his life and where it was headed. “It was an admission,” he said, “that your ideals are changing. You’re still doing what you used to do, but now you do it for a different reason.”

Not every song on Running On Empty is autobiographical. Rosie is one of Browne’s most beautiful songs, and certainly the funniest. It describes a roadie losing a star-struck groupie to a member of the band – of all people, the drummer – and consoling himself through masturbation. “The story was true,” Browne said. “Just not of me.”

It was on Cocaine – a song originally written by bluesman Reverend Gary Davis – where Browne really let the audience in on what happened after the show. The track was recorded in a hotel room in Edwardsville, Illinois, by Browne, his guitarist Danny Kortchmar and his famous sidekick David Lindley, whose fiddle and lap steel had been a key tone on his previous records.

Browne recalled: “Danny and I were snorting a lot of coke while we made that recording, and Lindley was not.”

The track ends with the sound of the drug being chopped out and sniffed. “The commercial for cocaine,” Browne called it.

Running On Empty was a huge hit, reaching No 3 in the US. This was, however, Browne’s last album of the ’70s, and in one sense there was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy in Running On Empty. Browne wouldn’t make another truly great record until I’m Alive in 1993. He also knew that drugs were a problem.

“My whole generation took a lot of drugs,” he said. “And we went from thinking this is absolutely the best thing since nighttime softball to knowing that it was a trap.”

Browne’s first album of the 1980s, Hold Out, was also his first and to date only US No 1. It included the song Of Missing Persons, written in memory of his friend Lowell George, leader of Little Feat.

The following album, 1983’s new wave-influenced Lawyers In Love, also sold well. However, Browne’s popularity subsequently declined with two albums – Lives In The Balance (1986) and World In Motion (1989) – on which he explicitly criticised American foreign policy under the Reagan administration.

Since the mid-’90s, Browne’s working life has slowed to a leisurely pace. In the 33 years since the release of I’m Alive he has made just five albums: Looking East (1996), The Naked Ride Home (2002), Time The Conqueror (2008), Standing In The Breach (2014) and Downhill From Everywhere (2021).

As he said to MOJO: “I don’t know if I’m lazy. I’m just not in much of a hurry.”

He talked in that interview about the thing that connects every song he has ever written. “All these songs remain open questions,” he said. “Even if it comes around to some sort of resolution by the end of a song, it leaves the question intact, because that’s actually how we live. And as long as I’m writing songs, the questions continue.”

Browne also spoke of his pride in what his friend Bruce Springsteen said of his songwriting: “A condensed emotional power in each line of his great songs… the meticulousness of craft, always matched by the deepness of soul.”

As Browne saw it, nobody has ever captured the essence of his music better than The Boss did that night. “It was a great moment for me,” he said. “It was one of the few times that anybody has really been able to say in so many words what it is that I do.”

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

Every week, we devise 10 fiendish and (hopefully) fun questions to test whether you've been paying attention. Or not…

Brain on? Let's go...

We hear a lot about hit songs having long runs at number one, but spare a thought for those that stayed at number two for numerous consecutive weeks but never managed to hit the top spot.

One notable example is Donna Lewis’s I Love You Always Forever, which peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 almost exactly 30 years ago and remained there for nine weeks.

Born in Cardiff, Wales, Lewis was all but unknown before the song became a hit. Remarkably, what you hear on the finished record is pretty much exactly what Lewis recorded in her home studio – but as we’ll discover, things could have worked out very differently.

These days, it’s taken for granted that you can make a release-quality track from start to finish in your bedroom, but in the mid-’90s, most aspiring songwriters were working with far more limited technology, and Lewis, who had spent years trying to get a record deal in England without success, was one of them.

“I was working with my Tascam PortaStudio eight-track recorder and my little Alesis MMT-8 sequencer [an ‘80s multitrack MIDI recorder that enabled DAWless music-making before DAWless music-making was ever talked about],” she said in an interview with Sony Music Publishing earlier this year.

“I probably manifested that song because I was walking around the streets in Birmingham [UK], and I was thinking to myself, ‘I wonder what it's like to write a song where you get on stage and everybody knows it as soon as you start singing it?’ And so I had this ‘feels like’ [opening line from the song] in my head, that little melody, and got to Martin, my husband's office, and said, ‘Give me some paper. I need to just jot this down. You know, I did some manuscript lines, to write the melody, so I didn't forget it, as we didn't have phones in those days.”

There’s definitely something quaint about the idea of someone rushing to notate a musical idea rather than humming it into a phone or mobile recorder, but Lewis clearly knew she was onto something, and was determined not to lose it.

“I think some songs come on the wind and you just go with it,” she says. “I think that probably took a day or so to write because I was obsessed with the single note sound on the Korg M1 [a synth that Lewis had recently bought] so I started sequencing that, and then adding all these atmospheric sounds around it, and then I was ready for the melodic ideas.”

Discussing the song’s lyrics and title, Lewis explained: “Originally, it was called Lydia when I wrote it because at the time I was reading the book For the Love of Lydia by H E Bates – just a simple romantic novel set in the 1920s in the English countryside – and I just thought, ‘Oh, the verses will work well, you know, falling in love for the first time in this descriptive wonderful world.

“There's a line in the book – ‘I love you always forever, near and far closer together’ – and I just thought that was great. So that ended up being the chorus.”

Lewis has said that she had doubts about this main hook: “I remember trying to rewrite the chorus because it sounded too much like a nursery rhyme,” she told Celebrity Parents Magazine in 2023, “but when I did, it didn’t work, so I kept it the same.”

A good idea, as it turns out, but there were other potential changes along the way that could also have scuppered the song’s ultimate success. The demo eventually got into the hands of Jen Stark, who worked in Atlantic Records’ A&R department, which resulted in Lewis being flown out to the US to meet company boss Doug Morris.

“I wasn't that optimistic because I thought, ‘Oh, probably just another rejection,” Lewis admitted to DJ Bowie Jane in a podcast interview last year. “So I sang a bunch of songs for him, and then he said, ‘Congratulations, we'd like to offer you a record deal. And who do you fancy producing – Trevor Horn, Steve Lipson? And it was like, you know, all my heroes. And so it's a bit like a fairytale at that moment.”

Ultimately, neither Horn or Lipson was available, so Lewis ended up working on I Love You Always Forever with Canadian producer Pierre Marchand. After a while, though, she began to feel like the song was going in a direction that she didn’t like, so she ended up back in New York working with another producer, Kevin Killen.

“I’d recorded everything on my Korg M1 keyboard - the brass organ, the sequence, everything – and then when we came to record it [in the studio] he said, ‘Why don't we get Chris Botti [US trumpeter and composer] in to do all the brass section? OK, that sounds great. And we did a bunch of different things with it. But then when I went to meet with Jason Flom [record company exec] after it was finished, he said, ‘What do you think?’ And I said, ‘I do feel it's lost the magic.’”

At this point, it sounds like frustration was starting to creep in in some quarters: “I did have a couple of people saying, 'Oh God, you're being so obsessive, Donna.’ But it had – it had lost the magic, and so he said, 'Do you know what to do?’ And I said ‘I do.’

“So we went back in the studio. We got rid of – it sounds crazy – we got rid of all the real brass. We brought in all the Korg M1 corny brass organ, everything.”

The result is that, other than a re-recorded vocal, the finished version of I Love You Always Forever is pretty much identical to the demo. “I'm glad I stuck to my guns,” says Lewis. “It was hard, you know, because you can so easily say, ‘OK, yeah, you're right,’ but it definitely lost magic, and so we brought the magic back. And thank God, you know, it did what it's done.”

Any emerging artist with a strong fanbase who creates beguiling and innovative music will inevitably find themselves the focus of music supervisors eager to license, or ‘sync’, their songs to film, TV, advertisements or video games.

As most musicians know, sync deals generally utilise tracks from artists’ back catalogues but in some cases, the artist has created such a stir that they may be approached directly to contribute a work-in-progress or new songs specifically for a project.

This is what happened to Lana Del Rey in 2012, when Australian film director, producer and screenwriter Baz Luhrmann approached her to contribute a song for the soundtrack of his forthcoming reimagining of F Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan.

Luhrmann was one of many people who were captivated by Del Rey’s talent. He recognised that her vintage Hollywood aesthetic and melancholic glamour would align seamlessly with the role he had in mind for a song in The Great Gatsby.

The song Del Rey contributed was Young And Beautiful and it would become the signature track for the film.

It is one of the high points of her career and a composition that captures Del Rey at her most haunting and exquisite.

It is now 15 years since Lana Del Rey emerged from seemingly nowhere with the song Video Games, a baroque pop ballad that would become a viral sensation.

Her breakthrough album Born To Die, released in January 2012, cemented her reputation. Hip-hop beats and sweeping cinematic strings converged to create a spacious enigmatic sound while grainy, evocative retro footage in her uploaded home-made videos exuded a powerful mystique.

Given the cinematic nature of Del Rey’s music it was no great surprise when director, producer and screenwriter Baz Luhrmann – one of the most visually-driven, maximalist directors in modern cinema – reached out.

Seemingly, Del Rey wasn’t Luhrmann’s first choice. Speaking at BAFTA’s Life In Pictures event in September 2022, Luhrmann said he approached Prince to write the lead song for the soundtrack.

“Prince had worked on a song for six months,” said Luhrmann, “and then suddenly decided to write a new one and it wasn’t right.”

There were also reportedly some rights complications as it was a “co-owned piece”.

At this point Luhrmann and his team approached Del Rey. Luhrmann believed that her signature melancholic, glamorous, and nostalgic persona made her the perfect artist to capture the opulence of the 1920s Jazz Age and the tragic romance of the character of Daisy Buchanan (played by Mulligan).

As anyone who has read Fitzgerald’s classic novel will know, the story focuses on mysterious, enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby – played in Luhrmann’s film by Leonardo DiCaprio – who is obsessed about reuniting with Buchanan, his former lover.

When Luhrmann and Del Rey first spoke about the project, she was working on her third EP, Paradise, with songwriter and producer Rick Nowels, a longtime collaborator who would go on to work on eight of her albums, from Born To Die (2012) through to Blue Banisters (2021).

“Baz had heard something else that I did and he wanted to know if I could write some ‘memory cues’ for when Daisy was thinking back to how she felt about Gatsby,” said Del Rey in a June 2013 interview with Jessie Jessup on 102.1 The Edge FM.

Del Rey and Nowels had been working on a song for the Paradise EP, which ultimately didn’t make the final tracklist. When she and Luhrmann first met in 2012 she sang him the chorus of this song as an idea for the track for The Great Gatsby.

“And so I had an idea for a phrase ‘Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?’ and it was kind of a long phrase to fit into a song,” continued Del Rey.

Luhrmann was inspired. “I was blessed with this beautiful, if you like, kind of innocent but slightly dark track that Rick Nowels and Lana Del Rey had come up with,” said Luhrmann in a trailer for the film, in which he talks about the gestation of the song.

From the outset, Luhrmann was directly involved with the development of the song, which would become called simply Young And Beautiful.

Luhrmann approached the concept of the song from the internal perspective of the character of Daisy Buchanan, capturing her tragic vulnerability, glamour, and profound insecurity about whether love can survive once youth and beauty have faded.

He wanted the ‘memory cues’ for the character of Daisy to capture these tragic insecurities and her fear of losing love over time.

At first, Luhrmann intended to place the song at the point in the film where Buchanan and Gatsby first meet. But he then realised the song could have a greater impact elsewhere. “It becomes clear that it's actually the major love theme in the moment [that] Gatsby shows Daisy around the castle,” Luhrmann said.

Luhrmann then realised that he would need a different vocal treatment for the song, which involved working directly with Del Rey and Nowels in the studio.

“But I'm in Sydney mixing the movie and Lana’s in Los Angeles with Rick Nowels,” recalled Luhrmann in a trailer for the film. “Thank you for Skype. I mean, really, we were very effectively able to have a Skype session where Lana was in Rick’s studio in LA, I was in my little garret in Sydney, and I sat there looking at Lana.”

Moments from this session are captured in the interview with Luhrmann in the official trailer for the film. “We’re very lucky that this song found the film, and most importantly, that you’re singing it,” Luhrmann tells the broadly smiling Del Rey via Skype as she sits down in front of a laptop 7500 miles away in Nowels’ studio in LA.

Luhrmann recalled that working on the session remotely with Del Rey and Nowels was as intimate as actually being in the studio with her.

“She was tremendously responsive to direction and very good at finessing things,” he said. “And she was a bit nervous at first. She just sat down and she sang. I directed her. Rick was there. You know, I wanted her to improvise.”

From the outset, Luhrmann was involved in shaping and editing the direction of the song, even reportedly amending the lyrics slightly to fit the narrative of his film.

“Abstractions,” he suggests to Del Rey at one point as she prepares to lay down some additional vocals that can be utilised throughout the film, “things that people aren’t gonna get on a record, you know?”

Luhrman referred to these as vocal textures. “[She was] terrific at doing that,” he said. “And then when we go back into the past, they're kind of a bit dreamlike”

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine anyone better suited than Lana Del Rey to write and sing Young And Beautiful. The characters in Del Rey’s songs occupy the same rarefied world as those in Fitzgerald’s iconic novel.

The themes and atmosphere too are strikingly similar – glamour, opulence, nostalgia for an idealised past, romance, reinvention and the inherent flaws within the American dream. The Great Gatsby is also a novel of youth squandered, a theme reflected in Del Rey’s work.

Sonically, Young And Beautiful is a majestic, heartbreaking chamber pop ballad with lush piano, deep sweeping orchestral strings, cinematic grandeur, and vulnerable lyricism about ageing and unconditional love.

It is vast yet spacious and Del Rey’s warm, rich reverb-soaked vocals sound effortlessly warm and rich. “I’ve seen the world, done it all, had my cake now,” she croons on the first verse. “Diamonds, brilliant, and Bel Air now/Hot summer nights, mid-July/When you and I were forever wild.”

Listening to Young And Beautiful now, it sounds like classic, almost cliched Lana Del Rey. But beneath the sweeping orchestration and breathy, echoey vastness, sits a stunningly-crafted song with strong, memorable hooks.

Young And Beautiful would ultimately be reworked by an orchestra and the song returns time and again through the film as a romantic motif for DiCaprio’s and Mulligan’s characters.

Released as a single on 23 April 2013, Young And Beautiful peaked at No 23 in the UK Singles Chart and No 22 in the US Billboard Hot 100. Elsewhere it fared better. It reached Top 10 in eight countries, including No 1 in Russia. No 2 in Greece and No 8 in Italy and Australia.

While not all journalists were taken with the song, the critical response was largely positive. Writer Davis Berry in the Canadian journal National Post concluded that Young And Beautiful picks up where Video Games left off. Berry added that the song’s “obsession with decay and the fleeting nature of the good life certainly resonates”.

It’s worth remembering that Young And Beautiful was written in the same year that her breakthrough album Born To Die was released. For all the viral acclaim, these were very early days for Del Rey, who was still in the ascent. It’s a testament to the song that, almost 15 years on, it remains a standout track in her rich and extensive body of work.

Young And Beautiful often charts highly in retrospective polls of the best Lana Del Rey songs. In a 2022 poll in The Guardian, Young And Beautiful was ranked No 3 in a poll of 20 greatest Del Rey works.

As writer Alexis Petridis put it: “By some distance the best thing on the star-studded soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, Young and Beautiful is Lana Del Rey at her most haunting. Co-opted by rather than commissioned for the film, its saga of fleeting youth and celebrity fits its story perfectly.”

As Ariana Grande prepares to play the final few dates on her Eternal Sunshine tour, fans still have a few chances left to enjoy her undoubted talent before she takes a step back from public life.

Her current show has received rave reviews, and one of the most talked about moments comes when Grande stands alone on her B-stage and asks the audience for quiet as she begins a performance of the title track of her 2024 album, Eternal Sunshine, by live looping her vocals.

Given the scale of the venues she’s playing, it seems like an audacious move, but as longtime Grande watchers will know, she’s been a fan of looping hardware since the start of her career.

In fact, we have her own YouTube channel to prove it: take this clip from 2007 that features a 14-year-old Grande using what appears to be a Boss RC device of some sort to create a live cover of India Arie’s There’s Hope.

Grande was at it again a few years later, in 2013, when she gave us this live looped version of Imogen Heap’s Just For Now using what looks like a Boss RC-50, another guitarist-centric product.

“I know I'm not supposed to use these foot pedals like this but it works,” she wrote, acknowledging that she was using her hands rather than her feet to press them.

Grande did get a tabletop Boss looper eventually, though – the RC-505 MkII – and used it to great effect in the intro of a live version of 2020 single Positions, which she performed for Vevo in 2021. According to Vevo’s Ed Walker, who was interviewed by Business Insider at the time, Grande told the producers of the video that she hadn’t used a looper for some years, but the RC-505 had seemingly reignited her love affair with its concept.

“She got one in the studio and she just used it and then she was like, ‘Right, we're starting the song with this,’” recalled Walker. “It took her back to being in her bedroom.”

When Grande appeared with what looks like an RC-505 on the Eternal Sunshine tour, then, it was far from a surprise.

At the time of writing, only seven performances remain – all at London’s O2 – after which we may not see the star on stage again for quite some time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the ’80s, Aerosmith pulled off one of the most successful comebacks in the entire history of rock ’n’ roll. But the band couldn’t have done it on their own – and one of their key collaborators was songwriter Desmond Child.

Aerosmith’s career was in disarray in the early part of that decade. Drug and alcohol problems had affected the band’s live performances and personal relationships, leading to the departure of guitarists Joe Perry and Brad Whitford.

1982 album Rock In A Hard Place featured two new guitarists, Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay, alongside the band’s three remaining founder members – singer Steven Tyler, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer.

Rock In A Hard Place was the first Aerosmith album to fail to reach the US top 30 since Get Your Wings back in 1974. And even when Perry and Whitford returned for the band’s 1985 reunion album Done With Mirrors, their struggles continued. That album also peaked outside the top 30.

It was in 1986 that Aerosmith’s fortunes turned around – when their classic 1975 track Walk This Way was covered by hip-hop trio Run-DMC with Steven Tyler and Joe Perry as guest stars.

The revamped Walk This Way was a worldwide smash hit, reaching No 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. And in its wake, the post-rehab Aerosmith worked with three songwriters from outside of the band to create the 1987 album Permanent Vacation.

Those three songwriters were Jim Vallance (Bryan Adams’s collaborator-in-chief), Holly Knight (co-author of Pat Benatar’s Love Is A Battlefield and Animotion’s Obsession) and Desmond Child (the so-called ‘hit doctor’ who had worked with Bon Jovi, Cher, Bonnie Tyler and Kiss).

Child ended up co-writing three songs for Permanent Vacation – Heart’s Done Time, Angel and Dude (Looks Like A Lady). And he discusses the latter song in a new interview for Rock & Roll High School with Pete Ganbarg.

As Child recalls it, his introduction to Steven Tyler and Joe Perry happened as they were already working on this song.

He tells Pete Ganbarg: “I walked in, not even a hello, and Steven called me over to this corner where Joe was recording this backwards guitar that had like a boogie woogie kind of ‘na na’. Then Steven started singing ‘Cruisin’ for the ladies.’ And then they stopped and he said, ‘What do you think of that?’ I said, ‘That’s really bad.’ I don’t know why I was so bold that I said this: ‘I don’t think Van Halen would put that on the B-side of their worst record.’

“Steven said, ‘Well, when I first started singing that hook, I was singing ‘Dude looks like a lady.’ And I said, ‘That’s a hit title.’”

Child says that Joe Perry disagreed about the title.

He recalls: “Joe kind of crossed his arms looking at me sideways. And he said, ‘Well, we don’t know what that means.’ And I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I know what that means.’”

And as Tyler then revealed, that title was inspired by a chance meeting with a fellow superstar rock singer.

Tyler said it happened when the newly teetotal band members went to a bar where they would relax drinking soda.

As Child tells the story: “It was an empty bar and there was this long row of bar stools and at the very end was this vision of loveliness. Teased-up platinum hair, ivory skin, all curvy with black nails.

“They were like drawing straws. ‘Who’s going to say hello? Who’s going to go up to her?’ And suddenly she turns around and it’s Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe!

“So that’s when Steven said, ‘Oh, that dude looks like a lady.’ That’s how he came up with it.”

Dude (Looks Like A Lady) was the lead single from Permanent Vacation, released on 22 September 1987. It reached No 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, their first top 20 hit since Walk This Way in 1976. And with that, Aerosmith were very much back in the saddle again.

It might be one of the biggest songs of the century, but Killers frontman Brandon Flowers says that when he and his fellow band members first pitched Mr Brightside to the big record companies when they were trying to get signed, no one was particularly taken with it.

Reflecting on the 2003 song’s beginnings and legacy with BBC Radio 2’s Vernon Kay, Flowers says that it was only after the Killers had been signed to indie label Lizard King in the UK and Mr Brightside became a hit that the majors came knocking. What’s more, they were convinced that something had changed since they first heard it.

“I don't know if people think it's just like ‘lore’, or like something that I'm spinning along the way, but every single major label had said no,” says Flowers. “They said no, and then we started getting this attention over here [in the UK], and they literally would say, ‘When did you record this song again? What producer did you bring in?’ And it's like, ‘No, that's the same song. It's exactly the same recording that you heard before.”

Flowers says that the Killers always knew that they had something with Mr Brightside. In fact, it was the only song of the ones they’d written that they didn’t ditch when they heard the Strokes’ 2001 debut album Is This It and realised that they needed to significantly up their game.

“It's a powerful thing to me,” says Flowers. “I have a real gratitude towards them for the powerhouse that that record is – and the first few records. So good. They just raised the bar so much higher than it was at that moment, and it just changed. It changed everything.”

With Mr Brightside, though, the Killers had a song that they believed could compete in this new musical landscape.

“It was funny because it was in the same vein,” says Flowers. “You know, I knew something was happening. It was like, what? Who is this person that must have some of these same influences that I do? And I felt like that song, it just was reminiscent of some of the things that were starting to happen, and it just felt good. It felt right.”

Of course, Mr Brightside has gone on to eclipse anything that The Strokes have created in terms of its place in the wider public’s affections, but when they were working on it, all the Killers knew was that it was the best thing they’d come up with up to that point.

“We didn't know it was going to become what it's become,” says Flowers. “How can you know that? But I remember the hairs on my arm standing up when we were performing it early on, and so something was different about that one.”

As for the song’s enduring popularity – it appears to have taken up permanent residence in Spotify’s Top 50 Global chart – Flowers is happy to accept that he and co-writer Dave Keuning (Killers guitarist) no longer claim any real ownership of it.

“It's not ours anymore. You know, I'd heard people say that, you know, in interviews... maybe it was like Sting talking about Roxanne or something like that. But now I understand it. It’s almost like it doesn't matter who wrote it – I don't feel like ‘Oh I wrote that’. It just exists."

Brandon Flowers new solo album, Thrasher, is out now.

We’ve heard about the preparation that new drummer Anika Nilles had to put in ahead of Rush’s 50 Something tour, but what about the other two? Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson have both had to get match fit after a decade’s absence from the live stage.

In a fascinating Rolling Stone feature, Lee has been talking about the vocal prep he’s had to put in. The bassist’s high-pitched voice is one of the band’s signature sounds and to access its full range at the age of 72, was a task that took a lot of work, hours of practice and, for the first time in his life, singing lessons.

His tutor was a fellow called Mitch Seekins who’s worked as a vocal coach for over 30 years and was also a Rush fan. Initially Seekins could see Lee was a long way from match fitness. “ It was shocking,” he says of the frontman’s voice before they started working together. “I mean, it was horribly out of shape. The muscles weren’t responding in the top end anymore.”

“I could hear that it was there, he just couldn’t do it yet. He wasn’t sure if he was ever gonna be able to do what he did when he was much younger… But there was no degradation at all, even due to age.”

Part of Seekins task was convincing Lee he could actually get there. “The hardest part of the repair part is the psychological end of the thing. Because it is subconscious, and if you’ve convinced yourself that you can’t do something, well, guess what? You can’t.”

Lee stuck to his task. “ It’s no different than going to the gym and getting strong,” he suggests.  ”You have to get this muscle strong, and that’s what I’ve worked on - and to take a more forensic look at how a voice makes a sound, and apply it.”

Gradually though, his confidence came back and colleagues began to notice. Dave Hislip who has directed the tour’s opening film remembers: “ We were just looking at each other like, ‘Holy crap,' Like, he has turned back time.”

Astonishingly, Lee has managed it and the band have even incorporated songs like the title track to Farewell To Kings, which push both Lee and Lifeson to the limit. ”You kick off the verse, and I have to sing in this fucking stratosphere,” says Lee. “There’s a lot of insecurity that comes with bringing back a song from that long ago… When you’re at this age, people expect you to be a lesser version of yourself, and that’s just not acceptable to me.”

Rod Stewart has had to cancel the remainder of his current US tour after having what has been described as “routine” heart surgery.

The 81-year-old singer has had a coronary stent procedure, in which a small wire tube is inserted into the coronary arteries, which supply blood to the heart, if they have become narrowed or blocked.

The operation is said to have been successful, but on the advice of doctors, Rod is having to take four weeks to recuperate and regain full fitness. This means that dates this week in Des Moines and Kansas City have been shelved, along with a six-date Las Vegas residency.

Writing on Instagram, he said: "I'm already feeling better and very much on the mend. I want to thank the doctors, nurses and everyone who has taken such wonderful care of me.”

"I am deeply disappointed to miss these shows and sorry to let my fans down, but I look forward to getting back on stage and having a good time with you all again soon."

The singer’s US tour hasn’t exactly been a smooth ride. Back in June, he cancelled a show in San Diego, allegedly due to a throat infection. The following day he rather unwisely posted a pic of himself looking cheery and, apparently, in fine fettle on a plane bound for Boston to watch the Scotland v Haiti World Cup game.

Later in that month at a show in West Valley City, Utah, Rod required medical intervention mid-show. Looking out of breath and having to prop himself up, he was seen on some fan footage requiring oxygen between songs and admitted to the audience: “I nearly f***ing fainted there. Would you mind if I sit down for this one?”

All things being equal though, this isn’t the end of the road for ex-Faces singer. He has talked about doing “one more” UK tour in 2027, although no dates have been confirmed as yet and he already has two shows lined up at Red Rocks in Morrison, Colorado in September next year.