Talking Heads frontman David Byrne has discussed his experiences working with Brian Eno, praising the legendary producer's knack for "using the studio as an instrument".

Fielding questions from Guardian readers in a new interview, he detailed how the process of collaborating with the legendary record producer and ex-Roxy Music synth player "changed over the years".

"I felt he was somebody who had a feeling and an understanding for what we were trying to do," Byrne said.

"At first, his goal was to capture what the band was doing. Once that was achieved, he brought ideas such as adding funny sounds, not having the songs all written – so we could improvise – and as he calls it, “using the studio as an instrument”."

He added: "It was fun and we got to things that we’d never have got to if we’d stuck to one way of working. As a producer, he’s very much a cheerleader. Rather than scratching his chin and saying, “I don’t know if this works yet”, he’ll go: “This could be the beginning of something incredible, let’s keep pushing in that direction.”

Eno worked on three landmark Talking Heads albums (More Songs About Buildings and Food, Fear of Music and Remain in Light) and famously helped devise the vocal melody for their classic song Once in a Lifetime.

In the interview, Byrne also commented on his interactions with other inspirational musicians like Ramones and Lou Reed. Of the latter, he said: "Lou had seen us in [New York City music club] CBGB a couple of times and said: “Come back to mine afterwards and we’ll talk about your songs.” We were really excited but nervous and in awe because we were big fans of his solo stuff and the Velvet Underground."

Byrne continued: "He proceeded to eat two quarts of the ice-cream he had in his fridge, but was creative as well. He started playing our song Tentative Decisions on guitar and suggested it could be slowed down, and slowed down to the speed of a Velvet Underground song. Which was pretty cool, but we didn’t slow it down as far as he suggested."

It's also this knack for creative insight that he valued most in Eno, who's widely renowned for the psychological impact he makes in studio environments, rather than pure technical ingenuity.

"Besides being a fifth band member on this record, Brian is a wonderful enthusiast," Byrne once said. "He sells the excitement and potential of working in a new way—the upside of stepping into the unknown, experimenting and seeing what might happen."

Legendary British actor Anthony Hopkins is set to release an album of original compositions titled Life Is A Dream, after signing a record deal with Decca Classics.

The two-time Academy Award winner for Best Actor has been playing piano since the age of four and regularly composed music for local drama productions as a teenager. Now aged 88, the Welsh film legend is finally ramping his musical ambitions up a notch.

Life Is A Dream consists of tracks from across six decades of original composing, with the recordings conducted by Gustavo Dudamel and performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Songs include Bracken Road, which was part of the composition 1947: Suite for Solo Piano and Orchestra, and My Fatherland, a nod to the traditional Welsh melodies that Hopkins grew up with in his hometown of Margam, Port Talbot.

While the legendary film star has never developed a musical project of this scope before, it's not the first time he has released his own compositions.

Back in 1986, his single Distant Star reached No. 75 in the UK singles chart, while in 2012, he released an album of classical music called Composer, performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.

“Music was my first desire, my first wish,” Hopkins said in a statement. “I’ve been composing music all my life. Some of these pieces have lived with me for decades and I still find myself returning to them.”

He added: "It has been a true privilege to collaborate with the distinguished Philharmonia Orchestra and the virtuoso soloists, cellist Gregorio Nieto and classical pianist Sergio Tiempo.

"My deepest gratitude and respect go to Maestro Gustavo Dudamel, whose artistry is an integral part of this musical journey. With the graceful precision of his baton, he transformed each note with profound and indelible meaning, creating a pictorial landscape that invites the listener to feel and imagine something uniquely personal.”

The Dutch DJ Franky Rizardo has withdrawn from the scheduled release of his remix of Everything But The Girl's Missing over concerns about the track's origins.

This came after the American DJ and producer John Summit claimed on X that Pete Tong had originally promised to release his version of the track, before repurposing that track and creating a remix with Rizardo instead.

Summit wrote: "Hey @petetong thanks for promising to release my missing remix with u (while doing nothing in terms of production) then jacking my remix to release with franky rizardo. release class act you are. to think i actually looked up to u too."

The Dutch artist responded by posting his own statement on X, which read: "After learning more today about the background surrounding this release,

"I’ve come to the conclusion that it no longer feels right for me to be part of it. This isn’t about taking sides or blaming anyone - it’s simply the decision that feels right to me."

He continued: "I truly wish all parties involved nothing but the best, and I hope everything gets resolved. I believe everyone acted with the best intentions, but it no longer feels like the right way for me to release my remix."

While he's hardly a volatile character, this isn't the first time Pete Tong has been at loggerheads with other artists over his remixes. In 2017, Massive Attack criticised the well-known radio DJ for covering their seminal single ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ for his ‘Ibiza Classics’ album without their permission. (NME)

"Thanks for covering one of our songs on your nostalgia nightmare roadshow. I don’t recollect you getting in touch to see if we would mind," they said.

"If you do mean to carry on coining it, why don’t you divide your nightly profit by the number of songs you murder in your set, and hand the total of that one song over to [charity] UNHCR.. It would be the least you could do."

Tong never responded to Massive Attack's criticism, and he's yet to comment on Rizardo's withdrawal from the remix.

"For now, it’ll remain a set-only track," Rizardo concluded. "At the end of the day, staying true to my values matters more to me than releasing a record."

Ahead of the release of his new album The Confuser (July 24), cult psychedelic rocker Robyn Hitchcock has spoken at length about the incredible musicians that have inspired him over his six decades in rock music.

In an interview with Stewart Lee for The Guardian, he reflected on the experience of coming of age in 1967 when Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd, psychedelic-era The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and acid-folk pioneers the Incredible String Band were all in their pomp.

"Although my prime influence was Bob Dylan, and Dylan showed me what I wanted to be, Syd Barrett showed me how I could be it," he said. "And I actually wound up sounding like John Lennon. To me, the Beatles are at the beginning and the end of everything. But my role has always just been to carry on a certain kind of music, which appeared in 66 and 67."

This remains the case on Hitchcock's new record The Confuser, which opens with 'I Am This Thing', a track that contains idiosyncratic lines like "I owe a lot to a dead man's cock / Tick-tock, I love to rock… I come at a price like egg fried rice / Every Sunday morning and it's ever so nice".

Across the project, there are strong traces of Barrett's lyricism, and of the humour that the Beatles continually revelled in. According to the 73-year-old, the focus remains on "creating a version of my existence [rather] than actually showing people the real Robyn." He suggests that across his 20+ studio albums with the Soft Boys, the Egyptians, the Venus 3 and as a solo artist, this has been a consistent thread.

At times, the tendency to hide behind his music led to moments of meanness, for example "writing a nasty song about his elderly neighbours.

"I was a self-centred, entitled little horror and arguably I still am," he says. "I've just learned to mask it more, and also I've learned to make a living out of it."

"I didn't invent this field of music, but I've perpetuated it," Hitchcock continued. "I wanted to maintain a tradition and do new work in that tradition. But the guys I worship were innovators. I'm the opposite. I'm sweeping up after them. It's like, 'Oh God, here comes Hitchcock with the broom.'"

Speaking on how he's often avoided major fame during his six decades in rock music, he added: "I always manage to dodge the extreme limelight. You know, in some ways I've avoided both success and failure. It's fantastic."

U2 have teased the release of their first new album in nine years by dropping a fresh single titled Street of Dreams.

The track's official music video, produced by Jacknife Lee and uploaded to YouTube on July 7, sees the band performing atop a bus in the tight streets of Plaza Santo Domingo, Mexico City, before a sudden thunderstorm causes a generator to crash and forces them to relocate to a local's balcony.

U2's strong Mexican fanbase — which has its roots in the release of the 1987 album The Joshua Tree and the huge stadium shows which followed — play a central role in the video, while Bono plays up to the crowd with Spanish-language lines like: "La calle, calle de los sueños" ("The street, the street of dreams").

Another key element of the new U2 release is the reappearance of Larry Mullen Jr on drums. The band member temporarily left the group in 2023 and spent three and a half years recovering from major neck and back operations before making his return for 'Street of Dreams'. The most-liked comment below the YouTube music video reads: "Great to see Larry behind the kit again".

U2's new album doesn't yet have a release date, but Bono recently confirmed: "We are in the studio, still working towards a noisy, messy, 'unreasonably colour xerox album to play LIVE… which is where U2 lives."

This news came after the release of the six-track EP Days of Ash in February. The project focused on telling the stories of people whose lives were tragically cut short by conflict, from Palestinian dad and No Other Land documentary consultant Awdah Hathaleen to the Iranian schoolgirl Sarina Esmailzadeh.

According to Bono, "These EP tracks couldn’t wait; these songs were impatient to be out in the world. The songs on Days of Ash are very different in mood and theme to the ones we’re going to put on our album later in the year."

The Beach Boys were midway through their 1966 tour of Japan and Hawaii when their founder, leader and sonic visionary Brian Wilson began the writing sessions that would yield God Only Knows, a majestic and achingly beautiful paean to love that Paul McCartney has reportedly called the greatest song ever written.

It was January 1966 and Wilson’s growing fear of flying had prompted him to stay at home in Los Angeles and send Glen Campbell out on tour in his place. From January to April 1966, Wilson and guest lyricist Tony Asher worked on the album that would become Pet Sounds, the first pop album conceived as one coherent work of art.

God Only Knows would become a crowning creative achievement of the seminal album Pet Sounds, its plaintive loneliness elevated by Carl Wilson’s wonderfully emotive vocal. It is a song that exists entirely in its own space, a masterpiece that remains as beautiful and awe-inspiring as the day it was released.

By mid-1965, Brian Wilson had tired of writing songs about surfboards, hot rods and girls, and decided it was time to start writing songs for “geeks” such as himself. Freed up from touring commitments, he had time to pursue his creative visions.

Wilson and his wife Marilyn had moved into their new home at 1448 Laurel Way in Los Angeles and it was here that Wilson experienced a rush of creativity. In January, 1966, he painstakingly planned an album fuelled by the idea of “making of music for people on a spiritual level”, as he said in Keith Badman’s 2004 book The Beach Boys: The Definitive Diary Of America’s Greatest Band, On Stage And In The Studio.

Wilson was a creative colossus; writing, arranging and producing the songs. But he needed help with lyrics. In late 1965 he was at a Hollywood party when he was introduced to Tony Asher, an advertising executive who had written jingles for companies such as Mattel and Max Factor. The two men hit it off and Asher visited Wilson to start work on the lyrics for Pet Sounds. They began by discussing Wilson’s interests in spiritual literature and the nature of love.

Wilson played Asher the pieces of music he had written for Pet Sounds and Asher wrote lyrics to fit the themes that Wilson had in mind. But when they got to God Only Knows, an argument began. Wilson was adamant that the opening line Asher had written “I may not always love you” was far too negative for a love song. Asher held his ground.

“I liked that twist, and fought to start the song that way,” said Asher in Charles Granata’s 2003 book, Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson And The Making Of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. “Working with Brian, I didn't have a whole lot of fighting to do, but I was certainly willing to fight to the end for that.”

Wilson’s second concern was the use of ‘God’ in the title. In the deeply religious America of the mid-'60s, using the ‘G’ word in a pop song was tantamount to blasphemy.

Asher convinced Wilson that it was spiritual and innovative, attributes that they were aiming for. But Wilson was proved right. When the song was released, God Only Knows was flipped with its B-side Wouldn’t It Be Nice after radio stations and record stores objected on the grounds it would cause widespread offence.

Given the complexity of God Only Knows, its actual creation was staggeringly quick. “I wrote God Only Knows in 45 minutes,” Wilson told Adrian Deevoy of The Guardian in 2015. “Me and Tony Asher”. But recording the song would take a great deal longer.

The Pet Sounds album was recorded between 18 January and 13 April 1966, with Wilson producing and Chuck Blitz engineering. God Only Knows was one of the last songs to be recorded and instrumental tracking began at 12:30am on 10 March, 1966. The location was Studio 3 at United Western Recorders, located at 6,000 Sunset Boulevard.

Twenty musicians were crammed into Studio 3 and many were members of the Wrecking Crew, the gifted and hip collective of LA session musicians who played on hundreds of Top 40 hits in the '60s and '70s.

Wrecking Crew regulars that day included drummer Hal Blaine, drummer Jim Gordon on percussion and renowned bassist Carol Kaye, who on this session played 12-string guitar. Carl Wilson also played 12-string that day. The bass part was played on upright bass by Lyle Ritz alongside a punchier-sounding electric bass guitar, played by Ray Pohlman.

Brian Wilson’s talent for achieving the exact sound he wanted shines through on the recording. The choice of French horn on the iconic opening motif, against Don Randi’s percussive piano chords, is inspired.

To his credit, Wilson was completely open to collaborative suggestions from the musicians on the studio floor, as is evident from audio clips of the session below from Behind The Sounds.

Distinguishing features of the arrangement include an echo-laden "clip-clop" percussion part, played by Jim Gordon on the bottom of two plastic orange cups, and Hal Blaine playing sleigh bells on every beat. The song’s iconic French horn part was played by Alan Robinson of the 20th Century Fox orchestra, who one year earlier played on the soundtrack of The Sound Of Music.

From the outset of the session, Brian Wilson was intensely focused. Three Dog Night singer Danny Hutton was at the session and marvelled at Wilson’s production skills. “[Brian] would hear something wrong, and bam 'One more time',” recalled Hutton in the 1997 Pet Sounds Sessions booklet. “I just sat there and didn't say a word. I had been in sessions where I thought to myself, they should do this and that. Not this time. I just shut up. What could I add?”

Wilson and the musicians worked fast, but the real stumbling block was the instrumental section. This is where the open collaboration between producer and musicians really bore fruit, as the audio from the session on Behind The Sounds series illustrates.

The musicians struggled to play the section’s accents and pushes in the way that Wilson wanted. It was pianist Don Randi who found a solution: “Let’s try when we get to that part, instead of playing the quarter note full, make it like a staccato note ‘bop, bop…” he suggested. It was a spontaneous suggestion from Randi that in an instant, brought cohesion.

Wilson then focused on the drums in the middle section. “Try a tom-tom one…let me hear it right now,” Wilson told drummer Hal Blaine. But it’s not the sound Wilson hears in his head. "Do a snare one," he suggested. "That’s it. Okay, let’s go".

And so it goes on. Wilson and the musicians worked fast and hard. Much of the talkback from the studio floor was swamped in echo, a result of the huge Phil Spector Wall of Sound ambience that Wilson so admired.

"Alright, Take 20' Wilson said later in the session. “One good strong take and we’ve got it… let’s play it strong, let’s go, move in closer flutes for the fade out."

And that as it turned out, was the take. The session ended at 4:30 a.m. It had taken just four hours to create a masterpiece.

Then it was time for the vocals. The first vocal overdubs were recorded later that day at Columbia Studios, with Brian singing lead. On 11 April, the band returned to Columbia but by then, Brian had decided that brother Carl Wilson should sing the lead vocal. “I gave the song to Carl because I was looking for a tenderness and a sweetness which I knew Carl had in himself as well as in his voice. He brought dignity to the song.”

Carl Wilson recalled the instructions he received from his brother, in Charles L Granata’s 2003 book Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Brian Wilson And The Making Of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, “[He said] ‘Don't do anything with it. Just sing it real straight. No effort. Take a breath. Let it go easy’.”

It was an inspired decision. There is a real purity and beauty to Carl’s voice which elevates the song to real emotional heights.

It was then down to Brian and Bruce Johnston to lay down the harmonies. “At the end of the session, Carl was really fried,” recalled Johnston in Charles L Granata’s book. “And he went home... there were just [me and Brian]. So in the fade, he's singing two of the three parts. He sang the top and the bottom part and I sang in the middle.”

God Only Knows was the opening track on side two of Pet Sounds, which was released on 14 May, 1966. Two months later, on 18 July 1966, the song was released as a single with Wouldn’t It Be Nice, relegated to the B-side simply due to fears over using the word ‘God’.

Much has been written by musicologists and music theorists who have sought to define what makes God Only Knows so compelling. While it can be diverting reading, nothing strips away the majestic brilliance of a song faster than dry academic analysis of its structural merits.

But broadly, one of the song’s major melodic strengths is that it seems to be in two keys at the same time – E major and A major. “It’s not really in any one key,” Wilson is quoted as saying in Paul Zolla's 2016 book. “It’s a strange song. That’s just the way it was written. … It’s the only song I’ve ever written that’s not in a definite key, and I’ve written hundreds of songs.”

The moving percussive bass part plays a strong role in elevating the song’s emotional core. God Only Knows builds and ascends, and it keeps promising and delivering more. Hope, yearning, sadness, joy, love and longing are among the powerful emotions it evokes.

One person who was deeply affected by the song was Paul McCartney. In 2002, at a benefit concert in Los Angeles, McCartney was invited to perform the song live with Brian Wilson. “I’ve actually performed it with him, and I’m afraid to say that during the soundcheck, I broke down,” recalled McCartney of the night. “It was just too much to stand there singing this song that does my head in and to stand there singing it with Brian.”

In an interview with BBC Radio 1 in 2007 McCartney spoke again about his admiration for the song: “God Only Knows is one of the few songs that reduces me to tears every time I hear it. It’s really just a love song, but it’s brilliantly done. It shows the genius of Brian”.

• Interview: Brian Wilson on Beach Boys hits, The Beatles, bass playing and more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

50 years on from its release, the Ramones' self-titled debut album will be commemorated with a special Los Angeles show featuring a host of rock music legends, including Billie Joe Armstrong and former band member CJ Ramone.

Taking place on August 30th, 2026, at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, The Official Ramones Anniversary Tribute will see Cretin Family — a supergroup featuring Tim Armstrong (Rancid), Billie Joe Armstrong (Green Day), Travis Barker (Blink-182) and CJ Ramone (Ramones), plus special guests — perform a set of Ramones tracks live.

The concert will be accompanied by a DJ set from artist-activist Shepard Fairey and multiple screenings, including a showcase of John Travolta's new film Propeller One-Way Night Coach (Travolta is also scheduled to host the event).

"From the moment I first heard the Ramones, music was never the same," said Tim Armstrong. "They are my favourite band of all time! I can't wait to play those great and perfect Ramones songs with my friends CJ, Travis and Billie."

Billie Joe Armstrong added: "The spirit of the Ramones is alive in every backyard punk show, punk club and festival.

"Generation after generation of cretins and weirdos become Ramones lovers. Kids are influenced by the Ramones and they don't even know it yet."

The iconic punk band formed in New York in 1974 and helped establish punk music in the United States, creating a fuzzy, energetic sound that provided huge inspiration to British groups like The Clash and Sex Pistols.

While they went on to release 14 studio albums and toured constantly before disbanding in 1996, the Ramones' debut is still widely considered their greatest achievement.

The record was recently ranked Number One in Rolling Stone's list of the Greatest Punk Albums of All Time, a testament to its enduring legacy.

Ahead of August's show, a limited edition, first-time picture disc pressing of Ramones will be released (July 17th). Half a century on from their seminal eponymous album, they continue to have a huge influence on global music culture.

"The Ramones are the blueprint," said Travis Barker. "Punk rock wouldn't be what it is today without them."

Morrissey has launched a rant against the BBC, claiming that the broadcaster is blacklisting his single Notre-Dame and insisting that its commitment to diversity "is a lie".

In a post on his website Morrissey Central, the singer-songwriter claimed the track had received "no airplay" despite it currently sitting at Number 6 in the UK singles chart.

He wrote: "The public wants to hear the song, but the BBC will not play it even though their stations are a public service duty-bound to reflect public taste. Obviously not! If the song is suspected of independent thought - God forbid! it is not played, therefore, under these circumstances, any station that pledges allegiance to diversity is lying."

The song in question, released in February, amplifies a conspiracy theory based around the 2019 Notre-Dame cathedral fire, suggesting that the incident was arson rather than an accident (no evidence of arson has been found, according to BBC reports). The track includes lyrics like: "Notre-Dame, we will not be silent / Before investigations / They said, 'There's nothing to see here'".

This conspiratorial tone is hardly a surprise given the singer's lurch toward the populist right in recent decades. For years, he has consistently flirted with controversial figures and espoused troubling views, including backing the far-right party For Britain on his website (Morrissey Central).

"When people say 'Diversity is our strength' they fail to mention how their notion of 'diversity' entails very strict Third Reich regulations and punishments," his recent statement on the song Notre-Dame continued. "I wonder why people can't simply be honest about these things?"

Morrissey's single peaking at Number 6 is largely down to physical sales following the recent release of a deluxe vinyl of the track. The Singles Sales Chart is based on the purchases of vinyl, CDs, and digital downloads, but when it comes to the Official Singles Chart, which also factors in streaming, Notre-Dame isn't even in the Top 100. Perhaps this is a sign of the former Smiths frontman's fading relevance.

Pop superstar Taylor Swift has finally won a copyright lawsuit over her song lyrics, after beating claims labelled "absurd" by her legal team.

Self-published poet Kimberley Marasco first brought a case against Swift in 2024, alleging that the singer-songwriter had stolen lines and taken inspiration from her poems to help create over a dozen songs on albums such as The Tortured Poets Department, Midnights, Evermore, and Folklore.

However, on Monday 6 July, Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case, ruling that "common observations", "ubiquitous metaphors" and vague references to gaslighting were the only common threads between the two artists' work (NME).

"The allegedly infringed material — basic ideas, themes, metaphors, isolated words, and short phrases — is not protected expression and cannot be infringed," said the Judge.

Swift's attorney Douglas Baldridge responded: "This is plaintiff's second frivolous and harassing lawsuit" against the artist. He claimed that the case against her was "absurd and legally baseless."

This isn't the first time Swift has been embroiled in an intense copyright battle. Following the release of the popstar's album, The Life of a Showgirl last year, the Las Vegas-based performer Maren Flagg claimed that the branding around the record infringed on her own registered trademark 'Confessions of a Showgirl'.

And back in 2023, a federal judge dismissed with prejudice a separate case filed by the Mississippi poet Teresa La Dart, who alleged that Swift's 2019 album Lover had copied the title, colour scheme and format of a self-published poetry collection by the same name (Pitchfork). Swift has repeatedly faced these types of allegations and come out on top.

The news of the case's dismissal comes just days after Swift tied the knot with American football player Travis Kelce, whom she's dated since 2023. The wedding took place at Madison Square Garden on July 3, 2026, and included performances from the likes of Ed Sheeran, Selena Gomez and the Haim sisters.

With this legal win, Swift has even more to celebrate. That being said, Marasco has pledged to appeal the decision. This may not be the last we hear of it.

Having previously claimed that Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter “couldn’t have got arrested” back in his ‘80s pop heyday, producer and songwriter Mike Stock has been fleshing out his argument in an interview with MusicRadar.

Stock, of course, was one third of crack music production outfit Stock Aitken Waterman, who had hits with Kylie Minogue, Rick Astley and many, many more. As he discusses how the industry has changed in the almost 40 years since then, though, it’s clear that Stock doesn’t believe that the current streaming-centric landscape is a hotbed for great pop music...

The music business has changed immeasurably since your hits started in the ‘80s. Do you think that now – living in a world of streaming – we’re in a better or worse place for making, finding and enjoying music?

“Well, you could ask this question first: How many artists in the last 10 to 20 years have achieved iconic status? That’s artists that are going to be around in 20 years. Is Taylor Swift that person? Is Ed Sheeran?

“The number of people achieving that ‘superstar’ status is always the same as it ever was – only one or two in any generation. And to be number one on the charts now is to be invisible. If you're a fan you’ll know if your artist is in the charts, but there's nothing now that we can focus on and so there’s nothing to measure your success against.

“For example, you see Harry Styles, and you say, ‘What a fantastic video. What a brilliant blah blah blah’, and it’s an interesting sound, it’s a bit art house, he's a bit this, he's a bit that, he's very… Harry Stylish. That's what he is. But that's all that he is. It's very superficial.”

“And I don't like Taylor Swift as an artist, I don't get that. I want to hear something that’s got the passion in it that deserves the love from the audience. That's what I want to hear, and I don't know many of those now. I can't remember the last time I heard one.”

Do you think that streaming has taken the magic out of making and discovering music?

“Back in the day, when you bought a record, you made an effort. First of all you would show your love for the artist by getting on a bus and going down to Woolworths and paying three quid for it. But that's an effort and who wants to do that nowadays?

“But we used to make records knowing that that's what somebody was going to have to do, and because of that we put love and passion into it, thinking that we want to make this exciting. We want you to love it like we love it. But these days… Who cares if the music just goes on Spotify?

“Most people use Spotify like it's a radio. They pick a list, they start it playing and go about the housework, or whatever. They don't lean forward. They're not going on to Spotify and typing, ‘I want this song’, playing it, and then being happy. They just lean back, put the thing on and let it run. So that means the passion for the music is less from the user, and that bounces back on the maker of the music, who's not that bothered either. Because if you don't have to work up any passion or thought or effort, then neither will I.

“Like, I hated the name ‘hit factory’ [used to describe Stock Aitken Waterman’s output]. I thought it made us sound like a sausage factory – that we were just churning them out – and that couldn't be further from the truth, because we always put the time and the hours and the effort in.”

Crazy Shot In The Dark by The Fizz and the long-awaited, self-titled debut album from Suzette Charles are out now.

Some of Coldplay’s rarest recordings are going up for auction, including their first stab at a James Bond theme.

They’re being sold by the producer Chris Allison, who worked with the band in their early days. They include the master tapes for their first Parlophone release, the Blue Room EP, which came out in autumn 1999, and alternate versions of some of the tracks that ended up on their debut album, Parachutes, including Shiver and We Never Change.

And yes: one of those tracks is Coldplay’s first attempt to write a James Bond theme – The World Is Not Enough. At the time (1999) they were just a group of hopefuls freshly signed to EMI and, not surprisingly, the gig went to a more established name: Garbage.

It seems that the band have tried to write a Bond theme several times. In a 2021 interview with NME, Chris Martin admitted “We kept trying to write one for 20 years, but never submitted them. We have Bond themes for about five movies, but they’re not very good, to be honest.”

“Also I don’t know if we’re spiritually on the same trip as James. As much as I like the films, I don’t know if us singing would do it for him. He’d be like, ‘That’s not what I’m into at all, fellas. I like guns and shit. All this hippie stuff just isn’t going to work’.”

Among the other Coldplay-related material Allison is auctioning is an early cassette, simply titled ‘Coldplay tracks’, which includes an early version of Shiver and a brilliantly-titled number called, er, Ode To Deodorant. There are also promo copies of The Blue Room on vinyl and CD, which can fetch up to three figure sums on Discogs.

Other items going under the hammer include rarities from other bands that Allison has recorded down the years, including The Beta Band and the Wedding Present. The producer is donating a portion of the proceeds from the auction to the music education initiative Restore the Music.

Before they reached Wichita, there was Phoenix. When you think of Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell collaborations, Wichita Lineman and its poignant imagery immediately leap to mind, but the hit Webb fashioned for Campbell prior to that is no less moving.

You’re probably familiar with the song. The lyrics tell the tale of a man who has left his lover and is driving eastwards across the US. The narrator wonders what his ex will be doing by the time he hits the various cities along the way.

It contains a number of heart-wrenching details (the note, the unanswered lunchtime phone call) that intrigue the listener – just what happened in their relationship? Why is it that leaving is such a wrench for him? And what happened next?

Webb penned the song while he was a staff writer at Motown. Signed at just 17, he’d been asked to provide a hit for the actor/ singer Paul Petersen, who was signed to the label. In a 2011 interview with Song Facts, Webb remembered: “They came to me and said, ‘We need a song for Paul Petersen.’ And I wrote By the Time I Get to Phoenix. And they didn't like it for him.

"They didn't like it for anybody. They ended up cutting it with a couple of different people and not really being happy with it. And when I left the company they gave me the song and said, ‘You can take this one with you.’ And I said, ‘Okay, I will. I like it.’ They liked verses and choruses there. Verses and big choruses. And By the Time I Get to Phoenix is three verses, very simple, very direct storyline.”

The lyrics came from a place of real pain. Webb had broken up with his girlfriend of the time. “I never even got as far as Riverside,” he said in a 2007 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “But I lost her. She married some other guy. We’re still friends. Her name is Susan Ronstadt” (a cousin to singer Linda Ronstadt.)

Many have commented on the physical impossibility of the narrator driving so quickly across the country.

“In fact, a guy approached me one night after a concert, and he had a map, and he had all the times, and he had a stopwatch,” Webb told NPR in 2010. “And he showed me how it was impossible for me to drive from LA to Phoenix, and then how far it was to Albuquerque and then - in short, he told me, 'This song is impossible.' And so it is. It's a kind of fantasy about something I wish I would have done, and it sort of takes place in a twilight zone of reality.”

Webb reflected that part of its eventual success lay in its lyrical economy. “I think that the appeal of the song lies in its sort of succinct tale - its beginning, middle and end - and the fact that it sort of has an O. Henry-esque twist at the end, which consists merely of the guy saying, 'She didn't really think that I would go,' but he did. And, in fact, I didn't. I didn't go. I stayed for more punishment."

Having left Motown armed with the song, Webb gave it to Tony Martin, a popular crooner of the old skool pre-rock n’ roll era. He recorded a version with a florid orchestral arrangement, but for one reason or another it never came out.

Next it landed on the lap of the pop/ soul singer Johnny Rivers, who cut a version in 1965. In the end, Rivers decided to not to release the record and decided to pass it on to a talented guitarist and singer who had yet to find his niche within the industry: a well-regarded session musician called Glen Campbell.

Campbell at the time was best known as a member of the so-called Wrecking Crew, an informal group of sessioners who invariably ended up playing on the many pop hits that were made in the LA studios.

He’d played guitar on Pet Sounds and indeed had become more involved with the Beach Boys – he’d replaced Brian Wilson in the touring line-up of the band during 1964-65, before being replaced himself by Bruce Johnston.

But Campbell really hankered after a proper solo career. He’d signed to Capitol as a solo artist in 1962 but only enjoyed sporadic minor hits. Even the gift of a Brian Wilson-penned A-side Guess I’m Dumb hadn’t led to an upturn in his fortunes.

Campbell fitted the song in a way Martin and Rivers did not. A tall, stolid individual who seemed to evoke the stoic American everyman, Campbell was perfect for Phoenix, a song where so much is left unsaid for the listener to puzzle over. His version is brilliantly restrained but still full of emotion.

There’s tenderness and resignation in his voice. His delivery wins you over to the narrator’s side of this breakup – it really sounds as if this is something he had to do, painful as it may have been for them both.

Campbell’s previous single Gentle On My Mind had been a modest hit in the summer of 1967, reaching Number 62 on Billboard. Released as the follow-up that autumn, Phoenix reached Number 26, Campbell’s biggest success to date. It won him a Grammy the following year for Best Male Vocal Performance. For both him and Jimmy Webb, it represented a breakthrough. Ahead lay Wichita Lineman, Galveston and, for Campbell, mainstream fame.

The version that Campbell recorded was a succinct two minutes forty. But the following year came a cover that elongated Webb’s original piece into a piece of groundbreaking aural cinema.

Isaac Hayes’s take on By The Time I Get To Phoenix stretched out for nearly 19 minutes, including an eight-minute spoken-word introduction that gives a shout-out to Webb (“one of the great young songwriters of today”) and takes up a whole side of his 1969 album Hot Buttered Soul.

If Campbell’s version is an exercise in restraint, Hayes spills his soul out for all to witness. It’s a beautiful example of how an imaginative artist can remould something fresh out of existing material.

In an NPR interview, Hayes explained how he got the idea: “There's a local club in Memphis, primarily black, called The Tiki Club. One day there I heard this song by Glen Campbell - By the Time I Get to Phoenix. I thought, 'Wow, this song is great, this man must really love this woman.' I ran down to the studio and told them about the song, and they said 'yeah, yeah.' They didn't feel what I felt, I thought maybe they weren't getting it.”

“The Bar-Kays were playing the Tiki Club a few days later, so I told them to learn the song and that I would sit in. I told them to keep cycling the first chord, and I started talking, just telling the story about what could have happened to cause this man to leave. Halfway through the song, conversations started to subside, and by the time I finished the song, there wasn't a dry eye in the house."

There have been other covers of Phoenix – Sinatra had a go at it and indeed once described it as “the greatest torch song ever written”. Nick Cave also covered it on his 1986 album Kicking Against The Pricks. But really Campbell’s and Hayes’ are the only two worth talking about.

They show that a song only truly becomes great once it meets the right interpreter, someone who can make you believe they really have lived the heartache of the lyrics.

1974 saw the release of debut albums by three young rock bands that went on to become legendary.

On their self-titled album, Canadian power trio Rush channeled Led Zeppelin on riff-driven tracks such as Finding My Way and Working Man.

British band Judas Priest played heavy rock – not yet full-blown heavy metal – on their cheekily-titled album Rocka Rolla.

And on another self-titled debut, Kiss, face-painted rock warriors from New York City, combined rock ’n’ roll swagger with British Invasion-inspired pop smarts.

The Kiss album featured songs that would live on in the band’s live set for decades until the final End Of The Road tour in 2023 – dynamic rock anthems such as Deuce, Cold Gin and Black Diamond.

It is one of rock’s classic debuts.

And in the early 2000s, Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, the leading figures and main songwriters in Kiss, were asked to name the debut albums they consider to be the greatest of all time.

Inevitably, as two committed Anglophiles, they both looked across the Atlantic.

Simmons picked The Beatles’ US album Meet The Beatles! – a counterpart to the UK LP With The Beatles (which was the band’s second album released in their homeland).

Among the classic songs on Meet The Beatles! are I Want To Hold Your Hand, the band’s first US No 1, I Saw Her Standing There and All My Loving.

The cover of Meet The Beatles! proclaimed it “the first album by England’s phenomenal pop combo”. In fact, its release on 20 January 1964 came 10 days after the release of the group’s US debut proper Introducing… The Beatles.

However, due to the message on the cover of Meet The Beatles!, Simmons considered it their debut, and stated: “Here, for the first time, was a band that played its own instruments. There was no backing band. They wrote their own songs, they sang all the parts. And everybody in the band was a star.”

He continued: “This album was sort of a hybrid of anything and everything that came before it. Paul McCartney could do the Little Richard stuff and Lennon could do the Chuck Berry stuff.

“The Beatles combined of all the great things in rock ‘n’ roll, from Motown to country to rhythm-and-blues to soul, and they put it together in a way that had never been done before.

“Today, still, they’re the hardest band to replicate. It’s easy to be the Stones – you have a singer, a guitar player, and so on. It’s tough as nails to be The Beatles. You not only have to play drums, you also have to sing. You play lead guitar and you gotta sing and write songs.”

Simmons concluded: “The Beatles is the pre-eminent, iconic rock band: the template for what all rock bands, in my opinion, should aspire to.”

Paul Stanley is also a Beatles fanatic, but chose a debut album from 1969 by a British band of a heavier nature.

“The first Led Zeppelin album was an amalgamation of American blues and British sensibilities,” Stanley said. “It took a music form that had already existed and created something new.

“Nobody was singing like Robert Plant before he was. Sure, you had Terry Reid, you had Steve Marriott, you had people out there, but Robert just took it to a whole new place.

“And Jimmy Page, besides being a fiery guitar player, is a brilliant arranger.”

Stanley declared: “To me, Zeppelin was the equivalent of great classical music – it’s Beethoven, it’s Mahler, it’s bombast! And yet they had incredible subtleties and variety in what they did.

“It certainly wasn’t – to coin a phrase – heavy metal. To call Zeppelin heavy metal is at the very least absurd and at worst a sin.

“Zeppelin covered more ground than most bands could ever hope to. And I’d say that first album is the defining album. The first time I heard Good Times Bad Times on the radio, my jaw just dropped!”

Spare a thought for Lizzo. Her fifth album, Bitch, only came out three weeks ago and it’s already been branded a flop, and the subject of a feature in Rolling Stone that ponders what exactly went wrong?

The numbers don’t lie. Bitch only sold 2,649 copies in its first week and racked up just under 2.7 million streams. The next week saw a dramatic falling off – just 650 units and 900,000 streams. Whereas her previous album, 2022’s Special, debuted at Number Two on Billboard, Bitch has missed the chart entirely.

It’s a similar story in the UK. None of Bitch’s singles have reached the Top 100. Neither has the album.

Speaking to the Swiftologist Proto Pop podcast about the album's disappointing numbers, Lizzo said: “I was so excited, 'cause I met my pre-saves goal, and then it dropped, and I was like, ‘Oh, OK, this isn't what I thought it would be. I didn't think it would be crazy, but I also didn't think it would be this. And I think that there was 24 hours of my life where I based my success and my worth on a number. And I think that was soul-crushing.”

Rolling Stone doesn’t pinpoint a single reason for this spectacular descent in popularity, but one anonymous label executive suggests she never really had a core fanbase. "She was a very song-driven, radio-hits-driven artist who lacked a core fanbase, and that’s what you need today for career longevity,” is their thinking.

Lizzo herself said in a post on Twitter/X that she thinks it might be the decline in popularity of radio in the US. “The industry changed so much in the last 3 yrs streaming replaced radio & I was a radio darling. That’s how my fans discovered my music.”

Industry pundit Ray Daniels, charmingly, describes Lizzo’s excuse as “all BS to me... If you know that the industry is changing, you should be warning your fans ahead of time. Why are you not telling your fans to request your song on radio? They’re your fans, they’ll do what you ask them to do.”

Perhaps her fans aren’t quite so fervent any more? Lizzo has had a few PR problems in the last few years. She has been accused of sexual harassment and creating ‘a hostile work environment’ by former backing dancers.

“A big part of her brand was being the underdog and being very self-confident, I am who I am, I support everyone, body positivity,” the anonymous label executive suggested. “And when you’re called to task for the mistreatment of exactly what you held out as being your, quote-unquote, brand, then fans don’t wanna see you win anymore, and they desert you.”

Lizzo has alleged a lack of support from her label, Warners. This may have some truth to it, in that the team at the label who signed her has changed. “It was a fluke, her blowing up,” an anonymous ‘veteran’ industry executive interviewed by the magazine says. “Nobody went and put millions of dollars behind her.”

“She is positioned to really be more successful than a lot of artists, so it is baffling,” they continued. “But it also shows you a classic industry underbelly fact, which is that the music industry does not care about its legacy artists at all, actually. If you fall off, you’re literally like nothing to your labels, or to anything.”

So is it all over for the 38-year-old singer and rapper? Not necessarily. “I think there’s always hope for every artist. A hit cures all,” the ‘veteran’ exec says.

“I don’t think she’s done at all,” Daniels adds. “This is just a moment to remind her that she still has work to do.”

This week sees the release of Confessions II, Madonna’s new album and a spiritual sequel to Confessions on a Dance Floor, the 2005 long-player that she made with producer Stuart Price.

Price is back this time, too, and has been talking to The Times about his working relationship with Madonna, which began when he ended up joining her touring band in 2001 as keyboard player and musical director on the Drowned tour

This might not have happened, though; Price says that he was initially intimidated by the “incredible musicians with an array of gear” that he encountered when all he had was a monosynth that “only makes one sound at a time”.

In fact, such was the level of Price’s imposter syndrome that he raised doubts about his suitability for the role.

“I’m from dance music – there’s nothing wrong with staying on one note for six minutes as long as it’s a really good note,” he argues. “So I said to her: ‘I don’t think I’m the right person to do this.’

Rather than accept that he was a bad fit, though, Madonna supported Price’s musical vision. “She reconfigured the whole setup on the basis of that comment. Instead of going back to my parents’ house in Reading, I ended up staying and she made me musical director of the Drowned world tour. So our relationship is ultimately based on honesty.”

It sounds like this high level of trust helps when the pair are in the studio together, too. “You always tackle a problem with a solution,” is Price’s diplomatic answer when asked if he and Madonna ever disagree. “When you have faith in your writing partner, the whole thing becomes pleasant.”

So pleasant, in fact, that Price describes their sessions “like being in a school band,” with both parties feeling able to be themselves. “Madonna will say, ‘I think I have something,’ and what comes out is not calculated, it’s just unquestionably her.”

The biggest hit from the original Confessions on a Dance Floor, of course, was the ABBA-sampling Hung Up, and Price previously spoke about the origins of that record to Music Week.

“Madonna was doing a movie at the time with Luc Besson, that didn’t materialise, which was going to feature music from different generations – a punk rock era, a ’20s era, and a disco era. So she asked, “Do you have anything that is like ABBA at Studio 54?” Originally, I said no.

“However, six months beforehand, I had a DJing residency at a club in Liverpool called The Masque, at the Chibuku Shake Shake night. One night, I was coming back from Chibuku, it was 5am on the M1, I was falling asleep – I wasn’t driving! – and Radio 2 was on. Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! started playing, and in that dream state I thought, ‘Wow, that would be a really good sample for a song.’

“So just before I went up to play Chibuku again, I quickly hacked the sample into a track that I could play in my DJ set. It was immediate – the whole room felt pretty special. I played it for the next couple of months, but like most DJs, I wore out my records and moved on. So when Madonna mentioned ABBA, I suddenly went, ‘Well, there is one thing…’

“I played her the track, she listened intently, then she just opened her mouth and sang: ‘Every little thing that you say or do, I’m hung up, I’m hung up on you…’ It really happened that quickly. We were in the studio, which was in the attic of my flat in Maida Vale, so I recorded her. Subsequently, the production took some work, but the whole thing about making Confessions On A Dance Floor was that it was such fun. Hung Up really set the tone for that album. In her brilliantly instinctive way, Madonna just pivoted, and instead of doing the movie with loads of sections, she went, ‘We’re going to make a dance record!’”

Confessions II is released on Friday, 3 July.

By 1985, John Lydon and Public Image Limited had reached an impasse. The exit of Keith Levene from the band in 1983 had been messy, with Levene releasing his own version of PIL’s fourth album before Lydon re-recorded its contents as This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get. Neither album did very well commercially and Lydon detected a lack of enthusiasm from Virgin Records regarding the promotion of his version.

“I didn’t know where I stood in the music industry,” Lydon told Sound On Sound in an interview from 2016. “The purse strings were being withheld and everything was difficult. PIL as a band was under real severe pressure and that pressure eventually cracked us and left me kind of stranded there. I didn’t know what really to do with myself.”

Now based in Los Angeles, a lifeline was thrown by producer Bill Laswell, who at that point was best known for producing Herbie Hancock’s electro crossover hit Rockit. This time Laswell was working with Afrika Bambaataa. The hip hop icon wanted to record a rock/ rap crossover track and was looking for a vocalist. A fan of PIL’s early albums, Laswell suggested Lydon.

“Bam had the basics of his song,” remembers Lydon, “but he had no hook and chorus and bam in I came with the ‘Time zooone’ bit. The whole thing came together relatively quickly.”

Credited to Time Zone, the track, now titled World Destruction, made Lydon relevant again. It might not have been a hit – it reached Number 44 in the UK charts in January 1985 – but it was praised as a groundbreaking single. It re-established Lydon as an open-minded, forward-thinking artist - remember this was eighteen months before Run DMC and Aerosmith’s link-up on Walk This Way.

Having worked successfully together on World Destruction, Lydon selected Laswell as his main collaborator for the next PIL album. The songs, including Rise, were worked out by Lydon and two members of his touring band – guitarist Mark Schulz and keyboard player Jebin Bruni – in the basement of Lydon’s house in Venice Beach.

Rise’s lyrics were inspired by the situation in South Africa, as Lydon explained in a contemporary interview in Smash Hits of all places: “I read this manual on South African interrogation techniques, and Rise is quotes from some of the victims. I put them together because I thought it fitted in aptly with my own feelings about daily existence.”

Also in the mix were the torture techniques that were then being used in Northern Ireland - hence the references to ‘They put a hotwire to my head/ Because of the things I did and said’. The Irish angle is made explicit in the chorus: ‘may the road rise with you’, a translation of an old Gaelic proverb "go n-éirí an bóthar leat" or ‘may the road rise up to meet you’, a phrase second-generation migrant Lydon would have doubtless heard in his family house as a nipper.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Laswell was assembling his own crack team for pre-production of the album. He hired drummer Tony Williams, who’d worked with Miles Davis, and guitarist Nicky Skopelitis. He and engineer Jason Corsaro, whom Laswell described in Sound On Sound in 2016 as “the beast of drum sounds. That’s the guy who kind of defined the ’80s.”

Corsaro had the inspired idea of recording Williams at the bottom of the elevator shaft at New York’s Power Station studio and you can hear the results on Rise, especially during the middle section. Williams, Skopelitis and Laswell himself on a fretless Wal bass cooked up the backing track. “We were using the Fairlight computer as a kind of click track,” remembers Laswell. “And on the piece that became Rise, Tony dropped a beat and we went back and dropped in this one beat.”

Eventually Lydon, Bruni and Schulz arrived from LA, which brought one issue to a head. “It was difficult,” says Lydon, “because the band I had in LA, they were very, very young chaps, and they couldn’t cope with the pressure of the New York studio. The whole thing tore them up really, and it was panicky fingers on strings, and time was of the essence. I think we’d given ourselves something like three weeks to make the whole album.”

Laswell and Lydon had to make a decision. Up against a tight deadline, they couldn’t afford to carry any passengers. “That night we went to a bar and I explained to the kids, ‘This is serious and we have to make something great and we’re gonna have to let you guys go.’,” says Laswell. “They were probably hurt, but they were not ready.”

“I missed them severely, Schulz and Jebin,” said Lydon. “But I had to very, very quickly make a difficult decision of sending them home and replacing them, if I was ever gonna meet the obligation of the three-week deadline. And so there it went.”

That meant making the album with session musicians and Laswell and Lydon brought in some, well, unexpected names. Ginger Baker, the irascible ex-Cream drummer, came in and though he didn’t play on Rise contributed to a number of tracks. Incredibly, he and Lydon got on: “My kind of bloke, y’know. Great fun in the studio. The amount of drum kits he destroyed was amazing. I think that was the biggest part of the budget.”

Then there was Steve Vai, the virtuoso guitarist known for his shredding technique. “People think that I wouldn't be listening to stuff like that, but I listen to everything,” said Lydon in a 2012 interview with Music Radar. “I was into the likes of people that were really willing to work with me. It astounded me at the time to see that I was respected. I wasn't aware of that.”

“I think he kind of altered his perspective after working with us. He did some wonderful stuff after that. You know, his mind… He got out of just heavy metal, and that's a good, good thing. To this day, I rate the man very, very highly. Very highly!"

Whilst Vai didn’t shred on the record, Laswell did coax a searing solo out of him on Rise. “Before he would play a solo, I would say, ‘Here, quickly listen to this.’ And I would play him, like, North African trance music for five minutes, or Indian music or Irish stuff,” explained Laswell. “And it totally took him into another space. So when he soloed, it wasn’t the normal ‘here’s the big rock solo’. I was conscious not to do clichéd rock stuff.”

To add to this mix, Laswell and Lydon decided to recruit another virtuoso from an entirely different field. They hired L Shankar, whose electric violin gives Rise a shuffly undercarriage and contrasts beautifully with Williams and Vai’s contributions. “We sort of referenced this idea of drones from the Indian music and the Irish fiddle music,” says Laswell.

“Oh, gorgeous tones,” says Lydon of Shankar’s violin. “I love tones. Just loads of inflections sort of buried in the background, so when you close your eyes those inflections will creep out and spur all kinds of delicious thoughts. Shankar was just marvellous. An eye opener.

"I knew his stuff, but I didn’t think he’d be quite in this mould. It completely worked and it made Rise stunning. Rise became a tour de force on that album.”

By the time the track was finished it sounded huge, a towering edifice of sound. The last thing to be added were the vocals and, as is his wont, Lydon’s lead was captured quickly.

“I rev myself up and usually my first or second or third performance is the best,” he said. “It doesn’t usually change beyond there except gets rougher. ‘Cause I put so much energy into it. I wanted the words to come over like sharp knife cuts. Every single word well pronounced and deliberately in their place.”

For the actual chorus, Lydon had some assistance. Bernard Fowler – who these days is best known for his long association with the Stones - helped with ‘may the road rise with you’ refrain. “Ah yes, Bernard was great,” Lydon recalls. “Bernard taught me vocal techniques that were simplistic, but for me were very challenging at the time. Just to get the harmonies right on Rise. It was an approach that I hadn’t involved myself with and I’ve got to say ever since then I became more and more involved in my craft as a singer.”

Released as the lead single from the album, which was bluntly-titled ‘Album’ (or ‘Compact Disc’ or ‘Cassette’ depending on your choice of format), Rise was a formidable statement. The line ‘anger is an energy’ reminded record-buyers just who this was – the one-time angry young man of rock who, a decade back, had changed the direction of music. But musically Rise was a completely original mix of all sorts of influences, which showed that Public Image were still capable of taking their music into intriguing places.

It would be one of the last times the band bagged themselves a mainstream hit. Rise reached Number 11 in February 1986, Lydon and co went on Top of the Pops to promote it (with Don Letts on keyboards moonlighting from Big Audio Dynamite) and even found himself on the cover of Smash Hits around this time.

“My message is there’s no political cause worthy enough that people should die for it,” said Lydon in a 2016 interview in Mojo looking back at the track. “Once you start murdering your fellow human beings it’s over.

"Rise is about the stop of that. I related it to my own background. I’ve got Protestant and Catholic relatives in the north of Ireland, why were they killing each other?

"I think it’s one of my best pop songs.”

Sombr has been reflecting on the experience of being asked by Taylor Swift to perform two of her songs at her Songwriters Hall of Fame induction ceremony earlier this month.

To begin with, the singer-songwriter says that he was both surprised and delighted to be asked.

“It was crazy,” he told Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show. “I mean, it was really her night, and she wanted me, out of all the people she could have asked, to perform two songs to help induct her.”

Asked by Fallon if the songs he sang were given to him or were his choices, Sombr said that he had free rein.

“So, basically I was like, ‘Taylor, what songs do you want me to sing? You know, this is your night.’ And she was like, ‘No, you choose.’ So I was like, ‘Seriously?’ So that really put the pressure on – she has such a vast discography of so many hits.

“So, I went through, I picked two songs, and I suggested them to her and she was like, ‘Perfect.’ So, I was like, ‘OK.’”

Sombr says that Dear John and Cardigan, the songs in question, are two of his favourite Taylor tunes, and Swift has also been very complimentary about his music in the past.

In fact, Fallon read Sombr something that Swift previously said about him: "His writing is so exceptional that it makes me actually envious. He's going to be the top of my Spotify Wrapped this year, guaranteed. Sombr is the future."

Looking slightly sheepish, Sombr responded by saying, “I'm so grateful for her. That's really such an honour.”

Of course, given that he was appearing on a talk show, Sombr also had something of his own to promote, and that something is a new single, My Body Isn’t Ready, which he talked about and then performed.

“This song I wrote about something I've been struggling with my whole life, which is issues with my body image,” he explained. “I feel like, growing up, feeling like I look different from the other kids in school, I always wanted a song that talked about that. So I just made it, first of all, to express myself, but to also have a song for anyone who struggles with their body image to know they're not alone.”

Billy Corgan has revealed that he’s planning to release 60 tracks of never-before-heard Zwan material – two new albums worth, he reckons.

Zwan? Who? You’d be forgiven for forgetting about Corgan’s short-lived supergroup. After the Smashing Pumpkins initial breakup in 2001, Corgan joined up with the Slint guitarist David Pajo, bassist Paz Lenchantin, and his old colleague Jimmy Chamberlin to form a new group.

Zwan only released one album – 2003’s Mary Star Of The Sea. Only a few months after its release, Corgan announced the group’s breakup. A couple of years later, the Pumpkins duly reformed.

Anyway, in a new interview with Stereogum, Corgan has revealed that there’s a lot more lurking in the Zwan cupboard than just that one album. “There will be, like, maybe two more LPs of unreleased tracks,” he said. “Because there’s so much Zwan stuff, I’m gonna put it out in different sets, otherwise the box set would be, like, 20 records long, and it’s just too much to ask fans to take on.”

“(There are] 60-plus unreleased Zwan songs that have never been released. Not just versions, like other songs. There was a lot of writing in that band.”

As for the Smashing Pumpkins, they are set to co-headline (with Chris Stapleton) a bipartisan America 250 show on July 4 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The event, titled ‘America’s Block Party,’ is to be hosted by Queen Latifah, with more performers set to be confirmed soon.

“Playing the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on July 4 for America’s 250th is a rare kind of moment,” Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin has said of the group’s participation.

“We’ve always believed in the power of music to be a unifying principle. It brings people together and allows them to express themselves in a forum that has a common destination – and it allows all of us the opportunity to participate in a celebration that has meaning, history, and impact.”

William Shatner, 95-year-old actor, occasional musical artist and all-round living legend, has been musing about bringing his proposed metal album – which is set to feature 35 musicians from the genre – onto the live stage.

In a new press statement, Shatner has said: “Having assembled one of the most ambitious gatherings of heavy metal royalty ever gathered for a single recording project, William Shatner is now exploring the possibility of taking his acclaimed Heavy Metal album to the stage for a live event unlike anything audiences have seen before.”

“Part concert, part theatrical experience, and part celebration of heavy metal’s enduring power and legacy, the proposed production would transform Shatner’s star-studded recording project into an immersive live spectacle combining legendary musicians, cinematic visuals, storytelling, and the larger-than-life charisma that has made Shatner a global icon for more than six decades.”

It’s also been announced that Mikkey Dee, drummer with Motorhead and more recently The Scorpions is on board with the project and has contributed to a cover of Judas Priest’s Living After Midnight.

Dee then joins a long list of his fellow sticksmen contributing to the album that includes Dave Lombardo (Slayer, The Misfits), Chris Adler (ex-Lamb of God, ex-Megadeth), Vinny Appice (Black Sabbath), Carmine Appice (Vanilla Fudge, Cactus), Kenny Aronoff (Steve Vai, Sammy Hagar), Simon Wright (AC/DC, UFO), Bobby Rondinelli (Blue Öyster Cult, Quiet Riot), Matt Starr (Ace Frehley, Joe Lynn Turner), Steve Zing (Danzig, Samhain, Mourning Noise), and Fred Aching (Kings of Thrash, Nuclear Messiah, Fraxures).

Also contributing, it seems, are Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford, with production being handled by Adam Hamilton (LA Guns, Brian Jonestown Massacre), Derek Hughes, Marcus Nand and Jurgen Engler of Die Krupps.

Shatner has added in his statement: “I needed pounding beats to make the music feel the way I feel it. The drums drive the emotion. They create the urgency, the excitement, the danger. Heavy metal should hit you in the chest and move your soul at the same time.”

The mind boggles. Shatner’s career as a recording artist has been esoteric, to say the least. Older readers will remember his late 60s album The Transformed Man, which contained his somewhat bonkers interpretations of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and Mr Tambourine Man. His second album 2004’s Has Been was produced by Ben Folds and included a cover of Pulp’s Common People. Since then he’s recorded an album of space-themed songs (Seeking Major Tom), a Christmas album (Shatner Claus) and a blues album entitled, er, The Blues.

As yet there’s no title yet for Shatner’s metal album/ live extravaganza. All those details, including other contributing artists and a release date are set to be announced “soon”.

You probably didn’t realise that today (June 25) is Global Beatles Day, did you?

That’s because the idea has been a grassroots-led initiative, led by one superfan Faith Cohen. Now her wheeze has been officially recognised by Apple Corps Ltd, and that body, which looks after The Beatles’ legacy, is honouring it today

Cohen originally picked June 25 because it was the day in 1967 that the group participated in Our World, the first ever multinational satellite broadcast and up to that point the largest TV audience for any one event (over 400 million people tuned in). It was on there that The Beatles premiered All You Need Is Love, the nearest the so-called Summer Of Love had to an anthem and arguably the peak moment in terms of the group’s global reach and influence.

Unfortunately, because it was 1967 the original broadcast was in black and white and we’ve all doubtless seen the grainy clips from it at various times – John Lennon chewing gum whilst clutching his headphones, Mick Jagger clapping out of time and the fusty-looking middle-aged members of the orchestra in their evening dress, looking like they’d been beamed in from 1912.

But today Apple has posted a colourised version of the Our World performance (above). Other than on the Beatles Anthology series from the 1990s this will be the first time it’s been seen – for free, anyway. According to Apple, it will “celebrate the iconic performance’s anniversary, mark Global Beatles Day, and give fans around the world the chance to relive that spectacular, global moment from 1967 and share their reaction in the live chat.”

Tom Greene, Apple’s current CEO has put out a statement, praising Cohen’s initiative: “More than ever, the message of The Beatles, and of All You Need Is Love speaks to something vital for community, connection, and the power of bringing people together. That is what makes Global Beatles Day so special. It asks nothing more than for people, wherever they are, to stop, listen, and share a little joy.”

What else was on Our World? Well other participants included the film director Franco Zeffirelli, who opened his rehearsals for the film Romeo And Juliet to the global TV audience and Leonard Bernstein, who could be seen rehearsing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 3 with pianist Val Cliburn. There are also rather less riveting segments that showed workers building a section of the Tokyo subway system and section from Australia about trams in Melbourne. So now you know.

If you want to know more about Global Beatles Day head over to its website at globalbeatlesday.com

It might be called Stupid Song, but Olivia Rodrigo’s latest single is yet another smart piece of pop songwriting from an artist who can do no wrong right now.

With Stupid Song riding high in global streaming charts, Rodrigo has now given us a little insight into how it was written in a new video interview with Pitchfork.

“It's the only song that I ever wrote on my grand piano in New York,” she remembers. “It was really expensive, and I was like, well, I didn't write any songs on it, but this one, this one I got it out in like the last few weeks of me moving [from] that apartment, so it was all worth it.”

Rodrigo says that the inspiration for Stupid Song came when she was out for an early morning walk in London: “This guy walks up to me – I thought he was gonna ask for a picture and I'm like, oh yeah, that's cool, it's cool – and he walks up to me, he goes, ‘You are so beautiful, like, can I take you to dinner?’ And I was like, ‘No, but, like, wow, thank you so much,’ and I was so like, just joyful and happy, and I went home, and I wrote this song about being infatuated with someone, and just like in total limerence.”

Discussing the song’s arrangement, Rodrigo says: “I wrote it on piano, and so obviously there's an element of it that's sort of piano ballady, but it had such energy, and we're like, let's put dance drums in there. And I think that little bridge part, it's my favorite part of the song, I love that part. I think it was the last thing on the record we finished, because we just could not figure out what that part was supposed to be, we tried everything under the sun, and yeah, I love that bit.”

It sounds like Stupid Song came together in sections, then, and Rodrigo says that she has no problem with it sounding like a hybrid of different parts.

“Whenever I play this song for people, they're like, ‘it's like three songs stitched together, but in kind of a cool way.’ And I think that was the vibe, that's what we were going for.”

Like other Rodrigo songs – Vampire, for example – Stupid Song is also a track that builds, almost theatrically, and she accepts that this is now something of a trademark for her.

“I just sort of write that way,” she explains. “I don't really know why. I’ve just always loved a song that is very dynamic – that's the type of music that I listen to. I think that's why I like rock music so much. I like something that's just really loud sometimes.”

There’s also another genre that Rodrigo and her co-writer/producer, Dan Nigro, have bonded over, along with an artist who’s served as an unlikely inspiration: “Dan and I, we really love a power ballad. We actually really love Meat Loaf songs sometimes, because we're like, ‘this is the ultimate power ballad.’”

Elsewhere in the video, Rodrigo also breaks down two other songs from her new album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love: The Cure and Cigarette Smoke. And, as if she wasn’t already busy enough, she’s also announced a new one-day music festival, Daisy Chain Fields, which will take place on 29 August at Great Park in Irvine California and feature an impressive all-women line-up.

As well as Rodrigo herself, this includes the likes of Chappell Roan, Bikini Kill, Doechii, Garbage, Katseye, Mitski, Rachel Chinouriri, Santigold and The Breeders, while Karen O, Sarah McLachlan and Stevie Nicks are listed as special guests.

All profits raised from the festival will benefit non-profit organisations that advance and advocate for women and girls, and presale tickets go on sale tomorrow, 24 June.

Matchbox 20 frontman Rob Thomas has been paying tribute to the late Clive Davis – and giving us a fascinating insight into what it was that made him such a music industry legend.

In an essay for Rolling Stone, Thomas goes back to the making of Smooth, the 1999 smash hit single that he co-wrote and eventually performed with Santana. Both the song and its parent album, Supernatural, were released on Davis’s Arista Records label, and Davis was involved in the creative process almost from the start.

Smooth was Thomas’s first project with Davis, but he was originally intended to be just the songwriter, alongside Itaal Shur. After hearing his demo, though, Santana and Davis had other ideas.

“We were sitting in his office debating whether George Michael or Jon Bon Jovi should sing it,” Thomas remembers. But Carlos was like, ‘I like this guy’s voice,’ and Clive loved the idea of getting this older generation guitar player together with newer generations.”

Thomas has mentioned the George Michael possibility before. “It was George I had in my head when I recorded the vocals in the first place,” he told Billboard in 2017. “If you listen to the melody and the cadence, it’s an attempt to emulate his style in so many ways.”

Davis knew what he was doing, though: Smooth hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and remained there for 12 weeks. What’s more, Supernatural was stuffed with cross-generational collaborations, and went on to sell 30 million copies.

This is just one example of Davis trusting his instincts rather than going for the biggest name, and Thomas says that there was another during the making of another Santana album, 2002’s Shaman. It came when Davis was considering what to do with lead single, The Game Of Love.

“He played me The Game of Love with Tina Turner singing on it, before Michelle Branch came on,” says Thomas. “Only Clive would get the magic of Tina Turner on a track then have the wherewithal to say, ‘I’m not sure this is the right look for Carlos.’”

It was Davis’s willingness to go with his gut rather than listen to voices around him that made him so special, believes Thomas, and possibly the last of his kind.

“Losing Clive is the end of an era,” he says. “There were a handful of people like him, people like Ahmet Ertegun [co-founder and president of Atlantic Records] – the last ones who weren’t weren’t all about the algorithm.

“There are fewer and fewer people running labels today who are COMPLETELY guided by their own taste meter. If you come to a label or a management company today they present you with a five-page report on your fan base, how they skew, and what brands they buy.

“I’m sure Clive was aware of those things, but they never informed what he did. Even if everybody around him said, ‘I don’t get it,’ he would say, ‘You don’t have to get it.’”

Wonderwall very much looks like it has become the default England anthem for this year’s World Cup, and Noel Gallagher is very much behind it. As you’d expect, of course.

“Wonderwall belongs to the people, and it was a magical moment between the people and the players,” the guitarist has told The Sun. “Best of luck to everyone who’s made the trip out there.”

At the conclusion of last Wednesday’s match against Croatia (which England won 4-2), the players came to the side of the pitch to applaud the fans, who were belting out the Britpop-era megahit.

Declan Rice has confirmed it was a bit of a moment: “On the pitch after the game and we were just connecting with the fans, and they were singing. That was special. Being in Dallas, singing Wonderwall. There’s nothing like that first time.”

And captain Harry Kane has described it as “one of my favourite ever moments in an England shirt, especially at a major tournament. It’s the emotional connection with the fans, we know how much it means to them.

In the footage, one or two like Jude Bellingham can even be seen mouthing along to the words. Bellingham, of course, like most of the squad, wasn’t even born when Wonderwall was first released in October 1995. But somehow this slightly sombre song, written in a minor key, has genuinely become an anthem that spans generations, every bit as ubiquitous and potent as Hey Jude.

Some have been perplexed by its adoption as a football song. Back in 2018, responding to reports that Manchester City had started to walk on to it, Liam Gallagher said: “Would you not prefer Rock And Roll Star? Wonderwall’s a bit ‘end of the night, my bird’s left me’ and all that kind of thing. It doesn’t strike me as something you play before the derby.”

Liam’s absolutely right, of course. But as Noel pointed out, it belongs to the people now, and they’ll decide how they want to use it.

Worldwide, it’s sold over 10 million copies and in the UK alone has gone eight times platinum. After Wham!’s Last Christmas finally reached the top a few years back, it’s now the biggest-selling single not to reach Number One in the UK. Could that change if England go deep into the tournament? Watch this space...

Charli XCX has been reflecting on the frenzied reaction to her recent single, Rock Music, and to one line from the song in particular.

The pushback when Charli sang ‘I think the dance floor is dead, so now we're making rock music’ was immediate, not least from Madonna, who responded with a caption on an Instagram post that read: ‘If your Dance floor feels dead / Maybe you're playing the wrong music’.

All good fun, but XCX has now clarified what she meant by that line in an interview with Rolling Stone.

“That lyric is very much about my relationship with Brat, and my personal experience with that album,” she says, before suggesting that she still appreciates good new dance music as much as anyone.

“My husband [the 1975 drummer George Daniel] runs a dance music label,” she points out. “There’s been such a wealth of incredible dance/electronic-adjacent records that have been coming out recently, whether it’s Slayyyter or Underscores or PinkPantheress. Dance music is in an incredible place.”

On a similar theme, XCX also played down the suggestion that Music, Fashion, Film, her forthcoming album, will be the rock record that some people have predicted. After discussing her love of The Velvet Underground and asking herself “What if we made a record with guitars?” in 2025, some fans assumed that this was the direction that her next album was taking, but it sounds like this isn’t the case.

“Obviously, I know that there’s been a lot of conversation around me making a rock album, which is something that I never said,” Charli says. “But to be honest, I’ve never thought about genre in a binary way. I find that to be a very old-school notion. I don’t even know what the genre is. It’s just me and A G Cook and Finn Keane, doing our thing.”

That means trying to avoid being influenced by anyone else, too: “To be honest, when I make music, I’m thinking less about other music as a reference point. I actually shut myself off, and we just escape into our own world. I’ve spoken at length about loving Lou Reed and John Cale and the Velvet Underground. But would I say that the record sounds like any of that? No.”

This admission comes despite the fact that XCX recently collaborated with Cale on House, one of the songs she contributed to the soundtrack to Emereld Fennell's 2026 adaption of Wuthering Heights.

Elsewhere in the interview, Charli opens up on her relationship with the late producer Sophie, who she worked with extensively on her 2016 EP, Vroom Vroom.

“I lost some­one who completely changed my life, and there are a lot of feelings to work through with that, especially because they were so attached to my creative life in a really positive way, but also sometimes in a difficult way,” she says. “Being able to express those feelings through my work has been really cathartic for me.”

Music, Fashion, Film will be released on 24 July.

To quote the song itself, when you first hear Ricky Martin’s Livin’ La Vida Loca, it really does hit you “like a bullet to your brain”. Released in 1999, it blended Latin pop, salsa, surf guitar and even a whiff of ska, and sounded quite unlike anything else on the radio. And, for the time, it was recorded in a very different kind of way, too.

“That was the first song to be all done digitally to make it all the way to number one,” confirms Desmond Child, who co-wrote and produced the record, in an interview with Elmo Lovano. “It was recognised by the Library of Congress, the National Registry of Recorded Works. It was like, you know, Thomas Edison or something. We made it all the way to number one in a completely digitised format.”

“We didn’t use any outboard or anything that was analogue,” confirms Child.

These days, of course, working in the box is a quick and convenient way of doing things, but in the late ‘90s, limited computing power and a reliance on additional DSP meant that systems such as Pro Tools – Child’s recording platform of choice – were far from the rock-solid solutions that they are today.

“We called it Slow Tools,” he remembers. “I mean, we’d have 19 breakdowns a day.”

Child overcame these challenges, though: “We made recording history,” he notes. And when it came to the in-the-box mixing, he decided to deviate from the sound that Martin’s Latin audience was familiar with.

“Latin radio, it seemed to me there was an overuse of reverb,” he says. “Everything started swimming, like it was like Italian pop or something. I was listening to urban music at the time, and it was very dry, everything was in your face. So I said, ‘let's mix it like that.’ And so, if you listen to it, you can hear it across, you know, a football field, because it jumps out of the speakers because it's so dry.”

Livin’ La Vida Loca was Martin’s debut English-language single, but came off the back of huge success in the Latin music world. It came about after Child had worked with him on La Copa de la Vida (The Cup Of Life), the official anthem of the 1998 World Cup, and it soon became clear that Martin had the potential to appeal to a much wider audience.

It was after the 1999 Grammys, where Martin sang Copa de la Vida and received a rapturous reception, that the seeds of Livin' La Vida Loca were sown.

“I got a call from [his] manager the next day, who said, "OK, we need a song in Spanglish [a hybrid of the Spanish and English languages], and I said, ‘OK,’” Child remembers.

After he and fellow songwriter Draco Rosa submitted it, though, they got a rather bewildering request from Martin’s record label.

“We got a call from Don Ienner, who was the head of Columbia Records, and he said, ‘OK, we like it, but can you do it in English now?’ And I said, ‘It is in English, really. It's like, it's all in English. There are only three words in Spanish – ‘livin’ is English, so ‘la vida loca’. There's nothing else in the song that's in Spanish.’”

Child clearly won the argument – though he does point out that, when Livin’ La Vida Loca was released and Columbia took out a full-page ad to promote it, they still felt the need to subtitle it ‘Livin' the Crazy Life’, just so people didn’t confused…

No matter, because the song went on to become a massive hit. What’s more, Child believes that it helped to change the course of Latin music.

“That has lasted to this day,” he says of the song’s influence, “because it was the door opened for urban Latin music called reggaeton, culminating, to me, in Despacito.”

Child would go on to have more hits with Martin – who can forget She Bangs? – but nothing can match their incendiary first flourish. We’re still not sure that anyone could convince us to ‘take our clothes off and go dancing in the rain,’ though.

Life moves pretty fast in Taylor Swift’s world. In fact, she’s just revealed that she wrote, recorded and produced I Knew It, I Knew You – her new end credits song for Toy Story 5 – on the same day that she watched an early cut of the movie itself.

In a video posted on Instagram that was captured on the day in question, we see Swift addressing the camera. “Kind of a hectic day,” she begins. “At 11am, went to see Toy Story 5. Got so inspired, got the songwriter zoomies. Went home, wrote the end credits song for Toy Story 5. We have now produced it and I’m doing vocals. It’s 6.57pm.”

Explaining the fast turnaround, Swift says: “In two hours, Bob Iger [CEO of The Walt Disney Company] and Tom [MacDougall, president of Walt Disney Music] from Pixar are coming to hear it. We have not recorded it yet [the vocal], and I think this is one of the most fun days of my life.”

Sitting alongside Swift is recording and mixing engineer Laura Sisk, who worked alongside producer Jack Antonoff on the making of the record (Swift was a producer on the song, too).

The video confirms what Swift said when I Knew It, I Knew You was announced – that she wrote it “as soon as I got home from the screening.”

Assuming that Swift made it back around 1pm and her meeting with the execs was at 9pm, this means that her song was created in around eight hours, which is certainly pretty speedy.

We’re guessing that more production and mixing work was done after that, but the story provides further evidence of the worth ethic that has taken the star to the very top of her game. Swift by name, swift by nature.

Toy Story 5 is released today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boy George has joined forces with an AI company that claims will help artists to ‘reclaim’ their hits.

It’s called Artist Included and its founders Paul Kemsley and film producer Jeremy Rosen seem to be positioning it as a tool for artists who want to re-record ‘new’ masters in the same way that Taylor Swift did for her back catalogue.

George has got on board with them and re-recorded a new version of Karma Chameleon. It is, Artist Included insists, not a synthetic AI recording, but uses ‘artist-approved and ethical technology’. See what you think.

In a statement, Kemsley said: “For decades, artists created the soundtrack to our lives while much of the long-term value moved away from the original creators. Artist Included was built to help reverse that dynamic. This is not about replacing artists or exploiting old catalogues - it is about helping artists create new ones. Used responsibly, AI can become one of the most powerful creative tools the music industry has ever seen.”

Rosen added: “The future of AI in music must put artists at the centre - creatively, ethically, and economically. Artist Included is building a model where artists control and participate directly in the future value created from their music, voice, brand, and legacy. All ego aside, we are shifting the narrative from piracy to partnership; a timely AI reframe.”

Artist Included seems to be gambling that there’s enough of a market for heritage artists wanting to re-record their classic hits. Whilst that gambit worked for Taylor Swift because she is the biggest, most powerful artist in the world with millions upon millions of fans, it remains to be seen whether it would for artists lower down the food chain. Given a choice between the hits that they know and love and new AI-assisted versions, most fans of Culture Club would probably plump for the originals.

Indeed, as you can see from the YouTube comments, fans seem divided about the new version of Karma Chameleon. “The original is far superior as a recording, mix and performance”, says one fan, whilst another pleads: “You should release your humanly-written unreleased stuff instead, you've got so many hidden gems from each era!”

Others are more cynical, with one asking: “What is the point of this AI construction? It can only be for money.”

George himself has put out a statement, defending the new version: “Revisiting Karma Chameleon in this way was emotional and creatively inspiring. The goal was never to replace the original - it was to celebrate it and let the song keep evolving for new audiences.”

Mike D appeared on Later With Jools Holland last night and spoke about his return to music after a long absence.

The ex-Beastie Boy released his first solo single Switch Up last month and an album has been pencilled in for later this summer. It’s the first music he’s made since the final Beastie Boys album – 2011’s Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. The group disbanded amicably after Adam Yauch died of cancer in May 2012.

During the show, the rapper sat down with Holland and talked about his grief at the loss of Yauch: "We had an incredible journey together, and then when Adam Yauch died, I was, you know, I think we were all really pretty devastated, right? You know, when you lose someone that you love to illness, it's yeah, it's devastating."

"For really just a long time, it was just way too sad for me to make music, to even like open up a music file, a Pro Tools file, whatever, I would just get sad, but then I don't know, you know, time has a funny way of sort of like changing your relationship with things, so here I am."

He also talked about his early days starting out with the Beasties in New York. “It was a total magic time,” he recalled. “Most people had abandoned New York City. When I was a little kid in the 1970s, most people had given up on it because there was too much crime. The city was literally going bankrupt so most families had moved on.”

But that meant the artists moved in. “At the same time it was this incredible place where people from all over the world moved to just be their own freaky selves. And they were free to do that, and it wasn’t expensive.”

“We were these kids that were allowed to run completely effing wild around all these clubs. I was literally 15 or 16. It was all there. In New York you had all of that stuff happening all at the time – the birth of house music happening in one club, the birth of hip hop in another, post punk – bands like Bush Tetras, ESG and those bands.”

Diamond and his band are currently on manoeuvres in Europe – they played the Porto edition of Primavera Sound over the weekend. And that album, entitled Thank You, will be out via Capitol on August 28.

Incredibly, it's been 45 years since Bucks Fizz won Eurovision for the UK with Making Your Mind Up. Now, the band are back, and, having been re-invented as The Fizz, their latest line-up is celebrating with a new single produced by studio legend Mike Stock.

Stock, of course, needs little introduction, having been part of the songwriting and production triumvirate that also included Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman and crafted over 100 hit UK chart singles, achieved 13 number ones and – in 1987 and 1988 – single-handedly generated an incredible 27% of all the cash in the UK record industry.

Not bad for three guys in a studio behind a tube station.

And with SAW fans also finally getting their hands on the trio’s final album – the previously unfinished, 33-years-in-the-making debut for US singer Suzette Charles – it’s certainly ‘Never Too Late’ to ‘Step Back In Time’ and catch up with Stock in the studio.

We're here to talk about The Fizz, 45 years after their Eurovision victory. The new single Crazy Shot In The Dark sounds like the perfect amalgam of their style and yours. For fans of the band and your productions, it feels like two halves coming together.

“I think whatever I'm going to do is obviously going to bear the hallmarks of what I’ve done over the years – I can't avoid that – but we definitely did try here in the studio to sort of cross it back to them when they were in their Camera Never Lies era. And we listened to Trevor Horn, what he did with Dollar, and a few other contemporaneous records around that period, and we realised they used certain equipment in a certain way, and those songs always had a ‘gimmick’. They weren't too personal or sentimental, and they had that little bit extra to them, so that’s what I tried to do here, and yeah, I think it turned out really well.”

And it's a doubly-interesting time for you, because we've also had the release of the long-awaited Suzette Charles album.

“Yeah, these things collided. That’s been 30 years-plus in the making, and of course, The Fizz have been around for 45 years, so it all came together.”

You’ve worked with so many artists on so many great songs over the years. What’s been the secret to crafting so many hits for so many people?

“When Matt Aiken and I wrote songs back in the SAW days we very often worked with new acts who hadn't had a record out, like Rick Astley, or Kylie or Sonia. So the first thing we always did was to talk around who the artist was, because you can do no better than make a suit of clothes, if you like, for that person.

“That’s what we did with Kylie. We measured her and we tailored it. Just as we did with Rick and others. And it's the best way of doing it. When you've done that and you've launched the artist, and, hopefully, been successful, you can move around a bit and do other stuff. But to begin with, it's got to be fairly organic.”

You’re well known for finding ‘plot tracks’ to work with. Gaining inspiration from other hits to give each project a focus and a starting point.

“Well, we’d say, ‘Hey, this particular song over here is a big hit now. The DJs love it, or radio loves it,’ so our job was – if we took a dance ‘plot’ from some of the house music that was going on – to put a pop tune on it and cross it over onto the radio, and then have a hit. Maybe.

“But also there were other things that we did. We'd be looking at not just what the artists themselves were like, or what was going around at the time but, when I'm in songwriting mode, my radar is up, you know? I'm listening for anything that can help. Other stuff that's going around, or somebody might say something. You're always looking for a lyric.

“Often we would have a title and you’d put it on the wall and start aiming at it – see if we can bring that title home. Because the high point of the song is the title, that’s the chorus, and if you can design it so that it starts down here, it gradually builds up to here, and finally reaches that chorus, which is the title you put on the wall, then you've hit the bullseye.”

The perception always is that you and Matt Aitken were writing and producing the music, and Pete Waterman was there for those ideas. He was in charge of the titles and the ‘plot’. It's one of SAW’s eternal mysteries: What did Pete Waterman do?

“Well, he was the guy that had the time to go out and shout about us. And he did that really well. He had contacts in the music industry that Matt and I didn't. You couldn't produce the volume of work that we did, and do a radio show, and do a TV show, and do every interview under the sun… That's what he did. Matt and I spent our time in the studio and Pete did his thing. He’d occasionally come up with a title idea, perhaps. I can think of a couple of occasions when he did that, but we'd have to hone it down to something singable.

“Like at the very beginning, if Pete came in and said, ‘We need to make a song a bit like this one over here,’ and play us a Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat or whatever, then we’d take some of the high energy aspects of that and pull our own song around it. Pete was always getting information from the industry of what’s going to storm the charts, so we got on the tail of that. But as we started to have bigger hits, we were setting our own trend, really, and other people were copying us.

“So there was a moment in time when Pete's input drove us, but once we were having the success – because you can only do that once or twice – we just kept branching out.

“For example, for Mel & Kim, I went down the Chicago house route because Pete Tong made me a tape. He was at London Records at time, and he was A&R for Bananarama. He gave me a tape of Chicago House and he wanted that sound for them. But I listened to it and thought that would be good for Mel & Kim, and so that plot came to us via a different source.

"Or the bassline on Never Going to Give You Up for Rick Astley. We were struggling with the record. We knew we had a song, but I came up with the trick – the Colonel Abrams approach – to take the syncopation of that bass sound [from Abrams’ Trapped] and program it into our song.

“All the notes are different, but the feel of it and the rhythm of it gives that track an extra little kick. It sits in the pocket at 114 beats a minute, whereas the Hi-NRG stuff we did was 120 beats a minute plus. So we felt the pace was a bit slow. We needed something to inject that, and that was the bass that did it.”

It’s interesting that you mention Hi-NRG because you were exclusively Hi-NRG producers for a while – using that tech and having hits with that sound. But then in 1985 you made Say I’m Your Number One for Princess – a complete switch in styles to R&B. Looking back, that seems such a risky move.

“I remember the occasion very clearly. Princess was in the studio with us, recording backing vocals for Brilliant. I liked the sound of the voice and Matt and I had Say I’m Your Number One, but we hadn't got that definitive version. And I thought to myself, ‘She could do that.’ So I asked if she'd stay behind.

"Pete was on holiday at the time, and I remember mixing it with Phil Harding. I was listening to Brooklyn, Bronx & Queens, you know, the BB&Q band, and they had a particular sound – that bell sound on there. And at that time there was Jam & Lewis too, so I sort of amalgamated those concepts, because up to then the song had been a bit more pacey than that. I wanted to slow it down to this R&B groove, and Princess delivered it beautifully.

“But prior to that, of course, we’d done Dead or Alive, we'd done Hazel Dean, we’d done Divine… So I was thinking this is a nice change! I left the cassette of it on Pete’s desk when he came back he went mental! He loved it so much. But we couldn't get arrested with it at a label, so Nick East, a colleague of ours, set up his label Supreme just to put it out.

“But you moved in those days. You kept moving – you were always on the hoof. Hoping that you catch a drift or a trend… And if the record label didn't like it, you could move again and get your record on your own little label. And you could promote it through the clubs because, if radio wasn't going to play you, you had club DJs who would, because Pete had connections to those. And although Princess wasn't too clubby I went round with her on a couple of evenings, touring little London venues, where she did a live performance, and you made a bit of a name for it. You did six weeks of build up, get some orders in the bag, and then release them all on the same day, and you’d get in the charts.”

And that modulation from verse to chorus on Say I’m Your Number One. That’s an absolute killer isn’t it?

“Yeah, that’s the bit where Pete Waterman hit the ceiling. Because it does sort of lift it. It is a strange modulation. Is it up a minor third? Hmm… I'll have to go back and listen.

“Y’see, this is true of any song I’ve done – I couldn't just sit on a piano and play it. I don't read music. I don't write music. It's all in my head, and I learn it as I'm writing it. It is a modulation, though, and it's an interesting one. It might be E to B flat, maybe? It may be more than a minor third. It is a strange one!

Did you ever feel like The Princess project could, and should, have gone further than one album?

“Yes, it should have done, really. But there's quite a number of those stories with Stock Aitken Waterman where we just did ‘the one off’ and then something went wrong somewhere! The problem here was that she was managed by her brother, and there were demands being made and we didn't really have a proper contract with her, and I think she went off and signed up with a major, and that was it, really. We couldn't really do any more. It's a shame, because we could have gone forward with her.”

On the subject of songwriting, it’s safe to say you’ve never been a fan of ‘the middle eight’… Speaking to your ‘mixmaster’ Phil Harding previously, he told us that often your songs had a hole in the middle and it was his job to fill it. What would you say to that?

“Look, if it's not a hit by the middle eight, it's not a hit! We were only interested in three-minute songs. Actually, I would have been quite happy with two minutes, and if you listen to some of the great Beatles songs, they're just two minutes long. So you don't have to have a middle eight.

“What Phil's really talking about there – and you know we love Phil – is that he always came up with ideas. Matt and I used to put six minutes down on anything that we knew was going to be a single. We would record six minutes, so you'd have a minute of build-up drums coming in, bits coming in, then do the song that you want, then break down in the middle, then do the final choruses, and then have a minute of drums tailing out, so the DJs can mix between the between songs. And what that did leave, in the middle – sometimes – was a gap, which you could fill with percussion. Or I’d put vocal samples in it, but Phil would sometimes come up with something else and that would get us over the middle bit.

“But doing a different melodic middle eight in a six-minute version? Where the tune has gone somewhere else? It breaks it up too much for the dance market, and that would feel a bit odd, I think. So we always kept it very direct.

“I appreciate what Phil's saying, though. We used to have three mixers, and Matt and I would be saying, before we finished, ‘This one's right for Phil’, because he can beat this up a bit. Or, ‘This one's better if Pete Hammond did it, because he's more melodic’. Or you’d give it to Dave Ford because he's slightly more orientated towards tunes. They were good in those areas for us, and so we’d pick and choose. I think we're probably lucky to have them all.:

It’s that kind of way of working that made PWL the ‘hit factory’. Was that label your invention? And your intention?

“I didn't coin the phrase 'hit factory'. That was between Pete Wateman and David Howells, PWL’s business manager. They thought it was an appropriate phrase, but I hated the name ‘hit factory’ for the reason you're saying. I thought it made us sound like a sausage factory – that we were just churning them out – and that couldn't be further from the truth, because we always put the time and the hours and the effort in.

“Matt and I made sure, for example, that Kylie Minogue's set of clothes wasn’t exactly the same as Jason Donovan's and we weren't terribly keen on doing another soap star after Jason. We thought that would be too much. People will start to think that this IS throwaway, or that we’re just repeating ourselves.

“So on Jason, on his first records, we always used guitars. Because we thought he's going to have that point of differentiation. We never used guitars, as you know. And so there was thought that went into it.

“But because we did so many, I can see how people might think we just churned them out. In fact, there was a criticism when we did You'll Never Stop Me Loving You for Sonia, which was a great little song which seemed to encapsulate youth, being a 16-year-old girl and teenage angst, and people said at the time, ‘Well, if you can make Sonia a hit, you can make anyone a hit’. We had such derisory comments. But when you slow that track down, and break it down as a slow ballad as we did it in the musical that we had out recently, it still has such strength. You can treat that differently, which is one of the tests of a decent song, isn't it?

“I resent the idea that anyone would think that we just churned them out, because even now it doesn't get any easier. I mean, the work that's gone into The Fizz and Suzette is the same as it’s ever been. It doesn't get any easier. It's hard blooming work, and at the end of it all, you don't sell many records nowadays anyway, so we’re doing it because we love it.

“You can get some publishing income perhaps, a bit of this and a bit of that, and The Fizz can sell a few more tickets to their live shows. But really, there's the love of the medium, the love of the style, and the love of the pop song. That’s why we’re doing it.

“Fortunately, I don't need the income but somebody should certainly recognise and give credit to The Fizz for having been around for 45 years.”

So is this the start of a resurgence of you writing and producing again? It feels like two Mike Stock buses have come along at once.

“Well, that's just a coincidence. I've done four albums with The Fizz over the last few years. I did a Shane Ward album, which sells well, but I can do all the writing and do all the making of the records but I can't promote it onto radio and onto TV. I can't get the big doors open for me because I'm not Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran. I'm on my own. I'm independent of everything.”

Of the many artists you worked with and the songs you’ve written and produced, is there something or someone that, you feel, didn’t get a big enough bite of the cherry?

“Well, The Reynolds Girls should have been given a little bit more leeway. There’s nothing wrong with the record. We were having a little poke at the radio at the time. Radio One hated me. Simon Bates gave me a right roasting!

“Lonnie Gordon, maybe?… Donna Summer should have done a second album. And of course, Mel and Kim. We felt we had something brilliant there, something that could have been world conquering. We’d only just got started.

“And Suzette is a perfect example because she got caught in the crossfire. She got stuck in an argument between RCA America and RCA UK, and Pete Waterman and myself walking away from each other. So that was a shame. She was left stranded.

“But I've rectified that now. That’s all in the past.”

Crazy Shot In The Dark by The Fizz and the self-titled debut album from Suzette Charles are out now.

Whilst there might be a dearth of new England World Cup songs this year – it looks like us sassenachs are stuck with Three Lions and those years of hurt until the end of time – musicians north of the border have been getting creative with their own odes to the Scotland team.

Now, to add to Belle And Sebastian’s It Only Takes One Lion and the rather fantastic We’re Made In Scotland From Girders, a tune that features Susan Boyle and Franz Ferdinand that’s featured in the new Irn Bru ad, there’s The Very Unofficial Scotland World Cup Song by JJ Bull.

As you can tell, apart from name-checking current stars Kenny McLean, Kieran Tierney and Scott McTominay (and Archie Gemmill – ask your grandad), it’s very obviously a tribute to James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem.

So who is JJ Bull? Well, he’s a bedroom musician, obviously. But he’s also a football writer, for The Telegraph and The Athletic.

Explaining how he came up with the idea for the song, he told NME: “I know this sounds weird but the entire thing just downloaded into my head from somewhere. It’s like I didn’t write it. This has happened a few times in my life and I’ve always liked those songs, so I had a few goes at making it sound like it did in my head and about three goes later landed on this one! The words, everything, were already written for me! What a boost.”

Asked whether he’s hopeful for a stamp of approval from Murphy, he said: “I’m hoping for nothing but people enjoying it and most people not hating it. I met James Murphy in Subclub Glasgow once, gave him a hug, gave him a CD of mine I had on me just in case.”

Paraphrasing LCD’s anthem Losing My Edge, he added: “I mean obviously if he liked it that would be nice, but I’d imagine he’d think: ‘The kids are coming up from behind – but this one I’m not concerned about actually…‘”

One thing previous Scotland World Cup songs have been noted for is humour, whether unintentional with Rod Stewart’s 1978 effort Ole Ola (‘we’re going to bring the World Cup back from over there’) or the 1982 squad’s endearingly-surreal We Have A Dream, or even Del Amitri’s wry 1998 song Don’t Come Home Too Soon (Scotland, you see, have yet to get past the group stage of the World Cup).

And clearly Bull has his tongue in his cheek somewhere too. Asked by NME what he thought of Scotland’s chances in the tournament, he replied: “Depending on who we get in the final, it should be a pretty straightforward win.”

Elvis Costello has said he is completely relaxed about Olivia Rodrigo’s song Brutal and its supposed similarities to his 1978 hit Pump It Out.

Brutal is a track on Rodrigo’s 2021 debut album, Sour, and yes, it does contain a riff almost identical to the one from Pump It Up. But the 71-year-old songwriter says he has no plans to sue.

"That’s too silly to talk about,” Costello told The Times. “Well, I met Olivia and she was lovely. I said: 'Look, this is just a riff and how could I be arrogant enough to sue on the basis of originality when my song is based on Subterranean Homesick Blues?'

"Did Bob Dylan sue me? He teased me about it but didn’t sue. And did Chuck Berry sue Bob because his song was like Too Much Monkey Business?"

As for Rodrigo – who releases her third album You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love today (June 12) – she’s previously defended herself against those plagiarism accusations. In an interview with Teen Vogue magazine, she said: "I think it’s disappointing to see people take things out of context and discredit any young woman’s work. All music is inspired by each other. Obviously, I write all of my lyrics from my heart and my life first.”

"Every single artist is inspired by artists who have come before them. It’s sort of a fun, beautiful sharing process. Nothing in music is ever new. There’s four chords in every song. That’s the fun part - trying to make that your own."

And Pump It Up is, in all likelihood, being played by Costello for the first time in years on his current UK jaunt. The songwriter and his band The Imposters are on manoeuvres around the country this week for a tour billed ‘Radio Soul! The Early Songs of Elvis Costello’.

While there’s still no news on whether the Rolling Stones will tour their new album, Mick Jagger has made one surprise live appearance – at a folk session in an Oxford pub.

What was one of rock’s true living legends doing there you might well ask? Well, it seems Mick was in town with his partner Melanie Hamrick as guests of Oriel College. The couple joined students for evensong at the chapel and then a meal at the college’s high table. All very fancy.

"After dinner and drinks in the SCR (Senior Common Room) a small group went off to the pub where Mick gave an impromptu performance with Rolling Stones keyboard player Matt Clifford and Oriel Politics academic Robert Cheah," the college said in a statement.

In a clip that has been put on Youtube, Jagger can be seen regaling punters with a version of the old folk tune Handsome Molly, which he first recorded on his 1993 solo album Wandering Spirit. One unnamed punter who just happened to be there told The Sun: “We were sitting right by the band when a small group wandered over towards the musicians. I caught a glimpse of one of them from the side and said to my mates, ‘Wait… is that Mick Jagger?’”

“A few moments later, someone hopped onto the piano, and Mick just started belting out some lyrics. The most surreal part was that almost nobody seemed to realise it was him. There were no crowds and you could really tell just how much fun Mick was having.”

Meanwhile, in other Stones news, the band are issuing a series of vinyl collectors’ editions of their upcoming Foreign Tongues album, featuring various Marvel characters.

There are five different editions to collect, featuring Spider-Man, Captain America, Thor, Wolverine and The Incredible Hulk. The various characters are depicted looking dynamic (the Hulk is lifting a London double-decker bus. Very Impressive.) with the Stones’ lips logo prominent in the designs. You can pre-order them by clicking here.

They’re not the only limited edition versions of the album that are currently kicking around. The Stones have teamed up with FIFA to issue some World Cup themed limited editions of Foreign Tongues. There are three to collect but all have the added attraction of a “special remix” of the track In The Stars.

And if you’re the sort of completist who loves Stones-related tat no matter how tacky it is, there’s more: “To further celebrate this collaboration, a range of clothing and headwear merchandise will soon be released and available for fans to purchase,” say FIFA in a statement. Splendid.

Robert Smith has provided a few more details about the burst of Cure albums he’s been talking about for a while.

The Cure leader was talking on BBC 6 Music after a triumphant headlining set at Primavera Sound last weekend. It was the band’s first live show for eighteen months and saw them delight both casual fans and the hardcore, breaking out the greatest hits, whilst dropping some rarities that haven’t been played for decades.

The festival was also notable for a surprise set by Olivia Rodrigo during which Smith made a guest appearance. The pair debuted a new collaboration, What’s Wrong With Me, which will be on her next album.

So it certainly seems to be all go again in Cure world, as Smith explained: “We did the initial recording of Songs Of A Lost World in 2019. We did record three albums' worth of songs. So the second one's done. So that's about to be delivered to Universal. The third one is really, really upbeat. It's really poppy. But it doesn't compare melodically to the stuff that Olivia does. It's more my idea of Cure pop. It's probably 20 BPM slower than anything she does.”

He continued: “What we've been putting out in the last couple of years, it's really rockin', it's bangin'. But the next one, if anything, it's more dismal than Songs Of A Lost World. I mean, ‘dismal’, that's a horrible word to use! But it's quite dark emotionally. It's related to Songs Of A Lost World, but it's a different perspective on things.”

Smith also talked about the Rodrigo link-up. “So I did the song with her, but I didn’t really expect to be singing it live. It’s just kind of happened that we were playing yesterday and she just said ‘how about we do it live’ and I said ‘ok’. I didn’t think about it too much because if I did I’d say it was impossible because we’ve got another show tomorrow and this is a run of 30 odd shows… and I should be in bed.”

He was effusive in his praise of Rodrigo, saying: “She’s so good. She is genuinely fantastic as a songwriter, a singer and as a performer. I’m slightly in awe at how easy she finds it all. It’s not really comparable to how I do things."

"It’s partly an age thing,” he mused. “At 23 you’ve got a lot more energy than someone of my age. But it comes across as very effortless, very natural and I’m not really a natural performer. I agonise over songs a lot of the time in later life, (whilst) she’s banging out songs, saying ‘what do you think of this?’ And I’m like ‘it’s great’ and I’m not really sure about it, (but then) it took me 16 years to get the last album done!”

Despite being hugely successful, Dire Straits were never what tastemakers might describe as ‘cool’. As such, they seem like an unlikely band to be enjoying a Gen-Z revival, but one song in particular is currently experiencing a significant TikTok-powered resurgence.

We’re talking about Walk Of Life, a jaunty hit from Dire Straits’ all-conquering 1985 album, Brothers In Arms. The song hit number 2 in the UK and went Top 10 in the US and, as well as being used as the soundtrack to countless short-form dance videos, has now been streamed more than a billion times on Spotify.

In fact, only one of Mark Knopfler and co’s songs has been streamed more: Sultans of Swing, another hit that’s resonating with younger listeners.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Dire Straits’ keyboard player Guy Fletcher says that the band’s renewed popularity is “in some ways surreal, yes,” but points out that, following the huge success of Brothers In Arms, they always had a wide age range of people coming to see them play live.

“You would sometimes see three generations in the crowd,” he recalls.

Asked why he thinks the music is resonating with a new wave of listeners, Fletcher says that it could be at least partly due to people seeking out musical authenticity in the age of AI.

“With bands like Angine de Poitrine coming on to the radar – people like things that are different, things that are real,” he points out.

For new and existing fans of the band, though, the bad news is that the chances of a reunion are “unfortunately, nil,” says Fletcher.

“Believe you me, I think the offers [for a reunion] that have been turned down are literally eye-watering,” he adds, noting that Knopfler – who he still performs with – has no desire to make Dire Straits as big as they once were.

If those streaming and viral video numbers keep rising, though, it might happen whether he likes it or not.

Jennifer Lopez says that she was advised to change Feelin’ So Good, one of the singles from her debut album, On the 6, because she was told that it sounded too similar to a Whitney Houston hit that had been released a few months previously.

Appearing on Track Star, Lopez told the story after she correctly identified Whitney Houston’s 1999 hit, It’s Not Right But It’s Okay.

“Funny thing: I had written a song called Feelin’ So Good and they were so similar and they were like, ‘You should change it, Whitney Houston has this other song,’” she recalls.

It sounds like Lopez demurred, though: “I was like, ‘But I like my song,’” she says.

While there are some melodic and rhythmic similarities between the two songs’ respective choruses, we can’t say that they sound too much alike, so Lopez was probably right to stick to her guns. What’s more, she has nothing but praise for Houston herself.

“There is no person who is a singer on the face of the earth in the history of the world who doesn't admire Whitney Houston,” she reckons. “She's probably one of my favorite singers of all time. You like different singers for different reasons – not just because they have this kind of range – and it was her tone. I think that was the most beautiful thing, ‘cos there's a lot of singers with range. There's a lot of singers who can do all the runs and the tricks and she had everything.”

In terms of her own career, though, it sounds like a more direct influence on Lopez was Janet Jackson.

After being played Jackson’s 1986 single, When I Think Of You, Lopez said: “She was one of my biggest inspirations. I actually got to dance for her for a little while. I did a video with her when I was still a dancer. And I think [1987 single] Pleasure Principle, that video made me want to become a pop star, in a way.”

Lopez also offered indirect praise for Jam and Lewis, the production duo who worked with Jackson to create her signature sound.

“She had a sound, a real sound. Her brother was huge and how do you live in that shadow? But she just kind of paved a whole other path with a totally different sound than the Jacksons.”

Olivia Rodrigo is officially in her Robert Smith era. First, she namechecked one of his songs, Just Like Heaven, in her comeback single, Drop Dead, and then its follow-up turned out to be called The Cure (although she later clarified that this has "nothing to do with the band, The Cure")

Now, ahead of the release of her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love, she’s not only confirmed that it contains a duet with Smith, What's Wrong With Me, but also debuted it during her surprise set at this weekend’s Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona.

Introducing the song, Rodrigo noted that this is the first time she’s had a featured artist on any of her studio albums, and that she’s over the moon to have Smith involved. “I just can’t believe that this song exists with the person that it exists with,” she said.

The star then sang the first verse and chorus of What's Wrong With Me – a sweet but anguished tale of longing, by the sounds of it – before introducing Smith so that he could sing his verse. The pair then harmonised on more choruses and a bridge.

Writing on Instagram after the performance, Rodrigo said: “I am still in disbelief that Robert who is in my eyes one of the most brilliant, legendary, wonderful people to ever exist is on this record with me. I had the most memorable evening singing it with him at primavera tonight and I cannot wait for this song and record to be yours.”

While Smith’s involvement on You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love had not previously been confirmed, it doesn’t exactly come as a surprise. After joining Rodrigo on stage at Glastonbury last year to sing two Cure songs with her, he later said that they’d stayed in touch and “enjoyed a couple of memorable nights in the studio together.”

“I bought Sour, and then Guts (both on CD!),” Smith told British Vogue. “Although most of the songs on those two albums are not really ‘aimed at my demographic’(!), they are all so good that it is hard not to fall in love with them.”

Rodrigo’s Primavera set also gave her the opportunity to give a live audience debut to The Cure, though she did previously record a version of it for BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge.

It’s one of his biggest songs – and now considered a classic of the retrospectively created yacht rock genre – but Christopher Cross says that his 1980 hit, Ride Like The Wind, actually owes a big debt to Paul McCartney.

Speaking on the Questlove Show, Cross has now revealed the true origins of Ride Like The Wind, his debut single, for what he thinks is the first time – specifically, the famous instrumental turnaround that occurs frequently throughout. He says that this came to him while he was onstage performing a fan-favourite McCartney composition that was released in 1974.

“So we used to play at a club, you know, covers and stuff like that,” says Cross. “We were doing 1985 [Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five], the Wings tune. And we played four or five hours a night so we’d extend tunes – it was a dancefloor – so we're playing 1985, it's in C minor, and we’re getting into a jam, and people are dancing, and I started doing that [sings turnaround from Ride Like The Wind]. And people, I noticed that they were really getting into it, you know, and it was another level of energy.”

Sensing that he was onto something, Cross says that he decided to expand the turnaround – which he saw that people were responding to – into a full song.

“So I took that part, and I went, ‘you know, there's something about this that's got the thing,’ so then I wrote the tune around that,” he confirms. “I had that part first, and then I wrote the verses. And I don't think I've ever told Paul that. He's probably gonna say ‘I should have gotten royalties.’”

Cross is clearly joking when he says this – or half-joking, at least – and we can’t honestly say that the two songs are similar enough to warrant McCartney calling his lawyers any time soon. They are both in C minor, though, and once you know the backstory, there is something about Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five’s rhythm that strikes you as similar.

What’s more, Cross is adamant: “The seed of the song came from 1985, McCartney,” he reiterates. “Yes, I ripped him off.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, Cross also discusses the guitar solo in Ride Like The Wind, and his decision to play it himself rather than offer it to one of the many great players that he had in his orbit (Steve Lukather, Larry Carlton, Eric Johnson and Jay Graydon, for example).

Despite being buried in the mix somewhat, the solo is highly regarded, but Cross says that he’s not sure how it ended up being him that took it. “Maybe Omartian [Michael Omartian, producer] said ‘Hey, you should play a solo on something,’” is his best guess.

Cross goes on to suggest that, given the company he was keeping, he was always slightly reluctant to put himself forward for a solo spot, this is also the recollection of Omartian himself.

Speaking to Mixonline in 2015, he said: “He always wanted someone else to play a solo, and I’d say ‘no’. I’d say, ‘Dude, play the solo,’ and he’d just burn it up. After we were done with the record, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen both wanted him to play guitar on one of their records, and he was so intimidated, afraid to do it, and he never did.”

Thanks to his gift for storytelling and stadium-sized choruses, Sam Fender is often referred to as ‘The Geordie Springsteen’, but now another US rock legend has suggested that he can spot his own influence on one of the British singer-songwriter’s hits.

We’re talking about Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham, who was played a live version of Fender’s 2024 single, People Watching, by his son, Will.

As we see the pair reacting to the video of Fender’s performance, it’s Buckingham Junior who first spots the Fleetwood Mac influence, so he asks his dad if that’s something that he likes to see, or can easily spot.

“It’s hard to be objective about that, you know?” says Lindsey. “I mean it did occur to me that maybe the guitar part was very much something I would do.”

Interestingly, Buckingham Senior also notices something about Fender’s songwriting and the production of People Watching that he finds familiar.

“The general kind of limits that the song puts on itself is very much like what we would do,” he says. “It kind of holds a certain emotive space and never varies from there, you know, and he knows what that is and wants to hold on to it.”

Later, the former Fleetwood Mac man also comments on how Fender’s songwriting is evolving. “He did Seventeen Going Under and that was great, too, but this is more of a complete song to me.”

Having noted the size of the crowd in the video, which was filmed last year at the London Stadium, Lindsey ends by asking his son if he’s also playing to big audiences in the US.

Having had it confirmed that he is, he says: “Well, that's good. He deserves it.”

We guess that goes down as a glowing endorsement.

Britpop band The Bluetones have been talking about how they put together their biggest hit, Slight Return, to The Guardian.

The song, which reached Number Two in January 1996, was one of the first numbers they wrote when they were just starting out as a band. “Scott (Morriss, bass) wrote the chord progressions and structure, but didn’t have any words or melody,” remembers frontman Mark Morriss.

“He recorded guitar into a cassette player, then played that back on a second cassette player so he could record himself playing along to what he’d just recorded, in a very rudimentary way of four-tracking. We liked it, but we weren’t skipping around the room going: ‘My God, we’re going to be millionaires.’”

Guitarist Adam Devlin remembers the bassist bringing in a “faster, simpler” version of Slight Return. “I fleshed out the guitar parts and put in a guitar solo. Mark worked out the vocal melodies, and we added a coda – the instrumental that fades out at the end, which originally had a sample from Tom Courtenay in Billy Liar, which was all very 60s.”

Whatever, Slight Return went down well at the band’s early gigs. “It was catchy and memorable,” says Morriss. “We recorded a demo version and sold it on blue 7-inch vinyl at our gigs. When we got signed to A&M, they were keen for it to be a single, but we felt like it would be short-changing our fanbase, which was about 200 people, who had already bought it. We had to be talked around by the label, who said: ‘We can hear it being played on the radio.’”

They weren’t wrong. Slight Return was A-listed weeks in advance of release by BBC Radio One, who were by then Britpop’s most enthusiastic patrons. In the end it didn’t quite make Number One, beaten only by Babylon Zoo’s Spaceman, a track which had had the even greater benefit of months of prior publicity due to its use in a Levi’s TV ad.

Despite - or perhaps because of - its success, Devlin admits the track hasn't always been a band favourite. "We’ve been playing it for 30 years," he said. "One tour, we’d got so bored with it, we didn’t even play it, which was a mistake because people thought we’d gone up our own arses. We learned our lesson," while Morris admits, "I’m bored of rehearsing it. If we do rehearse it, we’ll play it at three times the speed or in a reggae or funk style."

But what of the title, which is not mentioned at all in the lyrics? It is, apparently, a “sideways tribute” to Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Child (Slight Return) according to Morriss.

It's still, apparently, a cause of some puzzlement. “I was at a farmers’ market recently when one of the stallholders said: ‘You were in that band who sang Where Did You Go?’ says Devlin. “I said: ‘Yes, but that’s not what it’s called.’ People get confused because Slight Return isn’t actually in the lyrics.”

It was the song that gave the four members of Free their first taste of international stardom in the summer of 1970 – but the rock classic All Right Now was in fact inspired by one of the worst gigs the band ever played.

The song was written by bassist Andy Fraser and singer Paul Rodgers, and as Fraser recalled, the words in the title came to him after a “terrible” show at a college in Durham – on a “rainy Tuesday” that was “cold and miserable” with the band arriving at the venue in a “pretty foul mood”.

Things got worse from there, as the musicians realised that they would be playing to an audience of 30 (“too out of it to even notice”) in a room that could have held 2000. The performance that followed “absolutely sucked” with the band describing the experience as unsurprisingly “depressing”.

Drummer Simon Kirke went as far as admitting that the group “walked off the stage to the sound of our own footsteps”.

Fraser recalled to Songwriting Magazine in 2013: “Afterwards, in the dressing room, there was just this horrible silence… a really bad atmosphere. So to try and alleviate the tension, I just started singing, ‘All right now, baby, it’s all right now,’ over and over, kind of like a parent trying to gee their kids along! But it worked. The rest of the band started tapping along and so I thought, ‘We’re onto something here.’”

He was definitely onto something. This light-bulb moment would go on to change their lives and cement Free’s stature as one of the most important rock bands of the early ’70s alongside fellow trailblazers Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath.

Fraser went on to explain how most of the music was composed within the space of 10 minutes, with a little help from guitarist Paul Kossoff.

“The chords of the song were basically me trying to do my Pete Townshend impression,” Fraser said. “I actually wrote the riff on piano and then Kossoff transposed the chords to guitar. And he did a helluva job because that’s not always easy.

“Basically the chorus wrote itself, the chords took me about ten to fifteen minutes and then Paul [Rodgers] came up with the verses while he was waiting for a lift to a gig the next day.”

Ask Paul Rodgers how the song came to be, though, and you’ll get a very different answer.

His version of events is that the song took form after he spotted “a beautiful woman in the sunlight” – a chance meeting that gifted him “the chorus after 20 yards”. By the time his bandmates had picked him up in the van he was “nearly there” having written it “from the chorus backwards”.

Either way, though he wasn’t responsible for writing any of the music, it’s Paul Kossoff who steals the show in this song.

The chord voicings during the verse sections contribute heavily to the music’s overall thickness – Kossoff often using almost all of the strings on his guitar, whether fretted or left open.

He then chose to do the opposite during the choruses, sticking with dyads and single notes played higher up, purposefully leaving a lot of sonic room for Rodgers’ iconic vocal hook.

This slightly unorthodox approach to chords ended up becoming a big part of Kossoff’s musical identity – which, along with his signature vibrato, ended up inspiring many generations of players to follow, including Joe Bonamassa.

“His chords – that’s the first time I learned those chords,” Bonamassa said in 2016, when asked about what he’d learned from Free’s legendary six-stringer, who tragically passed away six years after the song was released. “The A chord with the five and the octave on top – he just squeezed the notes out of the thing.

"Another Kossoff thing I nicked just watching him were his E chords, the way he would mute strings inadvertently. I think it was intrinsically in his DNA. Instead of playing an E chord [Joe sounds all six strings], he’d play an E chord [plays the same chord with the major 3rd muted].”

He continued: “Now, the second time it’s the same but you eliminate the major 3rd. With your ring finger, you’re muting that G-string so it’s nothing but root-five-root-five-root-five. And the power of those chords… between Andy Fraser and Paul Kossoff they were just brilliantly in tune. The bass added the root-five on the lower side. It was this gigantic sound!”

In 2023, Black Stone Cherry singer/guitarist Chris Robertson told this writer how he was inspired by Kossoff’s pure and minimalist approach to tone.

He admitted: “When we started, I just wanted to be Paul Kossoff – a Les Paul with a wah into a Marshall and nothing else.”

Kossoff also delivered in All Right Now one of the most memorable solos of that era, played on his 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard most likely going into a Marshall Plexi, though some have suggested a Selmer T&B 50 amp – which has a similar circuit to the Fender 5B6 Bassman – may have also been used.

For what would end up becoming his masterpiece, Kossoff went for a song-within-a-song approach, holding onto one note and adding vibrato before gently building speed and climbing up the neck of his ’Burst. It’s played mainly from an A Major Pentatonic perspective, though some of the notes towards the end are actually from the A Minor Pentatonic family, which is ultimately what gives this section a Mixolydian flavour.

The track ended up storming top tens around the world, peaking at No 2 in the UK charts and No 4 in the Billboard Hot 100.

It has since been covered by a number of artists, from Christina Aguilera and Ali Campbell to Mike Oldfield and The Runaways.

In 2004 it was announced that Rodgers was joining forces with remaining Queen members Brian May and Roger Taylor, billed as Queen + Paul Rodgers out of respect to the late Freddie Mercury.

All Right Now was one of the most performed tracks on the subsequent tours which came to an end in 2009, with Queen eventually moving forward with American Idol contestant Adam Lambert.

Looking back on Kossoff’s legacy in a 2000 interview with Experience Hendrix magazine, Rodgers said: “In the very early days I used to tell him, ‘Man, you could be up there with Clapton and the guitar heroes, gods, if you will. You just gotta believe in yourself.’”

In real life, however, Kossoff was never as self-assured as the guitar player heard on the records.

“I think that was a little bit of his problem,” Rodgers said. “But it seems to me his mystique has grown, if anything, since those days, and he’s more acknowledged now, in some respects, than he was then.”

Olivia Rodrigo is, understandably, keen to talk about her new album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love, which will be released on 12 June.

However, during a new interview with The New York Times’ Popcast, hosts Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli couldn’t resist asking her about something that happened at the start of her music career – specifically, the time that she was seemingly forced to give a co-writing credit on one of her early songs to Taylor Swift.

The song in question is Deja Vu, Rodrigo’s second single, and the fifth track on her 2021 debut album, Sour. At the time, Rodrigo was keen to tell the world how much Swift had inspired her, and freely admitted that 1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back, another song on the album, interpolated Swift’s song New Year’s Day, from her 2017 record, Reputation. As such, both Swift and her co-writer, Jack Antonoff, received credits.

However, the case of Deja Vu – a somewhat ironic title, as it turns out – was different. In this instance, Swift and Antonoff (and also St Vincent) were only credited as co-writers several months after the song had been released – and, perhaps notably, after Rodrigo had said in an interview with Rolling Stone that Deja Vu’s bridge was at least partly inspired by the one in another Swift song: 2019’s Cruel Summer.

"We wanted to write a bridge," Rodrigo explained. "I wanted it to be really high-energy ’cause the rest of the song is so serene and eerily calm. But I wanted the last bridge to go crazy and I love Cruel Summer. It’s one of my favourite songs ever. I love, like, the yelly vocals in it, like the harmonised yells that she does. I think they’re, like, super electric and moving, so I wanted to do something like that."

It’s been noted that Rodrigo became notably less effusive in her praise of Swift after the credits incident, and when asked about it subsequently, she’s always tried to deflect the question while also not exactly putting the issue to bed.

You could say a similar thing about her answer to Caramanica, who asked Rodrigo directly if there’s now a “frost” between herself and Swift.

“I don’t know,” she replied, after taking a breath. “I think I tried to not let it, like, get to me or upset me. I think I just try to keep it trucking. I think there’s no… it was so long ago, there’s no use in, like, harping on it, and yeah, I just try to make songs that I love and try to be kind and good to other people and supportive of other people, and I’ve always like tried to be like that, and at the end of the day, I think that’s that’s all you can do.”

Read into that what you will, but one takeaway could be that Rodrigo feels that not everyone has been kind, good and supportive to her in the past.

Speaking more generally about being influenced by other artists – three months after the release of Good 4 U, another song on Sour, Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Josh Faro were credited as co-writers based on its similarity to their 2007 song, Misery Business – Rodrigo was unapologetic.

“I am a fan girl. I love music, and nobody can take that away,” she said. “I love music, and I feel so lucky that I get to do what I do, and I love so many songs, and you know, I’ve grown up being surrounded with awesome music and awesome bands, and I truly just do feel so lucky, and I love writing songs. I would be writing songs if nobody listened, and everyone hated it, and everyone thought I was bad. I would still be writing songs, because it’s what I love to do.”

What’s more, Rodrigo has certainly had some great experiences with many of her heroes. Even after the Cruel Summer drama, she collaborated with St Vincent, one of the parties involved, on 2024 single Obsessed, and went on to play St Vincent’s signature guitar model on stage while she was performing it.

And then, of course, there’s her ongoing friendship with The Cure’s Robert Smith, which began when she duetted with him at Glastonbury in 2025.

Add to the fact that she’s been able to pay tribute to Jack White, another of her inspirations, at The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and convinced The Breeders, who she also loves, to go out on tour with her, and we’re guessing that Rodrigo is pretty happy with her musical friendships right now.

Paul McCartney releases his latest album – The Boys Of Dungeon Lane – today (May 29) and the ex-Beatle/greatest living songwriter has given a fascinating, and thoughtful new interview in the Guardian.

The album is steeped in childhood memories of 1940s/50s Liverpool and the interviewer asks Macca about early sounds he remembers from those days. “There are so many,” he says. He remembers infant school, running indoors with his classmates. He recalls living in Speke (a Liverpool suburb) “hanging out on the grass verge of the dual carriageway, with girls, and listening to them chatting, and one of them said, ‘You’ve got great eyelashes!’” There were also family singalongs of Carolina Moon, Red, Red Robin, Bread and Butterflies.

He also claims briefly that he can remember being born:. “Highly dubious, highly dubious, but I feel the white tiles and chrome instruments and the sounds … It’s probably total bullshit. In fact, it almost certainly is. An imagined memory! And I was a forceps delivery.”

Inevitably he touches on the major losses of his life – Lennon and Harrison. “So, yeah, you do miss them. I start to get very sad, and I have to think, ‘Wow, wait a minute, everyone misses them.’ It’s not just me. So that makes me feel a bit better. I think: ‘Well, sod it, it’s life, and it’s what we’ve got.’”

He also talks about the importance of radio and he find out that Maxwell’s Silver Hammer was inspired by a BBC radio play he heard driving up to Liverpool in the late 60s: “I turned the radio on, and it was a play by Alfred Jarry, it was Ubu Cocu (Ubu Cuckolded). I loved it! It’s far out: ‘Hand me my shitter pump!’ I thought, yeah, I can identify with this person. And he’s just so outrageous.”

What do you ask Paul McCartney that he hasn’t already answered fifteen million times over a lifetime in music? Well, remarkably, we do find out some new things. He doesn’t like cookies for one thing. “There’s a lot of things I don’t do,”he reveals. “Everyone accepts cookies, and I go ‘No!’ I’m looking for ‘reject all’.”

He’s irritated, too, by one of the banes of modern life – the constant need for big tech to update everything. And being Paul McCartney, he was able to tell Apple CEO Tim Cook personally at the gig last year to celebrate the ‘other’ Apple’s 50^th anniversary: “I don’t want updates!” he told him. “I just learned this lot! My feeling is: Look, I bought this device, it’s mine. So it should kinda do what I want.”

And what’s his favourite emoji? Go on – have a guess. “Thumbs up is a big one,” he says. Well, how could it be anything else?

When we think of the defining artists of the 1990s, our minds tend to alight on the bands of the grunge era: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, or perhaps the Britpop groups: Oasis, Blur et al. But there’s one whose name never seems to come up in those TV retrospectives of the decade – Hootie & the Blowfish.

The South Carolina four-piece could never have been cool. Not with that ridiculous name. But it’s hard to remember now just how big they were. Their 1994 debut album Cracked Rear View sold a staggering 22 million copies, making it the seventh-biggest seller of the decade: more than Nevermind, Vs, and both of the albums Michael Jackson released during the 90s. Even today, it’s the nineteenth biggest-selling album of all time in the US. If you exclude compilations, it’s tenth.

Hootie were formed by two friends in the mid-1980s. Guitarists Darius Rucker and Mark Bryan were both students at the University of South Carolina. They eventually linked up with bassist Dean Felber and drummer Brantley Smith (there never was in actuality a ‘Hootie’).

Initially, they were just a covers band with no more ambition but to provide a good time to paying punters. But after graduating, they made the decision to start writing their own material and replaced Smith with Jim Sonefeld.

Sonefeld came to the audition with an ace up his sleeve: Hold My Hand. In an interview with Songfacts in 2022, he remembered how he wrote it at a time when he was still struggling with the guitar. “While you're writing and writing as a novice, there is a limitation with your hands. But also at the same time, there's a purity that can sneak through when you are limited.”

“If you have something profound that you wanna say - and all of our hearts say and feel profound things - but you're limited in the musical side, you get a really pretty but naive picture. You know, I wanna say something amazing, but gosh, I only have a few chords I know.

"There's a great moment to catch there where there's a combination of being unsure and sort of devout in your thought as well - like I gotta get this thing out.”

Sonefeld explained that when he had tried to write songs previously, nothing had really flowed. “But when I started writing Hold My Hand, it quickly was feeling like a new thing.

"Like, wait, this is flowing. It sort of propelled itself. I didn't stop and go, ‘Dang, I'm stuck. I don't know what to do here.’ It propelled itself as I was sitting there. And those are the special moments that songwriters go after where you're trying to say something, you're trying to have a certain melody and they're flowing at the same time and coming together. So that's what Hold My Hand was for me.”

The lyric he came up with could be about a relationship, but could also be seen as touching on wider issues, especially with its reference in the chorus to “the promised land”. There are nods too, to classic soul music: “with a little love and some tenderness” and - inevitably with any song called Hold My Hand - The Beatles. Coming from a more experienced songwriter that could have been dismissed as cunning, but there’s an endearing gaucheness to Hold My Hand that it’s difficult not to warm to.

Sonefeld’s bandmates certainly did. In an interview with Billboard in 2024, frontman Darius Rucker pinpointed it as the turning point: “He (Sonefeld) played that the day he auditioned for us. He walked out of the room and I told the other guys, ‘He’s in the band!’”

“We had written a couple of songs, but when Soni came in, we really started writing.”

The band began to accumulate material. From 1991, they started issuing their own cassettes to sell at gigs. A couple of years later, they pooled $8,000 of their own money and put out an EP, Kootchypop, on their own Fishco label.

The Kootchypop version of Hold My Hand is a little bit sparse – the harmonies aren’t quite as bulked out - and it’s over five minutes, but essentially it’s the same version that became a hit.

After getting rejected by record company after record company, Kootchypop landed on the desk of Atlantic A&R Tim Sommer. An ex-member of experimental art rock band Hugo Largo (best known for their unusual two-bassist and violin line-up), Sommer heard Kootchypop, was intrigued and decided to go and see them live. In a 2016 feature he wrote for the Observer, he remembered seeing what he described as an “interesting omen.”

“The week I was set to fly down to South Carolina to see Hootie & the Blowfish, I took a look at the Billboard Charts. In the US Top 10 Albums, there was a pile of grunge records, AND Bob Seger’s Greatest Hits.”

“This indicated to me that there was a MAJOR part of the marketplace NOT being served by the record companies, who were signing grunge and only grunge. They really were. I said to myself, Jesus, if Bob Seger’s Greatest Hits is f***ing sitting in the Top 10, man, somebody needs to sign something that could appeal to that audience: all those people going out to buy Bob Seger records.”

Sommer loved them, signed them, and by early 1994 Hootie were in the studio making their debut album at NRG Studios in Hollywood. Don Gehman had been selected as producer, largely because of his track record with John Mellencamp and REM (early Hootie sets would regularly feature REM covers). Recording was conducted swiftly, in just three weeks.

“It was a breeze,” remembers Sommer. “The band had been playing many of those songs for six, seven, eight years, so it was just a matter of shortening them, tweaking them and recording them right. Gehman did a fantastic job.”

Hold My Hand was trimmed to a more concise four minutes fifteen, but the harmonies needed something... a bit extra. An associate of the band suggested contacting a bona fide rock legend and expert harmoniser: David Crosby.

“We were trying to figure out who would do it, and our friend Gena Rankin threw out David's name,” Darius Rucker told Grammy.com in 2024. “She said it so casually, we all thought she was messing with us. There was no way a legend like him was going to come be part of this project! Sure enough, two days later, he walked into the studio (to record it). I still can't believe that happened.”

In another interview with Rolling Stone, Rucker revealed that Crosby had little confidence his contribution would be heard by many people: “It was funny because after he had sung, he said to our producer, ‘Next time, could you have me sing with a band that is going to matter? That’s going to be important?’”

Other than Sommer, nobody at Atlantic had much confidence in Cracked Rear View. “Shortly after we finished the record, I played it for the head of A&R, who was based in New York City,” Sommer remembered. “I played this fellow the entire album, and he immediately and firmly pronounced the record ‘unreleasable’ and said it didn’t have any singles.”

“Naturally, I was disappointed, but I trusted my ears. So I went to Danny Goldberg, who ran the West Coast office. I told Danny that the head of A&R said the record was unreleasable. I explained that I respectfully but adamantly disagreed, and I made my case. Danny shrugged, looked at me, and said, ‘Timmy, if it’s so important to you, I’ll make sure it gets put out.’”

Goldberg was as good as his word and Cracked Rear View came out in July 1994, with Hold My Hand selected as the lead single. It took a while to weave its magic - it wouldn’t be until the following February that it peaked at Number 10 on the Billboard chart.

Listeners came round to it gradually. For most of 1994, US rock fans were still processing and coming to terms with the death of Kurt Cobain. But as time passed, listeners became more receptive to something lighter, and more hopeful.

Hold My Hand was the right song at the right time. Its simple sentiments of support and succour in times of trouble (“we’ll rise above this mess”) were exactly what people needed to hear. It probably helped that the music was grunge-adjacent and Rucker’s baritone similar in timbre to Eddie Vedder’s, but Hootie came across as far more relatable and wholesome than any of the grunge bands. They seemed like nice, regular guys. Free of drugs, free of angst.

Further singles were released and Cracked Rear View started flying off the shelves. By the end of 1995, it had become the biggest-selling album in America that year, surpassing even Michael Jackson’s HIStory.

Mocked by the critics and hopelessly unhip, Hootie & The Blowfish would go on to become something of a people’s band in North America. Whilst they were never really able to sustain that huge level of success, they’re fondly regarded by those who were there at the time. And Hold My Hand remains one of those songs that people reach for when the occasion requires – post 9/11 it picked up a lot of airplay.

It’s hard not to see its relevance in today’s divided America. “It comes across as a song about peaceful love and hippie shit, but Hold My Hand was a protest song,” Rucker told Rolling Stone in 2024.

“That’s a song about 'Why are we hating each other?' The country was so divided. The idea was, we can get together. We’re better than this.”

Every great artist has their golden era, the period in which they reach their creative zenith, surpass even their own expectations and produce a catalogue of work that is as sublime as it is timeless. Such was the case with the artist born Reginald Kenneth Dwight, better known to the world as Elton John.

It’s now almost 60 years since the classically-trained session pianist from Pinner in Middlesex met Lincolnshire-born lyricist Bernie Taupin, after they both answered the same Liberty Records’ advertisement in the NME for songwriters, forging what would become one of the most successful songwriting partnerships in music history.

Since then, Elton John has sold over 300 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling artists of all time.

There have been standout songs across all six decades, but his golden era of critical and commercial success was from 1970 to 1976, when he released iconic albums such as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, achieved seven consecutive No 1 albums in the US and recorded the vast majority of his classic hits.

His breakthrough hit was Your Song, from his self-titled second studio album in 1970. But the song that cemented his success and helped transform him from a respected artist into a global superstar was Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going To Be A Long, Long Time) in 1972.

Rocket Man is a gloriously emotive and melancholic masterpiece on which Taupin’s theme of intergalactic isolation is melded with John’s sublime melodic prowess and top-tier production. It’s arguably Elton John’s best-loved song and one that has become a timeless and enduring classic.

The song was assumed to be directly influenced by David Bowie’s 1969 hit single Space Oddity. But whereas Bowie placed his character Major Tom floating in space, Bernie Taupin added an extra element of humanity, looking to a future world where inter-galactic travel would become commonplace and envisaging his Mars-bound astronaut’s mission as a regular, run-of-the-mill business trip.

In a 2023 interview with Elton John and Bernie Taupin, the latter explained what first inspired the song.

“The interesting thing about Rocket Man is people identify it unfortunately with David Bowie’s Space Oddity,” he said, “and it actually wasn’t inspired by that at all.

“It was actually inspired by a story by Ray Bradbury from his book of science fiction short stories called The Illustrated Man and in that book there was a story called The Rocket Man, which was about how astronauts in the future would become sort of an everyday job, so I took that idea and ran with it.”

All of which came as a surprise to Elton John. ”I never knew that,” said John, while sitting next to Taupin.

In an earlier interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2018, Taupin expounded on the backstory of the song.

“In mid-1971, I was in England driving north to visit my parents in Lincolnshire. I had moved to the States a year earlier and hadn’t been home in a while. After exiting the M1 motorway, I had to take back roads to my parents’ village. By then, the sun had set and it was pitch black. I remember the stars were out.”

Taupin said that during the drive he thought about the Bradbury story and the 1970 song Rocket Man, written and recorded by American singer-songwriter Tom Rapp for his band Pearls Before Swine, which was a literal retelling of the Bradbury story.

Taupin recalled: “Driving the back roads, I began writing a song in my head about the drudgery of being an astronaut. As I thought about how to start the song, the first verse came to me at once: ‘She packed my bags last night pre-flight/Zero hour 9 am/And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then.’”

Unfortunately, Taupin didn’t have a pen or paper in the car to write the words down.

“So, I repeated the lyrics over and over. I was trying not to lose my train of thought as I raced to my parents’ house. When I arrived, I rushed in without saying hello. I was hunting for a pen and paper.

“I had never written that way before. Usually, I’d come up with a line and build from there. In this case, words to an entire verse fell out of my mind and onto the page. The words had such a rhythmic cadence.”

While Taupin has detailed memories of writing the lyrics, John’s recollections of then writing the music are less revealing. “It was a pretty easy song to write the melody to,” he said in the 2023 interview with Taupin, as reported by NME, “because it’s a song about space, so it’s quite a spacious song.”

Rocket Man is an absolute masterclass in the craft of songwriting. It’s also a beautifully-realised vocal performance from John, one of his best, because it perfectly balances theatricality with raw vulnerability and emotional depth. It also steers well clear of any melodrama or bombast, opting instead for intimate phrasing and controlled drama.

The timbre of his voice is compelling. When he sings, “And I’m going to be high as a kite by then”, there’s a nice rasp at the start of the word “high” before he glides effortlessly up to falsetto and back down again.

His piano playing is rich and mellifluous, with large, flowing arpeggios which evoke the spacey, drifting atmosphere of the lyrics.

Rocket Man was the lead single from John’s 1972 album Honky Chateau, his first No 1 album in the US and a record so-named because it was recorded in the lush environs of Chateau d’Hérouville, a residential recording studio in an 18th century mansion, situated just north of Paris.

While Rocket Man may not have been directly inspired by Bowie’s Space Oddity, there is little doubt that it had an influence. Producer Gus Dudgeon had produced Bowie’s Space Oddity and both songs shared themes of intergalactic isolation and loneliness.

By the time John began work on the Honky Chateau album in early 1972, his stock was high with his record company and the first thing he did was to ditch the session players the label had insisted he use up to that point.

He replaced them with his touring band: Davey Johnstone on guitar, Dee Murray on bass and Nigel Olsson on drums. The effect was transformative. This band breathed fresh life to his songs in the studio and the spacious, perceptive production of Gus Dudgeon also reaped rewards.

Rocket Man was recorded on 16 January 1972 and was notable for being one of the few Elton John songs to begin with vocals from the start, rather than a piano intro. The first verse features only John’s vocal and piano, which gives the track real intimacy.

At 0:30, on the first bar of the line, “I miss the Earth so much/I miss my wife”, a bass enters the mix, a high G, followed by some beautifully melodic inflections from bassist Dee Murray.

45 seconds in, a single hi-hat appears. At 0:52, this shifts into double-time as Murray’s bass guitar ascends and then drops down into the first chorus as the acoustic guitars and drums enter and the whole glorious composition opens up.

“And I think it's gonna be a long, long time/’til touchdown brings me ’round again to find…”

At 1:14, as John sings “I’m a rocket man”, one of the song’s defining elements makes itself known – a slow ascending electric slide guitar from guitarist Davey Johnstone. The slide appears throughout each chorus on that phrase and at 2:06 a new, other-worldly, sound appears for the first time, adding to the song’s interstellar atmosphere. It’s a swooping, space-type effect, played on an ARP 2500 synthesiser by recording engineer and musician David Hentschel.

In addition to their instrumental skills, the three musicians in John’s touring band also contributed impressive backing vocals, and Rocket Man is believed to be the first composition they all sang on. Their vocals were a revelation for producer Gus Dudgeon, who called them “the best in-house backing vocalists that anybody’s ever had on record”.

Elton allegedly came in for a listen, realised it was good and simply said “get on with it”, before leaving Dudgeon and the band the complete freedom to create the backing vocal arrangements.

Davey Johnstone, Dee Murray and Nigel Olsson’s rich and precise backing vocals quickly became a staple of future live and studio performances.

Rocket Man was released on 17 April 1972 and reached No 2 in the UK and No 6 in the US.

It was critically acclaimed. A review in Record World concluded that “Elton John explores the outer limits of the possibilities of pop music”, adding that the song “should be a huge hit; it’s one of his best”.

Rocket Man duly became John’s biggest hit to date and as writer David Cheal noted in a piece on the song in the Financial Times in 2020: “Its lyrics came to serve as a metaphor for his stratospheric career and troubled life.”

Elton John would go on to personify Rocket Man and it would steadily grow to become his brand, eventually inspiring the 2019 biographical musical drama of the same name starring Taron Egerton.

The song has been covered by numerous artists, most notably Kate Bush in 1991.

There was also a spoken-word version by William Shatner from 1978, which has become something of a cult classic.

In May 2017, an official music video for Rocket Man premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. The video was one of three winners in a competition called The Cut, organised by John and Taupin in partnership with YouTube.

The competition called upon independent filmmakers to submit video treatments for three Elton John songs – Rocket Man, Tiny Dancer and Bennie And The Jets – to reimagine these songs from the 1970s, which were released before the music video age. The winning video for Rocket Man was an animated video co-directed by Iranian refugee Majid Adin, an artist and animator, and Irish animation director Stephen McNally.

The video was inspired by Adin's own experiences of a long and dangerous journey as a refugee, fleeing from Iran to England, and it features a character who makes a similarly perilous journey from Syria. The character envisages himself as an astronaut, drawing parallels between the song's lyrics and the experiences of a refugee.

John and Taupin invited Adin to the premiere of his video at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.

Sitting beside Adin on a balcony overlooking the sun-drenched city of Nice, the clearly moved John and Taupin watched the video that Adin had created, on his laptop.

“That’s beautiful,” says John. “You’ve made it so personal to you. It tells of your story and your journey. It’s just fantastic… thank you so much… so brilliantly done.”

“Very, very moving,” adds Taupin.

Adin’s video reinforces the timeless emotive power of the song and echoes its themes of isolation and hope.

John went on to tell Rolling Stone that all three of the winning videos – for Rocket Man, Tiny Dancer and Bennie and the Jets – had left him feeling “moved and amazed”.

Abba Voyage moves into its fifth year next week, but there’s one of the group’s classics that has been conspicuous by its absence in the much-praised, long-running avatar show. For that matter, it was also omitted from both Mamma Mia film and its 2018 sequel.

The Day Before You Came is Abba's own Banquo’s ghost. It doesn’t fit into the hen party version of the band; that is how mainstream culture prefers to view them. A bleak, haunting creation, six minutes long and without a chorus of any description, it’s one of the bravest singles they (or for that matter, any group of their standing) has ever released. It’s also one of their best.

Work on the group’s 1981 album The Visitors had been tense and frosty. By now, the two couples – Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid (Frida) Lyngstad and Bjorn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Falkskog were both divorced, and though no major announcement had been made, they had quit touring.

Early 1982 saw Benny and Bjorn start work with Tim Rice on a musical project that would eventually become Chess, Frida recorded a solo album with Phil Collins producing and Agnetha spent some time with her children.

Initially, it seems that Benny and Bjorn thought they could work on the musical concurrently with Abba and, in Spring 1982, the band were back in their own Polar studios in Stockholm, recording a new album that at this stage was tentatively titled Opus 10 (though confusingly it would have been their ninth).

But only three tracks came out of these sessions – You Owe Me One (which was eventually issued as the B-side of their final single Under Attack) I Am The City and Just Like That. The latter weren’t issued until the 1990s.

“Even when everything is working great, you have these ‘down’ moments every now and again, so at first you don’t take it as a sign that you’re getting tired of the whole thing,” Ulvaeus said later. “It’s only after a while that you notice that every time you go into the studio, it gets harder and harder.”

It was clear that something wasn’t clicking and a new studio album just wouldn’t happen in 1982. So instead, the group agreed to another greatest hits package, but with the addition of two new tracks, to be released that autumn.

The group returned to Polar studios in early August to record those new songs – Under Attack and Cassandra. But Bjorn and Benny were aware that neither constituted great comeback singles for the band and they required something stronger. They decided to do something that they’d hardly ever done in the history of Abba and write something right then and there in the studio. Using a Yamaha GX-1 synth and its built-in drum machine, Benny soon had the outline of a song, and within an hour, he and Bjorn had written the melody and given the track a working title: ‘Den lidande fågeln’ or ‘the suffering bird’.

Meanwhile, Michael Tretow, the engineer who worked on nearly all of the group’s records, recalled gating the sound of Benny’s Yamaha and thus creating a sequencer effect, which let the beat of the snare drum determine at what moments the synths would be heard or not. It gave the track a mechanised, circular rhythm, which gave his partner an idea for a theme.

Bjorn then went home and set to work on the lyric. He had an idea of an ordinary woman recounting the things she must have done on a day before her destiny suddenly changed. Talking to Abba biographer Carl Magnus Palm, Ulvaeus recalled that: “I already knew that the melody was such – from a technical point – that the lyrics had to be constructed so that they would lead up to the ‘day before you came’ in the melody.

"Then, when I got the idea for a theme, I wrote down all the everyday incidents and things I could think of that would happen to someone leading a routine kind of life. It was very difficult from a grammatical point of view to get it all to fit together, because it would all have to be logical, there was no place for any hitches.”

The lyric complete, the band reconvened on August 20 for the vocal session. It had been decided Agnetha would sing the lead, with Frida relegated to backing vocals. Benny and Bjorn instructed her to sing in character, as the ordinary woman who is the narrator.

Famously, the singer gave her performance with the studio lights all dimmed. Interviewed by Palm, Tretow recalled the session as “very emotional. There was a feeling that this was the end. Agnetha did her vocal with the lights down. The song still brings tears to my eyes.” It would be the last Abba recording session for 35 years.

The Day Before You Came was released in October 1982 and was greeted – at least initially – with a mixture of disappointment and bafflement. Record Mirror couldn’t get their head round it, describing it as a “morbid slice of crocodile tears” that “is tedium incarnate”. For Fred Dellar in Smash Hits, it was “the sort of song that usually accompanies romantic French movies,” but warned that its “very wordiness may be its chart undoing.”

Indeed, Tim Rice had warned Benny and Bjorn that though he loved it, he didn’t think it would be a very big hit. He was proved right. Though it went Top 10 in West Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands, in the UK (an Abba stronghold, lest us forget) The Day Before You Came could only creep up to Number 32 – their lowest chart position for seven years.

Once Abba had provided instantly catchy pop. But The Day Before You Came was almost the antithesis of Dancing Queen, Mamma Mia and the band’s classic uptempo hits. It’s a song that takes some time – years even – to appreciate, and in the decades since 1982 its reputation has grown and grown.

Just a couple of years later, the British synth pop duo Blancmange covered it and took it to Number 22 in the UK singles charts. And once Abba had been rehabilitated (at least, critically) in the early 1990s, it started showing up in those All Time Great polls that started proliferating around this time.

In 2010, ITV conducted a poll where fans could vote for their favourite Abba song. Incredibly, The Day Before You Came came in third, behind just Dancing Queen and The Winner Takes It All. Two years later, the NME, counting down ‘The Greatest Songs In Pop History’, placed it at Number Six.

Meanwhile, critics have sung its praises, commending its unconventional structure, those lyrics that paint of picture of numbing mundanity and the ominous, forbidding music. Perhaps more than any other Abba song, The Day Before You Came gets under your skin. And stays there.

It incites so many questions. What happened the day after the events painstakingly detailed in the song? What had happened in the narrator’s life to make her depressed? Was it simply the grind of a routine 20th-century working life? Or something darker?

And most of all, who is the ‘you’ of the title? The central mystery of the song has never been fully revealed and as songwriters you’d hardly expect Andersson and Ulvaeus to provide all the answers. The idea that the ‘you’ is merely a lover who lifted Agnetha’s character out of the dull routine that was her life doesn’t seem right.

The music is too bleak and full of dread, especially the long outro in which Frida’s wordless vocals, and banks of synths build up to create something truly funereal. In a 2010 interview with Bjorn in The Times, Pete Paphides asked that question, saying that whatever it was that happened, it wasn’t good. “Ah, you’ve spotted it, haven’t you?” Ulvaeus answered. “The music is hinting at it.”

So is the ‘you’ a murderer? Perhaps. But there is one more clue. The lyric mentions Agnetha’s character as reading ‘the latest one by Marilyn French or something in that style’. French was a radical feminist writer whose most famous work was her 1977 novel The Women’s Room.

The fight for female autonomy and independence in a patriarchal world was at the centre of French’s work. So is it possible to see Agnetha’s character as someone who is mourning a single independent life she didn’t appreciate at the time, before her life is turned upside down by the entrance of a male lover?

Well again, yes.. maybe. But this is the ongoing fascination with The Day Before You Came. A decade and a half before Mamma Mia and its will-this-do, back-of-a-fag packet plot, Benny and Bjorn had - in just one song - created a whole novel’s worth of intrigue.

Long after the four members of Abba leave us and the band exist only (along many others) in our collective memory as an emblem of pop music’s golden era, The Day Before You Came will still be provoking debate. It’s their final masterpiece, their eternal enigmatic question mark.

It’s World Goth Day (who knew?) and Olivia Rodrigo has released a new song called The Cure. But no, it’s not about the band of the same name – although she is, famously, friends with frontman Robert Smith.

Rodrigo was quizzed on the potential World Goth Day/The Cure connection on the Elvis Duran Show, but confirmed that she wasn’t even aware of it.

“Honestly, this song, The Cure, has nothing to do with the band, The Cure – although I love [the band] so much – but it is just a happy coincidence, I suppose,” she says.

Rodrigo previously revealed that The Cure is her favourite song on her forthcoming new album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love, and she said something similar to Duran.

“I'm really really proud of this song,” she says. “I absolutely love it and I'm really excited for people to hear it. I think it's like a new perspective that I haven't really had the maturity maybe to express before in earlier albums. And yeah, I'm really obsessed with it. I'm really excited to put it out.”

Beginning with rhythmic acoustic guitar strums and vocals, The Cure has one of Rodrigo’s trademark big choruses and builds to a pounding crescendo complete with drums, synths and strings.

Discussing her evolution as a songwriter more generally, Rodrigo says that she’s come to appreciate the importance of editing.

“I think editing is a really important part of the creative process that I didn't really realise when I was younger,” she notes. “When I was younger, making stuff, I was kind of just like vomiting an idea and being like, ‘Let's put it out.’ And I think it's really fun for me to go in and refine things and tweak things. I think there's something kind of beautiful and artistic about that.”

These edits, says Rodrigo, are on the production side, too – “little things that maybe nobody else would notice, but something that me and my producer [Dan Nigro] just spend hours kind of tweaking.”

And yes, before you ask, Rodrigo is still in regular contact with Robert Smith, who she duetted with at Glastonbury last year. “We talk, like, every week,” she reports. “He's amazing.”

Pet Sounds turned 60 this week and the three surviving Beach Boys from that era’s lineup have been talking about the album that many consider the greatest of all time.

Al Jardine, Mike Love and Bruce Johnston have given – interestingly, separate - interviews to Associated Press about Brian Wilson’s masterpiece.

By 1965, Brian Wilson had retired from playing live, and, whilst the rest of band were out touring, was laying down the instrumental tracks for Pet Sounds. They had little idea what was waiting for them on their return. “It was just another record,” remembers Al Jardine. “Brian was very excited to have us come home because he’d been working on this new record.”

Jardine recalls that the day after the group returned from Japan, he was summoned to the studio by Brian. “He says ‘you gotta hear this stuff!’ ‘Ok, alright’. And of course we were completely mystified because this was a whole new kind of msuic.

"It’s more thoughtful, it’s romantic, it’s melancholy. It’s all the things that the Beach Boys… well, we like romantic. But our songs are fun and joyous and happy and these songs were thoughtful and had some melancholy. But because we're professional guys, the next day we were in the studio singing I Know There’s An Answer.”

As we all know, it was Mike Love who was most resistant to the Beach Boys’ turn into introspective territory. Diplomatically, Love doesn’t mention that this time, though he does talk about the numerous vocal takes the older Wilson brother would make them all do. “We focused fiercely on the harmonies. My cousin Brian had us do one section of Wouldn’t It Be Nice more than 25 times. I said ‘Brian, that sounded great’. He said: ‘No, do it again’.

“I started calling him ‘Dog Ears’ because dogs are said to hear ranges that are higher and lower than human beings. I also called him ‘the Stalin of the studio’ because he was like a dictator the way he was in the studio at that time. But it all worked out for the good.”

Best of all is Bruce Johnston, who says: “I just shut up and didn’t talk and did whatever Brian told me to do. Because I knew this was the album. I was lucky enough to be included and knew this was the album of my life.”

And when asked what he is most proud of, Johnston replies: “I’m most proud of Mike and Al and Bruce not succumbing to alcohol, smoke or drugs and clouding the judgement of what I’m doing and being cool, clear and sharp to take the direction and hit the actual notes that Brian would assign us in Pet Sounds.” So there.

If you’d assumed that Olivia Rodrigo’s Robert Smith era began and ended with their on-stage collaboration at last year’s Glastonbury Festival, you were some way wide of the mark.

When Rodrigo returned with her new single, Drop Dead, last month, the lyrics referenced Just Like Heaven, one of the songs she sang with Smith at Worthy Farm. And now it’s emerged that the second single to be lifted from her upcoming third album, You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love, is called The Cure.

This, of course, is the name of the band that Smith co-founded and continues to front. Given that The Cure (the song) hasn’t been released yet, though, we don’t yet know if it’s about said band or is a reference to some kind of remedy for something.

Either way, we do know that Rodrigo is pretty proud of it. In fact, writing on Instagram, she said: “It’s my favourite song on the album and one of my favourite songs I’ve ever made.”

Rodrigo will doubtless be hoping that The Cure continues to build momentum in the run-up to the release of You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love on 12 June. She recently announced The Unraveled Tour in support of the album – this kicks off in September and will continue into next year.