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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad Bunny has become embroiled in a legal battle that could have huge consequences for the reggaeton scene and its producers.

It concerns a track called Fish Market, originally produced by Steely and Clevie back in 1989. Some parts of the song became components of the dembow riddim, which is one of the foundations of reggaeton as a genre.

Since 2023, Cleveland ‘Clevie’ Browne and the heirs of Wycliffe ‘Steely’ Johnson made a claim that could potentially affect over 100 artists and approximately 1,800 songs.

At a hearing in early July, US District Judge, AndréBirotte Jr determined that a jury should ultimately decide whether the musical combination identified by the plaintiffs is sufficiently protected by copyright and whether numerous reggaeton recordings copied those protected elements without authorisation.

However, last week Bad Bunny’s legal team and attorneys representing other artists succeeded in getting the judge to reconsider that original decision. Birotte Jr said that he would now need to take several weeks to make an order concerning the issue.

The case revolves around what actually constitutes the dembow riddim. The plantiffs contend that the dembow is derived directly from Fish Market.

However, Bunny’s attorney and others are arguing that the ‘Fish Market Elements’ in dembow do not constitute a continuous musical passage from a single composition. Instead, they say, it uses portions of different (but not continuous) sections of Fish Market along with another Steely and Clevie piece, Pounder (Dub Mix II).

Copyright protection, they argue, cannot be based on a musical arrangement assembled from different portions of different works when those portions do not appear together in the copyrighted composition. And in any case the composition copyright for Pounder belongs to another Jamaican producer Dennis ‘The Menace’ Halliburton, who is not a part of the lawsuit.

Yes, it’s all fiendishly complicated and clearly musicologists will have to be called in at some juncture.

The Bad Bunny songs that are affected include Tití Me Preguntó, Un Ratito and Una Vez, all of which use dembow. Other artists who have used it and thus could be pulled into this dispute include Justin Bieber, Daddy Yankee and Pitbull. Many other less successful artists and producers will also doubtless be on tenterhooks as to the judge’s decision in this complex case.

Tom Morello, Ad-Rock and Kathleen Hanna are among the artists that have joined forces for an Anti-ICE benefit album.

It’s called Contra-ICE Vol 1: ICE OUT and comes out on October 2 on Sounds Good Records. It features 30 tracks, all of which are previously unreleased, from a range of artists working in the music, spoken word and comedy fields. Confirmed names for the project include ex-Beastie Boy Ad-Rock, Jello Biafra, Ozomatli, Money Mark, Fred Armisen and David J of Bauhaus and Love And Rockets fame.

All proceeds from the record go to the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and Unión del Barrio, organisations that work with immigrant groups at risk of deportation.

The first single to be released from an album is a cover, curiously of Justin Bieber’s Let Me Love You, which features Hanna, Ad-Rock, Money Mark, Fred Ortiz and Frank Figueroa. See what you think:

Hanna, the Bikini Kill singer and riot grrrl icon, has said in a statement: “It’s not often you get to play music with your favourite people while working with a grassroots organisation like Contra-ICE. They are passionately fighting against fascism and white supremacy, which is something none of us can afford to ignore.”

She continued, “Mario Caldato Jr. (Beastie Boys) produced our song, which was a dream come true for me. Thank you so much to Contra-ICE for making this happen and allowing me to represent what we collectively stand for.”

The album has been put together by Build Art Make Change, a nonprofit group that aim, in their words, to “empower vulnerable communities by harnessing artistic expression to raise awareness, shift public discourse, and drive meaningful policy reform.”

Their founder Dali Colorado has said of Contra-ICE. “(It) is not only an album It is not only a collective. It is a cultural infrastructure built to support frontline organisations, amplify immigrant voices, and mobilise creatives who believe that love is not passive; it’s organised. Music has always been my first language. Justice has always been my inheritance. Contra-ICE is where those two lineages meet, urgently, unapologetically, and with love over fear.”

ICE, or the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, has been in the news since the re-election of Donald Trump eighteen months back. Trump has significantly expanded ICE’s budget and mission since then. The force’s greater visibility has led to clashes with protestors, which earlier this year led to the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti – both US citizens – by members of the force.

The day after the album’s release, on October 3, there’s a live event featuring a number of the artists featured on the album, at La Cita in Los Angeles.

Morrissey and Johnny Marr haven’t seen eye to eye on a whole range of issues – from politics to the management of The Smiths’ legacy – these past few years. But now the erstwhile creative partners have worked together on a new archive release.

It’s a box set of their old label’s singles entitled Rough Trade 45s: Volume 2 and as well as tracks from The Fall, Aztec Camera, Scritti Politti, The Sundays and Robert Wyatt, it has a contribution from The Smiths.

And it’s one for completists. The Headmaster Ritual was never released as a single in the UK, though it did come out in the Netherlands. On the B-side is another track from the band’s 1985 album Meat Is Murder: I Want The One I Can’t Have.

Both lead Smiths agreed upon the track, and Morrissey has overseen the single’s artwork, which continues the group’s tradition of featuring iconic individuals from the 1950s and 60s. In this case, the cover star is the American actor Billy Halop.

In addition to this, Morrissey and Marr have both contributed sleeve notes to the boxset, along with the likes of Green Gartside, Stewart Lee, Elvis Costello and Jonathan Richman.

Rough Trade released all of The Smiths' records during their five-year lifetime. The organisation celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, and last month was the subject of a weekend of events at London’s South Bank Centre that featured Pulp, Scritti Politti and one of the label’s newer signings, Caroline.

The fact that Morrissey and Marr have contributed to the new box set is remarkable, not least given the hostility that seems to have existed between the two men these past few years, especially from Morrissey's side. Back in June, the singer posted on his Morrissey Central website that Marr had “intentionally divided the Smiths audience into Marr or Morrissey factions... He has devoted his entire life to killing Morrissey in whatever way available.”

As yet, Johnny Marr has made no public statement about those comments. The guitarist has a new solo album, entitled The Age Of Everything, coming out in October.

The times they were a-changin’. When U2 wrapped up their eighties with a series of homecoming gigs at the Point Depot in Dublin in December 1989, they had already smelt the coffee.

Seven weeks previously, the Berlin Wall had come down. Revolution had spread to Czechoslovakia and then Romania. And the new decade was already acquiring a new soundtrack – dance and hip-hop were the rising forces and the rock bands who assimilated these best looked likely to be the ones to prosper in the 1990s.

So where did that leave U2, with their hoary old blues rock, their waistcoats and mullets? Needing to, in Bono’s words at the final Point show: “dream it all up again”.

Central to that was Berlin, the city which, it quickly became clear, would become the centre of a reunited Germany and a new Europe. When U2 arrived in Hansa Studios ten months later to start recording what would become Achtung Baby, one half of the band had a vague plan. While the whole group were keen that the new record should junk the Americana of the Joshua Tree/ Rattle And Hum era, it was unclear what should be put in its place.

Bono and The Edge were keen to incorporate dance rhythms and industrial textures into U2’s music. The rhythm section – Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr - weren’t so keen. In the 2011 documentary From The Sky Down, the drummer summed up the group’s problems: “Even before we got there, there was a sense that something was not quite right. And when we got there we were on completely different pages.”

“We would go into the room and just bash it out hour after hour, listen back and not like anything that we were doing,” said Clayton. “We were going down a lot of blind allies. There was a lot of friction, a lot of tension. Nobody was particularly happy.”

The band were struggling. Slogging through an early version of Mysterious Ways – then entitled ‘Sick Puppy’ – the group were trying a number of different chord progressions for the bridge when The Edge stumbled upon one that lit up everyone’s eyes.

“I played these on an acoustic guitar and everyone was trying to decide whether they were any good,” the guitarist remembered in the documentary. “And then Danny (Daniel Lanois) said ‘why don’t you play those two ideas sequentially, just one after another’. So I did and everyone was like ‘ooh that sounds really good.’

“So we all went into the big room. I shouted out the chords and we just started playing them. Bono got on the microphone and suddenly something very powerful is happening in the room. It was one of those hairs on the back of your neck moments.”

Bono improvised some lyrics and called out some chords, working out the song bit by bit. In just 15 minutes, a new song had somehow miraculously sprouted. “It was such a pivotal moment,” says The Edge. “We’d been going through this hard time and nothing seemed to be going right. Suddenly we were presented with this gift, it just kind of arrived. It steadied everyone’s nerves hugely in the studio.”

For his lyric, Bono decided to write about what was happening around him and the divisions in the band. One of the many ironies about One is that it took a song about breaking up to bring the group back together.

“There was melancholy about it but there was also strength,” Bono said in the 2006 book U2 By U2. “One is not about oneness, it's about difference. It's not the old hippie idea of 'let's all live together.' It is a much more punk rock concept. It's anti-romantic: 'we are one but not the same. We get to carry each other.'

"It's a reminder that we have no choice. I'm still disappointed when people hear the chorus line as 'got to' rather than 'we get to carry each other.' Like it or not, the only way out of here is if I give you a leg up the wall and you pull me after you.”

It was the first glimmer that the new album, and indeed the band itself – things had got that bad – was salvageable. The Hansa sessions were wrapped up by Christmas 1990, with One the only gleaming fruit of their stint in Berlin. “(Now) we just had put the work in and figure out the ideas and hone those ideas down,” said Clayton.

In the New Year, the band moved to a seaside home, Elsinore in Dalkey, south of Dublin, where they set up a studio and the bulk of Achtung Baby was put together. One was worked on some more with overdubs and strings added. Feeling that the track was ‘too beautiful’, the Edge added some ‘gritty’ guitar.

Then Daniel Lanois added a little something. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2016, he remembered: “It was just me and Bono in the studio and he said, ‘Dan why don't you play a little guitar part to try and juice me up,’ and so I overdubbed a part that made the finish line, this little hammer-on kind of part on his Green Gretsch and that provided Bono with some encouragement.”

Even after that, One was still subject to some last-minute adjustments. In September 1991 at the final mixing session at Dublin’s Windmill Lane studios, Bono re-recorded one line and The Edge added a guitar part, before it was put to bed, to the satisfaction of all parties.

Achtung Baby was released two months later. Reviews of the album were generally positive and much was made of how the album sounded different to the ‘old U2’, particularly the use of electronic textures and dance rhythms on some of the tracks. One itself flew under the radar a little.

Few reviewers picked it out as the outstanding track on the album, an exception being Niall Stokes, the editor of Ireland’s Hot Press, who described it as “a magnificent synthesis of elements, words and music, rhythm, instrumentation, arrangement and intonation combine to create something that speaks a language beyond logic, the definitive language of emotional truth"

It was released as the third single in February the following year with all proceeds (including U2’s royalties) going to AIDS charities in each country it was released in. Despite this, it only performed modestly, reaching the Top Ten in both the US and UK. It could be that fans already had the album and passed on the single; it was in the middle of a recession, after all.

After that came Zoo TV. One was played every night of the tour – ironically the one new song that seemed to strike at a profound emotional truth was an irreplaceable prop of a charabanc that saw U2 embrace fun, satire and insincerity. Perhaps it balanced out the rest. It showed fans that under the panstick and layers of irony, their band were still the same old dependable U2.

Of course, one further irony is that the band wouldn’t even have reached the point of touring as ‘the new U2’ without One, which showed that for all the talk of new directions and bold experimentation, a rock band lives and dies by its most precious asset: great songs.

One has earned its classic status by stealth. One marker of this has been the sheer number of covers over the years. British soul singer Mica Paris was first off the mark, releasing a version as a single in 1995. Then Johnny Cash included it among the covers on his American III album in 2000.

It popped up again in the British chart in 2006 when Mary J Blige recorded a version with U2 backing her that reached number two, outperforming the original. Since then artists as varied as Pearl Jam, Lighthouse Family, Joe Cocker, REM and Fontaines DC have all reached for the song.

It’s united soul singers, country legends, indie kids and hard rockers. Hell, even Axl Rose – a man not usually noted for his sensitivity - said in an interview with RIP magazine, not long after its release: “One is one of the greatest songs ever written. Now I can see and understand why people were into U2 years ago."

It began to crop up on those Best Ever lists in the Noughties. Rolling Stone put it at 36 in their Top 500 Greatest Songs in both 2004 and 2010. It came in at 5 in Blender’s Best Ever run down and Q were especially taken with it – it topped their equivalent list in both 2003 and 2006.

U2 had done ballads before, and have done them since. Indeed, they excel at the form. But what is it about One that elevates it above all their other efforts? It's unvarnished realism, perhaps; it comes from a place of honesty – a band struggling to find themselves in a new era. Like many songs that go on to become standards, it found a new way to state a universal truth: life is hard, yet whilst all of us depart this life alone, we cannot live it without others. We get to carry each other; a responsibility and a joy.

Which, frankly, is as close to the meaning of life as any pop song has ever reached.

It’s been a long while since horror doyen John Carpenter made a movie. But since The Ward in 2010, Carpenter has started up a second career as a musician. He’s released four albums of ‘Lost Themes’ via Sacred Bones, and now he’s about to put out a joint graphic novel/ album project.

It’s called Cathedral and as he’s told Spin, both novel and album are based on a nightmare the 78-year-old had that he couldn’t shake from his psyche. “It was so cinematic and vivid,” he said about the dream that involves a succession of murders near an old church. “I thought, ‘I have to score this.’”

Unlike the electronic scores his movies often sported, on Cathedral Carpenter spreads the guitars on thick. “It’s kind of our first heavy metal album,” he told the magazine.

In a separate interview with Rolling Stone, Carpenter spoke about how he’s enjoying the freedom his new musical career is giving him. “These albums brought a second career to my life,” he said of the records he’s put out do far. “Now that we’re putting out albums and touring, it’s joyous. It’s much less tension and pressure than directing a movie.”

Asked why a graphic novel instead of a new movie, he suggested: “If you said right now, ‘I have $200 million here, would you like to make a movie of this?’ I might say yes.” But, of course, nobody did. “(So) it’s going to cost way over a hundred million, and I’m old and don’t want to work that hard. And it’s much more fun to do music than it is to direct movies.”

He seems to have little appetite to return behind the camera. Of his future plans, he told the magazine. “We’re working on a new album and a new adventure. This time, it’s not a dream, and I can’t tell you any more than that.” Will it be a graphic novel? “I’m not going to tell you,” he says mysteriously. “It might be.”

We don’t often hear Mick Jagger provide an in-depth breakdown of a Stones song. But that’s exactly what he – with the help of producer Andrew Watt – has done on a new Behind The Song video for Variety.

It’s not about an old classic, but Mr Charm from the current Foreign Tongues album.

Apparently, the track started from a riff that Jagger asked keyboard player Matt Clifford to add a beat to. The singer then recorded a demo that he shared with Keith Richards: “Then my riff is still in the song. It’s not the dominant riff of the song anymore, because Keith came up with a really good riff.

"He made it so much better. So that’s his job, ha ha!”

“I think it’s really amazing how Keith hears grooves,” adds Watt, playing the bassline that the guitarist came up with for the song. “It wasn’t what the demo was. He’s turned it into something else.”

One of the most fascinating parts of the breakdown is where Watt talks about how Keith and Ronnie Wood’s guitar parts complement each other. “In this song in particular, (you can hear) the thing that they do so well, when they’re weaving together and listening to each other and responding to each other is alive and well.”

“Ronnie’s guitar part came from hearing Keith’s riff,” the producer says, before playing the guitarists’ isolated parts.

Steve Winwood guests on the track, playing his Hammond B-3 and Watt remembers the ex-Traffic man bringing in some congas into the studio that Jimmy Miller – producer of the Stones run of classic albums in the late 60s and early 70s – had gifted him.

The pair then get talking about percussion and Jagger - looking more spry than an 83-year-old has any right to - recalls how he was taught to play maracas by Bo Diddley’s player Jerome Green.

Anyway, it’s an intriguing look at one of the new album’s standouts, and up on YouTube now.

More trouble is heading Kanye West’s way. A freelance producer who worked for him on his Vultures 2 and Bully albums is suing him for unpaid wages and has alleged that – contrary to West’s claims – AI was used in the Bully album.

Days before the album was released online in March, West wrote on Twitter/X (all in caps and without punctuation) that: “BULLY ON THE WAY NO AI”.

The unnamed producer said that he was hired “on an emergency basis” for Vultures 2, but still has not been paid for his contributions to that album, nor to a number of tracks on Bully.

The action claims that “despite nearly two years of demands, (the) defendants have refused to compensate plaintiff for plaintiff’s services, have failed to provide any written contracts as required by law, and have failed to credit plaintiff on digital streaming platforms for his creative contributions.”

Apparently West hired the producer at the last minute for Vultures 2, just two days before the album dropped in August 2024. The plaintiff says he performed extensive vocal production services “under extreme time pressure,” creating at least 13 custom AI voice models, more than 400 individual vocal generations, and source material using his own voice.

Just a couple of months later, he says that he started work on Bully, which included more AI vocal production. The producer is seeking $110,000 in compensatory damages for his work on the tracks, as well as a similar amount under the Los Angeles Freelance Worker Protections Ordinance.

It’s only a week ago that the news broke that West, who now goes by the name of Ye, had reached a settlement with Lauren Pisciotti, an assistant to the 49-year-old rapper who had accused him of sexual assault, sex trafficking and wrongful termination of employment.

Earlier this year, he had to pay £200,000 to the composers of a track that was illegally sampled on Hurricane a track from his 2021 album Donda, the most recent of more than a dozen cases of copyright infringement that have been taken out against West over the years. He also had to contend with a flood of lawsuits from ex-employees after his infamous anti-semitic social media postings of 2022.

Maybe he just likes paying lawyers?

Brian Eno’s groundbreaking 1979 album Ambient 1: Music For Airports is to played in the environment it was designed for – an airport – in September.

It is to be performed by a chamber orchestra at Terminal 2 of Manchester Airport on September 20 as part of the Here We Are festival. This fest is the brainchild of the orchestra in question – the Manchester Camerata, which will see them perform music in all ten boroughs of the city in some unlikely places, including skate parks, libraries and shopping centres. And the airport.

Eno’s album is to be performed twice during the afternoon, from 2pm to 3pm and again from 3:45pm to 4:45pm. Be careful not to miss your flight.

In a statement about the project, Bob Riley, Chief Executive of Manchester Camerata, said: "To be able to partner with such a forward-thinking organisation as Manchester Airport for this concert has been a total dream.”

"Human connection through innovative, fearless and excellent performance is at the heart of Manchester Camerata, and we can't wait to share this special experience with the travellers at Terminal 2 on the day," he added.

It’s not the first time someone’s had the bright idea to perform Music For Airports at an airport. Twenty years ago, a New York ensemble called the Bang On A Can All Stars did the honours at Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport.

The original album was Eno’s first foray into the world of ambient music and went on to become hugely influential, not least in airports and among airlines themselves. That calming music that you invariably hear when you board a flight – where do you think they got the idea from?

For more information about the Manchester Camerata’s performance and everything they’re doing as part of the Here We Are festival head over to their website at manchestercamerata.co.uk

It might be remembered as a decidedly mediocre superhero movie (and that’s putting it kindly), but 1995’s Batman Forever did have at least one high-quality thing going for it. In their infinite wisdom, the producers included Seal’s Kiss From A Rose on the soundtrack, giving this 1994 song a new lease of life and sending it to number one in the US.

The story goes that Seal was never particularly proud of Kiss From A Rose, and hesitated in bringing it to producer Trevor Horn while they were making Seal II, his second studio album. Speaking in a series of shorts on his YouTube channel, though, Horn recalls that Seal had a clear vision for the song’s memorable vocal harmonies as soon as he came into the studio.

Discussing the origins of his song, Horn says: “Seal said to me while we were doing the first album, ‘I’ve got this song - it’s a bit like Greensleeves.’ I was like, ‘that sounds interesting.’

“And then we were working on the second album. We had all the songs, and then we were getting to the ones that weren’t so good, and I said to him, ‘What about that song that was like Greensleeves? Have you got that - let me hear that.’ And about three days later he came in with this demo, and the demo was really good.”

Not only that, but Seal knew exactly what was required to elevate the song further.

“Seal came in and said, ‘I’ve got some ideas for vocal harmonies on Kiss From A Rose - can we do them?’ And we did them all on this Tuesday afternoon, and that Tuesday afternoon was one of the best sessions I ever had in my whole life.”

Given how many sessions he’s been in, this is a bold statement, but as Horn remembers it, that session whizzed by in a blaze of creativity.

“Seal was just brilliant,” he says. “You listen to all the vocal harmonies on Kiss From A Rose – all the crazy contrapuntal counterpoint stuff. He had it all in his head, and we were just going like mad, really fast – four-tracking this, four-tracking that – and Seal was just doing it. And I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know where you thought of this stuff – it’s brilliant.’

“You know, who would have thought that Greensleeves would have R&B vocal licks in it? It was such a brilliant combination of things, and I think that’s the moment where I thought, ‘This is not bad this track – it’s actually really good.”

Horn suggests that, despite his initial reservations, Kiss From A Rose was very much Seal’s baby – he’s credited as the sole writer – but the producer can point to a couple of specific things that he brought to the party.

“My main contribution to the song arrangement itself was that I put in a 3/8 bar. You wouldn’t notice it. I mean, it was a bit of a freaker when we first did it, but it enabled him to sort of get a breath.”

Kiss From A Rose has a 3/4 time signature, giving it a waltz feel, but the subtle timing shift that Horn is talking about occurs in the verses, when Seal sings ‘you became’ or ‘you remain’.

As well as playing with the song’s time signature, Horn also made a brief change to the key – specifically, in the bridge.

“On his demo it was in the same key as the rest of the song, and I made it go down a key, so it could come back up a key at the end of it,” says Horn.

Again, this trick is barely noticeable unless you’re listening for it, but the payoff is that, when the next verse starts, it automatically gets a slight lift.

Kiss From A Rose is a perfect example of an artist and producer working in sync, then – and a song that’s aged far better than the film it featured in.

History was made last Friday as Sam Fender and Olivia Dean broke a record that had stood for 73 years.

Their 2025 collab Rein Me In has now topped the UK singles charts for 19 weeks, one more than Frankie Laine’s 1953 blockbuster, I Believe.

On breaking the record, Jo Twist, the CEO of the BPI issued a statement, saying: “Many congratulations to Sam and Olivia on their incredible achievement with Rein Me In becoming the most successful No 1 single in Official Charts history to cement its place as a modern classic.

“In an evolving world where we all consume music globally, it’s a truly remarkable feat for Rein Me In to resonate with fans in such a profound way. The British public have taken the song to their hearts, and we should all be proud and celebrate this special moment in our music heritage.”

How important the number one slot in the singles chart is these days is open to debate. Back in the day, long-standing Number Ones were events. If you’re 45 or over, every note of Bryan Adams’ (Everything I Do) I Do It For You is etched into your memory. The same with 1994’s 15-week Number One, Wet Wet Wet’s version of Love Is All Around.

Not that that’s any concern to Fender and Dean, who are naturally celebrating what is a historic achievement. On hearing the news, Fender told the Official Charts Company: “Completely lost for words, thank you so much to Olivia Dean and the fans for making this song the juggernaut that it is. Can’t believe we broke the UK record!”

Dean headlined Lollapalooza over the weekend and brought out Fender to play Rein Me In. Introducing the song’s original writer, she said: “I’m very proud to be part of the song that has just broken the Guinness World Record of the longest running Number One in UK history. It only felt right that we played it for the first time in America with the man himself.”

It should be noted that Bryan Adams still holds the record for the longest unbroken run at Number One. To smash that record, Rein Me In would need to remain at the top for another 11 weeks. Unlikely, but you never know...

The UK albums chart has just celebrated its 70th anniversary, and the body that looks after that venerable old institution – The Official Charts Company – has revealed what have been the biggest albums in all that time.

The biggest studio album of the last 70 years – in the UK at least – is Oasis's (What’s The Story) Morning Glory, which to date has sold 6.2 million copies.

If this sounds quite low, remember that this is just UK sales. Worldwide, the album has shifted over 22 million copies.

Ahead of Oasis are two unstoppable greatest hits juggernauts – Abba Gold (7.1 million copies) and the biggest overall album, Queen’s Greatest Hits (7.8 million). Released in 1981, the latter has sold over 25 million worldwide, and even in an era when the greatest hits package seems increasingly redundant, still keeps selling.

The biggest selling album released in the 21st Century is Adele’s 21, which comes in fourth with 5.7 million copies. The rest of the Top Ten is pretty much as you’d expect: in descending order – Sgt Pepper, Rumours, Dark Side Of The Moon, Thriller, Legend by Bob Marley and Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms.

The Official Charts Company has issued a statement together with this list. Becca Monahan and Chris Austin, the interim Co-Managing Directors of the body, said: "Huge congratulations to Oasis, as the incomparable (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? is officially crowned the UK’s biggest studio album of all time. Three decades on, its scale and influence remain extraordinary - a defining British record that continues to unite generations, fill stadiums and soundtrack lives.

"Celebrating 70 years of the Official Albums Chart offers a unique opportunity to honour the album’s enduring place at the heart of music culture. The way fans discover and enjoy music may be ever-changing, but the album remains the ultimate expression of an artist’s creativity, ambition and vision.”

So what was the very first chart topper, back in 1956? Well, it was a bona fide classic – Sinatra’s Songs For Swingin’ Lovers. The rest of the Top 5 (and it was only a Top 5 back then) consisted of the soundtracks to Rodgers And Hammerstein’s Carousel and Oklahoma and live recordings of Mel Torme and Louis Armstrong. Songs For Swingin’ Lovers was the only one of those five that was designed to be an artistic statement in its own right, and it pointed the way towards the future.

Whether the album format has much of a future in 2026 is another question entirely. But its demise has been predicted for quite some time now (at least since the turn of the century). Despite that, artists seem to keep on making them. And – for the moment - we keep on buying them.

There’s less of a link between successful movies and hit singles these days, but back in the glory days of the CD single, getting your song into a box office smash could make your career. Just ask Berlin (Take My Breath Away) or Wet Wet Wet (Love Is All Around) or for that matter Bryan Adams (Everything I Do) whose record-breaking 16-week stay at the top of the UK charts in 1991 has only recently been beaten by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean.

Or indeed Roxette. Their biggest hit, It Must Have Been Love, was another whose placing in a film – the Richard Gere/ Julia Roberts vehicle Pretty Woman – applied turbo boosters to an already successful career. The tear-jerking ballad is probably their signature hit. Indeed, it recently reached the landmark milestone of a billion plays on YouTube.

Marie Fredriksson and Per Gessle were both established artists in their native Sweden when they formed Roxette in 1986. The original intention was to see if could break out of their home market. “The whole idea with Roxette was that we wanted to go international,” Gessle explained to the Dutch web show Top 2000 a go go in 2021. “I’d had success with my band in Sweden, Marie’s solo career was going really well.”

Initially they were disappointed. The first Roxette album, 1986’s Pearls Of Passion, produced a couple of decent-sized Swedish hits but nothing more. At this stage, scoring US hits wasn’t on Gessle and Fredriksson’s radar – they had the more modest ambition of scoring a hit in West Germany. But EMI Germany turned its nose up at Pearls Of Passion and suggested that, in order to kick things off outside Sweden, the duo might try and write a Christmas single.

So Gessle set about that task. At home in Halmstad in the spring of 1987, he sat at the piano where he prepared all of his ballads.

“I always try to get the same temperature in the lyric and in the music,” he explained to Songwriting Magazine in 2020. “This music was really beautiful and it needed something reflective in the lyrics. It’s not about a specific event or a person, it’s a mood that I wanted to reflect. It was the music first and then the lyrics. With the best songs, you start writing the music and then you start writing the lyrics, then you continue with the music and you continue with the lyrics! They go hand in hand. I think that’s because I want to have them say the same thing.

“When I make demos, I keep them very simple. I’ll just play piano and sing over it. Then, of course, the big thing was to get Marie into the song. When she starts to sing it, you change the keys and you go from there. It’s also got a great opening line, one of my best: ‘Lay a whisper on my pillow’. That line just opens up a lot of things in your mind when you hear it. With pop music, you have to grab people’s attention with either a lyric or a hook that makes it interesting.”

Gessle added a line that references the time of year (‘it’s a hard Christmas day’) and gave it a title that made the connection obvious. Then it was time to go in the studio.

“A friend of our engineer had just bought a studio in Stockholm that had a Synclavier, one of the first digital-sampling synthesizers, so a lot of It Must Have Been Love was made by programming,” producer Clarence Ofwerman told the Guardian in 2025.

“Then we added drums and guitar in the EMI studios. I improvised the piano solo, the only time I’ve ever done that. It wasn’t a party tune, so we didn’t try to make it Christmassy, with bells or anything. Just after the solo, there’s a big key change where Marie suddenly sings much higher. It’s really difficult to sing like that, but she gave such a great vocal performance.”

It Must Have Been Love (Christmas For The Broken Hearted) duly was a big hit in Sweden that holiday season. Unfortunately, it didn’t cut any ice (or snow, for that matter) with EMI Germany. “They didn’t even release it,” remembers Gessle. “That goes to show how the music business works. It’s not enough if you have the right song, it has to be the right timing.”

But Roxette only had to wait another year. Their next album, Look Sharp!, was released in autumn 1988, and when the singles Dressed For Success and The Look were substantial hits at home, fortune smiled upon them: “This American exchange student who was in Sweden and became a big Roxette fan,” Gessle told the BBC. “When he went back to the States, a radio channel called KDWB had a show where the listeners can call in and request songs.”

“So he went up to the radio station and gave them the Look Sharp! album, and they kept it there for a couple of weeks. From what I heard, the programme director fell in love with the first song, so he played The Look. The phones started to ring and people wanted to hear the song over and over again. It was pure luck.”

And so Roxette broke America – both The Look and Look Sharp!’s ballad, Listen To Your Heart, were Billboard Number Ones. The rest of Europe fell into line soon after. Suddenly, Roxette were in demand.

“We had a lunch in 1989 in Los Angeles with EMI,” Gessle told Top 200 a go go. “They had just got the rights to a soundtrack to a movie called $3,000. It was a guy who hired a girl for a weekend for $3,000. They said they had David Bowie on board, they had Go West, Natalie Cole.... all those EMI artists. And they wanted us to write a song for the soundtrack.”

Gessle and Fredriksson were flattered, but were in the midst of promoting an internationally successful album. They simply didn’t have any spare time to come with a new song for a soundtrack album that was most likely destined for the bargain buckets. Then Gessle had a brainwave.

“But… I have a Christmas song,” he remembered. “I could very easily alter the lyrics to that song.”

And so It Must Have Been Love (Christmas For The Broken Hearted) was repurposed; upcycled, in modern parlance. The line about ‘a hard Christmas day’ was replaced by one about ‘a hard winter’s day’ and some minor touches were added. “The two versions aren’t that different,” says Clarence Ofwerman. “For the second one, though, the mixing engineer in LA put a load of gated reverb on the snare drum that he called his ‘lucky snare’, because it had already been on about 10 No 1 singles.”

“I remember when I received a telephone call from Garry Marshall the director of the film,” says Gessle. “And he said ‘Hey I just wanted you to know that I loved that song so much that I have given it a great place in the movie. There’s no dialogue over it because it speaks for itself – it just gives the whole movie a certain character’, and I was like [all nonchalant] ‘OK thank you very much.’”

Pretty Woman – as it had been retitled - became one of the biggest films of the 1990s and It Must Have Been Love’s prime spot in the movie guaranteed success for the song. It reached Number One on the Billboard chart in June 1990 and ended up becoming the second biggest seller in the US that year, behind Wilson Phillips’ Hold On. In the UK it was the group’s biggest hit, reaching Number Three, and it topped the charts in Canada and around Europe that summer – ironic, given that the song was originally meant to evoke the desolation of midwinter.

Its success cemented Roxette’s success around the world. The duo ended up selling over 75 million records, clocking up four Billboard Number Ones in total and hacing up 19 hits in the UK. They are quite comfortably Sweden’s most internationally successful act. Aside from Abba, of course.

They endured throughout the 1990s, but went on hiatus in 2002 after Fredriksson was diagnosed with a brain tumour. “After she became ill, she came to one of my solo shows in Amsterdam and I asked if she wanted to join me on stage,” Gessle told the Guardian last year. “She hadn’t sung in public for eight years but came on for the encore and sang It Must Have Been Love. I’ve never in my life seen so many people crying. Marie got so much energy from that that she wanted to make another album and go on tour, which we did. I think that gave her a couple more years.”

The singer died in 2019 from complications from the original tumour and that appeared to be that for Roxette. But the heritage pop industry abhors a vacuum and in 2024 Gessle teamed up with a new vocalist, Lena Philipsson, for a new iteration of Roxette. Inevitably, at their live shows, the song that’s dedicated to the memory of Fredriksson is It Must Have Been Love.

The shortlist for this year’s Mercury Prize has been announced and – as ever – it’s eclectic.

Designed to celebrate the best in British and Irish music over the past year, the 12-strong list includes one bonafide living legend, several artists who are arguably at their commercial peak, a revitalised Britpop-era band and a number of up and coming names. And, for the first time, a various artists compilation album is included.

The living legend is Paul McCartney, who probably doesn’t have the space on the mantelpieces of all his various homes for another gong for The Boys Of Dungeon Lane. Neither, arguably, does Raye, after all those Brit awards she took home the other year. Nevertheless, her second album, This Album May Contain Hope, is nominated.

Traditionally, the Mercurys’ panel has been shy of giving the award to conspicuously successful artists, though they bucked that trend last year with Sam Fender. So Raye could be in with a shout, as could Olivia Dean for The Art Of Loving and Jade, with her solo debut That’s Showbiz Baby!

Two previous winners have been nominated – 2019’s victor Dave is in there again with his third album The Boy Who Played Harp – as well as the revived Suede, who won the second ever Mercury way back in 1993.

Both, you’d say, would have to be outside bets (only one artist, PJ Harvey, has won the Mercury twice) as are Florence + The Machine, who have been a consistent presence in British pop for a decade and a half. With Everybody Scream now being their fourth Mercury nomination, they're probably not getting their hopes up.

Nia Archives might be a good bet with her second album Emotional Junglist, as might Kojey Radical for Don’t Look Down. Outsiders, you’d have to say, are the only Irish nominee on the list – indie folk fella Dove Ellis – and Knats. The latter are a Newcastle-based jazz trio, who certainly sound intriguing. But given that Sam Fender won in the first year the awards were moved to Newcastle, would the panel really give the prize to a North East artist for the second year in a row?

And finally there’s that Various Artists album. Help (2) is nothing if not a deserved nominee and, given that the project lacked the cut through its predecessor achieved 30 years ago, could certainly do with the publicity.

Inevitably, there's also been some chatter in regard to the albums that have missed out. Lily Allen's critically-acclaimed West End Girl and Harry Styles' Kiss All The Time, Disco Occasionally are two of the more notable omissions from the shortlist, though Styles' album wasn't greeted as warmly as some of his previous efforts, so its absence is less of a surprise.

The Awards ceremony will be held in Newcastle’s Utilita Arena on Thursday 22 October, with live performances from “many” of the 12 artists promised. The BBC are to provide coverage of the event, which will presumably include a TV broadcast.

Mercury Prize 2026 nominations

• Dave – The Boy Who Played Harp
• Dove Ellis – Blizzard
• Florence + The Machine – Everybody Scream
• Jade – That’s Showbiz Baby!
• Knats – A Great Day In Newcastle
• Kojey Radical – Don’t Look Down
• Nia Archives – Emotional Junglist
• Olivia Dean – The Art Of Loving
• Paul McCartney – The Boys Of Dungeon Lane
• Raye – This Music May Contain Hope
• Suede – Antidepressants
• War Child Records – Help (2)

The CEO of the Grammys, Harvey Mason Jr, has responded to BTS’s decision not to participate in the 2027 Awards due to the introduction of a new ‘Asian Pop’ category.

On Monday just gone (27 July), the South Korean megastars put out a message via Instagram simply saying: “We decided not to participate in the Grammys this year” and adding that they “hope that music can be heard and loved by itself rather than being divided by region or language.”

This was widely seen as a response to the announcement in June of five new categories, including ‘Best Asian Pop Performance’. Having released one of the biggest albums in the world this year in Arirang, BTS would surely have been favourites for the award. Their withdrawal arguably renders the category somewhat redundant.

Mason Jr has defended the original decision and said it was introduced with the best of intentions: “I am saddened to hear that BTS has chosen not to participate in the Grammy Awards process this year, but as a music creator, I understand and respect their decision.”

He continued: “I do want to clarify something that seems to be getting lost in the conversation. The Asian Pop category was created to celebrate the depth, diversity and extraordinary growth of pop artistry coming out of Asia. The spirit of this new category is to shine a dedicated spotlight on these important artists. More categories mean more artists’ work is recognised. It’s never to divide, but to expand who is recognised by our 15,000 Grammy voters.”

Mason pointed out that if artists submit music to the Asian Pop category that does not rule them out from being nominated in the more general high-profile categories: Record Of The Year and so on.

“As we continue to expand the reach, our membership and our awards, regardless of geography or language, I want to emphasise that we will continue to listen to the global music community and work to honour and celebrate all the artists whose music moves the world,” he explained.

The Grammys, of course, is known for having endless categories that ensures the actual ceremony itself can be something of an endurance test. There have been separate awards for Latin music going back to the first Awards in the late 1950s and a Best African Music Performance category was added in 2024.

But there has never been a ‘Best European Music Performance’ and perhaps this is BTS’s point. One man’s ‘dedicated spotlight’ is another person’s ghetto. Depending on where you stand on the globe.

You wouldn’t think it, given the roasting temperatures outside, but autumn is not too far away. And with it, another Beatles reissue.

This year it’s Rubber Soul that’s to be given the boxset treatment. Apple Corps has announced that a Special Edition of the 1965 album is coming in early October.

So what’s on offer for this one? Well, it’s very much a question of ‘what’s your budget?’ If your wallet is large enough, you might want to invest in the ‘Special Edition Super Deluxe’, which encompasses five LPs or four CDs. These include sessions and demos, a new stereo mix of the album, the original mono master, the original US version of the album AND an 88-page hardbound book. Oh, and 7-inch of the concurrent Daytripper/ We Can Work It Out double A-side single.

One step down is the ‘Special Edition Deluxe’. For that you just get the new stereo mix and sessions on two CDs or LPs. Then there’s the ‘Special Edition Standard’, which is just a single LP or CD.

Or you could – if you wish – go for the Blu-Ray edition, which will include a new Dolby Atmos mix, “high resolution stereo audio”, and the promo films for both Day Tripper and We Can Work It Out. You pays your money, you takes your choice...

For oh-so-jaded Beatles fans who have now seen decades of this sort of repackaging there is but one genuine selling point. Buried among the sessions and demos disc is a previously unheard John Lennon demo called Little Girl. Up until recently, this song was “not even rumoured” to exist, according to Apple Corps. We don’t yet know what sort of quality it is, or even whether it’s an update of Hello Little Girl, an early Lennon song that was one of the first to be credited to the Lennon/McCartney partnership.

We’ll see soon enough whether it could ever have been a contender for the Beatles’ first really adult album. Rubber Soul was a determined step upwards from Help!, with several of the songs being openly influenced by Motown and other US soul records (hence the title, of course), and with their individual personalities shining through more in John, Paul and George’s songs.

In recent years, Abbey Road has been the hip Beatles album to namecheck. But after spells when Sgt Pepper, Revolver and the White Album have all been the connoisseurs’ choice, perhaps now it’s Rubber Soul’s turn in the spotlight. For what it’s worth, it was apparently always George Harrison’s favourite.

Pre-orders for the Rubber Soul Special Edition are being taken now.

Former Daft Punk member Thomas Bangalter has been reflecting on the origins of 2013’s Random Access Memories, the duo’s fourth and final studio album, and how making the record affected his creative process.

Spearheaded by lead single Get Lucky, RAM ended up being Daft Punk’s most successful album – it’s sold more than four million copies and won multiple Grammy Awards – but, with its focus on musicianship and live instrument recordings, was a markedly different beast to their previous records, which were created using synths and drum machines.

Speaking to Dev Hynes on the A24 podcast, Bangalter says that the catalyst for this change in approach came from Daft Punk’s work on the soundtrack to 2010’s Tron: Legacy movie soundtrack, which was made with an 85-piece orchestra.

“The benefit of the Tron score, on a very personal creative level, was how we got from Tron to to Random Access Memories,” says Bangalter. “Before Tron, all the music we had made was just the two of us in in in my bedroom, and on a very super intimate level, not letting anyone in the process, even until it's mastered.”

Bangalter alludes to the limitations of this way of working – “Part of Daft Punk was working with electronic instruments, and it it takes so much effort to bring soul to the to the sound of those synthesizers” – and says that after they’d made a start on Random Access Memories before the Tron soundtrack, he made it clear to Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, the other member of the band, that he wasn’t happy with the results.

“We had made demos at the studio, you know, in Paris at Gang in 2008 and 2009, after the Pyramid [2007’s Alive tour], and I was not happy with the with the sound of all these demos,” he admit. “I think there were some kind of cool groves, but I was like saying to Guy-Man, ‘We need to trash everything, production-wise.’”

Their work on Tron, though, showed them a way forward.

“Tron was this kind of collaborative process… film work,” says Bangalter. “That's what Random Access Memories was – I really consider that Random Access Memories was like a film without cameras, basically the entire process of it. And somehow, at the same time, Tron happened in the middle of this process.

“After the Tron thing, there were all these demos, and we were like ‘OK – maybe we can go to LA and have these amazing session musicians turn it into something.”

Assessing the impact of the Tron project, Bangalter says that it helped him to discover “the magic of human beings performing,” but the eventual scale and size and RAM took a huge amount of creative energy, and so when it was over, it was time to strip things as far back as possible.

“For me, the pause was after Random Access Memories,” says Bangalter. “A song like Touch, with Paul Williams, had 250 tracks on Pro Tools. It was a 70-channel Neve board, and we had to divide it into three parts to be able to mix it. And so after that, I remember literally for two years, I had like one piano with like a a GoPro that I mounted on my piano. I didn't touch one synthesizer. I didn't open any machines.”

Explaining how alien to him this size of project was, Bangalter says: “You’ve got to understand that Homework and Discovery [the first two Daft Punk albums] were mixed on this 8-channel, small Mackie desk. So four mono, four stereo; like 12 channels, and that's as much as I can handle in terms of mixing myself.”

Daft Punk officially disbanded in 2021, and Bangalter has since focused on soundtrack work for ballets, films and an art installation. Homem-Christo has busied himself with songwriting and production for the likes of Travis Scott and Rosalía.

Roger Waters has recorded a new version of the Pink Floyd classic Comfortably Numb with the Palestinian singer Mona Miari and has been talking about it to Wired magazine.

Waters has been a prominent supporter of the Palestinian cause for decades now, and the new version is deliberately being released in the context of the alleged genocide in Gaza and the continued occupation of both that territory and the West Bank. It includes new verses written in English and Arabic and, significantly, Comfortably Numb Re-Imagined (as it’s styled) includes the line ‘I will never become comfortably numb’. Meaning numb to the ongoing conflict, presumably.

The video, below, doesn’t stint in showing Gaza as it is now. It’s deliberately uncomfortable viewing and doubles up as a fundraiser for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.

The interviewer doesn’t swerve the accusations of anti-semitism that have lingered around Waters for some time now, allegations that have been a significant factor in the seemingly-terminal ill feeling that continues to exist between himself and former Pink Floyd bandmate David Gilmour. Asked what he’d say to people who continue to view his work through the lens of anti-semitism, Waters is blunt: “Fuck off is my answer to that.”

“I don’t have an anti-semitic bone in my body, I never did and I never will have,” he insists. “I couldn’t give a shit what your religion is, frankly. I’m not interested in it. I’m interested in human rights for my brothers and sisters, whoever they are. Colour of the skin, religion, nationality, politics – I couldn’t care less.”

So there you go. The new track is a whole nine minutes long – three minutes longer than the original – but the pair have edited a three minute version for playlists. Asked what people will think of the Re-Imagined version ten years from now, Waters answers: “I hope they’ll hear that it was prophetic – there is a right and a wrong. This is not complicated, and this song is on the right side of history… I hope they’ll go ‘Phew’. They were part of the resistance, and we are part of the resistance.”

Emo math-rock band Daydream Plus have released an 8-bit chiptune remix version of their debut album Second Last Day of Summer that’s only available as a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) cartridge.

That means the only way to listen to the reworked album in its entirety is via a vintage games console launched in 1986. This comes after the original album was released in physical formats only, with fans of the group able to grab CD and vinyl copies of the project via music distribution platform Bandcamp.

The NES launch, titled Extended Forecast, is part of the band's wider push against less intentional modern forms of music consumption.

"I love owning physical media," Daydream Plus guitarist Payson Power told NME. "It's a sign of respect to the artist, especially in an age where things are so disposable. Nowadays, people consume at this voracious speed. I miss the days of building your collection bit-by-bit."

There's also a desire to counteract the growing trend of video games being released in download-only format, exemplified by PlayStation's recent decision to abandon physical releases completely.

"Digital means you only ever own a license to play and with Day One updates [that fix overlooked bugs] becoming more frequent, we all get an inferior product," Power said. "It just rewards greed and corporate bullshit."

Still, translating the album into NES format wasn't easy. Power spent countless hours watching YouTube tutorials on how to reprogram music for the NES' five available audio channels using 8-bit music tracker FamiTracker, and reached out to experts on vintage electronics for advice on how to make it work.

"It was a brutal experience," he said. "The NES is basically held together with chewing gum and paperclips. I've told my wife, when they put me in the crematorium oven, to make sure I'm clutching a copy of 'Extended Forecast'. It's my life's work."

Check out Daydream Plus on Bandcamp.

Belgian composer, organist and musicologist Sander De Keere has signed to Brighton-based indie label Phantom Limb and released a new song titled Pt 6.

Recorded on a faithful replica of a 1763 Contius baroque organ (constructed in 2022), the seven-minute composition is designed to pay homage to this heritage instrument and explore how it can be reinvented and reinvigorated in the modern age.

"You feel the music through your whole body", De Keere said of playing the organ. "It's incredibly physical. Each register holds a sonic character, and combining them becomes a kind of alchemy."

The song was recorded at the historic St Catharina Church in Wondelgem (Ghent, Belgium), and this spiritual setting seeps easily into the landscape of Pt 6, a track that smoothly blends minimalism and electronic experimentation.

This reflects De Keere's place in the world of music; born in Ghent and raised in Brussels, he focuses on bridging the gaps between historical music and contemporary sound, supplementing his releases with classical music lecturing and broadcasting.

On Pt. 6 De Keere's aim was to create "landscapes that challenge expectations of what a pipe organ can be", with nods to early sacred music, mid-century minimalism, the classical avant-garde and modern electronic experimentation.

And his ambitions run far beyond this release. Having signed to Phantom Limb, the rising Belgian composer is preparing to release his debut album later this year. Watch this space.

Following the release of the Rolling Stones' 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, Technics has created a limited edition wireless earbud in collaboration with the iconic British band.

According to the Japanese audio brand, "this exclusive collaboration unites Technics' signature audiophile engineering with one of music's most iconic legacies," in a joint project designed to "deliver every note as intended".

The new Technics EAH-AZ100 wireless earbuds feature the band's legendary red Lips & Tongue logo on the rubber case, while the earbuds themselves are built for exceptional clarity across the full frequency range, and include new technology like a Magnetic Fluid Driver – supposedly the first of its kind in the industry.

The product enters the market two weeks after the release of the Rolling Stones' new album, which debuted at number one in the UK. It became the group's 15th chart-topping album, and their third consecutive number one LP after 2023's Hackney Diamonds and 2016's Blue & Lonesome.

Mick Jagger recently opened up about his experiences recording Foreign Tongues, explaining how producer Andrew Watt pushed them to use tape for Chuck Berry cover Beautiful Delilah.

"I said, ‘What does it matter? If someone listens to it on their phone, they don’t know it was cut on tape — it doesn’t make any difference,'" Jagger said. "[But] we cut it on tape and we did it live. That was old style."

Only a limited number of people will be able to experience the new record via Technics' new earbud collaboration, with just 5,000 units available to customers. And compared to other wireless earbuds on the market, they're not cheap: the EAH-AZ100 is currently available via Technics , Amazon and through Bravado for $299/£259.

An unfinished George Michael song that was originally supposed to be a duet with Elton John could finally be released – if the late star’s cousin/ former manager gets his way, that is.

The track is called This Kind Of Love and its existence has been known for some time. It was originally recorded in the early 1990s as part of an album called Trojan Souls, which saw the singer duet with a number of artists, including Stevie Wonder, Bryan Ferry, Sade, Anita Baker and Elton. The project ran aground after Michael fell out with Sony and to this day remains in the vaults.

Now Michael’s ex-manager, a relation named Andros Georgiou, has made a film that takes its title from the album. With a somewhat aggrandising subtitle of ‘The Greatest Album That Was Never Made’, it can already be seen online. Georgiou, though, is looking for wider distribution, and in an interview with The Sun’s Bizarre column has been talking about his plans for the film – which includes the release of This Kind Of Love.

“I got this incredible interview with Elton that no one has seen and I’m saving that for when the film gets snapped up by a streamer like Apple,” Georgiou told the paper. “Elton said on the film, ‘I will literally do anything for George. I know at 21 he got the Ivor Novello award, and no one had ever done that before. When I got the call, before anything was said, I said yes.’

“We focused on finishing that song first because we knew Elton was going to come in. I’ve got George singing the track and Elton singing the track so the dream is to make another track. I would have to ask Elton’s ­permission to put the vocals together. I’m sure Elton would say yes because he was blown away by the song and was a huge ­supporter of George.”

Getting Elton’s permission would probably be the easiest part. More tricky would be getting the Michael estate to sign off on the project, along with all the respective record labels involved.

Elton was a friend, collaborator and cheerleader of the late singer, who died in December 2016. He once described him as “one of the most brilliant songwriters this country's ever produced, and certainly one of the best vocalists ever.” The two artists’ live duet of Elton’s Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me was a UK Number One in late 1991.

Some records are odd because of a single factor, but the Crash Test Dummies’ Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm, a worldwide hit in 1994, is peculiar for all sorts of reasons.

That hummed chorus and title for starters. Of course, many many songs in human history have had banal onomatopoeic names – La La La, Ooh Wee, Um Um Um Um Um, for example. There have been five separate UK hits with the title Ooh La La alone. But the Crash Test Dummies' song was unusual in that the odd title was juxtaposed with lyrics about unspoken pain and the silence that envelops small communities. The effect was striking, and haunting.

Crash Test Dummies were formed off the beaten track, in Winnipeg, Canada in the mid-1980s, with frontman Brad Roberts emerging as the main songwriter. Roberts’ baritone-verging-on-bass voice was another unusual element.

“I never even intended to be a singer-songwriter,” Roberts told Songfacts in a 2018 interview. “I'm very happy to write songs, but I didn't hear myself singing them because I thought my voice was crap. I sounded like some guy who would be better off in a choir, singing the bass parts in a church somewhere. But I just couldn't get any of the people that I tried to get to be singers for our band to sing the songs the way I heard them in my head, so I ended up becoming the singer myself.”

The Dummies slowly built up a following and signed to BMG in 1991. Their debut album, The Ghosts That Haunt Me, was a significant success in their home country, producing a Top Five single in Superman’s Song, with the band scooping Group Of The Year at the 1992 Juno Awards.

Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm was released as the lead single for the follow up, 1993’s God Shuffled His Feet. For the song, Roberts dug deep into his own childhood memories.

“It was a composite of stories,” he told the Dutch TV documentary series Top 2000 a go go in 2021. “There’s a story about a guy who was in a boat and he was sailing near Niagara Falls and he got too close and he thought he was going to die and his hair turned from black to white as snow. And I just thought it was really intriguing that something that physical could manifest in that brief a period of time. And so I put it into the song.”

The second verse alights on a girl who didn’t want to change with her school friends because she was embarrassed about her birthmarks. “I have a birthmark at the base of my spine called a ‘giant hairy nevis’ – I looked it up later. I was extremely self-conscious about it as a child and when I went to swimming lessons I was teased for it. And anyway, it always stuck with me that I was this marked man. Once again - this physical manifestation.”

For the final verse, Roberts decided to describe the situation of a child whose strict religious upbringing marked them out as different. “This girl that I knew, her parents were Pentecostal Christians, and they used to take her to church every week and do what they call ‘speaking in tongues,’” Roberts told Songfacts.

“When Pentecostal Christians get together every Sunday, some of them are moved to speak spontaneously. They claim that the spirit has entered their body and what they are saying is simply a transmission of that spirit. It's not themselves speaking anymore, it is the holy word of God speaking through them. And the language that comes out, sometimes it's an ordinary language, but quite often it sounds like gibberish. For my friend, as a little child going to school, she found this terrifying, needless to say, because her parents were the people that ran her life. They seemed to just become different people. It made a big mark on her, emotionally. It was a scarring experience, I would say.”

And, most enigmatically, Roberts as narrator adds nothing to these stories. There is no chorus reflecting on these characters other than ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ hummed twice. The listener is simply left to fill in the gaps… and wonder.

“For many years many people would ask me (dumb voice): ‘So, er what’s the matter? Couldn’t you think of any words for the chorus’,” Roberts said in 2021. “And I’d say ‘oh no no no. Less is more. Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm is a way of reflecting on what has been said. So even though the chorus has no words it's a kind of commentary on the verses, which is what a good chorus should do.”

“But having said all that,” he added. “When I wrote the song I couldn’t think of any words for the chorus! And I handed the demo around to the band and said ‘listen the lyrics are all there for the verses, but I don’t know what I’m going to do about the chorus yet. We’ll just have to see. But let’s go with this for now.”

“And they all came back to me and said ‘What – are you crazy? It’s perfect as it is! You don’t want to add words!’ I was like ‘Oh, thank God!’”

So Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm went out as it is, with that gnomic humming as its chorus. Strangely, although they had already broken through in Canada, the single wasn’t a huge hit in their homeland, stalling at Number 14. Instead it started gaining attention south of the border, with its video - which featured a school theatrical production depicting the lyrics - becoming an MTV hit.

“It got big in America, starting from Atlanta, Georgia,” Roberts told Boom 97.3’s Behind The Vinyl podcast in 2020. “Clive Davis, once he saw it was doing well in Georgia, he committed to putting in money and people and time into us and all of a sudden at every gig we were at someone at the record label would show up and be interested and report back to the president. They really put us through the wringer, but it was a good wringer to be put through. I’ve never been so busy in my life. But I’m very grateful for that.”

Aside from its obvious novelty factor, the song had two other things going for it. The music, with acoustic guitars, piano and in particular those creamy dreamy harmonies after the second and third refrains, was intoxicating, with many making comparisons to REM’s then most-recent album Automatic For The People.

But Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm was also adjacent to the then dominant alt-rock sound. Roberts’ voice was a similar shade to Chris Cornell’s or Eddie Vedder’s and the Dummies themselves looked like a scrubbed up grunge band. They looked and sounded familiar, but the single was utterly unique: usually a recipe for success.

The critics certainly seemed to think so. Billboard said that it “marries a worldwise vocal with a textured arrangement that is chock full of aural goodies. Given justice (and promotional tender loving care), this one will soon blossom into the across-the-board smash it should be.”

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times described it as “a deceptively original work about how kids are often tormented for falling outside the norm.”

The UK was in the early throes of Britpop, but Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm was original enough to break through the lowering blinds of musical chauvinism. Terry Staunton in NME described it as “very good indeed… a melodic saunter through the weird Americana of John Irving or Garrison Keillor.” For then-Melody Maker scribe Caitlin Moran it was “delicate... like hope, and half broken like Nick Cave. I had forgotten things could be quite so beautiful”. The only dissenting voice was in Smash Hits for whom it was a “joke record for old people.”

Their loss. When daytime BBC Radio One jumped on it, it was a guaranteed hit and Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm reached Number Two in Spring 1994, stuck behind Prince’s The Most Beautiful Girl In The World. In the US it stalled at Number Four, though it went all the way in Australia, Germany and Belgium, keeping the band busy throughout 1994. They were also recipients of the dubious honour of a Weird Al Jankovic parody later that year when he released his own ‘take’ on the track, Headline News.

With its heavy novelty factor, it was always unlikely that Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm would lead to a glittering career for the Dummies and, indeed, the chart positions dropped away soon afterwards. The follow up single, the TS Eliot-referencing Afternoons And Coffeespoons was only a minor hit in both the US and UK and, after their 1995 cover of XTC’s The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead – which was recorded for the film Dumb And Dumber – their chart record ceased in many territories.

The band, though, continued to make albums, and in the years since have had the usual hiatuses, solo projects and reunions that groups of their standing enjoy. Their most recent resurrection came in 2024/25 when they toured internationally to celebrate the 30th anniversary of God Shuffled His Feet.

To most of the world outside Canada they are regarded as one hit wonders, but few wearers of that musical albatross have produced something as thoughtful, other-worldly and unusual as Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm.

A capella hit singles are a rarity in pop. In fact, you can probably count them on the fingers of one hand: The Flying Pickets’ versions of Only You and When You’re Young And In Love and The Housemartins’ Caravan Of Love.

And Tom’s Diner, an oddity that somehow became Suzanne Vega’s biggest song, as well as playing a crucial role in the development of the MP3.

More of that later, but the song dates from the early 1980s when Vega was starting as a singer-songwriter. You surely know it: based around a simple ‘do-do do do da-do do do’ refrain, Vega recites an observational tale of sitting in the titular New York cafe reading a paper and watching life go by around her. Heard the first time, it’s a striking piece that seems to freeze time.

Vega first wrote the words sometime in late 1981. Tom’s Diner is, of course, a real place. Situated on the corner of 112^th Street and Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, it’s actually Tom’s Restaurant, though ‘diner ’, as Vega has pointed out before, scans much better.

“It was really written from the point of view of my friend Brian, who is a photographer,” she explained on a 1987 interview LP, Portrait Of An Artist. “He had made a comment to me one day that he felt that as a photographer, he saw his life through a pane of glass, and always felt like he was the witness to a lot of things, but was never really involved in them.”

“So I was sitting at Tom’s Restaurant one morning, and suddenly I guess I got this weird feeling. It came over me, and I thought ‘well, if I were Brian today, how would I be perceiving these different things?’ And in a way it was supposed to be slightly humorous and not entirely to be taken seriously. And also I thought of it from a male point of view.”

“The line about the actor ‘who had died while he was drinking’ was true: William Holden’s obituary had been in that morning’s paper,” Vega told the Guardian in 2016, dating the day inspiration struck her as Wednesday 18 November 1981. “The ‘bells of the cathedral’ were those of St John the Divine up the street, though I made up the bit about the woman ‘fixing her stockings'.”.

The melody came to Vega as she was walking down Broadway. “I wanted something jaunty,” she wrote in a New York Times essay in 2008. “I remember liking the near rhymes of ‘diner’ and ‘corner’, ‘sitting’ and ‘waiting’. I was imagining it as a kind of French film soundtrack, something vaudevillian on piano, like a background to a Truffaut film.

"But I didn’t play piano and didn’t know anybody who did. So I kept it a cappella, and began to sing it this way in my live show. This detail, singing the song alone with no accompaniment, affected everything to come.”

At her live shows, Vega noticed that if she started singing the song unaccompanied, people would immediately stop talking and pay attention. “So I used it as an opening song. I can’t think of a single time that this didn’t work. Even at the Prince’s Trust concert in 1986, in front of 10,000 people, I went onstage as the opening act and began the entire concert with that song - and it worked!”

By that point, Tom’s Diner had already been released once, in the January 1984 edition of Fast Folk Musical Magazine, a kind of audio mag that showcased the best of up-and-coming singer-songwriters of the folk/ acoustic persuasion. The exposure led to her being signed by A&M later that year.

Vega released her self-titled debut album in 1985. Both a critical and word-of-mouth success, it spawned a pair of UK hit singles – Marlene On The Wall and Left Of Center. Tom’s Diner eventually emerged on the following album, 1987’s Solitude Standing. Indeed, it appears twice, once as the opener and again in reprised form at the end. There was enough interest in the track for it to be chosen as the second single, though it was only a minor hit, reaching Number 58 in the UK charts in the summer of 1987.

And there the track might have remained, as a curio from a well-regarded album, were it not for Nick Batt and Neal Slateford. The Bath-based pair were at that point just another team of bedroom producers exploring the possibilities opened up by the then-new sampling technologies. Speaking to the Guardian in 2016, Batt remembers the genesis of their idea.

“Neal brought in Suzanne’s song and said: ‘I reckon we can stick a beat under this.’ I came up with a bassline, strings, a bit of piano. In those days, it was impossible to get a whole song into a sampler, so we spent evenings and weekends cutting Suzanne’s vocals into little bits.”

“We sent it to a mate who was a rep in London, and he took it around the shops. I went away for the weekend and came back to a phone full of messages. Everyone was talking about the track. Radio 1 even broke its policy of not playing bootlegs, which is all it was at that point.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, Vega was promoting her third album Days Of Open Hand. It wasn’t going well. Reviews had been mixed and audiences had visibly dwindled. Writing in the NYT, she remembers: “We were backstage at the Arsenio Hall show when my manager told me that some boys calling themselves DNA, in England - Bath, to be specific - had taken Tom’s Diner and put a dance track to it. They had ‘re-mixed’ it.

My manager, Ron Fierstein, told me that A&M and Polygram were considering taking legal action against them for copyright violation.”

But Vega listened to the bootleg, which at that stage still had the title of ‘Oh Susanne’ and found, to her surprise, she rather liked it. “It made me laugh. It wasn’t a parody, which is what I was afraid of. The song is the same, my voice is still my voice, the story still the story, even though they left out the very end (they told me later they thought it sounded weird, musically, to keep the ending).”

“It was so obvious that these boys were not slick hi-fi wizards, as the sound was boomy and the arrangement repetitive, but the raw energy of the idea jumped out right away. These were not boys with means and money, and I liked it that I had kindled their imagination.”

Vega and her management arranged a meeting with DNA, where she discovered – again, to her surprise - that they were white middle-class boys rather than the cool urban dudes she was expecting. A deal was worked out whereby Vega retained the rights in return for DNA being paid a flat fee. The track was released as ‘Tom’s Diner by DNA featuring Suzanne Vega’.

Both parties assumed that the track would be an underground hit at best. But bolstered by daytime Radio 1 play, the new version of Tom’s Diner reached Number Two in the UK, was a Top Ten hit all over Europe and even reached Number Five on Billboard, a rare feat for the British dance record in 1990.

But the success of the DNA remix didn’t seem to assuage appetite for the track. The number of covers, versions and interpolations of Tom’s Diner began multiplying exponentially from then on. Vega even compiled them onto an album called, inevitably, Tom’s Album, in 1991. “It was a logistical nightmare to administrate,” she admitted in 2008. “I had to go back to all the people who had taken the song without permission, and ask their permission... to use their version of my song!”

Since then it’s been covered by Giorgio Moroder and Britney Spears and REM and been sampled or interpolated by acts as varied as Public Enemy, Fallout Boy, Tupac Shakur and Lil’ Kim. According to Spotify, as of 2023, there have been over 50 different versions of the song. It’s probably an underestimate.

But this song’s shaggy dog tale doesn’t even end there. Tom’s Diner played a not-insignificant role in the development of the MP3. In the early 1990s, the German electrical engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg was working on the design of the file, especially the tricky problem of compressing an unaccompanied human voice. “I was ready to fine-tune my compression algorithm," Brandenburg told Business 2.0 Magazine in 2000. “Somewhere down the corridor a radio was playing Tom's Diner. I was electrified. I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a capella voice.”

Indeed, when compressed, Vega’s voice sounded hopelessly distorted. Brandenburg decided that going forward he’d use the track as a measure of how much progress he was making to perfect the compression process.

He calculated that he’d listened to Tom’s Diner “thousands” of times before he was satisfied that he’d cracked the problem. Among audio engineers, and later by sheer repetition, Vega has ended up being dubbed ‘the mother of the MP3’.

It’s a title she clearly looks on with wry amusement. In 2007 Vega met Brandenburg and his team at the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen, Germany, a meeting that was flagged up by the press as ‘the mother of the MP3 comes to the home of the MP3’.

Writing in 2008, she recalled: “We had a press conference at which they played me the original version of Tom’s Diner, then the various distortions of the MP3 as it had been, which sounded monstrous and weird. Then, finally, the ‘clean’ version of Tom’s Diner.”

“The panel beamed at me. ‘See?’ one man said. ‘Now the MP3 recreates it perfectly. Exactly the same!’”

When she suggested that the original has more warmth and bottom end, “The man looked shocked. ‘No, Miss Vega, it is exactly the same.’”

She held her ground. “’Everybody knows that an MP3 compresses the sound and therefore loses some of the warmth,’ I persisted. ‘That’s why some people collect vinyl…’ I suddenly caught myself, realising who I was speaking to in front of a roomful of German media.”

The man insisted. “’No, Miss Vega. Consider the Black Box theory!’”

Vega stared back blankly.

“’What goes into the Black Box remains unchanged! Whatever goes in comes out the same way! Nothing is left behind and nothing is added!’”

At which point, the woman who started it all, who on a cold autumn Manhattan day all those years ago wrote down those words that have led to so many different versions and interpretations and indeed shaped how we listen to music today, politely backed down.

Clearly, on this occasion, discretion was the better part of valour.

Lorde has taken Spotify to task over its new ‘About the Song’ feature, which scrapes third-party sources to provide information on the music that’s currently playing.

The feature was announced last year, and is now available in beta, but Lorde has issues with both its accuracy and the concept in general.

Posting on her Instagram story, she users the example of the About the Song info for Current Affairs, a track from her 2025 album, Ultrasound. The overview says: “On her Ultrasound world tour, Lorde turns Current Affairs into a full-on performance piece, stripping down to underwear while a dancer pours water over her stomach so the song plays out like the shower scene she talks about on stage.”

The information is attributed to a review of a show from the Ultrasound tour that took place in Brisbane, but is apparently incorrect. It was published on Australian website The Music.

“Hey Spotify, I’m going to go out on a limb and say we don’t want this,” writes Lorde. “Not only is this inaccurate (not the song I did that in), but reducing a song to an AI-generated meaning right at the source feels like it limits free interpretation imo. At least make it possible for artists to opt out please.”

Spotify has since confirmed to the Hollywood Reporter that the offending text has now been removed, but About the Song information from other sources remains.

Responding to Lorde’s concerns about the feature, a Spotify spokesperson said: “About the Song is a beta feature that presents cited information from third-party sources. We’re continuing to improve it based on feedback from artists and fans.”

About the Song was announced at the same time that Spotify confirmed it was expanding its song credits to include all the listed contributors to a track. It's also been rolling out SongDNA, new interactive view that enables you to join the dots between different songs, showing collaborators, samples, and covers all in one place.

When, earlier this year, Questlove was asked by Rolling Stone to rank his 100 top Prince songs, his number one was a track that a lot of people have probably never even heard.

We’re talking about the Special Dance Mix of Little Red Corvette, a song that originally appeared on Prince’s 1999 album, from 1992, but was released as a single the following year. It gave Prince his first Billboard US Top 10 hit, but for Questlove, it was the extended, eight and a half minute version that really hit the spot.

The Roots’ drummer has now expanded on just why he loves the song so much in the Song Exploder podcast, revealing that, when he first heard the 1999 album – a record that he had to keep hidden from his mother because she disapproved of Prince and his music (Questlove says that he ended up buying it “about six times” over multiple years because it kept being discovered and confiscated) – Little Red Corvette didn’t really make much of an impression on him.

“1999 is a triple record, and the highlights of 1999 to me happen on like side three and side four, in which all the experimental filler stuff was,” says Questlove. “Because, like Stevie Wonder, like Earth Wind and Fire, a sign of a true artist is where your filler is. I never listened or looked for the hits. That's for mere mortals and laymen. Even at 11, I knew that. So I wasn't focused on like the Captain Obvious single, you know?”

All that changed when, in April 1983, Questlove was in his basement practising drums.

“Little Red Corvette comes on. It was on the radio, and of course, I know the song, I'm gonna turn it off. But I was like, ‘Wait a minute, I don't remember the kick drum being that loud,’ and so something's instantly different. I'm like, ‘I think the album version there's less kick drum or it's lower, but here it's like louder and more, like.. oh, I'm bopping my head a little bit.’ So I'm playing along with it, and then somewhere at, like the two minute mark, there's a part of the song I don't know, there's a breakdown.”

As the young Questlove (or Ahmir Khalib Thompson, as he was known then) had noticed, there is indeed “a breakdown in the song in which [Prince is] individually playing each part that you would otherwise miss in the regular version of the song.” But, in terms of impact, that was nothing compared to what happens later on.

“At the five minute 18 second part of the song, Prince transforms this song, and at the time, I didn't realise what he was doing,” says Questlove. “I dropped my drumsticks and was like, ‘What the hell is happening? This is not the Little Red Corvette that I know. He's singing Little Red Corvette, but the music is different,’ and I couldn't quite fathom it.”

Now, of course, he can: “At that five minute and 18 second part of Little Red Corvette when he yells, ‘The ride is so smooth, you must be a limousine,’ he changes the bassline, and he goes to the relative minor, which is B flat, and then it becomes the funkiest thing ever. I never knew that, for every song that exists, you can facelift it and give it a new key, like plastic surgery.”

Questlove argues that this was Prince telling his black audience that, even though he’d scored his first big crossover hit – with a song in a major key – he hadn’t sold out.

“He already had his pop success with white people, but not to be outdone, he wants to remind black people, ‘I'm still black, and here's the proof.’”

What’s more, Questlove says that, on top of blowing his mind, it also opened it: “When I heard that, my mind exploded because I thought I knew how music worked. And wow – now I'm listening to every song to see ‘What's the counterbalance to that song? Like, what's the the relative major or the relative minor of that song?’ Now it's just endless possibilities.”

It’s a trick that Prince would use on other 12-inch remixes – check out the Raspberry Beret extended version – and is one that’s informed Questlove’s own songwriting and musical choices, including when The Roots were working on their debut album with producer Scott Storch.

“When we would have jam sessions, I would always yell to Scott, ‘Scott, play the relative minor of that,’ and he had to figure it out and move this chord, and then he'd do it, and then be like, "Whoa, oh my God! That's the song!”

Another David Bowie archive release is on its way – this time from the very early days of his career.

The material in question dates from 1965, when he was still known as Davie Jones (he’d adopt the stage name Bowie the following year when the Monkees – with their own Davy Jones – first emerged). It comprises tracks he recorded with Shel Talmy, the producer best known for his work with The Kinks and The Who.

The recordings also feature a young Jimmy Page, who was at that time an up-and-coming 21-year-old session guitarist. Page wasn't exactly impressed by the material Bowie had at the time.

Interviewed by the Daily Telegraph in 2010, Bob Solly, the keyboard player in Bowie's then backing band The Manish Boys, remembered: "We had a two-hour slot at the recording studio and did two cuts each of Pity the Fool and one of David's own songs, Take My Tip. It was the first time David committed a self-composed song to wax. At the end of the session Jimmy said, referring to Pity the Fool, 'Well, it's definitely not going to be a hit.' And he was right."

The producer was one of the few who had confidence in Bowie back then. Interviewed in 2017, Talmy (who died in 2024) said of Bowie: “I thought he absolutely was going to make it. The only unfortunate thing is that he and I were about six years ahead of the market.”

Talmy and Bowie first met in late 1964. After his success with The Kinks, Talmy was looking to develop new talent and signed Bowie and his then-backing band The Manish Boys. Aside from Page, Talmy also brought in Nicky Hopkins on keyboards, whilst the engineer on the sessions would also go on to greater things: an eager young 23-year-old named Glyn Johns.

Bowie would return to this era of music not once but twice during his long career. The 1973 covers album Pin Ups features a number of songs that Talmy had originally produced, including versions of The Who’s I Can’t Explain and Anyway Anyhow Anywhere and Where Have All The Good Times Gone by The Kinks. Around the time of the millennium, Bowie would re-record some of his 1964-1965 songs for the Toy album, which was eventually released posthumously in 2021.

The album, The Shel Talmy Recordings, comes out on September 18 in the usual variety of formats. It includes sleevenotes by the music historian Alec Palao, who says of the tracks: “This collection, a primary chapter if not the very earliest instalment in David’s musical journey, deserves legitimate consideration.”

“The sounds here should not be judged by the standards of his later career, but by the standards of what was happening in Britain at that precise point in time. In which case, they speak as loudly of the excitement of London and its music scene in that pivotal year of 1965 as they do for the launch of its brightest future star.”

The Rolling Stones’ 25^th studio album Foreign Tongues came out last week and Mick Jagger has given a lengthy – and very philosophical - interview to the New York Times in which he talks about his long career with the band and raises the prospect, albeit playfully, that they might have already played their last show.

When asked by the interviewer if he will ever know if he’s walked off stage with the Stones for the final time, the singer replies: “Maybe I have! I could get run over by a bus outside of my house. You never really know, do you?

"You don’t know what’s going to happen to you in life. But I personally hope to be able to tour. I like going places. I like meeting people.”

Elsewhere, the interview visits places that few on-the-record conversations with Jagger have ever ventured. How fronting a band like the Stones has changed him: “It does affect you. You can become disassociated… from other people. You get disassociated from what people might call ‘real life.’”

Jagger says that he has fought against that by doing supposedly 'normal' things. “But, nevertheless, that’s only temporary because psychologically your actual state of mind is permanently damaged. Your late 20s and early 30s is a very tough time for people in this business because it’s a big ego trip, and you have to have a huge ego to do this.

"People that do this that don’t have huge egos have huge problems because they have to manufacture a completely different (personality).”

The NYT man also confronts the elephant in the room regarding the remaining Stones in 2026: ageing. “There’s nothing good about it,” says Jagger, who will turn 83 in two weeks’ time. “It’s not particularly pleasant. You can’t do things as quickly as you want to. Physically you’ve got to be more careful. You know, when you’re playing football, they put you in goal a lot. I’m not very good at it!”

The band’s last album but one, 2023’s Hackney Diamonds was their first of original material for 18 years, a gap that clearly peeved Jagger. “Obviously everyone has frustrations," he says. "I was very frustrated professionally for years that the Rolling Stones never made any new music. That was a huge frustration for me, and I solved it.”

And the philosophy? Apparently, there’s a reference to Plato on one of the tracks on the new album, Jealous Lover. “My interest in philosophy is superficial,” the singer admits. “But I find it a hard subject to educate myself into.

"I’ve recently read a couple of books, and I’m really finding it hard. They’re always having so many arguments, these philosophers, and always disagreeing with their masters...”

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.”