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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blondie are to release another album in the New Year, which will feature what are likely to be the last recordings of Clem Burke.

The drummer sadly died of cancer in April last year. But he’ll be heard once more on High Noon, which will be out on 26 February 2027. It’s the band’s first studio album since 2017’s Pollinator.

Aside from Burke, there are a number of guests on the record, including Glen Matlock and Johnny Marr. Indeed, Marr co-wrote the album’s first single, Spectral Eyes, which is out right now. You can hear his instantly recognisable guitar on the intro.

The album has been a long time coming. It was started way back in 2022 – hence Burke’s presence on the record. Back in 2024, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein announced during a BBC 6Music interview that a new record would be released. Then in August 2025, the band’s website announced that it would be released in spring this year. One way or another (sorry, couldn’t resist), that didn’t happen, and it was delayed again. Until now.

With Burke no longer with us, only Stein and Harry remain from the band’s classic lineup. High Noon will be the group’s twelfth album and the sixth since they reformed in the late 1990s.

So what’s it like? Well, in a statement, Harry has said that: “This album is classic Blondie – an amalgamation of all our different influences and eras into something new. This music feels grounded in the present, shaped by who we are and how we’re living now.”

Her longtime creative partner, Stein added: “It’s been a long, strange ride, and somehow here we are with another Blondie album. I’m not sure what the fuck I’m supposed to say at this point, except that we’re incredibly grateful for all your support over the years.”

Led Zeppelin have done something they have never done before. They have actually allowed the use of Stairway to Heaven in a film.

Famously, the group have always refused to license one of their most famous songs in cinema. Cameron Crowe had to cut a sequence from 2000’s Almost Famous which showed the characters attempting to convince William’s mother to allow him to go on the road with the band Stillwater by listening to Stairway to Heaven.

The group’s policy has become so well-known that it was referenced in Wayne’s World. When Wayne walks into a guitar shop and attempts to play the song, he is directed to a sign on the wall that reads in no uncertain terms: ‘NO Stairway To Heaven’.

However, now, some 55 years after it was first released, Zeppelin are finally loosening their grip on the track. They have allowed Greta Gerwig to use a section in the trailer for the upcoming CS Lewis adaptation Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. During the three-minute-long snippet, you can hear Jimmy Page’s famous guitar intro, the bridge and Robert Plant’s outro line.

So why this film and why now? Well, it’s known that Robert Plant is a devotee of CS Lewis and Tolkien – his lyrics in both Zep and on his solo albums have referenced both authors’ works. Speaking to Rolling Stone about the trailer, Gerwig suggested that Plant and Page “saw the heart and the story and the drama in it.”

“It’s an epic song,” she said of Stairway. “It’s about the two paths of good and evil … It is a spiritual quest and a spiritual journey. So to me, this was a song that made sense to introduce the film to the world.”

Of course, the track has turned up in cinemas before, in 1976 in Zep’s The Song Remains the Same concert film/documentary. And some of their other more famous songs have been licensed to other films – Immigrant Song in both School of Rock and Thor: Ragnarok and That’s the Way in Almost Famous.

As for Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, you’ll have to wait a wee while to actually see it in the cinemas – it isn’t released until 12 February next year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 2027 Grammys have been scheduled for 7 February next year, but we already know that there will be some notable absentees from the glittering ceremony.

Drake has confirmed in the last day or so that he is not submitting any music for the awards. The rapper released three albums this year – Iceman, Habibti and Maid Of Honour – but none of their tracks will be up for a gong. Drake himself hasn’t offered an official explanation why as yet.

There is much speculation that this time he’s snubbing the Grammys due to lingering resentment at the fact that in 2025 they awarded Kendrick Lamar five statuettes for Not Like Us, the diss track against him. Whatever the reason, he had already signposted his decision earlier in the year on Make Them Know, the final track on Iceman on which he raps: “This album, I’m never submittin’ it.”

It’s not the first time Drake has given the awards ceremony a swerve. Way back before beef with Lamar blew up, the Canadian rapper declined to submit 2018’s More Life and withdrew the submission of Certified Lover Boy in 2022 and Honestly, Nevermind in 2023.

He joins BTS as prominent refuseniks for the 2027 awards. As we know, back in July the K-pop megastars withdrew in protest at the institution of a new ‘Asian pop’ category. The group took umbrage, 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.”

Despite the controversy, it’s recently been confirmed by Grammys CEO Harvey Mason Jr that the Asian Pop category will stay, at least for 2027. But the awards suffered another blow with the news in the last week that BTS’s compatriots Stray Kids have also refused to submit any music for next year’s ceremony. The group have issued a simple statement via their record label JYP that says: "Stray Kids did not submit for the Grammys." This is despite their EP This & That being within the eligibility window that runs from August 2025 to August this year.

Who will be left to fill the nominations for the beleaguered category? We’ll no doubt find out in due course...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Queens Of The Stone Age have a new album at the end of this month and in the run up to the release of Perfecth, Josh Homme has sat down with Rick Beato for a chat.

Homme’s long-time compadre Dave Grohl is one of the guesting musicians on the record and, inevitably, Beato brought up the Foo Fighters man. "He's so easy to play with, it's kind of – it's so easy that it's really addictive,” Homme explained. “Because It doesn't really matter what he sits behind. Of course, when he sits behind the drums it's so musical. So, whatever you play on a song, he just does it back here and that feels so comfortable."

"You play him a riff, and he'll play that riff back at you on the drums. And then he'll play a drum counter-melody that would have been a harmony going on, that's being beaten out of it. That's where the stuff is so inspiring. It's sick."

Talking about his drum style, Homme said: "He does this very strange thing where everything is the same hardness. He can make a floor tom as loud as a snare and I'm always like, 'What the fuck?'"

"Someone could say, 'Well, he hits them all hard', except when he's doing it soft it's the same too. So there's this sonic consistency across all boundaries. He can just dial it up and dial it back."

“One of my favourite things to do with him is push him until he’s almost frustrated,” Homme said. “Because all you have to do is go ‘well you could do that (part), you could add those (parts) together’. Watching him go ‘fuck’ and then (mimes just getting on with the job). I know if he goes ‘just give me five minutes’…” Homme then mimes being excited at the prospect of something really good.

There’s loads more that the two men cover: the sad demise of regional scenes in the US, how Homme made Songs For The Deaf a really loud album and how he gets his signature guitar tone.

Anyway, Perfecth, a nine-track album and Queens’ ninth album thus far, comes out on October 30.

Rare records don’t crop up very often on BBC1’s Antiques Roadshow, but one did the other night – a rarer-than-hen’s-teeth Led Zeppelin single from the early 1970s.

‘But hang on’, we can hear you cry, ‘Led Zeppelin, famously, didn’t ever release singles!’ Well, that’s not strictly true. After the release of Led Zeppelin II in autumn 1969, a single of Whole Lotta Love was released in several territories, including the US, where an edited version was issued to radio stations and made Number Four on the Billboard charts.

In response to this, the UK wing of Atlantic Records pressed up 500 copies of the track. Unhappy at this, Zep’s manager Peter Grant ordered them to be destroyed. However, a few, though, escaped intact.

One of them was the copy that turned up on the BBC show, which was this week hosted by Caerphilly Castle in Wales. One fellow brought along the single and told the show’s resident expert Marc Allum that it was given (not even sold!) to him at a record shop in the early 1970s. “I was looking for records to start a disco and out of his bag came a couple of records and he went ‘you can have those’,” he said.

Allum inspected the single, which has a finger mark on it and light scratching, and estimated that it would fetch around £1,000 at auction.

The fellow said that he had actually played it at discos back in the day and that punters “weren’t impressed”.

And by the sounds of it, it probably won’t see any turntable action for a while yet. “It's been with me for 55 years, and I will probably give it to my daughters to do what they want to do with it,” the fellow announced. “I don’t think I will play it again as it will devalue it.”

Of course, as any pop scholar knows, there was a supreme irony at Grant’s decision to nix the release of Whole Lotta Love. A year later, Alexis Korner’s group CCS recorded a cover, which reached Number 13 in the UK charts.

That version of the song was chosen as the theme tune to the iconic long-running British TV chart show, Top Of The Pops, which Led Zeppelin – because of their ‘no singles’ policy - never appeared on.

As we know now, the first new U2 album in almost ten years comes out in November and the band have given a lengthy interview to Rolling Stone covering all aspects of Carnaval De Luz.

Aside from the group’s collaboration with Dolly Parton and their tribute to Rosalia, there’s the lowdown on Larry Mullen Jr’s injury, which at one stage threatened his place in the band and U2’s unbroken unity: famously, no other rock band has made it to fifty years without any line-up change.

It seems the drummer had been suffering from neck pain for some years before his 2022 – 24 layoff. It was the result of a congenital fusion in a facet joint and by the time Covid came around Mullen was in so much pain he couldn’t play. “I realised that I was physically damaged beyond repair… I shut down, and my body just went, ‘You’ve had enough.'”

He - like the rest of the band - had already agreed to play The Sphere in 2023. “ I signed up to do it. And then a couple of weeks later my physio said to me, ‘You won’t make it through rehearsals. So you need to undo that,’ which was very difficult, very complicated to undo it, ’cause I’d made a commitment.”

Watching U2 play with another drummer was difficult, he says. In fact, he didn’t even see them play with Bram Van Den Berg until their penultimate show at the Las Vegas venue. “There’s a certain amount of humiliation when you get injured, and you can’t get over it, and I felt humiliated,” he says, “And it’s my own - that’s my own shit.”

“I absolutely understood,” he says. “Business is business, and nothing can get in the way of the process, and I accept that 100 percent. So the unspoken rule (that a band member could be replaced onstage) “applied to me in that case. It could apply to somebody else in another case. And that’s the cost of doing business. It is complicated being friends, being friendly, being in business.

"So yeah, we all have feelings. So I’m not gonna lie that it wasn’t difficult, but nobody imposed it.”

For a while the future of the band seemed uncertain. “We didn’t know if Larry was gonna come back,” Adam Clayton says. “Could we keep going? Would we wanna keep going? That’s still an open question.”

Luckily, Mullen made a full recovery following surgery - a procedure which doctors warned him entailed a real risk of full paralysis - and U2 returned to complete their fifteenth studio album.

“I don’t think we would’ve made an album if Larry hadn’t been able to play,” The Edge admits. “We would’ve just gone, ‘Why? Why make an album without Larry Mullen on it? Doesn’t feel right.'”

Released exactly 50 years ago, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life is often regarded as his crowning glory, and the last in his astonishing run of five great albums that began with 1972’s Music of my Mind.

Songs’ was originally released as a double album that also came with a bonus EP, called A Something’s Extra, but half a century later, Wonder has sprung a surprise by releasing another EP – again called Songs in the Key of Life – that features a further four unreleased songs that didn’t make the original release.

“We’ve lived with Songs in the Key of Life for 50 years, but there’s still more to hear,” says Wonder. “We didn’t add these songs to the album, but they were part of what I was feeling and discovering as we made it. They bring me back to that time in my life, and now they get to become part of yours.”

The EP was personally curated by Wonder, and mixed for release by John Fischbach and Gary O Adante, Songs in the Key of Life’s original recording and mixing engineers. Adante was credited on the original LP as Gary Olazabal.

The four songs – It’s Easier, My Life Story of Love, I Can See the Sun In Late December and I’m Into Livin’ – sound typical of Wonder in his golden period, and will delight fans who may have thought that there was nothing more to hear from that time. The star wrote and produced on all the tracks, with former Supreme and Motown artist Susaye Greene co-writing the lyrics for My Life Story of Love.

Musicians to feature include Greg Phillinganes, Michael Sembello and Wonder’s longtime bassist Nathan Watts, while the funky I’m Into Livin’ has backing vocals by Shirley Brewer, Thelma Houston and Deniece Williams.

Wonder is soon to head out on a celebratory tour of Songs in the Key of Life’s anniversary, with tickets available now.

The jazz world is celebrating what would have been John Coltrane’s 100^th birthday this week and with it comes the news that a tranche of his hitherto unheard live recordings are about to get a proper release.

These are the Tiberi Tapes, a series of recordings made by saxophonist Frank Tiberi of Coltrane playing in jazz clubs in New York and Philadelphia in the early 1960s. Tiberi started recording Coltrane in 1960 and over the next five years built up a substantial collection.

In an essay by music historian Ashley Kahn, Tiberi explained that though he had all the great man’s records, his live performances were on a different level entirely. “To me they were not anywhere near the kind of playing and inspiration that he would display at a club.”

So on a portable reel-to-reel tape machine, Tiberi went from club to club on a mission to capture Coltrane at his live improvisational best: “My main purpose of recording him was to really, to get information and harmonic values, so that I could be able to really play myself.”

The tapes began to take on something of a mythic reputation, especially after Coltrane’s early death in 1967. Now, at last, the public at large will be allowed to hear them – they’re getting a full release in November through Impulse! Records.

However, it should be noted that the recordings themselves aren’t of the pristine, straight-from-the-mixing-desk quality that many listeners are used to in the 21^st Century. They were recorded on comparatively primitive equipment in noisy clubs, and the balance often favours Coltrane’s sax and the drums at the expense of bass and piano.

Still, for Coltrane aficionados this is very much the holy grail. Just 11 selections from Tiberi’s huge library are to be released in November – his entire archive extends to 80 reels and over a day’s worth of music. But they include two versions of Giant Steps, recorded at radically different tempi, as well as readings of Thing In D Flat, Lover, West 42^ndStreet and Impressions.

Anyway, The Tiberi Tapes: The Complete Recordings is out on November 6 on a four-LP set, a three-CD set or digitally. There is also a limited-edition, hand-numbered edition out in early 2027.

WIth the demise of the monoculture it’s hard to have a bonafide hit, but try telling that to Ella Langley. Her 2025 single Choosin’ Texas has just broken the record for the most weeks spent at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 – 23 and counting – beating the previous mark set by Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You.

Of course, there will still be those who protest that they've never heard of either Langley or her omnipresent song, but her achievements are staggering. As well as breaking the Hot 100 record, she recently became the first country artist to top the UK singles chart for more than 20 years, and Choosin’ Texas’s streaming numbers and TikTok views run into the billions.

Langley co-wrote the song with Luke Dick, Miranda Lambert and Joybeth Taylor, and speaking to Billboard, she said that she knew immediately that it was going to be included on Dandelion, her second studio album.

“When we wrote it, I knew it was going on the record,” she recalls. “I honestly knew it was gonna be the lead single.”

Despite her confidence in Choosin’ Texas, though, Langley admits that its massive success is beyond anything she could have dreamed of.

“We love that song, but I don’t think I could have ever imagined what’s happening with it right now. Every day I wake up and it’s doing something that I didn’t even know was a goal that I could have had. And it’s just, it’s nuts. It’s crazy to see the ownership that the fans have taken over it, and the different demographics of people listening to the song is so cool. Just nuts to see everything happen.”

Choosin’ Texas was written on a writers’ retreat, and was born after Miranda Lambert had been telling Langley a story about once owning a pet kangaroo.

“She was telling me this story about how she got pulled over once. She had the kangaroo in the passenger seat, dog in the back, and she said she got pulled over and the kangaroo ended up getting her out of a ticket, but she’s like, ‘Of course, I had Texas plates on too.’ And I went, ‘Well, she’s from Texas. I can tell.’”

Bingo: “Just from that phrase, it kinda all hit us and the melody fell right out of me,” says Langley. “I went: ‘She’s from Texas, I can tell by the way he’s two-stepping round the room.’ Just like that. And Miranda was like, ‘Like the one he went with, the girl he went with.’ And 45 minutes later we had that song written.”

45 minutes well spent, we’d say, though there’s more to Choosin’ Texas’s success than the lyrics and melody. The introduction to the song features a distinctive twangy electric guitar lick, and that was played by renowned Nashville session ace Tom ‘Uncle Larry’ Bukovac.

Earlier this year, Bukovac discussed his contribution with the song’s engineer, Dave Clauss. “Ella came in and she was saying, ‘I want this vibe to be like an '80s country thing,’ he explained.

Addressing Clauss, Bukovac continues: “We all gathered in the control room and Charlie Worsham was there [acoustic guitar player on Choosin’ Texas] and we got a couple of acoustics and I just started coming up with that lick, and I thought it'd be cool to record it direct like the guys used to do in the '80s. So I said to you, ‘Can we just get a cool direct sound like a clean kind of Strat vibe?’ And I remember, I had my old Jeff Senn Strat and I ran the guitar into the pedalboard into the direct rig.”

“I think it went straight into the desk, which is an API, and then pretty slamming on the 1176 [compressor],” adds Clauss. “It's amazing – now it's almost like this iconic lick, direct.”

Not that this came as a huge surprise to Bukovac: “I remember saying on the session when we recorded it – and I never say this – I remember saying, ‘this song is going to be a fucking smash,’ and then when we got together months later to do another session, the first thing Ella said to me was like, ‘You called it. You knew it was going to be a hit.’”

Turning to the isolated guitar parts, Clauss reveals that the main lick is actually two tracks – a lead and a harmonised double – and that Bukovac added a third rhythm part underneath. There are also a lot of effects: “I was probably my EarthQuaker Dispatch Master and the Line 6 – I use a lot of Line 6 M9 digital reverb,” says Bukovac. Clauss added plenty of plugin “sauce” on top of that, too.

Listen to Choosin’ Texas carefully and you’ll notice the subtle guitar parts that fill the gaps between Langley’s vocals, which were recorded as the band played. This meant that Bukovac was able to make them respond perfectly to each line of the song, and helps to give it a ‘live’ feel.

Choosin’ Texas has definitely ‘connected’, and its cross-generational appeal is a rarity in this day and age. It’s worth saying, though, that Langley’s time in the Billboard record books could be short-lived: with the festive season looming charge and Mariah Carey going back out on tour to celebrate, surely it’s only a matter of time before her evergreen Christmas hit reaches the top spot once again…

A row has broken out about what is reportedly “the final” Fall album, over eight years since founder, frontman and sole original member Mark E Smith died.

Post Script is being released next month and contains nine tracks of Smith’s unmistakable vocals set against music that has been created – after Smith’s death – by long-time Fall associates Ed Blaney and Simon Archer.

However, Smith’s final partner and manager Pamela Vander is far from happy at this. Speaking to the Guardian she said: “They’re selling it as ‘the final album’ so people will think Mark made it on his deathbed, but none of it (vocally) was made after (2017’s) New Facts Emerge.

"I have Mark’s actual last recordings – he was working on a cover of Madonna’s Material Girl – but by the time of his death he had made the decision that New Facts Emerge was the final album, made by the longest-lasting lineup of the Fall, who were with Mark for 10 years. So I don’t think anyone else should override a decision he made when he was alive.”

(As an aside, who wouldn’t have loved to hear a Mark E Smith version of Material Girl?)

Anyway, Post Script is coming out on The Fall’s own label Cog Sinister on 2 October. Vander describes it as “a cash grab... just a collection of some shit from the cutting room floor. I wouldn’t have minded if it was being released as ‘the Mark E Smith archive’ or something, but there’s something ethically wrong with releasing it as the Fall.”

However, Blaney and Archer maintain that they have done nothing wrong. “Making this record was intended as a fitting tribute to Mark/the Fall because the vocals were there waiting to be put to good use.

"Words like ‘cashing in’ make me laugh. It was about love and respect for Mark: he was the Fall, and Mark’s vocals were recorded as the Fall, hence it’s being released as the Fall.”

Though they weren’t in the final Fall lineup, Blaney and Archer were both involved in the Fall during the group’s final phase. Archer played bass between 2003 – 4 and either produced or engineered the last nine Fall albums.

Writing on Facebook, he explained that he recorded most of Smith’s vocals for 12 years. “Some of these ideas went to the band for development and some were dropped. Others went into the vault with phrases like ‘put that in the safe’ or ‘you can do what you like with that one, cock’. I’d never had the time to check the safe but Post Script provided an opportunity for these loose ends to be tied up.”

What would Smith think of this? Not much, in all likelihood. The Fall leader was notorious for his determinedly forward-looking vision. He looked upon the archival arm of the music industry with disdain, and at any Fall gig you’d be lucky to hear anything older than the most recent couple of albums.

Perhaps this is what has prompted Vander to speak out. “It’s been eating me up,” she says. “I feel it’s still my job to stand up for Mark.”

Madonna and Charli XCX have confirmed they will be releasing a new track together this week – one that’s inspired by a song from Madge’s current Confessions II album.

It’s called Danceteria Afterhours and is a reworked version of Danceteria from the album. It’s also produced by Stuart Price, who helmed that record, and of course the original Confessions On A Dancefloor LP way back in 2005.

(There’s clearly a lot of nostalgia for the titular early '80s New York night spot at the moment. By coincidence Soft Cell release their final album this week, which is also entitled Danceteria.)

The two singers have been spending a fair bit of time together recently. They collaborated on a Club Confessions party with Saint Laurent during Paris Fashion Week, and there have been various social media titbits to whet fans appetite. The most recent of these features Madonna asking huskily "you wanna talk about Madonna and Charli?" whilst the camera switches between the two women dancing, before she says "everyone here is a work of art". The clip ends with Madonna looking at the camera and blowing out a plume of smoke from her cigarette. She always was the rebellious type...

Speaking to 6 Music in June about her friendship with the 68-year-old pop icon, Charli explained: “We went to Paris and we just couldn’t stop hanging out with each other. And it was fab! She is so interested in really talking about the music that she makes, and how and why, and I found it very inspiring to hang out with her.”

She admitted she wasn’t really a big fan during her younger days. “I think when I became a bit more interested in how music is art and artful – I think that’s when I began my Madonna time,” she explained. “My first big song that I fell in love with of hers was Hollywood. That song really hit me in a way.”

Danceteria Afterhours is out on Thursday and there will be a CD edition for the US, UK and International markets.

Given that he’s widely regarded as the most successful songwriter-producer of the century, it’s no surprise that many have attempted to examine Max Martin’s back catalogue in a bid to work out just how he’s managed to create so many hits.

Various theories have been posited, and now Miley Cyrus – an artist who Martin has worked with in the past – has been digging into the specifics.

Her comment came while she was speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe about Bass Persuades, her new album. Funnily enough, it was when Lowe asked Cyrus about what makes her happiest about being with a different Maxx – her fiance and collaborator, Maxx Morando – that she mentioned Martin’s name.

Cyrus contrasted Morando’s endearing “unknowing” with some of the people she’s worked with in the past: “I've been able to be in the room with some of the greatest producers and songwriters and artists of all time, and they know too much,” she explained. “They've lost their questioning and their searching because they know the answer. They're like, ‘Hey, well, when I was in Sweden with Max Martin, he taught me this. So you always have to put a chord on the final chorus that's not on the first because that's repeat factor.’”

Martin is indeed known for mixing things up in his final choruses, using not only different chords but also counter melodies that were introduced elsewhere in the song – often in the preceding bridge or pre-chorus.

And, despite suggesting that it’s possible to think too much about songwriting formulas, Cyrus admits that this one of Martin’s definitely butters the parsnips.

“It works, by the way – I’ve done it,” she says. “I was always like… I don’t think music is math… [but] he actually knows what’s up because every time I do it I’m like, ‘Damn, I do like to listen to this song over and over and over again and it's because I threw a random chord in the final chorus.’”

Cyrus also offered an insight into how the other Maxx – Morando – helped her during the making of Bass Persuades, specifically referencing fifth track Aftermath. This, she says, was originally written as a “very sad ballad,” but it was Morando who convinced her that she should take it in a different direction.

“I was playing the record as it kind of was with Maxx, and I said, "Be brutal – tell me what you don't like.’ He's like, ‘God, that Aftermath song is boring. I'm just gonna be honest with you.’ So [I was] like, ‘What would you do with it?’”

It was Morando that suggested that the song should have its “boom, boom, boom, boom” backbeat, and Cyrus says that she quickly realised that he was right.

“It's like, I was going for the Thom Yorke-like vibe. He's like, ‘No, boring.’ And so he made that song so much better.”

David Bowie fans will know that last week saw the latest release from the man’s archives. These were the recordings Bowie made with Shel Talmy in the mid-'60s when he was still scrapping round for a direction in mod-era London.

The key figure in this interesting tale is Alec Palao, a California-based producer who became close to Talmy during his later years. In 2017, Palao was at the producer’s house helping the near-blind Talmy put together the anthology Making Time: A Shel Talmy Production, when he asked about an alternate version of The Kinks’ You Really Got Me.

Talmy’s wife Jan, pointed Palao in the direction of the loft where a box full of old records lay. “(Then) there was a bit of an Indiana Jones moment,” Palao says.

"One of the last items I came across was a disc with no label with a barely decipherable pencil inscription, 'Davy Jones,'" he told the San Francisco Chronicle. It was a long-forgotten acetate that included some of the never-before-heard tracks now included on the David Bowie: The Shel Talmy Recordings compilation.

Bowie - then still calling himself Davy Jones - signed with Talmy in 1965. The producer was then riding high on the back of his work with The Kinks and The Who. But he couldn’t work miracles with the material Bowie was producing back then. It would be a number of years and a few more musical reinventions before Bowie found lasting success.

"So many Bowie commentators don't understand the context of these recordings," Palao said. "When you hear the Hamburg Beatles, it doesn't sound like Sgt. Pepper's. Bowie would go to different places, hear something and immediately turn around to try something else."

Of the material on the compilation, Palao says: "This was the most visceral I had ever heard David Bowie - primitive and somewhat unformed, but still instantly recognisable.”

Bowie would later return to this era of music. On 1973’s Pin Ups, he covered a number of the songs Talmy produced in mid 60s London, including Friday On My Mind by The Easybeats and The Who’s first two singles I Can’t Explain and Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere. Later in 2000 he re-recorded a number of his Talmy-era songs on the Toy album, which was only belatedly released in 2021.

"Listening next to early Stones, the Yardbirds and the Animals, these things will hold up against them," Palao said. "He loved that period."

As excitement grows in the gaming community about the imminent arrival of Grand Theft Auto VI, it’s been announced that an accompanying soundtrack album is coming too.

Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album arrives on 19 November – the same day as the game – and whilst it doesn’t feature every track used in the game, it does manage to pack 34 of them in.

It’s available to pre-order now, though, in their wisdom, Atlantic Records (who are releasing it) and the developer Rockstar Games have yet to issue a complete tracklist.

The only tracks we know for certain are included are: Yung Lean’s That’s It, RHYNO by Travis Scott (which Daft Punk’s Guy-Manual de Homem-Christo produced), Morgan Wallen’s Last Thing You Need, Macacoa 2000 by Rauw Alejandro, Sexy Magic, a track credited to CA7RIEL and a long list of featured artists including PinkPantheress, and finally Keith Richards' cover of Jimmy Reed’s old blues number Bright Lights Big City.

All six ‘singles’ are now up on streaming platforms, including Youtube.

As per in 2026, there are a number of different physical editions, including three Atlantic Records “exclusives”. You could purchase a limited-edition liquid-filled vinyl, a splatter edition vinyl or a CD jewel case.

Presumably, at some point Atlantic and Rockstar will provide a full track listing of both the album and the many other songs featured within the game. Stay tuned...

Mastodon released a new album – their first since Brent Hinds’ death last year – in August and the band have been telling Consequence about the new record, Marrow Deep, and the upheavals that have happened within the group over the last few years.

You may recall that Hinds – one of the group’s founder members - left Mastodon in March 2025 amongst much bitterness. The band claimed it was a mutual decision, which the guitarist disputed. Just three weeks before he died in a motorcycle accident, he claimed he had been “kicked out” and added that he wouldn’t “miss being in a shit band with horrible humans.”

But even before then, there had been tragedy. In 2024 drummer Brann Dailor and his family lost their home to Hurricane Helene. The following year, Dailor also lost his mom.

According to Dailor, the album’s lead single Your Ghost Again was inspired by Hinds and the spooky goings-on in the studio while they were recording: “I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye, which is common, I think, with somebody that you're really close to and you were in close quarters with for most of the time.

"When you're in those familiar spaces and they're not there, your mind plays tricks on you, and where they normally stand, kinda look over and get a little glimmer of hope that they're there, and then it reminds you that they're gone.”

“So, that's what the lyrics became about with that song... Myself working through my mom's passing and Brent's passing, and the tumultuous times in between, and Troy's loss with his house and everything that had happened there. Everything that had happened was right at the forefront.

"There wasn't really time for much metaphor, so it was all literal. And that's how we were trying to wrap our heads around it, was with the lyrics.”

The album’s artwork is inspired by Greek mythology and the three fates that determine our individual destiny. “They're Zeus' daughters and they basically pull the thread of your life,” Dailor explains, “The first daughter starts your life. The second daughter decides what happens in your life, and then the third one has the scissors and she decides when your life is over.

"And I always thought that the similarities between my mom and Brent were that they were these like Keith Richards style people, where you thought that they both had nine lives.”

“Brent (was) kind of always walking into the deep end, and it didn't seem like he had a care in the world sometimes. But he would always emerge, smelling like roses. Whereas the three of us would kind of be like, ‘Man, if I tried that, I'd be dead ten times by now.’ So, that was always kind of fascinating. I was like, man, somebody's looking out for that dude because I don't know.”

Whatever happened to La Roux?

It seems so long ago now, but Elly Jackson scored two huge hits in 2009 – Bulletproof and In For The Kill went to Number One and Two respectively in the UK. Her self titled debut album went platinum and for a couple of years the be-quiffed red head was a regular fixture in the British media.

Now she’s back and has issued a TikTok post which depicts her sipping a cup of tea (or a warm beverage of some description) with Bulletproof playing in the background. The accompanying text reads: “You think you can hurt me? I literally wrote and sung this song, lost my voice, had a nervous breakdown and disappeared for 10 years.”

There’s a little bit more to it than that. After her critically acclaimed (but commercially under-performing) 2014 album Trouble In Paradise, Jackson disappeared for six years. She was about to release a third album, Supervision, in 2020, when the pandemic happened. It was postponed and then later cancelled altogether.

She’s also given an interview to AnOther magazine and elaborated further: “I’d only just finished my last album when the pandemic hit, so I wasn’t ready to start making a new record instantly. You need a gap before you make new work. I started fucking around with new sounds and new ideas.

"It took a couple of years to know if I even wanted to make another record or if there was any point – we didn’t know when the pandemic would end. But I’ve pretty much been in the studio every day since. It was just whether or not I liked what I was making enough to put it out.”

That new album, entitled Old Flames, is out in November, with a single Lose Myself already up on streaming platforms. According to Jackson, the record “charts the journey of a very long, drawn-out and painful breakup.

"It was the only relationship I’d ever been in, until now, and it lasted the best part of 20 years. As I got to the end of writing the album, it was clear that it was a sad prophecy. It’s about being free of something that I never really wanted to be free from.”

“But if you don’t know any of this stuff, if you’re just listening to it as a fun pop record, that totally works too. You don’t have to know the deep undertones – it’s pop, not emo.”

Drake appears to be the latest urban artist who's adding country music to their musical palette.

The Canadian rapper dropped his trailed Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) the other day. He described it as a “not-so-short film”, but it’s really a collection of new videos of tracks from the three albums he released earlier this year, alongside some new tunes.

One of those interpolates Choosin’ Texas, Ella Langley’s huge summer hit, which also reached Number One last week (and broke Sam Fender and Olivia Dean’s vice-like grip on the British singles charts). Several others also appear to be influenced by country music.

As for the films, they were put up on Youtube last night but then were taken down again fairly quickly. Those that were lucky enough to see them have said they include – amongst many things – shots of Drake on a speed boat, Drake working out, the rapper in a Brat T shirt and much more.

Drake has written an Instagram post about FOMO, calling it, somewhat puzzlingly: “self-funded surrealism… A story about making the absolute most of it all in one summer.”

“Here’s some life advice before you watch,” he continued. “Nobody is coming to save you. You must use each day to decipher who you love and trust and march forward with them I hope this serves as motivation to make that call, take that trip, drop that song, open that shop, see your parents, leave that relationship or stay in it forever, spend the bread, get some more etc.”

“They keep saying our genre is dying,” he said. “Videos don’t matter. Nobody is watching nobody is listening. I still care. As much as I did on the set of Best I Ever Had. So be kind and rewind.”

He didn’t say when FOMO would be back online, nor whether the new tracks will be included in any audio release.

FOMO was premiered last night in Toronto and at the event the rapper said that he would be touring in 2027, embarking on his first North American jaunt since 2023.

Grand Theft Auto VI – without a doubt the most anticipated video game of the decade – is due to drop in November, and a whole load of artists have been teasing their inclusion on the soundtrack.

Travis Scott heavily hinted at his inclusion in an Instagram post. Writing, all in caps without any punctuation whatsoever: “Phase 1 / NOW ITS TIME / MY RETURN TO GAME GOTTA COME WITH RAGE AND A LOT OF DANCING LETS RIDE / J… O. H….. / to be continued / See yall soon,” he juxtaposed the lines with an image of a pole dancer's heel. ‘J.O.H’ is a reference to the Jack Of Hearts strip club, which apparently is part of GTA,VI and Scott tagged the game’s developers, Rockstar Games, in the post.

He wasn’t the only one. Both Fred Again.. and PinkPantheress have shared the same computerised image of a yacht that looks suspiciously like it’s been pulled from the game. And Keith Richards posted an image of an iguana, which again is in that similar GTA style.

Others, too, have got in on the act and teased their involvement, including Future, Morgan Wallen, Metro Boomin and Yung Lean.

All will be rubbing their hands with glee, given the uplift in streaming numbers some of the songs that were featured in the game’s ‘extended look’ trailer received a couple of weeks back.

Cliff Richard’s Devil Woman saw its plays on Spotify go up by some 325%, Prefab Sprout’s 1988 single Cars And Girls went up by 530% and But I Think It’s A Dream, an obscurity by the mid 70s AOR duo Captain And Tennille went up a scarcely-believable 130,730%.

Doubtless there will be other names confirmed and a full list revealed before the game itself comes out on 19 November.

M.I.A.’s biggest hit almost never was. The British-Sri Lankan artist’s breakout track was nearly lost after a fight with her producer – and boyfriend at the time – Diplo.

That track was Paper Planes, and as M.I.A. revealed to Rolling Stone in 2018: “It nearly didn’t happen. Straight after I wrote the song, me and Diplo had a massive fight, and I threw the hard drive [containing the demo] at his head from the top floor. Luckily the hard drive landed in the boot of the taxi that he was about to get into and not on the ground. So it got saved.”

This is one of several remarkable details about Paper Planes, a late single from M.I.A.’s second studio album Kala. From production to lyricism, this song became a triple-platinum-selling cultural behemoth despite flouting the rules of the pop music playbook.

For a start, the track’s hook contains basically no lyrics. In a creative choice that many labels would never accept, the famous chorus is built around a rhythmic sound effect onslaught: gunshot, gunshot, gunshot, gunshot, gun cock, cash register ker-ching.

“You have to fight for your vision,” Diplo reflected on Daniel Wall's Behind The Wall podcast, after revealing that label XL Recordings were extremely reluctant to release the song. That was down to several factors: its unusual hook, its bold political messaging, and the slightly odd creative process behind it.

Diplo recalled how Paper Planes was cut with co-producer Switch, and how one key element in the track was inspired by Pink Floyd’s use of schoolchildren’s voices in their classic hit song Another Brick In The Wall Part 2.

“We were in the studio, me and her and Switch, and we were like, ‘Yo, let’s get kids to do this thing,’” Diplo said. “Because I wanted it to have this Pink Floyd vibe to it. I was like, ‘This is English, this is kinda punky, let’s put some kids on this record.’ Some kids were in the street and I was like, ‘Bring ’em in!’ That made XL not wanna release it, but I was like, ‘This is what’s cool about it.’”

That punk spirit is present in the track’s primary sample, too. Joining the dots between two left-wing anti-establishment London artists — M.I.A. and The Clash — Diplo masterfully chopped up and looped a 10-second intro from The Clash’s 1982 track Straight To Hell, turning its chunky, rhythmic guitar chords and screeching lead line into an irresistible modern hip-hop melody.

M.I.A.’s tuneful, talkative rap style, peppered with references to modern consumer culture and money, slotted perfectly over the top of this brash, upbeat rhythm, helping obscure a strong, critical message about 21st-century America and the so-called war on terror.

For context, we should turn to her background. Born Maya Arulpragasam in Sri Lanka to Tamil parents who fled to Britain during the country's brutal 26-year-long civil war, M.I.A. had personal experience of being a refugee, and took this awareness of the plight of asylum seekers and minorities into her songwriting.

“Gun shots are part of our culture as an everyday thing,” she told the Daily Beast in 2017, reflecting on the horrific war her family fled. “I’ve been shot at so I’m quite comfortable with gunshot sounds. If you have a problem with it, go and talk to the people who were shooting at me.”

Diving beyond those iconic sound effects, the track’s wider lyrics explore how M.I.A.’s traumatic past in Sri Lanka continued to impact her adult life. Specifically, she satirises her own experience of being denied a working visa in the US due to alleged (and denied) links to Tamil militia groups during the latter years of the devastating Sri Lankan civil war. She also addresses the broader response to 9/11 which saw people of colour face intense scrutiny and prejudice at the borders of the US and other Western nations, parodying the stereotype with a set of anthemic faux-hustler lyrics: “I fly like paper, get high like planes / If you catch me at the border, I got visas in my name.”

Paper Planes became a global hit after featuring first on Seth Rogen’s movie Pineapple Express, then on Oscar-sweeping modern classic Slumdog Millionaire. After Slumdog Millionaire swept the board at the 2009 Oscars, M.I.A.’s track reached new stratospheres, although the rapper herself credited Pineapple Express creator Seth Rogen with “changing my life”.

The song’s long-term global impact is a testament to the power of bold, unapologetic songwriting and spontaneous creative decision-making.

Megastars including 50 Cent, Rihanna, Dizzee Rascal, Jay-Z and Kanye West soon got in on the act, sampling, covering and remixing the track.

Almost two decades after its release, it remains one of the most iconic pop anthems of the 21st century.

Apple Corps have dropped another taster from the upcoming Rubber Soul special edition.

We’ve already heard the early versions of Michelle and Daytripper that are included in the package. Now it’s time for the second take of Norwegian Wood

Recorded in October 1965, there were two versions of Norwegian Wood. This is the second and is closer to what eventually ended up on Side One of the album. You can hear John Lennon counting the band in, but the song opens with the double tracked sitar playing the bridge section, rather than the verse melody we all know.

This was the first time George Harrison had played a sitar on a Beatles track and in this Facebook post from the Beatles Cavern, the guitarist can be heard talking retrospectively about the track: “It felt very familiar to me to listen to that music,” Harrison says. “Around that time I’d bought a cheap sitar in a shop called Indiacraft in London.”

“It was just lying around. I hadn’t figured out what I was going to do with it. When we were working on Norwegian Wood, it just needed something and it was quite spontaneous.

"I picked the sitar up and kind of found the notes. I just kind of played it. I mic-ed it up. We put it on and it seemed to hit the spot and that was it.”

George’s words have been spliced with John Lennon talking about the track towards the end of his life: “I asked him ‘can you play this lick on the sitar? And it took him 20 minutes or half an hour to get the lick down.”

The Rubber Soul special edition comes out on 2 October, and as per usual features all sorts of alternative takes and demos from the Apple archives, as well as the band’s contemporary double A side single, Daytripper/ We Can Work It Out.

One of its main attractions is Little Girl, a John Lennon demo which up until recently no-one had any idea even existed, let alone that it was in releasable form. Perhaps Apple are holding that back until nearer the release date...

“I didn’t have to work at it,” Jay-Z said. “I’ve always rapped, like recreation. It wasn’t like I was doing it for any reason.”

It was February 2000 and Jay-Z was talking to Q magazine in his office high above the streets of New York City.

Looking back on his formative years, he added: “I never really knew how good I was at rapping till people started telling me. It was so easy for me, I didn’t know. If you don’t work at something, if it comes so easy to you, it ain’t nothing.”

In this interview he was promoting Vol. 3... Life And Times Of S. Carter – in fact his fourth album, despite its title.

This was his second consecutive No 1 album on the US Billboard 200, and he was already feeling that his high profile was in some aspects a problem.

“It happens with a lot of young black people who get famous,” he said. “What we wanna do is just party with our people, and it’s tough because you’re a superstar. You try to put yourself in regular situations but you have to realise – you’re not a regular person.

“People judge you every day. You’re in a club and you just wanna party with your people. I don’t wanna be the centre of attention, I wanna party with you, I don’t want everybody just looking at me.”

He explained: “I have the same people around that I always had from day one, and it’s not like you drive eight miles into the woods to get to my home. But when you’re in a business like this you never feel like you’re home. You need a kind of separation to get your thoughts clear.”

Jay-Z’s previous album, Vol. 2... Hard Knock Life, had been dismissed as superficial by some critics.

He responded: “I have to take those comments with a grain of salt, because when I made my second album [In My Lifetime, Vol. 1] they said I was too emotional. Now they say I’m too superficial! You’re confusing me, people!

“You know that 2Pac song Only God Can Judge Me? Now I understand what he was feeling! When they said I was too emotional, that made me make Hard Knock Life, so I guess it was to be. They were supposed to say that so I could make that next record.

“Like, I know what y’all want from me. My experiences, the things I went through, the emotions I can put into a record, those are my strengths.”

Discussing his creative process, he talked about how he was able to write an entire song in as little as 20 minutes.

“That’s when it works best for me, when it’s done on the spot and it’s not doctored.”

He had also worked fast to ghostwrite the lyrics to Dr. Dre’s 1999 hit Still D.R.E., performed by Dre with Snoop Dogg.

“It’s fun for me to step outside of myself and create for someone else,” Jay-Z said. “To put yourself in their shoes. You have to think what they’re thinking. It’s just a very creative thing to do. I already know what I’m thinking, and I know what I think people think of me, but to do that with another person, it’s just fun.

“I think I really, really nailed it with the Dre record, Still D.R.E. That was a perfect record for him. I didn’t know Dre, but I knew his work.”

Jay-Z also told Q about his friendship with legendary rapper Biggie Smalls, AKA The Notorious B.I.G. Biggie made a guest appearance on the track Brooklyn’s Finest from Jay-Z’s 1996 debut Reasonable Doubt. But they had first met as school kids.

“That was a passive thing,” Jay-Z recalled of their early association. “It was after we did Brooklyn’s Finest that we started clicking.

“We would always see each other and say, ‘We gotta make a song together.’ So when I was recording my first album, I reached out to him, and he came through. He sat in the studio and vibed, no paper, just listening to the music and rapping off the top of his head. I see him doing the same thing I’m doing, and it was just as much a shock to him to see me doing it as it was for me to see him doing it.”

Eventually a beef between Biggie and Tupac Shakur ended with both men shot dead.

Jay-Z reflected on their rivalry and its tragic consequences: “At the time when it was going on, I didn’t know – nobody knew – how powerful two rappers could be. Big said it: they only had a problem with each other. He never said, ‘I hate the West Coast.’ And Tupac never said, ‘I hate the East Coast’.’ They had a problem and everybody just took sides. ‘He’s from my coast, I’m sticking with him.’”

This rivalry had escalated with 2Pac’s song Hit ’Em Up, in which he raged at Biggie and his East Coast connections.

But as Jay-Z said: “I really thought it was just a music thing. You gotta figure, the foundation of rap is built on battling. That’s what they would do, they’d throw parties and see who could throw down the hardest. So I still was looking at it like, ‘Wow, he’s going at him hard - what’s next? Where’s the next record?’ I thought it was just music.”

In the Q interview, Jay-Z was asked what scared him. His answer pointed to his future as a multi-tasking entrepreneur.

“What scares me is going backwards,” he said. “I try new things, take on new challenges, instead of just making an album. I try to break new artists, after that a film company, a successful clothing company, just new challenges.”

He said he believed in God.

“I’m not a person who’s into organised religion, going to church and things like that,” he said. “I think if you’re a spiritual person, you can worship God in your own way. You don’t need anybody to tell you how to do it, you don’t have to go to no church.”

Finally, he was asked if he prayed.

He replied: “I give thanks a lot, you know what I’m saying? Some of the things I’m saying are beyond me. Wow, where that came from? I give thanks.”

If JRR Tolkien was the primary literary influence upon prog rock, there’s an argument to be made that Lewis Carroll served a similar role during the psychedelic era just a few years before.

John Lennon’s work during this era – I Am The Walrus, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Cry Baby Cry and more – is suffused by prolonged exposure to Carroll and his two Alice novels. And then there’s White Rabbit.

One of the signature hits of the Summer of Love, White Rabbit reached Number Eight in the Billboard charts, an extraordinary feat considering how unusual it was for its time – a Spanish bolero that doesn’t have a conventional verse or chorus but builds and builds until it reaches a strident crescendo.

Then there are the lyrics. It’s hard to believe that the song’s writer, Grace Slick, got away with a song that – on the surface at least – seems to celebrate experimentation with drugs. But White Rabbit got radio airplay and TV exposure despite its references to pills, mushrooms and “hookah-smoking caterpillars”. Not to mention Slick’s closing exhortation to “feed your head”.

Slick wrote White Rabbit in early 1966 whilst she was in her previous band The Great Society. In a 2016 interview with the Wall Street Journal, she recalled how she put it together. “I found a small upright piano for $80 at a warehouse in San Francisco. It was painted about 90 coats of bright red and was missing around 10 keys in the upper register. I didn’t play way up there anyway - the notes were too pingy - so I bought it. Jerry (her husband) and I put the piano in our living room.”

The Great Society were starting to get some press attention, and Slick gave a press interview in which she spoke in favour of marijuana and LSD. “(It) got back to my parents. It was painful for them, I’m sure, but I didn’t care whether they minded. Parents were criticising a generation’s choices while sitting there with their glasses of scotch.”

“They also seemed unaware that many books they read to us as kids had drug use as a subtext. Peter Pan uses fairy dust and can fly, Dorothy and her friends in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz cut through a poppy field and wind up stoned and fast asleep.”

“I loved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The stuff Alice drank and ate made her high (tall) or brought her down (small). There were all kinds of drug metaphors in there. The 60s were very much like that.”

One afternoon while her husband was out, Slick began work on a song inspired by Alice. First came the lyrics. Once those were completed, she moved over to her piano. “I worked on the chords, writing the names of the ones I liked over the phrases. I wrote the song in F-sharp minor, a key that’s ideal for my voice. Minor chords have a certain darkness and sadness.”

The music she came up with had a distinct Spanish flavour. A couple of years before, Slick had had a particularly intense experience listening to Miles Davis’s Sketches Of Spain whilst on LSD. She became obsessed with the album, playing it over and over. This all came out in White Rabbit.

“With the chorus - the Alice lines, like ‘Go ask Alice, when she’s 10 feet tall’ - I shifted to major chords for a release and to celebrate Alice’s courage following the white rabbit down the hole. Once down there, she didn’t have a Prince Charming. She had to save her own ass while going through all the insane hallucinogenic stuff.”

“I identified with Alice. I was a product of '50s America in Palo Alto, California, where women were housewives with short hair, and everything was highly regulated.

"I went from the planned, bland 50s to the world of being in a rock band without looking back. It was my Alice moment, heading down the hole. White Rabbit seemed like an appropriate title.”

“I always felt like a good-looking schoolteacher singing White Rabbit,” she reflected. “I sang the words slowly and precisely, so the people who needed to hear them wouldn’t miss the point. But they did. To this day, I don’t think most people realise the song was aimed at parents who drank and told their kids not to do drugs.”

A version of the song with a lengthy raga-like introduction quickly became part of the band’s live repertoire. But by the summer of 1966 the Great Society were falling apart: a recording session with producer Sylvester Stewart was a disaster that saw the future Sly Stone walk out in exasperation. Some members were talking about going off travelling. Meanwhile, another up-and-coming Bay Area band were eyeing their singer up with interest.

Jefferson Airplane had already recorded their debut album Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, but when vocalist Signe Toly Anderson left to raise her newborn child, they needed a replacement. In a 2021 Guardian interview, bassist Jack Casady explained why they chose Slick:

“One of the reasons I wanted to get Grace into Jefferson Airplane is that she walked to the edge of the stage to sing right to the audience and look right at you. Prior to that I’d only seen guys doing that.

"The chord structures that she wrote were really interesting and she allowed me to construct her songs in a different manner.”

Slick brought with her both White Rabbit and a Great Society B-side, Someone To Love, which was retitled Somebody To Love. In her first rehearsal she taught the former to her new bandmates. “The song is in F sharp, which is difficult for guitar players as it requires some intricate fingering, but (lead guitarist) Jorma (Kaukonen) and Jack are very good musicians so they were able to adapt to it and do it very well.”

Just two weeks after joining Airplane, Slick and the rest of Airplane were at RCA Victor Studios in Hollywood recording their second album, which would be titled Surrealistic Pillow.

In a 2021 interview with the website Happy Mag, Casady recalled the November afternoon they cut White Rabbit. “We recorded it out at Sunset and Ivar, in a huge room at RCA where they used to record A Hundred And One Strings. The room was massive, so we basically set up the instrumentation in the middle of this room and played it live onto four-track.

"It was very simple to record. I just led the song out as a bass part like Bolero, ripping off Ravel. It was all slow and slinky, it gave us the atmosphere we wanted.”

The lengthy introduction of the Great Society’s version was hacked off so the new version was a succinct two minutes 27: ideal for radio play. “After we recorded White Rabbit, we all went into the control room to hear the playback on the monitor speakers,” Slick said in 2016. “I was blown away. I wasn’t aware I sounded like that, with all that power. I was impressed.”

Surrealistic Pillow was released in February 1967 and, though well received critically, took a while to take off. It took the Top Five success of the new version of Somebody To Love to open doors for the record. Then the follow-up White Rabbit completed the one-two punch that took Airplane, the San Francisco scene, and the Haight-Ashbury counterculture all overground.

Speaking in 2016, Slick remembered that: “After the White Rabbit single came out, RCA told us each week where the record stood on the charts. I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t set out to write a hit single and I felt that radio only liked White Rabbit because it was short and they could get more ads in.”

Nevertheless, it reached Number Eight in August and would become one of the enduring aural mementoes of that epochal summer.

Jefferson Airplane too would become forever associated with the initial psychedelic explosion. Though they would never hit those commercial heights again, they carried on until they spluttered to a halt in 1973. Together with guitarist Paul Kantner, Slick then formed the successor band Jefferson Starship, remaining there even after they evolved into AOR rockers Starship.

Now 86 and retired from the music business, she’s still a curiously underrated figure in music history. Slick was one of the first women to play a creative role within a rock band, but her pioneering contributions have only rarely been acknowledged by those who walked through the doors she opened.

And White Rabbit not only pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in a pop song, but was a clarion call to a generation to open their minds in a more general sense. “Psychedelic drugs showed you that there are alternative realities,” Slick said in 2021. “You open up to things that are unusual and different, and, in realising that there are alternative ways of looking at things, you become more accepting of things around you.”

“The line in the song “feed your head” is about both reading and psychedelics. I was talking about feeding your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention.”

Geese have responded to accusations that have been floating around for the past few months that they are ‘industry plants’ or part of a major label ‘psyop’.

Yes, daft as it may seem, this moderately successful New York indie band have been accused of being part of a dastardly psychological operation to use social media to create fake fans and thus a buzz around the band.

The allegations stemmed from Geese’s relationship with PR firm Chaotic Good. In a Billboard interview in the spring, a couple of members of the marketing company talked about how they performed ‘trend simulation’ via farmed social media accounts. “We know how to go viral, we have thousands of pages,” one of them boasted, somewhat unwisely.

Geese aren’t the only artists that Chaotic Good have worked with – other clients have included Coldplay and Travis Scott – but they seemed to get tarred by association. Then The Wire magazine published a news piece in April with the headline: ‘The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop.’

Now in a Rolling Stone interview, the band have suggested that they had their own doubts about the veracity of their sudden success. “I thought the same thing, I really did,” frontman Cameron Winter says. “That seemed like a reasonable explanation.”

It seems the accusations about astroturfing (or should that be indie-turfing?) caused consternation inside the band too. “We were just like, ‘Oh, my God. The whole fucking thing is fake.’ We were having a meltdown. Then we marched up to our label over email, the relevant team members, like, ‘How long have all our fuckin’ fans been fake, you sons of bitches?’”

Winter says that he and the band had a meeting with Chaotic Good and were assured that their marketing extended to nothing more than sharing and reposting live clips of their music. “It wasn’t comments or fake fans or bots or anything,” the singer said. “It was low-effort TikTok posts that were used to boost the algorithm. They showed us samples, and it made me feel better because they were so shitty.”

Anyway, whatever the truth behind the marketing, Geese seem genuinely popular now. Their fourth album Getting Killed has gone silver in the UK, and their autumn US tour of theatres and arenas is already nearly sold out.

And the group themselves seem to have few regrets about the controversy. “I’m glad that people have thoughts about our stuff at the end of the day,” Bassist Dominic DiGesu told Rolling Stone. “At least we’re not boring and mid.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tickets are available via the Amy Winehouse Band website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.