The last time we can recall someone attempting to combine MIDI and QWERTY keyboards into a single product was the early ‘00s. The result was Creative’s Prodikeys, a splendidly Heath Robinson contraption that looked as mad as it sounds.

Sadly, it never really got any traction – unlike its excellent product demo video – but with its slick design and all-aluminium case, the new Polyend Keys might stand a better chance.

Designed for “both everyday computer use and making music,” this dispenses with the idea of trying to incorporate proper piano-style mini keys and instead reconfigures the top line of function keys on a QWERTY keyboard so that they correspond to the positioning of the black notes on a musical keyboard.

This means that, as well as being a mechanical typing keyboard, the Polyend Keys is also a three-octave MIDI keyboard, and there are nine controller knobs and a little screen, too. The inclusion of USB and TRS MIDI ports means that you’ll be able use it with both software and hardware instruments, and it’s battery-powerable.

It’s an idea that seems so simple that you wonder why no one has come up with it before, though questions remain. Polyend Keys is currently in prototype – it’ll get its first showing at the Cologne gamescom this week – and we’re yet to hear anything about velocity- and pressure-sensitivity.

There’s also the issue of playability to consider: will the Polyend Keys offer a markedly better experience than simply using your standard QWERTY keyboard in combination with the ‘musical typing’ function in your DAW?

We’re certainly keen to find out, and the good news is that further information – including on price and availability – is coming soon. In the meantime, you can sign up to receive updates on the Polyend website.

Brian Fallon makes no secret of the fact that Bruce Springsteen is a core influence. Spend some time in his company talking music and the Boss will inevitably come up in conversation. They have performed together. They’ve hung out. They’re buddies.

The way Fallon speaks about him, it’s like they live over the fence from each other, or run into each other down Whole Foods when they’re out buying groceries. “I do, funnily enough. I see him all over the place!” laughs Fallon.

And he isn’t joking. Fallon was in Springsteen’s company not that long ago, shooting a documentary about the Telecaster. “It’s basically all these people talking about the Fender Telecaster and it’s me and Bruce,” says Fallon. “I’m interviewing Bruce about his Born To Run guitar. I got to hold it and play it. It was nuts. And that was a huge moment for me to get to see and touch [it], just holding that guitar, the Born To Run guitar!”

Springsteen also had a guitar lesson for him. The Boss taught him how to play pinched harmonics.

“He actually gave me like a little tip, because there was this thing that he was doing that was like a little Roy Buchanan kind of squeal,” says Fallon. “I think the best place you can hear it is if you listen to Bell Bottom Blues from Eric Clapton, the first couple notes of the solo are like picked out with your thumb and then [hums pinch harmonic] and Bruce was showing me how to do that – and that was kind of cool.”

Talk about pinched harmonics these days and Eddie Van Halen, Zakk Wylde and Dimebag Darrell are the kinds of players who get mentioned in dispatches. But Roy Buchanan was doing them in the ‘50s, Clapton just over a decade later on Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs – and the example Fallon describes, where Clapton chokes his guitar out on them, is a very different thing to the super-sized squeal in rock and metal guitar.

Fallon says there is a lot we can learn from Springsteen the player. Yeah, we all give the Boss props for his songwriting, for performing. But his playing goes under the radar.

Fallon reminds us that Springsteen has ridiculously good chops.

“Oh, man, well, you got to watch this. If you go on YouTube, in 1975, they did the Live From Hammersmith Odeon album, then did Born To Run. Go to It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City,” he says. “Go watch that and how he plays guitar during that. And then he does at the end he does like a little trade-off thing, like a jam with Steven, and you’ll just see.

“Bruce, around Asbury Park in 1970, pre-Born To Run, like 1972/1973, he was known as the best guitar player in town, he was a serious gunslinger – and he still can really rip.”

Springsteen did not join the likes of Brandon Flowers and Phil Collen on Fallon’s new star-studded solo LP, Not Bad For New Jersey, but he was on The Gaslight Anthem’s 2023 comeback album, History Books, and there’s always next time.

He did however directly influence it.

The tempo and rhythm to the track Pearl, with the throb and pulse of that tremolo guitar, was an idea Fallon got from Aretha Franklin’s recording of The Dark End Of The Street, when she was accompanied on the track by two legendary Muscle Shoals players, Eddie Hinton and Jimmy Johnson (with Johnson sometimes credited on bass guitar it was surely Hinton who was responsible for the tremolo guitar part).

But the rhythm – where it is almost like a heartbeat – comes straight from golden era Springsteen.

“I like that pulse, even when it’s exaggerated, I really am enjoying that in any kind of music now, that kind of like heartbeat thing,” he says. “I think it’s really from Born In The USA, because that’s what Bruce said about, ‘I’m on fire!’. It’s like that’s the rhythm.

“The rhythm was supposed to be a pulse, like a heartbeat, so I think it was probably from that in my head. That’s where it came from.”

You can read our interview with Brian Fallon in full, coming soon to MusicRadar – and you can preorder Not Bad For New Jersey now, which is out via Nash York Records on September 11.

“The general political malaise isn’t good for songwriting,” says cult singer and songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. “Unless the sight of Nigel Farage galvanises you into producing some demonic piece of modern protest punk.”

Six decades into his music-making journey, and despite the societal volatility, Robyn has kept his music full of uplifting power pop, surreal lyrical insights and psychedelia. As co-founder of seventies act The Soft Boys, and as Robyn Hitchcock and The Egyptians in the eighties, he’s become a prolific solo artist with his latest record, The Confuser, his 25th solo effort.

Now aged 73, the joyous collection marks a significant creative milestone and shows he’s clearly still got plenty of appetite for the songwriting craft.

“Well it’s what I do,” he smiles from his American home on his continuing creative journey. “If you carry on like I’ve done, you’re inevitably going to get to album number 25. Unless you’re someone like Kate Bush or Bryan Ferry, who thinks very hard about what they do and has the money to sit on top of projects for ages. Someone like me just churns them out.”

Robyn is as self-deprecating and as charming as his music, with our conversation sparked with off-kilter humour. When not in the studio, he’s on the road, keeping the wheels around his music spinning via the Tiny Ghost label, run by his wife and artist Emma Swift.

“I’m more blasé about my songwriting than I was,” Robyn explains of where his musical mojo is currently at. “I’ve learned over the years that songs appear to me. If a song is there, it’ll let you know and you have to receive it. It’s like getting a phone call, if you don’t pick up, it’ll go away and won’t leave a message. Some songs are like cats, they’re subtle, insidious and likely to stalk you.”

The Confuser is Robyn’s first album in four years and latest in a musical career that sprang to life during the mid seventies. His band, The Soft Boys, formed in Cambridge inspired by the songwriting of Syd Barrett and the Beatles. Their 1980 psyche classic Underwater Moonlight is now regarded as a classic of the genre.

Over 45 years later Robyn is still busier than ever, with The Confuser written and recorded in his home in Nashville, the capital of songwriting.

“Living here hasn’t influenced my songwriting but it has affected who I record with as there are so many great players in the city,” Robyn says. “There’s a huge level of empathy and professionalism among the musicians. Nashville wears a Stetson hat for publicity purposes but it’s also a very good place to make a psychedelic rock record.”

The new album bursts with many of his perennial themes - the transience of life, death and his own sense of self alongside lyrical oddness.

Recorded at various Nashville studios, The Confuser features crack accompaniment from Music City session players including guitarist Jeremy Fetzer, bassist Todd Bolden, and drummer/percussionist Eric Slick. Special guests include cherished friends Gillian Welch and Kimberley Rew, Robyn’s Soft Boys co-founder.

“On the album, I love My Dead Astronaut and Ghost in Sunlight is another I really like with Gillian Welch on harmony and Kim playing guitar and me on piano,” he says.

“Gillian came and overdubbed her voice, we spent a long time on it, it’s the most worked on song from the record. Building from the Ruins is a funky jam, I’ve not done anything like it before, I was making it up as I went along and shouting the chords out to the others. It was more experimental than most of my songs and I’m pleased with how it came out.”

Robyn’s wife Emma is a vocalist and has applied some new methods around the recording in order to get the most out of the album’s songs.

“Emma made me go back and redo some of the vocals, she’s a great singer and also quite strict and has said how my voice has been out of tune on some of my records,” he states. “In the days of Underwater Moonlight, the attitude was more important than the take. On some of my music in the eighties, my vocals were horrible but full of attitude. Us Brits are really great at it, you can see it in Liam Gallagher and Ian McCulloch. But now as a kindly old gent, I’m just trying to sing in tune. I think The Confuser features some of my best vocal performances.”

One of Robyn’s ongoing musical preoccupations surrounds human existence and the inevitability of death. It’s a theme that's only increased in prevalence as he’s grown older after being a staple concern throughout his career - My Wife and my Dead Wife, Sounds Great When You're Dead and The Face of Death are just a few songs that have the shadow of mortality hanging over them.

“The less time I have, the more active I feel and thankfully in my later years, I can still get up, tour and wave my guitar around,” he laughs. “Rock and roll is for senior citizens now. However strange one feels, you can just look at the Stones who are far older and further down the path to oblivion. Sooner or later, they, McCartney and Dylan will discontinue so spry youngsters like myself in our early seventies [can take over], there is still that canopy of boomer pioneers waiting to go over the waterfall.”

The Soft Boys formed in 1976 with one of the original concepts being that a robot would front the band, then Robyn would be the guitarist. It was a futuristic idea that never came to pass, in part due to his lack of technical know-how.

“I’m absolutely and practically inept - I did learn to change a plug once with my parents’ gramophone but I generally couldn’t put up a shelf, never mind build a robot,” he continues.

“This was 1976 and I moved to Cambridge, and was beginning to find great local musicians. I wanted to be the Robbie Robertson style Svengali figure behind the band where we’d have this handsome android fronting it. It would have fitted slightly with the science fiction concepts that were percolating, Bowie had a bit of it, but I became my own frontman.”

Underwater Moonlight turns 46 this year and is still one of the highlights in Robyn’s rich and sprawling catalogue. Its ten tracks were populated by Hitchcock's finely drawn characters and served as a blueprint for eighties college rock that dominated the next decade.

“In some ways, it’s a lifetime ago as life can sometimes be very slow, then suddenly, time is gone in a flash,” he says. “Underwater Moonlight was made in what is a vanished world of ashtrays, dial phones, turntables and cassette machines. Other things haven’t changed. It’s still Fender Telecasters and SM58 mikes, so some of the essential ingredients are the same but rock is so history driven these days.

“The great thing is how Underwater Moonlight has lasted, it vindicates me as a songwriter and The Soft Boys as a band, we did come up with something great in a low-key, low-budget way. At that point, we’d been written off by the business and it was down to Richard Bishop who formed the Armageddon label just to put our record out.”

Kimberly Rew had his own songs that he was stockpiling and had massive hits with Walking on Sunshine and Going Down to Liverpool. Bassist Matthew Seligman sadly passed away from Covid during the pandemic but was an energetic bass player.

“He had this bouncy bass style, so enthused and very can-do,” says Robyn. “He was insanely optimistic and in about five different bands, he worked with us, then the Thompson Twins, then Thomas Dolby, and played with Bowie at Live Aid. Morris Windsor played drums with me when I formed Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians in the mid-eighties. Kim and Maurcie play with me off and on - that quartet were friends afterwards, it’s a relatively happy story.”

Robyn’s sound is inspired by a template first forged by the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Revolver enmeshed with the whimsy of Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn and the sprawling chaotic artistry of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. His live sets wear these influences on their sleeve, seeing him dipping into classics including Waterloo Sunset, Purple Haze and A Day in the Life.

“I was aware back when I started The Soft Boys 50 years ago that I was retro, I was flogging the psychedelic horse at a time when it had long left the stable,” Robyn says.

Still, Robyn’s ability to still be writing, performing and releasing music suggests he’s adept at navigating what can be a notoriously fickle industry. But he’s never deliberately set out to storyboard himself as an artist. Instead, an almost puppyish enthusiasm for listening, writing and performing has sustained him.

“I never thought about it as an opportunity for a nouveau psychedelic act, I could be in,” he states. “I didn’t draw myself as an artist, I’m not very savvy at that. I just take my songs round to people to see if they like them and most of them do. Every so often they get picked up. In more recent years, his wife Emma has run the Tiny Ghost label, helping Robyn continue to carve out his own idiosyncratic space with the music industry.

“There’s this thing where the more monolithic things become, the more corporate they become, the more artisanal and smaller enterprises pop up - the big organisms just swallow each other and get bigger while you have all these little creatures moving around in the foothills, and one of them is us.

“I’ve been on various labels, I’ve had music that has been absorbed into the monolith. I’m just grateful that in the eighties, none of the monoliths were interested in us so I never signed away the rights to Underwater Moonlight. My solo albums belong to me and people still buy them, I’m grateful that I have them.”

With hundreds of songs to his name, advice around the creative process is an obvious question. His response veers from caffeine to sea swimming as ways to get the musical juices flowing while hangovers can also unlock new sonic pastures to explore.

“I don’t recommend them or seek them out but occasionally I give myself one,” he states. “I find it’s one of the best times to pick up a piano or guitar, it’s so hard to focus on what you’re supposed to do. Being hungover to me is having my mind scrambled and it’s trying to reset itself - at that point, it’s wide open and anything can appear.”

He’s also collaborated with a wide range of artists including XTC’s Andy Partridge and REM’s guitarist Peter Buck.

“Partridge is the only person who I’ve ever been able to sit down with and write eyeball to eyeball,” Robyn outlines. “As he’s very quick-witted, it tends to be rather cerebral than emotional, it’s like two old chaps sitting down to do a crossword puzzle. He’s a terrific guitarist and songwriting engineer so what we managed to do sounds great.”

REM’s Peter Buck is a prolific guitarist who has worked with Robyn over various projects down the years, including his outfit, The Venus 3.

“He’s very inventive, if you play a song with him, he will put in plenty of neat guitar hooks, he’s done that a few times for me,” says Robyn. “He’s one of the most empathic musicians out there, there’s no denying it.”

As The Confuser has now been released to rapturous reviews, Robyn is now looking to the autumn where he gets to play the songs live. He’ll be moving between full band and acoustic shows across the UK and Europe and cites his love for playing as an element of his forever youthful vim and vigour.

“I love playing so any chance I get to corral a bunch of people together to play too is very exciting for me,” he says. “I will be playing more rock these days. I’ve now reached this august time in my life, I feel like getting the electric guitar, the pedals and the amp and cranking it all out.”

The Confuser is out now on Tiny Ghost records. Robyn Hitchcock tours the UK and Europe from September.

Harley Benton has rolled out a new range of cheap electric guitars that come with a $195 price tag but with their single-cut shape, plain colour tops and P-90/humbucker pairing, they’re making us thinking of something a little more upscale.

Just take a look at these SC-Special Hybrids at the top of the page. Then close your eyes and think of the most dreamiest of dream guitars on the high-end electric guitar market…

That’s right, while most budget models tend to draw inspiration from the archetypes – riffing on Les Pauls, ES-335s, Telecasters, Stratocasters and all that jazz – Harley Benton is coming out with something that makes us first think of Nik Huber’s venerable Krautster II, a guitar you’d pay north of three grand for. And okay, there's a little bit (a lot) of Les Paul Junior/Special inspiration in Huber's Krautster II design but let's not split hairs.

Of course, the price reflects the vast quality differential but still, we dig these. The SC-Special Hybrid has a neat look with that cropped pickguard against a solid colour top, the back and sides left natural – especially with that single-ply binding tying it all together.

The P-90 at the neck and humbucker at the bridge, might just be one of the best electric guitar pickup combinations you could get (here Harley Benton has used its Isola pickups, the VT-500CR Alnico V ‘bucker and CL-P90 single-coil).

These are controlled by volume and tone pots. Selected by a shoulder-mounted three-way switch. And that glued-in neck joint looks like it will be very forthcoming when it comes to access to the upper frets.

The body is solid okoume. The neck is medium-roasted Canadian maple. As with most beginner-priced guitars, this has a mainstream C profile, and sounds like it’ll be fairly accommodating, measuring 20mm at the 1st fret, 23mm at the 12th.

The general dimensions are Gibson-esque, with a 12” radius rosewood fingerboard (dot inlays further hint at the Junior/Special inspiration) and the 24.72” scale.

That wraparound tailpiece looks nice and tidy – the kind of hardware you’d expect on a rock ’n’ roll machine.

There’s also a set of Kluson-style Harley Benton-branded locking tuners.

You colour options comprise Vintage White Satin, Smoke Black Satin, Sherwood Green Metallic Satin and Maya Gold Satin. Looking at these models, Vintage White Satin takes home the Palme d’Or but they all look pretty sweet.

The SC-Special Hybrid is available now. Head over to Harley Benton for more, or indeed straight on over to Thomann.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yesterday was a devastating day for the world of music. Dolly Parton’s death has sent shockwaves throughout the world of entertainment and far beyond.

For those who knew and made music with the great woman herself, the cherished memories they have of her must now take on even more emotional significance.

One such unique insight into Parton’s process came from former Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter who recalled working with Parton in the studio in a recent interview with our sister site, Guitar Player, prior to Dolly's death.

A session player of great repute and a soloist extraordinaire, Baxter was quite bemused - and undoubtedly amused - by Dolly’s unique way of explaining just what she wanted from him when working on her 1978 disco-infused song Baby, I’m Burnin (which would go on to be the theme tune to her late ‘80s TV series, Dolly).

“Dolly Parton asked me to make fireworks one time,” Baxter told Guitar Player. “I was working with my Roland guitar synthesizer, and she said, ‘Can you just make it, like, reds and greens and sparkles?’

“So I thought about it for a second, and then with one hand I played as many notes as I could while the other hand was working the Roland’s [pitch] transposer, slapping it back up and down. She was going, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Whee!’”

Dolly’s instincts were right on the money, as Baxter coaxed a flourish of colour from his Roland guitar synth, which reacted to Dolly’s chorus lyric; ‘Hot as a pistol with flaming desire’ and continued to interject throughout the second verse. It’s an insight into how Dolly thought about music - and how she envisioned the arrangements for her songs. This, just one of over 3,000 original compositions that Dolly realised in her lifetime.

“I’ve always prided myself as a songwriter more than anything else,” Parton told American Songwriter. “That’s my personal feelings. That’s not to say that’s what I do best, [but] that’s my way of speaking for myself... Songwriting is a hobby and to me it's therapy.

“I love getting on a big writing binge and staying up a couple days working on song and knowing at the end of those two or three days that I've created something that was never in the world before.”

Read the full interview with Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter over at Guitar Player

In the annals of synth-pop history, there's one name that continually resurfaces. Most famous as one half of Erasure with vocalist Andy Bell, as well as being part-responsible for the emotive brilliance of Yazoo (alongside Alison Moyet), Vince Clarke is regarded as one of the world’s most adept architects of staggeringly successful electronic pop.

But, back at the beginning, when Clarke was merely a schoolboy, it was his partnership with his mate Andy Fletcher that led to the birth of a true behemoth.

Depeche Mode was the result of a meeting of gifted minds, with Vince, Andy, Martin Gore and Dave Gahan uniting to craft that iconic 1981 debut, Speak and Spell. Following which, Clarke departed the band for pastures new.

Vince spoke to us back in 2023, and remembered those early days back when the fledgling Depeche Mode were just kids, jamming in their bedrooms…

“At first, I was making music with Andrew Fletcher – we had a drum machine, he was playing bass and I was playing guitar and singing badly,” Clarke told us.

“Then Martin Gore, who was a friend of Andy’s joined and he had his own synthesizer. We looked at this thing and thought, okay, this is a lot easier than learning chords on a guitar and you only need one finger to play it.”

It was this initial dabbling with Gore’s synth that would trigger a lifelong love affair…

“That’s when I started getting interested in the technology and the fact that I could maybe reproduce or do something similar to the music I loved at the time. It was all-analogue and very expensive, but then so were guitars and amplifiers, so we had all our synths on HP [hire purchase].”

With the early Depeche Mode finding their sonic niche, it soon became clear to Vince that the role of frontman wasn’t one that was a natural fit for himself…

“[Dave Gahan] was someone that we used to see in clubs who was really fashionable, as opposed to us,” Clarke remembered.

In our interview, Vince also recalled how he met the other two signature vocalists that accompanied his most celebrated work.

“I had no illusions about my singing style or capabilities at all and I’ve been very fortunate to have worked with some amazing vocalists, which really proved the point. These people were just mates or within a circle of mates, so to speak. Alison Moyet was in a punk band called The Vandals where my best friend was the guitarist," Vince recalled.

“Erasure was different because I was working in the studio a lot trying to write songs and make records and after a discussion with the producer we decided that working with different people would be interesting but we really needed someone to be there all of the time. I advertised for a singer in Melody Maker and Andy Bell came along for the audition. He was from Peterborough, but we had very similar backgrounds, which cemented our relationship.”

Read our full Vince Clarke interview here.

After launching in public beta back in June, Bitwig Studio’s 6.1 update has been officially released, bringing with it a “radically updated” Sampler device that the German developer promises will “invite you to sample in ways that weren’t possible before”.

Sampler has received a major overhaul that dramatically transforms what the device can do, and among these new capabilities, sample slicing is one of the most useful new features for music-makers working with audio. Load up a sample, hit the Sliced icon and Sampler will chop it up into slices that can be triggered from a MIDI controller or the Piano Roll.

There are five Slicing Modes that determine how a sample is divided: Divisions slices the sample into a number of equal pieces between 8 and 64, Beats cuts at rhythmic intervals based on Sampler’s BPM detection, Onsets chops it at the transients with adjustable sensitivity, and Pitch slices at points where the sample’s pitch changes. There’s also a Manual mode for setting your own slice points.

There are several options for how slices are triggered, too: along with the usual chromatic layout, you can assign slices to white or black keys only, trigger them via note velocity, or trigger them with a dedicated Select parameter that responds to automation and any of Bitwig's modulators. Each slice can also be given its own loop settings and modulated independently, courtesy of three per-slice modulation sources that can be mapped to any parameter in Sampler.

Sampler has also been equipped with new automatic pitch analysis that makes it quick and easy to map a sample’s pitch accurately across the keyboard. Sampler can now helpfully sets a sample’s root key automatically, either by detecting the average pitch across the sample’s duration, or setting the root key from a chosen position in the waveform.

Click the Orb icon in Sampler and your sample’s pitch will be analysed, represented by an orange line running across the waveform. Press a key, and the sample will be dynamically retuned during playback to maintain the chosen pitch throughout its duration, even if the original sample changes in pitch.

The updated Sampler also features two new Play Modes: Spectral is designed for “stretching, bending and breaking” sounds, and uses a newly purpose-built algorithm to deliver clean and artifact-free time-stretching, with a Preserve Onsets function that maintains the punch of a sample’s transients even when slowing it right down. Spectral's Reharm mode lets you shift the harmonics of a sample while leaving the fundamental where it is, and harmonics can be quantized in line the project's global scale.

Complementing Textures, Sampler’s existing granular mode, Fragments Mode is a more advanced granular engine that can generate up to 256 independent grains per voice, giving each grain independent playback rate and direction, position and size. Grain size can be set in milliseconds or beat units, and there's a morphing grain envelope, a Motion control that randomizes each grain's playhead position and stereo placement, and the ability to repeat each grain up to 16 times for denser textures.

Sampler’s other Play Modes have also received an update: Repitch has been bolstered with two hardware-emulating characters that are applied per-voice – Bitwig says Analog delivers “juicy saturation and tape flavour” while Digital emulates vintage samplers via bit and sample-rate reduction – while Cycles, a mode that turns samples into wavetable-style oscillators, gains pulse width-style modulation, phase modulation and control over odd and even harmonics.

Bitwig Studio's new pitch detection also powers the Tuner, a new analysis tool available both as a device and as a Grid module. Grid users get some love too: the Sampler module can output its onset, pitch and envelope as signals, and Fragments grains can be triggered directly by signal input.

Whereas Bitwig Studio’s previous update was all about core DAW functionality, 6.1 finds the developer sharpening its focus and reimagining one key device that’ll be central to most users’ workflows, opening up an abundance of creative possibilities for music-makers that work with samples.

Bitwig Studio 6.1 is available now, and is a free update for all customers with an active Upgrade Plan. The updated Sampler and the new Tuner are included in every edition, though the Spectral and Fragments Play Modes are exclusive to the full version of Bitwig Studio.

Find out more on Bitwig’s website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s with huge sadness that we report on the death of a genuine musical legend. The great Dolly Parton has sadly passed away at the age of 80.

The news was announced by her nephew, Bryan Seaver via an Instagram video posted on Tuesday afternoon. Seaver had been extremely close with his aunt, having served as her head of security for over two decades.

“This video announcement is something Dolly asked of me years ago,” Seaver said. “Sadness lies with us, not with Dolly. Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus.”

Although a cause of death wasn’t disclosed, it’s been no secret that Parton was suffering from myriad health issues in recent months, with a series of concert and public appearances being cancelled as a result of ill health.

One of the most well-loved figureheads of country music, Dolly was of course best known for her iconic signatures 9 to 5, I Will Always Love You and Jolene. Born on January 19th 1946 in Sevier County, Tennessee, Parton, who started her musical career in the early 1960s, was also a prolific songwriting powerhouse, responsible for writing upwards of 3,000 songs. She scooped 11 Grammys (with a staggering 50+ nominations) and witnessed 44 of her LPs ascended to the top ten of the country music charts.

Widely believe to be the world’s wealthiest country music star, Parton humbly spread her reported $550m around various causes dear to her heart. Perhaps the most notable being her encouraging of literacy around the world with her Dollywood Foundation’s Imagination Library. Her wealth has also been used in the combating of Aids, funding the American Red Cross and urgently investing to help to develop the Covid vaccine during the pandemic.

We’ll bring a full obituary of Dolly’s incredible life and work soon.

The full official statement, put out by the Dolly Parton PR team, reads as follows;

“Global icon and humanitarian, Dolly Parton, known to the world as a beloved singer, songwriter, philanthropist, actress, playwright, and author died peacefully today in Nashville, Tennessee. She was 80 years old.

“Dolly is preceded in death by her beloved husband of 59 years Carl Thomas Dean (1942 – 2025), her mother Avie Lee Caroline Owens (1923 – 2003), and father, Robert Lee Parton, Sr. (1921 – 2000).

“A rhinestone life that shone bright enough for the world to see, Dolly will forever stand as an inspiration not only through her timeless music and prolific songwriting, but also her wit, warmth, and kindness that made us all feel like family. Dolly Parton’s legacy is one of love, compassion, and resilience. With a seven-decade career, she inspired multiple generations of artists and fans with her music and an unwavering commitment to making the world a better place.

“Her songs will continue to resonate with people of all ages, and her philanthropic work will have a lasting impact.”

A grand piano once played by Freddie Mercury is up for auction in October and could be yours if you have a spare hundred thousand or so currently burning a hole in your wallet.

The Yamaha C3 grand is one of a number of Freddie-related items once owned by Reinhold Mack which the producer (who turns 77 today) is selling. The piano was played on the Hot Space, The Game and The Works albums, as well as by a list of not-insignificant artists including Bryan Ferry, the Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen and Led Zeppelin. Its pre-sale estimate is somewhere between £200,000 and £400,000.

If that’s a bit beyond your budget, then how about an AKG C414 EB mic that Mercury used and which can be seen in the video to One Vision? That could set you back anywhere between £40,000 and £80,000.

Both of these fell into Mack's possession after his years working at Munich’s Musicland studios. Originally set up by Giorgio Moroder, Musicland birthed a number of classic albums – Donna Summer’s I Remember Yesterday, ELO’s Out Of The Blue and Black And Blue by the Rolling Stones, to name just a few.]

Queen were particularly fond of the facility, and struck up a close relationship with the in-house engineer. Freddie was godfather to Mack’s son, named Freddie Junior. He was also namechecked on Dragon Attack, a Brian May-written track on 1980’s The Game (‘gonna use my stack/ it’s gotta be Mack’).

The auction also includes a number of personal mementoes that the late singer gave Mack. There are handwritten lyrics to the songs My Love Is Dangerous and Let’s Turn It On, from Mercury’s 1985 solo debut, Mr Bad Guy. These are expected to fetch between £1,500 and £6,000. Rather touchingly, there’s also a teddy bear that Freddie presumably gifted to his godson that is estimated to fetch between £800 and £1,600.

In a statement, Mack has said: “Freddie was not only a colleague and close friend; in many ways, he was part of our family. Away from the countless hours we spent creating music together at Musicland Studios, our home in Munich became a place where he could escape the pressures of fame, relax and simply be himself. To us, he was never a celebrity; he was ‘Uncle Freddie’ - spending time with his godson Freddie Jr, playing table tennis with Julian and celebrating family birthdays with us.

“We have carefully preserved these items for decades, not because of their value, but because of the memories they hold. We now feel the time has come for others to enjoy and appreciate them, and we hope they offer fans a connection not only to Freddie’s extraordinary artistry, but also to the warm, funny and kind-hearted man we were privileged to know.”

Propstore are hosting the auction, which takes place on 1 and 2 October. Auction registration is now open with the full catalogue available to look at on the Propstore website. Alternatively, you can see the items at a free exhibition at The Cumberland Hotel in London from 23 to 27 September.

Andy Burnham was visiting Kyiv in his first visit to Ukraine as British prime minister, when he was presented with an electric guitar as the cameras were rolling.

This was not to be unexpected – and it surely wasn’t. Burnham was in the mobile recording studio of Ukraine’s military and artistic unit. Even so, when passed with a Woodstock T-style he had a decision to make.

Having credited the Smiths’ debut album, Hatful Of Hollow, as “the record that changed everything” for him, Burnham treated an audience of Ukrainian soldiers to an impromptu rendition of Rusholme Ruffians, the Elvis-inspired classic from Meat Is Murder.

The prime minister was a little out of practice. He didn't have a guitar capo. But that didn’t stop him; his right hand is in pretty good shape. Discretion being the better point of valour, Burnham did, however, draw the line at singing.

“It was an honour to spend time with Ukrainian soldiers in Kyiv. Not sure if they regret handing me that guitar now,” he wrote on Instagram.

Nonetheless, it was an opportunity for the former mayor of Manchester to rep one of the city’s great cultural exports. It was also a great choice. Rusholme Ruffians was inspired by Scotty Moore and Neal Matthews Jr’s playing on the King’s cover of Del Shannon’s (Marie’s The Name) His Latest Flame.

How did Burnham do? Well, appearing on Absolute Radio, Marr looked a little taken aback – lost for words, even – and described the moment as a “victory for guitar”.

“I can’t quite get my head around it,” said Marr. “I don’t know if pride’s the word, but it probably is. I’ve only just been told about it! I’ve only just been told about it, in great detail. I think it’s an amazing thing. In all honesty, for me, it’s like a victory for the guitar. Just the way I’m wired, I always think like that.”

Marr looks visibly shocked, and says that, in the grand scheme of things, his role in all of this, having written the song, was less important than the political context. But it is a clip that speaks to the cultural power of music, and of the guitar as a tool.

“It’s kind of beyond me to process it, really, ‘cos it could be massive that,” he says. “But I just sort of go, ‘How great is the guitar? I think, ‘Well, what an amazing tool the guitar is.’”

Speaking to the Quietus, Burnham said discovering the Smiths was a revelation.

“I remember everyone at school going on about The Smiths on Top Of The Pops, it was a massive thing when that happened, and someone took a record to school and told me to take it home, it was Hatful Of Hollow,” said Burnham. “Then I remember buying it at Piccadilly Records. I listened to that to death. It was the first indie record I ever bought.”

Earlier today, Marr released It’s Time, the latest single from his forthcoming solo album, The Age Of Everything, which is out on October 2 via BMG. You have to admire Marr’s timing.

Marr describes It’s Time as a protest song about “finding defiance in idealism”.

“I wanted a lyric that matched the exuberance of the music but is actually about resisting cynicism and corruption,” he says. “'Everybody ain't making it, change the weather and breaking it. Mobilise to know the truth. Open eyes to know the truth.' I guess it’s about the assholes with dodgy views.”

You can pre-order The Age Of Everything now.

The film makers behind the upcoming Oasis tour documentary Don’t Look Back In Anger have revealed the lengths they went to ensure they were invisible to their subjects.

And by ‘invisible’ they mean literally. In the current issue of Billboard, Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace have explained that they hid a camera rig in the London studio where Noel and Liam met and rehearsed for the first time in 15 years. “I don’t think Liam even realised there were cameras there for the first week,” Southern says.

The duo filmed the rehearsals and every gig on the band’s reunion tour, as well as the Gallaghers’ first joint interview in over 20 years. But whilst the two brothers are undoubtedly the stars of the show, almost as important are the fans, who had waited so long for their reconciliation.

“When the lights came up at the end of the first concert in Cardiff,” Southern explains, “we have a sequence where you just see people looking shell-shocked, like they’ve been through every possible emotion. Seeing that in real time... we were like, ‘We knew this was going to be big, but it’s on a different level emotionally than what we’d thought.’

“Then, as the film progresses, you see the music bringing (the brothers) together,” Southern continues. “The [fan] reaction is a huge catalyst in where they end up in terms of their relationship by the end of the film.”

Southern and Lovelace said that they had prepared for “any eventuality” before filming began (it’s easy to forget that many scoffed that the Gallaghers would be able to make it through an entire world tour without the whole thing exploding in a familiar familial conflagration). But of course, in the end, both the film and the fans were provided with a happy ending. “Our hope was to make a film about reconciliation and forgiveness,” Southern says, “and I think it’s ultimately about those things - and the breakthrough moments that happened throughout.”

Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger will get a cinema release on 9 September. But before then it premieres at the Venice International Film Festival. Later this year it will be available for streaming on Disney+ and in the US, both Disney+ and Hulu.

Kiss can never perform again without the permission of people outside the band.

That’s according to no less an authority than Gene Simmons. The bassist was talking on the Detroit classic rock station WCSX about the band’s future and whether they’d ever reunite.

“Kiss was actually sold - the makeup and the tunes and the publishing and all that - for a…” At that point the bassist garbled his words to suggest an unnamed sum that is a lot of money.

Indeed, Simmons and co sold the Kiss catalogue, brand name, likenesses, the whole kit and caboodle to Pophouse, a Swedish ‘global entertainment and music investment firm’ back in 2024. Pophouse is the group that's developing the Kiss avatar show, which should – if all goes according to plan – be with us in 2027.

“We're involved together in the future,” Simmons said of the Pophouse deal. “So there's gonna be a motion picture, which is being cast now, and there's gonna be - I don't know - cartoon shows, theme park, you name it, it's all coming up. So it's gonna be bigger and better than you've ever heard, including the avatar show.

“But that also means that Kiss can't play live without Pophouse's permission,” he continued, “because they own the makeup and everything.”

That, of course, doesn’t mean that they won’t ever play live again. Indeed, since what was supposed to be their final performance in 2023, Kiss have already reunited for a handful of shows in November last year. These were the Kiss Kruise: Landlocked in Vegas fan club events and featured the band ‘unmasked’ or without makeup. It’s not clear whether Pophouse had to provide their permission for those gigs to go ahead.

Simmons did admit in the interview that he still has a performance itch that he has to scratch. So he’s created the Gene Simmons Band to assuage that desire: “I didn't wanna stay away from the stage,” he explained. “It's the most fun. Being up on that stage and rocking out is the most fun I can imagine with my pants on. And there's a magic that happens there.

"Imagine being a painter, and you paint something, and you're really proud of it, and it just stays in your living room, and nobody sees it. Or if you write a song, and you really like it, you go, 'Whoa, this thing rocks,' but you're the only one who hears it. No, no, no. So I can't stay off the stage," he admitted. "I love it too much."

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.

One of Britain’s most fascinating bands, Supertramp garnered enormous global acclaim while also contending with their fair share of inner turmoil and personnel changes.

Despite their difficulties, Supertramp managed to nurture a unique sound during a golden era when complex songwriting and fastidious recording was the norm.

Formed in London back in 1969, Supertramp’s first two albums didn't manage to gain much traction, with commercial clout finally being attained with the release of their third album, Crime of the Century.

This album included the radio-friendly track Dreamer, while also introducing the world to their distinctive sound, which made extensive use of the Wurlitzer electric piano (more often described as a Wurly) played by lead vocalist Roger Hodgson.

The Wurly, along with other notable keyboards such as the Rhodes electric piano, went on to form a central role on their 1979 fourth album, Breakfast in America. The Supertramp entourage (of about 30 people) had moved to LA for a couple of years prior to recording the album. They also travelled with their own engineer, Peter Henderson, who had worked with them previously on Crime of the Century.

By their own admission, they lived in a bit of an English bubble during their time in LA, choosing The Village Recorder studio (a converted masonic lodge) as the venue for the recording of the album - citing its ‘homely vibe’. These sessions would result in the band's most successful single, The Logical Song.

One of the iconic elements behind the Supertramp sound is the use of relatively conventional triadic chord shapes, played repetitively as 8th notes (quavers), with notable accents. One reason for this musical choice is to occupy the void supplied by a lack of (regular) guitar in the band. The beautiful pounding rhythms, mostly supplied by Hodgson, act as a driving element, much like a rhythm guitar.

The Logical Song was recorded by the band formation that has become known as their classic lineup. Rick Davies supplied keyboard parts, embellishing Hodgson’s playing with similar instrumentation, such as Rhodes electric piano and Hammond organ. The song features John Helliwell on alto sax, in a highly virtuosic and solo capacity, with drums supplied by Bob Siebenberg and bass by Dougie Thomson.

The song’s lyric was inspired by Hodgson’s time at school, specifically his emergence from an English boarding school. Roger questions a system geared toward eliminating the quizzical and wondrous nature of childhood, in favour of expectations and results.

“Logical Song is very autobiographical,” Hodgson told Acoustic Storm. “I mean, you know, when I was young, life was very magical. I have old 8mm movies of me as a little child and I was just a joy bubble and most children are at that age and, you know, then they sent me away. Well, I was sent to boarding school. ‘They sent me away to teach me how to be sensible,’ and that was where confusion set in, really. I was taught all these ways to be and behave and it was not all bad but it definitely set in a level of confusion to what I felt when I was much younger. So when I left school, the burning question that came down to its rawest place was ‘please tell me who I am,’ and that’s basically what the song is about.”

Roger elaborated further in an interview with Songfacts; “I think it was very relevant when I wrote it, and actually I think it's even more relevant today. It's very basically saying that what they teach us in schools is all very fine, but what about what they don't teach us in schools that creates so much confusion in our being.”

Back to the arrangement and, in line with many other Supertramp songs, the Wurly plays a central role here, although the distinct sections are open to a degree of debate regarding which element is a verse or a chorus. In typical Supertramp style, the song is fairly unconventional in this regard.

We open with the classic sound of punctuating Wurly triads, based around a triad of C minor - it’s a natural keyboard key. Once the vocal enters, we hear a shift from Cm down to Ab major7, before landing on G minor7. We then shift up to Bb, followed by Ab and finally F7/A.

This is a fairly simplistic progression, but one that is complicated further by the use of alternating time signatures.

The occasional bar of 2/4 provides an unsettled feeling, as the harmony shifts and contorts. However, many of the chords are heavily associated, either by their relative major/minor standing, or their association by note inclusion, such as the shift from Cm to Ab major7.

A triad of C minor becomes the chord of Ab major7 when you play A flat in the bass. These harmonic choices speak to the pianistic nature the band, and how they went about their songwriting and composition.

The initial sequence repeats four times, to form what could be regarded as a verse. The next section, which adopts chorus sensibilities, shifts up to the relative major of C minor, Eb major.

Having settled on Eb for 2 bars, the bass remains static on the note Eb, while the upper chord shifts to A half-diminished, also be described as Am7 b5. After two bars, this resolves to Ab major 7 for two bars, before shifting to Db, which is accompanied by a bass line which descends in steps, down to Ab, before returning to the verse structure.

The first of two alto saxophone solos are played at the end of the second verse. The harmony itself remains the same, although the arrangement in the keyboard alters slightly, with higher voicings to illicit a sense of build.

John Helliwell’s exceptionally stylised saxophone playing relies upon several soloistic traits, drawn from jazz traditions. Various swoops and scoops lead up to notes while accents maintain interest throughout.

According to Helliwell, during the initial recording phase, he was forced to record in the studio’s toilet. Apparently, his sax was spilling onto the overhead drum mics, and so extreme measures had to be taken to ensure spill isolation…

“When we were recording the backing tracks, we didn’t want the sound of the sax to spill onto the drum mics, in case the sax wasn’t good and the drum was good and we wanted to keep it or whatever,” Helliwell told Connecticut’s 102.9 The Whale radio station.

“So the nearest place was the bathroom. So I sat on the toilet there, with a copy of Playboy in my left hand and my sax in my right hand and we did the takes there. In fact, the take that turned out to be the real good backing track was the one with the sax solo you hear on it. So I must’ve got the inspiration even through the walls, even sitting on the toilet.”

The microphone used for this alto solo was a Coles 4038 - a classic ribbon microphone, which is regarded as a classic for recording horns, and still in production today.

The thunderous outro for the song features more Wurly-based triads, but now with the superb use of a bass line to create tension. This section makes extended use of the dominant chord of G7, before resolving back to Cm, but the second time we hear it, the resolution adds a further element, with a shift to Bb and Eb - all associated chords, much like the rest of the song.

There was a feeling, particularly from Roger Hodgson, that The Logical Song had the potential to be something quite special. The band therefore took their time, not only throughout the recording process, but also during the mixing phase. According to a few sources, the track took two weeks to mix, with Hodgson even taking up residence in a camper van outside the studio, allowing him continual access, presumably to listen with fresh ears.

The results speak for themselves; The Logical Song is one of the classic tracks from the late 70s, and one of the go-to examples of Supertramp’s boundless musical creativity and gifted musicianship - whether tracking in a studio or on the can!

It is 60 years since the late Jimi Hendrix first plugged into a Marshall, turned it up and sent guitar spinning on a different axis, and the British guitar amp company is continuing its anniversary celebrations with a custom half-stack, headphones and a Bluetooth speaker.

All come in purple-and-black cosmic swirl, with silver details and commemorative badging, and for players who thought the hand-wired 1969 JMH Super Lead tube amp head launched in May was maybe too much of a fire-breather in this day and age, the more moderately powered 20-watt Hendrix 60th Anniversary JMH Studio Edition is a more portable – and more house-trainable – proposition.

A word of caution, though: 20-watts of tube power (a pair of EL34s do the grunt work under the hood) is still l-o-u-d, but this amp is switchable down to 5-watts.

This amp is all made at Marshall’s Bletchley factory, in the UK, and comes bundled with a matching 2x12 cab loaded with Celestion V12s, with both featuring a third eye badge. Another cool detail is the purple LED.

Elsewhere, it’s very much the Studio Vintage Plexi vibe we know and love – a downsized 1959SLP with two bridgeable channels, controls for Presence, Bass, Middle, Treble, High Treble and Normal.

Around the back you will find a series effects loop – hey, the originals did not have that – plus 16, 8 and 4-ohms speaker connections and a DI output, too.

You can check out how all this sounds in the demo video featuring Texan rock and blues guitar phenom Ally Venable above.

Janie Hendrix says it is incumbent on today’s generation of players to take the torch from her brother and reinvent the electric guitar their own way.

“Jimi was always searching for a sound that did not yet exist, pushing beyond what anyone thought an electric guitar could do,” she says. “Marshall gave him the power and freedom to turn those bold ideas into a sound the world had never heard before. Sixty years later, that connection between Jimi and Marshall still speaks to new generations of musicians who are pushing creative boundaries and searching for their own sound”

Also included in this release is a special edition Emberton III Bluetooth speaker and a set of foldable Royal V headphones.

These are available now direct from Marshall, priced £149 and £129 respectively, and from other retailers from September 9. The JMH Studio Bundle ships from September 9 and is priced £1,749. US prices TBC.

For more details head over to Marshall.

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.

You’d think that jazz, with its emphasis on live improvisation and its loose structure, would be the hardest genre of music for AI to analyse, wouldn’t you? Not so, according to a new research paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence.

The research, which was conducted at the University of Cambridge by a team led by one Huw Cheston, has shown that large language models can identify jazz pianists and even reveal the musical ‘fingerprints’ that made them stand out.

Cheston’s team fed the machine 84 hours of recordings from 1,629 different performances by 20 pianists. Among those that chosen for the study were Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner and Ahmad Jamal. The recordings were then converted into MIDI and displayed on a piano roll, which showed digitally what notes were played, when and at what pitch.

And wouldn’t you know it, the bots had a pretty good success rate. The best-performing model identified the performers with a rate of 94.4% accuracy. Interestingly, when tested individually, it was the composition’s harmony that gave the most accurate predictions, followed by rhythm and melody, while dynamics was the least accurate.

All very clever, of course. But what use is all this in the real world, you might well ask? Well the authors of the research say it may well have a number of uses. AI used in this way could suggest “possible authors for unattributed works or distinguishing authentic pieces from forgeries. It could also “highlight the networks of influence between artists, as well as reveal insights into the creative process itself.”

“Finally,” they say, “it can also be useful in educational contexts, helping to train artists to understand the distinctive voices of important figures within their particular discipline.”

If you’re interested in dipping further into the study head over to Nature Machine Intelligence’s website. There's also a nice little web app that enables you to explore the playing style of each pianist.

With a CV as extensive as Jack Antonoff’s you’d be hard-pressed to name a pop figurehead that hasn’t worked with him. The man who Taylor Swift trusts as her closest creative confidante (Antonoff co-produced and co-wrote on every one of her studio albums bar 2025’s The Life of a Showgirl), Jack has grown into one of modern music’s most esteemed luminaries.

Beyond Taylor, the likes of Lana Del Rey, The 1975 and most recently Sabrina Carpenter have drawn upon Antonoff’s emotion-led songwriting style and his distinctively retro gear-angled sensibilities when concocting the tracks that have dominated charts the world over.

But Jack, speaking to MusicRadar back in 2023, saw little distinction between the type of mass-appeal pop that he’s a dab hand at building for his roster of stars, and the music he makes himself under his synth-pop alias Bleachers.

For Antonoff, imperfection is often the key to making something sound unique;

“The irony of pop music is that it's this field that's so rigid, but the only stuff that's successful is the stuff that’s out on the other side of it,” Jack told us. “If you write something that you think is a perfect pop song, that fits perfectly into everything, it’s probably boring as f**k. The perfect pop song is by definition the imperfect pop song.”

It’s hard to believe, but Antonoff told us that he’s never once used a MIDI instrument, instead focusing on organic, out-of-the-box creation;

“I'm completely out of the box with gear. I've never used a MIDI instrument in my life. I'm always pushing myself by using different things, and what's nice about analogue gear is everything is a completely new journey.”

Antonoff’s fixation with analogue hardware can become a problem, particularly if he's having a sleepless night…

“The death of me will be that Reverb app. They're not paying me to say that, but Reverb and Vintage King and Soundgas and all those places… you know, at four in the morning when I can't sleep, I'm just looking for things and then dreaming about what I could do with them. Some people buy watches, some people buy cars, I buy gear. Since I was a kid, anytime I had a little bit of money, I would buy gear.”

Being such a tactile creative by nature, it’s no surprise that Jack has an aversion to presets;

“I have no presets. I’ve played synths long enough to know how to dial in the sounds I want,” Jack told us. “I know what to do, but I like the fact that it's new every time. Even if you have presets on a vintage synth, it's still new every time. That's one thing I love when we play live with Bleachers, we have Juno-106s on stage, and nothing ever comes out the same. Those things are just strange. Their mood is so interesting.

“One thing that I like about not having a preset is often if I’m just recording and I'm dialling in the sound as I'm going, the moments of dialling in a sound can become really interesting transitional pieces,” Jack explained. “If I’m dialling in a sound, it'll inherently sound like a question mark, and that's an interesting thing. So you can just go through the recording and grab those moments. For me, it's transitional bits: my rev up into a chorus or the panning sound that takes me into the next part, that could be a moment when I was searching for a sound and something happened that was interesting.”

Antonoff also told us about how he infused a heap of analogue synths into Taylor Swift’s 2022 record, Midnights.

“Oh, I went nuts on that s**t, man,” said Jack. “The funny thing about Midnights is, as synthetic as it is, it's actually very analogue. So much was going into tape. I was really into the Oberheim OB-8, which I had never used another album, so I got really crazy about that. We were getting a lot from Yamaha DX7s, which I hadn't used before really on anything. I was using the Solina in a lot of places, which I never use in other records. That album was just wanting to push into a different place with synths.

“There’s no Prophet on there, because I had used Prophet on a lot of other stuff, so I kind of just put that one away. Getting a lot of low end from the DX7, which I'd never done before. I was using patches on the DX7 that I thought were really rich, but then adding my low end afterwards, trying to find low end in odd ways. A lot of really grimy sounds I was dialling in on the OB-8 and then treating them after the fact.”

Jack continued, “I was just trying to play with the boundaries of things I hadn't done before. So what happens if all my delays are coming from tape, and all my choruses are coming from outboard gear, and I’m just running everything through as much analogue outboard as possible to make it so incredibly rich? When I listen back to that album, I have these memories of putting myself into those places. But really, for me, the OB-8 was the star.”

One thing we were keen to discover was how Jack gets the best from this revolving door of major superstars. How disciplined is the studio when working with these figures professionally?

“The room is a sacred place,” Jack told us. “There's no bulls**t. It's not about this, or that, we're all just working towards the album or the song. Like I keep saying, we’re finding that void in culture and then imagining what we want the world to hear and what's exciting us right now. It’s a gut thing, it's undeniable. When you're inspired, you're inspired. When you're not, you're not. I think that level of zero bulls**t about what we're feeling is the bedrock of making it at the level that it needs to be made at. I’ve always felt that way. I've always had a bit of deep, do-or-die, endless preciousness about how important this process is.”

Read our full 2023 interview with Jack Antonoff here

ZZ Top have got back on the horse in double quick time. Just five days after Frank Beard’s passing last week, they’ve resumed their Big One! tour in Austin.

Earlier this month the band announced that Michael Monahan would take over Beard’s place on drums for the time being. At the time, no further information was given about the reason for Beard’s absence. We know now, of course, that the 77-year-old drummer was entering hospice care, although we still don’t know the specific cause of Beard’s death.

Founder member Billy Gibbons introduced Monahan during Saturday’s gig at Austin City Limits. After the opener, Got Me Under Pressure, the guitarist got straight to the point: "I guess some of you probably know there’s a new man in town.

“In fact, it all started a little while back. [Bassist] Elwood [Francis] and I got an unexpected call from our dear Frank Beard, our dear drummer for 50 years. I've never heard him admit, he said, ‘My bass drum foot’s a little weak. Can you get my man [Monahan] to take over?’

"I said, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, he’s been doing pretty good.’ Frank said, ‘Yeah, that’s what worries me.’ "

Gibbons then shifted his tone a little bit, telling the audience: “We’re all here for a celebration, you know what’s going on. So we’re gonna have a good time.”

It’s not the first time ZZ Top have got back up quickly after a long standing member’s death. In 2021, longtime guitar tech Elwood Francis took over on bass just days after it was announced that Dusty Hill had passed on.

The group are on the road in the US all the way through to October when their The Big One! tour winds up in Port Wentworth, Georgia. Following that they have dates in Mexico and South America in November. It’s not known yet whether Monahan will remain behind the kit for those shows.

Two of the most influential figures in modern music have spoken up in favour of AI in music.

Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre – for it is they – have given an interview with the New York Times, in which they were asked in detail about the technology. Iovine was positively gung-ho, saying: “I’m very pro-AI in music creation. I don’t see the downside at all. There will be some crappy music. There’s crappy music now. In the studio, when gifted people have AI, they’re going to make better records.”

“The AI companies have the worst public relations in the history of the world,” he pointed out. “I don’t know the history of the world, but let’s just put it this way: They have terrible communication skills. That’s why everybody is all up in arms.”

Meanwhile Dre says, somewhat nonchalantly: “I don’t see it as a threat. I think the only people that see it as a threat are the people who have trouble creating.”

It seems the producer views it as just another piece of gear: "I had a discussion with a few people a few days ago. They were against AI and I’m like, 'OK, you sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.' Or synthesizers, right? It’s a new tool for creativity. Some people are afraid of learning new things. I’m embracing it. I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen with this.”

The two men have worked together since the early 1990s when Iovine’s Interscope label backed Dre’s solo albums, which rewrote the rules of hip-hop. In the Noughties, the pair launched the Beats By Dre headphones brand, which was acquired by Apple in 2014.

Both men say that they use AI. In fact, Iovine suggests that there are a lot of producers out there who are “closet” AI users. “They’re using it, they just don’t want to admit it,” adds Dre.

Iovine admits that he uses it all day. When asked what was the last thing he asked it, he reeled off a list: “The last thing I asked was what’s going on with democratic socialism. And another thing I asked was about David Byrne’s setlist. And about the absorption of iron in your body and the timing of it. And as far as iron’s concerned, shrimp versus tuna?”

As for Dre he asked how you put on muscle and lose fat. But revealingly, he says that the bot told him “nothing that I didn’t already know.”

Chris Slade, the Welsh drummer best-known for his stints with AC/DC, has announced his retirement.

Slade was brought into the band after previous incumbent of the drummer's stool Simon Wright left in 1989. He played on The Razor’s Edge album and the accompanying world tour, but left in 1994 when Malcolm Young intimated they wanted to bring Phil Rudd back into the band.

The decision to retire at the age of 79 comes after he suffered a stroke seven years ago. Announcing the news on social media, Slade wrote:  "Hello, everybody. It's with a heavy heart that I'm announcing my retirement from drumming."

"I'm near enough 80 years old. I've been drumming professionally since I was 16 with Tom Jones. I've had a good innings. And thank you all for coming to the shows.

"So, what happened was that I had a stroke, as you probably know, about seven years ago. A small stroke, but it's got worse. And I'm afraid that has screwed me up. I'm really jealous of people like The Stones or Paul McCartney who are going well into their 80s, and I wanted to do that. But it looks like I can't. So, as I say, with a heavy heart, it's bye for now.”

As he mentioned in his statement, Slade’s career goes back to the mid -60s and a stint behind the kit for Tom Jones. He later joined Manfred Mann’s Earth Band and his CV has a long list of diverse names on it – he’s played with Frankie Miller, Asia, Uriah Heep, Gary Numan, David Gilmour and Jimmy Page’s post-Zeppelin outfit, The Firm.

Slade rejoined AC/DC in 2015. You might recall that this was when Phil Rudd was in all sorts of legal trouble – his house in New Zealand had been raided and he was accused of possessing amphetamine, cannabis and – more seriously – hiring a hitman and attempting to kill two people.

Those charges were later dropped, but with Rudd unable to take part in the band’s Rock Or Bust world tour, Slade stepped into the breach. He stayed until 2020 when he was announced that he had left once more before the release of that year’s Power Up album.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of the key outfits pointed at when trying to discern just when that pivotal ‘I’ was applied to electronic music (and the term, ‘IDM’ - Intelligent Dance Music - was first coined) Autechre's legacy has been increasingly recognised over the last three decades, with their extremely innovative and questing spirit influencing generations of budding young producers.

Formed in Rochdale, Greater Manchester in 1987, Rob Brown and Sean Booth’s pursuit of fascinating new forms of electronic music has resulted in a vast body of work.

From the foundation of 1993’s Incunabula spawned fourteen further studio albums, including such electronic classics as 1995’s ultra-intricate Tri Repetae, 2001’s software-embracing Confield and the extraordinary Exai from 2013.

Today though, we’re casting our eyes back to a time long before Autechre became a byword for the notion of dance music as art, back when Rob and Sean were just two extremely creative guys, surrounded by a nest of wires, drum machines and beer cans.

We spoke to Rob and Sean back in 1994, right after the release of their ambient-flavoured second record Amber (in our dear departed sister magazine, Future Music). Journalist Simon Trask asked them about their earliest workflow…

“We used to do turntable mixes together at Rob’s house and then go to my house and edit and cut ‘em up, imitating early Mantronix [1980s hip-hop and electro funk outfit] stuff with pause-button edits on my cassette deck,” Sean explained.

“We used to put loops into the [Casio] SK1 and cut stuff up on the turntables over the top of that,” said Sean. “Then when we got the [Roland TR-] 606 and the [Boss] RSD-10 we’d put samples in the RSD, trigger it from the 606 and play with the SK1 on top of that.”

In the early 1990s, Autechre prided themselves on learning and memorising every facet of their hardware set-up;

“We’ve found that whenever we buy a bit of gear we try and lay off it for six months, until we’ve got used to using it,” explained Sean. “It’s only then that we start doing things that are actually worth using; if we start using something immediately, we just do the corniest stuff with it. There isn't one thing about the gear that we’re using now that we don't understand. The analogue synths are second nature to us, and the [Roland drum machine] R-8 is completely our machine.”

In retrospect, the period that Simon spoke to the pair was fairly pivotal, as he caught them at a time when they were just beginning to dabble with DAWs, software and the capabilities of MIDI. Although, at this early stage the results weren’t always worth writing home about…

“Cubase is a song man’s program, and we’re not song people at all,” Sean told us. “A lot of the tracks we do are very loop-orientated, and [Emagic] Creator [the proto-version of Logic] is designed to be used by people who like working in loops. So we started using that and it was just like using a drum machine, which we were well into - using the R-8 as a sequencer gave us our first lesson in Creator, almost.”

One of the most interesting moments in the interview was when Sean explained how the pair didn’t particularly like bringing in outsiders to their two-man operation; “We’ve only really worked in one ‘proper’ studio and we just ended up getting on the desk ourselves,” said Sean. “I don't know - we just don't like working with other people, basically. It's a lot easier if we do everything ourselves. It seems that in studios you have this code of practice that says you have to do things in a certain way. People say to us, ‘you've got this weird way of working’, but to us it isn't weird, it's the correct way of doing things - we’re happier working like that.”

Read our full classic interview with Autechre here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of house music’s leading lights, Chris Lake has become a club and festival mainstay for the last decade, with his vocal-led arrangements a stylistic signature that has entranced crowds the world over.

A few years back, MusicRadar spent a morning with Chris Lake in a London hotel, having a fairly chilled natter about Lake’s rise in prominence and, interestingly, his how his music production process is often a much more intuition-led than many might expect.

Firstly, we were delighted to hear that it was our very own sister magazine Computer Music (now, sadly no longer in print but then, still going strong) that first empowered Lake to learn about the nitty gritty of music-making;

“When I first got into music, I was picking up Computer Music off the shelf every month,” Lake told us. “It really helped me learn and understand what was possible, and what was available for making music. I remember the magazine grew off the back of the possibilities of the first seeds of the DAW. It’s funny how I remember some of the old cover features and those artist interviews still stick in my head.”

We also learned that Lake had been an avid Ableton Live user for a long time, however he first started on much humbler software…

“It’s been a long time [with Ableton Live] But I wasn’t a first user. I got into music around the late ’90s. The first DAW that I used was Sonic Foundry’s Acid, I then moved into Reason and then to Logic, and then, finally, Ableton Live. Live is my language now.”

Often, due to the demands of touring, Chris was unable to monitor his mixes on high-end gear, and had to trust his instincts when using his mobile set-up.

“Honestly, there was a moment about seven or eight years ago where I realised I was spending a ridiculous amount of time on the road,” Chris told us. “I started to feel paralysed when touring. I felt like I couldn’t do anything when I was away from the studio. I realised that I had to teach myself how to make music when I was out and about. I kind of forced myself into being uncomfortable. I taught myself how to make music on a laptop and nothing else. How do you teach yourself that? Well you just have to accept that you don’t have your studio monitors, a MIDI keyboard and all the other home comforts. But this is what I do have. It was like going back to the initial constraints that I had when I first started making music.”

We were surprised to hear that Lake - a global superstar - had actually put things out that had just been monitored using his laptop speakers…

“I actually started making music just listening with the laptop speakers, using just the QWERTY keyboard instead of a MIDI keyboard to put in notes. Now I’m really good at it. I can make 80% of my music anywhere; in a noisy environment or a busy room. I feel like I understand the sound of the laptop speakers and I’ve even released music that I’ve only monitored on laptop speakers.”

“I made my track I Remember in my parents’ living room. I didn’t even listen to it on headphones. I finished it, rendered it out then played it the following night in Moscow. It was one of the best-sounding records I’d ever made. I ended up listening to it on monitors a couple of weeks later to check the final mix, but I hardly changed anything since that first laptop mix. It sounded fantastic. Don’t get me wrong – on the super low end it’s definitely pretty difficult to be accurate – but, on that occasion, I fluked it and got it right.

Read our full 2023 interview with Chris Lake here.

Operating at the intersection between electronic music, indie rock and pop music, British five-piece Hot Chip have built their career on tracks that balance undeniable hooks with an alluring strangeness.

That sound comes from the band's mix-and-match approach to songwriting, which combines synths and electronic instrumentation with guitars and acoustic drums, and sees band members regularly swapping roles in the studio and onstage.

But, as band members Al Doyle, Joe Goddard and Alexis Taylor explained to us when we visited them in their east London studio, in the band’s early days that approach often meant working around technical limitations.

“When we made our earlier albums, Joe was always trying to capture what was happening when everyone was playing, but it didn't always work,” Doyle says. “We just didn't have the setup to be able to do that. But the instinct was always there to try. Part of the reason for building this place originally was to make that whole process easy.”

Much of the band’s first few albums – Coming On Strong, The Warning and Made In The Dark – were started in Goddard’s home studio. Although to hear Goddard describe it, the word ‘studio’ might be overselling it a little.

“The computer and a small amount of gear was just next to my bed,” he says. “There was a kind of spaghetti of black cables all over the floor, which traumatised my wife and still does.”

In the years since, the band’s studio setup has been upgraded significantly. The band now primarily work out of a London studio primarily set up by Doyle. With multiple rooms, an envy-inducing collection of vintage synths and a Trident TSM desk at its centre, the studio allows the band to write tracks in a more collaborative manner.

“Because we’re in this studio that Al built, we have space to make things very readily from scratch,” Taylor says. “There may still be times where somebody brings an idea they’ve written in to play to the rest of the band, but there are also times with the new records we've been making where everything is just happening in real time. We’re improvising things, trying things out.

“You make a beat on a drum machine and then somebody joins in on the keyboard, and another person simultaneously joins in on another keyboard over the other side of the room. Kind of just building up layers to see what the song could become.”

As Doyle explains, allowing multiple people to try out ideas simultaneously is one of the key benefits to the design of the studio space.

“In terms of how Hot Chip operates in this studio, that's why everything is basically plugged in all the time, because it means that there's no barrier to capturing a performance that's happening on any instrument in any space in here,” he says. “I think that came from that culture of trying to do that, even when we weren't quite able to do it.”

“The room allows you to be working on one thing in here collectively, but then there's also the drum room and the piano room through there,” Taylor continues. “Often I’ll run in there if I have a different idea for something. So you can kind of develop a second song while you're working on the first song. There are different spaces to try things out, and for some reason I think that's been quite key to the way we've always worked.

“Whether it's going into a different room or just stopping what you're doing and starting another thing, basically having a couple of things on the go in one day can mean that you have a breather from something. Then when you try a new idea, a second song, that could be quite exciting because you feel like you're making progress on a different thing. It gives you the space to then come back to the first idea with a fresh perspective on it.”

We took the opportunity to quiz Hot Chip on a few of their studio highlights. In the video above, Doyle, Goddard and Taylor talk us through some of their favourite synths, and why the Trident desk brings a distinctive vibe to the studio.

The band has recently reissued breakthrough albums The Warning, Made In The Dark and One Life Stand. Revisit our breakdown of the band’s classic track Ready For The Floor.

Some songs stop you dead in your tracks the second you hear them. They seem to change the molecules in the air.

The Sound Of Silence, the breakout hit that announced Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel as a powerhouse songwriting duo, is one of them. But it took its time to work its magic on a wider audience.

When it did, Simon & Garfunkel were on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Their 1964 debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3AM, had flopped and they were doing what twenty-somethings did in the mid ‘60s. Simon headed across the pond and was living in England, working on his debut solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook, working the local folk circuit. Garfunkel was still at Columbia University where he was studying art history.

At Columbia Records, the phone was ringing off the hook. There was a song off Wednesday Morning, 3AM that radio audiences across the Eastern Seaboard couldn’t get enough of.

“From a radio contact business in Cocoa Beach, Florida, it became a call-in favourite,” said Garfunkel, speaking to MusicRadar in 2012. “It made the promotion man call the home office in New York and say, ‘It’s been a year now, and they won’t quit over this one folky song from a group called Simon & Garfunkel. The album isn’t selling, but this one tune just won’t quit with its appeal.’”

It wasn’t just Florida. Audiences in Boston were entranced by it, too. The Sounds Of Silence, as it was originally titled, was speaking to the youth of America, haunting the airwaves with its minimalist folk presentation, just two voices and an acoustic guitar. This song had potential.

Columbia had recognised this when Simon & Garfunkel first auditioned for them. As did Garfunkel when Simon first showed it to him.

“It was the sixth song Paul ever wrote,” said Garfunkel. “He would come to my apartment on Amsterdam Avenue, where the roaches were in the kitchen, and he’d play me his songs. When he got to this one, I said, ‘Best one yet! If that’s not a commercial hit record, I don’t know what is.’”

The Sound Of Silence was such a good song that Simon was initially going to give it away. He was exploring his post-college options once his degree in English at Queens College was finished, and took a job in music publishing.

“I had either graduated from college, or I was in my last year, and I was working part-time for a publisher in New York, trying to get songs from their catalogue recorded by other recording artists,” said Simon, speaking to NPR in 2003. “A job that I was completely unqualified to do.”

But the job paid in other ways. It was there Simon met Tom Wilson of Columbia Records, the producer who had worked with Sun Ra and had just been picked up to work with folk’s new superstar, Bob Dylan. Wilson could have used a song like this.

“He had a group that he was recording called The Pilgrims. The only great artist that he had was Bob Dylan,” continued Simon. “I said to him, 'Well, I have a song that I wrote that I think might be good for The Pilgrims', and I played the song, The Sound Of Silence.

And he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I’d like to record that with them.’ And then I said, ‘Well, you know, I sing. I sing with a friend. Could we come and sing this for you?’ So, he said yes, and he arranged an audition for us.”

Wilson had Dylan. He had the Pilgrims. After Columbia president Goddard Lieberson liked what he heard, Wilson now had Simon & Garfunkel. Although there was still some disagreement over what they should call themselves.

The duo had been operating under the name Tom & Jerry back when they were high-school kids signed to Big Records, scoring a hit with Hey, Schoolgirl and appearing on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.

That was a real-life American Graffiti scene, and the name would never have worked with this new folk direction. And the record companies back then discouraged to Jewish artists from using their own names.

“There was a duo called Art and Paul, a folk duo, so that was out,” said Simon. “So then, they were tossing out different names that they might come up with to give to us. And it was never a consideration to call the group Simon and Garfunkel, because it was ‘too ethnic.’ It was just nobody did that. Nobody did that then.

“Bob Dylan was called Bob Dylan; he wasn’t called Bob Zimmerman. So, when they came to a stalemate and couldn't find the name, it was Goddard Lieberson, who said, ‘Call the group Simon and Garfunkel.’”

Wilson handled production duties for Wednesday Morning, 3AM. The engineer Roy Halee, who had recorded the audition tapes, was in the studio to work his magic. He had a burgeoning reputation as a genius in the studio and would be a regular collaborator of the duo’s, with arguably his greatest production feat coming in 1986 when he produced Simon’s Graceland.

The album was recorded in spring ‘64, released in fall, forgotten by winter, and by the summer of ’65 Garfunkel considered himself “a veteran of failure”. At least that’s how he remembered it when speaking to NPR.

He had gone out to visit Simon during his summer vacation and upon returning to the States, he discovered The Sound Of Silence had been remixed by Wilson for a new single release scheduled for September 12. Wilson played it for him.

“I was just, you know, amused,” said Garfunkel. “I was not so invested in whether it’ll be successful or not. I was feeling like a veteran of failure at that point. So I was just amused – and then I watched my life change over the ensuing months.”

Wilson had an ear for the zeitgeist and the electric 12-string guitar was becoming the sound of the mid ‘60s. Roger McGuinn’s playing on the Byrds’ Mr Tambourine man transformed the sound of ‘60s guitar. That jangle and chime was in. So too was reverb, and Halee applied it generously to this remix.

Wilson had just finished up recording Like A Rolling Stone with Bob Dylan and rehired guitarist Al Gorgoni and drummer Bobby Gregg, adding Vincent Bell on guitar and Bob Bushnell on bass guitar. They were going to give it the Byrds treatment.

Garfunkel told MusicRadar that he had no bargaining power to persuade the label to think twice about it.

“The home office overdubbed electric bass, drums and the electric 12-string guitar, which was the sound of the era if you know The Byrds and Mr Tambourine Man,” he said. “We were using electric 12-strings that season. They did this while we were away in Europe. I had no power, no creative leg to stand on, so by definition I was just a bemused listener: ‘Whatever the label is going to do, OK, cross your fingers…’ It’s not like I could have a point-of-view like, ‘How dare you! You ruined my record’ – I could never go down that path.”

We can look back and say this proto-psychedelic treatment of this folk arrangement was just what it needed, Messrs Simon and Garfunkel’s vocals hanging disembodied in the mix, ethereal, godly. The problem was the original was just two voices and the guitar and naturally the rhythm did not sit on the grid. They did the best they could but there’s no question, it sounds a little off.

“I heard it and thought, ‘OK, the rhythm slips a bit between the fourth and fifth verses, the overdubs aren’t exactly in sync, but the sound is commercial. Who knows?’ You can’t figure out the market,” said Garfunkel. “Now it becomes a giant world-wide hit. What can I say? I knew the song within.”

Great songs are rugged. They can be remarkably resilient to reinterpretation. Even so, Garfunkel thought that the 12-string guitar stepped on the vocal a bit.

It is a feeling that informs how he performs it to this day, almost as though he is singing it for an audience who is hearing those lyrics clearly for the first time, even if the truth is those lyrics could well have accompanied them during the most significant, maybe the toughest, moments in their lives.

But it matters little; the emotional temperature of the remix is little different to the original recording, and the chord changes still effectively betray Simon’s prodigious genius. He was just 21 when he wrote it.

The fact that Halee cloaked it in reverb, this great splash of ambient melancholy, is more than appropriate – not only was it consonant with contemporary production styles, it was just as Simon had originally written the song.

In his NPR interview, Simon explained the kind of at-home setup he would put together to get him in the zone, and it is quite funny to picture, maybe a little melodramatic, but just ask any guitar player who has played acoustic in the bathroom. There’s a natural reverb there that makes for an echo room that some studios would pay thousands to install in their facility.

“I wrote it in the bathroom of our house in Queens, with the lights off and the water running,” said Simon. “That was the atmosphere that I liked. If you put a candle in there, then, you’ll immediately understand what it’s like.”

We can’t say for sure what guitar Simon used to write it. Likely it could have been one of the big-bodied Guild acoustics that were favoured by that generation of folkies, and later when he came to perform it live he would typically rely on his Martin D-18. Those are guitars of considerable boom, but Simon tamed that, capoing his at the sixth fret for the recording.

What makes the chord progression so genius is how it sits in conversation with the lyrics. It opens with an Asus2 shape, neither major nor minor, then an open G major then back to A minor on “again” – and in just two lines, three chords, and the audience is right where they want them, and the whole song unspools as some gentle, dark night of the soul.

Even after all this time, it still hits Art Garfunkel hard. He says his appreciation of it has only increased as the decades rolled by.

“Ahhh, what a tune! Sound Of Silence has more melodic genius, and simple power than I ever realised,” he said. “As the years go by, there’s something extraordinarily hooky about that simple melody – I didn’t know that. I knew it was a good-sounding record when it emerged.”

“Well the passing of four decades has given the lyrics an extraordinary power simply because they have endured for such a long time,” Simon told NPR. “Again, for me, I am always aware of the fact that I was 21 years old when I wrote it, so I am kind of amazed that I wrote that. Although at the time I just thought that I was writing better. But now when I look at it I think, ‘Well, that was really something extraordinary that I wasn’t aware of at the time.’”

The Sound Of Silence is a “serious song” but what is it about? Simon is coy. It’s about “many things”. To explain it would be to rob it of its magic. We can assign our own meaning to them. That’s what makes them endure between the melody sticking in our head.

What The Sound Of Silence meant to nu-metal band Disturbed when they covered it will have been different to the kinds of things that were percolating in Simon’s mind when he wrote it in late ’63, early ’64, when the US was roiling after the assassination of a sitting president and the civil rights movement was working for a better union, an end to segregation.

Simon, for what it’s worth, had rerecorded it in the UK for The Paul Simon Songbook but that always sounded incomplete, like a demo. Art Garfunkel’s vocal makes it transcendent.

Purists might cite the original 1964 recording as the definitive take, others Wilson’s remix. We don’t have to choose. But in remixing it and rereleasing it in ’65 Wilson helped Simon and Garfunkel on their way to their first number one – and there was more where that came from.

While many have debated who the real ‘fifth Beatle’ truly was, in our mind there’s simply no contest. It’s quite obviously the late, great George Martin who deserves that honorary mop-top.

He’s the man who unlocked the Beatles’ creative ambitions and enabled them to evolve from pop sensation to music’s most pioneering figures, Martin was part-producer and part close confidante to four men who changed the way we think about music itself.

Although George Martin sadly passed away in 2016, George’s son, Giles Martin has inherited his father’s flair for manning a console, becoming a key figure in how the Beatles' recording canon is handled today, producing, remixing and supervising all major releases by the brand.

From Get Back to the recent Anthology re-release, to the upcoming Rubber Soul remix, Giles has overseen it all. He's, quite simply, the man entrusted with the keys to music’s most celebrated legacy

But Giles’ studio career extends beyond just taking on his father’s mantle, he has been involved in a wide array of projects including the remixing of The Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup and, notably, the incredibly fascinating Dolby Atmos mix of The Beach Boys' timeless Pet Sounds, released in 2023.

It was at that point that this writer was able to spend some one-on-one time with Giles, talking in-depth about why expanding Pet Sounds into Atmos was tantamount to genuine musical archaeology - but required some delicate, respectful hands…

“The fact of the matter is that mono can be immersive too – Sgt Pepper and Pet Sounds came out in mono, and people fell into them,” Giles said. “You have to mix to the source. It’s the equivalent of restoring paintings, brightening up an old Dutch master’s work and making it bright. So it’s always a challenge. I was deeply honoured that they asked me to do it.

“There had to be a lot of audio restoration. There were elements missing. So we used a combination of the original master tracks and newly-sourced mix elements,” Giles explained. “There were a couple of vocal things that had to be taken off the mono. Generally speaking, we had about eight tracks to play with. A lot of the instrumentation was on three different tracks, locked-in together.”

With the project on his desk, Giles settled on quite a daunting starting point; “You have to start somewhere, and I thought I’d start with God Only Knows, because it’s such an amazing song. It’s one of the greatest songs ever written. That can be challenging in itself. Then we went through the rest of the album in track order from then on. Then you go back and revise and revise and revise.”

Beyond the discussion of the complex process of converting this hallowed record into an immersive Atmos sphere, Giles talked about the vast creativity and singular vision of Brian Wilson - who sadly passed away last year - and also shared his father’s perspective on Wilson's exceptional talent.

“I was with my dad on a plane once, and I just suddenly realised how awesome he was. I said to him ‘Dad, what you did with The Beatles was kind of amazing, wasn’t it?’ and he looked at me and said: ‘not as amazing as Brian Wilson’. He explained to me that The Beatles always had him, and he had The Beatles. But Brian Wilson didn’t have anyone, and he went and made this record. Without this record, The Beatles wouldn’t have made Sgt Pepper.”

Giles also explained to us why Pet Sounds continues to be revered all these years on; “Forget sampling, this was real innovation.” Giles gushed, “Pet Sounds is an organic record, and you kind of want it to be real, you want to be closer to them in a way, you want to fall into the record. It’s almost like a classical record, it’s so intricate and so beautiful.”

Read our full interview with Giles Martin on how he brought Pet Sounds into the Atmos domain here

What is it?

The White Whale Junior is a compact, amp-like tremolo and reverb pedal. It's true bypass and all-analogue, but its true selling point is that it uses real springs.

The result is a very authentic replication of vintage amp reverb and tremolo, in a pedalboard-friendly form-factor.

Specs

• Price: $349 | £259| €299
• Type: Analogue amp-like spring reverb/tremolo
• Controls: Dwell, Tone, Mix, Volume, Speed, Intensity, Volume, Independent footswitches
• Features: Reverb, Tremolo pedals
• Connectivity: Input, Output, Power
• Bypass: True relay
• Power: 9V DC Centre-negative, 110mA
• Dimensions: 154 x 68 x 83 mm
• Weight: 490g
• Contact: Crazy Tube Circuits

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★★

The White Whale Junior aims to deliver a true amp-style spring reverb and tremolo in a compact enclosure. To do this, no corners have been cut – there's real springs inside the oversized enclosure. You can confirm this by giving the unit a gentle kick to hear the spring 'splash.'

This is something I can't wait to check out, popping off the back and eyeballing three real springs and a neat off-board wiring job. However, as noted in the manual, these springs and the fly leads are fragile, so it's not a good idea to do this at home!

Inside and out everything is sensibly laid out and feels sturdy. The true-bypass switches are soft-click relays, which is a nice touch.

Usability and features

Usability and features rating: ★★★★½

The pedal has seven straightforward controls. The reverb and tremolo sections have their own footswitches, and the effects are easy enough to dial in.

Compared to the larger White Whale, there's no harmonic trem mode, and the Dwell times are streamlined to a single pot. Still, this all makes for an intuitive set up, assuming you didn't need those features.

The only complexity comes from the reverb, as it has its own Volume and Blend controls. As this section contains an amplifier stage, finding unity volume is crucial.

The amp stage can result in level issues when paired with any pedals in front of the White Whale, which is likely to be at the end of your chain.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★★

With a clean guitar, the White Whale delivers characterful reverb and tremolo tones, but it really starts to come alive once there's a bit of dirt. The amp stage in the pedal can be used for boosting, but it has a dark voicing.

The Tone control affects the reverb, which can result in a more brittle sound when the Tone is up. Consequently it makes more sense to brighten up the gain blocks in front, and set a more neutral tone on the White Whale.

Placing a Rangemaster-style boost in front (Crazy Tube Circuits' own Triptychon, in fact) yields excellent results. Conversely, a Roland Space Echo-derived discrete op-amp preamp proves less satisfying due to its darker tone. Moving on to drives, the pedal interacts differently with the drives I throw at it.

Although there are no concerns, it does result in a fuzzier, darker tone. The Smallsound/Bigsound Mini JFet drive needs a fair bit of tweaking, while the Hamstead Odyssey runs prematurely to feedback. Though, it must be said, I do run that pedal quite hot.

At higher gain settings, the White Whale's voicing is less of an issue, since the overall sound is so complex. Turning again to the Triptychon to stack several gain blocks together, Rangemaster, Fuzz Face and drive modes running in series results in a searing lead tone, with the reverb eventually guiding the guitar into very musical feedback.

The tremolo, meanwhile, has no quirks, in a good way. I prefer the quick, choppy tremolo, but it can go all the way down to slow throbbing, with a depth from fully open or closed to quite subtle.

Verdict

For all that the White Whale gets right in bringing classic 50s and 60s tones to the modern pedalboard, it's still very much aimed at surf players.

Players from many genres might be after a spring reverb, especially one that sounds this good, but room, hall and ambient reverbs are the go-to for many players and genres. This makes the White Whale a more niche prospect.

MusicRadar verdict: If you need the most amp-like reverb that money can buy, and don't need the features of the larger White Whale, then the Junior is an excellent, compact option. It sounds fantastic, it's versatile, and it's mostly well behaved when stacked with other gain pedals on your board.

Also try

Hands-on videos

The Guitar Geek

R.J. Ronquilo

Tone Factory

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

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

Brain on? Let's go...

When did music production begin to have so many rules? It used to be that you could get away with pretty much anything when making tunes. Vinyl mastering engineers would probably tell you to make your bass mono so the needle doesn’t jump out of the record, but other than that, the sky was the limit - if only because in a pre-social media era, who was going to tell you otherwise?

Nowadays, however, you can’t take two steps on the internet without tripping over a loud and confidently stated opinion on the “correct” way to make music. Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, they’re all lined with hot takes masquerading as unbreakable rules, purists and gatekeepers claiming that analogue is always better than digital, Behringer gear is garbage, and your cheap-ass monitors must be ruining your mixes. What’s an up-and-coming musician or producer to do? In short: ignore them.

Many of the most transformative genres to emerge in the last 50 years - from punk to jungle to trap - were based around breaking the rules. Producers of old didn’t worry about what they were supposed to do, or waste their time pondering the opinions of beard-stroking strangers. They just got on with making the music that they wanted to make. Many of the most persistent myths that get repeated as fact don’t even hold up in real life. Here’s our number one rule: if it sounds good to you, it is good.

In the spirit of those legendary rule-breakers of old, here we take a closer look at ten oft-repeated music tech myths that fall apart in the harsh light of day.

1. Analogue is better than digital

Let’s start with this old chestnut. Many people will try to tell you that analogue synthesis is somehow inherently ‘better’ than digital. They don’t bother with any of that virtual analogue nonsense (despite the power, flexibility and convenience that digital can provide), nor will they trouble themselves with wavetables, FM or indeed anything other than tried-and-true, old-school subtractive synthesis.

Analogue can sound great, it’s true. It’s hard to top a vintage Minimoog or CS-80 in top condition for sheer sonic deliciousness. But objectively better? That’s a stretch. Limiting yourself to just one flavour can lead to bland results. It can also be a real challenge to get a lead to pop out of an all-analogue mix. And if analogue is the be-all and end-all, why are digital synths like Serum so popular? (Hint: because they sound good.)

Choose a synth because you like the way it sounds, not because of what’s under the hood.

2. Behringer gear is garbage

Comments about Behringer gear tend to fall into two main camps: it’s either complete garbage, or it’s incredible, and the company is going to save the world by releasing budget synths. Somewhere in between these two polarities is the truth: products from a mass-market retailer occasionally do fail, but no more than those of any other manufacturer working at a similar scale.

So why the hate? This appears to be a holdover from users who got burned by unreliable products in the ‘90s before Behringer made a number of manufacturing changes. It also restructured the company, with Behringer now just one of many brands under the Music Tribe banner, an umbrella that also includes respected outfits like Midas, Klark Teknik and TC Electronic. They can’t all be bad, can they? And why would Behringer's products be inferior and the others' not… even though they’re all made by the same company?

It’s not just poor musicians that use Behringer products, either; plenty of big-name artists do too. Hans Zimmer famously took his Behringer 2600 on the road to spare his vintage ARP the abuse, while the acid clone TD-3 has been caned by Squarepusher, KiNK, Anthony Rother and many more. Some may question their imitative designs, but Behringer makes solid gear at an unbeatable price. Don’t let the past grudges of others prevent you from enjoying what the brand has to offer.

3. Korg Volcas are a joke

In 2013, Korg released a trio of tiny instruments, the Beats, Bass and Keys. These were all part of the Volca line, and they kick started a trend of low-priced, diminutive synthesizers, samplers and drum machines that continues to this day, with Korg now offering 10 Volca machines and plenty of other companies copying their style. And yet somehow, the name Volca has become synonymous with ‘joke’.

This smacks of gatekeeping. While the Volcas may be limited compared to other items in the Korg catalogue, they’re also much, much more affordable. This low price makes them ideal starting points for newbies looking to explore music production, or wanting to make the jump from software to hardware.

With their built-in sequencers and motion sequencing capabilities, Volcas are also exceedingly fun. Many also feature circuitry borrowed from much more expensive units too, ensuring that they sound just as good as their bigger siblings. They also have some pretty famous fans, with artists as diverse as Aphex Twin, Octo Octa, Gorillaz and Mura Masa all having used them.

The next time someone calls a Volca a toy, take that as a recommendation - toys are fun to play with, after all.

4. FM synths sound cold

In 1983, Yamaha’s DX7 completely disrupted the synthesizer world, knocking analogue off its perch and introducing the world to the possibilities of digital synthesis. With its precise sounds and metallic, glassy tones, FM soon gained a reputation for being icy cold - particularly when compared to warm and fuzzy analogue synthesis.

While the famous EPiano 1 - the electric piano preset that dominated a thousand ‘80s hits - is admittedly on the chilly side, FM synths don’t have to be frostbite-inducing. A lot of this is down to the way you program them. While FM may excel at colder timbres, it can certainly do warm strings and brass too - you just don’t notice them as often, because they don’t stand out as much in a mix.

And, as FM synthesis has evolved over time, it’s also gotten warmer along the way. FM synthesis circa DX7 had only sine waves to play with. Modern FM synths are much more varied, with the Korg opsix (pictured above) offering 21 different waveshapes, ensuring many more toasty harmonics in the sound. They also often have analogue filters now, which can also heat things up a few degrees.

FM synthesis has a lot to offer. Frigid tones are just a small part of its repertoire.

5. GAS is bad

According to the armchair doctors of RedditMD, GAS is the worst affliction that can befall a musician. Short for Gear Acquisition Syndrome, it’s a colloquial acronym that describes what happens when purchasing new gear becomes more important than using and making music with said gear.

There’s a persistent attitude online that if you’re not making and releasing music with your gear or software then you’re some kind of worthless poseur. If you believe this, then getting caught up in buying gear can become shameful. Really, though, what’s so bad about it? As long as you’re having fun, who cares? And, with local music shops fast disappearing, there’s really no other way to try out gear than to buy first and ask questions later.

Not everyone sees it as a negative either. Take this anonymous Reddit user, for example: “(GAS) seems to be common in musicians, they love their instruments, and each one brings something a little different. Inevitably you have your favourite that you use all the time, but loving the tools you work with is not a problem, in my opinion.”

Of course, if you’re buying gear with money that you don’t have, that can become an issue. But having fun acquiring new gear within your means? Have at it.

6. Roland has lost it

Spend enough time in the online synth community and you’ll start to see a pattern, especially when a new Roland product is announced. The story goes that the company has fallen off - it just isn’t as good as it was back in the day. This is largely due to the fact that it famously doesn’t “chase ghosts”, meaning that it won’t clone its own past products.

This refusal to dwell in the past is particularly irksome to those who pine for the halcyon days of analogue - never mind the fact that clones of the instruments they want are already available from a variety of competitors, both large and small.

Whether Roland is as innovative today as it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s is certainly up for debate - many of its most lauded products, such as the 808, 909 and 303, were actually failures at the time of release - but it remains a reputable company with a wide variety of successful product releases every year.

Just because it’s not focusing solely on the development of retro-styled analogue synths (although it occasionally still does), that doesn’t mean Roland is no longer a force to be reckoned with. The company continues to release affordable and innovative products that consistently rank highly in our reviews: just a few months ago, we included its P-6 sampler in our round-up of 2024's best gear.

7. Your monitors suck

Have you ever experienced this? You post a flex photo of your studio to a Facebook group, fishing for a few compliments on the set-up that you’re really rather proud of, and then the insults begin to roll in: “When are you going to get new monitors?” “I’ll bet you don’t mix your own music with those speakers.” “Ew, Rokits.”

Despite being consistently well-rated and used by, well, pretty much everyone in the entire world, KRK’s Rokit monitors have become a target of internet scorn. Perhaps because they’re popular, or perhaps because they’re not quite specialist enough, they’re the gatekeeper’s first port of call when they want to take you down a peg.

Are there better monitors out there? Of course there are. But not everyone has that kind of expendable income, especially not in these days of mindless tariffs and sky-high inflation. Isn’t knowing your monitors and how they react to the room the most important thing anyway? And speaking of rooms…

8. Without sound treatment, your studio is worthless

Once the trolls get tired of picking you apart your monitors, they’ll inevitably move on to the next low-hanging fruit: the lack of acoustic treatment in your studio. Oh, the eternal shame to be sans rock wool, bereft of bass traps, and short of sound-deadening panels. You may as well put your gear on Reverb and take up golfing because with those bare walls, you’re now persona non grata.

Don’t worry. Many home studios are without sound treatment of any kind. You can happily - and successfully - make music without it. Proper treatment could make things easier, sure, but only after spending a lot of money and/or time setting it up. Not to mention the fact that not everyone owns their own home and most landlords won’t take too kindly to you drilling a bunch of big holes in their property.

If you’re concerned about your room and don’t have the means to put up treatment, there’s always room correction software to help out.

9. DAWs have their own sound

Here’s a myth that refuses to die, despite plenty of tests having irrefutably proven otherwise. Every DAW has its own sound, some say, with Ableton Live leaving a different sonic fingerprint on a track than, say, Pro Tools or Logic Pro. And now even Bob Horn is claiming that Pro Tools meters have a sound too?

Let’s put this to bed once and for all: DAWs (and meters!) don’t sound different. They’re recording digitally to ones and zeroes. There’s no ‘sound’ being imprinted on them. Of course, a DAW's stock plugins will affect the sound you get out of them - but bouncing out audio as-is will give you the same audio file, every time.

10. Moog synths are low-quality now

Whenever a beloved company changes owners, rumours start to circulate. This is doubly true for Moog Music, who were bought by inMusic in 2023. Moog synths were famously made in Asheville, North Carolina and now that’s all changed, leading to a drastic drop in quality. Or so the gossip says.

While inMusic hasn’t gone into too much detail about what, in fact, has changed, it seems that Moog may have been manufacturing components in Asia all along, with assembly happening locally in Asheville. That will continue for Moog’s high-ticket items, while the rest of the products will be put together where the components are made.

As for a change in quality? While it’s true that some users are vocal about issues they’ve experienced with some modern Moog products such as the Grandmother, just as many have attested to their robustness and roadworthiness. Is this just a case of a vocal few dominating the conversation? Or a bias from people who disapprove of an independent brand being eaten up by a corporate giant? Either way, the vast majority of Moog users are not reporting problems.

Moog synthesizers continue to be highly-rated musical instruments with a sound that thousands adore. If you’re concerned about quality control, hang on to your warranty card (not a bad piece of advice for any purchase, certainly).

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.”

Okay, so the end of August isn’t exactly known as prime bargain-hunting season for music gear. But sometimes, the universe throws us a curveball, and today, it’s a seriously good one. I’ve just stumbled across a microphone offer that genuinely rivals the best Black Friday music deals.

Right now, Guitar Center is slashing up to 25% off a bunch of studio equipment, but the real headline here is the jaw-dropping $170 discount on the Aston Origin condenser microphone. That brings the price down to a tiny $79!

I’m a big fan of the Origin even at its usual wallet-friendly price, but at $79, it’s honestly a no-brainer. I’d even be tempted to grab two and run them as a stereo pair.

So, if you’ve been on the fence about upgrading your mic locker, or just want a killer new sound for your studio, this is one of those rare times when hesitation could mean missing out.

For me, the Aston Origin isn’t just another entry-level condenser mic. This large-diaphragm, cardioid-pattern mic has earned a reputation for punching well above its price class. In our glowing in-depth review, we said, “Close up, the proximity effect doesn't get boomy and misbalanced; the low-end characteristic is pleasing, rendering the source with little tonal alteration beyond the basic physics of proximity. Vocals are a clear winner here, with plenty of scope for playing the mic from close-up intimacy to a more roomy distance without losing or altering the voice.”

The custom-finished, wave-form mesh head gives the microphone a boutique look, but it’s designed to handle knocks and bumps that would leave other mics bruised, or worse. Plus, Aston’s unique mesh acts as a built-in pop filter, so you can often skip the extra gear for controlling plosives.

MusicRadar’s resident recording expert Matt McCracken put the Origin to the test in a recent session, and here’s how he described the results: “I used the Aston Origin recently to record a Tweed Fender Blues Junior, on the edge-of-breakup with a healthy dollop of spring reverb. The Origin perfectly captured the lush, complex overtones of the metallic reverb wash,” says Matt.

“Paired with a dynamic mic, it nicely complemented the more direct tone with detailed room ambience, blending beautifully for an organic-sounding guitar tone that sat in the mix perfectly,” he continues.

The only issue Matt had with the microphone was the bulky shock mount, giving us this handy tip: “You have to do a lot of manoeuvring if you’re using it in close quarters with another mic. It’s fine on a single source like vocals, but a bit awkward when dual-micing a guitar cab.”

At $79, the Aston Origin is a steal, whether you’re a seasoned engineer or a bedroom producer looking to level up. Deals like this don’t come around often, so if you’ve been waiting for a sign to expand your mic collection, this is it.

In the sweltering summer of 1995, sci-fi-loving, Northern Irish indie-rock trio Ash (Tim Wheeler - vocals and guitar; Mark Hamilton - bass, and drummer Rick McMurray), rocketed to just outside of the UK top ten with their infectious indie/punk-pop anthem Girl from Mars.

Their previous single, Kung Fu, which was a thrilling, two-minute, Ramones-like homage to martial arts movies, had only reached number 57 in the charts, but Girl from Mars took them into the big time, hitting the radio just as Wheeler and Hamilton (who were both 18) were finishing their A-levels.

It proved that the Undertones weren’t the only Northern Irish outfit who knew how to get their teenage kicks with a joyous and energetic guitar pop tune.

Opening with some acoustic guitar strumming, Wheeler’s youthful yet wistful vocals asked us if we remembered the time that he knew a girl from Mars. Before going on to remind us of the tale…

We'd stay up late playing cards, Henri Winterman cigars
And she never told me her name
I still love you, the girl from Mars

With a shriek of feedback, the whole song then exploded, roaring and accelerating into a delirious, fuzzy monster.

As the song progressed, Wheeler further recalled this whirlwind summer romance with a mysterious female alien, where there’s 'electricity in the air' and 'a strange light shimmering over the sea'. Tim remembers the two star-crossed lovers spending the evening ‘Twisting all through the night on the terrace.”

Sadly, so soon after she’s arrived from space, the object of Wheeler’s desire was on her way back to Mars, and Wheeler was left staring forlornly at the stars…

Was it just a dream… and was she really from Mars?

Girl from Mars is a brilliant fusion of teenage lust, adolescent heartbreak and sci-fi romanticism that ignited indie club dance-floors and festival mosh pits that halcyon summer of 1995 and long beyond.

Wheeler wrote the song - the second single released in advance of Ash’s number one, platinum-selling 1996 debut album, 1977 - in his bedroom at the family home in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland.

Part of the inspiration came from his love of sci-fi (underlined by the album’s Star Wars release year-referencing title) which was also shared by US band Pixies.

Wheeler was an avid fan of the Boston legends, particularly their 1991 album, Trompe le Monde, which thematically had one foot in the quirkier side of UFO conspiracy theories…

“I loved Trompe le Monde - it was such a cool record”, Wheeler tells MusicRadar, adding: “It [the idea for the song] also came from Bowie and Star Wars. My sister is 18 years older than me - she was into Bowie, and her and her friend had written ‘Life on Mars’ on the wall of our rehearsal room, which had also been her den when she was a kid. So, right from our very first rehearsal, Mars was always hanging over our heads.”

He adds: “I was also looking at the TV listings and there was a film called The Girl from Mars, which was on at two or three in the morning. I didn’t watch it, or bother to tape it, but as soon as I saw the title, my mind went off and I imagined this whole story without ever seeing the film. I think it was a made-for-TV film - I’ve still never seen it. I thought it was such a good song title, and I knew I had to write a song about it.”

Another inspiration for Girl from Mars was teenage angst, which Wheeler was experiencing after breaking up with his first girlfriend. “I’d had a blissful year being 15 - I had my first girlfriend and Ash had got together,” he recalls.

“All of a sudden, we’d gone from being a real laughing stock [heavy metal] band called Vietnam, who were having disastrous gigs, but, suddenly, Ash coalesced - our ability kicked in and all the songs got better. I was really happy when I was 15, but things fell apart when I was 16 and I think I was going through depression - I broke up with my girlfriend and, after that rush of the band coming together, I wasn’t sure if things were going to happen with it.

“I was listening to Joy Division and The Smiths - that was the stuff that really spoke to me - but, at the same time, I’d seen Teenage Fanclub open for Nirvana [at the King’s Hall, Belfast] in 1992, and Ioved their melodies and beautiful chords, so I was channelling that when I wrote Girl from Mars.

“I was sort of writing about missing my first girlfriend and missing those euphoric feelings from the year before. I’d also been to France on caravan holidays with my family and little bits of the lyrics came from those trips - we’d found some cool kids to hang out with, buy tiny Kronenbourg beers and drink them on the beach. One time we found some Henri Winterman cigars, so that memory snuck into the lyrics.”

Sadly, Ash never got offered a sponsorship deal from Dutch cigar brand Henri Winterman, but, amazingly, Girl from Mars did end up being used as the telephone hold music for NASA! “That was the year it came out - I thought that was genius,” says Wheeler. “Hopefully it brightened up some people’s day, although I’m not sure who would be calling NASA.”

As well as a failed extraterrestrial romance and teenage angst, Girl from Mars is also about escapism - getting away from grey and rain-soaked Northern Ireland to visit sunnier climes.

“I guess it’s a real summer song. We’d spent most of my childhood summers going to Kerry in southwest Ireland, where we had great times, but when we went to France the weather was guaranteed to be amazing all summer. I was loving that and that fed into the song too,” says Wheeler.

Tim remembers writing Girl from Mars on a 1977 Fender Stratocaster, telling us: “I only had two guitars; I didn’t have an acoustic. I had a [Gibson] Explorer copy - I think the brand was called Artist, and it was a cheap little guitar that came with a practice amp - but for my sixteenth birthday I got a ’77 Strat for £250. Someone was selling it in the listings of our local newspaper. So, by the time I was writing Girl from Mars, I’d switched to the ’77 Strat, which was my main guitar, so I’m pretty sure I would’ve written it on that.”

The initial 4-track demo of Girl from Mars that Wheeler recorded before the band was let loose on the song is very different from the final version - it’s a jangly, mid-tempo effort and sounds a lot like its earliest musical influence, Teenage Fanclub, rather than a punky-power-pop anthem.

“That demo shows how I was seeing it to start with - a dreamy little song. I used to borrow the school’s 4-track, it was nice of them to lend it to me,” remembers Tim.

“We also used to record demos at this little studio in Strangford [Northern Ireland]. The guy there had a copycat WEM tape delay unit, which was kind of in bits, but he’d lend it to me, so I made a little sci-fi intro and outro with delay echoes - it was my first sketch and it was unusual because I didn’t often bother recording demos of songs, but with that one I felt an urge. Once we started playing it with the band, it got pumped up and sped up - there was a big jump from the demo and it took on a kind of Buzzcocks quality, which is funny because I hadn’t really listened to the Buzzcocks. I knew Nirvana were into them… Years later, we did gigs with the Buzzcocks and I was like, ‘My God, there are a lot of similarities…’ Nice chords and nice melodies, high energy and high speed.

“Once we started playing the song in rehearsals, we transformed it, and when we started playing it at gigs quite soon after that, I can remember that people would say, ‘Oh, I really like that song…’ They were singling it out at gigs, and so were close friends whose taste we trusted. That took me by surprise - I did really like the song but right from the start it was connecting with people. We’d had that with a couple of songs before but not to that level.”

Someone who had an early input into the song was Wheeler’s younger brother, Pat. “I always tried my songs out on him because his bedroom was next to mine, so if I’d written something and I was excited about it, I’d play it to him,” says Wheeler. “He’s a guy who is always encouraging and gives good feedback - he ended up being an architect, so he’s a creative spirit as well. He would offer up cool ideas - on Girl from Mars, he said I should do a quiet breakdown. That’s always been a great part of the song, especially live, it’s amazing.”

To our ears, the killer melodic guitar solo in Girl from Mars sounds like it has a Dinosaur Jr. influence, and Wheeler agrees: “Yeah - Dinosaur Jr. were a big influence on us. Right from the start of Ash, at our first rehearsal, we attempted a cover of The Wagon. I loved his [J Mascis’s] soloing. A few years before Ash, I’d wanted to be a metal kid and I was trying to solo, but I wasn’t technically very good. I liked fast bits and solos and showing off. So, when I discovered Dinosaur Jr. I was like, ‘oh - this guy has the technique, and he gets very exploratory, like Neil Young, but you can also hear a metal influence in there’. J Mascis is definitely a big influence on my solos.”

Girl from Mars shares thematic and sonic similarities with that other great punky power-pop song about interstellar romance, Another Girl, Another Planet, by late ‘70s English New Wave band, The Only Ones, which, coincidentally, also features a brilliant melodic guitar solo.

“Yeah - that’s awesome,” says Wheeler. “I’m not sure I’d heard that song at the time, but when Girl from Mars came out, I remember Bernard Butler saying that it was the modern-day version of Another Girl, Another Planet, and he meant that in a good way. So, that sent me off in search of the song and I was like, ‘Oh my God…’ ”

Wheeler had written Girl from Mars ahead of Ash making their 1994 mini-album Trailer for label Infectious Records, but recognising the surefire hit potential of the song, the band were advised by their manager and their label to hold off from recording it and to save it for their debut album proper.

“When we signed with the label, they’d heard Girl from Mars at our gigs and they knew it had hit potential, and our manager, Tav [Stephen ‘Tav’ Taverner], knew it right from the start. He was like, ‘That’s a hit, but let’s not record that for anything [yet]’. So, when we did our first Peel Session and our mini-album, we held it back,” says Wheeler.

“Between Tav and the label, they knew the song could be a hit but for it to be a hit you needed to be available to promote the hell out of it, but we probably weren’t ready for that and we didn’t have the time because we were still finishing school. So, in the end, the song came out a month after we’d left school.”

The initial recording sessions for Girl from Mars took place at the legendary Rockfield Studios, in Monmouthshire, Wales, where classic rock acts like Queen and Black Sabbath had made records - Oasis recorded almost all of their 1995 album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? there with producer, Owen Morris, who was also at the controls for Girl from Mars. Morris went on to produce Ash’s album 1977, which was also mostly made at Rockfield.

“We recorded the rest of the album six months after Girl from Mars came out. As far as I remember, we recorded Girl from Mars in the Easter holidays in 1995 - we went to Rockfield for a few days,” remembers Wheeler. “It was amazing - we’d done a session at Loco Studios [in South Wales] at Christmas [1994], where we did [the singles] Angel Interceptor and Kung Fu, but things were going well, so the label spent a bit more money on us to go to a fancier studio. Owen was in Rockfield a lot around that time, doing (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?”

“Rockfield was a nice residential studio - every room was en-suite with a jacuzzi and each room had a nice TV and there was catering; it was a very cool experience. I remember Owen got a nice groove [on Girl from Mars] - there was just a little bit of swing in it, and he made sure we didn’t race off too much with the tempo. He allowed it to be fast but with a little bit of a groove to it. I think he added something really cool. He also added some feedback drones behind it, almost like Eno, Fripp and Visconti on Heroes [by David Bowie]. Then he mixed the song and we went back to school to get ready for our A-levels.”

However, Morris’s mix was ultimately deemed as not being up to scratch.

“Between everyone, we thought it wasn’t quite as good as it could’ve been. It had a slight darkness to it - it wasn’t quite as poppy - and there were bits of my vocals that I didn’t like,” explains Wheeler. “There were a few little things that I wanted to tweak and add. I’d been listening to a lot of Beach Boys, and I wanted to add some timpani, and, between the label and our manager, they wanted someone else to have a crack at the mix.”

That someone turned out to be Phil Thornalley, who’d produced The Cure’s 1982 gloom-fest Pornography and had played bass for Robert Smith’s goth-rock outfit, but was also known for his production, engineering and mixing work with acts including Duran Duran, Thompson Twins, XTC, Psychedelic Furs and Prefab Sprout - after working with Ash, he went on to produce Natalie Imbruglia’s 1997 hit single Torn, which he also co-wrote.

“So, we went in with Phil Thornalley - I can’t remember when we did that; it must’ve been on a weekend and it was around the time of our school exams. It was pretty hectic and I don’t think we told Owen,” says Wheeler. “We were going in to do another mix of it and we added a few elements. I think I replaced the electric guitar in the intro and the breakdown with an acoustic, and we added timpani. There was a sax player who came in to do some stuff, but you can only really hear that in the outro.

“We did the additional recording and the mix at RAK Studios, in London, and then we had to do some B-sides: Astral Conversations with Toulouse-Lautrec and Cantina Band [from Star Wars]. I think at some point Phil Thornalley walked out of the session because he got pissed off about something. Maybe he thought it was ridiculous that we were doing Cantina Band or that Astral Conversations didn’t have enough of a song - it was quite experimental… I don’t know. So, Phil walked out of the session, but Owen was in town, so he came down and helped us mix Cantina Band, but, in the meantime, he found out that we’d gone behind his back and done the other version [of Girl from Mars]. It’s amazing that he came back in and helped us to finish it, but he was pissed off with us for a long time about that. It was quite mad, but I was just 18 and I was trying to keep everyone happy.”

When the new version of Girl from Mars was sent out to radio stations its infectious hyperactive energy resulted in massive amounts of airplay. It peaked just outside of the top ten - at number 11 - in the UK singles chart, becoming Ash’s first top 40 hit. It also reached number 16 in the Irish singles chart too.

“In those days, your single would go to radio about six weeks before it would come out. So, I think during the last couple weeks of me doing my exams, it was starting to get heavy radio play, and that's one of the reasons it became such a big hit - stations like Radio 1 hammered it, and so did MTV,” says Wheeler.

“We did a video straight after leaving school. I used to get in the car, drive home from school, and hear Girl from Mars on Radio 1 in the daytime - that was a buzz like no other. When I was doing my A-levels, I also had to do lots of Australian phone interviews, as things were kicking off for us in Australia.”

Two days after he finished his A-levels, Ash played Glastonbury, but despite Wheeler pursuing his rock ‘n’ roll dream during his studies, his school education didn’t suffer: “I got two Bs and a C, which was good enough to get me into university, but, luckily, I never ended up going there,” he says.

Thanks to the success of Girl from Mars, Ash secured their debut appearance on iconic TV music show Top of the Pops.

“I sang live on it,” says Wheeler, whose fellow band members performed to a backing track. “There was quite a lot of pressure on me - especially as I kicked the song off. We tried to give a lot of energy, and it was good. I think it did well and it connected, the show was huge back then.”

Since it was released, Girl from Mars has had a permanent place in Ash’s live setlist - the band aren’t one of those acts who shy away from playing what’s arguably their most well-known song.

“We’ve got enough other big singles that it doesn’t feel too different from some of the other hits, but, over the years, it’s grown in a way even more than anything else we’ve ever done and it’s stood the test of time more” says Wheeler.

“I guess I’m very fond of it and it’s connected with a lot of people. We play it at every show, and it always goes down amazingly. As soon as you play it, you know it’s going to kick off. We normally play it second to last in the main set - it’s always a real sweet spot. Over the years, we used to play it earlier to kick things off, but it seems to work nicely towards the end - it’s a nice thing to build up to. When I play it now, I sometimes think back to those huge festival slots that we had at Reading and Glastonbury - it would always go off at those huge shows.”

This October, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of 1977, Ash are reissuing their debut album as a special 2LP or 2CD set, as well as a digital version. The new editions feature extra tracks, B-sides, live versions and rarities, including a new demo mix of Girl from Mars. From September, the band are embarking on a world tour, on which they’ll play the whole of 1977, as well as other songs from throughout their career.

So, international travel is on the cards for Wheeler over the next few months, but how does he feel about space travel these days? Would he like to go on a mission to Mars?

“I would find it quite terrifying now to be honest,” he says. “I like the Buck Rogers version [of space] where you’re walking around, and you don’t need any fancy headgear and all that. Last year, we did a video for [new song] Give Me Back My World, where we were in replica space suits and it was incredibly claustrophobic. I was like, ‘wow - this is so intense…’

“I’ve read a lot about the Apollo missions, and it seems like it must’ve been so terrifying. I do like hearing about how when you’re looking down at the world how small it can look and what perspective that can give you - that sounds amazing - but going to Mars is a whole other thing; an epic voyage. I’m not sure about it at this point in my life - I’ve got kids… I’m happier to stay on Earth, but it’s nice to look at the stars.”

Ash’s 1977 30th Anniversary Edition is released on October 16 via BMG. For tour dates, visit Ash's official website.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whenever we discuss the so-called ‘loudness war’ here at MusicRadar, a key citation is often Metallica’s 2008 album Death Magnetic. The extreme volume of this Rick Rubin-produced record was the result of deliberate mixing and mastering choices, designed to make the tracks as in-your-face as possible when heard on radio - albeit to the detriment of dynamic range…

Mixing the record back then was Andrew Scheps - now universally regarded as one of the industry’s most accomplished mixing engineers. Scheps has overseen records from Adele, Green Day, Lana Del Rey, Lady Gaga and Justin Timberlake to name just a few. Back in 2008, when the loudness war was in full force, Scheps unfairly swallowed some of the criticism for the record’s ultra-extreme peaks.

With the loudness war now (largely) consigned to history, we spoke to Scheps at length about his career in 2023. Andrew reflected on that time period… and the fact that Death Magnetic in a sense was the last word in the audio conflict, as it couldn’t really be topped when it came to volume…

“I was the poster child for ‘loud’ because of that Death Magnetic record. You know, everybody hated that Metallica record that was ‘the loudest thing’. My line is that the loudness war is over because I won. And that's it. And that was the record that did it,” Scheps told us.

“I think, in pop radio, there really was a loudness war,” Scheps elaborated. “You had to be loud. But radio stations compress the crap out of everything. Everything that plays on Radio 1 is exactly the same level, it doesn't matter what level the mix was. So I think it was all a little bit inflated, and it was a lot just completely outside of my awareness… I never did anything because it had to be louder. Ever. Everything I did was always because ‘it's not feeling right’.

For Scheps, sometimes going quiet just wasn’t an option when working with Metallica; “There are people who will say ‘well just make it a quieter mix, and we can turn the volume up,’ but it's just not as simple as that. Forcing all that audio energy through a smaller hole because it's bigger? It just sounds different. It really does.”

On the recording of Death Magnetic specifically - and just how a simple guitars, bass and drum setup yielded such volume - Scheps pointed to Metallica’s technical proficiency as the real underlying engine driving the sound…

“Greg Fidelman recorded that. But no, there aren't a ton of guitars. I think sometimes people just forget that everybody in Metallica is really, really good at what they do. I mean, James’s rhythm parts are insane. His right hand looks like it's not even moving. And it's one of the most aggressive, precise things you've ever heard in your life. So two of those? That's a big machine. If you put more on there, it would actually end up getting smaller because they would just start collapsing together. So it really is just the band,” explained Scheps.

“You're so lucky to work on projects like that. It's not like they aren't still hard work. And it's not like you don't have to do anything. It's really hard work and there's a lot to do. Those mixes took a long time to get right. Songs are very long, and you have to keep people engaged the whole time, but to have that raw material? You know, it's a pretty good start.”

Read our full interview with Andrew Scheps here.

What is it?

The premise of the Towers Stereo Reverberant Filter pedal is to feed your guitar signal through what EarthQuaker describes as “an array of infinitely repeating micro-echoes” into a large cathedral-style reverb.

The whole lot then interacts with a resonant low-pass filter that’s woven into the signal path for an extra layer of harmonic complexity.

Specs

• PRICE: $299 | £329 | €338
• ORIGIN: USA
• TYPE: Stereo Reverberant
  Filter pedal
• FEATURES: Tails or Full bypass, 8x assignable presets
• CONTROLS: Length, Frequency, Mix, Filter, Preset selector, Mode switch (Man/Env/LFO), Stretch footswitch, Activate footswitch
• CONNECTIONS: Standard inputs (L/Mono, R), standard outputs
  (L/Mono, R), EXP
• POWER: 9V DC adaptor (not supplied) 85mA
• DIMENSIONS: 108 (w) x 121 (d) x 64mm (h) 
• CONTACT: EarthQuaker Devices

Usability and sounds

While you get a standard Mix knob to add effected sound to the dry signal, and a Length knob that determines how long your reverb tail is, the filtering is the key to the Towers’ unique sonic aspects, adding a ringing richness and movement.

A Filter knob controls how much the filter is mixed into the reverb pathways, determining the depth of harmonic resonance, with the filter Frequency dialling in variations of the effect via three toggle-switched modes that determine how it is applied.

Manual mode is used for setting the Frequency knob where you want it for tonal shading. In Envelope mode you can control the filter frequency with picking dynamics, the Frequency knob adjusting the sensitivity of the envelope and determining how you can emphasise that ‘opening filter’ movement in the sound. In LFO mode the filter frequency is controlled by a slow moving LFO, with the Frequency knob adjusting the sweep rate.

It’s here that you’ll find the most dramatic stereo effects as the signal pans across the field.

With left and right channels working independently, the pedal is at its optimum in stereo, but its richly textured reverb still works perfectly well in mono.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★½

There’s plenty to explore, with subtle sonic changes engendered by small knob adjustments, so it’s great that there are eight preset slots for you to save and recall any favourite sounds you might discover.

For performance, a second footswitch initiates the Stretch function, which slows the processor speed, doubling the length of reverb effect and generating a lo-fi effect that pulls apart the delay lines while smearing the filter and lowering the frequency responses – it’s not unlike a tape slowing-down/speeding-up effect.

There’s also provision to plug in an expression pedal for control of any one of the parameter knobs.

MusicRadar verdict: Just when you think you’ve seen enough fancy reverbs and ambience pedals, along comes another. However, EarthQuaker Devices has proven past history within this area and it all comes together in this excellent example of the genre’s shifting atmospheric soundscapes.

Hands-on videos

EarthQuaker Devices

Sweetwater

Cesar Soto of Ministry x EQD

• “A feral supernova awaits if you dime those dials”: EarthQuaker Devices Barrows Fuzz Attacker review
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save

Brian Setzer says that he feels “98 per cent” and is playing as good as he ever has after recovering from an autoimmune condition that left him unable to play the guitar.

Speaking to Guitar World, the Stray Cats frontman admitted that his career was hanging in the balance, after losing the use of his hands in late 2024.

““It was the strangest thing…before you knew it I was having trouble holding a toothbrush, a fork. I couldn’t button my pants,” he said. “There was no pain, but my hands just wouldn’t work. Of course, there was no way I could play the guitar, which was pretty scary.”

Worst still. There was no off-the-shelf cure, no magic pill to make him better. What worked was his doctor’s “Plan A”.

“When my doctor diagnosed my condition, he told me there was no real cure, so it wasn’t a slam-dunk that I would see results,” he said. “But his plan A was to get me playing again.”

Setzer announced he had the condition in February 2025, and first noticed it during the Stray Cats’ tour, when his hand would be cramping up. “It feels like I’m wearing a pair of gloves when I try to play,” he wrote on Instagram. He was in the early stages of his treatment but had recuperated to the point of being able to tie his shoelaces and hold a pen.

Setzer received treatment for almost a year, undertaking a programme of infusions at Mayo Clinic until he regained the ability to hold a Gretsch guitar in his hand and fret some notes – and regain it he did.

The Stray Cats have returned with their first new material in six years, with two singles, Stampede and Teenage Heaven – and Setzer is on blistering form. The latter is an old Eddie Cochran tune, and the former has an interesting back story. It’s technically a cover, too – though a reimagining/rewrite might be a better descriptor. It was originally a super-short, sub-two-minute surf-rock instrumental by the Scarlets, which was put out on 7” by Prince Records in 1959. There was not much there but it planted the seed in Setzer’s mind.

“I heard the song and thought the guitarist was so good,” he tells Guitar World. “I said, ‘I want to play that!’ There wasn’t enough of a song there, but I loved the riff, so I basically wrote a song around it.”

That Scarlets riff is a doozie. Setzer gives it a different treatment, a little rawer and more overdriven and throaty than the splish-splash spring reverb soaked original. But it’s a strange riff, with a little something about it that reminds us of something – one YouTube commentator said Master Of Puppets.

And it is an important riff. Pete Antonio and John Sanzone laid this down in 1959. Could they credibly claim to be the first surf-rock band, beating Dick Dale to the punch? Dale did not release Let’s Go Trippin’ until 1961.

Besides his peerless rockabilly playing, this is another of Setzer’s gifts – he unearth’s classics from rock ’n’ roll history that are ripe for rediscovery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wearable music-making tech is a somewhat niche category that’s given rise to some innovative products over the years, perhaps the most famous example being Imogen Heap’s MiMU gloves, a pair of sensor-equipped gloves that translate the flex and orientation of your hands into expressive MIDI control.

The latest entry into the canon is a one-off DIY effort from content creator, maker and 3D printing enthusiast 3DSage, who has designed what we’re fairly certain is the world’s first wrist-worn sequencer. (It’s also a rudimentary synth, but you might be surprised to learn that Audioweld beat 3DSage to the punch on that front with the unveiling of the Synthwatch back in 2018.)

Clad in a 3D-printed transparent plastic enclosure inspired by Y2K-era aesthetics, the Sage Sequencer gives you a clear view of its insides, and snaps on to the wrist via a slap bracelet (another retro touch) custom-made by encasing measuring tape in Gorilla tape.

Running on a custom PCB built around an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with an integrated 240x240 display, the sequencer features both a speaker and headphone jack and is powered by a USB-C rechargeable battery. You can play it, too: there’s a set of eight pins that run along the side which can be tapped with the attached stylus to play the notes of a single octave, producing a Stylophone-esque square wave that matches its old-school vibe.

The interface is controlled via a rotary knob and a single button: the button plays and pauses the sequence, while the knob navigates the sequencer’s 16 steps and edits the note values, which are arranged in a 4x4 grid. Its step count can vary from 4 to 16, and up to 10 patterns can be stored on the device.

Both tempo and overall pitch can be adjusted, and there’s a pattern generator on board that produces randomized sequences too. There’s even a secret playable game hidden behind the start screen, just in case you get a little bored. (The only thing it doesn’t do is tell the time.)

The Sage Sequencer might well be a little basic in its functionality – and likely to prompt a few raised eyebrows if you wear it out in public – but it’s pretty impressive for a DIY build and passion project, and as far as we can tell it holds the title of being the only wrist-based sequencer in existence. Bravo, 3DSage.

If you’ve ever been overcome by the desire to knock up a chiptune masterpiece on the go, then we have some bad news: you can’t currently buy a Sage Sequencer, but the creator says that he’s considering building a few more to sell, so hit 3DSage up in the YouTube comments if you’re interested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gretsch releasing a limited edition Penguin is always something to write home about – maybe also an occasion to check the bank account – and this summer’s release is no different.

This one dresses the classic singlecut electric guitar in Pale Blue Pearl and gives it a host of top-tier appointments that speak to the brand’s history.

The G6134T-58 is the kind of guitar that will look good in any lighting but we can’t help thinking how it might look in the spotlight, with that pearlescent top and the silver sparkle binding the kind of aesthetic largesse that pretty much only Gretsch guitars can get away with.

They have the golden era class to pull them off (revious limited run Penguins have given the singlecut a paisley finish with a gold edge burst, Champagne Sparkle, or with a quilted maple top).

Gretsch signature flourishes abound. This has the classic chambered mahogany body with a maple arch top. Be glad of that chambering because there is a Bigsby B3GP string-through vibrato tailpiece, and that can put the weight on (expect this to weigh between the 8 and 9lb mark).

There’s a glued-in mahogany neck with a Standard U profile. We have the 24.6” scale length, the Space Control bridge with its pinned-ebony base, mother of pearl Neo Classic thumbnail inlays on a 12” radius ebony fingerboard. This being a Japanese-made Professional Series instrument, you can bet the build will be tip-top.

But once you get over that finish and just how good it looks, it’s probably the pickups that are the star of the show. Gretsch has fitted this with a pair of TV Jones Ray Butts Ful-Fidelity Filter’Tron pickups, which are made to Butts’ original specifications and sound…

Well, they sound ridiculously good whenever we have heard them – and Jason Harris gets them to sing in the official Gretsch demo video.

These are the kind of pickups many of us wish we had in our Gretsches but you can’t simply buy these for an Electromatic or Streamliner and drop them in. The bridge ‘bucker has a DCR reading of 4.2K, the neck a reading of 3.8K. They sound like a TV Classic but have a tighter low end and you’ll find more detail in the high-frequencies.

This guitar does not come cheap. It’ll set you back £3,699/$3,799 street. But that price includes a hard-shell guitar case – and one of the coolest guitars we have seen this year so far. Just add a nice tube combo and you’re good to go.

See Gretsch for more details.

Riding high in the pantheon of the most aura-farming rockstars, Motörhead’s Lemmy garnered respect from all corners of the musical map.

Formerly of Hawkwind, Lemmy (aka Ian Fraser Kilmister) founded Motörhead in 1975 and remained the group’s only continuous member, with his coruscating vocals and thunderous bass the pivotal centre that his fellow Motörhead-men orbited.

But the sideburn-sporting Lemmy, who sadly passed away in December 2015, wasn’t just a lover of high-octane riffage, he also had something of a lifelong fixation with rockabilly; a genre that stemmed from the early rock ’n’ roll he’d first fallen in love with as a teen.

Back in 2012, MusicRadar chatted to Lemmy about this unlikely side-passion which he indulged with his other band, The Head Cat.

The band included Stray Cats drummer Slim Jim Phantom and guitarist Danny B Harvey. Ahead of a show at the Roxy in Los Angeles, MusicRadar sat down with Lemmy for a chat about rockabilly and how this other strand of his career began…

“We were doing a track for this album [Swing Cats: A Special Tribute To Elvis], and when we were done, we started fooling around with guitars. Before you knew it, we were playing a bunch of songs. It came easy - and that's the best way, isn't it? That's how you know you've got something worth doing,” Lemmy told us.

“I wasn't looking to start another group, so it's probably a big mistake that I went ahead with this. [laughs] But you know, when you've got some chemistry, and everybody knows the same songs, and they're good at what they're doing, why waste the opportunity?”

One of the big benefits of the Head Cat for Lemmy was the lack of pressure on it compared to Motörhead;

“Touring with Motörhead is so time-consuming. It's all I can do to find the time to do anything else. I don't know when The Head Cat is going to go into the studio again – there's no plans – but if we get two days off, we could make another record.

“We just get together and play, that's all,” continued Lemmy. “We can play just about anything, you know. Name a song, play it, see if the other guys know it – that's what we do in the studio. If you can't remember something, then pick another song. It's pretty easy."

His love of rockabilly (and indeed, rock in general) stemmed from attending a Billy Fury show in his youth, and that’s where his fixation began…

“Billy had the whole star thing down, had a silver suit and the whole bit. He was from Liverpool, same as The Beatles. Ballads were his main thing, but he did rock 'n' roll on his B-sides - that's what I liked, the rock stuff.”

We asked Lemmy for his perspective on how that original form of rock ’n’ roll became more watered down and chart-angled as the 1960s grew. But Lemmy was surprisingly open-minded;

“I didn't care, really – still don't. Just as long as it's a good song, that's all I ever cared about. The word 'pop' is just shorter for saying 'popular.' Just 'cause something's popular, it can still be good. In fact, if more people are buying it, then you must be doing something right. People look down on stuff that sells. What do you call that? Downward snobbery, I guess.”

Read our full classic interview with Lemmy here

What is it?

High-quality, low-priced electric guitars are a dime a dozen these days. That’s a great thing for both novice players and those looking to expand their collection without having to smash open the piggy bank.

Thomann-owned Harley Benton has found itself at the top of the tree when it comes to offering a lot of bang for very little buck, and its latest, modern-minded T-types are very much a case in point. From roasted flamed maple necks to locking tuners and glow-in-the-dark side markers, its spec sheet is generous for a sub-$500 axe.

But times, as Bob Dylan once said, are a-changing. Access to factories and materials is increasing, helping to drive down prices while simultaneously ramping up specs. And the more budget brands on offer – Sire is one of the brands proving a bit of a dark horse here – the more weight firms throw at their cheapest models. This iteration of its successful Suhr-inspired Fusion series is one such beneficiary as Harley Benton bids to remain ahead of the curve.

It sports a nyatoh body, the aforementioned roasted flame maple neck, and a rosewood fingerboard adorned with 24 frets. Its neck is billed as having a modern C-profile, a 12”–16” fretboard radius, and a Graph Tech TUSQ XL nut.

The electronics are also modern-minded, with two gold-covered Tesla Opus humbuckers, one Volume, one Tone control, an Alter mini-switch for a variety of coil combo sounds, and a five-way pickup switch.

Other specs include a Babicz Z-Series FCH hardtail bridge and a heel-mounted truss rod wheel. It’s well appointed, but does it outgun the other guitars at its price point?

Specs

• Launch price: £385 / $433 / €449
  Made: Indonesia
  Type: Six-string electric guitar
  Body: Nyatoh
  Neck: Roasted Canadian flamed maple, C-profile
  Fingerboard: Rosewood, circle dot inlays, glow-in-the-dark side dots, 305mm - 406mm (12" - 16") compound radius
  Scale length: 648mm (25.5")
  Nut/width: Graph Tech TUSQ XL, 42mm (1.65")
  Frets: 24, medium jumbo Blacksmith stainless steel
  Hardware: gold Babicz Z-Serie FCH fixed hardtail bridge, Jinho JN-07 staggered locking tuners
  String spacing at bridge: 52mm
  Electrics: Tesla Opus-1B and Opus-1N Alnico 5 humbuckers, five-way switch, mini Alter switch; 1x volume control, 1x tone controls
  Weight: 7.01lbs/3.18kg
  Options: including EMG pickup model in Satin Black, White Metallic with Babicz tremolo
  Left-handed options: including Flame Bengal Burst, Satin Gold (with Babicz FCH 2-Point Special Z-Series C tremolo), Black Metallic Gloss with maple fingerboard, EMG pickup model in Matte Black
  Finishes: options for hardtail include Purple Metallic (as reviewed), Quilt Black Burst Gloss with maple fingerboard, Flame Bengal Burst, Black Metallic Gloss, Satin Grey with maple fingerboard
  Case: Not included
  Contact: Harley Benton

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★☆

In a world littered with T-type copyists, it’s interesting to see Harley Benton colouring outside the traditional lines here and looking to brands like Suhr and Ibanez with its Fusion design. The Purple Metallic colourway, paired with the gold hardware, gives it a regal, premium look, but it also brings to mind Lari Basilio's LB1 Ibanez signature.

The Volume and Tone controls sit in tidy little grooves, and the embossed headstock logo makes it feel more like a premium player than a budget build. Everything fits snugly. It’s very well put together.

There are contours galore too, with the cut around the back of the treble horn, and the slick neck heel cut itself showing a level of detail I’m not used to at this budget.

This guitar has been living in and out of my office during a heat wave during some of the testing, with temperatures reaching 35°C on multiple days, and my office is small. It gets hot very quickly. Yet most of the time I’ve picked up this guitar, its tuning has remained pretty consistent.

A closer look at the bridge, which ditches the traditional ashtray approach, does a lot to instil confidence; this isn’t an own-brand pale imitation of a hardtail; it’s a branded and well-thought-out design.

Most notably, the eCAM system, which replaces small-screw saddles with a rotating cam-shaped design, endeavours to eliminate unwanted gaps between the bottom of the saddle and the top of the bridge plate, thereby improving sustain. As far as functionality and feel are concerned, it’s hard to fault it.

For my money, this Fusion-T II's weight is in that happy midpoint between being back-breakingly heavy and so light it doesn’t feel like you’re playing a guitar. Simply, it feels pretty good slung over my shoulder

I don't think the circle dot are a good design choice from a practical perspective. They’re quite subtle, which goes against what they’re on the guitar for. Thankfully, the glow-in-the-dark side dots are big enough to land a plane on.

Playability

Playability rating: ★★★½

The biggest surprise for me is that, contrary to its outward appearance as a modern machine, this Fusion-T II's neck is far thicker than I expected. It’s less shredder/session guitar and more old-school Fender.

Using digital callipers, I measured the neck thickness at the first and 12th frets to be 23mm and 23.3mm, respectively. That's thicker than the 21mm billed at the first fret in the official specs. It also comes in thicker than my Squier Classic Vibe baritone Telecaster (23mm and 23mm) and my Charvel Pro-Mod So-Cal Style 2 24 HH HT CM (20mm and 21mm). It absolutely impacts the playability for me. I found the beefy neck needs to be fought with a little, and it definitely slows me down when I’m playing leads.

The guitar ships with 10-46 gauge Harley Benton HQS EL Coated, which feel quite tight, especially on the higher strings, when in standard tuning. I’d be tempted to try 9s or 9.5s to make bends a little easier. These two features conspire to make playing the guitar a little less forgiving than anticipated for me.

The frets have been finely filed, and the arm contour really thins out the guitar body at the point of contact with my arm. That makes it perfectly comfortable to play, but I’m not sure the Alter switch is in the best place. It feels a little inaccessible to use on the fly, positioned as it is between the two control dials.

Placing it on the bass-side horn like a Les Paul, or offsetting it away from the dials, would have meant I didn’t feel I had to skirt around the outside of the Volume dial or over it to get to it. This is a switch I’ll use in the moment when gigging. Getting to it quickly is vital.

It’s worth mentioning that simplicity in design has paid off elsewhere. With a hardtail bridge and no tremolo bar, there are fewer things to go wrong and negatively affect tuning stability. That’s a smart option for a range with plenty of trem options elsewhere.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★☆

Starting with mid-gain Neural DSP plugin amp models to test the sounds, the pink amp on Tim Henson X (based on a Marshall JCM 800) quickly highlights how well-balanced the Fusion-T II's pickups are. There’s plenty of warm, roundness to the lower notes in the bridge position, with the higher octaves not too sharp or fluffy. Digging in, I can get a decent amount of grit and growl, with the guitar holding together so that, when I do, it doesn’t slip out of tune.

Position four thins out the tone, but not to the point of grating brittleness, while the middle pickup does everything it needs to do in providing a clean tone that’s neither too thick nor too thin, and, paired with the Henson plugin's Black amp, does a very impressive steel-string acoustic impression. I did, however, find position two to be a little nasal and generally underwhelming.

Which brings us nicely onto Harley Benton’s party trick: the Alter switch. If I’m honest, I was surprised it went for a five-way switch and the Alter switch. Often, it’s a three-way switch and a mini-switch for coil-split single-coil sounds, so it’s gone the extra mile here. It says the switch doubles the guitar’s total configurations, affecting all five positions, but, more intriguingly, it talks a big game about its “ghost tone”.

This isn’t just a switch in place of a split coil; it delivers “a hybrid tone which blends the warm bass of a humbucker with the bright bite of a single coil and takes on a spectral quality for ghostly playing.”

To me, that sounds like PR gobbledegook. These "Ghost Coil" split modes add partial coil blending in the five Alter-on switch positions, while retaining hum cancellation. Position five becomes a little snappier without draining it of low-end warmth completely. But nothing feels "ghostly" here to me, and the difference it makes feels too subtle elsewhere.

Engaging the switch in position four certainly makes it bite like a traditional single-coil Tele, but from a practicality point of view, going from position five and engaging the Alter switch in one fell swoop isn’t easy to do while playing a riff. I dare say Harley Benton is trying to be too clever for its own good here. I’d have been very happy with a three-way switch and a push/pull coil split.

That being said, I am really impressed with how responsive the Tesla pickups are to Volume control adjustments: in the middle position, with the Alter switch engaged and the Volume rolled back, it’s got a really slinky, sparkly quality that is very satisfying.

Elsewhere, the Fusion-T II can handle metal to a point, but has an innate snarl that’s a little much for my ears; it needs the edges sanded down with a bit of EQ. But with dry-as-a-bone tones - tested through the Henson plugin’s acoustic amp, Universal Audio’s Showtime ’64, and some black panel Fender amp models found on the Mooer GE15 Pro Li- there’s balance, clarity, and a really nice-to-the-ear sound.

Often with more budget-skewed ‘buckers, it’s these moments where their imperfections show themselves, but the Tesla pair pass the test with flying colours.

Verdict

This is a difficult guitar to put a review score on; if a four-star rating feels a little generous in light of the Alter switch and a surprisingly beefy neck that feels out of place with the style of this guitar, a 3.5-star review wouldn’t do it justice. This Fusion-T II is well-built, spec'd to the teeth, and holds up tonally. Yet the neck is too fat for its modern C-profile: billing, the Alter switch doesn’t do enough for me to warrant regular use, and overall, it feels nearly-but-not-quite.

If you find a thicker neck to be an attraction, the rest of the positives are plentiful; its looks are standout, the attention to detail in its build, from its contours to its hardware, goes against the current of its price, and its tuning stability is mightily reassuring.

But the neck makes it harder to play than its specs suggest, and as good as the pickups are, they aren’t a great option for heavier sounds to my ears. The strengths are still significant here, though.

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Cast your mind back to the golden age of music criticism when formulaic was one of the ultimate pejoratives – the caveat to give us the ick. How times change.

Pop formulas are on the syllabus at music schools. Melodies and song structures are engineered to anticipate our expectations rather than confound them. To quote Computer Music’s 2021 tutorial on Songwriting basics: how to create a modern pop song using just 4 chords, individuality is welcome, but, “if you want your tunes to fit well against the current landscape, they’ll inevitably need to conform to some extent to what your audience is expecting”. That’s just how it is.

But the brothers Ron and Russell Mael of Sparks never bought into any of that. They exist, Sparks exists, to summon something new out of the ether. Probably something a little weird.

Sparks are tribunes of pop’s avant-garde wing, career subversives who will give you what you want just as long as it’s a sense of surprise. Who else would advertise their “first full concert album” as having been recorded “at the beautiful Taruntius Crater” on the moon, with Hollywood A-lister Cate Blanchett the LA duo’s emcee for the evening?

The glint in Russell Mael’s eye as he joins MusicRadar over Zoom suggests Live On The Moon has a more terrestrial provenance but where and when on their MAD! Tour that would be telling.

No, this is Sparks going once more unto the breach, going “beyond” the music and deeper into their own universe, daring the audience to follow.

“The people that we have always liked the most in pop music have like, it seems to me, a universe around them where you can’t separate the person, or the artist, from their work,” says Mael. “It’s one and the same, and I think that it’s not something that we ever set out to do, but it’s just the way we are as artists, wanting to create a universe through the music – the lyrics, the image, the videos, the album artwork…”

The brothers Mael have been a blur of reinvention since the beginning, when they were presenting glam rock as radical pop theatre, a medium for absurdist lyrics, and over the course of 28 albums their stylistic convolutions have augmented the rock-and-pop idiom, laying the ground for the ‘80s synth-pop explosion, reinventing the rock opera…

You have Russell, the whirligig master of ceremonies with a puckish stage presence and falsetto range. You have Ron on keys/synth, stoic and theatrically impassive, his Chaplin/Hitler moustache now clipped into a less troubling pencil profile redolent of old Hollywood.

Even after Edgar Wright made a documentary about them, the brothers still seem enigmatic, wired to a different grid.

Mael feels today’s pop lacks something else beyond the immediate.

“[With] a lot of artists now, there’s a lot of this confessional kind of pop music that seems to be, like, it’s literally about, ‘Oh, that guy, he left me. I’m gonna pay him back!’ It is a lot of that,” he says. “It’s this confessional stuff that is kind of one-dimensional. It just seems like it’s there on the surface, and it’s literally about that.”

“What I really like is people who have a craft, or a craft for their music, where you care about the lyrics going beyond [that], and hopefully the music is going beyond, and the music always being challenging, and that you have – like you said – created a universe, and the rules within that universe can be anything, because it’s your world that you created.”

This pop-auteur theory afforded Sparks the freedom to follow their musical curiosity to see where it might lead. Not everyone wanted to follow them on that journey. The universe Sparks created bewildered some critics.

Their reinventions were a little too far ahead of the game, like when their heads got turned by the futuristic sounds of Giorgio Moroder’s studio work with Donna Summer as the disco era embraced new synthesized sounds. Why couldn’t the disco ball shine light across Sparks’ expanding musical universe? They would do a Moroder record their way.

“And for us, it was all consistent,” says Mael. “But at the time, you know, some [people], especially critics, thought that we were being blasphemous to whatever they thought our cause should be, that ‘it’s not rock music anymore’, or whatever. ‘You’re using electronics,’ and all that. Just being able to shift and work – with any kind of backdrop – that’s what we really enjoy. It’s the freedom that, we have a band, but it doesn’t mean that you have to use the band in a traditional way on every song.”

This freedom took Sparks from the bombastic avant-rock theatre of their 1974 hit This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us to the ecstasies of the Moroder-produced studio album Nº1 In Heaven in just five years. Welcome to the future.

Electric guitars were temporarily decommissioned in favour of the synthesizer, and yet tracks such as Beat The Clock, Tryouts For The Human Race, and The Number One Song in Heaven were quintessential Sparks. This was the Mael brothers doing disco, even if stumbling out of Studio 54 in the wee small hours was never their scene.

“It’s never been, from our standpoint, a thing of being infatuated with club music, or dance music,” says Mael. “What we liked was the sound of what Giorgio was doing with I Feel Love, and that sort of thing, and so we thought that the marriage of electronics with what we were doing, and with our lyrics, and my singing and all, would be something really fresh and special.

“And so it wasn’t that we ever hung out at Studio 54 or anything. [Laughs] It’s probably about as far from our sensibility as you can get.”

In Moroder they had found a kindred spirit. Dan Wyman, who had just worked with John Carpenter on the Halloween score, was hired to program the synths. Keith Forsey, who gave Blondie’s Moroder-produced hit Call Me its propulsive beat, played drums.

Nº1 In Heaven was something new for Moroder, too. Here he was working with a band, with two brothers at the heart of it. It was a collaboration on a different scale.

“No matter how amazing Donna Summer was, it was a challenge for him to be working with people coming from a band sensibility,” says Mael. “And so I think that was something from his standpoint, too, that was exciting.”

Sparks came as prepared as they usually did, which meant that some material was written and the rest was “winged” in the studio as they went along.

“It’s kind of what we do, and I think that was also what made it interesting,” says Mael. “Nobody knew what the final outcome would be, and it came out like it did. And I think it’s just working with three really strong people – Ron, myself, and Giorgio – and each coming with our own strengths and abilities, and pooling those things together.”

The synthesizers and sequencers brought a different energy to Sparks, a relentlessness. Moroder’s electronic production had the transformative effect they were looking for. Repetition, especially in lyrics, has always been a leitmotif of the Mael brothers’ songwriting, vocal refrains repeated to the point of giddiness, but here there was an electronic accompaniment doing something similar with the instrumentation.

Looking back, Mael simply saw it as a chance for them to push themselves and come up with something different.

“We just like having challenges and being thrown into situations where we’re uncomfortable, and I think that that was a situation where we were uncomfortable because it was out of our normal element,” he says. “I think it’s always good to be thrown into situations where you are uncomfortable because hopefully something new will come of it.”

It is one of the reasons why Sparks have always been so keen on collaborating with filmmakers. Cinematic references abound in their discography, in paeans to Katharine Hepburn, Veronica Lake, Gone With The Wind, and Ingmar Bergman. Dramaturgy’s Fourth Wall would certainly be a challenge worth scaling, allowing the Maels to work both sides of the curtain with a knowing wink.

They famously came close to working with the late Jacques Tati on his Monsieur Hulot films, a picture titled Confusion in which the veteran French director considered killing the character off in an on-set accident with a prop gun.

Their title track for the movie ended up on 1976’s Big Beat, with Sparks performing two tracks from the album in the 1977 cult disaster thriller Rollercoaster. Sparks stepped in after Kiss turned it down and played Big Boy and Fill-er-up. A young Helen Hunt can be seen rocking out to them.

But Sparks had to wait until 2021 to really scratch their cinematic itch when they teamed up with director Leos Carax for Annette, the musical starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, with Carax co-writing lyrics alongside the band.

“It’s throwing you into a world that is not your normal world, and that there’s a whole other set of rules,” says Mael. “And you’re fresh coming into that with your own sensibility of how things should work. I think that’s why a movie like Annette was really special and unique, because it was not going at it with a kind of jaded knowledge of what you do when you’re making a movie – and especially a musical. Any situation like that where you’re forced to be in an uncomfortable environment is potentially good for the outcome.”

Live On The Moon opens with So May We Start, the curtain raiser from the Annette soundtrack, and dives deep into the Sparks catalogue.

There are lesser-performed tracks like Academy Award Performance (another Hollywood reference) and Whippings And Apologies from their 1972 sophomore album, A Woofer in Tweeter’s Clothing, and performing them alongside perennials such as The Nº1 Song In Heaven and Sparks’ calling card, This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us (hey, another Hollywood reference).

“It’s a special song,” says Mael. “It was special then. I think it’s still special and unique now. So it’s a song that we would be remiss, I think, not doing it – and we enjoy doing it, and the fans enjoy hearing it, too.”

When Mael looks out from the stage, he is seeing younger faces in the audience.

“Some of it – a lot of it – we owe to Edgar Wright with the documentary [The Sparks Brothers], because he introduced the band to a lot of people that weren’t aware of Sparks,” he says. “I think those new fans that were attracted from that movie, and also from Annette… They see the new albums, the latest albums as being the focal point, and then going back and discovering albums like Kimono My House [and] Nº1 In Heaven.”

The cinema can be a compelling recruiting sergeant. But maybe it’s also a question of the audience seeking out new thrills.

Sparks have always been ahead of their time but in an era of programmatic pop – and worse, an era in which AI programs have digested the pop formulas required to make music ex nihilo with no living human needed, maybe we need a band who is just too weird to be anything other than human. A band that invites us all to consider the absurdity of the human condition, and to rejoice in it.

• Live On The Moon is out now via Transgressive
• Catch Sparks live at Green Man Festival this weekend Aug 23, at York Barbican on Aug 25 and Cliffs Pavilion, Southend On Sea on August 26. See Sparks for ticket details.

Jam Pedals and Stu Mackenzie have joined forces for an overdrive/distortion pedal that unlocks the small-amp magic of his King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard electric guitar tone.

The Tiny Amp Destroyer is inspired by Mackenzie’s utterly unorthodox setup, in which he drives a 30-dollar pawnshop guitar amp with a boost pedal and cleans it up by rolling his volume knob back. It’s the sound you hear on albums such as Flight b741, where these poor little amplifiers – in various stages of distress – yield hot yet boxy tones that sound great on a record.

In a sense, Mackenzie’s approach is straight out of the Recording Guitar: 101, in which a small amp, typically a compact tube amp combo such as the Fender Champ, would play a starring roll. Stick a mic in front of it and your good to go. Well, Mackenzie’s amp choices are not a champ.

He got the idea for using the cheapest, nastiest, and smallest solid-state practice amps he could find when giving guitar lessons.

“I used to teach guitar. I used to teach kids and teenagers when I was a teenager myself,” he told Total Guitar in 2024. “People would always come in with these tiny amps, just the classic thirty-dollar amps you can buy at the pawnshop. It’s just the cheapest way to get started with electric guitar, and sometimes these things would sound amazing if you cranked them up loud enough.”

Mackenzie went down to the shops and got himself around eight of these little amps, paying between 20 and 30 dollars for each of them. Turning them up until they suffer is how you get them to play nice. If they break, well, that’s 30 bucks. No biggie.

“You crank them up to a place where they are not supposed to go, and they are distorting when they are on the clean channel… That is awesome to me,” he continued. “A lot of the time it’s the speaker that’s distorting, and there’s something rattling that is not supposed to be rattling, but it’s all harmonics and everything. I am hugely into that.”

The Tiny Amp Destroyer is not an amp in a box in the strictest sense, like how Peavey put the Decade into a preamp pedal to tap into the rush to nail Josh Homme’s tone. “TAD is not an amp in a box,” explains Jam Pedals. “It is the sound of the box losing the fight.”

But it combines the sounds of these transistorised budget amps with a treble booster, presenting them as two independent but stackable drive stages, with a third footswitch activating a treble booster that’s voiced after Jam Pedals’ Rooster.

“It tightens the low end, sharpens the attack and changes how both drive stages respond,” says the Greek effects brand.

There are all kinds of controls for shaping your sound. It might have been inspired by Mackenzie’s rig but it does a lot more. Think of it has two gain voicings, both unruly, one hotter than the other, with Magic and Notch controls for allowing you to dial up the instability or dial in some more conventional drive.

"It makes your massive amp sound tiny, and it's just way better," says Mackenzie.

The first batch of these pedals is sold out — as is the second batch. But more will be coming in late August, early September.

Priced £319/$399, the Tiny Amp Destroyer is available now. Head over to Jam Pedals for more.