Howard Johnson

Kiss legend Gene Simmons fondly recalls the days when a fledgling Rush would regularly play support to the panstick-sporting rockers

On the 30th anniversary of Metallica's Black Album, we go behind the story of the album's cover

Eddie Van Halen's band were never afraid to wear their influences on their (record) sleeves

17 great musicians whose final moments went down in history for the wrong reasons

Fleetwood Mac's Rumours is a perfect album from start to finish, but that doesn't mean we can't rip it up and start again. So here it is, rearranged so it improves the longer you listen

How Iron Maiden forced BBC bosses to bend the rules in order to broadcast their performance of Running Free

The story behind Rage Against The Machine's nude, wordless protest at Lollapalooza in Philadelphia

The Fields of the Nephilim came riding out of Hitchin like desperados in a spaghetti western, and while infighting was their undoing, like the best cowboys, they never said die

A 36-minute Nirvana playlist which should be escorted to a dense forest and left there forever

How Guns N' Roses' anti-establishment stance is now establishment: create demand and fleece the punter for as much as you can

A Scorpions playlist which should really be covered in concrete and thrown into the ocean

Relax, you can keep your lighters firmly in your pocket for these 10 terrible power ballad turkeys

Take a bunch of ambitious lads from Yorkshire, add a brilliant producer, and you get the sort of alchemy that sells 10 million albums. Here's Pyromania, restructured to slowly improve as it plays

Myles Kennedy says the age of the rock star is over. And you know what? He could be right

Can we make one of the biggest selling albums of all time better? Of course we can't. But we can rearrange it so it gets better as it plays

Bob Dylan has rightly been lauded for his contribution to literature, but what about those who lyrical skills are more rudimentary? Here are 10 serial offenders

Ozzy is responsible for some genuine classics. And then there are these stinkers

With Ian Gillan and Roger Glover gone, Deep Purple ripped up the hard rock rulebook and produced one of the greatest albums of the 70s. Here it is, rearranged from worst to brilliant best

Black Sabbath's Paranoid was a full-stop to the Sixties and the start of something truly extraordinary. Nearly five decades later, its impact still resonates...

An Aerosmith playlist chock-full of awfulness

Seasick Steve has been exposed as a jobbing musician rather than a jumper of trains, but haven't musicians always played fast and loose with their stories?

The Priest have recorded some guff in their time. Here are 10 examples...

One of the biggest selling hair metal compendiums in history, we've re-shaped Slippery When Wet so it gets better and better the longer you stick around...

10 songs America took to its collective heart and turned into mega-hits while the British weren't paying attention

Not every song Mötley Crüe recorded was a stone cold classic