Features archive
February 2026
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35 articles
- February 6
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- The 12 best new metal songs you need to hear right now
- “The BBC showed one minute and 10 seconds of it!” Bring Your Daughter To The Slaughter: How a banned, censored and divisive single became Iron Maiden’s only UK number one
- Great new prog you must hear from Green Carnation, Magenta, Exploring Birdsong, A.A. Williams and more in Prog's Tracks Of The Week
- “I asked my mum to make me a costume, which I wore all around London. It tapped into the British sense of humour. There’s nothing more ridiculous”: If Death is a rabbit and you're on TV as a Womble, you’re probably Mike Batt
- February 5
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- "Queen's music doesn't belong to Freddie. It doesn't even belong to Queen any more." Writer/comedian Ben Elton reveals why Robert DeNiro's dream of making a musical about Freddie Mercury's life was vetoed by Brian May and Roger Taylor
- "I was being bombarded with Madonna's image on TV." How a beloved rock band took aim at a pop megastar, sampled Simon & Garfunkel and ushered in a genre-mashing masterpiece with a 90s classic
- "It was this dream song that just turned up as I was waking up one morning. It came to me fully formed." The story of the cinematic classic that kick-started Bob Mould's second life
- "I'm a grownass woman. I’m a female in the world taking care of myself. I can do whatever I want." Femme Fatale singer Lorraine Lewis on relaunching the band, skydiving in a bodysuit and joining OnlyFans
- "It's intense back there. Everybody is nervous. And everybody's really emotional because we know it's the last time." Halestorm's Lzzy Hale on Back To The Beginning: The build-up, the show and the aftershow... and the loss of Ozzy Osbourne
- February 4
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- "He looked at the lyrics and goes, ‘Rock ’n’ roll cocktail – I think I invented that!'" How Queens of the Stone Age got a metal legend to sing on a single US radio would not touch
- "I started meeting all these really warm, nurturing moms in school…and that wasn’t what I was experiencing at home." The heartbreaking tragedies behind the rise of metal's latest sensations
- “They all chimed in, ‘We want some crazy Spanish guitar. Improvise!’ I thought, ‘I’ve bitten off more than I can chew’”: When Queen pressganged Steve Howe into appearing on Innuendo
- “The email said, ‘John Cale is looking for you.’ It absolutely terrified me. I thought I was in trouble!” How the Velvet Underground icon voiced a powerful song on Cate Le Bon’s new album
- "When people hear my versions of pop songs, they're shocked. They never expect to hear Adele sound like that." Meet Solomon Hicks, the New York guitarist bringing the blues to a new audience
- “The lyrics were for people on the fringes”: He made a prog album to inspire positivity. Tragically, one song inspired the man who killed John Lennon
- "When Robert Plant introduced me I achieved closure. I had my song back for the first time since 1961." How Bonnie Dobson's post-apocalyptic first song finally found its way home via the Grateful Dead, Nazareth, Jeff Beck, the Allman Brothers and more
- "Not just a world-class guitar player but an all-around creative force." Nine Joe Bonamassa albums you should listen to, and one to avoid
- February 3
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- "Iʼm not doing it out of guilt. Even if I didnʼt do it, the poverty would still be there." How getting stuck in a "rut", some tempting by Bob Geldof and the most A-list bill in history helped Queen pull off the greatest rock set of all time
- "Having to resort to writing something like this is so embarrassing." The story behind the extremely controversial Nirvana song that almost got them banned and made a US President smash up his own daughter's CD
- "I miss Ukraine very much. I missed it even more when I realised that I cannot go back there." The Soviet-born heavy metal singer who had to flee war to make her rock star dreams come true
- "He was a big, burly dude who would go to the beach in a Speedo at 65 years old and hit on women with the most confidence you’ve ever seen." How the death of a loved one, pig squeals and TikTok helped crown a modern metal classic
- "We have no use for a standalone singer who doesn't play an instrument, preening themselves like a rock god": Atomic Rooster guitarist Steve Bolton on reviving the band, changing frontmen, and John Entwistle's phallic number plate
- “The school would kick everybody out with hair that touched their ears. Someone on the board found out we were wearing short-haired wigs!” Steve Morse endured educational woes, dodgy gear and jazz snobbery, but knew he could make it as a guitarist
- "The aspects of America that are really magical to us are the things it seems to reject, like black music or the Beat poets": The story of the multi-version David Bowie song that captured his revulsion of American corporate dominance
- February 2
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- "They're lining up six hours before the show. They just scream when you go out on stage as if it's Beatlemania." Nine Inch Nails and Korn love them and they might have invented metal's sleaziest subgenre. This is the story of Health
- Classic Rock's Tracks Of The Week: February 2, 2026
- What the 2026 Grammys got right about rock and metal this year - and what they got very wrong
- “We’re not flower children and we’re not yuppies. We’re somewhere in between – the Van Der Graaf Generation”: They had links to Jethro Tull, Voivod and The Cure. Did you really think Men Without Hats were all new wave and no prog?
- "There was no real sign that it was a big protest song, so most people listened to it and didn’t realise": The story of the anti-war commentary disguised as a four-minute pop song that set R.E.M. on the path to global success and stardom
- “We knew costumes wouldn’t be part of it. Phil wouldn’t have been good in a flower mask”: Peter Gabriel’s exit could have finished Genesis. Instead Phil Collins stepped up and they delivered prog classic A Trick Of The Tail
- February 1
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- “We ended up getting really, really hammered and commanding the stage. We were terrible, but we knew there was something magical about it”: The US band who stepped out of Bon Jovi’s shadow to become hair metal’s last superstars
- “I wrote it on a piece of paper somewhere on tour, and I thought, ‘That’s an album!’” A glimpse of how Ian Anderson creates Jethro Tull lyrics
- “We played at a punk club in Germany and this guy was pointing a gun at me the whole time. That was uncomfortable!”: The pioneering European metal queen loved by Dio, Lemmy and Gene Simmons
- “The two Johns very began to hate doing TV shows that wanted us to mime. For a band that worshipped Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy and UFO, it became a really big problem”: The huge 80s hard rock hit that drove a wedge between the band that made it
- “The economy of 80s synthpop made it so attractive. Within us were the seeds of something much more musicianly – whether you like it or not”: Tears For Fears sneaked prog into a run of hit singles in 1984 and 85. So why weren’t they at Live Aid?
