Prior to shepherding Iron Maiden to global megastardom, Rod Smallwood managed a band who, despite all efforts, largely failed to capture the imagination of the record-buying public.

London-based Gloria Mundi were a band out of time. Sharing a philosophy of self-determination and rebellion with the prevailing punk zeitgeist, they were also theatrical, technically adept and artistically ambitious: 1978’s Bowie-influenced I-Individual debut (now finally remastered for vinyl) is an overlooked masterpiece of dystopian proto-goth neo-prog. Vocalist Eddie Maelov takes up the story.

“Sunshine Patteson (keyboards, vocals) and I met at college then went our separate ways. I did a job in theatre and she went to London, where we hooked up again. We decided to travel the world and got as far as Paris, where we decided to write a rock opera.

“Back in London we advertised in Melody Maker for a musical collaborator, and the only person to answer was John Foxx, so we ended up in the early Tiger Lily before they metamorphosed into Ultravox!.”

John Foxx told me Gloria Mundi were “the first goths, the first London band with a synth”, and that it was Sunshine and you who inspired him to buy his first ARP synth. So who was inspiring you?

We’d seen the New York Dolls when they first came to London, but I saw Bowie at The Rainbow. Now here was a guy doing theatre and music together, which is just what I wanted to do. Not the same, but similar. Then I started to get more angry, which came out in the music.

You were already dressing strikingly; there were post-glam hints of 1930s Germany, science fiction…

We wanted to be our own artistic statement, to make each performance an event, an audio-visual experience. We decided early on that grey was going to be the colour of the band, and I had a few theatrical tricks; we used a lot of white light and strobing.

Where did you find the rest of the band?

Ice [Rowland Oxland, bass] was a friend of Stevie Shears from Ultravox!, we got Mike Nicholls [ex-Curved Air, drums] and Beethoven [one-time Sex Pistols auditionee Pete Vas, guitar] from an ad in the Melody Maker, then I met CC though some art performance people. He just came up to me one day and said: “You need a sax player in your band.” I couldn’t find a good reason why not, and so he joined.

How did manager Rod Smallwood come into the picture?

After we started selling out the Marquee, management started sniffing about, and we went with what looked like proper management. Rod and his partner Trevor were proper because they had an office in Knightsbridge… If people ask me what our manager was like I always say: “Have you seen Spinal Tap?”

How are you enjoying re-immersing yourself in I-Individual?

At the time, I was disappointed it didn’t sell more, but that’s the way it goes. I wasn’t entirely happy with the production, but it sounds a lot better now than I remember it. Back then we thought it was us against the world, and it got to a point where we just got too knackered to carry on fighting. Now, I’m speaking to people who actually thought we were good, and it’s vindication.

Gloria Mundi is out on vinyl now via Antenna Records.

Peter Gabriel has shared his latest single from his upcoming o\i album. After the relatively upbeat previous single, One By One, Face The Wall finds the 76-year-old singer pondering death.

"After last month, where we were ‘looking for the happy’, we can just follow that line all the way through and come to Face The Wall, which is looking directly in the face of death. A nice, cheerful subject," Gabriel says.

“The lyric is partly about getting older, facing illness, and it's looking death in the face, which I think we don't do enough of. I know I've talked about this before, but cultures which seem to include death as a normal part of life seem more comfortable with it and live life to the full. That was the starting point.

"Music is a cathartic process for a lot of us, and when I'm singing at the end, ‘I see you coming through’ that is a cathartic moment. I think that is an important line; conditions are getting worse and more intense as the song progresses, but with that lyric it suggests there is a reason to be hopeful.

"You never quite know when you’re in the studio whether the song is going to be a vehicle that can carry people, or not. I know this is going to speak to some people."

As with 2023's i/o album, Gabriel has been releasing a new track every full moon, and Face The Wall is the ninth track he's released ahead of his upcoming album, o\i, which is due out later this year.

The cover art for Face The Wall features a piece entitled The Nest by Tadashi Kawamata, photographed by Mika Huisman, which you can view below.

"When I saw The Nest at Amos Rex, I fell in love with it," Ganriel adds. "To me, the wall is there, big, solid, you know, a bit like death. These messy human chairs are falling over the wall and, somehow, they spill over the top. It's funny, but it's also hopeful and against unbelievable odds.

"I wasn't aware of Tadashi Kawamata's work before seeing this image, but this was the thing that got me excited. I thought it was perfect for this song and got me looking at a lot of his other work.

“I guess I'm attracted to stuff that is going against the rules or doing what it does in an unconventional way. We are used to seeing art in a museum or on walls, and here it is tumbling over the walls. That feels like a more interesting, adventurous, and unlikely context. Tadashi was taking a lot of the elements, the chairs in particular, from local reclamation sites, so they, if you like, belong to that community, that area. [The Lasipalatsi building in the heart of Helsinki]. The site-specific nature of the work is really something that he's having fun playing with.

“An artist to explore for those of you that love this image like I do.”

Ritchie Blackmore has opened up about his recent surprise reunion with Deep Purple.

The 81-year-old guitarist joined his former bandmates onstage at the Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, New York on August 12, where he played Purple classic Smoke On The Water. It was his first appearance with the band since 1993, and followed decades of often bitter estrangement.

Now the guitarist has addressed the reaction to his appearance, which was teased by his wife Candice Night the day before the show. Speaking in the first instalment of a new 13-part interview series with Phil Aston of Now Spinning magazine, Blackmore reveals when he decided to play – and his thoughts on the reaction to his appearance.

“I sat up in bed and thought, ‘What about if I got up on stage, as they're in the area?’” Blackmore says. “They're playing a great place called the Jones Beach Theater. And it's outside, and the view is over the water. Magnificent place. And I've always wanted to play there. But I sat up in bed and I thought, ‘I wonder if...’

Blackmore adds that he asked Candice: “How do you feel about me just asking [Purple singer] Ian Gillan if it's all right to play in Smoke On The Water, then just disappearing?' And then she thought it was a good idea, so we sent him an e-mail via Candice.

“And so we sallied forth and infiltrated. Now Candice sent the e-mail and Ian said, ‘Yes, of course. Welcome aboard. All the band is up for it. Come on stage for Smoke.' I just wanted to do one song, and I thought that would be the song. It’s big over here [in the US] – bigger here than it was in Europe. And so we kind of advertised it in a little way. Not much, just enough. And funnily enough, the ticket sales went up, which was nice. Anyway, they thought it was a good idea.”

Blackmore added that “everybody was so helpful… incredibly nice” when he arrived at the show. “And I played my three or four minutes of Smoke On The Water, which seemed to go down like I just invented the cure for cancer.

He continued: “And I felt very good about it because it was like playing with old friends… It'd been, like, 35 years since I'd actually played with the band, and nobody had changed. Everybody was great. And thank goodness it went off without a hitch, but it could have quite easily have fallen apart, and that would've been embarrassing.

“But it was well worth doing,” he concluded. “It was a good idea that I had, and it came to me very early one morning when I was in bed. I just thought, ‘Why not?’ Cos we never know when we’re going to meet again, which is like a sad note in a way.”

Speaking in the brand new issue of Classic Rock, Ian Gillan suggested the appearance had effectively been in the cards for some time.

“I wasn’t really surprised it happened,” the singer says. “I’ve been in touch with Ritchie for quite a long time now, and we’re on very good terms. All the nonsense from the past is now water under the bridge.”

Clutch have released details of their upcoming 14th album along with a video for the title track Wasted Lands.

The album Wasted Lands will be released on the band's own label Weathermaker Music on January 22, 2027. A promo video for the title track can be viewed below.

Clutch worked with producer Gene 'Machine' Freeman on the recording of the record at their Doom Saloon studio in Frederick, Maryland. It's the first time they've collaborated with Freeman since 2015 album Psychic Warfare.

On the song Wasted Lands, frontman Neil Fallon sings about a creature so awful that he tells us not even H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King could dream it up in their darkest moments. The song reveals the creature as "Neil Patrick Fallon".

Fallon explains: "The inspiration for the lyrics in Wasted Lands came about when it was brought to my attention that someone had been dragging my name on Facebook (weird, right?).

"Apparently, I had reneged on a free t-shirt and dinner. I think it was a prize in a pay to play contest. Not to overstate the obvious, but it was a load of horse hockey.

"Many people tried to explain to this person that it was not me and that they had been hustled. But they simply would not believe it. So I thought, screw it, no half-measures. You want a monster? Let's give you one."

Clutch Wasted Lands tracklisting

01. The Drifter Returns
02. Stage Fright
03. Loaf 'N Jug
04. High Class Action Lawsuit
05. Chestburster
06. Beware The Fever
07. Wound Collector
08. Colorado Fuel And Iron
09. Streets Are His
10. The Green Skull
11. Wasted Lands
12. The Message Is Clear

According to the Guinness Book of Records, the world's most foremost authority on verifying facts and achievements, Napalm Death hold the record for the shortest recorded song.

In the time it takes light to travel from the Earth to the Moon or a Zoomer to lose their attention span while watching online ads, the Birmingham grindcore pioneers recorded their shortest song in 1986. It has a running length of just 1.316 seconds.

You Suffer appears on the first half of the band's 1987 debut Scum. We say first half, because two-thirds of the band who wrote and recorded the first 12 songs – guitarist Justin Broadrick and bassist/vocalist Nicholas 'Nik Napalm' Bullen – left to pursue other musical interests and university studies before a brand new line-up joined drummer Mick Harris to complete a further 16 songs for the album's second half.

The first half of Scum was mostly written in the Broadrick's teenage bedroom in Shard End, Birmingham, where he lived with his mother and step-father. Partly inspired by Oregon crossover thrashers Wehrmacht's own cough-and-you'll-miss-it-song, titled E!, Bullen added his lyrics – four words: 'You suffer, but why?' – before the trio entered Rich Bitch Studios in Birmingham's Selly Oak in August, 1986.

"I was a barely functioning 15-or-16-year-old during my time in Napalm Death," Broadrick told Metal Hammer. "Everyone else in the band was two years older, but what I could do prolifically was write music and create songs. I was writing the majority of the music, and Nic was writing pretty much all the lyrics."

"You Suffer was largely a comedy thing, a one-second song," Bullen told Decibel magazine in their book, Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces. "It's ridiculous, but it was hilarious. We played that song in front of 30 local kids, like, every weekend. We played that song 30 times. It was a laugh."

Sometimes the laughter was directed at the teenage band, rather than with them. But gradually, people began to embrace the Napalm Death's relentlessly chaotic take on metal and punk.

"People would often come to laugh at us because we were like a kid band who played super-fast," Broadrick told Skinny Puppy's cEvin Key on his podcast. "We were like a laughing stock, you know, but eventually we weren't – people started taking this quite seriously. We saw people flocking to this sound. I remember thinking, 'What the fuck is happening here?'"

By the time Scum was released in the summer of 1987, the band's line-up had solidified to feature Lee Dorrian on vocals, Bill Steer on guitar, Shane Embury on bass, and Harris on drums. The four-piece were invited by John Peel to record the first of several Maida Vale sessions for his BBC Radio 1 show, and the late DJ would later play You Suffer a handful of times during a single show.

"There was a period when we had thrash band after thrash band after thrash band coming in to do Maida Vale sessions," said Peel. "These bands played pretty hard, full-on music, and they'd been in a tour van for the last two weeks, and you'd walk into their studio and you'd know they'd been working hard, if you know what I mean. Napalm Death was an extraordinary session because the songs were so short. When a song only lasts two seconds you can hardly say to the band, 'Can you play that again, please, I think a guitar was out of tune."

During this session, which was broadcast on September 22, 1987, the band performed a slightly longer version of the song, titled You Suffer (Part II).

"There is a bit of a novelty," said Harris. "Let's do the shortest, fastest thing you can do. And yeah, there are notes there. People think we just go, 'Blllp,' and that's it. And I believe there's, like, four notes or something. There's a lyric, 'You suffer, but why?' And it's played quick, fast and sharp and as tight as we could. We had a bit of reverb on there. It probably made it longer."

In 1989, the song was given away as a free seven-inch single as part of Earache's scene-defining Grindcrusher compilation. Backed by the Electro Hippies' micro-ballad Mega-Armageddon Death Part 3, it became the shortest single ever released, a feat recognised by Guinness Book of Records.

"We didn't ask for it," Harris told Decibel. "It just got put in there. We were told, 'You've made the Guinness book of World Records.' And we were like, 'Nah, get out of here,' and yes, there it is. It's sort of funny, isn't it? A bit of achievement, I guess."

Unbelievably, the song was brought to national attention two decades after its release, when current Napalm Death vocalist Mark 'Barney' Greenway guested on Labour MP Ed Miliband's BBC Radio 2 show.

The MP, sitting in for presenter Jeremy Vine, invited Greenway into the studio to talk about the band's upcoming appearance at the Glastonbury Festival. During the segment, the former Labour leader was given a lesson on how to become a grindcore vocalist.

“I’m going to now take my career into my hands if it’s not already gone down the pan and you’re going to try and help me to sort of do a bit of this extreme metal," said Miliband, before failing as quickly as the song itself.

The MP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"If you thought you were a bluesman, hearing the Red Devils would send you back to the woodshed in double-quick time. Listening to that record, King King, would yank anybody’s chains. I had a CD made up of just two of the tracks on a loop – Mr Highway Man and Automatic. It was on constant rotation in my car wherever I went" - Billy Gibbons, ZZ Top

When Rick Rubin left New York and headed west in 1988, he severed ties with Def Jam, the record label he’d co-founded and through which he’d launched the Beastie Boys, Slayer and Run DMC. A music freak with an instinctive knack for picking out maverick spirits, Rubin set up base in a gothic-looking mansion house in Hollywood and from there rolled out his second record company, Def American.

Cast in his own renegade image, it became a home for such disparate bands as the Black Crowes, Danzig and the Red Devils.

The Red Devils were Def American’s shooting comet. Signed to the label in 1991, they were the archetypal Rubin band – five greasers who roughed up the blues, they blazed a brief but brilliant trajectory. They made just one album, and backed both Mick Jagger and Johnny Cash, before crashing and burning.

Their end was sordid and senseless, a wretched mess compounded by the tawdry death of their frontman, Lester Butler, at the age of 38. Butler was mourned by fellow musicians as a great lost bluesman. Yet even in death he continued to stir ill will. The Devils’ former bassist, Jonny Ray Bartel, was initially reluctant to contribute to this article for fear that it would canonise Butler.

“My personal history with Lester ended up being really bad,” he said. “He became the worst friend and the most horrible guy you could imagine. I’ve had to work hard on forgiveness towards him.”

The Red Devils grew up out of The Blasters, a hot rod of a band who became a fixture on LA’s vibrant punk and rockabilly scene in the early 1980s. Their drummer, Bill Bateman, looking like he’d walked out of a Sun Records session three decades earlier, and commanding a wicked bare-boned groove, put together a blues-playing side group in 1986.

Initially called The Stumblebums and then the Blue Shadows, after a Blasters song, it was a loose collection of local musicians and jamming buddies. One of the guys who began sitting in with Bateman was Lester Butler, a surf bum who blew a mean harmonica.

Even then, Butler had a reputation for raising hell. He once told a journalist: “Remember in the seventies when they said cocaine wasn’t that addictive? I was a good argument against that bullshit.”

Butler was eight when he first picked up a harmonica, and was guesting with local pickup groups by the time he was a teenager. His earliest influences were America’s great bluesmen – such iconic figures as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter.

“I can still picture Les, a skinny surfer boy with long blond hair, riding his skateboard around town while playing his harmonica,” recalls Butler’s sister, Ginny Tura. “I remember him playing Whammer Jammer by the J Geils Band. A crowd used to gather around him in the parking lot where we all hung out. He loved music, surfing, skateboarding, bike riding and smoking pot.”

In early ’88, the owner of the King King, a poky dive bar in West Hollywood that had once been a Chinese restaurant, asked Bill Bateman to put together a full-time group to headline a weekly Blue Monday gig. Their nightly fee would be $200 a man.

Retaining the Blue Shadows name, Bateman co-opted his roommate, Jonny Ray Bartel, a rake-thin rockabilly nut, into the band along with Butler. Jonny Ray’s elder brother, Dave Lee Bartel, joined later on rhythm guitar, supporting an ever-shifting assortment of hotshot lead players.

The Blue Shadows were already whipping up a storm at the King King by the time the elder Bartel enlisted. Each Monday night, a crowd would line up around the block to catch the band tearing through a set of blues covers on the tiny 12-by-15-foot stage. The Blue Shadows brought out Hollywood’s hipsters and beautiful people – wannabe stars and starlets and leggy models. In early 90, Bruce Willis, then still in the first flush of his Die Hard fame, began showing up and sitting in with the band.

“Bruce Willis is the only guy that could possibly play Lester in a movie,” Bill Bateman says today. “Lester used to take him out on the street and show him how to play harmonica. He was on the team.”

In Willis’s wake, a coterie of musicians trooped along to the King King: Angus and Malcolm Young of AC/DC, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Black Crowes all crammed into the club’s red fake-leather booths; Brian May of Queen and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons both got up to trade licks with the Blue Shadows.

One night, Billy Gibbons calls me out of the blue. He’s heard about this piece from Jonny Ray Bartel and wants to reminisce.

“Oh man, they were quite an outfit to be reckoned with,” Gibbons says, chuckling. “I was running hard at the time with one of the ZZ Top dancing girls – they called her the Alley Cat because she was always crawling about. She lived close by the King King, and I became a regular there on a Monday night. And who should I make friends with in those days but Rick Rubin. He was hanging out and took an interest in the band.”

By Jonny Ray Bartel’s estimate, Rubin came by the King King at least 60 times to scope out the Shadows. “I loved their raw blues power,” Rubin says today. “They were edgy, rocking and grooving. It was a fun vibe seeing them every week. I have great memories of that time.”

In early 1991, Rubin decided to sign the band to Def American. He had two provisos before doing so: that they get a permanent guitarist, and they change their name.

Through the blues grapevine the band heard of a whizz-kid guitarist from Denton, Texas, named Paul Size, a fresh-faced 19-year-old who played like a veteran from the wrong side of the tracks. Size drove to LA in his pick-up truck to audition, got the job and then moved in with Butler.

The Bartels had first played together in a high-school rockabilly band called the Red Devils. Spotting an old button badge of theirs one day, Rubin told them the name would sell more records than the Blue Shadows and to revive it. The producer also decided that a studio recording wouldn’t do his new pet band justice, so instead he set about taping them live over three consecutive Mondays at the King King.

The resulting record, also titled King King, and featuring pianist Gene ‘Fingers’ Taylor, was released in July 92. It collected together blues staples such as Willie Dixon’s She’s Dangerous and Chester Burnett’s Mr Highway Man alongside a handful of self-penned tracks.

It was hot, blue and righteous: Paul Size shooting sparks off the rhythm section’s laconic shuffle; Butler blowing up a storm and singing as though there were a hellhound on his trail. It was also entirely at odds with the musical temperature of the time – Guns N’Roses, Metallica and Nirvana were the reigning behemoths.

Rick Rubin was also then working on Mick Jagger’s third solo album, Wandering Spirit. He’d brought the Rolling Stones singer down to the King King to see his latest charges, and in May ’92 he got the two parties together at Ocean Way Recording in Hollywood for a now-legendary 13-hour session.

Jagger and the Red Devils cut 13 tracks that day, scorching covers of vintage blues tracks and all but one of them still officially unreleased.

“We got a late-night phone call from Rubin and were told to show up at the studio at 9am the next day,” recalls Jonny Ray Bartel. “Mick came in and played the original recording by Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters or whoever, and we’d jam along to it through headphones. On the third runthrough, Mick would sing and we’d tape it. It was that quick and raw.”

“That session is incredible,” says Rubin. “You’d have to ask Mick why he never chose to release it.”

Flush from working with Jagger and with critical acclaim for their own record, the Red Devils set off on their first tour, criss-crossing America as the opening act for the Allman Brothers band, ZZ Top and Los Lobos.

It didn’t take long for cracks to appear. Let loose, the band ran wild – their singer wilder than anyone else.

“We were rowdy guys,” says Bill Bateman, cackling. “We went out for 120 days straight and there were all kinds of illegal things going on – drugs, fights, hookers, cops, jail, you name it. One of us was bound to end up dead. Lester had actually clinically died four times in previous years. On one occasion he woke up in the morgue with a sheet over his head. It was his opinion that he led a charmed life.”

Three months into the tour the band were in tatters. Dave Lee Bartel walked out after a show in Dallas, claiming Butler was paid double what the others got. They limped through the rest of the tour with a friend of Paul Size filling in and bad blood in the air.

“It got to the point where Lester was doing crack at every town we went through,” says Jonny Ray Bartel. “He’d stay up all night and listen to the board tapes of the gig we’d just done, and then go scream at Bill, the best musician in the band, telling him he was dragging. He basically just turned into this psycho drug addict who was never happy.”

Butler’s sister, Ginny, disputes this image of her brother. “Les had occasional lapses with drugs and alcohol, but for the majority of his professional life he was sober,” she insists. “The stress of being together with the band twenty-four-seven while touring was just too much for him. He was always a perfectionist with his music and he noticed when anything was off.”

When Butler returned to LA, he told Rubin he wanted to work with different musicians. Rubin humoured him by holding a series of open auditions, but then informed Butler he was only interested in the original Red Devils.

The patched-up band, with Dave Lee Bartel on board, toured Europe through the spring and summer of 1993, hitting a peak on an early afternoon slot at the Pink Pop festival in Holland (above). Pink Pop was the Red Devils’ valediction.

Then Paul Size quit, fleeing back to Texas, exhausted by sharing an apartment with Butler for two years. Rubin gathered the remaining members for one last great session at Ocean Way, backing Johnny Cash.

“He was a proper gentleman,” recalls Jonny Ray Bartel, “but the tracks sounded better with just him and his guitar, and that’s how Rubin put them out.”

It would be the last thing they did for Rubin. Soon after, they were dropped from Def American. They ghosted through a final European trek in 1994 and then split, beset by rancour and bitterness.

“Lester stole a bunch of money off us and wiped the band out,” claims Bartel. “We were broke and having to sleep on our fans’ couches. It was strictly his greed that took us out – that and drugs.”

“Lester had got back on the shit and he was a rookie,” says Bateman. “It was his first band, and he didn’t realise how hard it was to get five guys together that play that well. He tried to undermine it and it blew up in his face.”

Emerging from the carnage of the Red Devils, Bill Bateman returned to The Blasters, and the other three musicians to day jobs and part-time gigs. Lester Butler passed through short-lived groups and low-paid engagements in LA before gathering together a new band he called 13.

Mining the same blues seam as the Devils, they released a decent self-titled album in 1997 and had some success touring Europe.

“Lester’s reputation was a mess in LA. He’d done a lot of sub-par gigs and shown up in bad shape too many times,” says Alex Schulz, a seasoned blues guitarist who threw in his lot with 13. “For me, that band was a big step down in terms of business from what I’d been doing, but it was worth it to try and build this guy back up. When he was in good shape, Lester had some kind of magic. But he had big troubles in his personal life.”

13 bagged high-profile slots at blues festivals in Belgium and Holland in early May 1998. The shows were a success, but Butler was battling his demons, falling off the wagon after a stint in rehab. On the flight home, he told Schulz he’d hook up with a girl he’d just started seeing and buy an eight-ball of cocaine.

“He had five thousand dollars burning a hole in his pocket, and what he did was stay up for five days straight,” says Schulz. “I didn’t have the sense that he meant for it to end the way it did, but at other times he was pretty fatalistic. I think he felt there was a destiny he was living out – that he was going to go out that way.”

On the evening of May 8, 1998, Butler pitched up at Bill Bateman’s house in Hollywood. He was with another girl from the fast crowd he’d been running with.

“He’d been smoking rock, snorting coke, taking downers and drinking rum, so he was high,” remembers Bateman. “The two of them were sat in my living room and Lester was begging her for an injection of heroin, rather than snorting it like he had been.”

Bateman says he then left the house to go score his own heroin. He’d recently been convicted on a drink-driving charge, so was on foot and gone for more than an hour. When he returned, he says, Butler was still nagging the girl to shoot him up again.

“Eventually she did and he OD’d,” Bateman continues. “I was high myself by then and wasn’t paying them much mind.”

We may never know exactly what happened, as accounts differ, and by his own admission Bateman was worse for wear. Bateman recounts that the girl’s boyfriend came over, panicked, took Lester’s cocaine and shot it up through the veins in his hand.

“They had the idea that this would bring him back, and it killed him. They took him in his van to their house and he died there. After he’d been dead for eight hours they dropped him off at my place again, and I took him to the hospital. Then the cops turned up.”

Ginny Tura challenges Bateman’s account of her brother’s last hours and also the notion that he’d careered out of control. “Lester was sober for many years, and this relapse was fatal because his tolerance was low,” she maintains. “Bill did not make the emergency call when Les first passed out, and allowed two drug addicts to go off with his body. In my opinion he should have also done jail time.”

On the surface, the Red Devils’ legacy doesn’t amount to much – a solitary album and some celebrity fans. Yet King King has retained its power, and their influence lingers in America and especially Europe, where Lester Butler tribute acts continue to operate.

“The Red Devils is kind of a repeat of the thing people said about the Velvet Underground,” says JJ Perry, a South Dakota journalist and musician who runs nofightin. com, an online site dedicated to the band. “Their record didn’t sell, but it made a massive impression. Everyone I knew that heard it went out and formed a band.”

On November 12, 2013 Ginny Tura went out to dinner with her brother’s long-term girlfriend, Lori Peralta. It would have been Lester Butler’s 54th birthday.

“The Lester I knew and loved was extraordinarily witty, highly intelligent and charismatic,” says Tura. “He loved people and was constantly surrounded by friends and family. He could blow out birthday candles from across the room; we’d say he had harmonica lungs. Which of course he did.”

The men who shared the Red Devils’ short, crazy ride have a different recall of Lester Butler.

“He was a notorious addict,” says Jonny Ray Bartel. “And when you start messing around with heroin and coke, it’s a safe bet your heart and lungs are going to flip you out eventually. It didn’t shock me and I don’t remember a big emotional thing. I was just kind of numb.”

“Lester was an idiot, but I wish he wouldn’t have died,” concludes Bill Bateman. “I’ve searched the whole planet over and there isn’t anybody out there like him. Lester was the wildest one.”

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 195, published in April 2014.

Postscript: In May 2017 Bill Bateman, Jonny Ray Bartel, Paul Size, and Mike Flanigin, alongside Dutch blues singer and harmonica player Pieter “Big Pete” Van Der Pluijm, reformed The Red Devils for a series of shows in the Netherlands, before joining ZZ Top as support act on the European leg of their Tonnage Tour. A live album, Return of the Red Devils, followed.

Grunge legends Soundgarden have released the official footage of their return to the stage earlier this month.

With The Pretty Reckless's Taylor Momsen nailing the vocals and Pearl Jam's Mike McCready on second guitar, the band performed Outshined and Spoonman during the halftime break at the Seattle Seahawks' NFL season opener against the New England Patriots at Lumen Field, Seattle, on September 9.

For the performance, Soundgarden were accompanied by the Seahawks' 32-piece Blue Thunder Drumline, who've previously played with several guest drummers, including Yes's Alan White, Anthrax's Charlie Benante and Dream Theater's Mike Portnoy.

The two-song set was the fifth time Soundgarden have played live since the death of frontman Chris Cornell in 2017. Two years later, they performed eight songs at the I Am the Highway: A Tribute to Chris Cornell show at the Forum in Inglewood, CA, with Momsen singing Rusty Cage, Drawing Flies and Loud Love, and in 2022 she joined them at the same venue to sing Black Hole Sun during the Taylor Hawkins tribute show.

In 2024, Soundgarden played a six-song set billed as Nudedragons at the 1100-capacity Showbox in Seattle, with local singer Shaina Shepherd out front. And last year, Momsen returned to sing Rusty Cage with the band at the Hall of Fame induction in Cleveland.

Soundgarden are reportedly nearing completion on an album featuring unreleased recordings of Chris Cornell. Guitarist Kim Thayil has said that the band are putting the finishing touches on the tracks, describing the old demo recordings as "rough sketches" that are being filled out. Drummer Matt Cameron has also confirmed that the material is being mixed.

From the billon-dollar success of her Eras tour to the feverish clamour surrounding the release of her new single, Patient Zero, Taylor Swift is in no danger of being deposed from her throne as the most successful music star of the 2020s. But even pop megastars need a helping hand somewhere along the way – and in Swift”s case , that came from Def Leppard.

Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott was sitting in his band’s dressing room when someone walked in and placed a laptop in front of him, telling him to watch the video clip on it. It was 2008, and the Sheffield group were touring in support of their recently released album Songs From The Sparkle Lounge. The video on the laptop featured an interview with a rising young country-pop singer who had been garnering headlines recently.

“It’s Taylor Swift,” Elliott told Rolling Stone in 2018. “She’s doing this interview and she said there was only one band that she would ever do a Crossroads with and it was Def Leppard.”

Crossroads was a hugely popular American TV show airing on the CMT network that paired country music stars with artists from other genres. The musicians would jam together, playing each other’s songs as faithfully or differently as they saw fit.

And Taylor Swift? At the time, she was one of the most talked-about new singers in the US. Her self-titled 2006 debut album had topped the Country Charts and reached No.5 in the main Billboard charts. The album didn’t betray an affinity for the kind of stadium-sized hard rock that Def Leppard were best known for purveying, but her mother, Andrea, had been a huge Leppard fan in the 80s, and the young Taylor had grown up in a house where Leppare’s classic 1987 album Hysteria was on heavy rotation.

“Taylor Swift’s [2014 album] 1989 is called 1989 because that was the year she was born,” Elliott told The Irish Times. “Throughout 1988 she heard our music in her mother’s womb, non-stop. Her parents are big Def Leppard fans.”

Leppard were keen to take her up on her offer. “We’ve always been that poke-noses-out-of-joint kind of band,” Elliott told Rolling Stone. “I loved the idea of something that’s gonna either piss people off or they go, good for you for doing something different. If you’re gonna do collaborations, I don’t see the point in us doing a song with Bon Jovi.”

And so Def Leppard’s team reached out to Taylor Swift’s camp – something presumably made easier by the fact that Leppard drummer Rick Allen’s brother Robert was her tour manager at the time. A couple of months later, they were in rehearsals together in preparation for recording the Crossroads show. Given that Swift was in her late teens, some minor lyrical tweaks were necessary, not least on Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar On Me.

“Me and Taylor sat down, and she says, ‘I can’t sing that line,’ cos it was a bit too risqué’,” Elliott told Rolling Stone. “So we’d swap things around. And the fact that I was actually singing from the male point of view in some of her stuff, like in [Swift’s] Love Story.”

The Crossroads performance was recorded over two shows at the Acuff Theater in Nashville in early October 2008. The finished episode, which broadcast on CMT on November 8, three days before the release of Swift’s second album, Fearless, saw Leppard and Swift collaborating on 11 songs, with the American singer’s own band providing extra backing, including acoustic guitar and fiddle.

The show opened with Swift duetting with Elliott on a version of Leppard’s 1983 single Photograph, the teenager adding some swagger to the song’s opening lines. The rest of the set was an even split between the two artists’ songs with Swift’s Picture To Burn, Love Story, Teardrops On My Guitar, Should’ve Said No and Our Song and Leppard’s Hysteria, When Love And Hate Collide (apparently Swift’s favourite Def Leppard track), a raucous Pour Some Sugar On Me, Love and Two Steps Behind getting the collaborative treatment.

The show was an immediate hit, notching 4.5 million viewers in its initial airings. Swift’s career was already rocketing upwards at the time but it certainly didn’t hurt for her music to be exposed to modern rock audiences. For Def Leppard, it placed them in front of an audience who might not have listened to them since their 80s heyday – if at all.

Speaking to Classic Rock in 2019, Leppard guitarist Phil Collen acknowledged the bonus, stating, “The Taylor Swift thing probably did expand our audience. It was great mixing those genres of music.”

Ultimately, the Crossroads performance showcased the strengths of both artists – as well as some unlikely similarities. It proved so successful that Leppard and Swift re-teamed the next year to close the 2009 CMT Music Awards with Pour Some Sugar On Me.

“People were looking at us like we had three heads when we announced we were going to do this TV show with Taylor Swift,” Elliott told Classic Rock in 2023. “The point is to get two extremely opposite artists performing on it… We just saw it as an opportunity to do something different. And it was phenomenal fun.”

Seattle, March 1972, under a grey gunmetal sky. Black Sabbath are on their biggest US tour yet. Private planes and limos and all their chicks for free. Plus all that blow. Or ‘Charlie’ as they called it back then. Sabbath’s third and most recent album, Master Of Reality, had become their first US Top 10 hit. They were still in their early twenties, and they weren’t even peaking yet. The future was theirs to fuck with.

A hundred shows into an eight-month tour, four nights earlier they had watched Joe Frazier become the first man to beat Muhammed Ali in a boxing ring. Now they were at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle – famous for being built on stilts by the water’s edge, making it an ideal spot for fishing from your hotel room window. The Edgewater was also scene of the now infamous Led Zeppelin ‘mud shark’ episode, where a willing groupie reputedly agreed to be tied-up and pleasured with a fish for the amusement of various wasted band members and roadies.

Every band that stayed there since wanted their own shark adventure. Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne took the shark he caught and hauled it into his bathtub, filled it with water, then forgot about it and left for the gig. When he returned several hours later and found the shark dead, he began disemboweling it with a knife, leaving blood and fish entrails all over the walls. Guitarist Tony Iommi, meanwhile, who had also caught a shark, managed to hurl it through Bill Ward’s hotel room window, where it landed on the hapless drummer’s bed. “He was very surprised,” Iommi deadpanned. “Not pleasantly…”

At the end of the US tour the band were given a long weekend off, a three-day gap before flying to Japan for two shows at the Koseinenkin concert hall in Osaka. It’s the venue where Deep Purple would make their Japanese debut three months later, and tape the shows for their legendary live Made In Japan double album. Sabbath could have beaten Purple to it. Except that they were denied entry visas because of their various criminal convictions: Ozzy for theft, Tony and Bill for dope.

The Japanese shows were cancelled, as were dates in Australia. So the band flew home and were glad of the break. On the tour, bassist Terry ‘Geezer’ Butler had been the first to crack, complaining of terminal tiredness, as one show blurred into another.

“The trouble was in them days it wasn’t: ‘Oh, have a few weeks off until you feel better,’” he said, frowning. “It was: ‘Here, have a line of this’ or a smoke of that. ‘Take these pills, they’ll keep you going.’ It was about keeping going on the road. Until one day I knew I’d had enough – and had to stop. The others weren’t happy but there was nothing I could do. I thought: ‘I’m cracking up here,’ you know?”

When Ward was then diagnosed with serum hepatitis, they knew they were in real trouble.

“We were only about twenty-two years old, but we were already pretty much veterans,” Ward told me. “I got serum hepatitis from narcotic abuse. I was jaundiced for months.” Hepatitis B, as it’s also known, is not an infection that can be contracted from casual acquaintance, but a serious virus that is almost always caused by using infected syringes – ‘dirty needles’ – to inject drugs. Until then, Ward said, “I thought I was invincible… I didn’t feel so invincible after that.”

Despite doctors’ warnings, as soon as the jaundice subsided he went straight back into doing what he’d been doing. It was 1972, and that was simply “what you did, what everyone did”. He paused. “I’m pretty lucky to be alive, to be honest.”

With little else to do, Sabbath went to work on their next album. Or rather, Tony did. For the first time since their debut album two years before “took off like a fucking rocket,” as Ozzy put it, they were allowed to take their time. No more albums recorded on the run, between tours. This was the big time, they had a lot to live up to suddenly, and, as with Led Zeppelin’s momentous fourth album, released six months before, a great deal was expected of Sabbath’s fourth album.

Just one snag: a pub less than a mile from their Birmingham rehearsal studio. Most days, after a cursory plod through a few loose jams Iommi would be left to toil alone, after the others had wandered to the pub. Hours later they would return and half-heartedly enquire of their stone-faced leader: “Got anything yet, Tone?”

Iommi began to get the hump. A week into this irksome routine he’d had enough. When it was suggested they continue work on the album in LA, partly as a tax avoidance scheme, partly because studios were cheaper there, Iommi jumped at the idea. The others dragged themselves away from the pub long enough to follow.

Iommi had always been the driver – Osbourne liked to refer to him as Darth Vader – but now he was a man on a mission. It hurt that, as big as Sabbath were, they were still cold-shouldered by the music press, rarely mentioned in the same breath as more fashionable London-based contemporaries like Zep and Purple. Iommi was going to fix that.

A week later, working in LA on what he had decided would be titled Vol 4, in that portentous 70s way where albums were regarded as the latest almost biblical statement of earnest artistic merit, they were living together in the same luxury Bel Air mansion that quickly became notorious.

They rented it from John Dupont, millionaire scion of the Dupont family, who owned the multinational Dupoint chemicals corporation – key players in America’s development of atomic and chemical weapons, an irony not lost on Butler, the writer of War Pigs and other antinuclear diatribes, but who was too busy snorting mountainous lines of coke to care.

“We were like the fuckin’ Monkees’ evil twins,” Osbourne recalled in his baleful Brummy accent. “Hey hey we’re the-junkies…”

The house came with an Olympic-sized swimming pool, overlooked by an enormous ballroom which the band used to jam in and work on material. Band manager Patrick Meehan also set up office there, along with two French au pair girls. Recording took place at the nearby Record Plant, one of the first state-of-the-art studios to offer rock stars the ‘relaxed’ vibe they worked best in and also the go-to hit factory for high-decibel bands.

It was the perfect environment, Sabbath decided, to produce the album themselves – that is, for Iommi to lavish time and effort on his baby. A loose arrangement that contrived to make the sessions the longest the band had spent on an album (more than two months eventually) and by far the most hectic. What really helped the process along, Iommi would later admit, was “the enormous quantity of coke” the band were now getting through.

“We were all fucked-up bad,” Osbourne recalled. “Dealers coming round every day with cocaine, Demerol, morphine, everything round the fucking house.”

“It became a ritual,” Iommi would tell me. “Every time we’d do an album, we’d get a load of dope and then some coke and whatever else and off we’d go. I never used to want to leave the studio. That’s why we enjoyed making Vol 4 so much, because we had the house, and it was a great vibe we had.”

He pauses, before adding: “It did become insane.”

The cocaine would be delivered in phials in a box disguised as one of their speaker cabinets. It was the strongest, purest cocaine then available anywhere in America. The band would drool with anticipation as huge mounds of the white powder – the ‘snow’ – would be carved out on one of the marble-topped banquet tables, from which the band would take what they wanted, when they wanted, however they wanted – which was a lot.

One night, Osbourne was so stoned he accidentally sat on the button for the alarm, rigged to alert the local police station. As two squad cars screeched to a halt outside and armed cops began banging on the ornate front door, the band freaked out and flushed several ounces of grass and dozens of phials of pharmaceutical cocaine down the mansion’s various toilets.

Convinced they were being busted, “we must have flushed, like, ten thousand dollars’ worth”, Butler recalled. When finally they got one of the au pairs to answer the door and discovered the cops were simply responding to the false alarm, there was another crazy scramble to see if they could unclog any of the toilets and recover their drugs. Too late. Quick, get on the phone… According to Butler, it was also at the house in LA that he and Ozzy first enjoyed LSD.

“I’d done acid in England,” he told me. “Never wanted to do it again. Just had a terrible, really bad experience with it, really bad. The girlfriend I had at the time had to literally lie on top of me to stop me jumping out the window and killing myself. I swore I’d never do it again.

“Then we got to California, and we were at this chick’s place, this massive beach house in Laguna. And she gives us this stuff, psilocybin. I’d never heard of it, didn’t know it was another name for acid, and just took it – me and Ozzy and these girls. Ozzy went for a swim in the ocean [laughing] – at least he thought he did, but he was still on the beach, flailing away in the sand.”

“At that time in America, too, people were very fond of lacing your drinks with acid. I didn’t care,” Osbourne said. “I used to swallow handfuls of tabs at a time. The end of it came when we got back to England. I took ten tabs of acid then went for a walk in a field. I ended up standing there talking to this horse for about an hour. In the end the horse turned round and told me to fuck off. That was it for me…”

Word got round, and Sabbath’s Bel Air pleasure dome became one of the most debauched and therefore trendiest places in LA to hang out. Crowds of drug dealers and groupies and new best mates gathered night and day. So many that the band would make the girls queue outside on the lawn. Getting up and being driven to the studio and working was “the down part,” Ward admitted. Not for Iommi, though, who was spending longer and longer at the studio, as the long cocaine nights flitted by like the lights of a runaway train.

“You’d always read about bands like Deep Purple or The Faces going off playing football together,” he told me. “But we took our music much more serious than that. Or I did, anyway. Once I got in the studio, that was it, I wasn’t coming out again till it was over.”

Despite the mayhem surrounding its genesis, Vol 4 became another stone-cold classic Sabbath album. Opening with the eight-minute-plus epic Wheels Of Confusion, what jumps out is Iommi’s leonine lead guitar, a future-flash step on from the muggy sound of previous album Master Of Reality.

Intent on proving the band’s critics wrong, desperate to somehow catapult Sabbath’s musical credibility into the same starry stratosphere that Zeppelin and The Who now inhabited, the emphasis was on versatility, musicianship, rock’n’roll witchcraft.

Iommi sat down to play piano while Geezer operated the Mellotron on Changes, their most sophisticated ballad yet, and their first fully formed love song. It might have been a US hit single, too, if they had taken the advice of the Warner Bros radio promotion team, but Iommi wasn’t far gone enough yet for that. Keeping with their policy of not releasing more than one single from an album, they plumped instead for Tomorrow’s Dream, a stolid mid-tempo rocker and a great album track – and never a hit single in a million years.

Elsewhere it was First Class all the way. With its ferociously funky rhythm and needle-sharp single-string riff, Supernaut was like a white metal version of Isaac Hayes’s Theme From Shaft, a huge hit the year before, Osbourne’s voice like mercury pouring over the silver spoon of the guitars and drums; Butler’s lyrics, which he now claims to remember very little about writing, yielding to the new era of debauchery the band were now fully embarked on, of wanting to ‘touch the sun’ with the ‘need to fly’. There is not even a guitar solo, just a hail of percussion that takes over halfway through, before finally allowing the twisted riff in again through the back door.

The subject matter – and chief inspiration for an album they would not so subtly thank in the sleeve notes for with the words: “We’d like to thank the great COKE-Cola company of Los Angeles – was addressed even more directly in Snowblind, with Osbourne balefully singing about his dreams being ‘flaked with snow’ as the band pounded down on the juddering rhythm, lashing out the icy riff like a razor blade chopping white lines on a gigantic, cracked mirror.

Again the melodrama is expanded, with the surprise addition of a string quartet over the last minute or so, as Iommi weaves his way through a typically frenzied guitar solo. Even the lighter moments that Iommi always insisted on, as contrast for the frosted darkness of the show stoppers, were somehow more malevolent.

Of the two instrumental interludes, the first, FX, was simply Iommi, fuelled by way too much coke and grass, standing naked in the studio control room, distractedly fiddling with his electric guitar, as if sending signals out to space. Which is in effect exactly what it was, hence its title.

“He took all his clothes off in the studio,” Butler recalled, “and he was hitting on his guitar strings with the crosses that he wore around his neck.”

The second, Laguna Sunrise, came fully formed from his childhood imagination, a lush acoustic instrumental, flamenco in style, accompanied by a soaring, blissfully romantic string section. This was music to watch the Californian sunrise to – but only after you’d been up all night getting wasted on the moon and stars first. There was also another hit-that-never-was in the surprisingly short and catchy St. Vitus Dance, its irresistible tunefulness belied only by the mercilessly brutal chords Iommi stabs each verse with.

The true voice of Vol 4, though, was captured on its finale track, Under The Sun. A perfectly executed bookend, it’s another epic journey track, long, convoluted, and as hard to hold on to as the tail of a tiger. Moving through three discernible musical sections, it was tracks like Under The Sun that would become the sonic signpost for those bands that would follow Sabbath in the years to come; groups like Iron Maiden and Metallica, whose entire careers could be traced virtually to the last two and a half minutes of Under The Sun; self-absorbed, pained, almost repellent in its undeniable magnetism; over-involved and desperately serious; epic right down to its last inglorious, nail-hammering chords.

The final mixes for Vol 4 took place back in London, but of the band only Iommi was there to oversee them. Osbourne had gone back to his first wife Thelma and the family in Birmingham and talked about opening a wine bar. Now a husband and father – although mainly by long distance – he also moved his young family into a new house.

Butler, although also married, was still taking his laundry home for his mum to wash when he finally passed his driving test – and promptly bought a Rolls-Royce, phoning manager Patrick Meehan and getting him to “send a cheque”. Then he bought a house. A big one.

Not be outdone, Ward also bought a Rolls Royce, filling the back seats with crates of cider. Ward was, as he put it to me, “leading a Sid and Nancy lifestyle” with his latest girlfriend, who travelled back with him from LA, “living in hotels [and] loaded all the time”.

“That was the first album where I nearly got kicked out the band,” he said, frowning.

It was one thing for him to be zonked out all the time on cider, dope and cocaine, quite another for him to raise any objections to the “more sophisticated” music, as Iommi saw it, that presented itself on the new album. When Ward suggested they “forget fucking Mellotrons and string quartets and do some blues jams,” Iommi turned on him. After that, said Ward, “there was kind of a cold eeriness in the studios, and I realised I was under the gun”.

When Vol 4 was released, in September ’72, British music press reviews of the album were, again, universally snub-nosed – Max Bell described it in Let It Rock as “a monumental bore”.

In the US, however, the critics seemed to be coming round to Sabbath at last. Even Lester Bangs, who had eviscerated their first two albums, now performed an unabashed about-face, describing Sabbath in Creem as “moralists” and comparing their lyrics to those of Bob Dylan and the books of William Burroughs.

“We have seen the Stooges take on the night ferociously and go tumbling into its maw, and Alice Cooper is currently exploiting it for all it’s worth, turning it into a circus,” Bangs wrote. “But there is only one band that has dealt with it honestly on terms meaningful to vast portions of the audience, not only grappling with it in a mythic structure that’s both personal and universal, but actually managing to prosper as well. That band is Black Sabbath.”

Paradoxically, however, just as the media spotlight was finally swinging their way, Sabbath experienced the first reverse of their career, with Vol 4 getting only as high as No.13 in the US – their lowest chart placing since their first album. In Britain it was a similar story, getting to No.8, the same spot Sabbath had peaked at in 1970.

These days, ironically, Vol 4 is one of the Sabbath albums that mainstream critics cite as their favourite, yet at the time Tony Iommi looked upon it as a comparative failure. He blamed the pressures the band were under to come up with a follow-up to their biggest US hit. He also blamed the rest of the band for, as he saw it, “leaving everything up to me”.

Iommi was determined that their next album would be different. None of which stopped fans flocking to their latest American tour, where Sabbath’s reputation as monolithic doom merchants now preceded them. Sabbath rooled. By the start of the US Vol 4 tour, in the first week of July, they had their own coke dealer travelling with them. “He’d just turn up,” Osbourne said, “and he had a suitcase full of fucking kilos of this shit. Then one day I was in his room, and I opened his bag and there was bags of uncut coke, cut coke, different grade coke. I picked up one of these bags and there was a revolver underneath! I thought: ‘This smells like bad news!’”

That was also the tour, according to Osbourne, that “the groupies knew more about our tour itineraries than we did”. One morning he was awakened by a voice telling him: “I’m the Blow Job Queen. And who are you?” Freaked-out, Osbourne pretended to be Butler and gave her his room number. Ten minutes later Butler was on the phone to Osbourne complaining bitterly that he’d got some crazy chick in his room that he couldn’t get rid of. When he stopped laughing, Osbourne called Iommi and Ward and got them to accompany him to Butler’s room.

“So we all go over and say: ‘Please leave.’ And she says: ‘No! Why? I give the best blow jobs in the west. Don’t you believe me?’ We don’t want to hurt her, we don’t know fucking what to say or do. So finally we all threaten to piss on her if she doesn’t leave, and she does.”

Osbourne looked forlorn. “Gigs, bars, hotels, radio interviews… they were everywhere we went. We suffered the results as well. We got clap, crabs, all sorts of diseases. Then we’d have to go through the cures, big painful shots of penicillin in the arse…”

There would be many more volumes to come in the decades-long Black Sabbath saga, but their 1972 Vol 4 shows were the last shows before the rot set in as a combination of money and drug problems eventually robbed the band of their original spark. For all their misadventures on the road in America, they would never be quite so innocent again.

This feature was originally published as the cover story of issue 305 of Classic Rock magazine, in September 2022.

Black Sabbath legend Tony Iommi is on the cover of the current issue of Classic Rock. Buy it here.

U2 are one of the world's most divisive bands. To some, they’re insufferably-earnest, middle-of-the-road stadium rockers led by a smug, holier-than-thou preacher man. To others, they’re four music-obsessed Dublin school friends whose spiritual, open-hearted songs resonate with a huge global audience, and who found a way to stay culturally and artistically relevant thanks to a mischievous, fearless appetite for reinvention.

"The sound of the future is what we're most interested in," Bono said last year. "It doesn't exist yet. It's ours to make, and that's what we have the chance to do."

Here is U2's catalogue ranked from worst to best.

14. Songs Of Innocence (2014)

The corporate tie-in which saw Songs of Innocence 'gifted' to everyone owning an Apple product upon its 2014 release may have been the single biggest mis-step of U2's career: you can still find people grumbling about it today. Doubtless those complaints would linger even if Songs of Innocence was U2's defining masterpiece, but, trust us, it most definitely isn't.

Kind souls might allow Bono's humble love letter to the transformative power of punk rock, The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone), but while the singer hailed the group's nostalgic 13th studio set as "the most personal album we've written", it's a slog which singularly failed to strike a chord beyond the group's most devoted fans. A PR disaster, certainly, but a musical one too.

13. Pop (1997)

Having brilliantly launched U2.0 with the knowing, post-modern Achtung Baby and the less-startling-but-still-rather-smart Zooropa, U2 pushed it too far. Without long-term producers Daniel Lanois/Brian Eno to rein in their wackier ideas and trim excess fat, the quartet became a parody of a parody with Pop.

Stories of the album being rushed to completion with indecent haste to emerge ahead of an already booked stadium tour make sense when listening now: Pop is too long, it sounds cheap, and it's full of aimless, half-baked, dance-rock plodders that lack the smarts or craft of Achtung Baby. Pop? Flop.

12. No Line On The Horizon (2009)

If No Line On The Horizon often sounds like hard work, that's because it was. After an unsatisfactory first run at Abbey Road with Rick Rubin yielded nothing worth keeping, the group took a second tilt at following How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois in Morocco.

The stated aim, according to Bono, was to produce "future hymns" - classic songs which could be played forever - and some 50-60 new songs were written across two years, but when the new album was introduced by the grungy but utterly disposable Get Your Boots On, one sensed that this latest reboot was doomed. Talk of a huge stylistic shift proved to be anticlimactic too: too mannered to inspire mass sing-a-longs, and not sufficiently experimental to be seen as a unique curio, NLOTH exists as a frustrating halfway house of nothingness.

11. Songs of Experience (2017)

Three years on from the Songs Of Innocence debacle, U2 were still convinced that the thematic ideas of that album were worth mining even further. Songs of Experience was initially conceived as an EP, much like Zooropa was originally envisaged as a succinct accompaniment to Achtung Baby, but, once again, it morphed into a full-length album.

No one is ever going to pick Songs Of Experience as their favourite U2 collection, as it suffers from much of the same blandness as its predecessor, but the inclusion of the very excellent Summer of Love elevates it above U2 at their worst.

10. How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb (2004)

Winner of the 2006 Grammy for Album of the Year, which is... a bit much, truthfully, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb might be the most 'U2-sounding' album of U2’s career; all gargantuan, hook-heavy, soft rock, precision-tooled to trigger the synchronised sparking of lighters above head height in the world's largest venues.

Clichéd? Often. Schmaltzy? A bit. Effective? At its best, very much so. Recognising that City of Blinding Lights is clearly going for emotional manipulation doesn't mean you'll be immune to its charms, and lead single Vertigo is punchy, if obvious. If it's hard to understand exactly what got the Grammy voters frothing, HTDTAB is undeniably low-key seductive.

9. All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000)

After the dismal Pop, U2 retreated to safe ground for All That You Can’t Leave Behind; out went flashy stage outfits, onstage lemons and arch irony, back in came earnest stadium rock anthems, jeans and t-shirts. It's rather a shame that they felt compelled to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but rather this than it getting any sillier.

Re-establishing the brand, ATYCLB is not the classic return to form some have made out, but there are more than enough moments of soaring quality - Beautiful Day, Elevation, Stuck In A Moment You Can't Get Out Of - to make it a solid reaffirmation of the group's core values.

8. October (1981)

It’s fair to say that U2 still hadn’t completely found themselves by the time their second album was released. Still, if October is the weakest release of their first decade, mainly due to an over-reliance on blueprints established by post-punk influences like Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees, it still features some great moments.

With a Shout (Jerusalem) is driven along fantastically by Larry Mullen’s militaristic punk beats and opening track Gloria, with its spidery riff and ceaseless rhythmic march, is a true anthem. They’d get better, and quickly too, but October still stands up to scrutiny today.

7. Zooropa (1993)

Originally planned as a stop-gap EP to sate fans' appetites for new music between legs of the mammoth ZooTV world tour, the material on Zooropa fluctuates in quality, but a wealth of superior songs stack up to make this the last very, very good U2 album.

The quartet's experimental, Krautrock flights of fancy are milked for all their worth here, with The Edge fronting the band for the first time on the superb, staccato electro of Numb, and the industrial pulse of Daddy's Gonna Pay For Your Crashed Car proving absurdly OTT. Johnny Cash's cameo on The Wanderer is a nice touch, while album highlight Stay (Faraway So Close) is genuinely beautiful, heartfelt chamber pop. A bit of a lost classic, all told.

6. Boy (1980)

Opening your debut album with one of your greatest ever songs is a neat trick, one U2 pull off on Boy, with the shimmering, urgent I Will Follow an irresistible introduction to the young Dubliners.

It'd be a huge push to suggest that Boy foreshadowed U2's rise to become the biggest band in the world, but there's undeniable excitement in this set's youthful enthusiasm and kinetic energy, from the Joy Division-go-New Wave march of An Cat Dubh to the chugging guitars and gang vocals on Out of Control.

5. Rattle and Hum (1988)

U2-haters really hate Rattle and Hum: former Creation Records boss Alan McGee once said he would never have signed Oasis had he known that Noel Gallagher was a fan. Yes, the 1988 film documenting the quartet's love affair with America and its roots music is a little po-faced, but its companion album is so much better than it is given credit for.

The live tracks are predictably great, but it’s the studio cuts that shine brightest: Billie Holiday tribute Angel of Harlem is a fantastic soul song, Desire is a great bluesy stomp, and All I Want Is You is one of the finest ballads of U2’s career, with Bono’s subtle croon interweaving with soaring strings in spellbinding fashion. We're with Gallagher Snr. here.

4. War (1983)

Arguably the first album that truly sounded like the definitive version of U2. War is where everything falls perfectly into place for the Irishmen: the songs are broader, grander and more instantaneous, individual performances more assured, the balance between worthy punk and stadium rock expertly pitched.

Two Hearts Beat As One is gorgeously slinky, and Sunday Bloody Sunday is a stirring call to arms, but it’s New Year's Day that remains the high watermark - that bass line, those keys, that skyscraper chorus. The sound of a band truly finding their own voice, War represented a benchmark for U2's future.

3. The Unforgettable Fire (1984)

The passing of time has only accentuated the brilliance of The Unforgettable Fire, with the re-emergence of shoegaze and post-punk sonics in modern rock making these 10 songs sound more vital than ever.

The first fruit of U2's creative alliance with production duo Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, it sounds incredible. Pride (In The Name of Love) is the album's timeless anthem, Wire is where U2 finally out-Cure The Cure, and, although the definitive version of the song would be heard a year later at Live Aid, the sublime Bad, inspired by the heroin-related death of a close friend, might just be the best song of U2’s career.

2. The Joshua Tree (1987)

The record that turned U2 from a very big band into the biggest band on the face of the Earth. The Joshua Tree is a wonderful achievement, birthed by a group of still-hungry musicians giddy at their discovery of blues and Americana. The opening three tracks - Where the Streets Have No Name, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For and the beautifully simple With Or Without You - may well represent the most potent introduction to any album in the rock canon, and neither age nor familiarity can wither their impact.

Arguably though, the album gets even better towards its close, with less-lauded but exceptional deep cuts In God's Country, Exit and One Tree Hill. However you spin it, The Joshua Tree is an all-time classic.

1. Achtung Baby (1991)

You’re the biggest band on the planet, but experiencing a crisis of confidence: you can't see where you fit artistically at the dawn of a new decade and critics are sharpening their knives in anticipation of your inevitable fall from grace. What to do?

The obvious answer is probably not to buy some bug eye shades, abandon every element of the style that got you to this position, head to Berlin, make a self-mocking, ironic, post-modern set of dance rock songs and promote it by setting up your own television station.

But, that’s the weird world of Achtung Baby in something of a nutshell. With 18 million copies sold worldwide, it's hard to argue against U2's extraordinary reinvention as anything but a clear and obvious triumph, but even without that context, Achtung Baby deserves its spot at the top of this list on musical merit alone.

Nowhere is this band’s fusion of daring ambition and expert songwriting better realised; The Fly is a smarmy, glam rock belter, Acrobat a breathless rock waltz, Until the End of the World a maniacal mixture of tenderness and menace, while closer Love Is Blindness shows U2 at their grittiest, darkest and most moving. And that's before we get into the sublime One, the irresistible Even Better Than The Real Thing, So Cruel...

The biggest band on the planet proving exactly why they deserve all the plaudits that come their way, Achtung Baby is simply one of the finest albums you’ll ever hear.

Ghost mastermind Tobias Forge is reportedly recording a new death metal project.

Reports from multiple friends and collaborators suggest that the Swedish singer/multi-instrumentalist, who founded Ghost and performs as their masked frontman Papa V Perpetua, is in the studio working on something more extreme than his main band’s fare.

Speculation started in June, when Swedish drummer Johan Koleberg – who’s played in Hammerfall, Therion and other heavy metal bands – took to social media and said that he was helping Forge prepare drums for a new project.

“Helping out Mr Tobias Forge to tune these fine drums for his new project for the next couple of weeks,” Koleberg wrote, accompanied by a picture of a mic’d-up drum kit.

Another report emerged in July, when Digby Pearson, the head of UK rock and heavy metal label Earache Records, appeared on the Temple Of Bleh podcast. During the interview, Pearson recalled his attempts to sign Ghost before they blew up in the mid-2010s; even though Earache didn’t get the band at the time, he says that they’ve just “got the connected-to-Ghost death metal band” and that “apparently, he’s [Tobias] doing a death metal album, as well”.

Now, another hint has come from Joey Tempest, the lead singer of Swedish rockers Europe. Tempest – whose band got Forge to handle backing vocals on their album Come This Madness, out today (Friday, September 25) – tells Planet Rock “I don’t know [Forge’s] Ghost plans”. However, he adds: “I know he’s sitting in his studio again and no one is allowed in … he’s doing something!”

Although Forge switching from Ghost’s hard rock hit-making to savage death metal may seem like a leap, the 45-year-old has an extensive history in heavier music. From 1998 to 2004, under the pseudonym ‘Mary Goore’, he was the frontman of death metal outfit Repugnant. Their sole album, Epitome Of Darkness, came out in 2006: the same year that Forge formed Ghost.

Forge told Metal Hammer in 2023 that Repugnant’s split “broke my heart”. “I wanted us to be signed to Roadrunner and support Slayer,” he said. “That never happened, unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately, as it kept me grounded for a few more years and if those things had happened maybe I wouldn’t be here today.”

Talking to Loudwire, he admitted that he didn’t “know if [Repugnant] were good enough” to find success.

“Now, knowing a lot of the things that are required, how many stars that need to align and all the decisions you have to make, I can definitely look back on myself as a 21-year-old and quickly see why I didn’t achieve that with Repugnant. I wasn’t mature. I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t there yet.”

Forge reformed Repugnant in 2010 and hoped to record a second album with the band, tentatively titled Toxic Contagion. However, the reunion was short-lived and new music never materialised. The singer has ruled out making death metal with Ghost but told Loudwire that he was “still chasing” his longtime passion for the genre.

“I still get the same kick out of things that I liked as an 11 or 12-year-old, when I really started listening to that and when death metal was this really dangerous animal that you can just go to this one store to find,” he explained.

Ghost, one of the biggest rock bands in the world, went on hiatus in February, following the conclusion of their Skeletour world tour. Forge told Kerrang! that he was “exhausted” after completing the trek.

Metal Hammer has contacted Ghost’s representatives and asked Forge to comment on the rumours of a new death metal pursuit.

Carmine Appice was there at the beginning of hard rock. “I saw the whole thing grow,” says the man whose granite-heavy drumming in proto-metal pioneers Vanilla Fudge helped define the sound of an entire genre, influencing everyone from John Bonham down. “Now all the drummers from back then are gone, but I’m still here.”

The once jet-black hair may be an elegant, swept-back silver-grey, and the heroic bullhorn moustache he once sported is a little more dapper these days, but the 79-year-old New Yorker is as garrulous as ever. He’s talking to Classic Rock in the Big Apple, where he’s playing a show later with the current incarnation of Vanilla Fudge.

He juggles that band with the resurrected version of his 70s blues-rock trio Cactus, whose new album, Temple Of The Blues II, features an all-star cast of musicians including Dee Snider, Ted Nugent, Pat Travers, Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal and many others. “You gotta keep busy,” Appice says, not unreasonably.

Vanilla Fudge and Cactus are just two of the names on a resumé that includes 70s supergroup BBA (alongside Jeff Beck and Tim Bogert), Rod Stewart’s band (Appice co-wrote Rod’s monster disco-rock hit Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?), Ozzy Osbourne (briefly), 80s hard rockers King Kobra and Blue Murder, and a head-spinning list of collaborations.

There’s just one thing to clear up: how to pronounce his surname. “It’s ‘A-piece’,” he says. “I was Carmine ‘A-piece’ for years, everything was good. Then my brother Vinny [ex-Black Sabbath/Dio drummer] came out, and he was Vinny ‘A-pice-y’. So I’ve spent the last forty years explaining it to people. Thanks, Vinny.”

What was the scene like in New York when you were starting out in the sixties?

I played a lot of clubs. I played opposite Jimi Hendrix when he was Jimmy James. He’d say: “I wanna make it.” Me, I didn’t really want to make it. I just wanted to make a living. My drum teacher made a good living. He had a house, he had a drum room, he had a Cadillac. That was a good life in those days in Brooklyn.

How good was Hendrix back then?

He was great. When I saw pictures of this new guy Jimi Hendrix, with the big hair, playing with his teeth, I said: “That’s Jimmy James. Finally, he’s got his wish.”

How did you come to be in Vanilla Fudge?

I was playing in a club one time and these two guys walk in. It was [Vanilla Fudge keyboard player/vocalist] Mark Stein and [bassist] Tim Bogert. They said: “We’re doing this new kind of music and we’re looking for a drummer who can sing, who’s got a right foot, who’s technically good.” They said: “We got this guy who’ll pay us a hundred dollars a week just to record and make it.” I said: “I dunno. I’m making two-fifty to three hundred a weekend.” But I went to hear them and they were great. So I started working with them, and that was a life-changing decision.

Where did you get the idea to play drums so hard and loud?

No PAs. That simple. I beat the hell out of the drums so I could be heard. The bass drum was so small, so I figured if I got a bigger bass drum it would be louder, and it was. So I made everything bigger, which was much louder. But you really had to hit them hard to get the sound out. When I met Bonzo [John Bonham], he was on a little Ringo Starr kit. When he saw my drum set he went fuckin’ crazy. He said: “I want a set like that.” I called up [drum company] Ludwig and said: “There’s this new band, Led Zeppelin, with a great drummer, John Bonham, and he wants a kit just like mine.”

Which other bands were Vanilla Fudge hanging out with back then?

There was The Vagrants, which was Leslie West’s band. Billy Joel was in The Hassles. But our manager owned a club. He was a Mafia kind of guy, so we were hanging out with mob-types.

Can you remember any of the mob guys?

Yeah, Henry Hill was one of them, the guy from the Goodfellas movie. He used to come to my house: “Hey, Carmine, I got this stuff, it just fell off a truck.” Fur coats, little colour TVs, jewellery. I bought two Revox machines [tape recorders] off him. On the market they were seven hundred dollars. I bought two of them for two hundred bucks.

Led Zeppelin’s first ever US gig was opening for Vanilla Fudge in Denver, Colorado. What did you make of them?

We knew Jimmy Page from The Yardbirds, and we had the same attorney. They sent us an acetate of the first album and we listened to it and went: “Whoah…” I heard Bonzo on Good Times, Bad Times and went: “This guy’s really good.” So we were ready for them. We became great friends. I do remember walking down the street and telling Robert Plant he should move around more.

What was John Bonham really like?

I liked John. He was a nice guy until he started drinking. The drinking made him an animal. I saw him drag a guy out of a room we were recording in. The guy was putting down Simon Kirke of Bad Company, and Bonzo said to me: “Tell your friend to be quiet or I’m gonna pull him out by his hair.” The guy just kept going, so Bonzo came over and grabbed him by the hair and dragged him out of the room and slammed the door.

Is there any truth in the rumour that you were in line to replace him in Led Zeppelin when he died?

I heard that rumour. But I never got a call. Matter of fact I was with Rod [Stewart] at the time. He said: “Are you joining Led Zeppelin?” I said: “That’s what the rumours are, I haven’t heard nothing.” He said: “There’s rumours I’m going to retire. Keep the rumours going, we’ll sell more tickets that way.”

Vanilla Fudge have never got the proper credit for being one of the first heavy rock bands. True?

Without a doubt. We influenced so many bands. We’ve never got in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. Come on! I thought it was about influence. But now it’s just about bullshit. They should change their name to the Music Hall Of Fame, cos it’s not rock’n’roll any more.

Why did Vanilla Fudge split, in 1970?

We’d had some disagreements, the usual stuff. Then we did a gig with Ten Years After, the Jeff Beck Group and the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Zeppelin went up and jammed with Beck - Bonzo played the drums, and he ended up taking off all his clothes. My mother and father were there. They said: “Why would he do that?”

Anyway, that night, Bonzo said: “Jeff Beck wants to play with you and Tim.” Cactus was originally gonna be Jeff Beck, Tim Bogert, Carmine Appice and Rod Stewart, but Rod Stewart decided he didn’t want to work with Jeff any more.

Jeff was coming over to meet our managers and lawyers and put a deal together, and he got in a car wreck. It took him eighteen months to recover. We said: “We broke up Vanilla Fudge to do this; now we gotta wait eighteen months. Let’s just find some other guys.” We got [guitarist] Jim McCarty, who was a motherfucker of a player, and he brought in [singer] Rusty Day.

How was Cactus different from Vanilla Fudge?

Vanilla Fudge was like a symphonic rock band, real serious dynamics. Cactus was a party, groove, druggy band. Rusty Day was a fuckin’ druggy, crazy motherfucker. He carried knives, he carried guns, he dealt drugs, he did cocaine all the time. But his vocals and his lyrics and his songs were fantastic: Restrictions, Token Chokin’…

You eventually ended up playing with Jeff Beck in BBA. What was he like to work with?

About 1972 we got a call: “Jeff still wants to work with you and Tim.” So we gave Cactus to [keyboard player] Duane Hitchings, and me and Tim went with Jeff Beck. Most of the time it was fun, and he was an amazing guitar player, but there were some weird things. I remember BBA were on tour one time, everything’s going great, selling out everywhere, then one day we wake up and the tour manager goes: “Jeff’s gone home. He had a fight with his girlfriend.” That left a bad taste in our mouth. But we carried on.

How come BBA made only one studio album?

We tried to do a second album, but Jeff didn’t like it. I listened to some of the songs, I wouldn’t have liked it either. We continued to do gigs, but it ended when we played the Rainbow in London. We were playing like motherfuckers. But the second show, Tim was sick. Jeff said something derogatory to him, and Tim punched him in the face. That was the end of it. But if I’d never played with Jeff I would have never ended up with Rod Stewart. Playing with Rod kicked my career way up.

How much fun was it being in Rod’s band?

That was the best. I’d become really good friends with Rod when Cactus went on the road with the Faces. That’s when they were crazy – they had a bar on stage. After Cactus, I had a band called KGB with [guitarist] Mike Bloomfield, which didn’t happen. And I was asked to join Rainbow, but I couldn’t do it cos they were signed to someone else.

Then I hear that Rod’s looking for a drummer. I get a message from Rod via his tour manager, saying: “Tell Carmine to come up to the house, see if he likes the band.” Rod wasn’t there, but I knew those guys, [guitarist] Jim Cregan, [bassist] Phil Chen. Rod came back a couple of days later and says: “You got the job if you want it. Just one thing: how do you say your fuckin’ name? You’re like five different people.”

What do you remember about writing Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?, which was a big hit for Rod?

Rod would say: “I want a song like Miss You by the Stones.” I wrote it on a keyboard with a drum machine, I went to my buddy Duane Hitchings’ house, I played him the chords, we put a groove together, he wrote a bridge. So when we presented it to Rod it sounded like a finished song. He said: “Great, let’s do it.”

We did it a few different ways - great big drums, big guitars, it sounded freakin’ great. Then [producer] Tom Dowd came in and put so much other junk on it – orchestra, percussion, Linda Lewis singing the high line. We were like: “Is that gonna work?” Then it went to Number One in fifteen countries. I guess he knew what he was doing. The song made millions of dollars, I got a good lifestyle, even though I had to give half of Sexy to my freakin’ ex-wife that didn’t deserve anything.

What was Rod like back then?

He was the best rock singer and performer. His voice, his look… and he was a badass onstage. He’d get the whole audience singing. I’ve never seen anyone do that. He’d run up on the stage and jump up on the piano. I mean, come on!

And then he fired you in 1982. Why?

I don’t know, and neither does he. When I did my autobiography, he said in the intro: “I fired Carmine. Fuck knows why.” There you go. Too much drinking, too much drugging, somebody didn’t like the fact that I was the second-most popular person in the band. I don’t remember how we made up. I went to one of his weddings. By eighty-three or eighty-four we were friends again.

You joined Ozzy Osbourne’s band for the Bark At The Moon tour. Did you get on with Ozzy?

Yeah, I did. She [Sharon Osbourne] fired me. I was pissed off. I really wanted to stay in there and do what I do, which is give him a great drum sound, help write songs. After she fired me, she said my name was too big for that band; I needed to start my own band.

So that’s what I did [with King Kobra]. I bought a motorhome, a truck and a van to tour in. Funny enough, we were painting the motorhome white in this rehearsal place where Ozzy was rehearsing for drummers. Ozzy came up and said: “I know you and my missus have a problem, but I know we can be friends.” I’m up on this little scaffold, taping up the windows so they wouldn’t get sprayed on. He gets up there, and we’re both taping up these windows. He was a nice guy.

You’re still recording and playing today. What keeps you doing it?

It’s boring just sitting around doing nothing. I like doing stuff. I like creating music. I just got asked to do the drums for Captain Kirk’s spoken-word album, William Shatner. I’m gonna do Crazy Train. I know how to do that cos I played with Ozzy for nine months.

Rank these rock drummers in order of greatness: John Bonham, Keith Moon, Ginger Baker, Carmine Appice.

Oh god, that’s hard. We’re all so different. Bonzo was great cos the band was great – they kept him up there. If he was in another band, I don’t know if he’d have stayed up there. Ginger Baker was there at the beginning of rock with that double bass drum. Keith Moon was just so unusual. I took what I did and made it really powerful. And I’d add Dino Danelli from The Rascals. He started everything in rock drumming – the playing, the showmanship, the twirling. He was a monster player and never got credit.

If you were starting out now, what advice would you give the younger version of yourself?

Get a regular job. I really don’t know what it takes to make it today. I’m really lucky, I’m still here, I’m still doing it in my eightieth year. I got muscle pains, some of my speed has gone, but I still do it.

The new album from Cactus, Temple Of Blues II, is out now via Cleopatra.

Peter Hammill’s Tears In Time – his 37th solo album – arrives five years after his last solo release, 2021’s covers album In Translation, and nine years since 2017’s From The Trees, his last collection of original material. But the first thing to clear up is how to pronounce the new title – is it “tears” as in rips or as in crying?

“It’s whichever you choose,” says Hammill with amusement. “It’s like a flickering Chimera! I haven’t decided which way to say it myself; I’ll probably switch between one or the other. An interesting conceit, I thought!”

The 11-song work is described as having been “recorded at various locations between 1991 and 2026” – which might support the ‘rips in time’ interpretation – but the arrangements and lyrics all come from the past few years.

“I usually put in the dates of recordings, and a couple of pieces had their origins way back when I was still in [recording studio] Terra Incognita in Bath,” he explains. “But I’d say that actually both the tears and the tears are to do with the fact that there’s quite a lot of separations and endings in these songs.”

One of the oldest compositions on the album, dating back to 2022, is Heavy Weather, a version of which originally appeared on a limited-edition CD sold at Hammill’s October 2023 shows in Tokyo. While many of the songs on Tears In Time are reflections on time, memory and coming to terms with the hand that life has dealt, Heavy Weather is about the current state of the world.

“And specifically Ukraine,” says the Van der Graaf Generator man. “But Ukraine stands as a marker for so much of what’s happened since then. Obviously one has to live in hope and expectation and positivity, but these continue to be very worrying times.”

As has been standard procedure for decades now, he played, recorded and produced the album almost entirely on his own, although The Wheels is a co-write with longtime collaborator Saro Cosentino, who was also involved in its recording.

Hammill laughingly scoffs at the very idea of exposing his work to external feedback during its creation – but admits, “It’s probably not the most advisable thing to do. I end up with a finished piece of work I know everything about, but I don’t know how anyone else will take it, or how it fits into whatever I’ve done in the past.”

The first person to hear the finished product is always his wife Hilary, who’s described Tears In Time as “quite dark” – although, as Hammill says, “She usually does!”

The work feels vivid and accessible, certainly compared to the more minimal From The Trees. One of its standout tracks is Red Flags (In The Sunset), a terse rocker with a catchy refrain.

“Every so often, a three-chord trick will fall into your hands,” says Hammill. “It goes back to a Nadir-ish feeling, really, I’d say.”

And When He Ran, closing the record, is a particularly personal song about the death of his dog Bentley, known as Bendy. “Sometimes you have to write a song because that’s what you do, but I wasn’t sure at first whether I’d even make it public,” he says.

“But it’s something that a lot of people will have experienced. It’s about the acknowledgement and acceptance of the inevitability of things – it’s tough, but it’s OK. There’s still a memory of this spirit of life darting through the fields.”

Tears In Time is on sale now.

It’s something we’ve seen time and time again over the last few years: a massively successful band venturing into cinemas with a movie that’s part concert film, part documentary. Everyone from Ghost to Pulp has given it a go, and while it’s often gratifying seeing such stars unload their hits on the big screen, the behind-the-scenes looks sometimes lack. Like autobiographies with glaring omissions, these self-produced reflections give subjects the chance to downplay difficult truths.

This is why it was so interesting when Linkin Park announced their intention to wade into the genre. Arguably the biggest nu metal act of all time, their 2000 debut Hybrid Theory having defined a generation, their story has become one of resilience following frontman Chester Bennington’s suicide in 2017. They reformed in 2024, with new vocalist Emily Armstrong and drummer/producer Colin Brittain, then endured the scrutiny of Armstrong’s past ties to Scientology to (quite quickly) reach the mountaintop for the second time in their careers. In the last two years, they’ve topped charts with the From Zero album, put on their biggest-ever gig at Wembley Stadium and become the first band with a female singer to headline Download.

Directed by turntablist/co-founder Joe Hahn, it would have been easy for Unshatter to focus solely on the positives: the fact that the six-piece are back on top of the musical world, and how big and passionate the crowd was when they played São Paulo’s Allianz Parque stadium on their reunion tour. But Hahn, a proven director with 2014 feature-length thriller Mall under his belt, tells a gripping, heart-rending story.

Within 10 minutes, the members open up about the impact of Bennington’s death, how it sent them hurtling in disparate directions. They later admit their heartache after longtime drummer Rob Bourdon refused to return, and singer/guitarist/keyboardist Mike Shinoda reveals his complex feelings over guitarist Brad Delson’s initial reluctance to get involved.

Hahn also shares studio footage that captures difficult talks about the band’s future (should it be called Linkin Park anymore?) and offers intriguing easter eggs, such as Shinoda’s early demo for comeback single The Emptiness Machine. The sole elephant in the room is the backlash towards Armstrong’s history with Scientology: a knotted, possibly dangerous topic, given the church’s power and reach.

The São Paulo live footage is less prevalent here than in other recent rock-docs, but it’s integrated brilliantly. The highlight is watching Armstrong record Heavy Is The Crown in the studio, then the jumpcut to her screaming it before 55,000 people. Discussions of how she’ll handle Bennington’s parts are followed by the rap metal barbs of Bleed It Out, which evidences what the other members say about her filling the old singer’s shoes without being a carbon copy.

Ending with archival video of Shinoda and Bennington together onstage, Unshatter is reverent without falling into hagiography. The anguish of losing a friend and bandmate, and the emotional minefield of continuing afterwards, is never shied away from. Even the most obsessive fan will see new things – and probably gain extra respect for how Linkin Park have scaled nu metal’s peak all over again.

Unshatter hits cinemas on Tuesday, September 30, via Trafalgar. The soundtrack is out now via Warner.

We're back with a brand new Tracks Of The Week! This week we've got another seven new and diverse slices of progressively inclined music for you to enjoy.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Steven Wilson walked off with the honours last week with the title track to his much-anticipated album, Requiem For A Village. The Pineapple Thief came a very credible second and fellow UK progger Joh. Holden in third place.

The premise is simple - we've listened to a batch of new releases by bands falling under the progressive umbrella, and collated them together in one post for you - it makes it so much easier than having to dip in and out of various individual posts, doesn't it?

The idea is to watch the videos (or listen if it's a stream), enjoy (or not) and also to vote for your favourite in the voting form at the bottom of this post. Couldn't be easier, could it? We'll be bringing you Tracks Of The Week, as the title implies, each week. Next week, we'll update you with this week's winner and present a host of new prog music for you to enjoy.

If you're a band and you want to be featured in Prog's Tracks Of The Week, send your video (as a YouTube link) or track embed, band photo (please, don't forget the photo!) and biog with quotes to us here.

LESOIR - HIDDEN FIRE

The Dutch band's latest single, the Eastern-sounding Hidden Fire, is taken from their upcoming album Tomorrow Is Now Today, which is released through V2 Records on October 23. It's without a doubt one of the most enigmatic pieces of music we've yet heard from the Maastricht sextet. You'll be able to hear more from the new album when the band play live with Airbag in the UK in October and with Annicke van Giersbergen across Europe in November.

"The track captures that quiet despair of watching identity dissolve into passive consumption, questioning whether people still make conscious choices about what they let in," the band say. "Do you let it go, or do you push back? Let the frustration win, or stay true to yourself and speak up anyway?"

CROWN LANDS - THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Canadian prog duo Crown Landes have been preparing for their upcoming homeland headline tour by decamping to Chalet Studios in Pickering, Ontario, where their heroes Rush had worked on albums such as Presto, Roll The Bones and Counterparts in pre-production, to record a few tracks from their recent Apocalypse album, including the epic Through The Looking Glass. Impressive stuff.

“For me, what separates a good band from a great band is what they can do as a live band. When there are no tricks or backing tracks, " explains guitarist/bassist/keyboardist Kevin Comeau. "Just the musicians in the room. We wanted to capture ourselves as honestly as we could with this live series. I’m very happy with the way that we captured the band at Chalet studio. Chalet is probably my favourite place to be in the entire world. I spend as much time there as I can. In fact, I married my wife there 3 years ago!'

PILOTINTHEPICTURE - RUN

Pilotinthepicture is the introspective solo project of Hamburg-based musician and songwriter Wolfram Zarnack, better known as the drummer for the psychedelic rock band Lee Shore and the post-metal band Drownship. Zarnack's solo work blends prog rock, ambient, post-rock, and psychedelia into a melancholic, atmospheric sound, and he releases his debut album, While We Escape, is released on October.

Zarnack refers to his sound as “post-progressive rock”, and the insistently melodic new single, Run, which is released today, also features the charming vocals of Josefine Winter, which add another level of magnetism to the overall sound.

THE FLOWER KINGS - THE GODS OF ROME PT. 2

Sweden's prog rock royalty, The Flower Kings, have followed up last year's LOVE album with the similarly themed HOPE, which they released through InsideOut Music on October 23. The Gods Of Rome Pt. 2 is more classy prog from Roine Stolt and pals, who show no sign of letting on their message of positivity, which hasn't always been taken well by some online, Stolt told Prog magazine last year!

"At a certain point in life - you arrive at a place where outside opinions matter less - and the process gravitates towards making an album that YOU yourself would LOVE but would perhaps normally not be viewed as a commercial attempt at all," Stolt says. "We, the band - trust YOU, the audience - to be curious and to trust us that we want to bring you a grand glowing adventure.”

“This is one of several parts of an epic piece of music that has been swirling around for some years. I reworked bits and wrote some new lyrics that now have the backdrop of ancient Rome - but act more as a metaphor for modern-day power play. Every nation and every leader/president wants to shine and be remembered as the greatest - expansive dreams often tend to implode, however.”

WARRINGTON-RUNCORN NEW TOWN DEVELOPMENT PLAN - THE MACHINE

If Kraftwerky, Kosmische sounds are your bag, then Gordon Chapman-Fox's brilliantly named Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan are the band for you! He's been exploring the modernist utopian aesthetic of the UK’s post-war new town development programme through timeless retro-futurist electronic music since 2020 and will release his latest album, Industrial Growth, through Castles In Space on October 30. The brooding The Machine is a most appetising starter.

“My music has been getting heavier and heavier over the years”, says Chapman-Fox. “As my music often reflects my feelings on the outside world, this is very much a visceral response to our current times. There’s always been a darkness to my work, but this felt like the time to unleash it all."

SHY, LOW - PALMISTRY

Shy, Low are an instrumental post-rock quintet hailing from Richmond, Virginia, who will release their forthcoming album Purity Spiral through Pelagic Records on October 16. New single Palmistry shows a mastery of restraint whilst still managing to capture the emotional grandeur that great post-rock delivers, which bodes well for the upcoming album.

"Whether constructing intricate layers of harmony or driving songs toward explosive climaxes, there is a deep understanding of pacing, atmosphere, and the power of restraint," the band confirm. "Momentum is at the heart of this album; through intricate rhythmic detail and explosive bursts of energy, drums become the anchor and catalyst, supporting the expansive arrangements while pushing them toward moments of cathartic release."

RAINBURN - CONFESSIONS

Bangalore progressive rock trio Rainburn's third album, thirty seven, due for release on November 4, is woven from a near-death experience that frontman Vats Iyengar endured and survived while stranded at sea. Across nine connected songs, the record explores faith, humanity’s perceived superiority over nature, love and mortality, while pushing Rainburn’s sound into new territory through industrial rhythms, electronic textures and stark acoustic guitar

"We wanted the video to tell a story of its own, independent of the album’s narrative, while staying true to the song’s central themes," says Iyengar. "The sonic template for this record was very different from what we've had in the past - we were referencing bands like Depeche Mode, Rammstein and Nine Inch Nails far more than bands that are usually classified as prog. Of course, all these new elements were pulled into the ambit of the Rainburn sound, so this is very much a deeply conceptual progressive rock album, albeit with some unique twists.”

Hatebreed singer Jamey Jasta has opened up about the conversation with Metallica’s James Hetfield which encouraged him to quit drinking.

The hardcore frontman, 49, gave up alcohol in 2008, shortly before meeting Hetfield backstage at an MTV event. Talking exclusively to Metal Hammer, he reveals that the heavy metal singer/guitarist, who went to rehab for alcoholism and other addictions in 2001, urged him to take his sobriety one show at a time. The advice made getting clean feel like less of an “impossibility”.

“I already owed Metallica a huge debt of gratitude, because they played [Hatebreed’s] Perseverance music video when they hosted [MTV programme] Headbanger’s Ball,” Jasta remembers. “So, when I became host, I told them I was trying to be sober at the time, and he said, ‘You just got to get through the first show.’”

He continues: “You just have to know that you can do a show sober. Once you do, once you get a couple under your belt, it gets better as you go, because it feels like such an impossibility. That’s just great life advice for anything: whatever you think is impossible, on the other side of doing it is the best feeling, because you had told yourself, ‘Oh, there’s no fucking way.’”

Jasta first revealed that Hetfield had helped him on his journey to sobriety in 2019, when Hetfield re-entered rehab due to further addiction issues. Jasta wrote on social media at the time: “Meeting James at MTV and speaking with him about my drinking problem was very eye-opening, because this is a guy who is in one of the biggest bands in the world, with so much pressure on him and so much weight to carry, and he really made me think: if he could quit, so could I.”

Jasta has been part of Hatebreed since their 1994 founding and is the band’s sole constant member. They’re one of the best-selling hardcore acts in the world, having shipped more than 1.5 million records in North America. Their single Live For This was nominated for Best Metal Performance at the 47th Grammy Awards in 2005, but lost to Motörhead and their cover of Metallica’s song Whiplash.

Hatebreed will release their new album, Fatal Paradox, via BLKIIBLK on November 6. It will be their first album without founding bassist Chris Beattie, who was dismissed in 2024 and filed a lawsuit against his ex-bandmates in July 2025 alleging unpaid profits. The band’s attempt to dismiss the suit was shot down in May.

Meanwhile, Metallica are currently preparing for a residency at Las Vegas multimedia venue The Sphere, which kicks off on October 1 and concludes on March 13. After that, the metal giants will continue their M72 world tour across North America from May to June. Limp Bizkit and Avatar will support. Get tickets via Metallica’s website.

Tom Morello has spent decades as one of rock’s greatest guitarists, but instead of leaning on his trademark riffs, his latest solo album pulls together every chapter of a career that stretches from Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave to The Nightwatchman and his recent run of high-profile collabs, with 15-year-old son Roman sharing songwriting credits on five tracks.

It’s a ride with many twists and turns. The title track lumbers in on a bluesy groove, Tom’s weathered baritone recalling Johnny Cash at his most worldweary, while Adjourn It pairs Serj Tankian with the closest thing here to classic Tom Morello riffing. Date Night tears through a World War II resistance story with punk fire, Soldier In The Army Of Love smashes gospel, country and rap together before Tom fires up the fretboard, while Unconquered slams The Prodigy’s electronic pulse into Kneecap’s confrontational flow and Everything Burns, featuring Beartooth, lands one of the album’s biggest hooks.

By the time Tom reaches the Dylan-esque folk of The Last Rung On The Ladder and They Can’t Kill Us All, the album feels almost naked, leaving his convictions to speak for themselves. His politics haven’t softened with age, either. Serj Tankian’s righteous fury, Kneecap’s confrontational energy and Beartooth’s arena-sized punch all strengthen the songs while reinforcing themes of anti-fascism, immigrant rights and solidarity, all delivered through storytelling, punk energy and protest folk rather than sloganeering alone.

Tom’s playing remains unmistakable, yet it’s his versatility that leaves the strongest impression. Every side of his musical identity finds a place here, resulting in an album from an artist refusing to be defined by the instrument that made him famous.

Everyone Gets Everything They Want is out now via Mom & Pop.

By the time Fish’s final album Weltschmerz arrived in September 2020, it had been subject to delays for several years. In late 2018 – when he was still hoping for a release in a few months’ time – he was confident it would achieve what he wanted it to, and compared the experience to writing his final album with Marillion 31 years previously.

Retirement may be part of life, but for those who’ve had four decades’ immersion in an artist’s music and polished lyrics, the thought of a final album comes with an overwhelming sadness. For Fish, that album is the long-touted Weltschmerz, which – if his plans come to fruition – would already released and bookending his catalogue. Indeed, his December 2019 live expedition was billed as a Weltschmerz & Clutching At Straws Tour – the only problem being that Fish and his band hadn’t written a note of the new record.

“Yeah, last year I was really worried about it,” he admits. “There’s been so much that’s happened. My dad died in May 2016; and six months later, I kind of woke up in the garden and went, ‘Where has the last six months gone?’ I also had a lot of health problems and I just couldn’t get my head into writing. I was in a state of perpetual recovery.

“It was really only around February this year that Steve [Vantsis, bassist] and I had that one spark that just set the control room ablaze. Finally, things just started to come together. I mean, this is tagged as my last album. I just want to do what I want to do and it’s like a ‘damn the torpedoes’ kind of vibe. I’m just going to feel the whole thing through. Whatever it demands will be done.”

Certainly, there was a slight but nagging doubt that writer’s block might blight the project. But once a firm direction had been formed, ideas began to speedily morph into tracks. Within six weeks the duo had four songs in demo form, with two of those running to around 15 minutes each. With another two lengthy epics also in development, Fish began to consider a double album. Yet with the original intention for the album to be released by September, that was adding unnecessary pressure to his schedule.

“I realised it would really screw things up – I knew I’d never be get a double written,” he recalls. “Around March, I got a call from Mark Wilkinson, who told me that he had some issues he had to deal with and there was no way he’d get the artwork ready for September. He and I had been talking for the year previously about how we wanted to put together a great packaging layout, similar if not better to A Feast Of Consequences.

“I said, ‘Look, you’ve worked on every project that I’ve ever been involved with since 1982 and there’s no way I’m going into my last album without you.’ So I thought, ‘Fuck it – let’s find the silver in the dark cloud and put the album back to May 2019.’ I could have put my head under a pillow and had a good sob ,but I just thought, ‘Let’s find a way round it. There’s always a solution to everything.’”

For Fish, there’s a need for the lyrics to dictate the album’s flow – or as he calls them, “rock flicks moments” – where he can effectively draft a short story, then translate it onto a musical backdrop. It’s often been a tricky process. His plan was to bring his band to his Haddington home studio and filter ideas through a process of lengthy jams.

That provided difficult: guitarist Robin Boult was on tour with Howard Jones, and keyboardist John Beck “wasn’t answering his phone.” That left the singer to nurture his relationship with Vantsis, leading to the revisiting of a technique that dates back to Marillion’s early days.

“It’s really quite strange – I’ve kind of gone back to writing in the same way we did between 1982 and 1985,” he laughs. “It’s that kind of vibe. We’re taking bits and putting bits together, but they’re the right bits. It’s like Marillion used to trust me. I could say that I thought one bit works well with another bit, or that I needed a section to go from one piece to another. It’s all about letting the drama and the dynamic rule it with a very strong lyric.”

Anyone who’s followed his career, or seen the interviews which accompany the recent reissues of Marillion’s 80s catalogue may spot an irony. He’s been pretty outspoken about the band’s writing technique of piecing together tracks “with sticky tape.” Return to that method appears to be a pretty dramatic turnaround.

“Well yes, but that’s because I came to loathe it,” he says. “Back in the Script… and Fugazi days, I think they trusted me, and there were a lot of ideas around that we could sift through. Clutching At Straws was when we moved into songwriting. When we moved on to the album that was supposed to come after Clutching At Straws, I was getting presented with loads of bits – but they didn’t make sense. It was like having different scenes from different movies and trying to construct a story amongst it, you know?

Steve trusts me and trusts my vision on the lyrical side in the same way that the guys used to do in the old days. When you listen to the song we’ve just completed, Waverley Steps, there’s definitely a throwback to that period – it reminds me of Fugazi in the way the tempos move. It was like, ‘This is the story; this is what I need to put across, and I need so many bars to go into the next section.’ It really was like making movies for people’s ears. That’s been commanding all the songs.”

The German word “weltschmerz” refers to a sense of world-weariness and ennui; so it’s obvious that the album possesses an overriding sense of darkness. Yet Fish was keen to avoid clichés, and determined that the lyrics would be far removed from the more obvious protest songs delivered over the decades.

“I got the idea for the title over two years ago, when I was watching the news, and also becoming more aware of people’s feelings,” he explains. “There was a lot of sadness and world-weariness. It wasn’t apathy – it was that people were feeling browbeaten. The last thing I wanted to do though was talk about corporations, kings and queens or corrupt governments. That’s been done so many times by other people, right the way back to Queensrÿche in the 80s. I feel that I’m good at observations of people and observations of things happening around me. So it’s become a collection of songs, in the third person, that are all about people dealing with the world they live in.”

At face value, those subject matters may sound impenetrably gloomy. Waverley Steps delves into male suicide, C Song is written from the perspective of someone diagnosed with cancer, and Market Garden discusses dementia. There are also songs about self-harming and refugees. It’s by no means easy listening – but then Fish has always covered similar subjects in a researched and cerebral manner. Marillion’s Punch And Judy and his solo track Family Business covered domestic violence, and the likes of He Knows You Know referenced drug misuse. Yet for all the preconceptions that could be made about this new material, it’s far from being depressing collection.

“The subjects are really, really heavy,” he accepts. “But the approach I’m taking is something like the movie American Beauty. It deals with really dark subject matters, but it’s done in such a beautiful way. I’m not going out there to try and bring people down. There’s a melancholy to it – but it’s a beautiful melancholy. I took a whip to my own back as well, in that I gave myself a challenge to have a reference to a plant or a garden in every song. That’s all to do with being in the garden for six months after my dad died.”

The delay in writing the material led to the hatching of another masterplan. His current tour features the premiere of songs from Weltschmerz, with an EP and downloads of selected tracks released simultaneously, included Waverley Steps, Little Man What Now and Man With A Stick.

“I felt that I could really approach this in a completely different way,” he says. “Rather than the old-fashioned fanfare of ‘here’s the album,’ let’s release a bunch of downloads first. On tour we’re playing 40 to 50 minutes of Weltschmerz along with the Clutching At Straws material – which we intended to do the previous year. I was aware that the fans needed to hear it otherwise there will be some very awkward silences.

“So we’ve recorded 30 to 40 minutes of music already, and then in January, February and March 2019, we’ll record the rest of the material, ready for the album release next May. Next year, it’s the 30th anniversary of Vigil In A Wilderness Of Mirrors, which we’ll tour with Weltschmerz at the end of the year. Then in 2020, that will be the farewell tour.”

It’s evident that Fish intends the album to be a career peak, yet he feels free to enjoy the final writing and recording process. He’ll depart the recording studio with an eloquent, musical swagger rather than a nervous whimper.

“I really want to make it special. I’ve got Dave Jackson from Van der Graaf Generator coming to play saxophone on it – that’s going to be a real teenage dream for me. We’ve got string sections; we’re putting real brass onto Waverley Steps. This isn’t getting made for the money. No; I have to make this something really, really special. I want to be a recording that I can be proud of.

“When I left Marillion, Clutching At Straws had been the best album I did with them. It was my favourite album. One of the problems I’ve had is that people always ask what would have happened next. That’s the way I want to leave my solo career: I want to write an album where people are going to ask what would have happened next? Which is always the end to a good film.”

It's possible that no drummer has ever operated under the scrutiny that Anika Nilles has experienced on Rush's Fifty Something tour. Replacing the irreplaceable Neil Peart was always going to be a huge task, but the German musician has approached the task with enormous skill, drawing praise not only for her performances behind the kit, but for the infectious joy with which she performs.

Still, the scrutiny persists. And during Rush's first show at the Frost Bank Center in San Antonio, Texas, this week, Nilles provided onlookers with another stellar moment. During the much-loved drum fill section of set closer Tom Sawyer, she lost her grip on one of her sticks, sending it cartwheeling away from the kit and out of reach.

Lesser mortals might have panicked, but Nilles recovered immediately, grabbing a spare stick and continuing her path around the toms. As usual, the completed fill was greeted with roars of approval from the crowd, many of whom wouldn't have noticed the mishap.

Video of the moment suggests that Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson picked up on the near-calamity, with an amused Lifeson eventually picking up the stray stick and tossing it into the audience, and it was smiles all round as Tom Sawyer finished.

This isn't the first time Nilles has lost a stick on the tour. Ninety seconds into the opening number on the first night of the tour, Xanadu, the same thing happened. A fumbled stick. An instant recovery. Onwards and upwards.

The San Antonio stick incident can be watched below. The next show on Rush's Fifty Something tour is the second date at the venue, this evening (September 25). Full dates follow.

Rush: Fifty Something tour 2026

Sep 25: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Oct 01: Houston Toyota Center, TX
Oct 05: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 07: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 10: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 12: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 15: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 17: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 21: St. Louis Enterprise Center, MO
Oct 23: Cincinatti Heritage Bank Center, OH
Oct 25: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 27: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 30: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 01: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 05: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 07: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 09: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 11: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 15: Pittsburgh PPG Paints Arena, PA
Nov 20: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 22: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 25: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Nov 27: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Dec 01: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 03: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 10: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 12: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 15: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC
Dec 17: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC

Rush: Fifty Something tour 2027

Jan 15: Buenos Aires Movistar Arena, Argentina
Jan 22: Curitiba Arena da Baixada, Brazil
Jan 24: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 26: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 30: Rio de Janeiro Estádio Olímpico Nilton Santos. Brazil
Feb 01: Belo Horizonte Estádio Mineirão, Brazil
Feb 04: Brasília Arena BRB Mané Garrincha, Brazil
Feb 19: Paris La Défense Arena, France
Feb 21: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Feb 23: Amstersam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Feb 25: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Feb 28: Cologne Lanxess Arena, Germany
Mar 02: Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
Mar 04: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
Mar 08: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 10: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 12: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 14: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 16: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 18: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 21: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 27: Kraków Arena Kraków, Poland
Mar 30: Milan Unipol Dome, Italy
Apr 01: Basel St. Jakobshalle Basel, Switzerland
Apr 04: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Apr 06: Oslo Unity Arena, Norway
Apr 08: Stockholm Avicii Arena, Sweden
Apr 10: Helsinki Veikkaus Arena, Finland

Find Rush tickets.

Irish superstars U2 have announced details of their 16th album. Carnaval de Luz, the follow-up to 2023's Songs Of Surrender will be released on November 15, and is preceded by the second single from the album, Silencio. The first single, Street Of Dreams, arrived in July.

Guitarist The Edge describes Carnaval de Luz as “a messy, provocative, sacred collection of songs”, while frontman Bono promises listeners will enjoy “loud guitars, deep bass, some ecstatic rhythms."

The singer goes on to say, "The same imagination that brings us our creativity can also bring us monsters. So we make the drums louder. We build a bigger fire. We make our stories wilder and funnier. We make the melodies sweeter and the songs, they better shine, because if the world is in darkness, we better not be."

Carnaval de Luz features contributions from U2's most celebrated production team, Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who worked on the albums that turned the quartet into international stars – 1984's The Unforgettable Fire and 1987's The Joshua Tree – as well as Achtung Baby (1991). The album also includes Torn, the final song to feature vocals by late country legend Dolly Parton, who died last month.

“When she got ill, she got out of her bed to sing this song," Bono tells Rolling Stone. "And you can hear that. And I can’t even listen to it now. She sang her heart out, and I cannot believe that’s an 80-year-old woman.”

“She was so proud of her vocal and the recording," says producer Garret 'Jacknife' Lee. "She was thrilled with it. We were very nervous that she might not approve, or would be uncomfortable with it, but she loved it."

Carnaval de Luz is available to pre-order now. Deluxe editions will include physical copies of the digital EPs U2 released earlier this year, Days Of Ash and Easter Lily. Customers placing orders at the UK store will receive a ticket pre-sale code for a soon-to-be-announced tour.

U2: Carnaval de Luz tracklist

Go (Carnaval De Luz)
La Reina
Street Of Dreams
The Mirror Maker (Rosalía)
Superficiality
If The World Is At War We Better Not Be
Silencio
The Greatest Show On Earth
Glorify
Midnight Sunshine
Can’t Stop Us Now
Torn (Feat. Dolly Parton)

In the middle of legal disputes over their name, Pink Floyd created a personal and emotionally exposed album. The Division Bell defiantly went against the Britpop zeitgeist to top the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Prog explored its history in 2014.

"Why is that bloke singing like Syd?” asked Rick Wright. It was May 1994, and Pink Floyd’s keyboard player had just heard Blur’s new album Parklife. Floyd were on tour in America and had gathered in guitarist David Gilmour’s hotel suite to listen to the album that had just supplanted their latest, The Division Bell, at the No.1 spot.

Wright might have been concerned that Damon Albarn sounded like his ex-bandmate Syd Barrett, but his was the only dissenting voice. “We wanted to hear what all the fuss was about,” bassist Guy Pratt said. “Most of us thought Parklife was very good.”

Pink Floyd could afford to be gracious in defeat. The Division Bell, released in March 1994, became the band’s first album since 1975’s Wish You Were Here to reach No.1 in both the UK and US. Their 14th studio release also went multi-platinum and turned out to be a lone victory for prog rock in the boom years of Blur-style Britpop and dance music.

The Division Bell should be remembered for its music rather than the intra-band bickering that had blighted the previous nine years.

In October 1985, three years after Floyd’s The Final Cut, founder member/bass guitarist Roger Waters took out a High Court application to try to prevent the band name being used again. Weeks later he informed the group’s record company that he was leaving the band, and that the group were no more.

Unfortunately for Waters, Gilmour had no intention of laying Floyd to rest. “Dave absolutely saw red, and finally got it together to go back to work,” wrote drummer Nick Mason in his memoir, Inside Out. A year later, the Waters-less Floyd made their debut with A Momentary Lapse Of Reason.

Wright, who’d left under duress in 1979, had returned midway through the sessions, but wasn’t made a full-time member again. Instead, his name topped a list of 16 session musicians deployed to help bring the band back from the dead. Gilmour worked briefly with several outside songwriters, and the process was frequently interrupted by calls from lawyers tasked with defending his decision to continue. Waters even tried to stop the new Floyd from touring – but failed.

He went on to describe A Momentary Lapse as “a fair forgery,” but it still reached No.3 in Britain and America, and was promoted with a tour that turned Floyd into the second highest grossing act of 1987.

“I didn’t think it was the best Pink Floyd album ever made,” Gilmour admitted. But it proved that Floyd could still be a commercial success without Waters, the man who’d devised the concepts for The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall.

The first steps towards making The Division Bell began in January 1993 with Gilmour, Mason and Wright jamming in their Britannia Row Studios in North London. Before long, Pratt, who’d played on the Momentary Lapse tour, joined them. It was a dream come true for the bassist who, as a teenager, had watched his colleagues play The Wall at Earls Court. “It was thrilling to know you were playing on a Pink Floyd record,” he said Pratt, recalling that Gilmour gently instructed him to lose “90 per cent of the notes I was playing”.

By spring, Gilmour had moved the operation to his houseboat-cum-studio, Astoria, on the Thames, and he brought in The Wall and Momentary Lapse co-producer Bob Ezrin. Having amassed around 65 of what Mason described as “riffs, patterns and musical doodles,” Gilmour reported that "we had what we called ‘the big listen,’ where everyone voted on each piece of music.”

Ideas were merged or discarded; but so much material was left over that the band briefly considered, then rejected, the idea of releasing some of it on a separate album, including a set they dubbed The Big Spliff – which was, Mason explained, “the kind of ambient mood music being adopted by bands like The Orb.”

The voting system was abandoned when the others discovered that Wright was awarding his ideas the highest possible score, and everybody else’s the lowest. Part of the problem was that he wasn’t a full band member: “It came very close to a point where I wasn’t going to do the album, because I didn’t feel that what we’d agreed was fair,” he said. Soon he was fully reinstated, and scored credits on four of the album’s 11 tracks.

Shortly before the summer, Floyd – joined by Pratt and fellow touring members Tim Renwick Gary Wallis and Jon Carin – entered Olympic Studios in Barnes, West London, and recorded a handful of new songs. They later reconvened on the Astoria and began developing those tracks further. But Gilmour now faced the hurdle of writing lyrics; and unlike Waters, he wasn’t a confident lyricist. Ex-Slapp Happy songwriter Anthony Moore – who’d co-written on A Momentary Lapse – and former Dream Academy singer-songwriter Nick Laird-Clowes would both contribute to The Division Bell. But Gilmour’s then girlfriend, journalist and author Polly Samson, would end up co-writing the lion’s share of the words.

“I started writing things and looking to her for an opinion; and gradually, as a writer herself and an intelligent person, she started putting her oar in, and I encouraged her,” explained Gilmour, who’d spend the day working on the music on the Astoria before going home to write with his soon-to-be wife. “There was,” he said, “a whole invisible side to the process.”

Not everyone was comfortable with the situation. “It wasn’t easy at first,” Ezrin admitted. “It put a strain on the boys’ club, and it was almost clichéd to have this new woman coming in and then get involved in the career. But whatever David was thinking at the time, she helped him find a way to say it.”

Between them, the couple wrote the album’s strongest song, High Hopes. “It pulled the whole album together,” said Ezrin. “It also gave us an idea around which to hang some of the broader concepts.” Partly inspired by Gilmour’s childhood and adolescence in Cambridge, its beautiful lap steel guitar solo evoked Shine On You Crazy Diamond, while composer Michael Kamen’s orchestral arrangement flashed back to the strings and woodwind he’d used on Comfortably Numb.

In the meantime, Floyd dragged some of their vintage keyboards out of storage and sampled their sounds for Take It Back and Marooned. Wright was delighted: “My influence can be heard on tracks like Marooned. Those were the kind of things that I gave the Floyd in the past – it was good that they were now getting used again.”

In fact, the whole album was full of familiar motifs. Dark Side and Wish You Were Here saxophonist Dick Parry returned to the fold. So too did Dark Side mixing supervisor Chris Thomas, who helped oversee the final mix instead of Ezrin. “That was disappointing,” understated the producer.

High Hopes’ themes of nostalgia and reflection were reprised in the Gilmour, Samson and Laird-Clowes composition Poles Apart. Its first verse was inspired by Barrett; its second by Waters. What Ezrin called “the broader concept” of The Division Bell was communication and the difficulties thereof: between friends, wives and lovers, and former bandmates.

The clues were there in titles such as Lost For Words and Keep Talking, the last of which sampled scientist Stephen Hawking’s voice. “It’s more of a wish that all problems can be solved through discussion, rather than a belief,” said Gilmour, who was well aware of the irony considering Floyd’s poor track record in communicating with each other.

However, The Division Bell also seemed to have a subtext: rebirth. On Wearing The Inside Out, Wright cast himself as a man venturing back into the world after years of isolation. “There’s a lot of emotional honesty there,” said Ezrin. “Fans pick up on a sad and vulnerable side of Rick.”

Wright wasn’t the only one being emotionally honest. Gilmour talked about ‘killing the past’ on Coming Back To Life. Many took this as a reference to embracing his relationship with Samson and rejecting the hedonistic lifestyle he’d been enjoying for the previous few years.

Revisiting The Division Bell now, the angst and tension remains clear. On What Do You Want From Me, supposedly inspired by good old fashioned marital strife, Gilmour sounds fired up and frustrated as he dishes out some heavy blues guitar. Play it alongside 2006’s charming if very contented-sounding solo album On An Island, and you can hear the difference.

The album was complete by the new year, and the band began casting around for titles. Nick Mason favoured ‘Down To Earth’; others preferred ‘Pow-Wow’. In the end band friend and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy author Douglas Adams, spotted the words ‘the division bell’ in the lyrics to High Hopes, and suggested that instead.

Although the record suffers from what Pratt calls some “80s production hangovers,” it’s compensated for by Gilmour’s sense of tension and urgency, along with Wright’s welcome presence. Unlike Momentary Lapse, The Division Bell feels like a group effort; and Gilmour was soon telling interviewers that he thought it was the most Pink Floyd-sounding album since Wish You Were Here. Everything from those spaced-out keyboards to the languid guitar solos and Storm Thorgerson’s grandiose cover art compounded his theory.

Waters called it “an awful record,” and Melody Maker likened it to “chewing on a bucket of gravel” – but Floyd’s fanbase disagreed and the album soon topped the charts in 10 countries. Naturally, you can’t help wondering what a follow-up might have sounded like. Bob Ezrin feels the same. “I wish it wasn’t the last Pink Floyd album,” he said. “But I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

In the summer of 1991, as America celebrated Independence Day, Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan drove the 150 miles from his Chicago hometown to Madison, Wisconsin, to spend the day with his friend Butch Vig. The two men had first met in Madison's Smart studios the previous summer, when Sub Pop records co-founders Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman asked the producer - who'd made a name for himself on the US underground scene via his work with Touch and Go records artists Killdozer, Die Kreuzen and The Laughing Hyenas - to record two Pumpkins songs (Tristessa and La Dolly Vita) for release on their label in December 1990.

In the studio, Corgan and Vig developed a mutual respect which later blossomed into friendship over the 30 intense working days they devoted to the recording of Smashing Pumpkins' debut album Gish during the winter of 1990/'91. It was during these sessions that the producer was asked if he'd be interested in working on Nirvana's second album, and major label debut, the Aberdeen, Washington trio having parted company with Sub Pop since demoing tracks for the record at Smart Studios in April in 1990.

Vig met with the band for pre-production in Los Angeles at the end of April '91, Geffen having booked four weeks at Sound City studio from May 2 - 28. Before the sessions for what became Nevermind, Kurt Cobain gave Vig just one direction: "I want to sound heavy."

Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins)

"So the sun's going down, it's a beautiful Wisconsin summer night, and Butch is like, 'Hey, you guys wanna hear the new Nirvana?' And he brings out a boombox. And at that point, how many people had heard ...Teen Spirit? Probably under 10 or 20."

"When the song kicked in, I said, You ripped off my guitar sound motherfucker! [But] I'm not trying to take credit, Kurt was easily the most talented person in our class... I don't know know how long ...Teen Spirit is - four minutes? - but by the time you get to the end of the four minutes, you're like, Okay, that's a classic.

"It was obvious then and it's obvious now, Nevermind was a once in a generational record."

Dave Grohl (Nirvana)

"I thought In Bloom was going to be the ‘smash hit’ off the record, or Lithium. I thought Smells Like Teen Spirit was just another album cut. We recorded it pretty quickly, and I think it was one of Butch Vig’s favourites, and it soon became pretty clear that it would be the special song on the record. But, of course, at that point we didn’t think anything was going to happen with the record.

"I thought Teen Spirit might get on [MTV’s] 120 Minutes and allow us to tour with Sonic Youth, but no one thought it was a hit single because [that] was just unimaginable."

Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age)

"My band Kyuss was on tour, and I remember seeing the video on MTV at 3 a.m. in a hotel room. I was saying, 'Man, this is so good, everyone should be into this music but they’re not going to be, it’s not going to get played because it’s too good.' About a week later I realised how wrong I was …’

Chris Cornell, Soundgarden

"I think one of the biggest reasons why a band like Nirvana appealed to such a broad audience was the fact that you went from seeing a video of a band like Whitesnake, where you have the singer's model wife doing a striptease act on the hood of a Jaguar, and basically all of these rock bands presenting themselves as having a lifestyle that you will never have. That's very special. It's very exclusive.

"And then you see a video with a band like Nirvana, where the band essentially looked like everyone and their friends at high school, and it was proof that anyone can do it: you don't have to look a particular way. You can just be who you are, make great music, and it will appeal to people."

Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails)

“I wasn’t the biggest Nirvana fan in the world. I have since realized that part of my negativity toward them was probably jealousy. Even after I realized they were a good band, there was no getting away from them. They were everywhere-on the radio, on MTV, in the papers..."

Melissa auf der Maur (Hole, Smashing Pumpkins)

"When I heard Smells Like Teen Spirit in the club where I worked as a ticket girl, it wasn't the melody only, or the lyrics, it was the whole package. The magic that Butch Vig captured for that band, with that tape machine, and those tube amps, and mics, just had more shine to it. And the song itself captured a zeitgeist moment. Kurt captured our generation in spirit, somehow. Music is a magic potion, and you never know when you will strike the chord of an entire generation, but he did that.

"When I first heard it, it was like, Here we go, generation, here we go! The '90s have arrived boldly. The new sound was born through that song. And when I got an advanced cassette of the album, I just played it all day at the bar where I worked, and I'd tell people, You don't understand, life as we know it is going to change. Don't you see? It's over. Life is never going to be the same."

Stone Gossard (Pearl Jam)

"When you heard the first notes of the Nirvana record you just knew, you could just tell, that it was absolutely going to change something. It was so obvious that it was the perfect balance of totally straight rock, blues and punk rock. And sonically it had nothing to do with Mötley Crüe, which was so refreshing: as much as I loved the first Mötley Crüe record, I was ready for something new.’

Additional sources: The LA Times (Reznor), Rick Beato, Scott Lipps (Corgan), Templo of Chris Cornell (Cornell)

The trailer for the concert film Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back To The Beginning has been released.

The feature-length flick – which will recap Black Sabbath’s blockbuster reunion show at Villa Park in Birmingham on July 5, 2025, shortly before frontman Ozzy Osbourne’s death – is set to hit cinemas on October 28. Tickets are now available. Watch the trailer below.

The list of songs performed during the all-day event has also been released, and it can be seen in its entirety below.

As well as a headlining Black Sabbath set – which marked the heavy metal pioneers’ first time onstage since 2017, and their first performance to feature all four founding members since 2005 – and a set by Ozzy’s solo band, Back To The Beginning featured short slots from Metallica, Tool, Guns N’ Roses, Gojira and many others, who performed both original material and Sabbath and Ozzy covers.

There were also supergroups featuring Tom Morello, Billy Corgan, Tobias Forge, Yungblud, Sleep Token’s II and many others, who performed renditions of Sabbath and Ozzy hits. The cover of Changes by Yungblud, II, Frank Bello, Adam Wakeman and Nuno Bettencourt, which won the Best Rock Performance trophy at the 68th Grammy Award in February, will be among the songs making the cut.

Announced in early 2025, Back To The Beginning was put together as Ozzy’s final bow, following his retirement from touring in 2023 due to Parkinson’s disease and other health issues. The show was held a short distance from where the singer grew up in Aston, with proceeds going to local charities Cure Parkinson’s, the Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity and Acorns Children’s Hospice.

The show was Sabbath’s first since the end of their farewell tour, The End, in 2017. Although Ozzy, guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler took part in that tour, founding drummer Bill Ward didn’t, due to a contractual dispute ahead of the band’s 2012 reunion and the recording of the band’s final album, 2013’s 13.

The 44,000 tickets to Back To The Beginning quickly sold out upon release, and a livestream of the event was watched by more than five million people. An estimated $11 million US (£8,323,425) was raised for charity.

Ozzy died on July 22, 2025, just over two weeks after Back To The Beginning, following a heart attack at his Buckinghamshire home aged 76. Geezer Butler wrote in trouble after the news broke: “Four kids from Aston – who’d have thought, eh? So glad we got to do it one last time, back in Aston. Love you.”

Villa Park will be the site of the first edition of Ozzfest, the festival co-founded by Ozzy and his wife/manager Sharon in 1996, since 2018 next year. A US edition of the festival is also in the works.

Songs appearing in Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back To The Beginning

• Ozzy Osbourne – I Don’t Know
• Mastodon – Supernaut
• Rival Sons – Electric Funeral
• Anthrax – Into The Void
• Halestorm – Perry Mason
• Tool – Hand Of Doom
• Ozzy Osbourne – Mr Crowley
• Tom Morello’s All Stars feat. David Draiman, Jake E. Lee, David Ellefson, Mike Bordin, Adam Wakeman – Shot In The Dark
• Tom Morello’s All Stars feat. Whitfield Crane, Scott Ian, Nuno Bettencourt, Frank Bello, II (Sleep Token), Adam Wakeman – Believer
• Tom Morello’s All Stars feat. Yungblud, Nuno Bettencourt, Frank Bello, II (Sleep Token), Adam Wakeman – Changes
• Lamb Of God – Children Of The Grave
• Alice In Chains – Fairies Wear Boots
• Gojira – Under The Sun
• Pantera – Electric Funeral
• Slayer – Wicked World
• Ozzy Osbourne – Suicide Solution
• Tom Morello’s All Stars feat. Travis Barker, Danny Carey, Chad Smith, Tom Morello, Nuno Bettencourt, Rudy Sarzo – Symptom Of The Universe
• Tom Morello’s All Stars feat. Billy Corgan, Tom Morello, K.K. Downing, Adam Jones, Rudy Sarzo, Danny Carey – Snowblind
• Tom Morello’s All Stars feat. Sammy Hagar, Nuno Bettencourt, Adam Wakeman, Rudy Sarzo, Chad Smith, Vernon Reid – Flying High Again
• Tom Morello’s All Stars feat. Papa V Perpetua, Vernon Reid, Nuno Bettencourt, Adam Wakeman, Rudy Sarzo, Travis Barker – Bark At The Moon
• Tom Morello’s All Stars Ft Steven Tyler, Ronnie Wood, Nuno Bettencourt, Tom Morello, Andrew Watt, Rudy Sarzo, Travis Barker – The Train Kept A-Rollin’
• Tom Morello’s All Stars feat. Steven Tyler, Nuno Bettencourt, Tom Morello, Andrew Watt, Rudy Sarzo, Chad Smith – Walk This Way
• Guns ’N’ Roses – Never Say Die
• Metallica – Hole In The Sky
• Ozzy Osbourne – Crazy Train
• Black Sabbath – War Pigs
• Black Sabbath – N.I.B.
• Black Sabbath – Iron Man
• Black Sabbath – Paranoid
• Ozzy Osbourne – Mama I’m Coming Home

Linkin Park teamed up with America’s Got Talent winner Nene Royal for a performance of 2024 single The Emptiness Machine during the results show of the US talent competition last night.

16-year-old Royal performed with the Diamond-selling nu metal icons shortly before being named as the winner of this year’s series at the end of the show. She also joined The Warning onstage and jammed the Mexican alt-rockers’ song Kerosene. Watch both performances below.

Royal, the first Thai woman to ever win America’s Got Talent, became a fan-favourite through the series thanks to her vocal and guitar covers of such rock and heavy metal acts as The Cranberries, Soundgarden and Muse. Her winning performance took place at the grand final on Tuesday, when she covered The White Stripes’ signature track Seven Nation Army.

Linkin Park’s appearance precedes the theatrical release of their new documentary/concert film, Unshatter, next week. Directed by band member Joe Hahn, the film follows the band’s return from their extended hiatus, which began shortly after lead singer Chester Bennington died in July 2017, aged 41. It features archival recordings, clips from the sessions for their 2024 comeback album, From Zero, and footage from a show in São Paulo, Brazil on their 2024 tour.

From Zero was released on November 15, 2024, and was the band’s first album to feature Emily Armstrong, who replaced Bennington, and drummer Colin Brittain, replacing co-founder Rob Bourdon. The album topped charts worldwide and has already sold more than 1,600,000 units or equivalent.

In June, Linkin Park became the first band with a female vocalist to headline Download at Donington Race Track, the largest rock and heavy metal festival in the UK. Vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Mike Shinoda responded to the distinction during a BBC interview that weekend.

“So, I’ll start with the fact that I don’t feel like I should be answering the question, that Emily should be answering, so I went and asked her, because she can’t be here right now,” he said.

“I asked her and she said: ‘If it wasn’t us, it would’ve just been someone else, because there are so many great female-fronted bands.’ But, she’s so grateful, she wanted you guys to know, she’s so grateful that she is the one and that she’ll remember it forever.”

The band have no future live shows announced at time of publication.

Celebrate the imminent release of Imminence’s new album, Axis Mundi, with an exclusive Metal Hammer bundle!

Available to preorder now only through the Louder store, you can get a copy of the new issue of Metal Hammer with the band on the cover. Plus, there’s a red, yellow and black marble blend double-vinyl of Axis Mundi not available anywhere else and a set of stickers. Get your while stocks last!

Imminence are interviewed inside the new Hammer, telling us about Axis Mundi, their story so far and how they refined their signature ‘violincore’ sound.

“We felt that we didn’t need to put the violin everywhere, and writing [2019 album Turn The Light On], we still didn’t know how people would react to it,” singer/violinist Eddie Berg says.

“‘Violincore’ – that’s what people called it,”adds lead guitarist Harald Barret. “I think it hit that sweet spot of drama and emotional content. It was very hard and raw and honest, but very beautiful at the same time. It’s the duality of these two things.”

They also remember one of their most intense fan interactions. “There was a lady at a meet and greet, and she had been planning to go to our concert with her son, who had unfortunately passed away very recently,” says Eddie. “We were his favourite band, and he had been hoping he would be healthy enough to come to the concert. She wanted to send the signatures with him to his grave. It’s very hard to take these things in sometimes.”

Also in the new Hammer is an extensive interview with keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen of symphonic metal stars Nightwish, as the band celebrate their 30th anniversary. He opens up about his nervousness ahead of the six-piece’s debut concert all those years ago.

“I was so scared I thought I was going to die,” he admits. “I think I vomited before the show. I’d played shows before, but I was just the keyboardist in those bands, I wasn’t responsible for those songs. Nightwish was my baby, I was like, ‘I can’t fucking do this!’”

Plus, we recall the demons, gremlins and erections involved in making and releasing Slayer’s infamous Reign In Blood. In This Moment frontwoman Maria Brink gets the Hammer Interview treatment, explaining what it was like to be a teen mum, how she moved to Los Angeles at 25 to pursue her musical dreams – and why she’s always felt like a witch.

Satyricon reveal how they ended up playing a fashion show, Orbit Culture frontman Niklas Karlsson explains how he went from working in a slaughterhouse to playing on a stage, and Atreyu are our guides at Amsterdam’s massive MagiCon, the Magic: The Gathering convention bringing together fans of wizards, spells, and… metalcore?

Get the new issue – in that exclusive Imminence bundle – now through Louder!

No one would have predicted in 1976 that The Alan Parsons Project – a duo made up of a songwriter and a studio boffin – would become a huge commercial success. It’s been 50 years since the release of Alan Parsons’ and Eric Woolfson’s still-astounding debut album, Tales Of Mystery And Imagination (Edgar Allan Poe). Prog tells the story of a most unlikely phenomenon.

You wouldn’t immediately label Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson as future rock stars if you saw them in 1974. In photos from the era, they look like regular people with, perhaps, a slightly introverted edge that revealed their preferred activity – writing and recording music in the comfort of a studio. In those early pictures, they look like music fans, Prog readers in fact, and yet they went on to sell 50 million albums, something that few modern artists are unlikely ever to do.

The greatest of tales often have humble beginnings, and in the case of The Alan Parsons Project, the initial meeting of minds took place in the rather municipal surroundings of the canteen at Abbey Road Studios in London. It occurred in the summer of 1974: Woolfson, a songwriter and artist manager who was at Abbey Road to produce young artist Darren Burn, approached Parsons, a successful studio engineer and producer, with a compelling proposal. At 6’3” and 6’6” in height respectively, Woolfson and Parsons quickly saw eye-to-eye in more ways than one.

Parsons, born in London in 1948, had begun his career with a brief stint as a folk rock musician before landing a job at EMI then moving to Abbey Road in the late 60s, where he found himself working on The Beatles’ record named after the studio. “I’ve still never quite got used to the fact that I was involved in recording a Beatles album,” he later said. “That euphoria has always been there. You never shake it off.”

He went on to engineer Wings’ Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway and worked with The Hollies, notably on their 1974 hit The Air That I Breathe; but his biggest score at that point was an engineering role on Pink Floyd’s era-defining The Dark Side Of The Moon in 1972, for which he received a Grammy nomination – his first of 13 to date.

Woolfson, born in Glasgow in 1945, had been a session pianist before writing songs covered by Marianne Faithfull, Chris Farlowe and others; he also worked for the Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, and once recalled Mick Jagger asking him for piano lessons. He was managing Kung Fu Fighting singer Carl Douglas at the time of his meeting with Parsons. His idea was to form a musical partnership to record songs he’d written years previously about the works of American author Edgar Allan Poe.

He’d been inspired by a marketing course he’d attended in the 60s, at which the lecturer had mentioned that no cinematic adaptation of Poe’s works had ever made a loss. “This struck a chord with me,” ruminated Woolfson, “and I thought to myself, ‘If no film of Poe’s work has lost money, why should a musical album be any different?’”

Furthermore, he had vivid memories from his youth of seeing Poe posters in Glasgow cinemas. He’d been too young to see gothic classics The Fall Of The House Of Usher, The Pit And The Pendulum and The Raven at the time – but that only added to their unnerving allure.

The idea appealed to Parsons, a literary man himself, and as the pair talked further the discussion extended to the suggestion that Woolfson should become Parsons’ manager; despite his successes with Wings, The Hollies and Pink Floyd, he was not being recompensed suitably. “I had two consecutive No.1 records on the UK charts, and I had no money in the bank, so I thought something was wrong,” as he puts it.

Woolfson, experienced in chasing down overdue payments on Douglas’ behalf, soon rectified the situation, and the partnership was established. The idea of a manager also being his client’s musical partner raised a few eyebrows at Abbey Road, but that didn’t stop Woolfson securing a single-album contract for the Poe LP with 20th Century Records, the Fox studio label spinoff run by Russ Regan, to which Douglas was also signed. A UK deal was also signed with the Charisma label, run by entrepreneur Tony Stratton-Smith.

The record, Tales Of Mystery And Imagination (Edgar Allan Poe), was recorded primarily at Abbey Road, with earlier demos recorded at Pathway Studios. Woolfson wrote the songs with Parsons engineering and producing; he also contributed musical pieces, primarily instrumental. The music would be recorded by session musicians and vocals laid down by guest vocalists.

As Woolfson told this magazine’s editor: “Neither of us wanted any permanent members other than the two of us… I saw an opportunity to combine the roles of manager, songwriter and lyricist with Alan’s skills as an engineer and producer, allowing us to make records much in the same way as Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock made movies – where the directors, rather than the artists, were the focal point.”

Recording sessions at Abbey Road were booked with guitarist Ian Bairnson, bassist David Paton, drummer Stuart Tosh and keyboardist Billy Lyall from the Scottish pop band Pilot recruited to lay down the backing tracks. They were elite talents, with the best-known of them nowadays probably the late Bairnson – who went on to play the solo that you know (whether you think so or not) from the outro of Kate Bush’s 1978 single Wuthering Heights.

Bairnson recalled his band’s contact with Parsons had come after “EMI presented Pilot with a list of 10 engineers working in Abbey Road who wanted to graduate to producing. David recognised Alan Parsons as the engineer on The Dark Side Of The Moon, so his name stood out on the list. We’d noticed Eric Woolfson chatting to Alan in the canteen at Abbey Road, and Eric told us he would be managing him.”

With Andrew Powell, formerly of Henry Cow, on board as arranger and ad hoc keyboard and organ player, guest lead vocals came from John Miles, Arthur Brown, former child actor Leonard Whiting, Terry Sylvester of The Hollies and Parsons’ then-wife Smokey. Two choirs – The English Chorale and the Westminster City School Boys Choir – were booked; Parsons played synth and recorder; and Woolfson played piano, keyboards, harpsichord and organ, as well as singing backing vocals.

That’s an advanced dramatis personae by any standards; but it became even more so when Parsons landed on the idea of recruiting none other than renowned film director Orson Welles to read the spoken-word introduction to the first song, A Dream Within A Dream. “We said, ‘How about getting a really good narrator to introduce the album, and making him the voice of Edgar Allan Poe?’” Parsons recalls. “Somebody at the label knew how to contact Orson Welles, and he agreed to do it. I said, ‘Oh, fantastic – when would he like to do the recording?’ and the record company guy said, ‘I’ll find out.’ Literally the next morning, there was a tape on his desk.”

Unfortunately, Welles’ contribution – speedy though it had been – was a little too late in the process to be included on the original album. “It was very disappointing that we couldn’t use it for the release,” says Parsons. “I went through 11 years of being unhappy about it, but fortunately we had a chance to include it when I remixed the album for CD in 1987.”

Another recording session took place in Hollywood when Parsons invited rock band Ambrosia – fellow 20th Century Records signings whose second album, Somewhere I’ve Never Travelled, he’d just produced – to contribute to The Raven. Bassist Joe Puerta remembers now that “Alan asked us if we’d do him a favour and cut a track before they went back to England. Of course we agreed, because we were delighted to be doing something for Alan. But the subject was a complete mystery. When we went into the studio we weren’t told what the album was going to be about.”

It led to a fortuitous creative moment: “I asked, ‘What’s this song about?’ Eric said, ‘Well, it’s called The Raver.’ I said, ‘What’s a raver?’ He said, ‘A raver is what we call a streetwalker [sex worker] in London.’ I said, ‘Oh, well, if it’s a streetwalker, shouldn’t it be a little more funky?’ and I played the bass part that ended up on the album. He said, ‘Yeah, that’ll work!’ So, interestingly enough, had they not lied about what the song was about, I might not have thought of that bass part. If he’d said, ‘It’s called The Raven’, I don’t know what kind of arrangement that would have inspired.”

So what is Tales Of Mystery And Imagination actually like? Well, as with most advanced music, it’s hard to do justice to it in words; but one general observation is that in 2026 it doesn’t sound like a record made in the mid-70s. The irresistible hooks of its songs, combined with the impact of their production, gives it common ground with a whole range of modern sounds, from prog to synthpop and beyond. At the same time, the sheer volume of instruments and the richness of their arrangements gives the music huge dimensions, although Parsons maintains full control of the production, reining in the backing musicians to allow the orchestral elements the room they need.

The Raven is notable for an electronically treated vocal from Parsons via a vocoder: it’s a strings-heavy, chorale-driven composition, highly dynamic, falling almost silent at points. Bairnson delivers a searing guitar solo at the song’s midpoint, and unnerving chants of ‘Nevermore!’ finish up the song. Leonard Whiting – otherwise best known for starring in Franco Zeffirelli’s controversial 1968 film Romeo & Juliet – delivers a rather more introverted performance than that of Arthur Brown, who makes The Tell-Tale Heart his own with all the eccentric gusto that fans of his theatrical character would expect. Listen out for Parsons’ added ingredients: a harmonised guitar solo, layers of smooth vocals, guitar swells and even timpani as the song reaches its peak.

The highly accomplished John Miles – best known then and now for the Parsons-produced 1978 single Music – lends his golden pipes to The Cask Of Amontillado, a sombre, piano and strings-driven composition that builds to a full orchestra, but there are pauses for silence to punctuate the track. (On that note, Parsons always maintained that true silence was impossible to achieve on recordings that use analogue tape, because the tape contains nearly inaudible artefacts: it was only with the advent of CD, six years or so after the release of Tales, that real silence was present on audio recordings.)

Side one, if you’re listening on the original LP or one of the sumptuous vinyl reissues that have appeared since 2007, ends with (The System Of) Doctor Tarr And Professor Fether, which you won’t forget in a hurry because of the expert three-note hook in Bairnson’s guitar solo, and also because it has another set of superb vocals from Miles. The song ends with a fusillade of guitar harmonies and a threatening bass drone – something of a recurring motif on Project albums.

All this songwriting, arranging, performing and producing expertise is merely the appetiser for side two, the five-part suite The Fall Of The House Of Usher. Largely orchestral in nature and symphonic in structure, it moves from the cinematic Prelude to Arrival via the sounds of a thunderstorm, recorded by Woolfson and Paton when the skies unexpectedly opened over Abbey Road. A church organ, nippy synth notes and drum rolls combine with reverberating guitar for a lustrous feel, making the short Intermezzo that follows a chance to take a breath, if a tense one: it’s a minute of horror-movie strings.

Here’s where Andrew Powell really earned his fee, as he recalls: “We used unusual seating layouts for the orchestra for stereo effects on some titles. Most of the orchestra was recorded at Abbey Road, although the very large orchestra used on the Fall Of The House Of Usher suite was done at the old Kingsway Hall in central London, which had a great acoustic – even if one could occasionally hear the underground trains during quiet passages.”

Woolfson and Parsons really flex their songwriting and production muscles on the next two tracks, Pavane and Fall. The former builds via a double bass solo to a full-band groove, while the latter is a dramatic, full-orchestra experience that ends suddenly, leaving a final, unhurried To One In Paradise as the calm after the storm. It’s sung by Terry Sylvester with supporting vocals by Parsons and Woolfson.

Although the album had a title, Woolfson and Parsons didn’t yet have a name for their collaboration, referring to it until the last minute as “the Alan Parsons project” (note the lower-case second ‘P’). Regan liked the working title, though, and insisted on using it – much to Parsons’ surprise. As he says: “I thought it was going to be ‘Various Artists, produced by Alan Parsons.’ The name ‘The Alan Parsons Project’ was invented literally just before the release.”

Artwork was commissioned from Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis, best known at that point – like Parsons himself – for their work on Dark Side. “Alan and Eric wanted something which was very simple and plain as a graphic,” says Powell, “so our photographer, George Hardie, worked with us to create the symbol that you see on the cover. We also shot images that would be associated with Poe: you get the ravens in there, you get the ghostly, ethereal figure of the girl standing on the stairs and so on. We chose to do it at St Pancras Station, which in those days was very old and run-down. It was just a series of corridors and staircases full of cobwebs and grime. It was very fitting for that sort of spooky atmosphere.”

Tales of Mystery was released in the US in April 1976 against some tough competition – although had it appeared six months later it would have faced an even more powerful adversary in the Sex Pistols. As it was, huge-selling rock albums such as Frampton Comes Alive, the Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975) and Wings At The Speed Of Sound were doing extraordinary business – not that Parsons and Woolfson gave a damn about any of that when they launched their LP at the Griffith Park Observatory planetarium in Ll. The event came with one of the very first laser light shows, Orson Welles’ taped commentary and a huge afterparty: Woolfson and Parsons were evidently not planning to let their new masterpiece escape anyone’s attention.

“That was a terrific show, a huge spectacle,” recalls Joe Puerta. “You knew they were thinking big. It was obvious this wasn’t just going to be an album that they would toss out then go out and play a few clubs and see what happened. They definitely broke the mould of the music industry.”

However, an unpleasant surprise awaited: the record failed to make a major commercial impact, reaching only No.56 on the British album charts on its release that August – although it did make some inroads overseas. Reviews were generally civil but lukewarm, although an early fan was Harry Doherty of Melody Maker, who wrote: “I’ve played this album almost constantly for three weeks,” and the NME’s Fred Dellar wrote a florid appreciation in the style of Poe himself.

Both Parsons and Woolfson were disappointed by the relative commercial failure. The latter’s daughter, Sally – who now manages the Project catalogue – recalls: “Dad talked about the excitement of the album coming out, and then the shock when it wasn’t successful, which is why 20th Century Records didn’t offer them a contract for the next album.”

Still, the Project were just getting started. A glittering future lay ahead of them. What’s more, its legacy is intact, with the genius in the grooves of the LP long acknowledged. Modern analyses define the album as an essential part of music history, an example being Classic Rock magazine, which included Tales in its 50 Albums That Built Prog.

The last word goes to Parsons: “If I had to nominate a Project album as my favourite, I would choose Tales. There is something about it that’s unique to this day.”

Bullet For My Valentine have announced their first album since 2021.

The Bridgend metalcore favourites have detailed Social Apocalypse, the follow-up to their self-titled effort, due to come out on March 19 via Spinefarm Records. Pre-orders are now live, with the artwork and tracklisting available below.

Two guest spots have been confirmed: Lorna Shore screamer Will Ramos is set to appear on I Don’t Trust Tomorrow, while Chrissy Costanza of Against The Current is lined up for In The Absence Of You.

Bullet have also released Social Apocalypse’s lead single and title track. Watch the music video below.

Singer/guitarist Matt Tuck says of the new album’s themes: “Everything in life is changing at such a rapid pace, and it is hard to find a great deal of positivity when you look at events in the world.

“People are being pitted against each other. The world is full of conflict instead of unity. As a father, I look at what the world is like for younger people, and how completely different it is now.”

The album was produced by longtime collaborator Carl Bown, also known for his work with Sleep Token, While She Sleeps and Malevolence. “Carl doesn’t let you settle,” says Tuck. “He is always ready to speak up, push and challenge you to be the best version of you.”

To accompany the news, Bullet have detailed a new European tour for January and February 2027. The band will play arenas across the continent and in the UK, with support from Australian drum and bass group Pendulum. Florida metalcore young guns Dark Divine will open. Tickets go on sale on Wednesday, September 30, at 9am local time. See the dates below.

Drummer Jason Bowld spoke about Social Apocalypse last May, saying that the band intend to release a new single every month from the album’s announcement until its release. He promised “five singles, maybe, before it comes out”. In December 2025, Tuck said that Social Apocalypse will musically be a cross between their breakthrough 2005 debut The Poison, 2010’s Fever and the self-titled record.

Bullet attracted controversy in May 2025, when they announced that they’d cut short their co-headlining tour with Trivium to focus on making their new album. The Poisoned Ascendancy run was initially promoted as a world tour set to last from January to December; it ended up lasting just four months, with legs on two continents.

After Trivium’s Paolo Gregoletto and Corey Beaulieu blamed Tuck for the premature end via social media, Bullet issued a counter-statement saying that they wanted to focus on writing new music. Still, Bullet went on to play further shows in Australia, Asia and South America later that year.

Bullet For My Valentine: Social Apocalypse

1. Social Apocalypse
2. In The Absence Of You (feat. Chrissy Costanza of Against The Current)
3. I Don’t Trust Tomorrow (feat. Will Ramos of Lorna Shore)
4. Here Without You
5. Acid Rain
6. Fragile
7. CVLT
8. Masquerade
9. Read Between The Lines
10. Enough Is Never Enough

Bullet For My Valentine 2027 tour dates:

• Jan 21: Lisbon Campo Pequeno, Portugal
• Jan 22: Madrid Palacio Vistalegre, Spain
• Jan 23: Barcelona Sant Jordi Club, Spain
• Jan 25: Milan Forum, Italy
• Jan 26: Zurich Hallenstadion, Switzerland
• Jan 27: Dusseldorf Mitsubishi Electric Halle, Germany
• Jan 29: Hamburg Sporthalle, Germany
• Jan 30: Copenhagen KB Hallen, Denmark
• Jan 31: Stockholm Annexet, Sweden
• Feb 02: Helsinki Ice Hall, Finland
• Feb 04: Katowice MCK, Poland
• Feb 06: Munich Zenith, Germany
• Feb 07: Paris Zenith, France
• Feb 09: Luxembourg Rockhal, Luxembourg
• Feb 11: Frankfurt Festhalle, Germany
• Feb 12: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
• Feb 13: Vienna Stadthalle, Austria
• Feb 15: Budapest Budapest Arena, Hungary
• Feb 16: Prague O2 Universum, Czech Republic
• Feb 17: Berlin Velodrome, Germany
• Feb 19: Amsterdam AFAS Live, Netherlands
• Feb 20: Brussels Forest National, Belgium
• Feb 23: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
• Feb 25: Birmingham BP Pulse Live, UK
• Feb 26: London The O2, UK
• Feb 27: Manchester AO Arena, UK

In her recently deactivated post-metal band Svalbard, singer/guitarist Serena Cherry’s lyrics tackled such hard realities as mental health and abuse. You can’t blame her for retreating to fantasyland every now and again. Her solo outlet Noctule offers her refuge in videogames, and this second album takes the perspective of the bosses from Elden Ring, the hit RPG that helped Serena through her depression.

Noctule’s debut, 2021’s Skyrim-obsessed Wretched Abyss, was a raw introduction written during the Covid lockdowns and a promising start – Serena played every instrument herself, as she does again here – even if much of it sounded similar to Svalbard’s heaviest parts. It was a side-quest for fans of her then-main pursuit.

On Extinguish Thy Flame, there’s a musical identity as well as a thematic one. Although the pained Goddess Of Rot would have fit in on Svalbard’s 2023 swansong, The Weight Of The Mask, the rest combines the slicing guitars of Serena’s heroes Arch Enemy with the apocalyptic textures of Emperor.

Starting with a demented war cry over death/thrash riffing, opener proper Devour The Gods explodes forward. The titanic imagery – ‘Teeth like daggers, throne of flame! Reject the order and say my name!’ – scores high on the holy-fuck-o’meter, and Grafted doubles down on that epic scope. It’s an unencumbered symphonic black metal rager, where stabbing strings and ominous keys give way to frostbitten tremolo picking.

Everything else, from Lament Of The Omen King’s melodeath tapping to Age Of The Stars’ tower of vocal tracks, is dedicated to that same blend of exhilaration and grandeur. If you were to battle a 12ft colossus, sword in hand, this is the soundtrack you’d choose. It’s the first time Serena’s truly shone beyond Svalbard – and, released just one month after their final set, it’s come at the perfect moment.

Extinguish Thy Flame is out September 25.

Green Lung vocalist Tom Templar looks up at the blue sky and blazing sun above him, adjusts his sunglasses and sighs.

“Only we could make an album about graveyards and death and choose to promote it in a cemetery on one of the hottest days of the year,” he says.

The UK is in the midst of a heatwave, and right now London is roasting in the midday sun. It would be the perfect day to have a barbecue or head to the beach. Instead, we’re standing in Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, North London in the scorching heat, while Green Lung – Tom plus guitarist Scott Black, bassist Joe Ghast, drummer Matt Wiseman and organist John Wright – bake in their black jeans and denim and leather jackets.

There’s a reason for such masochism. The UK’s most significant doom metal success story are about to release their ambitious fourth album, Necropolitan. Tom calls it
“a love letter to London”, the city that’s nurtured and inspired them since their days as a bunch of unsigned hopefuls playing Sabbath-inspired riffs in tiny rooms above pubs.

“We headlined Desertfest two months ago and it was
such a symbolic thing,” Tom explains. “You think, ‘That
was the dream 10 years ago.’ Once you’ve done the dream,
it’s natural to want to send back some love to the people
that were around us early on. That’s why we felt like we needed to do this album.”

But Necropolitan is far more than just a bunch of songs about getting drunk in Camden boozers and playing open mic nights in Shoreditch. Instead, Green Lung have dived into the capital’s more esoteric history. It uses the ‘Magnificent Seven’ – a group of seven grand Victorian garden cemeteries that are scattered around the city, from Highgate in the north to West Norwood in the south, and includes our current location of Abney Park – as inspiration for a concept that explores the city’s occult underground and the cemeteries’ symbolism as monuments to our own mortality, as well as acting as an allegorical critique of the changing face of London.

Necropolitan plots the journey between London’s seven cemeteries, telling stories both real and fictional of the
city’s dark and occult history, told from the perspectives of everyone from a condemned man on his way to the Tyburn gallows to a group leading a paranormal investigation.
The band have agreed to act as guides for a tour that takes
in some of the real-life places that have inspired the album, starting here in Abney Park.

“I don’t think we could have done this album before,” says Tom. “We were outsiders, but now we’ve been here long enough that London is part of us.”

Abney Park was established in 1840, the result of London’s existing burial grounds being unable to keep up with the city’s growing population – and its dead. The cemetery is the last resting place of Isaac Watts, the non-conformist theologian and hymn writer who has a statue here in the grounds. His association with Abney Park led to the grounds becoming renowned as the place to bury dissenters and non-church goers.

It’s something Green Lung feel an affinity with. Formed in 2017, they spent the first half of their career out of step with rock’s current musical zeitgeist – there was little place for a psychedelic-edged doom band who wrote songs about pagan rites and medieval witches. That changed with their ambitious third album, 2023’s This Heathen Land, a record that added massive hooks without diluting Green Lung’s unique vision and pushed them closer to mainstream recognition. Today, they’re trying to balance their original approach with what’s expected from a band in 2026.

“It’s definitely interesting,” Tom says as we walk the quiet paths of Abney Park, protected from the sun by the shade of the trees and surrounded by some beautiful monuments. “We come from an underground doom metal scene, and although we’ve begun to traverse those spaces, we’ve really tried to ring-fence what we’re doing within the industry. I hate doing video content, I don’t want to ruin the mystery of us as a band, that’s kind of anathema to us, but it’s so commonplace now to establish your ‘brand’.”

Green Lung could have taken the easy route with Necropolitan and gone down an even more commercial path. Instead, they’ve made a record that dials up the riffs and throws in some classic organ playing that evokes such old masters as Deep Purple and Atomic Rooster.

“The writing was certainly more riff focused this time,” says Tom. “We toured more than ever on the last album and we wanted something that captured that raw, live sound.
It always starts with the music, and the heaviness of the material I was getting from Scott made me think of gothic London, of the seven cemeteries. If he had come to me with
a load of folky stuff it might have been different.”

Necropolitan is more than just a set of songs, though. Green Lung have really leaned into the idea of London – specifically the strangeness that lurks just beneath its surface.

“I first had the idea for this when I was writing a really
bad novel when I was about 21,” says Tom. “It featured the seven cemeteries and was this kind of Dan Brown-style occult conspiracy: what if they had been built for
a secret reason by a Victorian architect who had some sort of ritual in mind, but then they got abandoned? When
it came to album four, and we realised people liked our world-building stuff, it was time to bring the idea back.”

Green Lung have really leaned into the world-building thing on Necropolitan. The album comes with all manner of maps, illustrations and booklets brimming with dense lore and background.

“There was the map on This Heathen Land, which made the whole album feel much more immersive,” says Tom of the band’s breakthrough album. “When people responded to that positively, I thought, ‘Great! I get to do more of that now!’ You get to do more story – I always felt like I needed to get us to a certain level to really do that properly.”

As we continue to wander the paths of Abney Park and attempt to evade the sun, talk turns to Green Lung’s slow but steady rise. Despite the burst of success that came with This Heathen Land, the band are adamant they’ll always be connected to their underground roots. Tom says the fact that they were largely ignored by the music industry during the early part of their career meant that they were able to shape Green Lung into its perfect form without any outside interference.

“We were never a band that was going to go onstage in
a small pub dressed up or with a gimmick and be totally confident,” he says. “We’ve been on indie labels and we’ve had this dialogue with our audience where we’ve kind of grown together, meaning we now feel confident as artists to create this concept album. No matter how big we get, that DIY mindset will always be really important to us.”

That sense of self-sufficiency mirrors what happened here in Abney Park. After the company that owned the cemetery went bankrupt in 1970, it became overgrown and derelict.
It took the local council and some enthusiastic volunteers to restore it to its former glory.

“It’s the perfect metaphor for what we’re trying to say on this album,” says Tom. “We’re in an era where billionaires and tech moguls are trying to buy up this city and make it exclusively accessible for the super-rich. But this is proof
that this has all been done before. This was privately owned land made purely for the elites, and it just crumbled. Like always, it took the weirdos and the creatives to restore it, not the super-wealthy.”

None of the members of Green Lung were actually born in London, instead moving to the capital from various rural parts of the UK, eventually meeting and bonding over their shared loves of heavy metal, old horror movies and the occult. It is, they say, the perfect place to find like-minded artists, even if that’s in danger of being crushed by capitalism and gentrification.

“You can’t afford to live here and it’s something that
needs to be addressed,” says Scott. “You don’t want
a situation where only massive multinational corporations can afford anything. I worry that’s where we’re heading
– a cultural desert full of luxury high rises sold to private investment firms.”

Our time at Abney Park is finished, so we hop in
Ubers to another location that provided inspiration for Necropolitan. Founded in 2003, Treadwell’s Bookshop in Bloomsbury is home to all manner of tomes on magic and occultism. They sell actual crystal balls and they even have an Egyptian sarcophagus named Stanley.

“I’ve bought so many books from here that have inspired Green Lung lyrics,” Tom tells us. “It’s great to be able to
give something back. We’ve put it on the map in the album artwork, which is just a nice thing to do.”

Tom is clearly the driving force behind the lore and lyrics of the band, but everyone in Green Lung has their own specialist elements they bring to the table. Bassist Joe, for example, is something of a history buff.

“That’s my thing, for sure,” he nods. “I feel like I’m there to lean on for context for some of those historical characters, and due to being in the band and collaborating I’ve certainly become more interested in the occult.”

Joe has recently become a father, something that has understandably curtailed his reading time. Tom, on the other hand, tells us that, like a doom metal Chris Finch from The Office, he reads a book a week.

“I love coming here and just finding something new,” he tells us as he thumbs through the shelves in Treadwell’s. “The other guys are definitely interested in it, but I don’t push it on them. We’re not having a Green Lung book club.”

His obsession with the esoteric and the occult came from growing up in a remote part of England.

“You live in the countryside and there isn’t much going on,” he says. “So you start to develop these interests that quickly become obsessions and then you move here and you get to see them for yourself.”

Leaving the store, our next stop is The Angel pub in
St. Giles Street, near Charing Cross Road. A classic London boozer, its first historical record dates all the way to 1546. With our step count rising, it seems only right that we stop off for a pint and rest our weary legs, but this is also a pub that has some significance to Necropolitan. The album’s final track, To The Gallows Born, tells the tale
of a man taking his last steps before being executed, and is something that happened here in real life.

“This used to be the final stop-off for the condemned
who were being taken to the gallows round the corner,” explains Tom as we settle down in the pub garden with
a round of much-needed cold lagers. “They’d allow them to stop here and have their last drink at the pub before taking them off and hanging them.”

Pints downed and feeling refreshed and refuelled,
we make our way toward the final destination on our whistlestop tour of Green Lung’s London: Cleopatra’s Needle, the towering monument that overlooks the Thames on London’s Southbank.

Given to Britain as a gift from Egyptian ruler Muhammad Ali in 1819 to commemorate the Battle of the Nile and the Battle of Alexandria, the excavated obelisk, thought to have been built around 1500 BC, was eventually transported to Britain and erected here in 1877. It looks breathtaking towering above us with the clear blue sky framing it, a pair
of majestic sphinxes flanking its base.

“Did you know they actually lost it at sea when they were bringing it over, and they had to send another boat out to rescue it?” Tom tells us, nodding up at the Needle as we say our goodbyes. “I think that’s why I like it; it’s this old, ancient thing that was dug up from underground, came to London, was polished up and put on display, and now people marvel
at it. A bit like our band, I guess.”

He’s not wrong. If they carry on making albums as fine as Necropolitan, Green Lung could end up being every bit as definitive a part of this city as the places that make them such proud and protective Londoners.

Pye Dubois, the Canadian lyricist and poet most famous for his work with Rush and Max Webster, and later with Max Webster frontman Kim Mitchell, has died at the age of 77.

The news was broken in an obituary published by the Smith Funeral Home and Family Centre in Sarnia, Ontario. "Pye was a true Canadian Icon," the notice read. "A gifted writer, artist, lyricist, and poet, he was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2021."

"It’s been an unbelievably tragic year for Max Webster founder Kim Mitchell and all those who knew that band personally," Rush wrote on social media. "In late February, Max keyboardist Terry Watkinson passed away, and now, a mere seven days after the death of drummer Gary McCracken, news has reached us that Max Webster lyricist Pye Dubois has suddenly left the planet.

"For those who aren’t aware, over a span of 20 years, Pye and Neil collaborated on the lyrics for four Rush songs: Tom Sawyer, Force 10, Between Sun And Moon, and Test For Echo. We send our most heartfelt sympathies to the bandmates, friends and families of those three stellar musicians. RIP boys."

Dubois, born Paul Woods, was raised in Sarnia and joined childhood friend Kim Mitchell as a lyric-writing, honorary member of the fledgling Max Webster in 1972. Airing their skewed hard rock and prog on the local bar circuit, the band soon hit on their classic line-up, which comprised Mitchell and Dubois alongside keyboard player Terry Watkinson, drummer Gary McCracken and bassist Mike Tilka (later replaced by Dave Myles).

“Our lyrics were rarely stories," Mitchell told Classic Rock. "Pye would just jam with the English language in this amazing way, painting pictures. I said to him one time: ‘Pye, where are you getting all this stuff?’ He said: ‘You just have to listen really well. People are saying these things.’ I was like: ‘They are? Really?'"

Mitchell contributed lyrics to all five Max Webster albums, from their self-titled 1976 debut to 1980's Universal Juveniles, which featured Rush on the Mitchell/Dubois-written epic Battle Scar. At the recording studio, Dubois asked Rush if they might be interested in using some of his words, and the lyric he presented them with, titled Louis The Lawyer, was later reworked for Tom Sawyer, the much-celebrated opening track on Moving Pictures.

"His original lyrics were kind of a portrait of a modern-day rebel, a free-spirited individualist striding through the world wide-eyed and purposeful," wrote Peart, in Rush's Backstage Club newsletter. "I added the themes of reconciling the boy and man in myself, and the difference between what people are and what others perceive them to be – namely me, I guess."

After Max Webster broke up in 1981, Dubois continued working with Mitchell and co-wrote three of his first four solo albums, but the pair stopped working together after falling out during Max Webster's reunion tour in 1995.

In 2021, Mitchell and Dubois were inducted into The Canadian Songwriter’s Hall Of Fame, but Mitchell attended the small, COVID-postponed ceremony alone. “They told me Pye was invited, but he didn’t show,” Mitchell told Classic Rock. “In fact, he didn’t even respond. I haven’t seen him since the reunion tour.”

"Rest in peace, lyricist/friend/writing partner Pye Dubois," he wrote on social media as the news of his former bandmate's death broke. "You sure knew how to jam with the English language!"

In the summer of 2018, as Rose Tattoo hit Europe on their Blood Brothers tour, frontman Angry Anderson sat down with Classic Rock to discuss his life in unflinching detail. This interview has not been published online before.

An hour and a half in the company of Gary Anderson – you will know him better as Angry – is never dull. At five foot one inch, Rose Tattoo’s plain-talking frontman is a small guy with big opinions, and when we talk in London, life, death, politics, violence, political correctness, loyalty, religion, honour and even paedophilia are all discussed.

A band who shared both production team (Vanda and Young) and record label (Albert Productions) with AC/DC, not to mention a deep kinship with their fellow Aussies, Rose Tattoo are a five-piece from Sydney whose blues-drenched, sewer-rat rock’n’roll embodies the singer’s own brutal, uncompromising personality.

Anderson remains among rock music’s most fascinating characters. Rose Tattoo’s spot at the 1981 Reading Festival became etched into the event’s folklore. That day, the singer shocked 30,000 punters by smacking himself in the face with a microphone and then, his face smeared with blood, raising the mic stand, slamming it through the wooden stage before exiting to the wings.

Years later, Rose Tattoo’s influence was confirmed when Guns N’ Roses covered the Tatts’ song Nice Boys on Live ?!*@ Like A Suicide and later invited them to reunite as special guests for the Australian leg of GN’R’s Use Your Illusion tour.

But there was a flip-side. In 1987 Anderson had a completely unrepresentative solo pop hit called Suddenly, which the producers of the daytime soap opera Neighbours used to soundtrack the wedding between Charlene Robinson (Kylie Minogue) and Scott Robinson (Jason Donovan). The unlikely top-five success of Suddenly made Angry feel like “a legitimate songwriter”, and after he sang it on that year’s Top Of The Pops Christmas special Cliff Richard told him he loved it.

Overwhelmingly, though, Rose Tattoo are known as a volatile gang of beer-swilling, streetfighting gutter urchins. But time catches up with us all, and one by one the band’s core has eroded. Drummer Dallas ‘Digger’ Royall passed away in 1991, followed by co-founding slide-guitar exponent Pete Wells and bassist Ian Rilen, both in 2006. Another bassist, Lobby Loyde, died in 2007 and, two years later they lost guitarist Mick Cocks.

Not unreasonably, Anderson’s undesired status as the last surviving member of their original lineup weighs heavily on his mind. He’s also very aware of the scrutiny that inevitably faces any Tatts lineup without lynchpin Pete Wells. In typically raw and graphic fashion, he justifies the reasons for the latest Rose Tattoo reunion: “I saw Pete in hospital during his final weeks,” he recounts sadly. “We sat together for a couple of hours as he drifted in and out of consciousness. When I held his hand and asked: ‘What do you want me to do [about the band]?’ Pete could only acknowledge by the rolling of his eyes or moving his fingers.

“I was looking for some sort of direction,” he says. “Rose Tattoo was always Pete’s band – he was its boss. He had just enough consciousness to reply: ‘Fuck ’em.’ Everyone expected us to just fold up and go away, but here was Pete telling me that the band had to go on.”

Wells had fought in vain to play on the Tatts’ most recent album, Blood Brothers, released in 2007, a year after he passed away.

“We tried on several occasions to get Pete out of hospital and play a couple of solos, even if he was hooked up to machines,” Anderson explains. “I know that sounds overly dramatic, but he wanted to leave his mark. Sadly it didn’t happen.”

There followed yet another fatality, that of Mick Cocks, who did manage to perform on Blood Brothers despite being gravely ill.

“All of us knew that he was dying,” Anderson says. “We were aware that the next tour would be Mick’s last. And so it proved. Apart from me, he was the last member of the original line-up, and his passing really took the wind out of my sails. I came home and wondered what to do with myself.”

After playing the character Ironbar in the 1985 blockbuster film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Anderson might well have considered an acting career. Instead, defying a past every bit as colourful as his body art, he turned to politics. Using his birth name, Gary Anderson, he ran for the Senate as a candidate for the conservative National Party. As the grandson of a postal service union official and coming from a Labour-voting background, it was a huge U-turn.

“Things began to change once I escaped those blinkered viewpoints and got out into the workforce,” he explains. “For two years I did an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner, and when things turned to shit the union didn’t protect us at all. As I read things and experienced more of life, my world view matured.”

In aligning to the Australian Liberty Alliance Party, with a principal mandate to “prevent the Islamisation of Australia”, Anderson rendered himself controversial to an entirely new demographic.

Back in 2012 he appeared in a documentary series called Go Back To Where You Came From, in which he travelled to war-torn Kabul to meet some of those who sought to flee their homeland in search of sanctuary. Before going there, he insisted: “I don’t accept the boat people at all. Don’t tell me about what a hard time you’ve had. The first thing you’ve shown me is no sense of respect. End of story. Don’t bother.” But having put himself in the position to understand their desperate plight, those views softened.

“I wanted people to see the real story through the eyes of a sceptic,” he states now. “After going to Afghanistan and living with those people, sitting at their tables, eating their food, meeting their children and listening to their stories, I get it now. I understand why people who are pursued by extremists do those things. I just wish they didn’t have to."

“My motivation to get into politics was to help fix a variety of things, including the poor pay of teachers and nurses,” he continues. “I soon realised that you can’t pay them what they deserve, as those issues are simply a football. So you keep the teachers poor and the nurses working long hours. But what people don’t realise is that when Labour gets in they don’t fix those problems either.

“Look, I ran for a federal seat, then for a state one and finally for the Senate, and it soon became obvious that both parties are as bad as each other,” he announces. “The Who articulated it perfectly: ‘Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss’ [from Won’t Get Fooled Again]. I will be a conservative for the rest of my days, but I’ve got a foot in both camps. Power is all about keeping people at odds with one another.”

In 2015 Anderson withdrew his candidacy due to “personal reasons”.

So is his political career now over completely?

“Oh, abso-fuckinglutely,” he replies flatly. “I still say things at gigs, but that’s just to plant the seeds of thought.”

After what he terms his “flirtation” with statesmanship, Anderson was ready to “buy a bush block and raise a veggie patch, shoot feral animals and become a hermit”. But then, with Rose Tattoo out to pasture, last summer the organisers of Germany’s Bang Your Head Festival booked the Angry Anderson Band.

“I had been wondering whether to bury the whole music thing, but Bang Your Head gave me the kick in the gut that I needed,” he enthuses. “It was so exhilarating, I had to give things another go. Plus it gave me another reason to take up training again, also to look at my diet and seek some longevity in my life.

“But it all comes back to one thing – this fucking obsession with music. Being out on stage, with the crowd singing louder than the band, that’s an unbelievable feeling. On this [Rose Tattoo] tour there has been younger people [in the audiences] – chicks too. We never had that before. Boys and girls together makes things more interesting.

"I’ve always acknowledged the role of women, though it’s not as if I strive to be PC or anything. That said, my mother was a woman. And so was every girlfriend I ever had. Though I did have a relationship with a… well, that’s another story. Maybe I’d better save that for the memoirs.”

In rebooting Rose Tattoo, Anderson started with a blank canvas, although slide guitarist Dai Pritchard, a Tatts member since 2007, would retain his place. One other name was on the cards from the beginning was former AC/DC man Mark Evans, a no-brainer as the bass player.

“In the early days the Tatts were AC/DC’s fave band to go and see. That’s how we got signed to Alberts, they recommended us,” Anderson exclaims. “Malcolm and Angus [Young] and particularly Bon [Scott] all jammed with us back then. Mark has made no secret of wanting to join our band, and finally the stars lined up.”

Another musician with the blue blood of Australian rock royalty in his veins is guitarist Bob Spencer, who had played with both Skyhooks and The Angels. But with regular drummer Paul DeMarco imprisoned for illegal firearm possession and membership of a gun-running syndicate, the final piece of the jigsaw presented Anderson with a dilemma.

“I promised Marco that I wouldn’t re-form the band without him, but I went ahead and did it anyway,” he puffs. “He understands why. When Marco gets out of jail in 2020 the band will welcome him back – so long as he’s done with his drug problem. He may be out on parole next year. Let’s face it, familiarity with the criminal element hardly makes him unique in this band.”

For the band’s recent European dates, Aussie singer Jimmy Barnes’s son Jackie played drums. There’s strong talk not only of a return to European touring in 2019, but also of a new Rose Tattoo studio album.

Well, why not?” Anderson says, smiling. “Guy writes, Bob writes, and Mark, as it turns out, writes too. He’s not very prolific, but he can come up with a tune every now and again. The next problem is whether Marco can get a visa to tour overseas. Fingers crossed.”

Only a handful of bands have dealt with the deaths of five members, fewer still when the deaths were the consequence of entirely different strains of cancer. Anderson emits a rueful chuckle at the suggestion that Rose Tattoo are the band that refused to die.

“Yeah,” he responds eventually. “Pete Wells sometimes spoke about the fact that we had created something that would live forever, which made him very happy. Proving people wrong who said we couldn’t exist without Peter Wells is something that I’m enjoying – a lot.”

When asked if he’s doing this for the combined memories of the fallen five, Anderson nods and says solemnly: “Yeah. At a gig a few days ago I ran into a guy who’d waited thirty-five years to see this band. That really moved me.”

But enough about Rose Tattoo. Let’s talk Angry Anderson. At the grand old age of 71, does he still consider himself a hard man? Well, there’s no argument when he fixes me with a steely gaze and replies: “Yup. People still ask whether I’m still angry,” he adds with a calm authority. “Even if I don’t show it, I’m boiling inside.”

What sort of thing would make you turn angry?

“I would kill somebody who threatened my family,” he says, grimacing, and goes on to tell about when he overheard the “disgusting remarks” made about his daughter by a gang of youths in a fast-food restaurant. When events escalated and both parties stood their ground, “I knew it wasn’t going to end well. Suddenly, the me of old was back,” he says. “Eventually they backed off.”

[Note: Angry Anderson's youngest son, Liam, was beaten to death by a friend two months after this interview took place. The killer, who was experiencing a drug-induced psychotic episode, was sentenced to eight years in prison].

What else makes you violent?

“Oh, there’s a long list,” he says, laughing. “For instance, someone breaking into my house. And don’t try to take my guns away. It’s being done in a sneaky way, but our rights for assembly and freedom of speech are being eroded. Schools are becoming places of indoctrination and not education, telling them what and not how, to think. These are things I wanted to fight from the inside.”

Let’s not sugarcoat it: Anderson has done some bad things in his life, although the dysfunction of adulthood was to some degree predetermined by being sexually, physically and mentally abused as a child and raised by a single mum.

“I was constantly belittled and beaten by my father, and also a victim of paedophilia by another family member,” he says candidly. “On top of being a little guy, it was a lot to deal with.”

Can Rose Tattoo’s last man standing put his hand on his heart and claim to be a good man?

“Fuck yeah,” he fires right back. “In my early thirties I felt like I was my father’s son. That bloke was certifiable and did some strange and awful things. But during the 1970s it dawned on me that I was a really, really good person. Parenthood was what changed me the most. Nowadays I believe in good things and I help other people when I can. I might be broke, but I’m really, really happy with the way I turned out.”

Angry Anderson died in September 2026. This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 256, published in November 2018.

What’s the adage? You can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Not to compare Europe to an ageing bloodhound enjoying its dotage – although they did rock a few poodle perms in their time – but in the nine years since they last released a new album, something vital and new has shaken Europe up. Forget the ethereal noodling that made The Final Countdown a worldwide hit and phenomenon; Come This Madness is a much steelier proposition – harder, faster, and with a Mike Fraser (AC/DC, The Cult) mix it glimmers like a fresh paint job on a classic car.

Handing over the producer role to Tom Dalgety – who’s worked with Pixies, Ghost and Rammstein, among others – has also helped reinvigorate the band’s energy with a punchy veneer that recalls Scorpions in their pomp and latter-day Whitesnake before the wheels came off

It says something of Europe’s pedigree that both Tobias Forge and Mikael Åkerfeldt, of Ghost and Opeth respectively, turned up to sing backing vocals on the record, although both would have to go some to overshadow Joey Tempest’s pristine vocals, which have held up as well as if not better than his celebrated jawline.

It might be the Scandinavian talking, but the exemplary This Time Of Year, which manages to be somehow forthright and yet brittle at its heart, could have made it into A-ha’s live set. A pitch-perfect rock-pop song full of regret and longing, it plays out like a short black-and-white movie.

The Angels Must Have Flown is pure Europe bombast, with a marching riff interwoven with a tricksy synth line as Tempest’s vocals soar above it all sounding, strangely, like a young Ian Gillan. The Cult Of Ignorance comes rattling in, all elbows and attitude, the band dissatisfied and railing against the world, which, surprisingly, suits them. It’s indicative of the album’s taut energy; needles in the red, bristling with passion.

The album’s last note belongs to Nothing Can Follow This, which wrings that musical rag similarly dry, Deep Purple-like in tone; stabbing strings, washes of keyboards, the feel of endless motion; a car racing through the city streets at night; John Norum’s elongated and elegant guitar solo carrying the song towards the horizon and home. Welcome back, Europe.

Hayley Williams has paid tribute to her former husband, New Found Glory's Chad Gilbert, following the guitarist's death on September 20.

Gilbert passed away at home in Nashville, six months after sharing photos from his hospital bed as he recovered from brain cancer surgery.

A true lifer on the hardcore and pop-punk scenes , Gilbert joined Florida hardcore band Shai Hulud in 1996 as their vocalist, when he was just 14 years old, before founding New Found Glory the following year.

Williams and Gilbert began dating in 2008, and the pair were married in 2016-2017.

In a statement posted on Instagram stories, Williams admitted that she had "not known what to say or if it’s appropriate" following Gilbert's death, then added, "But I feel sure now that I want to bc life is made of the paths we cross and the reasons we cross them are infinite.

"Chad is indeed a legend in the scene and my time connected to him taught me a lot," she continued. "He introduced me to people that continue to shape my life in beautiful ways, and to music and culture that has made life a lot richer.

“There isn’t much that hasn’t already been said about what he contributed to the musical world a lot of us grew up in. His influence and attitude guided the genre forward. His passion for fostering the community was inspiring and sticks with me.

"I will forever be grateful that from him I gained a deeper understanding and a reverence for the community and the culture of hardcore.

"Sending love and my sympathies to his family, NFG fam, and all his friends."

The surviving members of New Found Glory paid their own tribute to the driving force behind their band when announcing his death.

"Chad’s guitar playing, songwriting, humour, and relentless drive helped shape New Found Glory for nearly three decades," they posted. "Through more than a dozen albums, endless tours around the world, and more accolades than we ever could have imagined, Chad challenged all of us to grow as musicians, performers, and human beings.

"While we are devastated to lose him, we are so grateful for the incredible life he lived, the memories we shared, and the brotherhood we had. His influence will always be part of New Found Glory, and his spirit will be felt on every stage we stand on, with every note we play.”

Bobby Gillespie, frontman and founder of Primal Scream, is perched in his publicist’s office in North London, wondering just where it all went right. He’s here to talk about Screamadelica, the genre-bucking phenomenon that spun 1991 on its head.

A glorious starburst of acid house, psychedelia, dub, funk and old-school rock’n’roll, it was the album that scooped the inaugural Mercury Music Prize, helped forge the reputation of Alan McGee’s Creation Records, and a record that united the hitherto largely disparate factions of indie rock and dance music. More importantly for Primal Scream, it also saved the band.

“I honestly never thought it would be a commercial record,” Gillespie says. “I thought it was going to be just a really cool underground album, like Tago Mago by Can. But then it started getting amazing reviews and just kept selling and selling. I believe it’s sold a couple of million now.”

The success of Screamadelica – led off by two UK Top 30 hits in Loaded and Come Together – was as swift as it was unexpected. Emerging from Glasgow’s early-80s indie scene, Primal Scream had been formed by Gillespie and schoolmate Jim Beattie, fired by punk and the licentious rock’n’ruin of the Stooges and MC5. In fact Gillespie was the drummer for The Jesus And Mary Chain by the time of the Primals’ first official gig, in 1984.

There were a couple of unsteady PS singles, followed by the inclusion of Velocity Girl on the NME’s fabled C86 cassette, a compilation that celebrated the new jingle-jangle dawn of British indie bands. Primal Scream’s debut album, Sonic Flower Groove, in 1987, was an awkward conflation of Love, the Velvet Underground and the Byrds, recorded for McGee’s micro-label Elevation. It peaked at 62 on the UK chart.

1989’s self-titled follow-up, by contrast, was a full-on rock album in thrall to the Stones and the Stooges, Ramones and the MC5, Gillespie’s cutesy vocals battling it out with a classic Les-Paul-through-Marshall-stack wall of guitars. Despite classics like Ivy, Ivy, Ivy, She Power and Lone Star Girl, it wrong-footed some fans and the music press pounced on them for being ‘sad old rockers’, with Melody Maker dubbing them “Primal Tap”. McGee later admitted that “Primal Scream, media-wise, were a fucking joke”.

Gillespie remembers it all too well, but says he never lost faith in the band’s own abilities: “We never sold a lot of records, but we toured that album all over Europe. But we really believed we were a great band and had something that nobody else had. We always believed we were fucking great.

“I know it sounds really arrogant, but when it did happen for us with Screamadelica we weren’t surprised. We’d been out there for years and knew how to play live. And we were fucking ready for anything. It wasn’t like we were some band who came out of nowhere, had success then didn’t know what to do with it. Plus we were still angry too. We were total punk rockers.”

Despite the media’s almost unstinting disapproval, that second Primal Scream album did at least snag the imagination of one punter. The band’s press officer, Jeff Barrett, had given a copy to his good friend Andrew Weatherall, a club DJ and publisher of a fanzine called Boy’s Own. Weatherall was much taken with the album’s ballads, particularly I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have. Urged on by Barrett, Weatherall remixed the song, dug out a drum loop from an Italian bootleg version of an Edie Brickell tune and added an intro from the old Peter Fonda biker flick The Wild Angels: ‘Just what is it that you want to do?/We wanna be free/ We wanna be free to do what we wanna do/And we wanna get loaded’. The band themselves were intrigued and, thus, Loaded was born.

The acid-house boom and the Primals’ own highly eclectic listening habits seemed made for one another. “I have this big thing about the fact you should be able to dance to rock’n’roll,” explains Gillespie. “What I liked about the whole acid thing was that you were dancing. Maybe you were dancing because you were on MDMA, but nevertheless there were a lot of electronic funk rhythms going on. Marry that to the fact we were into the Beach Boys, the Stones and free jazz, as well as lots of American blues.

"In Loaded there’s a bit where I go: ‘I’m gonna get down/I’m gonna get deep down’. There was a long outro section on the original song Andy Weatherall mixed it from, and I had this book of Robert Johnson lyrics, so decided to read some of it: ‘I’m gonna get deep down/Keep on tanglin’ with your wires/When I mash down on your little starter’ [1936’s Terraplane Blues]. So a bit of that ended up on Loaded. Nobody really knows that, but I just had all this stuff – Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, gospel music… And we’d grown up with pop radio in the seventies, so you had stuff like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, but you’d also have the Stylistics, the O’Jays and all that great black American soul that came out of Philadelphia.”

Loaded was released as a single in March 1990, and reached made No.16 in the chart. It was Primal Scream’s first UK Top 40 hit, and one that had the curious effect of crowning this most rock’n’roll of bands as the new darlings of the rave scene. The success of Loaded led to Alan McGee putting the band on a weekly wage of £50.

“We were on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme just before that,” Gillespie recalls. “We were absolutely skint. He gave us an advance of a few thousand pounds, so we built a studio in Hackney, on Tudor Road. We rented an office and turned it into a writing studio. We wrote a lot of Screamadelica in there. We wrote a lot of the songs on keyboards, though I shouldn’t really be saying that in Classic Rock. I mean, we are a guitar band live, a high-energy rock’n’roll band.”

They were certainly living the life. Screamadelica was a filthy party animal of a record. It was a place where the tribal edicts of rock’n’roll were played out amid the glowstick rallies of rave. The album’s unbowed hedonism was typified by songs like Higher Than The Sun, Gillespie intoning to some imaginary Golden God: ‘I live just for today/Don’t care about tomorrow.’

“That’s exactly how I felt,” Gillespie says today. “I didn’t care if I died. I know that sounds dramatic, but it’s all there in the lyrics. We were out there taking ecstasy and speed. Speed was our main drug of choice, then people got more money and got into cocaine, then they got into heroin and it kind of fucked everything up. But I can’t really include heroin here, because while we were making the record it’d be speed and ecstasy. We’d never record on it though; you can’t play rock’n’roll on ecstasy.

“Acid house was similar to the LSD explosion of the sixties. The music was different, but I think it released a similar amount of energy and creativity in people who maybe hadn’t realised they had that inside them before. The energy in the clubs was intense. It reminded me of early rock’n’roll and punk. And that energy was extremely seductive. So we were up for days, living what it says in the songs. Being up for days meant we were exposed to a lot of great scenes and wild, strange, dangerous people. And fucking weird scenes with weird women. But we were a serious band when it came to recording and gigs. We may have partied at the weekends, but every week we were in the studio writing. At that point in your life you’re really out to prove to the world what you can do.

“We had a fucking great time, and that found its way into the music and the songs. I think it’s a very euphoric record. To me it’s ecstatic rock’n’roll. It’s what rock’n’roll should be: joyous and celebratory.”

Amid the mixes by Weatherall, Hypnotone and The Orb – who took Higher Than The Sun into the freakoid realm of cosmic dub – Screamadelica was notable for a more obvious Primal Scream influence. Jimmy Miller was the producer behind The Rolling Stones’ killer streak of albums from 1968’s Beggars Banquet through to Goats Head Soup in ’73.

When engineer Colin Leggett quit three days into the sessions for Movin’ On Up, Gillespie knew just who to call to finish what was already an ultra-Stonesy track: “The one guy in the world I wanted to mix us was Jimmy Miller. But he was hard to find, because within the music industry he was seen as a burn-out. But I went up to Eden Studios and he mixed Movin’ On Up for us there. And it was incredible. Then he did Damaged with Andrew Innes. We were blown away. He was really into groove and rhythm. On Movin’ On Up there’s this mad percussion thing going on, and it’s Jimmy playing two Coca-Cola bottles.”

So was Screamadelica ultimately a balancing act between guest producers and the Primals’ own artistic vision?

“With Andy Weatherall, I think we were both coming from the same place,” Gillespie offers. “I think we married a rock’n’roll attitude and sensibility and songwriting instinct to Andy’s knowledge of the dancefloor and contemporary rhythms. Also, Andy was a bit of a punk. He wasn’t a musician, but what he had was ideas in abundance. I think the best records are not just made by people with loads of technique, it’s about attitude and imagination. #

"And between Andy and us – and The Orb and Jimmy Miller – we made a fantastic record. I’ve got to give those guys credit, but then they did what producers are supposed to do. Producers are supposed to enhance your songs and suggest things. For example, I know the Stones struggled with the rhythm of Honky Tonk Women, then Jimmy Miller came up with the cowbell intro. Charlie Watts said that it was Jimmy’s riff. And that’s one of the most famous intros in the whole of rock’n’roll.”

True to their own wilful nature, Primal Scream refused to repeat Screamadelica. Give Out But Don’t Give Up, in ’94, was instead a return to the visceral charge of time-worn rock’n’roll. The music press largely bemoaned the fact that this was no Son Of Screamadelica, and duly waded in. True, the album may have been uneven, but there were more than a few choice moments.

“Even if we’d wanted to we couldn’t have made another Screamadelica,” reasons Gillespie. “We were in a different place, and so was Andy Weatherall. I know that he didn’t – and we didn’t – expect that success. And then we went away and toured the world. Some of the band got into heroin. My take on it is that the creativity seized up a little. It was a really strange period, then out of that came the …Don’t Give Up album. We could have made a better record than that, but maybe that record was as good as it could be. There are two songs from that that we play live every night: Rocks and Jailbird. At the time, the music press in Britain slagged it. But when we play Rocks at our gigs these days, younger and younger generations just love it and the place goes fucking nuts. To me it’s like School’s Out by Alice Cooper.”

Primal Scream have made some striking albums since – chiefly Vanishing Point (’97) and Riot City Blues (’06) – but none more memorable than 2000’s XTRMNTR. Coming at the opposite end of the decade, it can almost be seen as the sinister flip-side to Screamadelica. It’s a dense, punishing listen, shot through with abrasive riffs, hard-nosed electronica and a misanthropic world-view. It’s like that second Summer of Love never happened at all.

“Screamadelica is an emotionally warm record,” Gillespie agrees, “whereas XTRMNTR is the other end of the scale – angry, paranoid, vitriolic, scathing. But then that’s part of my character and part of the character of the band. When he heard XTRMNTR, Alan McGee said to me: ‘That’s the record you’ve wanted to make all your life.’ And I went: ‘Yeah, you’re right.’

This article originally featured in Classic Rock magazine issue 155.

Here’s a tale about a rabble of underground rock visionaries turning a thriving local music scene into a global phenomenon, putting the world’s spotlight onto the US’s Pacific Northwest and prompting teenage Herberts as far afield as Chelmsford, Essex to suddenly have the urge to own a corduroy shirt (yes, that was me).

Along the way there were those who turned their back on it, those who lost their way, those who died and those who turned their back on it, but turned round again with a new set of rules and ended up staying really big anyway and everything was fine (okay, this bit pretty much just refers to Pearl Jam).

What remains is the music, most of which still sounds vital today, artefacts from an era that dramatically reshaped what rock music could be.

Green River - Rehab Doll (1988)

Rehab Doll is definitely not the first grunge record – it’s not even the first Green River record, preceded by the previous year’s mini-album Dry As A Bone and 1985’s Come On Down EP – but no band best sum up the different directions in which grunge would twist and turn than this Seattle five-piece. Stone Gossard’s gnarly riffs would be honed into anthemic classic-rock in Pearl Jam, as would the guitarist’s rhythmic interplay with bassist Jeff Ament, whilst frontman Mark Arm and lead guitarist Steve Turner would use the punkier moments as the template for the spikier, Stooges-y sound that underpinned Mudhoney. As a standalone record, this still thrills though, if only for all the possibilities you can hear that lay ahead.

Nirvana - Nevermind (1991)

The record that needs the least amount of explaining, the story of grunge is right here in Nevermind’s 42 minutes and 36 seconds – where sweatbox venue attitude meets burgeoning ambition, where perfect pop melodies slide off crunching four-chord riffs. It was the sound of grunge going mainstream, to the point that you could split the genre into two distinct sections: before Nevermind, and after Nevermind. Two very different worlds.

Singles: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1992)

Is it cheating to have this in here? Tough, I’ve already written it, it’s on the internet, the time to try and stop me has passed. But the truth is that, as the very excellent soundtrack to a pretty decent film, the soundtrack to Cameron Crowe’s Seattle-set rock-rom-com perfectly captured almost all of grunge’s key players at a point when they were about to go interstellar, containing non-album classics from Pearl Jam, Chris Cornell and Smashing Pumpkins, whilst Alice In Chains wrote their masterful Would? specifically for inclusion. I say almost because, obviously, there’s no Nirvana here, the planned inclusion of their song Breed nixed by Kurt Cobain.

Pearl Jam - Vs. (1993)

Pearl Jam were pulling in different directions when it came to making their second record. Eddie Vedder was trying to wrap the whole thing in barbed wire and avoid the band being pulled into MTV’s bosom, whilst his bandmates were thinking ‘what’s the problem? We’re huge, everything’s great!’. Nodding to this, Vedder wanted to call the record Five Against One, and it’s that tension that makes Vs. such a startling, exhilarating listen. But if he didn’t want it to be massive, maybe Vedder should’ve written some crapper choruses. As it was, he laid down a series of era-defining angsty singalongs for the masses to savour. It was so huge that Vedder saw no choice but to take them on a diversion for 1994’s Vitalogy. It would be almost a decade until they came back into the light.

Alice In Chains - MTV Unplugged (1996)

It wasn’t easy trying to decide which record to end this on. It could’ve been something that demonstrated the bandwagon jumpers who followed in grunge’s wake, terrible bands devoid of the risk-taking and adventure of the scene’s pioneers. Yes, I’m talking about Creed. Or it could’ve been Smashing Pumpkins’ epic Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, which triumphantly blew the whole thing wide open, or Hole’s 1998 album Celebrity Skin, a brilliant poppy rock record that hit at a time when everyone else had ran out of ideas. But really the story of grunge ends in tragedy and loss, and no record captures that better than this poignant, stripped-down live set, featuring one of Layne Staley’s final performances. The excitement of those early days was a long time ago. Here was when reality bit.

Alexandra Palace, London, February 14, 2026. Motionless In White are playing their biggest-ever UK tour and tonight’s show is off to a scorching start. Meltdown is a suitably explosive opener, accompanied by huge gouts of pyro while members of The Cherry Bombs – the alternative dance troupe led by Corey Taylor’s wife, Alicia Taylor – stalk the stage twirling glowing torches. They switch to angle-grinders for the cybermetal pulse of Sign Of Life, but the overall effect is no less stunning.

With a little space to breathe, the house lights come on and frontman Chris Motionless surveys the vast crowd in front of him. “I’m just going to stare at you guys for a second, is that cool?” he asks. “It is Valentine’s Day after all, I just want to adore you.” There’s a touch of canny showmanship to all this, but it’s not just banter. The singer has a look that suggests he’s close to being overwhelmed by the experience.

“I sent the video straight to my girlfriend afterwards and joked that I should have had them wish her a happy Valentine’s Day,” Chris tells us today. “I walked away from that show with the kind of feeling like you want to call your parents and be like, ‘We did it, guys.’ It was such a triumphant moment. This isn’t just one of the best shows of the UK ever, this is one of our best shows of all time.”

Motionless In White’s last album, 2022’s Scoring The End Of The World, only narrowly missed the Top 10 of the US Billboard 200, but it was towards the end of that touring cycle that they suddenly found themselves playing a succession of sold-out arenas. Some two decades after they started this band, with no more ambitions than “to jump in a van and live out the fantasy of being on the road”, Motionless In White had finally arrived.

Chris is joining us today from his home in Scranton, Pennsylvania – perhaps still best known to non-residents as the setting of the US version of The Office. He is, he says, using the limited time he has before Motionless In White’s never-ending tour schedule sweeps him away to Australia, to do “all kinds of house projects”.

Without the usual pale make-up he looks healthy and even a little tanned, long hair framing a casually bearded off-duty face. He also looks confident and relaxed, as well he should. There are more of those arena-sized venues looming across North America. There’s the little matter of a headlining slot at next year’s Bloodstock. And, right here and now, the band are about to release their brand new seventh album, Decades.

If the aptly titled Scoring The End Of The World rampaged out of a global lockdown with a sense of untrammelled release, Decades is an even more explosive statement. A big part of MIW’s appeal is their ability to blur boundaries, incorporating elements of industrial, electronica, rap, pop and more while always eventually circling back to the slamming metalcore heft of their earliest releases.

On Decades – an album that celebrates the band’s 20 or so years in existence – they throw in sounds picked up from every part of that journey, mix them up and turn everything up to 11.

“I want to get punched in the face when I listen to this record, because we have not had a record that aggressive since [2010 debut] Creatures,” Chris grins. “Every other record has had a lot of slow and mixed songs. This one is just energy of different variations and I felt like that is the message.”

It sounds like the album was a blast to make. As it turns out, it wasn’t. Chris says it came closer than ever before to breaking his love for making music – but more on that later.

Decades also marks another peak in a journey that the youngsters who formed the band could barely have conceived of. The band that would become Motionless In White came together in 2004 and chose their current name on New Year’s Day, 2005. The mathematically astute may notice that this makes the band at least 21 years old, but the frontman used his prerogative to name 2026 as their 20th anniversary year.

“I wanted to have earned it,” he explains. “Technically, we’re 21 years with the name, but we didn’t do our first real tour until 2006. You can play local shows with cover songs mixed in, but we weren’t a band until we had all original songs.”

Their first ‘proper’ gig was a local show supporting then-rising emo stars Senses Fail at The Staircase in Pittston, Pennsylvania in 2005.

“We didn’t even have our first demo fully finished, but I found the promoter through a friend and I called him every other day for a month straight,” Chris remembers. “Finally he just gave in, and we went out there like we were the headliners. It was cringy as hell looking back, but at the time it was the coolest thing ever!”

As soon as they could, they piled into a van (a cheap Ford Econoline that they all lived in, equipped with a trailer for the gear and a replica Triceratops skull mounted on the front) and headed out. The first few shows of their first tour had to be abandoned, after they broke down in a snowstorm and were forced to sleep on the floor of a rest stop on the side of the Interstate. They had to pool every penny to get fixed up and back on the road, but there was no way that was going to stop them.

Which isn’t to say that every member of the fledgling band had the same long-term drive and commitment as the frontman. Even as they built up a cult following through constant roadwork and releases such as their 2007 EP, The Whorror, and 2010 full-length debut, Creatures, that early line-up went through a lot of churn. By 2013, Chris was the sole original member.

“When we started, it was just friends wanting to play music and tour, but I don’t think people at that moment were in it for a lifelong career scenario,” he shrugs. “We’ve had some members dealing with health issues and some just move on to other things. Thankfully, it’s been cool, because all the iterations have, in my opinion, improved the band.”

Even with a turnaround resulting in eight ex-members, MIW have remained largely drama-free, in the public arena at least. Asked if there’s been a deliberate policy of keeping any issues behind closed doors, Chris concedes that there’s “definitely been some stuff with former members of the band and their behaviour justified them being removed from the band”.

The only real public spat involved “a situation that we were pretty upset about as a band, because we felt betrayed”, he adds. Fifteen years on, he’s still reluctant to name names or point the finger, but he’s clearly talking about guitarist Thomas ‘TJ’ Bell, who ditched Motionless for Escape The Fate. In a rare diss-post at the time, they said he “basically fucked us last minute” and questioned his commitment to the band and fans.

Still, one dispute with an ex-member and a minor beef with Ronnie Radke – and who hasn’t had beef with Ronnie Radke? – is a remarkably trouble-free track record for 20 years of existence. That genre-splicing musical explosion has always been a big part of Motionless In White’s appeal, but so has Chris Motionless, also known as Chris Cerulli, himself. He’s the outcast rebel you could take home to meet your nan; unfailingly polite, respectful to his fans and seemingly wholesome in a scene that frankly hasn’t always been all that it could.

Motionless In White have enjoyed a far more stable line-up over the second half of their career, but Chris is undoubtedly its figurehead. Asked whether he is also its undisputed leader, he takes a second to gather his thoughts.

“Around the 2011-2012 timeframe, I feel like everyone had a democratic vote and we didn’t have a leader,” he says at last. “It was so chaotic and nobody could ever make a decision and… so I felt like I needed to take control of the band. Once we went in that direction, we became a lot more professional and business-oriented. The democracy is still alive today. Everyone has a say and a vote and gets to speak their mind, but it’s always because I’m bringing them something ahead of that for us to discuss and figure out. So yeah, I would say I am the leader, or the person with the forward vision.”

The frontman’s drive is undoubtedly why Motionless In White are where they are today. The first time this writer interviewed Chris Motionless was shortly after the release of Creatures. The singer was rightly and inordinately excited by the fact that Twisted Sister legend Dee Snider was appearing in the video for Immaculate Misconception.

Even then he oozed ambition, but he was also awkward and very guarded, seemingly weighing every word before he’d allow it to leave his lips. The Chris in front of us today still puts thought into everything he says, but he’s a lot more confident and relaxed. More comfortable in his own skin, perhaps?

“You are very right,” he smiles. “I have always been introverted. I’m not so much of a people person that I know how to say the right thing, and I worried with social anxiety. I’ve just had so many years of doing it that it’s not like a desensitisation, it’s more like, ‘Oh, it’s not as bad as I was worried about.’ So it didn’t feel like there was an internal implosion, I think I just care less about being serious now. I don’t care about a lot of things I used to care about, and that’s been quite liberating.”

It hasn’t, though, been plain sailing to get to this point for either the singer or the band as a whole. When Hammer spoke to Chris in 2017, as they were about to release their fourth album, Graveyard Shift, it felt like a pivotal time. MIW had their dedicated fans, but they seemed to have hit a plateau.

Keyboardist Josh Balz – then the longest-serving member after Chris – had left the band, which hit the singer hard. He was also dealing with the fact that his dad had just had a heart attack, and questioning the future of the band and his own place in life.

“Life and mortality and intention of living became more of a focal point of mine,” he nods. “When you’re younger you feel invincible, and you don’t really worry about your family. And then it just hits you like a train one day, and you develop these different feelings about what life is and what you’re doing and your choices and everything.”

One way that Chris dealt with this torrent of feelings was through attending therapy.

“The number one thing I learned was that nothing I do can have any success if I’m not healthy,” he reflects. “If I’m not putting any work into me as just a human being – band aside, friendships aside, family aside – then everything else is liable to suffer. That was something that I put off, and admittedly still very much do. It’s rather clichéd to be like, ‘How can you love anything else if you don’t love yourself?’ but it’s true.

“The biggest benefit to spending the time on therapy is that now, any time things become incredibly overwhelming or stressful, I can always be like, ‘How can I make this better by stepping away and sorting through what I need out of this situation, and then go forward after that?’”

MIW’s fifth album, 2019’s Disguise, also gave the singer an extra outlet for processing many of the issues he’d been struggling with, the title track examining what happens when you mask your true self while battling the demons inside. It was well-received among the faithful, even if it didn’t move their career much further along in terms of finding the end of that plateau.

Then came Scoring The End Of The World, which finally saw them come into their own. It wasn’t instant. The venues kept getting bigger and bigger over a four-year touring cycle, but does the singer now feel like the band have experienced a glow-up, to use the vernacular?

“Totally a glow-up, deadass for sure. Print that!” he hoots. “If the kids want to keep the glow-up going on, you can direct that right over here, ’cause we’ll be happy to keep playing these badass shows.”

When it comes to the reasons behind MIW’s recent and still burgeoning success, he’s modest about the band’s own input.

“I think that’s a little bit of a result of rock music in general just thriving, and in the past couple of years it’s gone crazy,” he says. “We just happened to be in the right place in our career where as it trickles down from these big bands like Bring Me and Bad Omens – we’re next underneath that, where people are discovering our music.”

The guest appearance of Bryan Garris from Knocked Loose on Scoring The End Of The World track Slaughterhouse and a reciprocal appearance by Chris on the hardcore superstars’ You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To song Slaughterhouse 2 probably won’t have hurt, either. Asked if that unlocked any new fans for them, he nods.

“I think most of the people that we have had on a song have, but that’s not the reason we do it. We do it because we love those artists or feel they’re right for the song.

“I think some of the Knocked Loose fanbase are too cool for Motionless In White, so it’s cool that if they’re forced to be exposed to us, so to speak, at least there’s a song they could probably vibe with,” he adds with a self-deprecating grin.

With the band on an upward trajectory, it might seem like the process of making a new album marking their time together would be a celebratory affair. Not so, according to Chris.

“Making this latest record was as close as I’ve come to walking away from the band,” he sighs. “I wouldn’t, because it’s the only thing I know – the only thing I love and I’m passionate about. To walk away would feel like such a betrayal of the time spent and invested in this.”

The problem wasn’t writer’s block, he says, but more the sheer amount of work involved. “I ground myself to the bone for this record,” he admits. “I was going into these toxic cycles of workaholism and just burnt myself out. It took a little bit of my passion away, because it felt like a job for the first time, so I definitely wanted to walk away and come back to it. That’s part of why it took so long.”

It should also be noted that Decades did not start life as an album to mark the band’s 20th anniversary. A number of songs feature lyrics that circle around the theme of fear and no longer being afraid. When we tell him that, he smiles like we’ve unearthed a secret.

“The record was initially meant to be Afraid Of The Dark. So we went into the record, this is the theme, it’s about not being afraid to step into the unknown. As things took more and more time to get done, I recognised: ‘We’re coming up on 20 years here, that shifts what all of this is about. It still works, because the songs Decades and Afraid Of The Dark are the bookend messages.”

The tortuous and thematically revised process of piecing the album together resulted in a bigger pile of rejected songs than ever before. This included what Chris describes as arguably his favourite cut from the sessions. He declines to provide a title, but reveals that it was a “sad, slow, emotional song” in the same vein as R.I.P..

“Nothing has ever prohibited us from having multiple slow songs before, but I just felt like this record is supposed to be about fucking pure raw energy,” he says.

One song that bleeds raw energy and that Chris did love working on is Playing God, which features an absolutely feral guest performance from Slipknot’s Corey Taylor.

“That’s a great way to put it,” beams Chris. “I wasn’t in the room with him, but I don’t even know if I would have been able to get through it if I were, as I’d have been laughing and crying at the same time. He was very communicative and super-cool around the whole process, and when I heard it for the first time I was actually confused, because he did even more than I thought he was going to. When you’re asking someone that you either idolise or that’s just in a bigger position than you to sing, there’s an anxiety like you don’t want to overstep. But it seemed like he genuinely wanted to be a part of it on a bigger level.”

The album also features guest spots from singer-songwriter Skylar Grey (on R.I.P.) and Anthony Martinez of Dark Divine (on Blood Rave). As a metalcore act with a penchant for make-up and a dark gothic bent, the latter can clearly be seen as following in MIW’s footsteps, and Chris now finds himself in the position of mentor as well as mentee.

“I definitely resonate with what they’re doing and what they want to do, and I want to support that,” he says. While emphasising that he’s not comparing the stature of his own band to Slipknot’s, he adds that one of the most inspirational things about the Iowa legends has always been their willingness to take newer bands out – including Motionless In White.

Over the course of two decades, Motionless In White have got to tour with the likes of Slipknot, Lamb Of God and Alice Cooper. They became Warped Tour mainstays and have played countless European festivals. They’ve sold out Alexandra Palace, and icons such as Corey Taylor, Korn’s Jonathan Davis and Cradle Of Filth’s Dani Filth have guested on their albums.

Next year they’ll be headlining Bloodstock and playing a whole bunch of songs from Decades that will undoubtedly be new fan favourites by then. There have been a lot of highs, and there will surely be more to come, but, perhaps surprisingly, it’s not these undoubted peaks that Chris Motionless cherishes the most.

“Sure, I have a lot of favourite shows that I’ve loved, but nothing beats my favourite times of being crammed in the van with my best friends,” he says wistfully. “Nothing beats getting caught stealing food from Walmart because we were broke as fuck. Those are the moments that me and my friends bonded over the most, and I’m so grateful I got to experience that.”

Decades is out now via Roadrunner. Motionless In White headline Bloodstock Festival in the UK in August 2027.

Daevid Allen died of cancer in March 2015, aged 77 – but he’d had no intention of Gong dying with him. Tasked with taking up the baton, Kavus Torabi and his next generation began their new era with 2016 album Rejoice! I’m Dead! – and told Prog how they’d done it.

Kavus Torabi is addressing the somewhat incredible situation in which he and his Gong bandmates find themselves. “You really have to not think about it because otherwise you become too reverential,” he says. “We’re going to have to do this our way.”

Gong fans will be familiar with the situation, and it’s quite a story. Over the past few years, the band have been undergoing something of a musical renaissance, with leader Daevid Allen assembling a new line-up including Brazilian guitarist Fabio Golfetti (from Violeta de Outono) and bassist Dave Sturt (whose credits include Jade Warrior and Bill Nelson). In 2014, Allen recruited Torabi as an additional guitarist, despite having never heard the Knifeworld, Guapo and ex-Cardiacs man actually play.

But only a few months later, Allen announced that he had been diagnosed with cancer and would be unable to fulfil the world tour booked to promote latest album I See You. Reluctantly, but with his full encouragement, the rest of the band agreed to do the shows without him. And to their surprise, a new chemistry developed.

“Each night we sent Daevid recordings or links to YouTube, and from his sick bed in Australia, he wrote gushing praise about what had happened to the band and how this was exactly what he had hoped,” says Torabi. “By the end of the tour, and with the full blessing of Daevid, we decided to carry on.”

Allen had clearly been planning his legacy carefully, and had every intention that Gong should live on without him. “For the last few years, he was always talking about a continuation; he was always looking for a new direction,” says Sturt.

The people he’d entrusted had been well chosen for their strong identification with Allen’s ethos and its unique sound. Sturt was attracted to the “craziness mixed with musical complexity,” while for Golfetti, hearing Gong in his teens had made him want to be a musician in the first place.

Torabi was another teenage obsessive. “When I first heard Flying Teapot, it was everything I’d been looking for,” he says. The outsider, countercultural stance was also hugely important. “Absolutely! It’s only when you start meeting bands that you realise how few actually think that way.”

“It’s never conformed, which is probably why it’s never made any money,” comments Sturt, with characteristic dry wit.

Gong’s decision to continue without any original members isn’t without precedent – Golfetti cites the Sun Ra Arkestra; Torabi mentions Napalm Death – but what’s different is their commitment to respect the band’s heritage but to take it somewhere new.

“We were all fairly sceptical,” Torabi admits. “But we’re not one of those bands where you’ve got one original member and a load of young dudes playing the old material. It’s kind of a brand new band, but with this blueprint to draw from and create stuff in the style of. It’s more like a political party… one that’s getting more extreme!”

There’s no question that it’s still Gong. “As a fan, I know for a fact that the version we do of Master Builder is outrageous,” says Torabi. “It’s so out there – Steve Hillage loves it,”

Sturt agrees: “There’s been lots of discussions with the old guard. They all want it to carry on. They appreciate where we’re taking it. Steve has been very supportive.”

“And [former bassist] Mike Howlett was incredibly flattering about the new album,” adds Torabi.

The record in question is Rejoice! I’m Dead!, a stunning hour of modern psychedelic/ progressive music that affirms the new Gong as a serious creative force in their own right. While there are connections back to the classic Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy from the mid-70s, and particularly to the heavier sound of Planet Gong’s Floating Anarchy, it’s a vital and exciting piece of work with brilliant playing throughout from Torabi, Golfetti and Sturt, plus returning sax and flute player Ian East and new drummer Cheb Nettles.

“As soon as we started playing with Cheb, a new dynamic was created,” says Torabi. “During the big improvisational parts in the middle of things like You Can’t Kill Me, we really started feeling, ‘We’ve got something here.’ The music started going in directions it hadn’t done previously. So we knew that if we got to make another record, it was going to be really good.”

Yet despite their self-belief, the pressure to deliver was still high. “We all knew this had to be an amazing album, because otherwise that’d be the end of it. If it had just been Angel’s Egg 2, or even I See You 2, people weren’t going to buy into it.” Perhaps inevitably, nerves kicked in. “I’m always the stressy one, and once we got locked into it happening, I had a bit of a meltdown,” he confesses. “I was so worried because, having signed a record deal, we didn’t have any songs. Dave got it in the ear – I rang up and was just freaking out!”

Sturt adds: “But just from the first session between myself, Kavus and Ian, loads of ideas came out, many of which ended up on the album. And then Fabio sent through a demo of five or so ideas, and everything coalesced within a few weeks.”

Allen’s presence was still being felt by the band, as Sturt elaborates: “I could absolutely imagine Daevid dancing round the rehearsal room, because it really felt like he would have loved what we’d done. We were firing on all cylinders, which is what he would have wanted.”

Allen is also literally present on the album, with old recordings of his voice popping up on a couple of songs. Beatrix in particular sounds like a poignant dispatch from the afterlife (where, naturally, everybody speaks French). But while retaining the charm and eccentricity of Gong, Rejoice! I’m Dead! is a good deal less whimsical than previous releases, with the band emphasising the more radical agenda that Allen was increasingly pushing in his lyrics. There’s certainly no mention of gnomes or pixies.

“The Pot Head Pixies thing was Daevid’s vision – it would have been bogus to take that on and write another chapter,” says Torabi. “But with the more radical thing, that was something we could all take on. It was nice that Daevid was steering the ship this way because we all get that.”

“He thrived on the whole Occupy movement, and he loved the idea of standing up to The Man,” adds Sturt.

Allen had tapped into this growing feeling of popular discontent on I See You with lines such as: ‘This revolution will replace all those greedy capitalists who so fucked up.’ On the new album, the Sturt-penned Model Village shares the sentiment, being a Floydian vision of suburban hell where ‘Power and riches reside in the hands of the few.’

Even more strident, and perhaps the most un-Gong-like song on the album, is the predatory sturm und drang of Kapital, which comes on like a demonic cross between Sabbath’s Children Of The Grave and Eno’s Blank Frank. Even more surprising, it’s the one song on Rejoice! I’m Dead! that’s an Allen composition.

“When we heard Kapital, we all wanted to do it,” says Torabi. “It’s like, ‘My God, this is Gong’s most metal tune! And if we’re going to go metal, let’s go metal up the ass!’ But at the core of it, it’s a Daevid Allen song. It’s not like we took liberties.”

The other overriding theme of the album, from the title onwards, is, of course, Allen’s death. “As this is the transitional album, it felt important to make it about Daevid, like this was handing over the baton,” says Torabi. “Daevid seemed to have a certainty about death – he certainly embraced it.

“One night in Brazil, he had become convinced that this was the night he was going to die – he had his body painted all white and had a death ceremony. Then the following morning, he found out that [former drummer] Pierre Moerlen had died. He said he realised he’d had a premonition, but it was about the wrong person.”

Yet despite this talk about death, the mood in the Gong camp is exuberant – it’s the confidence of a band who know they’ve pulled off something special.

“All my experience before joining Gong feels like it was building up to this point,” says Sturt.

Torabi is equally upbeat: “It’s like we’re in a teenage band, only everybody’s really good now! I just want us to make another record, and I really want to go out and start playing this music.”

Oasis have added four new shows to their Live '27 tour plans.

Last week, the Manchester band announced 38 dates for their second reunion tour, which is scheduled to run from late May to mid-September, kicking off at Celtic Park in Glasgow on May 21.

Due to "phenomenal demand" the tour will now expand to 42 shows, with the Gallagher brothers' band booking two additional nights at Knebworth (September 25, 26), a third night at Munich’s Allianz Arena (July 6) and a third night at Rome's Stadio Olimpico (July 26)

The tour's promoters have also confirmed that the band's previously announced July 24 show at the Stade de France in Paris has now been re-scheduled to take place on July 20, for logistical reasons.

When the first set of dates were revealed on September 14, the group issued a statement saying:

"START THE CELEBRATIONS!!!!

After a period of reflection 'The Most Damaging Pop Cultural Force In Recent British History' has declared itself fit for purpose and will once again return to lift the spirits of the people.

Come witness the fitness.

It shall be a sight to behold."

Oasis Live '27 world tour dates

May 21: Glasgow Celtic Park, UK
May 23: Glasgow Celtic Park, UK
May 25: Glasgow Celtic Park, UK
May 28: Glasgow Celtic Park, UK
May 29: Glasgow Celtic Park, UK

Jun 04: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 06: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 08: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 11: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 12: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 15: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 18: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 19: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 22: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 25: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK
Jun 26: Manchester Etihad Stadium, UK

Jul 02: Munich Allianz Arena, GER
Jul 03: Munich Allianz Arena, GER
Jul 06: Munich Allianz Arena, GER
Jul 10: Barcelona Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys, SPA
Jul 11: Barcelona Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys, SPA
Jul 16: Amsterdam Johan Cruijff ArenA, HOL
Jul 17: Amsterdam Johan Cruijff ArenA, HOL
Jul 20: Paris Stade de France, FRA
Jul 24: Paris Stade de France, FRA
Jul 26: Rome Stadio Olimpico, ITA
Jul 29: Rome Stadio Olimpico, ITA
Jul 30: Rome Stadio Olimpico, ITA

Aug 10: Boston Gillette Stadium, US
Aug 13: Boston Gillette Stadium, US
Aug 14: Boston Gillette Stadium, US
Aug 20: Las Vega Allegiant Stadium, US
Aug 21: Las Vegas Allegiant Stadium, US
Aug 24: Las Vegas Allegiant Stadium, US

Sep 04: Slane Castle, IRE
Sep 05: Slane Castle, IRE
Sep 11: Knebworth, UK
Sep 12: Knebworth, UK
Sep 18: Knebworth, UK
Sep 19: Knebworth, UK
Sep 25: Knebworth, UK
Sep 26: Knebworth, UK

With demand for the Oasis Live ’27 shows expected to be extremely high, a registration process was put in place to reduce queuing times and organised ticket touting in order to give genuine fans the best possible chance to buy tickets. That registration window is now closed.

Successful applicants will be sent a unique, non-transferable code to access an allocated onsale window.

Fans will be informed which of the onsale windows they will be given access to, and at what time. There will be general onsale.

Oasis' 2025 reunion tour was a huge success, with the group selling 2,228,471 tickers across 36 shows.

Semi-retired Iron Maiden drummer has recalled the moment he met Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osbourne, and the late singer’s claim that he once saved McBrain’s life.

Talking exclusively to Metal Hammer, the drummer, 74, says that he first met the Prince Of Darkness on a boat crossing the English Channel. He doesn’t remember much of what happened next, but the next time he and Osbourne came face-to-face, Osbourne alleged that he saved McBrain’s life by stopping him from falling into the sea that day.

“I thought there was no way Ozzy would remember meeting me for the first time,” McBrain says. “He came into my room while we were on this boat with all these drugs falling out his hands. But he did, crystal clear when we ran into each other again later.

“He said, ‘Do you remember me saving your life?’ I was like, ‘No?’ He said I was so out of it, I was stumbling towards the railing and he grabbed me before I went over. All I remember was it was a rough crossing, going over the Channel. But apparently he’d saved me!”

Osbourne, who was fired from Black Sabbath in 1979 and pursued a massively successful solo career, and Iron Maiden were two of the biggest heavy metal artists of the 1980s. McBrain isn’t the only member of the band to have an unhinged, inebriated encounter with the Prince Of Darkness. In an interview with Jeremy Clarkson in 1999, frontman Bruce Dickinson revealed that he and Osbourne once drunkenly conspired to steal a taxi together.

“He had a couple beers and said to me, ‘Let’s nick a taxi,’” Dickinson remembered. “I asked, ‘How you gonna do that?’ He said, ‘Well, you call it and I’ll distract him – no, you distract him and I’ll hit him over the head! Can you drive?’ When I said yes he went, ‘Good, I can’t.’”

McBrain joined Maiden in 1982, replacing Clive Burr, and retired from the metal legends’ live lineup in December 2024, almost two years after suffering a transient ischaemic attack (TIA, or mini-stroke) which paralysed his left side. The drummer regained his ability to play in time for the band’s Future Past world tour in June 2023, but his abilities remain limited.

Talking to Hammer, McBrain reveals that he could only feel “70 percent” of his hand during the Future Past shows: “It was incredible to get any use back out of it at all … Like, I couldn’t do the drum fill in the intro of [1983 single] The Trooper, so I had to adapt it. Steve [Harris, bassist/bandleader] and the band were so supportive, but my body just wasn’t bouncing back.”

Simon Dawson replaced him on the road, but McBrain is still officially Maiden’s drummer. He says that, should the band enter the studio to make another album after 2021’s Senjutsu, he’d be “delighted” to contribute. However, his condition means the material would have to be “more simple”.

McBrain will release his autobiography, Hello Boys And Girls, on October 22 via Harper NonFiction. The publisher calls it “a thrilling, hilarious and deeply personal autobiography” that “takes readers behind the scenes of one of Britain’s biggest-ever bands”. He’s currently touring the US with his Maiden cover band Titanium Tart.

Maiden are also in the States, continuing their 50th-anniversary Run For Your Lives world tour. The setlist features songs from their first nine albums, 1980’s Iron Maiden up to 1992’s UK chart-topping Fear Of The Dark. They’re reissuing the same albums in a vinyl box set on December 11.

Angry Anderson, the frontman of Australian hard rock veterans Rose Tattoo, has died aged 79.

"It is with great sadness we announce the passing of Gary “Angry” Anderson on the eve of Monday 21 September 2026, surrounded by his loved ones here in Australia" reads a statement posted on the band's Facebook page.

"Angry was a devoted father, and much-loved member of his friends, bandmates and the wider music and entertainment community. His loss will be deeply felt by all those who knew and loved him both here in Australia and overseas.

"The family and band members are asking for privacy at this difficult time and will not be giving interviews. We kindly ask that their wishes are respected as they come to terms with this devastating loss and take time they need to grieve.

"We thank everyone for their prayers and messages of love and continued support."

Anderson was born in Melbourne in 1947, and formed his first band, Buster Brown, in 1973. The blues rock outfit recorded their only album, Something to Say, the following year, before drummer Phil Rudd left for Sydney to join AC/DC in 1975.

Anderson followed him a year later, when he hooked up with Rose Tattoo, a band whose blues-drenched, sewer-rat rock’n’roll embodied the singer’s uncompromising personality. The band shared both a production team (Vanda and Young) and record label (Albert Productions) with AC/DC, not to mention a deep kinship with their fellow Aussies.

"In the early days the Tatts were AC/DC’s fave band to go and see," Anderson told Classic Rock in 2018. "That’s how we got signed to Alberts, they recommended us. Malcolm and Angus [Young] and particularly Bon [Scott] all jammed with us back then."

The band's self-titled debut album (released in some overseas territories as Rock 'n' Roll Outlaw) was released in 1978, and is best known for featuring the song Nice Boys, later covered by Guns N' Roses on their Live ?!★@ Like a Suicide EP. They recorded four further studio albums – Assault & Battery (1981), Scarred For Life (1982), Southern Stars (1984) and Beats From A Single Drum – before splitting in 1987.

In their early years, Rose Tattoo made their name by combining their bluesy hard rock with famously aggressive and confrontational live shows, fuelled by cheap drugs. The band's show at the UK's Reading Festival in 1981 became legendary when Anderson deliberately smacked himself in the face with a microphone and then, his face smeared with blood, slammed the stand through the wooden stage before exiting to the wings.

"Speed was around, amyl was around, it was all about getting fully charged and just seeing how fast and dangerous you could be," Anderson told Planet Rock magazine in 2018. "We had this maniacal bass player [Ian Rilen], this Ronnie Wood character playing guitar [Mick Cocks], and Pete [Wells, slide guitar], who was this God-like creature.

"So I’m feeding off this maniacal energy, and I was so inspired by it and so caught up in it I thought, We’re going to be the most dangerous thing on the fucking planet. And if you don’t like it, stand aside or lose a limb."

In the summer of 1987, Anderson scored an unlikely hit single in the UK when Suddenly from his first solo album Beats From A Single Drum reached number 2 in the UK.

The song's popularity was due to it being used in a much-watched episode of Australian television soap opera Neighbours, which featured the wedding of popular characters Scott Robinson (Jason Donovan) and Charlene Mitchell (Kylie Minogue).

A second solo album, Blood From Stone, arrived in 1990, before Rose Tattoo briefly reunited in 1993 to support Guns N' Roses on tour in Australia – "Axl Rose said, 'No Rose Tattoo, no Guns N' Roses'" Anderson said in 2018 – and reformed in 1998, subsequently releasing three more albums, Pain (2002), Blood Brothers (2007) and Outlaws (2020).

Away from music, Anderson played the character Ironbar in the 1985 blockbuster film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, and embarked on a political career as a member of the conservative National Party before standing as an election candidate for the short-lived far-right Australian Liberty Alliance Party.

“I ran for a federal seat, then for a state one and finally for the Senate, and it soon became obvious that both parties are as bad as each other,” he told Classic Rock. “The Who articulated it perfectly: ‘Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss’ [from Won’t Get Fooled Again]. I will be a conservative for the rest of my days, but I’ve got a foot in both camps. Power is all about keeping people at odds with one another."

Rose Tattoo had planned to play their final shows in 2026, but the band's European tour was cut short last month after Anderson suffered a cardiac arrest and was hospitalised in Germany.

"We wrap it up at the end of next year,” Anderson told Melbourne radio station 3AW last year. "We will be 50 years old in ’26 on New Year’s Eve. I am proud to say – because I have survived all the original members, and a few along the way – we have achieved what we set out to achieve. At the end of the day, if you can say that you are a lucky man."

On September 23, 2016, following another successful crowdfunding campaign, Marillion released 18th album Fuck Everyone And Run. The 68-minute, six-track production reached No.4 in the UK chart – the first time they’d hit such heights since 1994’s Brave. Ahead of the launch, vocalist Steve Hogarth gave Prog a track-by-track rundown.

Tucked away in a rather anonymous business park in the Buckinghamshire countryside, the Racket Club has been Marillion’s headquarters and recording studio for over two decades.

At its core is a control room, decorated in eastern drapes and artefacts that provide the comfortable feel of a Mongolian yurt. It’s here, as singer Steve Hogarth delights in explaining, that “all the magic happens”.

It's July 2016 and the band’s 18th studio album F.E.A.R (Fuck Everyone And Run) has recently been completed, and Hogarth is visibly enthralled with results. It’s a beguiling work, with three of the tracks extending to over 15 minutes.

It’s beautifully layered, and as guitarist Steve Rothery neatly puts it: “It really embraces who we are and what we do.” With that thought, Hogarth talks us through the lyrical themes that provide an astute and salient take on the state of the world.

El Dorado

Split over five segments and extending to over 16 minutes, the track possesses the sublime musical passages that Marillion have always been known for.

Hogarth: “It’s really about a sense of foreboding and a feeling that everything is going to change in this country. I was trying to paint a picture of someone mowing their lawn in a quiet garden as a storm comes towards them.

It’s an ecological storm, a financial storm, it’s a humanitarian storm. It’s a feeling that there’s a sort of watershed coming. I don’t know what it is, but there’s just a foreboding. If there is a central theme to the record, it’s that, and the fact that we brought this about on ourselves and a sense of shame.

El Dorado is for me about the fact that there’s a sense of shame over the migrant crisis. It’s about the way that this country has responded to the refugees spilling over from Syria, which is a war that we’ve stoked the fire in, even if we haven’t created it.”

Living in FEAR

Ostensibly a song about peace, with archetypal 60s sentiments of disarmament, it’s a polished, succinct track that also has a sublime earworm of a chorus.

Hogarth: “That was one of the tracks that we worked on at Real World Studios [owned by Peter Gabriel]. They’ve got this big screen in the studio because they occasionally do soundtracks for films, so we can drop the big screen in the evening and just put a movie on, with the sound off and just have that running while we’re jamming.

So we’d be in the dark and there would be a vibe going. We were able to work late, stop and have dinner and then go back in to the studio space at nine or 10 at night, and there’s always a different atmosphere than there is during the day.”

The Leavers

An expansive song that contains five distinct, seductive sections. With soaring Rothery guitar solos and opulent keyboards, it’s one of the finest tracks that the band have released over recent years.

Hogarth: “The Leavers is a totally different animal. I wrote it really as a response to the corrosive effect that travel has on you. When you’re in a touring band, or even more so in a touring band’s crew, you’re hardly ever home; you wake up in a new city every day. There’s a repetitive thing of the process of putting a show together – perform a show, you take it down, get on the bus, go to sleep and go again. For crew that’s the life.

When you get home if you’re off, you’re not being paid and you feel like you’re unemployed. It’s also about how these gypsy, thrill-seeking people seem to arrive, do their thing and then are gone. You can’t trust them because they’ll forget you as soon as they’re gone.”

White Paper

Another shorter song, there’s a distinct sadness to the lyrics that’s neatly equalled by the authoritative musical backdrop.

Hogarth: “It’s about several things. It’s a sort of sister story to The Leavers in some respects. It’s about trying to settle into domestic life, about wanting to live passionately and in the moment. There’s also the thing about slowly coming to terms with the fact that you’re getting old, and you better get used to the fact that what you are railing against is very beautiful and natural.

There’s a line in the song: ‘I used to be centre stage, time I should act my age’, and that really is what this song’s about – at one time feeling you were the most important person in the equation, then having to come to terms with the fact that you’d better stand at the side and watch something beautiful going on, rather than try and occupy that space yourself, with your own ego.”

The New Kings

A powerful lyrical statement on the general state of the world, the track runs to almost 20 minutes of luscious progressive rock.

Steve Hogarth: “This is really a song about how the old systems of democracy have become overwhelmed and compromised by money and corporations – along with the fact that the division between rich and poor is widening all the time.

In 1989 there wasn’t any money in Russia, as everybody owned it all. Within 10 years, there were some people who were ludicrously rich. I mean, how can you do that legitimately?

The only people in Russia who had the cunning and sharpness to become businessmen were the politburo scumbags at the top. They controlled everything and had the keys to the locked doors where the money was. There’s also a healthy sprinkling of tax evasion, and a kind of overall loss of faith in what this country represents to me.”

Is Pat Travers criminally underrated? Rush’s Alex Lifeson certainly thought so. But in recent years, Travers’ most famous champion has been Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt. Describing Travers’ 1979 in-concert album Live! Go For What You Know as his “funk rock bible”, Bettencourt often cites Toronto-born Patrick Henry Travers as a major influence. Indeed, the two guitarists played on stage together in Orange County, California, only last year.

Like his hero Jimi Hendrix (Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Ronnie Montrose were also influences), Travers made it in the UK first. One of his Stateside rock star mentors, Ronnie Hawkins, had cautioned: “Play to the world, kid, don’t just play to locals.” The precociously gifted Travers took his advice, moving to London in 1975 aged 21, and quickly scoring a deal with Polydor Records after a false start making demos with Steve Lillywhite (later producer for U2) and Mutt Lange (later Def Leppard’s Midas-touch producer circa Pyromania).

A powerful, soulful vocalist, a sterling songwriter and a guitar magus whose unique sound owed something to his earlier adoption of chorus, flanger and delay effects, Travers soon found a key foil in ace bassist Peter ‘Mars’ Cowling, who would help anchor the Pat Travers Band for much of the following decade. Drummers Nicko McBrain and Tommy Aldridge also spent time in his band.

It was Neil Schon - whose band Journey the Pat Travers Band would support in the UK in 1979 - who introduced Travers to Pat Thrall, whose complementary, more histrionic lead guitar playing brought new colours to records such as 1978’s Heat In The Street. But even after Thrall bailed to join Glenn Hughes in the short-lived duo Hughes/Thrall, Travers proved to be more than capable of making other fine and forward-looking records – witness 1982’s Black Pearl, a true last-lost classic which Travers fought tooth and nail to make after legal wrangling with Polydor.

Today, Travers’ studio and live album release tally stands at well over 50. He has guested on records by Glenn Hughes (1977’s Play Me Out) and Extreme (1990’s Pornografitti), made a full-on jazz record (2019’s Swing!), and still gigs regularly in the US. Thanks to Rage Of Travers, a track on The Mountain Goats’ 2017 album Goths telling of Travers’ ire when Bauhaus declined to jam with him, he has also been immortalised in song. Long may he rock.

...and one to avoid

A campaign to raise $1 million to secure a permanent Neil Peart memorial in Lakeside Park in St. Catharines, Ontario, has reached its target after Rush donated $785,000 to the cause.

The campaign was originally launched in early 2020, when a petition to have a statue or plaque dedicated to Peart at Lakeside Park gathered more than 20,000 signatures. The park, a location on the shores of Port Dalhousie, where Peart spent a lot of his youth, inspired the song Lakeside Park, which appeared on Rush's 1975 album Caress Of Steel.

Rush's Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson presented the target-busting cheque to the Neil Peart Commemorative Task Force Fundraising Sub-Committee after completing their hometown shows at the Scotiabank Arena in Toronto last month. The band raised the money from the proceeds from sales of their VIP packages, while Lee also donated $1 from every ticket sold during his My Effin’ Life book tour in 2023.

“After years of dedicated work by the Neil Peart Commemorative Task Force and the incredible community support that brought us near the finish line, this remarkable contribution from Rush secures our $1-million fundraising goal,” says Eric Lamothe, City Manager, Community Programs and Parks. “This public art memorial will be far more than a tribute to Neil Peart; it elevates the park into a world-class cultural landmark.

"We are thrilled to see a space that is already a beloved destination for residents and tourists become a global beacon for enthusiastic music fans to gather, reflect, and celebrate an icon for generations to come."

“Our mission has always been to build a physical tribute that does justice to Neil’s immense legacy and his deep connection to St. Catharines," says Meg Symsyk, Chair of the Neil Peart Commemorative Task Force. "Neil was an extraordinary lyricist and Canadian poet, and Lakeside Park was, in many ways, a love letter back to this place.

"There is something incredibly powerful about standing here and experiencing the place behind those lyrics. We already see Rush fans from around the world making the journey to Lakeside Park and visiting the pavilion. This memorial will deepen that connection even further, creating a lasting destination for fans, residents and visitors to celebrate Neil and the music and words that continue to mean so much to so many."

The memorial will be completed by Morgan MacDonald of the Newfoundland Bronze Foundry. Comprising two bronze statues – one depicting Peart as a young musician, holding a book and drumsticks, the second portraying him in his later years, cradling a snare drum – it is expected to open in late 2027.

East Bay Ray, founding guitarist with San Francisco punk legends Dead Kennedys, has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The news was announced by the band's management team on social media.

The post reads: "Ray says he plans to continue performing and touring with Dead Kennedys for as long as his health allows, and expressed his appreciation to everyone for their continued support."

No further details have been confirmed.

The 67-year-old Ray, who released a new solo single – Area 51, produced by Butthole Surfers guitarist Paul Leary – last week, will presumably be hooking up with Dead Kennedys next month when they begin a run of West Coast shows in San Diego on October 6 with fellow San Franciscans Flipper. The band also play Mexico City on October 11. Full dates below.

Earlier this year, former Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra – who didn't rejoin the band when they reformed in 2001 – was hospitalised after suffering a stroke. Biafra returned to the stage with experimental hip-hop act Wheelchair Sports Camp at Tentacle Fest in San Francisco in July.

"Jello would like to let everyone know that even though he indeed got on stage for Tentacle Fest, he still has a ways to go in terms of his recovery," wrote his partner, Anne-Marie Anderso. "That evening took a lot out of him. It is pretty great that he has come as far as he has. Again, the outpouring of caring is very much appreciated. "

Dead Kennedys 2026 tour dates

Sep 06: San Diego The Observatory North Park, CA
Sep 08: Los Angeles The Belasco, CA
Sep 09: Santa Ana The Observatory OC, CA
Sep 11: Mexico City House of Vans, Mexico
Oct 06: Seattle Showbox at the Market, WA
Oct 07: Portland Roseland Theater, OR
Oct 09: San Francisco Regency Ballroom, CA
Oct 11: Riverside Riverside Municipal Auditorium, CA

The Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson has recalled one of the wildest shows he has ever played.

During an interview with YouTube personality Rick Beato, Robinson and his brother Rich reminisced about their formative years as teenage musicians pre-Black Crowes, when they played clubs and house parties in their hometown of Atlanta with their first band, Mr. Crowe’s Garden in the mid '80s.

One memory which has always stuck in the singer's mind was a four-band show, organised by their then-bassist Ted Selke and his room-mates, in the house where they were living at the time, which had been earmarked for demolition in an area of the city being redeveloped.

"They were like, We're going to have a party, like a Wreck The House party," he tells Beato. "But what happened was all the punk kids and skinheads, really violent kids, came, and actually started to tear the fucking place apart.

"I mean it was like The Shining, [with] axes through the walls. We're playing and some kid hit the gas with an axe in the kitchen, and a kid hit it with a lighter so that it was like a flamethrower shooting out into the woods, and the cops were coming, and people were smashing out all the windows... I remember going, Wow, this is insane!"

Robinson also recalls that he and his brother had no real expectations of making it in the music business, but that they also had no Plan B.

"Everyone in our lives was like, 'You're not going to college? You're an idiot'," he remembers. They said, 'You'll never make it.' I'm happy though that that was the feedback, because it gave us something else, it put a chip on your shoulders, [and we thought], Well, let's see. let's see."

The brothers also agree that their stubborn-ness and their refusal to be forced off their path ultimately paid off for The Black Crowes.

" Chris used to say - and it was amazing in the day to have that gumption and the balls to say it - to Sony or to Colombia, 'You have 1500 bands, I have one. I don't give a fuck what you do with those bands. I care what I do with my band'," says Rich.

"I would rather us fall on our face, than listen to you and fall on our faces" the singer adds.

You can watch the episode in full below,

UK power metal six-piece Dragonforce have announced their first album with new singers Alissa-White Gluz and Alessio Garavello and unveiled its lead single.

The new song, Hunger Of The Beast, is out now with a music video and precedes the release of their self-titled 10th album on March 19 via Napalm. The video can be seen below and preorders are now live.

Hunger… is the first song with Garavello, who replaced longtime singer Marc Hudson last week, following the announcement that Hudson had stepped away from touring and recording due to his struggles with the hearing condition tinnitus.

It’s their second song overall with White-Gluz, following an alternative version of 2024 track Burning Heart where she handled guest vocals, and the first since she became a full-time member earlier this year.

White-Gluz comments: “I have loved the entire process of making music with Dragonforce. It’s great to connect with such elite musicians and work together to really bring out the best of our respective styles. I think this new combo of speed and ferocity is refreshing and exciting. It's going to be so much fun to perform live.”

Guitarist and co-founder Herman Li adds: “Every time we begin making another album, we just think, ‘Wow – I can’t believe we're still doing what we love after all these years.’ The approach of the 10th album is as important as the first one, or any of the albums, because the way we look at music is we're making a piece of art that's going to be frozen in time.

“We always try to use everything we’ve learned from our years of experience, and put that into the new music. This is unlike any Dragonforce album you’ve ever heard, and unlike any metal albums out there. There’s just nothing like it, and everyone listening will realise that straight away. We’re not trying to be commercial. We’re not trying to be popular. We’re not trying to be famous. We make music because we want to make something that we love to hear and elevate our musicianship to the next level.”

White-Gluz, who left her longtime band Arch Enemy last November and also fronts the metal trio Blue Medusa, joined Dragonforce in May. The plan was for her and Hudson to be co-vocalists, but then, ahead of the new lineup’s debut shows at US festivals Welcome To Rockville and Sonic Temple in May, Hudson dropped out due to his hearing issues.

Dragonforce will return to the road in November, when they kick off a North American tour celebrating 20 years of their third album, Inhuman Rampage. The album contained their breakthrough single Through The Fire And Flames, which won the band many new fans when it appeared on hit videogame Guitar Hero III. Get tickets via their website.

Metallica frontman James Hetfield has hailed Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi as his personal ‘riff lord’.

Speaking during an episode of his SiriusXM radio show, James Hetfield’s Riff Life, on the 24/7 Metallica channel Maximum Metallica, the singer/guitarist introduces Sabbath’s 1971 track Children Of The Grave by saying, “Tony Iommi is the riff lord in my mind.”

He adds: “He is the one that has inspired me the most out of any guitar player for my rhythm guitar playing and songwriting.”

He then explains why the Children Of The Grave riff in particular is so special: “Obviously, Tony is the riff lord and everyone starts the song together on the one riff. Basically Tony plays off that riff, goes in to hit the big giant chords, which opens the song up.

“I really love the drum overdub that they did to help with that percussion of the riff and the real cool, ghostly guitar sounds at the very end.”

Iommi – who co-founded Black Sabbath with Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward in 1968 – has been hailed as the pioneer of heavy metal guitar playing, with such early, down-tuned riffs as those on Black Sabbath, War Pigs and Iron Man having a profound influence on the genre.

In 2015, Hetfield said that if he had to name one band as his favourite, it would be Sabbath. When Guitar World interviewed him and Iommi at the same time in 1992, he revealed that he discovered their music by rooting through his older brother’s record collection.

“Their album covers really drew me in,” he recalled. “I immediately thought, ‘I gotta out this one.’ And when I did, I couldn’t believe it. It was like, ‘Whoa! Heavy as shit.’ Sabbath was everything that the ’60s weren’t… Their music was so cool because it was completely anti-hippie. I hated the Beatles, Jethro Tull, Love and all that other happy shit.”

In the same interview, Iommi said that the respect ran both ways: “My son bought me your last album [1991’s Metallica], and it’s one of the first recordings I’ve received in a long time that I can praise without reservation. I listen to it in my car all the time.”

Sabbath and Metallica have crossed paths multiple times. In 2006, as Sabbath were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, Metallica covered Iron Man with Iommi, Osbourne, Butler and Ward in attendance. In 2009, Osbourne joined the band onstage and sang Iron Man and Paranoid.

In July last year, Metallica were one of the many support acts who appeared at Sabbath’s final show, Back To The Beginning, at Birmingham’s Villa Park. They played a six-song setlist which included covers of Sabbath’s Hole In The Sky and Johnny Blade. Sabbath’s headline set marked the first time their four founding members had shared a stage since 2005, and it was Osbourne’s final performance before his death on July 22, 2025, aged 76.

In 2016 The Pineapple Thief were on the verge of breaking through with their 11th album, Your Wilderness, their first to feature Gavin Harrison. Of course, leader Bruce Soord couldn’t know what the future held, and so Prog found him in a reflective mood – a little bewildered but still hopeful.

Bruce Soord used to get terrible stage fright. The sort of crippling sense of dread and panic that partly explained why his band The Pineapple Thief only used to play a handful of gigs a year. It manifested itself as a nagging, foreboding tension deep in his stomach that only got worse as stage-time approached. It provoked the sort of existential crisis no performer wants to go through. “You think, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I touring? Why am I going on stage?’” he says today. “It’s horrible.”

All that changed a few years ago when TPT were booked to play a festival in Germany. It was one of the biggest shows they’d played to date. “I don’t know how our agent got it,” says Soord. “It was a mainstream festival. Before we went on, there was this ‘Whooah-oah-oah’-type band playing, and everyone was into it. And we were following them with our prog rock. I was at the side of the the stage going, [puts face in hands] ‘Oh god.’ And we went on and fucked it right up. It went down like a lead balloon. Someone even threw a bottle at me. That’s the only time that’s ever happened.”

When the band came off stage, they knew something had to be done. They were booked to play another festival a couple of weeks later, and Soord knew that if that happened again, then “that would be it, it’s going to be over”. He decided to take drastic action. He decided to tap into his inner rock star.

“The next gig I went onstage and just went ‘Come on!’ It was, like, ‘Fuck you, I’m Bruce Soord – like it or fuck off,’ rather than [apologetic voice] ‘I hope you like it.’” He smiles sheepishly. “It sounds really cheesy.” He’s right: it does sound cheesy. But it worked. He got over his stage fright.

Soord makes for an unlikely rock star. Sprawled on the bed of his hotel room, the day after The Pineapple Thief’s headline appearance at Barcelona’s Be Prog! My Friend festival, he looks more like a typical Englishman on holiday: stripy T-shirt, scrawny legs poking out the bottom of his shorts (although his tan is surprisingly healthy for someone who describes themselves as “a bit of a studio nerd”). In truth, he doesn’t carry himself like a rock star either. He’s unfailingly polite and thoughtful, and always seems on the verge of apologising for something, even when there’s nothing to apologise for.

But 18 hours earlier, a rock star is exactly what Bruce Soord looked like. Onstage at the Be Prog! My Friend festival, backed by a vast screen that pulsated with colour, Soord was magnetic. Restless and electrifying, wrangling his guitar like it had a thousand volts pumping through it at any given time, this was as far away from prog’s usual introspection as it gets. His face lights up at the memory.

“When we came off that stage, we were, like, ‘Why can’t we have this more often?’ We’ve paid our dues. We’ve toured the shit holes in a crappy bus, playing to 50 or 100 people. You’re just chipping away at the surface when you do that. But this felt like going to another level.”

It’s ironic that Soord has stepped up to the plate just as his band have made an album that delves into their prog past. Where 2014’s Magnolia was a brazen and unashamed rock record, the follow-up Your Wilderness – their 11th LP – is all moods and textures. It’s a 21st-century prog record for sure, but a prog record it undeniably is.

“I grew up listening to prog, but also to mainstream rock,” says Soord. “And for the last three Pineapple Thief records, we tried to cross over to rock. I think a lot of people who weren’t into prog rock really loved it – but a lot of people in the prog rock world have gone, ‘This isn’t prog!’”

So has he backpedalled with the new album? He laughs. “No. I felt like I’d written those rock songs – if I tried to do another Magnolia, it would have been the same songs but not as good. So I said to the guys, ‘I’m going to remember what used to excite me when I was a kid growing up in the 80s, which was prog rock.’ So I put myself into the mindset of having a prog rock attitude.”

Which is what? “Not giving a fuck what people think. Or that it’s okay to play notes on a guitar longer than you would in a rock song, before the money shot comes in. It’s our 11th record. I can do whatever the fuck I want.” As soon as he says it, he looks a little sheepish.

A few things have changed for Soord in recent years. He released his first solo album in 2015, inspired by his love of Beck (“Half of my brain wanted to take the songs in a direction that wasn’t The Pineapple Thief, so I decided to take half my brain and put it over there”), collaborated with Jonas Renske of Swedish doom-metallers Katatonia on The Wisdom Of Crowds (“He loves singer-songwriters, which you wouldn’t guess to look at him”), and began to remaster other band’s records, most notably the reissue of Opeth’s Deliverance. But the biggest change in Soord’s life was that he finally got chance to quit his day job in IT and take up music.

“It always felt productive,” he says. “You spend seven hours a day doing something you don’t want to be doing while your brain wants to make music. When you get home, you’ve got so much energy: ‘Come on, let’s write this song!’ Weirdly, going full time, that’s gone. I remember thinking, ‘I’m going to have so much spare time that I’ll be able to write 10 albums a year. It’ll be so easy.’ But it isn’t. Even with this album, it was hard to get started. You should be careful what you wish for.”

If he sounds downbeat, he’s not – 17 years into The Pineapple Thief, and Soord has carved out a niche for himself alongside the Steven Wilsons, Anathemas and Opeths of this world. But is he happy where he finds himself these days?

“The stock answer is that I’m really grateful that we’re where we are. Commercially, I wish more people knew about us. It’s not about the money, although the money would be nice. The thing that frustrates me is that so many people haven’t heard of us. I don’t know why that is. We’ve been around for 17 years, and seen people like Steven Wilson and Opeth break through.”

How have they managed that where The Pineapple Thief haven’t? “The difference is that they really busted their arses touring. I didn’t do that. I guess you get what you deserve. I stayed in my studio, stayed in my day job, writing records, and I wonder if you can break through if that’s what you do.”

You tell us. “I don’t know,” he says. “We’re on an upward curve, but we haven’t made the breakthrough. We’re burrowing our way to the surface.” Is it down to lack of ambition? Or lack of hunger? “I think that I was quite ambivalent when it came to taking that risk. I fell into that comfort zone. I said to my wife, ‘I just want to make music – I’ve got my day job, we’re doing 10 gigs a year.’

“And you’re never going to break through doing that. What we should have done is bet everything on this album, doing a loss-making support tour and just going for it. But you don’t know that at the time.”

At the Be Prog! My Friend festival, Soord looked like he was truly enjoying himself, and there was the whiff of the Matt Bellamy about him in his slightly skew-whiff guitar heroics. And while prog has never had much truck with rock star fripperies, it has had its characters, from Daevid Allen to Rick Wakeman to Peter Gabriel and his wardrobe of weirdness. The question is: does Bruce Soord fancy himself as a rock star?

“No,” he says, wincing slightly. “It’s very awkward for me. Mike from Opeth is very similar. He doesn’t court that. He doesn’t want to be put on a pedestal. Sometimes I feel like a rock star. But then I feel guilty about it.”

But isn’t being put on a pedestal part of the job of being a musician, prog or not? Gabriel, Jon Anderson, Fish – they all embraced that aspect of things. “[Unconvinced] Yeah. We used to get people coming up to us after gigs going, ‘Oh Bruce, your last album was amazing. And I’d be, ‘[bashfully] Oh, no!’ My keyboard player said, ‘People don’t want to hear that. They want you to be that man they’ve heard on the record.’

“That was when I realised, ‘Yeah, maybe there is part of me that needs to embrace that.’ I do enjoy seeing the impact what we do has on people. At the gig last night, I said to Jon [Sykes], the bass player: ‘I can’t believe we’re doing this. This is an extraordinary experience.’ Because it’s a positive impact.” He laughs. “Just not for my ego.”

He’s right: there’s no obligation for anyone to start behaving like Bono. But as Soord has grown more confident onstage and off, you can’t help wondering why more musicians aren’t stepping up to the plate or even stepping out of the insular confines of the prog scene. Even Wilson – one of the big success stories of the 21st century – is still largely preaching to the converted. He’s broken through, but he’s not broken out.

“It’s certainly very easy to stay in that comfort zone,” says Soord. “You know that if you pander to that crowd, you’ll sell records. But what do you do? When we did Magnolia, we had really high hopes that it would resonate with people in the wider world. Artistically, I think it worked, but there weren’t that many people who were prepared to go out and seek out new music.”

Does the fact that you haven’t broken beyond the boundaries of prog get you down? “Yes, in a way. When people ask me what my expectations are, I go: ‘I haven’t got any.’ And that probably sums it up.”

If he seems defeated, he shouldn’t be. The Pineapple Thief aren’t that far away from doing a Steven Wilson and taking their music to a wider audience. And if they don’t, well, Soord will lose sleep – but not that much.

“Yes, we’ve got our 11th album coming out and, let’s face it, we’re still in the prog underground,” he says. “But at the same time, I’m quite rare in that I’m still doing it. That’s why all this is worth it.”

For a time, Kyuss were arguably the coolest rock band in the world. Metallica and Faith No More took the Palm Desert, California band on tour, and Nirvana's Dave Grohl (later Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl) swears he bought “at least 50 copies” of their 1992 album Blues For The Red Sun to share his love for the band with friends. Asked to define his band during a Canadian TV interview in 1992, guitarist Josh Homme settled on the description, "a fully escapist trip band."

"No politics, no bullshit, no funky costumes," he stated. "We just play music so you can shut your eyes and forget about all your problems."

Three years later however, Kyuss succumbed to their own internal problems - the group dynamic was "fucked", Homme later said bluntly - and broke up.

"We were young kids, boys becoming men, and so the music business was a shocking, strange, foreign, dark and scary place," drummer Brant Bjork subsequently told this writer. "Business started to dictate what we were doing, and the spirit of creativity and camaraderie and brotherhood – all that made our band pure and organic – started to evaporate."

In the wake of split, Josh Homme was of a mind to quit the music industry, and, after relocating to Seattle, he enrolled at the University of Washington to study business. But, inevitably, he was drawn back into the game, first joining Screaming Trees as their touring guitarist for Lollapalooza 1996 - an experience that would prove educational in more ways than one - then, after moving back home to California, founding a new project, Gamma Ray, with assistance from Screaming Trees Van Connor and Masters Of Reality frontman Chris Goss. When German power metal band Gamma Ray stepped in to stop the band trading under their name, Homme's new band became Queens Of The Stone Age. Starting over afresh, he admitted, "made me scared, cautious and bold at the same time."

It would have been all too easy for Homme to re-emerge into the spotlight - or, more accurately the one bare bulb underground rock community - with an album which built upon the cult success that his former band had enjoyed. Instead, he took a left turn, eschewing stoner rock fuzz for something altogether lither, more abstract and sexier. In doing so, he set the foundations for what is undeniably one of the most distinctive catalogues in modern music.

From its opening moments – the pounding one chord riff augmented with teasing, trebly guitar volume swells which introduces Regular John – Queens Of The Stone Age, the band's debut album, released on September 22, 1998, offers a new vocabulary for rock ‘n’ roll. When it emerged on Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard’s Loosegroove label it sounded fresh, visceral and original, the work of a rock band like no other, which was entirely the point.

Though it didn’t drop from a clear blue sky (the influence of The Stooges is immediately apparent, as is the forceful Motorik drive imported from Krautrock heroes Can and Neu!) Homme’s desire to fashion rock music “heavy enough for the boys and sweet enough for the girls” ensure that the album has an altogether more feminine sensibility than most modern rock releases, not least in Homme’s decidedly un-macho vocals and in the swing imparted by Alfredo Hernadez’s drums.

"I wanted to do something for girls," Homme told The Guardian. "The way I thought about it was trance robot music for girls. I wasn't interested in the guys at all. I wanted to make something that girls could dance to that really had a freedom that Kyuss didn't. By the end, Kyuss felt restrictive. I'd lived my whole life in Kyuss since I was a boy, and we had all these rules that were based on what you couldn't do. And I wanted a new set of rules based on what you could."

The opening tracks on Homme's new declaration of independence could hardly be stronger. Regular John, an unsettling tale of obsession and dark desires, is all insistent, propulsive groove, Avon – originally recorded with Monster Magnet’s John Paul McBain and Soundgarden’s Ben Shepherd for the third release in Homme’s Desert Sessions series – builds and climbs on a stepped Led Zeppelin-esque riff, and the tambourine-heavy If Only – with its conscious echoes of The Stooges I Wanna be Your Dog – is a stripped-back tale of love gone askew.

From this elevated platform, Homme sprawls out in different directions, from the lo-fi rumble of How To Handle A Rope through the hazy narcotic surrealism of Mexicola and its depiction of a world “full of shit and gasoline” to the bouncing, off-kilter swing of the instrumental Hispanic Impressions. Perhaps most striking of all is You Can’t Quit Me Baby, a song which inverts the title of Willie Dixon’s blues classic (later re-interpreted by Led Zeppelin on their debut album), and develops into a dark stalker fantasy (“Followed you home, crawled in your window, This life is a trip when you’re psycho in love”) while simultaneously skewering fragile male egos.

For other bands, a collection of this quality might well be be a career high, but in truth, as brilliant as it is, Queens Of The Stone Age isn’t even in the top three QOTSA albums. That this is the case speaks highly to Josh Homme’s restless, inquisitive spirit and his constant desire to re-mould and evolve his band’s sound. But as debut albums go, Queens Of The Stone Age is commanding and bold, both a razing of the past and a signpost pointing towards new horizons. It still sounds like the beginning of something very special.

Following on from Phil Collins’ memories of his early days and how Genesis became a streamlined musical organisation, he tells Prog about the era in which it seemed he couldn’t be escaped.

Were you surprised at the enormous global success of Face Value and the ensuing solo stardom?

Certainly. Don’t get me wrong, I took a lot of care over it. I don’t want to go cosmic on you and say, “I was just channelling something” – but it just came so easily. Because of my mental state probably. The house was empty [after his divorce]. That time wasn’t a barrel of laughs, but the more music I did, there was no stopping it.

If Leaving Me Is Easy is one of my favourites. I asked Eric Clapton to play on it. I’ve known him since before he knew I was a musician. I was just a friend of his wife Patti and would go over to theirs for drinks with them and his schoolmates. We used to drink ourselves to the point of stupidity back then!

Anyway, he came over and I pressed record. It ran through and he only played one note. One. I said, “What’s wrong?” He said, “I didn’t want to spoil it.”

Would you agree that Face Value shares musical DNA with John Martyn’s Grace And Danger album, which you played on, and Glorious Fool, which you produced?

Ah, I wish some of John’s albums had sold millions around the world too. Grace And Danger was lovely – we bonded strongly. He was in the middle of his divorce with Beverley and I was in the middle of mine. Yes, we both drank a lot, but he could drink anybody under the table. The album was full of really touching songs. Chris Blackwell thought it was too personal. I later helped John get another record deal and we did Glorious Fool, which is edgier than people realise.

Years later, I’d moved to Geneva and was very happy with my new lady. And John rang while I was just about to go into the dentist. He wanted me to produce another album, but I said, “I don’t think I can, John. I’ve got a new life here and I’m pretty busy setting up a house.”

He said, “I’ll come over!” I said, “Don’t come over!” ’Cos I was thinking of what my girlfriend might make of him; and, well, you couldn’t just dip into John. I loved him dearly but I couldn’t handle that then.

We worked out something where he sent me tapes and I’d put stuff on them, and it got him a new deal. Last time I ever saw him I presented him with an award at the Folk Awards. By this point he’d lost a leg and was in a wheelchair and looked like Orson Welles. But yeah, there’s a comparable intimacy, lyrically, on Face Value and Grace And Danger.

Do you understand why some elements of the public, or at least the press, got the hump with you when both yourself and Genesis were huge and ubiquitous?

I look back and realise I was never out of everyone’s eyeline, y’know? I was just omnipresent! But I can honestly say, on my children’s lives, it was simply enthusiasm. It wasn’t ambition; just one thing led to another. Same thing with Genesis – we thought playing the Marquee meant we’d made it. Then it was the Lyceum. Then the Rainbow. Then you think, “Hey, there’s a whole continent we haven’t played yet!” We’d keep gathering fans. But there was never really one moment where it changed: it changed gradually.

And as for me, I was being asked to do things by people whose records I’d bought – Robert Plant, Eric – and if you say no, I thought, they might not ask again. People choose to believe there was an ulterior motive or goal; but no, no, no, it wasn’t ego. I didn’t even want to be the Genesis singer! It happened by default. These things were just happening. There was no masterplan.

What’s your favourite Genesis album or period?

I enjoyed the last one, We Can’t Dance. But for me it’s more about memorable moments, pockets here and there throughout the whole thing. I used to love playing The Lamb live every night, singing along with Peter. I guess ...And Then There Were Three... wasn’t one of our best; it didn’t stay with me.

Your last tour and Genesis’ The Last Domino? gigs were emotional for audiences. How were they for you?

Well, I thought I’d done my solo farewells, but I guess... I missed it. And it was wonderful to see my son Nic playing drums behind me. Then Tony and Mike said, “Oh, he’s rather good, isn’t he?” So that was a no-brainer really. Nic was totally embraced by Genesis. And there was this 19-year-old coming into Genesis, just as I had at roughly the same age. Full circle. Hollywood couldn’t have written it better!

Any regrets?

I guess from a personal side I could say I’ve had regrets, and I should’ve done things differently. But then if I’d done that then I wouldn’t have the five great kids I’ve got today. So I can’t think like that. My glass is completely full. My kids all do what they want to do, and they’re good at it, and they’re happy. If I’d changed direction somewhere, all that might not have happened. It’s a win!

Will you be making any new music, do you think?

Um, I’m never gonna say no now. I’ve got my little studio still, and I’d like to get down there and just mess about and see what happens. There are some things I could finish. And other things which are finished. So, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility.

You’re looking well. The improvement in your health must encourage you.

Oh yeah, getting better. I went through some pretty dark times. Drink has come up a couple of times in this interview, but I was never “falling over” drunk. That wasn’t it. It was just drinking “normally,” as one would drink water. I’d wake up, have a glass of wine. Watch TV, read a book, have a glass of wine. And suddenly, some people’s insides can’t take it. Mine broke down.

My manager, Tony, called all the kids to Switzerland to have a meeting about me and my future. Because at one point it was kind of life support. Kidneys and liver were waving the white flag. I was close to dying and I hadn’t realised – I just thought I was sick. Well, really dark times. Spent a lot of time in hospital.

Then, pulling through that, I’ve had five operations on this knee. And drop foot. That’s why I have the crutches, just to make sure – I don’t want to fall over. But physically, now, I reckon I’m A-1, 100%. I’ve worked at it. Haven’t drunk for three years. I do physio three times a week, to bring me up to speed. All is good!

It’s been 10 years now since your autobiography Not Dead Yet. You should do a sequel.

Still Not Dead Yet, yeah! It’s all turned around completely. I’m closer to my children than I’ve ever been. We’ve seen together how fragile it can be. They’re proud of me for pulling through with flying colours, and everything – domestically, professionally – is all great. I’ve got no complaints. I’ve been very lucky. I never stop remembering that.