Former Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr have announced plans for a rare onstage reunion.

The two surviving members of the iconic Liverpool band will perform together at the charity gig VetsAid at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on January 29, with The Killers, St Vincent and others also on the bill.

Spearheaded by Eagles member Joe Walsh, the event will raise funds for Nevada military veterans and their families. An exclusive pre-sale for veterans and active service members begins this morning at 10am local time. An artist presale begins at the same time on Wednesday, ahead of general sale on Friday.

The show will mark McCartney, 84, and Starr’s, 86, first time onstage together since December 2024, when Starr joined his former bandmate onstage in London at the finale of McCartney’s Got Back tour. Starr played drums on Beatles classics Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Helter Skelter.

Joe Walsh comments in a statement: “Having spent the past two years at [local multimedia venue] the Sphere and working with the hardworking people of Las Vegas, I want to show them my gratitude and respect. This city has taken such good care of me and my family that it would be my privilege to give back to the large veteran community here and to their families.”

The news follows a report from Forbes on Monday that McCartney has become a billionaire, with his net worth valued at $1.4 billion (£1.04 billion). The publication states that the singer/bassist is the third-richest musician in the world, after rapper Jay-Z at $2.8 billion (£2.01 billion) and singer/songwriter Taylor Swift at $2 billion (£1.49 billion).

Forbes attributes McCartney’s much of enormous wealth to his founding of the publishing company MPL Communications in 1969, which let him “control his solo career publishing and master recordings, giving him a much larger cut of his future royalties”. He has also acquired copyrights from other artists such as Buddy Holly.

In addition, McCartney remains an active recording and touring musician, having released 27 albums under his own name (or with his solo band Wings) since the Beatles’ dissolution in 1970. His latest, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane, came out in May and topped the UK Albums chart. He has also performed and/or co-written a number of chart-topping hit songs.

In 2028, McCartney, Starr and the two late Beatles, guitarists/vocalists George Harrison and John Lennon, will be the subjects of individual biopics released simultaneously as The Beatles: A Four-Film Cinematic Event. The films are all being directed by Sam Mendes, with Paul Mescal set to portray McCartney. Barry Keoghan will play Ringo Starr, while Harris Dickinson will play John Lennon and Joseph Quinn will play George Harrison.

Never known to shy away from political discourse, U2 have weighed in on the furore which surrounded Macklemore being kicked off an Ed Sheeran tour in September.

The Thrift Shop rapper was forced off a US stadium tour with Sheeran following pressure from venue owners, who took exception to pro-Palestine speeches he was making onstage.

The removal incited widespread online backlash, with all of Sheeran’s other support acts and even his backing band dropping off the lineup in solidarity.

Talking to BBC News, U2 guitarist The Edge sees both sides of the controversy, supporting Macklemore while also defending Sheeran.

“We totally support Macklemore’s right as an artist to say what he wanted to say,” he says. “I don’t think Ed should be vilified. He was in a very difficult situation. But I commend the other young artists who decided to leave [his] tour. They were sticking up for an artist’s right to free speech, and I think that’s the issue above anything else.”

The guitarist likens Macklemore’s situation to one U2 faced in 1998, when the Irish rockers taunted Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet during a televised concert in Santiago: “It would have been way smarter and better for us to shut up. But it was artistically necessary, and we just said, ‘We can’t not do this.’”

Drummer Larry Mullen Jr echoes The Edge’s sentiments, adding: “Artists can choose whether they want to be politically active or not. It’s a human right. But we as a band will fight for the right to speak your mind as long as it doesn’t incite violence.

“And even if we disagree with it or don’t like it, nobody has a right – no billionaire, no promoter, no owner has the right to censor anybody. Um, but they will definitely not be censoring us ever.”

Elsewhere in the interview, the band discuss their collaboration with late country-pop megastar Dolly Parton on the new track Torn, taken from last week’s album Carnaval de Luz. Frontman Bono reveals that he sent the 9 To 5 singer a set of bagpipes for her birthday, which got her to listen to some demos.

“We had some folk songs we were playing, there was one called Lifelong, and I remember her saying, ‘You know, that’s a little too Irish for me,’” he remembers. “So she said, ‘Look, I’ve started a song called Torn. You can take it where you want, and I might like where you take it.’ And she did.”

Parton’s Torn vocals were tracked in June, three months before she died at the age of 80 following a brief cancer battle. The song was Parton’s last-ever recording.

Carnaval de Luz, U2’s first studio album of all-original material since 2017, is out on Friday. The band will embark on their humbly-titled The Greatest Show On Earth world tour in February. Central and South American and European dates have been confirmed, with North American shows set to be announced soon. See below for the itinerary.

U2 2027 tour dates:

• Feb 23: Mexico City Estadio GNP Seguros, Mexico
• Feb 26: Mexico City Estadio GNP Seguros, Mexico
• Mar 10: São Paulo Estádio MorumBIS, Brazil
• Mar 12: São Paulo Estádio MorumBIS, Brazil
• Mar 23: Buenos Aires Estadio River Plate, Argentina
• Mar 25: Buenos Aires Estadio River Plate, Argentina
• Apr 26: Stockholm Strawberry Arena, Sweden
• Apr 28: Stockholm Strawberry Arena, Sweden
• May 05: Paris Stade de France, France
• May 08: Paris Stade de France, France
• May 27: Lisbon Estadio da Luz, Portugal
• Jun 05: Amsterdam Johan Cruijff Arena, Netherlands
• Jun 06: Amsterdam Johan Cruijff Arena, Netherlands
• Jun 18: London Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, UK
• Jun 19: London Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, UK
• Jun 30: Berlin Olympiastadion, Germany
• Jul 05: Milan Stadio San Siro, Italy
• Jul 06: Milan Stadio San Siro, Italy

Alex Lifeson’s Envy Of None bandmate Andy Curran has recalled his reaction when the Rush reunion tour trashed their own road trip plans.

The alt-poprock outfit, fronted by vocalist Maiah Wynne, had released two albums – their self-titled 2022 debut and 2025’s Stygian Wavz – before it was confirmed that Rush were returning in 2026. Since then the Canadian prog giants have extended their plans to include a residency at the Los Angeles Sphere in 2027.

But former Coney Hatch leader Curran insists that, despite the disruption to his own band, there are no hard feelings – and in fact he’s delighted if they played a role in helping Lifeson and Geddy Lee get theirs back together.

“The stuff that was going on with Envy Of None, when Alex Lifeson decided that he was going back out with Rush, that sort of put a pin in all that activity,” Curran tells Distortion Den.

“Everybody was super supportive; we were very happy that, potentially, Alex’s involvement with Envy Of None had got him out of a very negative place after Neil Peart passed – then to a very positive place where he was creating music and playing guitar again.

“I know first-hand it was a very bad chapter for everybody in the Rush camp, with Geddy and Alex at the top of the list. Geddy went on to work on his books and his television programme and everything. I think that was really rewarding for him to step away. And Alex went in head-on with Envy Of None.”

Curran emphasises that if the band “played the tiniest part in that Rush reunion and getting Alex back into a place where he is creative, then checkmark – I am so proud to be part of that.”

He continues: “We were very close to committing to live dates. It looked very optimistic that we were going to play maybe four or five shows. And then the Rush reunion tour came out. So we realised, ‘Time out.’”

But he suggests that it might not be over. “There’s talks of doing a third album,” he says. “Everybody’s giving each other space.”

In the meantime, Curran has formed a solo band, released his EP Rockaholic, and plans to keep himself busy. “I stood back and looked and I went, ‘Alex is out having fun with Rush. Maiah’s playing dates for her solo record. Guess what, Curran – giddyup! Start doing some stuff!’”

Formed in Derry, Northern Ireland, in the mid-70s, The Undertones had hits including Teenage Kicks, the all-time favourite song of the late DJ John Peel. After fragmenting in 1983, they reunited at the end of the last millennium, without frontman Feargal Sharkey.

Below, rhythm guitarist John O’Neil, an original member, previews their 50th-anniversary tour of the UK and Ireland.

A half-century of The Undertones, albeit with a long break, is quite a feat.

I guess so. I don’t know. I just go with the flow. But when we broke up in 1983 none of us ever expected to reform, or to last even longer second time around. That was never in the plan. Part of our problem was that there was never a plan, we went along for the ride.

But you’re still having fun?

I’ve mixed feelings, to be completely honest. I love playing live but hate the travel. I’ll stick it out for another year and maybe that’s it. [Laughing] I’ve said that ten times before. I turn seventy next year, so maybe it’s time.

How did it feel when you began having that incredible run of hit singles?

Obviously we weren’t complaining. But, again, I never take that stuff too seriously. I loved being in the studio but never really enjoyed touring, especially in those days. Coming up with the songs was great, but it became harder and harder. We knew the end was coming, put it that way. We made a mistake going for the more soulful direction [with the fourth album, 1983’s The Sin Of Pride]. We had started out a garage band.

How devastated were you all when Feargal Sharkey quit for a solo career?

We were all having the same thoughts, but Feargal was the first to say it out loud. But as the singer it was easy for him to go away and get a publishing deal, even though he had never written a single song. The rest of us were all worrying about what happened next.

How did the reunion sixteen years later come about?

I had been with That Petrol Emotion, and had a couple of kids. I also had various jobs including teaching guitar. In 1999 we got back together for what was intended as a one-off gig, and the four of us [without Sharkey, who declined to participate] said we didn’t know we were that good. Everyone felt the same.

Newcomer Paul McLoone doesn’t sing anything like Feargal.

On some songs you’d be surprised. When Paul joined, it just felt like it was meant to be. Are the band still on good terms with Feargal? Even when he was with us, we never really mixed. There was a kind of schism between him and the rest of us. That was maybe because he didn’t really get involved in the songwriting.

Did his reinvention as a high-profile crusader for water cleanliness take you all by surprise?

Not really. He always had ambitions to make money, and to do well. Good luck to him.

With Paul McLoone at the mic the band released two albums – Get What You Need and Dig Yourself Deep – but there hasn’t been anything new for almost twenty years. Will that change?

For the first time in a long time we have six or seven new songs, so there’s a good possibility of that happening. Maybe we’ll release them as EPs [instead of in album form]. But it would be great to get some new Undertones songs in the set.

Presumably you still play all of the hits – Teenage Kicks, Jimmy Jimmy, Here Comes The Summer, My Perfect Cousin and It’s Going To Happen?

I don’t write the setlist. But yeah, we do all of the predictable songs. Paul sings them really well, and the chemistry within the band never went away.

The Undertones' tour begins on Thursday (November 12) at the Torquay Arena. For dates and tickets, visit the Undertones website.

In 2012, Classic Rock's sister magazine The Blues put Rory Gallagher on the cover and told the story of his 1974 Irish Tour, a legendary run of dates that united fans from both sides of the sectarian divide. In the same issue, modern-day guitar hero Joe Bonamassa, who would later honour Gallagher with a live tribute album and film titled The Spirit Of Rory: Live From Cork, paid tribute to a man he calls "the Stevie Ray Vaughan of the rest of the world."

We're running a Rory Gallagher tribute issue: do you think he’s a worthy cover star?

Oh, absolutely. The thing is, when you ask somebody over here in the States for a working-class guitar hero, they’ll go, Stevie Ray Vaughan. But if you ask someone from the UK, or Ireland, or Holland, the same question, then you’re gonna get Rory Gallagher. I’ve always said that Rory is the Stevie Ray Vaughan of the rest of the world. Yeah, I’m glad he’s going on the cover.

How did you first discover Rory Gallagher?

It was my dad. I remember that he put on Irish Tour ’74. And I think the American cover of that album just had Rory with the beat-up Strat, and of course, me being the guitar geek to end all guitar geeks, I immediately fixated on that, like, ‘Whoa, that’s a cool guitar’. So my dad goes, ‘Well, check out this guy, he plays really well, and he’s from Ireland’.

At that point, living out in New York State, he might as well have said Mars. But, from the moment you hear Cradle Rock – y’know, right from the first downbeat – you’re hooked. It was a special performance, that record. It changed my world. I really liked that take on the blues – you know, it was uptempo and raw, but there was some melody to it, and then it was just his songs.

What did Rory have that your other blues idols didn’t?

He was the guy who would just pour out of the van after he drove 17 hours, set up his own amp, plug in, play the best show you’d ever seen in your life, pick up his amp and guitar, get back in the van, drive to next city – another 10 hours – and not blink an eye. He had that nomadic working-class thing about him that endeared him to me.

You watch Live At Montreux or Live At The Cork Opera House… and he was that guy. There wasn’t any put-on there. He dressed that way, in the flannel shirt, on and off the stage, take it or leave it, and he did it with conviction. I think that kinda separates him [from other blues icons] a little bit, in the sense that he never changed his image or his style, right from Taste to his very last day.

He was that guy. I mean, we all change, y’know? Hell, I look back 10 years in my own career, and I was this awkward, geeky moron playing bad versions of Rory Gallagher songs… and now I’m still that guy, only dressed in a suit! So we all change. But Rory Gallagher never did. So that was cool.

Rory passed away in June 1995: how did the news hit you?

I remember reading about it in, I think it was Guitar World or something. This is before the internet, or at least before our town had a computer, you know, so we didn’t get all the news all the time. One month, the news was, ‘Rory Gallagher goes in for a liver transplant.’ The next month, it didn’t go so well, and he’s struggling, and then a couple of months later, he’s dead.

It was definitely a shocker because I would love to have seen him live, at any stage. It’s one of my big regrets that I never did. He didn’t tour America very much. It was mainly over in Europe.

How did it feel to play Rory’s iconic Strat at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2011?

My girlfriend, Sandi [Thom], she set up the whole thing. She’d met Donal Gallagher, and she told me, ‘They’re gonna bring the guitar down.’ I was like, well, just to see it is enough for me. But then Donal said that Bernie Marsden had played it in a tribute, and if I’d like to play it onstage… y’know, they had me at hello. But in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, ‘I’m gonna take so much shit for this’, because you just know that everyone on the internet will go, ‘Who do you think you are?’ But anybody would have done it.

So I said, ‘Well, here’s the problem: these are Rory’s strings.’ The thought of breaking one of them was too much to bear. They said, ‘No, no, we took Rory’s last set of strings off.’ So I put a new set on this thing. It hadn’t been played for almost 17 years. We plugged it in and it was just magic. I could see why Rory played it as much as he did.

Having owned a whole bunch of vintage Strats over the years myself, finding that magic one that has the right weight, balance, sound and dynamic, so that when you turn it up, it roars – that’s difficult. I could see why he loved it. Because even taking his name and prominence off it, it’s just a great ’61 Fender Stratocaster, that works. There was a moment in time, for about 30 minutes before I went on at the Hammersmith Apollo, when it was just me and the guitar in the dressing room. It was like,‘This is a big responsibility!’

I watched the video again about a month ago – it probably came up on some random thing that I was checking out on the computer – and I said to myself, ‘Man, you are a lucky dude, Joe Bonamassa.’ How many people could say they were able to do that? It’s one of the thrills of my career, being able to play Cradle Rock on that guitar. That was the thrill of a lifetime.

What are your favourite Rory moments?

Well, I grew up on the stuff he did with the battered Strat and Irish Tour ’74. But what I’ve been really getting into lately is the acoustic stuff. In the 90s, there were a couple of live bootlegs and some weird releases of him and Béla Fleck where he’s doing Walking Blues from Robert Johnson, just sitting there with an acoustic guitar. You can tell it’s not even plugged in. It’s just a microphone. And he just kills.

Rory had a unique style, both on the electric and the acoustic guitar. He’s the only guy, in my book, that made a Stratocaster sound like a Gibson. And when he plays the acoustic, he’s so heavy-handed, it’s almost like a lessbluesy version of John Hammond Jr. You know, because John Hammond really plays it just like Robert Johnson, or just like Son House, whereas Rory kinda puts more rock ‘n’ roll into it.

As a guitarist, Rory’s intonation on the slide really blew me away, because at that point, I was dabbling a bit in that. I know now how difficult it really is to effortlessly sing in tune, pitch-perfect, and then to put down a slide solo that doesn’t have any sharp or flat notes. And then he could just riff, just normal. Rory was the total package like that.

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock presents The Blues, published in November 2012. Rory Gallagher is the cover star of the new issue of Classic Rock, which is out now.

"Every aspect of life in Greece is connected with music, everything,” says Alex Karametis, frontman of Villagers of Ioannina City. “From the happiest to the saddest moments, there is always music.”

Perhaps that’s what gives his band extra potency. That sense that this music matters – singing of human struggles via powerful riffs, anthemic choruses and atmospheric old-world textures.

“I’m always trying to find meaning in something, what life means, what death means, why society is unfair,” says the frontman, who also produced their brilliant new LP Venceremos. “It’s like psychotherapy. I always say to my friends that if I didn’t have music I’d be in an institution or something.”

Over three studio albums, tours across Europe and headline Greek gigs in front of thousands, Villagers Of Ioannina City have honed a striking cocktail of hard rock, stoner heft and proggy metal spiced with old Hellenic instruments. Heady sounds that Karametis grew up hearing at ‘panigiria’ (village festivals) now feed into their records.

“It always felt natural,” he says. “So it’s very easy, because we’re not forcing ourselves to add anything. We just hear it in our heads, and do it.”

It all starts with Ioannina, a small mountain city in Northwest Greece where the band – completed by Akis Zois on bass and Aris Giannopoulos on drums – come from. Connections to nearby villages run deep.

“People go every weekend, they have houses there,” Karametis explains. “I spent my childhood summers there.”

Classically trained in piano and flute from age six, Karametis absorbed Mozart and co alongside his parents’ Simon & Garfunkel and Deep Purple records. As kids he and his future bandmates found Metallica, Iron Maiden, In Flames and others, and started jamming. It wasn’t until after high school, in Sweden – lured by the country’s metal scene – that Karametis connected with the traditional music of his youth.

“I was doing some errands in Stockholm, waiting in the bus station," he says. "The sun came and I got a bit homesick.”

Back home, Villagers of Ioannina City began in earnest in 2007. Local gigs reaped steady audience growth. In 2014, they went from crowds of 400 to shows in front of 1500 people in Athens and Thessaloniki. Now they fill arenas on home turf. All of which shows on Venceremos (‘We will win’), a Spanish title but a familiar term in Greece.

You can hear the dramatic Epirus landscape in these songs. The low, hypnotic, clarinet-heavy notes of ‘epirotika’ (the area’s traditional style). Sadness set to an upbeat tempo. Reflections of a world “going completely wrong”.

“I strongly believe we will win in the end,” says Karametis. “But right now it’s open to interpretation what ‘winning’ means. It’s not exactly about winning, it’s about refusing to break.”

Venceremos is out now via Napalm.

Footage of a screentest Kiss frontman Paul Stanley filmed in the 1980s has surfaced online, and it's really quite something.

In the clip, a makeup-free Stanley delivers a wild-eyed, overtly dramatic performance alongside an unseen reading partner.

"You need money, you come to me," menaces Stanley. "Who the fuck do you think you are, raising cash without coming to me?"

"Your ex-partner," Stanley's accomplice explains. "I'm buying you out, Joe. Read the contract."

"Fuck the contract, you son of a bitch!" Stanley continues, with the wild intensity of a pressure cooker about to blow. "Two years ago, no one would touch you. You were begging me for money!"

"But you're making an eighty per cent return, which is what you wanted," responds the off-camera voice.

"Don't turn around when I'm talkin' to you!" Stanley threatens, gesturing towards the camera.

While the video's uploader is unable to identify the source of the footage, the dialogue suggests that Stanley was reading lines from Someone To Watch Over Me, a neo-noir romantic thriller starring Tom Beringer and Mini Rodgers. Directed by Ridley Scott, the film was released in 1987.

Both Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons briefly pursued Hollywood roles in the early 1980s, with Stanley filming a cameo for the 1982 comedy Young Doctors in Love. Tragically, his scenes were ultimately left on the cutting room floor.

More happily, Stanley's dramatic yearnings were satisfied when he played the lead role in a production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera staged at the Pantages Theatre in Toronto, Canada, in 1999.

A new trial date has been set in the long-running sexual assault lawsuit filed against Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler. The case is now scheduled to go to court on May 3 in Los Angeles, with a fifth judge presiding.

The appointment of Lawrence Riff follows a delay in the case caused when the previous judge, Patricia A. Young, unexpectedly stepped down two weeks before opening arguments were scheduled to be heard in September. Young recused herself after disclosing that she had discussed the lawsuit with a second judge who had previously been disqualified from the case.

Riff says that he is willing to reconsider any rulings made by Young, which would include the dismissal in April of charges related to alleged misconduct taking place in Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington because the statute of limitations had passed.

At that time, only charges related to alleged misconduct that took place in California were to be considered, following the state's removal of time limits for historic sexual assault cases in the wake of the Bill Cosby case.

“Both parties here are entitled to have the peace of mind at the end of the case that everything was on the up and up and proper, and that there’s no lingering shadow of doubt of possible impropriety,” says Riff. "There will be more hearings, to say the least, but I don’t think it’s going to unduly prolong the pretrial proceedings."

The lawsuit filed against Tyler was first filed by the plaintiff, Julia Misley, formerly Julia Holcomb, in December 2022. In the lawsuit, Misley accused Tyler of sexual assault, sexual battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and alleged that the singer coerced and persuaded her into believing that their three-year relationship, which began in 1973, when she was 16, was a "romantic love affair".

Tyler has previously asked the court to dismiss the entire lawsuit, arguing that the age of consent in Massachusetts – where the pair resided – was 16, and that Massachusetts law governed them as they travelled to states where the age of consent was older.

Aerosmith returned to the stage with a pair of shows at the Hollywood Bowl two weeks ago.

Gentle Giant released one of their most daring albums in 1973. In A Glass House was written and recorded during what vocalist Derek Shulman refers to as an “emotional, dark time.” He tells Prog about the album’s creation, the technology that made the recent reissue possible, and the modern prog band for whom he has high hopes.

Derek Shulman will always be the genial, jovial pop star he became in 1967 when Simon Dupree & The Big Sound, his family’s R&B group, suddenly shifted direction and covered the hippy-dippy Kites, reaching the UK Top 10. He’s beaming on the screen from New York 59 years later as he tells Prog about In A Glass House, which his next band, Gentle Giant, released in 1973.

Their fifth album and their first for the short-lived WWA label is often seen as the one that got away in their canon; it’s never been as lauded as its predecessor, Octopus, or the record cited as their career best, The Power And The Glory.

To add to that, the events of the time – elder brother Phil Shulman leaving the band on tour, a rushed recording process, a new record label and underlying management issues – clouded opinions. It’s all coupled with the fact that, in recent years, the album’s master tapes couldn’t be found to give it the glow-up of their other releases, and left it somewhat obscure.

But no more. Using AI/ Demix technology, Brazilian producer Eber Pinheiro and Shulman himself worked on the album to give it a moment in the sun. “In A Glass House is a milestone,” Shulman says. “It was the first as a five-piece, without my brother Phil, and we had to refocus. It was hard to make. I’m glad we were able to find a way to make it sound the way it should have sounded back in 1973.

“This album was the one Steven Wilson really wanted to work on a decade or so ago, with Ray – rest in peace.” Derek’s younger brother Ray, integral to Gentle Giant as bassist, songwriter, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, died aged 73 in 2023. He worked with mix wunderkind Wilson, who first remixed Gentle Giant in 2014. The sticking point that had stymied them at every turn was the missing tapes. “We looked everywhere for the masters. We put out an APB: every studio, copy room, everywhere.”

But during that period the world turned and AI technology, used so transparently in The Beatles: Get Back, Peter Jackson’s salvaging of Let It Be, became widely available. Shulman found engineer/ producer Pinheiro in Brooklyn; he was able to split the mixed-down In A Glass House into stems of the various instruments so they could work as if it was a 24-track master.

In A Glass House was written, recorded and mixed in a four-to-five-week period of summer 1973, at Advision Studios in London with engineer Gary Martin and tape op Paul Hardingham. “We had an American tour lined up,” Shulman recalls. “We had no time to make it sound the way we wanted it to. And at the same time we were trying to refocus ourselves into a streamlined version of Gentle Giant. It was an emotional, dark time.”

Gentle Giant had been quite literally a band of brothers. Phil is 10 years older than Derek, and at their then-young ages, a decade is a quantum divide. But the gap didn’t seem to matter: “Our focus was completely on the band, and that was everything,” says Derek. “We all lived in Portsmouth and if we weren’t touring, we were rehearsing; if we weren’t rehearsing, we were writing. If we weren’t writing, we were recording.

“Phil did the right thing; I understand that his family was of number one importance for him, and we were working ourselves nonstop. It was weird, for Ray especially, as Phil had been there from the start of Simon Dupree.”

To draw a line and make a statement, the album crashes in with glass smashing, marking the opener The Runaway, which was soon to become one of the group’s most cherished songs. “We had a BBC recording of old sound effects of glass shattering. Ray and I thought it would be good to put it on. Paul Hardingham said, ‘What about making a loop of that crash?’ He literally had to splice pieces of tape to a five-four beat and then put them together.”

Immediately the group felt rockier, less restrained. “It loosened us up completely – I think this album was the one where we melded into the quintessential sound of Gentle Giant,” says Shulman. There were plenty of oblique references to Phil’s departure: he was the runaway, ‘lie low the wanted man’. “And,” he adds, “Way Of Life talks about what you want to do in your time.”

It’s a full-on album, broadly four rockers: the title track, Way Of Life, Experience and The Runaway, then the gentle A Reunion and the striking An Inmate’s Lullaby. The latter seems to be part of the pervasive presence of mental illness in popular culture in the 70s: psychologist RD Laing signed to Charisma; Stanley Kubrick adapted Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange; and Pink Floyd made The Dark Side Of The Moon.

“We were all realising that being in a band was stressful,” Shulman says. “There was an openness to write about it. Our band was pretty dramatic, generally, because we were workaholics. We didn’t really have time to take a breather or go on two weeks in Spain.”

Singing about wetting yourself wasn’t something other bands did. “Well, we didn’t listen to other bands,” Shulman says. “We were very secluded. Being in Portsmouth, we weren’t part of a scene – we didn’t hang out at the clubs in London. When we finished recording or touring we went home. We saw plenty of stuff that you could write about there.”

The irony was, when Giant arrived in the States, Columbia refused to release In A Glass House because they thought it was too uncommercial. Now, even the most casual Prog reader knows that every one of their previous four albums had been chock-full of hits… Not. “Exactly!” Shulman laughs. “Non-stop hit after hit! God almighty! So we went over there and it only came out on import, and became the biggest import that year, going gold, which is bizarre.”

It was with little surprise that they eventually won over their audiences in the US. “Phil’s departure focused us live, because six is a bit of a mess. Five, you’ve got the monkey in the front – me – and you’ve got four other musicians. Kerry Minnear was a classically- trained musician with a degree in composition. Ray was a classically-trained violinist. I loved R&B and soul, and Gary Green was a bluesman. John Weathers was a straight- ahead rock drummer. All these influences were melded together, and we always had fun onstage.

“We took our music seriously, but not ourselves. Whenever we changed instruments or we played recorders, our audience were smiling, and we loved that. I guess it was a carry-over from the days of our apprenticeship in a pop band. We wanted to be entertaining as well as being musical.”

Recent years have proven busy for both Shulman and Gentle Giant, whose legacy was cemented by the huge box set, Unburied Treasure, at the end of 2019. Since then a live US set, a souped-up Playing The Fool in-concert album, and his autobiography Giant Steps: My Improbable Journey From Stage Lights To Executive Heights have all arrived.

“The book took a lot of wind out of my sails, let me tell you,” he says. “I’m amazed that it’s been well received. I’m happy that I did it. It tells the truth about who I am and who we were as a band, and what I went on to do.”

After Gentle Giant split in 1980, he become a senior record executive and A&R for a variety of US record companies, signing and developing bands such as Bon Jovi, Cinderella, Slipknot and Nickelback. Were any starstruck by their A&R man? “A couple, yes. Dream Theater were fans. The other artist who knew everything about us was Ivan Doroschuk from Canadian off-kilter pop-rockers Men Without Hats: all the various albums and all the instruments. Not many bands went into details of my inglorious past. But then, we were big in Montreal.”

Always admired by the hip-hop community, Shulman Minnear and (posthumously) Ray, had the unexpected honour – and windfall – of Proclamation from The Power And The Glory being generously sampled at the beginning of Hyaena, the opening track from rapper Travis Scott’s double-platinum, 2025 album Utopia. In 2025 Giant were bestowed a BMI Award in recognition for radio plays for their contribution to the track. “I went to a couple of Travis’ shows,” Shulman says. “It was just unbelievable seeing 40,000 kids singing along to our song! We filmed it for a documentary that will appear at some point.”

Does this 79-year-old A&R guru and musician keep up with the current scene? “I’m dismayed with how music is heard and how little melody and creativity there is,” he says. “It’s all technology and analytics. Every hit pop song I hear, it’s that same computerised sound. It’s just a beat, with no change of chord or choruses. It’s all about five seconds of TikTok.”

He continues: “However, there is one band that I think are great, and that’s Angine De Poitrine. Apparently they’re Gentle Giant fans, which is even better.” It’s possibly the least surprising comment Prog has ever heard. “I hope this is the beginning of musicians playing well and interestingly, being fun and having a ton of creativity – uniqueness is a rare thing now.”

A bit like Gentle Giant were, then. His love of his own group is rekindled. “Sitting next to Eber and listening to In A Glass House, I got goosebumps,” he says. “I became a Gentle Giant fan for the first time ever. I thought, ‘How the hell did we come up with that? And that? And that?’ You can hear youthful creativity – creativity without boundaries.”

So, after all this, what’s next on the Gentle Giant bill of fare? “There’s going to be a new version of our live American box set coming out through Snapper, with four or so unheard shows. And after that...” Shulman pauses. “I think I’ll take a nap.”

The remastered edition of In A Glass House is on sale now.

Emo legends Fall Out Boy have announced the Twilight Of The Punks world tour, a four-month trek that takes them into arenas and stadiums across Europe and North America.

The tour begins at the O2 Arena in Prague, Czech Republic, on May 17, and arrives in the British Isles at the end of that month for shows in Glasgow, Dublin, Manchester in London – including a date at the 65,000-capacity Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

More dates in Europe follow, before the North American leg of the tour begins at Globe Life Field in Arlington, TX, on July 13. The final show is at Providence Park in Portland, OR, on August 26.

Support at the European shows will come from A Day To Remember and Neck Deep, with the North American lineup completed by The Offspring, The Story So Far and Good Charlotte (the latter won't appear at the St. Charles and Kansas City dates).

The sign-up for presale tickets is open now at twilightofthepunkstour.com, and general tickets will go on sale this Thursday (November 12). Full dates below.

The band have also released a new single, Aces, which was produced and mixed by longtime collaborator Neil Avro. The single is accompanied by a video directed by Brendan Walter, who directed the shoot for the 2024 Fall Out Boy single So Much (For) Stardust, and has also worked with Miley Cyrus, Green Day, Panic! At The Disco and Weezer.

To mark the UK tour announcement, a launch party featuring tribute act Fell Out Boy will be held at Electrowerkz in London tomorrow night (November 11). Reserve free tickets in advance at partiful.com.

Fall Out Boy: Twilight Of The Punks world tour

May 17: Prague O2 Arena, Czech Republic
May 19: Budapest Arena, Hungary
May 21: Milan Unipol Forum, Italy
May 23: Madrid Movistar Arena, Spain
May 25: Lyon LDLC Arena, France
May 27: Brussels ING Arena, Belgium
May 28: Mönchengladbach SparkassenPark, Germany
May 30: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Jun 01: Dublin 3Arena, Ireland
Jun 03: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Jun 05: London Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, UK
Jun 08: Amsterdam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Jun 10: Paris Accor Arena, France
Jun 12: Berlin Zitadelle, Germany
Jun 13: Łódź Atlas Arena, Poland

Jul 13: Arlington Globe Life Field, TX
Jul 16: Atlanta Truist Park, GA
Jul 18: Washington Nationals Park, DC
Jul 20: Detroit Fifth Third Park, MI
Jul 22: Toronto Rogers Stadium, ON
Jul 24: Chicago Soldier Field Stadium, IL
Jul 27: Nashville FirstBank Stadium, TN
Jul 30: Boston Fenway Park, MA
Aug 01: Queens Citi Field, NY
Aug 03: Atlantic City Beach, NJ
Aug 04: Hershey Hersheypark Stadium, PA
Aug 06: St. Charles Roaming Hills, IA *
Aug 07: Kansas City Morton Amphitheater, MO *
Aug 10: Commerce City Dick's Sporting Goods Park, CO
Aug 13: Sandy America First Field, UT
Aug 15: San Francisco Oracle Park, CA
Aug 17: San Diego PETCO Park, CA
Aug 19: Phoenix Chase Field, AZ
Aug 21: Los Angeles Dodger Stadium, CA
Aug 24: Seattle T-Mobile Park, WA
Aug 26: Portland Providence Park, OR

* No Good Charlotte
Find Fall Out Boy tickets.

On November 14, Phil Collins will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame in recognition of his solo career, 16 years after being inducted as a member of Genesis.

In a new interview with the New York Times, Collins says that he is "very, very pleased" by the accolade, and admits that he was "quite surprised" to learn that he was being considered for the honour. He also suggests that his solo career, which began with 1981's Face Value album, benefitted from the fact that he didn't really know what he was doing at the time.

"Being self-taught as a drummer and a keyboard player, I would come up with things that were unusual," he tells writer Jon Pareles. "Sometimes if you don’t know the rules, you don’t know if you’re breaking them."

Collins freely admits that he had no grand master plan when embarking upon his solo career: "It was just me trying to get the equipment to work and basically having a bit of fun improvising" he tells Pareles. As songs began to take shape, he imagined that their fate would depend entirely on whether or not his Genesis bandmates Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford might consider them for inclusion on the the band's tenth album. Banks and Rutherford maintain though that while Collins offered up Misunderstanding and Please Don't Ask as possible contenders for what became Duke, he didn't ever play them the song that would ultimately launch him as a solo artist, In The Air Tonight.

When released as a single, that song topped charts in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden, peaked at number two in the UK, and reached number 19 on the US Billboard Hot 100. It has since been certified for half a million physical sales in both the UK and US (plus three million digital sales in America, and 1.8 million digital sales in Britain), and remains Collins best-known song globally.

Though Collins went on to sell over 100 million albums as a solo artist, and has won eight Grammy Awards, he says that he was not anticipating that his solo career would be recognised this year by the music industry's most prestigious institution.

"I’d gotten quite used to being overlooked," he admits. "I didn’t go looking to see who was nominated this year, so I was quite surprised when I heard I was up for induction. It’s just a pat on the back, you know. If it wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be craving it. But it is there, and I’m very, very pleased."

This year's Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame induction ceremony will be held at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles on November 14. The class of 2026 inductees include Iron Maiden, Oasis, Billy Idol, Phil Collins, Wu-Tang Clan, Joy Division/New Order, Sade and Luther Vandross.

My Chemical Romance have landed their first Billboard 200 number one album with their 20th anniversary reissue of The Black Parade.

Following its original released in October 2006, the New Jersey band's third studio album peaked at number 2 on the US albums chart, held off the top by the Hannah Montana soundtrack: it went on to sell over four million copies in the US.

Now the 20th anniversary reissue of the record, featuring six additional songs, has given the band their first US number one, knocking Olivia Rodrigo's you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love from the top spot. The deluxe reissue sold 78,000 equivalent album units across over 20 formats to leap from number 139 to number one.

"Great bands never die," Tom Corson, chief operating officer of Warner Music Group, the band's record label, tells the New York Times. They just get rediscovered."

My Chemical Romance are arguably a bigger band in 2026 than they were when they announced their break-up in 2013. In July, Gerard Way's group sold out three headline shows at London's 90,000 capacity Wembley Stadium as part of their Long Live The Black Parade tour.

The group recently confirmed that they will begin work on a new album next year.

"Next year, we wanna go make a record," frontman Gerard Way told fans in attendance at their October 30 show at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. "We’re probably not going to do any shows. There’s no secret code to that. Maybe if we get really rusty when we’re making something we’ll be like, ‘Bro, let’s go.’ We will see you guys in 2028, you know what I’m saying?"

The band's last studio album, Danger Days: The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys, was released in 2010.

The band will close out a hugely successful 2026 with a trio of shows in Asia.

They are set to play:

Nov 07: Paradise City Korea, Incheon, South Korea
Nov 10: Singapore Indoor Stadium, Kallang, Singapore
Nov 11: Singapore Indoor Stadium, Kallang, Singapore

Powerwolf have announced one of their biggest tours ever for winter 2027. The German power metal heavyweights - who played the largest show in their history at Wacken Open Air this past summer - will headline arenas around Europe and the UK, including stop-offs at London's Wembley Arena and Manchester's Co-op Live.

"We're incredibly excited to hit the road again in autumn 2027 and bring the ultimate Powerwolf show to you," says the band's keyboardist and organist Falk Maria Schlegel. We’ll be coming with a brand-new, huge production, and trust me, it’s going to be massive. We can’t wait to get back on stage, feel that energy again and celebrate these shows together with all of you. We’ve got a lot of mind-blowing things planned! This is going to be awesome!”

Powerwolf will be supported on the 'Moral & Madness' tour by Finnish cello-metallers Apocalyptica and Swedish metallers Majestica. See the full list of dates below. General sale tickets will be released at 10am this Friday, November 13 from this location, while special pre-sales will be available from November 10 and November 11 at 10am GMT here.

A new Powerwolf studio album is also expected next year. Their latest and tenth album, Wake Up The Wicked, was released in 2024 to positive reviews.

Powerwolf UK and European tour dates 2027

Oct 27 Esch-sur-Alzette Rockhal, Luxembourg
Oct 29 Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Oct 30 Cologne Lanxess Arena, Germany
Oct 31 Antwerp Lotto Arena, Belgium

Nov 2 Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Nov 3 London OVO Arena Wembley, UK
Nov 5 Paris Accor Arena, France
Nov 6 Amsterdam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Nov 7 Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
Nov 9 Krakow Tauron Arena, Poland
Nov 10 Budapest MVM Dome, Hungary
Nov 12 Prague O2 Arena, Czech Republic
Nov 13 Vienna Stadthalle, Austria
Nov 15 Milan Unipol Forum, Italy
Nov 16 Zurich Hallenstadion, Switzerland
Nov 18 Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
Nov 19 Frankfurt Festhalle, Germany
Nov 20 Munich Olympiahalle, Germany

Dec 11 Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Dec 12 Gothenburg Scandinavium, Sweden
Dec 14 Oslo Spektrum, Norway
Dec 16 Helsinki Ice Hall, Finland
Dec 18 Stockholm Hovet, Sweden

Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry and saxophonist Andy McKay have revisited their experiences of making second album For Your Pleasure – the last to feature Brian Eno. He left soon after the 1973 record was completed, leaving the remaining members to exploit the more complex and experimental direction they’d discovered.

Asked if it was obvious that the split was coming as a result of tensions between Eno and Ferry, McKay tells Mojo: “They got on fine in the studio. The problem was that Eno was very flamboyant. His stage presence was a kind of artistic statement.

“And some people saw him as the band’s figurehead, which was not helpful. I don’t think it was a big surprise that he left. It’s fairly obvious that ego and ambition played some part.”

Ferry adds: “We didn’t have any quarrels – sorry to disappoint you! I just remember that I’d put everything into the album and I felt totally drained. We’d finished the album on a high.”

He continues: “We wanted to do something that hadn’t been heard before; do something that had a point to it, even though we weren’t sure what that was. We had a battery of sounds to work with. Phil liked getting unusual sounds. Having Andy’s oboe in the band was beautiful – I loved that sound. Eno could conjure up a million different things. Paul was strong and powerful. We were like beat brothers.”

Asked about his own contribution, Ferry responds: “My piano playing was quirky and my singing was pretty odd. It got better with practice. On the first album, a lot of the keys were too high. On For Your Pleasure I found my way as a singer. I was more confident and not overthinking.”

McKay reflects: “During the early days, Bryan was quite reluctant to front the band. Though he always saw it as his band, he preferred the idea of singing while playing keyboards at the side of the stage.

“But we soon realised that in a venue with people shouting, and wanting a bit of rock’n’roll, you needed someone in the middle of the stage. For a while, it had been me and Phil, and to some extent Eno, though he was a bit tied to his keyboards too. So we pushed Bryan. We said, ‘You’ve got to do something that doesn’t require the keyboard – just stand and sing!’”

For Your Pleasure has just been reissued in an expanded deluxe edition in multiple formats. Prog said of the package: “Spilling secrets yet enhancing the mystique, this is a magnificent presentation of a masterpiece.”

Muse have been confirmed as the third headliner for next year's run of BST Hyde Park shows in London. They'll perform on June 26, joining the previously announced Bon Jovi (June 24) and 2026 Mercury Prize winner Raye (July 10) at the 70,000-capacity series of concerts.

Support will come from Nothing But Thieves and CHVRCHES, with tickets going on general sale at 10am on Friday.

Muse will also headline the second Roundhay Festival in Leeds on June 27, with Nothing But Thieves back on the bill. Tickets for this show will also go on general sale on Friday at 10am.

"Following the success of our first year at Roundhay Park, we’re delighted to be returning to Leeds with one of the most incredible live bands in the world, says Jim King, CEO of AEG Presents UK & European Festivals. "Muse’s legendary outdoor performances and unrivalled production values continue to set the benchmark for live music, and we’re thrilled to welcome them to Roundhay for what promises to be a truly spectacular event."

Further acts will be announced for both shows.

Muse's most recent album, The Wow! Signal, was released in June, and the band begin their European tour in support of the record this week at Manchester's Co-op Live arena. Full dates below.

Muse: The Wow! Signal Europa Tour dates

Nov 12: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Nov 13: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Nov 15: London O2, UK
Nov 16: London O2, UK
Nov 18: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Nov 20: Milan Unipol Dome, Italy
Nov 21: Milan Unipol Dome, Italy
Nov 24: Düsseldorf PSD Bank Dome, Germany
Nov 25: Düsseldorf PSD Bank Dome, Germany
Nov 27: Paris La Défense Arena, France
Nov 29: Amsterdam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Nov 30: Amsterdam, Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Dec 03: Montpellier Sud de France Arena, France
Dec 04: Montpellier Sud de France Arena, France
Dec 07: Zurich AG Hallenstadion, Switzerland
Dec 08: Zurich AG Hallenstadion, Zurich, Switzerland

Jan 10: Lisboa MEO Arena, Portugal
Jan 12: Floirac Arkéa Arena, France
Jan 13: Floirac Arkéa Arena, France
Jan 16: Décines-charpieu LDLC Arena, France
Jan 17: Décines-charpieu LDLC Arena, France
Jan 19: Madrid Movistar Arena, Spain
Jan 20: Madrid Movistar Arena, Spain
Jan 23: València Roig Arena, Spain
Jan 24: València Roig Arena, Spain

Jun 18: Neuhausen Ob Eck Southside Festival, Germany
Jun 20: Scheeßel Hurricane Festival, Germany
Jun 26: London Hyde Park, UK
Jun 27: Leeds Roundhay Park, UK
Jul 04: Arras Main Square Festival, France
Jul 05: Belfort Les Eurockéennes, France
Jul 15: Carhaix-plouguer Festival Les Vieilles Charrues, France
Jul 17: Lucca Summer Festival, Italy

Find Muse tickets.

In one of the most unlikely musical alliances formed since Showaddywaddy supported Einstürzende Neubauten in London in 1987, genre-hopping Australian psych rockers King Gizard & The Lizard Wizard have hooked up with one of the nation's most beloved stars, Jimmy Barnes, to release a charity single.

The pair head a stellar Aussie cast on a rerecording of KG&TWL's 2020 track If Not Now, a song that won Australia's inaugural Environmental Music Prize in 2022.

The release intends to raise awareness of Scott Reef, an untouched coral reef located 190 miles northwest of Cape Leveque in Western Australia that's currently the subject of controversial natural gas exploitation plans.

Fossil fuel corporation Woodside, who say their Browse project will create "long-term energy security" plus "thousands of jobs and considerable tax revenue", plan to drill up to 57 wells under and around the reef, which is a habitat for migrating pygmy blue whales, the green sea turtle and the dusky sea snake – the latter an endangered species.

"Why are we still digging up coal and gas?" asks King Gizzard's Stu McKenzie. "Why are we allowing this? Why is the Australian government so hell-bent on destroying our beautiful wild and untouched places?

"I’m proud that a King Gizz song was chosen to represent a growing movement of people who are asking these questions and applying pressure. Let’s shut it down and keep it beautiful."

"Scott Reef is one of the few pristine reefs left in the world, and it happens to be on our doorstep," adds Barnes. "We’re custodians of it – we’re supposed to be looking after it. It’s ridiculous. We must protect our country and look after what we value most, which is the nature and the beauty of this country."

Barnes, the singer of Cold Chisel and a solo star in his own right, is joined on the song by his daughter, Mahalia Barnes and granddaughter, Ruby Rodgers, who won the Environmental Music Prize this year with her song Hits The Heart. The recording also features First Language vocals from Fred Leone and Drifting Clouds’ frontman Terry Guyula.

If Not Now is available as a seven-inch single via p(doom) Records, with all proceeds donated to Greenpeace Australia Pacific and Green Music Australia.

For more information about the campaign to protect Scott Reef, visit the Greenpeace Australia website.

Calling Slayer's Reign In Blood ‘the greatest thrash album of all time’ might sound like a convenient soundbite… until you hear it. With Rick Rubin producing, everything was taken to a height nobody would ever scale again.

The playing was world-class, the songs were stunning, the production balanced technology with the brute force of their live performance and, best of all, it came in at under 30 minutes, which meant that it never outstayed its welcome. From the moment the opening track Angel Of Death kicks in to the last chords of the closer Raining Blood, this is peerless.

"People come up and talk to me about Reign In Blood in the most random places," said drummer Dave Lombardo. "People yell out, ‘Slayer!’ or come up and say ‘Reign In Blood saved my life.’ That’s one thing I hear a lot. Although the music may have been intense and violent, people have told me that it’s helped them navigate the most horrible times of their lives. That’s just special."

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Every week, Album of the Week Club listens to and discusses the album in question, votes on how good it is, and publishes our findings, with the aim of giving people reliable reviews and the wider rock community the chance to contribute.

Join the group now.

Other albums released in October 1986

• Eye of the Zombie - John Fogerty
• The Dark - Metal Church
• Reign in Blood - Slayer
• True Stories - Talking Heads
• Rock the Nations - Saxon
• Whiplash Smile - Billy Idol
• Dreamtime - The Stranglers
• Blah Blah Blah - Iggy Pop
• To Hell with the Devil - Stryper
• Skylarking - XTC
• Alive and Screamin' - Krokus
• Can't Hold Back - Eddie Money
• Fame and Fortune - Bad Company

What they said...

"Reign in Blood established Slayer's spot in metal, and probably crowned them the unofficial gods of thrash. The unfortunate thing is that it also establishes a very generic sound that Slayer sticks to almost religiously throughout the album, and leaves me wishing they had expanded their musical repertoire." (Sputnik Music)

"The obsessive pace is almost always the same, and even when a song seems, from the beginning, to be different from the others, it always ends up with the same hammering riff played at the same speed and in the same key, ending up seeming like a sort of reprise of the previous tracks. The album is pleasant to listen to, but it could also be more varied." (Dabaser)

"The album acts quickly and with clinical precision – 28.56 breathless minutes to be precise, and when the needle enters the run-out groove after the terminal thunderclap of Raining Blood the only conceivable thing to do is to play the fucking thing again. And again." (The Quietus)

What you said...

Adam McCann: Genuine masterpiece, a stone-cold classic of the genre.

Andrew Cumming: Arriving and departing in less than half an hour, Reign In Blood is an unbelievably intense ride. In 1986, the world had nothing like it in terms of sustained speed and intensity. It made Motörhead and Metallica (the previous benchmark setters) seem sluggish.

What sustains Reign In Blood, though, is the quality of the songs. Bookended by two timeless classics (Angel Of Death and Raining Blood), but then chock full of great songs. Individually and collectively, this is a great listen and sets the bar for the genre. Even now, just the "dum dum dum" sound of those drums at the start of Raining Blood is enough to get the heart racing. Best heavy metal record of all time? Anyone want to argue?

Michael Böcher: Come on… 10/10. It‘s the classic genre-defining thrash metal masterpiece. 28 minutes of pure metal craftsmanship. Influenced so many other bands. The title track was even covered by Tori Amos. Stellar production job by Rick Rubin. One of the definite genre-defining metal albums of all time.

Gary Claydon: Twenty-nine and a bit minutes of unrelenting brutality. Aural assault with a blunt sonic instrument. Totally lacking in subtlety and nuance, but surely that's the whole point? I'm hardly being original in saying that Reign In Blood's best tracks are its bookends, Angel Of Death and Raining Blood, bona fide thrash classics both. In between, things suffer from a discernible element of sameness, and there are some truly risible lyrics throughout. Fortunately, Rick Rubin's production keeps things sharply in focus, and the whole thing is short enough to prevent it from becoming wearisome. 7/10.

Mark Herrington: I gave this a good listen and tried to get under the skin of it, but in the end was glad it was quite short.

I like a lot of heavy metal, but I also like a degree of melody and drama to hook on to. So, with thrash, I prefer the Metallica version over a relentless sonic onslaught with less pattern.

I don’t mind a degree of harsh vocals if it is alongside clean vocals, as with Paradise Lost, or of the gravelly type as with Mastodon.

The first and last tracks here were more memorable, but overall it did very little for me, and I wouldn’t listen to it again.

Andy Aris: 10/10, any less is plain wrong

Neil Immerz: Love it. First got onto it when I was 12 years old on my second trip to Utopia Records - Home Of Metal with my dad when it was on Clarence Street, Sydney. I’d read about the album in Hot Metal magazine at the time. So naturally I bought it.

It was the fastest, most aggressive thing I’d ever heard other than Metallica’s Master of Puppets, but this was on another level entirely. It is still a gem of an album and a masterpiece of thrash metal.

Robby Jackson: My body does not move like that anymore, and when it did, it wasn't to that. Did not like this album at all. Because you can sing, strum and beat the drums real fast doesn't mean it's going to sound good.

Nigel Taylor: Simply one of the greatest, most intense acts of savagery ever recorded. It still sounds as fresh and exciting today as it did on its release. 10/10

Mark Paul: One of the greatest thrash and metal albums of all time. No way should it get less than 10.

Chris Elliott: It goes beyond horrible. It's difficult to express just how bad this is. I never got thrash or the endless depressing genres that followed (honourable exception to early Metallica).

This summarises pretty much everything that I dislike in 30 minutes.

It's the musical equivalent of what the UK press called video nasties - and just as tedious. In the same way that video nasties were just crude, trying too hard to be shocking – in the first five minutes, 15 buckets of fake blood, zombies, lesbian nuns, some Nazi uniforms – and you go past revolted into utterly bored.... exactly like this. And musically? 220 BPM: that's it.

Philip Qvist: So we have a 10-track album that isn't even 30 minutes long, and two of those tracks, Angel Of Death and Raining Blood (my picks on Reign In Blood), are both over 4 minutes long. That gives you an idea how short the other songs are. In fact, its brevity could be Reign In Blood's saving grace, because most songs sounded the same to me, and a 40-minute-long album would have been pushing things.

Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman are on fire here, for both their guitar playing and songwriting, while singer and bassist Tom Araya and drummer Dave Lombardo both ensure that the album remains at a high tempo from start to finish.

I can understand why Slayer's third album is regarded so highly by so many, and it is a classic. If I had bought it in the late 80s I almost certainly would have given it a 9 or 10, but that was then, and this is now. It's still a good album, but I feel that I have outgrown it somewhat. A 7, maybe an 8, from me.

Greg Schwepe: I've always seen Slayer's Reign In Blood high on any list of classic albums for this genre, but I've never checked it out. Thrash is generally not an everyday listen for me. But this is a timely choice, as the early darkness due to the recent time change has relegated my running to my treadmill versus outdoor running. So what better time to listen to something that should blast me through 60 minutes (listen twice!) of running in place and staring at a wall? Let's find out.

Typical frenetic thrash pace? Yep. Vocals spit and barked out? Uh huh. Enough down-stroked buzzsaw power chords to grind a guitar pick to shredded plastic? Correct. Drum heads pummeled and getting close to needing replacement from the pounding? You got it.

It's the chunky riffs that kept me interested and in the game here. I'm not listening to the lyrics for any deep insight or anything that will change my general outlook on life. Yeah, that's not gonna happen.

Basically, this is everything I thought it would be, and nothing more. Actually, a little better than what I expected. 7 out of 10 on this one for me. And yeah, the treadmill pace was a bit faster today.

John Davidson: I tend to view thrash metal like other people view prog rock. I can see that the playing is technically accomplished, but the vocals are not for me, and I just can't connect to the music most of the time.

The drum patterns on Angel Of Death (and indeed peppered through the album) are a case in point. I know people love and revere Dave Lombardo, but that skank beat double-kick machine gun drum style just doesn't work for me.

Again, I appreciate that it's part of the appeal, but as an album it is absolutely relentless. At least it's only 29 minutes long.

Mike Canoe: I like the idea of Reign In Blood more than I like the actual album. Ten songs played so blindingly fast that they clocked in at under 30 minutes! Who can argue with a legacy like that? But as far as the actual album content goes, I like follow-ups South Of Heaven and Seasons In The Abyss better.

Bookends Angel of Death and Raining Blood are still outstanding, but the only two tracks that stand out from the blur in between are Criminally Insane and Altar of Sacrifice. With the benefit of hindsight, this feels like an album that the band had to get out of their system to prove it could be done. Once the land speed record was established, I feel they added some light and shade and became a better band.

Final score: 8.28 (106 votes cast, total score 878)

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Tomorrow night, Hannah Wicklund will be performing at the excellently named Snug Harbor venue in New Paltz, a small town 80 miles north of New York City, and if she's short of things to say to the crowd, she can tell them about her triumph in our latest Tracks Of The Week contest. And then, perhaps, she could play her winning entry. Look, here it is.

Trailing in Hannah's triumphant wake were Sazon and Beaux Gris Gris & The Apocalypse, but those podium positions aren't to be sniffed at, so we won't. This week's great eight are below.

Royal Blood - Mother Never Told You

Combining the gnarly, heavy urgency of their debut with the swashbuckling confidence and life experience of the last few years, Mother Never Told You is the sort of loose yet tight, ferocious banger that fans will be genuinely delighted to hear in a setlist. Swaggering blues rock with noisy punk in its heart and fire under its skin. Need another reason to check out their new album Dead Company (which, incidentally, just came out) in full? This is your reason.

Steven Wilson - Murmuration

This is one of our favourite tracks on the modern-day progressive auteur’s new album, Requiem For A Village. A mellower moment in an album full of twists and dark shapes, its offbeat spookiness (the low, ominous opening synth notes set a wonderfully creepy tone) translates into something strange but extremely moving. Lyrics don’t quite make “sense” but that’s part of its poetic atmosphere. Beautiful.

The Courettes - Killer Kiss

Need a short, sweet and very stylish dose of 60s pop, doused in Ronettes/Spectoresque ambiance and even some jingle bells in the background? (Christmas ain’t far off, right?) Listen to this one. “We wanted to write a 3 minute song that could breathe out all the thrills and chills of a good night out,” the band (married couple Flavia and Martin Couri) reason, “passion and dangers, drinks and strangers, lust and city light and…a killer kiss! Play it loud and never mind the cherry red lipstick stain in your record player.” Saucy.

The Mission - Kindness Is A Weapon

Delayed from its planned 2025 release – while frontman Wayne Hussey had open-heart surgery – Songs For Kith And Kin begins its journey into the world with this first taste, full of cavernous shadows, hypnotic guitars and heavy mystique. “It’s definitely had an influence lyrically,” Hussey says of his recent experiences, “almost every song mentions ‘heart’. Really, the surgery has made me care even less what others think. I’m doing what I want to do in the new songs, what feels natural.”

Lovehoney - Audience

Enjoy some belated Halloween spookiness with the Brooklyn rockers’ latest – all B-movie blood, smoke and crystal balls wrapped in riffy, Hendrix-y psychedelia, haunted woodlands and sinister record crackles. Appetisingly evocative of the late 60s/early 70s (even if its slim runtime left us wishing there was more) for anyone craving something emphatically AI-free. More to come on their new album, which is due out next month.

Devin Townsend - Covered By Causes

Building through orchestral layers, choral swoops, keys and spine-tingling performances from Devin and co-vocalist Lynn Wu (from Chinese progressive metallers OU), Covered By Causes is a stunningly cinematic highlight from Townsend's ambitious record The Moth. Captured at its live premiere in Groningen, the Netherlands, this newly released video captures the storytelling, delicacy and emotional weight that Dev, at his best, combines so brilliantly.

Ann Wilson - Me and Comanche

In which Heart singer Ann Wilson and her band Tripsitter perform a live-in-the-studio(s) version of the epic Me And Commanche, one of the highlights of last month's Consecrated Ground album. It's the kind of spooky Americana Robert Plant does so well with Alison Krauss (Plant and Wilson? Now there's an idea!), with sharp but restrained musicianship, a high desert vibe, and Wilson's warm but powerful voice still setting standards by which others will be judged.

Twisted Teens - I Spend My Time Crying

Another pearl drops off the Twisted Teens production line, with this highlight from the New Orleans duo's third album of 2026 (their first for Sub Pop) continuing their habit of producing songs that could have been written by Ray Davies in the 1960s but are otherwise 100% weird America. Take pieces of punk, bits of blues, fragments of folk, a soupçon of soul and a ragged, almost other-worldly production, and you're left with something that's warm-hearted and strangely timeless. Lovely video, too.

With just five studio albums in the bag since 1990, no one can accuse Tool of rushing things out to make a quick buck or two. And during that time, they've created enough lore to fill several leather-bound books.

But how much do you know about the band?

Are you obsessed with the Fibonacci sequence or are you some sort of Johnny-come-lately who's simply good at remembering stuff when it comes to the prog boffins?

There's a simple way to find out. And that's by taking this 20-question Tool quiz, which will sort out the true fans from the casual listeners.

Are you ready? 1... 1... 2... 3...

Mayhem frontman Attila Csihar has told Metal Hammer that he believes that he has the last-ever recording to feature Joey Jordison playing drums – a cover of a 1975 Kraftwerk song.

The pair met at a metal bar over 20 years ago, following a Mayhem show in Athens, Greece, and struck up a friendship in the subsequent years.

Csihar and the late Slipknot drummer Jordison began exploring musical ideas, including a period of demoing material with King ov Hell from Gorgoroth.

"I still have the demos with my voice on a few songs that ended up in that band, but I’d wanted to make it a little more Rammstein or Laibach – militaristic and pounding," he explains. "It turned out that he’d been very sick [with acute transverse myelitis] and had a lot of management involved. It was a very strange situation, but we were then able to make Sinsaenum enter the picture."

In Sinsaenum, a blackened death metal band featuring guitarist Frédéric Leclercq, guitarist Stéphane Buriez, and bassist Heimoth, Csihar shared vocal duties with Sean Zatorsky, while Jordison played drums. The band released two albums – Echoes of the Tortured (2016) and Repulsion for Humanity (2018) – and three EPs before Jordison's death in 2021.

Csihar tells Hammer that while visiting his friend in Des Moines, Iowa, they hit upon the idea of forming another musical project called Electhrone.

“He had a unique taste in music, because he didn’t just know all the metal bands but the industrial and goth-like bands," he says. "Bands like Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly and Suicide Commando, who were inspirational to me when I was in Plasma Pool.

"Electhrone was more of an industrial metal kind of thing and I think I have his last recordings ever," he adds. "We did covers of Kraftwerk’s Radio-Activity with Joey on drums and Skinny Puppy’s Assimilate, which we did for my friend Nysrok Infernalien and his band Alien Vampires, who I played with in Aborym.

Assimilate was the final track on Alien Vampires' 2023 album, Return Me To Hell, whereas the Kraftwerk cover remains unreleased.

"We were supposed to do more though, and it’s all only at the demo stage," says Csihar. "I really miss him. I invoke him alongside Euronymous and Dead and invite him to the Mayhem shows as the people from the beyond.”

Mayhem's album, Liturgy of Death, is out now via Century Media.

The decade-long run of game-changing albums that David Bowie made from 1970‘s The Man Who Changed The World onwards remains unmatched by any artist. This hot streak came to an end with 1980’s Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) - his last truly great album until 2016’s grand farewell, Blackstar.

Scary Monsters features one of Bowie’s all-time classic singles in Ashes To Ashes, a song that saw the singer moving on from his fabled ‘Berlin’ period and into a brand new decade. At the same it was also a callback to his breakthrough single, 1969’s Space Oddity, and the character at the centre of it, the astronaut Major Tom.

Musically, the inspiration for Ashes To Ashes came from an unlikely source: Inchworm, a song from the 1952 musical Hans Christian Anderse.

“I loved it as a kid and it’s stayed with me for ever,” Bowie told Classic Rock journalist Bill DeMain in 2003. “You wouldn’t believe the amount of my songs that have sort of spun off that one song.”

Bowie recorded the song in New York’s Power Station studio with guitarist Carlos Alomar, bassist George Murray and drummer Dennis Davis, plus guesting pianist Roy Bittan (of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band) and guitar-synth player Chuck Hammer. Overseeing the session was producer Tony Visconti, who likened Ashes To Ashes to “a Swiss watch.”

“If you open up a Swiss watch, you see all those tiny little wheels and hammers going,” says Visconti. “But no matter what’s going on, it has to tell the time in the end. There was so much Swiss-watch business going on in the tracks for Scary Monsters. That’s why we loved it.”

Ashes To Ashes was released in August 1980, giving him his second No.1 (after Space Oddity) and becoming his first great single of the new decade. For Bowie himself, it was a bridge between his glorious past and a bold future.

“It was this sense of: ‘Wow, you can borrow the luggage of the past, you can amalgamate it with things that you’ve conceived could be in the future, and set it in the now.’

Read the full story behind Ashes To Ashes in the new issue of Classic Rock. Buy it online here.

Sepultura were joined by several special guests during their epic final show.

The Brazilian legends brought the curtain down on their illustrious career on Saturday, November 7 with a farewell gig at the 9000-capacity Suhai Music Hall in São Paulo.

Their 30-song set saw the band dusting down several classic tracks that haven’t been played for years, including one that hadn’t been performed since 1998, notably Itsári from the Roots album.

The current line-up of guitarist Andreas Kisser, bassist Paolo Jr, singer Derrick Green and drummer Greyson Nekrutman were joined by several guests, including former Sepultura guitarist, Jairo ‘Tormentor’ Guedz, who was a member of the band between 1985 and 1987 and joined them for vintage Seps tracks Biotech Is Godzilla, Slave New World and Troops Of Doom at the farewell show.

They were also joined by João Gordo of Brazilian punk icons Ratos de Porão for Sepultura’s 1998 track Reza, before the rest of the latter band appeared for covers of RDP’s Crucificados pelo sistema and Beber até morrer.

Other guests included Ethan Kahn and Sean Sterling from Chained Saint, Allan Wallace of Eminence, Andreas Kisser’s son Yohan, Moyses Kolesne of support act Krisiun and drummer Amilcar Christofaro of Brazilian death metal band Torture Squad.

However, fans’ hopes original Sepultura frontman Max Cavalera and his brother, ex-drummer, Iggor would take part in the show were dashed, with neither appearing. Earlier this year, Andreas Kisser told Metal Hammer that the pair had declined an invitation to appear. “We did invite the Cavalera brothers,” the guitarist said. “I spoke to Iggor personally on a phone call a few months ago and we started some communication. Even our managers went to talk to their management and stuff. But, they don’t want to be a part of it, and that’s OK. It’s a choice.”

See the full setlist and video from the show below.

Sepultura final show setlist

Arise
Altered State
Desperate Cry
All Souls Rising
Kairos
Means to an End
Propaganda (with Ethan Kahn and Sean Sterling from Chained Saint)
Dusted (with Allan Wallace from Eminence)
Convicted in Life (with Yohan Kisser)
Attitude
We've Lost You
Against
The Place
Itsári (with Moyses Kolesne)
Kaiowas (with Moyses Kolesne)
Dead Embryonic Cells
Beneath the Remains (with Amilcar Christofaro)
Breed Apart
Sepulnation
Reza (with João Gordo)
Crucificados pelo sistema (Ratos de Porão cover) (with Ratos de Porão)
Beber até morrer (Ratos de Porão cover) (with Ratos de Porão)
Biotech Is Godzilla (with Jairo Guedz)
Slave New World (with Jairo Guedz)
Troops of Doom (with Jairo Guedz)
Beyond the Dream
Territory
Refuse/Resist

Encore:
Ratamahatta
Roots Bloody Roots

Richard Lloyd, the former guitarist with influential New York punk band Television, has died at the age of 75.

Lloyd passed away on Saturday morning at home in Tennessee. His death was a result of cholangiocarcinoma, a form of bile duct cancer. He had been diagnosed with the disease earlier in 2026. “His loving wife Sheila and his dog Willie Mays were with him at the end,” said his family in a statement to Rolling Stone.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1951, Lloyd co-founded Television in 1973 with guitarist Tom Verlaine, bassist Richard Hell and drummer Billy Ficca. They became fixtures on the early New York punk scene alongside the likes of Patti Smith, Ramones and Blondie.

Television followed their 1975 debut single Little Johnny Jewel with the landmark Marquee Moon album two years later. Widely hailed as one of the greatest records of the era, Marquee Moon was defined by Lloyd and Verlaine’s intricate, angular dual guitar figures.

They released one more album, Adventure, before splitting up in 1978. After reuniting in 1991, they released a third and final, self-titled album and toured sporadically over the next few years. Lloyd left the band in 2007.

Speaking of his contribution to Television, Lloyd told The Stranger in 2025: “All the filigrees and arabesques on Marquee Moon are all mine. Even though the solos are maybe different, during the verses, when Tom’s singing, I’m playing all the melody. I brought a rock’n’roll heart.”

Away from Television, Lloyd also released nine solo albums, the most recent of which was 2018’s Countdown. He published a memoir, Everything Is Combustible: Television, CBGB's And Five Decades of Rock And Roll, in 2018.

After being diagnosed with cancer in March, a crowdfunding campaign was set up to support Lloyd. The guitarist‘s New York contemporary Patti Smith donated $5000 to the campaign.

Phil Collins says just one thing is preventing him from touring again – and it’s not his health.

In August he told Prog that he had musical projects, complete and incomplete, which he could focus on if he wanted to. He added that the health issues that have hounded him in recent years were in the past and he felt in “A1” condition.

Now in an interview with the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, ahead of his induction as a solo artist on November 14, Collins says: “When you’ve been on stage all your life and tasted that, it's difficult to stop. I never say exactly never. Every now and again, I think about, well, going out on the road again.

“You can’t do that kind of thing just for a half a dozen shows, because it’s not financially practical. I do think every now and again that I haven’t finished. But when I think about the practicalities, I think getting inducted into the Hall of Fame is a lovely way to end it – a full stop on a lovely sentence.

“I’m now back to being where I think I could do it. But I think, ‘Yeah, I’ll enjoy the sunshine – there’s no sweat; I don’t have to do anything. I just get up and say, “What am I going to to today?”’

He outlines the alternative argument: “I’ve got a studio that’s totally in working order downstairs in the basement of my house, and I keep saying to myself, ‘I should go down there. I’ve got ideas. I’ve got things I’ve finished. I’ve got things that I’ve half finished. So who knows?”

Reflecting on how his successful solo work had a positive effect on Genesis’ career, increasing their audience size and attracting a wider range of people, he explains: “It meant you never felt that you were getting there – you were always on the road to getting there. Wherever ‘there’ was!”

Collins confirms he’s “thrilled” to be accepting his Rock Hall honour, 16 years after Genesis’ induction. “It's just one of those things you don’t think you're ever going to get, and sometimes you get proved wrong,” he admits.

“I turned 75 this year and I thought, ‘Well, it’s all coming together at a certain time – kind of retiring.’ It’s been a very profound last two or three years for the kids, and also for me. It’s got to be very special to have them seeing their dad go up and pick this award up. They’re very proud of me and I’m very proud of them. It’s nice to share that with them.”

Nicko McBrain has revealed that he dabbled with heroin in the late 1970s.

The former Iron Maiden drummer, who has just released his autobiography, Hello Boys And Girls!, tells Classic Rock that he used the drug, but that he was “lucky” to never become addicted.

“This was a period where I was introduced to the higher echelons of people in the music industry and in other walks of life, shall we say,” he says. “I never put it in my arm, I just chased the dragon, as we used to call it – put it on silver paper and fire it up, then puff it up through a straw.”

While Nicko doesn’t specify a time period when he used the drug, he confirms that he had kicked heroin by the time he joined Iron Maiden in late 1982.

“Here’s the thing: God blessed me with this gene where I could just turn that tap off,” he tells Classic Rock. “Same with smoking, same with drinking. Anyone who’s struggling with substance issues, go get help – there’s people out there to help you. It’s not admitting defeat.

“But I was lucky enough to have this gene, so when I stopped, I didn’t go cold turkey – I got a bit antsy, and I got the cold sweats and the shivers, but I was very fortunate not to get really deep into the rabbit hole. I’d already knocked that on the head prior to getting the offer to come on board with Maiden in 1982.”

McBrain replaced former Maiden drummer Clive Burr, who was fired following the tour for 1982’s The Number Of The Beast album. In Hello Boys And Girls!, Nicko reveals that he was initially approached by Maiden’s co-manager Rod Smallwood while Burr was still in the band and put on retainer as “back-up” – something the latter was furious about when he found out.

“About a week had gone by when I got a phone call from Clive,” recalls McBrain. “‘You fucking arsehole!’ he screamed. ‘You motherfucking cunt! You’ve had my gig!”

Nicko pacified Burr and suggested he clean up his act in order to remain in the band, which he temporarily did. But by the end of 1982, Burr was out of the band for good.

While McBrain praises his predecessor – who died in 2013 – as an “amazing drummer” and acknowledges his part in Maiden’s success, he recalls a tense moment during a drum clinic in the mid-80s, attended by Burr

“After doing a solo, which I thought was pretty good, I got up and asked if anyone had any questions, and someone shouted, ‘How big’s your willy?’” he writes. “I thought, ‘What kind of question is that?’, and although I didn’t see who asked it, I swear blind it was Clive. It was definitely his voice, and it wasn’t said in a light-hearted way; it had a hint of aggression about it, as if the person was pissed off at me.”

McBrain adds: “When I asked Clive if it was him many years later, he changed the subject.”

Nicko’s autobiography, Hello Boys And Girls!, is out now. Read the full interview with him in an upcoming issue of Classic Rock.

In the 80s, it’s safe to say, Genesis changed.

“I do feel the strain,” confides Phil Collins, “because it’s said so many times that: ‘The pre-Collins era was the true Genesis’, and: ‘It all fucked up when he started singing.’ Because, really, we all changed. If you stay together as a band, what you wear changes, what you think changes, what you listen to changes, and what you want to do changes. It was a group decision. Well, not even a decision – a metamorphosis.

“Sometimes, when people say: ‘Oh, the early-70s period was better’, that’s because their lives were different in the early 70s. It’s nostalgia for that lived. It was always on the band’s to-do list to have hit singles, to be played on the radio. Even before I joined, that was the premise of the band. I think we got better at knowing when to stop, and when to say, okay, this song sounds great just like this.”

In 1975 the band’s lengthy search for a replacement lead singer after Peter Gabriel departed ended with the post being filled in-house. Phil Collins stepped up to the microphone, still playing drums live during instrumental passages. It worked. Their 1976 album A Trick Of The Tail and the following year’s Wind And Wuthering, the first two of the post-Gabriel era, remain among the band’s best. Genesis had grasped the nettle, and seized victory and longevity from the jaws of fizzling out. They nearly hadn’t, though.

“I remember being in Peter’s hotel room in Manchester when he told me he was going to leave,” Collins recalls 36 years later. “It didn’t occur to me carry on. But my idea of being a four-piece instrumental band went out of the window pretty much that same day. Tony [Banks, keyboards] and Mike [Rutherford, bassist] said: ‘Don’t be ridiculous. We need a singer, because we’re songwriters.’ They didn’t really sing live, and I’d sung all the back-up vocals. Peter and I had become a sort of… Chas & Dave or whatever, and I’d been his stooge on stage. So it became my job to teach the songs to the guys coming to audition. And I always sounded better than them.”

Who decided that?

“Well, I didn’t. This wasn’t something that had entered my head. A Trick Of The Tail was written, and we went into the studio and still didn’t have anybody. We had one guy that we thought might be okay. He came in to sing Squonk, and it wasn’t good. To give the guy credit, nobody in the band had even asked him what key he preferred, if it was too high. We just wrote the music in the key it sounded best in. It was the same with me after I became the singer. No one ever took any notice of what my range was, I had to make do with whatever we’d written.

“So this poor guy left, and we all looked at each other and I said: ‘Well, let me have a go. I think I might be able to do this one.’ I was going to sing a couple of the lighter songs anyway, but nobody knew if I had the balls to sing the heavier stuff. We did it, and it sounded okay. And one by one we just went through it, ticking the songs off the list. As far as I was concerned we’d finished the album, but we still didn’t have a singer. I figured we’d find someone; the album would come out and it would be what it was. In those days, that was sacrosanct – your record was the Holy Grail. What you did live was… as best you could. So we had another half-hearted attempt at finding a singer, but… “

Guitarist Steve Hackett has said he’d pitched his tent ‘firmly in the Phil camp’, after you’d sung on his Voyage Of The Acolyte solo album (1975), and that he and Jon Anderson of Yes encouraged you at your first wedding.

“I’ve read that my first wife suggested I did it, which is quite possible. I may have gone in and said: ‘Well, I guess I’m going to have to do it, as long as I can find a drummer I like.’ And that’s when Bill Bruford came into the picture. But I don’t think anybody thought I’d be able to pull it off. Least of all me.”

“He had a lovely voice,” Tony Banks says of Collins. “He’d obviously done plenty on previous albums. But we weren’t sure he’d want to do it – he was the drummer, after all. And at the time, he didn’t seem to have… the gravitas. But he sounded great. Which meant we had a more difficult decision, in many ways, regarding the live shows, because now we had to look for a drummer as well. So it was two changes where only one had been needed.”

“It was a tall order to ask somebody with real talent to come in and pick up my odds and ends,” says Collins. “I was playing on the records, and also on stage when I wasn’t singing, so to offer a job as a hired hand isn’t normally going to make a great drummer jump up and down with happiness. Bill had played percussion in Brand X with me. We were rehearsing in Shepherd’s Bush one afternoon and he said: ‘Why don’t you ask me?’ He’d been in this area before [musically], with Yes and King Crimson, so he’d be friendly fire to the fans, but I didn’t think he’d do it. For him it was a transitional period, a holding area. Fantastic drummer, but very stubborn and single-minded. I don’t know how happy a time it was for him, but he did it. Then he left and we found Chester Thompson. Bill got us over the bridge.”

Did you get the sense that Genesis fans wanted you to succeed after Peter Gabriel left?

“Coming from our underdog position, when nobody expected anything, A Trick Of The Tail was a bright light. Yes, they wanted the band to survive. And they preferred that we’d made it work within ourselves.”

Can you remember the first gigs where you were front and centre, in March 1976?

“Vividly!” Collins laughs. “Canada, because it was always strong for us. London, Ontario was the first show, then Kitchener. For me it was: ‘What do I wear? What do I do?’ I had big shoes to fill. I had the goodwill of the audience, but not the security blanket of my drums. Y’know, I could sing, but could I talk? Once we’d got a couple of songs out of the way at the first show, I felt: ‘I can do this.’ But it took me years to take the microphone off the stand. It became my drum kit, to hide behind.”

Your cloak of invisibility?

“Yes. Taking the microphone off its stand was what singers did. I wasn’t ready for that.”

The vocal transition may have worked perfectly, but you were certainly a contrast to Peter Gabriel visually. He’d had such a theatrical persona, whereas you were the definition of unpretentious.

“It wasn’t something I thought about. I do remember saying: ‘Okay, I’ll give it a go, but don’t expect me to put on the costumes.’ Which is funny, as I was the one that had come from an acting background. It wasn’t a conscious decision to not do what Peter did, I just didn’t feel I could pull it off. So I became the guy next door. If you don’t put on costumes, you just stand there and sing. And that’s what I did.”

“In some respects that helped us,” adds Mike Rutherford. “You couldn’t carry on Peter’s mystique. I mean, it’s not in Phil’s nature. With his character on stage, lightening things between the darker songs, it helped the balance of the shows.”

After attending the band’s Hammersmith Odeon gig, Gabriel said: “I felt more at ease than I expected to. Except that I got some twitches during Supper’s Ready. It looked like someone else dressed up in my entrails.”

Collins has recalled: “Peter said: ‘You sing Supper’s Ready and Carpet Crawlers better than I do, but you’ll never sing them like I do.’ I know I sing it better than he does, but when he sings it it’s with more understanding.”

“We were lucky in a way,” remarks Tony Banks. “Despite what anybody might think of it now, The Lamb Lies Down, quite a difficult double album, sold less than [it’s predecessor] Selling England By The Pound. We were in debt. So we were able now [with A Trick Of The Tail] to come out with something more direct. Dance On A Volcano is a very arresting beginning to an album. It gets you in there. Then you have strong choruses like Ripples… It was a good place to be.”

“We’d started writing, and things just happened from the first day,” recalls Rutherford. “After two or three weeks we thought, this feels strong, feels good. It gave us the confidence to carry on. Phil singing happened in a very natural way, no forced pressure. And it wasn’t a whole new persona coming in. The audience liked that he was quite a character, but was one of us, one of them. We knew after half an hour in Canada that this was going to work. You don’t look for change, but when it happens it gives you a restart.”

Thus re-booted, the new Genesis saw A Trick Of The Tail – a winning, well-judged blend of yearning melodies (the title track, Ripples…), poignant narratives (Mad Man Moon), and mesmeric, velveteen sound-beds (Entangled) – sell well on both sides of the Atlantic. Left to their own devices, the quartet had got it very right. The next album, the melancholy Wind And Wuthering, consolidated the new line-up and sound, with tracks like One For The Vine, Your Own Special Way and Afterglow refracting the old, epic grandeur through accessible shapes.

The lyrics on both albums referenced a homeland both recognisable and mythologised – ‘a muddy pitch in Newcastle’, ‘dark and grey, an English film, the Wednesday play/We always watch the Queen on Christmas Day’ – which its residents love/hate. You could still escape into Genesis, but now you’d sometimes glimpse signposts from reality.

“It’s not one of my favourites”, Rutherford says of Wind And Wuthering. “It lacked balls, for me.”

“There’s a character about it,” offers Banks.

Steve Hackett decided it was his final Genesis album, and left the band as the live album, Seconds Out, was being mixed. “I didn’t leave because I was unhappy with the band’s music, I left because I was frustrated in my own ability to create a musical world of my own,” he told journalist David Buckley.

“Sometimes Steve would come in with stuff that we didn’t really like,” admits Collins.

“It was kind of weird, Steve’s leaving,” Rutherford says. “I don’t really know why he did. We were mixing the live album, and Phil passed him in Wardour Street. They nodded, said: ‘Hi. See you in a bit.’ Then Steve didn’t come in like he was meant to. It was an odd moment. A group needs a certain amount of communal energy to get a career on the road. You’ve got to get established before you do other projects outside it.

"Steve had made a move into solo work, which was fine, but he wanted to carry on with that. Not long after, we felt we had got established to the point where we could do solo stuff. So it came to him too early, I suppose. I took on the guitar role. I’m not a lead player of Steve’s calibre but, again, because we’re songwriting-driven, I was probably okay.”

And then there were three…

“Records became very easy to make then,” says Banks. “Although on [the next album] And Then There Were Three I did feel the lack of a guitarist who was fluent, as Mike was still learning at that point. Steve had his own character, which the album missed.”

“I don’t think it’s great,” says Rutherford. Follow You Follow Me turned out rather well, though. A nice little pop song, but not too sugary. I don’t know why it works but it does.”

Released as a single in March 1978, Follow You Follow Me gave Genesis their first UK Top 10 hit, their breakthrough into regular singles radio play.

“That album coincided with my marriage breaking up,” Collins remembers, “so really the writing there went between Tony and Mike. I wrote a few lyrics. I was preoccupied with other parts of my life, nothing to do with music.”

With Genesis now officially hit-makers, the three members felt they could venture securely into solo projects. Soon Banks and Rutherford were releasing albums (Banks first, with A Curious Feeling in ’79, Rutherford with Smallcreep’s Day in ’80; he would also later launch Mike + The Mechanics in ’85), while Collins worked on a little side-project album called Face Value, which opened with an understated song called In The Air Tonight. The songs he wrote were inspired by his divorce, live drums were largely replaced with programmed ones, and he brought in a horn section.

The album, released in 1981, went on to sell five million in the US, and go five-times platinum in the UK and 10-times platinum in Canada. The ‘drummer’s solo project’ became, unexpectedly, an international phenomenon. The shape, scale and feel of Genesis would never be the same.

“The two things cross-fertilised a bit,” explains Banks. “The problem was that having briefly escaped from the feeling that we were Peter’s backing band, suddenly there we were: Phil’s backing band. But I thought, what the hell. It would’ve been very difficult if Phil – or Peter, anyone – had had that kind of success when we were 21, but by then we were more like 31 and it was easier to take. We just went, ah, okay. It changed a lot of things. Phil, in a sense, had been the junior member of the group. By the end of all that stuff everyone was very much equal. I think we all benefited from it. We did get very good at writing hit singles.”

“We were one of the few bands who made it work,” Rutherford says of solo sabbaticals in general. “It probably kept us going a lot longer, because we had a great variety. After you’d been on your own, being responsible for a whole album, it made us appreciate each other. Because we’d been together since we were young men, there weren’t really egos within the band situation. Phil, having had huge solo success, came back to the band as it was before. He should be given more credit.”

Before 1980’s Duke gave Genesis their first No.1 album and Face Value made an unlikely superstar of Collins, there had been this awkward phenomenon called punk rock. It spat and roared that all the old established, indulgent dinosaurs must be swept away to make way for the new, three-minute, three-chord, all-rage anti-aesthetic.

The careers of many of Genesis’s peers suffered, never to fully recover, with musical proficiency labelled showy, and flights fantasy thrown of out with the bombastic bath water. Yet, somehow, Genesis survived again. In fact they grew bigger than ever. Further proof that in the peculiar case of this quietly strange band the normal rules do not apply. How did they avoid being razed to the ground?

“I think we were out of the country,” Rutherford answers blithely. “Because I don’t remember it happening. Of course, I knew it was going on, but I didn’t really feel it. Around ’76/’77 we did a huge tour, and then you don’t really follow England so intensely, or not as much as people who were here all the time. I was aware of it, and it was no bad thing, actually.”

Did it affect your thinking at all?

“By then we were too far down our own musical road. Also, we’d already rather simplified from the likes of Supper’s Ready to shorter songs. We’d made a big change, we’d moved along.”

“We’d adapted, become more straightforward, and that suited the times better,” says Banks. “It felt natural to us not to keep on doing complicated pieces and reprises and all the rest of it.”

“Being on tour such a lot,” says Collins, “we weren’t around to witness punk. We knew what was going on because we read the music papers, but didn’t feel too affected by it. I actually remember thinking, ‘Good – a lot of these bands I don’t like either will just disappear!’ I wasn’t a big fan of most of the bands who suffered anyway.”

Were you aware that you were suddenly proclaimed unfashionable?

“I think we were disliked by some, yes. But it’s like that John Cleese accountant sketch: ‘You’re perfectly boring, you’re perfectly normal, you’re perfectly suited to being an accountant.’ Cleese had an accountant’s meeting the following day, and suddenly realised this had been on television.

So he went to his accountant and said: ‘Did you see the show?’ ‘Oh yes,’ said the accountant. Cleese said: ‘Ah. I’m ever so sorry about that.’ The accountant said: ‘No, not at all. You see, I’m a chartered accountant.’ To me it was like: ‘Oh, they’re not talking about us, they’re talking about those virtuoso bands.’ We write songs, we’re not in that group. Although obviously a certain element of what we did was what they were trying to get rid of.”

As Duke showed, Genesis had done their own, voluntary curtailing and culling in time for the 80s. In fact what had originally been envisaged as a 30-minute suite of songs (including Duchess and hit single Turn It On Again) was separated into individual tracks. Meanwhile, Misunderstanding gave the band their first US Top 20 hit.

“I always say Duke is my favourite,” says Banks. “There’s something optimistic about that album, which I love. The way it starts. Bang! You’re in. That’s when we really gelled as a three-piece.”

“I was out with the mist with Duke,” says Collins, who made up for not being fully focused on its predecessor. “We rehearsed at my house while I was writing Face Value, too. We became more the band we used to be, writing stuff out of thin air, just from a guitar riff or a drum machine pattern or whatever. Working stuff up from scratch. And that became the way we continued. Because by that point I had a solo career.”

Indeed he did. After Duke, every subsequent Genesis album was perceived and judged differently. Phil Collins became one of the best-selling solo artists in the world, but continued to record and tour with Genesis until 1996, 16 years and four albums later. How did he manage to combine the two?

“Well, it’s what I did,” he shrugs. “By this time I was married for the second time and we didn’t have kids, although I had two from my first marriage and they came out on the road with us. On top of all this I got offered things where I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d be sitting at home and the phone would go and it’d be Robert Plant. I was living not far from Eric Clapton, and we became friends through John Martyn. Suddenly he calls me one day and asks me to produce his album. How could I refuse? I was being asked to play by the people I grew up listening to. I’d think: ‘I probably won’t get asked again,’ so…

“There was one year, ’87 I think, when…”

When Genesis became the first band to play four consecutive sold-out nights at Wembley Stadium?

“Yes. We had three weeks off after that tour and then I went on the road with Eric. And, you see, by the time we did a Genesis tour and went around the world and back, I’d feel I could do an album again. Or I’d do the same thing and tour with my album, and then it’d be time for a Genesis record.”

Did the lines between Phil Collins albums and Genesis albums ever get blurred?

“No. The way we’d developed, from Duke onwards, we all had outlets for our individual material. Rather than, say, Tony coming in and us learning his song the way he wanted us to play it, he’d do it as he wanted it done on his own album. Some of my things would never have had so much space if I’d put them in with Genesis. It’s a question of growing up and knowing what you want to do. And in the end I left the band after I’d done the album Both Sides, where I played absolutely everything. Because I thought: ‘I don’t know if I can go back now.’”

The end for Genesis wasn’t nigh yet, though. As if to show there were no hard feelings between frontmen old and new, in 1982 there was a one-off reunion performance with Gabriel and Hackett at a muddy Milton Keynes Bowl, under the moniker Six Of The Best. It was arranged (hastily) to raise funds for Gabriel’s WOMAD project, which was then struggling financially.

Karma thus ensured, Genesis, with Collins now (against all odds) a household name, spent the rest of the 80s growing absurdly big. Abacab (’81), Genesis (’83) and Invisible Touch (’86) outdid each other, before We Can’t Dance (’91) saw the final studio hurrah of the Collins/Banks/Rutherford line-up. The first of those, another UK No.1, was self-produced and another watershed. Recording it, they discarded an entire album’s worth of material as they thought they were becoming, in Rutherford’s words, “a caricature of ourselves”.

With evangelical new-wave-era zeal, they threw out any songs that sounded like anything they’d done before. It firmed up their move towards radio-friendly pop-meets-AOR, although the albums generally still featured concessions to longer-form structures. As Collins had done on Face Value, they used Earth, Wind & Fire’s horn section – an unthinkable move to fans of Genesis albums like, say, Nursery Cryme or The Lamb.

Even the album’s title was the polar opposite of the fantasies-and-fables days of yore. Rutherford told an American radio show: “There were three bits of music in Abacab, and we referred to them as Section A, Section B and Section C. At different times, they were in different order… and at one point it spelled ‘ABACAB’. On the final version, it wasn’t that at all, it’s more like ‘ACCAABBAAC’.”

Rolling Stone magazine praised the band for dropping their “ivory-tower artistry” and embracing “highly rhythmic interplay” and pop hooks, and compared Genesis to The Police and XTC. “Truly modern art rock,” said another review.

Thus the new incarnation was encouraged and confirmed. The music became increasingly clinical, ruthless, effective, 80s. Topical issues were sometimes touched on, and the dreamy meanderings of the past were gone. Genesis (the band members all refer to it as ‘the Mama album’) included Mama (concerning an obsession with a prostitute, and inspired by David Niven’s autobiography), That’s All and Home By The Sea, and was another No.1.

Invisible Touch was by far the biggest album of their career, selling more than 15 million copies worldwide and birthing no less than five US Top 5 hits, with the title track giving them their only No.1 single.

In American Psycho, the serial killer Patrick Bateman calls it their “undisputed masterpiece. It’s an epic meditation on intangibility. It deepens and enriches the meaning of the preceding three albums… Listen to the brilliant ensemble playing… you can practically hear every nuance of every instrument.” Satirist or not, he wasn’t their worst critic. As Collins has said:“In the later years there were people coming to our concerts who didn’t know I played drums.”

After a hiatus, Genesis reconvened in 1991 for their fourteenth – and what would be their final studio album with Collins – We Can’t Dance. “For me,” says the singer, “we sounded really good on that album.” Inevitably it was huge in both the UK and the US. The trio stress again that this wasn’t a case of chart-magnet Collins imposing hits upon the others.

“I can understand why people might assume so,” Banks says, “but it really did come from all three of us. The emphasis changed.

“Once, maybe, Steve and I had wanted to steer it a little more left-field, but after Steve left I lost that bit; I was quite happy. I’d come into the business to write pop songs. When we got it right, when it all fitted together, like on Land Of Confusion I’d feel a sense of satisfaction. And we were still able to do more ambitious pieces, like or Tonight Tonight Tonight. The live show was still perhaps heavier than the records.”

Genesis’s early-90s live album The Way We Walk divided the tracks into separate volumes: ‘the shorts’ and ‘the longs’. It was all a far cry from the trippy days of ‘Me, I’m just a lawnmower, you can tell me by the way I walk…’

When Phil Collins did cut the cord, it was down to geographical, not musical, differences. He recalls: “We met at [manager] Tony Smith’s house and sat round the kitchen table, and I said: ‘Well, I gotta go, guys.’ And they said: ‘Okay, fair enough. We’re surprised you stayed as long as you did.’ Which I thought was fantastic. When they actually announced it, they said: ‘After 25 years, we’ve decided he’s not the right guy.’ They had a wonderful attitude towards the whole thing. Then they said they were going to carry on, and I was pleased as punch, because the music touches so many people who have no control over it.”

It was the end of an era. Did you feel in any way sentimental about it?

“I felt some relief,” says Collins. “You do get into a situation where you’re a slave to the band. ‘Slave’ is probably the wrong word.

“I remember a conversation after my first marriage broke up, and Tony and Mike said: ‘Well if you’d just told us, we’d have cancelled some things.’ And I wouldn’t have thought of that! Because this was our job. I didn’t want to let the guys down. Or the roadies. At the same time, my life had pulled me to Switzerland, and I didn’t see at the time how we could carry on. I was becoming far more independent. The more you find yourself, the harder it becomes to sing other people’s thoughts.”

And you’d had so much validation as a writer at that stage of your career.

“But I’ve always erred on the insecure side, I must admit. That might sound difficult to believe, because I’ve been very lucky with the success rate of what I’ve done. Still, if there’s 100 people in the room and one guy doesn’t like it, I’m more interested in why that guy doesn’t like it than why the other 99 do. So I end up whipping and questioning myself. But I’ve had a charmed life, which Genesis has been a huge part of. We wouldn’t be sitting here talking if it wasn’t for Genesis.”

And so the glory years wound down. There was nothing left to prove, yet Banks and Rutherford brought in Ray Wilson (formerly of Stiltskin) as vocalist, along with other musicians, and released 1997’s Calling All Stations album. Sales were, by Genesis standards, disappointing. And while one imagines nothing would irk Banks and Rutherford more than it being described as a footnote to the Genesis saga, that’s what it was.

“It didn’t do badly, but not as well as one hoped, so it has a slightly tainted feeling with me,” says Banks. “And having to cancel an American tour was frustrating. The audiences that came to shows enjoyed it, but it was difficult to persuade them to come.”

Over the next decade, Genesis reconvened only for various archive box-set launches. In 1999 the ‘classic’ line-up of Collins, Banks, Rutherford, Gabriel and Hackett re-recorded Carpet Crawlers for a compilation. That might have been that. But in 2007 there came the Turn It On Again reunion tour.

At first the idea had been to gather the 70s line-up with Gabriel and Hackett to perform The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. When Gabriel couldn’t commit, Collins, Banks and Rutherford thought it would be more appropriate to bring back Chester Thompson and Daryl Stuermer (who, respectively, had played drums and guitar/bass live with Genesis after Gabriel and Hackett left, right up until Collins left) from the later era. Hackett had no problem with this.

“Peter was actually the one who’d suggested doing The Lamb,” reveals Banks. “We gave that serious thought, because we’d assumed he’d be the difficult one. But then he did become the difficult one. And I can’t blame him. Did he really want to go back into a situation where we all have an opinion? Phil is obviously more used to it, we have an easy relationship.

“It was a lovely tour to do. I enjoyed it. I was sad we didn’t play more in England. We didn’t know where we stood, to be honest. The group always got slightly strange press here, so we played it fairly safe, and played a lot in Germany, where we knew they liked us. It was a very ambitious show, and had to be financed that way.”

“We weren’t sure how it’d sell in England,” agrees Rutherford. “Of course, we should have done more nights at Twickenham. That was a shame. We made a mistake there.”

A free open-air concert at Rome’s historic Circo Massimo drew an immense crowd, estimated at around half-a-million.

“It was a pretty bullet-proof show, even though torrential rain followed us around,” Collins says of that tour. “It sounds corny, but it was fantastic to see parents telling their teenage kids: ‘Now this is a band!’ The fact that it was sold-out everywhere told us we were doing something that people still like to hear and don’t see much of any more. It was hard work, to try to play like you did 30 years ago, on some things. And, basically, that was the tour that fucked me up as a player. I did my neck and my back and my arm. Somewhere, doing the drum duet, something waved a white flag and just gave in. And now I can’t play any more.”

You’re definitely ruled out for good?

“Yes. I’m out of the whole thing. It’s fun to talk about, but I’ve got my kids, and I’ve written a book about Texan history and the Alamo. No, I can’t play now. A year ago, at the Prince’s Trust thing, I did Crossroads with Eric [Clapton] and I just couldn’t hold the sticks well enough. Really, I’ve done it all my life and it’s no surprise I’ve run out of air miles. I remember on stage in LA, at the end of the last show, I told the guys, in front of the audience, that I loved them. It was my way of saying I can’t do any more. We’re great friends, and that’s what’s so nice in the end, when you’ve been with people for such a long time. It’s been a great journey.”

Genesis were inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2010 (Collins, Banks, Rutherford and Hackett attended, Gabriel was in rehearsals for a solo tour). Gabriel and Hackett both released albums in 2011. Rutherford maintains his Mechanics, but “of course I miss it. It was a powerful machine when that band kicked in. Being on stage was the most wonderful feeling.” Banks loves writing, “so if the group’s not available, I do it some other way”. Collins has a place in history, along with Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, as the only musicians ever to sell more than 100 million albums as a solo act and another 100 million as a member of a band.

“What’s wrong with this picture?” he laughs. “Spot the odd one out. I had no idea until Going Back, my last album, came out. And of course that will always stay that way, because records don’t sell those sort of figures any more.”

Does it bother Genesis that they’ve never had the acclaim from the gatekeepers of criticism and cool that they must feel they’ve earned? (Particularly when you consider that there are more than 50 Genesis tribute bands in existence.)

“It’s not a big thing, really,” says Banks. “I am surprised, though, that we’ve slipped into this position – we had a lot of success at one point. No one minds being adored, do they? We didn’t get press, we didn’t get awards. We slip through the cracks somehow. The problem may be, a little, that Phil’s star has done funny things, because of his solo career and life. It’s perhaps affected how people perceive the group. Some people wouldn’t know which were Phil tracks and which were late-Genesis tracks. But those earlier albums are starting to be thought of a little more kindly.

“I can’t complain. I’ve had a fantastic career. And I can be on the Tube, go anywhere, live a totally normal life, so I think I get the best of both worlds. Besides,” he adds, “never being cool meant we never had the problem of suddenly not being cool; we’ve always been just not very cool.”

“Genesis was always a little ahead of the times,” reckons Rutherford. “We just kept changing. And that was good for us, but maybe not for the Grammys. I heard someone refer to Take That as a ‘heritage band’ the other day. I thought: everything’s relative. Also, because of the music’s intensity, people always saw us as rather serious. Actually we had the most amazing fun, a huge laugh, living our lives.”

“We started to get good reviews on the reunion tour,” recollects Collins. “I’d forgotten what that was like! Because, you know, I’ve lived under this umbrella of abuse for many years now. But it feels like a few slates are being wiped clean, credit being given where due. And the body of work will be remembered, not what someone felt at the time. Forty years of Genesis – that’s a lot of music. Bands don’t last that long now because of the media environment. Everything burns out quicker.

“My younger kids have just discovered what dad did. They listen to Genesis in the car. And it’s only when they listen to it that I do. It reminds me of the van breaking down on the way to gigs. Obviously that was in the early days, and not in the last 30 years. It was all experience and it’s all worth remembering."

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 168 (March 2012)

Ian Gillan has undergone a successful procedure in his journey to recovery from the medical emergency that led Deep Purple to postpone the remainder of their European and UK tour dates.

The issue first came to light last week when the rock giants postponed two shows in Germany as Gillan was taken to hospital due to a "medical emergency".

A few days later, they confirmed their upcoming European and UK shows would also need to be shelved. As it stands, scheduled dates in Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Mexico will still go ahead as planned.

Now the 81-year-old vocalist has given an update on his condition, without revealing the exact nature of the health concern.

In a statement posted online, Gillan says: "I had a procedure yesterday which was successful. I now have to rest, in order to make a complete recovery and ensure that I’m as fit as can be before getting back to work.

"Thanks everybody for your patience and understanding. I really do appreciate it and apologise for all the inconvenience. Cheers."

The list of affected dates can be viewed below, along with the currently unaffected shows in Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico.

Deep Purple postponed 2026 tour dates

Nov 03: Dortmund Westfalenhalle, Germany
Nov 04: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Nov 06: Frankfurt Festhalle, Germany
Nov 07: Nuremberg Arena, Germany
Nov 09: Amsterdam Ziggodome, Netherlands
Nov 10: Strasbourg Zenith, France
Nov 12: Bordeaux Arkéa Arena, France
Nov 13: Nantes Zenith, France
Nov 15: Lyon LDLC Arena, France
Nov 18: Newcastle Utilita Arena, UK
Nov 19: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Nov 21: Birmingham BP Pulse Arena, UK
Nov 22: Manchester AO Arena, UK
Nov 24: London Eventim Apollo, UK
Nov 25: London Royal Albert Hall, UK

Deep Purple remaining 2026 tour dates

Dec 05: Sao Paolo Suhai Hall, Brazil
Dec 08: Santiago Movistar Arena, Chile
Dec 10: Buenos Aires Movistar Arena, Argentina
Dec 13: Monterrey Arena Monterrey, Mexico
Dec 16: Guadalajara Arena Guadalajara, Mexico
Dec 19: Mexico City Estadio Fray Nano, Mexico

WWE Superstar Rhea Ripley was hailed as a "frontrunner" for heavy metal when she was welcomed onstage by Motionless In White this week.

Frontman Chris Motionless introduced Ripley during the band's show in Orlando, Florida, on Thursday (November 5) and praised her for everything she has done for his band and for the wider metal genre.

Ripley is known for her metal aesthetic and her excellent taste in music – she pays homage to former Suicide Silence frontman Mitch Lucker’s ‘deathcore stomp’ in her entrance and has had Ash Costello from New Years Day singing her entrance theme.

She also previously told Metal Hammer that she is bordering on being obsessed with Motionless In White - who provide her current theme and have performed it with her at Wrestlemania.

This week the band took the opportunity to share their love for the Australian athlete, and the audience at the Kia Center gave her a rousing reception.

Welcoming her to the stage, Chris Motionless says: "Make some f***ing noise for my hero – her name is Rhea f***ing Ripley This is the real f***ing superstar of the night. Make some God damn noise."

Addressing Ripley, Motionless adds: "Rhea we love you so f***ing much. Thank you for being here to come hang out with us.

"None of us in this room deserve you. Thank you for everything you have done. Not just for Motionlesss In White, but for metal and rock all the way around the world.

"It is because of you that so many people love this s**t. You are a f***ing frontrunner, bringing this f***ing music to so many people around the world."

He then dedicated the track Fight Like Hell – which was inspired by Ripley – to her.

Ripley previously told Metal Hammer: "I love Motionless In White. It’s just their style of music, and I love watching their music videos as well. I get so distracted watching them, sometimes I’ll just play them and I’ll sit there watching them like a movie for hours."

In an earlier Metal Hammer feature, Ripley explained how heavy metal helped her go from being a school misfit to one of pro wrestling's biggest stars.

Arthur Brown has revealed that he was warned off of using his ‘God Of Hellfire’ persona by Charles Manson.

In a career-spanning interview with Classic Rock, the shock rock godfather looks back over the controversy caused by his provocative 1968 single Fire, released under the name The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown.

Brown’s biggest hit, Fire reached No. 1 in the UK and No.2 in the US when it was released in late 1968. The singer, who famously performed the song while wearing a flaming helmet, got his nickname from its opening line: “I am the god of hellfire/And I bring you… fire.” But it also attracted some unwanted attention on both sides of the Atlantic.

“We were doing Fire at one concert in the early days, and some guy suddenly attacked me from the side of the stage,’ recalls the 84-year-old Brown. “The next thing I knew my head was on the keyboard and there was blood pouring out everywhere. But being the God Of Hellfire I jumped up and started singing again. He [the assailant] thought that was brilliant and started shouting: “Arthur Brown! Arthur Brown!”

He continues: ‘At another gig we noticed all these guys going around gathering troops, ready to storm the stage. It ended up with Drachen [Theaker, drummer] turning his cymbal stand upside down and wielding it like a club. While he sat there giving his tough Northern look, I went upstairs and broke the glass containing a double-headed silver fire axe. I returned to the stage in make-up, with my head on fire, waving this axe. At that point they decided they wouldn’t do anything after all.”

But his most unsettling encounter came with a member of the Manson Family, the cult-like followers of Charles Manson. According to Brown, the incident happened at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1968, the year before a group of Manson’s acolytes went on a murder spree in LA, killing seven people, including actress Sharon Tate.

“One of the Manson girls came backstage and said: ‘Charlie’s not happy with you,’” says Brown. “I asked what he objected to, and she went: ‘You’ve got to stop this God Of Hellfire shit!’ I said: ‘“Well, I’m due on stage now. I’ll see you later.’ I never saw her again. But it was a strange encounter. I mean, what do you do with that? Was I supposed to say sorry?”

Read the full interview in the brand new issue of Classic Rock, onsale now. Order it online here.

There's more to Limp Bizkit than red caps, baggy chinos and Wes Borland's bizarre stage make-up.

Around the turn of the millennium, Limp Bizkit were an omnipresent force in the media. Love them or hate them – and, in their pomp, some people really loathed them – they knew how to grab news headlines and had a knack of cramming tons of celebs into their music videos. Fred Durst even appeared as an unlockable playable character in a handful of video games.

But how much do you actually know about this nu metal band?

Get your red thinking caps on and see how many of these questions you can answer correctly...

One of the strangest moments in Nita Strauss’s career as a mother so far came in the middle of a baking-hot day in Las Vegas. The Raiders were in the middle of a game against the Kansas City Chiefs, and Strauss was due to perform with Alice Cooper at the halftime show – her first performance since taking maternity leave from the band early this year. Those stakes are high enough, but being the nursing mother of a months-old baby, she realised she was going to have to pump before she headed out to perform.

“I was in a [nursing] pod pumping, and somebody kept knocking on the door,” she tells Classic Rock. “I finished up, but we had the whole to-do where you get the milk on ice and clean it, so it took me five good minutes to pack everything away and store the milk properly. I came out, and it was a woman with a baby, and she started yelling at me, like, ‘You're in a pod, and you don't even have a baby!’ I showed her the pump, and she was like, ‘Oh.’

"Josh [Villalta, Strauss’ husband and manager] was with me and asked her, ‘What did you think we were doing?’ She said, "I don't know. Maybe trying to make another baby?" It was a funny little lesson learned, like, hey, motherhood looks different for everybody. Everybody's journey is different.”

Strauss is correct that motherhood looks different for everyone. But, arguably, her experience of it looks pretty different to most. As well as returning to the stage with Alice Cooper, Strauss is back playing halftime shows in her role as the LA Rams’ in-house guitarist. She’s spent the last few months getting herself fit for performing again – but not in a “how to bounce back to your Victoria's Secret body” way, she clarifies, but more a “how to nourish and take care of your body and mind in a more ancestral way” – and she’s been practising in preparation for hitting the road again, but this time, with her tiny baby Max in tow.

But Strauss’ pumping anecdote neatly sums up the constant juxtaposition of the seismic and the mundane that is becoming a mother. Your life changes in indescribable, irreversible ways, but the culmination of that is often just making sure your pump parts are clean when you need them, and you always have a decent supply of muslin cloths to hand – even when you’re about to perform to thousands of people.

This juxtaposition is never more clear-cut than when it comes time to return to work. The clichés about what motherhood does to a woman’s body are well worn, but it’s what it does to your brain that’s the really interesting part. A sizeable chunk of yourself is cleaved straight off, replaced by whoever you are in the face of helping this tiny person realise who they’re going to be. People expect the version of you who left work months ago to return intact, but fitting neatly back into your ‘before’ life is basically impossible.

“I learned a term in my postpartum journey, and the term was ‘matrescence’,” says Strauss. “It’s basically the concept that the shift from maiden to mother is like the shift from child to adolescent. Just like you can't tell an angry 13-year-old, ‘Why don't you go back to being a nice 10-year-old?’ you can’t tell someone who's now in motherhood, ‘Why don't you just go back to how you were pre-baby?’

"No. You have to say goodbye. You have to write a love letter to that version of yourself and thank her for the gifts and the blessings and the lessons along the way. And then you have to say goodbye and step into this new era of motherhood, of being this new person. I wish that was a little bit more talked about, because you don't know going into motherhood how fundamentally it's going to change you on so many levels.”

Strauss admits that postpartum life has been tougher than she envisaged. “It's a lot harder than I thought it was going to be; I will be honest about that,” she says. “I was very optimistic about the amount of time that I would have with a baby at home. I had books I was going to read, I had a book I was going to write. I've got an album that I'm working on. Now, of course, we've got a five-month-old velcro baby who won't nap during the day unless he's being held, which means that takes away my writing time.”

Strauss has named another impossible struggle of motherhood: the tussle between wanting to do your own thing, but not wanting to miss a minute with your baby. Luckily, she has at least one element of this sorted.

“Max is my biggest fan and the way that he looks at me when I'm practising is just so euphoric,” she says. “I'll lay a blanket on the floor of his nursery, and I'll sit cross-legged next to him, and I'll run through my solo set, or do my Alice Cooper set, and he will just giggle and coo and laugh and enjoy it. He's never seen anything like this before, and experiencing that from him makes it easy to practice. As long as he's happily watching, then I can get my work done. It's just about finding ways to make it work.”

Being a musician has gifted Strauss some unexpected, but useful, transferable skills when it comes to motherhood.

“Being a touring musician really sets you up well for having a baby and being in the newborn trenches,” she says. “We've been that same kind of dog tired, where you have to get up for lobby call, get on stage, put on a brave face when you've just flown 30 hours to Australia and it's 4:00 in the morning your time, but it's showtime there. It just sets you up well for a 2:00 AM wake-up with the baby.”

Strauss would like to be part of a shift that normalises the concept of a professional life after babies for female musicians. “I think that women are made to feel that if you take your foot off the gas for a second, then your life is over, your career is over, and you may as well just go be a mom,” she says. “I got so many comments like that on social media when I announced I was pregnant – ‘See you later, body, goodbye’, and ‘what a waste that she's going to go be a mom now’. What an insane concept.

"I don't think it needs to be all that different for a guy in a band to have a baby versus a woman in a band. Yeah, biologically it's different, but in terms of coming back [to work], we should normalise it and show women that there's more than one way to have a family and have a career. Motherhood doesn't make you less ambitious. It just gives your ambition a different perspective and a bigger purpose.”

A large part of Strauss’ career so far has revolved around advocating for and inspiring women in what is a fairly male-heavy part of the industry. Now she is mother to a baby boy, the desire to be a strong female role model has grown even greater, to show that little boy – all little boys – that this is not just a man’s world. “It has lit the fire under me even more,” she says. “I was always so excited to show other little girls that it could be done. But now I get to show my son what his mom can do from a front row seat.”

Some of the best parenting advice I ever received was from a friend who told me to “Just love the shit out of your kids. Everything else will work itself out”. This seems similar to the parenting ethos Strauss has picked up, and something she’s considering as life shifts again to one that has to marry the baby bubble and a busy working life. “I don't know everything,” she says. “I don't know how it's going to work, I don't know how every logistical thing is going to happen, but I know that we love this boy. We will always pay attention to him and put his needs first.

“As long as we're doing that, whether it's on a tour bus, whether it's on a bandwagon, whether it's on a plane, whether it's at home, as long as we keep that consistent, I think he'll have a wonderful, full, enriching, fulfilling, fun life.” And, we agree, he’s going to have some pretty killer stories to tell his preschool pals when he gets there.

Nita Strauss plays John 5’s NAMM JAMM on January 29 with Paul Gilbert in Santa Ana, CA, and at this year's Sonic Temple festival in Columbus, OH, on May 14.

Murderdolls, the cult horror-themed glam-punk band formed by late Slipknot drummer-turned-guitarist Joey Jordison and singer Wednesday 13, have revealed that they are reforming to play their first shows in over a decade – and their first since Jordison’s death.

The band are set to play Belgium’s Graspop Metal Meeting on June 18, 2027. “Murderdolls… coming 2027,” said the singer in a social media post, while Jordison’s family confirmed the news in a separate post: “We’re excited to announce that Murderdolls have officially joined the lineup for Graspop Metal Meeting 2027.” They both shared a clip of the band’s classic 2002 song Slit My Wrist.

Murderdolls were formed by Jordison and Wednesday 13 in 2002, after the then-Slipknot drummer recruited former Frankenstein Drag Queens From Planet 13 frontman Wednesday for a new side-project inspired by their shared love of Alice Cooper, the Misfits and ’80s glam metal.

“Joey actually asked me, ‘Do you like Slipknot?’” Wednesday told Metal Hammer in 2013. “I said, ‘Not really’ and he just laughed. He loved it that I didn’t care who he was.”

The band’s debut album, Beyond The Valley Of The Murderdolls, was released in 2002, and they scored a minor hit with a cover of Billy Idol’s White Wedding. Murderdolls went on hiatus after Jordison returned to Slipknot, but reunited in 2010 for a second album, Women And Children Last, before splitting once more the following year.

Jordison died in 2021, a decade after he played his final show with Murderdolls. Wednesday 13 resurrected the band in 2018 without Jordison for a one-off show in tribute to former drummer Ben Graves, who had died earlier that year.

No announcement has been made as to who else will feature in the reunited Murderdolls. The line-up at their last show in 2018 included guitarist Acey Slade and bassist Eric Griffin, who played on Beyond The Valley Of The Murderdolls, plus guitarist Alex Kane and ex-Type O Negative drummer Johnny Kelly.

The brand new issue of Metal Hammer is dedicated to Cliff Burton, the legendary Metallica bassist who died 40 years ago. In this exclusive feature, we speak to Cliff’s pre-Metallica bandmates, friends and music teachers about the birth of the legend.

Cliff Burton was born in Castro Valley, California in 1962. He developed an interest in music when his father Ray introduced him to classical composers and started to take piano lessons. But it was a confluence of circumstances that occurred when he was 13 that funnelled him towards the instrument on which he would so spectacularly make his name.

The first was the tragic death of Cliff’s older brother, Scott, from a cerebral haemorrhage at just 16. “Shortly after Scott died, Cliff came to his mother and me and said, ‘Mom and Dad, I’d like to learn the bass guitar’,” Ray Burton told Alphabetallica. Cliff said he was going to become “the best” bassist in honour of his brother.

The second was a growing friendship with schoolmate Mike Bordin – who would go on to co-found Faith No More – and their joint discovery of more and more types of music.

“It was 1975 and I was sitting in my friend Cliff Burton’s bedroom and he said, ‘Hey man, I’m going to play bass.’ And I said, ‘OK, I’ll play drums.’ It was a total knee-jerk reaction, completely unthought-out,” Mike told Modern Drummer. “A major turning point was when the two of us saw the Sex Pistols at Winterland [in 1978]. Would you have guessed that judging by where Cliff ended up professionally? Maybe you would, but the point is, we were open-minded. We were open to evolution.”

The pair first put together an outfit called Fry By Nyte. Mike described their first ever gig as “pure mayhem!” adding that it was a “totally illegal one in an old movie theatre, with a truckload of booze out back, and zero permits”. They played together for a couple of years before being approached by guitarist Jim Martin, who would also go on to stardom in Faith No More but at that time was playing in a band called EZ-Street, named after a local strip club.

“Our bass player quit, and he told us about Cliff,” Jim told Guitar World in 1992. “We started playing with him and he was already really good, way better than any of the rest of us. And he also looked pretty much the same as he did when he was in Metallica: bellbottoms and huge hair. He knew Puffy [Bordin] and got him to join the band.”

Around that time, Cliff, who was ever eager to improve his craft, started looking for a capable bass teacher. Supported by his parents, he tried two and rejected both because they couldn’t teach him anything. The third he tried was Steve Doherty.

“I’m a jazz player. I know nothing about the world of metal,” Steve tells Hammer today, as he recalls his most famous pupil. “And because I had classical training, it was fun for me because I could go in and see where the strengths and weaknesses were. It’s like being a detective rather than, ‘Now turn the page and play this scale.’ Having said that, we worked on technique and being able to get the ideas that you want out of the instrument.”

The teacher encouraged his student to learn to read sheet music. He taught him about the Baroque melodies of Bach and odd timing meters that went from jazz composer Dave Brubeck right back to Tchaikovsky.

“It was fun because with so many students it’d be, ‘Did you practise this week?’ ‘Well, I had this and I had that…’” says Steve. “Cliff came fully prepared, full of questions.”

EZ-Street gave Cliff the chance to do what he loved, playing shows with those windmilling skinny arms and curtain of hair, playing a combination of covers and the odd original. When the band eventually floundered sometime in early 1981, Cliff went on to study classical music and music theory at Chabot College. He joined another band with Jim Martin, an instrumental three-piece called Agents Of Misfortune, and also frequently jammed with other local musicians.

“Castro Valley was very well known for big house parties with live music,” recalls Mike Overton, who would play guitar alongside Cliff Burton in his first professional band, Trauma. “There was a place called Judd’s Barn and hauling your Marshall up the dirt road wasn’t fun, but the place was just amazing. Cliff was a mainstay on the bass during those jams.”

Cliff agreed to join Trauma at a house party in the summer of 1981, but said that he was going to perform at a Battle Of The Bands event with Agents Of Misfortune first. Despite boasting future members of what would become two of the biggest bands in the world, they didn’t exactly wow the panel.

“They gave us 12 minutes to play a few songs and we just played the same one for 12 minutes. We threw things into a huge, vicious turmoil,” Jim Martin said in Faith No More biography The Real Story.

“The looks on the judges’ faces when they came out playing that were just, like, shock and awe,” Mike Overton says with a laugh. “Most of us were going, ‘Man, that stuff sounds great. It’s so progressive and out of the box.’ But the judges were looking for the next Journey.”

Mike describes Cliff as his “stage buddy” but found his skills a little challenging at first.

“We actually battled a little bit in the beginning because he was playing way too much stuff, and I was just confused,” he laughs. “Cliff was all over the place, but it fit. I really had to learn a little bit in those few months we were playing and practising.”

Trauma started making a name for themselves on the tight-knit local metal scene but also had an eye on expansion. In 1982, Brian Slagel, founder of Metal Blade Records, had put out a compilation of underground metal bands called Metal Massacre, featuring Metallica’s first professional outing with Hit The Lights. He found himself inundated with demos, including one from Trauma, and included the band on the sequel. He also went to watch them play a Los Angeles showcase at The Troubadour.

“Within 30 seconds I realised that the band was OK but this bass player they had was just incredible,” Brian says today. “You know, he was Cliff Burton. He was in the denim with the big, wavy hair and the bass and going crazy onstage. I spent the whole show staring at him pretty much.”

In late ’82, Lars Ulrich told Brian that his band were looking to replace their then-bassist, Ron McGovney. He immediately suggested Cliff Burton. They went to watch him in action when Trauma next came to town and later offered him the role, which he accepted – on the condition they moved from their native LA to the Bay Area. So keen were Metallica to have Cliff in the band that they agreed without hesitation.

Then-Metallica guitarist Dave Mustaine later expressed regret about the way that it all went down, comparing poaching bandmembers to being “a homewrecker”. But for Trauma’s Mike Overton, there was no bad blood over the move on his band’s part.

“The other guys in Trauma were getting more into the lighter stuff, so I wasn’t upset,” he says of Cliff’s depature. “In fact, the first show Metallica did with Cliff, he put me on the guest list, and I’m sitting there going, ‘Oh my gosh.’ I was blown away with the raw power. I missed my stage buddy but I think it’s clear he made the right decision.”

His intuition was right. Metallica were the band Cliff Burton needed. And Cliff Burton was definitely the man Metallica needed.

The annual Cliff Burton Day takes place on February 10, 2026 at the Chabot Theater in his hometown of Castro Valley, California.

The brand new issue of Metal Hammer, featuring a tribute to Cliff Burton, is onsale now. Order it online here.

If ever there was a song made for Steven Tyler to climb on top of a grand piano to, it’s Dream On. Aerosmith’s 1973 debut single was at the heart of the Boston band’s six-song mini-sets at their two Hollywood Bowl comeback shows. And there was Tyler, 78 years young, standing astride his white piano with the fearlessness of someone a third of his age as guest drummer Dave Grohl added just a little too much mustard behind him.

Kiss will disagree, but Aerosmith were America’s greatest rock’n’roll band. The run of albums they made between 1973’s self-titled debut and 1978’s clammy, spiral-eyed Draw The Line positioned them as a homegrown Rolling Stones, their riffs filthier than a used hypodermic, their auras vibrating with malevolent juju.

Yet one of their greatest artistic contributions is also their most overlooked. With their 1973 debut single Dream On, Aerosmith inadvertently bequeathed the Great American Power Ballad to the world. This whisper-to-a-scream showstopper brought Broadway dynamics to hard rock and nailed the bad-boys-with-sad-faces trope that guitar bands, rappers and X Factor contestants alike would subsequently exploit whenever they needed a guaranteed heartstring-tugging hit.

That it was written by Steven Tyler, a man who once bragged that he had snorted Colombia and probably wasn’t exaggerating, isn’t as surprising as it sounds. The singer came from a musical family. His Italian grandfather, Giovanni Tallarico, had been a classical cellist, and his father, Victor, was a Juilliard-educated pianist. He may have pushed back against classical music when he discovered rock’n’roll, but it stayed in him.

The beginnings of Dream On predate Aerosmith, who got together in Boston in 1970. “The music for Dream On was originally written on a Steinway upright piano in the living room of Trow-Rico Lodge in Sunapee, maybe four years before Aerosmith even started,” Tyler said in Stephen Davis’ 1997 ’Smiths biography Walk This Way, referring to the resort his family owned in New Hampshire. “I was seventeen or eighteen… It was just this little thing I was playing, and I never dreamed it would end up as a real song or anything.”

Tyler did most of the heavy lifting when it came to songwriting in their early days, and one of the tracks he brought to the band was the song he’d started more than half a decade earlier on his parents’ Steinway piano. He fleshed it out on an RMI keyboard he always claimed to have bought with $2000 he’d found in a suitcase left outside the band’s apartment, which may or may not have been drug money (the story goes that money’s original owners apparently burst into the apartment brandishing guns and demanding their property back before being tackled by the band’s neighbour, an ex-Marine).

Tyler knew the song was promising, but it was only when he workshopped it with Perry and fellow guitarist Brad Whitford that he realised how special it was. “When I transposed it to guitar, Joe played the right fingers and Brad played the left hand on guitar,” the singer recalled. “Sitting there working it out on guitar and piano I got a little melodramatic. The song was so good it brought a tear to my eye.”

Just as the music was at right angles to the crackling, Yardbirds-indebted boogie-blues that made up the rest of their early sets, so Tyler’s lyrics swerved the lip-flapping, sexually-charged jive-talk. “Every time that I look in the mirror/All these lines on my face getting clearer,” sang the frontman, a world-weary early 20-something worrying about the passage of time he’d yet to experience. The song ended with Tyler repeating the phrase that gave it its title, an exhortation to believe himself: “Dream on, dream on, dream until your dreams come true.”

“It’s about hunger to be somebody,” he said. “This song sums up the shit you put up with when you’re in a new band.”

Joe Perry wasn’t as convinced by Dream On as Tyler, but he knew it would be good for his band. “To me, rock’n’roll’s about energy and putting on a show,” he told Classic Rock in 2002. “I didn’t really appreciate the musicality of it until later, but I did know it was a great song, so we put it in our set.”

It was a shoo-in for Aerosmith’s self-titled debut album, recorded at Boston’s Intermedia Studios in late 1972. When it came to laying down his big ballad, Tyler opted for a little chemical assistance. “I put the string section on Dream On sitting at this Mellotron while a friend of mine kept laying out lines of crystal THC that I was snorting while I was playing,” he said in Walk This Way.

The finished song still sounds terrific today. The decorative, weirdly medieval-sounding opening soon breaks out into something much grander, as Tyler’s old-beyond-his-years weariness is overtaken by hope, or at least the anticipation of it. The strangulated croak he adopted for the rest of the album is dialled back here. Instead, the song’s feverish climax is a teaser of what was to come: the Demon Of Screamin’ is in the house.

Aerosmith shimmied onto the shelves in January 1973, with Dream On released as a single in June. The song reached an underwhelming No.59 first time around, but it was a different story three years later, when it was re-released on the back of the success of their third album, Toys In The Attic. (’73 really was Year Zero for the power ballad – Styx’s superhumanly soppy Lady followed Dream On out of the gate a few months later, though it likewise took a couple of years to become a national hit).

Of course, Aerosmith knew they were onto a winner right away. The big tearjerker would become part of their arsenal, and everyone else’s too – no self-respecting rock band through the late ’70s and beyond could resist turning up the dial marked ‘emotion’ to show just how vulnerable they really were underneath it all. It wasn’t just hair-swishing dudes either – Eminem sampled it on his 2002 song Sing For The Moment, you could throw a stone at a random crowd and probably hit an American Idol singer who performed it on the show, and it was memed to high heaven a few years ago when it soundtracked a clip from the God Of War video game (You can’t say the same about Lady. Sorry Styx).

Just as they inadvertently created the Great American Power Ballad, so Aerosmith themselves killed it with 1999’s I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing, a Diane Warren song so ridiculously, meteor-destroyingly over-the-top that no one else could follow it. But the original remains the most significant – a message from the young, (comparatively) innocent Aerosmith to their older selves, with little knowledge of the wild, crazy turns their lives would take in between.

“When I wrote Dream On, I went, ‘Where did this come from?’” Tyler told Rolling Stone in 1994. “I didn’t question it. When I read the lyrics back now, for a guy who was stoned, stupid and dribbling, I got something out of there.”

Founding Type O Negative guitarist Kenny Hickey has explained why the leading goth metal band have yet to reunite without late bassist/singer Peter Steele.

Talking to the HardLore podcast, Hickey says that getting back together would be “such a large undertaking”. He also questions who would have both the vocal prowess and bass-playing skills to step in for Steele, who died of sepsis caused by diverticulitis at the age of 48 in April 2010.

“We got offered one show for a lot of money,” the guitarist states (via Blabbermouth). “We couldn’t do one show for a lot of money. It’s such a large undertaking. It would have to be a lot of shows for a lot of money.

“To get the band back together, to figure the music out again, to get a visual going for the show, everything you would need, find a guy that can pull [Steele’s vocals] off with taste, never mind his bass playing.”

He adds “never say never”, but remains unsure of whether a tribute show would prove “viable”.

Type O’s original lineup – Steele, Hickey, keyboardist Josh Silver and drummer Sal Abruscato – were childhood friends before founding the band in 1989. Drummer Johnny Kelly replaced Abruscato in 1993. The band split almost immediately after Steele’s death. Kelly told Sweden’s TV4 in 2011: “Even if there is somebody who could take his place it wouldn’t matter … when Peter died, Type O Negative died with him.”

Type O released seven albums together, starting with 1991’s Slow, Deep And Hard and concluding with 2007’s Dead Again. 1993’s Bloody Kisses, which featured the enduring singles Christian Woman and Black No.1 (Little Miss Scare-All), has been certified Platinum in the US, and 1996’s October Rust has been certified Gold in the same market.

Bands inspired by Type O Negative include Lacuna Coil, Swallow The Sun, Pallbearer and Hangman’s Chair. Talking to Metal Hammer in 2023, Brujeria and Alekhine’s Gun vocalist, and Orange Is The New Black actor, Jessica Pimentel remembered Steele as a “a very sensitive, deep guy”.

“To me, he was a big brother-type person and talked me through a very hard time in my life,” she added. “I was a lonely, depressed kid and I think he identified that. He made mixtapes for me and stuff. You might expect him to be a jerk or a womaniser but, if he was, I never saw that side of him.”

Hickey and Kelly now play together in the doom band Silvertomb. The five-piece release their second album, The Interpretation Of Nightmares, next week via Steamhammer. Meanwhile, Abruscato fronts rockers A Pale Horse Named Death

Steven Wilson wrote a set of rules for his band before they recorded new album Requiem For A Village, in a bid to avoid what he describes as “vanilla prog” appearing on the record.

In February he told Prog of the follow-up to The Overview: “I decided I wanted to remain in the realm of the conceptual and large scale, but I want to get back to a more quirky musical vocabulary. I’m very keen on keeping the little quirks and imperfections.”

In a more recent Prog interview he explained his ninth solo release – featuring contributions by XTC’s Andy Partridge and actor David Tennant – contains “moments when harmonies, intervals and notes occur that most trained musicians would find offensive, which I love the idea of.”

Now Wilson tells Now Spinning: “First of all was the idea of embracing dissonance, and instruments not being in tune. One of the rules I had with Randy, my guitar player, was: ‘you play the guitar as you find it. If we come into the studio in the morning and the guitar’s drifted out of tune, you’re not allowed to tune it.’”

He notes: “Most guitar players, if you said that to them, they’d just storm out in disgust and resign on the spot! But I think Randy got it.”

He continues: “The other aspect was playing instruments that I don’t normally play – or that I can’t play; approaching an instrument in the way a child approached an instrument. What does a child to when presented with a piano? Just makes a noise!

“There’s a lot of that on this record. I play violin – I can’t play violin! But I found something interesting to do on it. I play drums; I can’t play drums! Ditto on oboe, ditto on other things. It’s that Eno thing of embracing limitations, imperfections and the unexpected.”

Wilson expresses a continued desire to explore his own themes rather than doing what might be expected of him. “There’s always going to be a market for what you might call ‘vanilla prog rock,’” he says, “and there are bands out there doing that very well – bands that make records that Genesis might have made in 1973.

“And that’s fine. I don’t wish to be patronising about that. I made a record like that with The Raven – it was my homage to a 70s prog rock record. But it was a one-off for me. I’m more interested in creating my own music palette and vocabulary, and put them together in a way that doesn’t sound like a hotch-potch but sounds seemlessly, organically hopefully very creative.”

While Requiem started out as a standalone work, he confirms: “I’ve talked with Andy about maybe there being a sequel to this record – in true prog rock style! We’ve created this really fascinating world, and I think there’s potentially more to be said with the village concept.

“When you describe it to people, there’s a temptation to imagine it’s this very all-over-the-place incohesive bolting together genres that shouldn’t go together. it isn’t that at all. It feels like a Steven Wilson record; at least I hope so.

“I’m not self-consciously putting these things together – I just like these things and I think it’s interesting to put them together, and not to overthink it in a way.”

Requiem For A Village is on sale now.

Over the course of his career, U2 frontman Bono has put a serious shift in when it comes to using his platform to advocate for those far less fortunate.

He has campaigned to end extreme poverty and preventable disease with the ONE Campaign, raised funds to fight AIDS in Africa with (RED) and has lobbied politicians in the US to support funding for HIV/AIDS treatment.

Ahead of the release of the band's new album Carnaval de Luz, Bono told The Guardian that his confidence is low when it comes to shifting the dial with the Trump administration.

“There’s a permission you need to feel to do a certain task and if you feel it spiritually," says Bono. "You feel like: I think I might be able to help here.

“I have been invited [by the Trump administration], but I know I’m not up to that, I don’t have the ability to negotiate [with them], it’s too much. Maybe just leave that to someone else. I don’t feel … the leading, is that the word? That thing where you think you know what to do.”

The story recalls his successful negotiations with Republican senator Jesse Helms – whom the paper describes as "a virulent homophobe" – to agree to help fund the fight against AIDS. But now, today's Republicans appear to have a more rigid stance on such endeavors, initially freezing the funding for USAID and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2025.

“It’s a new world," he admits. "This is different. There’s a whiff, there’s a honk, and we’re all just trying to discern it. There’s a brand new dance and we do know its name. It’s a little… fascistic. And it needs a different response.”

Carnaval de Luz, the follow-up to 2023's Songs Of Surrender will be released on November 13, and is available to pre-order now.

The band have announced details of a world tour, dubbed The Greatest Show on Earth, which begins in Mexico City on February 23, 2027.

Find U2 tickets here.

Geoff Downes says he felt lost after the death of Asia bandmate John Wetton, calling him the best collaborator he’d ever had.

Wetton died in 2017 while work was underway on the follow-up to 2014’s Gravitas. The pair had been developing a suite, now titled Tattoo Indigo, which has finally found a home in new Asia album Indigo.

“We had been working on another album after we released Gravitas – the last album that I made with John,” Downes tells Glide. “Around 2015 and 2016, Tattoo Indigo was pretty much in the making – but sadly we never got to finish it because John got sick with cancer and then passed away.

“I lost my greatest writing partner of all time. I didn’t know what to do with this unfinished track after the loss of John. When we had the opportunity to record this album with the new lineup, I thought the track shouldn’t be locked away in a box for ever.”

Downes dug out the files and took them to new Asia member Harry Whitley, who’s taken Wetton’s place on bass and vocals. “I think John would have been proud that I actually did get it together and finished it,” he adds.

He accepts the track has a 70s feel, with references that could include Uriah Heep and ELP. “The middle section has a mix of The Moody Blues and The Beatles nostalgia,” he adds.

“John Mitchell did a great job on the guitar ending. He was in John Wetton’s solo band for quite some time. When it came time to put Asia back together again a few years ago for a John Wetton tribute show, John Mitchell was my first choice as a guitarist because he knew our music.”

Indigo features guest appearances by former member Steve Howe and Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy, and also includes another of Wetton’s unfinished collaboratons. Prog said of the record: The fact that it works so convincingly is testament to the quality of Asia’s current incarnation.”

Indigo is on sale now.

2026 is on its last legs. Thankfully. It's been a long old year, but with just two months left to go - and some of that will be eaten by the holiday period - we're starting to cast our eyes ahead to what might come next year. Festivals aplenty have already started announcing (Bloodstock and Wacken got in early, but we've also had Sonic Temple, Welcome To Rockville, 2000 Trees and Mystic dropping their line-ups), meaning the time is right to discover some wicked new music.

That in mind, here are the results of last week's vote. NWOBHM legends Saxon landed third place with their tale of the Gorgon Medusa, while newcomers Wulfgang took a healthy second place with their second single You Mean Nothing To Me. The overall winners for the week though were France's Sunborn, proving that people haven't yet tired of the Sleep Token-induced wave of masked genre-mashers whilst adding their own fine entry to the canon with Silent Attraction.

We've got a mix of established bands and newcomers for you to dive into this week, as we bring new singles from Sabaton, Death Angel, Distant, Charlotte Wessels, Comeback Kid and more. We've also finally got the debut single for Burn Eternal, the new band that reunites Adam D and Howard Jones, plus a few new discoveries for you to stick your teeth into. Let us know which songs excite you most by voting in the poll below, and use the comments to suggest any bands we should be keeping eyes out for. Have a great weekend!

Burn Eternal - Wounds I’ve Made

It feels like an age has passed since Howard Jones and Adam Dutkiewicz announced they were working on new music together. It's wild to think that almost 20 years have passed since Howard's last record in Killswitch, but the magic is clearly still there in Burn Eternal as the pair fall on old habits of making emotionally driven, riffy metalcore which makes great use of Howard's powerful voice. Burn Eternal's self-titled debut is due February 26.

Death Angel - The Never Was

Death Angel have had their eyes firmly locked on the past for most of this year, looking back at 1990's Act III for tour dates across America and Europe. That hasn't stopped them cranking the dials for new music though, and The Never Was maintains the thrash revivalist energies of the group's 2010s output. It doesn't have the funky low-end of their initial comeback albums but if you're in the market for speed and old school thrash, Death Angel are bringing the goods.

Charlotte Wessels - Incubus

Seems we can't go a week without a symphonic metal icon popping up lately, but when the music is this good, we can hardly complain. Charlotte Wessels is really coming into her own with her band The Obsession and new single Incubus has the familiar not-quite power metal melodies alongside some impressively technical guitars, Wessels' voice soaring atop it all to make the whole song feel epic and fantastical. New album Mute Swan Empire is due February 5.

Sabaton - Berserker

Not-quite power metal? Best to break out the big guns then. Sabaton will be back on the road in 2027 for the next leg of the Legends tour, and the Swedish band have just announced an expanded edition of that album for a March 5 release, commemorating the fact by going full Amon Amarth (thematically at least, though that's definitely a tour we'd love to see). If you've followed Sabaton for a while, you know exactly what to expect with Berserker, but if you've not prepare to be swept away in hale, chest-beating anthemia ripped right from the pages of classic heavy metal.

Cult Of Luna - Sadness Will Reign (ft. Joe Duplantier)

Sticking within the Swedish borders, Cult Of Luna have this week released new album In The Shadow Of Your Shadow. The post-metal giants have celebrated with the release of Sadness Will Reign, a thundering song that features guest contributions from Gojira's Joe Duplantier, and some surprisingly jazzy sax backing against their usual crashing-monolith of riffs. You can also catch the band at Damnation Festival this weekend (if you're in the UK, at least), which is always a bonus.

Raised By Owls - My Optician Called Me A Poser Because I Couldn’t Read The Sanguisugabogg Logo

After all that emotional heft, it can't hurt to have something utterly fucking daft. Raised By Owls have become masters of the online skit, and their satirical death metal gets hookier by the day. There will doubtless be purists who get pissed off by the UK band's prodding of the metal world, but its done with such clear love and devotion we reckon you're best just cranking it up and enjoying the fact we're all in on the joke.

Comeback Kid - Shedding Season (ft. Courtney LaPlante)

Another new record loosed into the world this week, Comeback Kid prove reliable as ever on Chosen Hell. New single Shedding Season is a typical pinball of fleshy hardcore violence, stomping and bounding off the walls, the Canadians flexing by getting Spiritbox's Courtney LaPlante on to provide guest vox.

Future Static - State Of Mind

Sometimes a voice just grabs you by the ears and drives your face through a wall. That's where we're at with Future Static's State Of Mind, the track's impressively clattering, rampaging riffs somehow fading into the background against some serious throat-acrobatics from singer Amariah Cook, who really puts her voice through its paces on a track that is both brutal and agonisingly harsh, and sublimely melodic at points. Their new album Ornaments & Memories is out today.

Everdawn - Illusionist

Symphonic power metal has generally been more of a European and Japanese phenomenon than something that's caught on in the States. But alongside a few other North American groups like Unleash The Archers and Seven Spires, Everdawn are helping to shift that perception. New single Illusionist is a powerhouse of sublime guitar work and stirring melodies, spelling exciting things ahead for new studio album Kalli on January 15.

Shevils - The Force Of Water

Hailing from Norway, Shevils generally deal in high-octane hardcore. But there's a tinge of their county's biggest metal export on The Force Of Water, the group exploding into a blackened frenzy that brings to mind the likes of Harakiri For The Sky or Svalbard in its incorporation of melody and black metal bluster. The group's new album Sect Resurrection is coming February 19, and clearly they're pushing their sonic boundaries if these recent singles are anything to go by.

Mike Batt paid affectionate tribute to session drummer Clem Cattini, a frequent colleague, who died on November 2 at the age of 89.

Cattini’s impressive list of credits included Paul McCartney, The Kinks, Jeff Beck, Lou Reed, The Yardbirds, Roy Harper, Brian Auger, Justin Hayward and many others – but Batt, naturally, focused on his own experiences with kids’ TV stars The Wombles, which he turned into a successful 70s novelty band.

In his social media elegy Batt – composer, conductor, and also creator of Bright Eyes, a song forever associated with Art Garfunkel and 1978 film Watership Down – looked back fondly on a time when music production had different values, and hailed Cattini for rising above them. “In the days before you could dial up any one of thousands of kick-drum and snare samples, you needed a session drummer who had a solid, strong right foot, a kit tuned to perfection and inbuilt, rock steady timing,” he said.

“Enter Clem Cattini, when I was an 18-year-old singer/arranger/producer with no hits yet but lots of hopes. I’d never heard of him. After one session, I insisted for years thereafter on working only when this busiest of drummers was available. If Clem couldn’t make the session, we shifted the date until he could.”

Batt hinted at an amount of envy: “The session boys were the rich ones, doing a jingle at 8am, then three pop sessions 10-1, 2-5, 6-9, and most of what they brilliantly played on did badly-to-ok. But of course, they played on the hits too.

“We scruffy young producers would get the tube back to our bedsits while the top session guys drove home in their BMWs to their plush pads. Hard-working is what they were, the really good ones. The ones everyone wanted. A small club of elites.”

Cattini played on most of Batt’s hits, including his Wombles material, but the songwriter regreatted that the drummer had been “far too busy playing sessions to come on Top Of The Pops in the 70s – just as he’d been too busy to have lunch to be recruited as the drummer of Led Zeppelin.

“But when in later life, drum machines had been invented and there was less studio work, he did accept my invitation to join us as a Womble when we revived the band in the 90s, scoring two re-entry hits for Underground Overground and Remember You’re A Womble.”

Batt recalled: “He loved it. I can still picture him sitting in the BBC TV Centre dressing room, his Bungo head off and his Clem face sticking out, having a cup of BBC machine tea in a plastic cup while my mum fussed about, adjusting his Womble feet. Fucking funny times, they were. Excuse the word ‘funny.’”

In September, Batt defended his Wombles work against an online troll who tried to play down their success. Responding to Batt’s criticism of the Eurovision Song Contest as a “dismal clown show,” a user commented: “Dude, you wrote Remember You’re A Womble.”

Batt replied: “I did. And it’s a banger. Now fuck off.”

Former Nightwish singer Floor Jansen has likened her recent split with the Finnish symphonic metal titans to a broken relationship.

Talking to NU.nl, the Dutch vocalist, who parted ways with the band last month after 14 years of service, says that she and her ex-cohorts could no longer navigate “difficult periods” together and couldn’t be the live act fans would want to see.

“I compare it to a relationship,” the 45-year-old explains (translated from Dutch via Google Translate). “You experience ups and downs together, and in one period you grow closer to each other, and then afterwards there is more distance again. But sometimes it just doesn’t work anymore.”

She adds: “We had to make sure that, as soon as we stood on stage together, we were once again the band everyone came to see. If that is no longer possible and you can no longer get through the more difficult periods together, then it is over. That is not a decision taken lightly, and I certainly didn’t make it lightly.”

Nightwish announced in 2023 that they would be going on a hiatus from live shows for the foreseeable future. The dry spell was attributed to personal reasons. Jansen’s exit was announced in a statement from the band on October 15, who stated that the parting was an amicable mutual decision.

Jansen issued her own statement later that day, thanking the fans for their support and saying “I believe there is a bright musical journey ahead of me”. A replacement singer has not yet been announced, but the band are currently working on the follow-up to their 2024 album (and Jansen’s swansong) Yesterwynde.

Jansen joined Nightwish as a live member in 2012, replacing Anete Olzen, and became a full-time addition to the lineup the following year. She sang on three albums with the band: Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2015), Human II Nature (2020) and Yesterwynde.

Jansen started a solo career in 2023 with her album Paragon and will return in January with its follow-up Hytress. The singles Run, Bring Me Silence and Everything Is Moving On are now streaming.

The singer will get back on the stage with her solo band in the New Year. A European tour will kick off on January 14 at Trix in Antwerp, Belgium, and wrap up on February 13 at Poppodium 013 in Tilburg, Netherlands. A South American tour is in place for April and May. See details and get tickets via her website.

Meanwhile, Nightwish have no live dates announced, but founding keyboardist and songwriter Tumoas Holopainen has hinted at a live comeback for 2028.

Former Eurovision finalist Sam Ryder has spoken about how Iron Maiden changed his life.

The Space Man singer, who represented the UK at the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest and came second in the grand final, discusses his love for the heavy metal band while competing on BBC programme Celebrity Race Around The World on Wednesday.

After spotting a passerby in Indonesia wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt, he explains how the band’s 1988 UK chart-topping album Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son made him fall “in love with music”.

“I went to a Catholic school,” says Ryder. “We were on a school trip to a nunnery, and I got on a bus, and on the floor was a CD. It was facing shiny side up. I turned it over: it’s Iron Maiden, Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son. As soon as I heard that, I was like, this is it! That’s when I fell in love with music. Fate put Iron Maiden into my life and it changed my world.”

He adds that he’s seen the band live 15 times.

Ryder, also known for his performances as the title character in West End musical Jesus Christ Superstar this year, has made no secret of his love for rock’n’roll. Talking to Classic Rock in 2023, he called Maiden’s Seventh Son… the greatest album of all time.

“I put it in my Walkman [after picking the CD up from the schoolbus floor], but nothing would play because it was so beaten up apart from one song, The Evil That Men Do,” he recalled. “I was blown away; the melody, the galloping, the power, the passion… I was an Iron Maiden convert from that day.”

On top of that, in 2022, Ryder sang a stirring rendition of Queen’s Somebody To Love with Brian May, Roger Taylor and Foo Fighters during a tribute show to the Foos’ late drummer Taylor Hawkins at Wembley Stadium. Ryder reunited with May the following year on the singer’s single Fought & Lost.

Celebrity Race Across The World is a reality TV game show where celebrities have to compete in travelling from one destination to another. It’s currently in its fourth series, where participants, who get to double up with a companion of their choice, must travel from Kuching, Malaysia to Melbourne, Australia.

Ryder is buddied up with his best friend and tour manager, Kaz. Other contestants include fellow English singer Ella Eyre, TV presenter Jeff Stelling and media personality Princess Andre. The show’s next episode will air via BBC One and iPlayer on Wednesday, November 11, at 8pm UK.

Meanwhile, Maiden are gearing up to bring their 50th-anniversary Run For Your Lives world tour to Australia and New Zealand, starting with shows at Spark Arena in Auckland on Saturday and Sunday. The tour will wrap up with a North American leg in the spring. See their schedule and get tickets via their website.

Tom Morello says that despite the Democrats' victory in the US midterm elections, the "real work starts now" if US citizens are to live in a "more just, more peaceful, more equitable world."

Following the elections earlier this week, the Democrats have now taken control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. This spells disaster for President Donald Trump, who will face difficulties in passing conservative policies or legislation.

In an Instagram post, the Rage Against The Machine guitarist, whose political views could be best described as radical left-wing, anti-capitalist, socialist, and anti-fascist, says the midterm results are a firm rejection of "all of Trump’s wannabe Nazi bitches" and Trumpism in general.

He said (as transcribed by ThePRP): “Last night’s election results were only the start. Sure, it was a repudiation of the ruling class, a repudiation of oligarchy, a repudiation of racism, a repudiation of ICE, a repudiation of wars overseas, a repudiation of our tax dollars being used to massacre children overseas rather than to serve our communities here. To serve our hospitals. To serve our schools. To serve our needy here.

"It was a repudiation of all of Trump’s wannabe Nazi bitches. It was a repudiation of Trumpism generally, and that’s all a good thing. But the real work starts now. Yes, the voting is done. But the day after the election it’s up to every one of us to continue to fight for the world we really want without compromise, without apology, and to not let those sons of bitches off the hook.

"Those that are in Washington, and on a daily basis, in our lives, in our schools, in our places of work; to continue to work and fight and organize for a more just, for a more peaceful, more equitable world. That is the job before us. Power to the people.”

Tom Morello's new album, Everyone Gets Everything They Want, is out now via Mom + Pop Music.

Rock’n’roll has always belonged to artists who do things on their own terms, and Rory Gallagher was definitely one such character. This issue we look back at the life and work of the Irish guitarist who built a massive global audience through constant touring, magical stagecraft, a check shirt and a worn Fender Strat.

The new issue coincides with a brand new biography of Rory, written by his brother, manager and closest confidant Dónal alongside CR’s sister magazine Guitarist’s Ed-In-Chief Jamie Dickson. We also have some book extracts and some unexpected tales of on-the-road shenanigans along the way.

A similar independent streak shows up throughout the rest of this issue. For The Classic Rock Interview, we talk with Arthur Brown, who reflects on his incredible (and very long!) career. Heart’s Ann Wilson discusses her new project, while Nicko McBrain reflects on five decades behind the kit and life after Iron Maiden. We also catch up with Asia, talk to Sheryl Crow, get the lowdown from Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats and so much more!

• Get the new issue of Classic Rock

Features

Rory Gallagher
No hits, no hype, no compromise: inside the life of the late shy perfectionist who conquered the rock world on his own terms. Plus: the essential Rory tracks.

Asia
They never held a settled line-up together for very long. Now they’re back with more new members and a new album.

The Classic Rock Interview: Arthur Brown
In 1968, on the back of hit single Fire he became the God Of Hellfire. Since then he’s toured the globe, almost formed a band with Jimi Hendrix… and uncompromisingly followed his own path. At 84 he’s still going strong and still one of a kind.

Ann Wilson
New band. New album. New documentary. Heart’s iconic singer talks about surviving cancer, embracing Nashville and making the most personal music of her life.

Nicko McBrain
The former Iron Maiden man lays bare five decades of drumming, drugs and near misses.

Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats
In 2013 they exploded from obscurity. Seven albums on, their witchy, doom-laced rock remains immersive as ever.

Sheryl Crow
The singer-songwriter shares life lessons learned while travelling life’s highway

Regulars

The Dirt
Bassist Ian Hill to retire from Judas Priest, Back To The Beginning Black Sabbath film hits cinemas. Welcome back Sari Schorr and Shogun Mojo. Hello to Pieces Of Molly and Eddie 9V. Say goodbye to Angry Anderson, Cronos, Sass Jordan.

The Stories Behind The Songs: David Bowie - Ashes To Ashes
How Bowie turned “an epitaph of the 1970s” into one of his biggest hits

Q&A: Shooter Jennings
The singer/songwriter/producer on working with his country legend dad’s songs, LA being the place to be, early years and more.

Six Things You Need To Know About… These Wicked Rivers
Their stage props are groovy; they’re grafters; their new album began in a curry house; they’re not actually wicked at all.

66 The Hot List
We look at some of the essential new tracks you need to hear and the artists to have on your radar. This month they include The Pineapple Thief, Twin Temple, Mason Hill, Gyasi, Lovehoney, Graveyard, Bleeker and more.

Reviews
New albums from Queens Of The Stone Age, Bryan Adams, Steven Wilson, Kings Of Leon, Nickelback, Bad Company, The Alarm, Rammstein, Down and more. Reissues from Motörhead, Def Leppard, The Who, Genesis, Kiss, Bruce Dickinson, Roxy Music, Be Bop Deluxe and more. DVDs, films and books on Rory Gallagher, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Sparks and more. Live reviews of The Darkness, Roger Taylor, Marillion, Warrior Soul and more.

Lives
We preview tours by Anvil, The Undertones and John Corabi. Plus gig listings – who’s playing where and when.

The Soundtrack Of My Life: Nickelback
Mike Kroeger picks his records, artists and gigs of lasting significance.

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After experiencing Motörhead work up 1986’s new songs (while strapped to a chair, at Lemmy’s behest) in rehearsal, then hearing rough mixes on his home stereo, Orgasmatron promised to be Motörhead’s wildest, possibly even best album yet. Bringing in unknown guitarists Würzel and Phil Campbell, Lemmy had seen his original vision of the UK’s MC5 manifesting 10 years after forming Motörhead, catalysed by the dexterous playing of drummer Pete Gill (formerly with Saxon).

But he hadn’t counted on NY avant-funk producer Bill Laswell, coming from PiL’s Album, now helming his first heavy rock set with Jason Corsaro, king of the era’s booming drum sound applying hip-hop studio techniques at the mixing stage. For Overkill-like peak barrage classics, Orgasmatron was up there with Ace Of Spades, Mean Machine one of their fastest, all somewhat neutered when mixed in NYC without the band present. As Lemmy declared in White Line Fever: “It was a much better album when he took it to New York than when he brought it back."

There was much hanging on Motörhead’s first full album with the lineup unveiled on 1984’s No Remorse compilation and first studio album since ’83’s Another Perfect Day. Orgasmatron was released on the GWR label after two years of legal wrangling with Bronze and getting turned down by most major labels. Ain’t My Crime, Claw, Nothing Up My Sleeve and Ridin’ With The Driver still packed a stonking punch but, as shown by this 40th anniversary remaster and late-period producer Cameron Webb’s new remixes, the album had fallen short of full mayhem potential.

Thankfully, the new mixes and mastering reinstate the full marauding glory that enough diehards knew was in there to send it to No.21, relishing Deaf Forever (about a corpse), Built For Speed, Dr. Rock and the cataclysmic title track with Lemmy sounding like some demonic fate manipulator lacerating global hypocrisy (“‘Orgasmatron’’s not a bad word, I just thought of it one day,” he explained, trouncing Woody Allen Sleeper references).

Extras include one-play-only backing track workouts and out-takes, bolstered by a live Castle Donington set recorded for Radio 1’s Friday Rock Show.

Even the Orgasmatron Machine stage prop proving too big for most venues backed up Lemmy’s declaration to this writer: “We’re Motörhead, man. One thing we are is unique. No one else does it” now ringing louder and clearer than ever on this consummate package.

Twenty-four years on from their debut LP, Theory Of A Deadman are doing it their way. Part 1: Funeral Songs is the Canadian rock band’s new EP, conceived to deliver only the songs they want fans to hear.

“Creatively, the days of putting out an album every few years are gone,” says frontman Tyler Connolly. “We’re really excited about the quality – you can’t write 12 amazing songs in three months!”

Take its title with a pinch of salt. The quartet’s approach is still filled with country twang, sarcastic humour and bright, incisive hooks.

You’ve released eight albums. Is the key ingredient to a good song the same today as it was at the beginning?

For me, it’s “Can I still communicate with the fans?” Eventually I’m gonna be 65 writing a song about partying, and people will be like, “Yeah… you’re done.” [Laughs] I once worked on a song idea with Jim Vallance [Canadian producer-songwriter] at his house. I sang it to him and he went, “I think I’m done.” “What do you mean?” “I think I’m done songwriting.” He retired in front of me! I was writing a song recently with some younger guys in a band and I felt like Jim. I’d shout out lyrics and they were like, “No.” So that’s it: can I still relate?

You touched on getting older on your recent single Winnebago (Lay Low), which you described as an “anti-bar song”.

You reach a point where your body can’t do it any more. New Year’s Eve has always been the party night. But one year, my wife at the time and I went out for dinner with friends, and we called it a night at eight o’clock. I’ve never celebrated it since. That’s Winnebago: I’m gonna wake up tomorrow, feel like crap, and have that ‘shoulda, woulda, coulda’.

Last year you celebrated your 50th birthday. What advice would you give 25-year-old Tyler about to sign a deal with Chad Kroeger’s 604 Records?

I was very introverted so my only advice would be to have more fun and enjoy it. I feel like I wasted 10 years being so worried about everything. People ask us how we’ve stayed together for so long – communication and conversation are key. We’re four very insecure guys, and when you get a rock band with a bunch of dudes who don’t know what they’re doing, it can be a wild ride. We’ve seen other bands fist fight and break up on tour.

Is it true that the title track from the new EP is about an actual dead man?

It’s a person who isn’t dead yet. I told our management that I won’t reveal who it is because that would be nasty. But it’s cathartic. We write songs about people or things that frustrate us.

How do you switch off when the world starts to feel a bit loud?

I exercise and try to stay off social media. And I golf a lot. I’ve been to quite a few tournaments. I once went to Torrey Pines in San Diego on a practice day and followed Tiger Woods around.

Would you say that successful musicians and sports people share a relentless drive?

There are definitely parallels. I’ve been asked about solo projects, but nope. I’m a team guy and I have zero interest in doing this on my own. Not only does it scare the hell out of me, but helping each other win is the best feeling.

Part 1: Funeral Songs is out now via ONErpm. Theory Of A Deadman tour the Europe in February 2027 and Canada in March. For dates and tickets, check their website.

There’s something rather lovely about Kings Of Leon seeming to be no longer particularly bothered about what people want them to sound like. Twenty-three years into their career, the multi-platinum group and family members have reached that privileged point where they can make a record they actually want to make, rather than trying to write the next Sex On Fire.

O My Beloved, their tenth studio album and first to be entirely self-produced, sounds like a band finally giving themselves permission to do just that. It’s a personal collection of songs, almost like a bundle of letters passed between the Followills, with fans given permission to read over their shoulders. Centered on family, fatherhood and the life they’ve built together, there’s an inoffensive intimacy here that they have rarely allowed to sit so comfortably at the front of their intentions

Kings Of Leon once gave us southern rock with a gravelly and endearingly mumbled delivery. Then came examples such as Only By The Night and a decade of fans wondering when the band might return to the unique chaos of Youth & Young Manhood or Aha Shake Heartbreak. The answer, increasingly, seems to be that they won’t. And perhaps they shouldn’t?

On O My Beloved the southern roots remain, but they’ve softened around the edges, taking on a country hue. Feel The Love brings some of Caleb Followill’s gentlest vocals yet, revealing a romantic side that hasn’t always had much room among the band’s early-days hooks and arena-sized choruses. Cold Blue Down carries a slight feel of Frank Black’s Honeycomb, while Warm Company wanders into Pink Floyd-adjacent territory.

It’s not ground-breaking (but that hardly seems to be the point). In fact the second half is where O My Beloved really settles into itself as they’re simply documenting where four family members are now.

Kings Of Leon’s intimate Nashville show at Basement East felt like a fitting preview of this quieter chapter. O My Beloved belongs in smaller rooms, on quiet Sundays, with people you actually want to spend them with. This album might be the confirmation that the band’s rugged days aren’t coming back any time soon (don’t worry, we can still pop on Youth & Young Manhood to scratch that itch). But if we want Kings Of Leon exactly where they seem happiest, then O My Beloved is the ticket.

It seems appropriate that at a time when Canada is coming under financial and verbal attacks from the Trump administration, Canadian Bryan Adams returns to the metaphorical ramparts to create a collection of songs that pay homage to the place where he grew up and still sometimes calls home. It began simply enough, writing a song for the documentary Canada’s Wild Eastern Edge, but by Adams’s own admission, he suddenly found himself writing more songs about Canada that took him “somewhere a little different, which made the whole thing exciting”.

It’s certainly a sudden left that feels right, but having a subject matter close to his heart has made for one of Adams’ best and most inspired albums in years.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the polished pop-rock veneer of his last few records – very few people do radio rock like the ageless Adams. But this record, a mix of roots, folk and rock, proves that he can write in almost any form (we await his unlikely jazz fusion double album with bated breath), and it’s in the writing of songs for home that has ignited something in Adams that resonates beyond mere boundaries or borderlines.

That said, he can still spin the most sublime of power ballads, although on How’s It Goin’ he isn’t writing about the archetypal cars and girls, instead choosing to sing, in Handful Of Gold, about the Klondike gold rush in northwest Canada in the late 1800s, and the frozen and cruel fate of thousands of the would-be miners who headed there in the hope of striking it rich.

Similarly, the tragedy of the Second Narrows Bridge collapse that caused the death of 19 men and remains the worst industrial disaster in Vancouver’s history is picked over for the elegiac-sounding The Bridge. They might sound like odd starting points, but Adams builds them into something magical and artful.

The resounding thrum of Iron Ribbon - which sounds like Adams doing his best Pete Seeger – takes its cue from heavy industry and the formation of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Which sounds like the driest puddle of inspiration, but with the backing of Bryan and his band, it thunders along merrily. And the punchy 51st State is an edgy riposte to the would-be critics of the Canadian way of living; all are welcome, but maybe just watch your step.

Pallas’ newly-released album, A Song For Tomorrow, is likely to be their last. It comes three years after 2023’s The Messenger and arrives a year after singer Alan Reed revealed he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

“I’m one of those guys that says, ‘Never say never,’ because there are lots of things we’ve said in the past that we’d never do again – and we did,” keyboard player Ronnie Brown tells Prog.

“But this feels different. Towards the end of making it, Niall Mathewson [guitarist] and I felt like it was maybe as far as we could go with the band.”

If the Scottish prog veterans’ ninth album since forming in 1976 does prove to be their last, it’s a fine swansong. Largely written by Brown and Mathewson, the 10-track record shifts between shorter, punchier songs such as dramatic opener Reset and the knotty Rushing Headlong, to more traditional epics like the moody Avenue Of Broken Dreams and the stirring Inside Out, the latter pair sung by Mathewson and Brown respectively.

All four members, including bassist Graeme Murray, pitch in with lead and backing vocals, and it also features a guest appearance by singer Natasha O’Neil.

“It sounds like Pallas always have, but more modern,” says Reed, who recorded his vocals over four days at his home in Stirlingshire. “There are parts that are moody and atmospheric, there are parts that are much heavier, and there are parts that sit everywhere in between. It really repays repeated listens.”

Brown and Mathewson are also responsible for the album’s lyrics. “It doesn’t have an overall concept,” says Brown, “but if you listen to individual tracks, it’s all about technology, conflict, references to Biblical events.

“Niall sees quite a lot of it as being about the wrongs of the world – wars happening and the feeling that the human race is collapsing in on itself. For me, it’s more about people and their characteristics, what drives us, what gets us out of bed in the morning; it’s a journey through that.”

Sadly, a tour or even one-off shows in support of the album are off the table. Pallas’ most recent gig took place in 2015, and Reed formally announced the end of the band as a live act at the end of 2024, citing the cost of touring plus the fact that Mathewson now lives in Cambodia.

The singer’s health has also meant bringing the curtain down on his own live performances. He bowed out following a short solo tour in September with his other band, The Daughters Of Expediency.

“It’s going to be very difficult,” says Reed of his decision to step back from playing live. “I’ve done this since I was young – it’s hard to let go. But because of my situation I need to stop.”

Reed isn’t completely done with music; he has a solo album in the pipeline, duesoon. And Brown says there’s a possibility he’ll continue writing with Murray and Mathewson regardless.

“It is slightly emotional,” says the keyboardist of his band’s apparent end. “We’ve had such a long time together and done so much, and we have so many happy memories. But it certainly feels like we can move on and look at other things in our lives.”

A Song For Tomorrow is on sale now.

Former Killswitch Engage collaborators Adam Dutkiewicz and Howard Jones have put out the first single from their new band, Burn Eternal.

The track, Wounds I’ve Made, is out now and precedes the release of the duo’s self-titled debut album via Metal Blade on February 26. Watch the music video below. The album’s tracklisting and artwork are also below, and preorders are now live.

Singer Jones comments: “Wounds I’ve Made is about both acknowledging mistakes and regrets of the past, while also constantly evolving and moving forward. Sometimes change hurts, but it’s necessary for self-growth and to avoid being stuck in the past. Some relationships aren’t meant to be.”

Guitarist Dutkiewitz adds: “We are glad to finally release Wounds I’ve Made. It’s crazy to think that this was one of the first songs I wrote for this project… six years ago! I really hope you guys dig it.”

After years of teases and studio updates, Burn Eternal officially launched last month, with the announcement of their Metal Blade record deal.

Jones first revealed that he and Dutkiewicz were in the studio together in 2023 via social media. “1st song down, 11 to go,” he wrote on Instagram. That December, the singer shared that vocal recording for Burn Eternal had been finished. It was confirmed in December 2024 that the album had been mixed.

Dutkiewicz co-founded Killswitch Engage, one of the biggest bands in modern metalcore, in 1999, and Jones joined their lineup in 2002, replacing Jesse Leach. With Jones upfront, the band made a series of era-defining albums, including 2004’s The End Of Heartache and 2006’s As Daylight Dies. The singles My Curse, The End Of Heartache and Holy Diver (a cover of Dio’s 1983 heavy metal anthem) were smash hits which enjoyed extensive MTV airplay.

Jones departed Killswitch in 2012 due to personal struggles and was replaced by his predecessor Leach. The exit was amicable, and the singer temporarily reunited with the band as a guest at select live shows in 2018, before handling co-lead vocals on 2019 single The Signal Fire.

Killswitch continue to tour and record with Leach. The band released their latest album This Consequence via Metal Blade last year and are currently playing across Australia and New Zealand. They’ll take the stage at Enmore Theatre in Sydney on Friday. See further dates and details via their website.

Burn Eternal – Burn Eternal:

1. Wounds I’ve Made
2. No Escape
3. Blackheart
4. To Bear The Cross
5. Scared Of Shadows
6. Bitter Pill
7. Learning To Let Go
8. Born Again
9. Fell Silent