Sir Rod Stewart has cancelled his upcoming live shows after undergoing a routine coronary stent procedure. The news arrives just days after Stewart postponed a show at the Riverbend Music Center in Cincinnati, OH, citing an "unforeseen but minor medical procedure."

"On the advice of his doctors, he will take the next four weeks to recuperate and regain full fitness before returning to the stage," say Stewart's representatives. "Unfortunately, this means he will be unable to continue his current tour dates."

"I'm already feeling better and very much on the mend," says Stewart. "I want to thank the doctors, nurses and everyone who has taken such wonderful care of me. I'm deeply disappointed to miss these shows and sorry to let my fans down, but I look forward to getting back on stage and having a good time with you all again soon."

Stewart's current One Last Time tour has already been affected by the singer's health issues, with several shows in June cancelled on medical advice and another show in San Diego shelved after Stewart was diagnosed with an acute upper respiratory infection that led to laryngitis.

In 2019, Stewart revealed he was cancer-free after being diagnosed with prostate cancer two years previously.

A complete list of the cancelled shows, which includes a six-night residency in Las Vegas, follows.

Rod Stewart: One More Time Tour (cancelled)

Aug 11: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Aug 14: Des Moines Iowa State Fair, IA
Aug 15: Kansas City Morton Amphitheater, MO
Aug 18: Las Vegas The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, NV
Aug 20: Las Vegas The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, NV
Aug 22: Las Vegas The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, NV
Aug 25: Las Vegas The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, NV
Aug 27: Las Vegas The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, NV
Aug 29: Las Vegas The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, NV
Sep 01: Falcon Heights Minnesota State Fair, MN
Sep 03: Mount Pleasant Soaring Eagle Casino & Resort, MI
Sep 05: Highland Park Ravinia Festival, IL

Sep 09: Monterrey Estadio Borregos, Mexico
Sep 11: Guadalajara Coliseo GNP, Mexico
Sep 13: Mexico City Palacio de Los, Mexico

A new documentary about late, legendary Rush drummer Neil Peart is to receive its world premiere next month at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Directed by Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn, the team behind 2010's acclaimed Rush documentary Beyond The Lighted Stage, as well as Iron Maiden: Flight 666 and the Metal Evolution documentary series, Neil Peart: No One's Disciple, will premiere on September 16, with a subsequent public screening on September 19.

The 96-minute film will also air on Canada's CBC network on September 23 as part of the series The Passionate Eye.

According to a press release, Neil Peart: No One's Disciple "documents the late Canadian musician's tough start as a young artist, followed by his meteoric rise", with the film-makers promising "an exhilarating and poignant tribute" to the late drummer.

The film includes interviews with Rush vocalist/bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson, alongside reflections from other acclaimed drummers. It also features Lee and Lifeson performing Rush classics with the likes of Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers),Stewart Copeland (The Police) and Danny Carey (Tool) filling Peart's seat at the drum kit.

In an archival interview used in the documentary, Peart states, "I think it matters for me to play better all the time, and to play my best all the time, to keep it fresh and changing. It’s kind of my responsibility, I see it, as a drummer."

Peart, 67, passed away on January 7, 2020, in Santa Monica, California after a three-year battle with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. Announcing his death, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson called the drummer "our friend, soul brother and band mate".

After a 32-year run, Barclay James Harvest split into two different bands in 1998. Bassist and vocalist Les Holroyd leads one while John Lees fronts the other. In 2016 Holroyd looked back on their early days, including one moment involving The Moody Blues that he’d rather hadn’t happened.

Les Holroyd remembers the time when he, John Lees, Mel Pritchard and Stuart ‘Woolly’ Wolstenholm were left to develop their own style without interference.

“Harvest, to whom we were signed at the time, really didn’t have much of an idea of what to expect from us,” he says. “The idea of progressive music was totally new, and we were right at the forefront of what was happening.

“So we were left to our own devices to write songs and create albums. We stayed in our farmhouse and just got on with the job of writing.”

He feels the music business wasn’t prepared for the progressive explosion. “The labels were all used to dealing with commercial, mainstream artists. There were so few who appreciated how to handle a band like us.”

While a lot of musicians in the late 60s and early 70s had a strong bond, BJH were a little removed from any notion of a movement. In fact, Holroyd recalls, there was just one band with whom they had any rapport.

“We got on really well with Argent. We did a lot of gigs with them. But we had very little to do with others like Yes, Genesis or any of the names getting attention at the time.

“We were often regarded as a cross between Genesis and Pink Floyd. Personally I never quite got that comparison. We were also seen as being close to The Moody Blues – but a lot of that was down to the fact that both bands used the Mellotron.”

BJH were sometimes referred to as a second-rate version of the Moodies. That led to the writing and recording of 1977 song Poor Man’s Moody Blues.

One of prog rock’s few diss tracks, it lampooned elements of the Moodies’ Nights In White Satin, with a similar pace and feel. The lyrics referenced nights, missing and loving someone – just as the 1967 song had.

Poor Man’s Moody Blues appeared on BJH’s eighth album, Gone To Earth, whih became their biggest-selling release. Eventually, perhaps predictably, there was a reckoning over the song in the form of Holroyd’s uncomfortable encounter with the other band’s vocalist, Justin Hayward.

“I met Justin a long time after we’d done that song and we had a chat about it. He wasn’t too pleased about that song. I can understand why.

“For me, it was never funny or clever in the first place. John Lees wrote it, and I was uncomfortable recording the song. I wish we’d never done it.”

Still, Holroyd regards that period as being highly successful. “We followed our own musical journey. Being commercial never worried us. All that mattered was being true to our vision.”

Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker has spoken about his darkest days following the 2008 plane crash which claimed the lives of his security guard and personal assistant.

Barker discusses the aftermath of the crash during a conversation with British podcaster and life coach Jay Shetty for the On Purpose podcast, ahead of the release of his forthcoming documentary Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear, which is coming to streaming services this week.

Barker, his friend Adam 'DJ AM' Goldstein, Barker's security guard Charles Still, and his personal assistant Chris Baker, were on a private jet which crashed during take-off from South Carolina's Columbia Metropolitan Airport on September 19, 2008. The plane's pilot and co-pilot died from smoke inhalation and burns, and Still and Baker were killed upon impact. Travis Barker survived, but had burns on 65% of his. body, and was kept in hospital for skin grafts and follow-up treatments for 11 weeks. Barker didn't board another flight for 13 years.

In his conversation with the drummer, Shetty mentions a section of the Louder Than Fear documentary where Barker recollects feeling suicidal in hospital, and recalled saying, "I'll transfer you any amount of money, just kill me."

"There was no light at the end of the tunnel," Barker admits. "I was like, I can't do this, I feel like [I'm] literally living in hell... it was just desperation."

After his recovery, Barker recalls that his friend DJ AM looked into getting treatment "where we could retrain our brains, where we'd hopefully forget what happened."

"I think he actually did the treatment," he tells Shetty, "and I said, There's no way I'm ever going to look down at my hands, or my legs, or forget what happened, because I lost my two best friends. There's not a scenario where I'll forget how how they left me."

Barker also speaks about the survivor's guilt he felt in the wake of his recovery, and says that it was only recently that he came to accept that he should live in his friends' honour, and make them proud.

You can watch the full podcast interview below.

Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear will be streamed globally from August 13 on Disney+.

“This documentary started over 10 years ago," Barker revealed to Billboard earlier this year, "and it’s been a wild, wild ride and I can’t wait to share it with the world.”

A synopsis for the film reads: "After surviving a devastating plane crash that nearly took his life, legendary and electrifying drummer Travis Barker embarks on a raw and redemptive journey. Once a trash collector in Laguna Beach, his life changed when he stepped in as a replacement for Blink-182’s drummer — igniting a meteoric rise that would make him the driving pulse of a generation.

"Yet beneath the spectacle of fame, the film reveals a complex man battling pain, grief and the thin line between survival and surrender. Featuring appearances from collaborators, cultural icons and those closest to him. This is the story of the man behind the tattoos. A tribute to those who keep going when the music almost stops."

Directed by Justin Krook and Michael Dwyer, the 90-minute film received its world premiere on June 13 at the Tribeca Festival.

Rising Swedish death metal stars Orbit Culture have paid tribute to late At The Gates frontman Tomas Lindberg, four years after taking part in Lindberg’s final tour before his death.

Talking exclusively to Metal Hammer, singer/guitarist Niklas Karlsson, whose band supported At The Gates and fellow Gothenburg melodic death metal pioneers In Flames across Europe, remembers Lindberg as a “metal uncle” who was approachable and down-to-earth.

Although At The Gates played a handful of festival shows in 2023, it was their last full-length tour with their singer before he was diagnosed with adenoid cystic carcinoma, a rare cancer of the mouth and pallet, in December 2023. He died in September 2025 aged 52, following complications in his recovery.

“[Lindberg] was so fucking kind to new, young bands,” Karlsson says. “The most down-to-earth guy you’ll ever meet. In one of the green rooms, he was watching skiing and drinking beer, and he was like, ‘You want to go out and play some darts?’ So we played darts with him and shit like that. He felt like a metal uncle, and it’s so sad that he got taken away at such a young age. We miss him.”

The singer/guitarist also remembers how In Flames, who headlined the tour, became one of Orbit Culture’s biggest champions. As well as opening for In Flames in Europe, Orbit Culture have performed at the band’s festival Göteborg Brinner and played with them across North America in summer 2022.

“I talked with Anders [Fridén, In Flames singer] a year or two ago and he said, ‘What separates you guys from other bands is you took the risk. You’re where you are today because you took stupid risks and they paid off,’” Karlsson explains.

“Our stupidest risk was our first US tour with In Flames in 2022. We were worth maybe $4,000 and we rented a bus for 60 grand. The funny thing is that we sold so much merch, we actually came home with profit! It was a stupid risk and I wouldn’t advise it, but, when you have a dream, you just try to pursue it, I guess.”

Lindberg co-founded At The Gates after the split of his previous band, Grotesque, in 1990. Though they initially specialised in a form of progressive death metal, they became one of the leading forces of the melodic death metal scene in the mid-90s, alongside In Flames and fellow Gothenburg band Dark Tranquillity. Their third album, 1995’s Slaughter Of The Soul, is seen as a masterpiece of the genre.

At The Gates split in 1996 but reformed in 2008 and made another four albums. The latest, The Ghost Of A Future Dead, was released after Lindberg’s death and featured vocal takes that he demoed shortly before his cancer surgery in early 2024. The music, artwork and tracklisting were approved by the singer.

News of Lindberg’s death was met with a wave of tributes from fans and peers. Opeth’s Mikael Åkerfeldt said that “as a frontman … he was awesome, plain and simple. Wild!” and “intellectually, he seemed to be a step above and beyond your generic metal musician”. Trivium’s Matt Heafy called him “one of the most important singers/screamers of any metal band”.

At The Gates have not confirmed whether or not they will continue without Lindberg. Their last show was at Aalborg Metal Festival in Denmark in November 2023.

Here at Louder, we’re big fans of House Of Marley’s range of audio products – especially the company’s selection of turntables. And if you’ve been thinking about taking the plunge, now is a great time to do just that because there’s currently deals on two of their record players in both the US and UK.

The first is a brilliant saving of 30% on the Stir It Up Lux, which has been reduced on Amazon US by 30% – down from $399.99 to $279.99. And UK music fans haven’t been left out in the cold either, because you can pick up the same model with a 14% price cut, with Amazon UK taking the price down from £349.99 to £299.99.

The Lux was unveiled back in August 2023 and was introduced to the market as an upgrade to the original model. As you would expect from a House Of Marley product, the Lux has been crafted using sustainable and recycled materials. It has an elliptical stylus, an aluminium head-shell, a bamboo plinth and includes a glass platter along with an anti-skate mechanism, in-built phono pre-amp and Bluetooth 5.3.

However, if you’re looking to get your hands on new turntable with a pair of speakers included, then the original Stir it Up is also available at a reduced cost as a package with two bookshelf 10W speakers.

On Amazon US, it’s down 11% from $449.99 to $399.99, but the biggest saving is in the UK, with Amazon knocking the price down by 21%, slashing the cost from £379.99 to £299.99.

This is an easy to set up system, and is a great choice of beginner turntable. It’s a two-speed, belt-driven unit with Bluetooth 5.3 and in our House Of Marley Stir It Up review, we awarded in 4.5 stars thanks to its sound, eco-friendly design and overall performance.

House Of Marley was founded by Bob Marley's son Rohan and the audio firm's commitment to sustainability is one of their core values. They are linked with One Tree Planted and the Surfrider Foundation.

You can find out more about House of Marley's support for the drive towards global reforestation and ocean preservation on the Project Marley website.

Teenagers arrested in connection with the murder of a 37-year-old man in Bulgaria have incited controversy by wearing heavy metal t-shirts in court.

Four of the five teens accused of beating Georgi Kuzev to death in Plovdiv on August 4 appeared at their hearing on Friday (August 7) sporting merch by metal bands – namely Powerwolf, Mayhem, Pantera and Sepultura.

The fashion choice has become national news. Tabloid paper 24 Chasa (24 Hours) published a story with the headline, “Satanic black metal brings together teenage killers from Plovdiv” (translated from Bulgarian via Google). The article alleges that the bands “send aggressive messages and set an example of brutal violence for their fans”.

It focuses in particular on the past violent actions of Mayhem’s former bassist Varg Vikernes. In 1994, Vikernes was sentenced to 21 years in prison (Norway’s then-maximum prison sentence) for murdering guitarist Øystein “Euronymous” Aarseth and burning down Christian churches. He was released on parole in 2009.

On Facebook, 24 Chasa’s reporting has stirred up debate about whether or not heavy metal encourages violent behaviour.

One user comments (translated via Meta): “The problem is not with the t-shirts. It’s not with the music. The problem is much deeper – in moral values, in upbringing, in parental control, and most of all, in the absence of parents from their own children’s lives.”

“Neither Pantera nor Sepultura has anything to do with Satanism,” adds another. “Mayhem is a different story. But the music has absolutely nothing to do with it.”

Another commenter disagrees, writing: “This metal band [Mayhem] is quite crooked. I used to listen to them. Well, I didn’t become a murderer, but the group is definitely extreme and is associated with unpleasant things for normal people.”

Another adds: “It’s no coincidence that I don’t like rock, rap, metal and similar genres. Ever since my sister translated the titles of songs by Metallica and similar artists for me, I was horrified.”

Bulgarian TV channel Nova reports that the shirts have “led to many speculations that it was the children’s musical interests that prompted them to show aggression”.

The Plovdiv District Court ruled on Friday that the five teens had to remain in custody. A judge said that there was sufficient evidence to reasonably assume the defendants attacked Kuzev and that there was no evidence to suggest the victim provoked them. Two of the accused are making appeals which will be heard in court on Thursday (August 13).

According to prosecutors, the teens imitated an online far-right “paedophile hunter” group and set up a meeting between Kuzev and a 17-year-old girl posing as a 15-year-old. Kuzev was assaulted for an hour at Youth Hill, Plovdiv and sustained serious injuries. He died several hours after being taken to hospital.

Kuzev had never been charged with a sexual offence and prosecutors said he did not lie about his age during the online interactions with the girl.

None of the bands whose t-shirts were worn by the accused have commented on the matter.

Multiple heavy metal artists have been accused of encouraging violent behaviour before, though none have ever been found legally responsible for a crime committed by one of their fans.

In 1990, the parents of a young American man who attempted suicide took civil action against Judas Priest. They alleged that the band subliminally included the phrase “do it” in their 1978 song Better By You, Better Than Me, which encouraged the man and one of his friends to try and take their own lives. The case was ultimately dismissed.

Similarly, following the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, right-wing politicians and media outlets targeted shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, alleging that his music influenced the two shooters’ actions. In 2005, Ashley Bird, then-editor of Kerrang!, told The Guardian, “[Manson’s] songs are not about murdering people – his message is that there are a lot of people out there who feel forgotten and misunderstood.”

Trivium shot to fame with 2005’s breakout album Ascendancy and a star-making appearance at that year’s Download festival. But the following year’s The Crusade saw a backlash hit. In 2006, Metal Hammer caught up with the band on their first US tour to talk success, snobbery and the blessing of metal’s biggest bands.

The desert sun is blazing in a cloudless sky, turning your heavy breastplate into a furnace and boiling your brain in the heated metal confines of your helmet. Your coarse woolen tunic tears at your flesh while you struggle to keep your spear steady and your aim true. You drop the encumbering weight of your shield but your cape still tugs at your neck, belabouring your breath and making your fear of heights all the more unbearable as you stand atop a cliffside wondering whether the tiny holes dotting the landscape really are home to poisonous snakes.

It’s only noon, but your head screams with pain as you contemplate whether pounding over a dozen shots of Crown Royal whiskey and Jägermeister until 6am this morning was such a good idea. You smile faintly at a couple of joggers who wave as they pass by. They might just be wondering whether you’re the first human being in the 15 million year history of Phoenix, Arizona’s Papago Park to turn up dressed like a Spartan warrior. You’re Matt Heafy, 20-year-old frontman of Trivium, and for you, life has just gotten seriously weird.

If you were one of the thousands of metalheads on hand to witness Trivium’s slot at Download 2005, you might have some idea why. Just a few weeks before, the Floridian upstarts’ rapturously received UK tour was enough to propel a last minute change from a tent show to Donington’s centre stage. And it was also enough to make many believe that Trivium, this previously unknown dynamo of the live circuit, had suddenly arrived. Not even slightly.

Nearly 18 months have now passed, and in that time they’ve played nearly 400 shows. 2005’s Ascendancy has sold over 300,000 records worldwide, and the follow-up The Crusade has swiftly topped that with over 400,000 units shifted – 90,000 passed over the counter in the UK alone. 60,000 of those moved on the first day of release. Impressive stuff for a band that only formed in 2000 and whose average age is a mere 22.

But forget about numbers for a moment. Download 2006 also saw Trivium on the main stage at Download – twice. First, in the middle of the afternoon, and later on alongside none other than Sunday headliners Metallica. Kirk Hammett was wearing one of their shirts. Talk about your stellar ascents and golden stamps of approval.

You might wonder why it is then that Trivium are only just now playing their first headlining tour of the United States. Or why, in some circles, their album’s received a swift dismissal as a mere facsmile of Metallica riffs and, perhaps cutting closer to the bone, James Hetfield’s trademark vocal style. It would seem that being in the good graces of one of the biggest bands of all time has become something of a poison chalice.

“Look, it’s probably not what people think,” says bassist Paolo Gregoletto, kicking his snakeskin boots into the dust in the direction of drummer Travis Smith, who’s nursing the worst hangover from last night’s drunken late night festivities judging by the kill-me-now grimace on his face. “Metallica approached us, so it wasn’t like we were all, ‘hey, we want to talk to them’. They dug what we were doing and that was an honour. Besides, we made The Crusade before we even met them.”

Read that last sentence again and ask yourself why the diminuitive four-stringer would say such a thing. It would seem the M-word strikes a nerve. But there’s more to the latest chapter in Trivium’s story than once favourable comparisons to their idols transforming into the basis of derision. Or their crusade to gain acceptance in their homeland after receiving such a warm embrace in the UK. For that, we quick-march off to a waiting cab, kicking up dust in the setting sunlight of Papago Park, trying to remember the lyrics to that odious but diabolically infectious Paul Stanley song and dodging the tiny holes in the ground.

“Metalica are YouTube fanatics,” laughs Paolo. We’re just boarding the air-conditioned splendour of Trivium’s tour bus outside the arse-end of Phoenix’s Marquee Theatre where they’re due to play tonight. Perhaps tellingly, the 1,000 capacity venue isn’t sold out. Someone’s fingered ‘I love you Corey!!!’ and a big heart into the behemoth’s desert-dusted side. Travis and Matt immediately collapse in their bunks.

“They were like, ‘yeah man, check this shit out,’” continues Paolo, taking a seat in the lounge. “They already knew about us when we met at [Germany’s] Rock Am Ring…”

“What was cool was, we gave Kirk a copy of The Crusade when it wasn’t mixed, just the rough tracks, and he was like, ‘yeah it fucking kicks ass, old school’. He was really digging the primitive sounding stuff.”

But it’s no mystery that Trivium have, and not for the first time, suffered something of a critical backlash despite their impressive sales. And not least of all, because of a peculiar similarity between Matt’s voice and James Hetfield’s. You sound like Metallica.

“That’s better than a lot of things people have called it,” chuckles Paolo. “I’d be more mad if they called it metalcore. Of course there’s a huge Metallica influence in our albums. That’s a negative thing? We’re such huge fans. That’s a huge part of our lives. How is that not going to show?”

It seems a diplomatic response to what has dogged the band from the moment their follow-up to Ascendancy hit the shelves. Certainly, the similarities seem like no accident, but Paolo and Corey seem slightly offended at the suggestion. As they see it, listen a little more deeply to The Crusade and there’s far more than those similarities.

“You’re going to hear all of our influences on there!” blurts Corey. “Your mom, your dad, whatever the hell it is. Wherever you get that, whatever it sounds like it always sounds like something. Always. I don’t care who you are. Is anyone saying it sounds like Annihilator? I’ve been listening to them a lot too.”

Just then Matt emerges and takes a seat, and mutters something about the greatness of riding in a proper touring vehicle. It’s the first time Trivium haven’t been in a van Stateside. He’s picked up on the conversation. A detached smile reads across his face.

“We’ve got approval from Metallica and Iron Maiden,” he says, referring to Trivium’s latest support tour. “I don’t give a fuck if anyone else doesn’t. That proves that we’re metal. We’ve got too much else going on to worry about whether some people are ever going to accept us. Even I used to be a snob.”

The hungover frontman explains how bands like Emperor, Lord Belial, Aborym and Dark Funeral were what he grew up listening to. For him, it was about drawing a line in the sand as much as it was the music. The parallel makes sense.

“I don’t think the underground or extreme metal scene will ever dig us,” he continues. “It’s elitist. People are free to be into what they like, but in school everyone was into emo and hardcore, so I’d listen to the most Satanic and terrifying black metal I could find. Whatever scared them.”

So you were a snob?

“I was, but that culture just isn’t my personality. We’re going to be supporting Iron Maiden soon. They’re one of the biggest metal bands in history.”

Of course, this is only your first headlining tour of the States. You’d think it’d work the other way around seeing as you’re from this country.

Paolo says: “Everything develops at its own pace. The UK just happened to be the first place where it blew up, but slowly but surely, all the hard work we’ve put in has been paying off. You can’t go around the world and expect to do the same things everywhere at the same time. We want to be a worldwide headlining band, that’s our ultimate goal.”

That’s ambitious!

“Yeah, but it’s always like that for us. We’ve got to think that way. If you have nothing to prove, you have nothing to work for. Playing Download in 2005, on the main stage, was the ultimate high for us, but that’s just one step we had to take.”

“The States just isn’t ready for us yet,” adds Corey. “When we started out we were a band with no sales, so we’ve just been touring as much as possible to get the word out. You’ve got to get out and go and not think about the big picture all the time. As it is we’ve just got a couple of hours to get ourselves together. But it’s part of being in a band, it’s part of doing what we do.”

It’s an interesting point, because despite the thrilling success of Ascendancy, it won Trivium no luxurious studio time or stays in stately manors. But if you’re guessing that’s because of their record label Roadrunner cutting corners, then you’d be wrong. All of The Crusade was written on the road in the spare minutes and hours afforded to Trivium between interviews, load-ins, load-outs, shows, and whatever social lives granted them.

So why didn’t you have more time to write The Crusade?

“I wish!” says Matt. “Hopefully on the next record, but some bands do take too long. I’d like three or four months to write an album but last time we didn’t get the opportunity to do that.”

Why not?

“We wanted that, but we wanted to stay out on the road,” says Corey. “We all figured there was no point in sitting on our asses in a studio for a month. If we’d taken three or four months off, we would have fallen out of sight. If people don’t hear the name all the time the next band comes in and picks up your crowd. It’s like, ‘why stop?’”

That sounds a little paranoid. Do you really think that you’d lose all this in just a few months?

The guitarist takes a moment to think about it. He’s the quietest of the group, often opening his mouth to speak at the precise moment that Paolo begins speaking. But perhaps his is the best assessment of Trivium’s current predicament.

“When you’ve worked this hard for something you don’t want to risk anything. We’ve still got a very long way to go.”

“And we’ve made some mistakes too,” says Matt, “when we first started we were going crazy trying to inebriate ourselves, just mask ourselves from everything. When we first got into it we were just the young cocky kids that thought it was all about partying, but I think it was nice because the four of us are all pretty normal, pretty humble dudes. I mean, there are a lot of bands that are twice our age that act like idiots, but that’s not me. I prefer this way.”

What was your vice?

“It was totally sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. Briefly.”

How briefly?

“Briefly.”

How long is ‘brief’?

“About a year,” he hesitates. “OK, a year and a half. It definitely wasn’t drugs so much, but it was us drinking every night and being new and naïve and really into it and having a good time. I’m having a good time now, but it’s me having a good time, not this person I thought I was having a good time.

“I look at interviews and I think, ‘man, I just sound like an asshole’. People praise that, they think that’s interesting, and a lot of bands crave that, but they’re going nowhere. They end up being a bunch of alcoholics playing crappy shows while they’re hungover every day.”

You’re ashamed of how you were?

“Not so much,” he says. “None of that really matters now. I mean, shit happens, and on top of that people will make up shit about our character. You’re not really doing well until people talk shit about you. Defamation and lies will happen no matter what you do. I used to worry about it.”

Do you regret all that now?

“Actually I’m glad that I did it,” he says. “There’s never been anything I’ve said that I’ve regretted, unless it was a complete misquote. But the shit where I’m probably fucking smacking my head, where I’m thinking ‘why the fuck did I say that?’ I’m not denying anything I’ve said, but I’ve learned from that so I’ll take responsibility for it. But then stuff gets written where you’re getting criticised for politeness. That’s actually the kind of person that I am!”

He’ll go on to describe how the mistake people make with him is that they expect him to be the same person offstage as when he’s on it, about how terrified he is at the thought of losing himself, being subsumed in the limelight. You just got out of school, do you stay in touch with your friends much?

“No,” he says. “Maybe I’ll see them at a show or something, but it’s mostly just the band, crew, mom, family, girlfriend…”

That’s a pretty small world, and certainly a pretty isolated one.

“I love the attention we get in the shows, I love making the videos and I love to see the fans out there but I would never knowingly act like a rock star. If I’m out at a mall, I’ll sign everything I’m given because even though I’m reserved I wouldn’t want to let my fans down. To be honest, I think I have mild social anxiety disorder sometimes.”

It sounds like a flippant self-diagnosis, but when really pressed on anything during this interview the newly long-haired frontman seems strangely ill-at-ease. He breathes deeply before replying, shifts uncomfortably in his couch and has the demeanour you’d expect of someone you were interviewing for a job. Heafy the frontman simply isn’t present.

“I’m fine at shows, but when I’m out with billions of people, from record companies, the press… being in those social situations, my brain sometimes just starts freaking out, and that’s happened a lot lately. There are days where there’s so many people involved in this thing called Trivium… I don’t know how the other guys are with it, but I’ve just noticed this problem recently. I want to be cordial, to say hi to everyone who’s hanging around but I’ve got problems and shortcomings just like everybody else. I’ve only freaked out a couple of times though, when it’s all just too much sometimes. I’m like, ‘fuck, what do I do here?’ but when that passes it’s fine. I’m fine on stage, but outside of that, I’m a dweeb. Video games and TV. That’s me.”

If you spend a little time with Matt you get the definite sense that the little shift in character he goes through when he’s on the stage and off is more than subtle. In real life he’s a completely different, unrecognisable guy from the one who’s known to conjure circle pits in the crowd, play blazing solos and seems, to many fans, superhumanly talented. But right now Matt rubs his left arm with other thngs on his mind. He’s just had a massive piece of tattoo work completed that’s currently wrapped up in cling film but clearly causing him discomfort.

“It’s late 1800s Japanese,” he says. “It’s from Japanese mythology where there was this demon terrorising Rashomon gate, and there was one samurai that was able to chop off the demon’s arm, but I’ve got the pre-battle scene where the samurai’s just about to go and chop the demon’s arm off.”

He’ll explain how it’s only very recently that he’s had a real awakening of curiosity in his heritage – Heafy’s mother is Japanese and used to relate that very same demon story to him when he was a child. According to Heafy, his was an idyllic upbringing. His mother and father are still together, he did well in school, he didn’t do drugs, and the worst problems he had were related to girls. Like many in their late teens, he went through a string of ‘stupid post school relationships’.

“All these young kids who are straight-edge now, a girl’s going to break their heart and they’ll start drinking,” he says, laughing. He’ll smile as he recalls the days when it was he who was outside of the mainstream. “That’s why I never give myself rules like that. When I was younger and I’d go to shows just so I could see the bands I liked, and I wouldn’t smile the entire time. If it wasn’t my band on stage, I’d just stand there and ignore it but we’re not about that now.”

So what drives you?

“What do you mean, why am I doing this?”

Yeah.

“It’s weird,” he says with a crooked grin. “I was gifted according the staff at my school, I wasn’t this nerd kid but I always did well. I’ve never had a job. This is my first. Maybe it’s because I don’t know anything else, or how hard this is supposed to be. It isn’t like touring’s easy, we’re up against it all the time. You don’t have any real comforts, there’s a lot of people who want to bring you down, but it’s getting past that kind of shit that makes a band big. We’re here to conquer. There’s no halfway for us.”

Later that night, with a packed crowd reciting his every lyric, Matt Heafy again becomes the frontman he’s recognised to be, like the geeky Peter Parker turning into the superhero Spiderman. He goads his audience, shouts, grunts and shreds his way through a 90 minute set as if he’s been doing this his whole life.

Wherever they go from here, it seems that Trivium’s story is only now just beginning.

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 161. Trivium tour North America from October to December.

Curved Air’s last co-founding member, frontwoman, Sonja Kristina, checks in as the London-based band – formed in 1970 and known for a fusion of progressive rock, classical and folk – prepares to call it a day, for the sixth and final time.

The dates, originally scheduled to kick off this month, have now been postponed until 2027 (this interview was conducted before the postponement).

The upcoming dates really are Curved Air’s final ones. Why is that?

Well, I’ve been unwell. Last summer I had surgery for stomach cancer and then there were complications. With the state of the world right now, in terms of touring it’s hard to know how things will be, going forward. So what we would like to do in the future is occasional, bigger concerts that include older members of the band.

I’d like us to do at least one of those, maybe in a bigger venue than these. So we will do the dates on this tour, followed by a final gig with as many people [past members] as possible. That’s health allowing, as we are all getting older – particularly me. [Sonja is 77 years old.]

What’s next on the agenda for you?

In the past when Curved Air has been out of action I have involved myself in other projects with different, talented people. I imagine that will continue. There are various people that want me to record with them, but what with my health I haven’t really been in the mood.

Could there be new music from Curved Air?

We are supposed to be making one. I’ve had lots of little fragments of ideas from the band members, and I started developing them, but for those same reasons so far I haven’t played my part. That [collaborative approach] is the way we made North Star [the band’s most recent studio album, released in 2014] and it worked out very well, but I’m still working on getting my strength back to write lyrics.

In terms of these final dates, will it be like one of those ‘glass half-full’-type funerals where the guests wear their loudest clothes and bring along dancing shoes?

[Sounding a little shocked] Well, I hadn’t thought about making a funeral out of them!

But you don’t want people to be sad?

No, no. They should be a cause for celebration. And if I’m well enough – if I have the energy – later on, if I can find smaller venues than the ones with Curved Air, I will also want to do my own [solo] shows. Those would be more in the vein of Songs From The Acid Folk [her album released in 1991].

What are some of the highlights of your time in Curved Air?

I’ll never forget the band’s formation. I was invited to meet them in Shepherd’s Bush. I was wearing my green corduroy hippie outfit and Polaroid glasses. They played such stunningly beautiful music; I was taken aback. It was sort of rock, but at the same time it was hard to categorise. I loved writing lyrics, so I accepted the offer to do that, and the rest is history.

And what about low points?

There isn’t anything I’d want to change. I’m a great believer in destiny. We played the material for the first album [Airconditioning, 1970] on the road before recording it, which really ironed out the kinks. That wasn’t the case with the second and third ones [Second Album and Phantasmagoria, released in ’72 and ’73]. They didn’t quite have the same heart and soul. I wish we’d have played in those songs first.

Looking back at the band’s career, what are you most proud of regarding Curved Air?

That we managed to keep things going, I suppose. Also the levels of musicianship, which were always exceptional. I’m happy that with each different [incarnation of the band] there was a flow. That includes the current line-up, with Kirby [Gregory] on guitar, who has come back to us once again.

Curved Air's final tour has been postponed until the summer of 2027 due to ill health, but original tickets will be honoured. For the new dates, keep an eye on the Curved Air website.

If the 1970s was prog’s heyday, then the 80s was when it reinvented itself. At the start of the decade, the genre’s big hitters may have been a little bruised by the upheavals of the previous few years – but for the most part they were still standing.

Pink Floyd, Yes and Jethro Tull all released albums, while Genesis became bigger than ever – albeit by streamlining their sound to fit prevailing pop trends. At the other end of the scale, the neo-prog movement produced a new generation of bands, most notably Marillion, Pallas, I.Q., Pendragon and, a few years later, It Bites.

That’s not to say the 80s was an easy time for prog bands or their fans – 25 minute epics were considered passé. In truth prog’s peak had passed – at least for the time being. But in 2016 we listed the most essential albums that kept the flame alive.

Rush – Moving Pictures (1981)

The final of the four albums in Rush’s second cycle, this is one of the Canadian trio’s three strongest albums – irrespective of the decade. The menacing introduction to the Mark Twain-inspired Tom Sawyer is merely a prelude to the equally wonderful Red Barchetta and the stunning instrumental YYZ.

Moving Pictures sees the trio pulling off the tricky balance between virtuoso musicianship and superb musical material and thought-provoking lyrics. Limelight’s take on fame remains ever-pertinent more than 30 years later.

Subsequent Rush albums in the 80s would get bogged down in synths, but Moving Pictures is the sound of the band at its peak.

Asia – Asia (1982)

A marketing man’s dream, Asia were a premier league prog supergroup: Yes guitarist Steve Howe and keyboardist Geoff Downes, ELP drummer Carl Palmer and King Crimson/UK/Uriah Heep bassist/vocalist John Wetton.

This, the quartet’s debut, spent nine weeks at the top of the US album chart. Hugely commercial, but with strong prog undertones and impeccable musicianship – plus the prog stamp of approval of a Roger Dean logo and cover – the likes of Heat Of The Moment and Only Time Will Tell earned Asia a huge audience.

Yes – 90125 (1983)

The eleventh-hour involvement of vocalist Jon Anderson meant that this extraordinary album appeared under the Yes name. With bassist Chris Squire and drummer Alan White on board, plus the return of keyboardist Tony Kaye, the band may have looked like Yes, but 90125 represented an astonishing sonic transformation.

The mastermind behind its compelling songs and unique sound was South African guitarist Trevor Rabin, abetted by some-time Yes vocalist Trevor Horn. The almost metallic riff of lead track Owner Of A Lonely Heart may have shocked old fans, but it also ensured Yes’ survival.

Supertramp – Brother Where You Bound (1985)

With Roger Hodgson departed for a solo career, keyboardist/vocalist Rick Davies assumed control of Supertramp’s musical direction. And with Brother Where You Bound that meant for a unique creation.

Cannonball and Still In Love have Davies’ piano to the fore, with plenty of horns thrown in for good measure, while No In Between is darkly atmospheric.

And just edging Better Days, the highlight is the thunderous 16-minute title track, featuring Thin Lizzy’s Scott Gorham and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour on guitars. An atypical Supertramp album, but also one of their strongest.

Marillion – Misplaced Childhood (1985)

Standard-bearers for the so-called neo-prog movement, Marillion had already enjoyed some success before the release of this, their third album. But with the timeless Kayleigh and epic ballad Lavender making serious inroads into the singles charts, Fish and co suddenly became household names.

Prog just wasn’t expected to be this catchy, but Kayleigh was instantly memorable, and Steve Rothery’s signature guitar sound throughout satisfied the purists. A bona fide concept album, Misplaced Childhood is one continuous piece of music. And at 41 minutes it doesn’t outstay its welcome either.

Emerson Lake & Powell – Emerson Lake & Powell (1986)

The cynics may have carped that, in Carl Palmer’s absence, Keith Emerson and Greg Lake brought in Cozy Powell only to maintain the ‘ELP’ continuity. But it’s the former Whitesnake drummer’s power that propels this superb album.

The Score and The Miracle are marvellous mini-epics. Elsewhere there are shorter tracks such as the jazzy Step Aside, the ballad Lay Down Your Arms and the memorable Touch And Go, plus Mars, The Bringer Of War, from Holst’s The Planets. This stands proudly alongside the best of the Palmer ELP albums

Pink Floyd – A Momentary Lapse Of Reason (1987)

Defying Roger Waters – who’d tried to shut the band down in the wake of 1983’s acrimonious The Final Cut – Messrs Gilmour, Mason and Wright reunited in 1987 for A Momentary Lapse Of Reason.

Derided at the time by Waters, it’s effectively a Gilmour solo album. And while it’s not a patch on the Floyd masterworks of the 70s, it merits inclusion here.

The ironically titled Signs Of Life is an instrumental prelude for Learning To Fly which showcases Gilmour’s guitar, while the pulsating The Dogs Of War is considerably darker, and the uplifting On The Turning Away simply sublime.

It Bites – Once Around The World (1988)

A prog rock band with strong pop sensibilities to boot, It Bites were an unlikely looking and sounding proposition.

This second album manages to mix hugely commercial tracks like Midnight and Kiss Like Judas with epics like Old Man And The Angel and the astonishing 15-minute title track without seeming contrived.

While Francis Dunnery’s voice is an acquired taste, his guitar playing and musical vision held enormous promise which as yet remains unfulfilled following the band’s implosion a couple of years later.

Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe – Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe (1989)

Yes in all but name for legal reasons. After that band’s Big Generator failed to match the success of 90125, vocalist Jon Anderson regrouped with former colleagues Steve Howe, Bill Bruford and Rick Wakeman for this one-off project.

More quintessentially prog than 80s Yes, ABWH stretch out with several mini epics – Themes, Brother Of Mine, the borderline twee Quartet and potent Order Of The Universe among them.

Elsewhere The Meeting and Let’s Pretend are reminiscent of Anderson’s work with Vangelis.

World Trade – World Trade (1989)

Formed by Lodgic bassist – and future Yes man – Billy Sherwood, World Trade’s debut is one of prog’s great lost albums.

Clearly influenced by early-80s Yes, World Trade fashioned a sound that was a hybrid of AOR and prog. A throwaway opening instrumental aside, this record is 10 near-flawless tracks.

Highlights include Life-Time, driven by Sherwood’s bass riff, the uplifting Revolution Song and caustic Fight To Win. Sherwood’s current membership of Yes aside, World Trade are a footnote in the prog annals – but this is essential listening.

Free began as a serious-minded bunch, each member steeped in the spirit of the British Blues Explosion. Most of their 1969 debut Tons Of Sobs and the eponymous follow-up consisted of meaningful blues tracts, and their concerts ticked along to a medium tempo. The story goes that after a particularly lacklustre college gig in Durham, Free headed for the dressing room to the audible indifference of the crowd.

“The applause had died before I had even left the drum riser,” recalled drummer Simon Kirke. “It was obvious that we needed a rocker to close our shows.” A tune that always got the room shaking was their take on The Hunter, a raunchy, upbeat blues recorded by Albert King.

“We couldn’t drop it because it was too popular,” remembered Paul Rodgers. “We knew we had to write a song with all those same qualities and a singalong chorus.”

That night in Durham, Fraser consoled his bandmates, reassuring them things would be okay by riffing on a consolatory line, ‘All right now, it’s all right now’. It stuck, and their biggest song was pieced together from there. Fraser wrote the timeless riff on piano, with Paul Kossoff then arranging it for guitar. If there were similarities with the Rolling Stones’ Honky Tonk Women, Fraser claimed he was actually trying to channel the era’s chord-meister, Pete Townshend.

If All Right Now showed Free’s more frivolous side, it was driven home by their unparalleled musical pedigree. Kirke’s cowbell-studded beat is rock solid, Fraser adds flamboyant, high-up-the-neck fills to his low-end bass groove, and Kossoff – besides that crunching riff – plays his heart out through the song’s soaring guitar solo, cut short for the single edit by Island’s Chris Blackwell, who could smell a hit.

Meanwhile, Rodgers takes the of-its-time ‘boy-pulls-girl’ lyric and pours soul all over it. The lyric, the frontman revealed to Free biographer Steven Rosen, was inspired by an unplanned encounter with actress Marsha Hunt (then in a relationship with Mick Jagger) on a London street.

"I used to live near Oxford Street and Hair was playing right there on the corner," said Rodgers. "And I remember seeing this girl and she may have triggered the idea for that, because there she stood in the street, and she seemed to be smiling from her head to her feet. She obviously had a presence, do you know what I mean? Because there were a lot of people around and she just stood there and I thought, ‘Wow – look at her’."

First charting in June 1970, All Right Now peaked at No.2 on the UK singles chart and at No.4 in the US. Its parent album Fire And Water also landed at No.2 in the UK, its momentum maintained by Free’s turn at the Isle Of Wight Festival that year, where Free headlined for a crowd estimated to be between 600,000 and 700,000.

In reaching that commercial high-water mark, one of the all-time great British rock bands gave us an enduring anthem. With 380 million Spotify hits and counting, it’s still played on radio daily worldwide, still lovingly murdered by countless pub bands every weekend, still imitated by the legions of groups Free inspired.

"I never bought a yacht on the Riviera off it, but it’s been very handy," Rodgers told Classic Rock. "A couple of TV ads butchered it like the Wrigley’s Spearmint gum thing, where they just used my voice. Island Records did better than we did. The song broke us in America, but we couldn’t capitalise because we broke up and became an enigma there."

Indeed, the success of All Right Now was a factor in that breakup, robbing Free of the musical freedom their name implied. “All Right Now really was an albatross,” Kirke told Classic Rock. “What’s that old Chinese saying: be careful what you wish for? And we got it. Suddenly, instead of playing a different town every night, we were playing a different country."

“The pressure was on to come up with a follow-up to All Right Now, and we just couldn’t," he continued. "That’s when Andy and Paul thought, well, we’ve reached the end of our musical journey together, let’s split up. I’ll never forget Koss’s reaction. He slumped like he’d been hit in the stomach.”

George Thorogood appears on the Zoom screen in a blank, neutral space, the background giving nothing away. The lighting is clean, the image sharp. Wearing a jacket and a big pair of shades, and with a thick head of light-brown hair, he looks every inch the high-functioning rock’n’roll lifer he has always been. He could very well be in Tysons, Virginia where he and his band the Destroyers are playing a show tomorrow night. But it’s a detail he won’t confirm.

“I like to keep one foot in the shadows,” he says, conspiratorially. Thorogood is here to talk up The Baddest Show On Earth, a live greatest hits collection that distills the best moments of a 50-plus-year touring career into a single set.

Back when you started out in those early bar gigs in Delaware, what did a great night feel like?

A great night was when nobody got hurt. That was our motive when we got into playing those barroom places. People drink a lot, they get excited, sometimes they take it too far. There’s a jealous husband or boyfriend. It could get rough. It’s better now. I like it better now.

Was there a moment early on when you realised you had something that could last?

The first time we played together. As soon as we played, the reaction was so immediate and high-energy and positive, we knew we had something right away. I said to myself: “This is who I am. This is what I am.” Before I even really got into music I was completely consumed by it. That’s all I wanted to do then, and that’s all I want now.

What for you is the hardest part of the touring life that people don’t see?

There are so many things. I could give you a migraine just listing them. Let’s put it this way: show business is not for sissies. Getting on stage and actually playing is the easiest part. It’s still difficult, but less difficult than everything else. Putting a tour together, getting a crew together, all the logistics. Just getting everybody out of the house.

Rock’n’roll is different now. People have families. They have to convince their wives or their children they have to go on the road. That’s not easy. In the 1970s we didn’t have those issues. Nobody was married, nobody had kids. People just went out and played and got high. That’s the way it was back then. Well, the world has changed. It’s become a more sophisticated thing, because, like Cyndi Lauper says, money changes everything. When the big bucks rolled in, it got more complex.

You’ve stayed remarkably consistent in what you do. How did you manage that?

I was lucky. I had a particular idea of what I wanted to do, and I also knew that’s all I can do. The riffs of John Lee Hooker, Bo Diddley, Howlin’ Wolf, they came natural to me. That was my favourite kind of music anyway, so I got a break there.

What was it like when you started meeting the very people who inspired you?

I was in shock. I still am. People like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Robert Lockwood Jr… they just took us under their wing. They naturally warmed up to us. That was the biggest surprise of all. I had no expectations about it, but they went overboard to help us any way they could. Guys in Howlin’ Wolf’s band, Hound Dog Taylor’s band, they were really for us. That meant everything.

When you were promoting your 1983 single Rock And Roll Christmas, in the video you had John Lee Hooker dressed as Santa Claus. How did you persuade him to do that?

John Lee was a friend of ours. We were doing this video for MTV. And when John Lee saw some of the women in the video he said: “Okay, I’ll do it.” He became the “boogie-woogie Santa Claus” as he put it. Everything we did with John Lee was a pleasure.

Rock And Roll Christmas was your own song. So was your biggest hit, Bad To The Bone (1982). Were you under pressure to write more originals?

In the 1970s people kept telling me: “You’ve got to write your own material.” And I was going: “What if the material’s not any good? How about that?” I wasn’t going to drop One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer [by John Lee Hooker] or Move It On Over [Hank Williams] just because I didn’t write them. That would be crazy.

Eventually someone else would do those songs. Linda Ronstadt would do Move It On Over, and I’d be left at the dock. So I kind of had to represent the band myself, to sell those songs to a record company. I found out later that record companies make more money off originals than they do off a non-original. I didn’t know that. I just figured, look, if a song is great, it’s going to be a hit whether I do it or not.

What difference does it make who wrote it as long as people dig it? The Allman Brothers, Elvin Bishop, somebody’s going to do it. So that was a big mental struggle for me in those days.

Looking back on your career, what are you most proud of?

The fact that I was able to make a living doing this. And that the songs we selected were right. I’m proud we exposed those songs. Once we made the first record [George Thorogood And The Destroyers, 1977] and it hit, then everything turned around. The record company came back and said: “Hey man, you got any more of those tunes?” So we proved ourselves in that department, and I am proud of that.

What would you have done differently?

About a thousand things. I would have tried to get a manager earlier, someone to beat the bushes and get us a record deal. That’s what managers do when an act is unknown. I had to represent the band myself, and that was a struggle. Sure, ultimately, I would have liked to get to a level like Steve Miller or Bob Seger. That didn’t happen. But I’m pleased with the level we made it to. Let’s put it this way: I clawed my way to the middle.

The 50/50 tour George Thorogood And The Destroyers did in 1981 – 50 states in 50 days – has become part of rock’n’roll folklore. What do you remember about it now?

It was an effort in lunacy. We had that tour planned, and then we got offered more shows with the Rolling Stones. [US promoter] Bill Graham wanted us to open for all the remaining dates of the Stones [Tattoo You] tour, but we couldn’t do it because we had already made that obligation. So the whole time on that 50/50 tour I was kind of kicking myself, knowing what I had passed up.

When you did get to tour with the Stones, did you spend much time with them off stage?

Mick Jagger took us out one night in Holland. We had a few beers and talked for a couple of hours – music, clothes, everything. He was a wonderful host. Very funny guy. He’s got a natural way of making you laugh. Very smart guy. I mean, he wrote Jumpin’ Jack Flash. That’s one of the greatest rock’n’roll songs ever. We send a birthday greeting to Keith every year. Sometimes we get a response, sometimes we don’t, but that’s the association, man. That’s good enough for me.

Did Ronnie Wood offer to paint your picture?

I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I don’t think I could sit still that long.

Brian Jones was an important influence on you as well, wasn’t he?

I’ll ask you a question: what do Keith Richards, Mick Jagger and George Thorogood all have in common? We all heard a slide guitar for the first time being played by Brian Jones. He played great rhythm and slide guitar. And that’s what I do. Brian Jones turned me on to that.

I once cornered Bo Diddley, and I said: “Bo, is there anybody you know that can capture your sound?” He said: “Nobody can be like me. I’m the one and only.” I said: “I know that, but if you had to pick somebody…” And he said: “The guy that got Bo Diddley down the best was Brian Jones.”

You’ve also spent time on the road with ZZ Top. What did you take from that band?

Every year we turn around, and at some point it’s always ZZ Top and Thorogood. Promoters like that bill. We just did New Zealand and Australia with them and we’re gonna do some Stateside dates with them later in the year.

I once asked Billy Gibbons if he could give me any advice. He said: [imitates Gibbons’ deep, slow, Texan rumble] “George… I’m still looking for that lost chord.” He was talking about that one chord that takes a blues song and turns it into a rock’n’roll song. He found a way to take that basic blues thing and make it something bigger.

You played at Live Aid in Philadelphia. What do you remember about that day?

Well, it was very hot, and we’d had no sleep at all. We were in San Francisco the day before when we got the word they wanted us to do this, so we had to jump on a red-eye plane. I won’t say it was hectic, but you had to keep moving. Mr. [Bill] Graham [promoter] didn’t want anybody hanging around backstage, because there was so many acts to deal with.

We got George Siegel, who I love, to introduce us. And I got to meet Jack Nicholson. He had a sort of bowling shirt on, looked like he just walked out of a bowling alley. And he walks up to me and he says: “Georgie… [imitates Nicholson: long, long pause, big wolfish grin]… Jack.” I said: “You know who I am?” He goes: “Sure… I always follow the rough boys!” We had Albert Collins and Bo Diddley both join us on stage. I asked Bo what kind of strings he was using. He said: “I don’t know, but they’re heavy duty.”

You’ve kept a band together for decades. What’s the secret?

Loyalty is based on finance. That doesn’t hurt. If you’re playing music, getting paid for it, and having fun, that’s rare. A lot of bands stay together because they’re successful, not because they like each other. If you can get along as well, that’s a bonus.

Come on! It’s got to be more than just the money. You and Jeff Simon (Destroyers’ drummer) have known each other since you were at school. You’ve been central to his entire working life.

Well, you might have got something there. Jeff was a few years younger than me. I went to school with his older brother. So I think he kind of looked up to me in the neighborhood. So when I said: “I want to form a band with you,” well, I think that gave him a rush.

And he had a great knowledge of music. For a young guy from about thirteen or so, he knew all about the Mothers Of Invention. He knew about the blues. He went to see Johnny Winter. He knew what was going on. So when he heard me play, he knew immediately where I was going, and he wanted to get involved with that.

What about the rest of the band? They’ve all been with you a very long time, haven’t they?

Yeah, a few years. Once you get in a groove with somebody… We’re fortunate. There’s a lot of acts that work together, and they stay together, but they really couldn’t stand each other, but they were successful. Legend has it that Lou Costello didn’t like Bud Abbott too much. Or Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee didn’t get along. But they stick it out because they’re successful.

You weren’t tempted to hire some bigger names or change the dynamic in some way?

Sure. I wanted to get Jeff Beck in. But he wasn’t available. Then I wanted to get Keith Moon, but he passed on. I went for the big time, but those cats were a little busy.

Dave Edmunds produced some of your songs. Maybe he would have made the cut?

I love Dave Edmunds. I’ve jammed with him. He got me up on stage to play with the Ringo Starr All-Stars. That was a gas. I just wish I had his chops. I mean, he’s the only guitar player in the world I knew who did that Russian song Sabre Dance [with Love Sculpture]. Now, that’s something quite extraordinary.

When Mick Taylor left the Stones, I thought Dave Edmunds could have been the man for the job. British, good knowledge of rock’n’roll, especially Chuck Berry. I was rooting for him. But I guess Ronnie Wood was the natural selection.

Your new album features live recordings from 1978 to 2024. How did you choose what songs to include?

There were certain songs we wanted to capture live that had never been on a record before. And then the record company wants to put some of our biggest songs on it to sell records. So it was kind of a fifty-fifty operation. We’re here to play what people want to hear. If they respond to Bad To The Bone, we play it. If they respond to One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer, then we play it. If we play a song and they don’t respond, then we don’t play it. How’s that?

Do you have any other message for your fans?

Most of what you’ve just read is true… But never let the facts interfere with a good story.

The Baddest Show On Earth: Greatest Hits Live is out now via Craft Recordings. George Thorogood and the Destroyers are currently on tour in the US - for dates and tickets, check the George Thorogood website.

Stevie Van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen's faithful brother-in-arms in The E Street Band, says that he has written scripts for no fewer than six TV series, and that his number one ambition right now is to have a TV network or major streaming platform commission at least one of the six.

In 1999, having had no previous acting experience, Van Zandt was cast in New Jersey Mafia drama The Sopranos, and proved a revelation in his role as mobster and strip club owner Silvio Dante. Twenty years on he was cast as a singer in Martin Scorsese's gangster movie The Irishman.

In 2011, the guitarist co-wrote, starred in, and was an executive producer on Netflix comedy-drama Lilyhammer, and in a new interview with Vulture, the 75-year-old star says that he would relish being given another television project.

"It doesn’t have to be one of my scripts," he says, "but that would be nice."

"My favorite script is called Nobody Loves and Leaves Alive," he reveals. "As all my stuff is, it’s a little bit of a dramedy. It’s about three brothers. And actually, I’m going to be playing two of them.

"The first brother is a gangster, which I’m going to play. People love me as a gangster. The second brother is a rock-and-roll guy, a real hippie type of rock-and-roll guy, which I can fake. And a third brother is an FBI guy, a role that I’m offering to Johnny Depp. I’m hoping he reads it. The show is about how they interact with each other — those three lives of the mob world, the rock-and-roll world, and the FBI world.... I already have the soundtrack done and the script done. So it’s a matter of somebody saying, 'Let’s go'."

Earlier this year, Van Zandt revealed that Bruce Springsteen, and his band members, had received death threats while on their Land of Hope and Dreams tour in the US.

"This tour has been a little bit different because of the high security," he told UK tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail. "It's a very specific political theme to this tour and there's been a lot of threats, death threats. Usually there's always some, but this time it's been increasing."

Revealing that Springsteen has had to "beef up security", Van Zandt added, "it's mostly just talk. And it's not like we're saying something that's not true or we're saying something that's so really particularly controversial, but it's specifically political."

"So the FBI and others have been really watching things and been overly concerned about it, as they should be," he continued. "We want the fans to be safe and feel safe. So we really go the extra mile with extra security for that reason alone."

It's all love and peace now, obviously, but when when [formerly] warring siblings Liam and Noel Gallagher were gleefully trading witty insults in the media, they were united in their belief that the band which propelled them into global consciousness was special, their songs forever resonant.

And they were right.

Here are 12 songs which demonstrate why Oasis continue to capture the popular imagination, 30 years on from their huge, history-making Knebworth gigs.

1. Rock 'n' Roll Star

Famously, in May 1993, Creation Records boss Alan McGee, back in his hometown of Glasgow to see family, caught Oasis playing third on the bill to 18 Wheeler, and offered the band a record deal on the spot. Noel Gallagher, already wise to the weapons-grade bullshit spouted by cocaine-fuelled music industry types thanks to his apprenticeship as a roadie for Inspiral Carpets, made sure that McGee left the venue with a copy of Oasis' eight-song Live Demonstration cassette, so he wouldn't forget the band's name when he sobered up. With all due respect, Strange Thing or Cloudburst on that tape would never have secured the Mancunian quintet worldwide record deals, but side B, song 4? That's the good stuff.

Imagine fronting a gang of older lads who look like they've stepped off a building site in their work clothes and delivering the line, “Look at you now, you’re all in my hands tonight” with utter conviction to audiences you could comfortably fit into a Ford Escort while third on the bill at JBs in Dudley, The Duchess Of York in Leeds, or Hull Adelphi. Then try to imagine watching anyone but a 21-year-old Liam Gallagher, still living with his mum Peggy on a Burnage council estate, singing this and actually believing him/her/they.

Gallagher The Younger quite correctly identified Rock 'n' Roll Star as “the most arrogant song ever” and as track 1, side 1, on Definitely Maybe, it is the most perfectly cocky introduction to a debut album that would change literally millions of lives. The Instagram/TikTok generation call this "manifesting", back in the '90s it was known simply as "dreaming", but no dream ever sounded more like destiny.

2. Live Forever

“I’ve pretty much summed up everything I wanted to say in Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, Live Forever, and Cigarettes & Alcohol,” admitted Noel Gallagher as Definitely Maybe was filed in record racks across the UK ahead of its August 29, 1994 release. "After that I’m repeating myself, but in a different way.”

Rock 'n' Roll we've already discussed, and Cigarettes & Alcohol is the most fabulously 'zero fucks given' song on the most fearlessly optimistic punk rock album in history, but it's Live Forever which is the most Oasis song ever written, and Noel Gallagher's definitive statement.

Written as a response to (incorrect) music magazine rumours that Kurt Cobain was intent upon naming Nirvana’s third album I Hate Myself And I Want To Die, Live Forever is all about widescreen dreams, unshakeable self-belief and BDE swagger, a transcendent anthem which encapsulates everything about early Oasis. If you don't 'get' Oasis after listening to Live Forever you never will, but if you know, you know.

3. Half The World Away

Coming in the wake of four superb introductory singles - Supersonic, Shakermaker, Live Forever and Cigarettes & Alcohol - Oasis' first non album single, released on December 18, 1994, was a bit... whatever. Until you listened to its B-sides.

Noel Gallagher's prolific songwriting talents had already allowed Oasis to casually toss out songs - Fade Away, Listen Up, Alive - as bonus tracks on singles when other bands would have killed to showcase them as A-sides. But listening to the B-sides of Whatever is the moment where you imagine Gallagher is starting to take the piss. It's Good To Be Free (check out the live White Room version) is a banger, but the beautiful, brilliant Half The World Away moves the dial from 'grandstanding' to 'shithousing'... not least because Noel, not Liam, at the time the world's most compelling vocalist, sings it.

That Half Away The World was subsequently used as the theme tune to much-loved BBC sitcom The Royle Family only served to copper-fasten its iconic status, and place it alongside Pulp's Common People as an alternative British national anthem, one that actually resonates with the majority of its citizens.

4. Talk Tonight

Without Melissa Lim, this list would end here. Rather ungraciously, interviewed for the Oasis documentary Supersonic, Noel Gallagher claimed to remember neither Lim's name, nor what she looked like, admitting that the time was “a bit of a blur”, but the San Francisco native's entry into Gallagher's life stopped him walking away from Oasis during their very first American tour, following what he considered to be a disastrous crystal meth-fuelled gig at LA's legendary Whisky A Go Go club.

Having been hit by a tambourine thrown by his little brother at said gig, a furious Gallagher collected his passport and $700 from tour manager Maggie Mouzakitis, pushed a note under her door to say that he was fucking off, then caught a flight to San Francisco to meet Lim, who he'd first met at Oasis' show at the city's Bottom of the Hill venue four nights earlier. “He was very upset,” Lim told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2016 . “I took him in, fed him and tried to calm him down. He wanted to break up the band... I wasn’t going to let it happen on my watch.”

The story is told, partially, in Talk Tonight, which Gallagher recorded solo in Austin, Texas just weeks later, after his return to the fold. The song's chorus runs “I want to talk tonight/ Until the morning light/ ’Bout how you saved my life”, a more gracious 'thank you' which no-one can ever take away from Lim.

By the way: listen to that Whiskey A Go Go gig sometime, because it's electrifying when the Gallagher boys aren't trying to knock lumps out of one another. And that was Oasis at their worst.

5. Acquiesce

"Because we need each other. We believe in one another."

In the sleevenotes to The Masterplan, Oasis' outstanding B-sides compilation album, we're informed that Acquiesce, contrary to all speculation, isn't about the relationship between Liam and Noel Gallagher.

Riiiiiiiight.

That Acquiesce was 'relegated' to the B-side of the infinitely weaker Some Might Say is, frankly, unbelievable: you'd have to have ears fashioned from Bagpuss' pelt not to hear the gulf in class between the two songs, not least when it comes to the soaring, sublime switches from Liam's verses to Noel's chorus.

When Oasis played two nights at Maine Road, then the home ground of their beloved Manchester City, in April '96, they chose Acquiesce as their set opener. The nerve! The chutzpah! Liam sings flat - whatever - and it's still unfeasibly thrilling.

6. Hello

Hello is by no means the best, most significant, or most important song on (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, but it's on this list for a simple reason. If you were an Oasis fan in 1995, and had heard the Mancunians preview their second album with the decidedly mediocre one-two of Some Might Say and Roll With It, you would have been forgiven for having a crisis of faith over what lay ahead, particularly if you also found time within that to question The Chief's wisdom in spunking so many killer songs on B-sides. But Hello, the album's lairy opener, was the moment you knew that everything was going to be alright.

With retrospect, the Gary Glitter echo is deeply unfortunate. But the Paul Calf-echoing "I've got a feeling you still owe me, so wipe the shit from your shoes"?

Come on.

7. Wonderwall

Is anyone here unfamiliar with Wonderwall? Anyone at all? Okay, next!

8. D’You Know What I Mean?

Another album opener, another absolute beast of a song.

Famously, Be Here Now, is Oasis' 'cocaine album': frankly, if you think any Oasis album wasn't a cocaine album, you weren't paying much attention. Whatever, the implication here is that Be Here Now was over-blown, long-winded, and full of its own self-importance, which is a totally accurate assessment. But in the case of opener D’You Know What I Mean?, the more relevant epithets are 'epic', 'massive' and 'monstrous', for it sounds the way you would hope one of the biggest rock bands in the world should sound, brash, bold and louder than bombs.

Explaining some of the thinking behind the song's swagger, Noel Gallagher stated, "We were a bunch of scruffs from Manchester and we're going out in a Rolls-Royce." Old school rock 'n' roll indulgence may be a bit déclassé in 2024, but sometimes you just have to sit back and gawp in wonder at the excess, and this is one such instance.

9. Little James

Now, wait, we're not suggesting that this is one of Oasis' greatest songs: we're not insane. But in terms of the Oasis story, Little James is a landmark moment, being the first Liam Gallagher-penned/non-Noel Gallagher penned song to feature on an Oasis album, specifically Standing on the Shoulder of Giants.

Rather sweetly, the song was written for Gallagher's former stepson, James Kerr, the son of Liam's ex-wife Patsy Kensit and Simple Minds vocalist Jim Kerr: a shame then, that's it's such a soppy, sappy, wet tissue of a tune, with lyrics - "Live for your toys / Even though they make noise / Have you ever played with plasticine / Even tried a trampoline" - that make Noel Gallagher's rhyming couplets read like Jean-Paul Sartre.

Noel, to be fair, was encouraging of his brother's efforts, saying, "It's good, it's very catchy... Now he knows he can do it, good luck to him." But in opening up his band's songwriting, Gallagher Senior opened up Oasis' own Pandora's Box...

10. Stop Crying Your Heart Out

Take a look at the songwriting credits on Heathen Chemistry: after Noel Gallagher opened the door to other writers, suddenly everyone in Oasis wanted in on the act (or in on the songwriting royalties, at least). To be fair, given that Andy Bell had written for Ride, and Gem Archer had a modicum of success with his previous band Heavy Stereo, you can easily imagine why they listened to Little James and thought, 'Right, fucking hell, if that's the standard now...'

Now go look at the the songwriting credits on Heathen Chemistry again. Notice anything? Here's a clue: the only good songs are all Noel Gallagher's songs. And Stop Crying Your Heart Out, the very obvious highpoint, is so far and above everything else on the record that you have to imagine that Noel Gallagher was trying really, really hard not to sound too smug when he presented it to the band. "Mind if I try one of mine lads?"

"Heathen Chemistry had a couple of good tunes, Little By Little and Stop Crying Your Heart Out," Noel later told NME. "The rest of it is a bit ‘meh’."

File under: sit down, shut up.

11. Lyla

So, following on from the previous entry, wherein it may have been implied that letting every fucker write songs for Oasis was The Beginning Of The End - which it kinda was - in the interests of fairness, we should state here that 2005's Don't Believe The Truth is [insert Larry David impression] pretty, pretty good. Andy Bell's Keep The Dream Alive is excellent, Gem Archer's A Bell Will Ring is decent, and the Archer/Liam Gallagher co-write Love Like A Bomb is catchy, sunny and fun, with some nice Beatles harmonies. Well done everyone.

Again, though, The Chief's compositions shines brightest, with Mucky Fingers, The Importance Of Being Idle and Part Of The Queue hinting that Noel's songwriting was heading in a more experimental direction. Lyla is more typical Oasis, but it's also arguably the band's last true banger, with a chorus tailor-made for summer stadium screamalongs 20 years on.

12. I'm Outta Time

Again, with hindsight, Dig Out Your Soul is probably most significant for foreshadowing What Noel Did Next, but let's give props to Liam here, because the rather lovely I'm Outta Time is not only the best and most poignant song on Oasis' seventh and final record, but also the album's most-streamed song on Spotify.

After this, you can understand why Liam felt pretty bullish about the prospect of post-Noel, post-Oasis life, which has worked out just fine. But not quite as fine, admittedly, as things have been since the brothers buried the hatchet and Oasis swaggered back into view.

Hollywood superstar Javier Bardem credits AC/DC's 1979 album Highway To Hell as the album that changed his life.

The Spanish actor, currently starring as Max Cady in Apple TV's remake of Cape Fear, revealed his gateway into the world of rock and metal during an appearance on popular online series Subway Takes. Bardem's 'hot take' is 'Hard rock and metal are the best music genres, with the best fans and the best audiences!', which host Kareem Rahma was "100 per cent" in agreement with.

"That's sick!," Rahma responds. "Unexpected and great!"

Bardem, 57, tells the host that he's been a "headbanger" since the '80s, and says that there's a "brotherhood" when you're a metal fan, with mutual respect and admiration shared.

"It's a really great energizing music that puts you... puts me in my place, like helps me also to relax, whether you believe it or not."

"The first album that I remember was Highway To Hell," he reveals. "I was 10. And the moment that I heard - sings the title track's main riff - my life changed. That moment, I was like, this is what I want to listen to for the rest of my life."

Bardem goes on to namecheck Metallica, Bad Omens, and Falling In Reverse as bands he's currently listening to, and gives a shout out to Linkin Park's Emily Armstrong as an "amazing singer".

Back In June, Bardem revealed that listening to Slipknot, Linkin Park,Falling In Reverse and Bad Omens helped inspire his frighteningly intense performance as vengeance-seeking psychopath Max Cady in the new Cape Fear.

"We absolutely went for a metal look, I loved that," the star told Kerrang!

"I listened to five songs especially," he says. "Two from Linkin Park, Given Up, with the great Chester [Bennington], and Up From The Bottom from the last album, From Zero. I think [Emily Armstrong] is an amazing singer.

"She really brought it back," he continues. “Those two songs really express frustration and the fight for raising up from [one’s] own ashes that [resonates] with Max. And songs by Slipknot, Falling In Reverse, and Bad Omens. I’m so bad with the names of songs, but they were in my head all day long before doing anything and helped put me in the mood."

In 1971 revolutionary singer-songwriter Roy Harper was about to go deep into the world of concept rock – but his four-track opus got buried by his label. In 2011 Prog found out why.

There are many ways to describe Roy Harper, but ‘conventional’ has never been one of them. He emerged from London’s boho folk circuit of the 60s as a singer-songwriter of alarming intensity, motored by a mistrust of authority and an inalienable belief in everyone’s basic right to individual freedom. While other folkies were protesting the Vietnam War, Harper was railing against deeper societal ills. But then he was never really a folkie in any traditional sense.

Shaped by a traumatic early life – a fanatically religious stepmother, homelessness, prison, a spell in a mental institution – his music avoided the easy route too. Harper’s early albums were hallucinogenic things that skittered between poetry, revox-blues and psychedelia, as much prone to spliffed-up lunacy as they were to chilling autobiography and 17-minute songs about Patrick McGoohan. His underground status as a countercultural hero was finally seeping upwards by 1970, when his friendship with Led Zeppelin led to the touching tribute Hats Off To (Roy) Harper, which appeared on Led Zeppelin III that October.

He was by then managed by Peter Jenner, onetime custodian of Pink Floyd (who themselves would later invite Harper to sing Have A Cigar on the multi-platinum Wish You Were Here). Jenner had produced Harper’s previous opus, 1970’s wonderful Flat Baroque And Berserk, at Abbey Road. With the same studio again available, and a searing new set of compositions, Harper began making Stormcock. For once in his five-year recording career, he was able to fully focus on the job at hand.

The combined studio time of his first three albums – from 1966’s The Sophisticated Beggar to 1969’s Folkjokeopus – had been a week. “Flat Baroque And Berserk was where I was spreading wings and finding out exactly what could be done,” Harper tells Prog. “But then I saw a different light at the end of that record. I felt the time was right for me to do what I really wanted to, which was Stormcock.”

Adds Jenner, who again produced the album: “The Floyd were making things like Atom Heart Mother and Meddle; Zeppelin were making long tracks and The Who were doing Tommy. The spirit of the times was concept rock. Suddenly, in terms of songwriting, you weren’t restricted to three minutes or what was acceptable for radio.”

Stormcock was a masterpiece. Comprising just four songs, most featuring only Harper and his dizzying skill on acoustic and 12-string guitar, it was emotionally fierce and highly inventive. There were savage attacks on war, the judicial system, rock critics and religious dogma – among other things – alongside an anguished plea to save the planet. And, trading as S. Flavius Mercurius, Jimmy Page provided flashing lead guitar on the 12-and-a-half-minute The Same Old Rock. It remains Harper’s own personal highlight of Stormcock.

“Jimmy’s so intuitive,” he explains. “He finds things he can identify with, and that’s what he did on that song. It was just an atmosphere he created – it’s one of those things you just remember forever in your life. Jimmy elevated it into something else entirely.” It’s an astonishing piece of work all round, both men spinning soundwebs as complex as they are complementary.

Jenner believes Harper and Page shared a common understanding in the studio: “Page could feel where he was going and Roy would follow him. Page obviously liked working with Roy. And it got him away from being either the session man or the rock god. He was just able to play.”

The Same Old Rock is generally perceived as a scathing indictment of religion. In truth it’s less specific – it’s actually a discourse on the constrictive nature of any kind of dogmatic institution you care to name. Harper’s frustration at organisations which fail to acknowledge any alternative belief system is shared aloud: ‘You try to warn me that there’s only one combination / One new sling, the same old rock.’ Above all, the piece sounds like a plea for tolerance.

Hors D’Oeuvres is equally withering. The first verse is an eloquent diatribe against the judiciary, particularly the power invested in it. Harper makes it personal by alluding to the fact that the jury had somehow been out on his career ever since he began. Hors D’Oeuvres, like Stormcock itself, was both a statement of intent and statement for the defence. It was Harper laid very bare. The second verse is a ferocious attack on music critics. Anyone in particular? “There were one or two it was aimed at,” he concedes.

“But I don’t think naming names is going to help. That’s not fair. It’s like football referees: you can single one out but then the poor bugger has to go home.” There were consequences, though: “I was told by one journalist, after Stormcock, that I was a megalomaniac. And it had a real intense effect on me. I thought, ‘If that’s what people think about me, what am I going to do about it?’ It was like being compared favourably to Hitler. If there was any ethic I would want to avoid it would be national socialism.”

His reaction might well surprise those who view turn-of-the 70s Harper – a man seemingly possessed of uncommon self-belief – as impervious to the slings and arrows of rock journalism.

“I think that was because of the absolute authority I looked as though I was handing it out with,” he suggests. “But I felt very hurt at the time, because the way I saw myself was exactly the opposite of that. You always get a critic who’s able to open your guts up and spray your innards everywhere.”

Stormcock doesn’t get any less heavy further in. One Man Rock And Roll Band is both a meditation on the madness of war and the peace movement’s propensity for breaking out into full-scale riots. It’s all ably rendered by Harper’s fluid guitar accents and piano, with a delicacy and lightness of touch that belies its subject matter. In fact, it’s one of the defining features of the album itself.

For all its bite and burningly poetic anger, Stormcock is beautiful to listen to. There are flourishes of reverb, double-tracked harmonies, passages that billow between folk and jazz, rock and acoustic blues. As Jenner explains: “We were working at Abbey Road with people who’d all recorded The Beatles in one way or another. The influence of Phil Spector – who they’d all worked with too – meant there were certain traditions where we were working. With Stormcock, Roy managed to make a record that embraced a lot of prog rock aspects within the context of the sort of music he wrote.”

Nothing illustrates this quite like the sumptuous Me And My Woman, a 13-minute opus orchestrated by David Bedford, who’d also been involved with Flat Baroque And Berserk. It remains one of Harper’s greatest ever moments. “It’s rather like an opera,” Bedford says. “The themes and the basic riff keep recurring. I decided to give the verses a kind of baroque feel, then have these big sweeping strings for the chorus to differentiate the two. And they seemed to really like that. Me And My Woman was almost three different songs fused together.”

The song could be taken as an ornate love ballad, but it’s actually one of the first eco-protest songs – Harper warning of imminent environmental collapse in the face of the relentless pursuit of wealth and power. Stuffed with metaphor, it’s a song open to interpretation.

“Me And My Woman is about Mocy [Harper’s first wife],” posits Jenner. “Around that time Roy’s marriage was breaking up and I think it was a statement about how important she’d been with Nick [Roy’s son] and all the rest of it. But Roy had a wandering eye. So I think Me And My Woman was his paean of praise to her, which I think was wonderful. And it was about living with her down in Wiltshire. In many ways I think it was one of the happiest parts of his life and it’s a shame he didn’t settle down a bit more into that.”

“It partly is about her,” Harper concedes. “But in my mind that song is always the question: ‘Me and my woman, what are we doing on this planet? Are we part of the ongoing fauna and flora or are we likely to last very much longer? Are we not making it very difficult for ourselves to carry on?’ I was making this point when I wrote it in 1970. People are still asking the same question – but it’s actually got a lot closer to the bone now. It’s still a huge question and one that remains unanswered.”

Released in May 1971, Stormcock should have been a flyaway success. But as with many things in Harper’s life, it was never quite that simple. The record company, whose execs had dipped in and out of the studio a couple of times, weren’t happy. “They wanted a single and there was no single appearing,” Harper recalls. “So even before the record was finished it was outlawed.” Not only did Harvest refuse to get behind it, assert Harper and Jenner, they claimed there was no budget for promotion either. It was the same in the US, where the suits at parent label Capitol just weren’t interested.

“They turned it down,” says Harper, “which effectively meant that it was a non-starter internationally. They were hard and fast pop men. Anything that was selling in millions they got behind, but they didn’t want to break new ground. That wasn’t in their remit. I was distraught, to be honest. I knew that if Stormcock had been taken at face value, it was a revolution in itself. It was a new direction for people to look in.”

It was a situation that also devastated Jenner. “Stormcock got virtually no promotion,” he says. “In hindsight, that’s one of the greatest disappointments in my life. It could have been a huge record, but they absolutely buried it. And that was a tragedy. It was Roy’s time but the boat just sailed away.”

Nevertheless, Stormcock remains undimmed by the years. Subsequent generations of musicians have hailed it as a hugely influential record. Kate Bush, for one, has long been an admirer, while Johnny Marr recently told The Guardian that “if ever there was a secret weapon of a record it would be Stormcock. If anyone thinks it might be a collection of lovely songs by some twee old folkie then they’d be mistaken. It’s intense and beautiful and clever: [Bowie’s] Hunky Dory’s big, badder brother.”

California’s harp-wielding phenomenon Joanna Newsom is another greatly indebted to Stormcock. A prime influence on her astonishing 2006 breakthrough Ys, she invited Harper to support her at the Royal Albert Hall the following year, where he performed Stormcock in its entirety. The pair are now fast friends. Another convert is Fleet Foxes’ leader Robin Pecknold, who has stated that the 12-string sections on their much-anticipated new album were partly shaped by Stormcock.

“It’s a great unrecognised masterpiece,” concludes Peter Jenner. “And as time goes by it looms larger in my personal history. I imagine people will still be listening to it and talking about it 50 years from now.”

Steve Hogarth endured a series false starts to his musical career – and came close to becoming a milkman before an old friend encouraged him to apply for Fish’s former role in Marillion. Since then he’s released 16 albums with the band, toured as a solo artist and collaborated with countless others. “I did always imagine I’d be a star by the time I was in my mid- 20s,” he tells Prog cheerfully. “It took rather longer than that. Some would argue it’s yet to happen.”

What was your first musical instrument?

Technically, you’d say voice – I was in a choir when I was about 11. But I saw Deep Purple at Sheffield City Hall on the Machine Head tour. I thought, “Nothing’s better than this – it’s what I should be doing!” I’ve never really understood guitars, so I pleaded with my mum and dad to get me an old piano, which we put in the back room and I slowly but surely banged on it until I could play it.

Where did prog fit into your DNA?

It was a big part of it. I remember going to a party at someone’s house when I was 15 or 16. They were playing Status Quo’s Piledriver and one of the Led Zeppelin albums. Then somebody put The Yes Album on. I thought, “What on earth is this? This is amazing!”

It still stands out, because it’s Yes at their rawest, before there were too many cardboard cows in the studio. They were fusing Beach Boys and Crosby, Stills & Nash and jazz and this amazing sense of musicality. I didn’t realise that at the time. I just remember thinking, “What the fuck is this?”

Did you get lucky at the party?

Oh, I did get lucky! I met my first girlfriend at that party. I managed to combine prog with romance. I did get into Genesis rapidly after that – Nursery Cryme, Peter Gabriel’s amazing, chilling tones. I went to see Yes on the Fragile and Close To The Edge tours; I saw Genesis on the Foxtrot tour, the Selling England By The Pound tour, twice on the Lamb Lies Down On Broadway tour. I was at all the live gigs back then.

School performances aside, what was your first time onstage with a band?

Me and my best mate at school, who was a drummer, formed a band called Harlow. We got another mate to play guitar and I played piano and sang. We did a pub in Doncaster called The Woolpack every Tuesday night. That might have been our first gig. We played the working men’s clubs and miner’s welfare clubs – that was the scene up there.

Harlow released a single, Harry De Mazzio, in 1978. You’ve been pretty disparaging about it. Why?

It was the 70s. People like David Bowie were doing their thing, and I was writing a song called Harry De Mazzio. There you go.

It came out at the height of punk. Was that on your radar?

Everybody looks back at 1977 as the year punk happened, but it never happened in Doncaster. I was a hippie in the jaws of punk. I think I was a bit eccentric. I used to go round Doncaster in a bathrobe, yellow clogs and a lot of beads. It got me in all sorts of trouble. There were a lot of coal miners staggering out of pubs who would take one look at me and hit me because I represented some kind of affront to humanity.

What were you like back then – were you cocky?

I don’t think so. I felt different. When you’re walking down a street in a bathrobe and yellow clogs, you do feel different. I think I had the need to make the point: “Look, I’m not like the rest of you.” That was probably why I got hit a lot.

You ended up moving to London. Did you step off the train and think, “This is it – we’ve made it and we’re going to be rich and famous in six months”?

I didn’t actually go down on the train. My girlfriend, who would become my wife, had already moved from Doncaster to Shepperton, so that was my opportunity. I moved down there with a bloke from Doncaster who moved furniture around the UK in his van. We ended up going via Devon and Cornwall to drop off desks and chairs before we eventually made our way to Shepperton, where he dropped me off with a large hi-fi and a few clothes.

The drummer and the bass player from Harlow had moved down as well. They got themselves a horror flat in Notting Hill, which was really rough in those days. We became the Neutrinos, briefly – I think we did two shows. We had a post office van that broke down after a couple of days, with all the gear in it. We couldn’t afford to fix it, so it ended up in a pound. And that was the end of the band.

You ended up joining The Europeans. You were their keyboard player, but they let you sing the odd song. Were you happy being reserve vocalist?

I didn’t mind at all. I’ve never been that bothered about the singing. I used to write little dodgy songs and sing them, but my focus was more on the keyboard playing. They had advertised for a keyboard player in the back of the Melody Maker, so the fact that they let me sing at all was quite generous of them.

We were rehearsing in Chelsea in the middle of the night ’cos it was cheap, and the bass player said, “Have you got any songs?” I told him yes, and he said, “Well, why don’t you sing them, then?” That’s how I became the second singer. But I didn’t find it frustrating at all.

The Europeans made two albums and then split up. What went wrong?

We were absolutely convinced we were going to be huge. It didn’t feel like a dream; it felt like something that was going to happen. We were signed to A&M, we were all great players, we could all sing, we were creative, we were great live. We thought, “This is it – we’re gonna be the next Talking Heads.” Then the record company split up.

Jerry Moss, who was the ‘M’ in A&M, decided to pull the plug on the UK office. They’d been used to signing The Police, Joan Armatrading, Joe Jackson and all these artists who’d had massive success, but then it had dried up and they hadn’t had a really big album for a while. And they said, “That’s enough.” Everybody got fired and that was that.

That must have been dispiriting.

We were fucked. We were on a retainer to stay alive from A&M, ’cos we weren’t making enough money to be self-sufficient. We had a manager at the time who said, “I can probably get you out of this deal, and we’ll just sign another one somewhere else.” He got us out of the deal but he couldn’t get us another one.

For a few years in the 80s, you did a bit of session work. Tell me the first thing that comes to mind: John Otway.

Completely nuts. Good nuts. But with a steely creative business plan underneath.

Julian Cope.

Completely nuts! I went in and did some backing vocals with him [on 1987’s Saint Julian]. He used to pop out to Hamleys and come back with lots of toys. Him and his guitarist used to sit in a corner of the studio playing with these toys. He was bananas, but I love his voice. I had a lot of time for Julian.

The The’s Matt Johnson.

Serious. Focused. Thoughtful. A little bit scary. He looked like the kind of person who might strangle you if you pissed him off – I’m not saying he would have, in any way. Later on, I went to his apartment; he was lovely. He was vegetarian and only drank fruit tea, so he was quite monastic in that sense. He was like a monk you wouldn’t fuck with.

Rather than pursue a full-time career as a session musician, you formed How We Live. How did you plan to avoid a repeat what happened with The Europeans?

I’m not sure we did! It was me and Colin Woore, the guitarist from The Europeans. Towards the end of The Europeans we were co-writing a lot together, and I really liked what he was coming up with. A guy named Peter Karpin, who was famous for signing Men At Work, wanted to sign me to his label, Portrait. I persuaded him to have Colin as well. It’s lonely being a solo artist, so I managed to sell them the idea of a band.

How We Live only managed one album, 1987’s Dry Land, then it all went wrong again. What happened?

We were called Jump The Gun at first. I changed that to How We Live and the record label didn’t like the name at all, so I pissed them off right from the start. The MD came down to a gig we did at the ICA in London, and he was overheard saying, “The singer can’t sing, the band can’t play and the songs are no good.” Well, I was the singer, the band was shit-hot and you can argue about the songs. But that was it. We were dropped the following week.

You’ve talked in the past about having considered quitting music to become a postman or a milkman. How serious were you?

Totally. I was heartbroken by the process of being signed to Portrait. We used to go in there and play the songs and they’d go, “Hmmm… have you got anything else?” It was horrible. It wasn’t about creativity, it was about, “Give us a hit or fuck off.” By that point, I couldn’t even walk past a musical instrument shop without the knot in my stomach tightening. I thought, “Life’s too short for this.”

My wife was pregnant with our first child, so I said, “Sod it, let’s go to Derbyshire, buy a nice cottage in a nice village; I’ll get a job that involves me being finished by lunchtime, and I’ll watch the kids grow up.” At that point, I’d have just as soon been a milkman as have anybody ask me to write another song.

You had an offer to play keyboards with The The on the tour for 1989’s Mind Bomb. Do you ever wonder what would have happened if you’d taken the job?

Yeah, I sometimes wonder. I suppose I’d have had the reflected glory of being in the coolest band in the United Kingdom at that point, but it was only a tour. I guess I’d have become, at best, a jobbing keyboard player to the great and the good. And I might have made more money. But it’s not really what I was hoping for at that point.

Instead, you took the Marillion job on the advice of your friend Darryl Way. A fair few fans refused to accept you as the new singer. Was that tough?

Not at first. The attitude of the other four was, “Oh, don’t worry about that, it’ll all be fine!” They’d talk about Fish in fairly disparaging tones because they were busy slugging it out in court, so they didn’t seem worried about it. It wasn’t until we played live for the first time that I suddenly realised what I’d bitten off. I really thought, “Oh Christ, what are they gonna do?” But the fact is that people who didn’t like a Marillion without Fish had already lost interest, so I didn’t really come up against them.

Were you consciously trying to change the band’s sound – maybe drag them out of the 80s?

I was, yeah. It wasn’t dead easy either. They were set in their ways, and with good reason – they’d had a lot of success. So someone who hadn’t had a lot of success going, “Are you sure about this?” isn’t something you’re going to listen to. But there was a conservatism within the band. David Bowie once said you needed to be in the water in that place where your feet don’t quite touch the bottom, because that’s where the good stuff is. And I think that if they were left to their own devices, they wouldn’t walk in that deep. They’d splash around where they always were.

Marillion went through a tough time in the mid to late 90s. How bad did things get for you?

To be perfectly honest, from my perspective I’d known much tougher times. I’ve heard the boys saying, “The money was tight and we were very worried,” and this and that. I never remember any of that. I just remember turning up at the studio and writing a few good albums.

I might be a lone voice there, but I know what it’s like to have no money and be going cap-in-hand with a demo tape to an A&R man who had your future in his hands who would just send you away. This wasn’t like that.

You released your first and only solo album, Ice Cream Genius, in 1997. If it had taken off, would you have left Marillion?

Impossible to say. But it didn’t. The day that album came out, I was watching Steely Dan at Wembley Arena. There were two guys sitting behind me who must have been in the music business, and one said to the other, “Well, what about Castle Communications going bust, then?” And that was my label. It was the first I’d heard about it. So that album was dead at birth. It was heartbreaking – but you’ve got to take it philosophically.

What’s the closest you’ve come to quitting Marillion?

Before Sounds That Can’t Be Made we went out to Portugal to write. I was in a vortex of domestic madness at that point, and it was an incredibly stressful time anyway. When I got there, they’d hired this place in the middle of nowhere. They’d set up in this hard stone room and they’d been having a whale of time, but from the moment I walked in, I couldn’t hear myself singing – it was just a riot of noise.

I didn’t want to be there from the start, and they were playing something they wanted to work on, which was a bit widdly and proggy, and I probably said the wrong thing. And that spiralled into a “Fuck you, I’m done” situation. British Airways were on strike, so I couldn’t even get a flight back to England.

I think I did knock it on the head. I said, “I can’t do this any more; I quit.” It was Ian Mosley – who’s always tended to hold things together – who said, “Let’s take six months off, not see each other, then I’ll call you and find out if you’ve still left.” So, of course, he called me in six months and I couldn’t even remember what we’d been arguing about!

What are you proudest of?

I’m very proud of the All One Tonight live video from the Albert Hall. It presents us in our best light. I remember standing there on the night and thinking, “God, this is beautiful – how have we pulled this together?” And I’m proud of still being here.

If Matt Johnson called tomorrow and said, “There’s a vacancy in The The,” would you bail on Marillion?

No, but I’d go and do some shows with him in a heartbeat. And I wouldn’t charge him either.

The reissue of Ice Cream Genius is on sale now.

"Now is forever! IN THIS REALM!"

So goes the battle cry for Castle Rat, the New York group who've leveraged high fantasy themes and roaring riffs into becoming doom metal's hottest new band.

They've played barely a dozen gigs in the UK so far - their first was at Desertfest last year - but already the buzz around Castle Rat is obvious. It's a little after mid-day but the crowd swells under the brutal sun ahead of the band's Bloodstock debut and we'd wager by the time they finish they've pulled a bigger crowd than any main stage act from Saturday save perhaps Bleed From Within or Slaughter To Prevail.

It's not hard to see why. They might not have any proper anthems just yet - though Wizard, Wolf I and Dragon from last year's The Bestiary are absolute belters - but it's impossible not to get caught up in Castle Rat's spell. The high-camp theatrics feel like something heavy metal has neglected over the past 30 years, even the likes of Ice Nine Kills or GWAR going more for tongue-in-cheek meta-jokes than for a genuine sense of the fantastic.

Castle Rat aren't playing up their fantasy elements for jokes. Vocalist Riley Pinkerton inhabits the role of the Rat Queen with a seriousness that'd do Arthur Brown or Hawkwind proud, narrating the lore of her band's fantasy realm with irresistible earnestness. The "sword battle" between Pinkerton and "The Rat Reaperess" might be the set's most TikTokable moment, but the music itself doesn't suffer for all their live antics, delivering a baseline of defiant, chest-beating heavy metal.

Chunky, fuzzy riffs and keening guitar solos help build the sense that Castle Rat are well on the way to becoming something massive, somehow tapping the vein for trad metal whilst feeling fresh and vibrant. If this is what they can do in a 40-minute afternoon slot, imagine what they could do as a headliner.

You Got Another Thing Comin', Metal Gods, Breaking The Law: talk about an insane opening run. But then, when it comes to Judas Priest, you'd be hard-pressed to find any combination of hits that doesn't feel like an all-time great selection of heavy metal anthems. So who better to close out the final day of Bloodstock's 25th anniversary celebration?

"25 years of Bloodstock? 100 years of Judas fucking Priest!" Frontman Rob Halford declares to massive cheers.

Barely 20 miles up the road from where he grew up in Walsall, Bloodstock is as close to home territory for Halford as you can get without Priest doing a gig at Bescot Stadium and there's a clear sense of gratitude as Priest get a homecoming for the ages. Early on, Rob sports a leather jacket with the Black Country flag proudly displayed on the back, and their ties to the region seep through in little nods and easter eggs that pop up in the graphics.

And this setlist is an absolute beast. With a greatest hits to promote, it's not a massive surprise that Priest are cranking anthems out at industrial pace throughout the night - The Ripper, The Sentinel, Turbo Lover, Victim Of Changes. It's perhaps not as adventurous as what they broke out at Bloodstock 2021, but it's splitting hairs trying to figure out what you'd take out to round it out. Steeler for Exciter? Desert Plains for Judas Rising? Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Far from slowing down in their winter years, Judas Priest seem to be picking up steam. Rob Halford confirms the band are working on new material - a delightful concept, considering just how fantastic their last two records were - and there's barely any pause in the set, even the encore - teeing a colossal finisher of Electric Eye, Hell Bent For Leather (complete with Harley ride-on, of course) and Living After Midnight - only taking a minute or two before the band charge back on.

In many ways, Priest are representative of what Bloodstock was all about in its early years - and still continues to be about now, even with the evolving roster of bands. This is, after all, a celebration of heavy metal in its entirety, a chance for bands who'd get relegated to the sidelines at more mainstream festivals to strut their stuff in front of an ardent and ever-enthusiastic audience.

With Priest covering much of their half-century-plus as one of heavy metal's most iconic bands, there's a real sense of celebration that makes it almost impossible not to grin like a loon and roar along to your heart's content.

Judas Priest setlist @ Bloodstock Open Air, 9/8/2026

1. You've Got Another Thing Comin'
2. Metal Gods
3. Breaking The Law
4. The Ripper
5. The Sentinel
6. Desert Plains
7. Lightning Strike
8. Turbo Lover
9. Steeler
10. Delivering The Goods
11. Panic Attack
12. Victim Of Changes
13. Halls Of Valhalla
14. Painkiller
15. Electric Eye
16. Hell Bent For Leather
17. Living After Midnight

Iron Maiden legend Bruce Dickinson has offered fans a tantalising insight into his upcoming new solo album, which is expected some time early next year. Speaking to VSX, the singer promises that the follow-up to 2024's well-received The Mandrake Project will be a heavy affair, though it will in no way be a direct sequel to that album.

'I've got a new record coming out next year, new solo album," he confirms (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). "It's kind of standalone. There's one song that has a bit of something to do with Mandrake. The album is heavy as shit."

Explaining why he didn't simply want to churn out a Mandrake Part 2, Bruce continues: "I try to not repeat - not because it's bad. You want to move on and put different nuances on things. It's like, I would say, if you have an amazing girlfriend and you start thinking, 'Yeah, I'm getting a little bit bored'...just turn the lights down and turn it a different way, and you see a side that you think, 'Oh, my God, she's absolutely incredible.' Just the red light there or the green or whatever, and you see the same person in a different day, in a different light.

"Music is something which you try not to stick too much of a format," he continues. "I'm within a particular style, for sure. But I try and vary it as much as I can."

The Mandrake Project marked Bruce's first solo album in almost 20 years following 2005's Tyranny Of Souls, meaning that he's operating at a relatively prolific pace as a solo artist right now. That's on top of Iron Maiden's ongoing Run For Your Lives world tour, which finished up its latest European leg at a spectacular show at Knebworth in the UK last month, with North American, South and Central American, Asian and Australasian dates still due to take place across the rest of the year.

Anyone unconvinced by Greta Van Fleet's return to action, pay heed, for their return to action has now been augmented by a hard-fought victory in our most recent Tracks Of The Week fracas. This historic triumph is despite the close attention of London's one-man rock'n'roll phenomenon Cam Cole, who finished second. So congratulations to them. And indeed, to him.

Third place was swallowed up by Hannah Wicklund, so congratulations to her, too. And now? We start again, with eight new candidates lined up to assume legendary status. We hope you enjoy them.

Sweat - Hilary

A loose-limbed, glam-booted banger with highly melodic feet in the camps of Heart and Cheap Trick, the latest single from these Pittsburgh rockers is a joyous thing to ingest. Also a strident calling card for their new album, In Dreams, which comes out in September. “Hilary lands in the sweet spot between glittering glam rock and late-’70s power pop,” the band say. “It’s a loud tribute to the friendships that become lifelines and the people who stay when things get messy, heavy, and uncomfortable — the ones who always show up when it matters most.”

Kris Barras Band - Beautiful Lie

The MMA fighting, blues noodling, hard-rocking singer/guitarist has the black attire and full sleeve tattoos of a metalcore star, but on Beautiful Lie he’s all about the oomphy yet tender hard rock with a moody, melodious heart under all the heavy, riffed-up muscle. Not long now til the release of its parent album, Monsters We Made – in fact, it’s out this week, accompanied by an in-store tour across the UK, with a full headline tour to come in October.

The Bites - Whenever You’re Ready

One of those rock’n’roll party-ready cheesefests whose substance sneaks up on you, Whenever You’re Ready put us in a great mood – it’s merrily, even proudly Route One lyrics (‘son of a gun / on the run’ etc etc) bounding into a warm, swinging pop rock chorus. Simple but effective harmonies complete the picture. Almost McFly-esque, but with more old-school heft. Feeling a little off today? Stick this on, turn it up and get some of those denim-clad Californian sunrays into your soul.

Grace Bowers - Eat Shit And Live

Earlier this year Grace Bowers quit Youtube, stating “I’m deeply uncomfortable with the amount of old men here. I’m no longer interested in playing blues or whatever the hell keeps attracting yall. I’m done.” It was a sad reflection of a certain portion of the online world (even if dismissing the blues itself feels a little reductive), but now she’s back with a bright, snappy bang – singing and playing on this taste of her next chapter. As a singer Bowers has something of a young Gwen Stefani going on, and her guitar chops here are full of punk rock teeth, sort of like the Runaways meeting Tom Morello for a jam.

The Pineapple Thief - New World Order

New World Order is the opening track of the British progressive quartet’s new album, Far And Wide, and it’s a biting, punchy beast with a note of dystopian menace. Still imbued with the moodiness and light, clever touches we expect from them, but packing an extra level of hard-hitting edge that nods to the increasingly big stages and globe-trotting adventures they’ve had in recent years (including successful first South America shows and an expanded US live presence).

Frenzee - Unapologetically Me

Need some proper, no-bullshit punk rock'n'roll with a feminist kick in your life this week? Meet Frenzee, the Greek-Australian siblings with Bikini Kill, Motorhead and Amyl & The Sniffers in their hearts and sweaty gigs written into their DNA (not to mention the marathon traditional Greek folk sets that guitarist Adonis and drummer Nikos cut their teeth in as kids). Unapologetically Me is fast, furious, over in about two and a half minutes and bursting with beefy, riffy fire – a strong showcase for these guys, in other words.

Jack J Hutchinson - Rise Again

Kicking straight in with an absolute ripper of a riff (conjured up one soundcheck), Jack J Hutchinson’s new track finds him channeling his blues-come-southern foundations into a big, upward-punching rocker – laced with the richness and grit of his heroes. “I told my producer Josiah that I wanted to write a track that sounded like a mix between Blackberry Smoke and Led Zep,” Jack explains, “with a melodic chorus like Neil Young’s anthemic rockers.”

Crossbone Skully - Thunder Love feat. Phil Collen

In which Crossbone Skully mainman Tommy Henriksen continues his apparent quest to create music for people who think it's all been downhill since Def Leppard finished touring Hysteria. There are gang vocals and booming drums and a euphoric chorus and executive production from "Mutt" Lange, and just in case that isn't enough, Leppard's very own Phil Collen guests on guitar and backing vocals. Oh, and there's a girl wearing a Pyromania t-shirt in the video. The Leppard vibe is recreated so perfectly it feels churlish to call out any lack of originality, and besides, we're enjoying the results too much to complain.

Who would have thought that Robin Trower, the “backroom” guitarist with the stately keyboards-led Procol Harum, would become one of the great blues rock guitarists?

It was the second of his power trio’s superb trilogy of back-to-back albums in the mid-70s that sealed his reputation. Beginning with the stuttering riff of Day Of The Eagle, the album combines urgency with gravitas. ‘A cold wind blows and gods look down in anger on this poor child,’ sings bassist James Dewar as the title track unfolds with a vast, slow momentum, like a planet drifting through the void.

It’s a beautifully balanced, dynamic record filled with quality songs, masterful playing from Trower (Bridge Of Sighs, Too Rolling Stoned) with his overdriven, reverb-drenched, swirling psychedelic sound and Hendrix inflections, plus some outstanding performances (About To Begin, In This Place) from the peerless Dewar.

Bridge Of Sighs peaked at No.7 in the US and remains one of the pillars of Trower's repertoire to this day.

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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.

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Other albums released in April 1974

• Ragged Old Flag - Johnny Cash
• Second Helping - Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Big Fun - Miles Davis
• Carolina County Ball - Elf
• Standing on the Verge of Getting It On - Funkadelic
• Okie - J.J. Cale
• Exotic Birds and Fruit - Procol Harum
• Hamburger Concerto - Focus
• Houston (I'm Comin' to See You) - Glen Campbell
• Positive Vibrations - Ten Years After
• Road Food - The Guess Who
• Secret Treaties - Blue Öyster Cult
• Unconditionally Guaranteed - Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band
• Sweet Fanny Adams - Sweet

What they said...

"At his best, Trower's gauzy sheets of oozing, wistful sound and subtle use of wah-wah combine with Dewar's whisky-soaked soul-drenched vocals to take a song like the wistful ballad "In This Place" into orbit. "Too Rolling Stoned," another highlight and one of the most covered tracks from this album, adds throbbing, subtle funk to the mix, changing tempos midway to a slow, forceful amble on top of which Trower lays his quicksilver guitar."(AllMusic)

"The song ideas are strong, and Dewar’s vocals are impressively sturdy, but ultimately it is Trower’s virtuosic touch, the nuanced tone of his Strat and the intrinsic skill of the 'bends and wobbles' that Robert Fripp so admired on which the success of Bridge Of Sighs rests." (Uncut)

"Throughout you can almost play 'name that Jimi' (try the last third of Too Rolling Stoned, where you can namecheck maybe four passages you've heard somewhere before), but with the raw bluesy voice of bassist James Dewar and Trower's writing the album manages to find its own voice. On the slower About To Begin the guitarist leans more towards Peter Green and a whiff of Carlos Santana's purity of tone." (Elsewhere)

What you said...

Adam Ranger: Such a good choice! As teenagers, my friend and I listened to Trower a lot. We could not understand why he was not talked about in the same terms as Hendrix, Page, etc. Very underrated outside of certain circles.

The Hendrix style is unmistakable at times, especially on Day Of The Eagle and Little Bit Of Sympathy. The power trio format may help that impression.

That said, he is no Hendrix tribute act. He has a wonderful style of his own. I love the way he often avoids obvious guitar licks and builds atmosphere instead (a good example is the title track). But when he lets himself go, it's a joy to listen to.

Special mention to James Dewar's bass and vocals. He has a wonderful voice for this style, low but melodic. Maybe comparisons with Cream are as valid as the Hendrix ones? The cover art always put me in mind of stirred cream.... A brilliant blues rock album that scores highly for me.

Philip Qvist: In the mid 2000s, as established South African radio stations started to shun rock music, record companies started to issue CD compilations of rock music from assorted artists, with a collection of songs from the usual suspects such as Deep Purple, Rainbow, Boston and Kansas. And believe it or not, it was on one of those compilations that I was first introduced to Robin Trower, via a live version of Too Rolling Stoned.

I had never heard of this guitarist and songwriter until then, and it's only after that moment that I started to listen to a couple of his songs, even if they never made it onto my playlist of essential songs.

So listening to Bridge of Sighs this week is my first real introduction to Robin Trower the solo artist, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Too Rolling Stoned, Bridge Of Sighs and Day Of The Eagle are my picks, but in truth there aren't any duds on this record.

Special mentions must go to singer and bass player James Dewar for his soulful singing, and drummer Reg Isidore for maintaining the pace. An 8/10 from me; I'm just glad that I finally got to listen to Bridge Of Sighs (named after a racehorse, I believe, and not the structure in Venice).

Jackie Craig: I bought this when it was first released. Re: the title track, when that riff comes in for the first time it still has the same mesmerising effect on me all these years later; probably more so now that I'm so much older. Day Of The Eagle is a great opener, and in fact the entire album is an absolute feast. 10/10.

John Davidson: Great album. Bridge Of Sighs is a fantastic track, but Too Rolling Stoned is the one I listen to most often.

I recall Trower being criticised for aping Jimi Hendrix, but while I can hear a little of his inspiration on some tracks, it's not overdone. The vocals are another highlight, and the bass and drumming complete the set. It's perhaps not groundbreaking, but it's very accomplished and a thoroughly enjoyable album.

Mark Herrington: My first introduction to Robin Trower was hearing the meaty Victims of the Fury on the radio in 1980, and buying the single. Intrigued, I bought the album, probably his hardest-rocking LP. From there, I was hooked on his bluesy psychedelic style.

Then I picked up a second-hand vinyl copy of Caravan to Midnight for £1, a much more languid, dreamy offering. Gradually, I worked backwards through his albums, until probably his best work, Bridge of Sighs (1974).

Trower excels in his expressive, psychedelic, and soulful bluesy guitar, dovetailing naturally with James Dewar's deep, emotive vocals. I gravitate to his slower, more expressive tracks such as Bridge Of Sighs and In This Place, where every note seems to linger and carry meaning. But I also love the muscular virtuosity on tracks like Too Rolling Stoned.

He is a master at bringing the guitar to life and giving it a voice, underlined by his live performances, where he seems to mouth every note he plays. Overall, probably Trower's finest work.

Mike Canoe: A classic blues-rock album. The title track is still the most amazing and astounding thing here, but the rest of the album is enjoyable too. Much as when we reviewed Twice Removed from Yesterday in the club's second year, I am struck by how bassist and singer James Dewar is the band's not-so-secret weapon. While Robin Trower is deservedly the name above the title, Dewar's gruff but melodious voice complements Trower's playing perfectly. He doesn't overemote or ape other blues singers; he just sings. The overall restraint of the musicianship is impressive, and the songs are songs first and not just showcases for guitar wankery.

Come for the title track, stay for In This Place, Too Rolling Stoned, The Fool and Me, and Lady Love.

Greg Schwepe: If you’re looking for another album to add to your “1970’s Rock Guitar Album Time Capsule” (there is such a thing, right?) before you bury it, look no further than Robin Trower’s Bridge of Sighs to throw in there with a few other good ones. How often have you heard an album called “dated?” Well, this one is. Sounds just like 1974, and meant to be that way!

This has all the hallmarks of a classic 70’s guitar-fest album; the tasteful guitar tones of Robin Trower, the soulful vocals (and bass) of James Dewar, and the grooving drums of Reg Isidore. Ah yes, the Power Trio. It’s been proven many times, you only need three guys to make an awesome racket.

The clarion call of Day Of The Eagle leads off the one-two punch of Sighs. The galloping and repeating riff gets your attention. And then, right at about three minutes in, the tempo slows to a halt, but your attention does not. Trower’s bluesy soloing finishes out the song. They are not the first band to change tempos and time signatures for effect, but they do it with authority.

The title track is next, and Trower’s trilling hammer-on note that fades in changes to a sparse three-four note repeating groove that is spacey, atmospheric, pulsing, and undulating, all at the same time. The layered repeating guitar sections at the end with the blowing wind sound effects make for a trippy end to the song.

I had read in liner notes how some thought Trower was a bit of a “Hendrix Clone.” Yes, he played a Strat through a Marshall, and used many of the same effects (Univibe, Wah-Wah, Leslie) as Jimi, but he had his own style. I think I also read that Trower said that if you’re going to be accused of copying someone, Hendrix wasn’t a bad person to be compared to.

Too Rolling Stoned is another riff-filled monster where Trower’s wah-wah pedal and Univibe get quite the workout. Once again we have a ton of riffs that then hit the brakes at about the 2:45 mark. Dewar’s vocals and the bluesy riffs finish out the rest of the song. Extended guitar solo anyone? Yes indeed. Along with a thumping drumbeat to keep you engaged.

I did a deep dive on Robin Trower’s catalogue several years ago after hearing Bridge of Sighs on the radio after not having heard it in years. While I had certainly heard of Trower before, his music was not a regular staple on the radio where I lived. “Oh yeah, I have got to check him out.” A compilation CD led to purchasing most of his catalogue. Which then turned into another “Wow, what have I been missing?” moment. 9 out of 10 on this one for me. Come for the title track, stay for the rest.

Final score: 8.91 (59 votes cast, total score 526)

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Like all Pete Townshend’s best songs, The Who's My Generation was a thrilling collision of body and brain. The title had highbrow roots, the guitarist inspired by the Generations collection by socialist playwright David Mercer. But the song’s visceral clatter was fuelled by Townshend’s disgust at his well-heeled neighbours in London. Despite the iconic ‘hope I die before I get old’ line, the songwriter later noted, it was wealth and class, more than age, that he despised.

"The line actually came from a time when I was living in a really wealthy district of London, just by accident," Townshend said in 1983. "I didn't really understand quite where I was living at the time. And I was treated very strangely on the street, in an imperious way by a lot of people, and it was that that I didn't like. I didn't like being confronted with money and the class system and power. I didn't like being in a corner shop in Belgravia and some woman in a fur coat pushing me out of the way because she was richer.

"I didn't know how to deal with that. I could've, I suppose, insisted on my rights and not written the song. But I was a fucked-up little kid, and so I wrote the song."

Townshend worked on My Generation during The Who’s Scandinavian summer tour of 1965, but on his return, the original demo proved a torpid thing, “very much inspired by Mose Allison’s Young Man Blues, my vocal casual and confident”.

Management saw the song differently, and pushed for a heavier riff and – after Townshend played them John Lee Hooker’s Stuttering Blues – the vocal tic that went down in history. Roger Daltrey had genuinely stammered as a child, but he was told to emphasise this. “[Manager] Kit Lambert came up and said ‘Stutter the words – it makes it sound like you’re pilled’.”

No doubt, it appealed to the mischief of all concerned that Daltrey was able to let a stammered ‘f’ hang in the air, the listener braced for ‘fuck’ (before the singer resolved the lyric with the less inflammatory ‘fade away’).

Both as a single – and on the Marquee stage, where the song had its first live airing on November 2 – My Generation let all four members shine. There was Daltrey’s rabblerousing vocal. Townshend’s slashed chords. John Entwistle’s rubber-band bass solo (“John was becoming the outstanding bass revolutionary of the day,” noted Townshend, “and I wanted to provide him with a vehicle for his incredible playing”). Keith Moon’s clatterous outro, chasing around the kit in a squall of feedback. Together, they made the heaviest sound in the pop charts of 1965. It also became the band's biggest UK hit – reaching number two in the chart – and denting the Top 100 in the US.

If Townshend felt any guilt at sticking it to the establishment, then shortly before the song’s release, he was reminded why he wrote it in the first place, as his 936 Packard V12 hearse was impounded on the orders of the Queen Mother. “She had to pass it every day and complained that it reminded her of her late husband’s funeral. So I resentfully dedicated My Generation to the Queen Mother…”

The song would influence a generation of up-and-coming rockers, including Alice Cooper, whose all-star Hollywood Vampires – named after the infamous drinking club whose members included Cooper and Keith Moon – play My Generation to this day.

“I think My Generation was maybe the first anthem," Cooper told Classic Rock. "That was the birth of the power chord, right there. And then you saw The Who performing it, and you saw [Pete Townshend] smashing into his amps, and you started going, ‘Is there any end to this British Invasion? I mean, who else is going to come up?’"

From Townshend's power chords to Daltrey's iconic stutter, via Entwhistle's string-breaking solo and Moon's wild, clattering finale, My Generation is one of those rare songs that's a solo tour-de-force for every band member, yet somehow comes together to be even greater than the sum of its virtuostic individual parts.

“Being a mod, I always thought My Generation was a fucking great song, an unbelievable song," said Kenny Jones, Moon's replacement in The Who. "Once a mod, always a mod, y’know? Moony was all over the place. That bit at the end where he goes crazy on the drums? I know – I’ve done it. There are fills that you have to play because the song dictates it."

In a famous scene in series one of Steve Coogan's brilliant TV comedy I'm Alan Partridge, the broadcaster has a business meeting with two Irish television executives (played by Father Ted writers Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan), and attempts to ingratiate himself with the pair by talking up his affection for Irish rock band U2.

"Sunday Bloody Sunday, what a great song," Partridge enthuses. "It really encapsulates the frustration of a Sunday, doesn't it? You wake up in the morning, you've got to read all the Sunday papers, the kids are running round, you've got to mow the lawn, wash the car, and you think, [exasperated] Sunday, bloody Sunday!"

"I really hate to do this to you, Alan," replies Linehan's character Aidan Walsh, "but it's actually a song about..."

"Bloody Sunday is actually about a massacre in Derry in 1972," Mathews' character Paul Tool chips in.

"A massacre?" says Partridge, grimacing. "Ugh. I'm not playing that again."

The joke within the joke here, which Steve Coogan understood as the son of Irish parents, is that U2 themselves were forever stressing the point that their 1983 single, taken their third studio album War, was not about the events of January 30, 1972, when British soldiers from the Parachute Regiment shot 26 unarmed civilians during a protest march in Derry, in the North of Ireland, killing 13 innocent Catholic men, with a fourteenth man dying four months later from his injuries.

When the Dublin quartet first played the song in Belfast, at the Maysfield Leisure Centre on December 20, 1982, frontman Bono explicitly told the mixed-religion audience that the song was "not a rebel song" - traditionally a folk song glorifying the Irish Republican cause, condemning the British presence in Ireland - but rather "a song of hope and a song of disgust".

"It was very emotional," drummer Larry Mullen recalled in a 1983 interview with Rolling Stone magazine. "It’s a very special song, because it’s the first time that we ever really made a statement."

In addition to being inspired by the band's own despair at the continued political and sectarian violence in the North of Ireland during what was euphemistically known as 'The Troubles', the song's lyrics were partially inspired by an argument that their manager Paul McGuinness, himself the son of a a British military serviceman, had in a New York bar with patrons who were pledging support for the paramilitary Irish Republican Army (IRA).

"I don't care who's who – Catholics, Protestants, whatever," Larry Mullen stated in 1983. "You know people are dying every single day through bitterness and hate, and we're saying, Why? What's the point?

"And you can move that into places like El Salvador and other similar situations – people dying. Let's forget the politics, let's stop shooting each other and sit around the table and talk about it... There are a lot of bands taking sides saying politics is crap, etc. Well, so what! The real battle is people dying, that's the real battle."

To avoid being too literal about the conflict in the North Of Ireland - and very possibly to lower their own chances of being targeted by paramilitary forces on either side - U2 opted to delete the song's original opening lyric, which ran 'Don't talk to me about the rights of the IRA, UDA [Ulster Defence Association]', replacing it with the line "I can't believe the news today", a reference to the fact that seemingly every single day broadcasters in Ireland would share further news of unrest and violence in the Six Counties. Elsewhere, in keeping with U2's shared Christian beliefs, the song is peppered with Biblical references, both an underscoring of their commitment to their faith, and a calling out of the hypocrisy of those involved in the conflict claiming to have God on their side, culminating in the lyric "The real battle just began, To claim the victory Jesus won."

In truth, there's a naivety to the song's lyrics: young men in their early 20s who had spent fewer than 20 days in the North of Ireland in their entire lives were never going to have the deepest understanding of the conflict. Years later, Bono would confess that "it was a song whose eloquence lay in its harmonic power rather than its verbal strength." And ahead of the release of War, in his review for NME, Belfast-born music journalist Gavin Martin wrote, "lyrically and musically it reminds me of a slightly superior Stiff Little Fingers, hardly what the world needs right now."

But when the band utilised live performance footage from their triumphant U2 Live at Red Rocks: Under a Blood Red Sky concert film to promote the single, the image of the singer waving a white flag while calling for an end to conflict - demanding the crowd join him in singing "No more!" - was undeniably powerful.

"It was only going to America made us think about Ireland," Bono told NME in 1984. "You just don't think about it until you have people throwing money onstage during Bobby Sands and the whole hunger strike thing. I thought that guy must be so brave, but why? Why be so brave? Why die? There's something not right about this.

"I would like to see a united Ireland, I belive it is an island," he continued. "People then say, 'Do you believe in a cause enough to die for it?' I believe in a cause enough to live for it. These people believe in taking others' lives away. I just can't agree with this whole, 'If you don't agree with me I'll put a gun to your head' vibe. Having had a Protestant father and a Catholic mother I know how grey it is. There are no sides."

Geddy Lee has detailed a spooky encounter that took place on the opening night of Rush's ongoing Fifty Something tour in June.

During an interview with Toronto radio station Q107 to celebrate the trio's first hometown shows in a decade, host Joanne Wilder asks Lee if he'd felt the presence of late Rush drummer Neil Peart on the tour.

"Spooky question!" Lee responds. "Well, it's funny. I'll tell you a little story. After the opening night, we were staying in L.A., and I was texting Al [Alex Lifeson]. We were in the same hotel, but we were texting each other.

"My door to my room was open a crack, and I don't know if you've seen the posters [for Rush's Fifty Something tour] that have two birds on a wire and the one bird is flying away. I looked in front of me, on the floor, and there was a bird on the floor that looked just like that bird in the poster.

"I was kind of shocked. And, you know, I love birds, so I approached it, and it flew by me and flew into my bedroom and sat on the edge of my bed. And when I approached it, it was like it was looking at me, and then it flew out the door. So, I quickly ran to the computer and was texting Al this crazy story that had just happened.

"Now, I'm not a guy who believes in all that mumbo jumbo. But it was a kind of remarkable moment, and as I was texting him, the bird returned and just stuck its head in the doorway, like to give me another nod. And then I said, 'Okay, bye,' and it flew away. It was crazy, crazy."

Wilson, who appears slightly more inclined to believe in all that mumbo jumbo, reacts by saying, "Okay, well I will believe for you. If you don't want to believe, I will believe for you. That was Neil."

Rush's second hometown date at the Scotiabank Arena takes place this evening (August 9), followed by shows on Tuesday and Thursday. Full dates below.

A new documentary about Peart, Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple, will premiere on CBC on September 23. The film includes footage of Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson performing Rush songs with the likes of Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Stewart Copeland (The Police) and Danny Carey (Tool).

Rush: Fifty Something tour 2026

Aug 09: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 11: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 13: Toronto Scotiabank Arena, ON
Aug 21: Philadelphia Xfinity Mobile Arena, PA
Aug 23: Philadelphia Xfinity Mobile Arena, PA
Aug 26: Detroit Little Caesars Arena, MI
Aug 28: Detroit Little Caesars Arena, MI
Sep 02: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 04: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 12: Boston TD Garden, MA
Sep 14: Boston TD Garden, MA
Sep 17: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 19: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 23: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Sep 25: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Oct 05: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 07: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 10: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 12: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 15: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 17: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 25: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 27: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 30: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 01: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 05: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 07: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 09: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 11: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 20: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 22: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 25: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Nov 27: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Dec 01: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 03: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 10: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 12: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 15: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC
Dec 17: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC

Rush: Fifty Something tour 2027

Jan 15: Buenos Aires Movistar Arena, Argentina
Jan 22: Curitiba Arena da Baixada, Brazil
Jan 24: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 26: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 30: Rio de Janeiro Estádio Olímpico Nilton Santos. Brazil
Feb 01: Belo Horizonte Estádio Mineirão, Brazil
Feb 04: Brasília Arena BRB Mané Garrincha, Brazil

Feb 19: Paris La Défense Arena, France
Feb 21: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Feb 23: Amstersam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Feb 25: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Feb 28: Cologne Lanxess Arena, Germany
Mar 02: Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
Mar 04: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
Mar 08: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 10: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 12: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 14: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 16: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 18: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 21: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 27: Kraków Arena Kraków, Poland
Mar 30: Milan Unipol Dome, Italy
Apr 01: Basel St. Jakobshalle Basel, Switzerland
Apr 04: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Apr 06: Oslo Unity Arena, Norway
Apr 08: Stockholm Avicii Arena, Sweden
Apr 10: Helsinki Veikkaus Arena, Finland

Find Rush tickets.

The Anchoress’ strikingly-titled single I Had A Baby, Not A Lobotomy was inspired by her experience as a new mother facing the bewildering attitudes of those around her.

After her daughter’s birth five years ago, she heard comments – now immortalised in the song – including: ‘I guess you’ll be retiring now’, ‘You’re getting on, the kid will hate ya,’ and ‘Guess now there won’t be any more tours?’

While Catherina Anne Davies stresses that the lead track from her latest Anchoress album, As We Once Were, humorous rather than a furious or vindictive rant, she admits she found the process of channelling the phrases into art somewhat therapeutic.

“I would jot it down on my phone every time someone would say something to me that pissed me off. Rather than want to throttle them, I would write it down and bite my lip, and it became this litany of comments.

“Some of it was really well meaning, or they thought they were being helpful, so I didn’t want to make people feel bad. The best thing you can do with satire and humour is to try and get people to think again. I always want to do that with a smile on my face.”

When the track went live she knew she’d struck a chord. “My phone has been blowing up, as the kids say, with all sorts of people, including a lot of other musicians and producers who are trying to navigate this shit the whole time.

“They’re all saying a very big, resounding ‘Yes! I feel like this, too!’ And other people are saying, ‘You wouldn’t believe some of the inane shit I’ve had thrown at me – jobs I’ve lost when they found out I had kids.’

“So yeah, it’s resonated in quite a serious way, even though my intention was fairly tongue-in-cheek.”

The song’s parent album is something of a concept set, partly inspired by a family discovery. “I found a lost tape of my grandmother’s voice, talking about her life, which is heard throughout the record,” she explains. That’s the thread that holds it all together.”

Four generations of Davies women are heard on As We Once Were – including her five-year-old daughter, of course. And there are other sounds to be heard that might be considered to come from a past era.

“I was invited to come into Pete Townshend’s studios and use all his vintage synths,” Davies says. “I got to have a whale of the time piloting all these crazy machines.

“It’s made the album very synth-heavy, but it goes to a whole new level from what I’ve done previously, because I’ve never worked on modular synths before.

“It was a real learning curve. On modern synths you can press a pre-saved patch and just play. With these you have to create and shape the sound yourself; and the sound I made that day on that synth, I won’t be able to repeat.

“And that chimes in with what the record is about, which is the impossibility of freezing time and holding onto moments.”

Meanwhile, she’s has launch a podcast called The Milk And The Music, talking to working musicians about their experiences of motherhood. Guests include Lau.ra, Charlotte Hatherley and Gazelle Twin.

Davies hopes it will move beyond storytelling to offer practical solutions. “I’m not a fan of negativity and moaning without some sense of what the solution is,” she explains.

As We Once Were is on sale now.

"Nevermore are one of the greatest, most important bands to ever do it." So says Urne's Joe Nally early on Saturday at Bloodstock and while the prog metal group's profile certainly never reached that of Tool or Rush, they wouldn't be the first band to make a comeback this decade and become bigger than ever.

But they endure a patchy start. Put it down to the controversy around tonight's headliners Slaughter To Prevail, the unyielding heat, or the simple fact that it's been 16 years since Nevermore last played the UK - and before that was Bloodstock in 2007, so they were hardly frequent visitors - but the crowd seems especially sparse for the retooled and revitalised Nevermore.

They won't let that stop them putting on a killer show. New vocalist Berzan Önen - replacing the much missed Warrel Dane, who died in 2017 - has great stage presence and his powerful, histrionic vocal talents are geninely captivating, while the band's unique fusion of extreme metal heft - just listen to that double-bass go, never letting up - old school heavy metal guitars and prog melody means Nevermore still feel genuinely ahead of the curve.

A few songs in, and the crowd thankfully swells to a healthy level as they hit their stride. Drawing from across their discography, the set is an abridged greatest hits with particular emphasis on 2000's phenomenal Dead Heart In A Dead World, thundering as they bust out the likes of Inside Four Walls and Engines Of Hate. Hitting each track with fresh vitality, Nevermore sound more like Hypocrisy or Strapping Young Lad than Queensryche and the sheer force of their sound is tremendous.

There's no major set pieces or production gimmicks, just great tunes and musicians going hell for leather for a hale 60 minutes. The highlight of the set is undoubtedly the gothic, doomy The Heart Collector, a track that somehow manages to bridge Sabbath and Nymphetamine with the Gothenburg sound, colossal in its ambition and brimming with anthemic potential. With more shows like this - and a new album on the way next year - we reckon Nevermore 2.0 might finally give the band the love they so richly deserve.

“I feel like Scotland have just won the World Cup!” says Bleed From Within frontman Scott Kennedy halfway through his band's set. Scott is happy, and so he should be; after all, his band have been grafting for 23 years and have reached a point where they can turn up at the UK’s premier metal festival and be greeted like one of the highlights of the weekend.

Two years ago at Bloodstock, Malevolence subheadlined the Ronnie James Dio stage, blew everyone away and walked off looking like shoe-ins as future headliners. Today, it’s Bleed From Within’s turn to do the very same.

With a back catalogue of seven strong albums and over two decades of hard road work behind them, BFW were never going to let an opportunity like today pass them by, and they are exceptional this afternoon, grasping the chance to stake their claim in an incredible manner. The grooves and propulsion of tracks like Levitate and God Complex sound magnificent, with Scott, rapidly growing into one of metal’s best frontmen, endlessly egging on the crowd, demanding more circle pits and more chaos. He gets his demands met, too, with at least five swirling pits being counted at one point.

The band sound fabulously tight, and the extra elements they add to their sound today with bagpipes players and vocalist Hannah Boulton pepper some glorious new textures to their meaty metallic crunch.

By the time they bid farewell with a superb run through of In Place Of Your Halo, jaws are on the floor and they’ve left headliners Slaughter to Prevail with a mighty high bar to reach. “This,” Scott tells us “is the best show this band has ever played.” It’s hard to disagree.

A John McGinn winner in the World Cup final? Sorry Scott, that sounds like pure fantasy. But Bleed From Within to headline Bloodstock? Well, that seems a much safer bet.

Dimmu Borgir frontman Shagrath remembers queuing up at an ATM in central Oslo when he was recognised by a group of local metalheads. Rather than giving a nod of appreciation, one of them offered a withering put-down: “Oh, are you going to take out some royalties then?”

This wasn’t recently, or even during the band’s initial breakthrough in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Rather, the year was 1994, and the band had only just released their debut seven-inch single, Inn I Evighetens Mørke, (‘Into The Darkness Of Eternity’) amidst a black metal scene still churning in the wake of Mayhem mastermind Euronymous’s murder and an ongoing wave of church burnings across the country.

No one then could have suspected that the makers of this embryonic three-track, keyboard-laden lament would go on to become the best-selling, and subsequently one of the most divisive, black metal bands of all time, but it was clear they were going to have to get used to being called sellouts from the start.

Shagrath (real name Stian Thoresen) had formed Dimmu Borgir with fellow 17-year-olds Kenneth Åkesson (aka Tjodalv) and Sven Atle Kopperud (aka Silenoz) a year earlier in the small town of Jessheim, 30 miles north of Oslo. Shagrath previously led his own teenage black metal band, Fimbulwinter, while his new bandmates had played in short-lived death metal groups before seeing the dark and switching musical allegiance.

“It was exciting times and dangerous times,” says Silenoz now. “When that stuff with the church burnings went down, we heard about people who were starting to wear knives and weapons, so we did the same. But if you were walking down the street in Oslo, the police would just stop you out of nowhere and search you because you were wearing black and fitted a certain description.”

The band initially called themselves Dimmuborgir, after an area of lava fields and rock formations in northern Iceland whose name means ‘dark castles’.

“We wanted a name that suited the darkness and atmosphere of what we were doing,” says Silenoz of the moniker, which was soon split into two words. “I always said later that if we wanted to be more commercial, we would have taken a different name.”

The trio’s initial roles in the band were in flux: all three would play guitar and bass, Shagrath doubled up on drums, while Silenoz did the majority of the vocals with Shagrath occasionally pitching in. But they resolved early on that they were going to focus on the musical and spiritual side of black metal rather than scene politics – sowing the seeds of an ambitious drive that would come to define them later.

Inspired by the likes of Emperor, Enslaved and Gehenna, they realised what they really wanted were some keyboards to add to the dark atmosphere that had emerged from the rehearsals. Silenoz roped in his childhood neighbour, Stian Aarstad, to that end. However, in a precursor of issues to come, getting him properly integrated in the band would prove insurmountable.

“He hardly ever turned up at rehearsals,” says Shagrath. “It was frustrating, creating melodies on keyboard was always as important as the guitar. But getting Stian to do anything was a fucking nightmare.”

Dimmu Borgir recorded their debut album, For All Tid, in 1994 and released it the following year, by which time they’d been joined by bassist Brynjard Tristan. Reflecting the conditions in which it was rehearsed (“It was a freezing cold, damp warehouse and the equipment was really shit, but that’s how you did it then,” is Silenoz’s recollection), its insular if evocative grimness remains a marker point for both a scene in total opposition to the world around it, and a band tentatively embarking on their own path.

The follow-up, Stormblåst, once again featuring Silenoz on vocals, was released a year later. But the band’s lack of experience – combined with their use of an engineer they didn’t gel with – meant Dimmu were reaching the limits of what they could achieve, falling short of their ever-growing ambitions. Where they went next not only dramatically altered the fortunes of Dimmu Borgir, it changed the landscape of black metal itself.

Dimmu might have been frustrated by the discrepancy between their vision and the reality with Stormblåst, but one person who saw the potential was Markus Staiger. The owner of increasingly influential German label Nuclear Blast, he’d been following their progress and was looking to sign black metal bands to the label’s roster.

“We knew we would get flamed for signing to Nuclear Blast,” says Silenoz. “But they had a few other really good bands, so we thought, ‘Why can’t we?’ We still had that underground mentality, but we knew that we just couldn’t go ahead with that kind of behaviour anymore.”

Their debut album for Nuclear Blast was 1997’s Enthrone Darkness Triumphant. Produced by Hypocrisy frontman Peter Tägtgren, it saw Shagrath moving to vocals, replaced on drums by Tjodalv, with Silenoz focusing on guitar. They were joined by new bassist/guitarist Nagash who brought what Shagrath calls a “creative weirdness” that helped broaden Dimmu’s sound.

Drawing on everything from huge-scale classic composers such as Richard Wagner, Antonín Dvořák and fellow Norwegian Edvard Grieg, to the vaulting goth rock of Fields Of The Nephilim, the album introduced a new level of bombast to black metal.

Its sonic scope took Dimmu out of the symphonic shadows of Cradle Of Filth and Emperor, and subsequently became the band’s ornate calling card. Silenoz remembers being told at the time that their label boss, Markus Staiger, had gone apeshit in response to hearing tracks from it for the first time.

“I immediately thought, ‘Oh, he’s pissed off,’” he recalls. “But I was told it was because he thought it was so good, and he put a ton of fucking money into the promotion campaign on that album.”

Enthrone Darkness Triumphant arrived at a time when the black metal scene was in the throes of evolution. Between 1996 and 1997, many of its key bands released transformational albums, including Cradle Of Filth, Emperor, Satyricon, Enslaved, Arcturus and Sigh. Enthrone Darkness Triumphant eclipsed them all, going on to sell upwards of 300,000 copies. But their artistic success didn’t come without some pushback, not least from other musicians.

“I could sense the envy, for the lack of a better word,” says Silenoz. “But it was also mixed with ‘How the fuck did you do this?’, because the sound was so polished compared to what everyone was known to listen to. They thought that probably we had sold our asses for a huge sum of money. That’s when I noticed people starting to make up assumptions about how things were. And in hindsight, that’s when people really started opening their mouths about what they thought.”

Rumours circulated of a rivalry between Dimmu and Cradle Of Filth, with Cradle’s Dani Filth supposedly taking umbrage at the Norwegians stealing his own band’s thunder. Today, Shagrath and Silenoz are adamant that there was no beef.

“We never had any bad blood,” Shagrath says of Cradle, with whom Dimmu had played a handful of shows in Germany just before Enthrone Darkness Triumphant was released. “I remember I was quite impressed how actually professional they were, and they inspired us to sharpen our knives after that tour. Music has never been about competition for me. It’s about being creative and the art aspects of it. There was some piss-taking, but nothing more than that.”

Dani need not have worried. When both bands appeared at the 1997 Dynamo festival, Cradle played the main stage while Dimmu Borgir were stuck on a dedicated black metal stage alongside Satyricon and Dissection. But billing was the least of their worries that day.

“We were on the way to get the boat over,” Shagrath recalls, “and Stian Arstaad calls me saying, ‘Hey, I can’t make it.’ He didn’t get permission from his parents or he was going into the military or something, I don’t know.”

Unwilling to tolerate anything less than total commitment, his bandmates were unimpressed and it marked the end of Stian’s time in the band. Family commitments meant that founding member Tjodalv couldn’t give himself fully to Dimmu’s increased touring schedule, and he left shortly after the band’s next album, 1999’s Spiritual Black Dimensions. It was the start of a long-running drama of hirings and firings that ultimately consolidated Shagrath and Silenoz as the band’s creative core.

Spiritual Black Dimensions saw the introduction of Mustis on keyboards, and ICS Vortex as guest vocalist, later to become a full-time member taking on bass duties too. His impressively sky-razing howl would, for a time, become another signature part of their sound, and if …Dimensions upped the theatricality even further, 2001’s Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia brought in a full orchestra, as well as former Cradle Of Filth drummer Nick Barker and a new lead guitarist, Galder.

Their biggest step into the mainstream consciousness, however, came with 2003’s sweepingly ambitious Death Cult Armageddon, whose imperious second track, Progenies Of The Great Apocalypse, appeared in the trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s acclaimed comic book adaptation, Hellboy.

“That and playing Ozzfest helped catapult us in the States for sure,” says Silenoz. “I was in a cinema with my girlfriend at the time in Texas. The trailer came on, and it was our music. It was like, ‘Fuck, that was a trip!’”

But internal tensions were starting to manifest, and yet more line-up changes followed. By the time of 2007’s concept album, In Sorte Diaboli, Nick Barker had been replaced by Mayhem drummer Hellhammer.

Yet more changes were afoot with the release of 2010’s maximalist mindfuck, Abrahadabra. Gone were the three-word titles, and the stage costumes had been changed from customary black to a winter wonderland white, but most noticeable was the absence of ICS Vortex and Mustis – two members many fans felt were integral to the band’s sound.

“People say, ‘Oh that’s the best era, when Barker, ICS and Mustis were in the band’, but it was a ticking fucking time bomb, and people had no clue what was going on behind the scenes,” says Shagrath. “Sometimes you need to make some changes; you have two options, and that’s to break up the band or move forward, and we chose to move forward.”

Bitter words were exchanged between both parties, though hatchets were buried when Mustis and ICS Vortex joined Dimmu Borgir onstage at 2024’s Inferno festival in Oslo. For Silenoz, there are lessons to be learned on both sides.

“Looking back, maybe everybody involved could have handled it a little bit better,” he says. “We felt like we got attacked. They probably felt that they weren’t heard and seen, so they teamed up against us and we felt we had to retaliate. But there’s been water under the bridge for a few years now, so it turned out to be a fun thing to do, and it was cool for the fans as well.”

Today, Shagrath and Silenoz are the sole remaining founder members of Dimmu Borgir (the next longest-tenured member, Galder, left in 2024 after 24 years).

“In many ways, you forge a bond maybe without even knowing it,” says Silenoz of the evolution of his and Shagrath’s musical partnership. “That carries on into the creative part of things. It all comes down to having something that you really are convinced about, that this is what you’re supposed to do.”

Whether the various personnel changes of the last two decades have impacted on their work rate isn’t clear, but the fact remains that the gap between Dimmu Borgir albums has grown. 2018’s Eonian arrived eight years after Abrahadabra, and the same gap separates the former from Dimmu’s new album, Grand Serpent Rising.

“It has been a very long process,” Shagrath admits. “But a more comfortable one, because we had time to focus on the small details, which is an important thing in Dimmu. We work with the band day and night, five days a week, so there are always things happening behind the scenes that might not be apparent.”

Although Shagrath will talk of creative differences in the painstaking making of albums, and the challenges and frustrations involved in overcoming them, they’re bonded by the mutual respect they still have for each other.

“It’s when we put our heads together that the magic happens,” he says. “You have to swallow some pride sometimes to make each other shine. It’s not easy, but it’s worked for 33 years now, and we’re still friends. The last line-up changes have made us a bit closer also. We communicate better, and right now the vibes of this band are incredible. I haven’t felt that joy for probably over a decade.”

Ask Shagrath and Silenoz what they want Dimmu to be remembered for, and they will both agree that it’s their refusal to compromise, rather than play to expectations, that’s taken them to their rarefied, top-dog status.

“We’ve never been afraid of going into places that other bands wouldn’t dare to go,” says Shagrath. “Hopefully we’ll be remembered for a band that crossed boundaries, and, basically, refused to play ball.”

Grand Serpent Rising is out now via Nuclear Blast. Dimmu Borgir play London's Brixton Academy on October 17.

It’s fair to say that more than a few eyebrows were raised last year when Slaughter to Prevail were announced as Bloodstock headliners. A new name at the top of the bill is always something to celebrate, but there were more than a few grumbles that the Russian/UK deathcore crew were either not big enough or not musically in keeping with the tradition of Bloodstock to truly fit the bill. So STP arrive at the festival very much with plenty to prove and a lot of cynics to win over.

With all of this for context, it’s actually quite impressive how emphatically they ram those doubts back down people’s throats this evening. Because Slaughter to Prevail look every inch the consummate modern metal festival headliner this evening.

The reasons they succeed are simple, yet stunningly effective; firstly, they bring a show, a sense of theatre and an aesthetic that should appeal to all fans of heavy music. There is fire, loads of it, there are explosions, tonnes of them, there are massive party cannons full of streamers going off over the crowd and there are the masks. There are plenty of bands in masks in metal (in case you hadn’t noticed), but STP’s might just look the coolest. Frontman Alex Terrible in particular has an amazing silver skull visage with a moving jaw that makes him look like Skeletor if he was reimagined for a Hellraiser movie. Again, a simple idea, but gnarly as hell in practice.

So they look the part and, luckily, they sound the part too. Any of the objections people have made to Slaughter to Prevail making dumb, simplified, meat-headed metal on record feel completely redundant the second you’re stood in a field and those riffs slam you in the gut. This is pummeling, crushing, groove-laden metal that just feels good to hear live, the likes of Russian Grizzy In America, Babayka and Viking all kicking like a mule and lapped up by the crowd.

Speaking of the crowd, the online suggestions that STP would pull the smallest headline crowd in Bloodstock history are laughably wide of the mark. The field is equally as full as it was for Lamb of God on Friday night, and these people are enjoying every second. When Alex Terrible tells everyone to wave their hands or crouch to do a 'jumpdafuckup', it stretches all the way back past the sound desk. If people were coming here purely out of curiosity or just to see Slaughter to Prevail fail then it would appear that they’ve all been won over.

There’s also the fact that STP treat this show as if it is something truly special to them. Alex speaks with humility to the crowd on more than one occasion, letting them know how nervous he is and how humbled he is to have been asked to headline this festival. It’s a sweet thing to see from a man who has an unbelievable, almost inhuman growl in his repertoire.

If there's one slight concern with their performance, it’s that Slaughter to Prevail could add a bit more dynamism to their music, the Rammstein-esque Behelit standing out as something quite different from the rest of their set. But this is a mere nitpick; with a first showing this strong, you wouldn’t bet against them tweaking things to address that the next time they come round. And, let’s have it right, when they do, they’ll be headlining again.

Motley Crue bassist and main songwriter Nikki Sixx says making full-length albums is a thing of the past.

The glam metal icons' most recent album was 2008's Saints of Los Angeles. And it seems that album – their ninth – could be the last we see from Motley Crue, with Sixx more keen on releasing singles or EPs to fall in line with the way the music business operates in the modern era.

They released the EP Cancelled in 2024, which marked their first release featuring John 5 on guitar after he replaced Mick Mars.

The band will most likely continue with shorter releases in the future, Sixx tells Joann Butler: "Honestly, I know fans don't want to hear this, but I don't believe in making full-length records anymore.

"The amount of work that goes into. it. If you're doing 10 songs on a record, you gotta write 20. And you better hope five of them are stellar.

"It's a lot of lyrics, a lot of notes, a lot of chord changes, a lot of time in the studio, which is all fine. That's what we do. We work hard.

"But what I don't like is that when people hear one song, and you recorded 10 or you recorded 20, and then 10 of them were demos and 10 was an album, they only hear one.

"Radio's changed, streaming is changing and evolving as we go. So I'm really into the idea of lightning strikes, something comes down, I call the guys. I got this song."

He adds: "I love the idea of like we did for The Dirt. We did five songs.

"We did three songs on this EP we just did. So I think we're just gonna keep going, like whenever something comes up, you feel something – heartbreak, joy, rebellion – let's write a song about it, and let's go cut it in the studio."

Motley Crue have lined up an extensive North American tour for next summer.

The Pineapple Thief just announced that 15th album Far And Wide will arrive on October 9, 2026. It follows 2024’s It Leads To This, which came out of a new way of working for leader Bruce Soord and drummer Gavin Harrison. That year the pair, along with bassist Jon Sykes, told Prog about the process.

There’s a slight air of world weariness about The Pineapple Thief. The band have been in Gavin Harrison’s studio, rehearsing for their upcoming tour in support of new album It Leads To This, and there’s the sense that it’s been an elongated, potentially mildly frustrating day of missed cues and occasional bum notes.

“Gavin doesn’t sugar-coat anything,” reveals frontman Bruce Soord, referencing the drummer with a knowing smile. “We play a song, record it, gather around the speakers and listen back. The first time you play it through it’s quite brutal. We have this dynamic where we have an ordered section and a chaos section, but I’m not going to tell you where the chaos section is.

“It’s an interesting dynamic and there’s a lot of patience with one certain member of the band. It’s quite a nice environment because nobody cares if someone says, ‘Don’t do it like that,’ ‘I don’t like that sound,’ or, ‘Actually play it right next time!’ It’s all fine, although that last one generally only comes my way.”

Such comments could be indicative of a band embroiled in disheartening studio friction, but the lack of animosity between the musicians is palpable. It’s merely the kind of jovial, lampooning mentality that relieves stressful situations in any collection of close bandmates. There’s also a transparent desire to ensure that their live presentation is as consummate as their evocative recordings.

It’s startling to consider that this year is The Pineapple Thief’s 25th anniversary, even if there have been drastic changes over that time. “It’s impossible to think of it as one thing,” considers Soord. “It really feels like three separate entities. There was the first entity, which was just me alone in the studio. Then we signed to Kscope and started to do small tours with the band. I think then this current entity started in 2016, when we met Gavin for the Your Wilderness album.

“That’s why it still feels fresh to me – because this is only the fourth proper studio album that we’ve done with this lot.”

The record in question is another captivating release that possesses all the classic Pineapple Thief signatures. Perhaps more guitar-heavy than its predecessor, it was assembled using a different writing style – in recent years the band have digitally exchanged files, but this time Soord and Harrison began writing together in the drummer’s north London home studio.

“I had been so used to working alone,” Soord explains. “I would come up with an idea and then send it to the guys. Gavin would send a drum idea back or chop things up, and I’d think, ‘I’ve a couple of days to faff around with this.’ There was no pressure. It’s hard work when you’re on your own; you think, ‘I’ll make myself a cup of coffee and do it tomorrow!’”

He continues: “We all have our own studios, which is a little bit of a double-edged sword. You can get a bit complacent and, dare I say it myself” – looking at the rest of the band – “a bit lazy. When you’re sat there together in a room, it’s a completely different mindset. It was good and a lot of the songs came out of that session.”

“I think that was the first time we were working in the same room together,” adds Harrison. “Before that it was an internet love affair, sending files backwards and forwards. You do something, but you might not get a response to it for a couple of days, whereas this was in the second – I’d play something and there was instant feedback.”

The combination of guitarist and drummer crafting much of the material together, without the involvement of keyboardist Steve Kitch or bassist Jon Sykes, may seem relatively quirky. While there’s a declared willingness of all four members to convene to write together in the future, Harrison expresses a certain reticence about the idea.

“You can just end up with a half-hour jam in E,” he argues dryly with a smile. “I’ve done it before and it’s very hard – you have three people all trying to contribute harmonically. If it’s just a drummer with a guitarist or keyboard player, then you can change the key, the tonality, the time signature, all on the fly.

“When there are three people all trying to play chords, asking, ‘What’s that? Is that in E and then it’s a D?’ You know, they’re just falling over each other and it’s not an organic process. It usually works best with one harmonics player and a drummer. It’s a bit easier to manoeuvre around each other and dance around, rather than three people all trying to contribute harmonically.”

“I think there are pros and cons,” says Sykes. “It gives you a fresh approach and you’ll get something different to what you’d have if you’d done it on your own. I think there’s also a benefit to the way we always did it, writing separately, because you get a different type of organic progress.

“Quite often we’re not even talking. The communication is through files with music on them. That must give you a different result to when you’re face to face saying, ‘What about this?’ I think it’s probably good to mix it up.”

While the core material is created by the Soord-Harrison partnership, the full band has been essential in shaping the album’s sound. Sykes suggests that The Pineapple Thief now feels more “proper” than in their past. “It definitely feels like more of a band project these days,” he says. “There’ll be a demo base that Bruce will have sent, which might be just a drone sound or something, which gives me a lot of space to develop.

“Usually, I’m responding to what Gavin has done; it does sometimes change the path of a song or might result in a bigger change to one of the sections. We don’t really talk about references or anything like that. There isn’t a steer to say, ‘Make it sound like this.’ You can just do whatever you think sounds right.”

For all the satisfaction over the album’s quality, Soord reveals that its creation was one of the most intense periods he can recall. It was seemingly caused by the combination of a desire to avoid stagnation, along with the challenge of playing some of the more complicated compositions.

“I think it boils down to just trying to better yourself every record,” he says. “I’m not saying it always happens like that; but as an artist, that’s your aim. I pushed myself personally to a higher level. There was a period when the album was coming together when you’re thinking, ‘Right, this is how it’s going to be.’ Then things start to ramp up and everybody wants it to be as good as it could possibly be.

“We’re all pushing each other and we all have ideas as to where we think it should go. Luckily, we’re all pretty much on the same page – but that doesn’t mean there isn’t healthy tension. So it was an intense time getting it finished.

“The good thing about coming to Gavin’s was that I was pushed. There’s one track called Rubicon, where he had a rhythm I hadn’t heard before. I was completely out of my comfort zone, but in a good way. It’s about pushing in every aspect, playing, writing words, and the sound.”

Those familiar with the band’s catalogue will be aware that Harrison’s arrival has altered their music, frequently adding complex, unexpected rhythmic patterns that embellish their sound. As one of the world’s most technically gifted drummers, do the rest of the band ever have to rein him in?

“No, I didn’t have the genital cuffs on!” says Harrison with a smile. “I try to do something unique, play some rhythms you’ve never heard before – things that you couldn’t say, ‘There’s a record just like that with that exact rhythm.’ With music that’s moving into a popular area, you get very limited; everything’s in 4/4 and there’s almost nothing you can do that hasn’t been done before.

“In a more progressive way, you can do things that aren’t technically complicated but you think, ‘I’ve never heard a band play with this rhythm before,’ which at the very least gives us something that’s unique and interesting.”

The carefully crafted musical backdrop is a perfect foil for Soord’s lyrics. Known for introspective tales that reference some of his personal, internal conflicts, the songs on It Leads To This continue his desire to attempt to comprehend the world. “I remember making a conscious decision about what the theme of the record would be,” he recalls.

“It began in the depths of the pandemic, when we started to write the first track, Put It Right. It was a time of reflection because you were forced into this solitary confinement of your house. I was lucky because I had the studio in my garden. So that definitely set the tone; but effectively, I feel it’s a continuation of the theme of the last album, which was basically looking at the world that we live in and thinking: ’What’s going on? How can I make sense of it, as it’s all getting a bit fucked up?’ Then in 2023 you look at it and think, ‘My God, how did it get this bad? This wasn’t in the script.’

That kind of relates to the It Leads To This title, but at the same time, it’s not all negative. It’s a positive message, which is that it’s in our power to change it. Writing about it is a way of dealing with it. It’s tackling it head on. Even now, we’re playing the songs together for the first time as a band, and it feels really good to sing it. It’s a cathartic experience.”

It Leads To This is avaiable via Kscope.

Blue Oyster Cult’s Imaginos is quite probably the longest-gestating album of all time. Its concept – in the loosest sense, the story of an alien race arriving upon Earth in the Middle Ages and shaping human history from that point forward – was developed by erstwhile rock critic Sandy Pearlman when he was still a college student in the mid-60s. Pearlman, of course, went on to found, manage and produce Blue Öyster Cult, originally as Soft White Underbelly. Even the band’s eventual name was taken from their mentor’s monumental creation.

The band used Pearlman’s sprawling collection of poems on the subject as source material for lyrics on their first four albums, notably on two tracks on 1974’s Secret Treaties –Astronomy and Subhuman – but never tackled the whole. That task eventually fell to drummer Albert Bouchard, who, having been fired from the band in 1981, went on to work with Pearlman on a planned three-double-album saga. However, Columbia Records, BÖC’s label, rejected the first instalment of Bouchard’s magnum opus in 1986, by which point BÖC had also disbanded, demoralised after the failure of their most recent album, Club Ninja, and then re-formed once again.

Pearlman coaxed the band back into the studio using his and Bouchard’s recordings as bait. He had BÖC’s two singers, Eric Bloom and Donald Roeser, substitute Bouchard’s vocals on the original tracks. He also added to them a so-called ‘Guitar Orchestra’ that featured, among others, Joe Satriani, and then persuaded Columbia to release the reworked

Trimmed to a nine-track single disc and with the songs lifted out of sequence from Pearlman’s original story, this new version of Imaginos was finally released in July 1988 and promptly bombed. So much so that it would be another 10 years before Blue Öyster Cult made their next record. Yet in spite of the concept being rendered now entirely nonsensical, in all other respects, Imaginos was as powerful and cohesive as the band’s best works from the 70s. Whereas BÖC had strived on their two immediate predecessors for a more AOR-oriented direction and sounded neutered, this was a hulking, riff‑heavy beast, casting them once more as an American Black Sabbath.

Suitably grandiose, it includes such high points as a retooled version of Astronomy and the ludicrously but also magnificently overblown The Siege And Investiture Of Baron Von Frankenstein’s Castle At Weisseria.

Speaking to Classic Rock in 2018, Eric Bloom didn’t necessarily agree such sentiments. Speaking today from his New York home, he seemed faintly baffled by the Imaginos experience, even 18 years on. This is what he had to say.

When were you first made aware of the Imaginos concept?

Eric Bloom: Sandy made the lyrics available to the members of the group in the original band house on Long Island. I moved into that house on Christmas Day 1968 and joined the band as a member in April 1969. So the lyrics were always there, in a manila folder. Any of us could just dip into that folder and write a song. But I was never aware that it was supposed to be three double albums. It was Albert who really took that under his wing. Most of the rest of us weren’t that interested in taking this material and making a record with it.

Did you understand the overall concept, or even care about it?

I got the general idea, but not necessarily every nook and cranny of the story Sandy had written. For instance, I know that the aliens lived underwater.

From your point of view, how did Albert’s solo project become a BÖC album?

The band had already re-formed with Donald, Allen [Lanier, keyboards], myself and a couple of sidemen. We had started to work again and there was an ongoing discussion about us making a record. At the same time, Albert and Sandy had been working together for years and by then burned through a small fortune that they had got from the record company. Ultimately, Columbia wasn’t interested in putting their record out, so it came filtering back to us that if we were interested in, um… I don’t know what verb you want to use, but I’ll say ‘fixing’ it then it could be released as a Blue Öyster Cult album.

My part in that record strictly extended to going in and doing vocals. I flew to San Francisco and sang at Pearlman’s studio for six straight weeks. Then I met Donald at the airport, passed off the keys to my rental car to him and he went on and stayed out there for an equal amount of time.

Ultimately, do you think it even really counts as a Blue Öyster Cult record?

In a way, since I sang on it and there’s one of my songs on there, albeit a slightly left-hand voyage through it [an updated Subhuman, retitled Blue Öyster Cult]. But I don’t really have a lot of love for that record because my involvement wasn’t so great. I think it’s fair to say that Columbia, certainly in America, didn’t do anything with it also.

For us, it was a means to a method in terms of getting a new record out. It was helpful to us while we were out on the road and we did play a few of the tunes in the live show. The people that cared, the hardcore fans, knew the story, but it didn’t reach out to the general public. Certainly, it didn’t sell much.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 232 (December 2016)

In 1969, the Allman Brothers were in Jacksonville, Florida, staying at the home of a friend. In the middle of the night, Gregg Allman woke from a dream with some music and lyrics in his head. Because bandmate Berry Oakley was in the next room with his wife and new baby, Gregg knew he had to be quiet if he was going to get his idea down.

He couldn’t find a paper or pen, so he ended up writing lyrics and notes using the only things available – an ironing board and the burnt end of a matchstick. It was the seed of the song that would become Whipping Post. For a number about a man who’s helplessly awaiting more torture from the woman who betrayed him, words scrawled in ash seemed an appropriately poetic beginning.

As with many classic songs, Whipping Post had a different feel initially. Guitarist Dickey Betts recalled, “It was a ballad when Gregg brought it to us. It was a real melancholy, slow blues.” Bassist Oakley’s intro bass lick – worked on all night, but only five seconds long – soon propelled the song in a new direction. Unusual for rock, Whipping Post had an unorthodox time signature. Or two, really – 11/8 on the intro, 12/8 on the verses.

“I just stumbled onto ‘em,” Allman later said. “I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I just did it. My brother said, ‘That’s good, man. I didn’t know you understood.’ I said something intelligent like, ‘What’s 11/8?’ and Duane just said, ‘Okay, dumb ass, I’ll try to draw it up on paper for you.’”

Recorded at Atlantic Studios in New York in August 1969, the song took an entire day to get down on tape. It clocked in at five minutes and seventeen seconds. But once the band took it on stage, it quadrupled in length, a mélange of blues, rock, funk and fusion jazz (the 22-minute version on 1971’s At Fillmore East is definitive).

"We just felt like we could play all night and sometimes we did,” says Betts. "We could really hit the note. There’s not a single fix on Fillmore. Everything you hear there is how we played it."

If one song epitomises their concept of “hittin’ the note,” that interplay and musical telepathy they were famous for, it’s Whipping Post. The Brothers played it at every show they ever did, and no two versions were exactly alike.

They encored with it at their final show at New York's Beacon Theatre in 2014, Gregg Allman ended his last UK show with the same song the following year, and in 2020, when the surviving members of the final Allman Brothers Band lineup reunited as The Brothers at Madison Square Garden in New York, Whipping Post was the final number in a mammoth set. In 2025, they repeated the trick over three nights.

Whipping Post also developed an unlikely relationship with none other than Frank Zappa. During a 1974 show in Finland, an audience member famously disrupted Zappa by repeatedly screaming a request for the song. Zappa didn't know it, but improvised a response by playing his own track Montona while altering the lyrics to mock the request, which he subtitled Whipping Floss. This interaction became known as 'The Helsinki Incident'.

"We didn't know it, and I felt kind of bad that we couldn't just play it and blow the guy's socks off," Zappa told Guitar Player in 1983. "So when [pianist/vocalist/saxophonist] Bobby Martin joined the band, and I found out that he knew how to sing that song, I said, 'We are definitely going to be prepared for the next time somebody wants Whipping Post – in fact we're going to play it before somebody even asks for it.'"

Zappa eventually released his own satirical-yet-virtuosic cover of it on his 1984 album Them or Us, while Gregg Allman would rerecord the song for his 1997 album Searching for Simplicity, ignoring the original's mix of time signatures and rendering it in good old-fashioned 4/4.

While the Allman Brothers Band were rightfully proud of the song and its improvisational legacy, they remained resistant to easy labels. “I’ve heard that damn expression ‘jam band’ so many times,” Gregg told Classic Rock in an interview. “It’s b.s. The Brothers are not a jam band. We’re a band that jams."

When Genesis released fourth album Foxtrot in 1972, they’d pushed themselves to create something more challenging and satisfying than anything they’d done to date. History would record they achieved that goal – notably with the most feted prog suite in history in Supper’s Ready – but as Steve Hackett told Prog in 2012, they were by no means certain that they’d delivered a successful record.

The foxtrot – the dance itself, which premiered a century ago – is usually defined as a smooth dance of long, continuous, flowing movements. Genesis’ Foxtrot, which arrived 40 years ago, certainly has its long, continuous flowing movements, and much else besides.

Today it sounds as unique, dramatic, thrilling and ambitious as ever. It’s where the classic line-up of the band came fully into being; it’s when they realised how much they could do, how far they could go. “It was about creating a film for the ear rather than the eye,” says Steve Hackett.

“And it even got to Number 12 in the charts,” Tony Banks laughs. “Of course the next week it went down to Number 27 or something, but it was our first moment of scoring anything, so we felt that we were underway, that we were heading somewhere different. Foxtrot was where we first started, in my opinion, to become significant.”

While all of its tracks are strong and inventive, Foxtrot is unavoidably dominated by the 23-minute, seven-part suite which graced what used to be side two. Supper’s Ready is one of the towering landmarks of prog, dovetailing short surreal pieces with moving neo-classical reprises and recapitulations, serene flows with shuddering staccato, parochial realism with pulchritudinous dreams.

Across this fire from the skies, Peter Gabriel sings of battles between good and evil and love and war, of firemen, farmers, flowers (‘a flower?’), and a frog who was a prince (who was a brick) (which was an egg) (which was a bird). And of 666 and a new Jerusalem. Startling then, it remains a stunning achievement of vision and scale. Roger Taylor of Queen has called it “at separate times, homely, beautiful, tortured and epic.”

‘We’ve got everything,’ it declares presciently. ‘We’re growing everything…’

While Supper’s Ready is the main course, Foxtrot should be appreciated as more than just a set of appetisers leading up to it. It’s strange to learn that the album came about in a relatively ramshackle manner: no great master plan had been conceived.

The band sought a producer who could capture their improving live sound, and to that end had meetings or sessions with Paul Samwell-Smith, John Anthony and Bob Potter. None was quite the right fit; so David Hitchcock, whose work with Caravan had impressed, came in with the more outspoken engineer John Burns.

Hackett was fatigued by the heavy touring schedule and still somewhat intimidated by his fellow band members’ prowess – he’s recalled thinking, “These guys are so good!" In 2012, having just re-recorded Supper’s Ready and others for his Genesis Revisited II album, he remembers the steps towards Foxtrot more fondly.

“There weren’t a lot of days off; we were a hard-working live band,” he says. “Whereas with its predecessor, Nursery Cryme, we’d taken the summer off and written and recorded together as a unit, bonding the team, this time we were on the run, in and out of the studio. I remember flying back from Italy to be in there a day or two ahead of the others, who were travelling by road, just to finish off my guitar parts on the end of Supper’s Ready.”

If there’s one album that doesn’t sound like a rush job, it’s Foxtrot… “Maybe not. But when you’ve done something, you know what your intention was. The perpetrators will always be looking for improvements. We generally agreed to a man that we recorded Watcher Of The Skies too fast. To my ears now it sounds like a young band desperate to get the notes right in a race to the finish. Once we’d been playing it live for a while, we relaxed into it and it sounded bigger.

“The version that ended up on Genesis Live is more in-the-pocket. That rhythm is almost impossible for any band to play perfectly! It’s full of pitfalls.Yet there’s lots of weird and wonderful stuff; it’s a band at its most creatively eccentric.”

Rehearsals and writing sessions in a variety of locations may have coloured the album’s angles and attitudes. Hackett recounts that Foxtrot was worked up in a variety of “drab, functional” places, until they moved (without Gabriel, who added the words later) to the Una Billings School Of Dance in Shepherd’s Bush.

“There were girls upstairs, learning their tap-dance and what-have-you. And the sound of that, those rhythms would come down through the ceiling. We were below in what had been a refectory, so you had a counter here and a gobstopper-dispensing machine there. It was all a bit strange, and the atmosphere influenced our subsequent efforts.

“Much of Supper’s Ready was written in the two weeks there. With the tap-dancing upstairs, you couldn’t be too serious for long, because you’d hear them: clumpety clump clump. That rhythm would kick in, and we’d have to break into smiles…”

Watcher Of The Skies had grown out of Banks “fooling around” with the Mellotron. “We bought one of the ex-King Crimson Mellotrons,” he notes, “and Robert Fripp insisted it was the one they’d used on In The Court Of The Crimson King. Mind you, he had three, and I’m sure he said that about all of them when he was selling them!”

Hackett also emphasises the importance of that instrument to the album. “I’d kept hammering on that we should get one, saying it’d make our story-telling abilities so much greater. It meant that the band could function as a time machine, with all these various mythologies. The idea was that all the old instruments were there within the Frankenstein that was the Mellotron.

“It was like an alien orchestra being beamed to you by satellite. And you need to be able to smell the dust from time to time. It had a… cold warmth. I think it’s actually the most influential keyboard instrument in the whole of rock.”

Banks reckons people had never heard “a big, big sound like that” before. It brought the album in with an impossible-to-ignore surge.

“Time Table, Get ‘Em Out By Friday and Can-Utility And The Coastliners don’t get as much attention as the others,” agrees Hackett, “but they’re all part of the journey.” Not least because of Gabriel’s always busy, multi-voiced lyrics. “Yes, there’s important social comment on Get ‘Em Out…, and the rest is hardly boy-meets-girl, is it? And the sci-fi elements show that mythology doesn’t have to be backward looking.

“Time Table has something: there’s a magic between the piano and the six-string electric. It chimes. You get that third instrument – not piano, not guitar – where the distinction between them is blurred. The ensemble work welds instruments together, grafts them onto each other like that Star Trek mind-meld. It’s not so much an album of solos.

So how was the response to Foxtrot upon initial release? Were people dazzled, confused, appalled, or exhilarated? Or just indifferent? “All of those things,” muses Hackett. “Don’t forget, we weren’t The Beatles. Just before they released Sgt Pepper, they worried whether they’d gone too far and whether the crowd might give them the thumbs-down.

“We felt in a similar position. It was early days for the band. We just weren’t sure. We’d really gone out on a limb with Supper’s Ready, it was labyrinthine with layers, and it was by no means certain that the response would be positive.”

Of course, Paul Whitehead’s surrealist sleeve design is as much a part of the Foxtrot “immersion” experience as that pyramid-prism is to The Dark Side Of The Moon. Gabriel certainly dived in, courageously donning his wife’s red dress and a fox-head for stage shows. “It’s interesting how the most cherished albums have the most cherished sleeves,” ponders Hackett.

“I think for fans of it there was always that feeling of looking at it and thinking: ‘I’m onto something here that other people don’t necessarily know about.’ One’s taste becomes tribal: these albums become important bonding elements. Where language leaves off, music begins, and you share a dream.”

A dream that’s lasted 40 years and counting, in the case of Foxtrot… “Musicians do tend to disparage their early work – the need to continually move forward can be everything,” Hackett says. “I prefer to celebrate it, and look for what’s right about it. If you have passion, energy and honesty you will come up with something valuable. You don’t always verbalise it as a band; you try to do things instinctively, listening closely to each other without ego - and sometimes you get a great crystallisation.

“You may not recognise it at the time; you might think it was just a doodle, but someone else will see it as a full-blown portrait, a Mona Lisa. The musicians might still be searching, but the audience, the true owners, will say, ‘Look no further. We’ve found it.’”

“We still laugh about it now,” says The Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson,. “We were one of those local bands that really wasn’t very popular. If we wrote a riff at sound-check then we played it that night, we’d play the song on the spot, just throw it in there. People weren’t so keen on that sort of thing.”

Even their A&R man stumbled upon them by accident. George Drakoulias was in Atlanta scouting other bands for Rick Rubin’s American Recordings label. He happened to be nursing a drink in a bar when he asked the stranger next to him if there were any rock bands in town worth hearing.

“And someone mentioned Mr Crowe’s Garden, as we were back then,” Chris recalls. “Typically, we had no shows booked while he was in town, but we had a gig booked in New York coming up, third on the bill of five bands at Drums. George came down and he said we were all right. And I guess we were. He kept coming down to Atlanta after that and we kept working on demos.

“All these bands in Atlanta were working hard on their repertoires and their stage shows, and we were the worst – no work ethic, non-career minded, no local following. But for some reason we always had people flying in from LA or New York to see what we were doing. We just thought they’ll take us to dinner. We’d order eight pitchers of margaritas and by the time the gig started we were pissed out of our heads and barely able to finish the show. They’d fly back home and we thought we’d got one over on them.”

Dining on someone else’s dime and playing live intermittently enabled the band to focus on making what would become their debut album for the American label. Yet while they were recording Shake Your Money Maker, they hadn’t even signed the deal. And George Drakoulias hadn’t produced a full album before, so he was also feeling his way. They hunkered down in a studio and wrote and rehearsed for days at a time.

“That really was when we built up our relationship with George,” says Chris. “We were kids, we had a few guitars, a couple of amps… We didn’t have a budget for food, we kind of ate whatever George didn’t finish. It was fantastic, though, a real adventure for us. We were thinking, we’re making a record, then we’ll get a deal and we’ll try to get us much out of this experience as possible and then figure out what we’re going to do with our lives. It seemed to us that you had to be an asshole to get on MTV or in showbiz. We weren’t interested in that so much.”

“It was just like that,” agrees the other Robinson brother, guitarist Rich. “The studio was a place where Brendan O’Brien had worked. He was just our engineer then, which is very strange when you think about it now. I moved into my 20s in the middle of recording our first album – as good a way to start a new decade as any.”

Two years later, Rich had come up with a song that would make the final cut of the album, the elegiac She Talks To Angels.

“She Talks To Angels has always held up for us,” says Rich, “That was the first song I wrote. And when George heard it he really liked it. Chris wasn’t sure, but George insisted, said we needed it on the record. Chris likes to move on, he doesn’t tend to dwell on the past, and I think that song had been around a while by the time we got to making the album and he just wanted to hear new stuff.”

“It’s a George record,” Chris says, but not unkindly. “We were so excited and eager, and George was very methodical – thank God. He made a very radio-friendly record. It took a long time because we weren’t used to the studio, we weren’t used to things being perfect. But we were thinking, this is how it’s done so this is how we’ll do it. Though when we bought our freedom with that record selling millions of copies in the States, we never made a perfect record again.”

Both Robinsons agree that the album still stands up 20 years later, even if they can hear the band’s naivety between the grooves.

“We still play pretty much everything from that record,” says Chris. “The only song that’s been lost is Struttin’ Blues. Seein’ Things is still a band favourite and a song that we probably play twice a week if we’re on the road. I hear songs on the radio like Jealous Again and I like it. It’s still a big part of our show. It’s an iconic song for us, as is Twice As Hard. I still love to sing Sister Luck when we do it.”

“Though it was Sister Luck that was really hard to capture in the studio,” Rich remembers. “As a band we hadn’t played much together, and trying to find that dynamic was really hard for us on some songs. We recorded Sister Luck several times just trying to get it really right. But it holds up as an album, I think. I always view our records as what they meant at the time. I think when you’re that young and things happen that fast, you really wear your influences on your sleeve. And the only frame of reference you have is wanting to make music that moves people as much as the music that I loved moved me. That was always the goal. So to me it was the best possible record we could’ve made then. I still think the songs are pretty great.”

So did the record-buying public. Shake Your Money Maker sold more than seven million copies, and on the back of it the band went off on a world tour that would take them away from Atlanta for almost two years, playing more than 350 shows.

“I remember us coming over to London to play the Marquee club, and thinking the queue outside was for someone else,” Rich laughs. “The audiences over there were unbelievable compared to America. We played the Marquee, and then went out opening for the Dogs D’Amour. Then months later, at the end of the Shake Your Money Maker tour, we came back to London and did Hammersmith Odeon. That sort of wrapped up it all up. We came full circle, and then we got on the plane and finally went home.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 150 (September 2010)

Former Iron Maiden frontman Blaze Bayley says only one of the iconic metal band's line of vocalists has achieved truly legendary status.

The band's first singer was Paul Mario Day, who was part of the founding lineup from 1975 to 1976. He was replaced by Dennis Wilcock, who held the role until 1978.

Paul Di'Anno landed the job in 1978 and sang on the band's first two albums – the self-titled Iron Maiden and Killers. Many fans still cite those two records as the group's best ever work, and Bayley agrees.

He believes Di'Anno, who died in 2024, holds a status that nobody – not even current and longest serving frontman Bruce Dickinson – can match.

Bayley tells Metal OBS: "There are different eras of Maiden, of course, but in my mind, only Paul is the legend.

"After that, we carry the name, we carry the torch of Iron Maiden. I may become a legend, Bruce may become a legend. But the legend of Iron Maiden belongs to Paul on those first two albums.

"Because they broke the mould, not just of heavy metal, but of music. Those albums are so different and do so many things. They break the rules.

"He's a legend. He was a legend. He now is a timeless legend. So that's something that can never be changed, in my opinion. It's only my opinion.

"Other people will say different things, but in my opinion, you listen to some of the songs on the first two albums, it's so different to everything else that was going on."

Di'Anno and Bayley became friendly after their stints with Maiden came to an end, and the pair even performed Maiden material together on the road.

Bayley adds: "We were colleagues. Paul was a very funny guy. I think people don't know that about him. He had a great sense of humour.

"Russia from St. Petersburg, Moscow, right across to Vladivostok, and we did Sweden together. We did all Scandinavia, and we did Australia and New Zealand. And when we had a good band, and he'd rested well, you could close your eyes and it was like the first album, but better. It was like those first two albums, but better."

Di'Anno's health struggle towards the end of his life is the subject of a documentary released this year – Di'Anno: Iron Maiden's Lost Singer.

Tom G Warrior of Celtic Frost, Triptykon and Hellhammer fame might not be the first extreme metal musician you’d associate with progressive rock – but in 2017 he told Prog about his passion for a wide range of those artists, including Roxy Music.

“People might be surprised to read this, but I was very heavily inspired by progressive music when I was younger.

I listened to so many different artists that it’s very tough for me to talk about just one. It seems almost insulting when there are lots who had an effect on me when I was in my teens.

I have to make an honourable mention of Keith Emerson. The way he used classical music with ELP on albums like Tarkus had a massive impact on me.

But I’m going to celebrate Roxy Music here. I can’t exactly recall when I first heard them, but I would think it was on a southern German radio station which played a lot of prog.

What I loved about them was their fearlessness and delight in experimenting. If you listen to them now for the first time, then you might wonder what all the fuss is about, because what they did sounds like no big dea today.

But in the 70s, it was radical and exciting, and they were pushing the boundaries without any concern for commercial compromise.

Phil Manzanera’s guitar playing made an impression on me as a budding musician, but it was their all-round style that impressed me most. They became more mainstream, but in those early days there was nothing quite like Roxy Music.

I got into them through their second album, For Your Pleasure, and then retrospectively discovered their self-titled debut.

And there’s no doubt they had an influence on what Celtic Frost did on our albums Morbid Tales, To Mega Therion and, especially, Into The Pandemonium.

If I have to select the best Roxy Music album, it would be For Your Pleasure. What sets it apart from the rest of their catalogue is the songwriting; it’s of the highest calibre, and it’s very powerful.

If you combine that with the band’s devotion to being individual and cutting edge, then you have a very potent album that, to this day, still resonates with me.

There are so many progressive artists to whom I owe so much. But Roxy Music are one band that I would always choose as being a major part of who I am today.”

During December 1965 and the first two months of ’66, The Beatles’ Rubber Soul album spent eight weeks at No.1 in the UK and six weeks at No.1 in the US, and was still in the US Top 20 when the group returned to Abbey Road studios in April ’66 to begin recording material for their next new album. The ‘all killer no filler’ excellence of Rubber Soul had set a new benchmark for the world’s top rock artists to equal, and was even talked about as having shifted the focus of rock music from singles to albums.

As others strove to equal it, The Beatles set about the task of making something even better.

“At this point in their career there was very little external pressure on them,” Apple Records director Tony Bramwell remembers. “EMI had all but given up trying to make them do things, and [Beatles manager] Brian Epstein never interfered in that way.”

Being a close associate of the band since his days of being their roadie in Liverpool, Bramwell noticed a different kind of pressure on them. “They were no longer the four-headed mop-top monster they’d been at the start,” he recalls. “They were developing their own lives away from the band, with John and George leading their suburban existences, George becoming interested in Indian music and Paul being thoroughly metropolitan, checking out the galleries and exhibitions, going to clubs and so on.”

McCartney was also the driving force of the band, Bramwell confirms, and was the one who took the initiative to get them back into the studio to record the follow-up to Rubber Soul. Fortunately they were still prolific songwriters so there was no shortage of material.

The first track they worked on was the epochal Tomorrow Never Knows, a psychedelic, pseudo-Indian cosmic soup dreamed up by Lennon four months earlier, inspired by the lines: “Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream,” which he’d read in translator Walter Kaufmann’s book The Portable Nietzsche.

It was also the first track that 19-year-old Abbey Road engineer Geoff Emerick worked on, having that very morning been promoted from recording assistant. “I was extremely nervous,” he recalled. “One request from John was that he wanted the vocal to sound like the Dali Lama singing on a mountain top twenty-five miles away. Obviously we had no plug-ins or software. What we’ve got is two tape machines, a [recording console] and one echo chamber. So I’m looking through the control room window into the studio and saw the revolving Leslie speaker from the Hammond organ, and I thought: ‘If we could get John’s voice to go into that revolving speaker, maybe we’ll get something that sounds a bit new.’ And that is what we did use, on the last verse. That sort of won John over.”

McCartney, too, had been working on ideas that fitted nicely with the other-worldly ambience they sought for Tomorrow Never Knows. “I had an idea to use something I had been experimenting with at home on my tape player, where I would put a piece of tape over the record head and saturate the tape with all kinds of sounds,” he later revealed. “I was listening to Stockhausen, and these saturated loops were inspired by his work.”

Producer George Martin remembered how “they would bring me tapes of all the loops, and we would play them just for a giggle, like crossword puzzles. And when we made Tomorrow Never Knows, that was all the tapes they had made at home made into loops. We had about twenty-odd loops or more, at varying speeds.”

For its time, Abbey Road was a state-of-the-art recording facility, but Emerick reveals exactly how primitive state-of-the-art was in 1966: “We’d lace [the tapes] up on our tape machine, and people would have to hold them out with pencils. On Tomorrow Never Knows there weren’t enough people in the control room to handle holding them, so we got some of the maintenance department down to help. I think we put five loops up on faders and then just played it as an instrument.”

Even just with those sonic innovations, Tomorrow Never Knows would have been a revolutionary-sounding track. But Emerick then pulled another rabbit out of the hat to refresh Ringo Starr’s drum sound. The Beatles had been hearing hard, solid drums on American records that were not being matched in England. So – and strictly against Abbey Road rules – Emerick “took the front skin off the bass drum, stuffed a sweater inside and put the skin back on… I moved the microphone about four inches away from the drum and got the bass drum sound I really wanted, this hard sort of up-front thud.”

Contemporary Abbey Road wisdom decreed that any mic placed closer than 18 inches from a bass drum would be damaged by the air pressure from it. But Emerick and The Beatles were less interested in equipment than in achieving new sounds. “All I could do to accommodate requests for new sounds for them was really, basically, just to abuse the equipment,” he says.

Predictably, Abbey Road management rapped Emerick’s knuckles. But in the longer term, equipment abuse became another tool in the search for new sounds.

The following day, work started on the uptempo Got To Get You Into My Life, a more traditional Stax soul-based McCartney composition. At first listen it’s just another standard romantic relationship song. But as Macca himself explained, it was written after his first experience with marijuana and was “actually an ode to pot, like someone else might write an ode to chocolate or a good claret”.

The track didn’t require the kind of innovations that transformed Tomorrow Never Knows but even so, producer Martin and engineer Emerick racked their brains to devise ways of making it sound the way McCartney wanted.

“In those days they would hear a record coming from America where they had really good brass sounds,” Martin explained. “They’d say: ‘Let’s try some.’ So we would get brass players in the studio and I would write down parts for them.”

For Got To Get You Into My Life, Martin brought in a horn section, including members of Georgie Fame’s Blue Fames and a fistful of London’s go-to jazz session players. “Paul sat at the piano and showed us what he wanted, and we played with the rhythm track in our headphones,” Blue Flames sax player Peter Coe remembered. “We tried it a few times to get the feel right, and then John Lennon, who was in the control room, suddenly rushed out, stuck his thumb aloft and shouted: ‘Got it!’”

However, Lennon’s celebratory yell referred only to their performance. The sound that McCartney envisaged was still not quite there. He wanted it to be bigger. Emerick pondered how to achieve McCartney’s aim. “We could double-track it, but there were no more tracks left. So we actually recorded it on to a [separate] stereo piece of tape.”

There was no way in 1966 to sync up two tape recorders, so they simply marked off the ‘start’ point of the copy with a grease pencil and, when it came to the final mix, crossed their fingers, started up the copy and the original and prayed that the two would “marry up”.

On April 11 they started work on Granny Smith, a Harrison concoction later to become Love You To. Harrison had become fascinated by Indian music and, specifically, sitars at a late-August 1965 gathering in LA’s Benedict Canyon, where The Beatles hung out with The Byrds, whose David Crosby introduced him to the music of Ravi Shankar. Two months later, Harrison had executed an effective sitar part on Norwegian Wood, but Love You To went much further. With minimal participation from the other Beatles, Harrison created the track with tabla player Anil Bhagwat and several Indian musicians from London’s Asian Music Circle.

Bhagwat was rung up on the day of the session. “It was only when a Rolls-Royce came to pick me up that I realised I’d be playing on a Beatles session,” he later explained. “When I arrived at Abbey Road there were girls everywhere with Thermos flasks, cakes, sandwiches, waiting for The Beatles to come out. George told me what he wanted and I tuned the tabla with him. He suggested I play something in the Ravi Shankar style, 16 beats, though he agreed that I should improvise.”

As he had done with Ringo’s drums, Emerick close-mic’d Bhagwat’s tabla, achieving a previously unimaginably powerful thwack. What remains unclear is how much of the sitar on the track was played by Harrison, but it seems likely that the intro is his while the remainder is played by an uncredited Asian Music Circle member.

With Love You To completed, work started on Paperback Writer which, because it was released as a single, did not appear on Revolver (a common practice in that era). This is also true of its B-side, Rain, recorded one day later. But both songs are clearly products of the same gloriously freewheeling mindsets that created the album.

McCartney had conceived the structure of Paperback Writer on the drive from central London to Lennon’s suburban home for an afternoon songwriting session. “I developed the whole idea in the car,” he explained. “I came in, had my bowl of cornflakes and said: ‘How’s about if we write a letter: Dear Sir or Madam, next line, next paragraph etc?’”

Opening with the most distinctively layered harmony vocals of their career so far, the song was propelled on a dynamic guitar riff underpinned by the loudest drum and bass combo yet heard on a Beatles single, thanks to Emerick’s now firmly established techniques. With typically tongue-in-cheek Beatles whimsy, Lennon and Harrison’s backing vocals bear no relation to the song’s lyric, as they sing instead the title of the French folk song Frere Jacques.

Rain, which was chosen as the B-side of Paperpack Writer, would have fitted perfectly on Revolver. Lyrically, it takes an off-kilter look at its subject matter. “Songs have traditionally treated rain as a bad thing, and what we got on to was that it’s no bad thing,” McCartney pointed out. “There’s no greater feeling than the rain dripping down your back. The most interesting thing about it wasn’t the writing, which was tilted seventy-thirty to John, but the recording of it.”

The new grainy guitar texture was achieved by recording the backing track at a higher speed than normal, then adding the vocals to the slowed down instrumental sounds. When Lennon went home after the session – in a somewhat altered state – he accidentally played the reel-to-reel tape backwards. “I sat there, transfixed, with the earphones on, with a big hash joint,” he later remembered. “I ran in the next day and said: ‘I know what to do with it, I know… Listen to this!’ So I made them all play it backwards. The fade is me actually singing, backwards, with the guitars going backwards.”

Dr Robert Freymann, a Manhattan doctor notorious for dispensing ‘good vibes’ – in the shape of vitamin B-12 shots laced with amphetamine – to his wealthy clientele provided the subject matter for the Lennon song they laid down on April 17. Explaining how Freymann inspired Doctor Robert, McCartney said: “John and I thought that was a funny idea – the fantasy doctor who would fix you up by giving you drugs. It was a parody on that idea.”

Perhaps not the album’s most captivating composition, Doctor Robert does contain an example of ADT (Artificial Double Tracking), a new recording technique developed by Abbey Road staffer Ken Townshend. ADT freed the band from the chore of recording their vocals more than once to fatten them up. Instead the system copied the vocal track then played it back alongside the original, out of sync by a matter of milliseconds, just enough to create a double image.

On April 20 the band were back in Studio 2, working on the songs Taxman and You Don’t Get Me, later retitled And Your Bird Can Sing. Harrison’s Taxman would be chosen to open the album, probably because of its dynamic opening bars and harsh, trebly chord slashes, but its most intriguing guitar-related fact is that the energetically crazed solo was played by McCartney. “I got the guitar and was playing around in the studio with the feedback and stuff, and I said to George: ‘Maybe you could play it like this.’ I can’t quite remember how it happened that I played it, but it was probably one of those times when somebody says: ‘Well why don’t you do it, then?’”

Later that day, Harrison and McCartney played the guitar duet on Lennon’s And Your Bird Can Sing, delivering a powerful, distinctly Byrds-like folk-rock workout, but they felt they could do better. By the time they returned to it a week later, everything was tightened up, the guitar parts flowed better and the rock was decidedly more evident than the folk.

Lennon never revealed what his song’s cryptic lyric was about, but one favourite interpretation is that it was an attack on Mick Jagger, whose ‘bird’ of the time, Marianne Faithful, could indeed sing.

The gloriously soporific I’m Only Sleeping was the next track they worked on, beginning on April 27 but not completed until May 5. Lennon was a notoriously snoozy kind of guy. In the contentious “more popular than Jesus” interview, journalist Maureen Cleave wrote: “He can sleep almost indefinitely, is probably the laziest person in England. ‘Physically lazy,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind writing or reading or watching or speaking, but sex is the only physical thing I can be bothered with any more.’” There are known instances, notably Here, There And Everywhere, of McCartney working industriously on songs at Lennon’s Kenwood home while his writing partner remained in the land of nod.

Lennon had written the lyric on April 25, on the back of a car-phone bill. But at the first studio session, McCartney noticed the lack of a middle eight, and supplied the more upbeat ‘Keeping an eye on the world going by my window…’ section.

In the wake of Lennon’s ‘discovery’ of backwards recording techniques during the making of Rain, it was now virtually de rigueur to try everything backwards – just in case. Harrison’s eight-measure solo in I’m Only Sleeping was one beneficiary of that process. The technique was somewhat refined, however, because Harrison deliberately crafted a solo which he thought would sound good in reverse, then asked George Martin to transcribe it backwards. What followed was an exhausting nine-hour session during which Martin conducted Harrison painstakingly through the reversed notation until he got it right. “I can still picture George hunched over his guitar for hours on end,” Emerick wrote in 2006, “headphones clamped on, brow furrowed in concentration.”

When he finally managed to play the solo, it was reversed before being inserted into the track.

Eleanor Rigby, begun on April 28, was a very different story. Folk-rock hit maker Donovan, one of McCartney’s near-neighbours, has recalled a day that spring when the Beatle turned up at his house uninvited: “He knocked on the door and said: ‘What are you doing?’ I said: ‘Writing songs. What are you doing?’ ‘I’m writing songs too…’ He sat down, and I said: ‘Okay, what do you got?’ ‘He said: ‘Well, I got this,’ and he sang this: ‘Ola Na Tunjee/Blowing his mind in the dark with a pipe full of clay.’”

Sing those words in your head to the tune of Eleanor Rigby and its easy to see where Paul was headed. He always considered melody the most important element in a song, and frequently tried out different words before settling on a final version (famously, Yesterday was called Scrambled Eggs for several weeks).

There’s no definitive account of precisely how he got from ‘Ola Na Tunjee’ to ‘Eleanor Rigby’, but McCartney’s version holds that he combined the first name of actress friend Eleanor Bron with a sign he saw in Bristol advertising wine merchants Rigby And Evens Ltd. Most curiously, though, there’s a 1939 gravestone bearing the name Eleanor Rigby in St. Peter’s churchyard in Woolton, just yards from the hall where Lennon and McCartney first played together in 1957. McCartney himself has acknowledged that he might have seen that stone as a teenager, and unknowingly unearthed it from his subconscious while working on the song.

Once he had the name and the lyric outline, the others helped piece together the rest, but in the final version, only the voices of McCartney, Lennon and Harrison are heard, backed by a pair of string quartets, arranged impeccably by Martin. In response to McCartney asking if the strings could sound more ‘biting’, Emerick again used close-mic’ing, this time with a separate mic on each instrument. The result was a dramatic improvement in the sound definition – rich, resonant strings with a front-and-centre clarity previously unheard on record.

Another flirtation with the classical world came about during the recording of For No One, which began on May 9. It had started life back in March as Why Did It Die, a McCartney song composed in a Swiss Alps ski resort chalet after an argument with his then-girlfriend Jane Asher. Neither Lennon nor Harrison took part in the recording, on which McCartney played piano, clavichord and bass, with Ringo on drums and tambourine.

“Occasionally we’d have an idea for some new kind of instrumentation, particularly for solos,” McCartney has said. “I was interested in the French horn because it was an instrument I’d always loved from when I was a kid. It’s a beautiful sound. So I went to George Martin and said: ‘How can we go about this?’ And he said: ‘Well, let me get the very finest.’”

For a fee of £50, Martin got Alan Civil, principal horn player for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, who remembers: “I thought the song was called For Number One, because I saw ‘For No One’ written down. Anyway, they played the existing tape to me, which was complete, and I thought it had been recorded in rather bad musical style, in that it was ‘in the cracks’, neither B-flat nor B-major. This posed a certain difficulty in tuning my instrument.”

Civil’s horn part was constructed by McCartney singing the melody he wanted to George Martin, who then transcribed it for Civil to sight-read. But they slyly slipped in a top F, one note higher than the instrument’s usual range. “Alan looked up from his bit of paper: ‘Er, George? I think there’s a mistake here – you’ve got a high F written down,’” McCartney remembers. “Then George and I said: ‘Yeah,’ and smiled back at him. And he knew what we were up to, and played it. These great players will do it.”

With its plangent, descending bassline, For No One’s understated mood of weary resignation provides a stunning contrast to the vibrantly experimental tracks that surround it.

On May 20 the band briefly left the confines of Abbey Road to film promos for Paperback Writer and Rain in the grounds of Chiswick House in West London. They returned to the studio on the 26th to continue the tradition of including one song sung by Ringo on every Beatles album. McCartney recalls the origins of Yellow Submarine thus: “I was laying in bed in the Ashers’ garret… I was thinking of it as a song for Ringo, so I wrote it as not too rangey in the vocal, then started making a story, sort of an ancient mariner telling the young kids where he’d lived.”

During the same Donovan encounter when McCartney had sung him Ola Na Tunjee, he also sang him, Donovan says, “another song that was missing a verse. It was a very small part, and I just went into the other room and put together ‘sky of blue, sea of green’. They had always asked other people for help with a line or two, so I helped with that line.”

Several people contributed words here and there for the lyrics to Yellow Submarine. A second recording session on June 1 turned into a mini-party with guests including Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull, Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd and a gaggle of Abbey Road staffers, all of them handed noise-making devices, ranging from chains to old bathtubs, dredged from the trap room, an under-stairs cupboard described by George Martin as “full of general sorts of percussion instruments”. Yellow Submarine even used an ancient cash register, which was used again in 1973 by Pink Floyd for Money.

Inevitably, down the years, critics and pundits have allocated symbolic significance to the song’s lyrics, sometimes drug-related, sometimes socio-political, but McCartney has always remained adamant that “it’s a happy place, that’s all. You know, it was just… We were trying to write a children’s song. That was the basic idea. And there’s nothing more to be read into it than there is in the lyrics of any children’s song.”

Which is not quite the case for Harrison’s I Want To Tell You, which was put together on June 2 and 3. Superficially it’s a simple tale of a young man tongue-tied in the presence of a pretty girl, but Harrison revealed that it was actually about “the avalanche of thoughts that are so hard to write down or say or transmit” caused by taking LSD.

His acid daze did not, however, prevent him from innovating musically; the song includes a rare use of the chord E7flat9, with which he was inordinately chuffed. When asked what it is, Harrison explained: “That’s an E7 with an F on top played on the piano. I’m really proud of that, as I literally invented that chord… John later borrowed it on I Want You.”

Neil Innes, of novelty act the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (and later The Rutles) vividly remembers recording an inconsequential music-hall song in Studio 1, during which he “snuck out, down the corridor to outside their studio, and I could hear very clearly what they were doing. They were working on one of George’s songs, and it was just fantastic listening to this, especially this F over the E.” At that moment, Innes realised just how far out of The Beatles’ league he was creatively. “Then I had to go back to our studio and record My Brother Makes The Noises For The Talkies.”

As the Revolver sessions neared their end, time was being taken up with mixing and overdubbing. But on June 8 they spent the first of two days recording Good Day Sunshine, which McCartney has described as “very much a nod to The Lovin’ Spoonful’s Daydream, the same traditional, almost trad-jazz feel”. Neither as technically complex nor as musically sophisticated as many other tracks on Revolver, it nevertheless includes a neat piece of studio trickery in the shape of George Martin’s honky-tonk piano solo, which was recorded slow, then speeded up to give it some extra zip.

It took three days, June 14-16, to record the sublime Here, There And Everywhere, but the writing of it, at Lennon’s Weybridge home, was much faster. “It was written quite quickly,” McCartney recalls, “out by the swimming pool in St George’s Hill while I was waiting for John to wake up one morning.” By the time Lennon woke, the song was almost complete, although McCartney concedes that when they went indoors to finish it, “John might have helped with a few last words”.

The last song recorded for Revolver was She Said She Said. According to Lennon it “was written after an acid trip in LA during a break in The Beatles’ [1965] tour, where we were having fun with The Byrds and lots of girls… Peter Fonda came in when we were on acid, and kept coming up to me, sitting next to me and whispering: ‘I know what it’s like to be dead.’ He was describing an acid trip he’d been on.” Lennon’s home demos reveal that after getting the basic idea for the song he changed it several times, added new sections and sought advice from Harrison. Harrison recalls that Lennon “had loads of bits, maybe three songs, that were unfinished, and I made suggestions and helped him to work them together so that they became one finished song”.

Lennon was evidently not entirely happy with She Said She Said, because it was not a serious contender for Revolver until the last moment, when they realised they were one song short.

An acerbic counterpoint to the honey of Here, There And Everywhere, it required a nine-hour session on June 21, during which Harrison played bass because McCartney and Lennon had become embroiled in a squabble.

Once it, and therefore the album, was done, producer George Martin reportedly sighed: “All right, boys, I’m just going for a lie down.”

As soon as the album was mixed, The Beatles played three dates in Germany, followed by a brief Far Eastern jaunt. But even while on the road, the album was uppermost in their minds. On June 26, the day of their gig in Hamburg, they finally decided on a name for it, discarding suggestions including Abracadabra, Four Sides Of The Eternal Triangle, Magic Circles, Pendulum and After Geography (Ringo’s jokey take on the Rolling Stones’ Aftermath). The multi-layered pun of Revolver won the day, finding favour with all of the band.

Also during the German trip, in Essen on June 25, they played Got To Get You Into My Life for support band Cliff Bennett And The Rebel Rousers. “Paul and John came in the dressing room and let us hear Got To Get You Into My Life,” Bennett recalls. “They’d thought it would be great for us because of all the brass. John played his guitar and Paul ‘dah-dah-dah’d the brass parts. Right away, even like that, I knew it was brilliant for us.”

Cliff Bennett and co. recorded the song at Abbey Road with McCartney as producer. “We were mesmerised with the things he did,” Bennett says. “New techniques like putting limiters on the piano, stuffing the grand piano cover inside the bass drum to get that flat-slap sound, things like that. Actually, I preferred the old ‘ba-boom’ sound from a bass drum, but we went along with it.”

At two am, when McCartney called it a day, Bennett still hadn’t done his vocals, so they reconvened the following morning. “Paul lived just along the road, so he turned up in his pyjamas, carpet slippers, and a jacket over his pyjama top. Must have walked round the corner like that, which I thought was hilarious.”

Revolver was released in the UK on August 5. On its front cover was a surreal mixed-media artwork by Klaus Voormann, the bassist with Manfred Mann and a friend of The Beatles since their early days in Hamburg. Having heard Tomorrow Never Knows, Voormann had decided: “They were being so avant-garde. I thought: ‘The cover has to do the same thing. How far can I go? How surreal and strange can it be?’”

His instantly striking collage, part line drawing and part photographic, ingeniously coupled modern art with commerciality. “We were very pleased,” McCartney enthused. “We liked the way there were little things coming out of people’s ears, and how he’d collaged things on a small scale while the drawings were on a big scale. He also knew us well enough to capture us rather beautifully in the drawings. We were flattered.”

Voormann was paid £40 for his work, which reduced Beatles manager Brian Epstein to tears of joy on first seeing it. It was subsequently awarded the 1966 Best Album Cover Grammy.

Cliff Bennett’s version of Got To Get You Into My Life was released on the same day as Revolver. The feeding frenzy accompanying any new Beatles album meant that virtually anyone lucky enough to acquire a pre-release test pressing headed straight for the nearest studio to record one of its tracks. Thus August 5 also saw the release of Here, There And Everywhere by The Fourmost, Good Day Sunshine by The Tremeloes, Tax Man by The Loose Ends, and two versions of For No One, one by Marc Reid and one by Brian Withers. In the coming weeks, Cilla Black released yet another For No One, while Episode Six went for Here, There And Everywhere. Intriguingly, apart from Bennett’s single, which peaked at No.6 in the UK, none of the other versions were noticeably successful, probably because so many people already owned the album that buying an inferior version seemed pointless.

Revolver’s commercial impact was immediate, the album topping the UK chart for seven weeks and the US chart for six. Culturally, although there had been earlier instances of psychedelic music, mostly in San Francisco, London and New York, Revolver opened the floodgates, and changed the thinking, and the chemical preferences, of young rock and pop visionaries worldwide. It’s hard to imagine the careers of Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and many others without the trail blazed by Revolver.

Even beyond the music world, The Beatles could now be seen as a socio-economic force. On August 10, just days after the release of Revolver, the American stock market wobbled because the price of shares in their US label, Capitol Records, dropped sharply. The reason was that Lennon’s observation that The Beatles were now “more popular than Jesus” had triggered bans and burnings of Beatles records. Of course, before too long their popularity would recover, but the incident made it clear that the music industry, and The Beatles themselves, were now seriously big business.

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 226 (July 2016)

Whatever your thoughts on who or what constitutes Sepultura, the fact that this is a band who have been a constant in the world of heavy music for four decades now is a remarkable achievement. This evening their 40th anniversary farewell celebration tour (now into 42 years) reaches Bloodstock for their final ever show on UK soil.

There’s a clear air of excitement for such an occasion in the field and the band are greeted like heroes as they walk onstage and launch in the immortal Inner Self. For a song that was released in 1989 it still sounds unbelievably fresh; a grooving, thrashing masterpiece, it’s an example of precisely why this band are held in such high regard.

Of course, as much as those in attendance want all of the classics from Sepultura’s golden, Max Cavalera-fronted era, you’d be a fool for sleeping on their more recent material. There’s a very good argument to be made that Derrick Green is one of metal’s most underrated frontmen; Kairos and Means To An End, both songs from his time in the band, sound massive today, and Green performs them in his usual commanding manner.

Sepultura also rip through three brand new songs from their recent The Cloud Of Unknowing EP, something that most bands on their final run would never even consider doing. The almost proggy The Place actually sounds more than at home in amongst their more legendary material.

Ultimately, though, as great as all of this is, things really reach fever pitch with the set's final lap. Can any band in heavy music match Territory, Refuse/Resist, Arise, Ratamahatta and Roots Bloody Roots as five-song run? Bloodstock clearly doesn’t think so and goes absolutely feral for 20 minutes of pure metal perfection.

As the final chords of Roots… ring out, guitarist Andreas Kisser thanks everyone for 42 years of support and to congratulate Bloodstock on its 25th anniversary; as he does Green stands beside him, glassy eyed and clearly emotional, knowing that this will be his last time in front of a UK Sepultura crowd. What a band, what a way to sign off.

The long and sometimes fractious relationship between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks has had plenty of drama over the years, but the story has just taken another twist.

Tensions have existed between the two ex-Fleetwood Mac colleagues – and former romantic partners – since singer and guitarist Buckingham was forced out of the band in 2018. But he has revealed that the ice has once again thawed between the two, hinting that they may even work together once more.

“Stevie and I are talking all the time now,” Buckingham told E! News. “Next year should be a pretty interesting year, because I think quite a few things will reveal themselves.”

Buckingham’s departure from the band was followed by a legal battle which was subsequently settled out of court. Nicks said in 2024 that the pair had only interacted once since then, briefly at the memorial service for late Mac keyboard player and singer Christine McVie, who died in 2022. “The only time I’ve spoken to Lindsey was for about three minutes,” Nicks told Rolling Stone. “I dealt with Lindsey for as long as I could. You could not say that I did not give him more than 300 million chances.”

The first hints at an easing in hostilities came in late 2025, when Nicks revealed that the pair had been talking ahead of a reissue of their pre-Fleetwood Mac album, Buckingham Nicks. Earlier this year, Buckingham himself confirmed their relationship was back on healthier terms via an Instagram video: “I think on a more general level, just the energy in terms of what Buckingham Nicks did to sort of create a resurgence of connection between Stevie and myself, I think on a larger scale, that seems to be something that’s in the air.”

His new interview with E! News seems to confirm this. Buckingham says an upcoming Apple TV Fleetwood Mac documentary was partly the catalyst for the pair’s renewed friendship. “I think the process of making that has been a very circular healing process for all of us,” he said, adding: “Because we had left things in 2019 [following the legal issues], maybe as far as I was concerned, not in a very good place for all the wrong reasons. No one was happy about it, and all of that has been healed and worked out.”

Whether the project Buckingham is teasing is a new collaboration between the pair or a Fleetwood Mac reunion isn’t clear – the guitarist was circumspect about the specifics, while Nicks hasn’t commented. But he didn’t explicitly rule out a Mac tour, despite the fact that Nicks has stated that she wouldn’t want to tour without McVie. “I don’t think the fact that Christine is no longer with us would be the deciding factor,” Buckingham told E! News. “If you want to be realistic about it, Christine left the band in the very late ’90s and we did 15 years very successfully and many tours and even did an album without her. And so there is a template that’s already been established for touring without Christine, so I don’t think that would be the decider necessarily.”

Whatever materialises, the fact that the two are talking once more indicates this long-running story has a few more miles in it.

Bloodstock is back, baby! After a triumphant first night with Saxon - who headlined the very first event back in 2001 - the 25th birthday celebrations are well underway by the time Lamb Of God rock up on Friday evening. It's their third time taking top spot - putting them on equal footing with Judas Priest and Nightwish for the bands who've headlined the festival most - and they aren't fucking about getting things started.

A blast of sparks marks their arrival as they get stuck into Ruin. From there, we get a crash course in why Lamb Of God are so beloved on these shores. Laid To Rest and Now You've Got Something To Die For are undeniable anthems, kickstarting a flurry of movement that is astonishing considering the day has effectively been HIT training with each successive band turning the dial up (Life Of Agony - Fit For An Autopsy - Biohazard - Municipal Waste - Sepultura's final UK show).

For all the energy the crowd bring, Randy seems to want to match them pace-for-pace. Leaping, howling and stomping his way around with a demonic sense of vitality, his howls take on an almost screeching, manic fury. It's all off-set with a sense of playfulness and humour that betrays that they aren't the same band who seethed with a genuine sense of danger and destructive force 20-odd years ago and to be honest, they're better for the change.

There's a sense these lads actually like each other, and are having the time of their lives on stage (Randy even brings out his beloved mock-British character "Roger Brilliant" for a few bits that clearly crack up guitarist Mark Morton), inviting 20,000 metal fans to join in the fun. Enhanced with pyro and some freewheeling instrumentals, the set feels loose and joyous as the band span almost their entire careers (no New American Gospel or Omens era tracks stops it being a clean sweep). While there's a few dips - the drum solo after Parasocial Christ doesn't help - they manage to keep things tight and explosive for the most part.

Given just how consistently brilliant they've been live over the past 26 years, it's easy to take Lamb Of God for granted. But when they break out the likes of Walk With Me In Hell, 512 or even a newer rager like Momento Mori, you can't deny they basically set the bar for 21st Century metal bands live. Accept no substitute.

In the summer of 1977, a journalist for US rock magazine Circus interviewed Paul Rodgers at Bad Company’s Palm Springs HQ. The group were touring their new album, Burnin’ Sky, and had rented houses in the California resort, from where they’d fly back and forth in a private jet.

When Circus’s writer arrived at Rodgers’ place, he found the singer waiting to have a karate lesson. In fact, Rodgers was photographed wearing his karate robe, known as a gi, on the cover of Burnin’ Sky. On Bad Company’s last tour the group had lived up to their outlaw reputation, but the singer insisted he was a changed man now. “I’m working at keeping fit,” he said, “because people can get very messed up on tour.”

The records that preceded it have always unfairly overshadowed Bad Company’s fourth album. In the band’s back catalogue, Burnin’ Sky is close to being a ‘great lost album’, if any US Top 20 gold-certified record could ever truly be described as ‘lost’.

Bad Company swept into the Château d’Hérouville studio in France’s Oise Valley in the summer of 1976, just as Iggy Pop and David Bowie swept out after recording Pop’s The Idiot. They weren’t in good shape.

“We had been on the road pretty heavily and we were burned,” admitted Rodgers, who wrote the chords for the title track in his Paris hotel suite and then ad-libbed the lyrics in the studio the next day. It was a one-take affair, recorded by the Rolling Stones’ engineer Chris Kimsey, but it worked.

Burnin’ Sky’s throbbing groove sets the tempo for what follows. Boz Burrell and Simon Kirke maintain a snake-charming rhythm for 5.22 unbroken minutes, as treated vocals, Mick Ralphs’ wailing guitar, peals of thunder and pattering percussion whizz around the mix. It’s spare and economical – Bad Company at their best.

Once again, Rodgers handled the lion’s share of the writing, serving up the bump-and-grind rockers but also the more thoughtful Like Water, co-written with his then wife Machiko Shimizu. Elsewhere, Ralphs delivers two of the album’s best riffs on Man Needs Woman and Too Bad – the last riff cheekily reconfigured by Whitesnake for their song Girl in 1981.

Elsewhere, there’s the jokey intro to Everything I Need, in which Bad Company sing a few lines from The Happy Wanderer (‘…with my knapsack on my back!’) and which evokes a 4am refreshment session, with empty bottles on the table and the unwelcome dawn light creeping through the curtains.

Burnin’ Sky ends as it began with another fine but often forgotten track. On Master Of Ceremony, Rodgers pleads for global harmony over a mesmerising groove. The whole song is fuzzy around the edges, suggesting either the last round in that 4am drinking session or the head-spinning after-effects of one of Rodgers’ karate chops.

Burnin’ Sky maintained Bad Company’s strike rate on the UK and US charts but without a big hit single to raise the profile, it’s since slipped between the cracks. More’s the pity. It’s high time to don the gi, head back to the château and get reacquainted.

You can say that you saw it coming, but you’d be a liar. On October 28, 2016, Avenged Sevenfold released their seventh studio album, The Stage. It had been rumoured for some time that the California chart-toppers were working on new music, in no small part due to a seemingly standalone single coming out in mid-October. But no one who woke up that morning truly expected to have 73 minutes of new music waiting for them.

To hear them tell it, Avenged surprise-released their progressive metal opus out of fatigue. Their last album, 2013’s Hail To The King, had a months-long rollout featuring online puzzles, a radio-ruling single and countless interviews. They were also in a legal battle with their former label Warner Bros and feared some kind of sabotage. Those fears were realised when friend and wrestler Chris Jericho ‘leaked’ a fake release date for The Stage and the label hurriedly announced an unauthorised Avenged best-of album to come out one week earlier. Long story short: they were sick of the industry’s shit, and they felt that their fans were, too.

“We could sense the boredom in our fans [after Hail…],” rhythm guitarist Zacky Vengeance told this writer in 2017. “‘Oh, Avenged is trolling us. They’re doing the campaign and doing scavenger hunts, just release the fucking songs already! We just wanna hear the album!’ This time, we gave them nothing and then we gave them the album, like, ‘Here you go. Make up your mind!’”

Of course, Avenged didn’t invent the surprise album release. It’s been a thing since alt-rock leaders Radiohead effectively leaked their own album In Rainbows in 2007. But since The Stage, and especially in 2026, metal has embraced the tactic like no other genre. Over the last few months alone, black metal band Ultha, doomsters Spirit Adrift and returning post-metal idols Neurosis have all put out new records with no notice. Converge released their long-awaited 10th album Love Is Not Enough in February, only to reveal shortly afterwards that it was the start of a two-part series, with Hum Of Hurt swiftly following. Avenged themselves went back to the well with the divisive Statica EP last month.

For Spirit Adrift, whose surprise album Infinite Illumination was also their last, the decision was born from the same music industry fatigue as Avenged. “I think bands and artists have two choices,” mainman Nate Garrett told MusicRadar. “You crawl out on your fucking hands and knees with the shit kicked out of you, or you walk away on your own two feet. That’s the way I look at it right now. I respect bands that go out that way, like, on the high-note.”

On paper, releasing an album without any singles or promotional interviews seems like commercial suicide, and it has been. The Stage was the lowest-charting Avenged album since 2007, and when A Day To Remember surprise-released Big Ole Album Vol. 1 in February 2025, they slid from the number 15 US chart position of predecessor You’re Welcome to 155. Talking to Guitar.com in May 2025, on the day his band surprise-released their final album Clockworked, Stray From The Path’s Tom Williams acknowledged the probable commercial slump yet was unfazed.

“Charting was important in 2016, but charting in 2025, no one cares,” he said. “I get an email every week about first-week sales and they’re just lower and lower and lower and lower. We charted back in the day, when it mattered, and that was cool, but right now, it’s more important for me to present the record in a way that’s fun and exciting and fulfilling.”

Zacky said similar in 2017: “Album sales [for The Stage] weren’t as good, but at what point do people critique success on how many fucking albums you sell in a week rather than how big your balls are? So for us, I think we had some pretty big fucking balls and we did some exciting shit. I think the fans appreciate that, too.”

That makes sense: in the streaming age, barely anyone makes a liveable profit from recorded music, so why not circumvent the time-consuming promo process? And for the majority of metal bands, who reside in the genre’s underground, their output is more album-focussed than single-focussed. No one could realistically accuse drone outfit Khanate, who returned out of the blue with 2023’s To Be Cruel, or panoramic stoners Sleep, whose 2018 album The Sciences stunned everyone, of being radio darlings.

Although there are major commercial drawbacks, there are also commercial benefits, albeit less obvious ones. Williams, who manages Canadian metalcore band Counterparts and oversaw the surprise-release of their 2024 EP Let Them Die, insisted that fans were relieved about the lack of a staggered preorder process, which sometimes doesn’t get the record to their doorstep in time for release day anyway.

“That’s when it really clicked for me,” he said. “Everyone was like, ‘Thank God! No fucking pre-order! The vinyl ships now!’ It’s what people want, and it’s what I want: I’m a consumer, too!”

Surprise album releases also have the potential to feel like events, in the way that traditional release days rarely do. When Neurosis came back with An Undying Love For A Burning World, it was monumental news. In the same instant, fans learned that the pioneers had reunited after a decade away, ex-Isis frontman Aaron Turner had joined, they were returning to the live circuit, and a new album was out, in full. It became a massive talking point for a cult band.

Had these stories been drip-fed, it would have been less of a moment, and the hype actually let Neurosis reverse the surprise-album commercial curse. Take a quick glance at Spotify and An Undying Love… is already one of their most listened-to albums, eclipsing even what was long assumed to be their swansong, 2016’s Fires Within Fires.

But these are all bands who are either firmly in the underground, who are breaking up or whose names are firmly established. For an up-and-coming artist looking to broaden their audience, a surprise release would be one of the worst things to do. As Sleep Token made readied breakthrough third album, 2023’s Take Me Back To Eden, the rollout was everything. Their scheme of sharing singles in rapidfire succession (five from early January to mid-February) offered the kind of frequency that social media algorithms reward, and they became a fast TikTok sensation. Safe to say, had the album just been unloaded in one go with no warning, they wouldn’t be filling arenas and headlining stadiums right now.

A surprise release is a great way to reward an active fanbase but no way to build one. For as long as heavy metal bands want to rebel against the music industry system and emphasise the album over the single, it will have a place in the genre. Whether or not it’s a good commercial move, if you’re truly set on doing a surprise release, you probably don’t care by that point either way.

Sevendust singer Lajon Witherspoon knew his band had made it when Ted Nugent turned up at one of their gigs with a live buffalo in tow. It was New Year’s Eve 1999, and the Atlanta five-piece were opening for Metallica at Detroit’s Pontiac Silverdome. The Nuge and fellow Motor City hero/future MAGA pitchman Kid Rock were also on the bill, as was the snorting 800lb hunk of meat Ted had brought with him.

“It was crazy,” Witherspoon says now, sitting in a dressing room beneath London’s O2 with Sevendust drummer Morgan Rose a few hours before his band take the stage as support to Alter Bridge. “We were in our bus and this truck pulled up. It was Ted Nugent and a big old buffalo. They had to reinforce the stage because he was gonna ride that buffalo on stage.”

That Metallica New Year’s Eve show was the result of a whirlwind couple of years that had taken Sevendust from unknown local band to national contenders. Their coronation would be complete at the end of Metallica’s set, when all four bands – Sevendust included – got on stage to jam on a cover of Kiss’s Detroit Rock City.

“At the end, James Hetfield gives me his guitar,” says Witherspoon. “I do not know how to play guitar, but I was playing my heart out.”

Have Sevendust spoken to any of the bands they shared the stage with that night since? Metallica, yes. Rock’s leading right-wing wingnuts? Not so much.

“Uh-uh,” says the singer, with a ‘do you really have to ask?’ look on his face. “Not me.”

Sevendust are one of America’s most resilient bands. They weren’t as successful as contemporaries such as Limp Bizkit and Creed, although a run of three gold albums on the bounce between 1997’s self-titled debut and 2001’s Animosity is nothing to be sniffed at. But their greatest achievement came afterwards – surviving the worst the music industry could throw at them. “Yeah, we’ve had a few moments where it looked like it was game over,” Rose says drily.

Atlanta wasn’t exactly a hotbed of hard rock and heavy metal in the mid-90s, but there were enough bands for Rose to cherry-pick musicians from to form Sevendust. As a teenager, the drummer had briefly been a member of local underground star and future Drag Race icon RuPaul’s new-wave band Wee Wee Pole. “I’m such a blip in that machine he’s run for the last forty years,” he says.

Sevendust rehearsed and sometimes gigged in The Wreck Room. “A rat-infested shithole,” as Rose puts it.

“There was a strip club next door,” Witherspoon adds. “You go in there you might not come out.”

They bagged high-profile management in the shape of former Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French, who also produced their self-titled debut album. That the union didn’t last much beyond that record says much about the relationship.

Sevendust sold exactly 311 copies the first week. But it sold more the week after, and more the week after that, until it sailed past half a million copies. They were road dogs, and feral on stage too – one band they supported, long-forgotten alt.rockers The Nixons, threatened to kick them off the tour for being too aggressive live. Sevendust found a place in the nu metal scene, but even then they felt like outsiders.

“They were cool kids from LA, we were hicks from Georgia,” says Witherspoon. “They kind of ignored us a little.”

There were fuck-ups along the way, mostly from the people around the band. Such as the time their label, TVT, blocked a collaboration with Eminem, who Sevendust had got to know on the 1999 Warped Tour, just as the rapper exploded. “They didn’t think it was going to be a thing,” says Rose, rolling his eyes.

Still, things seemed good. They opened for Metallica and Limp Bizkit and hung out at TV shows with a pre-megastardom Beyoncé. They were one of the best live acts around, and their records consistently sold. But it all came crashing down in the mid-2000s.

“There was a lot of money coming through,” says Witherspoon, “and we were making nothing.”

The reasons are complicated and a legal minefield. The short version is that a succession of managers and accountants didn’t necessarily have the band’s best interests at heart.

At one point they were so broke that they had to leave in the middle of a European tour.

“When you’re a week in and you hear: ‘You’ve lost seventy-five grand’, it’s bad,” says Rose. “We had to leave cos we couldn’t pay our rent back home.”

Later, the band attempted to sue one of their ex-associates for mismanaging their money, only to end up having to pay them $40,000.

“There were times we came close to going bankrupt,” says Morgan. “One of the people who was stealing from us is now in jail for stealing for somebody else.”

It took nearly a decade, and a new manager, to pull themselves out of the hole. Even then, their trials weren’t over. In 2022, Rose gave a podcast interview in which he said the band were planning to quit at some unspecified point in the not-too-distant future. “Oh, that was a real thing,” he says.

Today he admits that he and guitarist Clint Lowery were deadly serious about it. The pair were tired and frustrated that Sevendust seemed to be going in ever-decreasing circles. Tours had been confined to North America – their current European dates are their first in eight years, and their previous UK shows were nine years before that. They were ready to walk. The others?

“Everybody else despised the idea,” says Witherspoon. “I stopped talking to him [Rose] for a while. I can tell you, if they’d have done it, you’d have seen a band called Threedust, cos we weren’t giving up.”

The solution was to do what men of their age don’t do: talk about it. They re-examined their friendship and everything they’d been through. They emerged with new album, One, a record whose title underlines their rediscovered unity.

“It’s been tough - we’ve been ripped off, we nearly went bankrupt,” says Rose. “We survived what many people wouldn’t have survived. I don’t know how we did it, but out of everything we’ve done, I’m proudest of that.”

One is out now via Napalm Records. Sevendust are currently on tour in the US, and play the UK and Europe in November and December. For dates and tickets, check the Sevendust website.

The year 1971 was a momentous one for prog rock. Among the year’s signal albums were ELP’s Tarkus, Pink Floyd’s Meddle, Hawkwind’s In Search Of Space and Genesis’s Nursery Cryme, not to mention a brace from Yes.

The three-minute pop song had become passé. In its place were labyrinthine epics about things like Greek nymphs, moon dogs and strange Russian hogweed. This was music with a default setting of ‘challenging’.

Rock music was suddenly taking itself very seriously indeed. Never mind that much of it actually sounded thrillingly original, the battle lines between new and old – between knotty-browed experimentation and straight-up rock’n’pop – were well and truly drawn.

Enter Jethro Tull, who since 1967 had gradually morphed from a fairly conventional white blues band into avatars of something altogether weirder. Their fourth album Aqualung, released in March ’71, was a miasmic mix of folk, jazz and rock, wherein leader Ian Anderson vocalised all manner of thoughts on religion, consumerism and global poverty.

It sold by the bucketload, sealed their reputation at home in the UK and made them big stars in America. But critics suddenly started lumping Tull in with the prog pack, which Anderson didn’t exactly take kindly to.

“Prog was beginning to have a derisory and slightly critical note attached to it,” he explains today. “Bands like Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes and Genesis were seen as being bombastic, over-the-top, pain-in-the-arse, showing-off kinds of performers. And to some extent I felt that, too.”

Anderson’s response was to pour his scorn for critics and portentous musos alike into Tull’s next album, Thick As A Brick. What began as a song idea soon flowered into an intricate, 45-minute treatise that made dizzying use of harpsichord, strings, trumpet, organ, acoustic guitar and Anderson’s signature flute, among other things.

The whole shebang was then housed inside a spoof 12-page newspaper, The St. Cleve Chronicle & Linwell Advertiser, which claimed that Anderson had adapted all the lyrics for the record from a poem by an eight-year-old child prodigy called Gerald Bostock. What could be more prog than that?

“When I wrote Thick As A Brick I tried to approach it in a humorous and satirical way,” Anderson says. “The whole idea happened very quickly. It was done in a fast and furious period of time. I’d just turn up at rehearsal every lunchtime with what I’d written that morning. Then the guys would dutifully grapple with it and we’d try to recap on what we did yesterday and the day before.

“By the end of 10 days we’d rehearsed to a performance level all the elements of Thick As A Brick. And we went in and recorded it, literally in a few days. The album cover actually took us longer than the music itself.”

So is Thick As A Brick a song, or an album? And was it intended as more than mere prog foolery?

“It was written very much as I went along, and was a very natural, organically evolving piece of music. There was an almost Monty Pythonesque idea in my head of this pastiche approach to creating this idea – ‘the mother of all concept albums’, as I’ve come to call it.

“It was presenting such a preposterous notion that an eight-year-old boy had written this saga in some poetry competition. Of course, you can then suspend disbelief and just go with it. But there were a lot of countries where they just didn’t get the joke. They thought it was a real story, that this precocious schoolboy had written this stuff and somehow I turned it into an album.

“You have to preserve the fiction to some extent, because that’s your starting point – the absurdity of precocious youth and complex ideas; that somehow Thick As A Brick is an album about what this youth might become and the distortion of his ideas as a prepubescent child. Essentially it’s setting out future scenarios of what might happen.”

So there was a serious side to it all?

“Some of the elements in the lyrics are quite serious,” offers Anderson, “where I drew upon my own childhood and my own early experiences for ideas for sections within the overall work. But I was also drawing very much on the world of the eight-year-old Gerald Bostock. It was part of the absurdity.”

Thick As A Brick was edited and released as a single in April 1972, a month after the album’s release. But skimming the cream from a three-quarter-hour masterwork was never going to be easy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it failed to make the charts on either side of the Atlantic.

The album, however, made No.5 in the UK, while over in the US it topped the Billboard chart for two weeks. It remains Jethro Tull’s second-biggest seller in America. Critics and fans generally adored it, but Anderson had all eventualities covered in any case.

One section of The St. Cleve Chronicle has the audacity to contain a mock review of the album, describing it as being marked by “ugly changes of time signature, and banal instrumental passages”. Was he trying to make it all ultimately bomb-proof?

“It’s okay for me to say those things about my own work,” Anderson reasons, “but I don’t think it’s too cool if somebody else tries to do it, because I’m already well aware of it. There’s every scope to say that this is noodly, extreme, anal, pompous, bombastic, arrogant – all of those words are applicable to prog rock and definitely applicable to Thick As A Brick – but they’re there on purpose. And if you don’t get the joke, fuck off! Don’t start telling me something that I know full well, because I wrote it to be like that. That’s the point!”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 159 (May 2011)

The 25th anniversary edition of Bloodstock Open Air Festival kicked off this week and tonight organisers announced Mercyful Fate, Electric Callboy and Motionless In White as main stage headliners for next year's 26th year of the event.

With Lamb of God, Saxon, Slaughter To Prevail and Judas Priest headlining at Catton Park in Derbyshire, England, this weekend, fans who had just watched Municipal Waste's set on Friday were told who will be the big hitters on the Ronnie James Dio Main Stage in 2027.

In a statement announcing the 2027 lineup, Friday's headliners Mercyful Fate say: "Mercyful Fate is honoured and looking extremely forward to playing Bloodstock again. Last time was awesome, and this time with a brand new album out, finally!"

Saturday's main draw Electric Callboy will be headlining the festival for the first time. The German electro-metal party-starters are cover stars of the new issue of Metal Hammer magazine which is available with an exclusive cover and special art print.

On being confirmed as Sunday headliners for 2027, Motionless In White frontman Chris Motionless says: "We were told that we are one of the most requested bands to perform at your legendary festival, so it is with great honour to announce that we are answering the call and will be seeing you next year for our first ever European festival headlining show, and only UK show of 2027! Thank you so much! Let the countdown begin."

The Sophie Lancaster stage in 2027 will be headlined by Madball, Gaerea, Kanonenfieber and Dethklok.

In 2019 David Gilmour made the shock announcement that he’d decided to sell 123 of his guitars at auction, many of them legendary among Pink Floyd fans. The move led to all kinds of speculation about his future. He’d eventually raise $21.5m (about £16.6m) for the ClientEarth charity in a record-breaking event; but before it took place, he talked – and played – through some of the unique lots with Prog, and offered some hope for those who feared he might be retiring.

“I’ve no intention of going and doing a Pink Floyd record or a Pink Floyd tour again.” Words from the mouth of David Gilmour that won’t come as a massive surprise to fans, but are still likely to be met by a sinking of many hearts in Progland. Earlier in 2019, the guitarist also announced he was selling around 120 of his own guitars to raise money for charity, a collection that includes the legendary Black Strat that was used on all Floyd albums from 1970 to the mid-80s, and again at the Live 8 reunion; the equally legendary 0001 Strat; and Gilmour’s 1955 Les Paul Goldtop that was used on both The Wall and A Momentary Lapse Of Reason.

One can understand a certain frisson of fear creeping through the Floyd/Gilmour fanbase. What on earth is going on, Mr Gilmour? Does selling so many guitars equate to an announcement of retirement for a man whose guitar tone has coloured the lives of millions of music fans the world over?

Christies, the auction house reselling the Gilmour collection, said his guitar solos were “both lyrical and layered with color, and immediately identifiable to critics and pop music fans as readily as the brushstrokes of Monet’s water lilies are to art historians.” For many (Prog’s editor, for example), the solo in Comfortably Numb remains the finest moment of the finest song on the finest album ever.

“There’s a purpose to what’s going on here,” Gilmour says. “We’re selling the guitars – it'll do good. I could do without one or two guitars here and there; one or two guitars that I use less. I think, ‘Just do it. Get it done.’ If I find that I need something, I'll hunt down the person that bought it and buy it back, or I'll buy another one that’s almost identical. The second option's much more likely.”

Gilmour is, of course, no stranger to grandiose charitable gestures. In 2003 he sold his £3.6 million house in London's Little Venice to Earl Spencer, brother of the late Princess Diana, and gave the proceeds to the homeless charity Crisis, for whom he acts as a vice president. He once donated £25,000 to the Save The Rhino foundation at the behest of Douglas Adams, in return for the author’s invention of album title The Division Bell.

And yet there’s something inherently more personal about a guitar collection: instruments through which this mercurial musician has coloured some of the rock world’s most memorable moments – moments of personal triumph even, in the ongoing battle for the heart of Pink Floyd. Even if Gilmour’s words hint at a continuation of making music, there seems something horribly definite about selling so many of the things that connect him to music lovers the world over.

“These are instruments that have served me very well,” he says. “They have given me music, I’ve loved them, but now it’s time for them to go off and be part of someone else’s musical life. I’m hoping they’ll inspire music in other people. And selling them will hopefully give a fair bit of cash to a number of charities which are in deep need of that cash right at this moment.”

Let’s start with the Black Strat. How old is this instrument?

The Black Strat – my main tool of the trade for the last... God knows how long. I believe it was made in 1969 and I bought it at Manny’s in 48th Street New York in 1970. And it’s been on most Pink Floyd recordings from then up into the 80s, when I put it out to pasture for a while. But then I brought it back again and it’s still the guitar I play more than any other.

Manny’s was fantastic; a brilliant shop. The guy who ran it was called Henry, not Manny. He was a great guy; he would troop off to a back room and dig out a guitar and say, ‘Try this!’ We mostly got new guitars from Manny’s; he had the pick of the crop.

Have you always been that person in the shop gazing out across the various instruments, unable to stop yourself getting another one?

Quite a bit, yes. In Cambridge when I was a teenager and there was no way I could afford a Fender of any sort, there was a music shop called Ken Stevens; I used to spend a lot of time in it. It was a miniature shop – one of those ones where it was only half the width of a usual shopfront, probably only seven or eight foot wide. But there were guitars all the way down both sides, and there was a Stratocaster hanging in there for years, which we sometimes persuaded the guy in the shop to let us touch and play a tune or two on. But I could never afford it.

When you’re in a music shop, when you’re testing out a guitar, what do you play? People will go into guitar shops and test guitars by playing your stuff!

I haven’t been into a guitar shop for quite a while – it’s not the way it works any more. My people talk to their people and the guitars come and you play them and put them back in the box and send them away. There are places in England where they have a range of beautiful old guitars that you can go and see and play and buy. One is an acoustic place I’m going to go to quite soon, with a bit of luck, in Kent.

The first Floyd material the Black Strat appeared on is Meddle – the album many see as the template for the Floyd that would come after that point. So this guitar comes in at the same time. Did it feel like that?

It didn’t feel like that guitar had created that change, no; that would be being a little sparing of the truth. But it became my main guitar, the one I used pretty much on everything, unless there was a reason to want a different sound. So that’s definitely on Meddle, it’s on Dark Side Of The Moon, Comfortably Numb. The four notes at the beginning of Shine On You Crazy Diamond popped out of this very guitar [he plays a short part on it], because it was there and in my hands! What can you say? It’s definitely earned its keep.

If you look at the composite bits it’s probably only worth a couple of grand, but it’s got this status that you’re now using for a good cause. You wouldn’t call it a particularly iconic historical instrument, would you – apart from your association?

No, it’s a 1969 Fender Stratocaster, of which thousands and thousands were made. The actual lump of wood that the body is made out of wasn’t always the same type of wood – some are made of alder, some are made of other things. Sometimes you get a bit of wood that’s really light, sometimes you get a bit of wood that’s really heavy. They’re all different. If you pick one up without plugging it in and play it and it feels and sounds great, then it’s gonna sound great amplified, too. This one happened to be in the right place at the right time.

When you retired it, it hung on the wall of the Hard Rock Café in Dallas. Of course, it’s nice that people can see it – but did it grate you a bit thinking, “It’s not being played?”

I have a duality about it, about my affection for it, my teenage lust to have a Fender Stratocaster, and then having one and thinking, “Well you know, it’s a tool of my trade; it’s just a guitar. Get another one, what’s the difference?” And I did get the red one, which has EMG pickups on it, which are battery-powered – it doesn’t react to all the gear, hums and buzzes. Throughout our early time touring, one of the biggest problems was hums and buzzes that the guitar picked up, single coil particularly.

That’s why humbucker pickups are called humbuckers, because they buck that hum. Single coils pick up everything. You’re constantly moving the guitar around two inches, pointing it this way and having to play whole songs that are pointing a certain angle, because if you’re doing it three inches that way, this hum would come up.

Every time you turn on an effects pedal that hum is magnified by 20. And with all those light rigs and stuff that we toured with, it was a constant battle. Our guys would be there in the daytime setting up the gear and they would spend hours trying to pinpoint everything that could make a hum or a buzz and get rid of it, but it was a nightmare. Getting these different electronic pickups got rid of all that in a second, so it made touring life for them and for me much easier.

Did you ever have that Spinal Tap moment where you picked up a local radio station or something?

Yeah! And taxis – people asking for a taxi, they’d come straight through the guitar.

There’s a mythology around a strap that you’ve used on that guitar, more recently on your last tour. Is the myth true?

The myth? Well, my lovely wife Polly Samson bought me, as a present, a Jimi Hendrix strap, that you can see. The strap that he’s wearing at a lot of his later shows, at the Isle Of Wight in 1970 – which I helped mix the sound for. Not a lot of people know that. From the side of the stage on WEM Audiomasters with Charlie Watkins.

What do you recall from that gig?

I went down and I was camping in a tent, just being a punter, and I went backstage where our main roadie, Peter Watts, was trying to deal with all the mayhem with Charlie Watkins of WEM. They were very nervous; they were going to have to mix Hendrix’s sound. I did some mixing stuff in those days and they said, ‘Help! Help!’ so I did.

Did you chat to Hendrix much?

Not then. I had met him previous to that, once. I didn’t know him.

Let’s talk about the acoustics next – we’ll do the Martins. You’ve always had a love for acoustic music, for folk music and early blues. Was the love for acoustic guitars there before you fell in love with electric guitars?

Most people are going to start off on an acoustic guitar. I started off on a nylon-strung acoustic and then graduated to an archtop guitar with F-holes. My background in music is very, very mixed, very broad; I’m a Jack of all trades. I loved acoustic music, I loved folk music, I loved acoustic blues music. Lead Belly was a favourite of mine. Lead Belly had a 12-string; I had a 12-string when I was a teenager, about 19, for a while.

I’ve racked my memory to try and remember what happened to the guitars I had at that time. In some cases I can only imagine that, when I wanted to get another guitar, I had to sell that one to raise the funds. Anyway, I had a 12-string back then and I did very much like Lead Belly’s playing. And a guy called Erik Darling I was very keen on who played 12-string – I had a bit of stuff from him.

So, the two Martins… I bought one from a friend in England. Dunno why he wanted to sell it, but I wanted a 12-string and I didn’t have one at that time so I got this one. Sounds nice! [He plays the start of Wish You Were Here]. So that fell out of this guitar in the control room of Number 3 at Abbey Road in ’75. The people around me picked up on it, and so evolved Wish You Were Here.

There’s a bit of mythology around various cables being taken out of studios and run into cars, and run back again and put through car radios. What’s the start of that track, the sound of that guitar?

The track was supposed to be imitating the sound of a car radio, music being played coming out of a radio, supposedly into someone’s bed sitting room; and the guy in the room joins in and starts playing those melody lines over the top. We did actually run a microphone out into my car in the car park at the front of Abbey Road. I just twiddled with the dial. We recorded some stuff of twiddling with the dial and the changing of stations and used a bit of it on Wish You Were Here.

These strange things happen – it’s the weirdest synchronicity that you get, those strange voices saying weird things and then moving to a different bit. We did it again on The Wall album, exactly the same thing (‘Surprise surprise surprise’). You know you’re gonna get something fantastic. Nowadays, of course, you press a button to change channels between stations. I don’t think it would quite work these days, but in those days you just turned the thing and it gradually went from one into the next one.

Is it true that that guitar was stolen but then later returned to you?

Yeah. I lived out in the countryside somewhere and I had a little studio room. My brother had a band and he was in there rehearsing quite a bit, and these guitars were in that studio room. It was locked and everything; and one night it got broken into and some guitars went. It turned out to be one of the musicians who was in my brother’s band at the time – a temporary musician, very temporary in this case – had half-inched them.

They were put into a studio in Surrey, owned by Nigel Gray. He recognised the guitar and called us. He said, “I’ve got a sneaking suspicion there are some guitars here that might not belong to the person who brought them here.” We got most of them back. There were a couple that I never got back, one of which was a three-pickup black Les Paul with humbuckers on it, which I’d loved after seeing it on the cover of a Smokey Robinson and The Miracles record. And a Gibson Les Paul TV model, a little blond thing with double cutaways, that I didn’t get back either.

Who do you think is going to buy these guitars?

I hope someone who genuinely wants to play them and have some fun with them and maybe create something with them is going to buy them. But I don’t really believe that’s going to happen. They should be looked after; they should be played and passed on at the appropriate moment – which is now for me.

Have you had many people enquiring? You know, friends or fellow collectors going, “Could you...? How much...?”

I’ve told people about the instruments, but I haven’t had people enquiring with a view to buying them, really. The sort of people I know aren’t going to be the ones who want to buy these things.

What guitar are we going to end with?

This is a white Fender Stratocaster, made in 1954 with sort of gold bits on it. It had gold tuning pegs, but they don’t seem to be on it any more. Gold scratch plate, gold plate on the back with 0001 on it; I’ve had it since 1978. It was made by a friend of Leo Fender’s called Rex Gallion. He was the guy who suggested the scalloping out of the Stratocaster body and the shaping of it so that it would better fit someone’s frame as they were playing it.

I don’t know what his frame was like – maybe a bit like mine. It was a very good idea. Leo Fender gave him this guitar in around ’54, ’55. It’s a very, very beautiful instrument – but he was a Gibson man, it turns out, and so he didn’t really play it very much at all and eventually sold it, I believe, in order to buy a tape recorder. It was then in the window of a store somewhere in California and it was bought by a guy to give to his son for Christmas when he was 12. The years went by, mysterious things happened; and in ’78, I got it. And here it is. It is actually as good a Strat as I’ve ever played. Beautiful.

For me, there has been no real improvement in the making of the electric guitar since this was made in 1954. I would be as happy to play this electric guitar as any other electric guitar, out of all the other ones I’ve looked at and been asked to try over the years. How do you improve on perfection?

Do they have names?

Pardon?

Have you given them names, your guitars?

No.

Because it’s reasonably common for musicians to name, be it a Lucille or whatever.

I’ve never quite done that.

Why not?

Tools of the trade, mate! I guess I have a different form of romanticism.

Has anyone ever tried to steal that one? Does it travel under lock and key? Does it get its own plane seat?

Well, it doesn’t really travel. It moves from this studio to a studio in another house or something; not great distances. It usually just gets chucked in the boot of the car. There’s no massive security around it, no more than any other guitar. I’m lucky – it hasn’t been filched yet.

Do you ever lend these guitars to anyone? Does anyone ever go, “Do you think we could borrow 0001?”

I don’t know if I’ve lent the 0001 guitar out. I’ve lent all sorts of other guitars out to friends. They give them back.

I sense there is a dichotomy here... How are you going to feel when you’re in the auction house and you see these instruments in front of you and you see the money being bid?

Obviously there’s going to be a dual feeling from a little bit of loss but a huge sense of relief, in that I don’t have to think about what’s going to happen to them in the future. I’ve had my time with them. I’m finding new friends now and they can move on, and they’ll do an enormous amount of good. I don’t think it’s something I’m going to have to struggle with in a major way. I don’t think I’m going to have to see my shrink for weeks and months and years to deal with this.

Finally, what’s next aside from this auction? Are your eyes set on a new musical horizon?

I write bits of music. I work. I haven’t done much lately. Other things in my life are tidying up a little bit, one might say, at the moment. Clear space is coming up to me. I’ll be getting into this studio we’re sitting in at the moment and listening to the hundreds of little bits of demos that I’ve got, and developing them; seeing where they go and seeing if I get my appetite back to start recording a proper album and doing all the stuff that goes with it.

Entering into that, for me, is about a four-year project – the writing, the refining, the recording. The marketing of an album and doing a tour, preparing for rehearsals, getting the musicians, all that shit, takes a lot of time. I usually find at the end that it’s taken me about four years to do the whole thing, so it’s a commitment which I have as yet to make. But we’ll probably get there.

During the auction at Christies in New York, the Martin acoustic, with an expected sale price of $20,000, went for $1,095,000; the white Strat, expected at $150,000, went for $1,815,000; and the Black Strat, also expected to raise $150,000, became a record-setting transaction at $3,975,000.

Iron Maiden have, in their time, covered Jethro Tull, Focus and Beckett tracks. It’s a matter of fact that bassist Steve Harris and singer Bruce Dickinson are both prog fans. The genre has permeated their music since the late 80s, so it wasn’t too difficult to present a list of their 10 proggiest moments in 2024. And as the bassist told us: “Prog taught me to do whatever the hell you want to do – go in any direction you want to.” Amen to that.

Cross-Eyed Mary (1983)

This cover of the 1971 Jethro Tull song from Aqualung was the b-side to The Trooper single, and the first indication for many fans that there was some love for prog rock within Maiden’s ranks. Unlike Dickinson, who’s performed with Tull mainman Ian Anderson, Harris tells Prog: “I’ve never met himn. I sort of don’t want to, because I love his music so much.”

Rainbow’s Gold (1984)

Nestled away on the b-side to 1984 single 2 Minutes To Midnight is this cover of a song by 70s UK prog rockers Beckett. Their main claim to fame was singer Terry Wilson-Slesser, later the vocalist for Backstreet Crawler and Geordie, who was linked with AC/DC after Bon Scott's death. He also unsuccessfully auditioned for Maiden after Paul Di'Anno left. Band manager Rod Smallwood had been an agent for Beckett and a young Harris had seen the band play live.

Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (1984)

The epic closing track for 1984’s Powerslave album was the first Maiden-penned tune to offer a glimpse of the band’s proggy proclivities. It’s based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 epic poem of the same name (Rush had previously based Xanadu on Coledridge’s Kubla Khan). “It might be significant that my two favourite pieces of music of all time are Supper’s Ready and Thick As A Brick,” says Harris of his lengthy compositions.

Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son (1988)

It was all-out prog rock by 1988, with keyboards introduced into the Maiden sound for the first time. The title track of the band’s seventh album - their first ever concept record - was the proggiest of the lot . “A lot of thought went into it,” says Harris. “It was a good change for us and I think it worked really well.”

Sign Of The Cross (1995)

For their first album after Dickinson had left, to be replaced by Blaze Bayley, Maiden didn’t go for the easy option. Instead they opened The X Factor with this 11-minute epic and its moody intro of chanting monks, building the suspense until it explodes in emphatic style.

Dream Of Mirrors (2000)

The band’s passion for prog really came to the fore when Dickinson returned for 2000’s Brave New World – especially this 9-minute workout. “I don’t really know the reason for it,” says Harris of Maiden’s increased progginess since then. “It was the way it naturally evolved.”

Paschendale (2003)

Although he normally writes shorter, more commercially minded material, guitarist Adrian Smith got his prog on with this epic about the Battle Of Paschendale from WWI on the Dance Of Death album. Did you know the infantryman’s outfit donned by Dickinson when the band performed this song live was in fact Hungarian, and not British, as many thought? Take that to your next pub quiz with you.

When The Wild Wind Blows (2010)

Another epic album closer from 2010’s The Final Frontier, this time clocking in at almost 11 minutes and as complex as you get with Maiden. Penned by Harris alone, it soon proved to be a live favourite in the band’s set.

Empire Of The Clouds (2015)

With its laid-back piano intro, the final track on 2015's The Book Of Souls remains the longest song on any Maiden album. Penned by Dickinson, the song tells the story of the British R101 airship, which crashed in northern France on 5 October 1930 during its maiden voyage. “I just had to say to him, ‘You’ve outdone me, you bugger!’” laughs Harris.

Death Of The Celts (2020)

You could take any of the final three tracks – all written by Harris – from 2020's Senjutsu, and make a case for them being some of the band’s proggiest. Indeed, on the vinyl version, the last disc almost becomes a standalone Maiden prog album! We've gone for Death Of The Celts, a stridently uplifting tale of days of yore. A bit Spinal Tap? Never...

English producer and composer William Orbit (born William Mark Wainwright) has died, aged 69.

Orbit's death on July 23 was announced today, August 7, on his social media accounts.

The statement reads:

"It is with profound sadness that the family and friends of William Orbit announce that William passed away at home on 23rd July 2026.

'We are deeply saddened by his passing. He will be greatly missed by us and by so many whose lives he touched through his music, friendship and kindness.

"We kindly ask that the privacy of William’s family and close friends is respected during this difficult time."

Orbit produced Blur's 1999 album 13, co-produced No Doubt's 2001 album Rocksteady, and also worked with Queen, U2, and many more. He is arguably best known for producing Madonna's 1998 album Ray Of Light. He also released 14 studio albums as a solo musician.

Former Guns N' Roses manager Merck Mercuriadis, founder and chairman of Hipgnosis Song Management, was among those who has paid tribute to the late producer.

He posted: "The word genius gets used so often that it’s actually a cliche to say it gets used so much but William was a genius, he was a beautiful man that made some of the greatest music of all time. He was special and I was proud to have him as a friend. Arguably the most important producer of the 90’s and noughties and his influence will forever be felt."

"William is a complete madman genius," Madonna said of his work on Ray of Light. "I’d come to him with an idea of where I wanted to go musically, hum melodies or read lyrics, and then leave him alone in the laboratory. Sometimes he’d go in the direction I wanted and sometimes he’d swerve off somewhere else entirely."