Manzanera had auditioned the previous October, but lost out to former Nice man David O’List. But when the band played in front of EG Management in early February ’72, there was a fight between O’List and drummer Paul Thompson. As a result, EG took on the band but insisted on O’List going.

So in came Manzanera, joining Thompson, frontman Bryan Ferry, bassist Graham Simpson, synth player Brian Eno and saxophonist Andy Mackay. And, funded by EG, Roxy went to Command Studios in central London on March 14, working with producer Pete Sinfield, best known as the lyricist for King Crimson. “EG managed him, so they kept it in the family. I don’t why he was chosen, but the good thing is that Pete let us get on with it.”

Roxy recorded live in the studio, with few overdubs. But the band had rehearsed so much that they were ready to do it this way. “We were a band of inspired amateurs back then, who worked very hard and had lots of enthusiasm. And the album has a charm all of its own as a result.”

The songs were written by Ferry, bearing a number of cinematic references, something that delighted Manzanera. “That’s one of the things the two of us bonded over – we loved films. And to hear something like 2HB, with its tribute to Humphrey Bogart, or Chance Meeting [inspired by the classic movie Brief Encounter] was just incredible. Bryan had so many ideas, and I always thought the rest of us provided the music for his words.”

The opening song, Re-Make/Re-Model, actually sums up the band’s eclecticism, with nods to The Beatles, Duane Eddy and… Wagner. “We all got the chance at the end to do our own thing. It’s a mad journey with lots of energy and it’s so exciting. It immediately says who we were – a band who would try anything."

While Roxy had a big hit with Virginia Plain later in 1972, reaching No.4 in the chart, this was recorded four months after the album and not included in the track listing. “In those days, we liked to keep singles separate and not feature them on albums.”

Apart from the music, what immediately stands out is the cover, featuring model Kari-Ann Muller. It set Roxy apart from almost everyone. “This cover was so striking that we’re going to be using it to promote our January UK tour – it still looks so good even now.”

The album was eventually released through Island, thanks to a licensing deal done by EG. “We got £5,000 from the label for a five-year lease. In those days, that was very innovative. I know EG had to fight to persuade some people at Island to put this out. But it did well for them.”

Roxy Music reached No.10 in the UK charts, selling over 100,000 copies. As Manzanera concludes: “This was just the beginning. The rest is history.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 150 (March 2010)

While Black Sabbath virtually created the heavy metal genre, it was Judas Priest who gave it a shape and focus in the mid-70s. Theirs was the music springboard from which others would catapult into legend.

Priest started in 1969, when guitarist KK Downing and bassist Ian Hill decided to take their childhood friendship into music. A year later, singer Al Atkins came into the picture. He joined the duo after his previous band had split up. Crucially, he persuaded the pair to take on his erstwhile outfit’s name: Judas Priest, named after the Bob Dylan song The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest. With Glenn Tipton from The Flying Hat Band on guitar and Alan Moore on drums, the young band toured the local area, supporting the likes of Thin Lizzy and Budgie.

In 1973, both Al and Alan left due to financial problems. One Rob Halford stepped forward to front the band, while John Hinch was brought in on drums – one of many to occupy the stool over the years. John and Rob had already worked together in a band called Hiroshima.

The same year, Priest signed to the Gull label and recorded debut album Rocka Rolla with producer Rodger Bain. It wasn’t an auspicious start. The release received a lukewarm response so, when the band began work on the next one, the world wasn’t exactly expecting a portentous moment. But that’s exactly what happened. One that would invent the concept of heavy metal as we know it…

“As time passes, the heavy metal world does look back at Sad Wings Of Destiny as being a classic,” says Rob of the album that became the fulcrum of their career. “That happened many years ago now. We in the band accept that sort of response with gratitude.”

Two significant changes happened in the Priest camp as they prepared for the vital second album. Firstly, the decision was made not to work with Rodger Bain again.

“I don’t want to be nasty about Rodger, because he is a good producer and has done lots of quality albums,” recalls Tipton. “But I remember going home and listening to Rocka Rolla and being gutted at how disappointing it sounded. The songs were good, and many have stood the test of time, but it wasn’t well recorded.”

“The fact is that we wanted to grow as a band,” adds Rob, “so the logical thing was to change producers.”

In came the combination of Jeffrey Calvert and Max West, a pair not exactly renowned for their rock credibility. Jeffrey had worked at Morgan Studios in London, which had connections with the Gull label, while Max’s real name was Geraint Hughes Wyn. Amazingly, they were to have their own number one single in the summer of 1975, under the name of Typically Tropical (the song in question being the flighty cod-calypso Barbados), and would later write the Sarah Brightman disco hit I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper. All in all, not really the sort of producers one might expect to be involved with the young Priest.

“Gull suggested we work with them,” explains Rob. “As a band we felt that we now had the knowledge to get what was required from the new record. In addition, both Jeff and Max understood that we were gonna be very involved in this album, which wasn’t totally the case first time around.”

A very young engineer called Chris Tsangarides got his big break on the project, before going on to work with some of the biggest names in rock during the 1980s and beyond (he would produce Painkiller for Priest in 1990).

“Chris apparently heard me doing the solo on Victim Of Changes and loved it so much that he pleaded to work on the record,” laughs KK.

There have been suggestions that Rodger had imposed his own will on the band’s debut, even going as far as leaving off Tyrant, Genocide and The Ripper, all of which were said to be part of the band’s live set prior to Rocka Rolla. However, Rob refutes this view of history.

“I don’t recall any of these songs being played live before the debut,” he insists. “In fact, the only track from Sad Wings Of Destiny that we were doing onstage before that album was recorded was Victim Of Changes. All the others were newly written.”

The second major change came with the departure of John Hinch (he would re-emerge a few years later, managing cult New Wave Of British Heavy Metal band Jameson Raid), and the return of Alan Moore.

“Alan came back for the same reason that we decided a change of producer was necessary,” believes Rob. “Any new band has to constantly look at all levels of musicianship and consistency, if you’re determined to progress and get to the next level.”

In addition, the quality of the material was unquestionably several parsecs removed from what had gone before. The likes of the aforementioned Victim Of Changes, Tyrant, Genocide and The Ripper have become classics that stand loud and proud more than 30 years on.

“I think the writing combination of myself, KK and Rob really started to blossom here,” says Glenn. “We’d gotten to know each other a lot better after the experience on Rocka Rolla, and we’d grown in confidence. To me, this was the real start of Priest as everyone knows us.”

Despite Glenn’s belief that this marked the real birth of the Halford/Tipton/Downing writing partnership, in truth only three songs on Sad Wings… – Genocide, Island Of Domination and Deceiver – carried that famed writing credit. Although Victim Of Changes was predominantly written by the three, with input from Al Atkins, rumour has it that this epic was a combination of two other songs, namely Whiskey Woman (which dated back to the very early days of Priest, pre-Rob Halford) and Red Light Lady which Rob had brought with him from previous band Hiroshima. The frontman, though, recalls things differently.

“We always titled it Victim Of Changes, it never had any other title. I suppose that confusion might have happened because Whiskey Woman is the opening phrase.”

The band went to the famed Rockfield Studios in Wales to record what was definitely a crucial album. Having worked under a highly restrictive budget for Rocka Rolla, now things seemed to open up a little.

“We chose to go to Rockfield because it was a well-known, and heavily used, studio at the time,” says Rob. “It was also a residential place, which allowed us to stay together and concentrate fully on what we were doing.”

KK, though, doesn’t recall those times as being particularly financially viable for the band. In fact, he has a sense of bitterness about the way things were turning out.

“We were broke, simple as that,” he says. “While we were recording the album, the money dried up. We’d gone from Rockfield to Morgan Studios in London, but our tab ran out. We couldn’t even afford food and drink – that’s how bad things had become. Here we were, in one of the most famous studios around – with the likes of Black Sabbath and UFO also recording – yet living on the breadline.”

In all, Judas Priest spent four months working on Sad Wings Of Destiny until July 1975. They took the occasional break, but for the most part sank everything they had into making the album as good as it could be.

“It was a lot of effort, and it really took its toll on us,” admits Rob. “But then none of our albums have been that easy to make. They have all been about blood, sweat and tears… but that’s the way it should be for any band. Give anything less and you get a poor end result.”

The album was released on March 23, 1976, and gave the band their first ever UK chart success, as it peaked at a modest number 48 (although it didn’t chart in America at the time, the record has now sold over half-a-million copies there). But it was a step forward from the failure of Rocka Rolla, and one cemented by a heavy touring schedule.

All of which meant the band were now really ready for major success. But it wasn’t to happen with Gull Records. There had been a growing unrest with the label’s attitude, and one that came to a head when the money ran out in the studio, leaving the Priest barely able to live. Now, underscores Rob, things were about to be resolved.

“One day we went to the Gull office and said, ‘Look, we want to be a great heavy metal band and show the world that this can be done. It would really help if we could get, like, 25 quid each per week, so that we can put our heart and soul into writing’. What dosh we’d made from touring at the time went to pay off the bills. They refused, so we left.”

“Even though we were playing a lot of shows in those days, we’d gotten to a stage where unless Gull gave us some financial backing, we’d have to come off the road. It was ridiculous,” emphasises KK. “In fact, things were so bad we all had to get part- time jobs. I was screwing bolts into a ceiling. Gull didn’t seem to care what we did touring-wise. Crazy! So, eventually we had to leave, and signed to CBS.”

“Priest has been through so many ups and downs during our life,” adds the singer. “We weathered the storms, from labels to outside attitudes and opinions. We’ve always maintained: we are a heavy metal band, and if you don’t like us or won’t back us… fuck off!”

Sad Wings Of Destiny was to be the band’s last album for Gull, and it has been reissued on numerous occasions over the decades. It remains a landmark release, unquestionably the record that kickstarted the whole metal style. In fact, one could make a strong case for suggesting that this is the blueprint for everything that’s happened since.

“You can hear and sense the growth from Rocka Rolla,” concludes Rob. “Most bands hit their stride on a second release. You learn so much from the first experience. Today, all of us in Judas Priest rate it as a piece of pure metal magic, and are still very proud of what we did.”

First published in Metal Hammer issue 177 (March 2008)

The Shins – Oh, Inverted World (2001)

After forming a joint venture with Warner Music Group in 1994, Sub Pop was struck by an identity crisis. With Pavitt keen to retain the company’s DNA and Poneman fixated on increasing revenues and stabilising their financial situation, the duo were at a crossroads.

With pressure to churn out new Next Big Things as the profile of alternative rock grew ever larger, there was a distinct shift in Sub Pop’s company culture, resulting in Pavitt exiting the label for good. Struggling to find stability and cycling through multiple new identities as it attempted to define itself post-grunge, by 1997 Sub Pop had almost collapsed completely.

After years spent trying to turn the label into a corporate force, eventually Poneman realised why nothing was working. Reflecting on Sub Pop’s DNA, it became apparent that bands weren’t seeking out contracts with Sub Pop for the chance to become global megastars, they were drawn to its community foundations. After deciding that the way forward for Sub Pop was to realign with its initial vision, Sub Pop needed a new marquee artist: enter The Shins.

Clocking in at just 33 minutes, the Albuquerque band’s debut Oh, Inverted World is a near-flawless summer pop rock record. With frontman James Mercer’s clever wordplay laced over endless swirling hooks, it proved to be a huge seller for the label, and a landmark release: suddenly, Sub Pop was cool again.

The Postal Service – Give Up (2003)

With The Shins’ success empowering Sub Pop, the label began to forge a new identity. Rebranding as the home of dreamy American indie music, it would become home to artists such as Iron & Wine, Fleet Foxes, and Band of Horses. But no-one would release anything with quite as much impact as The Postal Service’s, Give Up.

Arriving at the label by chance due to Sub Pop A&R head Tony Kiewell’s friendships with Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello, the band’s only album brought an entirely new audience to the label, but its success was more than the label bargained for.

Predicting that Give Up would shift around 20,000 copies, Sub Pop feared their own figures may be optimistic, and duly recruited two of their heaviest hitters – The Shins and Iron & Wine – to cover the album’s tracks to help with promotion. But, once Gibbard and Tamborello returned from a month-long US tour following the album’s release, they were indie superstars.

Becoming the second-best-selling Sub Pop album after Bleach, the group’s debut brought nods to new wave and synth sounds of the 80s, but most importantly it brought a sense of connection. With music fans all over the world delving deep into their emotions while immersing hearts and souls into songs of doomed love and bittersweet memories, 2003 would be the year that indie broke worldwide, and Sub Pop was right at the heart of it.

Metz - Metz (2012)

In the '90s, the debut album by Canadaian noise-rockers Metz would likely have emerged on Amphetamine Reptile Records, or perhaps on Trance Syndicate, the Austin, Texas indie label founded by Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey. But the Ottowa trio were so enamoured with the iconic Seattle's label's catalogue that, even before they signed a deal with the label, they joked about naming the record Sub Pop in its honour.

With eleven songs packed into its 29 minutes and 50 seconds run-time, Metz sounds like some of the best bands of the '90s - The Jesus Lizard, Helmet, Fugazi, Unsane, Shellac, Drive Like Jehu - melded into one beautiful slab of black vinyl. A cursory glance at the album's song titles - Headache, Sad Pricks, Rats, Wasted - telegraphs the tense, caustic, relentlessly aggressive vibe of the record, with walls of riffs erected, smashed into atoms, reconstructed and deconstructed. Metz are currently on an indefinite hiatus, but even if they'd imploded after this record, their place in noise-rock is assured.

Father John Misty – Pure Comedy (2017)

Initiated into the Sub Pop family with Fleet Foxes back in 2008, Josh Tillman was always destined to be more than a drummer in a Seattle folk rock band. Though the band’s first two albums brought considerable success for the label, Tillman was a star in his own right, and upon his departure from Fleet Foxes in 2012, his potential began to be truly realised.

Adopting the stage name of Father John Misty, 2012’s Fear Fun and 2015’s I Love You, Honeybear introduced a deep, introspective approach to songwriting worlds away from Fleet Foxes’ earnest expansiveness, chronicling the darker aspects of the human condition. Paired with a wry stage persona, this vision came to full fruition on his 2017 masterpiece, Pure Comedy.

An immersive character study into his semi-fictionalised self, Father John Misty’s third album merged contemplative lyricism with gorgeous melody to completely shake up the alternative music scene. A melting pot of music, politics, technology, human nature, and connection, with Pure Comedy Sub Pop moved beyond simply providing a platform for incredible albums, to emerge as an incubator for some of the greatest and most ambitious songwriters of the modern age.

Slift - Fantasia (2026)

A genuine word of mouth sensation whose reputation spread spread globally following the recording of a session for Seattle's KEXP radio station, Slift - brothers Jean Fossat (vocals, guitar, synthesizers) and Rémi Fossat (bass), plus drummer Canek Flores, a friend of the duo since they were in high school together in Toulouse, France - formed in 2016, and signed a worldwide record deal with Sub Pop in 2023.

Never shy of hyping up its artists, the label suggested that the trio's fourth album, this year's Fantasia, had the potential "not just to disrupt the status quo but perhaps to destroy it completely." Released in June, Fantasia has yet to turn the planet upside down, but its early days yet.

A thrilling amalgam of post-rock, psychedelia, jazz-fusion, space rock, krautrock and prog, it's an unforgettable, DNA-rearranging sonic adventure, with the potential to make a solid 98% of modern rock bands seem utterly irrelevant. Released as Sub Pop turns 40, its a record that suggests that the label hasn't lost its hunger to disrupt and redefine rock for future generations.

As native sons of the very streets left to pick up the pieces, they knew the realities first-hand. Frontman Kelly Jones and late drummer Stuart Cable grew up on the same one, in fact. Enlisting bassist Richard Jones and after a decade deep into their friendship, plying their wares on the dive circuit, the trio finally caught a break. In the summer of 1996, fellow Welshmen Manic Street Preachers were staking a strong claim as the most important band in the UK, propelled by their anthem-packed fourth album, Everything Must Go. Taking their up-and-coming countrymen out on the road in support of the record, the industry was sensing blood in the waters.

Soon enough, Stereophonics had successfully whipped up enough fervour to become the first act signed to Richard Branson’s newly launched V2 Records, one of 35 labels alleged to have wanted their signature. Such faith would be justified before too long.

Despite years of musical kinship forged in covers bands, Stereophonics boasted an emerging teenage star who had tales to tell of his own. And on Word Gets Around, his richly evocative stories were worth listening to.

Those who embraced the record, were welcomed into a world filled with both characters and character. The focus places Cwmaman firmly at the front and centre of its canvas, but the woes of its people prove unerringly universal. You don’t need to know the real Chaplain, Cliff Chips or Caramel Crisp namedropped in the lyrics. These local folk legends might go by different names elsewhere, but every small town and village spawns its own equivalents. They emerge from environments where everybody knows everything about everyone else, and the suffocation plays out in all manner of excruciating ways.

Kelly Jones paints the minutiae of that life in unapologetically grim and unglamourous strokes. The drama inhabits pool halls, chips shops, market stalls, and working men’s clubs. Between the lines, the sticky carpets and decades-old stench of cigarettes is almost tangible.

The former junior boxer writing those lines never pulls a punch (or equally as important, punches down). He never lets himself or his narrators off the hook either. There’s the self-knowing barb in the observations of Goldfish Bowl, for instance, “I'm drinking, sinking, swimming… thieving, cheating, beating… I'm deep in a goldfish bowl. It's sink or swim.”

He’s a product of this environment and just like everyone else, he’s doing all he knows to survive. In service to the songs and their cast of loners, drunks and hometown heroes, the music keeps things taut and economic. Even at the quieter end of the scale (Traffic, Not Up To You) the Bird & Bush production aims sky-high. If you didn’t pay close attention, you could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing’s quite upbeat other than a few exceptions.

Of course, that belies the swinging tonal extremes of self-loathing and unshakeable local pride. For Stereophonics, there seems to be an unspoken understanding in play that yes, some of these people might be bastards, but they’re their bastards. Woe betides anyone else who’d dare speak ill of them.

That’s the kind of world that Word Gets Around is mired in. Frustration and disenfranchisement abound. Infidelity and sexual murkiness are never far from the scene. The small-town rumour mill might be the only one left still working overtime. The authenticity of the band’s lived experience is never in question, however. These are dispatches from the dying embers of once proud and united communities, now tearing at the seams and coming undone.

From the “blue rinse” brigade down to the barmaids and boys out for another tear up in town, there’s generation-spanning pathos. There’s victims everywhere. It’s a record that finds heft in everyday mundanity, but they’re sad stories at the core. On Local Boy In The Photograph young people gather to drink away the pain of grieving the tragic loss of their friend. It all ends on the haunting ballad of Billy Davey’s Daughter, the titular character who threw herself off a bridge that both joins and separates this village from the next, where much of the same dramas are likely unfolding.

In many ways, history has been unkind to the band behind this debut album. Arguing the whys and wherefores of how that came to pass aren’t required here. What’s not up for debate is that Word Gets Around deserves better. It tells tales of people and perspectives rarely heard beyond the communities they originate from. For the often underrepresented from unsung, unglamorous locales, there’s comfort in recognising the similar if not the exact sames.

Outside of some wildest hopes, dreams and maybes, these were not songs destined to be sung by thousands of people while headlining music festivals. Stereophonics’ success wasn’t supposed to be crowned by number one records. Yet those things would come to pass. And when the band won the 1998 Best British Breakthrough Act at the BRIT Awards, it felt fairly seismic. The next month they gave Local Boy In The Photograph its second shot at the singles chart where it landed at number 14. The subsequent attention and momentum saw the album attain gold status (100,000 sales) in the UK. In 2026, it's nudging closer to one million sales, which seems like a worthy reward for a record that deserves to be heard, loved and remembered fondly.

“It’s the album that defines who we are, where we came from, the one die-hard Stereophonics fans will probably say we’ll never beat," Kelly Jones reflected in 2013. “It’s that record.

“I’m still very, very proud of [it], because I still can’t believe that an 18-year-old kid wrote some of that.”

It’s a two-way fight between Aerosmith and Kiss for the title of America’s Greatest Rock’N’Roll Band. Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley have the whole band-as-brand thing nailed, but when it comes to swagger, attitude and malicious intent, The Bad Boys From Boston rule.

Aerosmith’s genius idea was to repackage the Rolling Stones’ pharmaceutical rock’n’roll and sell it back to America as home-made product. The frequently brilliant albums they made in the 1970s were feral and brash, fuelled by a cocktail of bulletproof self-confidence and weapons-grade chemicals. Toxic Twins Steven Tyler and Joe Perry were 70s rock incarnate: cool, charismatic, permanently strung out.

It couldn’t last, and it didn’t. By the start of the 80s, this speeding train had crashed off the tracks, leaving a pile of twisted metal and mangled bodies. But halfway through the decade came an unexpected resurrection. A world-beating collaboration with hip hop group Run DMC on a cover of their own 1975 hit Walk This Way put Aerosmith back in the game, while the subsequent string of multi-platinum albums repositioned them as rock’n’roll’s wayward uncles, the glint of their gold earrings matched by the one in their eyes.

Their second act has been even more successful than the first – 1998’s Armageddon-soundtracking mega-ballad I Don’t To Miss A Thing became their biggest ever hit and the soundtrack to ten million prom nights. Nor has the soap opera surrounding them abated – the last two decades have been punctuated by bust-ups and bitchiness, relapses and rehab that would have put lesser bands out of business.

But Aerosmith aren’t lesser bands, and over 50 years and more they proved over and over that the music and the drama needed each other. Rock'n'roll's a dirty job, and no one did it dirtier than Aerosmith.

The band celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2027 and will also tour and headline three of their own unique Weekend Events in their hometown of Stroud, in Ramstein in Germany and Warsaw in Poland.

The format for the Weekenders will follow previous events in Morecambe, Peterborough, Exeter and Zabrze, with an evening show on day one and day two being a mixture of events and a late afternoon show, with the Pure album being played in its entirety over the weekend.

The Stroud Weekender, which takes place at The Subscription Rooms on October 2 and 3, takes band members Nick Barrett, Pete Gee and Clive Nolan back to their actual hometown. As a slightly smaller venue than those for previous UK Weekends, the Stroud event is expected to sell out very quickly.

The German Weekend will take place at the CCR in Ramstein on October 9 and 10 and in Poland at the Terminal Kultury Gocław in Warsaw on October 15 and 16.

The band's Go Your Way tour will take place between the Weekends with support from Peter Jones performing a Tiger Moth Tales acoustic set. You can see the full list of dates below.

PENDRAGON GO YOUR WAY 50TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR DATES

Oct 2-3: UK Stroud The Subscription Rooms
Oct 5: NED Zoetermeer De Boerderij
Oct 6: BEL Ittre Zik-Zak
Oct 7: FRA TBC
Oct 9-10: GER Ramstein CCR
Oct 11: SWI Pratteln Z7
Oct 12: FRA TBC
Oct 13: ITA Borgomanero Teatro Rosmini
Oct 15-16: POL Warsaw Terminal Kultury Gocław

Get tickets.

Orange Juice – You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever (1982)

As tempting as it would be to pick a massive selling or iconic artist like The Jam or Echo & the Bunnymen here, you’d be mad to sleep on Scotland’s Orange Juice if looking for a band with a long lasting and clearly evident influence on the sound of indie-rock here in the UK.

Although their second album Rip it Up, released later the same year, is almost certainly the one they’ll be remembered for as it features their most well-known song in the form of the album's title-track, the band’s debut album is arguably more ahead of its time and features more signposts as to where the genre would travel throughout the decade and beyond.

Frontman Edwin Collins is now rightly revered as one of Britain’s finest ever songwriters, and You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever expertly nails everything from the pure pop that would make Blur superstars on Wan Light, the weird garage jangle so beloved of Franz Ferdinand on Tender Object, the mod-revival sound of basically half of the Brit-pop bands on opener Falling and Laughing and indulge in the dry wit and sarcastic pomposity that Morrissey would end up making a career out of. It may be the lowest seller on the list, but, song for song, it can compete with any album here.

The Fall – This Nation’s Saving Grace (1985)

For decades The Fall have been the United Kingdom’s ultimate cult band. The late Mark E. Smith and his ever-revolving cast of musicians gobbled up an endless number of musical styles and genres over the years, but their eighth studio album, This Nation's Saving Grace, could well be the one with the longest lasting impact.

Unsurprisingly, line-up changes had plagued the band prior to the recording of the album, with their rhythm section, brothers Paul and Steve Hanley, leaving in 1984. Still, Smith had a good relationship with producer John Leckie, who seemed to have a knack for bringing out the pop sensibilities in guitarist Brix Smith, whilst also keeping the chaotic punk rock edge that had come to define The Fall. The result is an album that is full of swerving post-punk and Smith’s distinctive yelping, but also is catchy as hell. Songs like the jangly dance noise collision of Bombast, the slow hand blues goes post-punk of Vixen or Spoilt Victorian Child, which is a both a fantastic ear-worm and a disorientating noise freak out, are all fantastic.

Within a few years, Pavement, Sebadoh and more would adopt similar principles, and Blur sold a shit load of records a decade down the line copying this exact blueprint.

The Jesus and Mary Chain – Psychocandy (1985)

If Orange Juice showed how pure pop could be utilised in an indie framework and The Fall pointed the way toward more discordant and angular sounds, both being hugely influential in the process, so The Jesus and Mary Chain did the same by taking the harshness of noise rock and giving it a melodic, marshmallow quality.

The result of Jim and William Reid’s desire to mix harsh Stooges guitars with sunkissed Beach Boys melodies and a Phil Spector-esque wall of noise, Psychocandy did that to a tee, leading to them doing as much as anyone (possibly bar Cocteau Twins) to invent a design for the shoegaze bands that would begin to spring up in their wake. Beyond its influence though, this is just a perfect noisy, indie rock record: when The Jesus and Mary Chain rage on In a Hole they sound magnificently raw and gutsy, the riff on The Living End wouldn’t be a million miles away from Black Flag were it not for the chamber pop vocal, and when they’re delicate, such as on the goth Isley Brothers swing of Cut Dead, they as fragile as music can be. Wonderful stuff.

The Smiths – The Queen is Dead (1986)

The Smiths were already a cult favourite who had begun to fully cross over into the mainstream when their third album was released. And there’s no real radical change to their approach on The Queen is Dead, but the sheer strength of songs here dictate that this is the album that had to be included.

Where previous darlings of the UK indie scene like Robert Smith or Ian Curtis were glumly downbeat (the former) or genuinely tortured (the latter), frontman Morrissey brought an arch sense of the hopeless romantic to the scene. His palpable sense of disappointment, distain even, mixed with wonderfully overdramatic lyrics, such as comparing himself to Joan of Arc on Bigmouth Strikes Again, brilliantly give real emotional heft to these songs. That plus the unique guitar work of Johnny Marr and the superbly underrated rhythm section of drummer Mike Joyce and late bassist Andy Rourke created a perfect balance of power and pathos, influencing everyone from Suede to Pulp to The 1975 to an entire generation of US emo artists in the process.

The Stone Roses – The Stone Roses (1989)

Somewhere there is an alternate universe where The Stone Roses were able to follow their remarkable debut album up quickly and, most importantly, with a similar level of quality, and they go on to be the definitive band of the 90’s. That’s obviously not what happened, but, nonetheless, The Stone Roses have more of a legacy than many artists with 40-year careers and multiple albums could dream of achieving.

As the second summer of love blossomed in mid-1989, as the barriers between guitar music and the euphoric sounds of the free party, acid house movement crumbled away and as young fans found common ground in sharing the pure joy that music can bring, there couldn’t have been a better world for The Stone Roses’ debut album to be born into. Their mix of 60’s psychedelia, most notably in the sublime guitar tone and playing of John Squire, the throbbing, beat filled pulsing rhythms of bassist Mani and drummer Reni, and Ian Brown’s brilliantly breathy, wonder-filled vocals, utterly encapsulated everything that felt revolutionary, beautiful and special about that time.

If the track listing reads like a greatest hits set, that’s because it basically is: Made of Stone, Waterfall, I Wanna Be Adore, She Bangs the Drum and, of course, the breathtaking closing I Am the Resurrection are all iconic songs. From the look, to the influences they were bringing to the genre, they created the blueprint for the Brit-pop explosion that would follow in the 1990’s. An explosion they sadly went AWOL for, but, regardless, their influence was inescapable.

Crown In The Grave, the follow-up to last year’s Struck Dead EP and the band’s first full-length since 2021’s In The Court Of The Dragon, comes out on November 20. Preorders are now live; the tracklisting and artwork can be seen below.

The title track has been released accompanied by a music video inspired by Japanese cinema of the 50s through the 70s. Watch below.

Longtime bassist Paolo Gregoletto comments: “Crown In The Grave is our 11th record, and when you get this far into a career, it’s easy to rest on what you've already done – or to reinvent yourself just for the sake of it. With this record, we wanted to find the space between those two things: take everything we’ve learned and everything that makes Trivium what it is, but present it in ways we hadn’t before.”

He adds: “We also wanted the record to exist within its own world. That began with the title track, inspired by [Japanese director] Akira Kurosawa’s Throne Of Blood, and led us deeper into Japanese horror and cinema from the 50s, 60s and 70s. That influence grew into this darker, ghostly atmosphere that became a set of guardrails for the music, lyrics, artwork and overall identity of the record.”

Crown In The Grave will mark Trivium’s first album with new drummer Alex Rudinger (ex-Whitechapel), who replaced Alex Bent last year. It will also be their first full-length album recorded at The Hangar, their self-built studio and rehearsal space in their hometown of Orlando.

Trivium will promote Crown In The Grave on a North American tour with In Flames. Orbit Culture, Fit For An Autopsy and Frozen Soul will support. The shows kick off on November 5 at Jannus Live in St Petersburg, Florida, and conclude on December 19 at the Fillmore in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In the New Year, Trivium and In Flames will reunite for a European tour, with Paleface Swiss and Vola opening. See dates below.

Trivium – Crown In The Grave:

1. Crown In The Grave
2. Dead Inside Of Me
3. Lie Of It All
4. The Haunting
5. Agony
6. Paradise Of Sinners
7. Blood On The Throne
8. Blackout The Dawn
9. Death Throes
10. Devour Your Dreams
11. Shadow Of The Sun

Trivium and In Flames 2027 European co-headline tour:

• Mar 29: Dublin 3Arena, Ireland (Trivium headline)
• Mar 31: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK (Trivium headline)
• Apr 02: Manchester Co-op Live, UK (Trivium headline)
• Apr 03: London Alexandra Palace, UK (Trivium headline)
• Apr 04: Cardiff Utilita Arena Cardiff, UK (Trivium headline)
• Apr 06: Brussels Lotto Arena, Belgium
• Apr 07: Paris Zénith, France
• Apr 09: Hamburg Sporthalle, Germany
• Apr 10: Dresden Messe Dresden, Germany
• Apr 11: Berlin Velodrom, Germany
• Apr 13: Esch-sur-Alzette Rockhal, Luxembourg
• Apr 14: Bern Festhalle, Switzerland
• Apr 16: Frankfurt Festhalle, Germany
• Apr 17: Düsseldorf PSD Bank Dome, Germany
• Apr 18: Amsterdam AFAS Live, Netherlands
• Apr 20: Prague O2 Universum, Czech Republic
• Apr 21: Vienna Stadthalle, Austria
• Apr 23: Stuttgart Schleyer-Halle, Germany
• Apr 24: Munich Zenith, Germany
• Apr 25: Bamberg Brose Arena, Germany
• Apr 27: Copenhagen K.B. Hallen, Denmark (In Flames headline)
• Apr 29: Oslo Spektrum, Norway (In Flames headline)
• May 01: Stockholm Avicii Arena, Sweden (In Flames headline)
• May 03: Tampere Nokia Arena, Finland (In Flames headline)
• May 05: Riga Xiaomi Arena, Latvia
• May 07: Katowice Spodek, Poland

The band's 1976 classic will be made available as a three-LP set, a 3-CD set, an exclusive picture disc and a Blu-ray.

The three-LP set, 180gm heavyweight vinyl bookpack, shown below, mastered by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios,is limited to 1,976 copies, containing an individually numbered Certificate Of Authenticity, alongside the original 1976 album, the 1987 Remix album, a Work in Progress album featuring early rough mixes, demos and alternative takes, and a deluxe book featuring full lyrics, bonus track commentary, and interviews with Alan Parsons, Sally Woolfson, musicians and contributors to the album.

The 3-CD set, also mastered by Showell, includes the original 1976 album, the 1987 Remix album, 34 bonus tracks (including 12 previously unreleased), alongside rough mixes, demos and alternative takes, as well as the book.

The Picture Disc LP features the original 1976 album pressed as a strictly limited-edition picture disc LP, and includes a 12” x 12” insert containing the original artwork of the inner gatefold sleeve.

And the Blu-ray features a new 2026 Dolby Atmos mix and the 2016 5.1 surround sound mix by Alan Parsons from the original multi-track master tapes. Also contains the original 1976 album HD Remaster plus the 1987 Remix Album remaster and the Work In Progress album all mastered by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios. The Blu-Ray edition also includes a fully illustrated 16-page booklet featuring full lyrics plus quotes from Alan Parsons and thoughts on the new remixes.

You can watch a video trailer for the releases below.

Pre-order here.

Palace For The People – named after North London venue Alexandra Palace, of all places – keeps their end up. Tear It Down and Into The Beginning shake their arena-rock tail feathers splendidly, defined instantly by Josh Kiszka’s rafter-rattling screech, which once again overshadows brother Jake’s impressively protean guitar playing.

The whole thing is overseen by A-list producer Mike Elizondo, whose credits span everyone from Eminem to Mastodon and who gives Palace For The People the kind of gloss that music this self-consciously grand deserves. Although perhaps Elizondo might have told Josh Kiszka to rein it in a little on Play Your Game, a track rendered borderline unbearable by a vocal register that isn’t so much ‘singing’ as ‘child’s tantrum in a supermarket’.

There are some interesting moments. Lost In The Golden (golden what?) uses Middle Eastern scales to create a slightly otherworldly vibe. Best of all is Tough Again, with its wistful look-to-the-West vocals, demolition-hammer drums and swirling strings. It's their Going To California, When The Levee Breaks and Kashmir all in one.

But it’s hard to not want more out of Greta Van Fleet at this stage. Palace For The People is the fourth album of a career that properly got started in 2016. It’s maybe unfair to draw yet another parallel with Zeppelin, but by the time that band made their fourth album they’d already reinvented themselves twice and then proceeded to serve up one of the greatest albums ever.

Greta Van Fleet clearly aren’t Led Zeppelin, and 2026 couldn’t be more different from 1971 in terms of the musical landscape, but Palace For The People is the work of a band that have found their groove and are sticking to it. That’s fine as far as it goes – Greta Van Fleet continue to make hay at a time when for so many of their peers the sun isn’t shining. But it’s difficult not to want more ambition from a band who clearly have it in them to deliver something spectacular.

Richard Wright redefined the idea of “the quiet one” in rock. Discreet to the point at times of invisibility, the Pink Floyd co-founder made other legendary taciturn group members such as John Entwistle or George Harrison seem positively garrulous in comparison.

Yet what he brought to the band was an unmistakable brilliance; his work was just there, shimmering and shifting, far less definable than the other parts of the sum. From his ethereal beeps and bleeps of the Syd Barrett days to his most magisterial mid-period material – and that beautiful bluesy improvisation around Old McDonald Had A Farm at the start of Sheep on Animals – Wright added considerable magic. Quietly. Texturally. So quietly, that few in the wider world had actually realised he’d left the group until his name was not on 1983’s The Final Cut.

Happier on his boat than in a recording studio, he was sacked by Roger Waters in 1979, but famously returned to The Wall tour on wages – thus becoming the only band member to be paid once the road trip’s costs had been covered.

Like that first last laugh, Wright rejoined the group as a session musician in 1987 before becoming a full member again for The Division Bell in 1994; and, after his sad passing in 2008, became – like Syd Barrett on Wish You Were Here – the main inspiration behind a Floyd album, The Endless River in 2014.

If it was difficult to see Wright in Pink Floyd, one almost needs a microscope to assess his solo output: two solo albums and one collaboration were unobtrusively released over 18 years. An actual wet dream would stir more emotion than when Wet Dream, his first album, appeared in September 1978.

Pink Floyd had been on sabbatical, having stopped working together in July the previous year, and although David Gilmour was the first to release his solo record, Wright’s was the first to be recorded. Of course, the first time Wright had been heard solo was on the 13-minute Sysyphus on 1969’s Ummagumma, which he’d dismissed as “pretentious.” But now, nearly a decade later, times – and budgets – were different.

Although she was only eight at the time, Wright’s daughter Gala clearly remembers Wet Dream coming together. “We were around for the actual writing of it,” she says. “It was a unique situation – the kind of thing that one remembers from their childhood. We were living in Greece in this very basic house. There was electricity, so he had something plugged in.

“It happened quite quickly; it was a couple of months. We went back to school in the September of that year [1977] because we’d not been at school for a year, and then all the recording happened. I remember listening to it at boarding school on my Sony Walkman that I’d got for my birthday. I remember thinking Dad’s voice was really embarrassing. But then I loved a couple of tracks – I loved Cat Cruise right from the beginning.”

Wright put a band together with Mel Collins on sax, Snowy White from the In The Flesh tour on guitar, and the rhythm section of Robin Trower, drummer Reg Isidore and Gonzalez bassist Larry Steele. The album was recorded at Super Bear Studios on the Côte D’Azur between January and February 1978 – the studio that would soon Floyd’s base for The Wall.

“On a solo project, you have to be on top of it, all the time, constantly,” Wright told Karl Dallas in 1978. “I’ve never been in control before, totally, so that’s one of the reasons I did a solo album: to put myself into that sort of situation. I wanted to see if I could cope with it. It was a challenge.”

With its mellow vibe, Wet Dream instantly dated on its release. “Among us younger fans, obviously, there was no way Wet Dream was going to make a dent at all,” Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets bassist Guy Pratt says. “It came out six weeks before The Clash’s Give ’Em Enough Rope!

“But it’s exactly what Rick wanted and there’s nothing wrong with that – just not then. If he’d put it out when, say, ambient house was just starting, everyone would have been all over it to do remixes. There would have been an Orb collaboration.”

“Wet Dream is an album that’s completely devoid of any punk aesthetic,” says Steven Wilson. “If you listen to Animals and The Wall, it’s there, which is why the Floyd were able to ride out the whole period in a way that a lot of bands of their generation probably weren’t. Listening now it’s really natural – a little naïve, but I embrace that as a positive now. I’m not going to say it’s a masterpiece, but it is a beautiful and a totally worthwhile entry in the Floyd canon.”

Wright later described Wet Dream as rather amateurish, but that is something Wilson refutes. “It doesn’t sound amateurish to me. A little gauche in places lyrically, perhaps, but Rick would not claim he was a lyric writer. His is almost an underachieving voice, which, in an age of Auto-Tune, I would rather listen to, speaking as someone who themselves has an underachieving voice. It sounds so natural.”

Any promotion there might have been for the record was curtailed because Floyd had to go back to work, thanks to the looming Inland Revenue issues and the misinvestment of Norton Warburg. “Dad would go off sailing,” Gala says. “He certainly didn’t communicate with us anything about how things worked.”

Pratt adds: “Pink Floyd were in terrible trouble. I mean rich people trouble. Not ‘They’re coming to cut the gas off, heat or eat’ trouble, but they had this massive tax bill; that’s why they were in France.”

After Wright’s well-documented ousting from Pink Floyd, his first appearance was in the unlikely duo of Zee with Dave Harris, who, as ‘Dee Harriss,’ had led Fashion on their second album, 1982’s Fabrique. The pair had been introduced by saxophonist Raf Baker Street Ravenscroft.

Their sole album, Identity, shouldn’t be overlooked – it’s probably the most contemporary thing ever done by a member of Pink Floyd (bar possibly the New York no-wave free jazz of Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports). For example, the track Strange Rhythm places itself somewhere near Donna Summer’s version of State Of Independence and All Night Long by Lionel Richie.

“Dave Harris asked us a couple of years ago if we wanted to re-release it. He’s such a lovely man,” Gala says. “We knew it wasn’t Dad’s proudest moment, but at the same time, we remember him recording the album well. Dad loved sound. He’d really get into the weeds of how it sounded as well as being a sensitive musician. That’s what was happening with the Zee album – they were playing with the Fairlight, which was his new toy, really going for it.”

Identity seemed to be missing just that – on irelease in April 1984, the first commercial sighting of Wright in the 80s disappeared faster than Frankie could say “Relax” (pop’s preoccupation at that time).

Wright’s final solo album, Broken China, landed in October 1996, by which time he had two further Floyd albums and tours under his belt. Co-written and produced with Anthony Moore, it was a grander work. “It has got a producer, which means it has an editor,” Pratt says.

“Broken China has a lot of the conceptual sweep that we associate with Floyd,” adds Wilson. “It sounds more like it was a part of what was going on in the 90s; a lot more use of digital technology. I love the fact it’s an epic.”

It also features two great performances from the late Sinéad O’Connor. However, in keeping with the rest of Wright’s solo work, and despite the elevation that The Division Bell offered him, it failed to make the UK or US charts.

In the early 21st century, Wright joined David Gilmour and Guy Pratt in the touring band for Gilmour’s On An Island. “That tour was such a great thing for Rick to end on,” Pratt notes. “That was about the love, and people will always talk about the version of Echoes. Rick was a sideman, so he got introduced every night. He’d never been introduced onstage in his life. It was so nice that he got to see the love people had for him.”

That, and his part in Pink Floyd’s Live 8 reunion in 2005, was the coda to his career. “It became more apparent as the years went on that David loved Rick so much,” says Pratt, “and kept him involved in everything, because he understood the value of their musical relationship. That was such a key part of Pink Floyd which gets overlooked in the ‘Alpha wars’.

“Rick went to Lindos [an island in Greece] first; David followed. Even when Rick was out of the band, David and he would meet up down there. David went to all three of Rick’s weddings; he was the only person who did.”

There would be no follow-up to Broken China as Wright died at home in London on September 15, 2008, aged 65. Rumours of a stockpile of solo material are, sadly, just rumours: “I’ve got a track that I worked on with Rick; I added drums and bass and it was really beautiful,” Pratt says.

“Unfortunately, it’s so many data storage formats ago, I can’t find it. I can’t remember what it was called because it would have had one of those silly, sketchy titles. If people are hoping for a long-lost album, I really don’t think it’s there.”

If anything, Wright’s real solo project was his sailing. “Someone said every band has a quiet one, but if Rick had been any quieter, you’d have to put out a missing persons alert,” says Pratt. “I sailed the Atlantic with him in 2002. There’s a picture of us in the Canary Islands before we set off. I looked at it the other day – that Rick, ‘Boat Rick’, so relaxed and confident. That was his happy place. It really got me, remembering that guy. That’s where he could be in control, running a boat.”

His other great pleasure was his grandchild, Gala and Guy’s son, Stanley, who was born in 2002. “He was a brilliant granddad,” Pratt says. “Totally naughty grandpa: he undermined all of your parenting – everything grandparents are supposed to do.”

Wright once said that Pink Floyd was a marriage that was always on trial separation. Although, sadly he can never rejoin that union, while skirmishes continue in their current less-than-civil war, a corner of the group will forever be bathed in his warm, sun-kissed textures. And for those who wish to explore further, there are these three solo works that go some way to fleshing out the body of this most hidden man.

Jarre originally released the album in France in 1976, ahead of its international release in 1977, Oxygene helped bring electronic music to a global audience and established Jarre as one of the figureheads of the genre.

The album was recorded in the former kitchen of Jarre's then Paris apartment using an eight-track tape machine, a homemade mixing desk and a small collection of synthesisers and electronic instruments; the album went on to sell more than 18 million copies worldwide.

“When I created Oxygene, I was working directly with analogue instruments and tape, and the sound had a particular depth, movement and life of its own," he recalls. "For this anniversary edition, we returned to the original tapes with the aim of preserving that character rather than changing it”.

A Dolby Atmos version has been mixed by David Kosten, Steven Wilson and Jarre for Distant Swimmer, the new immersive-audio partnership between Kosten and Wilson, with Oxygene its first project.

The release includes a 180g black-vinyl edition, half-speed mastered and cut by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios; CD; limited-edition coloured eco-vinyl; digital editions; and a deluxe Blu-ray mediabook featuring Oxygene in Dolby Atmos for the first time, alongside a new 5.1 mix, the 2026 stereo remaster and selected archival material.

Jarre will also publish Machines: A History Of Electronic Music through Thames & Hudson on November 24. The book draws on Jarre’s own collection of electronic and electro-acoustic instruments, and presents 130 machines, specially photographed, that trace more than a century of electronic music, from the first electrified machines of the early 20th century to artificial intelligence algorithms.

And Jarre will also appear on October 21 as Guest of Honour at Amsterdam Dance Event, where he will present the sold-out immersive concert Oxygene & Beyond: A Sonic Journey Celebrating 30 Years Of ADE at AFAS Live. His wider ADE program will also include three exclusive panel discussions at ADE Pro, bringing together the history of electronic music with the ideas, emerging technologies - including AI - and artists shaping its future.

Pre-order Oxyegen (50th Anniversary Edition).

Sadly, with the death of Geordie Walker in November 2023, it's unlikely we will hear anything more from one of the world's most singular bands.

Here's Killing Joke's back catalogue re-reviewed, rated and ranked.

15. Outside The Gate (1988)

The only Killing Joke album that doesn’t really sound like Killing Joke, Outside the Gate is the kind of album that could be seen as a nostalgic little time capsule of the kind of slick '80s pop that conjures up images of neon lights and rolled up sleeve jackets if it had been released by anyone else.

But Killing Joke have so much material that has aged brilliantly, so many albums that stand up to scrutiny today, that the OTT, overly emoting synth pop on display here is lacking in comparison. Outside the Gate isn’t terrible, it’s just a bit odd, thin, cheesy and throwaway in such a fantastic back catalogue.

Buy Outside The Gate

14. Brighter Than A Thousand Suns (1986)

Certainly not as glaring a 'WTF?' as Outside the Gate, Brighter Than A Thousand Suns is arguably an even less interesting artefact in the Killing Joke vaults just by being, you know, a little bit dull.

This album avoids taking the wooden spoon purely thanks to the inclusion of the excellent Wintergardens, which really shows up how uninspired Killing Joke sound throughout the rest of the record. The more melodic era of the band, which produced some classic material, plateaued here.

Buy Brighter Than A Thousand Suns

13. Fire Dances (1983)

Killing Joke would quite drastically change their sound in the aftermath of this, their fourth album, and listening to Fire Dances it feels like a necessary change. You can tell here that the formula they had been leaning on heavily in the early part of the career was starting to creek a bit.

Opener The Gathering has become iconic, and the strut of Dominator is cool, but Paul Raven's first album with the band is a very one-dimensional record from a group who are capable of so much better.

Buy Fire Dances

12. Hosannas from the Basement of Hell (2006)

Within two years of the release of Killing Joke’s 12th studio album, the original line-up of the band would be back together. The passing of bassist Paul Raven in 2007 would inspire the reunion, and it’s a shame that the last album he played on would be such an average affair.

Hosannas... is without doubt one of the heaviest KJ albums, and opening song This Tribal Antidote is a brilliantly crushing way to start a record, but it soon becomes exhausting, largely due to it being fairly one paced.

Buy Hosannas from the Basement of Hell

11. MMXII (2012)

Two years’ prior, the reunited original line-up of Killing Joke had released one of their finest albums. They couldn’t follow it up with anything as essential though.

MMXII is thematically heavy, with Jaz Coleman musing on the paranoia inspired by the prospect of the end of the world, and opener Pole Shift is an 8-minute plus epic that ranges from deep synth dub to raucous thrash riffing. But, overall, the songs that made Absolute Dissent such a success were replaced with a fair bit of bluster, and nothing truly memorable or dynamic enough to live up to its predecessor.

Buy MMXII

10. Revelations (1982)

This is where it starts getting difficult. Revelations is placed this low not because it is a bad record, but more due to the fact that the rest of Killing Joke’s albums are all very good indeed, and the quartet's third long-player is ultimately more of the same as we’d had before.

There are a few absolute ragers here in the shape of the singles Empire Song and Chop Chop, surely one of their weirdest ever singles, and nothing present is bad. But it was starting to feel like Killing Joke had nailed their sound and were becoming slightly too comfortable with it.

Buy Revelations

9. Democracy (1996)

Slated at the time, Democracy really deserves to be re-evaluated. It’s an odd album, and certainly, considering the UK was at the height of its Brit-pop obsession, its dense, weird, warped grooves were totally out of step with the zeitgeist of the time.

But even though it wouldn’t be considered one of Killing Joke’s finest moments, the stomping opener Savage Freedom, the eight-minute death disco of Aeon and the psychedelic chaos of Prozac People all sound unique, and uniquely excellent, all these years later.

Buy Democracy

8. Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions (1990)

With former PiL/Ministry drummer Martin Atkins powering the group from the back, Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions is an incredibly important album in the Killing Joke discography that rarely gets the credit it deserves.

Yes, it's rather low on this list, but it may well be one of the band's most important releases, as they ditched the lightweight synth pop sound of the late '80’s and adopted the apocalyptically angry sound of industrial metal. You can hear the influence of Ministry on songs such as the scathing Money is Not Our God and Intravenous, and they sound great.

Buy Extremities, Dirt and Various Repressed Emotions

7. What’s THIS For...! (1981)

Having to follow a truly classic debut album is a challenge for any band. And while What’s THIS For...! undeniably falls short of Killing Joke's startling debut, there are some incredible post-punk songs here. For proof, just check out the opening one-two of The Fall of Because, with its tag-teaming guitar and drum attack, and Tension, which, with its marching drum beat and popping dub bass, would be in the very highest echelons of a list of the band's greatest ever songs.

Not everything here scales the same heights, but the likes of Follow The Leaders and Butcher play their part in making this a worthy follow-up to a great debut.

Buy What’s THIS For...!

6. Pylon (2015)

The most recent Killing Joke album, Pylon got far closer to recapturing former glories than 2012’s MMXII did. There is all manner of harsh, white noise all over Pylon, but the hooks that make Killing Joke soar were back in spades.

Opener Autonomous Zone is a pounding, driving banger, New Cold War is packed full of evil, grinding dread, Euphoria is a beautiful, dreamy pop song covered in filth and Big Buzz is as close to an arena rock song as they have ever managed. This deep into their career, for Killing Joke to release a record this good is a phenomenal achievement.

Buy Pylon

5. Killing Joke (2003)

The Dave Grohl one. After 7 years of inactivity, Killing Joke returned with everyone’s favourite Foo Fighter, a long-time fan, plonking his bottom onto their drum stool. The result is one of the most urgent-sounding albums of the band's career, with Grohl’s instantly identifiable style driving the riffs of Geordie Walker in a thrilling way. Just listen to the garage squeal of Blood on Your Hands for evidence.

The inclusion of songwriting credits from Gang of Four’s Andy Gill, alongside Grohl’s contribution, make this the most singular sounding Killing Joke record. The two men helped nudge the Londoners into garage rock territory, which is something you never knew you needed, but you really do. A true one off.

Buy Killing Joke

4. Pandemonium (1994)

At a time where Ministry, Fear Factory and Nine Inch Nails were considered the cutting edge of heavy music, Killing Joke proved that they were more than capable of keeping up with the industrial metal heavyweights.

Pandemonium is a very, very, '90’s sounding album, but you cannot argue with the grinding, pounding beats that the band produce here, and the fantastically deranged performance by Jaz Coleman, who barks and coughs his way through Exorcism, delivers a shamanic warble on the excellent Black Moon and even adds some much-needed melody to the haunting Pleasures of the Flesh.
Buy Pandemonium

3. Night Time (1985)

The one featuring the biggest hit of their career, the fantastically swooping Love Like Blood, but there is plenty more thrills to discover on Night Time. The juddering title track has an evil Depeche Mode vibe to it, the sleazy glam goth of Kings and Queens is instantly danceable, and the riff to Eighties is so good that it ended up being stolen by Nirvana for Come As You Are.

The main reason that Night Time sits so high in this list is that it is the first time Killing Joke really managed to tame their sound enough to fill it with real pop nous, without losing any of the existential dread that defines them.

Buy Night Time

2. Absolute Dissent (2010)

The band's first album with the original line up for 28 years is an incredible return to form. Killing Joke had been on decent form before the return of Youth, but the bassist's return seemed to revitalise everyone involved in the band, leading to this superb record.

The title track is as heavy as anything they had ever done, but the amazingly catchy synth throb of lead single European Super State and the beautiful dub lament of Ghost of Ladbrook Grove show that Killing Joke had remembered that their greatest strength lies in the depth and dexterity of their music. One of rock's finest comebacks.

Buy Absolute Dissent

1. Killing Joke (1980)

Not just Killing Joke’s best album, one of the best debut albums ever made, and one of the most definitively British records of all time.

The smoggy, industrialised, Thatcherite United Kingdom is perfectly captured in sonic form here; angry, claustrophobic, raw and uncomfortable, Killing Joke seemed to ingest the restless feeling of the working class and turn it into a new and threatening musical style.

Thanks to Metallica, The Wait might be the most famous song on the album (although their version pale in comparison to the original), but every track on Killing Joke throbs and seethes in a wonderful way. Change, Wardance, Requiem, Bloodsport, all are essential listening for any fan of thought provoking, heavy alternative sounds.

An undeniable classic.

Buy Killing Joke

The release heralds the release of a new deluxe digital edition of Aurora, including instrumentals of the full album, as well as the Ariadne video, directed by Matt Hutchings.

"Ariadne was one of those songs that seemed to reveal itself as we were writing it,” says Jon Davison. “I’ve been captivated by Greek mythology since I was a child, so there was something particularly exciting for me about exploring the story of Ariadne through music.

"There’s a wonderful sense of mystery and discovery in the song, and that’s what I love most about it. I’m really proud of what we created together, and I hope people feel that same sense of discovery and wonder when they hear it.”

Aurora is also available as a limited deluxe 180g Light Green 2LP+2CD+Blu-ray Artbook & Poster, as well as a Ltd Deluxe 2CD+Blu-ray Artbook, both featuring the stunning artwork of Roger Dean and Freyja Dean, as well as a bonus disc of instrumentals, and a Blu-ray featuring Dolby Atmos, 5.1 Surround Sound & 24bit stereo mixes (by Curtis Schwartz). The album is also available as a Gatefold 180g 2LP and LP booklet, special edition CD digipak and as a digital album.

Here, we reveal 25 things you might not know about the original.

1. Bron Yr Aur, the cottage situated between Aberystwyth and Machynlleth in South Snowdonia where Page and Plant wrote and rehearsed material for Led Zeppelin III, is Welsh for ‘golden hill’, ‘breast of the gold’ or ‘hill of the gold’.

2. That’s The Way was originally titled The Boy Next Door. Robert Plant introduced it under that title when they performed the song during their famous bill-topping appearance at the Bath Festival on June 28, 1970.

3. During the making of their third album, Led Zeppelin were the first band to record at the newly built Island Studio 2 in Basing Street, London. This would later be the location of the recording of the Band Aid single Do They Know It’s Christmas? in 1984.

4. Despite their no singles policy, Immigrant Song was at one time lined up to be a UK single backed with the third album leftover Hey Hey What Can I Do?. It was assigned a catalogue number 2091 043 and a release date of November 27th 1970 but was subsequently shelved.

5. A cover version of Immigrant Song by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor featuring Yeah Yeahs' singer Karen O was used on the soundtrack of the David Fincher film The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

6. The lyrics of Hats Off To (Roy) Harper are based on Bukka White’s 1937 recording Shake Em On Down. Robert Plant also leaned on that source for inspiration on Custard Pie, the opening track on 1975’s Physical Graffiti album.

7. The traditional blues tale Gallows Pole that opens side two was discovered by Jimmy Page on an album titled 12 String Guitar released in 1962 by American acoustic performer Fred Gerlach. The track was originally recorded in 1939 by iconic bluesman Leadbelly as Gallis Pole.

8. The acoustic instrumental Bron-Yr-Aur was one of a handful of tracks left off the album – it would later appear on Physical Graffiti. Page’s acoustic work on the likes of Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp revealed the influence of folk guitarists Bert Jansch and Davy Graham.

9. Down By The Seaside, The Rover and Poor Tom were all originally worked on during the Zep III sessions but issued on subsequent Zep albums – Physical Graffiti and Coda respectively.

10. The original UK pressing of Zep III was released in October 1970 on the orange and maroon Atlantic label, distributed by Polydor. Copies bearing the inscription “Executive Producer Peter Grant”, which was omitted on later pressings, are worth around £150 in mint condition.

11. Friends, conceived by Page on the balcony of his Pangbourne boathouse home in early 1970, was later re-recorded by Page and Plant in India with the Bombay Orchestra in March 1972, a version that remains unreleased. Page and Plant returned to the song for their 1994 Unledded/No Quarter MTV performances.

12. Since I’ve Been Loving You previewed on the UK in 1970, some ten months before the album’s release. Listen carefully to the studio version and you can hear John Bonham’s bass drum pedal squeaking.

13. The title for Out On The Tiles was derived from a drinking song John Bonham used to recite in the studio with the words, “I’ve had a pint of bitter and now I’m feeling better and I’m out on the tiles”. It started out as a backing track dubbed “Bathroom Sound” (this version can be heard on the Led Zeppelin III companion audio disc on the remastered set).

14. The Jimmy Page composed Tangerine was first recorded in April 1968 at the final Yardbirds recording session under the title Knowing That I’m Losing You.

15. Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp was written at the Bron-Yr-Aur cottage about Plant’s dog Strider. The tune itself was first tried in an electric, rockier arrangement titled Jennings Farm Blues. This take can also be heard on the Zep III companion audio disc

16. Key To the Highway/Trouble In Mind was found by Page at the end of a studio tape reel from the recording session that produced Hats Off To (Roy) Harper.

17. A similar blues jam, recorded at the same session, features the band running through versions of Bukka White’s I Feel Like I’m Fixin To Die and Arthur Cruddup’s That’s Alright. Officially unreleased, this has surfaced on various bootlegs.

18. Just prior to the release of Led Zeppelin III, Zep jammed with Fairport Convention at a gig at the Troubadour in Los Angeles. Although recorded at the time, the tapes remain unreleased.

19. The elaborate Led Zep III sleeve was designed by Zacron, a former student of Kings Collage of Art, who Jimmy had first met in the early 60s.

20. The photos that adorn the back cover were taken by sleeve designer Zacron during a series of visits he made to each of the group members’ respective houses in the spring of 1970.

21. Original pressing of the album have an inscription on the run-out groove of each side - “Do What Thou Wilt” on side one and “So Mote It Be” on side two. Both are quotes from the black magic occultist Alistair Crowley, who Page had an interest in.

22. In September 1970, Led Zeppelin were voted the world’s top band in the annual Melody Maker poll, ending The Beatles reign. Plant and Bonham appeared on BBC TV’s Nationwide news programme to explain their success (and have a smoke!)

23. The swirling noise that cross-fades Friends into Celebration Day was a deliberate edit effect by Page to cover up a studio cock-up when John Bonham’s original opening rhythm track to Celebration Day was wiped.

24. The famous bootleg album Led Zeppelin Live On Blueberry Hill, recorded at the LA Forum on September 4th 1970, includes live versions of Immigrant Song, Out On the Tiles and Since I’ve Been Loving You, performed a month prior to the album’s release.

25. Page mixed Led Zep III at Ardent Studios in Memphis with Terry Manning, a studio engineer Page knew from his Yardbirds days, when Manning was in the band Lawson and Four More.

In the early 70s, Audience had a high enough profile to fill college gigs, but this popularity never fully translated into record sales. Although they wore their soul and R&B influences on their sleeves, Audience’s originality put them right in the progressive milieu. In the words of singer and guitarist Howard Werth they were always looking “to distort things a little bit and go in off-beat directions”.

The excellent House On The Hill (1971) shows this. Produced by Gus Dudgeon, Jackdaw opens with Werth’s soulful yell and acoustic guitar surrounded by Keith Gemmell’s horns. This leads into a lengthy instrumental section with Gemmell’s flute and clarinet lines, played in unison with Trevor Williams’ fuzz bass, filling out the sound field.

At times it shares some ground with Family or the anglicised jazz and R&B of groups like The Alan Bown. You’re Not Smiling could have been a big hit, with its classic 70s ‘Na-na na-na na-na’ singalong chorus – one similar to Van Morrison’s Caravan – with blazing horns and hyperactive bass guitar. Then there’s the pastoralia of Raviolé, with Werth’s intricate guitar picking veering Eastwards at times, and a string arrangement by Robert Kirby, famous for his work with Nick Drake.

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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 May 1971

• Leon Russell and the Shelter People - Leon Russell
• Peaceful World - The Rascals
• Weather Report - Weather Report
• Carpenters - Carpenters
• Relics - Pink Floyd 
• Ram - Paul McCartney and Linda McCartney
• Rory Gallagher - Rory Gallagher
• 28 Songs for Beginners - Graham Nash
• And So: On - Jimmy Webb
• Another Dimension - Bo Diddley
• Edgar Broughton Band - Edgar Broughton Band
• Live Johnny Winter And - Johnny Winter
• Man in Black - Johnny Cash
• Smash Your Head Against the Wall - John Entwistle
• Summer Side of Life - Gordon Lightfoot
• Winwood - Steve Winwood
• Every Picture Tells A Story - Rod Stewart

What they said...

"I Had a Dream" sounds like Knockin' On Heaven's Door played by Creedence. Eye To Eye is pure Jethro Tull in both the use of the voice and flute. House On The Hill has its prog jazz opening and Van der Graaf-like sax. Jackdaw, with Werth's vocal openings as if he were Chris Cornell. Raviolè, a refined instrumental based on classical guitar accompanied by the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra. The strange cover of I Put a Spell on You by Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Progressive? Just like the cover: this is art rock." (Debaser)

"Leading off with the adventurous Jackdaw, it's here that the band present their most powerful prog-rock statement on the album, a lengthy piece with soaring vocals from Howard Werth, searing sax courtesy of Keith Gemmell, and a wild fuzz drenched bass solo from Trevor Williams. You're Not Smiling could have easily been a hit single, a real memorable folk rocker that wouldn't have sounded out of place on The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St. album, featuring hook-laden vocals, jazzy sax, and plenty of Werth's lush electric classical guitar." (Sea Of Tranquillity)

"Arguably their best album, House On The Hill was released in 1971 and benefits from its direct nature and jazz/folk/blues vibe. There is plenty of energy on offer, which hits you squarely in the face with the first track, Jackdaw, helped by Howard Werth’s distinctive vocals. The introduction of flute, woodwind hypnotics and vibraphone adds an eclectic twist to the presentation." (The Audiophile Man)

What you said...

John Davidson: Well, this was an odd one. Take bits of Roxy Music, throw in some Jethro Tull and blend with a range of 1970s pop-rock offcuts and you might end up with Audience. It was nearly enjoyable but just kept missing the mark for me. 4/10.

Warren Bubb: Listened to this album as I loved the single Eye To Eye, which should have been a chart hit, fitting in with bands like Curved Air and Lindisfarne. The rest of the album is a bit of a mixed bag with several conflicting styles. Still a great lost single and worth a listen for that track alone. Only 5/10 for me.

Adam Ranger: Thanks to the club for another artist and album that I was not familiar with. Art rock? Something we Brits seemed to do lots in the 70s and 80s.

The album starts strongly with Jackdaw. Well, the first three minutes, at least. Then it all goes a bit wrong. I like the flute interlude, but the remainder felt like a good song ruined.

And that is my problem with this album. Some nice, even great moments, amongst some jarring moments. It's not sure of its identity, which may be the point.

Talking of the flute, Eye To Eye could easily have been a Jethro Tull track. I like this one. It's short and does not meander.

I quite like the cover of I Put A Spell On You. It's true to the Screamin' Jay Hawkins original, but different enough to be worth the listen. I also quite like Indian Summer. But overall, this is not my thing, and I found myself not enjoying the listen for much of the time.

Mike Canoe: I don't know how I learned about House On The Hill first. Either I saw the album cover in a Hipgnosis coffee table book or a friend put Audience's cover of I Put A Spell On You from this album on a mix CD he gave me. Either way, I decided House On The Hill was worth seeking out.

"Art rock" seems to be one of those catch-all genres when something sounds too weird to be pop but not complicated or pretentious enough to be straight-up prog rock. The description does seem to fit Audience, though.

Howard Werth's unique and charismatic voice was the initial draw. He seems equally comfortable with folk-adjacent songs like Jackdaw or I Had A Dream, as well as jazz-comfortable numbers like Eye To Eye or I Put a Spell On You. The latter gives Screaming Jay Hawkins' classic a jazzy Moondance makeover, providing a nice contrast to the malice-filled lyrics.

Then there's Keith Gemmell and his arsenal of woodwind instruments taking the solos instead of keyboards or electric guitar. You're Not Smiling and Nancy are essentially pop songs but with instrumentation more akin to classical music. Howard Werth gets to show off his electric classical guitar on the mostly instrumental Raviole, but honestly that's a trifle compared to the rest of the album.

The swirling, surging, sinister title track finds the band playing to all of its art rock strengths. It also brings to life the murder mystery playing out in the cool Hipgnosis sleeve design.

As has become a bit of a theme with the club recently, the band's lifespan was relatively short the first time around, but their music has been rediscovered through streaming. I think House On The Hill defines the term "lost classic."

Hylton Blignaut: A famous late-night DJ in South Africa, Chris Priorr, played the title track one night in the early 80s. The next day I hunted down the album. An import on a student's odd job pay, but well worth it

Philip Qvist: This was a first for me, or so I thought. When I saw this week's album choice courtesy of Mike Canoe (many thanks), my first thoughts were that I had never heard of this band, far less the album.

And that thought remained the same while listening to what was a pretty decent record, until we got to the final track on the album, mainly The House On The Hill. Within seconds, I recognised the track, courtesy of a period during the 1980s and 90s, when mainstream South African radio stations used to play modern and classic rock music, featuring songs such as this track.

The title track, complete with sinister lyrics by bassist Trevor Williams and some great sax and flute playing from Keith Gemmell, is my highlight on this album. The instrumental Raviole, which allowed Howard Werth to showcase his guitar playing skills, along with opening songs Indian Summer and You're Not Smiling, were my other standout numbers. Their version of I Put A Spell On You, a track covered by so many artists, doesn't really add much to the song, while the other tracks were good without leaving their mark on me.

I doubt I will listen to this album again, but it was fun to listen to, and it is always great to listen to another one of these lost treasures. Another 7 from me this week.

Greg Schwepe: Total new one for me. We’re on a streak with the “never heard of ‘em” picks with The House On The Hill by Audience. But no preconceived notions about anything at all here; clean slate, open mind.

Jackdaw leads off the show, and I hear horns, then flute, then fuzzed-out guitar, squawking sax. Checks release date; 1971. Yep, that all checks out. The longer the song went on, the more intertwined that instrumentation got.

The second track, You’re Not Smiling, kind of actually described me halfway through, but that changed a little by the end. I Had A Dream actually did have me figuratively smiling, as this was the best track so far. But then I got to Raviole, and that took the best track so far mantle. A little more to my liking with the acoustic and nylon-string guitars. The cover of I Put A Spell On You may be the most odd version I’ve ever heard.

Basically, I grew into the album as I went on, until I didn’t. Each successive song seemed to have slightly less of the characteristics of the prior song that maybe kept me from liking it 100%. OK, here we go…this is good. But then the next song was kind of a turn-off after a few to my liking. Jekyll and Hyde. One step forward, two steps back, whatever goofy analogy you want to use.

I will say, the sax sound was very reminiscent at times of what you heard on King Crimson’s debut. But it had this weird way of me liking it one song, then not caring for it the next track. The title track featured even more off-the-wall sax. That guy must have blown through (no pun intended!) a whole box of reeds while recording that track. I did like the big loud acoustic guitar though.

6 out of 10 on this one for me. Still trying to figure this one out, to tell you the truth.

Final score: 6.13 (22 votes cast, total score 135)

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This Was (1968)

It’s all in the title, isn’t it? This was Jethro Tull. That’s no accident – when we were recording it, the one thing I felt sure about is that if we were lucky enough to make another album, I knew it wouldn’t be like this one: based on blues elements and black American folk culture. That’s not part of my life and I couldn’t keep doing that. I’d look like a complete twit. The cover had no logo or anything and people were telling me we couldn’t do that; but we did it, of course.

Stand Up (1969)

The coming of age, in a way; the birth of more original music for us. It was then that what was referred to as progressive rock music was coming into being. If it’s in that vein, it’s rock music rather than folky. But it’s progressive in that it reflects more eclectic influences, bringing things together and mixing and matching and being more creative. For me it’s a very important album – a pivotal album.

Benefit (1970)

A darker album. You have to put that into the context of a band returning from the first of three forays into the USA – that altered my mindset. It’s not all gloom and doom, but it’s a slightly more oddball album. On For Michael Collins, Jeffrey And Me, we referenced Michael Collins, the astronaut who was stuck in the command module and, we now know, was given the instructions to leave the others behind. The loneliest man in space. And also he gets no glory because he’s not the guy who walked on the Moon.

Aqualung (1971)

That’s the singer/songwriter side of things, where a lot of the music came out of me strumming an acoustic guitar with a view to keeping it that way, as opposed to writing that way and turning it electric. That big title track riff came out of an acoustic jam – you’ve just got to have that imagination to hear that. You have to know that you can make it sing. It went on to sell and sell across the world. It’s the album that broke us in countries beyond the UK and US.

Thick As A Brick (1972)

After Aqualung I felt we had to take a big step forward. Many writers wrote about Aqualung as a concept album and I kept saying, ‘Maybe two or three songs are in the same area, but there’s not a concept.’ In the wake of all of that I thought, ‘Right, let’s show them what a concept album is!’ It seemed like an amusing idea to go down that route in this Pythonesque way and to try to use surreal humour. It clicked in America, which was a surprise, and it was our first real foray in that sort of theatrical presentation.

A Passion Play (1973)

The “step too far” album – we decamped to the Château d’Hérouville in France where Elton had recorded, and had a rotten time: technical issues, gastric bugs… we just wanted to go home. So we did, and had a frantic few weeks of writing a new album. Two pieces made it on to the War Child album and one or two morphed into something more sophisticated, but they never came to light on that album. Steve Harris of Iron Maiden loves A Passion Play. I’m glad someone liked it!

War Child (1974)

It’s kind of okay. The big one on that was Bungle In The Jungle, which is a complete rebuild of a song from the Château tapes. Very much rewritten, but it used the reference of people behaving like they’re animals in the jungle. It was written to be a radio hit, and in America it nailed it – we got AM radio play, which opened us up to a much wider audience and brought a lot more people into the concerts. It had its moment. Ritchie Blackmore has a soft spot for that album, for some reason.

Minstrel In The Gallery (1975)

That’s an odd one. It’s the last one Jeffrey Hammond played on, so it has this negative undertow to it as we knew he was going. Jeffrey leaving made me think, “Maybe I need to do this without relying on others so much.” I started working more on my own in the studio, writing and recording, playing to a click track, so a lot of it was a bit more “them and me” – a bit more insular, musically speaking, which wasn’t great in the spirit of working together.

Too Old To Rock’n’Roll: Too Young To Die! (1976)

The title track came to me on a plane journey when I was in heavy turbulence and very frightened. It was a piece about the kind of 50s Brit rock’n’rollers. Those bikers in that era, it was their world and they were already pushing 40 or 50 by then. You could mock that – but there’s something rather noble and determined and dignified about it, and I just wanted to explore that dichotomy. It’s wistful and nostalgic and also a bit of a put‑down, and it’s finding that balance in a song sometimes.

Songs From The Wood (1977)

More than any album we’ve done, this is one where the band had more to do with the elements of the songs. Martin Barre and Dee Palmer particularly had worked some material up that would fit right into a song, and where the recording process had all the band involved. There was an exception or two – Jack-In-The-Green was me one Sunday after lunch in there alone – but the rest of it was all of us. I feel perhaps since the days of This Was or Stand Up, it had much more of a band vibe. It was good.

Heavy Horses (1978)

You have to remember, this was at the time punk’s final embers were burning out and you had bands like The Police and The Stranglers, who were, collectively speaking, a bunch of old hippies. The brave new world of punk rock had perhaps become commercialised at that point. But bands like those two used punk as a means to get their foot in the door, just as I did with the blues in 1968.

So from our perspective, it wasn’t that we were vindicated that this new, intrusive music form had somehow ousted us from the public eye and approval. It was just a parallel event. I don’t recall being moved as a music maker by any of those changes. I knew what it was about and I rather liked some of it, but it was entirely separate to what I was writing. I didn’t want to try to catch up or be influenced by it. We were still making Jethro Tull albums at that point.

Stormwatch (1979)

There was a lot of stress within the band, mainly to do with John Glascock’s illness [the bassist had heart problems]. We sent him home and told him he had to get out of this spiral he was in because it wasn’t just his illness, it was lifestyle. He’d be on stage and his face would be white like wax, with a film of sweat. I made him leave to get himself well. Sadly he got worse and then we got the terrible news that he’d passed away. Did we do everything we could to help? That’s a question we’ll ask ourselves forever.

A (1980)

It was as simple as A for Anderson because it was supposed to be a solo album. I wanted to take some time out and I asked Eddie Jobson to be involved, so we started in the studio. I heard this guitar line in this bit I’d written and I called Martin Barre and he ended up staying. Then the record company said, ‘It sounds like a new Tull album,’ and I regret giving in to that. It sits there on the edge of our repertoire: it’s quite the mainstream thing.

The Broadsword And The Beast (1982)

That followed a bit of hiatus. We were getting towards the end of the record, and I thought – as I have before – “I’ve spent so much time with this material, I’d really like someone else to come in and mix.” We found Paul Samwell-Smith, who we knew from The Yardbirds, and he came in towards the end and took a lot of pressure off me. We worked well together; we had this good accord and bounced off each other very well. I’d been feeling very pressured on the previous albums, nursemaiding everything to the end.

Under Wraps (1984)

That was following my solo album Walk Into Light, where I’d been exploring what was then the new technology of the emerging world that was moving from analogue to digital – drum machines, very primitive sequencers and so forth. I thought we could use that on a Tull album. It’s got some great songs and it’s arguably the one album where I really pushed myself as a vocalist. It’s a great album apart from the drum machine – it annoys me to this day, and the public didn’t like it either. I’m glad I did it though.

Crest Of A Knave (1987)

I was going out and doing Under Wraps live, and I ripped up my throat – I couldn’t sing and I thought maybe time was up and I’d blown my voice completely. I spent a year not doing anything but seeing throat specialists, so it wasn’t until the summer of ’86 that we went out and did some shows, including one in Budapest where I wrote the song of the same name. In America it was the early days of MTV and Steel Monkey got quite a lot of prominence. That album did well in the US and won the Grammy.

Rock Island (1989)

The antidote to the more cheerful Crest Of A Knave, it’s mostly dark subject matter of alienation and desolation, except for the absurd Kissing Willie – an all-too-regrettable, unsubtle piece of saucy innuendo. Benny Hill would have been proud of that one. But the song Strange Avenues is still a favourite of mine. And Another Christmas Song too, which talks of origins and cultural identity. ‘Everyone is from somewhere, even if you’ve never been there.’

Catfish Rising (1991)

A rather good collection of songs, but at a time when Tull weren’t exactly in fashion! Some people felt it went back to our bluesy base – maybe too much for one reviewer who referred to it as ‘cod blues.’ This Is Not Love, Still Loving You Tonight and Rocks On The Road stand out for me. A lot of this was recorded alone in my studio with overdubs from Martin and Dave Pegg. The worst thing about the record was the album cover. Too much black! Too much Spinal Tap! No space to sign autographs with a black Sharpie.

Roots To Branches (1995)

The last album with Dave Pegg, who played, I think, only on three tracks due to the resurgent popularity of Fairport Convention – always his first love – and the increasingly difficult task of being the bass player of two bands at the same time. All the songs on this record still work for me. We enlisted American jazz rocker Steve Bailey to play bass. He turned up on a freezing January morning to start work on the record in my new studio. These days he’s Chair of Bass at Berklee College.

J.Tull Dot.Com (1999)

With the advent of the internet I thought we should have our own website. After some legal arm-wrestling with the cheeky owner of the name www.jethrotull.com, I beat him into submission in a Swiss court and got the name freed up for our use. The title track stands out, along with Hunt By Numbers and Wicked Windows – a reference to the heinous Heinrich Himmler of the bespoke dodgy specs. I was in the Auschwitz museum recently where the glasses of many incoming prisoners are on display. I thought of him while I was walking around. A lot.

The Jethro Tull Christmas Album (2003)

When the record company suggested we do a Christmas album, my immediate reaction was no – but I started to wonder if there was a way to do something not altogether cheesy and trivial. So I came up with some variations on Christmas carols, looking at the “other side” of Christmas. Some Tull material was re-recorded as I already had a few pieces in the repertoire that touched on the spirit of winter. Birthday Card At Christmas is special for me as my daughter’s birthday is on December 22 and it tends to be glossed over in the days before Christmas.

It’s the summer of 2012 and a stressed Jonas Renkse is in a minuscule studio in London, about to play Dead End Kings to journalists for the first time. He hasn’t had time to live with the new album himself – the band only finished it a few hours earlier. “We had to master Dead End Kings on the evening before I left or even on the same day,” the Swedish frontman remembers. “My CD was the only copy so far. If it got broken on the way we’d have nothing to show anyone.” On arrival he was thrown into a stifling routine: “Ten journalists came in. We’d play the album, they’d go out for snacks and ten new people would come in. I just sat there getting more and more drunk, trying to see on their faces if they liked it or not.”

Spoiler alert: they liked it. Not a surprise reaction, in hindsight, considering every Katatonia release before it had been a critical success. Early albums Dance Of December Souls and Brave Murder Day had expanded the growling brutality of the 90s death/doom metal movement into vast prog songs. Then, in 1998, a host of new, sullen influences, as well as Renkse’s screaming technique shredding his throat, dictated a softer goth rock turn on Discouraged Ones.

From there the Katatonia brand became all about endowing dark anthems with increasingly avant-garde rhythms. The 2000s heralded such mainstays as July, My Twin and Ghost Of The Sun, not to mention a lineup – Renkse, guitarists Anders Nyström and Fredrik Norrman, bassist Mattias Norrman and drummer Daniel Liljekvist – that lasted for the whole decade.

Dead End Kings’ predecessor, 2009’s Night Is The New Day, even pushed the band to the then-highest chart position of their career when it reached number 39 in Sweden. Life was going pretty damn well.

“It was a very good time,” Renkse says of the 00s. “At the same time as Night was released, we started working with our management, Northern Music Company. We went from being self-managed to being part of a group that gave us opportunities to play places that we hadn’t played before.”

Despite the Norrmans exiting in December 2009, the early 2010s maintained the band’s momentum. Northern snagged them longer tours with the likes of Opeth and Swallow The Sun, paving the way for Dead End Kings to be Katatonia’s most successful material to date. In Sweden, it rocketed to number 12 on the charts. Plus the reviews – including those from the journalists crammed into that studio with an increasingly inebriated Renkse – were glowing.

In Classic Rock magazine, Malcolm Dome noted that the Swedes’ prog flirtations had evolved into overtones, and compared their ninth album to the works of Porcupine Tree and Opeth: the “stealthy ambient atmosphere is obviously rooted in the visions of Steven Wilson,” he wrote. Other reviewers went so far as to label the band as Sweden’s answer to Tool.

While some may have raise their eyebrows at such comparisons, there’s no denying that Dead End Kings was Katatonia’s proggiest moment up to that point. After opening song The Parting commences with Renkse’s melodic howls, it bursts into an off-kilter rock riff. Alien time signatures go on to define the entire album, from the scattering percussion underneath Hypnone’s clean guitar strums to Dead Letters’ back-and-forth between machine-gun chugs and post-rock arpeggios.

Dead End Kings also shares prog’s penchant for drama through strings and keys, which carry over from Night Is The New Day and 2006’s The Great Cold Distance. Cellos swell at the outset of The Racing Heart, before, on Ambitions, synths bubble in isolation beneath Renkse’s pleas of “Hear my thin voice.” Such touches were so significant to the album that, a year after it came out, Katatonia released Dethroned And Uncrowned: a stripped-down redo of Dead End Kings that had just the vocals, keyboards and classical instruments, as well as a handful of newly recorded acoustic guitar takes.

“When we were mixing, David [Costello], who recorded the album, muted all the guitars and drums,” Renkse explains. “We realised how much music was going on that you wouldn’t really hear over all the metal stuff – it was fascinating. We realised: ‘Wow, this is another album!’ We just kept talking about it. It sounded good enough to be made into a companion release. Dethroned was a fun, interesting experiment.”

The story of Dead End Kings begins on December 22, 2009: the day Mattias and Fredrik Norrman said they were leaving the band, after 10 and 15 years respectively. Renkse remembers the news “was a shock. We had a solid line-up for a long time and, all of a sudden it wasn’t there any more. Of course that’ll affect you – both the band and you personally – but they did it for the right reasons. We had no fighting, no drama: just cold, hard facts.”

He attributes their departure to the management’s drive to get the band more time on tour. The statistics certainly corroborate that – the following year was the band’s busiest ever for live shows. “Fredrik and Mattias had good jobs and they didn’t want to be on the road all the time,” Renkse confirms. “They had boss positions, so they got decent pay, and they had kids and houses. So I totally understand and respect their decision. They still come to our gigs when we play Stockholm. Sometimes they say they regret quitting the band!”

To replace the duo, Katatonia tapped guitarist Per Eriksson and bassist Niklas Sandin, both of whom appear on Dead End Kings. Renkse knew Eriksson through their death metal side-project Bloodbath, in which the player had the charming nickname of “Sodomizer.” He met Sandin through a mutual friend who was bragging about how fast a learner his new bassist was – so Renkse stole him. “Niklas had never even been on tour at that point,” he recalls, “but he was a super easygoing and friendly guy, so he was in.”

After a 2010 packed with concerts, Katatonia began composing Dead End Kings in 2011. Notably, the writing went back to being a two-man process between Renkse and Nyström, as it had been on The Great Cold Distance and every album before it. On Night Is The New Day, in contrast, the guitarist had suffered writer’s block and only contributed ideas to two of its 11 songs.

“He’s been up and down with that for a few years now,” Renkse says. “I try to write music all the time and end up throwing away a lot of garbage, but Anders needs to be inspired: he needs a certain mood for writing. When you have a family and other parts of your life that aren’t connected to music, it can take a lot of time and energy from you. He wrote more stuff on Dead End Kings though, and the album after that, The Fall Of Hearts.”

Like earlier records, Dead End Kings’ lyrics tackle depression, mistrust and alienation. As Renkse summarises: “I like abstract stuff.” However, some songs are more specific. The Parting, for example, was his attempt to enter the headspace of a refugee: “I was trying to understand what it would be like to leave your home and your country. I’m a safe Swedish guy; I have no idea what it’s like.”

Meanwhile, bonus track The Act Of Darkening is about the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, while Buildings and Undo You both explore Renkse and Nyström’s hobby of visiting abandoned villages. “We went to a mine called Stråssa Gruva. There was a little town around it with kindergartens and grocery stores, and it was all just left to rot. I don’t know why I’m so intrigued by these places; but it’s fascinating knowing that something was once so vibrant, and now it’s not.”

He says he felt the same vibe in the Dead End Kings studio as he had from such derelict scenes. Unable to reuse the spot they’d used to track Night Is The New Day, they holed up in the basement of a halfway house, located in a “shitty neighbourhood” in Stockholm. “There was always something unnerving going on,” he reflects. “I remember finding a room that looked like a cave, with a slaughtered police car in it. There were guards working 24 hours a day, walking the corridor with dogs. I had a dog at the time, and sometimes I had to bring it to the studio. David stopped my vocal takes so many times because the dogs were fighting.”

He adds: “Next to the studio was a rehearsal room, and there’d been a break-in in there. So, to scare away potential burglars, a band put a radio on super loud and left it overnight. It always sounded like there was a party in that room.”

It’s a testament to Katatonia’s talents that they were able to make something as refined as Dead End Kings in such a shithole. It defined their later output, especially follow-up The Fall Of Hearts, which leant even heavier into prog rock with its twisting time signatures and grand song structures.

“I’m super proud of Dead End Kings,” Renkse enthuses. “I think it’s a quality album; I think it’s sophisticated. When we play those songs live, it feels like they’re part of the more recent stuff that we’ve done. But 10 years is a long time – we get a weird feeling every when we play them. Where has the time gone?”

Their debut single A Whiter Shade Of Pale had given them a UK number one in the summer of ’67. But a short time afterwards the band released their self-titled, debut album, a record that helped shape what would become progressive rock. “We never thought of ourselves in that way,” late lyricist Keith Reid admitted to Classic Rock in 2010. “We were into soul, rock’n’roll and country music. But then there was no such thing as prog in those days.”

Reid met vocalist/pianist Gary Brooker when the latter was still in his pre-Procol band The Paramounts. When that group split up, the pair decided to work together as songwriters.

“We actually founded Procol Harum so that our songs would get recorded and heard,” said Reid. “Nothing we did had been taken up by artists. I think we’d written one song for Dusty Springfield, but I don’t know if she even heard it. That was the way things went.”

When A Whiter Shade Of Pale took off, the band were pressured into getting an album finished as fast as possible. “We’d spent ages writing the songs and rehearsing them, but the recording process was rushed. I wish we’d taken our time, but that’s what happens when you have a massive hit.”

So, Reid and Brooker – together with guitarist Robin Trower, organist Matthew Fisher, bassist Dave Knights and drummer BJ Wilson – went into the studio with producer Denny Cordell to record 10 songs for the album.

“The way Gary and I worked, I’d come up with the words, and then he’d add the music,” recalled Reid. “The only time on the debut album that we deviated from this was for Conquistador. I travelled down to Southend one day to see Gary, and he played me something he’d been working on. I thought the title Conquistador would fit, and then went into another room to write the lyrics.”

The studio experience was to be one that was far from smooth. “There were times when the tape operator forgot to press the ‘record’ button. And we also had takes wiped accidentally. We were incredibly tolerant in the studio, but back then everything was much looser. You never had anyone telling you to guard the tapes with your life.”

As a result of which, the original multi-track recordings have long since gone missing. “That’s the case, unfortunately. In the 60s this sort of thing happened regularly. We didn’t even record this in stereo. It was all mono, and then some trickery was used to get a stereo effect.”

In the modern era when every conceivable marketing ploy is used to sell an album, it seems amazing that A Whiter Shade… was missed off the album. “We were very idealistic back then.” Reid told Classic Rock. “We just felt that the single had been heard and bought, and we wanted people to get 10 new songs.”

Incredibly, given the huge success of that single, the album failed to make the Top 50 in the UK. But speaking in 2010,, Reid had a genuine fondness for it. “It was so badly recorded, because everything was too hurried. However the songs were great.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 150 (September 2010)

Singer Stevie Nicks, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and drummer Mick Fleetwood were doing a round of media interviews to announce the band’s 2013 tour when they were asked about the events of 1987, when Buckingham quit the band following the release of the album Tango In The Night.

Buckingham did not respond directly to the interviewer. Instead he turned to Nicks and Fleetwood and reiterated his reasons for leaving the group at a critical stage of their career: foremost among them, his sense that Nicks and Fleetwood had lost their minds and souls to drugs.

“What Lindsey said in that interview was very moving,” Fleetwood says. “He told us: ‘I just couldn’t stand to see you doing what you were doing to yourselves. Did you ever realise that? You were so out of control that it made me incredibly sad, and I couldn’t take it any more.’ It was really powerful stuff. This was someone saying: ‘I love you.’ It hit Stevie and me like a ton of bricks. And we all cried, right there in the interview.”

It was a moment that Mick Fleetwood describes as “profound”. But even after all these years, his memories of that time in 1987 are still raw. For when Lindsey Buckingham walked out on Fleetwood Mac, he did not go quietly. When Buckingham told the band he was leaving, it led to a blazing argument that rapidly escalated into a physical altercation between him and former lover Nicks, in which she claimed she feared for her life.

“It is,” Fleetwood says, “a pretty wild story. It was a dangerous period, and not a happy time.” And yet, for all the drama that came with it, Tango In The Night was a hugely important album for Fleetwood Mac. It became the second biggest-selling album of their career, after 1977’s 45-million-selling Rumours.

Just as Rumours had done in the 70s, so Tango In The Night defined soft rock in the 80s. Perhaps most significant of all, it marked the third coming of the Mac, following the successes of the Peter Green-led blues rock Mac of the late 60s and the Buckingham/Nicks-fronted AOR Mac of the 70s. And for Mick Fleetwood, it represented a personal triumph. While he freely admits that his own drug-fuelled insanity was instrumental in Lindsey Buckingham’s exit, it was Fleetwood who kept the band together once Buckingham had gone. And this was key to the success of Tango In The Night.

“My motto” Fleetwood says, “was ‘the show must go on’. It was almost an obsessive-compulsive desire to not give up. And it worked.”

There is an irony about Tango In The Night: that it began not as a Fleetwood Mac album but as a solo project by the man who would leave the band once it was completed.

In 1985, Lindsey Buckingham was writing and recording songs for what was planned as his third solo album. Fleetwood Mac had been on indefinite hiatus since 1982, following a world tour in support of their album Mirage. In that time there had been solo albums from the three singers: Nicks’ The Wild Heart sold a million copies; Christine McVie’s eponymous album yielded a US Top 10 hit with Got A Hold On Me; but, to Buckingham’s chagrin, his album Go Insane didn’t make the Top 40.

There had also been problems for them over these years. Nicks had been treated for drug addiction. More surprisingly, Mick Fleetwood had been declared bankrupt following a string of disastrous property investments. It was rumoured that Fleetwood Mac had split up.

“At that time,” Buckingham later admitted, “the group was a bit fragmented.”

By the end of ’85, Buckingham – working alone at his home studio in Los Angeles – had three songs finished: Big Love, Family Man and Caroline. But while he was busy making music, Mick Fleetwood was busy making plans to get the band back on track.

The wheels had been set in motion when Christine McVie recorded a version of the Elvis Presley hit Can’t Help Falling In Love for the film A Fine Mess – backed by Mick Fleetwood and the band’s other remaining founding member, her ex-husband John McVie. She invited Buckingham to produce, alongside engineer Richard Dashut.

“It was the first time for nearly five years that we’d all been in a working environment together,” Christine said. “We had such a good time in the studio and realised that we still had something to give each other in musical terms after all.”

Mick Fleetwood was more forthright. “The reality,” he says, “is that Fleetwood Mac were intending to make an album. And Lindsey was in many ways pressured into it. ‘Hey, we’re making an album – let’s go!’”

Buckingham relented, partly out of a sense of duty. “I had a choice,” he said, “of either continuing on to make the solo record, or to sort of surrender to the situation and try and make it more of a family thing. I chose the latter.”

What Fleetwood didn’t know is that Buckingham’s agreement was conditional. “I had the idea,” Buckingham said, “that that was going to be the last work with the group.”

For all that, Buckingham threw himself into the album. He either wrote or co-wrote seven of the 12 tracks that made the finished album. He also acted as co-producer with Richard Dashut. And it was at his home studio that most of the recording was done.

What was unusual about the recording of Tango In The Night was the absence of Stevie Nicks for much of the process. Nicks contributed three songs to the album, but was in the studio for only two to three weeks.

“She was not hugely present,” Fleetwood says. “I don’t remember why. And I don’t think we would remember – Stevie and me were nuts!”

Fleetwood says that he and Nicks were doing more cocaine during the making of Tango than when they were recording Rumours – an album on which they seriously considered thanking their drug dealer in the credits.

“Actually,” he admits, “it was way worse on Tango In The Night. For sure.”

“Certainly, I smoked a lot of pot. But I was never a big user of coke,” Buckingham notes. And by the mid-80s, he’d had enough.

“The subculture was pretty much at the point of burning itself out,” he recalled. “The ‘anything goes’ attitude that existed in the 60s had become something entirely different. But still, everyone thought you had to do certain things to play, and I don’t know that I ever thought about it that way.”

While Tango was being recorded at his home, he found a way of keeping the two cokeheads – plus assorted hangers-on – at a safe distance.

“Lindsey had a Winnebago put in his driveway,” Fleetwood says. “And that’s where Stevie and I would go with our wrecking crew. With me, the party never stopped. I was like Keith Moon. And for Lindsey, having that around his own house was a fucking nightmare. So he gave us our own house outside in the garden.

It wasn’t until years later that I asked him: ‘What was all that about?’ And he said: ‘I couldn’t stand having you punks in the house. You’d turn up at the studio with people that you’d met from the night before, and you’d start gooning around. You were too fucking crazy.’ Lindsey was never a drama queen, enjoying the 80s drug culture like Stevie and me. It wasn’t his scene. He wasn’t comfortable being around that much craziness. And we were blissfully unaware – completely oblivious to things that needed to be addressed.”

The drug taking was only one part of the problem. There were other things eating away at Buckingham.

For all the money and fame that Fleetwood Mac’s success had brought to him, Buckingham felt compromised on an artistic level – pressured by what Mick Fleetwood calls “this monolithic thing known as Fleetwood Mac”. There is, Fleetwood says, a “tortured side” to Lindsey Buckingham.

“Staying honest and staying creatively alive is very tricky in a commercial business,” Buckingham said. “You’re trying to hold on to a certain idealism, and not succumb to becoming a parody of oneself. Are you trying to flex your muscles creatively, or are you trying to sell records? In my mind it was pretty much clear-cut. There wasn’t a lot of middle ground.”

Buckingham felt he had won this battle with Tusk. The easy option for Fleetwood Mac would have been to make another Rumours. Instead, Buckingham spiked the Tusk album with weird, left-field songs such as the new wave influenced Not That Funny and the bizarre title track.

“A precedent was set by Tusk,” Fleetwood explains. “Lindsey could say: ‘I want to do this within the framework of Fleetwood Mac,’ without pissing everyone off.”

Buckingham loved the dichotomy in Tusk: the contrast between his songs and Stevie’s and Christine’s.

“You got that sweetness and me as the complete nutcase,” he said. “That’s what makes us Fleetwood Mac.” But he felt that the band’s next album, Mirage, was too lightweight, lacking the experimental edge of Tusk. And that nagging feeling returned to him as Tango In The Night was being completed. Buckingham had written many of the songs for the album. In addition, the songs he had recorded solo remained mostly untouched.

“Those songs,” Fleetwood says, “were already very sculpted. All we did was rip some drum machines off and put drums on.”

One trick of Buckingham’s, in Big Love, was especially brilliant. For the song’s climax, he used variable speed oscillators on his voice to create the effect of a male and female in a state of sexual excitement – the “love grunts”, as he called them.

“It was odd that so many people wondered if it was Stevie on there with me,” he said, a little disingenuously. Although there were other great songs on the album – slick pop rock tunes in the classic Fleetwood Mac style, such as Christine’s Little Lies and Everywhere, and Stevie’s Seven Wonders – Fleetwood calls Tango In The Night “Lindsey’s album”. But for Buckingham himself, there was a sense that in the transition from solo album to band album, something had been lost. A perfectionist, intensely analytical, he felt that Tango In The Night was too predictable, too safe.

“For political reasons, I was pretty much treading water,” Buckingham admitted. “We sort of lost the moment, going back to try to find that Rumours territory. I couldn’t do that as a producer and as a player. I was demoralised. Maybe I wasn’t even motivated to go back. I did the best I could.”

Fleetwood also believes that Buckingham felt undervalued in his roles of producer and arranger of others’ songs. “He was going, ‘Shit, does anyone ever realise what I do?’ Insecurities, we all have them, and that was part of Lindsey’s personality. I have insecurity even about walking on stage and thinking I can’t play drums. I don’t blame Lindsey for thinking: ‘It would be nice if someone thanked me for all the fucking work I’ve done!’”

But the biggest problem for Lindsey Buckingham was, of course, Stevie Nicks. “I’ve known Stevie since I was 16 years old,” he said. “I was completely devastated when she took off. And yet I had to make hits for her, I had to do a lot of things for her that I really didn’t want to do. And yet I did them. So on one level I was a complete professional in rising above that, but there was a lot of pent-up frustration and anger towards Stevie in me for many years.”

That frustration had first become evident on Rumours. Nicks wrote about Buckingham in the song Dreams, in which she sang the line: ‘Players only love you when they’re playing.’ Buckingham responded with Go Your Own Way, in which he claimed uncharitably, ‘Shacking up’s all you want to do.’ And over the years, things had only got worse.

“He got very angry with me,” Nicks said. “He tossed a Les Paul across the stage at me once and I ducked and it missed me. A lot of things happened because he was so angry at me.”

During one Fleetwood Mac show, Buckingham kicked out at Nicks. “It was just a little something coming through the veneer,” he said later. “There has been a lot of darkness. There was a time when I felt completely unappreciated by her.”

Buckingham’s frame of mind was not helped by the not inconsiderable success that Nicks enjoyed in her solo career. In 1981, her solo debut, Bella Donna, went to No.1 in US. Other hit albums and singles followed. Buckingham’s solo records sold next to nothing.

“Jealousy is the wrong word,” Fleetwood says. “But it was hard for Lindsey. The reality is, she’s Stevie Nicks! And Lindsey I think felt left out. That was his cross to bear.”

Despite the hostility, Nicks tried to retain sympathy for Buckingham. “Lindsey and I were really breaking up when we joined Fleetwood Mac. We’d lived together for five years. It’s one thing when you break up for that person to go their way and you to go your way, quite another to break up and have to sit together in the breakfast room of the hotel the next morning. Not easy.”

But neither Nicks nor Fleetwood saw what was coming. “We just didn’t realise quite how unhappy Lindsey was,” Fleetwood says. “He had to get out. And of course he did.”

Tango In The Night was released on April 13, 1987. The first single from the album, Big Love, was already a Top 10 hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and a tour was scheduled to begin in Kansas City on September 30. But when the band gathered at Christine McVie’s LA home to discuss plans for the tour, Buckingham told them he was out. And at that moment, it turned nasty.

It was Nicks who landed the first blow. “I flew off of the couch and across the room to seriously attack him,” she recalled. “And I did. I’m not real scary but I grabbed him – which almost got me killed.” Nicks ran out of the room with Buckingham in pursuit.

“He ended up chasing me all the way out of Christine’s maze-like house,” she said. ‘Then down the street and back up the street. And then he threw me against a car and I screamed horrible obscenities at him. I thought he was going to kill me, and I think he thought he was probably going to kill me too. And I said: ‘If the rest of the people in the band don’t get you, my family will – my dad and my brother will kill you.’” Buckingham walked away.

“We were all in shock,” Fleetwood says. “It was very upsetting for all of us, Stevie most of all.” But in this crisis, Fleetwood acted quickly. “Most people would go: ‘You’ve just made an album and one of your lead components is not there? You’d better retreat rapidly, lick your wounds and reassess what the hell you’re gonna do.’ Well, that was not what my mind told me to do. I went: ‘We’re not stopping.’ And literally within a week, I convinced everyone that we should not stop and have this be a catastrophic non-event and have no promotion for the album.”

Fleetwood was able to remain calm and pragmatic because he, and also John McVie, had been in this situation before – firstly, and most traumatically, when Peter Green, the original Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist, quit the band and the music business in 1970 after one too many bad acid trips.

“When we lost our mentor, Peter Green, we felt completely adrift,” Fleetwood recalls. “We went: ‘What the fuck are we going to do now?’ Seriously, I thought we’d never get over losing Peter. But we got through it. And then it became: there’s no such phrase as ‘the band’s going to break up’. And that became habit-forming. So when Lindsey left, we already had a blueprint.”

For the tour, Fleetwood brought in not one but two guitarists to replace Buckingham – a measure of Buckingham’s high calibre. Billy Burnette, the son of rockabilly singer Dorsey Burnette, was a country artist of minor repute. Rick Vito had worked with John Mayall, Jackson Browne and even David Soul. Fleetwood knew he was taking a risk.

“On paper,” he says, “it was sort of insane. But it worked.” It had to. “We still did that tour,” Nicks said, “because we we’d signed the contracts. We couldn’t call in and say: ‘Oh, we can’t do the tour.’ We had to do it. Or Fleetwood Mac would have been sued forever.”

The tour was a huge success. It wasn’t the same without Buckingham. Fleetwood accepts that. But the numbers – including eight sold-out shows at London’s Wembley Arena – spoke for themselves. And with the new-look Fleetwood Mac out on the road, sales of Tango In The Night went above and beyond Fleetwood’s expectations. In the UK the album went to No.1 on three separate occasions, and three singles went Top 10: Big Love, Little Lies and Everywhere. In the US those three tracks reached the Top 20, along with Seven Wonders, and the album sold three million copies in a year.

“The album was well received,” Fleetwood says. “Somewhat sadly, the kudos of that was never really fully attributed to Lindsey because he wasn’t present. But on the other hand, there’s a comedic sense to it – that we were promoting an album that was mainly his body of work.

"It was like Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys: ‘I’ve made the album, but now I’m staying at home.’ But also, when I look back, I see another example of how desperate Lindsey was to be heard. Basically, he was coerced and persuaded to do that album – mainly by me. And to his credit, he put aside everything that he’d dreamt of doing, including making his own album, for Fleetwood Mac. But then realised that he’d made a mistake and went: ‘Oh my God – I’ve got to get out.’ Lindsey was not being heard. We just didn’t get it. And really, I think that excuses him for letting the side down.”

Mick Fleetwood is not sure it is simple coincidence that Fleetwood’s two biggest-selling albums, Rumours and Tango In The Night, were made when the band was at its most dysfunctional. “Also,” he says, “I’m not sure I should be so proud of it.”

Equally, Fleetwood has reservations about Tango In The Night. “It’s an interesting album,” he says. “But it’s not my favourite Fleetwood Mac album sonically. We got a little too involved in electronic-y ways of doing things.”

But that album is undoubtedly a classic of its time. With it, Fleetwood Mac were reinvented for a new era. One of the biggest bands of the 70s became one of the biggest bands of the 80s. And from an album created amid chaos came some of the best songs of the band’s entire career. Even Lindsey Buckingham conceded this much.

“On the whole, that album is lacking in direction,” he said. “But there’s good stuff on there.” In the 90s, Buckingham rejoined Fleetwood Mac, and, more importantly, made his peace with Stevie Nicks. They have both come a long way since that dark day in 1987: Buckingham now married and a father of three, Nicks happily drug-free. All that remains between them is what Mick Fleetwood calls “the good stuff”.

“Stevie and Lindsey are not ‘in love’ but they love each other,” Fleetwood says. “And that’s why they’ve been able to get through some awful situations. There’s something I was asked recently: ‘What’s the most misconstrued thing about Fleetwood Mac?’ I said: ‘I don’t want to sound over-sentimental, but I think that people don’t actually understand that we really do love each other – a lot.’

"And you know, sometimes that’s been lost amid all the fear and loathing. But, to say the least, it’s been an interesting journey."

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 189 (September 2013)

The track is featured on a new definitive 2026 3CD+DVD Super Deluxe Edition of the band's second album, 1973's For Your Pleasure, which is out on November 6th 2026 via UMR/Island EMI.

The band have also shared video footage of the band’s iconic performance of the single on Top of the Pops in March 1973 which you can see below. The tape of the show was recently unearthed in a collection belonging to mobile disco DJ Roger Hill, having been lost in the BBC archive.

In the above previously unseen photo by Ian Dickson, Bryan Ferry shows guitarist Phil Manzanera how to play the track on his iconic blue Hagstrom guitar. Speaking on the process of Bryan writing on guitar for the first time.

"Bryan was intent on getting to wear a guitar – at which, obviously, I thought: ‘Oh Christ.’ But I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll show you how to tune the guitar so you can play it with just one finger'," recalls Manzanera. "And he actually came up with something! Which shows how clever he was. The whole of Pyjamarama is just sliding between four positions on open-tuned guitar. Of course, having started off like that, when we eventually went into the studio, I had to come up with some parts that would work, solos, lots of overdubs. And because I had to tune the guitar this funny way, all the strings were very loose, meaning it was a nightmare to stay in tune.”

As well as the four-disc Super Deluxe Edition of the album, For Your Pleasure will also be released as a 2LP (black vinyl and blue pearl vinyl as a D2C Exclusive), 2CD, Digital, Blu-Ray and Dolby ATMOS.

Listen to the demo version of Pyjamarama here.

Pre-order For Your Pleasure.

Throughout his career Hughes has been equally blessed and cursed: respectively, with arguably the most distinctive voice in hard rock, and by drug addiction that saw him ricochet from one project to the next with no real cohesion or direction, although almost all were flecked with flashes of brilliance.

Impressively, even during his drug years, he contributed to landmark albums either as a fully fledged band member or bassist/singer for hire. Infamously, while touring with Black Sabbath, with his band due on an LA stage in a matter of hours, Tony Iommi couldn’t find the errant Hughes. It turned out that the elusive bass player wasn’t even in the state of California.

Since experiencing some sort of epiphany on Christmas Day 1991, which resulted in him forsaking his cocaine mainstay, Hughes has intensified his work ethic. Despite a self-destructive impulse and years of abuse, he's still blessed with a voice that can straddle funk, soul and rock (sometimes critically to his detriment), but it’s to his eternal credit that he can genuinely say that he sounds absolutely like no one else; vocally he has no peers.

It was the three albums he recorded as bassist/vocalist with Deep Purple (Burn, Stormbringer, Come Taste The Band) that brought Hughes international attention and acclaim, but it’s the durability of his extensive catalogue that may turn out to be the cornerstone of his legacy.

From his relatively brief tenure with British hard rock quintet Trapeze, to the aforementioned hazy days with Deep Purple, through his first solo album, the quite excellent Play Me Out, to the landmark Hughes/Thrall album years later – and many people are still waiting breathlessly for its successor. Hughes is equally at home tied to the mast of The KLF’s Viking longboat in the video for America: What Time Is Love? or as Tony Iommi’s foil on the 2005 Fused project.

In recent years, Hughes has introduced himself to a whole new generation of fans via his work with the Black Country Communion, California Breed and the Dead Daisies. And while he announced his retirement from the stage in 2026, shortly after a show with Matt Sorum's Kings Of Chaos supergroup, we suspect we haven't heard the last of the ever-prolific Mr Hughes.

And one to avoid...

The three-year gap between this and 2023's i/o album represents the shortest between his studio albums since the early 1980s.

As he did for i/o, which forms a collaborative 25-track joint project with o\i, Gabriel has been releasing single tracks every full moon for the past year, which have pondered our relationship with nature, the passing of time, the increasing influence of technology in our lives and our place in the world; “Trying to get a handle on where you fit in life, that's what I write about a lot,” Gabriel says. "This record has been more of a marathon than a sprint - it’s the longest album I have ever put out, with 13 tracks that complete the i/o / o\i 25-track joint project.

“The songs are a mix of thoughts and feelings,” he continues. “I have been thinking about the future and how we might respond to it. We are sliding into a period of transition like no other, most likely triggered in three waves: AI, quantum computing and the brain-computer interface. Artists have a role to look into the mists and, when they catch sight of something, to hold up a mirror.

"We are not, and have never been, the exclusively self-determining, independent beings that we imagine we are. We have had a sense of entitlement that everything exists for our benefit - that we’ve been given the run of the world to exploit as we see fit.

"We are something else, a part of nature, a part of everything and when we feel that connection, shake our booty and give and receive a little love, it can help us find our proper place - and put a big smile on our faces. “This is how I see the lumpy bits – i/o: the inside has a new way out and o\i: the outside has a new way in.

o\i features long-standing band members, guitarist David Rhodes, bassist Tony Levin and drummer Manu Katché, supplemented by other members of the i/o touring band Richard Evans, Josh Shpak and Don E and Real World staffers Faye Dolle and Katie May, as well as Brian Eno, guitarists Leo Nocentelli and Tony Berg, drummer and percussionist Abe Rounds, pianist Tom Cawley, trumpeter Paolo Fresu, cellist Linnea Olsson and multi-instrumentalist Evan Smith. Once again Gabriel’s daughter Melanie provides vocal support.

o\i will be available as a four-CD pack featuring both the Bright-Side mixes by Mark ‘Spike’ Stent and the Dark-Side mixes by Tchad Blake of all 13 tracks, as well as separately as double vinyl albums. The digital-only Dolby Atmos In-Side mix is again shaped by Hans-Martin Buff, who won Best Immersive Mix Engineer at the Grammys for his work on i/o.

Pre-order o\i.

Peter Gabiel: o\i

CD | Digital
1. Been Undone
2. Put the Bucket Down
3. What Lies Ahead
4. Till Your Mind Is Shining
5. Won’t Stand Down
6. Who Are We Talking To?
7. Yes, It Will Go
8. One by One
9. A Hard Lesson
10. Face the Wall
11.I Belong to the Sky
12. Looking for the Happy
13. Sacrament

Vinyl

SIDE A
1. Been Undone
2. Put the Bucket Down
3. What Lies Ahead
4. Till Your Mind Is Shining

SIDE B
1. Won’t Stand Down
2. Who Are We Talking To?
3. Yes, It Will Go

SIDE C
1. One by One
2. A Hard Lesson
3. Face the Wall

SIDE D
1. I Belong to the Sky
2. Looking for the Happy
3. Sacrament

If you want thunderous bombast and songs about bloody battles and mischievous Norse gods, Amon Amarth are the ultimate contemporary source of such humble thrills. As a result, there has never been any real need for the band to reinvent themselves. Instead, they’ve simply focused on becoming bigger and better at what they do. That, in a nutshell, is what their latest album is about: heavy metal with a Viking heart, strategically designed to level arenas and festival sites the world over.

The Allfather Awakens is instantly recognisable as another pummelling tour de force, with 10 new paeans to the age of Viking supremacy and a suitably momentous and imperious atmosphere. Polished to skull-shattering perfection by producer Jacob Hansen, the Swedes’ 13th album sounds as vast and unstoppable as a fleet of marauding longboats.

Its grimly ornate artwork will inevitably lend itself to a new, dazzling stage show, presumably featuring more costumed miscreants whacking the merry fuck out of each other with plastic weapons. One of the few major modern bands that seem utterly impervious to passing trends, Amon Amarth’s blinkered progress continues to be an absolute joy.

The Allfather Awakens does include one significant curveball, albeit one that belongs firmly in this band’s long-established ballpark. Upphaf is a brooding, acoustic confection, borne of moonlit campfires and mythological contemplation. But despite its lack of scything riffs and pounding drums, it fits perfectly into the musical and thematic worlds that Amon Amarth have been thoughtfully constructing over the last 34 years.

That one minor side-step aside, Amon Amarth are not in the business of surprises and shocks. Mindful of their lofty status, they’ve simply written a set of blistering new anthems to meet the moment. From the cataclysmic fury of the opening Gjallarhorn and the Maiden-tinged gallop of Eight Legs Of Thunder, to the rabble-rousing victory squall of We Rule The Waves and the monstrous rush of might and melody that is the closing Ascending Like An Eagle, every song is alive with electrifying confidence and unwavering authority.

The infectious hooks and raucous choruses that fans have come to expect over the years are as finely honed and forceful as they have ever been. Sword-wielding standouts include the hulking menace of Kvasir’s Blood, the uplifting muscularity of Die With A War Cry and the brutally catchy Oden’s Hunt, but The Allfather Awakens is as cohesive and coherent as any record in Amon Amarth’s illustrious canon, and the most unified body of work they have made since 2008’s Twilight Of The Thunder God. Onwards to Valhalla they row, these heavy metal warriors, as we raise our horns yet again.

The Allfather Awakens is out now via Metal Blade. Amon Amarth tour the UK from October 9.

In the twangling sitar of Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), the Grecian textures of Girl, the baroque effects of In My Life (Lennon’s self-proclaimed “first major work”) and the Byrdsy drug fun of The Word and If I Needed Someone, The Beatles took their boldest steps into revolutionary pop experiment, and nothing – music, art, fashion, your mum’s body count – would ever be the same again.

The album itself, be it in the mono, stereo or Dolby Atmos mixes included in the various formats of this Special Edition of up to five LPs or four CDs, repels criticism by this point. It’s a masterwork; argue among yourselves over this or Revolver. But the expanded release has other treats to recommend it.

The inclusion of a seven-inch of Day Tripper /We Can Work It Out is a nifty gimmick smacking of period authenticity, and the decidedly folk-rock Capitol Records US version that ditches some of the more intriguing tracks (Drive My Car, Nowhere Man, If I Needed Someone) in favour of a couple of songs left off the US version of Help! evinces how far American fans were behind The Beatles’ evolution as 1966 dawned.

It’s the discs of unreleased demos, instrumentals and alternative session takes that will most excite the faithful. Amid the magical larks, fluffs and Goonslike Beatle-babble – the laboured We Can Work It Out demo that becomes a game show interlude, or the whole track of Beatle Talk in which they quote Stingray lines and call each other “pickled onion” – some tracks arrive ready-made for greatness (In My Life), while others evolve on-mic.

Michelle begins in country trek fashion, Nowhere Man has several wonky early iterations, and take one of Drive My Car almost invents grunge. Most revealing are the various takes of Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown), involving a clunky, heavy-handed folk take and a highly experimental sitar version that illuminates their desire to push their own boundaries, and a previously unheard Lennon demo titled Little Girl, a twee romantic acoustic ditty exposing his true feelings towards such material by 1965: ‘If you’d asked me yesterday,’ he sings, heartthrobishly, ‘then I’d have told you sweet FA.'

If you cut through Opeth they’d bleed Mellotrons. Or flutes. Or any classic tool of the prog trade. Since veering away from their metallic roots after 2008’s Watershed, the enigmatic Swedes – who first won over scores of fans with boundary-crushing death metal – have dived further and further into the swirly depths of progressive music.

Frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt has spent most of his adulthood cultivating an obscenely extensive vinyl collection, much of it proggy and/or pre-dating 1976. Now, five years after their ‘prog debut’ Heritage, he’s capitalising on the influence of all that fantastic plastic with more gusto than ever. Oh yes, Opeth have gone to the prog side, no question.

Their new album Sorceress – recorded at Rockfield Studios, Wales, with Royal Blood producer Tom Dalgety – continues this thread. Two songs were initially called ‘Jethro One’ and ‘Jethro Two’. One piece, The Wilde Flowers, was named after the 60s Canterbury band, who never released anything but did end up spawning Caravan and Soft Machine, which pretty much started the whole Canterbury scene; another, The Seventh Sojourn, shares its name with a Moody Blues album. Give them some whimsical outfits and songs about dragons and these former metal men would be proggier than Yes at a wizard convention in Hastings – in capes.

“Steven Wilson played me a Jethro Tull record, Stormwatch, that I didn’t have,” Åkerfeldt tells us in a velvety Swedish accent. “He was like, ‘Have you heard this record? There’s a song you have to hear – it’s called Dun Ringill.’ It’s late-70s Jethro Tull. I generally have a limit around 75, 76, because production went downhill after that. But that record made me want to write a song with a capo, up high on the fretboard, because it brings a nice ringy sound to the guitar.”

Offstage, Åkerfeldt – the band’s singer, guitarist and songwriting mastermind – is easy, very likeable company, but not without an element of reserve. He swears relatively rarely, but when he does, it’s with relish. He’s tall and slim, with a big moustache that he calls his “70s porn director” look. And he’s infinitely happier talking about music than he is about anything personal. The merits of Tull, therefore, is an area he’s pleased to get stuck into – as is his bandmate who joins him here today.

“We listened to Stormwatch quite a lot when we had beer sessions over the last couple of years,” nods guitarist Fredrik Åkesson, a thoughtful man with a gentle voice, regal goatee and a giant crop of springy curls. “I’ve been obsessed by the song Orion on that record.”

“And Minstrel In The Gallery,” adds Åkerfeldt, “we played that a lot. I love that album. So I’ve been rediscovering some of these records that I’ve been listening to for a long time.”

This conversion to the prog side hasn’t sat well with all of their fans. 2011’s Heritage, their first record with no screamed vocals, prompted outrage from a very vocal contingent of metal purists, and they’ve never been totally silenced. Not that it’s done them serious harm. Their last album, 2014’s Pale Communion, hit the Top 20 in both the UK and the US. New waves of non-metal listeners have joined their fan base. And this year they’re headlining London’s Wembley Arena – no small feat for any ‘non-mainstream’ band, and especially not for one as unbothered about what sells as Opeth.

Indeed, their huge success (which has also seen them fill the Royal Albert Hall) is almost inexplicable in an age where things like social media optimising and crowd-pandering are supposed to be crucial for widespread outreach.

“For me, the only thing that’s important is to keep the music fun and interesting,” says Åkerfeldt, “and to develop and experiment. That’s what I think music should be. It should be fun. The idea of stagnating, of writing a record simply to feed a career, that’s scary.”

For now at least, they’re showing no signs of stagnating, as they demonstrate on album number 12, Sorceress – a beautiful hybrid of classic prog, folk touches and hooky hard rock riffs. There’s no concept, and most of the songs hover around the five-minute mark, but to our ears, it sounds the most cohesive of their prog albums. The songwriting seems sharper; catchier even.

“It is a bit more catchy, I think,” Åkerfeldt says. “But I haven’t even listened to the final version yet. We did so many mixes – I listened to each and every one of them – so I needed some time to step back. But I think it’s a really good record. I’m really happy with the songs. I think it’s a very diverse record. I made a point of having each song as different as possible.”

Alongside his own collection of classics and obscurities, Åkerfeldt has been ingesting his girlfriend’s jazz records – not a direct influence on the new record, but certainly a background factor in the creative process. “She’s a huge John Coltrane fan. And I had a nice little Miles Davis collection, so I’d been going through his musicians that play on those records, guys like John McLaughlin and Herbie Hancock,” he says. “But I don’t think it rubbed off on my writing.”

Instead, it’s bands like Mahavishnu Orchestra and Tull that you’ll hear on the record. The flute-tastic likes of A Fleeting Glance reflect their folky side, while Seventh Sojourn captures an alluring Eastern quality. With the title track, Åkerfeldt wanted to trick the metalheads who’ve hated his prog adventures but remain interested in Opeth nonetheless. Accordingly, it starts with a classic fusion-esque melee of Fender Rhodes keys and proggy timings. It has no place in 2016 whatsoever.

“I wanted the haters to go, ‘Oh, not that shit again!’ and turn it off,” Åkerfeldt grins, “until some of their friends say, ‘Why did you stop listening? It gets really heavy after a while!’ So it’s a bit of a trick. But we haven’t really played it yet. We rehearsed it once. It’s one of those live tracks – big, stupid rock, basically.”

“Neanderthal rock!” Åkesson beams. “After Watershed, this is probably the heaviest record we’ve done.”

The fact that Åkerfeldt paid a lot of attention to the drums for Sorceress goes some way to explaining this, after drummer Martin ‘Axe’ Axenrot, a deft all-rounder, revealed a particular penchant for classic rock. “We did a soundcheck at a show and he was fooling around, playing this meat’n’potatoes rock, this Judas Priest 1978 type of drumming,” Åkerfeldt explains. “And he’s so good at that stuff. So I was thinking a lot about the drums for this record, about what he loves to play. Because, like everyone, when something’s fun, you’re good at it. You play better. He can play anything, but he’s exceptional when he’s doing that kind of stuff. When I see him laugh, that’s when he’s at his best.”

This style is an important dietary staple for both Åkerfeldt and Åkesson. Åkerfeldt has long professed his admiration for Ritchie Blackmore and Black Sabbath, and he began his lifelong vinyl obsession by collecting Iron Maiden records. Before joining Opeth in 2007, Åkesson – a violinist, initially, before he discovered the guitar at the age of 12 – played with Europe guitarist John Norum and melodic hard rockers Talisman, as well as the metallic likes of Arch Enemy and Krux. “I think it helped me a lot to have done all these different styles previously with other bands,” he says.

We wonder how much they listen to this kind of heavy rock fodder, which seems to add melodic beef and familiarity to their proggy cocktail. “Quite a lot, actually,” says Åkerfeldt. “More than we listen to… I want to say Yes, but I do listen to Yes quite a lot. We are first and foremost hard rock guys, metal guys. That’s what shaped us in the beginning. So those records are immortal to us, the AC/DCs and the Michael Schenkers, Judas Priests…”

Åkesson: “Iron Maiden, Scorpions, Accept…”

“And many of those guys, in the early days, were really quite progressive,” Åkerfeldt says. “Like Priest, Sabbath, Deep Purple. They were labelled progressive rock, or progressive pop, on the back of the records.”

Thematically, Åkerfeldt says the new record largely deals with love. Unhindered by the potentially squishy, sickly connotations the word carries, this chief idea splits into individual song vignettes, ranging from anger to melancholy.

“It’s mainly personal,” he says. “I’ve had a turbulent life in the last five or six years or so, though I didn’t deliberately, specifically write about that. Back in the day I used to start by writing mock lyrics about… beer! And then I’d translate them into something more meaningful, or something that looked good. But this time I started writing, and in the middle of the process I found many of these lyrics dealt with love – mostly the negative emotions you can get with a positive feeling like love: paranoia, insecurity, anger, jealousy, hate even. I didn’t set out to write these types of lyrics – it was only afterwards that I kinda knew what they dealt with.”

Just like his friend and collaborator Steven Wilson, Åkerfeldt isn’t forthcoming about his personal life. He’s divorced from his wife Anna, the mother of his two daughters, but doesn’t talk about it. Now happily settled with his girlfriend, he’s reluctant to say whether any particular incidents ended up influencing what he wrote.

“Well, again, it’s my recent life,” he says slightly awkwardly. “I’m not saying those lyrics are biographical or anything like that. But I’ve been troubled, and when you have these kind of weird thoughts, catastrophic thoughts, which I had… So what I wrote down is not necessarily something I experienced myself. I didn’t think too much when I wrote. I wrote each line down and thought, ‘Okay, that’ll work with the rhythm, with the vocal, that sounds nice.’ And then I finished it and became more and more angry every now and then, which I found interesting.

“I just know that when you’re in the middle of a chaotic relationship, or when you feel that you’re being mistreated or something like that, you get weird thoughts. Not necessarily about… [laughs] stabbing somebody in the fucking face, but you start acting weird. Love is like a mental disease, which everybody kind of wants to catch. It’s crazy when you think about it. I love ‘love’, but I’m also interested in how it can affect you; how this positive emotion that musicians have been talking about for years – ‘All you need is love’ – can feel so damaging when you’re in the middle of it. So that’s the basis for those lyrics. But they aren’t about anyone in particular.”

Indeed, simple glances at the news proved to be incredibly fruitful sources of inspiration too. “The other day I heard about a guy who killed his pregnant wife with a machete in Sweden,” he tells us. “I assume that somewhere before this event took place, he loved her. So it’s an interesting emotion, and it’s interesting to see what it can bring out of seemingly normal people.”

In a wider sense, Opeth have never been publicity seekers for anything other than their music. Their recent 25th-anniversary book, the Book Of Opeth, chronicled their evolution without delving into personal issues or potential controversy. Nevertheless, after over two decades in the business and a rotating cast of band members (Åkerfeldt is the only remaining founder member), they must have had a diva rock star phase at some point. Right?

“Currently in the middle of it,” Åkerfeldt laughs. “But no, there’s a lot about this band that we kept under wraps, but we decided to… I mean, we did the Opeth book recently, and deliberately kept that down. But there’s been a lot… of that. A lot of that.”

Can you elaborate at all? “Well, if I was going to, I would have done so in the book, wouldn’t I?” he says, only slightly defensively. “But there’s a lot of things happening in this band. I mean, we’re good people, everyone who’s been in the band has been good people, but there’s been massive trouble.”

And that’s all he’ll say on the matter, though he’s gleefully candid when we ask what the most ‘metal’ thing he’s ever done is. “I threw chairs out of a balcony once – 25 floors,” he enthuses. “I think it was in Adelaide, maybe around the time of Deliverance in 2002. It was me and Per [Wiberg], our then-keyboard player, [Martín] Méndez and [former drummer Martin] Lopez were sharing a room and they were passed out, and me and Per were drinking on their balcony, so we decided to throw out the chairs. I thought we were closer to the ground. I was really drunk. The next day the hotel manager stopped us when we were checking out and said, ‘Didn’t you like the chairs on the balcony?’ We had to pay for them, of course.”

And then there was the time he poured vodka all over a major label exec in the US. “I’d been drinking heavily and smoking mushrooms mixed with hash or something,” he recalls with some pride. “I don’t usually do drugs but I thought this seemed like a good idea. I got really crazy, and it was at an after-party in a hotel room in the US. I didn’t know anybody there. And the label manager for Century Media in America was there, and I grabbed him by his hair and poured a bottle of vodka in his face.”

“You do get a bit of an ‘evil eye’ when you’re drunk…” Åkesson says thoughtfully, stroking his beard. “When I started in the band, he used to jump on people and wrestle them.”

It’s an oddly endearing, childlike image – the tall, suave Åkerfeldt taking a running leap at some unsuspecting roadie or bandmate. “But I’m very anti-violence,” Åkerfeldt hastily adds. “I’m not trying to hurt them. It’s childish playing, and I was drinking a lot then. I haven’t done it since I stopped drinking hard liquor.”

Hidden darknesses aside, Opeth haven’t had a great need for violence – certainly not as far as creative control is concerned. Slightly amazingly, they’ve never been seriously pushed around by label execs and the like, which has allowed them to remain in a progressive niche and build a substantial fan base entirely on their own terms. The only real opposition they’ve faced has been from fans, when they largely abandoned metal in favour of prog with Heritage. This year, onstage at the Be Prog! My Friend festival in Spain, Åkerfeldt commented on how much hate the album has received, and how he equally hated the people that hated it. Tongue-in-cheek, but it points to truth…

“I don’t hate people who hate that record,” he says measuredly. “The people I do hate are the ones who try to tell me what to do. So it’s more that I have a problem with authority to begin with. And I hate a lot of records, y’know. I’m not very vocal about it. I’m not going to assume that my personal wish will change what the organisation or band or whoever, what they’re doing. My opinion means fuck all to them, I know… And I would never go up to bands I look up to and tell them that what they’re doing is bad. But I’m a different generation.”

Has that less flattering side of the metal world made the prog community seem a bit more welcoming by contrast? “I assume that the prog fans are generally a bit older,” says Åkerfeldt slowly, “and maybe more mature. They’re not necessarily so keen on hating; making it known that they hate this and that band. Maybe they’re like me – if they don’t like something, they just back off. They’re not actively repulsed.”

“I’m trying to think about the live shows we do and the reception we get to those,” muses Åkesson. “At Be Prog! My Friend, I saw a lot of young kids, metalheads, but they were totally into the proggier stuff.”

They hope to see a lot of said kids in November, when they headline Wembley Arena in London. Today they’re relatively tight-lipped about their plans, but they do tell us that there may be a special set specifically for the Wembley show. Unlike previous gigs, they’re looking to be more involved with the whole staging process.

“We’re working on a new stage set for this upcoming tour for the new album,” Åkesson says, “which includes this new lamp design. It hasn’t been used much. You can do a lot of spaced-out stuff with it.”

For such a classic, prog-loving band, Opeth’s stage shows have hitherto remained rather minimal. As they continue to embrace the musical daring of their prog forefathers, we wonder if there’ll ever be a visual side to match. As it stands, they’re not exactly talking [earlier Opeth album] ‘Blackwater Park: ON ICE’ à la Rick Wakeman.

“That’s the Achilles’ heel, the visual thing – everyone’s a bit uncomfortable with it.” Åkerfeldt gestures to his demure all-black attire – not a gimmick in sight. “I’m in my stage clothes now. I don’t mind bands with a strong image, and I wouldn’t mind if we had a strong image if it was something we were comfortable with, but we haven’t found anything like that yet. We’re trying to get the guys onstage to move a bit and have some sort of ‘look’, so no shorts, no free tour T-shirts from the support band… that’s as far as we’ve got.”

So no capes then? Or a giant peacock, like the one seen on the Sorceress album cover? You could get an inflatable one and have it float around the arena?

“Well, that could be done, of course,” Åkerfeldt nods, in a voice that says ‘but probably not’. “Mendez is an artist and painter, so he’s more into that type of thing. Whenever the guys in the crew start talking about the show and how it’s going to look, he’s the one who gets most involved.”

It turns out that Åkerfeldt has more important things than stage design to worry about. For such a long‑serving frontman, as adept at voice‑of-Satan metal growls as melodious straight vocals, he admits that his confidence is “pretty shit”.

“Our first show after we did the record was our first show in nine months, supporting Iron Maiden – in front of about 65,000 people,” he says. “I was nervous. I was doing some newspaper thing outside, and I felt calm but my legs were shaking. So yeah, I do get nervous.”

How do you combat that? “I go onstage,” he replies, simply. “I go out there and do my best, but I don’t get pumped up or anything – no ‘Yeah!’ or fist-pumping. I’m not really rock star material in that sense.”

“We do a handshake before we go on,” Åkesson nods.

Off tour, it’s a little easier to relax. Both Åkerfeldt and Åkesson, who is also a father, currently live in the suburbs of Stockholm. Return trips home are spent with their children, barbecuing, cycling and jumping in the nearby archipelago, largely free of the demands of being in a world-famous band.

How often do you get recognised back there? “Quite often actually,” says Åkerfeldt, “but it’s not like I need a wig or a disguise. But yes, people do come up to me.”

“But it’s not like Beyoncé,” Åkesson adds.

“No,” agrees Åkerfeldt, “not like Beyoncé.”

“Every year Tom Hanks has a Shakespeare reading to raise funds for schools,” says William Shatner, demonstrating his ability to spin a great celebrity yarn. “He gets all his friends together – of which I’d like to consider myself one – and we do a reading of one of Shakespeare’s plays. The latest one is The Two Gentlemen Of Verona. Paul McCartney is going to sing some songs, and I’m going to do Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds with him.”

That $1,500-per-seat event took place at a sold-out Broad Stage Theater in Santa Monica. Hanks, Macca and Shatner were joined by Val Kilmer and Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander, among others, to raise money for various good causes.

With its tempo changes, Mellotron intro and marshmallow skies, Lucy is a pretty proggy piece of work. Shatner’s remarkable take on it was the highlight of The Transformed Man, his debut album – released in 1968 as the original Star Trek series was entering its third and final season. “My understanding is Paul found my interpretation ‘interesting!’” the actor laughs. “That’s the word he used!”

William Shatner does. From time to time. Speak in. Staccato bursts. Also, he has a knowing, almost English sense of irony about himself. He’s well aware that many people might find him – or at least his musical endeavours – faintly absurd. And yet he’s friendly, articulate and, with his 83rd birthday coming up, still in possession of more marbles than many Hollywood stars begin with.

“He’s just an amazing, down-to-earth guy and an amazing artist,” says former Yes guitarist Billy Sherwood. “He’s capable of going to the Bahamas and retiring, but he wants to continue with his art, and I respect that.”

Sherwood has collaborated with Shatner on his fourth musical enterprise, Ponder The Mystery. They were introduced by Brian Perera, founder of Sherwood’s regular label Cleopatra, which also released Shatner’s daffy 2011 covers album Seeking Major Tom.

“Brian suggested I meet Billy,” says the actor, “and they asked what I’d do. I said, ‘Well, I could take a period of time: there’s a guy on a beach who’s in despair an hour before sunset. The sun sets, and through the beauty of what he sees, he regains his joy of life.’

”They said, ‘Uh, okay!’ They didn’t really know what I was talking about – and in a way, neither did I. I began to write new lyrics about twilight, sunset and the sounds of the night, and before we knew it we had 15 songs.”

“I thought it was an incredible artistic expression for a man in his position,” says Sherwood. “I said, ‘Let’s go at this like a serious progressive rock record. Let’s try to make an interesting piece of art here, not worry about what people are expecting and just do what we want to do.’

“He was into that and ran with it. I waited for him to give me lyrics; I got the vibe, harmonically speaking, and bounced off of those.” He cites and example: “He wrote So Am I about his dog dying, and equating it to himself and mortality. It was melancholy, so I wrote music with almost a church-like atmosphere.”

Though perhaps not for everybody, the concept works well for those who to go with it. Shatner’s spoken-word existential enquiries are set to Sherwood’s highly effective symph-prog rock arrangements, on songs such as Where It’s Gone... I Don’t Know, I’m Alright, Where Does Time Go? and I Think. Musically and vocally, Sherwood – “a bloody genius,” according to Shatner – does the heavy lifting. His layered harmonies and rock tones are an astringent counterpoint to the Star Trek hero’s distinctive, what’s-it-all- about recitative.

Musically, jazz is Shatner’s first love; and he admits that, before hooking up with Sherwood, he’d never been a big progressive rock fan. “But when I came up with this idea, I went back and listened to all these great bands like Pink Floyd, to get the cohesiveness of the concept. I tell ya, I’m getting myself into deep water here! I seem to have lurched into this area by osmosis.

“I conceived the idea that progressive rock is to music what science fiction is to literature. There is in science fiction a desire to further the imagination, to take what exists and go further to explore the boundaries, the horizons. In progressive rock you push the music to the edge and discover new ways of doing things.

“Maybe this album is a new way of doing things – I don’t know, but in my experience this is new. It tantalises you with new ideas of how music and the spoken word – the music of language itself – can combine.”

The oddest, most avant-garde tune on the album must be Rhythm Of The Night. Hawkwind’s Nik Turner adds sax to an evocative, glossy slab of AOR- inflected prog that’s intriguing and fun, with Shatner’s love of wordplay at the fore. “I had the idea for the line, ‘The cricket is the ticket to the rhythm of the night / The cadence of the hawk is obligato to the dusk.’ Billy took the rhythm of my words and put them to music.”

Sherwood adds: “I wanted that in an odd meter – to have the rhythms move around. So I played the drums crazy on that one. It’s a cool tune. My main challenge was to make sure when I played something, he was digging it. He was really accepting of the compositions; it became very natural. Many of the projects I do, we start getting in a flow and they become easier over time.”

Through his Prog Collective and numerous tribute albums, Sherwood has a proven track record for eliciting great performances from a galaxy of prog stars. Ponder The Mystery is energised by guests including Steve Vai, Edgar Winter, The Doors’ Robbie Krieger, Foreigner’s Mick Jones and Tangerine Dream’s Edgar Froese.

When Al Di Meola heard Shatner was doing a new album, he called him up directly and asked to be a part of it. The actor had never heard of the jazz fusion guitarist – but Sherwood leapt on the chance to get him involved. Rick Wakeman has been a Sherwood ‘friend and ally’ for years so he’s added some nimble parts. The album is notable for featuring some of the last recorded work by the late keyboard great George Duke, whose overdubs were sent to Sherwood’s studio just days before he died.

The theme of mortality is a major aspect of the work. Shatner’s strong second album, 2004’s Has Been – produced by Ben Folds – contained some intense moments such as the hauntingly sparse What Have You Done, inspired by the tragic 1999 death of his third wife, Nerine Kidd-Shatner. “That’s what I tuned into,” says Sherwood.

“It was very heavy; it was real. I knew there’d be people who would get Ponder The Mystery, and others who were waiting to hear Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds – there’s nothing we could do about that, so I decided to roll the dice to get people thinking rather than waiting for the joke. I’m very very proud of what we’ve come up with.”

They launched the album with three small club dates in LA, where Shatner was backed by Sherwood and his regular band Circa, featuring Tony Kaye. “I’ve never done a show like that,” says Sherwood. “I’m used to music in its traditional form; this was more like prog rock theater. I’m singing, doing my thing, and Bill’s reading and doing his, and the mixture created a unique experience.

“One night he told a story about how musicians, if something’s wrong, give each other a look – he’d realised the battery pack for his in-ear monitors wasn’t even on. I said to him afterwards, ‘Dude, you’re supposed to tell me these things so I can come over and fix it!’ In rehearsal we musicians might be getting a little tense; he’d be just sitting there, smiling through it all. I’d tell him, ‘You need to screw something up so I can yell at you a little bit!’ It was all so funny, and so surreal.”

If Sherwood’s main priority was to keep his captain happy, he certainly achieved that. “I’ve never had a more creative, enjoyable and spectacular time with anyone in any place,” says Shatner of his co-writer. “There are such unbelievable players on the album.

“I’d worried there’d be a sameness to the songs – but they’ve lent their uniqueness to them. There are songs on here that move me to tears no matter how often I hear them. It’s been wonderful.”

It’s been 20 years since Kristoffer Gildenlöw was somewhat acrimoniously forced out of Pain Of Salvation, the well-respected Swedish prog metal band led by his brother Daniel. In the space of those two decades, the younger sibling has reinvented himself as a successful session musician and solo artist. He’s played and toured with Neal Morse, Lana Lane and Damian Wilson. His solo albums have hit a string of rich and varied notes, ranging from smoky singer-songwriter vibes to stirring moments of full-on symphonic prog.

What he hasn’t done much of – a few session slots aside – is the sort of progressive metal with which he originally made his name. His 2024 album Empty made some tentative steps toward the rockier side of the prog spectrum; but on his latest release, [Humanised], he’s finally returned to his roots.

“I’ve never seen myself as a singer and I think that’s the biggest obstacle I’ve had,” he offers by way of explanation. “With the earlier music, I could lean more towards the story-telling and the lower voice. I’ve really picked up the electric guitar and got better with that, so I felt more secure in doing more guitar work on my own, and also singing and raising the bar. That’s when I decided, ‘Okay, I’m ready to take that step into a heavier sound – a more technical kind of music than before.’”

[Humanised] is, indeed, a technically accomplished album; but one that also retains the emotional weight of his previous releases. There’s a tension running through most of the songs and a deliberate sonic heaviness, but it’s far from one-dimensional. It’s meticulously constructed: even a track like The Almosts, built around just two chords, stacks multiple layers of texture and melodies to impressive effect.

Elsewhere, there’s a full complement of virtuosic bass runs, drilling modern prog metal riffs, unconventional vocal phrasings and giddily veering time signatures. It’s a fantastic album that more than stands on its own merits. Beyond some superficial similarities in dynamics and vocals, it doesn’t particularly sound like Pain Of Salvation, but that shadow was always going to loom large when Gildenlöw turned back to the heavier side – especially as it also features current POS drummer Leo Margarit and a guest appearance from their former guitarist Daniel Magdič.

“It’s a blessing and a curse,” Gildenlöw says of his history. “I’m extremely proud of everything we did and I learned so much from it. But yeah, I think you’ll always be ‘the ex.’ In my case, I’ll always be Daniel’s younger brother and I’ll never be able to get out of that shadow. He’s so much better than I am: more talented, better music, better singer. Everything I can do, he can do 10 times better.”

That seems a harsh conclusion, given the quality of the younger Gildenlöw’s own body of work; but his feeling of being overshadowed isn’t a new sensation. “It was a weird, but also kind of magical time,” he says of his stint in POS. “I’m five years younger than my brother. It doesn’t matter now, but when you’re 17 and your brother is 22, that’s a huge difference. So I was always watching over my shoulders, like, ‘Okay, when’s the real bass player showing up? When will I be kicked out of the band?’ In the beginning it was like, ‘I love doing this, but am I good enough? Am I worthy enough? Am I just here temporarily till they find someone better?’”

As it turned out, he’d hold down that bassist role for 12 years, touring the world and playing on POS’s first five studio albums, including 2002 breakthrough Remedy Lane and sprawling theological follow-up BE. He was only asked to leave after his relocation to the Netherlands produced apparent logistical issues for the band.

“There was for years some bad blood between us as to how and when it happened,” he says today. “I moved in 2003. We played our last tour in 2005 and I had said, ‘Guys, if it’s not working, I’ll make this my last tour.’ They said, ‘No – no problem. We’ll make it work and we’ll start on the next album.’ I went to Sweden for Christmas and they played me a couple of the new songs and I was like, ‘Will you send them to me?’ But they didn’t send anything. They had a chat and gave me a call: ‘You’re out of the band.’ It was, ‘Damn it, guys! I could have left with a little bit more dignity than this.’”

Two decades down the road, Gildenlöw acknowledges the decision was probably best for both parties and says that his relationship with Daniel is in a much better place. “When I left the band, it definitely felt like I got my brother back as a brother,” he adds.

When it came to looking for assistance putting [Humanised] together, Margarit was one of a shortlist of two for the drum seat (Gildenlöw diplomatically declines to name the other). The pair had never overlapped in Pain Of Salvation, but had worked together previously on Within Temptation guitarist Ruud Jolie’s prog side-project, For All We Know. “I know a lot of great drummers,” Gildenlöw says, “but there has to be a little bit extra. There’s more jazz and fusion in there than hard rock and metal. It’s not going to be just a technical thing. It has to groove.

The multi-instrumentalist handled everything else himself apart from those guest solos from Magdič and Dutch newcomer Thijmen van der Meer. “The great Paul Coenradie, who’s in my live band, had done most of the solos until now. For Empty it was a no-brainer for him to do all those David Gilmour-ish kind of solos. But for this album I needed something with a little bit more history in metal to get the right tones and the right chops.”

The music for [Humanised] didn’t appear in a rush – some of the songs had been hanging around for years in a rudimentary form. Gildenlöw says he writes all the time, curating pieces that seem to fit together. It’s only then he starts thinking about lyrics and themes.

“I know where the song wants to take me musically, but lyrics are always the last thing I do. This album was the biggest journey for me because I tried so many themes to get it to work. Then I came up with the idea: ‘What is it like to be human, or become human?’ Binary is about a robot or some kind of AI acquiring human feelings – in this case, falling in love with a human girl on the other side of the computer. What is it like to be human but not accepted in this society; the people on the edge who don’t belong?”

These themes are channelled into songs that sputter with anxiety. But when it comes to the future of humanity itself, Gildenlöw remains cautiously optimistic. “On one side I’m extremely excited about what we have done. We just went past the Moon – how crazy is that? But then there’s war again, which we’ve been doing for thousands of years. One side of humanity evolves and the other side doesn’t. I can get pessimistic, but there’s also a spark of hope. I love being alive and being here with amazing people. And there’s always music to enjoy.”

[Humanised] is on sale now.

Following a formative apprenticeship on London’s R’n’B scene and fronting The Jeff Beck Group, Stewart enjoyed a concurrent success with the Faces as his solo career exploded in 1971, when his pivotal third album, Every Picture Tells A Story, and its attendant Maggie May single, simultaneously topped charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

He went on to dabble in everything from disco to the Great American songbook, bagging a knighthood in the process, and now he's finally beginning to wind down, with a farewell tour announced for 2027. But these are the six essential Rod Stewart solo albums.

The 54-year-old, who joined the masked nu metal megastars as they were recording their breakthrough 1999 self-titled debut album, posted a video of his guitar pedalboard to Instagram on Monday (September 28). “We’re about to get real busy,” he teased.

Replying to comments on the post, Root spilled more details, saying, “[One] very important thing for us at this time is to not ‘repeat’ ourselves. It’s gonna hurt some feelings. We’re really experimenting with different approaches.”

He urges people not to expect another Slipknot or Iowa, their chart-topping 2001 second album, explaining that “we’ve been there”.

“The vibe feels honest and true to me,” he continues. “It’s uneasy and reminds me of recording in the earlier days. I’m not saying that means it will translate to the type of music we’re creating or the sound/production of it. The early records had the vibe. You can’t miss that with Ross [Robison, Slipknot and Iowa producer].”

Root adds that some of Slipknot’s more recent material has been “over-produced” – something he intends not to repeat on their next release: “Not necessarily the ‘best’ sounding one. The most exciting sounding… liveliest etc. We did track on the floor live with Eloy [Casagrande, drums]. We hadn’t done that in a long time for various reasons. Everything is analogue and played. All the pieces that need to be there are there.”

The guitarist also replies to a fan who offers a pretty harsh critique of Slipknot’s last album, 2022’s The End, So Far. “Please don’t make another The End, So Far,” the fan writes. “We need this to be heavy and not Stone Sour,” referring to Root and singer Corey Taylor’s former melodic rock project. Root simply responds, “Agreed.”

Root has been critical of The End, So Far in the past. Talking to MusicRadar days before the album’s release, he lamented the fact that the band didn’t do pre-production, and said that more preparation would have resulted in “a better product”.

“Directors will say constantly that they never finish a movie, they just abandon them!” he added. “I feel like, more than anything with this record, we had to abandon it and move on from it.”

Slipknot are recording their new album, their eighth overall, with former Faith No More producer Matt Wallace. It will be their first via their own label, (sic)est Records. They released the single Arsenal earlier this month, but Root revealed shortly afterwards that the track will not appear on the new album.

On Monday, Slipknot announced extensive touring for 2027, kicking off with a show at Wembley Stadium on July 3, their only European date all year. The announcement of Marilyn Manson as main support for the Wembley and South American dates proved controversial, as Manson has faced multiple misconduct allegations in recent years. A lawsuit by his former assistant Ashley Walters accusing him of verbal, physical and psychological abuse has been granted a trial date in November. Manson denies any wrongdoing.

Artist Derek Riggs spent weeks on the 32-inch by 15-inch painting.

“It wore me out quite severely,” Riggs revealed in Martin Popoff’s book Run For Cover: The Art Of Derek Riggs. “I was living in London at the time, and working on that for two months, and it took three months in all – I just had to stop, because I had had enough. It got into my head and I just couldn’t see anything else. I couldn’t think about anything else. It did my head in, because there’re all these little details.”

We’ve stared at the front and back cover for what feels like days to bring you 39 of those little details…

1) Riggs’ stylised signature can be seen as a badge on Eddie’s chest.

2) Eddie is posed next to a street sign which partially reads Acacia. We can only assume it’s a reference to The Number Of The Beast song 22 Acacia Avenue.

3) Next to him is a poster from the band’s 1980 debut album.

4) To the left of Eddie’s gun, there’s an Eye Of Horus placed at the top of a skyscraper. This ancient Egyptian protection symbol is mentioned in the title track of 1984’s Powerslave.

5) Behind Eddie’s right leg, reflected in the window of the Bradbury Towers Hotel International, there’s a sign that reads ‘This is a very boring painting’. Speak for yourself, there’s plenty of references to go.

6) The biohazard sign on Eddie’s crotch? “He’s got a nuclear-powered willy,” says Riggs. Quite.

7) Next to Eddie’s left leg, there’s a plastic yellow bin fixed to a lamppost, referencing the cover of Iron Maiden’s self-titled debut album.

8) Aw. Who’s this? It’s the black cat from the Live After Death artwork. Name unknown.

9) Who’s Webster? Charlie Webster was EMI’s art director.

10) Hungry? There’s a Pizza Hot which can be seen through Eddie’s legs. “The Cyrillic above the words Pizza Hot? I think it says sour milk in Russian,” remembers Riggs. The perfect drink to wash down a Meat Feast.

BACK COVER – SECTION ONE

1) Fancy a pint before jumping in the cockpit and starting up the engines? Try the Aces High Bar.

2) There’s a spitfire from the single cover twisting overhead.

3) In the skies beyond the city, all you can see are pyramids. That’s all to do with Powerslave.

4) L’Amours was a Brooklyn venue which Maiden played often. They returned to play a secret show in 1988 under the name Charlotte and The Harlots.

BACK COVER – SECTION TWO

1) Long Beach Arena is where Maiden recorded Live After Death.

2) Hammerjacks is a Baltimore nightclub they used to visit.

3) Below Hammerjacks reads a sign for Tehe’s Bar, where the gang vocals for Heaven Can Wait were recorded.

4) The angel plummeting down the side of Bradbury Towers is Icarus. Still not having much luck there. It’s not even sunny this time. It’s also a nod to Led Zeppelin.

BACK COVER – SECTION THREE

1) Iron Maiden filmed a 1980 concert at the Rainbow in London’s Finsbury Park. It’s now a Christian church.

2) See the sign saying Sand Dune over the bridge? That’s in reference to To Tame A Land, from 1983’s Piece Of Mind album, which was based on Frank Herbert’s novel Dune.

3) The band called up the author to ask his permission to name the song after the book. His reply? “No, you can’t call it Dune. And you can’t do anything based on my book, because I think rock ‘n’ roll is decadent and corrupt”, remembers Riggs. “So they put Herbert Ails [on the bridge], as in, Herbert’s not very well.”

4) Next to that is a sign for the Marquee Club, which looks bigger than the original venue in London.

5) There’s Doctor Who’s TARDIS. Bruce Dickinson is a fan.

6) The Ruskin Arms was an East End pub where Maiden cut their teeth.

7) Above the pub, there’s a prostitute in a red room. That’s probably Charlotte The Harlot, still on the game after all those years. Good grief.

8) On the bridge across the road, there’s a digital clock reading 23:58. Two minutes to midnight. See?

9) ‘The Philip K. Dick Cinema’ is a nod to the author whose book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the film Blade Runner.

10) That’ll explain the Dekkers Department Stores and Tyrell Corp signs in the background.

11) Asimov Foundation is a nod to the sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov.

12) There’s the Grim Reaper from the Live After Death and The Trooper artwork.

13) The Phantom Opera House refers to the band’s song and one-time Lucozade soundtrack Phantom of the Opera.

14) Another West Ham reference on the bridge. According to the scoreboard, the Hammers appear to have given Arsenal a spanking. As we said, this is the future and all just fantasy.

15) Down the road, there’s a neon sign saying that Gypsy’s Kiss are performing that evening. They were Steve Harris’ first band. It’s also Cockney rhyming slang for piss.

BACK COVER – SECTION FOUR

1) Fancy a fish dish that takes around 14 minutes to prepare? Head to the Ancient Mariner Seafood Restaurant.

2) Bradbury Towers can be found on Upton Park, once the home of Steve Harris’ beloved football team West Ham United.

3) Under the Bradbury Towers sign reads ‘Maggie’s Revenge’, the now-dead Tory Prime Minister whose nickname was ‘The Iron Maiden’. She fucking loved her metal.

4) Batman can be seen lurking in the shadows on the bridge.

5) Nicko McBrain’s t-shirt says ‘Iron Wha?’. “They complained because they didn’t look exactly like them. Hello? They’re inches tall. They’re the size of postage stamps,” said Riggs.

6) Bruce Dickinson is holding a brain, a reference to the band’s 1983 album Piece Of Mind.

But while their logo remains synonymous with “this primal rock stuff” that would become tagged as grunge (the term ‘grunge’ gained traction after Mark Arm of Green River, and later Mudhoney, used it to describe his music, although he denies coining the phrase), Sub Pop have adapted over the years to survive – sometimes, admittedly, by the skin of their teeth – the evolution of American indie rock after the 90s explosion began to lose its heat. In fact, so varied, extensive and consistently good is their roster, we’ve had to be painfully strict about our choices for the main sections here – no singles (despite excellent one-off releases from Babes In Toyland, Shudder To Think, Cheap Trick, Les Savy Fav and a stereo mix of The Beach Boys’ I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times), no comedy albums (even though there’s genius to be found from stand-up David Cross and musical comedy duo Flight Of The Conchords) and no compilations (but really, do track down Sub Pop 100 and Sub Pop 200 for a spectacular snapshot of a particular time in US punk rock). And even then we’ve had to miss out truly brilliant albums by bands including Codeine, Sunny Day Real Estate, the Postal Service and the Gutter Twins, simply because it’s physically impossible to cram it all into just one feature.

The Sub Pop motto is, “We’re not the best, but we’re pretty good”, but here are the records which made the label great.

Green River – Dry As A Bone/Rehab Doll EP (1987)

Soundgarden – Screaming Life (1987)

Mudhoney – Superfuzz Bigmuff (1988)

Nirvana – Bleach (1989)

The Afghan Whigs – Congregation (1992)

Mark Lanegan – Whiskey For The Holy Ghost (1994)

Sebadoh – Bakesale (1994)

Sleater-Kinney – The Woods (2005)

Band Of Horses – Everything All The Time (2006)

Downtown Boys - The Cost Of Living (2017)

There’s a phenomenon that affects astronauts when they travel into space and look back at the Earth, called the overview effect. “It’s reportedly a cognitive shift that occurs that’s to do with perspective and how they feel about their lives,” says Steven Wilson, a man who hasn’t been into space yet but has thought about the overview effect a lot over the last couple of years.

“It’s a mental perspective – quite literally having an overview of where we fit in time and space, or some inkling of it, and understanding in a split second of just how insignificant we are.”

It affects different people in different ways. When actor William Shatner, at the age of 90, travelled into space aboard the Blue Origin shuttle in 2021, the former Captain Kirk had an overwhelmingly negative reaction. “He said he’d expect to feel this sense of euphoria – but all he felt when he looked back at the Earth was a sense of death and nothingness,” says Wilson, as we sit at right angles on a pair of sofas in the open-plan kitchen of his north London home. “Isn’t that funny? Of all the people.”

Others have found beauty or even comfort in something that only emphasises our ultimately insignificant place in an unmeasurable, potentially infinite universe. Steven Wilson can understand this. “Your life is futile, it’s meaningless – and isn’t that a wonderful thing?” he says with more relish than it probably warrants. “And I do mean that. We spend so much of our time anxious, stressed, worried about things that sometimes we just need an injection of perspective.”

The idea informs Wilson’s new solo album, tellingly titled The Overview. Across its two lengthy tracks – one 23 minutes, the other 18 – it makes a dizzying, dazzling journey from the surface of the Earth to the most distant reaches of the universe. Musically, it’s the most recognisably prog album he’s made since 2014’s The Raven That Refused To Sing, even if it shares little with that record’s self-conscious homage to vintage prog.

Instead, the new work offers a much more contemporary version of the genre. “This record is definitely more informed by the genre hitherto referred to as progressive rock,” he says wryly at one point. Conceptually, it’s extremely ambitious. It starts with an encounter with an alien on some unnamed moor and ends billions of light years away on the very edge of the universe, taking in everyday dramas on the streets of Swindon, the destruction of Earth and such vast cosmic phenomenon such as the Omega Centauri, the Andromeda galaxy and the Eridanus supervoid.

It’s an album about the rise of social media and the death of curiosity, about the existential futility and beauty of human life. But mostly it’s about perspective. As Wilson puts it: “Sometimes being reminded how insignificant you really are in terms of time and space can create a sense of perspective, in a positive way as well as a negative way.”

Prog has already heard The Overview through headphones; but before we sit down for the interview, he invites us through to his home studio to listen to it through the ultra-high-end equipment he uses in his capacity as both a musician and one of the most in-demand Atmos remixers around. Sitting in a high-backed chair, bathed in unearthly wall-mounted mood lights, a screen flickering with lines and numbers before us as the album bounces around the room like it’s alive, it feels like we’re on the deck of a spaceship.

The album’s two parts has two personalities. The first, Objects Outlive Us (“The human story,” as Wilson describes it), is detailed and protean – a suite of music that shifts from acoustic passages to warm electronics, capped by an all-time-great solo from guitarist and regular Wilson collaborator Randy McStine.

The second half, the 18-minute title track, is entirely different. More electronic, it evokes the sparseness and coldness of space – emphasised by the sound of Wilson’s wife, Rotem, dispassionately intoning numbers that correspond to increasingly vast distances from Earth and the cosmic phenomenon they represent. It may be a cognitive illusion of our own, but it evokes a sense of movement: a camera view of Earth as it gets more and more distant, pulling away until what Carl Sagan referred to as the “pale blue dot” vanishes; part of an ever-growing tapestry of galaxies and nebulae, as everything we know is erased by distance and time.

“What did you think of it?” asks Wilson, when Prog emerges, blinking, from the studio and touches back down on the sofa in the kitchen. It sounds brilliant, but it’s also thought-provoking, disorientating and existentially terrifying, in a good way. “I kind of want that,” he says. “The whole album is about cosmic vertigo. That’s what the overview effect is.”

The Overview is Wilson’s second solo album in less than 18 months, following 2023’s The Harmony Codex. He seems very proud of that fact. “It’s not quite up there with Taylor Swift knocking them out every year, but it’s not far off!” he says. “By the standards of musicians in their 50s it’s pretty good going.”

He admits he didn’t know what to do next after finishing The Harmony Codex. “Every time, I think, ‘How the fuck am I going to do another record? What the fuck am I going to do next? There’s nothing left in the well.’ I’m always thinking, ‘What can I do next that’s completely different?’”

One of the things he considered was writing the music for an installation of some kind. He met up with Alexander Milas – former editor-in-chief of Prog’s sister magazine Metal Hammer, and founder of Space Rocks, a unique multimedia project that brings together science and the arts – with a view to collaborating on something. It was Milas who introduced Wilson to the overview effect. “It was the lightbulb moment,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh Christ, there’s an album there, isn’t there?’”

Wilson has never had any particular interest in sci-fi, at least not in the kid-friendly Star Wars variety (the cold, existential sci-fi of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is a different matter). What he is interested in is space itself – the scale, the emptiness, the mindblowing incomprehensibility of the numbers involved. He starts reeling off stats.

“There are two billion trillion stars in the universe. That’s 23 zeros; I worked it out with Google! Earth has been here for four billion years, and we – as in humans of some sort – have been here for 300,000 years. That’s 0.007% of the time the Earth has existed.” How does that make him feel? “I don’t know,” he says, shaking his head like someone whose brain is in danger of short-circuiting from data overload. “I. Don’t. Know.”

He dove into research. Not books or movies, but facts. He spent a lot of time “mucking about” on an interactive website, Scale Of The Universe, which allows the user to zoom into the most infinitesimally small thing science can comprehend (the ‘string’ of string theory) and out to the most immeasurably large thing (the Hercules- Corona Borealis Wall, which stretches to an estimated 10 billion light years).

But it wasn’t just the daunting sizes and distances of these universal phenomena that were inspirational. It was the reality of space itself. “Space is very often portrayed as this kind of cuddly place, where people have adventures,” he says. “And the reality is the complete antithesis of that. It’s nothingness; it’s scary; it’s death. It’s fucking terrifying.”

Wilson’s journey to the stars began here in north London with a five-minute piece of music originally written for The Harmony Codex, but left out. “It was good, but I felt it was a bit too progressive for that record,” he says. The piece appears halfway through The Overview’s title track.

He admits he’s not the kind of person who “can go into a hotel room with an acoustic guitar and come out with something.” Instead, he develops ideas from piano melodies, drum patterns or keyboard textures. Lyrics, he says, slow down the flow of music. “They always come at the end. I can’t stop to write lyrics.”

These lyrics – and its overarching narrative structure – don’t feel like an afterthought. Musically and conceptually the pair of tracks are two sides of the same coin. “Objects Outlive Us is about what we do to the planet, juxtaposed with what’s going on on the other side of the universe. Then The Overview itself is basically about being lost in space, on the other side of the universe.”

Objects Outlive Us begins with an encounter with an alien, who asks, ‘Did you forget about us?” – plugging into another favourite Wilson theme: the idea that humanity has lost its curiosity. It also ties in with a recurrent bugbear: our obsession with screens, with gazing downwards at the internet rather than upwards.

“The first line on the album is, ‘I incline myself to space,’” he says. “The idea is that we no longer look up at the stars in the way that we used to in the 60s, when Kubrick made 2001 and everyone was obsessed with the Moon landing. These days we’re more interested in looking into the phone than we are looking up. It’s self-obsession; it’s narcissism – it’s the enemy of curiosity. Curiosity is one of the most undervalued human attributes. It’s what takes you to great music, to great movies, to other countries.”

For one sequence in Objects Outlive Us, Wilson enlisted the help of XTC’s Andy Partridge to write the lyrics. “The whole thing about Andy is that he’s brilliant at observing smalltown England,” he says. “I knew early on that I wanted a sequence that would be this juxtaposition of the triviality of human life with these nebulae exploding and black holes imploding on the other side of the universe. So I rang him and said, ‘I’ve got a challenge for you. I want smalltown soap operas juxtaposed with cosmic phenomena.’ And he said, ‘OK, I’m going to give it a try.’”

Partridge nailed the brief. That sequence, titled Objects: Meanwhile, offers pithy yet perfectly-drawn portraits of a shopper helplessly watching as her grocery bag bursts, spilling their contents in shapes that resemble star clusters; a distraught driver weeping in his car over the debt he owes as a star blinks out billions of light years away; or an elderly widow dreaming of dead spouses as “a nebula dives into our Milky Way.”

“The idea was that you have these little soap operas in Swindon – because it’s Andy, obviously – which end with, ‘…Meanwhile, on the other side of the universe, this is going on...’” says Wilson. “Isn’t that fucking amazing?”

A subsequent section of Objects Outlive Us takes what Wilson calls “a nihilistic, doom vision of where we are right now as a planet”, before the remnants of humanity packs into an ark and heads for the stars. “The alien becomes our guide, and we end up literally floating in nothingness on the other side of the universe, billions and billions of light years away.”

Objects Outlive Us concludes with one of the album’s most transcendent moments courtesy of Randy McStine. The guitarist delivers a monumental solo, one worthy of David Gilmour or Steve Hackett. It’s the point of lift-off in more than one sense.

Wilson recalls: “What I said to him was, ‘We need to reinvent the classic rock solo. What I don’t want is Comfortably Numb – what I want is something that’s similarly heroic and epic. I want you to find a new way to speak in that vocabulary.’”

The result is a solo statement. It doesn’t sound like Comfortably Numb or Firth Of Fifth or any of the great 70s solos that defined the form, instead updating that heritage. Why didn’t Wilson play it himself? He laughs. “Honestly? I don’t think I’m good enough. I can shred a solo OK, but I bore myself. What’s beautiful about a soloist coming along is that they’ll give you something unexpected and make you rethink where the music is going to go. And that was what Randy did.”

If Objects Outlive Us sees humanity’s tiny, cosmically insignificant dramas playing out on the vast stage of the universe, the 18-minute title track flips things around. It features the aforementioned contribution from the album’s other notable guest, Rotem, making her third appearance on one of her husband’s albums, following The Future Bites and The Harmony Codex.

In a featureless, almost mechanical monotone that deliberately echoes HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, she relates a series of increasingly large numbers followed by the proportionately enormous cosmic phenomenon, representing both their size and distance from Earth. ‘Size beyond one megametre... 10 to the power of six... Ganymede, Callisto, Wolf 359...’ she recites, culminating with: ‘Size beyond one yottametre... 10 to the power of 24... Virgo super cluster, Eridanus supervoid, supercluster complex’, the latter one of the most distant structures discovered in the universe. It’s a lesson in contrasts.

“It all goes back to perspective,” he says. “That idea of cosmic vertigo. And that, by the way, is exactly why I think we’ve invented religion. Religion is a classic manifestation of cosmic vertigo: ‘I don’t understand my place in the world, I don’t understand the point of my life, there must be a reason for this – let’s invent religion.’ What amazes me is that it still clings on as an idea in such a big way when you think we should have evolved beyond that. To even understand even the very simplest, most basic facts about space, should be enough to disabuse anyone of the notion of God. But apparently it doesn’t.”

If he sounds disappointed by culture’s inability to let go of outmoded models of thinking, that’s because he is. “I’m a 57-year-old man – of course I’m disappointed,” he says with a laugh. “It disappoints me that people still believe in bullshit; it disappoints me who people vote for, it disappoints me what they eat. But at the same time, I think life is amazing. I think it’s an incredible gift.

“I look around the world and there’s so much to be fucking depressed and miserable about. But there’s also so much incredible stuff that we do – unbelievable, beautiful, inspiring, dazzling. It’s possible to hold those two things simultaneously in your mind: the logical and the illogical, the good and the bad.

“And one of the things The Overview is about is that once you realise just how futile your existence is, and what a random gift life is, you think, ‘OK, fuck it, I’m going to make the most of it.’ That’s the positive side to it. At the end of the day, your life is meaningless – so embrace it.”

He pauses. Suddenly the interstellar camera stops, reverses. In a fraction of a heartbeat, we’ve flashed back across tens of billions of light years and we’re back on a sofa next to a window in a kitchen in north London. “Do you want another cup of coffee?” he asks. In the face of a vast, unforgiving, incomprehensible universe, yes, another coffee would be nice.

If there’s a thread running through Wilson’s eight solo albums, it’s that no two sound the same. The Steven Wilson Solo Musical Universe stretches from the abrasive guitar rock of Insurgentes to the graceful art-pop of To The Bone, from the robots-dancing-on-a-production-line electronics of The Future Bites to the wilfully boundless multi-genre exercises of The Harmony Codex.

The Overview finds him broadly circling back to the same territory he explored on 2014’s vintage prog homage The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories), albeit in markedly different form. “To pre-empt a question you’re maybe going to come to, why have I gone back to a more progressive style?” he says. “It’s because that’s what the theme suggested to me. It all comes down to this idea of perspective. That immediately suggested something more long-form, more conceptual and, dare I say it, more progressive.”

So, you’ve made a prog album. “It’s definitely going to appeal to...” he starts to say, then laughs. “It’s a prog record, yes.”

Having to prise this admission out of Wilson shouldn’t be a surprise. His relationship with progressive music runs deep – he’s said that Pink Floyd were fused into his DNA as a child after being introduced to them by his late father. But it’s also a complicated one. His solo career has often seemed like an exercise in running away from the idea of being pigeonholed as a prog musician.

“Did I run away?’ he asks, almost to himself. “I guess I did. I think the simple answer is that I don’t think of myself as a generic artist. This is a progressive album, and I’ve made progressive albums before, but I never thought that was the extent of what I could do. Perhaps part of making records like The Future Bites, which is an electronic pop record, or The Harmony Codex, which is a fuck-knows-what- kind-of-record, and coming out the other side is that I feel like I can make a progressive rock album again and people aren’t going to say, ‘That’s all he does’ –because they know that isn’t all he does.”

Prog wonders if being pigeonholed was really that much of a fear. He thinks for a couple of seconds before answering. “It’s more that I listen to so many different kinds of music and I love so many different kinds of music that I didn’t think of myself as being someone with a very limited pool of inspirations. So when anyone would tell me that I’m a ‘progressive rock’ artist... yeah, I guess I’m in that tradition, but I also reserve the right to go off and do dark ambient drone music or noise music or electronic pop music.

“I’ve always kicked against the notion of being a generic artist, of being associated with only one genre and one musical style,” he continues. “The great movie directors are able to go from making a costume drama to a horror movie to a ghost movie. They can go from one thing to another and no one thinks that’s off. Do that as a musician... it’s hard to redefine yourself with every record you make. And yet the artists I admire the most are the ones that have done that.”

It sometimes seems like Wilson has a healthy disregard for what other people want from him. He doesn’t go out of his way to alienate his audience, but he certainly doesn’t pander to them. “I love the idea of confronting expectations,” he says. “People think I deliberately go out of my way to upset prog fans! There’s a small group of hardcore fans I probably would be very happy to upset: ‘If it doesn’t sound like it was recorded in a basement in 1972 with Mellotrons, it’s not proper music and people need to be educated to enjoy it.’

“Those people, I would be very happy to upset any day of the week, and I’ll go out of my way to upset them. But generally, people who like more progressive, more conceptual rock music, they’re much more open-minded than perhaps even they give themselves credit for.”

Still, it seemed like he did lose some of your audience with To The Bone and especially The Future Bites. Is that how it felt? “For sure.” DId that bother him? “Of course,” he admits. “It’s not my goal to lose people. But there is another side to that coin. The Future Bites got me so much more attention in parts of the media that had never paid me any attention before. While it wasn’t resonating so greatly with my fanbase, it was getting phenomenal reviews with the more indie, hipster people that hadn’t really paid attention to me before.

“Certainly this time around there are people paying attention to this record that would never have paid attention to The Raven 10 or 11 years ago, and that’s because I’ve made songs like King Ghost and Personal Shopper. Not that it was intentional – I want to make that clear. There was no masterplan: ‘I’m going to make this record and get more press on my side.’ The thing is, I don’t mind if people don’t like what I do. It’s when they dismiss it as trash...” That doesn’t really happen very often, though, does it? “I don’t know,” he says, shrugging. “I don’t read stuff online.”

A cynical view of The Overview – one that glosses over its brilliance – is that it’s a deliberate move to claw back some of those more dug-in prog fans lost through The Future Bites. “No, absolutely not,” he says emphatically. “Because if I were to do that, I would have done it with The Harmony Codex. It’s hard to answer that question, because on the one hand I’m aware that it’s going to happen; on the other hand it really wasn’t a motivating factor.

“I’m sure some people might draw that conclusion, but anybody who knows me well enough knows that wasn’t the case. Also, with my next record – whatever it is – I’ll be looking to do something completely different. Which will probably alienate people who like this record!”

Even before The Harmony Codex, Wilson reasserted his prog bona fides with the surprise return of Porcupine Tree after an 11-year hiatus with 2022’s Closure/Continuation album and a hugely successful tour. Where The Harmony Codex was written “before, during and after” the reunion, the new one is the first Wilson album to be written since then. Did the Porcupine Tree comeback feed into The Overview in any way? “It must have done, but I can’t tell you how, not in a conscious way,” he says. “Did I feel more liberated? No, because that’s never been an issue for me anyway.”

The subsequent Porcupine Tree tour was a huge deal. Venue for venue, they played to more people than Wilson does as a solo artist. “For sure,” he says. Is that annoying? “Not at all. The reality is that Porcupine Tree came back and played to more people than Porcupine Tree did. When we stopped in 2011, the pinnacle was one night at the Royal Albert Hall.

“I played three nights at the Royal Albert Hall as a solo artist. When Porcupine Tree came back, it leapfrogged all that and we sold out Wembley Arena. I’m going to take a little bit of credit for that myself, having carried on as a solo artist. And Gavin Harrison being in King Crimson helped too.”

Does that mean people want a shot of nostalgia from old music more than they want to hear new music? “I’m not sure about that, because we made a point of playing the whole of the new record,” he says. “Everyone who comes to a show wants to hear their favourite songs; of course they do. That’s true of my solo shows – people want to hear The Raven That Refused To Sing and Harmony Korine.

“Maybe I’m flattering myself in saying this, but Porcupine Tree were a little bit ahead of our time in the way we infused big metal riffs with classic songwriting and electronic sound design. It was very unusual when we were doing it back in 2002, 2003. Since then it’s started to grow. A lot of bands sound like they have been quite influenced by us. In fact, I know there are a lot of bands who have been influenced by us.”

The surprise return after a decade of radio silence defines Wilson’s modus operandi. It’s not that he’s unpredictable – that suggests chaos and randomness, which don’t seem to be his style. It’s more that he thrives on confounding predictability, partly from fans but mostly from himself. Pretty much the only thing that links his solo albums is the impulse never to repeat himself. It‘s why he’s come back to prog – or at least a version of it – on The Overview.

“I always like to do the unexpected,” he says. “‘I always like to do something different to what I did before. I do really push my audience around, and for whatever reason – with the exception of the prog hardcore that have drifted away – they’ve stuck with me. Even if people don’t like everything I do, they’re still curious. Even if it’s to moan that you’re not doing what they wanted.”

There’s another thing that defines Steven Wilson, which is the fact that, in mainstream terms, he’s been on the outside looking in for the whole of his career. He’s had huge success within whatever fields he’s chosen to operate in, but he’s never crossed over to reach an entirely new audience. He’s one of the most successful cult artists on the planet, and there’s sometimes a sense that this frustrates him.

“Would I love to be embraced by the mainstream? I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t. Would I love to have a Grammy, finally? Yes. Would I like to have the same level of respect afforded to Radiohead or feel like Thom Yorke digs what I do? Of course I would. Why am I never considered in the same breath as Thom Yorke? ’Cos I’m not as talented, I know that. Or it could just be down to the music I make. But yes, there’s a part of me that does crave that – the part of me that looks at Pink Floyd or Radiohead and says, ‘They never compromised and they’re household names.’”

On the other hand, you’ve done pretty well without mainstream approval. “Yeah, I’ve done alright. But wherever you are, you’re always looking in the distance at something you can never get to. You’re always looking at the horizon, and when you get there you’re still looking at the horizon. You can never reach it.”

On the near horizon for Wilson is a run of UK and European dates in May and June, including four nights at the London Palladium. Remarkably, it’s his first solo tour in seven years. He’ll be playing The Overview in full, together with a set of solo songs he says “will be informed by the style of the new record.”

So, a prog set, then? “I didn’t say that,” he replies good-humouredly. “But I think Prog readers will be happy with the set. I’m going to be doing more long-form tracks. That’s not a cynical thing – it feels like the right thing to do.”

And further out in the Wilson universe? It’s too early to think about a new solo album, but there will be one at some point. He’s not opposed to the idea of another Porcupine Tree album, either. “We haven’t got any plans, but I think we’ll make another record,” he says. “We really enjoyed making the last one, partly because nobody knew we were doing it. Everybody thought the band had gone away forever. We had so much fun, just the three of us without any agenda.

“One of the things we said at the end of the Closure/Continuation cycle was that if we were going to make another record, it would have to be something different that we feel is exciting. So yeah, I’d be surprised if we didn’t make another record.”

Given The Overview was seeded by a conversation about space, so Wilson is keen to dive deeper into that world. He invited astronomer Dr Stuart Clark – a member of prog rockers Storm Deva – to a recent Atmos playback of the album, and would like to involve astronauts with their experience of having gone into space. “Imagine someone who has actually experienced the overview effect talking about it,” he says. He has plans to visit an observatory in Chile to look first-hand into the cosmos.

Any musician could conceivably do this. What sets Steven Wilson aside is that he’s actually thinking about doing it. In a world where success is measured in streams and views and the luck of the algorithm, there’s something to be said for turning left when everyone else turns right. The sky isn’t the limit. That’s the whole point.

“Just be emboldened to do what the fuck you want,” he says. “These days, you can never second-guess what people want or what’s going to do well and what isn’t. So just do what the fuck you want. Being able to do that, that’s got to be the measure of success, right?”

Keys To Ascension marked the first proper reunion of the Tales From Topographic Oceans/Going For The One/Tormato line-up of the band of Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, Rick Wakeman and Alan White since the early 1980s (although all five had featured on the multi-line-up Union album of 1991 and subsequent tour).

The band regrouped following the splintering of Yes after 1994's Talk, when a new manager struck a deal with the Essential label (a subsidiary of Castle Communications) for a live album as long as the 70s line-up reunited. The new line-up had recorded two lengthy new songs, Be The One and That, That Is, but the record company's attention was on a new live album.

Three live shows were recorded at the Fremont Theater in San Luis Obispo, California and the two studio tracks were added to the end of the 1996 live album Keys To Ascension. More new studio material was recorded, but no new studio album was forthcoming. Instead, a second live volume, Keys To Ascension 2, was released in 1997 with more studio material.

Angered by the lack of interest in the new material from the label, Wakeman again left the band, who then recruited current bassist Billy Sherwood and recorded the Open Your Eyes album, which was released on the Eagle label. Wakeman would never again record with Yes, although he did return from 2002 to 2004 for live work, but no new studio recordings occurred. In 2001, a single CD, Keystudio, was released, featuring the studio material.

The new 2LP set will be available as a gatefold double vinyl edition, a limited blue double vinyl edition, and a studio CD edition, featuring brand new material from Roger Dean and new liner notes from Prog magazine’s Jerry Ewing.

The live material is expected to be released at a later date.

Pre-order Keys To Ascension: The Studio Recordings.

Yes: Keys To Ascension: The Studio Recordings
1. Foot Prints
2. Be The One (The One / Humankind / Skates)
3. Mind Drive
4. Bring Me To The Power
5. Sign Language
6. That, That Is (Togetherness / Crossfire / The Giving Things / That Is / All In All /How Did Heaven Begin / Agree To Agree)
7. Children Of The Light (Children Of Light / Lifeline)

Formed in 1971, Vinegar Joe were one of the lesser lights of the British pub-rock explosion, and will be remembered by most as the band that introduced Elkie Brooks and a pre-solo-stardom Robert Palmer to the world.

Six Star General, their third and final studio album, released in 1973, is a prime example of their classic soul-infused rock. Brooks brings a whiskey-soaked, belt-it-to-the-back-row soulfulness that rivals Janis Joplin at her peak, while Palmer counters with his signature R&B croon.

Tracks like Proud To Be A Honky Tonk Woman and Lady of the Rain are a testament to a band that should have been bigger, although their recorded output struggled to capture the supercharged energy of their live shows.

“It wasn’t good enough on record, was it?” Brooks told Classic Rock in 2015. “We did very well on tour, but we just weren’t pushed enough in the studio.”

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

Join the group now.

Other albums released in October 1973

• For Girls Who Grow Plump in the Night - Caravan
• Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - Elton John
• These Foolish Things - Bryan Ferry
• Cyan - Three Dog Night
• Suzi Quatro - Suzi Quatro
• Selling England by the Pound - Genesis
• Moondog Matinee - The Band
• Mystery to Me - Fleetwood Mac
• Time Fades Away - Neil Young
• Wake of the Flood - Grateful Dead
• Live in Europe - Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Montrose - Montrose
• Hat Trick - America
• Pin Ups - David Bowie
• Quadrophenia - The Who
• Frampton's Camel - Peter Frampton
• All American Boy - Rick Derringer
• Ashes Are Burnin - Renaissance
• At the Rainbow - Focus
• Full Sail - Loggins and Messina
• Gone Crazy - Grin
• Inside Out - John Martyn
• The Joker - Steve Miller Band
• Laid Back - Gregg Allman
• Marjory Razorblade - Kevin Coyne
• Nine - Fairport Convention
• On the Road - Traffic
• Please Don't Ever Change - Brinsley Schwarz
• Sweet Revenge - John Prine
• Takin' My Time - Bonnie Raitt

What they said...

"Vinegar Joe were initially marketed in the UK as a homegrown amalgam of The Allman Brothers Band and Wet Willie. However accurate Island’s marketing ploy might have been is a matter of opinion; what Vinegar Joe’s third, final and biggest-selling album makes clear is their empathy with, and mastery of, their craft." (Record Collector)

"Elkie Brooks tries hard to be like a kind of white version of Tina Turner, and doesn't do badly, and the playing is first-rate; the band's rhythm section was always solid no matter who was in it, and Pete Gage's guitar work was lithe and aggressive. The songs are all good, ranging from searing R&B to straight-ahead rock & roll, and the recordings provide a glimpse of the kind of surging, energetic performances that made their shows a major attraction – it's a pity there aren't any live tapes." (AllMusic)

"A pretty well-balanced album. A good mix of raunchy blues rock with a couple of slower songs and a fair bit of funk/soul influences thrown in, often in the same style as Kokomo and Cado Belle. This sounds better today than it did years ago. Elkie Brooks is a superb vocalist, and Robert Palmer ain't half bad either." (RateYourMusic)

What you said...

Greg Schwepe: The only good thing about Mondays is waking up and seeing what album was selected for this week’s review. And more often than not, it’s “Wow, never heard of the band or the album!” And then the adventure begins. This week’s pick of Six Star General from Vinegar Joe was a nice little surprise. And who knew that the one person in the band I knew of would star in a music video over a decade later that featured a highly attractive female “backing band” and was all over that network.

But before we get to hear Robert Palmer, we are treated to the bluesy wail of Elkie Brooks right off the bat with the opening song Proud To Be (A Honky Woman). And unfortunately for Elkie (or any other early 70s female singer with a voice like that), the inevitable Janis comparisons come about. But the more you listen, you can hear that Ellie has her own style and is no Janis clone. Big vocals will continue throughout Six Star General.

Food For Thought has some nice funky keyboards. Dream My Own Dreams gives us a little chicken pickin’ boogie. Lady Of The Rain brings us a little reined-in vocals, which shows Elkie Brooks is not just belting it out and howling. Stay True to Yourself has more funky keyboards and might be my favourite track on the album. We get Robert Palmer joining in on this one.

Talkin’ ‘Bout My Baby features Robert Palmer and a vocoder. You can’t get more early 70s than that. Let Me Down Easy features a rollicking guitar riff and more big vocals.

7 out of 10 on this one for me. If you’re looking for something more recent and comparable, check out one of the two releases from The Rossington Collins Band featuring the vocals of Dale Krantz Rossington.

Mike Canoe: Ask and you shall receive. While, of course, I know Robert Palmer (but mainly from his 80s "plastic soul" heyday), I had never heard of Elkie Brooks or Vinegar Joe. Six Star General may be a little too jam band boogie woogie for my tastes, but I'm still glad I heard it. Dream My Own Dreams hit particularly hard while going nowhere fast on my Monday morning commute, and Black Smoke Rising from the Calumet is a nice melancholy big number. Bigger things were in store for the two singers, but Six Star General demonstrates they were already capable of delivering the goods.

Nigel Mawdsley: There's some excellent musicianship on this powerful album and maybe if they'd written/ released a single in the Status Quo vein chart success could have beckoned.

I did compare some of Babe Ruth's tracks (last week's review album) to Vinegar Joe in places, but I found the former's album a lot more varied. Like most reviews on this FB page 7 out 10 for a very good blues rock LP.

Glenn McDonald: Good band they were. Kinda like a better-mannered British version of Big Brother & The Holding Company. But they came across better live than on their records. Still, they gave us two of the UK's greatest singers. Both Elkie and Robert made great albums in the 70s before tasting mainstream success.

Which is why Elkie's second album Two Days Away, or Robert's Sneaking Sally Through The Alley would be worthwhile future choices for the group to consider. Both far surpass what they did with Vinegar Joe.

Philip Qvist: I always saw Elkie Brooks as one of those middle-of-the-road singers, with her biggest hit being penned by Chris Rea, while my first introduction to Robert Palmer was his rather good 1980 Clues album, and of course those famous mid-1980s videos. So it is a bit strange to hear both of them singing blues numbers for Vinegar Joe, a band that I had heard about but never really explored.

And all in all, both singers pull it off. I notice that guitarist Pete Gage was the main songwriter, although both singers, along with bassist Steve York (who I am sure ended up on Marianne Faithfull's excellent Broken English record) and drummer Pete Gavin, also picked up some writing credits.

Six Star General doesn't set new boundaries, but it's a decent record and well worth a spin or two. Another 7 from me this week, thanks for the suggestion.

John Davidson: Like most people, I know of Elkie Brooks from her mainstream solo success at the end of the 70s (Pearl's A Singer) and Robert Palmer mostly for his smooth, soulful 1980s pop (Some Guys Have All The Luck, Addicted To Love).

I'd heard of Vinegar Joe, more as a pub quiz answer than as a band, and consequently never really given them much thought until I listened to the album today. Six Star General is a competent, professional slab of vocal-heavy, stonesy blues rock.

Where last week's Babe Ruth leaned towards progressive/psychedlic influences, Vinegar Joe favour southern rock and country twangs. There is a good variety of tempo and tone through the album, but they never lose their core sound.

Giving Yourself is a jaunty romp, while Black Smoke is a mournful lament to peace. Talking Bout My Baby has a sleazy groove that is closest to the Stones.

There is nothing on the album that makes me want to add them to my list of favourite bands I'd never heard of before, but it's good music, and almost any of the songs would fit well on a blues rock playlist. A good listen this week and a solid 7/10.

Chris Elliott: It's a mildly interesting blues rock album. Not quite sure what it wants to be and never manages to master anything.

For some bizarre reason, in the midst of my hippy phase I totally fell in love with Pearls' A Singer - and then the two Pearl albums. Vinegar Joe seemed a safe bet, but I'd rather hear Ellie doing MOR well.

Gary Claydon: By coincidence, there was an excellent interview in The Guardian a week or so ago with Elkie Brooks - now 81 years old and still performing. Well worth a read.

Final score: 6.95 (22 votes cast, total score 153)

Join the Album Of The Week Club on Facebook to join in. The history of rock, one album at a time.

Basically, when people are talking about the death of metal in the 1990s, they tend to mean the confusing, ill-advised and often just frankly appalling cack put out by many of the genre's biggest established names during that period. There’s no doubt that the decade was not so kind to the thrash and hard rock bands of the 80s.

There are a few of the 90s big boys here as well, and there are some omissions from the decade that might seem obvious to some readers. Like Machine Head’s divisive The Burning Red, that isn’t included here due to 2001’s atrocious Supercharger being even worse. Ditto the criminally underrated Load series by Metallica, which are very good records and a quantum leap away from St. Anger. Carcass’ Swansong is actually great (yes it is), so that’s never getting in. Same for Judas Priest’s Jugulator and Ministry’s Filth Pig, which are both far better records than you remember. And Motley Crue’s risible Generation Swine, is left out because... well... are Motley Crue a “brilliant” band? No, obviously not.

They all just made it out unscathed, but here are 10 albums we just cannot defend.

Exodus – Force of Habit (1992)

So, in the 90s Metallica sold out and made a hard rock album, and all the other thrash bands stayed true, right? Sorry, but we’re calling bullshit. There are a few examples of this idea being nonsense on our list, but none stinkier than Exodus’ fifth album from 1992. Most of Force Of Habit is pretty unmemorable groove metal that attempts to mix itself with the darkness of Alice In Chains, which is not what we want from Exodus. But really this album is on this list thanks to one song: the truly woeful Rolling Stone cover Bitch. A song where the Bay Area’s most notorious metal band enlist a brass section (lads, what were you thinking?) then proceed to try and impersonate the good-time funk metal of Extreme. It’s a ludicrous idea that’s appallingly executed, it pretty much represents the absolute nadir of thrash metal, and might be the single worst song on this entire list. And you got annoyed about Nothing Else Matters? Give your head a wobble.

Danzig – Blackacidevil (1996)

Glenn Danzig: the evil Elvis and a man who released some sublime and essential goth-laden alternative metal in the early part of the 90s. But by 1996, Danzig was looking a little old hat. He decided to combat this by looking at the success of White Zombie, Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, and jump onto the industrial metal bandwagon. A bandwagon with a set of wheels that were rapidly in the process of failing during the second half of the 90s. If industrial metal needed saving, Blackacidevil was certainly not the album to do it. Sounding dated pretty much before it was even made, the sound of Glenn binning off his smoky croon to belch all over the Republica B-side electronics of a song like Sacrifice was eye watering enough to smear his entire fanbases’ mascara. Glenn soon realised and retreated back to his Roy Orbison records, with his leather trousers between his legs.

Body Count – Violent Demise: Last Days (1997)

It was a different time, guys! Ice-T and Body Count have always gone out of their way to be as provocative as possible, and are still doing it to this day. And that's fine. But there are certainly some moments in their career that aren’t as challenging and necessary as Cop Killer, and are, in fact, just grotty and ill advised – and most of them happen to be on Violent Demise. Like the lyrics of Strippers, for example. But it’s the jaw-droppingly offensive I Used To Love Her, where Ice puts himself in the shoes of OJ Simpson as he murders his ex-wife – a crime he was famously acquitted of – that really does it. It’s a hot potato he’s handling, and it certainly burnt our hands. Ultimately this was just a very bad idea – quite how it got made without some record executive rightly putting a stop to it is frankly baffling.

Iron Maiden – Virtual-XI (1998)

The mid 90s were the lowest point of Iron Maiden's career. After managing to keep their heads above water with Fear Of The Dark on the strength of the title track alone, the band lost their iconic frontman Bruce Dickinson and replaced him with Wolfsbane vocalist Blaze Bayley. 1995's The X Factor wasn't great, but many were willing to give Maiden the benefit of the doubt. That last little bit of belief in Maiden as a force was totally extinguished by Virtual XI three years later. The album was inspired by both their upcoming video game and the 1998 World Cup (?), which is obviously not what you want from a legendary heavy metal band.

Listening back to it today, Maiden have never sounded so tired or so old hat as they do here, even on records that were released nearly two decades after this. The plodding, folk-tinged prog of The Angel And The Gambler feels longer than a prison sentence, When Two Worlds Collide would be rejected by Spinal Tap for being too ridiculous, and The Educated Fool sounds like a load of pissed up football hooligans doing an impression of a metal band. Bless Blaze, he did his best, but this album has been rightly forgotten.

Van Halen – III (1998)

Van Halen were just a soap opera in the 90s: falling out with Sammy Hagar and trying to reunite with David Lee Roth, before settling on former Extreme frontman Gary Cherone for 1998’s ill-fated III. Amazingly, Eddie Van Halen spoke gushingly about the working relationship the band had with Cherone for his sole album with the band, both prior to release and in the years that followed. But, with all due respect to Eddie, this is comfortably the weakest album of the band's career.

The tight, taut, brevity of their debut and 1984 had been replaced with pointlessly long, overwrought and dull songs, with none of the outrageous OTT personality that made them so exciting. Cherone was essentially a “yes man”, allowing Van Halen to indulge every idea that Eddie had, with the nadir coming on the six-minute plus album closer How Many Say I, where the guitarist inexplicably takes lead vocals with disastrous results. They might have thought it was the greatest musical relationship they had ever had as a band, but everyone else thought it sounded like the greatest guitarist of all time deeply inhaling a jar of his own farts.

Slayer – Diabolus in Musica (1998)

Exhibit-B in our counter argument on the classic, “Metallica sold out and all the other thrash bands didn’t.” Oh yeah? Got any explanation for why Slayer sound like a nu-metal band on this album? In the years since Diabolus In Musica, guitarist Kerry King has been at pains to remove himself from the creation of the album.

This is clearly the most simplistic Slayer record in their catalogue. That’s fine when they get it right, like on the excellent Stain Of Mind, where Slayer actually sound like a pretty good version of Static-X. Although, shouldn't the bar be a little higher for the greatest thrash metal band of all time? We think so, but that’s not the real problem here. Ultimately songs like Overt Enemy and In The Name Of God sound like a sort of lobotomised, dopey, plodding version of the band that wrote some of the most thrilling metal ever. It might not be a truly terrible record like some on this list, but it’s arguably worse: a Slayer album that just rolls along, all of it forgettable and aimless, before politely ending. Our Slayer would never...

Sepultura – Against (1998)

To be fair, Sepultura were on a bit of a hiding to nothing in the late 90s. With the acrimonious departure of frontman Max Cavalera after their superb Roots album in 1996, and with Max hitting the ground running with his Soulfly project and getting their well-received self-titled debut out before the Seps had even announced his replacement, many people had already written the band off.

Against was the first album to feature new frontman Derrick Green, and although he is a much-loved part of the band now, back then he was still finding his feet. Against sort of bears the hallmarks of a Sepultura album, but without ever really sounding as confident, controlled or, crucially, catchy as they had on the four world-beating albums that had come before. Instead, songs like Old Earth and Common Bonds just resemble shells of Sepultura ideas, all tribal rhythms and big riffs, but lacking hooks or personality. The balance would eventually be struck, but, first go or not, this is a messy effort.

Paradise Lost – Host (1999)

Is Host actually a bad album, or is it just a result of metal fans' snobbiness at a formerly brutal band bringing in a whole new set of influences? To be honest, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Yes, the reaction of the metal community to the doom metal maestros going all electro-pop was certainly over-the-top, but Paradise Lost didn’t really help themselves with the record.

The band had never really had a problem penning memorable hooks and songs previously, even when they were going for full-blown heaviness, so quite why the choruses seemed to desert them here is anyone's guess. Paradise Lost going full Depeche Mode is not a terrible idea, but the latter are stadium-bothering megastars because they write huge pop songs, and, with the exception of the lovely Harbour, this album is a bit of a barren wasteland for moments that sucker onto your brain as this style should. Plus, the production of the songs themselves sound malnourished and sparse where they should sound bombastic and huge. It took a 2018 remaster to really fill the album out. But by that point, the damage was done.

Megadeth – Risk (1999)

Exhibit-C and the absolute knockout blow to the idea that thrash bands “kept it real” during the 90s. Listening back to Risk today, it’s amazing that Dave Mustaine actually could believe that this turgid slice of radio rock would be a musical risk in any way. Although, writing a song like the opening track Insomnia, which sounds like Def Leppard getting off with the Happy Mondays, and letting anyone hear it, does feel like a risky thing to do if you want people to think you are actually good at making music.

The album's best-known song Crush ‘Em was written by Mustaine in the hope that it would end up being a huge sporting anthem to be played in stadiums around the US, but it doesn’t sound big enough to be suitable for Scunthorpe vs Barrow in the Papa John’s Trophy group stage, let alone the World Series. The difference between The Black Album and Risk is, on the surface and stylistically, very little. But the main thing that sets them apart is that while Metallica wrote Enter Sandman and Sad But True, Megadeth wrote faux cowboy, Bon Jovi shite like Wanderlust, and tried to marry Rush and the Goo Goo Dolls on Breadline. They couldn't even sell out properly.

Coal Chamber – Chamber Music (1999)

Admittedly it's something of a stretch to call Coal Chamber a “brilliant band”, but when you consider just how big a deal they were in the nascent nu-metal movement, it feels fair to include Chamber Music. Because Coal Chamber’s second album was a disaster. Opening song Tragedy features the kind of vocoder that you have to assume they thought would help them sound futuristic, but actually just sound like a pissed up Daft Punk hiccupping into a kebab. Burgundy sounds like Sloth from The Goonies trying to cover Faith No More, and the truly bewildering cover of Peter Gabriel’s Shock The Monkey, which ropes in Ozzy Osbourne (who sounds like he’s just been dragged out of bed at half five in the morning and kicked into a vocal booth) set a new low benchmark for nu-metal bands covering 80s pop songs. It’s an album that turned Coal Chamber from one of metal’s hottest bands to a joke in just under an hour.