In early 1971, radio DJ John Peel was aboard a ferry crossing the Irish Sea when he was accosted by a tall, striking, dandily attired fellow with an Afro, who urged him to listen out for his band Thin Lizzy. Radio 1’s captain of the late-night airwaves admired the young musician’s boldness, and by the autumn a BBC radio session was in the bag. Several of those songs, from both Peel’s Top Gear and Stuart Henry’s 70s show, augment this repackaged edition of Thin Lizzy’s self-titled debut album.

It was a welcome stroke of luck in an otherwise tough landing for the trio who were top draw in their native land but restarted their career at the bottom in London, where they recorded their first LP for Decca, steered by fellow Dubliner Ted Carroll, ex-manager of compatriots Skid Row and founder of Rock On record stall in London’s Portobello.

Comprising original songs written by Lynott plus one from guitarist Eric Bell (the Hendrixian Ray-Gun), Thin Lizzy garnered scant sales or attention at the time, apart from airplay by a few cool DJs. The album does, however, provide an early peek at the many jewels at the band’s disposal - Lynott’s distinctive voice and poetic, cinematic imagination, and the respective talents of Bell and drummer Brian Downey who melded together in a goldmine of potential.

While there were other Celtic rockers, such as the aforementioned Skid Row and Horslips, Lynott and co. had the swag. The spoken-word intro of The Friendly Ranger At Clontarf Castle switches effortlessly into the joy of strolling with his girl under starry skies, swept along by Bell’s glowing playing, and flows into Honesty Is No Excuse, one of Lynott’s finest songs.

Diddy Levine and Clifton Grange Hotel (owned by Lynott’s mum) both weave a musical tale from chequered familial history. It’s a pity that the powerfully atmospheric Eire is only two minutes long, when it cries out to be an epic. (Metallica thought so too.)

This three-CD/four-LP set includes new stereo mixes by Richard Whittaker and rarities, including the debut single The Farmer, the New Day EP, and the previously unreleased Beggar’s Song, along with BBC sessions and instrumental outtakes. The generously illustrated book of early-days memorabilia will delight the dedicated. From Crumlin to Sydney Opera House is some giant, long-legged leap, and much changed along the way, but here’s how Thin Lizzy’s fantastic voyage began.

In 2016, to mark the 40th anniversary of his debut solo album, former Yes singer Jon Anderson looked told Prog about the amount of pressure he’d laid on himself to create almost every aspect of Olias Of Sunhillow alone.

One morning around dawn in spring 1976, Jon Anderson burst into tears. Yes’ lead vocalist was in his garage/home studio in Buckinghamshire, recording his first solo album, Olias Of Sunhillow. The singer had spent days attempting to synchronise drums, bells, voices and what he calls “a Middle Eastern guitar” to create a vital passage of music. In 2016, this would all be done at the touch of a button – but all those years ago it was still a painstaking process. Anderson was also playing every instrument on the record.

Late one night, after trying to co-ordinate the tracks yet again, he’d dozed off at the console. When he awoke, he had no idea if the process had worked. As the dawn chorus began outside and hazy sunlight peeked through the studio window, he pressed ‘play’.

A perfectly synchronised one‑man mini-symphony floated out of the speakers. Anderson felt a rush of relief and joy – and that’s when the tears flowed. “I was in a state of madness making that album,” he says now. “But whenever I listen to it, I thank the gods.” Today he still marvels at the power of nature and the human mind, just as he did four decades ago on his debut solo LP. But the story of his 1976 album began long before he ventured into his studio.

“I’d been thinking about Olias Of Sunhillow for a long while before I actually wrote it,” he says. “When Roger Dean started creating artwork for Yes, I saw the ship he’d drawn sailing around the planet for Fragile [in 1971], and thought it was a very interesting concept.” Anderson then spent “a period of a year” composing a story about a magician/hero who rescues his people from their dying planet in a galleon-style Noah’s Ark-cum-spaceship.

In the meantime, though, his day job meant he was busy conquering another planet – ours. Yes’ imperial phase had begun with Fragile and continued until 1974’s Relayer. Each of the five albums they released during this period, including the live Yessongs, went Top 10 in Britain and Top 20 in the US, with Tales From Topographic Oceans reaching No.1 at home.

These figures make sense of the commercial and musical landscape in which Anderson created his brain-boggling concept album. As a huge hit group, if Yes wanted time off to each make a solo album – even the drummer – then Atlantic Records indulged them.

Their temporary separation began on 24 August 1975, the day after they headlined the Reading Festival above Supertramp and southern rockers The Ozark Mountain Daredevils. “We’d been touring and recording for five years solid,” explains Anderson. “It was time for a break. I’d been waiting for a space in which to make my own record.”

His bandmates had the same idea – and the NME warned its readers to prepare for “Five versions of If I Ruled The World.” Guitarist Steve Howe’s Beginnings, an album of knotty guitar solos and rather harsh vocals, arrived in October ’75. Bassist Chris Squire’s Fish Out Of Water, a collection of anthemic art rock featuring a full orchestra and the St Paul’s Cathedral organ, followed a month later. Drummer Alan White’s understated Ramshackled – basically White drumming in a band with his non-Yes mates – turned up in the New Year.

Not that Anderson was paying much attention. “I sang on Alan’s album,” he recalls vaguely. He and Howe contributed to White’s version of poet William Blake’s Spring – Song Of Innocence. “I liked the other band members’ records,” Anderson adds. “But I was in such a strange state of mind I wasn’t very connected to anybody.”

After the Yes tour, he returned to the seven-bedroom country house he shared with his first wife, Jenny, and their children, in the Chiltern Hills some 25 miles from London – and stayed there. “Seer Green, Buckinghamshire, was in the country, so I didn’t have to bother with the city any more,” he says. “I was surrounded by trees, birds and bees, and started living a hermit‑like existence.”

He went into the garage and began creating. While Dean’s artwork for Fragile was one inspiration, another came from the painter and mystic Vera Stanley Alder’s books, The Finding Of The Third Eye and The Initiation Of The World. Both had been published in the 1930s, but had found a new readership among the spiritually inclined pop generation – even Elvis was a fan.

“Vera Stanley Alder talked about the connection we have with the third eye,” Anderson explains, referring to an ‘invisible’ inner vision through which some believe we can access a higher state of consciousness. A devotee of meditation since the early 70s, he regarded the third eye as “a beacon – like a radio satellite connection – to all that is divine.”

Meanwhile, in The Initiation Of The World, Alder posited the theory that there had once been four “nature tribes” on the planet. “There was Negro, Asian, Oriental and Nordic,” says Anderson. “And that’s where the four tribes in Olias Of Sunhillow came from. My four tribes were not physical tribes, but music consciousness tribes.”

Anderson’s tribes – Nagranium, Asatranius, Oractaniom and Nordranious – existed, he said, “through music, rhythms and tempos.” Their planet, Sunhillow, was on the verge of collapse after a volcanic disaster. The titular hero builds a ship, the Moorglade Mover, to transport his people to a new planet. He’s helped in his endeavours by fellow magicians Ranyart, the ship’s navigator, and Qoquac, the four tribes’ appointed spokesperson. As Yes’ producer Eddy Offord once divulged: “All of Yes – apart from Rick Wakeman – smoked a lot of dope.”

But open the window and let out the bong smoke, and what you have is a story about Anderson’s long-held belief that music is more than it seems. “It’s a vibrational energy,” he insists. “You have people singing, dancing, crying and loving to music. It’s more than just Top 10.”

The album’s eco-conscious message also seems relevant in the era of global warming. The nature-loving, eco‑aware Anderson was ahead of the curve. In 1975, The Green Party was still called The Ecology Party and was widely dismissed in the mainstream press as a haven for cranks and hippies.

Like the story, the music was personal. Having made seven studio albums with Yes, Anderson wanted to write on his own and play everything on the record. Olias Of Sunhillow was the music inside his head, uninterrupted by, say, Chris Squire’s earthquaking bass.

By this time, though, Anderson had met his future collaborator, former Aphrodite’s Child keyboard player Vangelis. After Wakeman left Yes for the first time in 1974, Vangelis joined them for a jam session/audition in Paris. However, the Greek maestro was too much for a band that already contained several large egos. “It was crazy,” laughs Anderson. “Vangelis was a one-man band anyway.”

The pair’s friendship led to later speculation that he played, albeit uncredited, on Olias Of Sunhillow. Not true. “I had been spending time with Vangelis and I’d learned a lot,” points out Anderson. “But I wanted no one else on the album. Vangelis never heard the record until it was finished.”

The mythical connection came from Anderson contributing to Vangelis’ solo album Heaven And Hell in late ’75. Anderson sang on So Long Ago, So Clear, from Heaven And Hell Part One. Its choral vocals and waterfall keyboard effects do sound like a forerunner to Olias Of Sunhillow.

The singer describes the time he spent making the record as “going to music school.” Yes’ studio technician and live engineer Mike Dunne worked the desk, while Anderson took care of vocals, percussion, guitar, harp, Moog, sitar, flute and a Turkish lute-style instrument known as a saz. “What I learned was that you can play instruments and it works, even if you don’t play them incredibly well,” he says. “You don’t have to be that good, but you can merge a guitar with a harp or a sitar or a flute and create new sounds.”

Borrowing from Vangelis’ tireless work ethic (“That guy never stopped”), he worked 10 hours a day, with only Dunne allowed to hear the music they were making: “I didn’t play it to anyone else, not even my wife.” He also banned Atlantic Records’ president Ahmet Ertegun – whom he describes as “a father figure” – from hearing a note. “The record company kept asking, ‘What are you doing, Jon?’ I said, ‘I can’t tell you.’”

Asked if he ever wished he had the rest of Yes to help him with the album, he responds with a wary chuckle. “No! I didn’t want anyone to hear it as they might not like it. I was very cautious.”

Interviewed in 2000, Offord suggested that a lot of Yes’ creative tension came from former teenage session muso Howe and some of the others questioning Anderson’s musical credentials. “Everyone criticised Jon for his lack of musical training,” said Offord, “but I think that’s one of his beauties.”

Perhaps learning to play the harp and driving himself insane with flutes, sitars and a Turkish lute was Andersons way of proving he was a ‘proper’ musician. “I wanted to come out feeling like I had achieved something,” he admits, “because I was always relying on other people to create the work. Doing it on my own gave me the chance to create something unique.”

His greatest instrument, of course, was his voice – something none of his bandmates could match. Above all, Olias is a vehicle for some extraordinary vocals and lyrics. When confronted by their singer’s abstract words, the rest of Yes often wondered what astral plane the singer was living on. But in the garage at Seer Green, he could sing what he liked, unchallenged.

So much so that he even created a new language for one track, Sound Out The Galleon. The lyrics, ‘Do ga riytan, sha too Raytan, gan matta sha pa… mutto matto mutto…’ have always fascinated long-time watchers – especially the permanently stoned ones. “Those words were a solo for my voice,” he explains. “I couldn’t play a solo on an instrument so I used my voice instead.”

It wasn’t the first time Anderson had done so. We Have Heaven, his solo song on Fragile, was a repetitive vocal cycle and another forerunner to the ideas explored on Sound Out The Galleon. “The different language was a vocal exercise,” he elaborates. “I still do that now. If I don’t have a lyric, I make a sound. On Olias, I sang it and sang it until we created 20 voices and finished up with this tangible energy.”

But after three and a half months in the studio, Anderson had reached his “state of madness.”

“There’s a point in the story where the four tribes have to board the Moorglade, and they come from different parts of the planet,” he recalls. “The music has to reflect that – but it drove me mad.”

He’d created different musical motifs for each of the tribes. He outlined those differences in his story/sleevenotes: “Nagranium – deep dark skinned stretch beat”; “Asatranius – jangled lines of monotone,” and so on. The result was, he says, “drums, bells from Asia, sitars, Middle Eastern guitars…” He then had to transfer these sounds from four tape recorders into a 24-track machine to create around six minutes of music.

“There were no click tracks then,” he says. “But I had a metronome, so I’d created everything in the right tempo.” The problem was that after four minutes, “the tapes would go out of whack.” This went on for three days until Dunne could take no more. “Mike was a wonderful engineer, but decided to go home. He’d been sleeping in the garage and I used to wake him up so we could try syncing these tapes again. It was driving him crazy. And I was getting so angry because I didn’t know how to stop trying.”

He synced again on his own around 2am, but fell asleep before the process finished. On waking up and pressing ‘play,’ he says: “I held my breath for almost six minutes, but it was perfect. And so I just cried.” It was a turning point. “Before that, I didn’t know if what I was doing was any good. After all the pressure trying to get it right, I wanted to shoot myself. But that convinced me it would work.”

The final vital component was the album’s equally ambitious artwork. Yes had won the NME Readers Poll for ‘Best Dressed LP’ two years in a row (for Yessongs and Relayer). Artist David Fairbrother-Roe’s work on Olias Of Sunhillow took sartorial elegance to a whole new level. But he wasn’t Anderson’s first choice.

“I wanted Roger Dean,” he says. “In fact, I drove Roger crazy, asking when he could do it. But he was too busy.” Instead, a friend suggested Fairbrother-Roe, who, like Dean, was an alumnus of the Royal College Of Art. His previous commission, for Nazareth’s Hair Of The Dog, had been plastered across record shop windows in the spring of 1975. Anderson met the artist, “and David just got it,” he says. “He understood the story. When I saw the artwork for the first time, I said, ‘Oh my gosh…’”

Even now it’s impossible to separate the music from the images on that sumptuous gatefold sleeve, with its intricate landscapes and its Moorglade Mover – part dragonfly, part pirate ship, part alien construction. Though nobody knew it then, Olias Of Sunhillow would carry one of the last great, fiendishly detailed LP covers. Soon after, everyone – including Yes – would downsize.

By late spring 1976, Anderson had been creating for the best part of eight months. He’d planned to have the album out by Christmas ’75. Come the New Year, he was still re-recording most of it onto 24-track – “to ensure the colours and textures were right.” Then Yes told him they had to go on tour.

“We were supposed to play in Japan, but I had to say, ‘Sorry guys, I’m not finished yet,’” he recalls. “They wanted to make money, so that did not go down well at all. But I was mentally wrecked – totally exhausted.”

Olias Of Sunhillow was finally revealed to the world on July 9, 1976, by which time Yes had begun their optimistically titled ‘Solo Albums’ US tour – within a fortnight all their solo tracks had been dumped from the setlist. Ocean Song, the opening track on Anderson’s record, was played only once as an introduction to the show. Even in 1976, it seemed audiences only wanted ‘the hits.’

NME’s prediction about “five versions of If I Ruled The World…” was also wide of the mark. Yes ruled the world; the band’s individual members less so. Beginnings and Fish Out Of Water made the UK Top 30; Ramshackled and Patrick Moraz’s solo concept LP The Story Of I didn’t. As the instantly recognisable voice of Yes, Anderson was in a stronger position than the others. Olias was a UK No.8 hit and made the Billboard Top 50.

“An unashamedly romantic solo album that combines grace, taste and power,” wrote Yes aficionado Chris Welch in Melody Maker. He also saw similarities between its fusion of “folk imagery and space” and science fiction writer Brian Aldiss’ novels Non-Stop and Hothouse. Like Olias… both books dealt with extraterrestrials, ancient civilisations and the elemental power of nature.

Anderson’s bandmates weren’t quite so effusive in their praise though. “We were all lost in our own little worlds. It was weird. Alan told me he loved it. Chris said he liked it…” What about Steve Howe? “Steve didn’t say much. But I wasn’t fishing for compliments.”

Instead, an outside musician became Olias Of Sunhillow’s great cheerleader. “Vangelis told me it was wonderful, a classic work,” says Anderson. “It felt good to hear that from someone I respected, because up until then I didn’t know if it was good or not.”

Interviewed in 1976, Anderson told the music press that he hoped people “wouldn’t read too many hidden meanings” into the record, and was reluctant to discuss the story in too much detail: “He’s sufficiently aware of the cynicism prevalent in rock not to wish to be exposed to instant ridicule,” speculated Melody Maker.

He’s altogether less self-conscious now: “It’s a wonderful experience whenever I hear any moment; it still sounds fresh and different.” That said, a planned sequel, The Songs of Zamran: Son of Olias,, is still to be completed.

Much like its artwork, Olias is a flashback to a bygone era: a science-fantasy-driven concept album released just before such things became terminally unfashionable. But with its trace elements of ambient, new age and world music, it’s certainly not the rock folly that it’s sometimes portrayed to be. There’s also an honesty and innocence to the record. It was Anderson doing what he wanted to do – regardless of whether it was a hit or not.

Soon after the release, he was back in the studio with Yes recording 1977’s Going For The One (“a happy album”), after which, he sighs, “The business started getting heavy on me.” He stayed with the band for two more years. After that he embarked on a solo and collaborative career, scored hits and misses, rejoined Yes – and left again – and sold his country house with its garage/studio to crooner Val Doonican.

But his solo story started on Sunhillow, a dying planet populated by four musical tribes, with three magicians and one mystical flying galleon. He offers a gentle, knowing laugh. “Sometimes I still think, ‘Where did all that come from?’” he smiles. “But, hey, it worked.”

System Of A Down emerged from Hollywood in the late 90s as part of nu metal’s second wave to become one of the most unlikely bands ever to notch up a string of number-one albums. From the juddering freakouts of 1998’s self-titled debut to 2001’s blockbusting Toxicity and beyond, the Armenian-American four-piece made a name for themselves as one of the era’s most idiosyncratic and unique bands.

Sadly, they’ve been stuck in a creative stand-off with each other since the one-two of 2005’s Mezmerize and Hypnotize, though they still convene every few years to headline festivals and fill stadiums, including London’s Tottenham Stadium on July 13 and 15.

It briefly looked like a pair of surprise-released 2021 singles Protect The Land and Genocidal Humanoidz would break the deadlock, but they soon settled back into studio inactivity, leaving the world with a slim but hugely influental catalogue that amounts to just five full-length records. Here’s every System Of A Down albums ranked from worst to best.

5. Steal This Album (2002)

It’s a debate that has been going for well over a decade now: is Steal This Album a ‘proper’ System Of A Down album or not? The band claim that it is, and that, rather than the collection of outtakes and B-sides that many assume it to be, it’s of the same quality of the rest of their back-catalogue. Sorry to disappoint you, lads, but Steal This Album definitely feels way more like a collection of curios and unfinished ideas than it does a proper record. That’s not to say that there are many moments of greatness on here, mind. Opener Chic ‘N’ Stu is batshit brilliant, the groove on I-E-A-I-A-I-O is undeniable and Highway Song is a lost anthem. But the fact that the majority of songs don’t even cross the three-minute mark means Steal This Album isn’t really System at the top of their game.

4. Hypnotize (2005)

The last album released under the System name to date is the weakest official studio album the band have put their name to. The fact that it is still an incredibly strong collection of songs goes to show just how consistently excellent they’ve been throughout their career. The opening salvo of Attack is a wonderfully dizzying way to start the record and the ingenious dual vocal tradeoffs between Serj and Daron have arguably never been stronger than they are here on the epic likes of Holy Mountains, Lonely Day and Dreaming. A very good album in a run of exceptional ones.

3. Mezmerize (2005)

The first half of the Mezmerize/Hypnotize set is certainly filled with the more well-known and iconic songs from that era, hence it just pipping the follow-up. B.Y.O.B. can stand shoulder to shoulder with Chop Suey! or Sugar when it comes to the very biggest moments in the bands back catalogue, Violent Pornography and Lost In Hollywood are massive fan-favourites, and System have arguably not sounded as ‘wacky’ as they do on Cigaro and Radio/Video since their first album. Pretty much bulletproof.

2. System Of A Down (1998)

In 1998, the nu metal freight train was already running out of ideas. After the explosion of new sounds that Korn and Deftones brought in the middle of the decade, the bandwagon-hoppers were out in full force. It’s no wonder that System Of A Down’s self-titled debut album was so lauded in a scene that had come to rely on the likes of Coal Chamber and Spineshank, but that only really tells half the story.

System Of A Down is an absurdly brilliant record whoever you put up against it in competition. Spawning the anthemic likes of Sugar, Suite Pee and War, SOAD’s debut is one of metal’s finest opening statements, punkier and rawer than they would ever sound again (clearly owing a great debt to The Dead Kennedys) it still has moments of fragile beauty, likes Spiders, that pointed to where they could go next.

1. Toxicity (2001)

What else was it ever going to be? Toxicity remains one of the most essential releases made by any band in the history of metal. Debuting at number one on the US Billboard 200, it turned System from hot new cult band to one of the biggest names in the world of music. That it managed this feat without sacrificing one iota of the bands quirks and oddness is an even more stunning achievement.

Now that songs like the title track, Prison Song, Ariels and the career-dominating Chop Suey! are so deeply woven into the fabric of metal it would be easy to forget just how bizarre and challenging those compositions are, but the fact they turned them into genuine generational anthems is a trick that maybe no other band can claim to have done.

Do yourself a favour and listen to this album with fresh ears: Toxicity has refused to age, unlike so many releases by System’s nu metal peers, and still sounds as weird, as wild and as inhumanly massive as it did 25 years ago. The work of pure genius.

In 2023 one of metal’s biggest bands – at one point hailed as the next Metallica – threw caution to the wind, embracing psychedelics, absurdity and a wilful disregard for the limits of genre. Avenged Sevenfold frontman M Shadows gave Prog an insight into the philosophy, sound and pursuit of discomfort that shaped their most recent album to date, Life Is But A Dream...

“We were cognisant of the fact that this could get crazy,” says M Shadows about his band's genre-diverse new album. Despite their status as torchbearers for the next generation of heavy metal stadium-fillers, Avenged Sevenfold first revealed their interest in colouring outside the lines on 2016’s The Stage, which ventured into prog metal territory. However, Life Is But A Dream... goes above and way beyond anything they’ve done before.

“As we started the writing, we were really attracted to the music that was making us feel uncomfortable or things that would throw you off-kilter,” says Shadows. The album moves from metal riffs to lullabies, techno and industrial to lounge music, often within the space of a single song.

“We had this philosophy where we didn't want to stay anywhere too long,” says Shadows. “We wanted things to jump around and be more ADHD to get in and out of these ideas quicker. I think it becomes a lot more exciting, interesting, discombobulated. It’s all over the place.”

Many bands might feel nervous stepping so far outside their comfort zone, but Shadows felt it was essential “because the discomfort we were feeling on the other side, from doing the same music again, was worse.”

While Avenged embraced the concept of using the studio as a creative tool, Shadows wanted to avoid the slick, over-produced sound that's now commonplace in metal. They used real instruments to create the sounds they were seeking instead of samples and plug-ins.

“There’s a 30-second piece in Beautiful Morning where it sounds like Beach Boys meets Beatles and it goes down the rabbit hole. There’s flute, there’s Wurlitzer, there’s a whole other drum kit, there’s all these things but we’re recording 30 seconds,” says Shadows. “During Nobody there are three drum kits. Somebody could say, ‘Well, that's overproduction,’ but to me there are three different sections of the song that have a different feel.

“Overproducing to me would be to lay down one drum kit, then go in and find samples of the tones you want and just stick them in those parts and then you’ve got a glossy, almost sterile environment where everything sounds the same. If you keep it organic, you’re really playing instruments, you’re getting what you want, then that doesn’t cross the line of overproduction.”

One memorable part of the creative process involved spending a week with a shaman and consuming 5-MeO-DMT, a psychedelic that induces hallucinations. Shadows describes the experience as “the most impactful thing I’ve done in my life,” saying that the trip made him realise how short life is, “and how negative the ego can be if you let it get out of control; and also that if you’re going to make art, don’t be a slave to audience capture, where people expect something of you and you keep doing that because you’re too afraid to let them down.

Shadows says he’s a classic Type A personality, but wanted to strip away his ego. “What it really taught me was to be bold and just do the things you want to do, and once you are free in that sense, it helps with everything,” he says. “It helps with not worrying about if people like it or not, worrying about how it’s going to go over live. You’re just doing, you’re just creating, and so it had a bunch of positive effects in my life in dealing with my family, my friends, love, understanding people better and empathy. Lyrically, the whole record is based around the purpose and meaning of life, or the meaningless life that we have, how you find purpose and make sense of this place.”

One significant influence was the writings of Albert Camus, the French philosopher who explored existentialism and absurdism, ideas that permeate Life Is But A Dream... and set it apart further from its predecessor.

“Albert was an influence definitely on things like Game Over and (D)eath,” says Shadows. “The Stage doesn’t have a lot of human experience in it; it has bigger ideas, like the Big Bang and the starting of life on the planet, but it doesn’t explain how it feels to be a human.”

What attracted Shadows to Camus was his musings on finding meaning in the face of a universe that’s utterly indifferent. “He talks about how the mundane things in life are actually the beautiful things,” says Shadows. “When you’re doing the mundane – watching a show with your family or getting lunch – you’re always thinking about the next thing. But one day you’re going to be 80 years old and you’ll look back on your life and go, ‘Where the hell did that go? Did I do what I wanted to do? Did I love the people I wanted to love the most? Did I spend the time with them?’

“What I love about his philosophy is that it’s the meaninglessness that creates the meaning, it’s the mundaneness, you should be trying to live in the moment. Smell the roses, it’s the simple things. That’s what I love about it.”

Life Is But A Dream... is divisive among fans as it marks such a departure even from the prog metal of The Stage, but for Shadows, there was simply no other way to move forward.

“It was either this or nothing,” he says. “It was either, we’re going to make the things that really inspire us and make us happy, or we’re not doing anything. When you get to that point, there’s no fear to have. Someone likes the record or doesn’t, it’s the same thing. The art is out there, it’s part of the human conversation – that’s all art is anyway – and it’s in the ether and you’re going to let it be.

“For us it was about putting something out there that we really enjoy and something that inspired us. That’s all we can do.”

Though many of its prime exponents had emerged during the previous decade, newcomers such as Bon Jovi and Europe stepped up to join the elite class of melodic rock in the 1980s. New, more colourful recording techniques served to fine-tune the genre’s palette, and with MTV calling the shots, Def Leppard wreaked multi-platinum hysteria with their album of the same name. 

These acts were among the era’s preeminent names, but let’s also give a shout-out to Survivor, Night Ranger, Balance, Diving For Pearls, Icon, Giuffria, Signal, Strangeways and a cast way too massive to mention.

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The new-look Asia line-up have shared a video for their brand new single, The Traveller (Into The Light). It's the first new studio music rrom the band's latest incarnation of long-standing keyboard player Geoff Downes, John Mitchell (It Bites, Lonely Robot, Kino, Frost* and more), Planet X drummer Virgil Donati and bassist and vocalist Harry Whitley.

The track is taken from the band's upcoming new studio album, Indigo, which will be released through Frontiers Records on November 6. It's the band's first new studio album for 12 years, following on from 2014's Gravitas.

“The first track off the album is a high-power energy piece, with a few elements of prog trickery but retaining the accessible chorus block, which was always a signature of Asia’s music from the very beginning," says Downes. "Harry and I started working on this as one of the early ideas that seemed to come together very organically. Virgil’s dynamic and innovative drum parts drive the piece along, while John’s soaring guitars keep the momentum. Harry’s vocals are commanding and my keyboard parts hold the wall of sound together. It’s a song of great optimism, mainly about looking forward to the future and travelling ‘into the light’."

The new album features two co-writes with the band's former singer and bassist, the late John Wetton, Tattoo Indigo (Parts 2 & 3) and Chesapeake Bay, the latter featuring a guest appearance from former guitarist, Yes's Steve Howe and the former from Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy.

“The initial writing period began in 2015, following the release of our previous album Gravitas in 2014," Downes continues. "John Wetton and I started putting our ideas together, aiming to get into the studio once more. It was with great sadness that John became seriously ill during this time and we had put on hold our plans, and sadly John passed away before we could continue and complete it. So, it was always in my mind that at some point it would be a shame not to finish off some of these songs and finally release them as part of an Asia album.

"The album was really a joy to make. I forged a close writing relationship with Harry, and I felt how great was to be working with someone who had very similar musical influences and taste once again, just as I did with John. I feel that this is one of our best albums to date. The songs are deep in musicality, with a powerful and original performance, dynamic and strong lyrical undertones—it’s an album that hopefully our fans will widely appreciate and support our cause to put Asia back on the map. Enjoy the ride!” he concluded.

Indigo was recorded throughout 2025 and produced by Downes and the band, with mixing and mastering handled by John Mitchell.

Pre-order Indigo.

Asia: Indigo
1. The Traveller (Into The Light)
2. Change Of Heart
3. Arcadia
4. Is This The Life?
5. Tattoo Indigo (Part 1)
6. Tattoo Indigo (Part 2)
7. Tattoo Indigo (Part 3)
8. Life In The Sun
9. Hymn For The Fallen
10. Night And Day
11. Valencia (The Ghost Ship)
12. An Elegy
13. Chesapeake Bay (featuring Steve Howe)
14. On A Winters Night
15. Echo Of You

California‘s Palm Desert might not be a location immediately synonymous with punk rock, but, just like CBGBs in New York and The Roxy in London, this arid wasteland incubated a rebellious DIY music scene whose impact still resonates. Inspired by local skateboarders’ imaginative quests to find new spaces in which to ride, bands such as Yawning Man and Across The River sought out desolate locales in which to spark up, plug in portable power generators and rock out, out of sight of the authorities.

Fuelled by beer, weed, acid and crystal meth, these impromptu, free-for-all assemblies became the stuff of local legend. And it was here that the teenage Josh Homme served his musical apprentice, in Kyuss, a brooding, intense, psychedelic punk band completed by his high school buddy Nick Oliveri on bass, vocalist John Garcia and drummer Brant Bjork.

“We were a little young to go to see Black Flag and the Misfits and GBH and Discharge without getting killed,” Homme recalled, “so we ended up creating what we wanted to hear those bands evolve into. In the desert, it was about having to make your own thing, and being isolated enough to do it without anyone fucking with you.”

Kyuss ended up recording four studio albums, peaking with 1994’s Welcome To Sky Valley, before imploding acrimoniously.

“Business started to dictate what we were doing,” says Brant Bjork, “and the spirit of creativity and camaraderie and brotherhood, all that made our band pure and organic, started to evaporate.”

It would have been all too easy for Josh Homme, the band’s most charismatic and confident character, to re-emerge from the wreckage with a vehicle which traded upon the cult success that his former band had enjoyed. Instead, following a summer serving as a touring guitarist in Screaming Trees, Homme purposefully took a hard left, renouncing stoner rock for something altogether more nimble, more abstract and more sensual.

With Queens Of The Stone Age, 'The Ginger Elvis' aspired to create “trance robot music… heavy enough for the boys and sweet enough for the girls.”

Inspired in equal measure by The Stooges, Misfits, Discharge, Can, Frank Sinatra, Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash, the band’s self-titled 1998 debut album, with its motorik riffs, studied minimalism, louche Rat Pack swagger and obvious disdain for hard rock orthodoxy, represented both a razing of the past and a signpost to new horizons.

The wired, unhinged and stylistically promiscuous Rated R was an even bolder leap forward. Introduced by the remarkable Feel Good Hit Of The Summer, on which Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford joined Homme and his berserker sidekick Oliveri to deliver a verse resembling a junkie’s letter to Santa (“Nicotine, Valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol”) and a single word chorus - the word “cocaine” gleefully stretched like bubblegum – it saw QOTSA anointed as “the new saviours of rock music” by broadsheet newspapers and fashionista style mags, much to Homme’s bemusement.

“Is rock’n’roll in trouble?” he asked drolly. “Is it drowning somewhere and I don’t know? I’ve been listening to good rock music since I was a kid. I mean, I love our music, and I want other people to love it as well, but I just don’t know that rock needed saving.”

Homme was right, obviously, but with Rated R racking up 100,000 UK sales. plus Album Of The Year accolades from Kerrang! and NME, his band were were now regarded as serious players in an industry which, via indie darlings The Strokes and The White Stripes, had suddenly fallen in love anew with guitar bands.

“[Our label] have suddenly realised they’ve got this cool little band on their hands, all ready to go,” Homme observed. “It’s almost like a challenge to stay ahead now. Some people may say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, but I say, Fuck you. Catch me if you can motherfuckers.”

Expectations for the group’s third album were duly inflated… which Homme, forever a punk at heart, naturally interpreted as a green light to make Queens’ new songs louder, darker, weirder and more fucked-up.

“There are a lot of people who like heavy music but don’t want to listen to Creed or nu-metal bands,” he reasoned. “I think we can offer something a little more esoteric.”

“It's a three-record plan," Homme said at the time. "The first record needed to step away from Kyuss and announce a new sound, which was repetition, trance, and simplicity. Then the second record needed to fan the music out so we could display it and play whatever we wanted. So, the third record, to get it right, should combine the first two and go even further.”

Sessions for the third Queens Of The Stone Age album began in October 2001, with Homme confident that he had amassed his strongest set of songs to date.

Many of these had actually been recorded before, at the Rancho De La Luna in Joshua Tree, California, during the Homme-helmed Desert Sessions, freewheeling, spontaneous, experimental jam sessions involving the likes of PJ Harvey, Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan, Masters Of Reality mainman Chris Goss (producer of three Kyuss album and both previous QOTSA long-players), Goatsnake/Earthlings’ vocalist Pete Stahl and more.

Homme imagined that he could recreate the loose, organic feel of these sessions in the studio with Queens, but the vibe with new producer Eric Valentine was markedly different, regimented, meticulous and not altogether fun. To Homme’s fury, word began to filter through that “the adults”, the executives at Interscope Records, were expressing concern over the album’s direction, or, more specifically, its lack of direction.

“To other people there seemed to be a lot riding on this record,” he noted pointedly, “and they ended up standing in our way trying to help. Our main thing we had to overcome was other people that were not involved with us and sort of pushing them to the side, whether gracefully or violently.”

One man who voluntarily stepped away from the project after a mere seven days, due to other obligations, was Queens’ drummer Gene Trautmann. Fortunately, Homme had a back-up option, namely former Nirvana drummer-turned-Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, a long-time friend.

“I called Dave and said, Do you want to finish this record?” Homme recalled. “He said, ‘I’m in Malibu. I’ll be there at six o’clock’.”

“I first met Josh in 1992, at a Kyuss show at the Off Ramp in Seattle because he was touring with my friend Pete Stahl's band, Wool, and The Obsessed,” Dave Grohl told this writer in 2009. “This was the first time I'd seen Kyuss and I was blown away, they were fucking great. They seemed like us, like kids who grew up in the suburbs listening to rock ‘n’ roll records, doing petty crime and drugs, just a little vandals from the middle of nowhere.”

“Then we had QOTSA on tour with us for a really long time in 2000. Instead of putting ‘Queens Of The Stone Age’ on their dressing room door we used to put ‘Critic’s Choice’ because they were the coolest band in the world, and honestly, we thought that too. So in 2000, as we were touring with Queens, someone asked me what was my biggest regret of the year and I said that it was that I didn’t get asked to play on Rated R.

“So Josh said, ‘Dude, if you want to play on a couple of songs…’ Then, that day, I was driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, going to the beach, and he called and said, ‘Do you want to play on our whole record?’

“Josh and I have a connection musically that I just don't have with anybody else: as a drummer, playing with him, we share this frequency that I haven't shared with anyone else. It's intangible and unspoken, almost like ESP. I made a U-turn, went straight to the studio, and we recorded the drums in like 10 days, maybe two weeks.”

“Dave came in and made these songs that I thought were good, really phenomenal,” marvelled Nick Oliveri. “It uplifted not only our spirit, but us as players, including Josh: his playing on it really made everybody come forward. Dave was a champion of all things. He helped us in so many ways we could never repay the guy.”

As the sessions finally gathered momentum, Homme hit upon a unifying concept to tie his band’s “eclectic, schizophrenic” new songs together: they would be presented as a selection of tracks aired on disparate radio stations dialled in on a night drive from Los Angeles to Joshua Tree, a road trip Homme had undertaken countless times.

“When I’d do it, I didn’t have a stereo, all I had was a radio,” he recalled in 2002. “And it goes into weird religious stations and really bad, bad music on that trip through the middle of nowhere. I used to really enjoy the silence and then every once in a while the station you were at would all of a sudden let out a screech, and become a new station. I just wanted to bring that to a record somehow. It is kind of a concept record, but as if the word ‘concept’ didn’t suck.”

The idea was a masterstroke. With friends such as The Cramps’ Lux Interior, Eagles Of Death Metal’s Jesse Hughes and Marilyn Manson bassist Jeordie White recruited to voice mock radio station idents – “KRDL… we spoil music for everyone”, “KLON… we play the songs that sound more like everyone else than anyone else” – the album was given continuity and cohesion.

Crystallising QOTSA’s ‘last-gang-in-town’ outlaw cool, Songs For The Deaf is a wild, disorientating joyride into a grotesque world of sex, drugs, violence and death, laced with subtle black humour. On a diverse and challenging album, not everything quite worked - the scorched-earth punk of Six Shooter is disposable at best, while The Sky Is Fallin’ resembles a cast-off from co-producer Chris Goss’ Masters Of Reality – but when Homme’s band hit their mark, it’s irresistible.

Opener You Think I Ain’t Worth A Dollar, But I Feel Like A Millionaire boasts a storming route one riff and a manic Nick Oliveri screaming “Gimme some more!”, First It Giveth deals with chasing narcotic highs, Another Love Song is surf guitar-driven Motown metal and Go With The Flow is a deathless ode to squeezing every last drop of pleasure out of life.

Best of all is the kinetic No One Knows, a Josh Homme/Mark Lanegan co-write, where the thunderous interplay between guest Dave Grohl, Oliveri and Homme recalls Led Zeppelin at their most telepathically locked-in.

Like its desert setting, this is music without horizons, all heat, light and awe-inspiring elemental power.

Released on August 27, 2002, Songs For The Deaf debuted at number 4 in the UK, and peaked at number 17 on the Billboard 200 chart in the US. Its release was preceded by festival dates for the band, including an appearance at England’s Glastonbury festival, with Dave Grohl on drums.

This was all the more notable because, at the time, Grohl was supposed to be in a Hollywood recording studio making the fourth Foo Fighters album, One By One, a fact that understandably alarmed his bandmates. Some wondered privately whether Grohl might ever return. For a fleeting moment or two, the thought crossed Grohl’s mind too.

“I did a one-off show with Queens at the Troubador [on March 7, 2002],” Grohl recalled, “and we walked offstage and Mark Lanegan said – and this was one of the few things that Mark Lanegan ever said to me - ‘You know, it’d be a shame just to do that only once’. My decision was purely musical and motivational.

“Being in Queens was one of the greatest experiences of my life. If you can say that you were a member of Queens Of The Stone Age that’s like wearing a patch on your chest that says ‘I Am A Badass’ for the rest of your life, because the only people that get to play in Queens Of The Stone Age are badass motherfuckers, and that’s the truth.

“Walking through the backstage area of a festival with Queens is like the moment in a Western where the saloon bar doors swing open and the piano player stops playing and everyone just stares. You have Josh, [Mark] Lanegan, [Nick] Oliveri and me walking in a straight line and it's like being in the coolest gang. We never had a bad show. I was now playing drums in the best band I’d ever been in and fucking loving it.”

This busman’s holiday ended for Grohl at the Fuji Rock festival in Japan in July 2002.

“I started missing my friends,” he explained. “The Foo Fighters had become a family by this point and I’d been away from home for too long.”

“I always knew that Dave was going to go back to Foo Fighters,” Josh Homme admitted. “I was always trying to intimate that this wasn’t something the other guys needed to worry about. But band people, and I mean this in a very blanket way, are very easily rattled, because many bands don’t last, and they’re such an unpredictable animal that it’s easy to get your confidence rattled.

“What was great about that time was that Dave did go back, and that said that it’s possible to have a musical mistress: it would have been terrible if Dave had stayed in Queens because it would have eliminated and killed the suggestion that you can do multiple things. In a rare moment it had proved that having multiple personalities isn’t a bad thing for someone playing music. Once you feel you can do anything in music, that’s when you can get closer to God.”

Asked to ponder his band’s new found popularity in 2002, Homme had this to say: “Kyuss got noticed because it didn’t give a shit if anyone noticed it. Bands now scratch and they claw. I don’t wanna show up and go, Please can I get into this club? I want someone to ask me. That attitude is the reason why it’s still fun. It’s like being a deliberate outsider. You invited the outsider in, and now the outsider’s gonna fuck things up.”

Songs For The Deaf ensured that Homme’s band would be outsiders no more.

For the recording of this, his Grammy-winning and best-selling solo album The End Of The Innocence, former Eagles drummer Don Henley recruited a band of musicians and singers that reads like a Who’s Who of rock’n’roll: members of the Heartbreakers and Toto, Sheryl Crow, Axl Rose, Melissa Etheridge, Edie Brickell and most notably, Bruce Hornsby, who adds some classy piano touches to the title track, a Top 10 hit in the US.

Much of The End Of The Innocence was a poignant reflection on Reagan-era America, with Henley juxtaposing the rise of neoliberalism against the loss of the idealistic American dream, the bittersweet ache of ageing, and faded romance.

“We live in a time of great mistrust," Henley told the New York Times. "The feeling that we are one as a nation is rapidly disappearing, and that carries over into people’s private personal lives. I mention lawyers several times on the album. That’s because of the pervasive sense of every man for himself and every woman for herself. It’s a very insidious thing."

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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 June 1989

• Agent Orange - Sodom
• Flowers in the Dirt - Paul McCartney
• Passion - Peter Gabriel
• In Step - Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble
• World in Motion - Jackson Browne
• Trouble in Angel City - Lion
• Extreme Aggression - Kreator
• Gretchen Goes To Nebraska - King's X
• Mr. Big - Mr. Big
• The Real Thing - Faith No More
• Cosmic Thing - The B-52s
• Bad English - Bad English
• The Iron Man: The Musical - Pete Townshend
• Magnum Cum Louder - Hoodoo Gurus
• Margin Walker - Fugazi
• Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe - Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe

What they said...

"Don Henley took some time before completing his highly anticipated third album, The End of the Innocence. Although he manages to duplicate much of the magic of his previous album, Henley has backed off of the synthesisers and expanded his musical palette. He uses background vocals to great effect, whether it's the tragic ballad New York Minute (with vocal group Take 6) or the angry rocker I Will Not Go Quietly (with Axl Rose)." (AllMusic)

"In an era where individual songs often overshadow albums, The End Of The Innocence stands out as not only a timeless work but one that is cohesive and memorable. Yes, it is most certainly an album of the 80s, but its production is so strong that it can still be appreciated by modern audiences as Don Henley's talent as a musician knows few peers. For those with an interest in Henley, the Eagles, or classic rock, The End Of The Innocence is an essential listen." (Subjective Sounds)

"Unlike most major pop albums from the era, The End of the Innocence pays great heed to self-awareness, lessons, and mature depth. It may be cliché to describe the album simply as “pop with a message,” but the precision of Henley’s lamentations flavour well with the over-the-top sonic nature of an 80s album. Henley’s greatest legacy will probably always reside in the legendary annals of Eagles history, but The End of the Innocence cemented his reputation as a solo artist, and more importantly, a storyteller. (Sputnik Music)

What you said...

Philip Qvist: I cannot fault Don Henley's lyrics, while his voice is a perfect vehicle for the songs that he has written, either as a solo artist or as part of the Eagles. I don't rate him as a drummer, but that isn't an issue when the likes of Jeff Porcaro enter the studio.

As is the case with his previous albums, one Mr Henley has surrounded himself with great musicians, songwriters, producers and backing vocalists, including Bruce Hornsby, various members of the Heartbreakers and Toto, and his ever-dependable side man, Danny Kortchmar (or Danny Kootch as he appears on Carole King's Tapestry album). My picks from this album include The End of the Innocence, The Heart of the Matter, Little Tin God and Shangri-La, while New York Minute was just too whimsical for its own good.

So lyrically and musically, The End Of The Innocence is a pretty decent album to listen to, while it did tone down the synthesisers that were a constant feature on his previous two records. However, while it remains his biggest-selling album, I do have my misgivings about this particular record, mainly that an artist's best-selling album is not necessarily his best.

I would argue that Building the Perfect Beast is Don Henley's solo masterpiece, while I would also argue that his debut, I Can't Stand Still, is also a superior album. While The End Of The Innocence is a pretty good album, I won't be giving it much more than a 7.

Mark Herrington: My favourite Don Henley album, one that is anchored by some of his best-ever ballads.

The real strength of this album is the tracks in the style of the Eagles' The Last Resort, namely The End Of The Innocence, Last Worthless Evening, New York Minute, and The Heart of the Matter. The uptempo songs are generally not as good as those on Building the Perfect Beast, although the enjoyable I Will Not Go Quietly and If Dirt Were Dollars are the exception.

I really like Henley’s vocals, and here he’s on top form, with help from the likes of Bruce Hornsby to give its best moments a great laid-back vibe.

Regarding any feelings about his personality, I couldn’t care less, as we are reviewing his music. Overall, it's probably his classiest album, due to the strength of the slower songs.

Gary Claydon: I always liked Henley's vocals, and he's a competent enough drummer, but The End Of The Innocence is just dull. Ultra safe, conservative, white collar AOR/pop rock, which nevertheless sells by the bucket load in certain markets. People have done jail time for lesser crimes than Little Tin God.

Chris Elliott: Not an 80's cliché left behind. Add in the cast of thousands (endless writers), and it sounds like an 80's compilation, including what sounds like a Huey Lewis outtake.

The tracks vary from car crash (cod reggae) to bad hard(ish) rock through to okay, albeit overplayed. The guest vocals really emphasise the feel of a playlist more than an album.

Bar two tracks, it just passes by. You make dinner, it doesn't distract, then you forget it.

Evan Sanders: I'm glad I listened to The End Of The Innocence a couple of times this week, as my opinion rose after the second time, possibly because the first time I had turned on shuffle mode in Spotify, and I was really puzzled by the song order.

What I really like about the album is the social commentary lying beneath or right upfront in many of the songs. As he says with his guest singers on the third song, he will not go quietly. There are multiple strong songs which have remained radio staples, from the title song, as well as Last Worthless Evening, New York Minute, If Dirt Were Dollars, and The Heart Of The Matter, the last of which could almost be interpreted as a break-up song with his Eagles bandmates.

A hidden and prescient gem is Little Tin God, which could easily be a b-side, but has lyrics that make me think of today's AI-driven culture. If the Eagles had not come back together a few years after this one, I wonder if Henley would have devoted more energy to these kinds of songs, rather than playing Hotel California and Take It Easy night after night. I'll be listening to his follow-up efforts next. 7/10.

Greg Schwepe: So, when your mega-huge band is in the middle of a 14-year vacation, you’ve still got musical ideas that you want to share. And when you’re a prolific songwriter who’s written some pretty big songs, you can probably pump out albums fairly easily (says the person who has never released an album!). The End Of The Innocence was Henley’s third solo album, and at that point, I’m guessing Henley wasn’t sure if he was going to be a solo artist from this point forward or would eventually get back with his Eagles bandmates.

Don Henley has always had a lot of intelligent, insightful things to say in his lyrics. There is a lot to chew on lyrically in The End Of The Innocence, and just as much to chew on musically. I’m going to make this more of an album review rather than a literature review. But if you want to peel back the onion on every song on this album, there’s plenty of onion to go around. I certainly don’t know where Henley was coming from on every song, but for me it’s “here it is…here’s what I see… you figure it out and make your own conclusions.” And for me, it was the current state of things in America, all across various demographics and geographies at the time.

The title track opens with the distinctive keyboards of Bruce Hornsby. His piano style is as distinctive as the guitar tones of Carlos Santana or Brian May. And that’s just the start of the musician firepower on this album. When I read the album credits again, I was floored by the list. Axl Rose, Danny Kortchmar, Mike Campbell, Waddy Wachtel, Steve Jordan, Stan Lynch, Jeff Porcaro, Pino Palladino, David Paich, Patty Smyth, Melissa Etheridge, Edie Brickell, Sheryl Crow. Need I go on? I could! Massive talent base there.

Henley is another songwriter (along with Mark Knopfler) who can paint a picture with his lyrics. With Building The Perfect Beast he’d already provided the lyrics for me to envision a “Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac” and characters in and around the Sunset Grill. And there’s more of that on this album.

There's the yearning of the title track. The subtle rage of I Will Not Go Quietly with Axl’s background vocals adding emphasis. The chugging The Last Worthless Evening and its take on relationships. The jazz bar intro of New York Minute. Another picture painted. If the strings and piano don’t set a mood, I don’t know what does. The funky Shanghai-La and its funky cousin Gimme What You Got.

There is no filler on this album. Nothing I have to skip past. In my case, it’s the opposite; it’s going back and playing the same song a few times in a row. And that one for me is If Dirt Were Dollars, with my favourite line “If dirt were dollars, we’d all be in the black…”

The ringing tones of The Heart Of The Matter " close out the album; there are a lot of moods in those five-plus minutes. A perfect closer to tie this one together. Another picture painted.

8 out of 10 on this one for me. This one builds on the strengths of Building The Perfect Beast and ups the ante to make it a nice bookend to that one.

John Davidson: There was some excellent music created in the 80s despite the glossy production and overuse of synth drums. This is not one of them.

You can't deny Henley's chops as a lyricist (look at the Eagles songs he wrote), but they are wasted here on trite tunes and lifeless production.

The second-rate Hornsby piano-led opener is probably the best the album has to offer. Shangri La is a poor song on a decidedly dull album. But it's still heading downhill.

Lots of artists were exploring/exploiting calypso and reggae sounds in the 80s, but Little Tin God has to be one of the worst. If Dirt Were Dollars is (I presume) supposed to be the Boys Of Summer-style hit from this album, but it lacks attack and feels like it's holding back rather than rocking out.

Brian Hart: I’ve got to admit I’m kinda surprised by some of the negative reviews on this album. Let me start by saying Don Henley is not an artist I typically listen to. I’m more of a 80/90’s hard rock fan.

Surprisingly, I actually own this album. I remember liking the singles and bought the CD used. I never really gave the other songs a listen. I revisited this album, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Henley is a master at producing great introspective mid-tempo music. The title track, New York Minute, The Last Worthless Evening, and The Heart of the Matter are classics. They’ve aged well and still sound great.

What surprised me was the harder rocking songs I Will Not Go Quietly (Axl!), If Dollars Were Dirt, and Gimmie What You Got (shout out for the excellent guitar work on this one). How Badly Do You Want It, Shangri La, and Little Tin God fall short for me. They’re too experimental for my liking, and the 80s keyboards and electronic drums completely kill the vibe for me.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised. I have to note how much I appreciate the lyrics on this album. Today’s artists are extremely lazy when it comes to lyrics. It’s usually four lines for the verse and then straight to the chorus. Henley’s lyrics are long and well thought out. The thoughtfulness of the lyrics on this album cannot be understated – even if you don’t like them. I can’t say that this will be on regular repeat. However, I will definitely listen to this album more than I did previously. 7/10.

John Edgar: This is certainly my least favourite of Mr Henley's 80s output, yet it's still a decent release. Surprisingly, this was his best seller, but that may be because initial sales were boosted by his previous album, which had multiple radio hits and videos all over MTV.

At that time period in America, MTV definitely ruled the day. It lacks some of the 80s production vibe featured on his first two solo releases, and because of that, The End Of The Innocence may seem a little less dated than its two predecessors. Now, almost 42 years after the original release date, the whole affair just feels a little...average. It lacks the bounce of his first release, and it lacks the great lineup of songs on his second release.

I have all of Mr Henley's solo releases in my music collection, but when I get in the mood to listen to some Henley, this is probably the least likely of his releases to get played. In 2012, Rolling Stone had it on their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. But then again, Rolling Stone lost touch with the real rock world way before 2012.

Henry Martinez: Building The Perfect Beast is typically considered Henley's solo peak, but I'd argue he reached it here. It has a more organic feel than the mid-80s processed production of Building The Perfect Beast.

Let's start with the opening title track, with Bruce Hornsby providing the catchy piano bed, not unlike his timeless The Way It Is. Both are social commentary, but Henley is more biting here with his line, "They're beating plowshares into swords/For this tired old man that we elected king." (still relevant!)

From there, Henley simply decides not to constrain himself to any one style. His choices of backing vocalists for certain songs illustrate this: Ivan Neville (Shangri-La), Patty Smythe (How Bad Do You Want It?), Edie Brickell and Melissa Etheridge (Gimme What You Got), Sheryl Crow and J.D. Souther (If Dirt Were Dollars). These are among the weaker tracks, but hearing those familiar voices lifts everything up a notch. In other words, no song is easily skippable (except perhaps for the faux reggae Little Tin God).

But the most celebrated backing vocals came from Axl Rose on I Will Not Go Quietly, a hard rocker that would have benefited if Slash had also made an appearance. Danny Kortchmar is a perfectly fine guitarist, but not especially known for power chords, which this song demanded. But turn it up, and you'll at least get the idea.

Aside from the title track, three tunes serve as the album's anchor. New York Minute is a gorgeous arrangement with Henley finally showing a vulnerability he seemingly always tries to hide. This is one of his solo songs the Eagles always play (had they stayed together for an artistic statement in the '80s, this song would have fit nicely). The Last Worthless Evening is the first bookend for Relationship Don on this record. It's very earnest yet sincere in his message to his potential partner; you can do better, don't settle. No wonder it was an MTV hit.

The closing track is the other bookend, The Heart of the Matter. Tom Petty guitarist Mike Campbell returns after supplying The Boys of Summer on the previous album. This is so much more heartfelt and profound both musically and lyrically. It's not a breakup song; it's an aftermath one. He's wishing his former lover well, but the phrasing and words cut deep emotionally. Anyone in a similar situation can relate (and probably shed a tear) when hearing the money line: "I think it's about forgiveness/Forgiveness/Even if/Even if/You don't love me anymore."

The song and album fade into oblivion, and we as listeners are left to pick up the pieces. I think in his heart of hearts, Henley knew this was his solo peak, which is why hell froze over five years later when the Eagles reformed. But at least he left a statement of purpose behind, one that is eminently listenable all these years later.

Adam Ranger: I so want to like Don Henley's solo stuff. But I can't listen to the albums in their entirety. Any of them. Just not my style. I like a lot of his lyrics. But in the main, the songs are just not inspiring for me.

The perfect Don Henley album would be selected songs from all five solo albums. Controversial maybe, but I think 2000's Inside Job stands out as the best of those five.

So I can't score this album highly. It's not that it's awful or badly played, but it's just too 80s AOR/MOR for my personal tastes, and I don't feel inspired to listen to it again.

Mike Canoe: Several decades have not softened my dislike for The End of Innocence. I was 40 years too young for this album when it came out, and I'm almost 80 years too young for it now. At its worst, it's the simpering sentiments of a sanctimonious asshole wallowing in self-pity for himself and his fellow boomers.

Of the five singles, the click track title track is the nadir, while New York Minute is redeemed by the harmony vocals. I Will Not Go Quietly displays Henley, one of the big a-holes of the 70s, sharing the mic with Axl Rose, one of the biggest a-holes of the 80s, yowling about how they're going to keep on being a-holes. How Bad Do You Want It? Gimme What You Got and Little Tin God are OK in that slumming as a bar band sort of way. For me, solo Henley begins with Dirty Laundry and ends with The Boys of Summer. Nothing on The End Of The Innocence comes close.

Final score: 6.80 (64 votes cast, total score 442)

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Fresh from last year’s psychedelic Ritual I & II, Crown Lands are back with an even more ambitious concept piece that embraces not just their love of Rush, but also Yes and world-building tales. The Canadian duo, who consider Apocalypse to be a love letter to their inner nerdiness, tell Prog about their dreams of creating a better world for everyone.

“Ten thousand decibels is the required volume in the universe to create a black hole,” says Crown Lands guitarist/bassist/ keyboardist Kevin Comeau. “As a live band, that’s what we hope to eventually do. Sadly, we’re only sitting at around 100db right now – but give us time.”

It’s safe to say that Canadian duo Crown Lands are ambitious. In addition to their goal of altering the very fabric of space and time, new album Apocalypse continues what’s becoming one of progressive rock’s most elaborate storylines, the kind of tale that might be best told via the medium of infographics. It’s complicated, as they say.

For those who need reminding, the story really began on The Oracle, the 13-minute, five-part final track on 2021’s White Buffalo EP. To complicate things – even at this early stage – The Oracle was the third in a trilogy of songs, the second of which had appeared on the previous year’s self-titled debut album.

The third part, Mountain, was on the Rise Over Run EP in 2017. The convoluted yarn continued on 2023’s Fearless album, but the band haven’t finished yet. “We’re actually currently writing the sequel to that,” says Comeau, “but Apocalypse serves as the prequel.”

Still with us? There are other layers of complication in the story of Fearless, who awakens from cryosleep at the bottom of the ocean to find his planet terraformed (deliberately modified) by a terrifying corporate conglomerate. This part of the tale is told on Starlifter: Fearless Pt. II, the nine-movement Fearless opener, in which the character – essentially acting as a one-man army – rises against this evil syndicate and its army of radicalised minions.

“We storyboarded a lot,” says vocalist/drummer Cody Bowles. “That’s my favourite part of it: getting into the story of it and developing character arcs, or being creative in world-building. Being fans – nerds! – with a big love for the greats like The Lord Of The Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars and Star Trek, all of those things conglomerate into this massive love letter to our inner nerdiness, and we combine it with stuff that has allegories for our world and things that are happening within it.”

So the story draws parallels with the perilous political climate in the US and the controversial activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement? “Yeah, absolutely,” says Bowles. “Apocalypse is a story of the fall of Fearless’ planet, but also of the main antagonist, who we introduce here. His name is Black Star, and his planet falls victim to cannibalisation under the stress of radicalisation, greed and corporate overreach.

“The first song, Foot Soldiers Of The Syndicate, is about the radicalisation of people. How do they become radicalised? How do they become a tool of this military arm, and how do they get wrapped up in something when they don’t even know the scope of what they’re dealing with? What creates that core situation?”

The drummer has some theories: “I think people feel like they want to belong to something when they don’t have power; they feel weak, and they feel radicalised by how toxic masculinity is represented in the media. Some men fall down this rabbit hole of wanting more power when they feel helpless.”

“You push people into desperation,” Comeau adds. “It’s quite easy, really. You just take away people’s financial autonomy, and they’ll do things they wouldn’t normally do quite quickly. I think we’ve seen a lot of young people radicalised to the right. It’s weird seeing people who are younger than ourselves, absorbed by social media, who have grabbed onto a lot of these fascist ideals.

“And I think a lot of it comes from seeing zero stability and not seeing anything improving. When you make things bad enough for normal people to want to join up in this violent regime, it’s going to backfire. And, yes, Black Star has this moment. He’s a tragic anti-hero. Well, not an anti-hero – just tragic, really. Everything he fought for is gone. When he gets back to his planet, his wife and his child have succumbed to the war, and he’s like, ‘My God, what have I done?’”

“His whole planet is collateral damage for the spiral of ruin he’s set upon the universe,” says Bowles.

“Spiral of ruin!” says Comeau, delighted by this new turn of phrase. “Write that down! This is basically how this entire record gets made!”

Unlike Fearless, which came out via the duo’s now-expired deal with Spinefarm/Universal, Apocalypse is released by InsideOutMusic, home to Dream Theater, Devin Townsend, Big Big Train and other prog-minded folk. It’s a more natural base for Crown Lands; but with major label budgets a thing of the past, the band have adjusted, recording much of the album at Chalet Studios in Uxbridge, a small township 45 miles north-east of Toronto.

It’s the space where Rush completed pre-production work on Presto, Roll The Bones, Counterparts and Test For Echo, and it’s become a home away from home for Crown Lands, who’ve been using it since 2020. Last year’s meditative Ritual I & II was recorded there, and gave both musicians the confidence that they could successfully make an album without the kind of fancy studios major labels expect their expensive charges to use.

And then, with the first tracks in the bag, they received a visit from an old friend, producer Nick Raskulinecz, who worked with them on 2021 single Context: Fearless Pt. 1. “We went out for coffee with Nick, and it just felt like no time had passed,” says Comeau. “It just felt really special again, and he invited us down to his studio in Nashville to do some writing together. That was our first time really writing with Nick, rather than having him just producing.”

The first song they came up with was Casting Stones – which, in typically unstraightforward Crown Lands fashion, doesn’t appear on Apocalypse, despite being one of the pair’s favourite tracks from the sessions, because “it didn’t quite fit into the story”. It will eventually appear on a deluxe edition of the album.

Back to Raskulinecz: “The music and the writing process were just so good that we wanted to do more,” says Bowles. “So we ended up doing another track with him, Through The Looking Glass, and it absolutely slapped. We were so excited.”

At this point, Raskulinecz’s diary got in the way with Deftones, Evanescence and other lucrative names. And with some of the drums recorded (Raskulinecz, lest we forget, was the recipient of one of Neil Peart’s fabled Drum Workshop kits), they returned to Canada to track the rest of the album at Chalet with David Bottrill, who oversaw most of the production work on Fearless and whose CV includes Peter Gabriel, Tool, Muse and Rush. He also mixed the album.

The result is spectacular, from the waves of gentle synths that introduce Proclamation to the wild 2112-isms of Foot Soldiers Of The Syndicate, and the lovely The Revenants. Crown Lands still sound like peak-kimono Rush for most of the album, but when Prog suggests that the choreographed chaos of the 19-minute title track’s climax might actually have been inspired by Yes’ The Gates Of Delirium, they swiftly agree.

“That was the part we turned to in Relayer,” admits Bowles. “We’re like, ‘Remember that part in Relayer where it goes crazy? This is where we do that!’”

“Cody had this bag full of percussion bits,” adds Comeau, “and we were just knocking it around, yelling and creating that chaos!”

It’s also an album that presents a challenge. With all that chaos creation and more overdubs than on previous recordings, the duo have to figure out how they’re going to play it live. “We realised after touring Starlifter and playing an 18-minute song front to back with just two people, we had to figure out what the hero should be in any section. Is it a bass moment? A keyboard moment? A guitar moment? Does Cody need to focus more on singing? Does Cody need to focus more on drums? And for this record, we just said, ‘Whatever –we’ll figure it out later!’”

And they did. In March they released a stunning performance video of Apocalypse, with Comeau and Bowles (stepping out from the drumkit, singing like Jeff Buckley in a coat worthy of Ming the Merciless) joined by guitarist/ keyboardist Adam Inrig and bassist Dan Walton, both from fellow Ontarian prog rockers The Dreamland Band.

“I realised how much more freeing it is for Cody and I to have these parts that we’ve written played by somebody else,” says Comeau. “And then we can just do whatever we want over it.”

“Apocalypse has a lot of harmonies, for the first time ever in Crown Lands, and to be able to sing with other people for the first time is magical,” adds Bowles. “We didn’t want to inhibit the music in any way. We wanted to be the best thing it possibly could be on this record. We do have ideas for an arrangement where we have to scale back to play as a duo. Inevitably, we’re not always going to have our buddies around to help us.”

The extra musicians bring another benefit, as Comeau reveals how Bowles can talk to Walton about Star Wars all day, or to Inrig about Phil Collins and Neil Peart. It’s Crown Lands’ nerdiness that makes their music so beguiling: their pure love for the source material, and that obsessive fan approach to their own take on it.

“To be a progressive rock band in 2026 is a living anachronism,” says Comeau. “I think our role is to push further and further into the niche that we’ve found. Our career has blossomed when we’ve gotten weirder and weirder and fully embrace the music we both love.”

And the message of Apocalypse – are we really doomed? “Someone once said to me that we can only tend to the parts of the garden that we can reach,” says Bowles. “People feel like they can’t change the world, so why bother? But I’d challenge them to think of changing what they can within their own lives, within their own friend groups, within their own circles, and making them the best places to possibly be.

“I think if enough of us do that, it will ripple across the fabric of society and create a better place.”

Apocalypse is on sale now.

In 2022 King’s X ended a 15-year silence with the release of most recent album Three Sides Of One. Ahead of its launch they told Prog how they’d got there.

With drummer Jerry Gaskill suffering a pair of near-fatal heart attacks and guitarist Ty Tabor developing an unspecified illness that required “vigilant monitoring”, causing the second axing of a visit to Europe and the UK, the past few years represented a tumultuous era in the history of King’s X. Bassist and frontman Dug Pinnick, too, was twice hospitalised. On top of everything else, the idiosyncratic Texas-based trio were forced to delay entering the studio after a big fall-out with a record label. Don’t forget to throw in a pandemic that devastated the world of music. However, despite their previous album, XV, being released as long ago as 2008, Dug Pinnick insists that there was never any possibility of King’s X dropping quietly off the map.

“No,” he scoffs affably. “My issue was just a hernia. Jerry had two heart attacks but they didn’t cause him to be disabled. He’s probably healthier than any of us right now. Ty has an immune problem that the doctors are trying to deal with. So we didn’t think about throwing in the towel just yet, but it’s going to happen sooner or later. At almost 72, I’m realising that there are things I won’t be able to do forever, such as singing Over My Head, or something.”

Since settling upon the name back in 1985 (though the trio had worked together for longer), King’s X have carved a defiant though less than meteoric path, despite the magazine covers and ticker tape welcome that greeted their fabulous debut, Out Of The Silent Planet, in ’88. Their 13th album, Three Sides Of One is a statement of solidarity from a group that continues to wield a massive influence without reaping the financial rewards. This is something King’s X have had to learn to live with.

A lifelong fan of the genre, Pinnick – who cites Close To The Edge by Yes as a record that changed his life – is very pleased to be talking to Prog once again.

“As a musician I love the time changes and the space for ideas that progressive rock opens up,” he grins. “There was something about Yes: the way that Jon Anderson and Chris Squire came up with those amazing, beautiful harmonies and beneath all of that they would be playing such complicated music. Those key elements never detracted from the other. For some bands that was too much of a battle, but Yes had a knack of making it work. Close To The Edge… what an amazing 18 minutes of music that was; and you never got bored. I would play it to my friends and they would say, 'Oh my God, that is so great.’ And these were people that didn’t listen to music a lot. to me, Roundabout is still one of my all-time favourite pieces of music. It’s a template for the way I write my own songs.”

Does Pinnick consider King’s X a prog band?

“No,” he fires back, smiling. “King’s X is a rock band. We dabble in all sorts of avenues, from gospel to blues, rock and prog. From show tunes to classical. We’ve never been able to add a label to our name and I don’t think we ever will. One of our songs could be based on two chords and the next is a magnum opus. It all depends upon how we are feeling.”

Some might suggest that the very uniqueness of King’s X renders them progressive? Pinnock considers the question for a moment before replying: “Yeaaaah. It’s really nice to be in a band that doesn’t just sound like another band. It has its drawbacks, of course, but overall we’ve been pretty lucky.”

All the same, the bass player is proud of his belief that nobody successfully cloned King’s X.

“I’ve heard similarities – but subtle ones,” he laughs. “When we began drop D tuning back in ’88, nobody else was doing that,” he explains. “Van Halen and Killing Joke did songs in that tuning but their bass players never did. Eighty per cent of our first album, Out Of The Silent Planet, was drop D and it led to a whole different approach on the guitar. After we did that, the grunge generation followed suit – in fact, the whole world did. Alice In Chains were doing the same thing as us, but in a more primitive way that really appealed to the masses.

“You know, somebody from another band once told me: ‘You can take one chorus from a King’s X song and make it into a whole new genre’,” he adds with a chuckle. “I thought that was very cool.

“But answering your question, even when others try [to sound like us], they don’t [manage it],” Pinnick adds. “There’s something about the three of us. We play on each other’s nuances. It’s not just notes; it’s about how we blend our emotions. When people hear that, it’s special.”

Despite the inclusion of lyrics such as, ‘Is this the end of the world/Or a new beginning’ (from its opening track Let It Rain), Three Sides Of One was written and recorded though not mixed before the pandemic. The band used the Emmy Award-winning Michael Parnin, who had previously worked with Pinnick on his 2007 solo set Strum Sum Up and also on a Jimi Hendrix tribute album, as producer.

“I’ve known Michael for more than 20 years and asking him to do the record was a great marriage from the very start,” Pinnick enthuses. “He got us, and we liked him.”

Pinnick alone brought 27 songs to the session, with Tabor and Gaskill submitting their own compositions, before whittling them down to the final dozen. “Our prognosis was that every song had to be recorded to make it sound like a single,” the bassist explains. “People don’t listen to albums like they once did, so some songs have a lot of bass, others drums, and Take The Time was mixed for Top 40 radio.”

Pinnick’s Give It Up, in which mentions the making of a will, is highly autobiographical. “I had just turned 70 when we started to make this record and those lyrics were an awakening for me,” he explains. “That realisation now causes me to live in the moment.”

Destined to become a stage favourite, All God’s Children is a quintessentially King’s X-stylised song written by Tabor about the puzzling duality of Christians with less than evangelical beliefs. As a gay man and an individual of faith, that hypocrisy is something Pinnick knows all about.

“Here in the US we’ve got the Christian nationalists, everything has split apart and it’s become political,” he sighs. “It’s getting scary. It’s all a big mess and I don’t want anything to do with it other than to tell folks to wake up.”

Elsewhere, Gaskill addresses his own advancing years with She Called Me Home, inspired by the drummer’s multiple heart attacks. “For a while, Jerry thought that
maybe he couldn’t do this anymore,” Pinnick confides. “And then his brother came along and told him, ‘Get your shit together, go and make music’ – and he did. We’re a band that sometimes needs a kick in the ass.”

Which brings us to the subject of taking 14 years between albums. If Pinnick and company are counting out time, do they feel bad about wasting so many precious moments?

“Not at all,” he fires right back. “In that time, I did Tres Mts with Jeff Ament and Mike McCready of Pearl Jam, three KXM albums with [ex-Dokken guitarist] George Lynch and Ray Luzier of Korn, two albums with Grinder Blues, my Hendrix tribute album [Tribute To Jimi: Often Imitated But Never Duplicated] and two solo albums. I’ve been busy, busy, busy. It’s not my fault the other guys didn’t want to make music.”

So what has changed?

“The guys felt it was time. After making Gretchen Goes to Nebraska [1989], Dogman [1994] and all the rest, they were reluctant to make a record just for the sake of making a record. The last thing we wanted was to shit out crappy music for people to be disappointed.”

Despite the announcement of a deal with the Australian label Golden Robot back in 2018, King’s X have returned to their old home of InsideOut for Three Sides Of One. Pinnick isn’t keen on raking over the details, commenting: “Some things happened, and they broke the contract in a way that made us say: ‘This is not cool. We’ve got to go.’ And we left.” He adds: “We’ve known Thomas [Waber] at InsideOut for so long, they had signed us for two previous records, so it’s like going back to family again.”

A social media post from July 26 showed King’s X rehearsing for the first time in two and a half years ahead of a trio of US shows. In it, Pinnick admitted to having a “panic attack”, but the group’s shared joy was obvious.

“Each of us was having panic attacks,” he laughs. “The type where your stomach knots up and you wake up in the middle of the night afraid of not remembering the songs.”

Getting back onstage was “horrifying”, he laughs. “After all that had gone on we had no idea of whether we could do this individually, let alone as a band. I had had Covid, which forced me to rehearse at home alone. All of us were thinking about our age. It was like running a marathon after 15 years… without training. As a band, we have always played inside each other’s heads and suddenly I was having to think about things like notes and timing, but it was like riding a bike and I’m happy to say that those days are over. We did three shows and after the second we said, ‘Okay, we are starting to get warmed up. We can do this again. Now we’re excited.’”

However, when asked how soon King’s X might return to Europe, Pinnick can’t be sure.

“I don’t want to even make a prediction because we’ve let people down twice now,” he replies. “When Ty’s doctor gives the all-clear, that’s when everything gets re-booked and not before. Individual gigs are okay, but going on tour is the problem. After flying, Ty needs a couple of days to recuperate. A tour of Europe is night after night and his immune system wouldn’t hold up to that. Right now, we don’t know when that situation might change. It’s possible that he could have immune problems for the rest of his life, which would mean that we could only play at weekends every month.”

With a shrug of the shoulders he concludes: “But you never know.”

The knock-on effect of ZZ Top’s breakthrough 1973 album, Tres Hombres, was a huge popularity spike. They were no longer just that little ol’ band from Texas. Already invested in a relentless touring cycle, they suddenly found themselves playing to sold-out venues across the States. By September 1974, with the album having gone gold and lead single La Grange a hit, the band were headlining ZZ Top’s First Annual Texas-Size Rompin’ Stompin’ Barndance & Bar B.Q., attracting some 80,000 punters.

The festival was held at the Memorial Stadium at the University of Texas in Austin. Also on the bill were Joe Cocker, Santana and Bad Company, the latter featuring a guest turn from Jimmy Page. ZZ Top eclipsed them all, fetching up in sequined jumpsuits and indulging in pyrotechnics and goofy stage routines. They returned for two encores. The concert brought in the equivalent of $4 million in today’s money.

The preceding tour also directly informed the trio’s next move. At the Warehouse in New Orleans that April, manager Bill Ham arranged for the show to be recorded. The Record Plant Mobile Truck was duly commissioned to capture ZZ Top in all their live vigour. A month later, jamming backstage at a rodeo arena gig in Florence, Alabama, Billy Gibbons hit on a dirty boogie riff that wouldn’t let up. Dusty Hill improvised a vocal over the top. Three minutes later they had a new song, Tush. Gibbons borrowed the title from Tush Hog, a 1966 instrumental by fellow Texans The Roy Head Trio.

Selected live recordings from New Orleans would constitute side one of Fandango!, ZZ Top’s next album. Initially released by Dallas rock’n’rollers The Nightcaps in 1960, Thunderbird is a lively enough opener. And while a souped-up version of Jailhouse Rock feels pretty superfluous, it’s the near-10-minute Backdoor Medley that reconnects the band to their blues roots.

The medley segues between Gibbons/Ham co-write Backdoor Love Affair (from ZZ Top’s First Album) to Willie Dixon’s Mellow Down Easy and John Lee Hooker’s Long Distance Boogie. It’s all “captured as it came down - hot, spontaneous and presented to you honestly, without the assistance of studio gimmicks,” as the sleeve blurb puts it.

Side two, by contrast, is purely new studio recordings. “We had enough live material to make up one side of the disc, so we decided to go with the unusual move of making the album half live, half studio,” Gibbons later reasoned to Music Radar. “It turned out to be a winning combination for us.”

The biggest winner is the aforementioned Tush. Despite its less-than-taxing verses (“I said, Lord, take me downtown / I’m just lookin’ for some tush”) it proved an instant classic, giving ZZ Top their first Top 20 hit in the U.S.

“As for the lyrics, it’s not exactly Bob Dylan,” conceded Gibbons. “[But] Tush felt good from a musician standpoint. You can never tell what’s going to be a hit or not. We were enjoying the recording experience, figuring out how to grab a moment and making it repeatable.”

Fandango!’s other great moment is the breakneck Heard
It On The X. Paying homage to the ‘border blaster’ radio stations of their youth, which pumped out music from the Mexican city of Juárez via stations in El Paso, the song finds both Gibbons and Hill in full voice, testifying to the sheer power of the experience: “Do you remember / Back in 1966? / Country Jesus, hillbilly blues / Where I got my licks / From coast to coast and line to line / In every county there / I’m talkin’ ’bout that outlaw X / He’s cuttin’ through the air.”

Released in April ’75, Fandango! mirrored the success of Tres Hombres by going Top 10 on Billboard. It was also the first ZZ Top album to trouble the UK charts, albeit at a modest No.60. By the end of the year, according to Newsweek, Fandango! was still shifting 50,000 units per week. The magazine also noted that the band had outdrawn Elvis Presley in Nashville and broken Led Zeppelin’s attendance record for New Orleans. Ever the droll commentator, Gibbons accounted for ZZ Top’s appeal as “honest ignorance”.

People tend to go big in Texas. On the back of Fandango!’s success, and no doubt fortified by the Memorial Stadium event, ZZ Top cooked up the Worldwide Texas Tour. Kicking off in May 1976 in North Carolina, the tour lasted more than a year and a half, covering more than 100 shows in five separate bursts.

It wasn’t just the time frame that was ambitious. In an attempt to “bring Texas to the people”, the band appeared on a 35-ton stage that resembled their home state. The backdrop was a giant hand-painted desert panorama with elaborate lighting effects. Amidst a variety of native fauna – cacti, yucca, agave – ZZ Top also shared the space with a bunch of live animals. On any given night you were liable to encounter buzzards, a black buffalo, tarantula spiders, a Texas Longhorn steer and a plexiglass pyramid crawling with diamondback rattlesnakes.

“They were actually treated better than we were!” Gibbons recalled to NME in 1994. “That tour was handled by a guy who was a specialist in animal handling. It was well done, a lotta fun. In Pittsburgh, the buffalo gets loose and he’s chargin’ around the arena, didn’t know where to go, things like that. But we just kept on playin’.”

Things got off to an ominous start. Opening night at Groves Stadium in Winston-Salem was preceded by hailstorms, tornado scares and a heavy four-day downpour. Plans to visit Europe, Japan and Australia were cancelled due to animal quarantine restrictions.

ZZ Top pushed on regardless, building up further dates in arenas and auditoriums across the US, variously supported by Lynyrd Skynyrd, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Blue Öyster Cult and REO Speedwagon, to name but a few. By the time they finally signed off in Amarillo on New Year’s Day 1978, ZZ Top had played to more than 1.2 million fans, and America had a new favourite band.

A longer version of this feature appears in Classic Rock Presents ZZ Top, a brand new magazine dedicated to the Little Ol’ Band From Texas. Order it online and have it delivered straight to your door.

In 1971, Kiss weren’t even a twinkle in the eyes of Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. Back then they were just another pair of struggling New York musicians trying to pay the bills – albeit musicians with more ambition than most. Not content with churning out covers in local clubs for chump change, Simmons and Stanley were dead-set on rock stardom from the off. And the sooner it came, the better.

The vehicle they hoped would get there was Wicked Lester, a five-piece featuring Simmons and Stanley alongside guitarist Steve Coronel, keyboard player Brooke Ostender and drummer Tony Zarella. The band were a long way from Kiss’s larger-than-life approach – rather, they sounded like an unlikely cross between The Beatles and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

Wicked Lester rarely performed live. Instead they focused their energies on getting a record deal. One early convert was Ron Johnsen, house producer at Electric Lady Studios, who dropped by the band’s Chinatown loft to watch them rehearse. Impressed, he took the band under his wing to make an album.

“The idea was to bring in all of our favourite influences and marry them into a direction based on the new songs,” recalls Steve Coronel. “Free, Buffalo Springfield, The Move and The Beatles.”

There was one problem. Wicked Lester didn’t have the money to hire out the studio themselves. “We were literally going into Electric Lady when there was free time,” Stanley says. “Weeks could go by, and then we might go in for 36 hours straight.”

In the studio, Simmons and Stanley took a back seat. “We were at a point in our careers where we were happy to just go in and record,” Stanley admits. “We were good boys. We did everything that the producer told us.”

They made slow progress. It took a year to record the album, though it did mean they crossed paths with several artists who were also recording at Electric Lady, including Jeff Beck, Stevie Wonder and Stephen Stills (the latter laid down a solo for a Wicked Lester song, Sweet Ophelia, though the band decided it didn’t pass muster and discarded it).

The finished album was a stylistic Frankenstein’s monster, touching on baroque pop (Keep Me Waiting), folk (Molly), prog rock (an early version of future Kiss staple She, featuring Jethro Tull-esque flutes), and even the odd track that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the Studio 54 dancefloor a few years later (Stanley’s Love Her All I Can, also revisited by Kiss).

It also drew heavily on material by outside writers, including Sweet Ophelia and Too Many Mondays by Brill Building songwriter Barry Mann, plus a cover of obscure Hollies track We Wanna Shout (its ‘We wanna shout it out loud!’ refrain would be recycled on Shout It Out Loud, on 1976’s Destroyer).

“It was done over such a long period that if a hit record had a sitar on it we put a sitar on a song, So we wound up with an album with no focus,” says Stanley of the mish-mash approach.

The band had already signed a deal with Epic Records on the back of a handful of songs. But on hearing the finished album, the label decided not to release the record after their head of A&R, Don Ellis, said he “just didn’t get it”. Simmons and Stanley took the hint and pulled the plug on Wicked Lester. With hindsight, it was a fortuitous decision.

“Paul and I weren’t happy with the record,” says Simmons. “It had a West Coast American hippie sound. We looked at each other and decided to form a new group, which was Kiss.”

Today on, the Wicked Lester album remains officially unreleased. Epic planned to put it out in 1977 to capitalise on Kiss’s popularity, but the band got word and bought the album back from the label. In 2001, three tracks (Keep Me Waiting, She and Love Her All I Can) appeared on a Kiss box set. Inevitably, though, a bootleg has been in circulation for years.

While it lacks the flashbomb power of Kiss, it’s an enjoyable listen, and one that shows off the versatility of Simmons and Stanley when it comes to more sophisticated material. But there are no plans to release it properly – after 40 years of Superman, it would be like meeting Clark Kent.

“It’s not that I’m embarrassed by it,” says Stanley. “You let something pass for long enough, and time goes by and you can kind of chuckle at it.”

Flying Whales is one of the 21st century’s essential metal songs. Back in 2022, Gojira frontman Joe Duplantier told Hammer how the extreme metal heroes made their defining track – and why he’s not a massive fan of it.

There are a multitude of things that set Gojira apart from so many of their contemporaries. There’s the French band’s groundbreaking, environmentally conscious lyricism, singer/guitarist Joe Duplantier often screaming for the salvation of a polluted world.

There’s the mix of technicality and brute force of Mario Duplantier’s intricate drumming against hulking riffs inspired by everything from death metal to nu metal. And there’s their ability to conjure inventive melodies, something backed up by the millions of Spotify streams amassed by hook-laden singles such as Silvera and Stranded.

All three came together perfectly on Flying Whales, the 2005 anthem that has become one of their signature songs. The seven-minute behemoth – originally from Gojira’s third album, From Mars To Sirius – plummets from a hummable introduction to bouncing death metal, before Joe roars about the wonders of ocean life over a torrent of breakdowns.

The song turned out to be Gojira’s moment of self-actualisation and its omnipresence in their setlist for the last 17 years has gifted it with life beyond even their control. Gig-goers regularly bring inflatable whales to gigs and chuck them about, and there’s even a Facebook fan group called Gojira Whaleposting with some 20,000 members.

There’s only one downside: Joe Duplantier doesn’t particularly like Flying Whales very much. “It starts with a super-duper long intro that, honestly, if I’m going to listen to the song, I skip,” he tells Hammer with a laugh.

“It’s such a drag! It leads into that main riff, which dictates the tempo of the song. To this day, we don’t understand what’s so special about that riff, but Mario has a million theories. He says that Flying Whales is the perfect tempo. That’s why it’s successful, because it [matches] the average human heartbeat.

“Then the lyrics are like this crazy, mystical bum that lives in a cave and says, ‘Oh, I wanna reach the whales!’ It’s so weird. I’m kind of pissed, because these are not my favourite lyrics and there’s something clumsy about the song; it has a million breakdowns. When we play it every night, I’m wondering, ‘What’s up with this song? Why do people want to hear this song?’”

Joe may lament the lyrics of Flying Whales making him sound like “a fucking hippie”, but the fact remains that the song’s awe at the miracles of nature perfectly fits his values and upbringing. He and his brother Mario, five years his junior, grew up in the rural Landes forest, two hours from Bordeaux in the south-west of France.

Joe used to pass the time collecting wood and stones at the beach, only to come home with hands blackened by crude oil. Even worse, Mario once went to the hospital with an ear infection after swimming in polluted water. As the pair grew older and discovered rock and metal, they attended gigs in the nearby Basque Country, which was fighting a perennial battle for independence from France and Spain.

“There was some ‘mild’ terrorism going on,” Joe recalls. “They were exploding cars and banks and real estate. There was an ongoing war between the French and Spanish police and these Basque terrorists, so there was this climate of tension. Bands would do underground shows in somebody’s garage or somebody’s barn. Even though I didn’t share the whole ‘independence of the Basque Country’ [stance], I got to witness this electric dimension of rock and punk music that had a purpose.”

Gojira’s 2001 debut album, Terra Incognita, and 2003 follow-up The Link combined brutal death metal with spiritually inclined lyrics that pondered meditation and the course of life. “My political consciousness wasn’t activated yet,” admits Joe. By the time of From Mars To Sirius, that was starting to change. Their love of nature and increasing desire to make music to instigate social action began to shift front and centre – something manifested on Flying Whales.

The frontman was inspired to write Flying Whales’ lyrics when he read that ocean-based mammals, such as whales and dolphins, have some of the most complex brains in the world. “This book said that whales, like humans, have an incredible amount of grey matter compared to other animals,” he explains. “So, what do they do? They don’t build houses, roads or prisons. They don’t have laws, don’t read books, don’t make movies. Why are they so smart? Maybe we’re missing something.”

While honouring these mysteriously intelligent cetaceans, Joe holds a mirror to mankind: the species that hunts them for their meat and blubber. ‘Beneath the seas I searched and had a different view of us on Earth; the sinking ship of man,’ he growls during the second verse. It neatly fits the over-arching theme of From Mars To Sirius: not only is there a flying whale emblazoned on the album’s cover but, lyrically, it’s fixated on the belief that we must reject violence to evolve.

“Mars is the Roman god of war and Sirius is a star that, in some cultures, represents love and peace,” Joe elaborates. “Going from the masculine energy of Mars to the more feminine and peaceful Sirius is what humanity needs to do in order to survive.”

Although the band’s messaging evolved, Flying Whales’ music is a result of Gojira doing what they always did: jamming in the Duplantiers’ house until they stumbled upon something cool.

When Joe slid his fingers from the fifth fret of his guitar to the first, the quartet instantly leapt on the sound and composed the simplest yet heaviest of riffs around it. It proved emblematic of an album that, guitar-wise, became the least complicated Gojira had done at that point, de-emphasising tremolo picking in favour of pick scrapes, melodic taps and seismic chords.

“There’s a nu metal vibe,” Joe concurs. “I think Gojira dwell somewhere between Morbid Angel and Korn. We had a lot of fun playing with those two elements, often in the same riff: death metal and whatever Sepultura invented with Chaos A.D.. The Flying Whales riff came from a pulse, a mood, that happened organically in the rehearsal space.”

Meanwhile, that atmospheric opening – the one that Joe today considers skippable – was necessitated simply by the song’s placement midway through the album. “We try to balance out the pace of every record by putting in a song with a calm intro,” explains Joe. “That’s what every musician is probably doing when they release an album; maybe after six songs, they’re like, ‘OK, this is too much! We need to slow things down so we can come back and strike again.’”

Despite being held up today as the band’s earliest masterpiece, From Mars… proved more of a creeping infestation than a meteoric smash hit. Released on underground label Listenable and too monolithic for rock radio, its success came on the back of Gojira’s live shows, which were as frequent as they were intense. “We’re definitely a live band,” states Joe. “We record albums and then we just tour, tour, tour. We never said no to a tour for 20 years.”

Such a prolific schedule has only made Flying Whales more and more of a Gojira mainstay. In turn, Joe has only grown more and more perplexed. “When I talk to fans, they say, ‘If you don’t play that song, I’m going to shoot myself in the face,’” he laughs. “There are so many other songs that are way better than this one! I think it has something to do with the title. The image of a flying whale has caught people’s attention, like, ‘What?!’ It became this gimmick for our entire career.”

Indeed, ever since the singer painted a planet-sized white whale and plastered it on the front cover of From Mars…, the image has been inseparable from Gojira. A legion of devotees have the artwork as a tattoo. Plus, the connection between the band and the animal has been the inspiration for countless memes all over social media, no doubt fuelling the song’s status as a live must-see. Joe himself has mixed feelings about the unexpected life the song has taken on.

“I actually dislike fans bringing inflatable whales to shows,” he says. “I’m trying to express something spiritual and otherworldly, and it ends up being a bunch of plastic objects thrown at people. When I look at this paradox, I’m cringing a little bit. But that’s personal. This band is not my band; it’s everybody’s band. They want to come to the show, have fun and do their own thing.”

This article originally appeared in Metal Hammer issue 358, March 2022.

Soon after he’d joined Yes, Rick Wakeman turned to the history books for his solo debut, The Six Wives Of Henry VIII. Inspired by the spouses of one of England’s most famous monarchs, the six complex instrumentals had record label execs chewing down their nails and tearing their hair out. In the wake of its 50th anniversary in 2003, Wakeman told Prog about the album that launched his solo career.

In 1973, at the age of 24, Rick Wakeman was among the biggest stars in the world of rock music. As a member of Yes – whose fifth album, Close To The Edge, had become a creative and commercial triumph – the classically-trained keyboard wizard had paid his dues as a session player, put in the hard miles on the road and stood on the precipice of superstardom.

Created against all the odds, his first solo record, The Six Wives Of Henry VIII, was the statement that made him a household name. (Let’s overlook Piano Vibrations, an eminently forgettable 10-song set made by Wakeman for Polydor in ’71 that didn’t even feature his name on the cover.)

By rights, The Six Wives Of Henry VIII shouldn’t have been such a huge success. Wakeman’s record company hated it and they had no problem telling him so. The album was certainly unique, and half a century later its six instrumental songs, each inspired by a celebrated spouse of one of England’s most fascinating monarchs, still stands the test of time. It was also the first extra-curricular statement from a member of Yes, with numerous successors of varying quality set to follow.

Having respectfully declined an offer from his friend David Bowie to become a Spider From Mars, at the time Wakeman was extremely content in what would be the first of five spells with Yes. Featuring a solo track from each band member, the group’s fourth album, Fragile, had been put together in a hurry, something that irked Wakeman – who once dismissed his submission, an instrumental reworking of the Brahms piece Symphony No.4 (newly titled as Cans And Brahms) as “dreadful” – but Close To The Edge provided the breakthrough that Rick and his bandmates both sought and deserved.

The opportunity to spread his wings further came in 1971 when Jerry Moss, then head of A&M Records, offered him a contract to make five solo albums. Wakeman relished the challenge, setting himself to work late that same year. As one of the most popular and identifiable musicians of the era, bagging the record deal would prove the easy part.

Deciding upon the subject matter would be a little more difficult. In the end, inspiration fell into Wakeman’s lap while perusing a book stand at an airport in Virginia during a tour with Yes. Written by Nancy Brysson Morrison, The Private Life Of Henry VIII had been published the better part of a decade earlier. It would prove the best few dollars ever spent by Wakeman.

“You can say that again,” he laughs. “Back then there were no Walkmans or iPods to fill the time on flights, so you’d buy a book. I like my history and that one leapt out at me. I know it sounds daft, but when I got the part where Anne Boleyn got stuck in the Tower, a melody came into my head. I always carry manuscript paper with me and I wrote it down. The deeper I got into the book, more things came to mind. I realised the story could make a great album.

“Then I started thinking: ‘Okay, this is the Tudor period, do I make it about the Tudors?’ That was too bloody obvious. I had to think a little more Dalí than that. I had to paint the surrealistic pictures that were appearing in my head. I didn’t simply want to depict those times; here was one of the greatest stories ever told.”

Wakeman promptly disappeared down the rabbit hole of Henry, the larger than life, serial-marrying adulterer who ruled England from 1509 until his death in 1547. In attempting to write about the differing characters of the King’s wives, he spent a lot of time with his head buried in books.

“Despite the one thing they had in common, these ladies were all very different in their own way,” Wakeman explains. “One of the main difficulties I faced, for instance, is that nobody knows for sure how old Catherine Howard was. At the time, a lot of births went unrecorded. She could have been anything from 17 to 20 when Henry decided to chop her up a bit.

“There was some reading between the lines,” he admits. “I know Henry was a very naughty boy, but some of the wives were, too. It was wonderfully rock’n’roll.” He began preparing the album in December 1971, though it was laid down in fits and starts the following year. “We were solidly busy with Yes; there were either two or three tours of America, plus Europe and Heaven knows where else, so during gaps in the band’s schedule I shot into the studio. In a way that helped, because each time it felt unbelievably fresh.”

With Wakeman acting as producer, sessions took place at Trident Studios, where Bowie acolyte Ken Scott handled the engineering and mix of Catherine Of Aragon; and also across London at Morgan, a regular haunt of Yes. A wide variety of musicians dropped by to perform, including his bandmates Steve Howe on guitar, Chris Squire on bass and the drumming duo of Alan White and Bill Bruford.

“Using different players and engineers also contributed to the sense of originality,” Wakeman believes. “If somebody wasn’t around, I used an alternative and it all worked out incredibly well. I really like the electric sitar as an instrument. We were in the middle of Catherine Howard and there was a gap. I thought, ‘Who does that? Ah, Dave Cousins,’ so I called him up.”

Wakeman also remembers bringing in Barry de Souza, “a great drummer who is sadly no longer with us. I had worked with him in a band called Spinning Wheel. Barry was so technically gifted. I was also bringing in friends such as percussionist Frank Ricotti. The girl backing vocalists were organised for me by Joe Brown’s wife, Vicki. Sadly, we’ve lost her too.”

The sessions also reunited Rick with his former Strawbs colleague Chas Cronk, the bassist with whom Wakeman had performed on his very first paid session, with Ike and Tina Turner. Intriguingly, Dave Wintour, who played bass on Anne Of Cleves and Catherine Parr, went on to become a longtime member of The Wurzels.

“Having friends walk in and play with me was such tremendous fun,” recalls Wakeman. “Some of it was carefully planned but other parts were left to the imaginations of those in the room.”

One song that fell into the latter category was Anne Of Cleves (spelled Ann Of Cleaves on early editions). “For the solo section, I remember being at home on the morning of the recording and realising that the only way to do it was off the cuff,” he recounts. “That meant instead of me following the guys, they’d be following me. I told them, ‘Wait ’til the solo starts and then just fire away – imagine we’re onstage.’

“We did it in one take. It was absolutely amazing, but there was a problem – it didn’t have an ending. That’s why we used the trick of bringing in a church organ to bring us out the other side.”

This being Rick Wakeman, any old church organ would not suffice. Surprisingly, the powers-that-be at St Giles-without-Cripplegate, an ancient Anglican place of worship located in the City Of London, agreed to a brief loan of their prized instrument. “Getting to have that on the album was great,” Rick enthuses. “At the time there was a feeling of... I won’t say anti-rock’n’roll coming from the Church [as an institution], but they seemed to think it was the Devil’s music. It isn’t true – that’s country and western!

“But I called Guy Protheroe from the English Chamber Choir and asked if he knew of anybody who’d actually let me in. He reckoned St Giles was a very forward-thinking place and when I rang them to ask they said, ‘Yeah, great, come along.’ So we made a suitable donation and did that. It was the old days of recording: a couple of Revoxes, mics everywhere – job done. We also did Jane Seymour and some of the others as well.

“Remember, there were no digital instruments or samples,” he continues. “The harpsichord I used on Jane Seymour was built by a wonderful guy called Thomas Goff, a friend from the Royal College Of Music. I considered it the finest harpsichord ever. It sounded fantastic on the track, but listening back, it needed something extra, which was the Minimoog part that we added. When Bill Bruford heard that song he assured me that percussion could be used on it, but not a traditional drum kit. So he added various bits to make it sound good.

“The joy of Six Wives was that everybody got to throw in their two-penn’orth [of creativity],” he smiles. “There was always a plan, but sometimes it was a loose one.”

An interesting story lurks behind the composition of Anne Boleyn. Wakeman had a recurring dream of being present at the execution in 1536. “It was such a strange experience,” he nods. “We had finished the song and Paul Tregurtha did a rough mix for me, which I played during the drive home to Gerrards Cross [in southeast England], where I was living. The car is a great place to listen to a song and I knew that something wasn’t right. It didn’t end properly.

“That night I couldn’t sleep,” he continues. “It was in the early hours that I finally dropped off, and the track was running through my head. And suddenly, there I was, at the Tower Of London. It was as vivid as a dream could be. The crowd was gathered by the gallows – I was right with them.

“I can’t say that I saw Anne’s head go into the basket, but after what had happened everyone started singing the hymn The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended. I woke up with a start and said to my then-wife: ‘I’ve got the ending of the song.’ She replied [sounding bored], ‘Oh, good.’”

Wakeman drove to Morgan Studios and played his own arrangement of the song [written by Reverend John Ellerton] on the piano. “We got Vicki and the girls in for some ‘oooohs’ in the background; they didn’t sing the actual words,” he says.

In fact, The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended wasn’t actually sung at Anne Boleyn’s execution. “The hymn wasn’t even written until quite a few years later [in 1870],” says Rick, “but I felt it was important for it to be there.”

It’s been claimed that Wakeman had wanted Catherine Of Aragon, which featured Howe and Squire, to have found a home on Fragile. He’s happy to confirm that is a “fallacy,” insisting, “It was always intended for Six Wives.”

The album was originally titled Henry VIII And His Six Wives, and Wakeman had written a song about the regent called Defender Of The Faith. “The last piece we recorded was Anne Of Cleves, I think, and then we realised that in the days of vinyl there would be no room for Defender,” he explains. “That’s what prompted the change of title.”

One of the questions he is asked most often concerns the album’s running order. People want to know why the wives weren’t presented in chronological order. “Again, that’s due to the restrictions of vinyl, and of cassette,” he explains. “The two sides needed to be as even as possible.”

As part of his stand-up act and in interviews, the musician has told the tale many times of his presentation of the finished record to the suits at A&M. However, for the purposes of the story, let’s put him back in the room once more. “Okay...” he says cautiously. So who was present at this now fabled meeting?

“Let’s see,” he replies, “there was the head of A&M’s UK company, who’s no longer with us; the lawyer from America, and Tony Burdfield and Terry O’Neill, who both worked promotion in the UK. It was in the label’s office in George Street, London. I had a reel-to-reel and two tapes and I went in very excitedly. By the time I swapped over the tapes I knew that I was pretty much in the stinky brown stuff. In these situations it can be hard to tell whether or not the staff are excited, but this time it was very obvious that they were not. They didn’t get it at all.

“There was a cocktail cabinet in the corner of the room – these were my drinking days – so I asked if I could get something. As the tracks went by, I think I pretty much cleaned the thing out. At the end, the lawyer from America asked, ‘Can I hear it with the vocals on it?’ I replied, ‘There are no vocals; it’s an instrumental keyboard album.’

“They said, ‘Nobody makes instrumental keyboard albums,’ to which I replied, ‘I’ve just done it.’ They couldn’t get their heads around it. ‘So we’ve just paid for an instrumental keyboard album?’ ‘Yep.’ And somebody said, ‘God help us.’

“Another person said, ‘We’ll be lucky to sell 20,000 copies.’ That really hurt me, because I was very proud of the album. Tony and Terry did tell me, ‘You’ve got something very different here. It’s going to be really hard to get you any press at all, but we’ll do the best we can.’”

Did anybody then suggest adding some vocals? “No. I don’t think they wanted to spend any more money. In fact, after they heard it the budget for the album cover was cut back.”

The artwork presented further problems. “Finding portraits of the wives was very difficult,” states Wakeman. “The ones you see on the cover are pretty much all there is.”

Featuring a photograph of Wakeman (wearing jeans and a pair of trainers) standing before waxworks of Henry VIII and company at Madame Tussauds, the front cover is certainly distinctive, but whoever failed to notice a wax effigy of then-US President Richard Nixon clearly visible behind a curtain in the background deserved an instant dismissal.

“The cover was originally to have been in black and white, but Mike [Doud], who did the artwork, made it a lot more sepia, which was a big improvement,” explains Wakeman.

A&M had budgeted that 12,000 copies would need to be shifted in order to break even. Not that they thought it had a hope of doing so. It begs the question of whether anybody present in the boardroom that day ever apologised for their lack of faith? “Good grief, no,” Wakeman laughs, astounded by the question. “Record companies never admit they were wrong. Are you mad?!”

When released on January 23, 1973, the gentlemen of the press mostly shared the same opinion as A&M. In a previous interview Wakeman told this writer, “We had just one decent review, and that was from an angling magazine up in Grimsby. Even Melody Maker said that the album wasn’t fit to be played in a lift. I was devastated.”

“It’s true,” Rick says now. “The best reviews that it got said simply, ‘This is an interesting album,’ but nobody really got it. And the press absolutely hated it.”

Tony Burdfield did come up with a plan of buying advertorials in the leading magazines. “Johnnie Walker interviewed me for those, and they looked like real articles, so I got to say what I wanted to,” Wakeman remembers. “That really helped.”

Two pieces of luck were around the corner. The director of the Old Grey Whistle Test happened to be in the A&M office while somebody was playing the album, and Wakeman got a spot on the show, which at that point pulled half a million viewers.

However, its BBC 2 schedule clashed with David Bailey’s controversial Andy Warhol documentary that was to be shown on ITV. Moral crusader Mary Whitehouse and TV presenter-activist Ross McWhirter had condemned it for pornographic sequences and bad language, which of course only made it even more popular.

“The entire country dashed home from the pub in time for this Warhol film – including me,” Rick chuckles, “only to find Parliament had banned it at the last minute and replaced it with some programme on gardening in Afghanistan. Whatever was on BBC 1 had already begun, so nine million people switched over to BBC 2. A month later it went into the charts at No.13, before climbing to No.7.”

By the summer Six Wives had sold 30,000 copies and was still flying out the door. It’s now gone platinum many, many times over. Effectively speaking, the album that the critics and even Wakeman’s own record label dismissed as valueless became a period piece. As time passed, along with follow-ups Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (1974) and The Myths And Legends Of King Arthur And The Knights Of The Round Table (1975), it developed into a coffee-table essential.

Wakeman insists that thoughts of leaving Yes were still some way off – “It wasn’t even in my mind because I had found an outlet for my own music that made me very happy” – but his solo popularity did create ripples within the band. He’s too much of a gentleman to say that anybody became jealous – several Yes alumni had joined him in the experiment, after all.

But he admits: “It presented problems for the band’s management. The others had a go at Brian Lane, asking, ‘Why has Rick got a solo deal and we haven’t?’ He had to explain that ‘When Rick was with Strawbs they all signed solo contracts’ and the record company had exercised the option to take it up. So Brian went to see Ahmet Ertegun [boss of Yes’ home of Atlantic], who didn’t want to rock the boat and gave them all solo deals. Hence they did their own albums and it kept the peace.”

Let’s be clear, however: when Yes went back out on the road there were no ego problems of any kind. In fact, Jon Anderson insisted Wakeman should include some of the album in his solo spot. This explains the presence of a medley of highlights on the band’s triple-live set, Yessongs. “Jon loved Catherine Howard and wanted me to play that,” stresses Wakeman today. “There were no problems over it. These were long shows – sometimes they seemed to go on from dusk to daylight.”

The sting in the tail is that despite the popularity of Wakeman’s first three solo records, he wasn’t destined to see much financial reward. “I used the money from Six Wives to make Journey,” relates Rick. “I was only getting £4,000 for each album, so the proceeds went into the next one. I used the money from Journey to do a tour in America with an orchestra and choir. The remainder of that money was used for King Arthur. I was playing a dangerous game of blackjack.

“It was always going to collapse, but that wasn’t the point,” he continues. “I wanted to do the best I could with everything. I was in control; nobody could tell me, ‘You can’t do that.’ I bloody well could, and I did. It was a wonderful era. Managers and labels don’t like it – they want to be in the driver’s seat and let you have a little bit of power. That’s where Bowie was brilliant; everything that happened came from him.”

Circa the release of Six Wives, Wakeman tried hard to play a concert at Hampton Court. To say that he was rebuffed would be putting it mildly. “I think Cardinal Wolsey [whose relationship with the regent broke down after failing to get an annulment to Henry’s marriage to Catherine Of Aragon] would’ve been more welcome than me,” he jokes. “It wasn’t even a, ‘No, you can’t do that’ – the subject simply wasn’t open for discussion.”

Wakeman had to wait 36 years to perform the album in its logical home. “And then they asked me!” he grins, aware of the irony. “Things had changed. It was the 500th anniversary of Henry’s ascension to the throne. And of course the show allowed me to include the album’s missing song, Defender Of The Faith. I rescored it in places, too, making some of the pieces longer and of course we added an orchestra too. That gave another excuse to spend more money than I had.”

On the night concerned in 2009, Wakeman also brought in his friend Brian Blessed as narrator, who then proceeded to go... shall we just say ‘off-script’ with his duties? “Ha ha ha! Brian did go mildly off script, as is his wont,” Rick chuckles. “I don’t think I had heard Catherine Howard described as ‘a right old tart’ before, but it was very funny.”

Until now Wakeman has never really disclosed that Blessed had been at the bedside of a terminally ill relative during the build-up to the performance. “I know that had he not been, Brian would have thrown himself into the lines a little more. Being honest, we only found out two days before and we didn’t have a Plan B, so his being there at all was pretty incredible.”

The success of Wakeman’s solo career eventually allowed him to quit Yes in 1974 at the age of 25. “That’s true,” he nods, “but I will be honest, even without it I’d still have left after Tales From Topographic Oceans. I’ve always had an ethical belief that music should be both give and take. Tales wasn’t where I thought Yes should be. It wasn’t until I heard Going For The One [the 1977 album that saw him re-enter the group] that I thought: ‘Ah, they’re back on track.’

“Journey had gone to No.1 [in the UK – in the States it reached No.3], which gave me security, but regardless of that I’d still have jumped.” With a massive smile he concludes, “Even though I’d spent all of the money.”

As impressive as Metallica already were when they came screeching out of the Bay Area in the early 80s, few could have possibly predicted the journey that their story would eventually take them on. From the early drama of Dave Mustaine's dismissal to the gutting tragedy of losing Cliff Burton; from the shocking change in direction as the 90s dawned and eventual rise to the very top of the heavy metal tree; through breakdowns, fights, feuds, blockbuster movies and boundary-pushing experiments, theirs is a career like no other.

With most recent LP 72 Seasons now firmly bedded into their considerable back catalogue, we decided to rank every single Metallica studio album from worst to best. In the interest of keeping things straightforward and fair, we didn't include the S&M live albums or their classic covers album Garage Inc, nor their bold but divisive Lulu experiment with Lou Reed. Here, then, is how Metallica's main discography stacks up.

11. St Anger (2003)

Is it predictable that St Anger is rock bottom of another list like this? Yup. Is it still justified? Sadly, still yup. Metallica’s most hated album is far from the complete write-off many would have you believe; Frantic and the title track still go hard, songs like Invisible Kid and cult fan fave Dirty Window could have been world class with more work and the countrified re-dub of All Within My Hands the band have experimented with in recent years shows there’s a decent little song hiding under there.

Of course, none of that can cover for compositions that feel messy and disjointed and one of the most infamously disastrous production jobs in metal history. Artistically, St Anger is an interesting chapter in Metallica’s career at least: a raw, ugly cry from a band on the edge. Musically? This just ain’t it, no matter how you try to paint it.

10. Reload (1997)

When Reload hits the mark, it does so in style. Fuel might be basic as hell, but it remains a wonderfully simple, full-throttle burst of heavy metal adrenaline; The Memory Remains packs not just one but two of Metallica’s most earwormy moments (both its iconic chorus and Marianne Faithfull’s ‘Da da da daaa da, da daaaa’ refrain); The Unforgiven II is a more than worthy sequel to its predecessor and an outstanding power ballad in its own right.

That all said, Metallica’s confidence in their leftover material at this time was just a tad too optimistic, because Load’s sequel is packing way too much filler. James Hetfield’s wonderful lyrical streak was at least still in full flow, but even he wasn’t enough to save Reload from feeling largely unnecessary.

9. Death Magnetic (2008)

Critics were delighted with Metallica’s return to more traditional heavy metal fare (and solos!) when Death Magnetic arrived five years after the spectacular misfire of St Anger. In the cold light of day, it’s undoubtedly superior to its predecessor, featuring some full-on metal bangers (That Was Just Your Life, Cyanide) and two genuinely great power ballads in The Day That Never Comes and the severely underrated The Unforgiven III. Unfortunately, Death Magnetic as a whole is held back by two pressing issues.

Firstly, while a clear improvement on St Anger, the production is poor, Lars' drums still sounding like they were recorded using kitchen utensils. Secondly, and not for the first or last time, many of the songs just go too long. The End Of The Line, All Nightmare Long and The Judas Kiss are all solid tracks pulled down by meandering riff repetition, while forgettable instrumental Suicide & Redemption feels particularly self-indulgent at a whopping ten minutes. Decent, but far from a classic.

8. Hardwired...To Self-Destruct (2016)

Hardwired…To Self-Destruct was both a refreshing reminder of Metallica’s ability to pen top-tier metal hits and frustrating further evidence of the problems that come with their now trademark lack of self-restraint. The first half of the record in particular is filled with killer material, from the pulsating thrash assault of Hardwired and Moth Into Flame to the groovy, Load-ish power of Now That We’re Dead and epic, anthemic closing moments of Halo On Fire.

The second half, however, is a big letdown, the likes of Confusion, Am I Savage, ManUNkind and Murder One largely plodding and toothless (a particular shame given the latter’s status as a tribute to the legendary Lemmy Kilmister). Luckily, Spit Out The Bone turns up right at the end to finish things on a big high. What a rager.

7. 72 Seasons (2023)

For the third time in a row, Metallica put out an album that was solid as hell and packing plenty of great moments, but a little bogged down by a lack of incisive editing and at least a couple of tracks that just didn’t quite measure up. What can’t be in any doubt, however, is that 72 Seasons is the best-sounding Metallica album in over 25 years, the likes of its rollocking title track, the triumphant Lux Æterna and majestic album-closer Inamorata sounding truly stadium-sized under the bedded-in fingers of Greg Fidelman.

Papa Het’s voice also has no right sounding this good this far into his career, the band’s talismanic frontman bellowing like a vengeful mountain god during the pounding If Darkness Had A Son. A couple of minutes snipped off here and there and a little more ambition on the musical side of things and this could have been special. As it is, 72 Seasons is still pretty damn decent.

6. Load (1996)

Throwing caution to the wind following the absurd success of The Black Album and confirming that their thrash metal days were well and truly behind them (at least for now), Load saw Metallica dip their toes into everything from grunge to alt-rock to country. The result is a deeply fascinating record that unquestionably features some of the Four Horsemen’s most boldly realised leaps of faith; both the emotional Bleeding Me and album-closing epic The Outlaw Torn remain deservedly thought of as two of the most compelling compositions of the band’s entire career.

There are missteps for sure, and it’s a little too long overall, but for many, Load remains the point where Metallica were still truly blazing their own trail and letting ambition guide their creative impulses. It also features some of Hetfield’s most impactful lyrics, his introspective self-dissection reaching a new level of insight and raw vulnerability.

5. Kill 'Em All (1983)

Metallica would become far more layered and sophisticated in their songwriting as the 80s wore on, but even four-plus decades later, there’s still something so primal and satisfying about Kill ‘Em All’s snotty, ‘fuck-you’ attitude and relentless, proto-thrash assault. Smashing together Messrs Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton and Hammett’s love of punk rock fury and NWOBHM might with the subtlety of a brick to the groin (with some not inconsiderable help from a certain Mr Mustaine), the quartet kickstarted a movement and produced one of heavy metal’s all-time great debut albums in the process.

It’s easy to overlook just how stacked with classic ‘Tallica cuts Kill ‘Em All is, too: Hit The Lights, The Four Horsemen, Motorbreath, Whiplash, Seek & Destroy…plenty of bands could release all that, call it a day and consider their career a job well done. Incredibly, Metallica were only just getting started.

4. ...And Justice For All (1988)

Depending who you ask, …Justice is for all intents and purposes the last of Metallica’s 'thrash' records, but sees the band turning their backs on the short, sharp shock stylings they had embraced with their debut in favour of the more epic fare that had become their bread-and-butter. The loss of bassist Cliff Burton can be felt keenly, not least in the controversial decision to completely flatten the mix of newcomer Jason Newsted’s contributions, but also in the subtle shifts away from more classical-leaning compositions that Burton had contributed to the band’s sound.

In its place is an almost prog-like approach to song structure, Metallica effectively crafting their own metallic symphonies with even the more straight-ahead fare of Blackened, …And Justice For All and The Frayed Ends Of Sanity having multiple movements and segments. Fans might still clamour for Justice For Jason, but …AJFA shows just how hard Metallica were fighting to reinvent themselves and push their artistry to new levels, towering ballad One awarding them a level of MTV-friendly success that few of their contemporaries have ever been able to match, certainly never surpass.

3. The Black Album (1991)

Responding to the overly-ornate compositions of their previous album, Metallica ground their sound into its essential dust on The Black Album, producing one of the best-selling records of all-time in the process. The band didn’t lose their thrash entirely – Through The Never and Holier Than Thou have the same bulldozer-through-a-China-shop power that Master Of Puppets used so excellently, while the likes of Sad But True, Enter Sandman and Wherever I May Roam deliver an enormity and instantly gratifying sound that better suited the arenas they were now playing.

Even with that, the band also found a whole new universe of depth and artistry with huge ballads like The Unforgiven and Nothing Else Matters, the latter even setting the stage for the band’s orchestral S&M thanks to some sublime arrangements by Michael Kamen. Naysayers might point to The Black Album as the point where Metallica stopped being Our Band, but therein lies the rub: Metallica were always too ambitious, too commercial and just too damn big to be satisfied with being the biggest fish in a small pond.

2. Ride The Lightning (1984)

There’s still a youthful rawness to …Lightning that captures the sparks flying between a youthful Hetfield, Ulrich, Burton and Hammett, the band already extricating themselves from their peers by sheer dint of having the finest songs and most ambitious compositions around. The album’s title-track is effectively a dry-run for the epic grandeur the band would ride so thoroughly on follow-up Master Of Puppets, while For Whom The Bell Tolls and Creeping Death awarded Metallica their first genuine arena-sized anthems.

There are also moments of respite and reflection; Fade To Black’s anti-suicide ballad might have ruffled feathers with the full-speed-or-nothin’ brigade, but the song’s beautiful composition, reflective lyrics and undeniable breakout headbangable moments showed that they had plenty to say and weren’t afraid to take chances on themselves.

1. Master Of Puppets (1986)

If you drilled down into the atomic structure of heavy metal, the genre’s evolution and its watershed moments, you’d probably find Master Of Puppets embedded at the core. Black Sabbath might have kickstarted the genre almost 16 years earlier, but Metallica codified metal with their third studio album in ways that are evident in the sheer mind-bending number of bands who have professed an undying love for the album over the subsequent decades.

Thrash gone cinematic, Master… refined and reinforced everything Metallica had done with their second album but bigger, better, harder and yes, more metal. From the delirious rampage of Battery to the tooth-gnashing militaristic blows of Disposable Heroes and careening violence of Damage Inc. to the iconic title-track, Metallica never again sounded as all-conquering as they would on Master Of Puppets, slower efforts like The Thing That Should Not Be introducing a sludgy dynamism that showed the band’s toolkit was varied.

Again wetting their beaks with ballad Welcome Home (Sanitarium), Metallica were carrying themselves away from being anybody’s back-up to instead be absolute champions in their own right. A tour with Ozzy Osbourne helped cement them as metal’s Hot New Things and even the tragedy of the crash that took bassist Cliff Burton couldn’t slow the unstoppable machine the band had set into motion by writing an album so undeniably massive and untouchable that it basically created a division between themselves and just about every other metal hopeful at that point.

A serious contender for the greatest metal album of all time, it’s no overstatement that the spirit of Master echoes in everything from Machine Head’s The Blackening to Gojira’s Magma and just about any other grandiose, epic metal effort put to tape. You can all rest easy: the Master is here.

If 2024’s =1 represented a significant return to relevance for Deep Purple (now firmly entrenched in their Mark IX incarnation), then Splat!, their 24th studio album, confirms beyond question that they’re currently enjoying yet another golden age.

Inevitably, time’s passage has to be respected. Ian Gillan made a conscious decision to eschew screaming at the very peak of his range at 60, and in the intervening 17 years he’s cannily fine-tuned the subtler qualities of his instrument to excellent effect. Today’s Gillan is a true exemplar of refined rock vocal maturity: his rich, confident tones masterfully suggest searing passion in lieu of ripping his voice box to shreds while shattering every single spectacle lens in the front five rows.

That said, some of Purple’s more spectacular and lengthy excesses don’t entirely translate outside their pomp; the key question isn’t so much whether one could sing Child In Time in 2026 as whether one should. Technically speaking, instrumentalists customarily enjoy a far longer shelf life, and the remainder of the Purps, not least the evergreen Ian Paice, remain at the top of their game. Simon McBride continues to add a contemporary virtuoso flavour to his blessedly concise guitar work, while Roger Glover (bass) and Don Airey (keyboards) provide driving rhythmic power and ingenious melodic interest with equal unfailing aplomb.

As with Alice Cooper, the often unsung hero of latter-day Purple’s arguably unlikely return to vintage form is =1/Splat! producer Bob Ezrin, a commercial-eared past master of astute editing who’s pretty much untouchable when it comes to steering stalled rock careers out of instinctively self-indulgent cult status and into the mainstream

Where Splat! ultimately improves on =1 is that while compounding the impression of a new, improved Mark IX Purple (freshness, concision, engaging narrative lyrics seasoned with Gillan’s sometimes surrealistic wit and imagery), it’s also laced with unmistakable echoes of Mark II and III. Of Splat!’s 13 tracks there’s barely a stumble. Jessica’s Bra with its laboured titular pun is possibly a wee bit too 20th-century for its own good, but hey, who among us isn’t? Elsewhere it’s only a succession of highlights: Arrogant Boy is a compelling second cousin to Highway Star, Diablo as gloriously mad as a tree, and Splat! itself an irresistible groove.

In many ways, Splat! captures the very best Purple one could possibly expect to hear in 2026. Pretty good cover as well. They’ll go far.

Deep Purple discuss the making of Splat! in the new issue of Classic Rock.

Along with Journey, Anglo-American superstars Foreigner defined early 80s AOR music thanks to 1981’s mega-selling 4 album. In 2011, the band looked back on the making of a classic.

Six months into the endless, ever-expanding time frame that was the making of Foreigner’s fourth album, producer Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange decided he needed a break.

Looking up from the mixing desk in Electric Lady Studio, located at 52 West 8th Street in New York’s Greenwich Village, he yelled at those in the control room who, like he, had just endured yet another gruelling night-shift and missed yet another sunrise.

“What the fuck are we doing here? We need to go out! We never go out! We need to go to Central Park… Let’s go buy some Frisbees!”

With the band having long left the studio, Mutt’s outburst would only have been witnessed by his close coterie of engineering staff, and a young, then-unknown keyboard player named Thomas Dolby who had recently been drafted in for the sessions.

All of them were startled, but took their cue and followed Mutt up the stairs and out on to West 8th Street, blinking in the morning sunshine. He hailed a yellow cab and ordered it to wait outside 5th Avenue’s legendary toy store FAO Schwarz while he bought a variety of Frisbees, then leapt back in the cab and instructed the driver to take them all, giggling, to Central Park. For what Dolby remembers as a truly joyous five minutes, they raced about the park, flinging the coloured plastic discs around like excited schoolchildren high on life. But, after those five minutes, the real Mutt Lange resurfaced…

“What the fuck are we doing here? We’ve got an album to make!”

With that, he led them all away, hailed another yellow cab and raced back to Electric Lady.

Foreigner’s guitarist Mick Jones hears this story for the first time when Classic Rock Presents AOR meets him in his London hotel suite during the band’s recent European tour. He might be unfamiliar with this specific tale, but recognises it immediately as indicative of what he describes as the producer’s “intense” commitment to the work. Jones recognises it, of course, because it mirrors his own, and explains why the album took so very long to make. How long?

“It took about 10 months, counting pre-production… maybe the best part of a year,” Jones shrugs, pointing out that the group’s 1977 debut LP had taken nine months, their second, 1978’s Double Vision “about six months”, and their third, 1979’s Head Games, “probably almost the same again”. So Foreigner had form in that department. But 10 months? The best part of a year?! Wasn’t that some kind of record at the time? Apparently so…

“I remember I was in a club in London and Simon Le Bon came up to me and said, ‘I hear we’re in the running for the prize for spending the most time and money in a studio!’,” grins Jones, not a little ashamed as well. “Unfortunately, we did share that distinction…”

The Frisbee excursion was not a significant factor, then, in Foreigner 4’s extended gestation. The real reason was Jones and Lange’s 100 per cent commitment to making absolutely the best record possible, and refusing to stop until they were sure they had. For both men, that meant achieving a new level of excellence in the songs.

Jones: “The songs are the basis of everything. They always were with this band. I always set out to make albums that you could listen to from beginning to end, without filler…”

The statistics for Foreigner 4 prove that all the hours, days, weeks and months in the studio, all the deadlines missed, all the budgets broken, were ultimately worth it.

The album enjoyed 10 weeks (in three spells) at No.1 in the Billboard charts, starting on August 22, 1981 and ending February 11, 1982. American sales exceeded six million. It remains the band’s best seller in the UK, reaching No.5, and earning a gold disc, while it also made No.4 in Germany. Of the six songs released as singles in the US, only the last – Luanne, in 1982 – failed to go Top 30.

Perhaps most importantly of all, 30 years later all 10 of these songs still resonate strongly.

Time and money are relative. As is failure.

A bit of context is needed. Foreigner were a success right out of the box: Stateside, their self-titled debut of 1977 sold five million copies and reached No.4. A year later, their second effort, Double Vision, made No.3 in the US – even climbing to No.32 in the UK – and shifted seven million copies. So when third album Head Games, released in 1979, stalled at No.5 on the Billboard chart and only went quintuple platinum, something was deemed to have gone wrong.

Jones: “That did start the thinking, that we needed to be positive about our identity for the fourth album. Okay, we’d beaten the jinx of the first album being a flash-in-the-pan with Double Vision being so strong, but I think on Head Games we really went into ‘excessive mode’. The drugs came into the picture a bit too much there. So we kind of had a massive hangover after that album [laughs]. I look back on it and think it wasn’t quite focused. We tried to toughen the image of the band up with Dirty White Boy and Head Games itself, but that’s where the question about where we were going originated…”

English bassist Rick Wills – who had joined the line-up for Head Games, the former Peter Frampton band/Roxy Music member having replaced New Yorker Ed Galgliardi – had a few concerns. “In some ways, after the first two Foreigner albums, Head Games was something of a departure in style and form,” he says. “It was a bit more heavy and rocky, and that didn’t go down so great with everyone. And, of course, we had that very controversial album cover…”

It featured a girl caught in the act of wiping her phone number off a gents’ toilet wall, but it was perceived by some as something more provocative. A lot of American record stores refused to rack it.

“I think we sold a lot less of that album for that reason alone,” Wills continues. “It did very well, but by Foreigner standards it was considered something of a failure. Having just come into the band I was thinking, ‘Bloody hell – this doesn’t bode well for my future!’”

Jones was thinking about the future, too, but Wills wasn’t the one who needed to worry. The guitarist and band-leader was more concerned that the demands of keyboard player Al Greenwood and ex-King Crimson multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald to be included in the songwriting process would weaken the band. Greenwood was dismissed first, McDonald followed soon after (years later, when the band reconvened in mid-2010 to rehearse some new songs, McDonald was present, but the line-up was soon pared again down to four).

Wills: “I hadn’t expected this. Mick had said to me he wanted more freedom to bring other musicians in, to experiment – especially with keyboards – because this was the era when people were beginning to do amazing things, electronically. Mick – who was never one to stand still – wanted to try these things out, because he thought that was the way forward.”

Jones: “It was a tough time, emotionally. Ian was a close friend, but Lou [Gramm, singer] and I just felt we had hit our stride writing together and we wanted to really start to maximise on that. We talked at length about it and had a fairly clear vision of where we wanted to go, so it was a question of being a bit ruthless. We felt we wanted to focus.”

One of the songs that was helping them focus was a ballad.

Wills: “Mick tended to write most of the songs on a piano, using mostly the black notes, so everything was in sharps and flats, and little bit weird when it came time to transpose them to the guitar… As I recall, it was fairly bitty at first, but the one song he did have completely finished was Waiting For A Girl Like You. The first time they played it to me, I said, ‘Well if that isn’t a hit, I don’t know what is!’”

Jones’ voice bears a tremor of emotion as he recalls the genesis of that song: “Waiting For A Girl Like You almost wrote itself. That was the first time I had a really serious emotional experience. It was overwhelming. From the moment we put down the basic track and Lou added a scratch vocal, I found it hard to be in the room without breaking down during the playbacks. It was such a strange sensation. I really got the feeling that something was coming down through me, that I was just the conduit. It was the first time I’d got in touch with what I’d heard other writers or artists talk about.”

That song would, of course, change everything – but so would the band’s choice of producer. Jones had taken both co-production and ‘musical direction’ credits on the first three albums – never less than fully involved – but was also keen to gain a respected second opinion on a song (or third, if it was one co-written with Lou Gramm). The man chosen was Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange (rhymes with “hanger”), a man known as Mutt who was the big dog in rock production at the time, having steered AC/DC to consecutive multi-platinum successes with Highway To Hell and Back In Black.

Jones, though, had been a fan of his for some time: “Mutt first caught my attention when he produced a band called City Boy, way back [Mutt produced City Boy’s first five albums, starting with 1976’s self-titled debut]. I’d been impressed by the work he’d done on that band. And he had applied to do the Head Games album, actually. He came over to New York to see me, but it was just a question of bad timing for him, so we chose Roy Thomas Baker. But Mutt was always in the back of my mind, so when he reapplied for the fourth album, that was it.”

Lange later became legendary for his painstaking, particular note-by–note work with Def Leppard, but was still a relatively unknown quantity to Jones, who insists he was unaware such methods might be used upon Foreigner.

“I knew that he was really into sound, that he was dedicated and he was very serious,” says Jones. “He really showed incredible enthusiasm.”

The first evidence of that enthusiasm came during the pre-production stage when, having heard the songs that the band felt were ready to be recorded, he asked to hear the ideas that Mick considered unfinished. It was not something the guitarist felt comfortable doing, inviting this stranger into his hitherto-private world of taped bits and pieces.

Mick says Lange “forced his way into” this private world. “It was the first time I’d ever let anybody in there,” he adds. “In some cases, he was hearing stuff I thought was embarrassing. But he wanted to hear every single thing I had, even if it was only a 10-second snippet.

“Out of that process, we put Urgent together. It began as just an instrumental passage I had, the thing that became the intro. But I didn’t know what I was going to do with that. I thought it might become some sort of weird instrumental.

“Mutt also helped put Juke Box Hero together. It was originally two separate songs. Lou had one idea called Take One Guitar, and I had the Juke Box Hero thing. Mutt helped us to gel the two…”

Mutt’s contributions are openly acknowledged, but not recognised with the co-writing credits he later received with Leppard. It seems safe to presume he was handsomely rewarded, although Mutt is never available for comment. The man who Jones, with a grin and no small degree of understatement, describes as “a bit of a recluse”, has made only one significant public statement in the last couple of decades: “I’ve always been a private person. I don’t value being in the media spotlight. I’m fortunate to be able to avoid it.”

English engineer Tony Platt, a man who worked with Mutt on a number of albums before Foreigner 4, offers a first-hand view of his methods, and insists the producer is always artist-led. “One of Mutt’s absolute talents – and it is an exceptional talent – is insisting upon getting the songs right,” Platt says. “And he wants to get the songs right before you go into the studio, so you’re starting from a very strong perspective. In fact, the Foreigner 4 album got put back a couple of times, because Mutt didn’t feel the songs were in quite the right shape. Even when I went out to theoretically begin recording, and they were still in pre-production, I ended up hanging around in New York while they were sorting out a couple of songs.

“Then we took them into the studio and started getting sounds. That would undoubtedly suggest other changes that they might want to make in the arrangement of the song, strengthening the sound. The sound can then move further forward – and at a certain moment, we take a snapshot of it and then they could say, ‘That is how it should be. That is the moment in time that this song should inhabit.’ Mutt was always very good at picking that moment, perfectly.”

History has proven Mutt’s infallible sense for what makes a hit record. But what was it like on the other side of the control room window?

Jones shrugs. “Mutt was intense. He was intensely dedicated to it, as well. We had our differences, you know. We were like two goats – stubborn – and we locked horns a few times…”

At a point that even the meticulous Platt can only recall as “late summer/early fall 1980”, recording finally began in the same studio where Head Games had been recorded: Atlantic Studios, on New York’s Upper West Side. However, it would prove to be a false dawn.

Platt: “It was a studio in which a lot of very good things had been done, but it had seen better days at that point in time. Atlantic had air-conditioning units that buzzed, and there were desks that were a little bit weird, so after about a week in there we just decided we had to go somewhere else.”

They would end up at Electric Lady, the legendary recording studio in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village that Jimi Hendrix had built in a basement he’d originally bought to turn into a nightclub. His earlier plan to make it a ‘curvaceous’ space with no right angles faltered, but as a studio it has endured. Jones had worked there in Spooky Tooth. Lange had used it for Back In Black.

Platt: “Both Mutt and I had been very happy at Electric Lady, so we decamped and went there. Studio A is a big room. It still has the murals on the wall that were done when Jimi first bought it. It’s an astonishing space. It has a lot of vibe to it.

“So we set up… We created a large area for the drums, with a big screen set up for the bass. We built a room within the room for the guitar amps. I had to get as much separation as I could, but within a rock context – because I knew a lot of stuff might be replaced. And Lou sang all his vocals in the vocal booth that was already there. It was quite a large booth – and that became his home for all the time we were there! He kept bringing things in and making himself more comfortable.”

But first things first, and that meant recording Dennis Elliott’s drums.

“Mutt had wanted to go the electronic route with the drums,” remembers Jones. “That didn’t sit well with me or with Dennis. That was a bit of a bone of contention!”

Wills: “I remember for three days Dennis was just hitting snare drums. He finally got up and said, ‘Listen man, I can fucking play drums. You can’t even get a sound!’ He was really angry [laughs].”

Jones: “Mutt also wanted to use a click track for timing, and Dennis took offence to that, as well. When he and I were working on the song Break It Up, we got so fed up that, at one point, we just said, ‘Fuck this!’ and went into the studio together. I sat at the piano, Dennis sat at the drums, and we laid down the basic track, just him and me. Then we turned round to Mutt and said, ‘Okay? Happy now?!’ We wanted to prove the point that this band could play and keep time, too.

“I guess I wanted to stay more old-school than Mutt,” Jones muses. “He was all for going ahead and using the technology that was coming up at that time – as you can hear on his Def Leppard albums, the drums there are electronic, they’re synthesised… But I didn’t want to go that route. It wouldn’t have worked for us.”

Today, Dennis Elliott – now retired from the music business and answering a new calling as a wood sculptor – seems reluctant to re-live all this, but recalls that his working life was simpler on the group’s earlier albums. “I was usually done with the drum tracks within the first two weeks, and the songs were then built upon those tracks.”

Elliott is a keen sailor, and during the sessions for Foreigner 4 he would moor his boat at a basin on the Upper West Side, where he lived with his wife Iona. The basin being a relatively short drive from Electric Lady, members of the band and Mutt would often step aboard after a day in the studio, to unwind and enjoy the views.

Elliott, who might ordinarily have expected to be hitting the ocean by this point in the sessions, recalls: “I couldn’t really go too far, and it did seem to take an eternity. Sometimes a song would go through so many changes during that time, it was necessary for me to come back in and start all over… I would stop by the studio every week or two to see what progress was being made – but on the Foreigner 4 album, they always seemed to be playing foosball!”

Sometimes known as table football on this side of the Atlantic, Platt recalls that he and Lange installed the foosball table at Electric Lady. “We bought a table and put it at the back of the studio so, at the end of the night, we’d all unwind around it. We’d get the beers or the wine out, and have a tournament.”

Wills: “Every time there was any downtime, we’d go out there and play at the foosball table. We all got good – and got ferociously competitive about it. Especially Mutt…”

Platt insists he was the foosball champion – “Somewhere I’ve got the trophy, a miniature Converse sneaker” – which Jones confirms. But, as Wills observes, “at $2,000 a day, it was quite an expensive hobby!”

According to the bassist, very little work seemed to be getting done. “It was hard to get the gist of where we were going to go with this album, because after just about every session, there would be this long conversation, between Mick and Mutt, about where we were going with the album and what was needed. If Mutt’s anything, he’s a perfectionist. He doesn’t let anything slide, won’t let anything past him unless he thinks it’s good enough. And Mick Jones is pretty similar – so boy the two of them did lock horns a few times. It was tough!”

Everyone agreed, though, on Waiting For A Girl Like You.

Wills: “That was one of the first songs we recorded – kept and done as a second take! It sounded fabulous. Everybody’s performance on it sounded great and we knew we had that in the can.”

“Waiting For A Girl Like You was Lou’s original live vocal,” says Platt. “That was one of those tracks where I remember the recording session very, very clearly. We put down a basic washy keyboard in the background, with the main track. There was some editing in between takes… And once we’d chosen the master and done all the edits, I remember sitting there till about three o’clock in the morning, and everyone was still saying, ‘Oh, play it back again, play it again!’ There was a general feeling that this was going to be the big hit…”

What no one appreciated while listening to Waiting For A Girl Like You, however, was that Gramm was not going to be able to replicate its incredible chorus live.

Jones: “In hindsight, I’d say Mutt really pushed Lou, probably past his range. I was there as well, so I have to take a bit of… I don’t know about blame, because it all worked out as we all wanted it to work out. But in hindsight, Lou did have a lot of difficulty with the pitch and the range of a couple of those songs. Juke Box Hero was another song that strained his voice to the limit.”

Wills: “Lou could sing it in the studio, but he couldn’t reproduce it live every night. We actually used to do it a semitone down from the record. We used to detune – we had separate guitars for that song. Same with Juke Box Hero. It was just too much for Lou to do. It led to some sort of mind-games going on between him and Mick about performances and stuff. That’s how the whole thing started to disintegrate later on in our careers, really, with Lou not being able to really cope with the demands.”

At the time, though, Wills reckons the singer was unfazed by most of what was going on: “He just dealt with it in Lou’s way – very quietly and subdued. Although he was very much involved in the writing side with Mick, when it came to the recording he would make suggestions, but pretty much let Mick and Mutt run the show…”

That show was gradually running around the clock. They might take the occasional day off, but recording was becoming a way of life.

Wills: “Electric Lady became our second home. We initially began sessions at midday, but three months later they’d gone on so long that we were starting at midnight.”

Like Dennis, Mick and Mutt were holed up in the city. Lou Gramm and Rick Wills were commuting from their homes in Westchester County – about 45 miles, or a 45-minute drive, from Manhattan. This was “no big deal” according to Wills, who prefered to “go back to his home and his family every night. Or whatever hour it was. Sometimes I’d get back at 6am, just as they were getting up to go to school… It was pretty bizarre!”

Their shifting schedule ultimately led to the lyrics for one of Foreigner 4’s songs. Nearby the studio, on the corner of Sixth Avenue, there was a Nathan’s Famous hot dog eaterie, as Jones recalls: “The later it got at night, the bigger the buzz got, and a lot of weird characters, some of them hookers, would appear. It was a big mixture of a lot of different characters – so that was the inspiration for opening song, Night Life.”

However, the extended studio hours were taking their toll financially.

“At the time it was considered unrealistic,” says Wills. “We’d spent over a million dollars in recording costs. There was a lot of pressure – from the record company, from the management and from ourselves. It was pretty tough. Our manager, Bud Prager, was going crazy, having to keep going to Atlantic for more and more advances, just to pay for the studio time. Because once you’ve got that far into it, you can’t turn back, and you begin to realise that you’re going to have to sell a hell of a lot of records to pay that advance back…”

Steadily, though, great tracks started to emerge, including songs like Urgent, which had barely existed when sessions first began, and was, at one point, stripped right back to Elliott’s drum track and that quirky guitar intro.

The song, however, is made by the sax solo played by the late, great Junior Walker. Jones saw Walker and his All-Stars were playing in a club nearby, so he and Wills skipped out of Electric Lady, watched three or four sets, and then invited a bemused Walker down to the studio.

Elliott and his wife made sure they were there to see the soul legend in action. “It was very amusing,” remembers Iona, “because after he played his solo once, he was very happy with it, but Mick made him play it several more times, and was trying to get him to stretch out more and more, until it became that wonderful solo.”

“It turned out that in all his career he had never done an overdub,” adds Jones. “Everything he’d ever done was live. So the first five or six takes, he was really uncomfortable. He had the headphones on, but couldn’t get used to that fact that he was overdubbing. But he did, after a while, and started playing some stuff. He explained, ‘I’ve kind of changed my style up a bit…’ and started playing this jazzy, softer type of stuff. Mutt and I were sitting there thinking, ‘Oh, no, we need the Junior Walker we know and love.’

“Mutt, bless him, went and straight-talked it to Junior: ‘This is great but we really need some of that Shotgun/Road Runner stuff.’ ‘Oh, you want the old shit? Okay!’ So he gets up, does it again and in two or three takes we’ve got it. However, it did take a tremendous amount of editing. Mutt and I spent two days chopping up little slivers of quarter-inch tape from the different takes, and then splicing it all together. We wanted it to be a classic solo, and I think that’s how it ended up…”

It’s tempting to paint Lange as the villain of the piece, but, as the Junior Walker story shows, Jones was just as much a perfectionist. Today, he concedes: “We had these moments with Mutt, but we kind of overcame it. Nothing lasted longer than the time it took to achieve what we’d set out to achieve. Gradually, things eased up with Mutt, and we really started to appreciate what we were all bringing to the party. He loosened up from his more ‘stiff’ approach.”

After three months, however, Platt had to leave. He’d stalled a prior engagement to re-mix Samson’s Shock Tactics LP, but could delay the project no longer.

Platt: “I would speak to Mutt now and then, of course. If he ever had any questions on anything I’d done, he’d just call me up. It was all recorded in 24-track analogue. Those tapes already had a lot of edits in them, so you wouldn’t want to keep playing them. The normal practice in those days was to make up a slave reel from the master reel so you could do all your overdubbing on the slave reel – then you would lock the two together when you did the mix, so you wouldn’t be degrading the sound on the master reel, by playing it over and over again. So before I left I made up all the slave reels and checked everything was right before I left.”

The other thing Platt did before leaving was recommend his replacement, Dave Wittman, the man who would carry the torch as Lange’s right-hand man to the very end of the project.

Initial sessions had seen Platt record keyboards by Peter Frampton’s Bob Mayo, sometime Lou Reed man Michael Fonfara, and Larry Fast from Peter Gabriel’s band. But Mutt and Mick wanted something more. They went after a then-unknown Englishman by the name of Thomas Dolby, who could be found busking in Paris, avoiding a UK music lawyer’s bill he couldn’t afford…

Dolby: “I got a call from a friend in England who said, ‘Somebody called Mick Jones phoned for you and said he wanted you to do a session…’. I thought this was Mick Jones of The Clash, who were one of my favourite bands at the time. I’d actually never heard of Foreigner. But when I looked into it, it turned out that they were actually very big in America!”

Lange, a partner in Zomba Publishing, had heard one of the 22 year old’s demo cassettes and liked his keyboard playing, so, in mid-January 1981, he suggested to Mick that they should check Dolby out.

“I spoke to them from Paris and they suggested I should try out for a day or two and asked, ‘When could you come over?’,” remembers Dolby, of the initial contact. “I thought very hard and said, ‘Well, tomorrow morning!’

“Mutt was really sticking his neck out in insisting that they hired me and fly me over. I was a kid who had previously thought himself lucky to have spent four hours in a recording studio. I was like a bull in a china shop – ordering up all sorts of keyboards and effects, from a list like a takeaway menu.

“They’d already put keyboards on most of the album, but they weren’t very happy with them, so they gave me a trial to see what I could do. The first track they gave me was Urgent, and they were very pleased with that so they asked if I could stick around and do the whole album.”

Mostly, Dolby’s contributions consisted of very subtle keyboard arpeggios, doubling every note Mick Jones and Rick Wills had played.

Mutt could then add yet another layer to the mix but, as Dolby explains, “he’d make it very, very quiet, so you could hardly hear it. That would just make the guitar playing sound better… I think I was on pretty much the whole album.

“Waiting For A Girl Like You was clearly the centrepiece of the album, but they were nervous about it, because they weren’t really known as a ‘ballad band’. But they were also very confident about it, and Mutt Lange, in particular, was absolutely convinced it would be the biggest hit they’d ever had. He said, ‘I really want to make this remarkable. Every time this comes on the radio, I want people to prick up their ears and know exactly what they’re listening to.’

“I was very heavily influenced by Brian Eno and his ambient stuff, and I had a style like that. This was in the days before polyphonic synths that allowed you to play chords. Back then you could only play one note at a time, but you could build up chords on a multi-track by playing long single notes and layering other notes above and below them. It would vary the sound a bit, and you’d end up with a nice mesh. So I recorded a few minutes of that, and Mutt came in and took a slice of it – maybe 25 seconds or so – and spliced it into the front of the song. And it worked rather well!

“I remember, a couple of years later, I’d be driving in middle America somewhere, listening to some AOR rock station, and this sound would come on. It was absolutely unmistakable. I felt it was quite subversive, really, to get some ambient Eno music on to American AOR radio!”

For Dolby, who to that point had “barely made a penny” as a session musician, one month’s work changed his life. “I came back from the States with an envelope full of cash, which I used to make my first album, so the proceeds from Foreigner 4 set me up. By the time Waiting For A Girl Like You came out, then suddenly I had all sorts of option for other work…”

Despite that cash – which led directly to his 1982 debut album The Golden Age Of Wireless, and early hits Windpower and She Blinded Me With Science – Dolby recalls that “they were trying not to break the bank, so I actually stayed in Mutt’s hotel suite on Central Park South. It had a pull-out settee in a second room, and I slept on that for the first week or so. I remember that Mutt would leave for the studio in the morning, before I woke up, and often wouldn’t get back until after I was asleep. The man slept, like, four hours a night! And yet he still found time to sit cross-legged on his bed, playing guitar and singing like Van Morrison. Really extraordinary. He was a very interesting man…”

By the time Dolby arrived, Foreigner had been in Electric Lady about six months but were, it would transpire, only two-thirds of the way through the process. “They would work during the day on vocals and mixing, and at night I was set free in the studio until they came back in at nine o’clock in the morning.”

Jones: “We would give him a load to do, then go out to dinner and just leave him there. Then we’d come back to hear what he’d put on…”

The painstaking work continued with some unusual distractions. Next door to Electric Lady is an art-house cinema called the 8th Street Playhouse. After a late-night showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, one of the punters had inadvertently left his seat gently smouldering. Some hours later, smoke was seen pouring out of the cinema; next door, in Electric Lady’s control room, Mick Jones could smell something burning.

“We thought at first the fire was on our side,” he remembers. However, thoughts of countless hours of work being lost were suddenly interrupted by a loud banging on the wall.

Dolby: “Suddenly members of the New York Fire Department came through the wall of the studio with axes. They were very big, beefy guys, and all I could think was that they looked like the Village People…”

Electric Lady survived the intrusion and work resumed. Soon, Dolby’s work was done and he flew home. But for Jones and Lange, pressure was building. Their time at Electric Lady was about to hit a brick wall as the next client, Hall & Oates, refused to budge again. Worse, Mutt’s booking to produce Def Leppard’s Pyromania had also been put back for the last time. Eventually, he simply had to let go of Foreigner…

Jones: “Mutt stayed absolutely as long as he could. It was gut-wrenching for him when he had to leave, but he had to… Def Leppard was already three or four months over-schedule. We’d been through this intense time together, the best part of nine months, so it really was gut-wrenching.”

With Mutt out of the studio – though still in touch on the phone, and listening to mixes couriered across the Atlantic – Jones ended up adding the final touches, mixing and sequencing with engineer Dave Wittman. This lasted around four weeks, from March through to April. With just 10 days of studio time remaining, Jones took the drastic step of taking a bed into the studio and sleeping there rather than lose focus.

Jones: “We’d got into this thing where the studio was like my den. I didn’t even go outside.”

Wills: “He was almost going mad, truly!”

Come the final seven days, Jones and Wittman reckoned they still had 10 days of work to do. With “Hall & Oates’ roadies in the corridor delivering their gear”, they were completing the final song. Meanwhile, Lange and Prager opened what was supposed to be the final mix of Foreigner 4.

Jones: “I get this call from Mutt, and he says: ‘Where are the fucking background vocals on Juke Box Hero?!’ Then my manager called up, asking the same thing: ‘Where are the background vocals?!’”

Jones admits he had removed them on purpose: “It was some ridiculous idea I’d had… I tried to explain this as a creative decision, but they both said I was crazy and insisted I put them back – at which point I realised I’d made the wrong decision, somewhere in those last 10 days of madness.

“So I go see Dave and say, ‘I think we may have fucked up, here! How can we fix it?’ He just said, ‘Don’t worry!’ and rushed back in. Juke Box Hero was so intricate that we’d used every single cable and every single piece of equipment in the studio. Dave and I had all four hands on the desk. Within two hours, he had re-established the set-up – all the equipment, the cabling, the faders, everything and remixed the whole chorus section of the song again. It was just his recall from a completely different mix. And by some miracle it fitted back in – with just a little bit of level adjustment – the choruses and the rest of the song are from two different mixing sessions. It was miraculous. And that was the very last thing we did!”

A fittingly fraught ending to the marathon process, a stroke of luck that was well deserved after all the hard work before. The band took the songs out on the road… and the rest is rock’n’roll history. Asked to reflect on Foreigner 4 today, Jones pauses thoughtfully before answering. “It was definitely the sum of what I thought we’d been building towards. When I look back on it I know it’s my favourite album. I know the process was long, gruelling and costly – costly not just financially, either. Relationships got strained during that album. Domestic situations got out of control. There was a lot of intensity involved in that. But looking back it’s the one I always say I’m probably the most proud of.”

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents AOR magazine issue 3, July 2011

David Bottrill was sitting in Maynard James Keenan’s apartment with the Tool singer’s cat on his lap when Maynard unleashed a blood-curdling scream. Except it didn’t stop. On and on it went: 5, 10, 25 seconds. Finally, after nearly half a minute, the noise stopped.

“I was sitting at the computer recording vocals, with Maynard behind me. I didn’t have a camera or a mirror, just this cat on my lap,” David recalls now. “He starts to scream, and it’s going, and it’s going… At the end, I turn around and Maynard’s on his knees, completely spent. It was the first take. Just one take, and that was it.”

It was 2000, and the pair were recording vocals for The Grudge, the song that would open Tool’s third album, Lateralus. It was a fittingly intense moment. When it finally dropped on May 15, 2001, Lateralus marked the end of a gruelling five-year period for the band, during which time they’d been pinioned by a crushing legal battle with their then-label that had left their future anything but certain.

Lateralus was a huge release of energy and emotion – a 79-minute, spiritually charged behemoth, bursting with dizzying time signatures, seismic riffs and themes of isolation, vulnerability and connection. Twenty-five years on, its impact can still be felt.

In 1997, while touring in support of their second album, 1996’s platinum-selling breakout Ænima, Tool were slapped with a lawsuit from their label, Volcano Entertainment, alleging contract violations. It was the start of a war of attrition that brought on total creative paralysis, as much a psychological battle as a legal one.

“It was a very grating period, having this ‘lawsuit fog’ hanging over us for years,” bassist Justin Chancellor explained in a 2001 interview on MTV2. “But in a way, it forced us to look inward and really solidify as a unit. We had to fight to even be allowed to create, and I think you can hear that struggle and the eventual release of it in the music. It wasn’t just about making a record anymore; it was about survival.”

By the end of 1998, agreements were drawn up and the legal drama ended, freeing the band to return to the studio, which they did with a heightened sense of purpose.

“We had a couple records under our belt and lots of touring,” guitarist Adam Jones told Revolver in 2022. “By that time, we knew our limits. We knew what stuff we could push. We were a well-oiled machine. And we knew each other. And there were things we learned about each other on that record that are pivotal to this day.”

The musical landscape had changed radically since Tool emerged at the start of the 1990s. Many of the bands they’d once shared stages with had splintered or split.

“Alice In Chains, Helmet, Soundgarden, Nirvana, and now Rage [Against The Machine],” said drummer Danny Carey in 2001. “It’s really kind of amazing that all of them are gone. It’s a strange feeling to look around and realise we’re still here. But I think that sense of being the survivors gave us a certain freedom. We didn’t feel like we had to fit into a scene anymore, because the scene didn’t really exist. We just had to answer to ourselves.”

Now more than ever, Tool were marching to their own complicated beat. At the dawn of the 2000s, progressive rock seemed like a bloated relic of a bygone age. A handful of groups – Dream Theater chief among them – were flying the flag for complex, ambitious music, but bands and the public alike seemed largely immune to prog’s charms. Why listen to old dudes in capes when you’ve got Korn and Limp Bizkit?

By contrast, Tool cast their gaze back to the progressive giants of the 70s, particularly King Crimson. Led by the exacting, innovative visionary Robert Fripp, Crimson were the architects of a disciplined, professorial strain of music that prioritised knotty polyrhythms and structural subversion over traditional riffs. With songs such as 1969’s proto-prog metal classic 21st Century Schizoid Man, they proved heavy music could be high-art, trading musical excess for a clinical, forward-thinking precision that redefined the boundaries of the genre.

“We pulled quite a bit of King Crimson into what we’re doing,” Maynard explained in 2001, adding: “I think we’ve brought in a much more vulnerable, emotional element that was missing in King Crimson. Which is good. I would hope that that’s something that they could recognise and… be the master in the corner that nods silently: ‘Very good work.’”

“Tool were one of the greatest bands to take influences from so many different styles and blend them into something completely unique,” says David Bottrill.

“I think you hear King Crimson in the songwriting structure, in the way that Adam builds his tone, and in the way Danny listened to both [King Crimson drummers] Bill Bruford and Pat Mastelotto. It’s also the Led Zeppelin influence Adam had from doing No Quarter [the 1973 Zeppelin song covered by Tool during the Ænima sessions that was eventually released in 2000]. Working on those sonics and that structure amalgamated into what Lateralus became.”

Tool began work on the follow-up to Ænima in the autumn of 2000. They took a different approach to the way they’d made the previous record: where the writing process for Ænima had seen Maynard forging melodies and lyrics alongside the music being created by Adam, Danny and Justin, this time the instrumental trio began poring through four years’ worth of riffs, melodies and ideas while Maynard more or less left them to it.

“They would have a whiteboard and go, ‘OK, well, let’s go from Riff A to B to C,’” explains David Bottrill, who had produced Ænima, and was on board once again for Lateralus.

“They would just work things around, try many different options of arrangements to see which ones felt the best.”

Maynard, for his part, spent much of 2000 on the road with his side-project A Perfect Circle while his bandmates worked. His stance, as David recalls, was one of blunt pragmatism:

“‘Look, you guys get the arrangements sorted out… send it to me when you’re closer, then I’ll work on the lyrics.’”

The songs that resulted achieved a rare balance between technicality and humanity, where the intricate musical arrangements never choked out the raw, visceral pulse at the centre of it all. Thematically, Lateralus ditched the cynical edge that had partly defined Ænima and their 1992 debut EP Opiate for a radical, wide-eyed vulnerability. Maynard framed the album as a “spiritual roadmap” designed to transform toxic energy into transcendence.

“If I have a spiritual side, it’s about trying to be as honest as I can,” he noted at the time. “The one thing that was missing from that very heady, artistic progressive rock approach was the emotional… we didn’t seem very ‘vulnerable.’”

That approach was encapsulated by The Grudge, the album’s eight-and-a-half-minute opening track and the song on which Maynard unleashes that monumental scream heard by David Bottrill and a cat.

Lyrically, it’s the singer’s warning against what he called the “lead weight” of grievances that drag the soul under. It’s seemingly loaded with both alchemical and astrological symbolism: Tool-watchers have suggested the line ‘Saturn ascends’ refers to the time it takes Saturn to orbit the sun, around 29.5 years.

Maynard has never revealed the specific significance of that line, though he did say that the track was a conscious decision to choose “the transformation of negative energy into positive energy” over the easy payoff of rage.

Musically, Lateralus dispenses with any remnants of the marginally more straightforward alt metal sound with which Tool made their name in favour of music that is complex and expansive.

Schism is defined by a coiling, serpentine bassline and a constant rotation of odd time signatures, The Patient uses restraint as a weapon, its slow burn mirroring the very process of the existential survival that birthed the record, while the transition from the ethereal Parabol into the earth-shaking Parabola remains one of heavy music’s most devastating payoffs, its tension slowly building until it has no choice but to explode with the force of a neutron bomb.

The mid-album firestorm Ticks & Leeches hits like a high-velocity exorcism, pushing Maynard to a level of vocal strain that purportedly sidelined his ability to sing for weeks. The album’s final descent is the 25-minute suite of Disposition, Reflection and Triad, which trade sheer force for a trancelike, Jungian exploration of ego-death and spiritual realignment.

Beyond the sprawling song structures, the band still left room for moments of eccentric experimentation. This manifested in the album’s atmospheric segues, most notably on the track Mantra. Though it sounds like a deep, meditative hum, Maynard later revealed to the Japanese magazine Buzz that the recording was actually a “treat” for fans: the sound of him squeezing his Siamese cat, slowed down until the animal’s protest became a cavernous, ambient pulse.

It wasn’t the only found sound to make the cut. Elsewhere, Danny Carey growled through a tube to simulate the chanting of Tibetan monks for Parabol, and the album’s closer, Faaip de Oiad, utilises a sampled 1997 radio call to Coast To Coast AM from a man claiming to be a panicked, former Area 51 employee – a paranoid interlude that tapped into “the sheer frequency of human desperation”, as described by Maynard.

But the album’s most famous Easter Egg is embedded in the album’s title track. The Fibonacci sequence is an ancient mathematical pattern in which each successive number is the sum of the two that precede it. Somehow, Tool found a way to work it into one of their songs.

“Justin brought in this amazing bass riff,” Adam recalled. “He said, ‘The first part’s in 9, the second part’s in 8 and the last part’s in 7.’ Danny was like, ‘[987] is a number of the Fibonacci. That’s really cool.’… We told Maynard, and he went, ‘Oh, my god, I’ll write my lyrics like that!’”

The singer’s vocals follow this pattern, each syllable representing a number in the series. It’s a very clever arrangement that has, over time, been wildly mythologised and over-emphasised by those hungry for esoteric secrets. Maynard himself has spent years trying to deflate that particular balloon.

“I feel like I kind of pulled a very pedestrian, sophomoric move,” he told podcaster Joe Rogan in 2017. “It’s good to let people know about [Fibonacci] but it was kind of a dick joke, in a way. I could do better.”

Intellectual dick jokes notwithstanding, the album sounded like nothing else that had come before. It was closer in spirit to Radiohead’s Kid A, released the previous year, than any contemporary metal band.

Just like Kid A – another album that refused to play by the music industry’s rules – Lateralus proved that mainstream success didn’t have to come at the expense of intelligence and vision.

Yet Tool weren’t completely exempt from having to play the game. Schism was released as a single at the start of 2001, a taste of what was to come. Even so, it was a defiant choice for radio.

“I found it very hard when we came to pick a single,” Justin told Prog magazine in 2021. “Adam and Danny immediately were like, ‘Schism is the hit, that’s the one, everybody is going to love it.’ I was honestly really on the opposite end of that. ‘Really? It’s so odd.’”

The gamble paid off, with the song’s success amplified by a disquieting stop-motion video directed by Adam that featured no footage of the band. Justin credited this to the group’s refusal to sign away their autonomy, noting that the guitarist’s background in special effects allowed them to ignore the industry’s demand for a typical rock promo.

“Nobody gets to tell us what to do at all,” Justin said. “We never felt under pressure to make a typical rock video with the band jumping around onstage.”

Nor was the album’s packaging comparable to anything their contemporaries were doing. For the artwork, they enlisted artist Alex Grey, whose anatomical, translucent illustrations – rendered in a multi-layered, clear plastic booklet – mirrored the album’s obsession with peeling back layers of the self to reveal the luminous spiritual core beneath.

“Alex has a way of visualising the things we were trying to articulate lyrically,” explained Maynard. “It’s that sense of a ‘spiritual roadmap’. When you look at the layers of the Lateralus booklet, you’re literally peeling back the physical to find the light inside. It perfectly captured the intent of the record: the idea that we are more than just these meat-suits."

When Lateralus itself landed in May 2001, it dashed any hopes or expectations for an Ænima Pt. 2. Critics were predictably split. While Metal Hammer praised its “proper serious heavyweight rock” as being on par with Led Zeppelin’s equally epic Physical Graffiti or Pink Floyd’s The Wall, chronically petulant hipster music website Pitchfork issued a baffling 1.9/10.

By that point, Tool were critic-proof anyway. This sprawling, cerebral monolith demolished the competition, debuting at No.1 on the Billboard 200 and selling a jaw-dropping 550,000 copies in its first week, beating the likes of Missy Elliott and Destiny’s Child.

In the years since its release, Lateralus has taken on a life beyond the band. Fans had proposed alternate track sequences, dived deep into the album’s vast numerical realms, and come up with some truly head-scratching theories, like the one claiming the band wrote Lateralus along to the film The Passion Of The Christ, a movie released three full years after the record.

Adam recalls first hearing about that theory from a fan email: “I wrote her back and said, ‘Cool. You figured it out.’”

The factual impossibility was beside the point. The engagement wasn’t. Within the scene, Lateralus emerged as a beacon for what prog metal could become. While some bands simply mimicked Tool’s technical quirks to infinitely lesser effect, acts such as Mastodon took the album’s spirit of ambition to forge their own conceptual paths on albums like Leviathan.

By clearing a space for atmosphere and experimentation, Tool provided a vital blueprint for the challenging music made by the likes of Gojira, The Ocean and Tesseract.

“Lateralus redefined what heavy music can be,” says David Bottrill. “There’s nobody that sounds quite like them. I can tell you, you’ve got no idea how many demos I get that are pastiches of what they do, and nobody comes close.”

Perhaps Danny Carey himself put it best: “It still makes my hair stand on end when I listen to it alone in the dark.”

US prog rockers The Mars Volta have announced that they will release a new live album, Lucro Sucio; Unfinished Business, as a digital release on September 4 and as a physical release on October 16.

The band have also shared their brand new single, Cue The Sun/Alba del Orate, which you can listen to below.

The new live album, the band's first official live release since 2005’s Scabdates, was the result of an interactive campaign which allowed the band's fans access to live recordings from their 2025 tour, featuring audio previews from multiple live recordings and a voting mechanism that allowed fans to choose which specific performances make the final cut for the album.

Lucro Sucio; Unfinished Business will be available across three distinct configurations, allowing physical collectors to choose between a Special Edition CD Digipak or a limited Edition 2LP vinyl set to be released on October 16, as well as a launch on all major streaming platforms as a digital album enhanced with Dolby Atmos spatial audio on September 4.

Pre-order Lucro Sucio; Unfinished Business.

Is The Pineapple Thief’s Bruce Soord consumed by existential angst, or has he made the most quietly powerful solo music of his career? Prog takes a walk with the Ghosts In The Park.

“It started off completely different,” says Bruce Soord. Ghosts In The Park, his fourth solo studio album, is his most personal, heartfelt record yet. The songs were conceived on tour with The Pineapple Thief while he was confronting the death of his father. Writing from a place of such profound intimacy shaped the music, transforming his original vision for the album.

“I was going to do more of an electronic-backed record,” he says. “Then, when I was on tour and it was just myself and the acoustic guitar, I realised that was the real spirit. There’s this feeling where you come up with something and you know when it’s an accurate projection of what you’re thinking and feeling; then there’s a feeling when you you’re just going through the motions. It may as well be AI – you’re just putting Lego pieces together until a song pops out.”

There’s nothing mechanical about Ghosts In The Park. Sitting in a series of hotel rooms, Soord found the sounds to match the emotions he was feeling.“That’s when I realised I could do it with the melodies of an acoustic and my voice,” he says. “The hotel room is where I found it the record.”

It was such a successful experience that the album features many of the original guitar demo performances. “I was always under the impression that I was going to go back in my studio and re-record. When I did, technically it sounded better, but it just didn’t have that hotel room magic. It sounds really pretentious, but I put the new recordings in and the song lost its soul in a way.”

Perhaps it was a case of reverse red light syndrome: the absence of the pressure to capture a perfect performance that made the hotel performances special. “I was just going along with the flow, not worrying about what’s going on the record,” he says. The result is music shaped by the geography of a tour itinerary and maps of the heart and mind.

Meet Me On The Downs was written in response to the loss of his father. “This isn’t exceptional; this is a universal experience I went through. I’m not looking for anyone to go, ‘Oh Bruce, that’s terrible’ – it’s just a normal part of life,” he says. “My father suffered from dementia and had a very long and slow decline until he died last summer; and my mother has been suffering from end-stage Alzheimer’s for goodness knows how long.

When my father eventually died, I drove to the retirement home which I’ve been going to for the last seven years. I parked outside and I thought, ‘What a strange feeling this is.’ You look up at the window and think, ‘There’s no one in there any more.’ So I sat in the car and reflected on the stillness.”

The lyrics explore that landscape of loss as Soord went into his father’s flat to begin clearing it out. “All the photo albums were scattered on the floor, so that was something I put into the lyrics. I came back from the flat, went into the studio, thinking about how I wanted to remember my father. His dementia was so extreme that he was delirious, so it got quite intense.

“I didn’t want that to be my memory, so I went to the studio, I shut my eyes, and I tried to go back as far as I could, and picked out memories of when I was four or five. The more you thought about it, the further back you could go, and that formed the second half of the song. That’s just an example of how personal the record is. That might not be everybody’s thing, but for me it was a way to make it sincere.”

Conversely, The Pineapple Thief isn’t the right vehicle for such sensitive subject matter and introspection. “With them I’m still singing about similar things in terms of relationships – love and death and all that stuff – but in a much, much broader way. The solo stuff is so much more personal; I’m basically baring everything; my soul, really.”

The Pineapple Thief and Soord’s solo releases are “completely compartmentalised” in his mind, reflecting the different experiences of working alone versus in a group. “In The Pineapple Thief, we’re always together, we’re always talking about the songs together; but when I put this record together, it’s me, on my own in my studio or in my hotel room. I unapologetically made the tracks about very, very personal things.”

He recently toured the album round small venues with TPT bassist Jon Sykes, using looper pedals to recreate the music’s layered parts. “I always had a mind to playing it live on a very intimate basis,” says Soord. “When I’m introducing the songs, it can feel like you’re having a conversation with every single person in the room.”

“I know it’s a cliché when you talk about intimate shows, but that is absolutely what it feels like. The Pineapple Thief is now this big rock show with lights, the big stage, the big, loud PA. But my solo stuff is me and Jon sat down with our instruments and that’s enough. I’ve been to some shows that have been solo or just two people in churchy venues, and I’ve come away thinking, ‘Wow, that’s one of the best shows I’ve been to!’ Sometimes you don’t need all the production. It’s just a different animal.”

Ghosts In The Park isn’t purely acoustic, boasting terrific electric guitar work in tracks like Kept Me Thinking and Pillars. “I indulged myself with some solos,” admits Soord, who names Camel’s Andy Latimer and The Alan Parsons Project’s Ian Bairnson as his six-string heroes because “they both share the ability to do melodic, hooky solos that you could sing or air guitar along to. You don’t need to widdle up and down the fretboard to come up with a good guitar solo, so I thought, ‘Let’s do that; let’s have some confidence in yourself and get the guitar out.’”

It’s also an album of rich, layered sounds and dramatic arrangements, whose grandeur belies the music’s humble hotel room origins. “I always like the drama,” says Soord, picking the title track as the song that he’s “most proud of in terms of the songwriting and arrangements.” He explains: “It gets very big and very dramatic in the silences. That’s what I’ve always enjoyed, surprising people with silence. There’s a section where it almost fades to nothing, and you’re thinking, ‘What’s going on here?’ Then all of a sudden it starts again. You can only get that kind of drama when you get that juxtaposition of intense moments and really delicate bits.”

His previous solo record, Luminescence, featured string arrangements by Andrew Skeet, but this time Soord didn’t want to go down that road, preferring an approach that he can replicate onstage. “I thought, ‘No, rather than have a string section, I’m going to have an acoustic guitar orchestra,’” he says. “The title track has sections where I’m layering – a wall of acoustic guitars – which is easy to do with a looper pedal live, so you still get that big, lush arrangement. But really, I just wanted to make the whole thing from my performance and my soul.”

All of which raises the question of what drives his urge to share such profound, personal experiences with an audience? “I still can’t really answer that,” he says. “I’m generally a very happy, positive person, but if you listen to my solo records, you probably think, ‘Goodness, is he just so wrapped up in the existential problems of being a human? is this who Bruce is all day long?’

“It’s not. I just find it very intriguing to sing about life and death and all that stuff, and try and make sense of it. It is a strange thing. It’s ridiculously personal stuff you’re sharing; it’s not like I would sit in a coffee shop and talk to people about this kind of thing. I never would.

“I’ve pondered it for many hours, and I think it’s just a cathartic thing and a way of coping with this existential issue of being a human that we all have.”

Ghosts In The Park is on sale now.

Former Supertramp co-frontman Roger Hodgson's first two solo albums, In The Eye Of The Storm and Hai Hai, have been remastered at half-speed by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios and will be reissued through Universal Records on August 21.

Following on from the recent Supertamp series of vinyl reissues, both featuring artwork faithful to the original releases.

Hodgson left Supertramp when their 1983 tour in support of the previous year's ...Famous Last Words... culminated in September, to spend more time with his family, having recently relocated from Los Angeles to Northern California. He'd recorded a solo album, Sleeping With the Enemy, prior to ...Famous Last Words..., but decided against releasing it.

He released what became his debut solo album, In The Eye Of The Storm, in 1984. Selling over two million copies, it remains his best-selling solo release. Hai Hai followed three years later, although prior to the album's release, Hodgson broke both wrists falling from a loft at his home and could not promote the album sufficiently. The album featured Land Ho, a song he and Rick Davies had written for Supertramp in 1974, but never used.

Hodgson worked with Trevor Rabin in 1990, co-writing the Yes song Walls that featured on the band's 1994 album Talk, as well as Rabin's 2003 archival release 90124, but he declined an offer to replace Jon Anderson in the band. Since then, he's released one more solo album, Open The Door in 2000 and two live releases, Rites Of Passage in 1997, which featured five previously unrecorded songs and a rare guest appearance from Supertramp's John Helliwell, and Classics Live in 2010.

Pre-order here.

In The Eye Of The Storm

Side One

1. Had A Dream (Sleeping With The Enemy)
2. In Jeopardy
3. Lovers In The Wind
4. Hooked On A Problem

Side Two
1. Give Me Love, Give Me Life
2. I'm Not Afraid
3. Only Because Of You

Hai Hai

Side One
1. Right Place
2. My Magazine
3. London
4. You Make Me Love You
5. Hai Hai

Side Two
1. Who's Afraid
2. Desert Love
3. Land Ho
4. House On The Corner
5. Puppet Dance

In 2016 Devin Townsend announced he’d started work on The Moth, a symphonic rock opera centred around sex and death. The project lay dormant for a number of years, but it’s finally out as the singer/multi-instrumentalist comes to terms with his personal life being turned upside-down. He tells Prog about the decade-long backstory and intense themes of his self-described “life’s work.”

Devin Townsend wasn’t allowed to be emotional when he was a kid. Born in Canada to a family of British and Irish immigrants, his parents forced him to maintain a proverbial stiff upper lip and keep his anger, sadness and even joy to himself. One of the few ways of letting his feelings out without being seen as uncouth was listening to musicals with his mum and dad.

“It was like, ‘You’re upset? You’re gonna wanna keep that quiet, because you’re gonna spoil dinner for everybody,’” the 53-year-old prog metal maestro remembers. “But music was a loophole. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, musicals were such a part of the lexicon of my family’s communication skills, whether we were singing the songs to each other or referencing the humour of a film.”

Townsend loved West Side Story, Jesus Christ Superstar and Paint Your Wagon, and it’s a passion that’s endured well into his adult life. His 30th (yes, 30th) album, The Moth, is rooted in the same symphonic drama as those influential films. It’s a near-80-minute, strings-loaded prog opera recorded with the 70-piece North Netherlands Orchestra and a 65-person choir, with 24 songs telling the story of a hero’s journey from birth to death. Many current and former collaborators, including guitarist extraordinaire Steve Vai and singer Anneke van Giersbergen, make appearances.

Townsend – once renowned for his ability to unload records as quickly as machine-gun fire, not just under his own name, but through such bands as extreme metal aggressors Strapping Young Lad and ambient country duo Casualties Of Cool – has referred to the project as his “life’s work,” having chipped away at it for almost a decade. “It feels like I’ve been taking a 10-year shit,” he says, “and I’m just wiping now.”

He first announced The Moth in 2016, saying it was the next thing on his to-do list after the Devin Townsend Project’s Transcendence. The following January, during a now-famous Vice interview, he said it’d be a stage show about “cocks and vaginas and death” and that he’d need $10million to get it off the ground.

The next big update didn’t come until 2024, when he revealed it would be an album and the follow-up to that year’s PowerNerd. Then, in March 2025, he played the whole thing in full for two nights only in the Dutch town of Groningen, suggesting that the release would happen sooner rather than later.

He says that, for all the delays and changes the project’s been through, it’s still the meditation on sex and mortality that he originally intended it to be. “When something comes to me it’s a 10-minute process,” he explains. “Ten years ago, I’m like, ‘It’s called The Moth and it’s about sex and death and transformation – and go!’ There’s no sense of, ‘I’m going to sit down and write this now.’ I just live; and then, as a byproduct of living, those creative moments, if they’re good, end up adhering themselves to your experiences.”

Many think about sex in positive terms: a bonding moment between two people who share a mutual attraction, or even just something that feels good. But Townsend talks about it as if it’s hideous. He calls it “a proxy for unity” and compares it to hollow things like pornography, social media and drugs, in that they’re all ways people “try and connect with something more than us.” In the liner notes of The Moth there are gross oil paintings of men with giant penises sword-fighting and someone else ejaculating into space. Prog wonders where this seemingly dark relationship comes from.

“Myself and a lot of people in my life went through formative experiences that were really traumatic,” he answers. “For me, sex from a very young age was coloured by experiences that were really difficult. Because it’s an awkward conversation a lot of times, it’s swept under the rug, but it affects our entire fucking life.”

When asked to open up about the nature of that trauma, it’s the one time in our 50-minute interview that he flat-out declines to say anything. “It’s not important to the conversation,” he says. “As opposed to me using this work as an opportunity to have public therapy, the idea is more, ‘Oh, I recognise how much it plays into my own personal development: these unaddressed traumas and unprocessed feelings.’”

Nonetheless, The Moth is clearly an autobiographical work. It has a narrative with a cast of characters, but Townsend is almost dismissive about it, beyond the fact that he wants to turn it into a book one day and that it’s a hero’s journey in the vein of writer/historian Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. More important to him right now is that it’s an allegory, the protagonist and their journey a metaphor for him processing his past experiences and how they shaped his personality.

“Is there a story? Absolutely!” he says. “Are there characters? Absolutely! Is it of any importance to the understanding or lack thereof? I don’t know. Maybe not. For me, it all served a real practical purpose: leaving home, going into the unknown, facing the demon, whatever it is; these big ‘hero’s journey’ archetype chunks. We made a wheel out of it that had 13 sections and were like, ‘This here is the quiet, this is where a war is, this is where the confrontation is, here’s the resolution’ – all these theatrical tropes that I was then able to write songs for.”

And then you connected them to your personal experiences? “Of course! But those personal experiences are what come to you after you’ve outlined it. I think, if you start with the personal experiences, you’re going to be fucked from the beginning because you’re just never going to want to do it. You’re never going to be like, ‘You know what would be a great way to spend the day today? If we just dig into trauma!’”

Every story has an inciting incident: the moment where the hero is thrust into the unknown and forced onto their quest. Townsend says that his own – which made him want to open up on The Moth – was when “everybody left.” Around the time he started PowerNerd, his son moved out to go to college.

“I was stuck in this place full of broken dreams,” he remembers, “and I had to start writing PowerNerd. That record was supposed to be a fuck-around and it ended up being an album about heartbreak. Up to the point where everything went away, I had a certain amount of creative motivation that I gleaned from tenacity – ‘I’m the guy that can get through any of this!’ Then life put me in a position where it was like, ‘I can’t handle this; it’s too much for me.’

“What was so dramatic about it was, for the first time, I felt like I couldn’t put on a brave face. I couldn’t hide behind platitudes. I couldn’t be this, ‘Well, you gotta go through what you gotta go through to get to where you’re going’ – all this fucking shit. I was just kind of like, ‘I’m fucked!’”

He recalls crying as he finished The Moth at home with only his dog Oliver for company. The album includes a love letter to his loyal pet in the form of its ambient closing track, We Don’t Deserve Dogs. “I had this dog following me around, being like, ‘I know you’re upset, I want to be with you,’” he says. “And my reaction to it was like, ‘I don’t want to be seen when I’m emotional.’ Finally, I had to surrender to the fact that this dog had no agenda. It was simple. He was like, ‘You’re sad. I’m here for you.’ Accepting love was one of the most foundational changes as a result of going through this process.”

While the liner notes contain those graphic sexual illustrations, the album cover is a picture of Townsend’s face. That’s it. After so many years of deflecting and refusing to confront his past, he explains that he’s “unafraid to be seen,” adding: “If you’re gonna be seen, you’re gonna wanna go balls-out: Thelma And Louise it over the cliff, you know? In the past, when I’ve been guilty of not committing to it, it’s been, ‘I don’t wanna be perceived as being irrational.’ But I’m just a fucking artist, dude! This is a representation of an emotion that I don’t have a vocabulary for, other than fucking ‘Grrrrrr!’ To be able to do that and be like, ‘Yes, it’s me’, that was the goal.”

As for what’s next, he has an outline of a plan, although the specifics are a mystery even to him. “After a project like The Moth, all of a sudden everyone in my professional world might be like, ‘Make more metal, fuck-face!’” he laughs. He said in 2024 that the follow-up to The Moth would be an album called Axolotl, but he reveals today that he has 10 projects on the go, and that “the one that takes pole position is going to be the one that’s most creatively compelling.” What matters far more to him right now is that he’s just made music that is true to his experiences, no deflections or platitudes in sight.

“What’s important is the truth: who you are, making peace with who you are,” he says. “These are subtle things. All they require is being able to sit with yourself and your pain, really being present with yourself in ways that are really fucking uncomfortable, because you have to be willing to see yourself as the person you are, not the person you want people to see.”

The Moth is on sale now.

On the 30th anniversary of Asia’s groundbreaking debut album, late frontman John Wetton and keyboardist Geoff Downes told Prog about the struggle to maintain their vision and the pressure that came with the LP’s unexpected success in 1982.

“Asia? You framed an Asia poster? How hard did the people at the frame store laugh when you brought this in?” It’s one of the most memorable lines in the 2005 comedy The 40 Year Old Virgin. Steve Carell, playing sexually inexperienced Andy Stitzer, is about to let a prospective girlfriend into his apartment. Seth Rogen, as his buddy Cal, is taking Andy to task over his “un-sexy” collection of video games and action figurines, topped off by the poster that came with Asia’s self- titled debut album.

The image of the mythical sea dragon was instantly recognisable to a generation who’d been teenagers in 1982 and who remembered hearing Asia’s US Top 5 hit Heat Of The Moment on constant rotation that summer. The song also featured in the movie’s soundtrack.

“It was very amusing,” laughs Asia’s keyboard player Geoff Downes 30 years later. “And it helped re-kindle interest. People remembered Heat Of The Moment and that poster. Teenagers, kids, students – they all had it on their bedroom walls. I almost find it scary that something we did back then could end up having such an impact so many years later.”

Asia’s debut represents that fleeting moment when prog rock hijacked the US pop charts. Asia comprised two escapees from Yes, Geoff Downes and guitarist Steve Howe; ex-ELP drummer Carl Palmer and bassist/ vocalist John Wetton, who’d served time in King Crimson, Family, UK and numerous others.

Released in March 1982, Asia’s first was a runaway success, spending nine weeks at Number One in the US. But it happened while the record industry was looking the other way. 1982 was the year Human League’s Don’t You Want Me and Soft Cell’s Tainted Love crossed over to the US charts. Nobody expected refugees from Yes and ELP to make hit records; least of all hit records whose imagery would seep into popular culture and become Hollywood shorthand for a never- ending adolescence.

The roots of Asia could be traced back to the mid-70s. After leaving King Crimson in 74, Wetton put together a new progressive outfit called UK. Their second album, 1979’s Danger Money, tempered its virtuosity with more commercial touches. Wetton’s songwriting was slowly evolving into the streamlined sound of Asia.

“I was even heading in that direction in Crimson with songs like Easy Money and Starless,” said Wetton says now. But the process took time. “I had a Svengali, John Kalodner,” he explains. Kalodner was an A&R executive for the newly formed Geffen Records. “When I presented UK to him he said, ‘You’re close but no cigar’.” When UK split up in 1980, Wetton spent three months in Miami with Wishbone Ash, working on their album Number The Brave “soaking up American radio and writing songs after everyone else went home.”

Back in England, Wetton recorded a low-key solo album Caught In The Crossfire, made up of pop-rock songs in a similar vein to Foreigner and Toto. Kalodner was impressed, but thought Wetton needed a band. For a time, Palmer, keyboard player Rick Wakeman and guitarist Trevor Rabin were mooted. Then, Wetton was introduced to Howe.

“Yes had just imploded at the end of the Drama tour,” explains Downes. “But Steve and I had worked up a good relationship. So I then got a call asking if I wanted to play keyboards on Steve and John’s new songs.”

Downes joined Wetton, Howe and Palmer at London’s Nomis Studios. But Kalodner’s idea for Asia included a lead vocalist. American singer Robert Fleischmann, who’d briefly fronted Journey, joined them in the studio. “But in rehearsals John [Wetton] was leading the field vocally,” says Downes. “So we said ‘No, this is good with the four of us’.” Fleischmann was sent home.

In Downes, Wetton had found the ideal songwriting partner. In 1976, while Yes were crafting the 15-minute epic Awaken on their Going For The One album, Downes had been scraping a living writing advertising jingles. Three years later he was behind The Buggles’ massive hit Video Killed The Radio Star.

“I wasn’t much younger than the rest of them,” he says. “But I was the new kid on the block, and had been involved in a different side of the music business. The others had had their fill of epic pieces. They wanted something more direct.”

What Wetton and Downes also shared was a mutual interest in English church music. “My brother is a choirmaster and church organist,” says Wetton. “That’s the music I grew up on.” “English church music was fundamental to the Asia sound,” adds Downes. “That’s where we got those anthemic chords.”

Asia signed to Geffen, and the album’s recording took place through summer and autumn 1981 at Richard Branson’s Townhouse Studios and Marcus Studios in West London. Geffen had brought in former Queen engineer Mike Stone to produce. Stone had just finished work on Journey’s Escape. “We weren’t exactly the Son Of Journey but in some ways Asia did become a British equivalent,” says Downes.

Crucially, Asia weren’t an obvious musical amalgam of Yes, Crimson and ELP. “If we’d made the album people expected us to make we’d have sold 150,000 records,” says Wetton. “That’s fine, but we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. It was always going to be a more commercial sound. ”

Asked if Howe and Palmer were as committed to Wetton and Downes’ musical vision, Geoff offers a diplomatic: “We had a united front.” “I can only speak for myself, but I was committed,” laughs Wetton. “But... okay, yes, I got shot down many times on that album: ‘Oh, it’s pop. Oh, it’s bubblegum...’”

Out of the creative tension came an album that, as Wetton puts it, “mixed prog stuff with a backbone of great pop-rock songs.” There was fiddly art-rock (Time Again), a tender ballad (Without You) and three hits- in-waiting (Heat Of The Moment, Only Time Will Tell, Sole Survivor). As a nod to the past, Asia commissioned Roger Dean to create the album artwork. “Asia wanted their cover to look as unlike Yes as possible,” Dean said in 2005.

Still, the picture that ended up hanging on the virginal Andy Stitzer’s wall wasn’t to everyone’s liking. “The president of the record company took me to one side and said, ‘Quite honestly, we find the cover a bit dark, the logo is ugly and, frankly, we don’t hear a single,’” laughs Wetton.

Incredibly, Heat Of The Moment – with its churchy keyboards and burnished chorus – was the last song recorded. And, as Wetton admits, “If you’d taken that off the album you could have taken two zeros off the record sales.”

Heat Of The Moment emerged as a single in April, climbing to Number Four on the Billboard pop charts, with the LP hitting Number One in the Billboard Top 100, and 11 in the UK. “In spring ’82, if you turned on the radio or MTV it was Heat Of The Moment,” says Wetton. “Everything else was Human League and A Flock Of Seagulls, and then we came in like a ton of bricks.”

Asia had been booked on a tour of college halls and modest-sized theatres. But as the album and single raced up the charts, they moved to bigger venues. By July, they were selling out the 18,000-seater Dallas Reunion Arena. “Suddenly we were this lauded supergroup – and everyone wanted a ticket,” says Downes. “We were the band of the summer.” Surveying the audience from behind his extensive bank of keyboards, he noticed a significant change since Yes days. “They were a lot younger and there were women,” he chuckles. “The bands we were in before attracted the beards-and-pullovers brigade.”

“Someone did a survey,” adds Wetton. “And it was exactly 50-50 men and women. We had that mass appeal – all ages. We were all in our early 30s, we still looked alright at that stage of the game. We could get away with it.”

The follow-up singles Only Time Will Tell and Sole Survivor achieved similar sales and airplay. “At one point we had six tracks in the Billboard Top 30,” marvels Wetton. “Six solid tracks for AOR radio – fucking amazing. I think only Foreigner came close to that.”

Asia ended 1982 with one of the year’s biggest selling albums. But under pressure from Geffen and their management, they went back to the studio to make the follow-up Alpha, released in August ‘83. It was too quick. Wetton: “The management wanted more of the same – like Die Hard 2.” The first single Don’t Cry was promoted by a video in which the band hammed it up in a pastiche of the recent hit movie Raiders Of The Lost Ark. At one point Howe falls down a cliff and catches fire. (Downes: “I look at it now, and think, ‘Did we really do that?’”)

Initially, the signs were good. Alpha went Top 10 in the UK and US, and Don’t Cry was another US Number One. “It was the fastest selling single to go to Number One in the fucking history of music,” says Wetton. “But two weeks later, when it dropped out, everyone goes, ‘What a shit single!’ And I get the blame.”

In a shock move, Wetton was fired two months later. The problem? “I was drinking a lot,” he sighs. “But ‘rock’n’roll star drinks’ is not headline news... Basically, I didn’t fit into their plans.” Greg Lake was brought in to play a handful of Asia shows including a televised gig at Tokyo’s Budokan in December. “Greg’s a mate. He did his job. But it would be like me joining ELP.”

Wetton returned for 1985’s Astra, but, by then, Howe had walked. The album sold poorly, and Wetton jumped ship. Downes, Wetton and Palmer reunited in 1990 (Wetton: “But without Steve it was not the same”). Downes toured and recorded under the Asia banner with various musicians.

Then, in 2006, the original four reconvened. “We booked a meeting at a hotel in Paddington,” recalls Wetton. “The protagonists – or antagonists – were me and Steve. That’s where the trouble was. Then, as fate would have it, we bumped into each other in the lobby having not seen each other for years. We had a hug and it was all over before we’d even got in the elevator.”

In 2012, XXX became the third Asia album since 2008 to feature the classic line-up. “We still make a good noise,” insists Wetton. “We’re better now than we were in 1982. Back then, a lot of people saw Asia as a Yes spin-off. But that couldn’t be further from it. Asia was a whole different direction – and one that Yes picked up on later. Their album 90125 [in 1983] was much closer to what we had done earlier.”

Nevertheless, that four-million- selling debut album still looms large, even more so since being revived in a Hollywood movie. “Thinking about it now, what we did was so leftfield,” says Geoff Downes. “Somehow, we nipped in and captured the hearts of the American public, and, crucially, a younger generation. Even now, we hear people say, ‘I can still remember what I was doing when I heard that first Asia album.’ It never goes away.”

The world's longest-running weekly music show, Top Of The Pops was never exactly a hotbed of subversion. The TV show's most iconic moments - from David Bowie performing Starman in July 1972 through to Nirvana's November 25, 1991 desecration of Smells Like Teen Spirit - gained infamy precisely because they were such a jolt to the senses on a programme regarded as a national institution.

Which might help explain why being confronted by the sight of a twitching, lairy man with a strip of hair shaved from the centre of his head stomping up and down an abandoned London Underground tunnel waggling his pierced tongue down the camera lens caused such outrage when the British public settled down for tea in front of Auntie Beeb's flagship music show on March 28, 1996.

A record number of complaints followed, and as the song began a three-week residency at the top of the national singles chart, the tabloid press and a number of English MPs expressed alarm at what potential messages this self-professed 'Twisted Firestarter' might be imparting to the nation's youth. As a teaser of what was to come with The Prodigy's third album, it could hardly have been more impactful.

A veteran of the underground rave scene whose healthy distrust of authority and love of punk rock and hardcore hip-hop infused The Prodigy's second album, 1994's Music For The Jilted Generation, Liam Howlett remembers the creation of Firestarter with dancer-turned-vocalist Keith Flint as "a special moment."

"I remember driving back to Essex from London after recording Keith’s vocals and we played that shit over and over again," he recalled in 2018. "We knew it would change things. But we didn’t know it would change to the extent where Keith couldn’t walk down the street or walk into a pub without someone going, ‘Oi! It’s the Firestarter!’ But it gave us more strength to know who we are, and who we didn’t want to be. It gave us something to rebel against again.”

Nowadays, when we tune in to music, carefully manicured algorithms offer up songs which fit our natural rhythms and sit comfortably and seamlessly alongside our tried-and-trusted favourites for a smooth, linear, non-challenging listening experience. When it arrived on June 30, 1997 via XL Recordings, The Fat Of The Land was, in contrast, pure smash and grab. The aural equivalent of a bank heist, it found Liam Howlett pocketing a clutch of influences from the worlds of dance, rock and hip-hop and, aided by a supporting cast of like-minded mavericks, uniting them to create a fierce, confrontational sound that's since been ripped off countless times, but never repeated.

A tour through the album's three singles gives a flavour of its appeal. Each song is thunderously heavy in its own way but all of them bark with the creators' twisted sense of humour. Breathe followed Firestarter to the top of the UK charts in November 1996. This time, Howlett paired Flint on vocals with MC Maxim Reality, whose snaking body paint and fish-eyed contact lenses also gave him the appearance of an entity beamed down from another planet to remind us all how music can transport you to a different place. Backed by Howlett's ominous keyboard strokes, DJ Shadow-esque drum patterns and squeaking samples that repeated like a glitch in the matrix, Breathe freaked out fewer people than its predecessor, while delighting many more. The Prodigy's momentum was building.

The album's third and final single, Smack My Bitch Up, arrived one year later, seemingly intent on pouring petrol on the blaze that Firestarter first kindled. This time, the song and its controversial, Jonas Åkerlund-directed video – which followed a party girl on a gleefully hedonistic night out, shot from the protagonist's point of view – were banned from many TV and radio outlets, with the band eventually forced to declare that the track's title and lyrical refrain were absolutely not advocating violence against women. For by the time it emerged, The Prodigy were no longer an underground dance crew, but bonafide global superstars, with a platform to match, after The Fat Of The Land topped charts in the UK, US, Australia, Germany and a host of other European nations.

Such was the mainstream success of its three singles, that it's easy to forget that The Fat Of The Land is more than just a presentation case for Firestarter, Breathe and Smack My Bitch Up. From the futuristic hip-hop of Diesel Power and the Beastie Boys-sampling Funky Shit to the hypnotic Climbatize and the blistering, album-closing, cover of L7's Fuel My Fire, there is power and passion in every beat.

Fuel My Fire is a fitting conclusion for The Fat Of The Land. L7 vocalist Donita Sparks' lyrics seem to articulate the frustrations Howlett has voiced in interviews down the years: despite the epochal impact that his music has had on the British music scene in particular, The Prodigy often remain tolerated rather than recognised as one-offs, leaving them as at-best misunderstood and at-worst dismissed, possibly because they never even flirted with being part of the establishment.

While Oasis cosied up to New Labour only a couple of years after The Prodigy's Their Law had expressed its contempt for the Criminal Justice Act, Howlett refused be sucked into the machine.

"None of the success ever went to our heads," he insisted. "We weren’t interested in being rock stars, we were totally grounded. We always felt like any of us could have jumped out of the crowd on to the stage. That punk rock thing, without us ever thinking about it being punk rock. We just wanted to keep it real. It’s important for us to stay on a knife edge."

"And if another cunt calls me The Firestarter, I'll stab him in the fucking throat," Keith Flint warned, only half-joking.

The Prodigy's next 'proper' studio album, Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, wouldn’t arrive for another seven years: ripping up the blueprint once more, it relegated the estranged Flint and Maxim to appearances on remixed bonus tracks. The approach was somewhat forced upon Howlett - he and Flint in particular were barely communicating - but it showed once again that The Prodigy were nobody's puppets.

Not that Howlett wanted to disown what came before, for on The Fat Of The Land, the convergence of their creative powers and radical energy did more than start mosh pits at rave gigs: it showed that true originality and subversive thinking can't be suppressed. Anyone looking for music that makes them feel like they belong, could do worse than listen to this still incendiary blast of outsider art.

From Dance On A Volcano to Los Endos, Prog dissects each track on Genesis’ A Trick Of The Tail and rediscovers what made their first album without Peter Gabriel such an essential listen on release in 1976.

‘You’d better start doing it right,’ sings Phil Collins in opening track Dance On A Volcano. The seventh Genesis studio album, A Trick Of The Tail came with a whole bundle of pressure. With Peter Gabriel departed – but not “to go senile in the sticks,” he told the press – Genesis had questions and doubters to answer. Collins assumed they’d go on as a four-piece instrumental band.

“But my idea went out the window pretty much that first day,” he told this writer. “Tony and Mike said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous! We need a singer, because we’re songwriters.’”

Fortunately, although it took them a minute or two to realise it, they had an excellent singer within their ranks. “He had a lovely voice,” said Tony Banks. “He’d obviously done plenty on previous albums. But we weren’t sure he’d want to do it – he was the drummer, after all. And at the time, he didn’t seem to have the gravitas. But he sounded great.”

After many fruitless auditions with Collins teaching the applicants the vocals, it became clear who was the man for the job. “I do remember saying, ‘OK, I will give it a go,’” he recalled, “‘but don’t expect me to put on the costumes.’ Which is funny, as I was the one that had come from an acting background! It wasn’t a conscious decision to not do what Peter did; I just didn’t feel I could pull it off. So I became the ‘guy next door’. That’s what I did: I just stood there and sang.”

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

It also helped that the album was a completely inspired winner. A Trick Of The Tail is an exquisitely gauged blend of yearning melodies, heavy but not too heavy thumpers, affecting sad ballads and hypnotic soundbeds. The quartet had found all the right answers.

“We were lucky in a way,” recalled Banks. “Despite what people think of it now, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway – quite a difficult double album – sold less than Selling England By The Pound. We were in debt! So we were able now to come out with something more direct. It was a good place to be.”

An album built by strength but revealing frequent tenderness, A Trick Of The Tail is a very good place to be indeed. It’s a dreamlike world in which to immerse yourself, from the opening rumbles and flourishes.

Dance On A Volcano

“It’s a very arresting beginning to an album,” Banks said. “It gets you in there.” It certainly does, all but erupting. The atmosphere and tone of much of the record is established by the determined drama of this colossus, which also makes a cameo reappearance at the album’s finale. There’s no shortage of unpredictable rhythm, channelling Collins’ beloved Weather Report.

He was still razor sharp at the day job, and longtime fans were reassured the new Genesis chapter wasn’t about to take easy options. Yet for all the twisty interplay, the song surges ever forward, its motivations and momentum rich with excitement.

This was the first album to credit individual songwriters rather than the band as a whole, so it’s telling that this opener was a Rutherford-Banks- Collins-Hackett composition: everyone involved, pulling together, keen to not merely steady the ship but to get it going at a rate of knots.

“We’d started writing, and from the first day things just happened,” said Rutherford. “And after two or three weeks we thought, ‘This feels strong, feels good.’ It gave us the confidence to carry on.”

The listener was confident now, too: this Genesis was both accessible and aesthetically intriguing.

Entangled

And nowhere more so than on this, possibly Steve Hackett’s finest contribution to the band. Banks added the chorus, but it “was based on this really beautiful piece Steve had written,” he said. (His synth solo is simultaneously eerie and charming, and seems to change shape second by second.)

Seeing Hackett’s lyrics for the first time – ‘over the rooftops and houses’ – Collins perceived something of a Mary Poppins vibe about them. But its weird science (Freudian slumbers, hypnosis, sinister urges to sleep) also shares some DNA with Here Comes The Supernatural Anaesthetist from The Lamb. It’s a gorgeous reverie, the band resisting temptation to oversell its innate mood, and Collins’ prowess with soft, alluring numbers – as a singer he rarely does too much or too little, always serving the song – gets an early showcase.

Guy Garvey has said Entangled was a big influence on Elbow’s own 2001 breakthrough, Newborn, and that it’s the one Genesis track everybody in his band agrees on. (He’s eulogised it, and Ripples, on his BBC Radio 6 Music radio show.)

Hackett mused: “I’d gone off to do a solo album, Voyage Of The Acolyte, and it’s difficult then to go back and just write the odd bit or odd song. But on A Trick I’d come up with Entangled and got the ball rolling there. It was a happy camp for most of that period. There are some classics on that album.” Its gorgeous, hazy, stoned coda is a pinnacle.

Squonk

In a way it was Squonk that meant Collins had, as they say, passed the audition. The potential Gabriel replacements struggled with it – even the frontrunner – albeit the band were playing it in too high a key. Collins chuckled that it never occurred to them to give the singers a better chance by adapting, and that his bandmate didn’t offer him that courtesy either. “I had to make do.”

Inspired by the thumping drum sound on Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir (“My John Bonham moment,” said Collins), its lyrics were based on a mythical creature as illustrated in the snappily titled 1910 American fantasy- folklore book, Fearsome Creatures Of The Lumberwoods, With A Few Desert And Mountain Beasts; the squonk was apparently easy to hunt because it wept constantly.

The song is a powerful slab of mythology in its own right – even if it does end up, poignantly, as ‘just a pool of tears.’

Mad Man Moon

The relatively unsung masterpiece of the album, Banks’ composition leans into the multipart ‘suite’ format the band were elsewhere moving on from, and its Mellotron magic coaxes forth a mournful majesty. Banks has suggested the reason it gets less attention than some tracks is because they never played it live.

“It’s more, dare I say, a feminine track,” he told Prog. “I was very pleased when I wrote it, especially the verses. The noodling in the middle is quite fun, but if you listen carefully, it’s beyond my playing ability!” That’s a high bar, then.

With its ‘snowflake in June’ and ‘horse not made of sand,’ this is one mysterious aria. When asked about the line describing ‘a muddy pitch in Newcastle’ Banks said with a smile, “I’ve had a few phrases that you shouldn’t use: ‘Into the breadbin’ in All In A Mouse’s Night. ‘Double glazing’ in Domino. You either like those lines sticking out or you don’t. We’ve always been a divisive band, and I’ve always been happy with that.”

Robbery, Assault and Battery

“Coming from our underdog position,” reflected Collins, “when nobody expected much, A Trick was a bright light. Yes, our fans wanted the band to survive – and they preferred that we’d made it work within ourselves.”

This, though, is arguably the weakest link, as it comes across as Collins trying to “do” Gabriel essaying a Cockney-geezer accent. His childhood role as the Artful Dodger at drama school qualified him somewhat, but it’s awkward.

Penned chiefly by Banks, it’s squarely in the tradition of The Battle Of Epping Forest or Get ’Em Out By Friday, but although it has some charm and humour – and was swiftly dropped into their live set – it never quite breaks free of its chains. And between the romantic lushness of the classics either side of it, it’s almost a mood-killer.

Ripples…

Created via Rutherford’s 12-string guitars and some mid-section Rachmaninov-inspired piano from Banks, Ripples… was one of the first songs written with Collins’ voice in mind. Instantly a crowd favourite, with lovely looped guitars from Hackett, its gentle verses and showstopping lighters-in-the-air chorus exhibit the perfect balance of shrewd songcraft and ‘Genesis epic’ DNA. It gave them the confidence to write more ballads.

And if it’s lyrically vaguely in the same zone as The Lamia, with a flavour of fearing age and mortality, they were to nail their courage to the mast and pen actual love songs imminently. “It’s a strong chorus,” said Banks, with customary understatement.

“There’s still an aspect of the musical odyssey there,” pondered Hackett.

A Trick of the Tail

Banks composed the title track, some years earlier, circa Foxtrot. He’d been reading William Golding’s book The Inheritors (his 1955 follow-up to Lord Of The Flies) and began jamming around the rhythm of The Beatles’ Getting Better. He wanted “something lighter and more quirky.”

Revisiting a world of elves, sprites and aliens, and with a now-visible hint of the cautionary tale of exploiting outsiders in The Man Who Fell To Earth (the Nicolas Roeg film starring David Bowie that came out a month later), it’s a song that could only be Genesis – jaunty, catchy, but with an almost shy pride in its accidental grandeur and undeniable pathos.

It flopped as the showcase single, with Collins citing the video, where effects “shrank” him to a miniature man hopping about on the instruments, as the most cringeworthy of his entire career.

Los Endos

A marriage of overture and an end-of-night rock-out (it became an enduring and glorious live finale), Los Endos was a band composition initiated by Collins summoning his Brand X jazz-funk tastes, offering flashes of Santana and Weather Report.

It has since been revealed that its opening began life as part of It’s Yourself, a track cut from the album for length and which emerged later. Reprises of Dance On A Volcano and Squonk are interjected, there are false endings to die for, and over the fade Collins subtly sings, ‘There’s an angel standing in the sun.’ That quote from Supper’s Ready can be read as a final fond farewell and acknowledgement to Gabriel’s role in creating Genesis.

But, now there were four. And as A Trick Of The Tail got a great response from the press, quickly went gold (doubling any previous album’s sales) and paid off most of their debts, it heralded the band’s new beginning.

“I do feel the strain,” Collins once told this writer, “when it’s said so many times that, ‘It all fucked up when he started singing’ – because, really, we all changed. It was a metamorphosis. And I think we got better at knowing when to stop; to say, ‘OK, this song sounds great just like this.’”

Accessible but never predictable, warm but still weird, and beautiful without being bland, the album proved Genesis could thrive after their reshuffle. For all the Gabriel-era genius, they did sound great just like this. They were doing it right.

Steve Marriott was always going to be a star. By the age of 13 he was playing in bands around his native East London and appearing in the West End production of Oliver!, his hyperactivity an ideal fit for his role as the Artful Dodger. It was a presence he brought to bear on the Small Faces, the band he co-founded with fellow songwriter Ronnie Lane in 1965.

Along with drummer Kenney Jones and organist Ian McLagan, the quartet quickly became totems of the emergent mod culture, assimilating the hard grooves of American R&B and soul into a British vision of sharp suits and laddish bonhomie.

Both Marriott and Lane were unusually gifted songwriters, creating some of the most enduring 60s classics in the shape of Itchycoo Park, All Or Nothing, Tin Soldier and Lazy Sunday. But it was Marriott’s blue-eyed soul voice that set him apart. The Stones, The Who and the Sex Pistols were just a few who acknowledged his influence.

Marriott effectively broke up the Small Faces after a stormy gig in 1968, throwing his guitar to the floor in frustration at what he perceived as the group’s inability to break into more demanding artistic territory. While the others would go on to form The Faces, Marriott co-founded Humble Pie with Peter Frampton, Greg Ridley and Jerry Shirley, and cast off his past glories in favour of a much heavier brand of riff-centric blues rock.

Overshadowed by 70s contemporaries such as Led Zeppelin and The Who, Humble Pie were nonetheless a blistering proposition, especially live. America became their stronghold as the decade progressed, and they crammed in more than 20 US tours in one four-year period.

Humble Pie’s golden era was over by 1975. So, too, was Marriott’s. Divorced, hobbled by debt and with a serious drug and alcohol habit, he made a token attempt at a solo career before ill-fated reunions with both the Small Faces and Humble Pie. His final years saw him return to his roots in the pubs and clubs around London, fronting bands including Packet Of Three and The DTs.

Tragically, Marriott died in a house fire in 1991, having fallen asleep with a lit cigarette. “Though he could be hell to be around, he had a pure heart and I loved him as a brother,” McLagan wrote in his memoir, All The Rage. “He never stopped rocking.”

...and one to avoid

Van der Graaf Generator frontman Peter Hammill has announced that he will release his first new album for five years, Tears In Time, through Esoteric Antenna Records on September 25.

The album is a collection of songs that have been recorded at various locations of his Terra Incognita studio between 1991 and 2026, and is his first since 2021's In Translation album, itself a selection of cover songs, making Tears In Time Hammill's first selection of new material his first in almost a decade, since 2017's From The Trees.

"These songs have been a long time in the gestation and making," Hammill explains. "I’m pleased with the way they’ve worked out. They seem to hang together as a group, even though there’s a wide range of styles represented here. I’ve not stopped yet and I’m very happy that songs still seem to find their way into my hands."

Tears In Time will be available on both vinyl and CD. You can see the new album artwork and tracklisting below.

Pre-order CD.

Pre-order vinyl.

Peter Hammill: Tears In Time
1. For A Rainy Day
2. The Wheels
3. Heavy Weather
4. Angle Of The Curve
5. So Much Water
6. Tabula Rasa
7. Oh The End
8. Red Flags (In The Sunset)
9. You'll Never Know
10. The Half Of It
11. And When He Ran

If you were to time-warp back to 2001 and tell people that Slipknot will create one of the most vulnerable and evocative ballads in metal, they’d laugh in your face. The Nine rocketed to prominence around the new millennium by being the angriest band of the nu metal takeover: their music was extreme, their live shows anarchic and their appearance deliberately shit-your-pants terrifying. However, continued relevance requires musical evolution – and that’s precisely what the Des Moines renegades underwent as the noughties resumed.

After putting the metal world on notice with their furious debut then doubling down on Iowa (still the angriest album to top the UK charts), Slipknot grew beyond unfettered rage. Members took breaks from the 18-armed wrecking machine in less destructive side-projects and/or got clean from substances. When they regrouped to make 2004’s Vol. 3, they craved acoustic guitars, bigger singalongs and a more colourful emotional palette. That pursuit then reached its apex four years later, with the creation of the band’s softest and most emotionally exposed song: Snuff.

Snuff was controversial at first. When released as the 11th song of Slipknot’s fourth album All Hope Is Gone, reviewers were apprehensive, while fans were either confused or incensed. Many likened its melodic singing and clean guitar tones to Corey Taylor’s hard rock second job Stone Sour. Others, even worse, lambasted the ballad as a sellout move, mocking what were once metal’s rowdiest iconoclasts for lamenting a breakup with lyrics like “It took the death of hope to let you go”.

However, Snuff has since been reappraised as one of Slipknot’s greatest achievements. Its release as a single in 2009, with a cinematic music video directed by percussionist Shawn “Clown” Crahan, broadened the band’s appeal and saw it resonate with anyone who’s felt emotions as universal as heartbreak or self-loathing. In 2023, The Nine were forced to add the ballad to their setlist – such was the intensity of fans demanding to hear it live.

In much the same way Snuff was unusual for Slipknot musically, its songwriting was different to how The Nine normally operated. Late bassist Paul Gray and drummer Joey Jordison were the outfit’s principal composers, especially during the volatile sessions for Vol. 3, but the roots of this song were solely with Corey.

“I get into arguments with fans all the time about this: everybody’s like, ‘Oh, it’s just a leftover Stone Sour song,’” the singer recalled during a 2021 fan Q&A. “No, I wrote that for Slipknot. I didn’t expect them to use it, to be honest, but I wrote it specifically for Slipknot, because it was regarding one of the heaviest times of my life.”

Snuff directly addresses Corey’s emotions at the end of his first marriage, which lasted from 2004 to 2007. “It was one of the heaviest disappointments, one of the heaviest heartbreaks, I’d ever felt,” he said of the split. “It took years to get through, even after moving on and being in different relationships. That haunted me for a long time. It’s one of those things where you knew you weren’t supposed to be together, but there was something there that felt so good. When it’s ripped away from you, you just feel like there’s a hole in your chest.”

The lyrics unpick the complexity of that: ending a relationship where there’s disappointment and hurt yet, also, still affection. “If you love me, let me go,” Corey declares at the start of the second verse, later adding juxtapositions like “You couldn’t hate enough to love” and “Angels lie to keep control”.

Although Corey never expected Slipknot to go for the song, Joey and Paul were hugely impressed by it. Joey secretly recorded a drum track to accompany the frontman’s demo and, when he presented the new package to Corey, the singer burst into tears. Meanwhile, the bassist was an ardent supporter of the tender track to the rest of the band.

“If Paul hadn’t championed that song, I don’t think we would have recorded it,” Corey told Kerrang! in 2018. “But he loved it and saw the potential with it and really wanted us to do it.”

Despite the initial shaky response to Snuff when it was first heard on All Hope Is Gone, its re-examination started as soon as its single release. The song made it to number six on the US Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, a career-best that the band didn’t outdo until 2019’s Unsainted, and number two on the US Mainstream Rock chart. It’s nowadays the second-most-streamed All Hope Is Gone song (behind Psychosocial), while the video currently boasts 163 million YouTube views, which is more than such beloveds as Wait And Bleed and Left Behind.

Beyond cold, hard numbers, Snuff also gained newfound sentimental power following the death of Paul in May 2010, aged 38. The late bassist’s diehard support for the song saw Corey play it to him as a tribute during his solo shows. In this new context, the heartbroken lyrics were reapplied from a breakup to an untimely passing, and videos of Corey getting emotional while singing them went viral in the 2010s, reasserting its emotional impact.

“When Paul passed, the song suddenly became less about the dark side of love and it became about triggering memories of him,” Corey told the BBC Radio 1 Rock Show in 2017. “He loved that song, so it really reminds me of him, especially when I play it live. It’s strange there are a lot of times where I can’t even remember the level of potency that maybe the original emotion had when I recorded it – it just means something different now.”

Today, Snuff remains both a potent tribute and one of metal’s most adored ballads. No, the Slipknot of 2001 could not, and would not, have written something this sensitive and exposing. But that only makes the song a testament to the fact that – beyond playing guitar or having a nice voice – one of the key skills of excellent musicians is personal growth.

“I’m 42 years old, and I’m just discovering a side of myself that’s been a mystery for a long time,” says Daniel Tompkins. The TesseracT vocalist has just announced his new band, Prince Of Failure, a 50/50 collaboration with Chimp Spanner mastermind Paul Ortiz.

Their self-titled debut album, out now via Kscope, finds him addressing his life-long struggles with ADHD, and the pair’s insecurities operating within the music industry.

“I think it’s extremely cathartic as an experience,” Tompkins says of laying it all bare. “This is a very poignant moment of time in my life. Having ADHD isn’t a superpower – but what I can do is turn pain into poetry, and this album does that.”

He continues, “Being diagnosed with ADHD and autistic traits has made me question everything. It’s like growing up with a shadow version of yourself that you can’t see – you just sense it.

“So, the Prince Of Failure is a representation of the insecurity and the ongoing inner turmoil of trying to fit into this world where my ADHD and autistic traits are in conflict with one another.”

The pair are well acquainted, having worked together on 80s synth project Zeta and on Ruins, a heavy reimagining of Tompkins’ first solo album, Castles. “There have been very few times in my career where I’ve clicked with someone like I do with Paul,” he says. “He’s an amazing songwriter. Without him, it’d be like losing an arm.”

The record centres on a love of nu metal, which harks back to the music of their youth, where the story begins. But their prog sensibilities also see them “smashing things together that sound cool.”

“The difference is that the prog isn’t put front and centre – but it’s there in the background,” Ortiz adds. “It adds a little bit of spice and complexity, but it doesn’t make the songs feel uncomfortable. It’s really affirming to have a body of work that we’re both really proud of.”

The project’s timing has a special meaning for Ortiz. “As someone who swings between loving what I do and feeling like I could sell my guitars and never do it again, it’s really affirming to have a body of work that we’re both really proud of,” he explains.

“Working with Dan has pulled me out of a long slump. It’s really amazing.”

Prince Of Failure is on sale now.

The Kinks’ 80s revival, which actually kicked off in the latter half of the 70s, followed several years of concept album indulgence. It began when Ray Davies stopped squinting at the village greens of Albion and embraced the neon glare of American arenas, and Give The People What They Want was the moment the band fully weaponised their legacy, trading music-hall whimsy for slabs of radio-ready arena rock.

The title track was a snarling commentary on media-fed bloodlust that felt decades ahead of its time. Meanwhile, Destroyer cannibalised the iconic riff from 1964's All Day and All of the Night and reintroduced the title character from 1970's Lola. It really shouldn’t have worked, but it did.

Although Ray accounted for 100% of the songwriting credits, brother Dave was the secret weapon, his guitar slashing through the mix with an intensity that suggested the band intended on going toe-to-toe with the new wave kids and power poppers who’d nicked their blueprints.

True to its title, Give The People What They Want was the sound of The Kinks giving the public exactly what they demanded: commercial, radio-friendly arena-bound rock'n'roll. Suddenly, the British Invasion had a sequel.

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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 August 1981

• Torch - Carly Simon
• Shot of Love - Bob Dylan
• Tattoo You - The Rolling Stones
• Dark Continent - Wall of Voodoo
• Sleep No More - The Comsat Angels
• Pretenders II - Pretenders
• Scissors Cut - Art Garfunkel
• Fire of Love - The Gun Club
• Brothers of the Road - The Allman Brothers Band
• Maiden Japan - Iron Maiden
• New Traditionalists - Devo
• Short Back 'n' Sides - Ian Hunter
• Time Exposure - Little River Band
• Whitford/St. Holmes - Brad Whitford and Derek St. Holme

What they said...

"Throughout the record, the band kicks up a storm, rocking out with a surprising amount of precision, and although Ray Davies' writing isn't as strong as it was on the group's two previous albums, he has contributed a set of professional hard rock that is distinguished by solid hooks and a clever sense of humour." (AllMusic)

"Hook-laden and hard-rocking, this is the best-crafted Kinks album in over a decade, which means that for someone who's found Ray Davies's world-view increasingly mean-spirited and mush-brained, it's also the biggest turnoff. Back when he was chairing the Village Green Preservation Society, Ray's dotty lyricism put his nostalgia in appealing and appropriate musical perspective; his current clean-cut arena style makes him sound smug and strident, as well it should." (Robert Christgau)

"Ray’s paranoia fires up the band on its first effort of the Ronald Reagan–Margaret Thatcher era. He may have been too old to be a real punk, but this non-concept album about selling out demonstrates he sure had the attitude for it. The spitfest is tempered by one perfect ballad (Better Things) and the most complex portrait of pedophilia ever crooned (Art Lover)." (Blender)

What you said...

Nigel Mawdsley: The UK's record-buying public abandoned The Kinks in the early seventies. Supersonic Rocket Ship from 1972 was the band's last sizeable chart hit before a rerelease of Come Dancing" in 1983.

The Kinks' LP chart positioning was even worse in the UK. Their last stand-alone studio album to reach the charts was Something Else in 1967. (This doesn't take into account the re-release of The Village Green Preservation Society in 2018). But Ray Davies never lost his songwriting ability. Indeed, The Kinks became superstars in the USA from the mid-1970s onwards.

One of the many Kinks' LPs to deservedly hit the Billboard charts was Give The People What They Want, a top 20 smash in 1981.

Give The People What They Want is an amazing rock album from start to finish. The two opening tracks, Around The Dial and the album's title track, state the album's intentions, both great rocking tracks with brilliant lyrics and amazing fretwork from Dave Davies. The superb production really whetted my appetite for more when I first heard it.

The other notable rockers on the album are the punky Add It Up, Back To Front, and the minor US hit single Destroyer. The latter track cleverly intersperses the All Day And All Of The Night riff into the song and really does catch the listener between headbanging and dancing!

Elsewhere on the album, Ray Davies courts controversy with his song Art Lover, with wistful lyrics that should be listened to intently before the listener makes a judgment! Yo-Yo is an amazing song about a problematic relationship with some equally amazing lyrics.

The lyrics to some of Davies' songs on the album dealt with difficult subject matters ahead of their time. A Little Bit Of Abuse is about domestic violence and is very powerful lyrically and musically, whilst Killer's Eyes sees Davies seemingly taking the role of a psychiatrist trying to fathom out why his subject matter became a killer. Better Things" closes the album, a song that saw The Kinks return, albeit with a minor hit, to the UK charts. It deserved better!

Like many of The Kinks' albums from the mid to late seventies and early eighties, Give The People What They Want gets a very rare 10/10!

Zak Browne: I just listened to the whole album for the first time in quite a while. I heard a lot of songs that sound like they could be found on albums by The Replacements. I think Better Things is a great closer, and Predictable and Yo-Yo were my other two favourites. 8/10.

John Davidson: Like many rock fans in the UK, I pretty much ignored everything created by the Kinks after Lola.

This album from 1981 sounds very new wave mixed with American pop-rock. The Knack, XTC, Elvis Costello, The Pretenders, etc., may all have taken inspiration from The Kinks, but this album seems to be a case of the masters aping their apprentices.

On Add it Up, for example, it sounds like Andy Partridge is singing lead for Blondie. Destroyer recycles All Day And All Of The Night and references back to Lola without being quite as good as either of their previous hits.

My first impression was that I wasn't keen, but I think it has enough quirky charm that with more listens, I might be won over. A 6/10 just now, but that might go up.

Greg Schwepe: The story goes that Dave Davies took a razor blade to the speaker in his amplifier so it would rattle and distort more as the volume was increased. And the rest, they say, is history. And if it’s good ol’ distortion and power chords you want, along with a dose of witty and incisive lyrics you’ll pay attention to, then Give The People What They Want does just that.

This was The Kinks' first studio album after the highly successful live album One For The Road. That one got lots of airplay here in the US in my area, and for many (me included), hearing new, recharged, revved-up versions of many of their classics led to an increased interest in new material from an established classic rock band.

The album kicks off with an ode to their favourite DJ in Around The Dial. And the title track after that, um, yes, gives the people what they want. You get the idea. Fun, bouncy, driving rock that has you reaching for the volume knob. It’s radio-friendly 80s Kinks! And it’s like they were saying, “Yeah, we want to be played on the radio again… so here it is.”

Destroyer is a mashup of The Kinks' history. You get a mention of “Lola” in the lyrics and the riff of All Day and All of the Night. Double bonus.

Overall, this is a great collection of songs that ushered in a new era of the band that would result in newfound popularity from exposure on the radio and MTV. They wouldn’t “come dancing” until the follow-up to this one, but this opened the door to a great run of 80s albums. 8 out of 10. I got what I wanted.

Mike Canoe: For the past few years, I have haphazardly tried to find the right Kinks album to suggest to the group. The one with Lola on it? One of the first two albums, even though they were more than 60 years old? Wait, All Day and All of the Night was a non-album single? #@%&!!! Definitely not Preservation Society or Muswell Hillbillies, which were severely lacking in power chords and did not rock.

Give the People What They Want was probably the strongest contender, but, with its 1981 release date, it made me feel like a Johnny-come-lately Kinks fan, which, of course, is exactly what I was because that's the album I came in with, thanks to the brilliantly paranoid Destroyer. The full album holds up well as a rock album and quite possibly their last one, once the nostalgia-fueled Come Dancing changed everything.

It also shows how influential the Kinks were to bands not named Van Halen. A Little Bit of Abuse sounds like the Kinks covering Elvis Costello covering the Kinks. Around the Dial, Back to Front, Killer's Eyes and Add It Up could all be on any number of albums by second-wave UK punk bands. The creepy yet beautifully sad Art Lover makes me think that we'll get to a Stranglers album someday.

Give the People What They Want is fun but still has bite, clever but not too artsy and pretentious about it. And it even has a cameo by Lola.

Philip Qvist: My views about the Kinks: When asked to pick my favourite songs from the year when I was born (1964, yes, I'm that old) then You Really Got Me is my standout track.

I would rate them as one of the most underrated bands from the 60s. There was so much brotherly love between Ray and Dave Davies that they always guaranteed a punch-up or two in the recording studio.

The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society is a masterpiece of an album. That all said, they did come out with some great songs throughout the 60s and early 70s.

I knew their early 70s hit Lola was one of their last big hits until the rather excellent Come Dancing hit the charts in 1983, and I was also aware of their Live 1980 record One For The Road, but what I didn't realise was that they had been releasing more than a few studio albums between those two hits, including this one, Give What The People Want.

I gave it a couple of spins, and while I don't think it quite matches their 60s output, it isn't a half-bad record. Ray Davies' songwriting is still top-notch, brother Dave's lead guitar still rocks out as and when required, while the songs all have that distinct Kinks sound.

The title track, the mash-up of Lola and other tracks that is Destroyer, Yo-Yo and Predictable were my favourite tracks on this record. I don't think the band created new boundaries with Give The People What They Want, but it did prove that The Kinks were still alive and kicking as the 80s began, and that definitely wasn't a bad thing. A 7 from me.

Final score: 7.82 (57 votes cast, total score 446)

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In 1967 Procol Harum emerged from the ashes of a modest Southend beat group to score an all-time best-selling single. But instead of milking A Whiter Shade Of Pale, their debut album wove epic fantasies into a proto-prog classic. We explored the story with the late Gary Brooker in 2012.

When your first single is one of the most lauded in history, there’s a possibility it can overshadow not just your inspired debut album, but your entire subsequent career. Gary Brooker, who co-wrote and sang A Whiter Shade Of Pale for Procol Harum, isn’t one to moan, however.

“I think anybody would be happy to have such a success,” he shrugs. You’d think so, but musicians in comparable situations tend to whine. Brooker’s not having that: “Oh no,” he says. “Suddenly, everything was available. It was only ever a dream to go to America at the beginning of 1967. I would imagine playing in San Francisco, but I didn’t really even know where San Francisco was! But within a few months, there we were. So it opened a lot of doors...”

As did Procol Harum, their first album, which laid some of the foundation stones of what was to become progressive, or symphonic, rock – even though Brooker thinks of it mostly as “modern blues for its time, often with a dark edge.” Recorded after the stratospheric success of A Whiter Shade Of Pale, its original release did not include that one-off smash, and sales suffered. Wasn’t that a strange decision?

“I’d entirely agree with you – today,” says Brooker. “In fact, even a year later, I would have. But the point was, that had sold enormous numbers. I should think that everybody – I’m not exaggerating, everybody – had it. So we felt it would be cheating people to make them buy it again. That was our logic. It made perfect sense at the time.”

Various reissues over the years, and even of-the-time releases in other territories, have had the track-listing meddled with, often including the underrated follow-up single Homburg too; but it’s the band’s original, pure debut album we’ll discuss here. “I have to cast my mind back 44 years,” says Brooker, “but I gave it a listen this morning and I heard a lot in it, considering...”

By ‘considering,’ he means the production. “You have to see through it – it’s disappointing. For some reason, it came out in mono. Which, as stereo had been around for a few years, is hard to believe! One can blame Denny Cordell, the producer, for that. And the four-track machine. So there are limitations, just in the sound of it.

“The guitar solo in Kaleidoscope seems to have got completely lost. When you can hear Robin Trower’s solos they’re absolutely magnificent, ground-breaking. We were live in the studio: he’d be blasting it out, BJ Wilson would be thrashing like an octopus in a bathtub – we were doing things there that people hadn’t done before. So there were high points...”

There certainly were. From the dramatic opening gambit of Conquistador (re-recorded with a symphony orchestra, a hit in ’72 – although Brooker wrote it with The Beach Boys in mind), through the strangely warped rock of Something Following Me and Cerdes (Outside The Gates Of), to the epic instrumental early set-closer Repent Walpurgis, it fuses riffs, bass lines, classical tropes and psychedelic detours, plus surrealist lyrics, into a pulsating, prescient whole.

“It wasn’t typical,” says Brooker. “Neither were we. Where the world was at was ‘smiling beat bands,’ and it certainly didn’t have that atmosphere. Probably just a year before, something like Frank Ifield had been number one. Procol Harum seemed very, very different. That’s how things felt. We were moodier. We were serious about it.”

The album’s genesis was about Brooker and Keith Reid “getting together a bunch of musicians. We had a concept of what we wanted: bluesy guitar, bass and drums, a Hammond organ, then me on piano and singing.” After cutting his teeth as a Southend teenager playing with The Paramounts (seven singles; tours with the Stones and The Beatles), Brooker had ‘retired’ at 21 to become a songwriter. “I’d been bashing around in the van on the road for years. I’d retired from active duty to sit at the piano.”

Introduced to lyricist Reid by producer Guy Stevens, the pair clicked instantly as a creative unit. Demoing their new songs, they realised Brooker was the best man to sing them. They were the core of a new band before they knew it; Brooker’s retirement was short-lived.

With a name suggested by Stevens in honour of a friend’s blue Persian cat (the cat’s name was a misspelling of the Latin phrase for “beyond these things” – Procul Harun), they sought players with influences ranging from Booker T & The MG’s to Dylan to Bach and Tchaikovsky. It took two or three months, but musicians were selected, and the debut single got them off to a flyer.

The album was well under way, but “we decided that it wasn’t quite hitting it,” Brooker recalls. “It wasn’t gelling in certain areas.” So changes were made. “We’d already auditioned a lot of people. Some had turned out to be heroin addicts; all sorts of problems. So I suggested BJ Wilson as drummer and Robin Trower as guitarist, both of whom I’d played with in The Paramounts. Everyone realised they were great. I’d known that anyway, but hadn’t wanted to say, ‘I’ve found the boys, take it or leave it!’”

The line-up was completed with bassist David Knights and Hammond player Matthew Fisher (credited as sole writer of Repent Walpurgis and a man who, along with Brooker, presumably knows something about the minutiae of writing credits after the infamous legal case regarding his contribution to A Whiter Shade Of Pale). They went back into the studio and re-recorded everything. And so a 60s landmark ensued?

“People generalise about ‘the 60s.’ It was 10 years. But ’67 was a landmark... things did change. Like the attitude of young bands creating the music. Was it all long hair, drugs and Carnaby Street? Well, yes, it was! It was part of life in that era.

“What we thought could work became different. The building blocks came from my influences of rock, blues, classical, everything – but when we were asked what ‘sort’ of music it was, we said, ‘Well, it’s our music.’ That was the only answer there was!

“‘Progressive’ rock was a title that was made up a couple of years later. I’m not sure who was the first to be actually called that. But it did involve a lot more movement and thought about the chords and the bass lines. And I think that’s evident from this album.”

Brooker finds if hard to say whether he noticed its influence on others. “We went to America: the album was very big there. They weren’t all that interested in A Whiter Shade Of Pale – they loved these songs. I’ve met musicians over the years who’ve said it really woke them up. If you’ve got somebody who has a different way of doing things and has a big off-the-wall hit, I’m sure others thought: ‘Well, we’ll try doing that!’

“I was putting my classical influences in, little quotes here and there, which strengthened it. On our second album, A Salty Dog, we decided we’d do an 18-minute-long semi-connected suite – ‘the great work,’ we called it. Sound effects; an orchestra. That was very unusual at the time, and after that King Crimson and Yes showed you can do anything...”

Reid’s lyrics were also unusual, displaying a determination to open up doors of perception. People still debate their meaning. Try A Christmas Camel, which offers not only ‘some Arabian sheikh most grand impersonates a hot-dog stand,’ but also ‘some Arabian oil well impersonates a padded cell.’

“Don’t forget I start that one with, ‘My Amazon six-triggered bride…’” Brooker points out. “They were challenging, yes, but that’s what I liked about them. Different, yes; yet I understood all the colours, the images. Everything about them rang a chord with me. I didn’t find it weird. On reflection, how on Earth can you start a song singing about your Amazon six-triggered bride? Or sing, ‘Outside the gates of Cerdes sits the two-pronged unicorn’?

“I wouldn’t say I understood them, in the sense of seeing exactly what was being said, but in Keith’s words there were a lot of references to mysterious women. There’s often a mysterious woman involved.”

Was such material harder to sing than ‘ooh baby baby…’? “The question is not was it difficult, but was it in fact a stroke of genius to be able to sing those things and make them believable? I’m being immodest here, but I made those things sound like: ‘Yeah, here’s a lyric, here’s a song.’

“When Keith gave me Something Following Me, I just thought: ‘Well, it’s the blues.’ This guy’s got a problem, but it’s not that he woke up this morning and his car had gone. It’s just that this guy’s tombstone is following him everywhere and he’s right on the edge. Some of the great minds have pondered over what they mean, these ‘hard to understand’ lyrics – but they’re easy also.”

Robin Trower says he hasn’t heard the album for decades and “never really listens to any bands of the progressive rock genre.” He does recall: “The sessions for that album were relaxed and fun, and the combination of players worked very well, with everyone slotting in easily. I find Keith’s lyrics very hypnotic, and Gary came up with excellent complementary music for them. I don’t think I could bear to listen to it today though, as I know I’d be unhappy with my guitar playing.”

Brooker isn’t. He praises Knight’s bass (“fantastic”), highlights the contrasts (“Mabel was light relief between all the drama”) and says that when Procol Harum play live now, and 20-year-olds call out for She Wandered Through The Garden Fence, a part of him thinks, ‘Oh, it was worth it...’

Just the start of a career that’s been so much more than the bridal train of A Whiter Shade Of Pale, that debut record – a prog dawn – has been praised by everyone from Jimmy Page to Elton John. Paul McCartney would bring the other three Beatles and Pete Townshend to see Procol Harum play.

“They liked what we were doing,” says Brooker. “From the writing point of view, it was a semi-conscious bid to do something that wasn’t being done, and perhaps everybody else picked up on that.”

In Piccadilly, London, in 1972, cocky new art-rock types Roxy Music were about to record an album that would become the blueprint for 70s glam. In 2011, guitarist Phil Manzanera told Prog what happened next.

Bryan Ferry nervously brushes back the quiff of hair from his face. Behind him, he hears a preparatory swirl of notes from the sax, and the climactic build of a showbiz-style roll on the snare drum. The guitarist, now finished tuning up, gets everyone’s attention and, after the briefest of pauses, there’s a count-in and it begins.

As the controlled frenzy of the drums erupt and both sax and guitar become demonically entwined, Ferry inches nearer the mic, eyes closed, taking a breath just ahead of his cue. ‘Concrete cold face cased in steel. Stark sharp glass-eyed crack and peel’ he trills over heavy slab-like minor chords. ‘Bright light scream beam brake and squeal. Red white green white neon wheeeeeel.’ The stentorian vibrato in the vocal makes those around take notice. But as the number scrambles to a truncated crescendo, it’s clear that nobody – including Ferry – is especially pleased with the results.

The session is over. The guitarist thanks the singer for his time. His voice was fine but ultimately not right for King Crimson. However, before Ferry leaves the band’s basement rehearsal room, Robert Fripp gives him the telephone number of EG Management, suggesting if Ferry gets his own band together, he should give them a call. Although he doesn’t know it yet, as Ferry steps out onto the Fulham Palace Road, the failed audition will turn out to be the biggest break of his entire career.

For most groups trying to make good the starry-eyed dream of getting signed to a label and eventually recording and releasing an album, you had to get your hands – and much else besides – dirty. Driving the length and breadth of the country’s B roads, humping bass bins into inaccessible venues, playing to indifferent audiences whose only glimmer of enthusiasm is the moment when you announce it’s your last number; all of this, and more, were part of the time-honoured system of paying your dues.

Signing to EG Management (who looked after T-Rex and ELP as well as Crimson), Roxy Music bypassed all that irksome stuff, sweeping onto the scene, apparently fully formed in a haze of pop, pastiche, synthesisers, sequins and Brylcreem in 1972, with only half a dozen gigs under their belt and a debut album that remains a remarkable tour-de-force.

One man who had no doubts whatsoever about Roxy’s future prospects was guitarist Phil Manzanera. “I just knew they were going to be absolutely huge when I first heard them. They were special people. They were all quite stylish and intelligent. I was only about 20 or so and here were these 25-year-olds who all looked so grown up. They’d been to university, they had bank accounts; two of them were teachers; they had a car; they’d got a bank loan to buy a PA! They were really cool people.”

Manzanera famously lost out the first time he auditioned for Roxy in the summer of 1971 to David O’ List, previously a member of The Nice. “If it had been any old Tom, Dick or Harry, I’d have been upset. I’d seen Davey with The Nice at the Royal Albert Hall so I thought, ‘Fair enough.’” Yet when O’ List departed in February 1972 , Manzanera – by then notionally mixing sound for the group – picked up where he left off.

As Roxy Music was released in June 1972 on Island, TRecstasy had vast portions of the nation’s teenage population swooning, and David Bowie was busy unleashing Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. A cursory glance in the direction of Roxy might have suggested they were simply hitching a ride on the coattails of glam rock. Yet both record and band pulled off a how’d-they-do-that conjuring, trick scooping up pop culture references from the past, present, and possible futures, into one unified package that demanded attention and captured the imagination of fans on both sides of the divide between the pop market and progressive scene.

If opening number Re-Make/Re-Model was, as Melody Maker journalist Richard Williams astutely observed, Roxy’s musical manifesto, it was proclaiming that rock’n’roll as we knew it was undergoing a strange and irrevocable transformation.

There’s the knowing post-modern wink that has backing singers intoning a car registration number (‘CPL593A’) in the place where a girl’s name might normally be crooned. Then there’s the hurly-burly blur of continually morphing sax and guitar lines swirling above and below the vocals. Moving quickly, it sounds all above board and ship-shape. Yet listen closely and you might be receiving a transmission from the free-jazz climes of Albert Ayler and Sonny Sharrock.

The track’s coup de grâce was a series of solo statements. Book-ended by Paul Thompson’s thunderous John Bonham-like run-in, in order of appearance we hear Graham Simpson bending the bass into a soulful, jazzy pose; Brian Eno’s outré, atonal caterwauling synth squeal; Andy Mackay’s leery account of Earl Bostic meeting Wagner; Manzanera’s steady-Eddie Cochrane Velvets vamp, and finally, Ferry’s atonal singalong-a-Stockhausen piano party-piece. At the end, this pop culture parade is sucked down the black hole of Eno’s VCS3.

Recorded at Command Studios in Piccadilly in March 1972, the album was produced by Peter Sinfield, himself just recently divorced from King Crimson. Still managed by EG, and having had experience at the mixing desk from In The Court Of The Crimson King (1969) through to Islands (1971), he was viewed as a safe pair of hands to take Roxy out on their first spin.

A former BBC studio, beneath which London’s underground trains could occasionally be heard rumbling, Command’s principal advantage was its cheapness. Accordingly, the album went in the can for £5,000. Given that he’s subsequently recorded in some of the world’s top-flight studios, Manzanera retains a surprising affection for the venue. “It was a big old-fashioned space where orchestras would’ve played. It was very atmospheric and was absolutely perfect for us.”

With Sinfield and engineer Andy Hendriksen ensconced in the control room up a flight of stairs, and the band in the cavernous depths below, the team worked on a set of songs composed largely the previous year by Ferry. Prior to entering the studio, Sinfield and the band had spent three weeks working on the album’s final shape.

Curiously, the songs have a habit of starting off as one thing and then undergoing a startling transformation into something else entirely. Ladytron begins as a languid sci-fi dreamscape, but ends as an exercise in power-chord slash and burn. The country lilt opening If There Is Something rapidly falls away when Mackay’s processed sax solo takes centre stage, and we know we’re not in Kansas anymore. The solo, like all the others on the record, isn’t about instrumental prowess. It’s about the seductive qualities and possibilities of the sound itself, manipulated and mediated by Eno.

Through his electronic alchemy, the sax hovers listlessly over Thompson’s jackhammer beat and mechanistic piano chords. When Ferry’s vocals burst in on the last third of the song with ‘Shake your hair, girl with your ponytail/takes me right back…’ it’s freakish, unsettling, and utterly magnificent. That distinctive warble, which caused heads to turn in Crimson’s rehearsal rooms and far beyond, was never quite as powerful or as singular as here, captured by Sinfield.

Manzanera readily acknowledges that Ferry’s unusual vocal style was something they understood and exploited. “Nobody sounds like Bryan. It’s very distinctive and it comes from nowhere. It couldn’t be any one else in the whole world with this voice. So we were starting with an advantage.”

Though he’d be fired following a drug related breakdown, Graham Simpson’s bass work is frequently adventurous and unorthodox. On tracks like 2HB and Chance Meeting, every part of the fretboard is up for grabs. “He was probably the most accomplished musician among us all at that time,” says Manzanera.

Chance Meeting also contains some of the album’s most haunting guitar. Although his instrument was usually filtered by Eno’s synthesiser, here the space-age sounds are created by more traditional means. “I had a wonderful Gibson 335, which had a hollow body. It just fed back beautifully, and then you could manipulate the note with the tremolo arm and a bit of echo. That’s actually all it is. Now Ladytron; that’s the classic Eno-treated guitar. Terrific stuff.”

The sonic properties of Roxy Music still polarise opinion. Ferry has said he didn’t care for the sound of the vocals. But Manzanera is philosophical about the album’s production values: “On the first one we always said we were inspired amateurs learning how to make a record, so I listen with nostalgia and fondness rather than a critical ear. It was a moment in time captured and I’m very happy to have been part of it. Pete Sinfield did the best job he could, really. But obviously, once you get to For Your Pleasure and Chris Thomas – who’d trained with George Martin – it’s in a different league.”

Yet the exotic, multifaceted soundworlds conjured are due at least in part to Sinfield’s quixotic recording and intuitive response to what was coming into Command’s control room. “It was just the summation of all different individuals putting in their little bits and pieces which then added up to Roxy,” says Manzanera. “You couldn’t have planned it. You couldn’t make it up.”

Reaching Number 10 on its release, Roxy Music catapulted the group from being cultish outsiders and into the mainstream. Though future albums would outsell it, when it came to a forward-thinking, truly progressive fusion of diverse ideas, eclectic style and unnerving bravado, the band would rarely be as challenging or inventive.

It was a long time coming, but after several years under wraps, Yes bassist Chris Squire and former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett released A Life Within A Day – the only album they made as Squackett – in 2012. Three years before Squire’s passing, they gave Prog the backstory.

The union of Chris Squire and Steve Hackett has been mentioned in dispatches for almost half a decade. In recent years Squire has guested on Hackett’s solo albums, contributing his distinctive bass guitar to tracks on 2009’s Out Of The Tunnel’s Mouth and last year’s Beyond The Shrouded Horizon. But a full-blown collaboration between the Genesis and Yes legends has taken longer to come to fruition. At one point, Squackett looked like it would become an elusive, mythical beast – until the release of A Life Within A Day.

At just 46 minutes it might seem a modest dividend for the patience invested those awaiting this rare foray from Squire outside Yes and Hackett’s most notable collaboration since GTR (with Yes’ Steve Howe). But never mind the quantity of music on offer – just revel in the quality: A Life Within A Day’s nine tracks both surprise and delight.

While they’ve never until now been in a band together, Squire and Hackett have shared history. “I first started working with Steve in 2006 on my Christmas album [Chris Squire’s Swiss Choir],” he explains. Squire’s original vision was to involve a number of guitarists on different tracks. “I was hoping to get Jeff Beck, Brian May… but everyone was busy.”

His drummer, Jeremy Stacey, suggested asking Hackett. Surprisingly, given their respective track records, Squire and Hackett’s paths had barely crossed. “I haven’t done a lot of things outside of Yes,” acknowledges the bassist. Initially he sent Hackett a couple of the songs destined for Swiss Choir. The guitarist took little persuasion. “I would have worked on anything that Chris had offered me because he’s such an icon,” he says. “When people think of bass sounds, they think of Chris.”

“What Steve did was so good that I immediately asked if he could do the whole album,” says Squire. “After that, I said that I’d be happy to reciprocate with anything he needed me to play or sing on.” As a result, he guested on Hackett’s last two solo albums. They considered writing a musical together, but ultimately settled for the more realistic album solution.

At the time, though, the bassist wasn’t actively seeking an outlet outside Yes. “I was living in London, doing the Christmas album, and Steve and I just developed a relationship.” It was uncomplicated and remarkably free of the titanic clash of egos that can bedevil such projects. “We got on easily and were able to create at a fast pace without feeling any pressure. That’s very valuable and helped move things along really smoothly.”

But A Life Within A Day has had a lengthy gestation, due to the belated return of Yes, the search for a suitable record label and simple geography. “When we started, Chris lived in this country and we were near neighbours,” Hackett recalls. “Suddenly America beckoned, and I had to put the album on hold for a while.” But the interregnum had an upside. “It meant that when we came back to it, it was all the stronger for that gap and there were things that we shifted around.”

Unusually in an age when many records are tracked by solitary musicians sending files to each other, the pair recorded most of the songs together in Hackett’s studio or at his house. “Most of it was done eyeball to eyeball,” he confirms. “I didn’t want to work in splendid isolation.”

He reports the writing sessions were painless. As a starting point he’d suggested that they pooled material, and Squire offered Aliens – which had already been performed live by Yes – while Hackett contributed Stormchaser. “I had three or four songs that I had written ostensibly for a solo project,” says Squire. “But that never happened, which is the story of my life!” In the end he, Hackett and keyboardist Roger King are all credited on each composition, with the tour-de-force title track and another highlight, Tall Ships, written specifically for the album.

Tall Ships came from Squire experimenting with a new bass and playing a sinuous, muscular riff that inspired Hackett. “It sounded like it had some swing to it,” the guitarist recalls. “Ninety nine per cent of people I‘ve worked with can’t remember the wonderful thing they’ve just played. So unless the tapes were running, you’ve had it. But Chris remembered it, and we had the rhythm which runs throughout the whole song. There was the unvarying link which provides the engine to the journey.”

He added a guitar phrase, the lyric and the chorus tune, while Squire provided the verse melody. “It was very easy to write together – a bunch of mates sat round in the living room, chipping in ideas,” Hackett continues. “It was like a giant jigsaw puzzle with three people going, ‘Here’s another piece – does that fit?’ We avoided the downside of composition by committee where people whittle each other down to the bare essentials and often end up with the lowest common denominator. That can be the downside of working with a group.”

The Squackett scenario of avoiding the dilution of ideas and feeding off but also deferring to each other was largely unfamiliar to Hackett as, since 1986’s GTR album with, he’s largely been captain of his own ship with his solo band. “I didn’t mind handing the wheel to Chris and we didn’t have too many moments where we thrashed it out,” he says. “Most of the time it was plain sailing. Occasionally we’d hit a sticky patch, but it seemed as if Chris and I had been working together all our lives.”

He cites the intensely commercial Divided Self as an example: “Chris played wonderfully and transformed it. He doesn’t just play a bass line. It must be his choral background; he comes up with another melody, counterpoint, descant, and makes it swing. He does things naturally that I suspect other bass players dream of. He plays with a guitarist’s sensibility. There‘s that sense of the size of the bass sound, but there’s also that twang and ring, so you can always focus on the bass part. It’s always clear as a bell and it’s not just all about how loud it is in the mix.”

Another striking feature of A Life Within A Day is the significant use of harmony vocals. “Chris and I are both fans of the great harmony bands – The Beatles, The Who, Crosby Stills & Nash,” says Hackett. While vocal harmonies featured prominently in Yes, they were less prevalent in Genesis. “I was often trying to steer it that way with my own stuff. We made them a raison d’être on this album.”

“My voice and Steve’s blend well together,” adds Squire. “That’s something I was surprised about, and the more we worked on harmonies the better they became.” Hackett and former choirboy Squire are responsible for all the vocals on the album, save for an appearance from Amanda Lehmann, a Hackett band regular who supplies some backing vocals, most notably on the smooth-as-silk Can’t Stop The Rain. Hackett thought that the track had an “a Burt Bacharach aspect to the chorus, so I suggested we go the whole hog and make it sound really luxurious and get some girls in. It needed something feminine.”

As the Bacharach reference suggests, A Life Within A Day contains some surprises, but it shouldn’t disappoint fans of Hackett or Squire. Hackett confirms the tempo for much of the album is very laidback, but it’s hugely atmospheric and rich in detail. There are some exceptions – most notably the frenetic middle section of the title track, which should sate the appetites of those wanting the two to cut loose instrumentally.

Any suspicions that the record might be a cynically contrived ‘GeneYes’ product prove wide of the mark. It’s not an album you might expect two such veterans to make, mainly because there was no masterplan. “It happened naturally,” Hackett explains. “We were working on a number of things for each other, and from the very first thing that Chris did on something of mine, I could see he was genuinely enjoying it. His whole body was moving. I realised that I had this top bass player – such a hero to a lot of people – giving it everything. Chris runs on enthusiasm.”

While they didn’t set out to cater to the Yes/Genesis audience, one track comes close. “The Summer Backwards is a nod to all things psychedelic and the 1960s,” reveals Hackett. “Listening to it a few days ago, I came to the conclusion that with two 12-strings and harmonies we’ve got Yes and Genesis, really. But that’s not what I was intending to do at the time.” In fact, The Summer Backwards was originally earmarked for a Hackett solo album before Squire intervened.

They drew on a wide array of reference points. Led Zeppelin influences are most apparent on Stormchaser and the title track. “It’s John Bonham meets Phil Collins meets Jason Bonham meets Jeremy Stacey meets the production values of the 1980s,” laughs Hackett. “Many years ago in Genesis, we were driving around the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, having just driven back from Belgium or Italy with no sleep all night, and Kashmir by Zeppelin came on. We all stopped in our tracks, particularly Peter Gabriel and myself. The drums were enormous. It was Radio Luxembourg so it was probably even more distorted and strange coming to us in mono.

“It was nectar to the ears, a breath of fresh air. I loved the simple, demonic, relentless, mechanical approach to drums that just marched through time itself. It was a huge influence on Phil, Peter and me. Chriss favourite Zep track is Kashmir – surprise, surprise! In a sense it’s the model for something that can be both orchestral but minimal; something that has pauses.

“For years I’ve been trying to deny the fact that I love slow powerful rhythms – I thought they might be a bit soggy for people who want their rock to be fast. Again, I noticed these slow, heavy rhythms crop up on Joe Bonamassa’s stuff, like The Ballad Of John Henry. There’s something about the earthiness of that.

“I’m like a gannet,” adds Hackett. “I don’t have any prejudice against any musical form any more, because I’ve been caught out before.” He doesn’t disagree with the suggestion that he’s a musical contrarian. After all, choosing to exit Genesis in 1977 was a brave move. “I’ve always tried to prove a point,” he admits. “I’ve always wanted to prove people wrong.”

While Squackett is certainly varied, Squire is keen to point out that Yes have always been willing to head off in different musical directions: “I never put limits on Yes. We’ve delved into so many different areas over the years. We were more of a rock band in the 80s, more of a proggy jazz band in the 70s. I’m not afraid of moving in and out of different areas with Yes.”

An album whose longest tracks are under seven minutes might confound anyone expecting prog rock epics. Squire: “There was no conscious effort to go, ‘This is what we’ve done in our various bands, so let’s do something different.’ We just got on with it. If something had turned out to be a 10-minute plus track and we’d liked it, we’d have used it. There were no guidelines.”

As a teenager, Porcupine Tree mainman Steven Wilson was a swift convert to Hackett’s solo material. “When I was discovering the wonderful world of progressive music, one of the first albums I happened across was Steve’s Please Don’t Touch album, which totally blew me away,” Wilson says. “The second side especially remains for me one of the most inspiring 20-minute sequences of music ever recorded, covering everything from beautiful orchestral soul ballads to the dark nihilism of the title track, and all points in between.”

Wilson declares himself a fan of Hackett’s other early solo albums, and also an enthusiast of his more recent work: “It’s been inspiring to hear how Steve’s last few albums have recaptured the very best of that 70s work, but with a modern twist. His music is epic and musically dazzling – but always retains great songwriting and melody at its core.”

While Hackett’s recent solo albums have many merits, Squackett arguably has greater commercial potential. Whether that potential will be fully realised may depend on how much time and effort the musicians put into promoting it. Hackett relishes the opportunity to continue the partnership: “There’s a sense of harmony between us. Nobody was trying to knock anyone down.” But it’s unclear whether Squackett will tour – Squire’s schedule with Yes having nixed a potential opportunity to play at last year’s High Voltage festival in London.

“I would like to think there’s time in the midst of our busy schedules to play live together,” admits Hackett. “But I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep.” He continues to put in plenty of time on the road. “My attitude is that the clock is ticking for me. I love playing live. I do it because I must. I always want to do everything at 100 miles an hour. I think Chris has a more measured approach.”

Marillion's final album on EMI was their first not to reach the UK Top 10. Afraid Of Sunlight has since been hailed as one of the band’s greatest recordings. Prog sat down with the band on the album's 30th anniversary in 2025 to get the inside story...

“Do you know what was really amazing?” asks Steve Hogarth. “It was like it had sunk the day before, but in fact, it had been down there for nearly 40 years. It still had the Union Jack on the tail fin, and it was still so blue, so much of it was still intact.”

“I was at the end of the pier taking photos, as the craft broke the surface of the water and they hauled it out of the lake, while all of the world’s press were a hundred yards behind me behind a barrier,” continues Steve Rothery. “It was quite spooky when I think about it. Like someone raising the Titanic.”

“I remember watching [the accident] happen on the news, I was just a kid,” says Hogarth. “This weird, lobster-shaped machine suddenly doing a back-flip and noticing that my mum was crying and wondering what the significance of that was. I was too young to really get it.”

On January 4, 1967 Donald Campbell would make history for all the wrong reasons when his Bluebird K7 craft flipped over during a water speed record attempt on Coniston Water in the Lake District, shattering into pieces and killing Campbell instantly. The infamous footage of Campbell’s craft flying helplessly into the air to its doom sparked something in the young Steve Hogarth and inspired him to begin writing a pivotal part of the Afraid Of Sunlight album: Out Of This World.

“I’d started writing some of the lyrics before I’d even joined the band, I think, I had a handful of lines,” he says. “And then later when I was writing the lyrics, developing what I wanted to say, I thought of it being a little bit of a love song about his wife’s take on it, how maybe he doesn’t love her enough to take his life in his hands like this, made it into something more than a bloke just driving fast over water.”

Either way, the song would catch the ear of one Bill Smith, an underwater surveyor and diver who, inspired by Out Of The World, created The Bluebird Project and set about bringing both the K7 and Campbell back to the surface. And that’s why in the spring of 2001, both Steve Rothery and Steve Hogarth found themselves on the pier at Coniston Water watching the centre hull of Campbell’s ill-fated Bluebird breaking the waters that had once carried it and him away.

“Some songs have influence in places we couldn’t have imagined,” says Hogarth.

“That Bill heard that song and thought, ‘Right, I’m going to see if I can go find it’, and that I ended up singing the song at Donald Campbell’s funeral at [St Andrew’s] Church in Coniston in 2001 was a very weird experience, not least because it came out of this record.”

That song may have helped change the course of history, but in 1995 the band who created it were struggling to tell their story. Although the previous year’s Brave album had been something of a creative landmark for the post-Fish Marillion, the band were at odds with their record label, EMI, after the record had run over time and budget and fallen foul of their A&R man who felt the band had deliberately attempted to undermine him. They hadn’t, but there’s still a feeling that both parties won’t be swapping Christmas cards anytime soon. Still, somehow after the Brave project, Marillion were allowed one more record: Afraid Of Sunlight.

“I was in a café in Stockholm,” says Hogarth, “with our manager at the time, and he was saying that EMI didn’t want another record, but he’d persuaded them to do one more if we could do it quickly and cheaply. I still think it’s a great record, but after that we were gone.”

“I think they’d [EMI] given up on the band before they’d even heard the album,” says Rothery. “The message had come down from on high: ‘Let’s get what we can out of this band because we’re dropping them.’ It was one of those times when EMI was trying to streamline the company to sell it, so they dropped quite a few acts. But I think we were probably the most successful act that they dropped. The album still did something like 400,000 or 450,000 copies. To get dropped by a label after selling that amount, it’s just insane, ridiculous, really.”

“Record companies play games with you,” says Pete Trewavas. “Even on the first album they were muttering to our then-manager about who they thought should stay in the band and who should go. He said, ‘Listen, you’ve signed the whole band, so the whole band are doing this album.’ And when they first heard Misplaced Childhood, they said they couldn’t hear a single and I remember [our producer] Chris Kimsey saying, ‘I’ll make a hit out of Lavender or Kayleigh’, and by God, he did.”

“Sunlight escaped more than it was released,” recalls Hogarth, who claims the band were deceived by their A&R. “I think arms had to be twisted to even get them to release the Beautiful single. Our A&R man, who we’d fallen out with over Brave, and who pretty much hated us at this point, said he didn’t like Dave Meegan’s mix, and he’d sent it to an American remix guy called Michael Brauer [award-winning mix engineer for John Mayer and Coldplay]. But it turns out he hadn’t sent it at all – I phoned Michael’s office in New York myself. So, I ended up sending it and he thought it was great, said he would have loved to do it. But that’s just another example of how being signed to a label can make you suicidal, because it can make you think nobody likes what you’re doing only because your A&R man has lied to you. It drives you nuts.”

Intriguingly, Beautiful would go on to become the mainstay love theme of a very popular South American soap opera called Cara & Coroa.

Mark Kelly explains: “My wife Karina, who’s Brazilian, tells me that whenever the love interest appeared onscreen that Beautiful would start playing in the background, that’s how it became so popular in Brazil and probably explains why it’s our second most listened to song on Spotify.”

Though not even a nation of ardent daytime TV fans could convince EMI to change their minds when it came to Marillion. But as the adage goes, art out of adversity. Talk to each bandmember now and though there are moments not unlike Rashomon – where each party describes the same event in a different or contradictory manner – they can all agree on one thing: how the threat of being dropped galvanised them to create what’s arguably the album of their careers.

“It was a weird situation, though the five of us understood what we had and what we had to do,” says Trewavas. “I remember Steve [Rothery] coming up with Afraid Of Sunlight at Racket [the band’s rehearsal space], the riff, and thinking, ‘Oh, that’s really good.’ You know you’re on to something then.”

“We still had confidence in the band,” says Rothery. “This blind optimism, if you like, because we’d just made such a great album. We thought, ‘We don’t need EMI, we’ll survive.’ And of course, we did, but it meant signing to a small independent label for three albums, and seeing our record sales fall a third or a quarter of what they had been. But the thing I remember about those sessions for Sunlight was that they were fun. It was this very productive writing period, and after Brave I think we wanted to prove that we could come up with an album of great, diverse songs. And that’s what Dave [Meegan – see box out] was so great at: he would kind of encourage you, so you kind of go down a certain path with it. So, you know, something like Gazpacho is so different to something like King, but it was all encouraged, and it just kind of made the process easier.”

“One of Dave’s real strengths is that he gets people,” says Trewavas. “He’s very knowledgeable, very switched on, he picks up on moods and ideas. Also, he’s not afraid of telling people when he thinks they need to stretch themselves: he pushed Steve Rothery with his guitars, did the same with Mark, he just got the best out of all our abilities.”

“He was the sixth member of the band, to me,” says Ian Mosley. “The way he would go through our jams, distil it down and find the right part for the song or the song itself. I remember going into the studio one day, and he’d built this whole section of a song from a jam we’d done, it was almost unrecognisable, pulling one part from here and one from there and then moulding them into this new thing. It’s an incredible skill set and sort of set the way for how we’d write going on from there.”

Afraid Of Sunlight opens and closes with meditations on the vagaries of fame, bookends of avarice and excess. Dizzying highs and the crushing lows, Gazpacho ends with the sounds of OJ Simpson’s televised run from the police, a helicopter buzzing overhead (Ian Mosley: “Dave recorded that when he lived in LA, and Universal Studios
was burning down. And there were helicopters circling over his building.”). King opens with a babble of famous voices before ceding into Hogarth’s plea to escape the rigours of celebrity. They’re extraordinary entry and exit points on an album filled with surprises, and though far from a concept record, the toll stardom can take is never far away. Hogarth, unapologetically frank as a confessional lyricist – he sometimes refers to the process of going into himself to find the right words to fit the band’s songs as soul mining – is at his most explicit here.

“I was struggling a bit,” he says. “My marriage was in a bad place, and so was I. I was just generally burnt out by having a bit of the rock star excess, I suppose. Everything that goes with it, the price to be paid for all of that was getting to me. I was raw and suggestible and there was the whole OJ Simpson thing, the Mike Tyson rape case, and I was thinking a lot about what success and fame had done to these people and thinking like I could relate to some extent and that all lead to King.

“Then [Marillion lyricist] John Helmer sent me Gazpacho, and that’s what those words were saying to me as well: they’re all about the whole trip, when I sing: ‘the boys who run the house’ll make it all OK’ when you feel screwed, the list of causalties is endless,
the machine eats its own. And what everyone keeps forgetting is the sheer amount of work people have to do, the constant pressure and that gets to you eventually as well. We’ve never had that kind of success, never been the biggest band in the world. I think if we had been then we’d have split up years ago.”

Brave had seen the band set up home at a château in the French countryside. By the time of Afraid Of Sunlight, they were calling the upscaled version of the Racket Club studio in Buckinghamshire not just a rehearsal and writing space, but a recording hub, too.

“I could see the logic of having our own place,” says Kelly. “Though I do recall us having a problem with rats in the loft. But it was the right idea, we got dropped after we’d made our first record there and if that had happened and we hadn’t had Racket, then we would’ve had nowhere to work. It would have made it much harder for us to continue, especially through the late 90s, the lean years when we were doing the Castle albums. The records wouldn’t have sounded half as good, either.”

“The album just flowed. Top to bottom it took something like three months to make,” remembers Mosley, “which is unheard of with us. We’d just finished the Brave tour, too, and we were on something of a high, firing on all cylinders as players. Even though
we had the whole EMI thing hanging over us, it was just a case of crack on and get it done.

“It’s a very ambitious-sounding record, too. Even though it’s our album, you’ve got lot of styles on there, that Beach Boys vibe with Cannibal Surf Babe – that was a one-take thing, we could never really reproduce it as well as we did the first time we played it – the Yes-like punch to Gazpacho and then the Joni Mitchell feel of Afraid Of Sunrise. It’s a very much standalone kind of record, there’s a lot of experimentation on that album. I mean, we all love Brave, but this was a much more freeing experience. Brave was a mammoth task. I remember being back in the US, and after about three months calling the boys to ask how it was going and them telling me that they’d just finished the bass parts. I went, ‘What?!’”

And while Hogarth was struggling with his own demons, Mosley was having problems at home, too. His marriage was also falling apart. Though while Hogarth poured his
pain onto the page and into his songs, Mosley went a more conventional route to kill the pain: Prozac.

“I was all over the place,” says Mosley. “I was taking quite a lot of the stuff, which was just brilliant. I had a lot of energy. I was coming over from the States and doing blocks of work at a time, so Sunlight is a bit hazy for me. In the middle of working, because of the Prozac, I’d be thinking, ‘I might go for a bicycle ride and get a packet of fags.’ Suddenly I’d be riding 70 miles!

“I went to New Zealand for the weekend. There was a girl that I knew, so I popped over to see her. I went on the Friday and I’d finished taking the Prozac – this is quite funny really – I got to New Zealand and I was standing on top of this building, looking out over the harbour and I thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ I came home –
I was back in London by Monday night!”

One of the sublime highlights of the record is the folksy-sounding Afraid Of Sunrise, which echoes elements of the title track, but comes at the lyric from
a completely different musical world.

“I remember us working on that song,” says Hogarth. “I used to go in about seven in the evening to do lead vocals with Dave, and I went to the Racket Club. It was early in the year, and I did about seven or eight takes of the vocal for Afraid Of Sunrise conjuring up this desert heat, the golden light coming in through the window, sun
on skin, mirages and heat coming off roads, all of that stuff. Then I went outside to drive home, and several inches of snow had fallen while I’d been there. I spun the car three times on the drive home on these A roads, which were totally impassable, but I had to get home. And that was a weird thing to sing a song like that with all this snow piling up outside, in this sort of sanctuary we’d made for ourselves.”

Ask all five members what they make of Sunlight now and they’re unified in their effusiveness, even if they can’t quite pin down just how they managed to capture lightning in a bottle so ably. Steve Rothery thinks it might be their best record, and he might be right, even more remarkable really considering that EMI were distancing themselves from the group and Hogarth was in something of an emotional freefall.

“If the mood’s right, then creativity can be effortless,” says Rothery. “For me, Sunlight is a perfect example of that. The title track and The Great Escape [from Brave] are probably my all-time favourite Marillion songs. We were still optimistic about the future and how can you be despondent when you’ve made an album that’s
this good? If the ideas had dried up and the creativity had gone then we would have wondered what the point was, but we were very far from that.

“I don’t think there’s a weak track on there. Part of that might have been because the writing was on the wall with EMI, I don’t know. But I do know that Dave Meegan did such a great job bringing that out in all of us, especially in H, I think. Making us
do things in a way that you wouldn’t naturally gravitate towards as well, playing different parts of the songs in different keys, different tempos. It was quite something.

“You also have to remember that it was our first time recording in Racket, too, changing the way we were doing things. So, it was quite groundbreaking for us and set the pattern for the next 30-odd years. I also think it’s probably the first album where the five of us were fully interacting. We’d tried pop with H and failed. Brave was a band reaction to that, us restating our prog credentials if you like, but with Sunlight there was no agenda, it was just us, our essence, this crafted music. For me it was the perfect storm, everything came together, even though the circumstances were less than ideal in that we were being dropped.”

It was telling of the situation the band found themselves in that Hogarth and Trewavas were sent to Paris to do a day of press and ended up in their hotel rooms doing phone interviews to other territories instead, the culmination of their trip being an extended face-to-face interview with a French fanzine. Back at home, Q magazine raved about Sunlight and found a place for it in their albums of the year, but by then EMI had just about cast the band adrift.

“That was a mad, little press trip,” says Trewavas with a smile.

“You got the feeling that they looked up and went, ‘Marillion are coming in today? Oh God, who can we get to talk to them? Who’s in town?’ It was really stupid, we just sat in our room on the phone to all these different territories, and then they got some bloke from a fanzine to come in a chat to us, bless them, but it was a bit underwhelming, shall we say?”

Dave Meegan didn’t realise the potency of the album until he went back to visit the remaster and was blown away by its creativity and depth of songwriting. It took Mark Kelly a few years to realise the album’s worth, too, though for different reasons.

“We were really rushed, or it felt that way, and I wasn’t very happy with it at the time,” he says. “Not that I wasn’t happy with the results, but my opinion of the album was spoiled by the process. There was a song called An Accidental Man, which we did
a version of that I liked, and for some reason we threw it out. It resurfaced with different music on This Strange Engine, but I liked the Sunrise version. Dave Meegan and Steve H didn’t, I’m still not sure why, and my opinion of the album was tainted by that, you know? ‘You threw out one of my favourite songs!’

“It was just that particular thing, really. I got a bee in my bonnet about it. I liked the original, there’s a demo of it kicking around somewhere and I think we did actually put it out as part of the This Strange Engine [2024 deluxe] reissue. I should go and listen to it and decide whether or not it really was as good as I thought it was at the time, but I was a lone voice. I don’t know how it happened, but I think it got bumped off the album in favour of maybe Afraid Of Sunrise, which I particularly didn’t like. So, I was probably doubly hurt about the fact that one of my songs got bumped for something that just sits on the same musical motif for five minutes, but then, Nowhere Man goes around like that for five minutes and it’s a classic.

“So, my whole opinion of the album was kind of coloured by that experience. Of course, you go back to it years later you realise that it’s a really good album, one of our best. We just did it in full alongside the Marbles album, another one of our best records and another Dave Meegan record, at the Port Zélande Weekend, and it’s
so good to play live. All the tracks work really well, it sort of plays itself: well-constructed songs, good lyrics.”

Before gentrification gave it a slick makeover, Battersea Power Station was made famous on the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals. In reality, as a listed building, the façade remained intact, but the interior was left empty and unwanted, which makes it odder still that a photographer and members of Marillion were in there shooting promo pics for Afraid Of Sunlight record. Pete Trewavas plays Napoleon, OJ Simpson and Mike Tyson stand in the frame, an astronaut sits at the edge of the photograph. Fame, downfall and celebrity crashing together in the burst of the photographer’s flashgun.

“I’m still not sure why I was Napoleon,” Trewavas chuckles. “And was H the angel? Of course, he probably was. I think it was the photographer’s call to take us there. It was this weird wasteland and there was what I think was a Pedigree Chum [dog food] factory next door. All very odd.”

“It was like this big vacant lot,” says Hogarth. “We’re doing these promo shots, and half the band aren’t in them. But it had something to it and it clearly caught someone’s imagination.”

Two years later, on the band’s 21-city crowdfunded US tour (financed to the tune of $60,000, around £45k today, by eager American Marillion fans), Steve Hogarth was reminded of that shoot as he was stood outside the band’s show in Columbus, Ohio, signing autographs and posing for pictures with fans.

“I remember it like it was yesterday,” says Hogarth. “This guy was having his photo taken with me and he asked me why there was an astronaut in that publicity shot. So, I was explaining to him that it’s an album, in part at least, about people who become unhinged as a consequence of their success, and Buzz Aldrin says he came back from the Moon a slightly different man. And this guy says to me, ‘That’s strange, because this album is like the story of my dad’s life’, and I said, ‘Who’s your dad?’ And he said, ‘Neil Armstrong’ and my jaw hit the floor, as you might imagine.”

“Rick, that’s the son, and Neil had been playing golf up in Scotland so I got to meet him at Heathrow for lunch as they were on their way home. I had my son with me, and he’d just got a new bike and Neil was asking him all about it, the most normal things from one of the most abnormal individuals on Earth. They had to get to Gatwick to make their connecting flight home to the US, so I’ve got them in the back of my car haring around the M25, really gunning it to make sure they don’t miss their plane and thinking, ‘God, don’t be the man who kills Neil Armstrong.’

“And he was great, excuse the pun, but so down to earth. And it’s really hard to comprehend, isn’t it? When you really think about it, he’s been to another planet. He’s travelled through space. It’s such a great privilege just to be around someone like that, to have anything to do with it.”

Strange to think, how the disparate yet pioneering spirits of both Donald Campbell and Neil Armstrong could echo through the ages, and both find their place on a record that was, in its own way, pushing the envelope of a band who were trying to find their own path forward and do things their own, new way. Marillion might not have touched the sky or tested the limits of machine and man on the frigid waters of a northern lake, but in their new way of doing, they shared stories, changed some ways
of seeing, and helped bring at least one modern hero home from the black waters of Coniston. All with unflinching endeavour, staring at the sun.

They may have emerged during nu metal’s infancy, but Deftones quickly carved their own path, becoming one of the most inventive bands of the last 30 years – and one of the most turbulent. In 2010, as the band prepared to release their sixth album, Diamond Eyes, singer Chino Moreno and guitarist Stephen Carpenter looked back over the highs and lows of their career.

There aren’t many bands in modern rock who’ve gone through as much as the Deftones. Through inner-band conflict, substance abuse, the tragedy of losing a member to a car accident and all sorts in-between, they remain one of the biggest bands within our stratum. They’ve outlasted nu metal, emo, metalcore and screamo (and they’ve been labelled in just about all of them) without ever altering their core sound. Ol’ Blue Eyes says he did it his way, but Deftones are the real deal.

Their seeds were sown in 1988, during seventh grade at a school in Sacramento, California. Abe Cunningham and Chino Moreno were classmates who would sit in lessons and spend their time like most other high school students: by taking apart a pair of headphones and running one ear up each of their sleeves and playing the then-recently released …And Justice For All by Metallica over and over again.

“I knew Abe played drums but there was a song on that record that he said he could play all the way through,” laughs a reminiscing Chino Moreno. “I was like, ‘No you can’t!’ I went to his house and he played the whole song. I had to take him to meet Stephen (Carpenter).”

Hailing from the same modest suburban neighbourhood of Sacramento as Chino, teenage guitarist Stephen had already taught himself how to shred. By this point, Stephen was already able to rip on the likes of Death Angel and S.O.D., and following Chino introducing the pair, the musical chemistry between Abe and Stephen was instantaneous.

“They were locked in straight away. Stephen’s jaw just hit the ground when he heard Abe play,” says Chino. “I saw Abe at school a few weeks later and he said he and Stephen had been jamming for a few weeks and they’d written a few songs and Stephen wanted me to sing.

“I didn’t know anything about heavy metal really, apart from a couple of Metallica records, so I didn’t know how to sing like that,” admits Chino. “I didn’t know how to sing but in junior high school, I used to rap. I loved The Smiths so I’d try to sing like Morrissey and I’d rap too, so I had no identity at all. All of those things are still in me and that’s made the uniqueness of what I do, I guess.”

With bass player Chi Cheng completing the Deftones lineup, the young band wrote everything from reggae-rap to straight-up, balls-to-the-wall heavy metal in a crusade to cement their sound. Honing their craft locally in Sacramento, they formed their signature sound and hit LA to get themselves a deal, meeting fellow newcomers Korn in the process. After recording a demo with soon-to-be nu metal über-producer Ross Robinson, Chino says that people were already starting to spit jibes at the band and label them ‘baby Korn’.

“We were definitely grouped in with Korn,” says Stephen. “The only similarity was that we both made heavy music and we were both doing something that people considered exciting at the time, but I liked what those guys were doing.”

“We had to take our own road and not attach ourselves to any scene,” agrees Chino. “That’s something that’s always been our thing.”

Recruiting Pantera and Prong producer Terry Date and signing with Madonna’s Maverick label,  Deftones recorded and released their debut album, Adrenaline. Alongside Korn and Incubus,  Deftones were cited as pioneers for the burgeoning nu metal scene and riot-starting tracks like 7 Words and Minus Blindfold sound as fresh and club-ready in 2010 as they did upon their release.

“I’m not sure our mental capacity has ever been forward- thinking,” says Stephen, who laughs and reveals that his down-beat turn of phrase has earned him the nickname Negatron amongst his bandmates. “We try to do something that sounds good to us and that’s just about it. There’s never a masterplan behind what we do.”

“I couldn’t even say that we put that much thought into that record,” says a modest Chino. “We captured an energy and a youthful spirit that you can still hear and that still shows today but we were just excited to be recording an album.”

If the band fired early warning shots with their debut release, their sophomore effort, 1998’s Around The Fur, blew the fucking doors off. Maintaining the zip-and-bounce of their debut on the dancefloor-filling My Own Summer (Shove It), the band also began to extend their journey into the world of atmospherics with Chino’s other-worldly vocal delivery growing in stature tenfold, on an album that’s rightfully regarded as one of the most essential rock albums of the 90s.

“It’s funny, people always think it’s me who brought that other side to the band,” Chino shrugs. “It was Stephen who wrote Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away) and started building on our sound in that way and it just kind of worked for all of us.”

“I wrote Mascara too and that’s pretty mellow, right?” laughs Stephen. “I don’t always write the heaviest music. I write what I feel. I just feel the heavier stuff more often than not because that’s how I am as a guitar player.”

Riding universal acclaim for their bold leap forward on …Fur, its follow-up White Pony saw the band branching out further than ever before with Chino adding second guitar to the writing process but, due to his amateur ability, also adding an age to the band’s recording process.

“It slowed us down incredibly because he didn’t really know how to play guitar,” says Stephen. “That time when he was learning to play guitar was when we went from taking a year or less to make a record to two years or greater.”

“I sucked at guitar,” admits Chino. “I was learning to play and I didn’t really know what I was doing and I still don’t, but Stephen only recently admitted that it made him mad.”

“I still joke around with him about how I wish I could have learnt to play guitar in a band that was signed already,” Stephen concludes.

Through this sense of frustration, there were allegations within the press that a power struggle was starting to emerge between Chino and Stephen during the album’s creation.

“There wasn’t a power struggle,” says Stephen with point- blank directness.

“People don’t realise that me and Stephen wrote a lot of that record together and we were in the same headspace at the same time,” asserts Chino. “It wasn’t that I took control and mellowed out the band at all. We write well together because we’re both looking to push ourselves. It’s not that we want to out-do each other but we do try to out-do ourselves.”

Through all of the alleged creative control issues and added time to the band’s schedule, the Deftones created what is commonly considered their finest hour with White Pony. Fearlessly experimental and a true journey of an album, it’s a record that is rightfully revered as one of the best rock albums of the last decade and an essential purchase for anyone interested in alternative metal.

“Towards the end of the making of that record, we knew we had something special,” admits Chino. “When we were listening to the final mixes, we knew we were doing something that nobody else was doing, that had pushed ourselves and I felt great about it.”

White Pony saw Deftones hit new heights, landing at number three on the Billboard charts and taking in headline arena shows in the UK that included A Perfect Circle and Linkin Park serving as support acts at Wembley Arena and the now-defunct London Arena in Docklands respectively, as well as beating Pantera, Iron Maiden and Slipknot to win Best Metal Performance at the 2001 Grammys.

If it seems all fluffy kittens and rags-to-riches up to this point, prepare for a slight change in pace. If this were an episode of VH1’s Behind The Music, this would be the part where the music becomes sombre and the voiceover guy puts on his best serious voice…

Beginning work on their self-titled album (ironically, originally set to be titled Lovers), the band began to hit hard times in their personal lives.

“That’s the only album where the music was secondary to our personal problems,” says Chino. “We were all going through different things like divorce or drugs. It’s hard to really think back to that period because I was out of my mind!”

With Chino beginning to fight a war with drug abuse that was set to consume him for the next few years of his life, the personal problems that were coursing through the band’s lifeblood would start to cause a musical breakdown. With those reports of creative power struggles within the band rearing their ugly head once more, Stephen admits that he took a stand in the making of that album.

“When we got to the self-titled album, Chino would play the quieter stuff and little jangly things and me, as a guitar player, I made a stand on that record,” Stephen states. “I said, ‘If it’s not heavy, I’m not playing on it.’ I stuck to that. I was introduced to Meshuggah and I was consumed by their music and we’re a heavy band and I just wanted to play heavy-ass music and Chino wasn’t into that. We were as far away from each other musically at that point as at any point in our history.”

The band battled through their problems to create the most challenging and musically diverse collection of their career. While it stands as the most successful Deftones album in terms of chart positions in both the UK and the States (numbers seven and two respectively), the self-titled effort didn’t garner the widespread acclaim of any of the band’s previous outings and remains something of a love-hate album amongst the band’s fanbase. This feeling of indifference was to prove the least of the band’s worries, with Chino’s drug problem beginning to spiral out of control.

“I’d do whatever, mostly coke and speed, and get amped out of my mind,” admits Chino. “I’d think I was being produc- tive but I’d never finish anything. I’d drink a lot of Jamesons to bring me back down too. When things were bad, I’d just drown myself in the dirtiest shit I could do. For a whole lot of my career, I lived like I didn’t give a shit about the next day.

“That was probably why I was so difficult to deal with for those years, but I wasn’t the only one in the band doing something that they shouldn’t have been doing.”

Sessions on the band’s fifth album, Saturday Night Wrist, came to a grinding halt. With Chino continuing his stop-start style of working and then going on to complete an album with his ambient side-project, Team Sleep, his bandmates started to lose patience with their vocalist.

“It wasn’t a fun time at all,” says Chino. “I really lost my friendship with the band during that whole thing and there was something really personal which I will tell you because it never really gets spoken about. I heard they were talking about getting someone else to sing so they could finish the record. When I heard that I laughed, but I thought, ‘Could they really just do that to me?’ I believed it and I stopped communicating with them and I went and did Team Sleep and I didn’t do that out of defiance, I was going to do that anyway, but I left and I didn’t talk to any of them for six months.

“I still haven’t really confronted them about that whole thing because it’s not worth it,” says Chino. “But that was the main thing I look at and go, ‘Man, you knew me since I was eight years old and you guys would really get somebody else to record these songs because I’m having a hard time in my life right now? If I really am a drug addict then help me!’ and I felt like they were pushing me away and they probably felt that I was running away. It was a pretty deep time.”

Did you think about quitting the band?

“Yeah,” admits Chino. “I thought about it a lot during those times. During the self-titled and also during Saturday Night Wrist. When I was finished with my vocals on …Wrist I told the producer that it was the last Deftones album that I would ever put vocals on.”

“It wasn’t just me that considered [replacing Chino], it was all of us and it really didn’t have anything to do with him at the time,” said Stephen. “We had the music all done and he’s just going to bounce now and do Team Sleep before we’re finished? What the hell! Nobody wanted to replace him but nobody wanted to sit around and wait for him either.

“When he got back and we were clear that we were ready to move on and we put out B-Sides & Rarities, it lit a fire under Chino,” says Stephen. “The overall sound of …Wrist needed to go through that whole process to get to what you hear today. As wild a journey as that was, we were coming together as individuals by the end of that process and it was good for us and the vibes within the band have been good ever since.”

Saturday Night Wrist was released to moderate acclaim from fans and the press but, more importantly, the Deftones began to enjoy each other’s company for the first time in too long. Chino is currently two years sober of drugs, and the band’s shows on the Saturday Night Wrist tour were better than they had been since their arena-selling heyday. They were seemingly invincible. 

Then tragedy struck. It was as the band were finishing up work on the album known as Eros that they took the biggest hit of their career. On November 4, 2008, Deftones bassist Chi Cheng was involved in a car accident in Santa Clara, CA that left him in a coma. Chi has come through a potentially fatal septicaemia infection and is currently in a minimally conscious state.

“It was one of the hardest things we’ve had to deal with in our lives,” says Chino, the anguish evident in his every word. “We never had that conversation about the band continuing. We just wanted to play music together to help escape what was going on; we just wanted to get in the room and play and we invited Sergio (Vega, former bassist with influential post-hardcore outfit, Quicksand) to play with us and it felt good. We couldn’t have just sat and wallowed in it, it was too much. We miss Chi dearly and I look at [new album] Diamond Eyes as being really therapeutic for us as a band.”

“Chino calls it therapy through music, but for me it’s just that you can’t sit around forever, you have to go on and live. It’s just not easy,” says Stephen. 

“That same energy that carried us through …Wrist when Chino was away and not thinking about the rest of us that dragged us through, is the same energy that’s dragged us through Diamond Eyes,” Stephen continues. “The only difference is that when we went through the same struggles with Chino, it was of a selfish nature, and this whole thing with Chi has just been tragic. It’s not that I’m uneasy talking about it, it’s just that I don’t know what to say. One of my best friends who I spent my whole adult life with is not here with us because of one moment and he’s fighting day-by-day to come back to the world and be himself and that’s just difficult and there’s nothing perfect to be said.”

But through all of the heartbreak comes Diamond Eyes. A defiant and uplifting listening experience, it stands up as one of the greatest albums of the band’s career and hind- sight could well prove it to be a milestone in modern metal.

“We made this album in the wake of Chi’s accident and created something positive in amongst that huge negative,” says Stephen. “What I hear when I hear this record is positivity; it was a fun and enjoyable experience making it.”

“This is the first record in a while where I can’t wait to get out and play these songs for people,” agrees Chino. “We’ll always play the old stuff that people want to hear but there’s lots of this record that feels just as necessary for us to play because we’re so proud of this record.”

Celebrating the 15 years since the release of their debut album, perhaps the biggest testament to the Deftones’ career to date is that they’ve never allowed themselves to become a nostalgia act. They are still creating some of the best work of their lives in 2010. Constantly moving forward, Deftones have never allowed themselves to become cartoon characters for the media like so many of their peers, nor have they ever descended into self-parody. Quite simply, Deftones have been one of metal’s most gloriously creative shining lights for the better part of two decades and they continue to create career-affirming music to this day.

“There’s never been a point where we’ve found a formula and stuck to it or wanted to fit in with what’s cool,” says Chino. “We’ve changed as we’ve changed as people and as musicians and we’ve grown that way and that people have liked what we do is great. We’ll keep evolving, I can promise that.” 

Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 205. Since the piece originally appeared, Chi Cheng sadly passed away in 2013

1966 was the year the guitar hero was born. It was the year that Eric Clapton, aged 21, recorded the landmark Beano Album with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and then walked away to form Cream; the year that Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, both aged 22, ended up smashing guitars and bashing through sonic barriers together in The Yardbirds; the year that marked the arrival of 19-year-old wunderkind Peter Green and a game-changing 24-year-old named Jimi Hendrix. It was, in short, the year when a new generation of guitar giants transformed the American deep blues songbook into a new strand of rock music.

Things were happening at a grass roots level too. The British R&B/blues circuit was a hothouse for new musical talent, many of them the stars of the future. Steampacket featuring Rod Stewart, Julie Driscoll and Long John Baldry, an amazing triumvirate of singers, along with the organist Brian Auger, was one such band. Ten Years After, boasting the speed-king Alvin Lee, Chicken Shack with the wiry blues warrior Stan Webb, and The Paramounts with apprentice guitar hero Robin Trower criss-crossed the country in their Commer van, playing a network of clubs, bars and town halls that stretched from the Club A’Gogo in Newcastle to the Florida Rooms in Brighton.

“There was an underground feeling in the air,” John Mayall says of the period just before the Beano Album came out on July 22. “The people in the clubs were flocking to see us, regardless of what was happening in the record business or the pop charts. We were playing to capacity crowds, six or seven nights a week, everywhere we went. So we figured something was about to happen.”

And happen it did.

The electric guitar has always been part of the British pop dream. At the start of the 1960s, the immaculately groomed Hank Marvin and the Shadows, with their gleaming red Stratocasters, gave way to a wilder breed of player with the arrival of Keith Richards and Brian Jones.

The Rolling Stones themselves had been mentored at the outset by the bandleader/guitarist Alexis Korner and harmonica player Cyril Davies, who had introduced the blues to jazz audiences when they formed Blues Incorporated in 1961. The players who passed through the line-up of this loose collective included Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker and Charlie Watts, while those who made guest appearances with the band on their regular Rhythm and Blues Nights at the Ealing Jazz Club included Mick Jagger, Mayall and Page.

By the start of 1966, Korner was about to wrap up Blues Incorporated and – at the grand old age of 38 – embrace his well-earned status as an elder statesman of the R&B scene he had done so much to inspire. All around him his protégés were flourishing. In the pop charts the Stones were second only to The Beatles, while R&B-influenced bands such as The Animals from Newcastle and the Spencer Davis Group from Birmingham were dominating the airwaves on the ever-more popular pirate radio stations.

Foremost among the British blues pioneers who had followed the Stones into the world of pop stardom were The Yardbirds. Their album Five Live Yardbirds, released in December 1964, was an early prototype of the blues rock genre, thanks to the advanced musicianship of the band, and in particular that of its young lead guitarist, Eric Clapton. Although poorly recorded, the album’s wild-eyed versions of Smokestack Lightning, I’m A Man and others provided a template for the instrumental wig-outs that two years later would become the stock-in-trade of Cream and many other groups that emerged in their wake.

Clapton’s tenure with The Yardbirds ended abruptly in March 1965 when he deemed the group’s first hit single, For Your Love, to be insufficiently bluesworthy for him to be associated with. He was replaced by Jeff Beck, another supremely gifted guitarist with a similar art school background and fascination for the blues, but a more mercurial and experimental nature.

By the start of 1966, The Yardbirds had already travelled a long way from their blues beginnings. In February, they released the pivotal single Shapes Of Things. With its bold, philosophical lyric and Beck’s heavily distorted guitar solo, it found them exploring new frontiers of psychedelic pageantry. “We were all on the threshold of this new thing,” Beck later said. “The Yardbirds were the very first psychedelic band, really.”

But back in the clubs, bars, town halls, student unions and speakeasys of the UK, Alexis Korner’s legacy was clearly in evidence. There, a dedicated cadre of young musicians immersed in the history and artistry of the blues played to fans rammed into smoke-filled rooms who spread the gospel further afield with every day that passed. Like a gathering storm, the blues was about to break.

“It all happened very quickly,” recalls Mayall, who had relocated from his native Manchester to London, and by the start of 1966 had taken over from Korner as the torchbearer of modern blues in Britain. “British audiences had been listening to trad jazz for ten years, and a new generation was ready for something new. There was a really great energy that suddenly came about.”

Nowhere was that energy more concentrated than in the latest line-up of Mayall’s Bluesbreakers that featured John McVie on bass, Hughie Flint on drums and Eric Clapton on guitar, who Mayall had snapped up as soon as he’d left The Yardbirds.

On January 1, 1966 the Bluesbreakers saw in the New Year playing an all-nighter at the Flamingo in Soho, the first date on a gig sheet that already stretched ahead with few breaks into the months ahead. The Flamingo, a basement club in Wardour Street, was run by brothers Rik and Johnny Gunnell. Rik, an ex-boxer and bouncer, was also Mayall’s booking agent, and the venue was a colourful R&B mecca – “semi-dubious”, according to Mayall – where gangsters and prostitutes rubbed shoulders with jazz and blues musicians.

“Everybody knew everybody, because we were all playing the same circuit,” Mayall says. “Everybody was all part of one big family, if you will. We were all really surprised to discover that we could actually earn a living out of this music.”

For Mayall it was all about playing live and keeping together a band that could handle the workload. “The club scene was rolling for everybody,” he recalls. “There was so much work going on. There was enough for everybody.”

The bigger bands had a driver but there was no road crew. Drummer Aynsley Dunbar, who joined the Bluesbreakers in September 1966, remembers it as a time when road and vehicle safety were not the best, when nobody wore seatbelts and a new law prohibiting drinking and driving was passed in January 1966 but it was rarely enforced.

“I couldn’t sleep when I was being driven,” Dunbar recalls. “There were so many drivers around who’d had a drink or were too tired, and there were a lot of crashes so, over the years, I used to do a lot of the driving myself. I loved it! My average speed was always a hundred miles per hour or a bit more. We had some near misses.”

When the band got to the gig they would have to unload and set up the gear themselves. Mayall’s equipment included a Hammond organ that took some manhandling. “I fashioned some wooden handles and fixed it up like a sedan chair with a couple of poles running through the organ,” Mayall explains. “Two guys could navigate most of the venues like that, whether it was down to the basement at the Flamingo or up a flight of stairs in some cases.”

Mayall’s first album, John Mayall Plays John Mayall, released on Decca in 1965, had sold less than 1,000 copies and he had accordingly been dropped from the label. A succession of singles fared even worse, and it was only thanks to the persistent lobbying of producer Mike Vernon that Decca countenanced recording and releasing the Beano Album.

No one in the business was expecting the thunderbolt that arrived in the summer of ’66. But Clapton’s street reputation was already a phenomenon, and at least one tastemaker with a spray can had declared ‘Clapton Is God’ on a wall in Islington, North London. It was a measure of the young guitarist’s charisma and ability that such an outrageous tag stuck. And it was a measure of the brilliance of the album, formally titled Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton – but known as the Beano Album after the comic that Clapton can be seen reading with effortlessly cool insouciance on the cover – that it exceeded all precedents, never mind expectations.

The Beano Album raised the bar in modern recorded music overnight. From the opening notes of All Your Love, in which Clapton’s distinctive vibrato and steely tone slice through the mix like a guillotine, the sound and performances on the album were – and still are – superlative. The combination of Clapton’s Les Paul and an overdriven Marshall amp became the new template for a cool electric guitar sound and one that has rarely been bettered in the 50 years since.

“Eric’s contribution was quite phenomenal,” Mayall says. “He was the best there was. He wanted to play the blues and I provided a platform on which he could develop that.”

Mayall’s own routines on the harmonica-driven tracks Parchman Farm and Another Man were no less remarkable for their raw, gutbucket energy, while his howling vocal call on the Mayall/Clapton composition Double Crossing Time echoed the ghosts of blues singers down the years.

More than just a stunning blues collection, the Beano Album was the first de facto rock album. It featured nothing so commerical as a hit single, yet it reached No.6 in the UK. Its unexpected yet emphatic success was a key moment in the process whereby albums started to take over from singles as the barometer of a band’s success.

With its revolutionary sound, its reverence for the nuances of electric Chicago blues, its spiritual vigour and technical rigour, the impact of the album was seismic. A generation of guitarists had just received the wake-up call of their careers, and within a year the British Blues Boom would be in full swing.

For Mayall it was simply business as usual. “The record business was something we had no control over,” he says matter-of-factly. “But we did have control over getting our weekly quota of shows. The main focus for me was to keep the band together – or some line-up of the band – so that we could continue to go out and play.”

For Clapton, however, the Beano Album was instant history. By the time it was released he had already left the Bluesbreakers. Things happen fast when an art form is at a pivotal stage of its development, and Clapton was a young man driven by the same urgency of feeling that you could hear in his playing. On July 30, the day that England won the football World Cup, and just eight days after the Beano Album was released, Clapton, Bruce and Baker played their first gig together as Cream at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester.

Bruce had played with Clapton in the Bluesbreakers for a stretch the previous year, and on one occasion Baker had sat in. “That was when Eric, Jack and Ginger got talking in dark corners about their own futures,” says Mayall, who was remarkably unfazed at the prospect of having to carry on gigging without the star of an album that had just reached the Top 10. “For me it’s never been a problem,” he says. “Somehow or other I’m always able to find somebody else and make a different band.”

Clapton’s replacement was Peter Green, another blues prodigy from East London, who had deputised for Clapton in the past. “It took me a while to talk him into it,” Mayall recalls. “He’d been offered a job to tour America with The Animals. But in the end the music won out. He decided he’d rather play blues than go off to the States.”

In September, Hughie Flint also called it quits and Mayall was now on the lookout for a new drummer. He spotted Aynsley Dunbar playing a gig with Alexis Korner at a venue called Les Cousins in Wardour Street, and invited him to come and check out the Bluesbreakers a couple of days later at a gig at Chelsea Town Hall.

“They came on stage and Peter Green started with three notes and I just fell in love with the band right there and then,” Dunbar recalls. “His playing was just so soulful. It wrenched me apart. I couldn’t wait to play with them.”

He didn’t have to. Mayall instructed him to report for duty the following day and the drummer played his first gig as a member of the Bluesbreakers at Norwich Town Hall that night. He played six or seven gigs a week for the next six months. “There were no rehearsals,” Dunbar recalls. “All rehearsals were done on stage in front of an audience – or you might get a run through before doing a take in the recording studio.”

There was also the small matter of recording the band’s next album, A Hard Road, which was completed over four days in October 1966 at Decca Studios in West Hampstead. As with the Beano Album before it, A Hard Road was a showcase for the band’s new guitarist.

While Clapton, Beck and Page shared similar backgrounds, Peter Green was unlike any of them, indeed unlike anyone else on the scene. A quiet, contemplative man from a Jewish family, he took up the guitar after he first saw Clapton, whom he idolised, playing in The Yardbirds. Where Clapton (and Beck’s) playing was driven by an insistent, aggressive urgency, Green’s playing (and singing) style had a more emotional elegance that tapped into the mournful quality of the deepest blues.

Green’s instrumental composition, The Supernatural, built around a single, spine-tingling sustained note, was one of the most haunting pieces that Mayall ever recorded - and Out Of Reach, an achingly sad song composed and sung by Green (not on the original album, but released as a Mayall B-side around the same time), was simply one of the most soulful recorded performances by any blues act of this era.

“I can say without hesitation that Peter Green was the most brilliant musician I have ever played with,” said Mick Fleetwood, who played drums in the Bluesbreakers after Dunbar left in 1967 and later formed Fleetwood Mac with Green. “He could be running through a blues progression we all knew, one that we’d heard a million times, but when Peter played it those same old notes sounded brand new.”

While Green was recording A Hard Road, and Clapton was gigging and recording his debut album with Cream, the era’s two other great guitarists were about to be immortalised on the big screen. Between October 12 and 14, The Yardbirds were at Elstree Studios, where the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni was making his film Blow-Up, a murder mystery-cum-social snapshot of Swinging London. The script called for a cameo from a rock group who would sum up the nihilistic, countercultural energy that was rippling through the capital’s musical psyche in 1966, and The Yardbirds were it.

It had already been a turbulent year for The Yardbirds, whose bassist Paul Samwell-Smith had left the group in June and been replaced by session guitarist Jimmy Page. Page and Beck had known each other since they were teenagers, and enjoyed a lively relationship delicately balanced between respect and rivalry. Page was never going to be anyone’s bass player for long, and switched to guitar the first chance he got.

The new line-up (with Chris Dreja on bass) had just finished a tour with the Rolling Stones and Ike and Tina Turner when they got the Blow-Up gig. Antonioni filmed them playing Stroll On, a rocked-up version of an old American jump-blues song Train Kept A-Rolling, on a stage set that replicated the Ricky Tick Club (actually in Windsor rather than the capital) in every detail, right down to the chewing-gum on the chairs.

“Antonioni was an awkward bastard,” Beck later recalled. “He says to me: [adopts Italian accent] ‘We want you to break your guitar.’ I said: ‘Oh yeah? A 1954 Les Paul and you want me to smash it? Get away.’ He said: ‘Don’t be ridiculous, we pay for it.’ I said: ‘You can’t replace that.’ So then they got Höfner to bring down these shitty guitars. So I had this tea-chest full of these twenty-five-quid joke guitars. They were just destined to be smashed, and I went right through ’em three or four at a time with this Höfner rep standing watching at the side. He thought it was all great fun.”

This was a good day’s work for The Yardbirds. Blow-Up was hailed as a masterpiece and became one of the biggest-grossing films of the year in America. As a means of rubber-stamping the concept of the British guitar hero for an international audience it could hardly have been bettered. But according to the band’s manager, Simon Napier-Bell, the experience of making the film gave Beck a taste for smashing up equipment on stage during the group’s ensuing US tour, which proved destructive in other ways.

“Gig after gig he tottered round the stage, ramming the neck of his guitar through the speakers and crashing his feet into the delicate electrical controls. I was left a prisoner in my suite at the Chicago Hilton, phoning round America trying to find the location of every Marshall amp in the country and chartering planes to fly them to the next evening’s gig, only to be destroyed by another night’s bad-tempered Beck-ing.”

The expenses mounted, and relations between Beck and the rest of the band soured until, three-quarters of the way through the tour, Beck left the group, pleading “inflamed brain, inflamed tonsils and an inflamed cock”.

Beck was duly booted out of the group in November. Page took over and began a process of ramping up the grandstanding performance elements with a violin bow during increasingly extended solos, and laying the foundations for the his next band, the New Yardbirds. Within two years he had changed their name, and Led Zeppelin were born.

The emergence of the Thames-delta guitar hero as an icon of popular culture was almost complete when the most exotic creature of all landed in their midst. Jimi Hendrix arrived unknown and unheralded in London on September 24. With the help of his manager Chas Chandler, he began sitting in with just about every band in town – including the Bluesbreakers and Cream – while recruiting an English rhythm section to be his band. Dunbar was one of the drummers who auditioned for him.

“We were perfect together,” Dunbar says of this encounter with Hendrix. “Later, when I had my own band [the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation] Hendrix would jump on stage and play with us every time we played at the Speakeasy. One night, he just poked his guitar through the ceiling.”

Be that as it may, Dunbar didn’t get the job with the Experience. The story goes that Hendrix and Chandler tossed a coin to choose between Dunbar and the man who got the job, Mitch Mitchell.

“I’ve got to clarify that,” Dunbar now insists. “They were offering me twenty pounds a week to play with Jimi. I said: ‘Give me thirty a week and I’ll be there.’ It wasn’t a toss of a coin. They were just trying to be cheap.”

Presumably Dunbar was making more than £20 a week playing with the Bluesbreakers. According to Napier-Bell, bands such as The Yardbirds and The Who could command a fee in the UK in 1966 of £350 a night (about £4,500 in today’s money). Setting the gold standard, the Stones would go out for a fee of £450 (£5,800) and The Beatles – who played their last live concert, at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August ’66 – would have been charging “around a thousand pounds” (£13,000).

A year of freewheeling creativity ended with two of the most significant rock releases of the decade. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s debut single reached the shops on December 16. Hendrix’s cover version of the old murder ballad Hey Joe and its B-side Stone Free was a harbinger of a revolution to come.

Released a week earlier, Cream’s debut album, Fresh Cream, was a game changer in much the same way that the Beano Album had been six months previously. Applying a skill-set that was more akin to that of the great jazz improvisers than to pop musicians, Clapton, Bruce and Baker made an incredible opening statement, full of mind-bending harmony vocals and unprecedentedly extravagant soloing on guitar, harmonica and drums. Blues rumbles such as Willie Dixon’s Spoonful and Skip James’s I’m So Glad were turned into monumental instrumental workouts, while original compositions such as N.S.U. and Sweet Wine redefined the parameters of a rock genre that had only just been defined in the first place.

It was an astonishing album with which to bring the curtain down on a year during which the skill of the guitarist had for the first time been elevated above the appeal of the singer, and the skill and daring of one guitarist in particular – Clapton – had been elevated above that of all others.

Rock was finally rolling.

Arriving soon after Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day, Muse's 10^th album is a roaring comeback in a similar vein, a widescreen sci-fi blockbuster that combines extraterrestrial speculation with crowd-pleasing entertainment and a warm emotional heart. With their stadium-sized, chart-topping, omnivorous, prog-metal glam-punk maximalism, the Teignmouth trio have long transcended genre labels. Their loyal fanbase would probably embrace any outlandish indulgence right now.

Even so, The Wow! Signal feels super-focussed, densely layered and stacked with killer tunes. Cramming 10 tracks into 45 minutes, this is Muse at their sharpest, eclectic and energised but low on the bloat and bombast that sometimes marred previous albums.

The Wow! Signal is named after a mysterious deep space radio burst, detected in 1977, which some scientists speculated was proof of extra-terrestrial life. These familiar Close Encounters themes run through the album, notably opening track Dark Forest, which refers to the theory that alien civilisations would assume all others to be hostile and thus conceal themselves from discovery. Combining orchestral strings with Hi-NRG electro beats, solemn choral sections with supercharged guitar solos, this baroque'n'roll disco-metal epic is one of Muse's most ambitious mini-operas yet, a Bohemian Rhapsody for the post X-Files era.

Fans of classic Muse tropes – virtuosic guitar shredding, histrionic vocals, apocalyptic imagery, complex tempo changes – are well served by Cryogen and Hexagons. But Bellamy also has a solid track record of blending high-octane riff-scorchers with slick, shiny, catchy dance-pop. Powered by Chris Wolstenholme's snappy, super-funky bassline, Nightshift Superstar is a falsetto-voiced disco earworm, Daft Punk meets Hall & Oates. The Sickness in You and I leans more into nu-metal funk-rock, sounding like Prince Against The Machine, while Hush finds Bellamy sharing a muscular, melodic duet with Britpop diva Ellie Goulding.

For all their intergalactic excess, Muse have always had a deeply romantic side, and Bellamy makes some of his most nakedly emotional statements to date here. A mighty electro-gospel anthem built around a church organ, Be With You is a majestic heartbreak ballad with strong Freddie Mercury overtones. The climactic Space Debris is another stand-out, a tender orchestral heart-tugger that likens two lovers growing apart to broken satellites falling out of orbit, its skittish rhythm resolving into a lush, tumbling, waltz-time fade-out. Bellamy reportedly split from wife Elle Evans last year, so he may be channelling real feelings here, private pain as public catharsis.

Rich in everything but understatement, The Wow! Signal finds Muse on thrilling mid-career form. Their interstellar ambitions will always be too gauche for self-serious music critics, but they remain unique prime movers in the field of unabashedly grand-scale rock, undefeated world champions at balancing outer-space spectacle with inner-space psychodrama.

You can get the new issue of Metal Hammer in the ultimate bundle for Bring Me The Horizon fans, celebrating the upcoming release of the Yorkshire band’s re-recording of their propulsive debut, Count Your Blessings.

Exclusively via the Louder webstore, get your hands on the magazine with an exclusive cover dedicated to the 2006 album, wrapped in stylish silver foil. The package also comes with a vinyl copy of the re-recording, called Count Your Blessings Repented, plus a ‘Count Your Fuckin’ Blessings’ t-shirt and a poster depicting the band in their early days.

Only 500 editions of this extensive bundle will ever be made, so buy now while stocks last!

Inside the new Hammer, singer Oli Sykes reflects on the Count Your Blessings era, when the band’s rapid rise while still in their teens won them goodwill and jealousy in equal measure. He reveals that he and his cohorts dropped off of one festival lineup in 2006 as another act threatened to beat them up.

“We said we were sick [when we dropped out of the festival], because there were another band there that said when we got there, they were going to shave all our hair off and beat us up. It were mental at first,” the frontman recalls.

“It were that era, when people latched onto something, like, ‘We hate this band, we hate My Chemical Romance.’ It were everyone.”

Also inside, you’ll find an interview with singer Bruce Dickinson and bassist/founder Steve Harris of the legendary Iron Maiden, as the veteran Brits gear up for their two-day festival Eddfest at Knebworth House in Stevenage next month.

“When I walk out onstage, it’s one of the few moments during my life when the rest of the world can go to hell,” he says. “On a really good night, you completely lose yourself in some weird higher power that takes you over. You inhabit the song, your voice just seems to anticipate everything, and that’s why I do it. Simple as that.”

We also look back on System Of A Down’s early years as the nu metal-era stars prepare to return to Europe, and we tell the story of the long-lost Slipknot album Look Outside Your Window as it finally gets a wide release, 18 years after being recorded.

Plus, we review new albums by The Pretty Reckless, Warning and others, and we report back from Desertfest, Incineration festival and gigs by Karnivool, Dogma and more!

Get your mega Bring Me The Horizon bundle now via Louder while you can!

In 1973, Jon Anderson sold Steve Howe an idea he’d come up with from the pages of a guru’s memoir. The result was sixth Yes album Tales From Topographic Oceans – a four-sided release containing just four tracks. In 2016 Prog explored the determination it demanded of the band members, and the price they paid to deliver it.

“I actually wanted to record Tales From Topographic Oceans in a tent in this beautiful wood that I’d found, miles from anywhere. I thought we could bury a generator 300 yards away under the ground so we could have electricity in the tent. We’d be able to record there and have all these natural sounds around us. That’s where my brain was at at that time. Of course, they thought I was totally crazy!” laughs Jon Anderson.

“Crazy” turned out to be one of the nicer things said about the sixth Yes studio album upon its release in December 1973. Although achieving Gold status on both sides of the Atlantic, it received a mauling from many critics. When the band played the four-sided opus live, many fans found it a challenge. But challenge is exactly what Yes thrived on. Always a band on a mission and in a hurry to push forward, they were keen to do whatever was in their power to be at the forefront of a musical movement where nothing that was worth anything stood still for very long.

Chris Squire observed that the build-up to Tales… had been going on for some time, with Heart Of The Sunrise marking the realisation of an ambition to produce something on a much bigger scale. With Close To The Edge, they went bigger still. An epic release, it meshed adventurous solo excursions with tightly knit arrangements. The punch Yes delivered came not from a single source but rather their collective force. Anderson was determined their music should avoid showboating licks for their own sake. “There were a lot of bands up there soloing forever but that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to create music that had length and breadth and adventure, that would carry the audience through this experience. With lights and staging, you could take them on a journey.”

They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Tales From Topographic Oceans began with a single conversation between two characters at very different ends of the musical spectrum. In Bill Bruford’s London flat in early March 1973, along with dozens of other friends celebrating the drummer’s wedding earlier in the day, Anderson sat perched on an open windowsill talking with Jamie Muir. “He was an unbelievable stage performer,” says Anderson of the eccentric King Crimson percussionist, known at the time for wearing bearskins, spitting blood capsules from his mouth and flailing his percussion rig and packing cases with heavy chains. “I wanted to know what made him do that; what had influenced him.”

Muir enthused about Autobiography Of A Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. The late guru was well-known in esoteric circles, and had made a more secular cameo appearance on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, wedged between HG Wells and James Joyce. Reading Yogananda’s words, Muir told the singer, had had a profound impact upon him. “He said to me, ‘Here, read it,’ and it started me off on the path of becoming aware that there was even a path,” says Anderson. “Jamie was like a messenger for me and came to me at the perfect time in my life… he changed my life.”

It was powerful stuff. Reading the book prompted Muir to quit music and become a Buddhist monk, and while the effect upon Anderson may not have been so extreme, it was the catalyst that took Yes into uncharted waters.

Discovering a reference to the different levels and divisions within Hindu scriptures in a footnote led to a ‘Eureka!’ moment for Anderson as the group toured Japan. Convinced he’d found the structural framework within which to place the large-scale ideas and concepts he’d been mulling over, he found a willing ally in Steve Howe. Having written Roundabout and Close To The Edge together, there was a real bond between the pair.

“We were really up for the big, challenging things like, ‘Let’s do an album with four Close To The Edges,’” laughs the guitarist. Over several post-gig evenings in candlelit hotel rooms, locked away from all the usual distractions from life on the road, they trawled through a huge accumulated array of musical sketches and motifs, searching for pieces to complement Anderson’s thematic ideas.

“I’ve a lot of cassettes of Jon and I sitting in places like New York or Cincinnati recording songs,” recalls Howe. “Jon would say to me, ‘What have you got that’s a bit like that…’ so I’d play him something and he’d go, ‘That’s great. Have you got anything else?’ and I’d play him another tune. I notice that one of the pieces he turned down early on eventually became part of side three. He heard it later and said, ‘That’s a good piece,’ because we were looking for something different then.”

At the end of a marathon all-night writing session in Savannah, Georgia, the basic themes and broad outline of the next Yes project had finally coalesced. Alan White recalls them presenting their deliberations to the rest of the group. “I thought it was great. The band wanted to make a big statement here worldwide. We had this whole story, you know? I wanted to create music that had length and breadth and adventure that would carry the audience through this experience.”

Howe remembers a slightly more cautious reception. “Some guys in the band were like, ‘Hold on a minute.’ They were fine with a double album but were, you know, ‘Just four songs?’ But Jon and I did manage to sell the idea.”

If the starting point of Tales… had come about when the paths of Yes and King Crimson had accidentally crossed at a party, the next stage in the story found Yes indebted to another part of the prog spectrum: Emerson Lake And Palmer and their Manticore Studios, based in an old converted cinema in Fulham. Over several weeks in the summer of 1973, occupying the main stage at the rehearsal complex, they got to grips with fragments, sketches and outlines. In some respects, this was business as usual for the group. Countless times in their history, Yes had sewn together different musical elements – never the easiest of jobs

The arrival of Rick Wakeman in 1971, who understood the nuts and bolts of the music, had improved the pace with which loose ends and threads might be put to use or dispatched. If things weren’t quite so quick this time, it came down in part at least to the sheer scale of the task. Nailing one track can be hard enough. Trying to map out four, each lasting the side of an album, was enough to give even the most enthusiastic in the band pause for thought. The logistics of creating a piece that would go through several distinct transformations over 20 minutes was a formidable prospect even for a group with Close To The Edge under their belt.

Likening the process to climbing a mountain, Anderson argues, “Sometimes you need someone to say, ‘This is where we’re going to go; we’re going to make it, we’ve done it before. Don’t worry, it’ll be okay.’ If you wait for everyone else to arrive at a decision, we’d still be climbing the mountain!”

He readily admits he was frequently overbearing during the writing and rehearsals, chivvying his bandmates along, trying to keep people focused. “So many things happened in that two-and-a-half-month period. In rehearsal I tended to know exactly where we were going, to a point. I knew there were going to be some solos from Steve, and in the first movement there were solos from Rick, and in the second movement. In the third movement there’d be solos from Chris and, especially the fourth movement, a lot of drums. I had such great faith in doing it.”

That faith was something shared by Howe. It was tough going, he admits, but there was a sense that there lay an unprecedented opportunity before the group, provided they were able to keep their nerve. “As hard as it was, and it was hard, nobody wanted to bottle out of what we’d committed ourselves to do. We just knew we had a big landscape we could explore. Side one set the scene so much. It was showing that we wanted to use some themes but use them in different ways. It was quite plain what we were doing.

“By the time we got to the second side, I think we really wanted to go off somewhere else altogether if we could. There’s folky bits where I’m playing lute and we got very light and spry, which is its own dynamic. We could really stretch out; and no less so than on side three, when most of the beginning is a stretch-out of some mad, really quite wacky ideas – some quite Stravinsky, some quite folky. With Leaves Of Green you get back to the roots of our music. There’s almost a Renaissance period that we play at the end of side three. To close, we had to do something that was going to be bigger than big. We felt that with what we had constructed we had a beautiful song, Nous Sommes Du Soleil, and there was a use of theme again that we did nicely, I think.”

Anderson recalls being eager to get started as early as possible because they had so much to get through, though not everyone in the group shared that particular body clock. “It’s a known fact that Chris Squire never wanted to play music before midday,” laughs White [who died in 2022]. “We’d spend all day going over things and we’d get to dinner time and then get some rest. There was some trial and error initially. It was a collection of lots of pieces of music that we had carrying the story. We had to find a way of joining the jigsaw puzzle together to make it work.”

With much of that puzzle now in place, albeit somewhat loosely, Yes transferred to Morgan Studios in Willesden. Its urban location, on a busy road with heavy traffic, was about as far away from the countryside idyll Anderson had originally envisaged as you could get. On the plus side, it boasted a 24-track desk that was more than capable of containing the band’s expansive musical ambitions. And that lack of bucolic charm? Well, Rick Wakeman had the answer.

“One day Rick was in a particularly funny mood, which is not hard for Rick – he used to play jokes on everyone,” reveals White. “He said he wanted some cows in the studio. He had a cardboard cutout cow at one end of Morgan Studio, so we all said we didn’t mind. Then he brought some palm trees in. I was like, ‘Okay Rick, have you finished decorating ?’ ‘It’s a nice environment now,’ he said, and I went, ‘Okay, I can live with that…’”

As an indicator of how strange things had become, White also remembers a shower cubicle complete with tiles being built inside the studio in order to try to replicate the sound Anderson heard when he was singing in the shower at home.

Ask any musician about their ambition and the opportunity to make a record will be pretty high on the list. All the players in Yes had been there and done that several times over. As seasoned and successful professionals, there was no naivety about what was involved. They’d experienced the nitty-gritty of putting records together. Yet this time it was different. Every day, as each of them drove from home to the studio, the distance between what Anderson and Howe had outlined and the reality of what was going onto tape gnawed at their confidence. Of course, other sessions hadn’t always been plain sailing, but nobody in the band was quite prepared for how choppy the waters had now become.

Squire [who died in 2015] recalled in 1992 that despite the cardboard cows and DIY plumbing, there was little in the way of levity. Journeying deeper into the making of the album, he and Anderson were bumping heads. “At that time, Jon had this visionary idea that you could just walk into a studio and if the vibes were right, the music would be great at the end of the day… which is one way of looking at things! It isn’t reality. It took a lot of Band-Aids and careful surgery in the harmony and embellishment department to make it into something.”

Wakeman’s musical skills and flair for arrangements had been heavily utilised throughout the making of Fragile and Close To The Edge. However, changes in the personal and social interactions between the band took their toll in the confines of Morgan. As the construction of the vast musical edifice continued, the personal harmony prevalent on other albums was now rather elusive. Speaking in 1995, co-producer Eddy Offord commented on the rift that opened up during the recording. “At that point it was obvious that Rick became really much more outside the rest of the band. It wasn’t so much musical direction… If you want the honest truth, it was the fact that the whole band was into smoking dope and hash and Rick was into drinking beer. He never touched pot. I don’t know what it was, but he was on the outside.”

Yet there was perhaps another, more significant factor. The phenomenal success of Wakeman’s solo career with The Six Wives Of Henry VIII had created its own momentum and, not unreasonably, there was demand for a follow-up. As Tales… slowly progressed during the summer and early autumn, Wakeman, when not supplying keyboards to Black Sabbath in the adjacent studio, was also busy scoring his next solo project, Journey To The Centre Of The Earth.

Anderson, believing that these extracurricular activities were distracting and preventing Wakeman from contributing to the full extent as he had done on previous recordings, was in little doubt as to what the priority should have been. “My feeling was, ‘Why don’t you put that music into this project, into Tales…?’ We had a couple of times when Rick said, ‘Well, I’m doing what I want to do,’ and I was like, ‘Okay, well, I’ll just get on with it.’”

For his part, Wakeman had genuine misgivings about the general direction of the material. “Yes was heading towards avant-garde jazz rock and I had nothing to offer there,” he observed in 1974. “We had enough material for one album but we felt we had to do the double.”

Marshalling both music and esoteric concepts into a series of cohesive suites required a kind of commitment that was beyond their usual experience, says Howe. That some were struggling was, of course, a cause for concern but, he argues, the way around that was to overcome the doubt by diving in. “You could say to another member, ‘Well, you don’t like this bit but have you got a part worked out yet? Because if you find a part, you’ll get involved in the music!’ Jon and I sometimes really had to spur the guys on.”

A byproduct of Wakeman’s absences was to create a space for others to fill. White recalls sitting at the piano and coming up with the chords that would be used for the ‘Hold me my love’ bridge on Ritual. On another occasion, the drummer sat tinkering with a guitar, working out some chords. They captured Anderson’s attention as he strolled past. “Jon said, ‘Show me those chords,’ and then he took it over,” resulting in the chord sequence being added to The Remembering.

A hungry beast, Tales… called upon all of their songwriting resources, meaning that many items that had been discarded from their previous writing sessions were now re-examined and press-ganged into service. Some, such as the Young Christians theme that appears on side one, dated as far back as Fragile. Back then the passage had been given a much rockier treatment but had ultimately failed to find a suitable home. At this point, necessity demanded it be piped aboard the good ship Topographic.

The clock was ticking. A UK tour was already advertised for November and December. Factory time for pressing of the album was already booked. Every hour that swept by in the studio not only broke down into minutes and seconds but pounds and pence as well. “God bless Eddy Offord,” laughs Anderson, referring to the period when the pair were literally camping out at Morgan Studios as they worked around the clock, even sleeping there in order to cross the finishing line as mastering and manufacturing dates loomed.

“In those days it was like rolling the dice, whether you could mix it well on the first take or the 20th take. There’s a classic photograph of all of us on a fader. It was crazy but what happened was we would mix in sections: two minutes, one minute, four minutes and so on. Then we’d have the quarter-inch tapes hanging from the wall and Eddy would then stick it together with Sellotape and that was how we made albums in those days. There was no automation or click tracks.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, remixing the album in 5.1 surround sound was no easy task for Steven Wilson. Despite having so many previous surround sound remixes of classic material under his belt, he recalls how daunting it was to delve into the source tapes and make sense of what were in effect micro-managed moments and decisions taken on the fly 43 years ago.

“Even though it was recorded on 24-track, the complexity of the music and arrangements meant that every inch of tape was crammed with overdubs. One channel on the tape might start off as vocals, but then switch to a percussion overdub, then a lead guitar phrase, then some mellotron, et cetera. In order to have maximum control over the mix, and to be able to give each sound its own space and treatment, I had to identify and break every element out onto its own channel. This meant that one side of the original album could extrapolate out from 24 channels to 50 or 60 individual parts. Actually, I think side four ended up being more like 100!”

Although they’d always built their albums from a patchwork quilt of takes, Tales… had without doubt been the most arduous recording in the band’s career. The grand themes and vistas, meticulous sonic sculpting and textural details embedded into the album hadn’t come easy, and nor did the completion of the record. With mastering and manufacturing deadlines looming, as Anderson and Offord sat bleary-eyed after the final overnight mixing session, their sleep-deprived state caused a last-minute drama that came perilously close to farce.

“At about nine in the morning, me and Eddy packed up the tapes and went to our car and he put the tapes on the top while he found the keys,” says Anderson. “Then we got in and started to drive toward the main road with all the tapes still on top of the car, making them slide off into the middle of the road. There was a big, red double-decker bus coming towards us and I ran out and stopped the bus [laughs]. That was our wild experience of making this album – we nearly had it crunched under a double-decker bus!”

The true extent of Wakeman’s antipathy towards Yes’ music became obvious early on in the UK tour in November 1973. “I remember we played the whole thing in its entirety at The Rainbow and he wasn’t happy,” says White. “It kind of went downhill from there.”

Wakeman’s growing disenchantment would famously manifest itself in eating curry on stage during Tales… and though it became something of a running joke, it was in truth an expression of his boredom and a protest of sorts. Looking back, White feels a sense of disappointment at the rift between Wakeman and the rest of the band.

“For some reason Rick couldn’t get his head around what we were doing but he played all the parts and he was great. He’s just an amazing keyboard player. But he couldn’t see where the band was going. He felt he wanted to move in his own direction.”

Even some of the band’s long-term supporters in the press at the time baulked at a record that had slipped far from rock’s usual moorings. With this double album, the argument went, they had overreached. Wakeman’s oft-quoted assertion that the album suffered from too much padding because of a lack of real musical substance became received wisdom in discussions of the band’s work. In later years it was routinely cited as evidence of prog rock’s over-indulgence, with sceptics pointing to its 80 minutes as proof of hubris and artistic extravagance.

When Yes went off the road in January 1974, Wakeman staged and recorded Journey To The Centre Of The Earth. Shortly after its release in May ’74, it topped the album charts. Hearing the news on his 25th birthday, Wakeman rang in his resignation from the band on the same day. Anderson recalls the recriminations following Wakeman’s departure. “Management and the record company were saying, ‘Why didn’t you just do another Fragile?’ I just had the feeling that if we don’t try something in this lifetime then, okay, we’re just rock stars, and I personally don’t think that way… You’ve got to do things that are a little bit different in this lifetime. And when you have the chance to do it, you have to jump in that water and enjoy it.”

For Howe, the album remains an important milestone in the Yes story. “It was a time of spreading our wings, a wonderful project where we went to the end of the earth to do it. There was often a feeling that disaster was almost about to strike, but we got there in the end. You have to account for Tales… in our history to properly talk about what Yes achieved because it was quite exceptional. I don’t think we’d be the same group without it.”

In 2016, as Yes toured America, The Revealing Science Of God and Ritual resurfaced. “Going on the road playing side one and side four is really nostalgic,” says White. “We made a great career of really adventurous material that was trying to move music in a good direction. Side one is a difficult thing to play and side four, you’ve got the whole Ritual thing at the end, which is quite a thing to put together, where you’ve got the drums playing the lead melody. We had a theme running through the album, recurring though different songs, and it culminated in the whole band playing the melody on drums, all of us at the same time. I’m really looking forward to playing it live again.”

Tales From Topographic Oceans is an album you can’t be ambivalent about. Asked if it’s a formidable achievement or a folly, Steven Wilson says, “Both! One of the things I miss in modern rock music is the will to reach for the stars and risk falling flat on your face. Conventional wisdom might be that with this album Yes roundly achieved the latter, but I’m happy to see a growing number of those like me that appreciate its beauty and ambition. Even when the ideas perhaps aren’t entirely coming off, I still admire and enjoy the sheer uncompromising strangeness of it. It doesn’t have the immediacy of some of Yes’ other records of the era, but I think, given time, it reveals itself as perhaps their greatest musical statement of all. It’s pure hardcore Yes!”

Led Zeppelin's seventh studio album Presence wasn't the easiest to make. Robert Plant was recovering after the August 1975 car crash in Crete that had left him with serious arm and leg injuries, and the band's touring schedule had been pitched into turmoil.

The show had to keep rolling, and the following month the band gathered for writing sessions in Malibu Colony, 30 miles south of Los Angeles, before recording commenced at Musicland Studios in Munich, Germany.

Over the years Presence has frequently been cited as Jimmy Page's favourite album, presumably because – as with Led Zeppelin I – he was fully in control. With Plant's input restricted, there were, as Tight But Loose editor Dave Lewis says, "no Mellotrons, acoustic guitars or keyboards of any kind – no Jonesy! It was all Jimmy. No one else really got a look in.”

Below, Jimmy Page recalls the recording of Presence.

A lot of people presume that Presence is your favourite album

I don’t know why they think it’s my favourite album; I don’t have any one favourite album because they all mean different things from the whole journey of Led Zeppelin. Presence was recorded in real stressful circumstances, Robert was in plaster with his leg and we didn’t know what the outcome was going to be of all that at the time.

It’s a very dark album, it’s really intense.

That’s the one where it took three weeks to record and do overdubs. We did it in the Musicland Studios, Munich and after us were the Rolling Stones. I called them up and asked if I could get a couple more days, because they were busy trying out various guitars, and they said OK. The tracks were done and Robert’s vocals were done and I was going to do what I had normally done and still do – the overdubs and production.

There was me and the engineer Keith Harwood, and whoever woke first would get the other up and we’d get straight into the studio and do the guitar overlays. It was the same with the mixing. Jagger was staying in the same hotel and I went up to see him to say thanks for letting us use the studio in their downtime. He said, “What have you done?” I said “I’ve done an album, do you want to hear some?” I put on Nobody’s Fault But Mine, which he sort of knew as a blues song and he was quite startled by it.

Although doing an album in three weeks was an exception, I never worked slowly, nor did anyone else. We were all very fast and to the point. If we were recording something and it wasn’t happening we would stop that number and do something else, there was no point labouring it. That’s something I brought with me from the session days – you know when the spark’s there and you know when it’s gone and there’s no point proceeding, especially if you have other numbers to do.

When Presence came out, everyone thought it was the direction Zeppelin would be taking in the future.

Yeah, for example, Tea For One is exceptional. It was to the point, recorded in a couple of takes. Robert’s vocals are tremendous. He was doing that his leg was in a cast, miles away from home.

Weren’t you particularly out of it during the recording of Presence?

I was into it. [laughs] I was seriously focussed. You don’t make music like that in such a short amount time falling about in the street drunk. You do it when you’re one hundred per cent focussed.

This interview originally appeared in Classic Rock's Led Zeppelin Special, in November 2007.

Dark proggers Crippled Black Phoenix have moved away from their usual narratives on broken society and turned inwards on Sceaduhelm. Multi-instrumentalist Justin Greaves and vocalist Belinda Kordic take us on a journey beneath their music’s shadowy veil.

“It’s not going to get better – I’m sorry!” says Belinda Kordic. “It’s just going to get worse. We’re doomed!” Bastions of radical rock since 2004, Crippled Black Phoenix have never been a band inclined to mince words; and on their latest album, Sceaduhelm, core members Kordic and Justin Greaves deal with some difficult subjects that reach into the heart of our modern malaise.

But rather than indulge in a political debate or prosaic protest, their new songs take a more thoughtful and personal approach to confronting the impending end of all things.

Thankfully, the music contained on their 13th album of new material is often majestic, uplifting and weirdly accessible, as if the poison pill of their brutal lyrical preoccupations has necessitated a more easily digestible backdrop. But underneath that gritty, grandiose and fervently melodic exterior, multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Greaves and vocalist Kordic are laying landmines for the unsuspecting public to stumble upon.

“Yeah, in a way it’s cheery pop songs, but with a basic message of ‘We’re fucked!’” says Greaves with a laugh. “I’ve said it many times in the past, but sometimes I feel like we’re giving people candy with razor blades in it. It sounds really nice, but there’s always some vicious little things in there, and it’s pointed in terms of its themes and stories. This album is more dark than political. It’s a little more personal for Belinda, while it’s all a little more veiled.”

Previous albums have dealt with the harsh realities of everything from the abuse of animals to the impacts of depression. Sceaduhelm is less bombastic in its themes. From recent single Ravenettes – which at least seems to be about struggling to shake off past traumas – to the self-explanatory Tired To The Bone – a paean to post-millennial exhaustion – this is an album that stares into the dark with a keen eye and a heavy heart.

The title is a neat synopsis of the current state of things and a typically ambiguous statement from this ferociously intelligent band. “The translation of the title is ‘the cover of darkness’,” explains Greaves. “The first half of the word is pronounced ‘shadow,’ which represents darkness; and ‘helm’ is a protective cover or a castle in the rocks or whatever. So it could be that darkness is covering us all, and the world is in darkness, or it could be about protecting yourself from the darkness. It’s a duplicitous title!”

“I mostly sing about animals and politicians and all that stuff,” adds Kordic. “But this time I’ve gone more inwards. I’m not a person who wears their heart on their sleeve. I’d rather not tell you exactly how I feel; I veil it, because it feels too naked for me.

“People say it’s therapeutic to write a diary and express how you feel, but for me it’s the other way round. It gives me more anxiety. I need to keep shit locked up in a box. I feel worse writing down how I feel. But I felt like doing it this time, at least with a few of those songs, so it’s more personal this time.”

At a time when caring deeply about the world and the poor, downtrodden bastards that live in it is just about the most radical thing we can do, Crippled Black Phoenix’s outlier status is more apparent than ever. An admirably tricky band to pin down to any one sub-genre or stylistic approach, Greaves’ amorphous crew take pride in their opposition to the obvious and the conventional.

That they maintain their identity while making glorious, impassioned rock songs is even more impressive in light of the amount of abuse they get from – to be slightly reductive for a moment – angry people on the internet. Particularly when it comes to their militant opposition to animal cruelty, Crippled Black Phoenix have turned the act of rubbing people up the wrong way into a noble, if accidental, artform.

“I’ve found in recent years that because we do stick our heads above the trench a few times and try to shed light about something we’re passionate about, it’s made us a target,” says Greaves. “People think they can try to destroy us with stupid comments, like we’re always up for debate or we can be bullied.

“I posted something that was related to Gaza and I’ve had death threats ever since! We post something about animal abuse, and there’s always someone going, ‘Ha ha! I like my burgers! Shut the fuck up!’ or the classic one: ‘I came to this page for the music, not your opinions!’ Well, fuck off, then! You came for the music and you’ve got the music. You can have something else as well if you want – but if not, just ignore it! There’s no reasoning with these fucking idiots.”

“If I had the mental strength to be out in the field, working for animals or documenting slaughterhouses and all of that, I’d do it,” Kordic notes. “But I don’t. I can’t handle that stuff. So we do it this way instead: we write about it. How can people tell musicians what to write about? I would never tell someone else what to write.”

By far their most focused and cohesive album to date, Sceaduhelm pitches Crippled Black Phoenix as inveterate refuseniks who use music as their means to find some shred of sanity along life’s relentlessly enervating journey. It’s both a magnificent slice of dark, progressive rock and one of the most thrillingly punk records in recent memory.

That curious dichotomy has driven them throughout their lengthy career, and Greaves continues to take pride in such gently subversive creativity. “What we do is whatever we want it to be, but it will always have that spirit, whether it’s a punk spirit or we’re just free-spirited,” he states. “I think the punk spirit is about having a conscience, being tolerant of other people and being creatively independent and creatively original.

“But we ended up being on a prog label and being in Prog magazine, and yeah, we can be classed as progressive. It’s like the spirit of ’69 to ’75, when bands were genuinely doing original stuff. They were the ones in charge; they tried different things and did whatever they wanted, and that’s progressive to me.”

Even though they light fires of comfort and solidarity under the cover of darkness, Crippled Black Phoenix are still primarily concerned with being the best band they can be. As they enter a new era, with a largely settled line-up and the prospect of tours and festivals on the horizon, their desire to offer something honest and real is as refreshing and inspirational as ever.

Sceaduhelm is a riveting, agit-rock Trojan horse, designed to make people think – and, with any luck, to find some humanity and compassion too. “This is our little outlet to be creative,” Greaves says. “People still don’t know where to put us. We’re not preaching, but long live independence! It’s all about thinking for yourself.

“We record an album, and if people like it, great; but we’re the ones who decide what it is. We’re old-fashioned, I guess. No one knows what to do with us. We’re always the anomaly!”

Sceaduhelm is on sale now.

Magic mushrooms, hit single pressure and second album syndrome – in 2024 Marillion looked back on the challenges of creating 1991’s Holidays In Eden, their sixth album and second with vocalist Steve Hogarth.

The tipping point for Marillion came with ‘Mexican Night’. It was late summer in 1990, and the band had spent several increasingly frustrating weeks holed up in Stanbridge Farm Studios, a residential facility outside the English seaside resort of Brighton, attempting to write their second album with new singer Steve ‘H’ Hogarth.

The breezy mood surrounding the band had evaporated as weeks dragged on. Their unhurried, jam-based approach to songwriting clashed with Hogarth’s more traditional modus operandi. Tensions were rising, and the atmosphere was getting fractious.
 “No one hit anyone else, but we did have a few words,” says bassist Pete Trewavas. “Steve was getting pissed off: ‘What’s the point of me being here?’ I suppose he was also trying to stake his claim on where he would fit in the band.”

Then came Mexican Night. The plan was for the band and their lyricist, John Helmer, to get together in Stanbridge, deck themselves out in ‘bandido’-style fancy dress and stuff themselves with Mexican food in an attempt to alleviate the tedium and ease the pressure. It wasn’t the first themed night they’d had, and none of them had worked. The omens weren’t good for this one either: there had been a row earlier in the day.

“There was a bit of an ugly atmosphere and none of us wanted to be there, but there was no getting out of it,” says keyboard player Mark Kelly. “Then someone discovered there were magic mushrooms growing in the field outside, which we naturally took. We had a great time. It was a good bonding experience. Everybody felt much better about things 
after that.”

The slog wasn’t over for Marillion, though; they still had an album to write. But that psilocybin-fuelled dinner felt like the point where they turned a corner. The album that emerged from that frequently tortuous period, Holidays In Eden, remains an outlier in their back catalogue. It was the sound of a band who’d reluctantly acceded to their record label EMI’s desire to make a ‘pop’ record in order to boost their career. It failed in that respect – yet it acted as a crucial stepping stone between what Marillion were and what they would become.

“What I love about Holidays In Eden is that it sounded like a proper, polished album to me,” says Hogarth. “I’d waited all my life to be involved in something proper and polished.” Having replaced original singer Fish in 1989 after the latter’s acrimonious departure, his entrance into Marillion had been smoother than he’d anticipated. “The Seasons End tour had been successful; the response from fans was incredible and we were getting on well,” he remembers. “I was expecting some kickback, but I didn’t really experience it.”

There was just one issue, though. EMI, were concerned about what Kelly calls “a downward trajectory sales-wise.” The label made it very clear they wanted Marillion’s new album to feature three hit singles.

“They were thinking, ‘Well, what are we doing with this band? And more to the point, what’s this band doing for us?’” says Trewavas. “If we didn’t have another big hit soon, the writing would be on the wall.”

“We were prepared to give it a go,” adds Kelly. “The biggest problem was that we weren’t very good at writing hit singles.”

That may have been the biggest problem, but they were about to encounter another unforeseen one. Some of the music that ended up on Seasons End had pre-dated Hogarth’s arrival; but now they were effectively starting from scratch. “It was the difficult second album all over again,” says Kelly.

The band entered Stanbridge in mid-1990 with a blank page. It was a reflection of their mood that they were paying someone just to be on hand if they needed booze or cigarettes from the nearest shop. “We went in there in a good frame of mind,” says Hogarth. “It was our intention to be there for two or three weeks. We went in there in June and came out in December.”

Initially, the band knew what they wanted – or at least what they didn’t want. “There were certain things that Steve H didn’t want to revisit from Marillion’s past, and certain things we didn’t want to revisit either,” says Trewavas. “We wanted it to be a clean slate, and for the band to move on.”

Still, there were some reservations about just how far they wanted to go. “I think certain members were becoming increasingly scared that this new guy was going to start pulling them in the direction of pop music,” says Hogarth.

Marillion’s songwriting process was relaxed at best. When they weren’t playing pool or drinking, Kelly, Trewavas, guitarist Steve Rothery and drummer Ian Mosley got together to jam then find ways of fitting together the bits they liked. The pragmatic Hogarth preferred to construct songs: verse, chorus, middle eight.

“It became apparent where each party was coming from and it was completely different,” says Kelly. “You’ve got H going, ‘Let’s work hard, let’s put the hours in.’ At the other end, you’ve got Steve Rothery going, ‘I don’t really feel it today; I’ll wait for inspiration to strike.’ You can’t knock either method, because both work – just not necessarily at the same time.”

“Everybody had a sort of an agenda that I wasn’t party to,” says Hogarth. “It wasn’t really about songwriting, it was about doing their thing and getting their musical reward. I couldn’t just grab their ideas and go, ‘Look, I can finish this song, I just need the middle eight and it’s done.’”

That didn’t lessen his growing restlessness. “I think he found it more frustrating working with us than we did working with him,” says Kelly. “We were sitting around, drinking and playing pool, and he was just pulling his hair out: ‘What the fuck have I joined here? I just want to get on and make an album!’”

Mexican Night went some way to dispelling the agitation within the band, though Hogarth and his colleagues remained at a creative impasse. Eventually, it was suggested that the singer take a break from the studio to focus on writing lyrics while the others attempted to come up with some solid songs. “I was sent home!” says Hogarth. “Looking back on it, I totally get it, but I was slightly hurt by it at the time. I felt excluded.”

The temporary separation helped to a degree. The singer returned a fortnight
later with a set of revised lyrics, as well the foundation for The Party, the album’s vividly moody third track. His bandmates hadn’t been idle, repurposing unused music they’d come up with during their very last session with Fish for eventual album closer 100 Nights. Conversely, the band had been working on the song Holidays In Eden when Hogarth left. When he returned, they still hadn’t finished it. The creative breakthrough they needed remained elusive.

“There wasn’t a breakthrough at all,” says Hogarth. “There was just a feeling of, ‘Well, we’d better just stay here until something happens.’ It was a kind of process of attrition.”

The band’s A&R man, Nick Gatfield, was watching costs escalate with nothing to show for it. The onetime sax player with Dexys Midnight Runners announced he’d come to Stanbridge to check out progress. “He said, ‘Maybe I can see if I can help anywhere,’” recalls Trewavas. “We were, like, ‘What does that mean – does that mean you’re interfering with what we’re doing? We didn’t really like that.’”

Despite their reservations, Gatfield did have some constructive input. He pinpointed a track they’d been working on, the breezy love song No One Can, as a potential single – one of the three hits EMI had asked for. “It had a nice guitar and keyboard figure, some nice sounding chords, and Steve put a great melody over it,” says Trewavas. “And the label was thinking, ‘Oh, this sounds very of the times, this could be pop music.’ Of course, that’s the last thing we wanted.”

In the end, Marillion themselves realised they needed to call a halt to the interminable songwriting process and actually start recording songs. “I think it was Ian who said, ‘We’re not paying for any more of this nonsense,’” recalls Trewavas.

With their lengthy stay at Stanbridge finally over, the band decamped to The Moles Club, a venue-come-studio in Bath, where they demoed the music they’d been working on.
A trio of fanclub gigs at Moles in December 1990, under the name The Low-Fat Yoghurts, even saw them giving an airing to a handful of new songs, including No One Can, Waiting To Happen and a version of Splintering Heart with an intro that was gnarlier and more guitar-heavy than the one that would eventually open the album.

Plans to record the album with Chris Kimsey – who’d produced their twin commercial highpoints Misplaced Childhood and Clutching At Straws – were thwarted by the Rolling Stones, who insisted Kimsey work on their live album, Flashpoint. Instead, when Marillion entered Hook End Manor in Oxfordshire in early 1991, it was with Christopher Neil, whose credits included Sheena Easton, Shakin’ Stevens and, more recently, Celine Dion. But it was the presence of Mike + The Mechanics on Neil’s CV that convinced EMI, if not Marillion, that he was the man for the job.

“I think the label thought, ‘Which prog rockers have had pop hits? Oh, Mike Rutherford. If we can do a Mike + The Mechanics with Marillion, we’ll have hits and get on the radio and make a lot of money,’” says Hogarth.

Neil himself played a blinder when convincing the band that he was the man for the job. The producer told them his son was a big fan of theirs. “He said, ‘If I fuck you up, he’ll never forgive me,’” says Hogarth. “I’m not sure if it was true or not, but that was the line that got him the gig, really.”

“Chris Neil reassured us that he wasn’t going to turn us into a pop band,” says Kelly. “And then proceeded to attempt to do it. I don’t blame him. That was his brief from the record label.”

Neil was a personable character, and the band got on well with him, even if his production sensibilities were only marginally less at odds with Marillion’s than Hogarth’s approach to songwriting had been. Neil was a studio pragmatist: his priority was to get a solid backing for the songs above all else. That wasn’t how the band were used to operating.

“I liked to experiment with sounds and textures on my keyboards, to give myself different options,” says Kelly. “But he had no time for it. I’d play something and he’d say, ‘No, that’s fine.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Actually, not for me it isn’t.’”

They still only had one of the three singles EMI demanded, but Neil had a ready-made solution. He suggested they record a version of Dry Land, the title track from the one and only album from Hogarth’s pre-Marillion band How We Live. “I’m not sure how he came across it, but he came pre-armed with the idea that we should cover it,” says Hogarth, who describes Dry Land as “a song about sexual tension rather than unrequited love – that feeling that perhaps something could happen with this person, but neither of you are going to say it.”

The new version retained the original’s structure and airy melody, though Marillion added their own character to it. However Rothery, in particular, wasn’t comfortable with covering another band’s song. “Steve doesn’t like playing other people’s parts, and that song was based around a particular guitar pattern, a set of chords played in a specific way,” says Kelly. “But he put his stamp on it, especially the solo.”

It was Neil, too, who came up with the idea for the third potential hit. Rothery had played an echoey, U2-esque figure during one of the sessions at Stanbridge, over which Hogarth sang lyrics from an unreleased How We Live track titled Simon’s Car, inspired by suave 60s TV presenter Simon Dee and featuring period-piece references to Sandie Shaw, David Hockney and The Avengers’ Emma Peel, among others. “It ended up on tape somewhere, and Chris heard it and loved it,” says Hogarth.

The singer dialled back the explicit 60s iconography, turning the song into a hymn to an idealised woman: ‘She’s like the girl in the picture that he couldn’t afford.’ Crucially, though, he kept the original opening lines and initial vocal melody: ‘Cover my eyes/The light falls on her face.’

Neil had another suggestion. The band should take another song fragment – essentially Hogarth intoning a swooping ‘Hey’ – and merge it with the first part. The band titled the finished song Cover My Eyes (Pain And Heaven), even if the final version found Hogarth stretching the three-word subtitle over nine notes. In the eyes of the producer, they had their three ‘hits’ – although certain members remain sceptical as to their merits. “We were stuck for time,” says Mark Kelly. “We needed a single.”

Cover My Eyes (Pain And Heaven) was the first single from Holidays In Eden on May 28, 1991, three weeks ahead of the album itself. Longtime fans were mildly perplexed by its unfamiliar, poppier sound, and the song peaked at No.34 in the UK charts – disappointing, but far from catastrophic.

The next single, No One Can, was a safer bet. This soft-centred ballad had true crossover potential. It entered the charts at No.36, but began picking up radio airplay. EMI capitalised on this positive state of affairs by promptly diverting its promotional budget to Vanilla Ice’s latest single, Satisfaction. “And it flopped without trace!” says Mark Kelly of the US rapper’s track.

Realising their error, the label re-redirected their budget to No One Can, but it was too late. Radio stations had moved on to something else. “I was hurt that No One Can wasn’t a huge hit,” says Steve Hogarth. “It still sounds like one to me.”

Holidays In Eden itself was received with a degree of suspicion by longtime fans on its release in June 1991. They were unhappy with the pop leanings of No One Can, third single Dry Land and Waiting To Happen, and the apparent lack of anything resembling the band’s knotty, proggy old sound. But the naysayers overlooked the likes of dramatic opening track Splintering Heart, and the closing mini-suite consisting of This Town, The Rakes Progress and 100 Nights, both of which pointed towards the complex, atmospheric songs the band would produce in subsequent years. And it wasn’t like Marillion had never written a ‘pop’ song before anyway.

“Kayleigh wasn’t dissimilar to other things that were around in the charts at that time,” says Trewavas. “But because it was wrapped in this bigger concept, people forget that it was a nice little pop song.”

Although it peaked at No.7 in the UK chart, Holidays In Eden failed to arrest the downward commercial trajectory of Marillion’s recent albums. Live, the band’s pulling power wasn’t what it was either – a show at London’s Wembley Arena was curtained off halfway due to underwhelming ticket sales. “It didn’t meet the label’s expectations,” Kelly admits. “But we did our bit – we delivered the album the record company wanted. If nothing else, it convinced us that, actually, we’re not a pop band. Trying to write hit singles isn’t for us.”

That would be borne out by Marillion’s next album, Brave, a record that was as intricate and opaque as its predecessor was glossy and straightforward. It was, says Trewavas, a direct reaction to their experiences. “One of the criticisms of Holidays In Eden isn’t that it’s too commercial, it’s that some of the songs lack a bit of depth. It doesn’t have the little bits of detail that some of our other albums have. That’s why, with Brave, we decided to rebalance that and have as much stuff in there as humanly possible.”

Brave would fare even worse commercially than Holidays In Eden, though it successfully corrected the band’s drift pop-wards, at least in the eyes of their diehard fans. Now, Marillion look back on their sixth album with a detached fondness. Kelly still loves Splintering Heart and 100 Nights. “This Town and Cover My Eyes not so much,” he says.

Hogarth says he likes the album, though it’s “tainted” by the arduous process of making: “Putting the head of a horse on the body of a camel,” as he puts it. “To some extent, EMI fucked it up,” claims the singer. “But looking back, I’m glad they did.

“Because if we’d had a huge hit with No One Can, that would have pigeonholed us in a place where we wouldn’t have been very comfortable at all, it would probably have eventually split the band up. And that would have meant that an awful lot of good music we wrote after that would never have been written – which would have been a shame.”

It’s better to burn out than fade away, as the old saying goes. While countless bands from the Rolling Stones down would argue with that, there’s something to be said about releasing one brilliant album and then vanishing.

Rock’n’roll has served up its share of one-album wonders over the decades, from psychedelic mavericks to hard rock hotshots. Some have imploded due to intra-band bust-ups, some butted up against the brick walls of record industry apathy and public disinterest, while others met a more tragic end. But they all had something in common: namely, a legacy that amounts to one perfect record.

We’ve rounded up the very best of rock’s one-album wonders here. There are rules, naturally. We’re talking bands who made just one studio album during their lifetimes – posthumous records, remixes, compilations and live albums don’t count. But we are including one-off solo albums by established musicians, and albums by supergroups.

So here they are. Rock’s greatest one-album wonders.

Mother Love Bone – Apple (1990)

It was the perfect album. At the perfect time. Not just for music, but also for me. Apple, which I picked up on its day of release, remains one of a handful of records of which I genuinely wore out the grooves. And what grooves.

Led by the flamboyant Andy Wood – his voice the bastard larynx of Axl Rose and Steven Tyler – alongside future Pearl Jam men Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, Seattle’s Mother Love Bone combined the wham, glam, thank you, ma’am of the hairsprayed LA set (who had been my music of choice) with the nascent, rain-sodden doom merchants of grunge (who would capture my heart from here).

From the kaleidoscopic This Is Shangri-La to the gentle Stargazer, the delicate Crown Of Thorns and the scorching Holy Roller, Apple had something for everyone.

Sadly, Andy Wood never saw his album released, a heroin overdose taking his life weeks before it hit the shelves. His death would inspire Temple Of The Dog, but that, as they say, is another story.

Siân Llewellyn

Lift To Experience – The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads

Come the turn of the millennium, anyone fortunate enough to have seen Lift To Experience live will have witnessed a fearsome roar of shuddering intensity, delivered by three scary-looking Texans with beards as long as their songs. That apocalyptic power was duly loaded into 2001’s The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, a shattering concept album in which the Lone Star State was an end-of-days Promised Land crawling with Biblical visions; a place where the sustained drone of My Bloody Valentine met free-form noise-rock in an epic sheet-wave of sound.

What’s more, it was a very real piece of psycho-geography, at least for those who made it. Both frontman Josh ‘Buck’ Pearson and drummer Andy ‘The Boy’ Young were sons of southern preachers, raised in deeply religious households in which God was a dual symbol of beauty and terror, lending the album a visceral charge that served as the band’s proof of existence. You can hear this conflict all over tracks like Down With The Prophets and the 10-minute With Crippled Wings, pieces that feel like titanic struggles of faith as much as like conventional tunes.

The band blew apart – undone by drugs, booze and familial grief – shortly after the release of The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, relegating Lift To Experience to the province of one-album wonders.

Rob Hughes

Blind Faith – Blind Faith (1969)

Even taking into account everything else the three main protagonists (bassist Ric Grech was, really, an Economy passenger flying Upper Class) have in their back catalogues, Blind Faith is an album Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Steve Winwood could be proud of. “It was pretty good and stands up well,” said Winwood. “In retrospect, people even think it has a few classics on there.”

More soulful than Cream, heavier and bluesier than Traffic, it features terrific performances. On its three standout tracks – Had To Cry Today, Sea Of Joy and Presence Of The Lord – Clapton’s playing is focused, crafted and wonderfully melodic; Winwood’s Hammond adds colourful washes, his at times on-the-limit vocal delivery recalling his R&B belter days with The Spencer Davis Group.

While the band was never going to live up to expectations for those who had it on equal billing with the Second Coming, the album did offer a tantalising glimpse of what might have been had Clapton’s plan to reshape Cream with the addition of Winwood come to fruition. But even with this line-up, none of them expected it to hold their interest for more than just the one album.

Critically acclaimed and derided in equal measure – often for the same things – in the US it had staggering advance orders of 250,000, although conversion to sales stalled when half the stores there refused to stock it because of its controversial cover. And still it was a UK and US No.1.

Paul Henderson

Sea Hags – Sea Hags (1989)

If ever there was a band that had it all and then blew it, it was the Sea Hags. After getting Metallica’s Kirk Hammett to produce their demo, the San Francisco quartet roped in the hottest producer around for their debut album: Mike Clink, fresh from working on Appetite For Destruction. “We’ll be the new Guns N’ Roses if anyone wants to point that at us,” said frontman Ron Yocom, acknowledging the expectations.

The album came out at the height of hair metal, but the band’s “musicality” and “70s vibe” (Yocom’s descriptions) translated into the kind of dirty, funky rock that Aerosmith made in the 70s. It was loaded with great songs, from the charged Half The Way Valley to the menacing finale Under The Night Stars.

But the Sea Hags screwed up, big time. When they played London’s Marquee club, Yocom was so drunk he fell head-first into a flight case. He was also addicted to heroin, as was bassist Chris Schlosshardt. And after the album stalled at No.150 on the US chart the band split up.

Yocom planned to re-form the Sea Hags, but Schlosshardt died in February 1991. This one great album became his, and the band’s, epitaph.

Paul Elliott

Hughes/Thrall – Hughes/Thrall (1982)

By the end of the decade it wasn’t easy being a 70s supergroup refugee. Exhibit A: Deep Purple’s singing bassist Glenn Hughes. His first solo album, 1977’s Play Me Out, sounded too much like Stevie Wonder for the denim brigade, and it bombed. Then, in 1981, he met Pat Thrall, guitarist for Canadian rocker Pat Travers.

Within months the pair had signed a deal and were recording in a Malibu studio with Eric Clapton’s old producer Rob Fraboni. So far, so good. Soon, though, Free/Stones engineer Andy Johns replaced Fraboni, and session drummers came and went in H/T’s irresolvable quest for perfection. “Cocaine was consumed nightly,” Hughes admitted.

The duo’s only album was released in August that year. Its futuristic sound encompassed the blue-eyed soul with which Toto were raiding the US charts (The Look In Your Eye), new wave-ish pop (Beg, Borrow Or Steal) and priapic hard rock (Muscle And Blood). Yes, those overwrought lyrics and jingling guitar-synths are pure 1982, but the spooked-sounding power ballad First Step Of Love and Thrall’s idiosyncratic guitar playing on Hold Out Your Life are still laughably brilliant, while the whole record thrums with nervous energy.

Sadly, Hughes/Thrall tanked. The Class As didn’t help, but its USP was also its biggest drawback. Most rock fans preferred the simpler charms of fellow Deep Purple offshoots Whitesnake or Rainbow, while American pop audiences opted for that first Asia album instead. Since then, H/T has been hailed as a lost AOR classic, but it’s too heavy – and peculiar – to fit neatly into any category.

Apparently, a second album was started but remains unfinished. It couldn’t possibly be better than this.

Mark Blake

Jeff Buckley – Grace (1994)

In 1991, the son of a dead folk singer sat down to jam with an ex-Beefheart guitarist in a West Village apartment. And when Jeff Buckley sang the first line of Grace’s title track, Gary Lucas knew they had something.

“My jaw dropped,” he recalls. “I said: ‘Man, you’re a phenomenon.’”

That octave-straddling swoop of a voice may be Grace’s calling card, from the operatics of Mojo Pin to the shimmering cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, but equally impressive is its eclecticism. Buckley’s influences pinballed between Led Zeppelin, The Smiths, Bad Brains and Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Accordingly, Grace knows no boundaries, visiting smoky jazz on Lilac Wine, sprouting chest-hair on the bombastic Eternal Life and carving a buzzsaw riff through So Real. You sense a writer having creative differences with himself – and thriving on it.

Released in the wilderness between grunge and Britpop, Grace was a commercial slow-burner, despite plaudits from Jimmy Page and Thom Yorke. But Buckley’s promise was curtailed when, in June 1997, his body was dredged from the Mississippi. The vaults would be swept for 1998’s Sketches For My Sweetheart The Drunk, but Grace remains his spellbinding last goodbye.

Henry Yates

Toy Matinee – Toy Matinee (1990)

It begins with some radio dial roulette; an orchestral crescendo… a blast of vocal harmony… a speedy flamenco guitar riff… Back in angsty-grungy 1990, this opening salvo was music to my ears. As I dug in I marvelled at their Foxtrot-era-Genesis-meets-Beatles balancing act. Virtuoso noodling looped through tight pop structures, huge hooks wrapped in hyper-literate, humorous lyrics about the apocalypse, surrealist art and Elvis impersonators. “I wanted to write songs you could sink your teeth into,” said singer/multi-instrumentalist Kevin Gilbert.

Gilbert formed Toy Matinee with Pat Leonard after a ‘battle of the bands’ contest. Leonard was a judge. Gilbert’s band Giraffe won. The two bonded over a love of Jethro Tull and Steely Dan. Leonard, who had produced and written hits for Madonna, supplied studio time and an ace band. “No strings, no expectations,” was how he described the sessions. “We made it without pressures to create a hit.”

While the single Last Plane Out generated radio buzz, the album never transcended cult status. Leonard, unwilling to tour, soon returned to his lucrative life as a producer. Gilbert, after helping then-girlfriend Sheryl Crow create Tuesday Night Music Club, and making a fine solo album, took his own life in 1996.

Having gone in and out of print three times, Toy Matinee’s heady charm still enthralls. “As bizarre as either of us could get,” Leonard said, “the other could keep up.”

Bill DeMain

The La’s – The La’s (1990)

Lazily pegged as a proto-Britpop band, the self-titled album from The La’s has more in common with 60s British pop than with the self-important strutting of Oasis et al: ringing guitars, fierce strumming and elliptical lyrics, sugar-coated with effortless melodies.

Opener Son Of A Gun sets the scene: short, sharp and sweet, with singer/songwriter Lee Mavers asserting his vocal presence amid tight harmonies, though the peak is the incandescent There She Goes with its chiming guitars and Scouse romanticism. Only the final introspective Looking Glass breaks the three-minute barrier, opening up new vistas to explore.

The perfectionist Mavers hated the production and disowned the album. His issues ran so deep that, all these years on, he hasn’t come even close to following it up.

Hugh Fielder

Burning Tree – Burning Tree (1990)

‘Coulda, shoulda, woulda’ sums up many one-album wonders, but in the case of Burning Tree, fronted by future Black Crowes guitarist Marc Ford, it holds particularly true. Their sole record might have been a hit in another era. Instead it sank, thanks to bad timing, bad judgement and bad luck.

While they took their cue from Jimi Hendrix and Cream, what separated them from many others was an exquisite pop ear, noticeable on the hook-heavy chorus of Mistreated Lover and the harmonised outro to Crush, one of the great unheralded songs about being in a band.

Sadly, someone at their label decided to unbung the schedules by releasing nine albums on the same day, under the banner ‘Epic Rock’. Eight of the nine disappeared; Burning Tree glowed briefly and beautifully for the few who got to hear it. It remains a classic awaiting rediscovery.

Jon Hotten

Pride Tiger - The Lucky Ones (2007)

It was a CD plonked on my desk by James Gill, a writer on Classic Rock’s sister magazine, Metal Hammer: a plain white disc with the words ‘Pride Tiger’ scrawled on it in red marker. “I think you’ll like it,” he said. It wasn’t promising: three of the band had been in underachieving hellions 3 Inches Of Blood before leaving to scratch a more melodic itch. (“After a while,” singing drummer Matt Wood explained, “metal just becomes the same thing over and over.”) Out went Iron Maiden dual guitars, in came, er, Thin Lizzy dual guitars.

I did like it. I didn’t stop listening to it for months. Fill Me In became the ‘Most Played’ song on my iTunes – an irresistible Boys Are Back In Town knock-off that could stand with Lynott’s best. I bought the video of the title track from iTunes – it remains the only music video I have paid money for. Full of cool dudes and hot girls (but not in the usual leery way), it was a seductive vision of a future where the soundtrack to the best party in town had big riffs and swaggering choruses.

So good was The Lucky Ones – and so frustrated were we by the fact that no UK label would sign bands like this – that we set up Powerage Records and signed them ourselves. The band played a triumphant set at Hard Rock Hell, winning over a hungover Saturday-morning audience, and stumbling around for the rest of the weekend, stoned and raving about being at a festival that featured Budgie and Thin Lizzy.

And then? The album sold 850 copies on Powerage. Rock’s future did not look like The Lucky Ones vid. It looked like Hard Rock Hell, like lots of hard work peppered with small victories and little financial return.

The band split in the summer of 2009. Powerage shut up shop not long after. We’re not embarrassed. For a moment there, Pride Tiger renewed our faith in new rock music, and The Lucky Ones stands as a lost classic. Someone should send a copy to Scott Gorham and Ricky Warwick asap.

Scott Rowley

Sex Pistols – Never Mind The Bollocks (1977)

The Sex Pistols’ only proper studio album was just 39 minutes long, included four of their previous singles, and pre-dated the end of the band by a mere three months. Yet it remains one of the most influential and controversial records in history.

With Johnny Rotten’s abrasive vocals and provocative lyrics splayed across a wall of thrillingly direct guitars, Bollocks is a barrage of both gratuitous angst and elemental purity. While many punk ‘classics’ survive as nostalgia or well-meaning polemic, these compelling tirades against British society, hypocrisy and intellectual torpor still send rushes down your spine. Problems, Liar, Bodies and EMI (‘and you thought that we were faking’) were miniature sonic snuff-movies, a dive into the previously unsayable. “My words are my bullets,” said Rotten/Lydon in 2008. “They meant a lot to my generation.”

As 1978 dawned, he was growling: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” and the Pistols were shot. But they’d hit the bullseye. Job done.

Chris Roberts

David + David – Boomtown (1986)

Studio musicians and sometime producers David Baerwald and David Ricketts would find real, if fleeting, fame in 1993 as part of Sheryl Crow’s Tuesday Night Music Club band. But that was a world away from the pair’s collaboration Boomtown, released six years earlier.

A bleak reading of America’s underclass in the depths of the Reagan era, this was a collection of vignettes of lives full of wrong turnings, of dead-end jobs, of drink and drugs. First single Welcome To The Boomtown began with the desperate howl of Ricketts’ guitar, before Baerwald dispatched his bitterly ironic lyric about a high-living drug addict and her lowlife dealer: ‘Pick a habit, we got plenty to go around,’ he sang over a thrumming pop-rock hook that date-stamped it to the mid-80s. Both unnerving and eminently hummable, it gave the duo a US Top 40 hit. The album followed it to No.39.

The success was short-lived. Ricketts was apparently put off the hard rock fans they were attacting, and they disbanded before the album caught its second wind. Sheryl Crow beckoned, ensuring neither David would get this bloody again.

Philip Wilding

GTOs – Permanent Damage (1969)

No one was ever sure what GTO actually stood for. Girls Together Occasionally? Girls Together Often? Girls Together Only, Outrageously, Orally, or Orgasmically? Essentially the GTO’s were a crew of enterprising Hollywood rock groupies led by Pamela Ann Miller (later Pamela Des Barres) and Linda Sue Parker, who used the stage names Miss Pamela and Miss Sparky.

With four other like-minded young women from the Sunset Strip they formed a performance group known as the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company, switching to The GTOs as they approached the orbit of Frank Zappa.

Back in ’69 Zappa was augmenting the Mothers Of Invention with pet projects on his Straight and Bizarre labels, such as Alice Cooper and Wild Man Fischer.

The GTOs became another of these endeavours. Lowell George, Russ Titelman and Ry Cooder were brought in to supply the music, and contributions also came from Jeff Beck, Davy Jones, Rod Stewart and Cynthia Plaster Caster. (Who wouldn’t want to work with an ensemble of wild and sexually adept young women?)

Sadly, somewhere along the line Zappa lost interest or ran out of budget. Permanent Damage was released as an unfinished social document, with potential songs staying as synchronised recitation, padded with anecdotes and snatches of conversation. Which is unfortunate, since the finished tracks – not least Do Me In Once And I’ll Be Sad, Do Me in Twice And I’ll Know Better (Circular Circulation) – suggests the GTOs deserved better.

Mick Farren

Coverdale Page – Coverdale Page (1993)

In 1993 Jimmy Page was a guitarist in desperate need of a singer. I know because his manager had asked me to help find him one. I wish I could say teaming up with David Coverdale was my suggestion, but that brainwave was Geffen executive John Kalodner’s.

The result was exactly what everybody secretly wanted: a Zeppelin album from the band’s earliest, sexed-up days. Opening with blues rock colossus Shake My Tree, it was sheer bombastic bliss, from the mystic blues of Don’t Leave Me This Way to grand finale Whisper A Prayer For The Dying – where Stairway To Heaven met Kashmir, no kidding.

They played a few shows in Japan, before Page put in a call to Robert Plant, leaving this as one of rock’s great ‘What if?’s.

Mick Wall

Derek And The Dominos – Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs (1970)

If great music comes out of tragedy, then it’s little wonder Derek And The Dominos’ sole album is a masterpiece. It was recorded amid drink and drug abuse and undiagnosed schizophrenia. But for all the travails surrounding it, the five musicians involved – Eric Clapton, Duane Allman, Jim Gordon, Carl Radle and Bobby Whitlock – created something passionate and timeless that would stand as arguably the finest album of their respective careers.

Layla itself is the most high-profile track, but the likes of Bell Bottom Blues and Tell The Truth are just as beautifully realised, combining pin-sharp musicianship with earthy spirituality and a true sense of joy. The overall impact is diverse, devastating.

They attempted to record a second studio album, but the project was sunk by drugs and paranoia. Layla remains a stellar legacy. “It touched people where they needed to be touched,” Bobby Whitlock says. “In their soul.”

Malcolm Dome

Temple Of The Dog – Temple Of The Dog (1991)

Chuckles were hardly high on the grunge agenda at the best of times, but this one-off tribute to late Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood – a collaboration between Soundgarden singer/Wood’s flatmate Chris Cornell and the surviving members of MLB – had fewer laughs than your average BBC3 sitcom.

Astonishingly, what could have been a turd in the swimming pool turned out to be the greatest album of the era. Cornell dialled down the wailing, imbuing Say Hello 2 Heaven and the Eddie Vedder-assisted Hunger Strike with a nobility that was alien to the plaid-shirted hordes, while Reach Down was a glorious exercise in rocking-out-as-catharism. Grunge had never been so moving, and it would never be again.

Dave Everley

Lowcraft – Manticore (1999)

By the turn of the millennium, glam rock had been hijacked by the goth-spattered bumps and grinds of Manson, and Bowie-era grand gestures were in short supply. With the gilding on the Suede lily dulled by five years of familiarity, Portland, Oregon’s Lowcraft crash-landed in post-Britpop London as the very exemplar of a band out of time.

Fronted by Nathan Khyber – a statuesque fop who punctuated studied Bryan Ferry ennui with the androgynous allure of a Ziggy made flesh – Lowcraft dealt in emotive anthems, perpetually teetering on the brink of delicious desperation.

Listening to the album now it’s almost inconceivable that it should have been allowed to fall between the cracks: the hook-heavy crescendos of One Of Us, the narcotic dreamscape of Transcendental Meltdown, the pulsating prurience of Pornstar. It’s glam’s last hurrah, its lost masterpiece.

A dispiriting toilet tour followed, but without adulation and stardom Lowcraft lost their mojo and duly split.

“It’s naiveté that allows you to create grand gestures,” says Nathan, now making music both in a solo capacity and with Manticore producer Clark Stiles as The Good Listeners. “When you’re writing in the void you have an enormous voice, but once you see the wall you become diminished again. There was a lot of passion in our writing because we thought we could conquer the world.”

Ian Fortnam

Sledgehammer – Blood On Their Hands (1983)

John Betjeman might have wanted it bombed out of existence, but the unremarkable Berkshire town of Slough survived the poet’s brickbats to spawn one of the NWOBHM’s most remarkable bands: power trio Sledgehammer.

They’d had a self-titled song on 1980’s Metal For Muthas compilation but they failed to capitalise on it. When their one and only album, Blood On Their Hands, came out in 1983, the NWOBHM had long-since peaked and it sank without trace.

Guitarist/singer Mike Cooke was a serious-minded individual with strong religious beliefs, and Blood has an eccentric, off-kilter undercurrent that gives it an unusual edge. Over The Top 1914 is a bitter anti-war anthem, the Who-like 1984 offers a dose of Townshend-style cynicism, and the trippy Perfumed Garden sounds like an undiscovered 60s proto-metal anthem. Sledgehammer itself isn’t about having your skull caved in at all, it’s actually about God: ‘It struck me like a sledgehammer that faith can move every mountain’.

It’s almost impossible to find out what happened to the band. Google their name and you get Peter Gabriel. However, we did discover that drummer Ken Revell still lives in Slough. In an air-raid shelter, probably.

Geoff Barton

Shadow King – Shadow King (1991)

It was fitting that the band formed by former Foreigner singer Lou Gramm and ex-Dio/Whitesnake guitarist Vivian Campbell played their only live show on Friday 13th in London, if only because their luck was lousy. Within six months of their self-titled debut album, Campbell had quit for Def Leppard and Shadow King’s initial promise had withered on the vine.

Poor timing aside, there’s no doubting the quality of the music they made during their frustratingly brief existence. The 10 songs that made up the album were consistently classy hard rock. Campbell displayed his full arsenal of tricks, showboating his way through Once Upon A Time and displaying more restraint on the fragile Russia, but the defining moment came with Don’t Even Know I’m Alive, a slice of top-drawer, lighter-waving wimp-hem – which is ironic, since Gramm had cited ballad overload as his reason for leaving Foreigner.

The singer blamed the group’s fate on a lack of label attention, although the changing musical climate didn’t help. Whatever the reason, Shadow King remains an underground classic.

Dave Ling

Skip Spence – Oar (1969)

I chanced upon this wonderful thing while wading through the import racks at Harlequin Records in Soho circa 1971. John behind the counter smiled: “Never heard it? Lucky bastard.”

The platter that hit my Bush turntable sounded like someone enveloped in demons but laughing at his plight. Oar? Or? Awe. The stoner on the cover was 23 yet appeared to have accumulated decades of experience, not all agreeable. Come along for the ride – at your own risk.

Canadian-born, California-raised Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence ran with the West Coast San Francisco elite. He played guitar with Quicksilver Messenger Service in 1965, before Jefferson Airplane poached him to play drums on their debut album Takes Off.

More maverick than team player, his wanderlust lead him to form Moby Grape, who sacked him when he tried to axe his way into one of his bandmates’ rooms in 1968. Deranged from LSD abuse and believing he was the antichrist, he was committed to a psychiatric ward and diagnosed with schizophrenia.

On his release, he took himself to Nashville where he recorded an album of Old Testament intensity laced with moments of lucid self-realisation. The 12 songs that became Oar were made in virtual solitude, except for engineer Mike Figlio, in producer David Rubinson’s Nashville studio on a primitive tape machine. He’d only intended to demo, but Rubinson was so enthralled that he released the album naked – every stick played by the Skipper himself.

This one-man psychedelic masterpiece dealt with childhood (Little Hands), the warp of fame (Lawrence Of Euphoria) and acknowledgements of madness (Weighted Down (The Prison Song), delivered in a vocal that sounded like a man living at the bottom of a mine shaft. Even so, that’s a lovely, lovely voice, and the album’s combination of cranky time signatures, labyrinthine lyrics, acid-drenched electric and acoustic guitars, and epic percussion (not least on closing track Grey/Afro, a masterclass in drumming) are the products of true artistry.

Alt-minimalism taken to the nth degree, Oar made zero chart impression when it was released in 1969 – in fact it was Columbia’s worst-ever-selling LP at the time. It was subsequently hailed as a masterpiece by the likes of Robert Plant and Tom Waits. Sadly, Spence never benefitted from their plaudits. He died of lung cancer in 1999, aged 52. Oar is a great, if occasionally troubling, testament.

Max Bell

Rock'n'roll bands don't come much bigger than Bon Jovi. In a career spanning nearly 40 years, they have sold 130 million albums and played to an estimated 34 million fans in more than 2,700 shows.

At the heart of this classically all-American success story is the man born John Francis Bongiovi, Jr, in Sayreville, New Jersey in 1962. Blessed with movie-star good looks and driven by a ferocious work ethic and an unshakable will to succeed, he was the kid who had the Superman logo tattooed on his arm and believed it. And after renaming himself Jon Bon Jovi – less “ethnic”, more “rock star” – he found the path to glory.

Having served a lengthy apprenticeship in various bar bands and working at his cousin Tony Bongiovi’s recording studio, The Power Station, Jon got his first break in 1982 when his song Runaway became a radio hit in the Jersey area. A contract with the Mercury label followed, and a band was formed under the name of Johnny Electric, hastily changed to Bon Jovi.

The band’s original guitarist was Dave ‘Snake’ Sabo, a childhood buddy of Jon’s who went on to form Skid Row. But in 1983 Jon settled on the line-up with which he would conquer the world: guitarist Richie Sambora, keyboard player David Bryan, bassist Alec John Such and drummer Tico ‘The Hit Man’ Torres.

It was in 1986, with their third album, Slippery When Wet, that Bon Jovi became one of the biggest bands in the world, and Jon Bon Jovi, with his fluffy hair and million-dollar smile, was transformed into rock’s leading sex symbol. The follow-up album, 1988’s New Jersey, was another multi-million seller. But arguably, Bon Jovi’s greatest success has been their longevity.

While many big 80s acts were killed by grunge, Bon Jovi rode out the storm with 1992’s Keep The Faith, but the last few years haven't been easy. Sambora left the band more than a decade ago and shows no sign of returning, while Bon Jovi himself underwent reconstructive surgery of his vocal cords after their 2022 tour. But next month, they're back again, with nine shows scheduled at New York's Madison Square Garden, and five UK and Ireland Stadium shows booked for August and September.

Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story, the band's well-received 2024 docu-series, explored decades of stadium-level success, but it also confirmed something else: that the 80s saw Bon Jovi at their big-haired, hard-rocking best, when Jon sang without a trace of irony or embarrassment: “I’ve seen a million faces, and I’ve rocked them all!”

How we loved him for it.

In 2024, to celebrate the reissue of Swervedriver’s “lost” 1998 album 99th Dream, Adam Franklin joined Louder to talk us through Swervedriver’s back catalogue, one album at a time.

Raise (1991)

We hadn’t been together that long when we started work on Raise. We’d recorded three EPs with Creation Records already, and then it came to the album. When we'd been looking for a label to get started with, Creation had been literally the last label we’d intended to give a cassette to. We had a bunch of cassettes made up of our demo which we gave to various labels. We had one left over and we thought, ‘What shall we do with this? Creation? They won’t sign us but let’s give one to Mark [Gardener, of Ride]”. And then the story is [Creation founder] Alan McGee was in LA in the back of a car looking for some music to play. He finds this tape given to him by Mark, of this band Swervedriver from Oxford and he puts it in – straight away it sounds great. He contacted us immediately and said “I wanna sign you”. And then things just happened very quickly.

Over time, signing with Creation informed the whole legacy of Swervedriver and the way we were perceived. If we weren’t on Creation we probably wouldn’t have been called shoegaze. I think the perception of us would’ve been quite different, and I don’t think that would’ve been that much down to the music – although we were also inspired by our surroundings. I think you do end up being inevitably influenced and inspired by what’s going on around you. If you’re living in London in that environment with those bands around you it’s going to rub off; if we’d been living in New York and hanging out with a whole bunch of different bands we probably would have sounded different.

We get into a studio in London to record the album and I remember thinking that the final tracklisting wasn’t what I wanted. It was a McGee thing, where he said “we’ve got to have the three singles on the album, because it’ll be like the Sex Pistols album”. McGee had the right plan, but it meant that the actual album was three singles – Son Of Mustang Ford, Rave Down and Sandblasted – and only six new songs. Considering we’d put out three EPs by then, which was 12 songs, in some ways I think it was quite strange that the album came out with only six new songs. But it was a wise choice to have the three singles on there.

The great thing about this album, I think, is that everybody got the idea. Everybody bought into it, into the whole thing – the song titles, sunset, the driving thing. I think it creates a mood, and you enter into the mood of the album, and that’s probably the best thing you can say about a good album – that you step inside it and you’re taken away for 35 minutes.

The actual sound is a bit lumpy as far as we’re concerned, as Son Of Mustang Ford and Rave Down are from different sessions, but it’s a great album. I love this record. It’s massively flawed, as they all are, but I think you can clearly hear this is just around the time I’d got a Vox AC30 and a Boss reverb pedal as well as the Marshall. There’s something a bit warped about the sound, like it’s been left out in the sun or something.

Standout track: Rave Down. It was the first recording we were really happy with and it just has this energy to it that is brilliant.

Mezcal Head (1993)

So Raise is released, then we go on tour, and… the band falls apart almost immediately. Graham Bonner, our drummer, famously left for a sandwich after a show in Boston never to return. We heard he was found wandering in no man’s land by Canadian Mounties. They came on the bus and said “One of your party has defected!” It turned out he could only speak to one member of the entourage, which was [guitarist] Jimmy Hartridge, so Jimmy went in and sat down with him and he said “I can’t go on”. So we gave him enough money to get to San Francisco, where he ended up staying for years.

So we had to move from no band to getting a band together. We were down to two at one point as our bassist, Adi Vines, had also left before recording began. We had all these songs appearing – Duress was there, which was good, and Duel and Blowin Cool – but we didn’t really have a band. We had to find a drummer.

There were two drummers in line – one of whom had a Ford Mustang, the other didn’t – Jez Hindmarsh didn’t have the Ford Mustang, but he ended up getting the gig. We didn’t get a bass player in time so we covered the bass ourselves. We holed up in the same rehearsal space in Camden Town with an 8-track recorder and set about demoing these songs. It was quite exciting because Jez is quite a different drummer from Graham, and obviously Adi wasn’t there, so it was either me or Jim playing the bass. The rhythm section totally changed, it sounded different and Jez played in a much more expansive way.

We end up getting in the studio with Alan Moulder again. The funny thing is that apart from the actual personnel of the musicians, the people who were around were the same. The road crew, the recording crew and the management. It astonishes me now when I think about the timeline. When you think about how little I’ve done in recent times, compared to when we were suddenly having to completely reconstruct the band and get an album together and out on the road again.

My thoughts on Mezcal Head are that I would’ve changed the tracklisting slightly. I may have taken A Change Is Gonna Come off, possibly, but I appreciate that that song was quite different and it’s quite a strange song for us. But I would probably replace that with Planes Over The Skyline, which I think should’ve been on the album. And The Hitcher – I think The Hitcher is a classic lost Swervedriver song. Those two songs I think would go on the album, possibly in place of A Change Is Gonna Come and You Find It Everywhere. But I say that and other people say “Oh but I love that song!” or “You can’t replace that one!” and I think that’s what happens in the end – however flawed an album might be, or how much you think you could improve it, in the end people just want it how it is.

The second verse of Harry And Maggie is literal, by the way. Harry is my friend who’s a stone mason, and still is, and he really did get commissioned to redo the gargoyles on the Houses of Parliament. And he really did scrawl “Maggie sucks” on the back of them before they got stuck on. So on the Houses of Parliament there are these gargoyles and they say “Maggie sucks”. And like I say in the song, in 500 years if somebody picks them up, that graffiti will be there. It’s best that they just live there like that, like these songs live within us.

Standout track: I’ve been asked before what I’d say if an alien came down from another planet and asked for the best Swervedriver song, and Duel is probably the most all-encompassing. If there’s a Swervedriver vision, it’s in there somewhere.

Ejector Seat Reservation (1995)

We came back from touring Mezcal Head and hunkered down in the studio, but there was a sea change happening outside the studio as far as what was going on musically. There were people wearing 70s Adidas T-shirts with the three stripes down the sleeve and people had short spiky hair – just a few months before it was long hair and plaid. Things had suddenly changed without a shadow of a doubt. Of course, that sea change extended in our case to A&M dropping us two thirds of the way through the album, which meant consequently Creation did also.

When we did this album, from our own point of view we wanted to change our sound. Mezcal Head had all these drum samples and big sounds but we wanted it to sound more clattery, and although we got Alan Moulder again we wanted actually the sound of Jez’s kit. Half the songs were recorded at our own studio, so it was a much more rough and ready sound.

There was definitely more English references because we were aware we were perceived as being transatlantic and we wanted to be less American. So instead of Son Of Mustang Ford you’ve got Son Of Jaguar E. I think this album was great – the problem was with the marketing. At the time, Britpop was everything, and by this point all the bands were doing songs that started with the acoustic guitar and then the strings came in. And it was like, “Ahh, for God’s sake” – we’d actually done Last Day On Earth before anyone had released anything like that – I swear! – and the idea behind Last Day On Earth was having strings on this song that would appear towards the end of the album, which would freak everyone out because they’d go “fucking hell, Swervedriver have got strings!”. But McGee didn’t see it. We wanted The Other Jesus to be the single. For me it was The Other Jesus – that’s the song that said Swervedriver’s back, but McGee couldn’t hear it unfortunately. They released Last Day On Earth which was a bullshit selection and, again, I think it probably changed the perception of the band, because people were like “Oh, Britpop’s come along and now Swervedriver have got acoustic guitar and strings”. This track was meant to be the penultimate track on the album, it wasn’t meant to be the lead single. And anyway, Creation then put the album out and dropped us a week later anyway.

Ejector Seat Reservation didn’t get a fair shot in that it wasn’t released in our biggest marketplace. It didn’t come out in the US, so from that point of view it certainly wasn’t given a fair whack. But I do think there was some great stuff on it. The lyrics on this album were a bit crazy in an interesting way. I remember there were things from dreams being put into the lyrics, but also around that time, because it was the Britpop era, there was a lot of cocaine going around London, so I guess it was cocaine imagery too.

Standout track: The Birds. The Birds is second only to Duel, I would say, as the greatest Swervedriver track. It’s been a standard of the set for a long time.

99th Dream (1998)

After A&M dropped us, Geffen were wanting to sign us, so we were like “Oh, great, we’ve got another big American label here wanting to put our records out”. They wanted Ejector Seat Reservation but didn’t get it, so they said "Shall we just carry on and get a new record together?” So that’s what we did.

Then the person who signed us at A&M lost their gig, and they brought in Michael Alago, the guy who discovered Metallica. He came over to cold, rainy Crouch End in February from LA. He was perfectly nice, he came over with a recording engineer, and they wanted to re-jig the album. It was the first time ever in the studio that we weren’t actually at the control desk calling the shots. I remember one morning I was the only one there, sat at the back, and Michael was saying to the producer “I want the acoustic guitars in there and the organ up”, and they did this mix of that song that sounded fucking horrible. That was really quite depressing, it was like “Ugh, god, this is the end”, really – there was only one of us in the studio, none of us has sat at the desk, we don’t even know these people. So that was a nightmare, but it was saved by the fact that Geffen changed their mind and said they didn’t want to put it out after all – but that we could keep it. So then it eventually came out with New York indie label Zero Hour in 1998.

The reception was lukewarm in some quarters, certainly in the UK. But I think it’s become more revered over time. Working on the reissue I realised how much was going on at this time, because there’s a lot of really good material. But what I didn’t like about the album personally was the singing. There was something I was trying to do there and I didn’t do it well, and I really can’t stand the vocals. And I think there was a general harshness to the album which has been softened up in this new remaster. The unreleased tracks on CD3 will probably blow a few people away, actually. I think if you’re going to put out unreleased tracks after a long time they ought to be pretty fucking good. And I think these ones are. They’ve got this energy to them and that really struck me.

We already knew we were going to have to do a double vinyl reissue, so it was a question of if we spread the 11 tracks across four sides or if we added a fourth side. I decided to add a fourth side, because the songs on there were all things that appeared on indie 7”s. So you have Why Say Yeah, 93 Million Miles From The Sun, The Director’s Cut Of Your Life. For me, side four is what makes it more of a whole, because I think those songs create more of an overall picture of what was going on with the band around the time. I think this album is flawed, they’re all flawed, but this representation does emphasise things you might have missed first time around.

Even though I don’t like the singing, I appreciate the songs. I think people will be surprised to hear what’s going on on this record considering it’s an album that was the last album a band did for 17 years. Creatively there’s no sign of the band running out of steam, I think it’s more the marketplace that was running out – we had less road to run on at that point.

Standout track: That's a tricky one. The one track from this album that does always get in the sets is These Times, so we'll go with that.

I Wasn't Born To Lose You (2015)

In the years after we went on hiatus, sometimes I’d hear a Swervedriver song and think “Ah, that's a good song. Shame I'll never play that ever again". But it felt like the band had its run and I was doing other things, putting out other records.

Initially, we just got back together to play shows, and that was really fun. I think that was probably in 2012 or something. It took a while before we actually recorded a new record. But eventually, it got to a point where Jimmy said, 'Look, we want to do new stuff.' So we started trying to write songs. I remember sending the band the demo for Deep Wound, and I think Steve [George, bassist]'s one-word response was 'beautiful,' and Jimmy's one-word response was 'nasty'. It was quite funny because they both happened to reply with just a single word.

We were very much aware that this was the first album in a long time and that it had to be good or it wasn't worth doing. If it wasn't good enough, we just wouldn't put anything out. But it was really good for me, Jim, Steve, and Mikey, who's playing the drums, actively trying to write an album. We had toured Raise not long before, so we had an idea of how an album should flow in our head.

I remember sitting down with the three of us at a rehearsal, and Steve said, "I feel we need a Duel, we need something." It's like, yeah, we do, but you can't force these things. Because if you try and write a Duel, you'll screw it up. But then, a few days later, we sort of had it, because Steve sent this piece of music. I thought, "What the fuck is this?" And it turned out it was the track Lone Star, but he'd reversed a section of it. And what it became was Everso, which became like the whole centrepiece for the album.

For me, and I've said this before, this is my favourite Swervedriver album. It's one that I can actually put on just to listen to, which is quite something. The really interesting thing about the origins of this album is that there's a recording of a sound check in Arizona in 1998; our sound manager recorded it, and I found the tape. Between us playing a couple of songs, you hear a guitar playing Lone Star's melody, and I thought, that's quite cool. What is that? So I played it back. I don't know if it's me or Jimmy – I think it was me. But it was this really good riff that ends up being the main intro riff of Lone Star. So that whole tune came out of two seconds of a sound check in Arizona in 1998. And if Dave our soundman hadn't recorded that and that song, that melody would have floated off into the ether and been lost, or picked up by somebody else. I do quite like the idea of musical archaeology – just finding this tape and this little thing and turning it into something else.

We definitely wanted to do an album that stood up against all the others, and in the end – and I mean, yeah, personal taste and all that – but for me I think we managed it.

Standout track: Everso. It's the centrepiece, after all, and I think without Everso, the whole album might not have come together quite the way it did.

Future Ruins (2019)

We recorded this album in Los Angeles and Brighton, when we were offered some studio time in Los Angeles at the end of a tour. We had this lovely studio to go to, and two weeks in there. So we just got in there and recorded all this stuff – we recorded, I don't know, 30-ish songs. There's a lot of stuff in there. And then we got back to Brighton to reassemble it. And then did a whole year touring it.

The standout track is definitely The Lonely Crowd Fades In The Air. That title is a misheard Supremes lyric. The original lyric was 'The lonely cry fades in the air.' I misheard it as 'The lonely crowd.' And I thought, that’s a great lyric, then when I looked it up I realised it actually wasn't the lyric, and that I could claim that lyric. I think there's a desire to sort of subvert the language a little bit sometimes. You can have a rock song, and lyrically you can do anything you want with it. And quite often, people don't even take it in. I mean, even after 30 years, you find out what somebody was singing, and you never knew that's what they were singing. But I always thought if someone is gonna find out after 30 years what you were singing, they might as well have a pleasant surprise, and find that there's just something kind of reasonable going on there.

I became more aware of this probably around 2000 or something – when I started playing solo shows, and I realised that the songs from my back catalogue I was more tempted to solo with were songs that had good lyrics, It didn’t matter if the music was good. Some of the Swervedriver songs don't have that great lyrics, but I found myself playing the ones that had the interesting more meaningful lyrics.

The world’s continuously going to pot, isn't it? And that's in the lyrics. I think some people were a bit sort of disarmed that they felt Swervedriver were doing political lyrics, but they would have missed out on the political lyrics that were on Mezcal Head and Ejector Seat and things.

It's difficult to have a perspective on this one because it’s so recent. But the title track was great and I love Theeascending, it’s a beautiful song. Spiked Flower was actually a Jimmy riff, and I ended up pretty surprised with the vocal, which I sang late at night – suddenly it was like, ‘oh, holy fuck’, I kind of surprised myself. I think sometimes you hear your own stuff, and when it's something you've recorded and then gone out and toured and played live lots of times, you then have that live version in your head. So you go back, and you hear strange little production things and they can sometimes sound a little out of place.

There's something coalescing in terms of a next album. I mean, literally, we have been radio silent for four years. But we did a bit of recording back in October in Oxford, we just haven't gotten around to finishing it off yet. But there are some songs there, and some other stuff that's creeping up. We've been searching for that mojo, and I think the mojo is coming back.

Standout track: Definitely The Lonely Crowd Fades in the Air. There's something about it that is just… right.

A half-century on and we’re still riding the ripples of The Stooges’ second album, Fun House. It’s a beautiful thing, a seven-track study in the feral and unhinged.

Essentially, but for its rock-friendly elements (guitar, bass, drums, vocals, attitude), it’s a record that’s got far more in common with the free interpretations of contemporary jazz than with the uniform strictures of the punk scene that it apparently sired.

Against the brute minimalism of the rock-solid yet instinctively fluid Stooges, Iggy Pop’s voice extemporises, blurts, explores and punctuates like Miles’s trumpet in full-on gonzo shaman mode, sounding like a savage messiah left for dead in a dumpster on droning psyche-punk classics like Down On The Street, TV Eye and 1970.

Scott Asheton’s drums are a stoned, tribal thump that seems determined to raise the dead or soak the ground with Devil’s rain, while Ron Asheton’s guitar is a looping, feral acid trip that throbs like a war wound.

Marred by the meandering, self-consciously Doors-y title track and the jazz-skronk splatfest LA Blues, as an album Fun House doesn’t quite have the bite of its predecessor, but it’s still a wild ride.

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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 July 1970

• Cactus - Cactus
• Osmium - Parliament
• Cosmo's Factory - Creedence Clearwater Revival-
• Time And A Word - Yes
• John Barleycorn Must Die - Traffic
• Number 5 - Steve Miller Band
• Devotion - John McLaughlin
• Free Your Mind... and Your Ass Will Follow - Funkadelic
• Full House - Fairport Convention
• Humble Pie - Humble Pie
• James Gang Rides Again - James Gang
• The Last Puff - Spooky Tooth
• On The Waters - Bread

What they said...

"Fun House is where Iggy Pop's mad genius first reached its full flower; what was a sneer on the band's debut had grown into the roar of a caged animal desperate for release, and his rants were far more passionate and compelling than what he had served up before. The Stooges may have had more "hits," but Fun House has stronger songs." (AllMusic)

"The Stooges appeal to me intellectually – their monotonousness obviously transcends competence and the introduction of a saxophone on this record represents a nice synthesis with new thing jazz – but I have to be in a certain mood of desperate abandon before I can get on with them musically. Can that be good?" (Robert Christgau)

"Unhinged is too weak a word for the wildest moments of Fun House, especially closer L.A. Blues, a fiery freakout that's more heroin than LSD and makes no pretence of song structure. Saxophonist Steven Mackay adds a nasty edge to the album's second side, blazing right along with the rest of the band to create a texture that sounds exactly like the album cover – Iggy tossed in a flaming sea, possibly hell. (Pitchfork)

What you said...

Zak Browne: I have to go 9.5. It's not perfect, but it's really close.

Chris Elliott: I kind of appreciate this record. It's a bit like art that's interesting/challenging, but you wouldn't want it in your living room. I love the albums that followed (once Bowie made them play songs). This is raw garage, and its energy is undeniable. There are a couple of great tracks, but it's a jam band being self-indulgent (albeit at speed) for great chunks.

Nigel Mawdsley: I've not listened to Fun House for over 40 years, since a friend lent me his vinyl copy. I'd forgotten how good this album was.

This album must have influenced so many music genres: punk, glam, new wave, to name but a few, and hundreds, if not thousands of bands, from Motorhead to The Boomtown Rats; from New York Dolls to The Sex Pistols (that's only 4) must have fed off the raw power (see what I did there) of this album. Great!

Andrew Cumming: Fabulous album. Still sounds great today. I guess the fact that it was so raw and unpolished at the time has given it a kind of timeless quality. The songs on side one are punchy and intense, TV Eye probably the best known, but Loose is just as good. After side two kicks off with 1970, the whole thing spirals into oddness with Fun House and LA Blues. Heaven only knows what they were thinking as they wrote and recorded the songs, but it worked then, and it still works now.

Mark Herrington: I remember first seeing one of Henry Moore’s sculptures in Kew Gardens. I could clearly see it was well executed, but it literally did nothing for me.

I feel the same way about this week’s album.

It sounds ahead of its time, full of energy and steering clear of the crowd, but I find little here that actually moves me. It is obviously influential and one of the early trailblazers.

However, when I put Sabbath's debut on from the same year, 1970, and it still reaches down deep and resonates across my musical core, I know where my heart lies.

Evan Sanders: I really like this pick, especially with it coming not too many weeks after what many considered the first-ever punk album, Never Mind The Bollocks. If that is true, then Iggy Pop and The Stooges were proto-punk multiple years before Johnny Rotten was finding ways to insult the Queen.

From the opener of Down On The Street, straight through to the title song, then L.A. Blues, I find the songs to be an assault of unpolished guitars and vocals, in a good way. At a time when rock was fracturing after the Beatles' break-up, albeit with strong rockers such as Paranoid, Layla, and Live at Leeds, we see that the Stooges kept to an even more raw sound. A worthy one for the playlists. 7 or 8 out of 10.

Gary Claydon: Released amid the post-Altamont death throes of the hippy zeitgeist, and this sure ain't no summer of love, baby. Raw, chaotic and looser than a lactose-intolerant person at a cheese tasting, a vibe reinforced by Gallucci's 'live' production. Iggy bestrides Fun House like the colossus he is, but the Ashetons and Dave Alexander rarely receive the credit they deserve for providing the unrelenting sonic superstructure that the frontman climbs all over.

Largely ignored at the time, over the years, Fun House has, rightly, come to be regarded as seminal proto-punk/alt. rock.

Ben Smith: Can we just skip to the ratings already? It’s a 10

Greg Schwepe: Every music scene seems to have its epicentre; Birmingham, New York, Seattle, and London, to name a few. And the epicentre and fertile ground for Midwest garage rock is Detroit. And while The Stooges technically hail from nearby Ann Arbor, it’s close enough to have that Motor City vibe.

Fun House and its sound fits the gritty, hardworking ethic of the blue-collar Motor City region: Don’t fuck around, just hit me with power chords and a 4/4 beat, get to the point, and then we’ll knock down a few Stroh’s Beers when we’re done. Led by the shirtless, sinewy, gyrating vocalist Iggy Pop, his antics keep your attention, even in the studio.

The first three tracks, Down On The Street, and T.V. Eye really kick out the jams, to borrow a line from another famous band from that area. This part of the album has more of a proto-punk vibe, like you’re getting smacked with a two-by-four. Short and sweet, nothing extra.

Then we start to get a little drawn out. Dirt is maybe the only song where the beats per minute are less than 200. Maybe more of a slightly psychedelic take here. The band gives us all a chance to catch our breath here, because the last three tracks will test your mettle.

Here’s where it’s not three minutes and outta here. 1970, Fun House and L.A. Blues are where things get a little more strung out. 1970 is a rave-up with lots of wah-wah guitar and a lot of sax. Fun House brings more sax, urgent drums and clocks in at eight minutes. The closing track L.A. Blues reminds me of nothing to do with L.A. or the blues… so maybe that’s the point here. A little irony in the title. A lot of random grooves with Iggy working hard to shred his vocal cords. Who knows, this could have been the producer going, “Hmmm… we got enough space left for one more track, whatcha got? Anything? Go!” as he hits the record button. Five minutes of frenetic sounds to finish out the album.

7 out of 10 on this one for me. I get what The Stooges are doing here; some won’t! The first third of the album is of more interest to me, but it all works.

One slightly funny sidebar to end this. I saw Iggy Pop open for The Pretenders in the late 80’s. The wife of the couple that went with us said, “This will be fun. The last concert I saw was James Taylor back in college.” “Oh, she will be in for a real treat when she sees Iggy!” I thought to myself. I look over halfway through his set as the usual shirtless Iggy is writhing and gyrating across the stage; my friend’s wife’s eyes have bugged out to the size of grapefruits, and her jaw is firmly sitting on the floor. A look of shock on her face! And that, my friends, is rock and roll.

Iain Macaulay: It’s raw, it’s messy, it’s loose, and with seven songs at 36 minutes long, it’s over before you realise. Yes, there are a couple of long songs, but for the most part, each track is its own entity, with its own style and flavour. And, you could say each track was the ground zero for several different music genres that were still way off in the distance.

This is the sound of four guys realising they made it past the first album and found themselves still alive, so they revelled in the glory of doing what they wanted without worrying about any kickback, because they knew it wasn’t going to last much longer, and it didn’t, for that incarnation of the band.

The album was recorded live to get the aggressive sound that got them noticed, and you can’t deny that it worked, warts and all. There are many better live recordings of these songs throughout Iggy's solo career with different lineups of musicians, but each lineup shows how well these stripped-back songs were written in the first place, because they still stand up.

John Davidson: Fun House starts out sharply with a punchy groove and some aggressive guitars on Down On The Street. Loose continues the groove and accidentally invents both indie and stoner rock along the way. TV Eye continues in a similar vein but is less well executed Dirt finishes off side one and sounds like The Doors more than anything else. Side two is less successful, devolving into noise by the end of LA Blues.

I can't think of any other bands from 1970 that would have sounded like this. Most of the British heavy rockers were classically trained or steeped in the blues, or in Hawkwind's case, stoned out of their minds.

Side one is pretty intense and sets up the template for a lot of music that came after it – mixing raw vocals, heavy guitars, prominent bass and a steady groove – while side two devolves into pure aggression.

Interesting to think this was made in 1970, and while I doubt I'll add it to my regular listening, it really is a standout album.

Philip Qvist: You get albums that take months to record, with every note polished and re-recorded until you get that perfect sound, and then you get albums that take mere days to record and produce, leaving you with a raw sound, complete with a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. I'm not sure which approach is the better option (I am more the middle ground type of person when it comes to music), but there is no doubting under which circumstances Fun House was recorded.

It is loose, raw and spontaneous, which is both its strength and weakness. Side one benefits from that minimal approach, with the likes of Down On The Street and TV Eye, but it then starts to get irritating when the saxophone makes an appearance on side two. I guess Iggy Pop and co were having fun at the time and probably playing by ear, but the closing track LA Blues, was just a mess, although the seven-minute title track was okay enough for me.

I have never been a huge fan of The Stooges, but at least I have now listened to one of their albums. Although it is one record that I will probably never listen to again, I will still give Fun House a decent enough score, because it was fun enough to listen to.

Mike Canoe: A friend once described the Stooges' Fun House as "stumbling into a tent revival sermon to find a preacher hollering about sex and drugs instead of Jesus."

Inherent crassness of that statement aside, it's a great description. Fun House is transcendent, ecstatic, powerful, cathartic, an overwhelming sense of being enveloped by a higher power you can't fully understand, but you put your faith in it because it makes you believe. And who better to lead this worship than the original manic street preacher, Iggy Pop?

Even without any visuals, Iggy Pop is utterly captivating and transfixing. I will argue here and in the hereafter that Iggy is not only one of rock's greatest frontmen but one of its greatest singers. His voice can do all the things: whoop with joy, howl and growl with lust, wail with ecstasy, and even croon with genuine emotion and feeling.

Like any band with a magnetic and charismatic frontman, it's easy to forget the Stooges were a band. Iggy wouldn't have sounded nearly as good without the sonic tidal wave that the Stooges allowed him to surf on top of. Ron Asheton's guitar sound is truly revelatory, brute force repetition that suddenly careens wildly like an Oldsmobile on an icy Detroit road without ever actually crashing. Brother Scott Asheton and bassist Dave Alexander lay down a groove as deep as the Mariana Trench and keep the proverbial wheels from falling off.

It seems limiting to refer to the tracks on Fun House as mere "songs." They have more in common with the way jazz sessions were recorded at the time. TV Eye, obvious classic, but so are Down On the Street and Loose, with Dirt destroying power ballads before they ever even existed. Side two is when the freak out really starts with the pummeling 1970 and the orgiastic title track bringing in Steve Mackay to contribute some wailing, never flailing saxophone.

Closer L.A. Blues is the hardest one to digest, but I hear it as the final exhilarating climax of a rock concert where everybody is just bashing the crap out of everything, only stretched out to song length. It's not much on its own, but it is a fitting chaotic closer to the album.

This is the one that actually had all the raw power, but the title Fun House fits it so much better. Ten out of ten, only because I can't give it infinity.

Final score: 7.94 (53 votes cast, total score 421)

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Music has long been associated with therapy, but Ed O’Brien took it to another level on his second solo album Blue Morpho – the first released under his own name. It’s the result of a battle with depression that led to the Radiohead guitarist experiencing a complete transformation, as he tells Prog.

Despite the drop in temperature in Austin, Texas, Ed O’Brien speaks with a warmth and candour that’s at once disarming yet utterly compelling. At the top of the agenda is the Radiohead guitarist’s tunningly beautiful second solo album Blue Morpho. It represents so much more than simply another release – for this is a reckoning, a shedding of skin and a profound rebirth.

Named after the dazzling butterfly he first encountered while living with his family in Brazil, the record captures a moment of transformation that saw him emerge from the deepest depression of his life with a renewed sense of purpose, identity and faith. “I’m not hiding any more,” he says simply.

Previously he’d released music under the alias EOB; a decision rooted less in artistic intent than self-protection. “I was hiding behind a doppelgänger called EOB. I didn’t think it was very cool going out under my own name. Coming from Radiohead, I knew that whatever I released would be compared to what each of them does either solo or collectively. And I felt deeply insecure about that. I felt like, ‘Who am I? What am I?’”

Those anxieties ran deep. In 2020, while making his debut solo album Earth, and despite working with acclaimed collaborators including guitarist Adrian Utley of Portishead, drummer Omar Hakim and folk singer Laura Marling, O’Brien found himself overwhelmed by doubt.

“There’s healthy insecurity or healthy humility, but this felt crippling at times,” he recalls. “It felt like carrying this weight.” What followed was a collapse and, ultimately, a clearing.

“There’s nothing like going into a deep depression and coming out of that like a dark night in the soul, which completely puts everything into perspective,” he says. “You come out of something like that and you go, ‘I don’t care any more – I don’t care what people think about me.’”

That shift from fear to acceptance beats at the heart of Blue Morpho. Where Earth was shaped by hesitation and uncertainty concerning his role in Radiohead, his latest album is defined by release. “The less you care about your detractors, the more you let go; the more you make the music you want to make,” he says.

“To me, it’s the process of making music that is so completely alluring and all-encompassing and it’s a necessity. I have to do it –and I love it now.”

His depression, which took hold during the pandemic’s first lockdown in 2020, was all-consuming. “That place, the depression, just reduces you. It crushes the ego. It’s like a death,” he says. “Then you slowly build up; it’s like rebuilding your kind of framework and your beingness, and you just do it. You get to this place of acceptance. You go, ‘Yeah – and? So?’ For me it’s a process of letting go, and that has a deeply profound impact on the music.”

In practical terms, that meant letting go of structure and expectation. During that first lockdown, O’Brien found himself being unable to listen to music at all. Initially, he turned outward. “It was almost like this ground zero,” he says. “I was just listening to the insects in that beautiful, glorious weather we had.”

But new and unexpected sources of inspiration soon followed. Almost accidentally, he began listening to Gilles Peterson’s Saturday afternoon show on BBC Radio 6 Music, a programme that champions a heady mix of contemporary and established jazz, hip hop and electronic music. At the same time, O’Brien found himself being drawn to the classical music of his youth; and the mixture of the two made for a potent cocktail in his mind.

“I was just like, ‘I’m kind of done with the form of where I am.’ I wanted to breathe some formlessness into the music that I was making. So it was interesting – the death of the ego was also the death of that form as well.”

The result is an album that resists convention and easy categorisation as it stretches and unfolds according to its own internal logic. “If a song’s going to be 10 minutes long, it’s got to be 10 minutes long,” he shrugs. “Why try and get it down to three and a half minutes? I’m bored with that. I like to let things breathe.”

The path back to creative process became almost like a ritual that doubled as an exercise in survival. Encouraged by his wife, Suzi, O’Brien would retreat into his home studio every morning while his family navigated lockdown life around him.

“I literally had this compulsion,” he explains. “It was my intuition saying, ‘You’ve got to go into this room at nine o’clock, go through ’til 12 – just play. That’s what you’ve got to do: just play. There’s no expectation. You’re not trying to create music; it’s therapy.”

Likening the process to yoga, he continues: “You get into the discipline of practice, turning up each day, and your body switches on and your soul switches on. And with musicians, it comes through us.”

His emerging raw and unfiltered ideas, at first glance, appeared to be directionless. “I had about nine months’ worth of these little gems. I thought they were shit! I didn’t know what they were. Then I came out of this dark place, played them back, and went, ‘Oh my God!’ These notes and riffs held an imprint of the emotional state that I was in. It was a very dark place, but there’s beauty in that place as well.”

Key to shaping those moments was multi award-winning producer Paul Epworth, whose instinctive, fast-moving approach provided a vital counterbalance. “He’s such a different musician from me; he works so quickly. He’s a vibes man and an amazing producer with an amazing soul.”

But while Epworth helped give the songs form, the environment in which they were created gave them their spirit. Much of Blue Morpho was written and recorded in Wales, a place O’Brien describes in mythical and spiritual terms.

“It’s ancient Celtic land,” he says. “There’s a real power there and it gets more interesting the more you learn about the language. That spirit is infused in the language, and that language is infused in the land.”

Having grown up in what he calls the “academic and non-spiritual” environment of Oxford, O’Brien’s connection to nature has become central to his life and work. “It’s been the hardest part to talk about, but it’s my truth,” he says. “I’ve been on a journey for a number of years; I think I’ve been seeking it. I taught myself meditation, but I’ve never sort of had that connection.

“Then, five years ago, it just suddenly came, and it was deep and it was powerful, and it’s a connection with God – it’s a spiritual connection. Unless you’ve experienced it, you cannot describe it.”

In Wales, that connection feels even more tangible. Once an avowed city dweller, O’Brien bonded with the land after buying a house on the remains of a Roman villa surrounded by valleys, ancient oak trees and running waterways. By a strange coincidence, it’s a stone’s throw from Bron-Yr-Aur, the cottage where Jimmy Page and Robert Plant laid the groundwork for Led Zeppelin III.

“When you go to this land, you understand Led Zeppelin in a way that goes deeper,” he says. “When you hear The Battle Of Evermore – man, it’s like being on the top of fucking Plynlimon, the highest point in mid-Wales, and you feel it.

“And it’s so in this land, this land of poets, this land of mystery, this land of spirit. If you’re sensitive to this stuff – and musicians tend to be sensitive souls – you feel it. And that’s why I’ve been drawn to Wales. That’s why I love Wales; that’s why Wales is my home.”

This spiritual awakening feeds directly into Blue Morpho’s sense of rebirth. The title evokes not only transformation but also an ongoing journey of discovery. “It’s like rebirth,” says O’Brien. “It’s been profound, and I’m excited about what’s next.”

That openness to the unknown helped shape the album’s collaborative process, which came together through chance – indeed, contributions from British jazz multi-instrumentalist Shabaka Hutchings and Estonian composer Tõnu Kõrvits occurred almost serendipitously.

“I met Tõnu in Estonia over dinner,” recalls O’Brien. “He said, ‘If you ever want any string arrangements, please contact me.’ Five weeks later he’d done an incredible arrangement with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra for the title track and Sweet Spot.

“With Shabaka, I was chatting with him at Glastonbury and I said, ‘Do you fancy coming in?’ And he came by three or four months later, laid some flutes down on Thin Places, and it was beautiful.”

For an artist long defined by his specific role in one of the world’s biggest and most original bands, that sense of freedom and transformation hasn’t distanced him from Radiohead. If anything, it’s deepened his appreciation of the band and his role within it. Moreover, the experience of taking on lead vocals strengthened his position as a backing singer to Thom Yorke – something that came to fruition on Radiohead’s unexpected 2025 tour, their first outing in seven years.

“One of my greatest joys is to sing with one of my oldest friends, and I think our voices work really well together,” says O’Brien with no little pride. “I’ve always loved supporting Thom, but I love supporting him vocally now. I know he really enjoyed it, because he said so. I’m just not racked with insecurities like I used to be. I don’t care. I just do it.”

Blue Morpho isn’t just a record, but a carefully charted map of a journey from darkness into light. Like the flight of the butterfly it’s named after, it suggests that O’Brien’s transformation in an ongoing voyage is far from over.

Blue Morpho is on sale now.

By the autumn of 1981, everyone knew Motörhead. Whether revered as the kings of greasy biker grebo, fast’n’loose dirty rock’n’roll, or reviled as the sort of dirty ruffians who turned everything up to 11, drank too much and flipped dirt-encrusted middle-fingers to the dull and boring British public, Lemmy, Philthy Animal Taylor and Fast Eddie Clarke were news to everyone. Their popularity was at an all-time high: No.1 albums, Top 10 singles and even an appearance on children’s TV show Tiswas had seen them emerge as one of Britain’s top bands. Lemmy even got away to record a single featuring The Young & Moody Band plus The Nolan Sisters, Don’t Do That…

Not that they ever took any time to revel in the fruits of such labour. Indeed, the answer to this almost bizarre level of success was for their management at the time to keep them on the road, to keep them working and speeding along, to keep them on a relentless cycle of touring which saw them never really get any time off. This was soon to prove a major problem, but in August 1981, life was sweet.

The band started their initial recording work for the Iron Fist album with Vic Maile at Jackson’s Studio in Rickmansworth, the partnership having enjoyed outrageous success with the previous two albums and so obviously feeling the good work would continue. It’s tough to know exactly how much pre-production and writing the band could’ve done, but it wouldn’t be a wild guess to say not much, simply because Motörhead never seemed to take the time to write! The lure of the road – sex and drugs and rock’n’roll – was ever-present. And so a ‘studio break’ was called while venues across Europe took another beating from Motörhead and support act Tank, a London-based punk-metal band whose sonic assault was very much in the Motörhead vein.

When the tour ended, Fast Eddie went into Ramport Studios with Tank and produced their debut album Filth Hounds Of Hades, along with Eddie’s old pal, Will Reid-Dick. It was an event that was to have a profound impact on Motörhead.

Clarke didn’t care for Vic Maile’s work with Motörhead, and promptly announced to Lemmy and Philthy that he would handle production duties for Iron Fist, along with Reid-Dick. Lemmy and Philthy reluctantly agreed. So at the end of January 1982, Motörhead strode into first Morgan and then Ramport Studios to continue recording Iron Fist with Clarke and Reid-Dick at the controls.

Reid-Dick came with a high pedigree himself, having been an engineer on significant albums by Thin Lizzy and Saxon, but the problems with Iron Fist lay somewhere between the break-up of a successful partnership with Maile, Clarke’s relative inexperience and Motörhead’s lack of creative preparation. It sounded at the time like an album that needed another level of work, another couple of months of time and a strong hand at the helm to shake the extra dimension from Motörhead that …Spades had.

Clearly, Iron Fist was never going to be a direct sibling, but the dovetail between Mack-truck power and subtle humour which …Spades had was just out of focus on Iron Fist. Tracks like Loser felt distinctly like hastily written filler, and even the nifty riff on Shut It Down sounded bored of itself and in need of some coffee, fresh air and a cigarette.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Iron Fist is that the potential for greatness was alive and kicking, if only more time had been spent writing and recording it. Because some of the songs on the album were absolute belters; classics even. The title track was to become a familiar set-opener for many years, and Speedfreak had that deliciously filthy bass tone sitting on the riff.

Then there was the brilliant (Don’t Need) Religion, which saw Lemmy malevolently expound on one of his favourite targets with some of his finer lyrics (‘Don’t save no knee-pads for me up there/If your head’s alright, you don’t need binoculars to see the light’), and which remains one of Motörhead’s darkest and most adventurous songs.

Truth be told, Iron Fist was a classic example of the era. Strike while you’re hot, get it out and don’t stop to smell the flowers. Looking back, it’s hard to figure out exactly where the trio found time to write any songs for …Fist, let alone work with them for longer than an A.D.D. minute. Forensic science dictates it must’ve happened between the hours of 3am and 9am on Friday and Saturday nights around Christmas 1981, but truth be told, nobody has a clue. Somehow it happened.

“I didn’t like Iron Fist,” Lemmy said. “We let Eddie produce it, which was a mistake. It was also following No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith, which didn’t help. The next studio album after a great live album is always going to sound a bit wet.”

It’s hard not to look with a degree of cynicism at their former manager during this era. Doug Smith, Lemmy’s old friend and a man who had doubtless put up some serious cash to help Motörhead get to where they were, was not exactly one to forcibly direct the band to take a breather. And so as the Motörempire grew greater, the workload remained relentless, and the branding of the band became a thing of legend.

The War-Pig had established itself as one of rock’s most popular images, which made Motörhead T-shirts an international best-seller. Not that the band necessarily saw the returns – they were too busy on tour! And as long as their needs were met (fags, booze, drugs, cheese sandwiches and small fluffy partridges flown in specially from Norfolk), they were happy enough to barrel along. With any twinges of business acumen and hindsight stuffed in a closet, three of the hardest, fastest and loosest rock’n’rollers steamrollered forwards with little thought of future consequences.

“See, this is now where I live, on this bus,” stated Lemmy. “I am no good for anything else. My life is over as far as ‘sitting down to dinner with a few friends’ goes. You can forget me, I am a road clone. I love sitting in that front seat and watching the sun come up…”

Iron Fist was released on April 17, 1982, but the Iron Fist tour had already begun. If you’ve ever wondered where Lemmy’s palatial abodes (you know, the ones he earned from …Spades and No Sleep…) went, you’d have seen them in the production values of this absolute barnstormingly mental night out. The set opened with a live band playing very loudly, but not visible. Instead, fans peered into an empty space where the stage should’ve been but wasn’t. That’s because moments later, the stage, the band, their gear and a ton of lights were visible to all who looked up, descending from the sky like that enormous fuck-off spacecraft from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, support being offered by four enormous metal chains.

Once safely in place on the floor, a huge iron fist could be seen behind Philthy Phil, and at the end of the show, he would fall into the fist, which would then close! If you’re going to spend the vast majority of your hard-earned cash on your own show, it could be argued that this was the way to do it, because Motörheadbangers far and wide still speak of this tour with reverence.

I can personally tell you that I went to all four Hammersmith Odeon shows, and I feel safe in saying that most of the staff working on this magazine who are of a similar age were there for all of them too. Of course, looking back it was classic Motörhead – move fast, do things impetuously and worry about the money, well, never.

“To summarise, we came up very fast and went down just as fast,” said Lemmy. “We spent a lotta money doin’ all these big stage sets and bringing them all over the world. A lot of the time we didn’t look after our money and neither did our management, but we were all being carried away on this wave of euphoria, that indescribable rush.”

In May 1982, a seemingly innocuous side project would result in the implosion of a line-up absolutely no one could’ve imagined apart. Lemmy got together with Wendy O Williams, the irrepressible, fun, sparky and diminutive frontwoman for New York shock rockers the Plasmatics, to record a cover of country singer Tammy Wynette’s classic hit Stand By Your Man. A harmless little bit of fun if taken on face value, but an unknown storm must’ve been brewing, unrecognised and unaddressed, because it became a back-breaker.

Clarke was never enamoured with the idea and did not play guitar, but agreed with some hesitation to produce the session. With Reid-Dick in tow, Clarke was not happy about the difficulties Williams found in getting her performance to a strong place. This led to increasing tension, and further reinforced Clarke’s view that the collaboration was not good for Motörhead. Matters became heated, and a good ol’ fashioned studio barney ensued. There was no thaw post-ruckus. Indeed, word has it that Lemmy had everyone wearing Plasmatics shirts on the bus the next day in a display of visual sarcasm. Lemmy has always possessed a wickedly deft (or in this case, sledgehammer!) sense of humour, but Clarke didn’t see the funny side whatsoever.

The rot was so rapid that within a week of the studio door closing, Fast Eddie Clarke had left Motörhead mid-tour. In typical fashion, Motörhead just kept moving forwards, head down, a steam train not about to be derailed even by this seemingly unnavigable event.

Into the frame came Brian Robertson, the Scottish guitarist who had made his name as a member of Thin Lizzy in the 70s, playing on such classic albums as Jailbreak, Johnny The Fox and Live And Dangerous. Robertson also had a fearsome reputation as a whisky-drinking hardman whose behaviour was so wild that it had led to him being fired by Lizzy, one of the hardest-living bands in all of rock’n’roll.

Philthy Phil loved Thin Lizzy and especially Robertson’s playing. So when he and Lemmy found out Robertson was recording an album in Canada, they made the call. Robertson was happy to come out and help Motörhead complete their North American tour, things going so well that he further agreed to stick around and join the band for what would undeniably become their most controversial career phase.

Robertson was not one to offer the slightest of what he viewed as personal concessions. At one of his very first live British appearances, the Hackney Speedway Festival in July 1982, he insisted on wearing tight shorts and a black mesh disco vest with a white headband and tennis shoes. It could only have been more shocking had Lemmy joined him! In the grand scheme of things, it was perhaps not the smartest choice of attire when introducing yourself as the new guitarist for Motörhead, especially not at a Hells Angels-operated festival. So when Robertson compounded this first impression further by firmly refusing to play any of the band’s established classic songs, the die had been cast, the public were furious and Lemmy had to placate more than a few people. It was an inauspicious start, to say the least.

Robertson brought a lyrical edge to both the guitar sound and writing process, which was certainly different from Clarke’s more aggressive, attack-minded performance. Both loved their blues, but while Clarke had a very clear frame of how he felt a Motörhead guitar should sound, Robertson enjoyed experimenting. The result, 1983’s Another Perfect Day, was one of Motörhead’s greatest musical achievements, an album brimming with scope, superb songs and some supreme guitar work.

This writer was invited, as a teenage school magazine scribbler struggling with the weight of ‘O’ levels, to join Lemmy and co at Olympic Studios in London to hear a mix of the album. With a pint of vodka and orange thrust in my hand, my arse shoved firmly into the producer’s chair and Lemmy showing me where the volume fader was on an enormous mixing desk, Back At The Funny Farm blew the few facial hairs I’d tried to grow clean off my 15-year-old baby face and I proceeded to be pinned back by this quite sensational stew.

I remember the beauty and terror of the moment, song after song roaring from studio monitors, Lemmy having given me full licence to turn up the volume. I turned it up as far as the fader would go. I tilted backwards in the studio chair and I didn’t leave until I’d heard Another Perfect Day twice. It was clean, crisp yet still with enough definitive dirt to feel like Motörhead. But it was absolutely not even close to oily-denim grebo fare. This was a stealthy beast stuffed with variety, refusing to sit on old riffs and ideals, reaching out instead for melody and variation but never sacrificing power.

At the time, reaction was frighteningly poor. Fans felt betrayed on several levels, and few could get beyond the idea of Robertson and his disco gear to allow their ears to offer a greater perspective. It was, admittedly, a big ask, one which required enormous willpower, but one which offered great reward to those prepared to seek. Shine signalled something blisteringly new – clear melodies, wrapped neatly in a minor key and augmented by Robertson’s stunning lead work – while Rock It was a snarling jaw-snapper with swagger, sass and a thunderous piano for texture. And Lemmy fucking loved it! Every Chuck Berry-flavoured, hip-swinging goddamn minute of it. Even the lead-fisted hammerhead of Die You Bastard enjoyed Robertson’s flourishes, leaving an album which 30 years later is revered by Motörheadbangers as a belting classic.

The wave of negative press started building. Aside from a hopelessly one-sided defence of both Another Perfect Day and Motörhead in Sounds magazine (written, as an intern, by me), the knives were out. Put simply, this was an aesthete’s revenge, and it’s worth contemplating whether a pair of jeans, some boots, a normal fucking shirt and the odd live classic on Robertson’s part might’ve changed perspectives.

The 1983 tour was, by Motörhead’s standards, just north of a disaster. Towns which only 12 months earlier had hosted multiple nights now struggled to sell out one. Fans were unable to disengage from the mesh vests and white headband, and Robertson steadfastly refused to play Bomber, Overkill and Ace Of Spades. There was no stage on chains from the sky, no Bomber lighting rig and no giant fist. As my spotty memory recalls, there were these purple/blue fluorescent neon tube lights adorning the amps, but the main point is that these shows were not spectacular visual feasts – they were spartan. Add the crushing lack of typical Motörhead production to every other change and it was only the hardest of hard-core fans that took note.

There was word that a love affair with alcohol was not helping matters and quickly, distance between the band members grew. Creatively, the gel was powerful and positive, but as people, walls were being built. Lemmy found himself caught in a crossfire between knowing how strong the material had been, but recognising that the public had no time for Robertson’s belligerent disregard of Motörhead traditions. Besides, he was seemingly always moaning about something or other.

“Brian Robertson was great. I just couldn’t get along with him, but he was a great player,” Lemmy said. “Robbo used to say, ‘There is no bass! How can I do this? Can we set up another bass drum? I need bass.’ I said, ‘What makes you think that I wanted bass?!’”

With attendances down, classics consigned to a lock-box and increasing unhappiness between the band members, it was agreed that Robertson would leave Motörhead, his last appearance being in Berlin during November 1983. The writing, it is fair to say, had been billboard-sized on walls worldwide.

There is little doubt it was a relief for most Motörhead fans at the time, but that fantastic mirror to the past now suggests that even one more album of Robbo-generated material would’ve seen some great songs. Of course, what it also would’ve done is rob us of a soon-to-be classic guitar feast and a man who would rewrite the band’s history and establish himself as Lord Axesmith of the Motörhead guitar legacy…

But we’ve stepped slightly ahead. It’s important to realise just how utterly in the doldrums Motörhead were at that moment. Take a deep breath and consider the three-year span from 1980 to ’83. No.1 metal band, an immortal smash-hit single with Ace Of Spades, No.1 album with No Sleep…, another smash-hit single with Please Don’t Touch and tour after tour sold right the fuck out, sweaty, gurning fans packing in like epileptic sardines to see their grebo heroes turn hearing to shit and fracture necks.

Yet by the time Robbo got his (mutually understood) marching papers, Motörhead had lost a good 50 per cent of that audience, their money had evaporated into the ether of stage shows, touring and creative accounting, the band consisted only of Lemmy and Philthy and their last album had, comparatively, tanked.

As hard as this is for anyone to imagine, a whisper started floating around that Motörhead might be over, that they might break up. This was Motörhead in December 1983. Merry fucking Christmas and more figgy pudding.

But at the start of a new year, the band would announce the arrival of not one but two new guitarists: Phil Campbell and Michael Burston, aka Würzel. The new-look Motörhead would make its first public performance on The Young Ones – the cult alternative comedy show. And this would lead to a resurrection that Christ would’ve been proud of. Not even Orwell predicted this 1984…

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents Motörhead

The subtitle of The Kinks’ inventive, exploratory 1969 album Arthur said it all: The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire. But despite its awe-inspiring creativity, The Who had pipped them to the rock opera post with Tommy –and although Arthur was critically acclaimed, it flopped. In 2019 we argued that, five decades later, its message addressed Britain’s current state of affaird.

Although it was a commercial flop at the time, The Kinks had already dipped their toes in the water of concept albums with their excellent, Britpop-influencing Little England commentary The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society in 1968. With Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire), released the following year, the group flung themselves in the deep end with the most ambitious record of their career.

Ray Davies often found source material in his family life and north London neighbourhood, and this time around was no different. Ray’s much older sister Rose had emigrated to Australia in 1964 under the government’s Ten Pound Poms scheme and Ray had been pining for her and her avuncular husband Arthur ever since.

Granada TV approached with a commission for an ‘experimental’ programme collaboration with playwright Julian Mitchell. Ray had an idea that centred around a salt-of-the-earth carpet layer, and his existential crisis within a post-war Britain that didn’t look after people of his age, or ilk, any more. Arthur the rock musical (or “pop documentary”, as Ray calls it now), loosely themed on his brother-in-law’s life, was conceived.

Causing a little consternation, long-time Kinks bassist Pete Quaife had left, but the line-up of lyricist/vocalist (and guitar/keyboardist) Ray, his brother Dave (vocals/guitar), mainstay drummer Mick Avory and new bass player John Dalton began the recording process at Ray’s manor in Borehamwood in May 1969.

The songs ranged from celebrating the England Arthur grew up in (Victoria and Young And Innocent Days) to going to war (Mr Churchill Says), the death of his brother in battle (Yes Sir, No Sir) and the dangle of the Utopian carrot for emigration in Australia.

The sleeve, by Bob Lawrie, was all flag-waving, 1911 Coronation cup nostalgia with a Terry Gilliam-esque visual flair and a massive cartoon kangaroo in boxing gloves in the gatefold’s centre. Musically, tropes from Village Green and Something Else remained, with music hall, brass bands and baroque pop mixed with strings, late-60s shaggy rock and Ray’s wry observations.

Two tracks reign: Australia, a jaunty marketing jingle turned into a wonderfully loose jazz-jam, and the melancholic, misguided Englishman’s-home-is-his-castle metamorphic suite Shangri-La.

The album was released to acclaim but low sales; the TV show was pulled due to lack of finance — and the band had been beaten to the rock-musical by The Who’s Tommy.

Oddly, Arthur’s time seems to be now, 50 years on, perfectly suited to Brexit and an era of broken governmental promises. It has finally debuted as a play on BBC Radio 4 as well. And the real Arthur? Ray visited him just before he died, and apologised for putting him at the centre of the story. It was fine — Arthur was flattered. How could you not be?

In July 1973, a week after announcing Ziggy Stardust’s retirement, David Bowie flew to France to record an album of 60s-era cover versions. Although the resulting Pin Ups remains the dark horse of his 1970s catalogue, it captures Bowie at his most relaxed, and his right-hand man Mick Ronson at the height of his powers. Even Starmen need to come down to earth now and then.

Consider David Bowie’s gravity-defying release schedule of the early 1970s: Hunky Dory, December 1971. Ziggy Stardust, June 1972. Aladdin Sane, April 1973. Even by the standards of the era, that’s prolific. Then consider that all three are classics, two of them regulars on Greatest Albums round-ups. Then throw in constant touring, press and the day-to-day of trying to live up to lofty accolades such as “brilliant songwriter”, “darkling prophet” and “TS Eliot with a beat”. Bowie may not have been ready to ‘kick it in the head when he was twenty-five’ (he was 26), but he sure needed a breather to recharge his creative batteries.

His idea of a break was a walk down Memory Lane – in this case Wardour Street in London’s Soho – to a time when hewas a mod teen at the Marquee club, soaking up sounds by his favourite bands, such as The Pretty Things, Pink Floyd, Them, The Yardbirds and The Who.

Bowie planned to repay the debt of inspiration with an album of cover versions. And really, he’d already been indulging his fanboy tendencies with homage songs to Warhol, Dylan and the Velvets. There was also Let’s Spend The Night Together on Aladdin Sane. Even the Ziggy Stardust character was a kind of mash-up tribute to Iggy Pop and Vince Taylor.

The vacation began on a dramatic note. On July 3, 1973, Bowie closed out an 18-month world tour at Hammersmith Odeon. There had been triumphs along the way (two sold-out nights at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, later turned into a live album) and disappointments (more than a few venues in America’s heartland were half-empty, audiences lukewarm to a flame-haired androgynous alien). If the Rock ’N’ Roll Suicide finale at Hammersmith didn’t make it clear enough, Bowie famously announced: “This is not only the last show of the tour, it’s the last show we’ll ever do.”

Explaining himself to the NME that summer, Bowie said of Ziggy: “The star was created; he worked, and that’s all I wanted him to do. Anything he did now would just be repetition, carrying it on to the death. Now he’s up there, there would be very little point in doing anything else with him.”

If fans were shocked, imagine how the Spiders From Mars felt. Bowie’s manager Tony Defries informed guitarist Mick Ronson and pianist Mike Garson that they would be joining Bowie and producer Ken Scott the following week for recording sessions in France. Drummer Woody Woodmansey was fired – on the day of his wedding, in fact – and replaced by Aynsley Dunbar.

“I was officiating at Woody’s wedding and had to tell him he was let go,” Bowie’s long-time pianist Mike Garson tells Classic Rock. “I felt terrible. He was my friend. They were all my friends. But it wasn’t a personal thing with David – it was his musical restlessness. He had to stretch his wings, just like when Diana Ross left The Supremes. These people have to go on and do other things.

"Of course, we all take it personally, he continues. "Every album of David’s I didn’t play on, I wish I played on. I took personally. But it was just him saying: ‘This is the direction I’m going in now, what I’m hearing next.’”

“It was a dreadful way to let the band go,” Suzi Ronson tells Classic Rock. “David was so cold to have done it like that. It took Woody a long time to come around, and I understand that completely. The Spiders were a fantastic band. They didn’t deserve that.”

Reportedly, an invitation was extended to Cream’s Jack Bruce to replace Trevor Bolder on bass, but Bruce declined and so Bolder stayed on. But it would be the final album for both him and Mick Ronson. On July 9, Bowie took the boat and train from London to Paris, then a limo to the Château d’Hérouville, an 18th-century castle outside the city that had been converted into a 16-track recording studio. “A studio where you could sleep, be fed, record on your own schedule and never leave the premises?” says Garson. “That was an unprecedented, amazing thing at the time. I loved it. It was a magical place.”

In the outside world in July 1973, US President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal was deepening by the day, the Soviet Mars 5 space probe launched, and three separate commercial jets crashed in the space of a month. Almost symbolically, legendary actress Veronica Lake, whose coiffed look Bowie had borrowed for Hunky Dory, died the same week the Pin Ups sessions started.

Meanwhile, in the idyllic world of the Château, it was all nostalgia and sunshine, cigarettes and coffee. And rock’n’roll. Each morning, Bowie and Ronson spun a couple of 45s from Bowie’s collection for the band to listen to. They’d learn the songs, gather in the George Sand Studio, located in the Château’s converted stables, and bash them out to tape. “Most of the basic tracks were captured on the second or third take,” Garson says, “and often David would get his vocal on the first take.”

During the three weeks at the Château, visitors including Nico, Mick Rock, Ava Cherry, Suzi Fussey (the Spiders’ hair stylist, later Ronson’s wife) and Lulu (who recorded covers of Watch That Man and The Man Who Sold The World while she was there) lent the proceedings a convivial vibe.

“Meals were eaten family-style in the large kitchen,” Suzi Ronson recalls. “There was a pool outside the Château that wildlife had taken over, so no one was going in. The studio was great. The control room had a window seat that looked out over the courtyard. The rooms were French country style – not huge, but comfortable. The whole place was made of stone, so it was cold. Mick and I didn’t care. It was where we first got together, so it was a little like our honeymoon.”

The Château’s chef entertained everyone with his nightly impressions of Charlie Chaplin, and there was a green Cadillac with a driver on hand for anyone game for nightly jaunts to the Malibu Club or Crazy Horse in Paris. Ken Scott and his assistant Andy always stayed behind and played pinball, occasionally returning to the control room for further tinkering on the tapes of the final Hammersmith gig, planned as a live album (tentatively titled Bowie-ing Out).

Bowie mostly kept to himself, reading the newspaper and working on songs for his ambitious next project, a musical based on George Orwell’s novel 1984. Ronson was usually at the dining room piano, with a felt-tip pen and manuscript paper, working on his next arrangement.

And on Pin Ups, it’s Ronson who shines the brightest. His arrangements are inventive and startlingly modern in places, especially on the two centrepieces: See Emily Play (Pink Floyd’s second single) and Sorrow (a hit for The Merseys in ’66). The first is a whirlwind of dramatic scene shifts, from bass and one-finger piano to power chords and vari-speeded vocal harmonies, to interludes of dissonant noise and a modern string quartet. It plays like a forecast to the cut-and-paste music of Beck and Radiohead 25 years later.

Sorrow threads its spare elegance around a single cello line, back beat and layer-cake vocal harmonies. Again, there’s a prescience about it. In the moment where Bowie’s singing: ‘With your long blonde hair, I didn’t sleep last night,’ one can almost hear the DNA for Raspberry Beret-era Prince.

“I knew when we did these arrangements that no one would get them,” Garson says with a chuckle. “And I still didn’t care. David and Mick didn’t care. I think it’s undeniable that David affected Prince, Beck, Kate Bush, all these artists. You can hear his influence everywhere today. And those string parts that Mick wrote were magical. He was a terrific natural string writer. The fact that he wasn’t trained served him well, because he thought outside the usual boxes that arrangers think in. His guitar playing was tremendous, of course, so lyrical and strong.

“He was the perfect foil for David. Those of us who knew him weren’t surprised by the depth of his talents, but I think the public didn’t know, and still don’t. Just a once-in-a-generation talent.”

“Writing and arranging music came very easily to him,” says Suzi Ronson. “David trusted him and didn’t interfere with the process. I loved that about David. He was open to other people’s ideas, and when Mick came along, what a gift for David. He was so lucky to have found such a talented musician. Lucky for Mick, too. He found someone whose music inspired him. David’s music was calling out for Mick, and Mick did not disappoint.”

That summer, Ronno was also being groomed by Bowie’s manager Tony Defries for a solo career, which may have caused some ripples between him and Bowie. But if so, it’s certainly not apparent on the album. Pin Ups is often dismissed for being frivolous and light, but that’s a big part of its charm, especially sandwiched between the seriousness of Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs.

Ronson made it easy for Bowie to clown around behind the mic in a way that he never had before, and never would again in quite the same playful way. Rosalyn, Here Comes The Night, Friday On My Mind, they all capture the singer at his most loose-limbed and freewheeling. Significantly though, the album ends with The Kinks’ cranky Where Have All The Good Times Gone. Like Davies, Bowie had a pessimistic bent that never squared with the 60s’ sunny optimism. The run-out message of Pin Ups seems to be: “This has been fun, but time to move on now.” Much too fast to take that test indeed.

It turned out that 1973 was the year of the covers album. In June, Harry Nilsson had released A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night, a collection of Tin Pan Alley standards recorded with Sinatra’s arranger Gordon Jenkins. Laura Nyro put out Gotta Take A Miracle, remaking Brill Building-era pop. John Lennon had begun the dark odyssey of Rock ’N’ Roll with Phil Spector. But treading much closer to Bowie’s stylistic turf was Bryan Ferry, who was halfway through recording his own covers of English pop for These Foolish Things.

There are differing reports of how Ferry’s anger over the competing project played out. Some say he asked his label, Island Records, to file an injunction to prevent RCA from rush-releasing Pin Ups. Others say he bombarded Bowie with telegrams and calls at the Château d’Hérouville. Bowie certainly hadn’t forgotten Ferry’s comment to the press about how, in concert, David liked to “push all his band back, like props in their little boxes”. Either way, both sides agreed to let it be.

Released on October 19, Pin Ups entered the UK chart at No.1, with Bowie’s three previous albums lingering nearby at 13, 19 and 16 respectively (he was the best-selling album artist of the year). Led by its first single, Sorrow, it shipped 147,000 copies, then continued to sell 30,000 a week through Christmas. “It’s the kind of music your parents will never let you play loud enough!” teased the tag-line on RCA’s ad campaign, and fans loved it.

Critics were less enthused. Rolling Stone said: “Even in 1965, any of a thousand bands could have done better.” NME said: “David Bowie should know well enough not to succumb to everyone else’s idea of how-to-make-your-next-album.” John Peel said: “I’ll be glad when Bryan Ferry and David Bowie get this oldies business out of their normally diverting systems.”

Because it’s covers, Pin Ups will never have the artistic heft of Bowie’s other 70s albums, but it remains an energetic and highly charming throwaway, a kind of glossy Pop Art reassembly of 60s singles. Spending five months on the chart, it gave Bowie the respite he needed to plot his next move. The 1984 musical was scrapped after Orwell’s widow denied Bowie the rights, and its apocalyptic visions were folded into what was essentially Ziggy’s epilogue, Diamond Dogs. It was the last straight-up rock album that Bowie would make. Just ahead lay Philly soul, chilly Krautrock and the Berlin trilogy.

Bowie tipped his hand that summer by telling the NME: “The rock business has become so established, and so much like a society, that I have revolted against it. That’s what wasn’t liked; that I won’t take it seriously, and I’ll break its rules, and I won’t listen to it, and I won’t take much notice of it. It doesn’t worry me.

Although he was too restless to see it through, Pin Ups was planned as a two-part release, with the second leaning on covers of American music, such as the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Summer In The City, the Beach Boys’ God Only Knows and the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat. The version of Bruce Springsteen’s Growing Up that surfaced later as a bonus track hints at what might have been.

Mike Garson, who has been leading a worldwide tour of alumni musicians called the Bowie Celebration, says: “Over the years, David talked about doing a Pin Ups 2, even as late as 2002, but it didn’t happen. There were a lot of projects that we never got to – a Broadway show, Outside 2 and 3, a big-band album where we’d rearrange the least-known song on each of his albums.

“But I think the original Pin Ups has been overlooked for too long. That’s why I put Sorrow in the set for this tour. People say it was just a stopgap album, but it was a genius idea, another change of direction in his seventies story. I want every Bowie fan, new and old, to listen – or relisten – to it. It’s just more proof that his creativity never stopped.”

The original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock 251, published in June 2018