The shadow of cruel mortality has fallen across two of the year’s biggest metal releases, both unavoidably steeped in grief for much-loved creative talents taken far too soon. After processing Tomas Lindberg’s final At The Gates record, The Ghost Of A Future Dead, we’re confronted with the first Mastodon album without the unique voice and guitar wizardry of Brent Hinds, who quit the band last March and died five months later.

Mastodon’s previous LP, 2021’s double platter Hushed And Grim, was itself born of sorrow following the death of their long-time manager, Nick John. It was ambitious, audacious and liberally sprinkled with Mastodon’s patent genius, but attention couldn’t help flagging on a few mid-tier tunes. Nothing about Marrow Deep is mid-tier; every song pulls its considerable weight, maintaining an artisanal consistency across its comparatively concise 63 minutes.

More than once Brent declared to the press his dislike of heavy metal, bringing more of the psychedelic, progressive and punk influences to bear on the band’s sound. So perhaps it’s no surprise that this is the heaviest and most devotedly metallic Mastodon have sounded for 20 years.

After spending decades broadening their sonic palette and refining their melodic nous, many of the Atlanta outfit’s fans have long yearned for a return to the brute-force riffing and volatile aggression of their early work. The opening song’s vivid title, Barbarian’s Blood, confirms that the time is now, and the tune marauds with pugilistic intensity through Neurosis-damaged sludge chops, d-beats and exuberant guitar harmonies.

Tense, heaving chords and hammering drums continue to dominate Poisonous Weapons, but perhaps out of respectful restraint, there’s no guitar solo until the fifth song, Out Like A Lamb. When it finally arrives it makes up for the wait, new boy Nick Johnston bringing his Satriani-schooled precision to a full minute of cosmic heroism, flamboyant but maintaining a melodic melancholy.

There are still shades of 70s prog, but they’re fleeting moments of light relief among the head-caving metal. Witness the quirky notes soothing the jittery dynamics of Your Ghost Again, the intergalactic Moog in Snakes For Dinner, which features Queens Of The Stone Age frontman Josh Homme, or the burbling electric piano and dogfighting Hammond over closing epic The Three Fates, enhanced by a slavering vocal from Clutch’s Neil Fallon. The record’s most prestigious guest star - only Geezer bloody Butler - provides a bass intro to The Vanishing, the closest Marrow Deep gets to a chill-out zone, with bluesy guitars and spacey vocals building to a tumultuous crescendo.

Mastodon fans will always nitpick over this or that LP, but the band have never really put a foot wrong in 25 years, maturing from the ravenous young bucks of the early millennium to the grizzled gateway legends of today. Their development has been a thrill to behold, as has the prog-sludge scene that flourished in their wake. Marrow Deep may not shepherd us into bold new pastures, but after the first tragic breach of their line-up, it makes sense to revisit old stomping grounds with newfound purpose and profundity. Not for the first time, Mastodon have snatched joy from the jaws of heartbreak.

Marrow Deep is out August 28 via Loma Vista Recordings.

Today, 50 years on from its original release, Boston's debut album continues to be championed as a seminal touchstone in classic rock, with more than 18 million copies sold. In 2006, Classic Rock sat down with band mastermind Tom Scholz for a look back at the group’s monumental career.

A notorious workaholic and perfectionist, Boston guitarist, visionary and sonic architect Tom Scholz spent years honing and perfecting the songs that would later appear on the group’s debut album. Undeterred by a stream of record company rejection letters and the rapid depletion of his finances, Scholz forged ahead, stubbornly focused on bringing to life the ambitious and cinematic sounds in his head.

Signed to Epic Records in the mid-70s, Boston hit the airwaves with their quintessential self-titled album, electrifying rock fans with a juggernaut of gloriously melodic and radio-friendly songs including the hits More Than A Feeling, Peace Of Mind, Long Time and others. An instant smash, Boston quickly put the band’s name on the rock landscape, sparked by Brad Delp’s operatic vocals and the sublime orchestrated guitar of Scholz (occasionally augmented by bandmate Barry Goudreau).

In the wake of the unprecedented success of their first album (still one of the best-selling debuts of all time) and 1978’s follow-up, Don’t Look Back, Boston underwent a series of personnel changes (Scholz and Delp remaining the nucleus of the line-up) while releasing a string of acclaimed releases including Third Stage and Walk On.

While Scholz and company have gone on to create more spectacularly crafted rock-pop songs (Don’t Look Back, A Man I’ll Never Be, It’s Easy, Amanda), Boston remains their crowning achievement, a dazzling tour de force of brilliant songwriting, fiery musicianship, virtuoso vocals, taut arrangements and near-perfect production.

Take us through the many years it took for Boston to finally land that elusive major-label record deal.

I started around 1969. That was when I wrote my first song, which was Foreplay. It was an instrumental piece. It’s ironic that the first piece I ever wrote appeared on a best-selling 17-million-plus album. From there it was a long, long string of doing everything from buying time in so-called professional recording studios.

Back in the 70s that was incredibly expensive. It’s not like today. Today anybody can make a recording. Everybody’s got their own home eight, 16, 24, 64-track computer set-up. You can buy multi-track tape recording mixing systems for nothing off the internet. Back then it typically cost $75 to $100 for eight-track time in a studio. We’re talking 1970s dollars, so that was approximately maybe $250, maybe $300 an hour. Now picture that: somebody spending $300 an hour today to try and put down an idea they have for a demo. That’s some pretty serious pressure.

I worked at Polaroid, and the money I made at Polaroid went into recording demos. Then after I had blown enough money doing that and realising that this was just gonna cost too much, I decided I would put my own little demo studio together. I cobbled something together from a few tape machines, some that I had bought as junk and got the parts. I learned all about the technical part of tape recording at Polaroid, from a couple of friends I had there in the electronics department and some of the work I was doing.

I built my own little cheap demo recorder to start with, and gradually put a better studio together over the years. This was where I did most of the work and developed Peace Of Mind, Rock & Roll Band, More Than A Feeling, all of the songs that I wrote that appear on the first album and a couple from the second album. That whole process took until 1975.

The culmination was finally completing this last demo tape. I’d been spending money for six years in pretty large quantities – as much as I could make, basically. You graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [M.I.T.] with a master’s degree and go to work for a company and have a good job, you’re expected to do a little bit better than I was doing. Being married and looking at 30 coming up, it was time to throw in the towel. So I was gonna finish this last demo, sell the equipment and stop pissing away all my money doing these stupid recordings.

There were numerous demo tapes. I made so many tapes and sent them out, and I’d get all the rejection slips back. This started in 1971, maybe 1972. There were six songs on this final demo tape. It was Rock & Roll Band, Peace Of Mind, Something About You, More Than A Feeling, Hitch A Ride and one more. All of these demos were done in the same way. My friend Jim Masdea played drums and I would overdub all the instruments, Brad Delp would overdub all of the singing parts.

I wrapped it all up, and in the meantime some of these songs had been heard by a few companies. I had sent out a portion of that demo and suddenly got a reaction from three major labels; RCA was one, A&M Records, and possibly Columbia, but not Epic. In fact I got an incredibly terse rejection letter from a guy in the A&R department at Epic, saying: “This band has absolutely nothing new to offer” [laughs]. It was quite funny. I think later that same guy claimed that he had discovered Boston. But we still didn’t get a deal. I still had two more songs to finish that weren’t quite complete at the time. I finished those up, put the six songs together, and within a matter of a few weeks Epic came in with a good offer to make an album.

The funny thing is they wanted those songs on that demo plus some other ones, but they didn’t want that demo; it had to be recorded in a real studio. I knew I couldn’t record in a real studio. I’d gotten used to working alone. There was nobody else there when I was playing my parts. It was me running the machines and playing the guitar and the organ and the bass. I got so used to that isolation. It was the only way I could work. The only time there was someone else there was when I laid down a basic drum track with a drummer or if Brad Delp was singing his parts and I was engineer/producer. I knew that I couldn’t make that album in a so called ‘professional’ studio.

John Boylan, the producer Epic chose, offered me a deal. I would make the record in my basement and wouldn’t tell anybody, and he would take Brad and Barry Goudreau – my old friend that used to play guitar with me – and a couple guys he knew out to LA. They would record some songs out there, and Epic would think all the recording was done in LA. Let Me Take You Home Tonight was the only song that ended up being included that was recorded in LA. I think they worked on three of Brad’s songs out there. Brad had written a few songs on his own, and of course he had co-written several songs with me over the years.

Meanwhile, I would make a master with all the instruments on it back in my basement. I had to record all the songs exactly the same as they were on the demo. And not only did I record it exactly the same, I recorded it on the same equipment. It was still done in a basement studio by the same person. So it was really crazy.

We took the instrumental tracks out to LA, and Brad overdubbed the vocals. Then John Boylan and I mixed it. So the album wasn’t the actual demo tapes, it was a re-recording done exactly the same way: all the instrumental parts, with the exception of the drums, which were done by Sib [Hashian] and Jim Masdea, were done in my basement.

Having recorded the songs on your demos, did re-recording the final tracks come together more quickly?

Just the opposite. Usually when I record the first time I play something that I like and that’s the one I keep. I’m working on a tape and it’s gonna be what goes out there. It’s very easy afterwards to listen to a song and learn to play a part that you hear on the tape. I could play the parts on these songs with my eyes closed any time. But doing it the first time is very difficult.

What I had to do in this case was exactly duplicate these parts that appeared on the demo. I had only played them once when I played them for the demo, so I had to learn not just a guitar part or a lead part but everything: the bass notes, how I played each one of the rhythm chords, the sound, the touch, everything had to be the same because these people [at Epic] were expecting to hear what they’d heard on the demo but not the same recording.

It’s a bizarre story, but that’s how that first album came to be. They got basically another basement recording done the same way. The only thing that had changed was Sib Hashian played a lot of the drums instead of Jim Masdea. I preferred the demos, but there were minor improvements technically in the mastering.

You’re known as a guitarist, but you started out as a keyboard player.

I played keyboards from a very early age. I started playing piano, and then started playing organ when I was at M.I.T. in Boston, just for the fun of it. I played in some local school bands. Barry [Goudreau] and I played together under lots of different names, never for more than a few jobs. I was never able to find work. I realised there was absolutely no future in trying to play in bands in bars if I really wanted to do this and enjoy it from an artistic sense. What I really wanted to do was play music in a band and have somebody listen to it. So I stopped it all together.

Starting with the first band I was ever in, I decided that I had to learn how to play guitar, because I really liked the instrument and the way it sounded. I usually didn’t like the way that people were playing it. Slowly, over the years, I picked it up. And I’m still trying to figure out how to play that thing. Eventually I got good enough at it to get my ideas down on tape. I found that the only way that I could really get the ideas on tape that I was hearing in my mind was if I did the parts.

How did Brad Delp come into the picture?

Brad is one the best singers I’ve ever heard. How he happened to stumble into my musical life is as much a mystery to me as to everybody else. Barry had heard about him from somebody else. Brad came to a studio where I was finishing up a recording and laid a vocal track on an early attempt at a song. From that moment I knew he was the singer. He could sing high. He was awesome the moment he opened his mouth.

As a musician using his voice he had an incredible born talent. He can do a vocal line and change one little thing in it and do it over and over again. He can sing four harmonies to it and go back and do the original line and change one little thing in it. He hardly ever makes a mistake; two or three times in 30 years I’ve heard him miss something or do something wrong on stage. It’s been so shocking that nobody knows what to do, because it never happens.

Boston’s records are immaculately recorded and produced. Who were your role models in that respect?

The first person I ever heard do harmony electric guitar parts was Todd Rundgren on I Saw The Light. He was without question one of my biggest influences as an arranger. He was also the first person I knew of who could go into the studio by himself and make a record. Jimmy Page also was an influence. Very briefly on How Many More Times he played a little harmony guitar part and I thought: “Why didn’t he do that for a lot longer?” I mean, it was like two notes long. I wore that 10 seconds of vinyl out on my Led Zeppelin album almost immediately.

So that also inspired me. That’s all it took, I heard both of their pieces, totalling 20 seconds, and I knew that was what I wanted to do. And of course I had to do it playing with my own parts on tape. I’d lay a track down, and I would try a part over it and I would go back and erase it and play a different part over that.

Beyond that I would have to mention Jeff Beck, who I still think is the greatest lead guitar player of all time, and Joe Walsh because he was the funkiest; not the Hotel California stuff, I’m talking about when he was back with the James Gang. Those were my guitar influences for arranging. But it was really the classics – and I don’t mean classic rock. I’m talking about Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. Those people were power brokers in the music world. Amazing stuff. Kids don’t listen to it seriously.

For some reason, when I was a little kid I used to park myself in front of this big speaker and my parents had some classical music that they let me play. To this day I recognise the parts of great musical compositions. I don’t know who wrote it, I don’t know which symphony or who did it, but I know it. It’s part of me. It’s ingrained. It got in there at a very early age. So most of what I write when it comes to melodies, and especially arranging, comes from classical music.

Your guitar solos on Boston records are marvellously melodic and orchestrated, and they’re not flashy.

First of all, the reason that they weren’t just excuses for flashy playing is that I wasn’t a flashy player [laughs]. The notes that you choose when you try to play a guitar solo, a lot of guitar players didn’t seem to think the notes were very important; it was more important how many of them you could fit into a millisecond. It was almost like a sport activity, as opposed to a piece of art you were trying to do. So I didn’t really aspire to that kind of playing.

I didn’t know what I was gonna do on the records. I kind of knew where I was gonna put some guitar playing. I would listen to the song – the chords, the rhythm – and then I would start experimenting with it. Almost always those experimental paths took me through classical melodies. I’m not saying that everything was lifted off of Mozart or something, because it wasn’t, but I think I automatically thought in the same vein that the old-time composers thought in. So they turned out to be melodic instrumental parts. I was into the power part of it. Music, to me, was a feel-good thing, and I wanted it to take me some place other than where I was; higher was better.

When the first album, Boston, was released you were still working at Polaroid.

Yeah. I took a leave to re-record the album in a ‘professional’ studio. Which turned out to be the same basement the demo was done in. It was even a step down, because a few of the tracks on that original demo had been recorded at a studio where I had some equipment. I used to work there in the middle of the night. But that studio closed down.

So everything was totally recorded in my basement. It took maybe three- and-a-half, four months. Then I went back to work at Polaroid because I wasn’t expecting anything to happen with this music. I never thought it would be a success. I certainly didn’t think I was gonna be able to make a living off of it. I didn’t leave Polaroid until we were heading out on a headlining tour the next year.

While I was working on demos and working at Polaroid during the day, I remember once, a year or two before I got the album deal, my department manager came around and said: “Tom, listen… I’ve got to lay off a few people. We’re cutting back a little bit. You’re not on the list and I don’t want to lay you off, but I’ve got people here with houses and families and kids that I’m gonna lay off. I heard you’re making recordings in a studio, and if you’re gonna be leaving here to become some kind of rock and roll musician…”

I said: “Ed, that’s like a million-to-one shot. There’s no chance that this is gonna amount to anything. I just do that for a hobby.” He said: “Okay, I’m just checking.” As I’m leaving Polaroid a year-and-a-half, two years later, I’m in the elevator waiting for the doors to close. He comes screaming into the hallway, stops the elevator door and says: “A million to one?” [Laughs]

What are some of your memories behind some key Boston tracks, starting with More Than A Feeling?

It’s something that happens to everybody: that déjà vu feeling, or suddenly reliving something from the past because you hear the same song or the same sound that you heard on the radio at that time.

I’m not the kind of writer that has something happen and then goes and sits down and writes about it. It was just something that occurred to me as I was listening to the tracks for More Than A Feeling. I always finish the music first, and sometimes I would listen to the music for quite a long time before anything would pop into my mind. For whatever reason, this idea of writing a song about that music pulling you back into a memory got to me. Marianne was my cousin who was older than I was by a bit, and I had a crush on her when I was 13. ‘I see my Marianne walking away…’ A kid’s grade-school crush, and her name fitted, and it worked out perfectly.

What inspired the music?

Any ideas that I have for music are basically spontaneous. It usually happens when I have an instrument in my hand. A lot of times I do it purely by accident. Only rarely do I actually hear an idea in my mind. Once I have some chords and a rhythm, then I start to hear things – lead parts, bass parts – and all of it starts to come in a flood.

The initial inspiration for the rhythm part that starts off Don’t Look Back or any of those is really hard to pin down. I’m always experimenting, whether it’s on a keyboard or a guitar, and virtually everything that I ended up recording was something that just kind of happened. You start off trying to play something and end up with a song instead.

How does it feel knowing that Nirvana borrowed the More Than A Feeling riff for their grunge anthem Smells Like Teen Spirit?

It made me feel good that Nirvana listened to Boston at all and ever wanted to mention it. I didn’t hear anything that I thought was a lift at all. It’s a very awesome tune by a good band.

What about Don’t Look Back?

That was the last song I did before the album was wrapped up. It was a lucky, last-minute idea that I got. That was definitely the single that made that album work. When we’re on stage and doing fairly recent Boston songs and old songs, that one fits right in. It still sounds good when we start it off, and it still works.

Was Peace Of Mind written about people you worked with at Polaroid?

It’s not specifically about my experience at Polaroid or people around me. It was about the American experience of having to keep up with the Joneses and go up the corporate ladder and all that bullshit that people in this country buy into.

The music that sticks in my mind, whether it’s past or present, are those few gems that each of us composers comes up with once in blue moon that are so catchy that everybody wants to hear it and everybody remembers it. And that’s the great part. Writing the stuff that goes on the B-side is easy.

The reason that I had more luck with it on that first Boston album than most writers or performers is that I spent so many years doing it and being completely ignored. After six years of experimenting and coming up with ideas, I had a pretty good backlog of songs. It wasn’t like this was some corporate band that got thrown together and stuck in a studio and then a bunch of money was put into promoting it.

This was an effort that had gone on for years and years with absolutely no recognition. I mean less than no recognition. We were scorned for the entire six years. Even when we got the deal there was this local music publication and they told all about what local musicians were doing.

It went on and on in this one issue for three pages, and at the bottom, on the very last line it said: “… and the band Boston was signed by Epic Records.” [laughs] That was it. That was all the press we got in six years. We got signed to a class-A deal. It didn’t happen very often to a band from Boston. We were absolutely ignored.

Boston were slammed by the critics for being what they saw as a ‘corporate’ rock band.

That was later. We were a totally experimental band. We played in a basement. We had no success and we weren’t expecting any. We got released by a company that didn’t know what to think, and suddenly, bingo, the thing goes crazy. All of a sudden people were listening to the Boston album, and there were tons of bands that happened afterwards that had harmony guitars, harmony singing and involved arrangements.

Everybody wanted to cash in on what we had stumbled onto. We totally stumbled onto the secret of success in the late 70s, and we did it at a time when disco was the thing that was supposed to make money and be successful. All we were guilty of was stumbling onto the secret of success. We had no intention of doing so, it just kind of happened.

Epic Records promoting the band with the slogan ‘Better music through science’ rankled you.

The idea of bringing science into it seemed a little silly, because it was probably the only recording they’d released that year that had been done in somebody’s basement.

It’s often said that you’re a perfectionist. Where do you think those qualities in you come from?

I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Whatever I do I’m driven by this desire to make it as good as I can. I’m not saying I’m some wonderful person who has all these lofty goals. It doesn’t matter what it is. If I’m cleaning out the kitchen – which I rarely do – I gotta do it right.

Hasn’t that sense of perfection worked in your favour?

Well it has with the music. It’s just part of me. It’s what I do. Maybe that is a facet of my personality that has made this work for me. When I was putting songs together and I’d play a guitar part to it, I would sit back and listen and go, “Well, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll have some better ideas.” I’d do it again the next day and next week and rewrite the lyrics three different times.

I’ve spent six months making a recording of a song that I’ve thrown out. I’ve done things like that over and over again. It’s just something that I have to do. I have to do it the best I can do it. I never claimed that anything I did was better than anyone else or even that great, it’s just that when I’m doing it I feel incomplete if I haven’t given it my best shot.

How did you approach performing the songs from the first two Boston albums live?

It’s not supposed to be the same thing as a studio performance. A studio performance is like a piece of art that you put together like an oil painting. A live performance is more like a basketball game: you go out and do the best you can, and you never know what’s gonna happen.

Looking at it now, why do you think the Boston album is such a classic record?

I didn’t expect the first album to sell. But I think that’s what happens when you put somebody in a basement and let them experiment with something for six years, and then you only take the best things that happened and put them on one record. You end up with a lot of good music that people like.

At the time of the release of the follow-up, Don’t Look Back, in 1978, you suggested that it was unfinished.

I believe the album was only 32 minutes, and I felt it was always a song short. Perhaps I should have waited to see what other songs I could have come up with. It was very rushed along, finishing the album. I’m not particularly happy with the mixes on that.

Part of that was the enormous pressure I was getting from the people that wanted to make money off of it. That was the last time I let that affect anything that I did. The individual acting as manager was out of my life from that point on. As far as music was concerned it was the last time I did anything for CBS Records [of which Epic was a subsidiary]. I decided that wasn’t gonna happen again. If they were gonna get pushy about it, the deal was I would make the records and when they were done they could release them. Now I love Don’t Look Back, because I remastered it and got it the way I like it.

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 98, in October 2006. A remastered 50th anniversary edition of the album, including a bonus disc of "lost" demos, is available to pre-order now.

The personal tragedies that befell Neil Peart in 1997 looked likely to end Rush’s career. He lost his daughter in a car crash; then, just 10 months later, he lost his wife to cancer. Knowing she’d died of a broken heart, the drummer took off on his bike. He wrote a song and a book about his travels; then, finally returned to the Rush fold with Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson.

The result was 2002’s Vapor Trails – and while fans were delighted to welcome their heroes back, they were perhaps less delighted with the album. In 2010 guitarist Lifeson told Prog about the trio’s feelings on their work at the time.

“I’m not sure what kind of band we would have been if we hadn’t taken that time off. Who can tell? It was four years. but we certainly didn’t stop. I produced and did TV stuff – it was just that playing in Rush at that point wasn’t an option.

“Then, when we did reconvene for Vapor Trails, it became this most emotional and powerful record. We think very highly of that record, but there are things wrong with it. The way it sounds… it could have been better recorded. We would have done things in a different way. But I suppose we weren’t thinking straight – no, not that; it was just very raw, very visceral, you know?

“A lot of that stuff on there is first takes and demos, but because of what had happened and how we felt, we didn’t want to re-record. They felt too precious in a way. We were very protective of those songs at that time; we were all feeling very tender about it.

“Rich Chycki, my engineer, re-remixed One Little Victory and Earthshine for Retrospective III (2009) and they sounded just great. I’m not a big fan of those compilations, to be honest. They come and go; they’re contractual obligation things.

“But we’d all been feeling the same way about the sound of Vapor Trails. We’ve talked about revising the sound – we’ve talked about it a lot. I guess enough time’s passed now.

“I think we’re more curious than anything to see how it would sound. Now having heard what Rich has done with some of those songs too, it’s really made us think about it a lot more.”

Rumors continued to circulate until Rush confirmed the release of an updated Vapor Trails in 2013, remixed and remastered by David Bottrill. That year Prog declared the results to be “deeply satisfying” and worth the long wait.

“We now get an album with more definition (How It Is, The Stars Look Down and Sweet Miracle all reveal greater detail and warmth), with noticeably less clipping or distortion on the guitars (listening to heavyweight opener One Little Victory ceases to be an endurance test) and greater dynamic contrast on almost every track – less noise and more room for the music to breathe.

“During the instrumental breaks towards the end of Ceiling Unlimited, Rush came across as an ill-disciplined bar band, raucously battling each other to be heard. Now everything has its own space and suddenly what sounds suspiciously like a guitar solo appears, hopelessly submerged or completely missing formerly, adding an extra welcome bonus.

“Taken on its own merits, and in the context with their back catalogue… Vapor Trails emerges as a more nuanced and, fittingly, more human album than Rush fans may remember.”

Canterbury legends Soft Machine are to have their most creative period celebrated with a massive 17-disc box set, Slightly All The Time Recordings 1970-1974, released through Sony Music on October 30.

Spread across a mammoth 14 CDs and three Blu-rays, the set collects the five albums the band recorded for Columbia Records between 1970 and 1973 - Third (1970), Fourth (1971), Fifth (1972) and Sixth (1973) - all newly remastered from the original ¼” tapes. It also includes all of their extant BBC sessions (half of which are unreleased) and a generous selection of rare and previously unavailable concert recordings from Europe (UK/France/Switzerland), as well as a book featuring brand-new liner notes from Prog writer Sid Smith.

Compiler Mark Powell, head honcho of Esoteric Recordings, has also unearthed an entirely different set of recordings of Fifth, as well as over six hours of superb audio-visual material gathered from European TV broadcast archives, almost all of which has never been issued before, such as Paris 1970, Brussels 1971, the complete Berliner Jazztage performance and the BBC TV appearances on An Anatomy Of Pop and Full House.

The band have shared a video of them performing Virtually Parts 1-3 (from 1971's Fourth) from Beat Club in 1971, which you can watch below.

Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, a peer of the band back in the late 60s and early 70s, and who also produced drummer Robert Wyatt's second solo album, 1974's Rock Bottom, commented, "If there really was a UFO Club house band, it was a title shared between The Soft Machine and (the) Pink Floyd. Even though the musical influences could not have been more different, I tend to think that the one ingredient that both bands were unique in providing was playing music that was simply impossible to dance to.

"I don't think there was any rivalry between us. I think we probably huddled together for comfort as Northern Soul music and the Top Rank ballrooms topped the bill. We did become friends, and I have happy memories of spending time - I think in the Chelsea Hotel, or Max’s Kansas City in NYC – waiting to head out to attempt to conquer the American mid-west. And in later years I had the privilege of producing Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom album as well as appearing on Top Of The Pops with Andy Summers in pre-Police mode as a fill-in guitar player to accompany Robert.

"Although Pink Floyd were to head down a very different musical path in the years to come, I do clearly remember being deeply impressed by the musicianship of Soft Machine. That modern jazz influence was something I could only wonder at and certainly couldn’t emulate! I’m looking forward to reacquainting myself with some happy memories as well as good music."

Pre-order Slightly All The Time Recordings 1970-1974.

The story of Helmet in the early '90s isn’t one that can be effectively told through the usual checklist of music industry awards and accolades. There aren’t any easy-reference stats or figures that speak to their true status or impact. Instead, for a sense of where they were at, and what the world thought back then, it’s instructive to turn towards the era’s indubitable bastions of good taste and distinction, Beavis and Butthead.

In a 1993 episode of their hit MTV show entitled Beware Of The Butt, Helmet's video for Unsung, the sole single from the New Yorker’s second album Meantime, was aired. Following some entirely predictable sniggers at the quartet's chosen band name, our adolescent anti-heroes briefly fell silent in appreciation.

“If you, like, saw these guys in the street,” Butthead sagely noted, “you wouldn’t even know that they’re cool.”

“They look like normal guys… Like us!” Beavis giggled, the duo duly proceeding to air guitar and headbang as the song frantically raced to a finish.

Ignoring the fact that this insight and wisdom was preceded by a scene in which the pair had exposed their asses at the local drive-thru, alongside a rearranged marquee message reading, ‘Hello, look at our butts’, such a resounding endorsement was, um, not to be sniffed at. In the 1990s, if Beavis and Butthead said you sucked, you probably sucked. But if they decided you were cool, it was kind of a big deal.

For Helmet, this endorsement represented a new level of mainstream arrival, and approval. Scoring a double hit of horns-up appreciation on a TV show being beamed into the homes of untold millions of impressionable teens around the world left a cultural imprint, however archaic such influence might sound to anyone too young to have experienced life pre-internet.

The segment was a watershed moment for the quartet, another somewhat surreal milestone in a whirlwind couple of years, which saw them emerge, in the post-Nirvana goldrush, as one of the principal acts courted and coveted by major labels desperate to unearth the next big thing. Strange as it may seem in hindsight, Helmet were considered serious contenders.

There were legitimate reasons for this optimism too. The four piece - vocalist guitarist Hamilton, Australian guitarist Peter Mengede, bassist Henry Bogdan and drummer John Stanier - had notched-up impressive sales of 40,000 for their 1990 debut studio album, Strap It On. For context, that level of return ensured that the band’s parent label, Minneapolis-based indie Amphetamine Reptile, could continue to do business throughout the decade, releasing glorious noise-rock records from Melvins, Today Is The Day, Chokebore, Cows, Cosmic Psychos and more.

With the buzz of that breakthrough came the inevitable A&R clamour. At its height, it’s rumoured that there were as many as 22 labels involved in the bidding war for the band’s signature. In the end, Interscope Records would be the victors, thanks to a reported one million dollar signing fee and by virtue of their overtures pre-dating the bandwagon-hopping opportunists.

“They were interested in us before Nirvana even broke,” frontman Page Hamilton told Spin magazine in September 1992. “And that's good because we're obviously not it [the next big thing]. I actually had an A&R guy at one label tell us that we were the next U2. At a certain point it just becomes ludicrous.”

Helmet being hyped as the next anything, let alone big, underlined a fundamental misunderstanding of what made them such an intriguing prospect in the first place.

When they emerged at the tail end of the ‘80s, long hair, denim and leather was still the unofficial uniform of hard rock and metal true believers. Grunge would go some way towards breaking down those image-centric norms, but inevitably, the so-called Seattle scene’s own look soon became codified and co-opted into new cliches. It wasn’t until Helmet came along that image became somewhat optional. Suddenly, four regular guys with short hair, T-shirts and work pants were awkwardly vying for stardom. Even if they hadn’t intended to.

It wasn’t just image archetypes that changed either. Until then, the guitar solo was still of central importance to a lot of popular rock hits. Eschewing all such extraneous frippery, Helmet favoured a no-nonsense, almost workmanlike approach to their art. No frills, no fat, no fucking about. The cover for Meantime fell in line with this aesthetic, borrowing a 1979 image from urban documentarian photographer David Plowden, entitled Puddler In Blast Furnace Cast House, Steel Mill. East Chicago, Indiana. Just as hard-bitten and industrial was the sound of the music contained therein.

Clocking in at a shade under 37 minutes, its 10 tracks are both economic and blistering, kickstarted by the rolling, tumbling stomp of the Steve Albini-engineered In The Meantime.

At first it’s the rhythm section that hits. From start to finish, John Stanier’s drums and Henry Bogdan’s bass work in tandem with a piston-like precision. Then there’s the riffs. The endless, bludgeoning riffs. Jazz-trained Hamilton’s staccato style synergised with Peter Mengede’s rhythm guitar perfectly, bulking out the duo’s drop-D tuned blunt force power. An employee at CBGB's once approvingly likened the result to "icepicks to the forehead".

In full flow Helmet were a quartet to be reckoned with, virtuosic in an entirely new and different way that would spark inspiration that fired off in a multitude of musical directions. Although rarely celebrated for his vocal ability or lyrical contributions, the full-throated bark of Hamilton’s delivery and occasionally caustic barbs (‘To die young is far too boring these days’) played their part too. As did Wharton Tiers’ engineering and the triggered samples and clinical style of Andy Wallace’s mixing job. Supposedly irked by his remix of In The Meantime, when Steve Albini was in negotiations to work with Nirvana on In Utero he insisted on a clause being added into the contract stipulating that Wallace would be forbidden from touching his recordings.

These disparate, combined disciplines worked a charm for Helmet. It might not have made them the next Nirvana, much less U2, but despite lacking even a sliver of commerciality, Meantime met with success, peaking at number 68 on the Billboard 200, and receiving, in 1994, RIAA classification as a 'gold' record in acknowledgement of 500,000 sales in the US alone.

Such numbers opened doors. In time, the band would go on to feature in big deal video games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and secure prime spots on Hollywood movie soundtracks like Judgment Night and The Crow.

Despite charting higher than its predecessor (hitting number 45 in the US) 1994 follow-up album Betty didn’t sell as well, but it was just as powerful, widening the band’s musical scope and producing a clutch of cult classics in its own right. Helmet would eventually breakup in 1997, only to return for a second stint in 2004, albeit with Page Hamilton the only founding member to have performed under the name since then.

That classic line-up of Hamilton, Mengede, Stanier and Bogdan undoubtedly captured something special on Meantime, however. Its influence and legacy can be found all over the alternative music and metal spheres. Through the years, Helmet songs have been covered by artists as diverse as Soulfly, former touring partners Faith No More, and Pig Destroyer. In 2016 a tribute album, Meantime Redux featured covers of the record (among other band tracks) by a range of underground noisemakers, from KEN Mode to Fuck The Facts. Listen closely and you can trace a line through artists such as Tool, System Of A Down, Far, Filter, Silverchair, Norma Jean, and a host of nu-metal acts, forever indebted to the sound and spirit of the New Yorkers. Without Helmet, Deftones might not even exist. As they started to come into their own on 1997’s Around The Fur, that influence couldn’t be clearer.

“Every band should wish to aspire to the originality and genius of Helmet,” the Sacramento band's late bassist Chi Cheng once proclaimed. “[They are] an inspiration to fans and musicians alike.”

In saluting a band who defy easy classification, perhaps it's best to defer to Beavis and Butthead, even 30 years on. Helmet are cool. And Meantime will forever remain an ice-cold classic.

What unites a mysterious god said to be older than Odin, the motto of Blackadder’s General Melchett and a cross-country skiing blastbeat? The surprising answer is Heimdal, Enslaved’s 16th album, released in 2023. Just before its arrival, Grutle Kjellson and Ivar Bjørnson took Prog inside the masterpiece.

In Norse mythology, when the great and terrible Ragnarök arrives to lay waste to the Nine Realms, the gods will know the hour has come when Heimdall blows the Gjallarhorn to rally the warriors to the final battle. Heimdal, the 16th album from Enslaved, opens with the sound of that fabled horn – and the god who guards the Bifröst bridge casts a long shadow over the band’s career.

The track Heimdallr appeared on 1994 debut Vikingligr Veldi. “That was one of the first songs we wrote; it was even included on a demo tape we recorded in 1992,” says vocalist and bassist Grutle Kjellson.

“Heimdall is one of the most important figures in Norse mythology and yet he is surrounded by mysticism. All the other gods and deities have clear origins. Heimdall hasn’t. He’s always been debated amongst scholars – where does he come from? Does he come from a pre-Norse mythology cult? Does he have an equivalent in other mythologies? Has he been around for longer than Norse mythology? And the answer is: probably.”

Ancient rock carvings indicate Heimdall may have been worshipped since the Bronze Age, when the cults around Odin and Thor arose. His mystery is further complicated by the fact that precious few texts have survived the passing of the centuries. “There’s The Heimdall Spell that only exists as a small fragment – it’s like two sentences and the rest is gone,” says Kjellson.

“That makes the whole thing even more interesting, even more obscure. He’s a very important figure and very fascinating. He’s been lurking in the background of our concept ever since the beginning, so we thought it was time to honour him with an album.”

To create the sound of the Gjallarhorn, the band brought in Eilif Gundersen from Wardruna, who used a replica of a 3,000-year-old bronze horn found in a bog in Denmark. “He’s a good friend of ours. He really appreciated being asked and he loved the concept,” says Kjellson.

“You can find rock carvings from the Bronze Age of horn blowers that might have been a forerunner of Heimdall. So we decided to connect the story of his horn with the replica bog horn. We also tried to simulate paddling a Bronze Age boat – that was a cool experience. It was done at a lake just nearby my house. I have some boats, so it was just a question of bringing the hornblower and his instrument.”

The album’s lyrics were written by Kjellson and guitarist Ivar Bjørnson (the pair co-founded Enslaved 32 years ago). The lack of records on Heimdall afforded them the freedom to explore their own interpretations. “It’s a more liberal way,” says Bjørnson. “You reach a node and that gives you an association in one direction, and you just go with it – you don’t have to stay on topic, so to speak. It takes on a life of its own.”

He says he can’t imagine making an album without a unifying concept, continuing the tradition of 2017’s E and 2020’s Utgard. “When we first talk about what universe to explore and the concept, it’s all floating around like inflammable gases, and it needs a spark to ignite, to go off in a direction. Then it’s all chaos from there on – everything happening at the same time, and we’re trying to manoeuvre and organise it somehow.”

Composing the music is even more instinctive, “because it’s really hard to put into words and that has a tendency to become limiting,” says Bjørnson. “On the title track for Heimdal, when the god appears on the scene, the music needs to be heavy so it’s understood. Music is the current that flows through; the lyrics are made as we go along and that influences the music and back and forth.

“It’s hard to separate – and really, I don’t think I would separate them. It’s like a bike ride down a very steep slope; you just have to keep going because the moment you start thinking, it’s going to get ugly.”

Bjørnson says his relationship with the band’s catalogue and chronology is not really linear. Many things in life can give me something to measure against, to tell you, ‘This is 30 years ago,’ but with the band it’s not like that. Some things that are distant, from the beginning, feel like they just happened. In some places time is folded, in other places it’s crumbled up, and in other places it’s a straight line.”

He continues: “I guess ‘Enslaved’ is a pretty good description of our sound. It’s an abstraction – it doesn’t really deal with everyday frustrations or teenage heartbreak. It’s more of a summary of life lived over 30 years, like the human experience, I hope, in a broader sense. We are partly human at least… Half bionic!”

Enslaved inhabit a singular place in the musical pantheon, after outgrowing the Norwegian black metal scene they emerged from in Bergen, western Norway. “To the diehard metal fans, we’re definitely too experimental, too proggy, whatever you want to call it,” says Kjellson. “And we might be too heavy for the equivalents on the proggier side. But it’s been crucial not to have those things in mind. We just want to make our own contemporary, favourite music, and that obviously changes. Your musical horizon hopefully expands.”

They’ve found that their breadth of vision pulls in a wide range of listeners, as Kjellson notes: “There’s a wonderful audience in the United States because you have the youngsters in the first five rows, then you have the middle-aged, grumpy black metal people in the middle, and then you have the old prog rock hippies in the back. It’s diverse – I love it!”

Heimdal spans the acoustic folk moments of Forest Dweller and the slamming heaviness of Caravans To The Outer Worlds, while Congelia taps into their metal roots. Bjørnson wrote that song around an idea from drummer Iver Sandøy. “Iver suggested there should be a song that’s based on the black metal cross-country skiing blastbeat and accompanying riff. I don’t know if that was done because he knew it would make life hard for me!

“I wanted to mix it up with the things I really love: 70s, early 80s heavy metal guitar riffs and that 70s sequencer, synthesiser thing. How to mix that in with the proto black metal? It’s the other way around from a lot of stuff when you just add some black metal on top of something, like a catchy rock riff with some screeching or a blastbeat, or ‘classical meets heavy’ – yawn. This was turning it around: having a total black metal thing and trying to mix other things in with it.”

The difficulty of forcing such disparate ingredients together required a degree of stubbornness from Bjørnson, who refers to the immortal words of General Melchett in Blackadder Goes Forth: “If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.”

He says: “It turned out to be true! With the drumming and Grutle’s vocals – the very definition of black metal vocals for me – I knew that Jens [Bogren] would get it glued together in the mix. It was a bit nerve-racking until we got the mix set with Jens. Then I could take down my General Melchett avatar in my room and stop sacrificing animals to him every night!”

From the melodic metal of Kingdom to the frantic barrage unleashed in The Eternal Sea, there’s one principle that guides the writing process. “Although we’re experimental and someone might call us progressive,” says Kjellson, “we listened to a fair share of classic rock and pop in our childhoods. So we know we need to write songs. It’s not 72 different parts; we have to make songs. That’s a good thing to keep in mind.”

After four decades and 16 albums, the music has evolved and the fanbase might be more diverse, but the essential visceral thrill of making music together in front of an audience remains undimmed. “The energy is still there – the anticipation before we go onstage,” says Kjellson. “Of course, everything else has changed. It’s a lot different to go on tour in 2022 compared to van-touring in Mexico in 1995. In those days even the plane ride was fantastic because I had free drinks. Wow!

“It still feels almost exactly the same as it did on the first shows in 1991, and I think that’s amazing. That’s the main driving force. If those feelings disappear, it’s time to call it a day, but that’s still present, and that’s fantastic.”

“It’s such a big part of who we are,” adds Bjørnson. “Enslaved have become juggernauts of their own and, as Grutle says, the core is still there – being a performing musician. We’ve done somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 gigs since the start. I still have that one second where I think, ‘I should just take off and not do the gig.’ I still haven’t done it. But it would be awesome to do it one night. The guys turn around: ‘Where the fuck did Ivar go?’ I text them, ‘Couldn’t do it. Too nervous.’

“But I love feeling, ‘This is the last thing I want to do in the world – I’m really nervous now.’ And you just do it, and it’s great.”

At the height of grunge - and the nascent Britpop scene – of the early 1990s, Levellers were the whipping boys of both the priggish weekly music press and pious anarcho-punk underground. The former, critical of success in which they didn’t have a hand, dubbed them ‘crusty’, the latter refused to have any truck with those perceived to be co-opting their scene for major-label commerce.

Formed in 1988 by vocalist/guitarist Mark Chadwick and bassist Jeremy Cunningham, Levellers grew out of Brighton’s punk squat scene. Named after the 17th-century political movement that campaigned for rule by the people and equal rights, the band were synonymous with the late-80s/early-90s free-festival milieu, the traveller community and associated counterculture.

Cunningham and Chadwick added drummer Charlie Heather and fiddle player Jon Sevink. Guitar and mandolin player Simon Friend chose Levellers over New Model Army, completing the line-up for Levelling The Land onwards. Consecutive gold-certified albums followed throughout the 90s.

Levellers were influenced by the punk of The Clash, the ideology and DIY ethics of Crass and Zounds, the folk/punk of The Pogues and the folk rock of The Waterboys, but perhaps most closely by cult Brighton folkpunk band McDermott’s Two Hours.

Levellers’ profile exploded – from their relentless touring as much as record sales. First stepping outside of the local scene and then the student circuit, they eventually headlined Glastonbury 1994, playing to a then record-breaking audience of 300,000.

Reinvesting back into their scene and community, they bought disused Brighton factory the Metway for use as a co-operative recording studio and space for local musicians and artists. Philanthropic, they donated to charities and campaigned against the Criminal Justice Bill. In 2003 they established the anti-sponsorship and anti-branding annual festival Beautiful Days.

Negotiating the pressures of initial rapid success, the resilient family-like band have stuck it out for almost 40 years. Sometimes mistakenly written off as a 90s band, recent albums demonstrate not just a return to form but also masterly songwriting. Total record sales have now reached six million.

"I identify with the Levellers," said fellow British folk artist Billy Bragg in the 2014 Levellers documentary film A Curious Life. "I feel we carry on a tradition of music that says something and means something."

...and one to avoid

Moving Pictures is a benchmark album for Rush – and it sounds as fresh today as when, after five months of often fraught work, the band sat in a playback at Quebec’s Le Studios and declared it was finished.

Side one of the original vinyl featuring Tom Sawyer, Red Barchetta, the instrumental YYZ and Limelight was faultless. Flipping it over, we heard a newly matured Rush – each aged 27 or 28 at the time – rein in the epic The Camera Eye (inspired by John Dos Passos) to 11 exhilarating minutes, terrify us with Witch Hunt, then set our techno pulses racing with Vital Signs.

“Moving Pictures was such a huge record for us," Geddy Lee told Prog. "That level of success was like nothing we had ever experienced before. But we had a lot of ‘moments’ with that record – it was a tough one to finish.

“Two songs came together pretty smoothly: Limelight and Red Barchetta, which was such a great thing to play live, off the floor. Tom Sawyer was the opposite, a late bloomer. We had so much trouble getting the guitar solos down and balancing the bottom end. But after a lot of struggling, we nailed it, and it was so powerful. We were going, ‘Shit, where did that come from?’"

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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 February 1981

• Killers - Iron Maiden
• Difficult to Cure - Rainbow
• Fire Down Under - Riot
• Face Value - Phil Collins
• St. Valentine's Day Massacre - Motörhead & Girlschool
• Another Ticket - Eric Clapton
• Working Class Dog - Rick Springfield
• Point of Entry - Judas Priest
• Bangkok Shocks, Saigon Shakes, Hanoi Rocks - Hanoi Rocks
• Captured - Journey
• Feels So Right - Alabama
• The Fool Circle - Nazareth
• My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - Brian Eno & David Byrne
• Stray Cats - Stray Cats
• The League of Gentlemen - Robert Fripp and The League of Gentlemen
• Wild-Eyed Southern Boys - 38 Special

What they said...

"On Seventies albums like 2112 and Hemispheres, Rush mastered the high-prog epic. Moving Pictures was the record where they proved they could say as much in four minutes as they previously had in 20. Songs like Tom Sawyer, Limelight, and the Police-like Vital Signs showcased the trio’s superhuman chops in a radio-ready framework, while more adventurous tracks like the Morse code-inspired instrumental YYZ and the synth-heavy suite The Camera Eye found them tastefully streamlining their wildest ideas. (Rolling Stone)

"Witch Hunt and Vital Signs remain two of the trio's more underrated rock compositions. The former is a moody collage of shouted voices, blasting guitar riffs, and dynamic crunch with sinister vocals, while the latter offers syncopated synths skillfully melding new wave and polished reggae with prog. Moving Pictures proved Rush still had vast, uncharted musical territory to explore." (AllMusic)

"To write a manifesto is folly; songs become manifestos. Such is the case with Tom Sawyer. Rush’s signature song embraces technology without succumbing to its dazzle. 1981’s version of Mark Twain’s 19th-century warrior with a mean, mean stride does many things that make sense only in Peart and co-lyricist Pye DuBois’ notebook, but the enthusiasm of Lifeson’s guitar fills and Peart’s nervous triplets are matched by Lee’s Oberheim-OBX solo." (Pitchfork)

What you said...

Mike Canoe: What to write about an album about which just about everything has been written? On any other day, I would probably point to Permanent Waves or Farewell to Kings as my favourite Rush album, but as soon as Tom Sawyer starts, I realise that there is only one answer and that answer is Moving Pictures.

Side A is practically perfect in every way: 1) Tom Sawyer's a megahit I've never gotten tired of, 2) Red Barchetta is one of the best story songs ever written by anybody ever (and probably the best one written by Rush, sorry, Prince By-Tor and 2112) 3) YYZ was probably the first favorite instrumental of every male in my age bracket (and the first airport code we knew) 4) Limelight might be the most uplifting song about the woes of stardom ever written.

Side B was a tougher nut to crack. It took me a long time to appreciate the long The Camera Eye and, through proximity bias, it dragged down the surprisingly dark Witch Hunt with it. I am good with them now, but the last song, Vital Signs, has pretty much always been my favourite Rush song. Granted, my music experience was still pretty limited in 1981, but I had never heard anything quite like it, and I still think it's a jawdropper. I've made a point to avoid the setlist but would, of course, love it if Vital Signs made an appearance.

I was set to see Rush in June, but both that show and the rescheduled show got postponed. Hoping everyone is healthy and happy in September and their gear is exactly where it's supposed to be.

Andrew Cumming: Are Rush perpetually underrated? Sure, they've got a huge fan base. But there always seems to be a caveat. Too nerdy, too proggy, don't like the vocals. Rush could do it all - classic rock, classic pop, prog, hard rock. That six-album run from 2112 to Signals has to be one of the best six-album runs in all of pop and rock music (is there a better run?). Moving Pictures comes late in the sequence but showcases all of the above. Classic rock (Tom Sawyer, YYZ), classic pop (Limelight), prog (most of side two). It's about as close to perfect as you can get. Shame it's not more widely recognised as so.

Mark Herrington: Moving Pictures is a great progressive rock album, which I bought on release in 1981.

I thought I’d look at each track in my order of preference. Witch Hunt has always been my favourite on Moving Pictures and stood out the first time I heard it. Dark, atmospheric and menacing - it immediately appealed to my Sabbath leanings. Tom Sawyer is a great opener and one of their defining signature songs. Limelight: soaring vocals, great guitar and another fantastic track. Red Barchetta is a great track, with its strong sci-fi narrative. Camera Eye has one of the highlights of the album in the vocal passage that begins with “They seem oblivious to a soft spring rain..” and ends with “The focus is sharp in the city”. Its only drawback is a slightly overlong intro. YYZ: an epic, driving instrumental. Those six tracks are all top-drawer rock classics.

The one track that is not on the same level is the last track, Vital Signs. It does not appeal to me as an album closer, where I’d prefer something epic, and I don’t think it’s in the same class as the rest of the album. Overall though, Moving Pictures is an album that is one of the best in this area of classic rock.

Evan Sanders: What a great album, among those that were ubiquitous in the vinyl collections of my teenage friends back when it was released. Rush had an unusual place among my teenage buddies. Not quite as hard-rocking as Van Halen or Aerosmith, and their members didn’t have the girl-friendly sex appeal compared to others, and their progressive history sometimes put them in a category with bands like Yes and King Crimson. They were most popular among my musician friends, who admired the technical excellence of their playing.

With Moving Pictures, Rush probably took their most successful step in bridging the worlds of prog rock and classic rock. The four songs on side one deserve to be on a list of best album sides ever. And the best song of those four might be the instrumental YYZ. The second side is closer to their progressive roots, and I wonder how many people didn’t listen to it as much, especially if they were drawn more to the classic rock sound.

Thank you to the group for giving me a reason to put Moving Pictures on repeat this week, as well as the entire Rush catalogue. And respect goes out to all of those who got to see them live in their original lineup. 9/10.

Chris Downie: A truly iconic entry, and according to many the crowning achievement in one of the greatest consecutive album runs in music history, from 1976's breakthrough 2112 to 1985's Power Windows, the majesty of Moving Pictures needs little introduction.

It's no surprise the band chose to perform this in its entirety on their spectacular Time Machine in 2011 as part of its 30th anniversary celebration; from the opening bars of Tom Sawyer to the Police-influenced Vital Signs (which foreshadowed much of what was to come on the next two albums), there isn't a weak moment to be found.

Whether this is their greatest album is a topic of many forum debates (this writer has it tied with predecessor Permanent Waves and the aforementioned 2112), but like its predecessor it sees them seamlessly transition from their pioneering prog-metal days, to a more slick, traditional song-oriented format. That said, as the 11-minute epic Camera Eye amply demonstrates, they never abandoned their roots completely. Essential listening, in a back catalogue already rammed with classics. 10/10.

Greg Schwepe: When I saw Moving Pictures was selected as this week’s album, I joked to myself, “Oh, this will be the easiest review I’ve written…ever!” Then the more I thought about it: “Oh, this could also be the hardest review I’ve ever written.” Easiest because of my familiarity with it (which I’ll delve into) and hardest because I’m not sure I could offer any new insight into what is probably the most popular album by the band.

By the time Moving Pictures was released in 1981 I was already a full-blown fan. I owned almost all of their catalogue (bought this at its release), I had already seen the band twice, and the FM rock stations where I lived in the Midwest were very Rush-centric and played them out the ying-yang.

So now you had this excellent example of the band morphing away from “whole album side songs” or a 10-15 minute song (pretty much a whole album side!) to more bite-sized (and radio-friendly length) songs. This began with the predecessor album Permanent Waves, and by the time they released Moving Pictures, they hit it out of the ballpark. But since they’re Canadian, I’ll use a hockey analogy and say this was the equivalent of scoring top shelf on the goalie from a blue line slap shot. But Geddy is a huge baseball fan, so the baseball analogy works too.

In listening for the eighth millionth time while writing this, I tried to figure out what keeps drawing me back to this album, besides the obvious great musicianship and lyrics. And if I had to narrow it down, I’d say it’s the different moods that the various songs evoke, and how I can get lost in each of these seven classics.

It’s the synthesiser lines and the “air drum in your car drum solo and I don’t care who’s watching” of Tom Sawyer. It’s the dystopian feel and excitement of Red Barchetta where you can feel yourself punching the gas on the “shining car.” It’s the Morse code intro to YYZ (Toronto’s airport code) and then the ensuing groove and locked-in guitar, bass, and drums. It’s the emotive solo in Limelight. It’s the metropolitan travelogue feel of Camera Eye where you can imagine yourself in New York and London. It’s the angry mob in Witch Hunt where you feel a part of the mob. And finally it’s the twitchy guitar riff of Vital Signs.

While hardcore Rush fans could quibble all day long about what their best album is, Rush created an album that the average rock fan or non-hardcore Rush fan will probably call their favourite. And when your songs get used in a South Park episode, well, you’re immortal.

While in college, I was able to see the actual Moving Pictures tour where many of these songs were played live for the first time, something I still mention to this day to friends; and just did again here! Then in 2010, my son and I saw the “Time Machine” tour, where they played Moving Pictures in its entirety. Talk about geeking out.

And there have been times when I will listen to this album five times in a row. So, yeah, I guess this one has had quite an impact on me. And in about a month from now, my son will fly home from halfway across the U.S., and we will make the trek to Cleveland (where I’m sure the band will do something special), where he and I will see the band together for the fourth time. Ahhh, bonding!

10 out of 10 on this one for me. I rarely give 10 ratings on these reviews, but in recalling all the reasons I liked Moving Pictures, I really couldn’t give it anything less.

Mike Sargent: My favourite Rush album is Power Windows, but objectively, Moving Pictures is the best Rush album.

Paulene Ashmore: Rush! One of my favourite bands. First came across them in my student days back in 1979. 2112 was my first purchase, followed by their self-titled debut, and I’ve been there ever since. Have my (UK) tickets for March next year, which will be my second time seeing them live since the Signals tour. And I cannot bloody wait!

Moving Pictures has to be up there as one of their best, but 2112 will always be my favourite: pompous and overblown. Just how I like it!

Dave Morgan: 45 years on and still I marvel at the musicianship. It hasn’t dated at all. 10/10.

John Davidson: Not only is this a strong contender for the best album slot in Rush's impressive and varied catalogue, but it's also a strong contender for best rock album ever made.

Tom Sawyer is a song I've heard so many times I can play it in my head without even putting the record on. But it's a rare evergreen song that never gets old.

Red Barchetta was my favourite song on the album as soon as I heard it. It remains so today. A perfect marriage of song and lyrics. Only Rush could write a classic rock "I love my car" song and turn it into a Sci Fi short story on the way.

YYZ is a great instrumental, but really blossoms live, where it became a showcase for Neil Peart's drumming. Limelight is a rare thing on a Rush album; a singalong. But Peart's lyrics explore the parasocial relationship that arises between a band and its fans. Written 25 years before social media, it is even more relevant today.

Camera Eye is the album's epic love letter to both New York and London, and it sees Rush embrace keyboards in a way that bridges the band's emerging 80s sound with the riff-rich atmospherics of Alex Lifeson's guitars. Witch Hunt brings the mood down a little with a brooding tale of the dangers of giving in to fear and groupthink. It too remains as relevant today as it did in the 1980s.

Vital Signs is the only song on the album that I don't love. The reggae-style beat and guitar riff seemed out of place at the time, but as with Camera Eye, it's the strongest guide to the evolution in style they were about to embark on in Subdivisions.

I don't think Geddy Lee delivered a better vocal performance than on this album. The fact that he could do it live, while laying down rich and complex bass parts and playing the keyboards at the same time, impresses me even to this day. 10/10.

Philip Qvist: A full-blown classic as simple as that. That amazing six-album run from 2112 to Signals was when Canada's greatest ever band was at its peak, and Moving Pictures was the jewel of that amazing run.

The best songs are the evergreen Tom Sawyer, the instrumental YYZ, their nod to their progressive roots with The Camera Eye and Red Barchetta, but this is pretty much a flawless recording.

When I first heard Tom Sawyer on the radio, I was convinced that Rush were a five- or six-piece band and not a trio, while I would never have guessed that their drummer was the band's main lyricist. I would say that Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart peaked with this 1981 release.

A classic at the time, and it still remains an absolute classic to this day. Moving Pictures is one of my Top 50 albums, and it's a 10 every day of the week.

Adam McCann: Stone cold classic. Shout out to Vital Signs, a massively underrated Rush track.

Warren Bubb: Quite probably Rush's finest album.

Adam Ranger: Good timing for me. I have been listening to a lot of Rush recently, since I got my tickets for their London shows in March next year. The UK tour for this album in 1981 was the first time that I saw Rush live.

I believe that Moving Pictures is the last truly great Rush album. I didn't much care for the albums that came after it. At least not until Roll The Bones or Counterparts anyway.

There are no filler or substandard tracks here. And for the most part, the songs are shorter and punchier than previous records. The opening of Tom Sawyer, Red Barchetta and YYZ is as good as you can get. Limelight is almost a sing-along from Rush! But not cheesy or formulaic.

Then we have the one "epic" (by which I mean an eight-minute-plus track) on the album, Camera Eye, with traditional changes of pace. Then the darker Witchhunt and finally the more quirky reggae influence of Vital Signs, a track that many don't seem to like as much but I have always loved. For some reason, it takes me back to those 1981 times more than any other track.

A strong contender for one of the best Rush albums ever. Given what went before, that's a huge compliment.

Marco Edwards: I have listened to this album more times than any of the albums featured as Album Of The Week. It is simply amazing. For once, I haven't got to think about the scoring. It will always be a 10 from me.

Brian Hart: This will be a short review because there’s nothing to say about this album except that it is a classic. It's seven songs that clock in at 39 minutes. Sweet, short, and to the point.

No need to expand on Tom Sawyer, Red Barchetta, and Limelight because they are Rush's greatest hits! YYZ is an instrumental that hits and is catchy enough to keep you interested. It’s the last three songs – The Camera Eye, Witch Hunt, and Vital Signs – that I was a little less familiar with. They aren’t on the same level as Tom Sawyer, Red Barchetta, and Limelight, but they are still very good.

Rush are another band that was just a bit before my time. I knew all their greatest hits, but I wasn’t a super fan. I regret that I never got to see them with Neil Peart. I saw Rush for the first time last month at night four in Chicago. I’ve been to well over 100 concerts in my lifetime, and I can honestly say that show was in the top three concerts (if not the best) I’ve ever seen. Geddy’s singing was excellent, Alex’s playing was incredible, and Annika Niles’ drumming is top-notch. I highly recommend seeing them if you still have a chance. I haven’t stopped listening to Rush since that concert. I am definitely a big fan. There are no skips on Moving Pictures.

Final score: 9.14 (142 votes cast, total score 1298)

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In 1974 Jethro Tull released War Child, an album Ian Anderson has described as “kind of okay.” It was the result of a failed attempt to make a movie and came while the band were still adjusting after the disasters surrounding the previous year’s A Passion Play. But Anderson regards the year of War Child’s release as containing many more significant events in music. In 2014 he told Prog what 1974 meant to him.

Ian Anderson has an interesting recollection of the music scene in 1974. “It was a time when everything was in the doldrums,” says the Jethro Tull mastermind. “By that, I don’t mean that nothing was happening, but it just appeared that no one knew what would happen next. Anything was possible.”

It was indeed a fascinating one. Monty Python’s Flying Circus ended on TV and Tiswas began. Richard Nixon resigned as US President to end the Watergate scandal, there were two general elections in Britain, and the IRA launched a bombing campaign.

Meanwhile, progressive music was in a state of tumescence, as the biggest names were regularly headlining arenas. “Well, Tull were still playing in theatres, at least in the UK,” recalls Anderson. “In November we did three nights at The Rainbow in London, instead of one night at somewhere like Wembley Arena. It suited us better.”

The London shows opened with a celebrity introduction, thereby accentuating the way prog was becoming accepted as part of the mainstream. “We got Stirling Moss, the racing driver, to do it on all three nights. I’m not sure whose idea it was. But he was one of those high-profile personalities on the after-dinner speaking circuit, and we wanted someone who wasn’t obviously from our world.

“However, even back then he was pretty elderly. The audience reaction was interesting. On the first night, some wag shouted out, ‘Where’s Jackie Stewart?’ [Stewart was one of the pre-eminent Formula One drivers of the early 70s]. I’m not certain how that went down with Stirling Moss.”

Yet it some ways, 1974 was to prove an unrequited time for Tull and Anderson. While they released the successful War Child album in October that year, that hadn’t been the original plan. In fact, War Child began life as a movie project. “There were elements of a potential storyline in our previous album, A Passion Play, and that led to me writing a detailed synopsis for a film. It was about 50 pages long, and done to hopefully enlist the aid of professionals from the movie world.”

He describes the storyline as “epitomising the post-war experiences of growing up in Britain. It was a world I knew, but wanted to examine through different eyes. It was a comedy – but more on the dark side of Monty Python than, say, a Benny Hill knockabout.”

There was certainly interest in the project from some heavyweight names. “Sir Frederick Ashton, who had only just retired as director of the Royal Ballet, agreed to be involved. And the prima ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn was also kind enough to express an enthusiasm. I also had John Cleese on board from the comedy world, and he said he’d co-write the script with me. The character actors Leonard Rossiter and Donald Pleasance also said yes to being in the cast. The only problem was that both wanted to play God.”

Things began to go off the rails for this embryonic creation when Anderson had a meeting with his namesake, director Lindsay Anderson. “He tore the whole thing to shreds and was very unkind, harsh and cruel about the film when I met him. I suspect he viewed me as an upstart, entering a world I knew nothing about. It was very upsetting to have someone you admire being so nasty about your work.”

Thankfully, Bryan Forbes was a lot kinder about the film and agreed to direct it. The real troubles came when attempts were made to get American studios to provide the finances. None were prepared to commit money. “Bryan Forbes was very much seen by them as ‘Bryan Who?’ They wanted an American director, and also American actors. At the time, there was just no interest in British cinema so they wanted to relocate the whole story to the States. But it was written in the twilight zone of dark British post-war weirdness – it would never have worked in the States.”

In the end, the process of getting the film off the ground proved too time- consuming for the peripatetic Anderson. “It can take two or three years just to get something agreed in that world, so I abandoned the idea.” He elected to adapt much of the music that had already been composed and demoed for the movie soundtrack to make a cohesive Jethro Tull album instead. To this selection were added songs originally conceived and recorded the previous year in France at Château d’Hérouville, colloquially known to the band as Château d’Isaster.

“We took Skating Away On The Thin Ice Of A New Day, Bungle In The Jungle and Only Solitaire from Château d’Isaster and reworked them for the album. There was a somewhat folksy feel on War Child. Of course, this folk theme was more developed on later albums.”

The 2014 deluxe version offered the chance to hear the original orchestral demos recorded with the movie in mind. “I have to admit that I think these are of dubious value. They were written as movie music, and Tull fans have to appreciate they don’t feature the band much at all. I didn’t play flute or guitar on any of it.

“I think Martin Barre played some classical guitar, and John Evan does some piano parts. Barrie Barlow could have done some percussion. I’m not too sure Jethro Tull fans will want to sit through this stuff. It’s really background music, composed by myself and David Palmer, as he was known back then [now Dee Palmer]. Are they relevant to the album? I don’t know. They’re there for oddity value, really.”

Anderson has even been surprised by some of the material he has unearthed from 1974. “I came across a couple of sophisticated demos I’d forgotten we’d recorded. But then we were in the studio so much at that time. We all lived comparatively close together in Greater London. So popping down to a studio like Morgan in North West London was easy.

“We’d just moved back to London after living abroad for a while, due to the murderous tax regime over here. We’d been advised to leave the country when our first royalty cheque was due and we were facing 83 per cent tax charges. But we never gave up being British residents, as some did.”

Anderson returned to a country that was in a state of flux. The miners’ strike at the start of the year not only led to power cuts, but also the introduction of a three-day working week by the Conservative government, to try to combat the growing energy crisis. This period of instability led to two general elections in ’74, both won by Labour.

“I was politically aware, but disenchanted with all politicians,” Anderson says. “I thought it was okay to shun the whole thing and stand outside of the system. The world was a lot more black and white in 1974 than it is now. The choice facing us was between a very socialist Labour party and an arch and very scary Conservative party. You could not like any of the politicians. They were deeply unpleasant people.”

He believes what happened on the music scene reflected the political and social climates at the time. “You can look back at 1974 and appreciate that it was the birth of punk rock. You had bands like the Ramones starting up, and a lot of this was due to the anger many people felt, the bitterness they had of being marginalised and powerless. That’s why punk came about. Most of the big bands of the time in prog – ourselves, Yes and Genesis – ran in parallel to that world. Punks couldn’t admit to loving us at the time, although a lot did.

“The Ramones were true American rock’n’roll in a grungy, street-credible way. And that sort of music comes round in cycles. In 1969 it had been the MC5, whom Jethro Tull actually played with, and then in 1974 it was the turn of the Ramones.”

Anderson now believes that the first golden era of progressive music was drawing to its conclusion. “We were at an in-between time. You couldn’t see where things would go. But we in Tull kept our heads down and got on with the next record, the next tour. All of us on the scene at the time were professionals at hiding our heads in the sand.

“With some bands, though, you were never quite sure what to expect. That was true of King Crimson. They changed a lot as they went along. Sometimes these bands floundered commercially, but they didn’t follow the predictable path. They were the brave, restless souls of music. And the ones to whom I warmed.”

“Genesis I never came across, even though we enjoyed the same success at the same time. On The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, they appeared like a strange one-man band with theatrical elements. That was because of Peter Gabriel. The rest of them always looked faintly embarrassed.”

Anderson says of Yes: “I found them noodly and austere and they took themselves terribly seriously. Rick Wakeman did give them a self- deprecating humour when he was in the band, which was their saving grace. But he left in ’74, didn’t he? Still, they were tight, always spot on and had great songs. So you have to admire what they did.

“ELP were not known for humour, but they could take the mickey out of themselves. They eventually realised there was something pompous and silly about it all, although I’m not sure if that all came in retrospect.”

The artist for whom he has a lot of affection, despite his obvious shortcomings, is Captain Beefheart. “We toured together. And I spent a lot of time with him. But he was such a manipulative character that there came a point when being around him was dangerous. He was a paranoid, insecure person, and used to try and intimidate people, but underneath was desperate to be liked. I did manage to keep him at arm’s length, but I would have gotten on a plane at a minute’s notice to go and visit him towards the end of his life. Sadly, I was told he was a recluse by then and would see no one.”

Now, the Tull mastermind can be objective about the way big bands behaved towards each other in 1974, and be honest concerning their relationships. “It was very competitive. If you felt you were part of a movement then you instinctively felt you didn’t want to be – you had to stand apart. But there was also a huge admiration and mutual respect between us all.”

Anderson successfully avoided the brisk hedonism that was a hallmark of the era. Not only has he never had a reputation as a crazed felon of bacchanalia, but there are no hidden stories on this front. “I had no social life whatsoever. I was either on stage, in the studio or else writing music. If I had any time off, I spent it on my own. I loved being alone, just reading; John Le Carré and Ian Fleming were my friends.

“If you spend so much of your life in planes, hotels, on stages, you’re surrounded by people, not to mention an audience every night. You are overwhelmed by the stench of humanity. The antidote was my own company. As a child, I never enjoyed sports at school; I couldn’t interact that way, so I learned to be alone – to read, draw, paint and learn things. People did think I was standoffish, arrogant, a loner.

“But I wasn’t in the mood to go to a roadies’ party, hang out with groupies or indulge in booze and drugs. On the road, I went to my room and read a book. But I did meet my wife, Shona, in 1974, lthough we didn’t get together until the following year.”

For their War Child tour, Tull had an all-female string quartet with them, and that brought its own problems. “Through what I can only describe as mutual desperation, the members of this string quartet paired up with roadies or others in the band.

“And this inevitably diminished their situation musically. As always happens under such circumstances, when these relationships floundered, it brought about its own difficulties, because these personal problems were carried onstage and led to a strained atmosphere.

“Any band is obviously made up of different characters. While I was very relaxed being on my own and avoiding all the pitfalls of partying too hard, there were other members of Tull who were extremely gregarious and very needy.

“They embraced the rock’n’roll lifestyle which was prevalent in ’74. But there was also someone like Martin Barre, who had a similar attitude to mine. We could work together and then go our separate ways without needing to live in each other’s pocket.”

Apart from the start of what would become punk, Anderson has no doubt about what, in his opinion, was the most important musical movement of 1974. “It was the birth of glam rock, and with it the seeds were sown for the domination of British music right into the 80s.

“Of course, you had bands like Slade on Top Of The Pops, with their platform soles. But it was Roxy Music whom I really enjoyed. There was a sleazy slickness to the music that appealed to me. The presentation was glamorous and old fashioned, which I liked.

“The arrival of glam rock came at a time when, thanks to progressive music, British artists were commanding global attention. But if anything, it heralded a new era where home-grown talent led the way to an even greater extent. In that respect, it was a year when the musical world was indeed a melting pot. The likes of Cream, The Beatles and Hendrix had gone, and I believe the upheavals of the social and political spheres meant that there was an equal uncertainty in music.

“It’s at times like these that you get innovation. While I don’t feel the big prog names were still necessarily being bold and adventurous, nonetheless that spirit was alive and spreading.”

When Yes convened in Paris in 1979 to record the follow-up to troubled record Tormato, late producer Roy Thomas Baker found five musicians at each other’s throats. Those “pub sessions” were to spell the end of the band’s classic line-up – again – for another 16 years, while a new line-up would release Drama in 1980.

Yes’ first collaboration with Queen, Journey and The Cars producer Roy Thomas Baker took place in Paris in 1979 – but the resulting recordings never saw the light of day, although many of those tracks later appeared on solo records, expanded reissues of Yes albums, or the 2002 In A Word box set.

But what happened at the end of the 70s in the French capital? Why did the recordings not amount to a finished release? And why did events there lead to the departure of Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman?

Baker recalls the initial excitement about the material presented by the band. “There was some great stuff,” he says.

Wakeman, however, has a very different view: of an outfit that was failing to keep up with outside musical change. “In 1979, the world of music was going through serious changes and Yes was not embracing them,” he recalls.

There are contradictory views of the city itself. “I find Paris excessively inspiring,” states Baker, although he accepts that they were too far from the centre. For Steve Howe, Paris was not conducive to a healthy, happy atmosphere, especially compared to Montreux in Switzerland where they recorded 1977’s Going For The One.

“Paris was a whole different reality – ‘reality’ being the operative word,” the guitarist says. “It wasn’t beautiful like Montreux. There was no fantasy here – it was not a place we could sit back and relax.”

After having to fight through traffic to get to the studio, things hardly improved. “There were definitely issues in terms of communication within the band,” says Baker.

Howe recalls Anderson playing harp instead of his usual guitar and so found it difficult to bounce ideas off him. He remembers the singer and keyboardist “had done some music together” that he and Chris Squire “were not that clear how to treat guitaristically.”

They were, he says, “very bouncy and very Rick in musical style, and a bit new; a new kind of thinking about Yes, because Jon usually wrote with Chris or me and now suddenly he was writing with Rick – which we weren’t against, but it was a different breed of music.”

Howe and Squire weren’t excited by Anderson and Wakeman’s ideas, and the feeling was evidently mutual: How vividly remembers a “farcical” situation involving Wakeman chucking peanuts at Alan White’s drum kit, so displeased was he with the state of affairs. “This was the kind of mayhem we were creating for ourselves,” says Howe.

Wakeman agrees that it was “not the happiest of times” for Yes. “It was completely the opposite to the feelings of the band a few years earlier when we recorded Going For The One, where everybody was driving down the same musical road,” he says. “In Paris, not only were we not on the same road but we were not even heading in the same direction!

“Jon and I had put some songs together during the previous tour and we felt they had great potential. Sadly, tht was not felt by Steve, Chris and Alan, and sessions in the studio were laborious and not pleasant at all.”

Baker acknowledges the factions within the band. “There were two camps. Trying to pull the whole thing together, I felt more like a referee than a producer.” Did he have to bang any heads together? “No,” he laughs, “they were doing it amongst themselves!”

The situation eventually became so difficult that Atlantic Records majordomo Ahmet Ertegun flew over from New York for a crisis meeting. Baker recalls: “His attitude was, ‘How the fuck do we get this back on track?’ Trying to get them in one room and get them to talk were two different things.”

By this point, Wakeman knew things had gone too far. As he puts it: “Not even Henry Kissinger could have resolved that mess.” Matters reached a sorry end just before Christmas, when drummer White broke his foot on a roller skate. Wakeman and Anderson took solace in spirits: “Jon and I met for a drink. Well, actually, it was a whole bottle of Calvados,” he laughs. “We both agreed this wasn’t the Yes we loved and believed in.

“I don’t mean the guys – I still have great respect and love Steve, Chris and Alan very much. as they’ve been a big part of my life. But I always refer to ‘Yes’ as the music. I always felt we were guardians of Yes’ music and should be treated with respect.

“Jon and I both felt it was slipping away and so it was time for us to slip away, too, and that’s exactly what we did.”

The final straw was that broken foot. “We had a drummer who couldn’t play,” Howe says. “That was the catastrophic moment when we said: ‘Let’s stop.’ I think there was a feeling we all wanted to stop anyway, because the session was going nowhere.

“It didn’t have the same bright feeling we’d had on Relayer or the sense of a reunion we had on Going For The One. There was no magic or chemistry between us and Roy Thomas Baker. It was just a write-off.

“We weren’t challenging Yes to go forward – we were finding a party line, a kind of music that was easy for us to do: sprightly and mellow and nothing like Drama would be.”

He believes they developed a new lease of life with the arrival of Buggles duo Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes for the band’s real 10th album. “Chris, Alan and I proved the point because when we got on to Drama, we made an album that really stung at you. It shouted and it had attitude.

“We didn’t have any attitude in Paris, apart from, ‘Where’s the next bottle of wine?’ or ‘Should we drive a Rolls Royce or a Bentley?’ All decisions that had fuck-all to do with music.”

Were they galvanised by punk on Drama? “There might have been a subconscious awareness of what was going on,” Howe concedes, adding that the record “was more aggressive and heavier than some of the things we’d done.”

Following the events in France, Wakeman recalls, “The studio was cancelled and everybody went their separate ways. I spent a few more days in Paris walking my German Shepherd before going home to Switzerland to contemplate a future I wasn’t expecting.

“Yes had already lost its guarantee of selling hundreds of thousands of records, the record company didn’t know what to do with the band and we still had more egos than the entire Premier League footballers put together.”

Not that he believes the experience was a waste of time. “Not for me! My father always drummed into me to learn from things that haven’t gone to plan, and I did learn a lot about myself.”

For Howe, the Paris sessions haven’t quite acquired the status of legend à la The Beach Boys’ Smile, nor does he have much stomach for piecing together the finished tracks to make something approaching a complete album. But he doesn’t have any regrets.

“I’m not morbidly sad about it,” he says. “We had a good run and did some great things. That wasn’t one of them.”

With hindsight, it’s easy to see why 1994 is considered both a landmark year for popular music, and a transitional one. The tragic death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain on April 5 that year represented a horrific reality check for the grunge/alternative rock community's fairytale takeover of mainstream culture, although the release of Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral and Manic Street Preachers' harrowing third album The Holy Bible proved that there was still plenty of darkness and nihilism for rock to mine.

Into the void left by a scene in mourning, came BritPop in the UK and pop-punk in the US, with emerging stars Oasis, Blur, Weezer and Green Day all releasing landmark albums that year full of life affirming, happy-go-lucky positivity. The after effects of the second 'Summer of Love' saw acid house and techno co-opted into big pop chart hits, even as the highly controversial Criminal Justice Bill sought to destroy it as a counter culture movement, ushering in the rise of superstar DJs. Hip-hop too was undergoing a transformation, with the unflinching socio-political commentary of early gansta drowned out and dragged into the charts by the previous year's Cristal-popping, game-changing Dr. Dre album The Chronic.

But, even in an era where the mainstream reached out to embraced the freaks, the outsiders and the underdogs, Portishead stood apart, the Bristol trio gaining a reputation as enigmatic, shadowy mavericks, even as their debut album Dummy ushered in the first significant commercial interest in the oddly lo-fi mash up of classic soul, jazz, cutting edge samples and gothic noir that would become known globally as trip-hop. With Beth Gibbons' vocals seemingly beamed in from another world, it sounded like nothing else on earth. And for one young American musician, its impact was truly life-changing.

"Beth Gibbons was one of my greatest vocal and musical inspirations," Evanescence vocalist Amy Lee told The Guardian. "In the 90s when I was a young teen really feeling music I loved Portishead, Massive Attack and the whole trip-hop vibe. It was dark and cool, really different."

Portishead emerged from a fecund Bristol music scene which took pride in its independence from, and disinterest in, mainstream industry trends and hype.

In the late 80’s, club nights in the city began to feature artists and DJs including Tackhead and The Wild Bunch, the latter collective featuring three members of what would become Massive Attack, who were experimenting with mixing hip-hop breakbeats with early jazz recordings. This would become known initially as 'The Bristol Sound.'

Having moved to the town of Portishead, 8 miles west of Bristol, as a young boy, Geoff Barrow found himself caught up in the movement after landing his first job as a studio hand at Coach House Studios. He worked as an assistant on Massive Attack’s debut album Blue Lines, and, having played in a few bands of his own, decided he wanted to record his own compositions based on the new sound from the surrounding area. Using the spare time he had in the studio; he began to craft what would become the songs on Dummy.

The project began to gain momentum when Barrows met vocalist Beth Gibbons on a coffee break at a 1991 Enterprise Allowance course, set up to give support to young people looking to set up their own business. The pair began to work on music together, recording a version of It Could Be Sweet as their first song. Local jazz guitarist Adrian Utley, who was in the Coach House recording parts for a different project, happened to hear the song being played in an adjacent studio.

“I remember somebody opening the door upstairs and me hearing It Could Be Sweet," Utley told The Guardian. “I was all, ‘Fuck me, what is that?’ Just hearing the sub-bass and Beth’s voice – it was unbelievable. Like a whole new world that was really exciting and vital.”

Utley and Barrow immediately hit it off, and the guitarist joined the fold, asking Barrow to teach him everything he knew about sampling and production. In return, Utley would play unique parts on the Portishead project, creating a musical Frankenstein’s monster, where classic jazz and soul samples (everyone from Isaac Hayes to The Weather Report were utilised) would coalesce with Utley’s own guitar, bass, organ and theremin tracks, and Gibbons distinctive folk and rock-influenced vocals.

It took three years to get the album right - the process involved analogue recording of Utley and Barrow’s original musical parts, then transferring them to vinyl, and finally sampling them for the finished project - but upon release Dummy was more than worth the wait.

Debut single Numb, released ahead of the album, didn't dent the charts, but second single Sour Times, broke into the UK top 15, and even made it to number 63 on the US Billboard singles chart. Although a couple of Mo-Wax Records releases, and Massive Attack, had enjoyed a measure of commercial success, there was nothing as dark, melancholic, chilling or threatening in their work as the gothic chime that accompanied Gibbons whispered, pained vocal on Sour Times. At once captivating and completely alien, to hear it was to experience similar emotions to those Utley felt upon hearing It Could Be Sweet.

Much like the music on the record, the success of Dummy was something of a slow burn. Released on August 22, 1994, it slowly crept up the UK charts, and by January 1995 it had reached number three, kept from the top spot by Celine Dion and The Beautiful South, before eventually peaking at number 2.

Its success was helped by the release of third and final single Glory Box, another top 20 hit in the UK, and a song Portishead played live on Later... with Jools Holland. Their performance on that show is staggering: seeing the live line-up of the band, complete with guitar, bass, drums and a DJ, was unique enough, but Beth Gibbons' delivery of the song - eyes clenched tight, gripping onto the mic as her remarkable voice flows from her, part Patti Smith, part Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis - can still make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up today.

Dummy would go on to win the 1995 Mercury Music Prize, beating off competition from Oasis, Supergrass, Tricky, Leftfield, PJ Harvey and many other hugely respected and eclectic artists. The Bristol Sound now had a superstar album, a figurehead and a definitive name; trip-hop, coined in a 1994 Mixmag article focusing more on The Chemical Brothers and DJ Shadow.

“I don’t think with 10 albums of the year you should just judge one album,” shrugged a clearly overwhelmed Barrow in the press conference after the Mercury Prize ceremony. “there could be a bloke sat at home on his organ recording something that is better than any of this stuff. People injected all of their emotions into albums this year... I just expected a free piss up!”

Barrow may not have realised it at the time, but Dummy would go on to be one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the next three decades. It still sounds fantastic. From the second a loose, clean guitar is joined by scratches, drum loops and Gibbons haunted croon on opening track Mysterons, Dummy grabs you and won't let go. From the alien march and Gibbons wail on Strangers, the Mos Def does Ghost Town stalk of Numb, the now iconic, heart-wrenching organ opening of Roads, a song that sounds like the aural definition of heartache, all the way through to Glory Box, a good shout for one of the greatest closing numbers on any album, Dummy remains a faultless piece of work.

In 2015, as a 'thank you' to an album that resonated so strongly with her, Amy Lee covered It's a Fire, alongside U2's With Or Without You, Led Zeppelin's Going To California, and Chris Isaak's Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing for her Recover, Vol. 1 EP.

"This song (and all of Dummy, actually) was a huge inspiration to me in my formative years," she said at the time. "I listened to the song recently for the first time in a long time, and fell in love with it all over again. The lyrics are so powerful, they helped me through so much. It is my honour to do this little homemade homage to a group I have loved so much for so long."

Once darlings of the 80s pop scene but always powered by prog, Tears For Fears made a bold return with 2022’s The Tipping Point, their first new album in nearly 18 years. At the time of its launch, Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith told Prog about the ambition that kept them going – and how their difficult reunion led to a rediscovery.

Curt Smith has a framed picture of King Crimson on his bathroom wall. It’s not just any old photo. The occasion is April 30, 1981, in the confines of Bath’s Moles club, where a fresh iteration of the band – tentatively called Discipline – is returning to the stage for the first time in seven years. Bassist Tony Levin dominates the foreground, while the 19-year-old Smith stands directly in front of him, utterly transfixed.

“A friend of mine got Tony Levin to send that picture to me,” explains Smith, who
went on to form Tears For Fears with Roland Orzabal later in ’81. “Apparently, Tony used to have this side-stage camera that he’d take pictures with during a gig, using a footswitch. So it’s taken from slightly behind him, with me watching him play a Chapman stick. In the picture I’m like, ‘What is that?’”

To the uninitiated, it may come as a surprise to discover that Tears For Fears are big prog fans. After all, they became synonymous with the new breed of British synthpop with 1983 debut, The Hurting, before conquering the rest of the 80s with platinum-selling monsters Songs From The Big Chair and The Seeds Of Love. But there was always something much deeper going on.

The Hurting was a concept album about childhood dysfunction and trauma, with allusions to Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy – dark themes cloaked in mainstream pop. The title track was an inventive mini-suite, while songs like Memories Fade boasted the forceful complexity of the best prog. Even King Crimson veteran Mel Collins popped up on sax.

And while 1985’s Songs From The Big Chair yielded the mega-hits Shout and Everybody Wants To Rule The World, its sense of ambition was far more attuned to the world of prog. There’s a clear Crimson feel to the knotty precision of Broken; the fragile I Believe betrays the influence of Robert Wyatt (to whom it’s dedicated); and Listen is nearly seven minutes of gorgeous futurist abstraction.

By the time they returned with The Seeds Of Love in 1989, Tears For Fears had assimilated prog, pop, jazz and post-psychedelia into a richly organic vision, the questing spirit of late-60s rock dressed in late-80s luxuriance. Even the guests – Phil Collins, Simon Clark, Jon Hassell and Simon Phillips among them – had serious prog credentials.

“We’ve always been drawn to a certain kind of music,” says Orzabal. “Complicated music, if you like; whether it’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts by David Byrne and Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel 3 [aka Melt], or whatever. In the days when everyone would go to school with the name of a band on their rucksacks, mine was Uriah Heep. I was absolutely obsessed with them. And then Foxtrot and Genesis Live. And Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy.”

“I was always more of a Peter Gabriel fan than Genesis,” adds Smith. “Renaissance was another one: Scheherazade And Other Stories. When I look back at the albums I listened to, they were all very lyrically intense and musically a little weird. Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here and Animals were two albums that I loved. Wish You Were Here, particularly, was just so daring and different. Floyd were a huge influence for me.”

Back then, as teenagers in Bath, school friends Smith and Orzabal were inspired to form a band of their own. Mod-leaning quintet Graduate were duly founded in 1978, but ground to a halt three years later, after a solitary album that didn’t sell. Undeterred, Smith and Orzabal pressed ahead as a duo.

“Curt and I were almost like students, trying to get to that fucking level of the music we really loved,” Orzabal recalls. “But you never can; it’s always slightly out of reach. My God, you can have a lot of fun trying to get there, though. So we had that sort of united quest for the gold bars coming out of the speakers.”

Adds Smith: “We listened intently to other records. We knew we could never be that good, but at least we could aspire to get closer. I think we’ll always be in a position where we feel like that. And I think that’s a good place to be in, because then you continue to strive.”

Intriguingly, Tears For Fears returned to their teenage selves to kickstart their new album. The Tipping Point, their first for 18 years, had a troubled and lengthy gestation. Their management team had initially suggested that Smith and Orzabal write and produce with younger artists in order to snag a more commercial, more youthful demographic. What the duo now dismissively refer to as “speed dating” was a failure, the upshot being a set of recordings devoid of Tears For Fears’ core identity. Not for the first time in their career, it also led to tension between Smith and Orzabal.

They decided to change management, scrap the collaborative album and switch labels. Just before the pandemic hit, the pair got together in Smith’s adopted city of Los Angeles for a crisis meeting. “When we’d come off the last tour in 2019, I’d gone into my second rehab and Curt had gone off into the sunset,” Orzabal explains.

“We tend to be at loggerheads when we go on tour a lot, because touring is very stressful. And like a marriage, if something goes wrong, you immediately blame your partner. So we went out for lunch in early 2020 and sort of reconnected. Then we got together in Curt’s house with a couple of acoustic guitars.

“It was the first time we’d really done that since we were about 18. And I became aware, probably from sobering up, that something occurs between the two of us, like a third force. And that third presence is very creative. Curt had a riff and we came up with a piece of music that was really unusual. Then I took it away and just ramped the whole thing up.”

The result was No Small Thing, the opening track on The Tipping Point. Smith says: “Roland went back to England after that writing session and sent me this song that was just completely different. It went from an acoustic guitar thing into this grandiose track. And I was like, ‘Yes, that’s what we do!’ Initially, I was wondering whether this project was ever going to work or not. But that song led us on the way. That was the point where I realised we could make this record.”

The Tipping Point is a majestic and fittingly mature work. Prog-pop songs soar, borne up by strings. Acoustic hymns glow amid layers of quivering synths, while guitars churn and ballads stir. It’s also deeply affecting. Tears For Fears have been through a lot to get here, particularly Orzabal. The album is heavily informed by grief, loss, mental anguish and healing, among other things.

Some of its most moving moments – the title track and Please Be Happy – were written about Caroline, Orzabal’s wife of 35 years, who died in 2017. Already on medication for depression, the onset of alcohol-related dementia meant that Orzabal spent five years as her prime carer.

“That song is really about clinical depression, where the person you love can’t get off the sofa,” he says. “They don’t want to go out for a meal. In fact, they don’t actually want to eat. With Caroline, her depression and anxiety was off the scale. Like The Tipping Point, it came from a long period of time. We’re talking many, many years of decline. I wrote more songs about that whole scenario, but those were the two that made it onto the album.”

Orzabal developed his own related problems at the same time. “I was also in the grip of addiction,” he explains. “And my first instinct was denial. We were on tour in the States when Caroline passed away. I flew back, arranged the funeral, did the wake, got back on a plane and continued with the tour. Even towards the end of that year, we were still working. It was only when we stopped that the wheels came off for me.

“My first Christmas without her, at our family home with our sons, I was absolutely done in. And then I had my own health issues, where I ended up in hospital four times. I ended up on the same fucking psychoactive drugs as she did. So I know exactly what happens if you drink with them and suddenly stop. Thankfully, I had the support and wisdom to put myself into rehab. Caroline tried so many times, but she just couldn’t do it.”

Despite the profoundly personal nature of parts of The Tipping Point, the songs also work on a universal level. Smith and Orzabal examine love, devotion, loss, sorrow and redemption throughout. Anger and compassion too. The ruling patriarchy is lambasted on Break The Man, while the sublime Rivers Of Mercy addresses Black Lives Matter and societal unrest.

“We care a lot about what’s going on in the world,” Orzabal says. “Especially in this day and age, where the myths we’re being sold by governments are so powerful. Within that, someone’s got to step forward and start speaking about the reality. That’s what we’re trying to do. Not libertarian, but more sort of social commentary.”

The Tipping Point is way better than anyone might have expected from two 60-year-old men who’ve been together (on and off) since they were kids. Tears For Fears have their own unique, sometimes combustible chemistry – and an intensity and sense of adventurism that continues to align Smith and Orzabal to the artists they adored in their formative years.

With a stack of live dates coming up in 2022 they’re in a very good moment right now. Past experience, however, has taught them not to get too far ahead of themselves. “Going on tour will be step one,” says Smith. “If there’s a step two, that will either present itself or not. Roland and I are old enough and wise enough to realise that. Anytime we make plans further ahead, they tend to never materialise.”

Orzabal, meanwhile, seems to be reawakened. “At the end of 2019, I had kind of a shift, personally and emotionally,” he concludes. “Partly being with my new wife [writer and photographer Emily Rath] and being in a far better place, mentally. And I had a sense that there was something important that Curt and I had to do. A sense of mystical purpose, if you like, to ring in a new era for Tears For Fears.

“And for us – as people who’ve known each other since the age of 14 – to turn 60 together, and to be still working together, is really something. This has been a bit of a dream, to be honest.”

The late 80s was a tough time for British metal. While the rest of the planet seemed to be throwing up new thrash bands at a frightening pace, what did we have to offer? Well, if circumstances had played out differently, there was one band who just might have competed with their peers from the US and Germany: Sabbat.

The Nottingham band offered something that was musically fresh, diverse and innovative. Mixing pagan ideas with deeply-set folk and progressive influences, plus a sonically theatrical dynamic, they threatened to take thrash metal to a new level.

Sabbat started as Hydra in June 1985, with vocalist Martin Walkyier, bassist Fraser Craske and guitarist Andy Sneap. The arrival of drummer Simon Negus, replacing Mark Daley, who left at the same time as second guitarist Adam Ferman, coincided with a name change to Sabbat.

Two demos, Magik In Theory And Practice and Fragments Of A Faith Forgotten, not only got the young band major media attention, but led to a deal with celebrated German label Noise Records (amusingly, the deal couldn’t be signed until Sneap turned 18). Their debut album, 1988’s History Of A Time To Come, underlined the foursome’s class, creativity and loud clout. By the end of that year, they’d become a permanent five-piece with the addition of guitarist Simon Jones (formerly with Darlington’s Holosade), all of which set up what should have been the big international breakthrough, their second album Dreamweaver: Reflections Of Our Yesterdays. A concept album, no less.

“I had read a novel called The Way Of Wyrd by Brian Bates, and thought it could be easily adapted to Sabbat,” recalls Walkyier. “I was always into the idea of doing concepts anyway, and the rest of the band were up for that idea.”

A fantasy story set in pre-Christian England, the spirituality and Pagan philosophies in the 1983 book appealed to the singer. In the meantime, Sneap had been working up a lot of musical ideas.

“I had loads of riffs and arrangements already worked out,” says the guitarist. “They were more involved than had been the case on our debut, but that was to some extent because I was trying to keep myself entertained. I had no problem with the idea of a concept album. I was into King Diamond and Mercyful Fate, so went along with Martin on this one. I did read The Way Of Wyrd, and enjoyed it. Not exactly what I was into, but Martin did an amazing job in fitting the whole story into the lyrics.”

Putting together the words and music was a comparatively smooth operation, although Walkyier was still finishing off the lyrics when Sabbat relocated to Noise Studios in Berlin. They were working going to work with producer Roy Rowland who had been behind the desk for the debut.

“We wanted to use Roy again, although in the end I think he was the wrong choice,” admits Walkyier. “That’s typical of us, always making mistakes back then. The thing is that everything about Dreamweaver… suggests, even now, that it could have been a great album – except the production. Maybe it was too complex for Roy, I’m not sure. You’ve also got to remember this was before computers were being used – everything was on two-inch tape which caused its own problems. The tracks which bookended the album, the opening and closing ones, started to wear out on the tape.”

“We had two weeks in Berlin before we could even record,” says Sneap. “Roy was waiting for a delivery of acoustic tiles because the studio sounded awful. Noise had bought it from Tangerine Dream and ripped out a carpet that was in there. It was replaced with a pine floor and, as the ceiling was low, the sound was dreadful. A great start for us, especially when you consider that Noise were charging us for studio time while Roy waited for those tiles!”

Eventually the band spent six weeks in Berlin, with Walkyier and Sneap staying on for the mixing process. “Things were getting out of hand,” laughs Sneap. “There were objects flying out of fifth floor windows, microwaves being blown up and lots of drunken behaviour. So, it was decided to send the other three guys home.“

It didn’t help that Sabbat had virtually no money to ease the pain of Berlin. “We each got the equivalent of £3 per day, which meant that we could barely afford to eat anything!” recalls Walkyier. “I guess that was typical of the way Noise treated us. There was no financial commitment at all from their end. Having signed us, the label didn’t show any interest in what we did. I still believe that had Noise bothered with Sabbat, then Dreamweaver… would have been really successful, and we’d have gone on to have a great career. The plus side to this was that they never interfered artistically – we just got on with things the way that we wanted.”

“The problem that we had was that there was no-one looking after us,” Walkyier continues. “We needed a manager at the time, someone who’d be our big brother and deal with the money. All of us were so young and naïve that we had no clue how to manage finance. Every tour we’d come home having lost money. It was crazy. Noise did suggest one possible candidate, but none of us thought he was right for the band. So we went through all of that era with nobody to turn to.”

Dreamweaver… was released in June 1989 to a strong critical reaction and decent sales. Its combination of Sneap’s complex riffs, Walkyier’s distinctive half-snarled vocals, and the singer’s in-depth pagan-centred lyrics, it sounded like nothing else out there.

But while Sabbat may have reached new artistic heights with this record, it also signalled the death knell for the line-up that recorded it. Walkyier and Craske left following a tour with Manowar, with the singer citing musical and financial reasons.

“There are stories that I quit Sabbat because the rest of the band didn’t like my Pagan lyrics. That’s not true,” clarifies Walkyier. ”All of us shared an interest in that side of things. The Paganism was never a problem. I was always left to get on with the lyrics in the best way that I saw fit. No, the truth was that I could see the music was going to get even more complex. Andy was writing 11-minute metal epics, and I couldn’t even begin to see how I’d write lyrics for something like that. I wanted to explore other musical styles, to bring in violins for instance. That would never have worked with Sabbat.

“The other trouble was that I was broke. It wasn’t too bad on the road, when you’d get your food and drink. But I was living at home on £27 a week income support, and my girlfriend was pregnant with my son. I just couldn’t go on like that.”

Sneap and Negus continued under the Sabbat banner without them, recruiting US singer Richie Desmond, bassist Wayne Banks and second guitarist Neil Watson, who replaced the departed Simon Jones. This short-lived line-up released 1991’s critically mauled Mourning Has Broken album before splitting (Sneap later conceded the record should never have come out under the Sabbat name).

After his departure, Walkyier formed Skyclad, whose blend of metal and folk would prove hugely influential.The singer, Craske and Jones reunited in the late 1990s under the name Return To The Sabbat – Sneap, who was starting out on a career as an engineer and producer, blocked them from using the Sabbat name, aggrieved that he and Negus had been left with in debt following their former bandmates’ depatures. But by 2006, any lingering tensions had been put aside for a full reunion, supporting Sabbat devotees Cradle Of Filth at a handful of dates. While there were never plans to record, the band fell apart once more due to an argument between Walkyier and Sneap.

Sabbat have remained inactive since then, though Dreamweaver… has subsequently been held up as a cult British metal classic, even if Walkyier and Sneap have mixed feelings about it.

“The songs and musicianship are still really strong,” says Walkyier. “I can’t fault them. But the production… you can hear holes all over the place And I also feel the overall feel of the record is too complex. Maybe part of the problem was that we were trying to cram too much into about 40 minutes.”

“Basically, we packed so many riffs onto the record; I think there must be about 20 on each track,” says Sneap, whose production and mixing credits includes albums by by Machine Head, Arch Enemy, Killswitch Enagage and Judas Priest, the latter of whom he subsequently joined as touring guitarist. “What this album ended up being was Martin screaming poetry over loads and loads of riffs. If a band came to me today with these ideas, I’d pull it apart and get them to rethink the songs. But, we were so young back then – I was barely 20 – that we didn’t have the experience. One thing that does come through is what a clever lyricist Martin was – and is. There’s nobody who can touch him, in the way he uses words.

There’s little doubt that Dreamweaver: Reflections Of Our Yesterdays is the story of an opportunity lost. In differing circumstances, this could have transformed British thrash.

“It’s a record of its time,” says Sneap. “Despite all the obvious mistakes, it seems the fans still love it, and it was a very challenging project.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer 161. Updated May 2024

After Canadian singer Benoît David’s tenure with Yes ended unhappily, he returned to his previous band, Mystery, to record his second of three albums with them, One Among The Living. The band's fourth record overall, it proved to be their strongest. In 2010 Prog spoke to David and band leader Michel St.Pere about the release.

Aptly named, Mystery are not a band with a particularly high profile. In fact, the Canadians got their biggest break two years ago, when vocalist Benoît David was chosen to replace Jon Anderson in Yes. Suddenly, Mystery were catapulted into something approaching the limelight. However, the story of the band goes back nearly a quarter of a century, to 1986.

Originally, Mystery featured founder Michel St-Pere on guitar, Raymond Savoie on vocals, Benoît Dupuis on keyboards and Stephane Perreault on drums. It took until 1992 for the band to release a self-titled five-track debut mini album, by which time Gary Savoie was on vocals and Richard Addison on bass. However, when Perreault was struck down with a debilitating illness the band were forced to take a break, returning in 1993 by which time the drummer had lost the use of his legs; thanks to innovative technology, however, he was able to carry on playing from his wheelchair.

By 1996, the band were down to the foursome of St-Pere, Savoie, bassist Patrick Bourque and Perreault, releasing debut full album Theatre Of The Mind through St-Pere’s own Unicorn label.

David arrived in 1999, but it took until 2007 before he made his recording debut on the album Beneath The Veil Of Winter’s Face, with St-Pere and Bourque now joined by drummer Steve Gagne. And after a further three-year absence, Mystery have just unfurled their most internationally acclaimed album yet, in One Among The Living. David, St-Pere and Gagne remained from the previous record, with a host of guests helping out, including Daryl Stuermer (Genesis), Oliver Wakeman (Yes) and John Jowitt (of Ark and IQ).

For the frontman, it’s a relief that the Montreal band are now back in action, although he understands the reasons behind this delay.

“This is Michel’s project – he’s the driving force. While the rest of us are involved, and are far from just his hired hands, we have to wait for him to make the decision to do a new album. He’s a busy guy, and obviously it costs a lot to do a Mystery record. As the head of the Unicorn label, Michel’s the man who has to raise the finances; he does it through releasing a lot of other projects.

“But I’m delighted to be back working with him. And I think this time we’ve found our sound. The problem on the last two records was that we were still looking for a direction. Our style has always been defined by the fact that we sound a little like Pink Floyd, Genesis and Marillion – you can hear all of those influences in what we did – but it never had enough individuality. This time I believe we’ve taken a real leap.”

David feels that, after a lot of stop-start moments in their career, Mystery are now poised to make a real impact, and this won’t be hindered at all by his commitment to Yes.

“Of course, I have my priorities, and Yes will come first. They would accept nothing less from me. But, the fact is there are enough gaps in the band’s schedule to allow me to do a lot with Mystery. It’s not as if they’re having to sit around waiting for me to tell them I can do a date here and a show there. We will have a lot of time to tour on this album, if that’s what Michel decides.”

Just how far and deep David’s passion for Mystery goes can be seen from the fact that the new album features his first songwriting contributions to the project.

“I’ve got credits on one or two songs, and I enjoyed that experience. I’ve never been excluded from the writing process before; it’s not as if Michel keeps everything to himself. But I’ve been happy in the past just to put myself into performing the songs, because Michel is a good writer and has always understood how to construct lyrics that work for me. So, I’ve believed in what I’m singing.”

The album features a number of stellar guests, including David’s current Yes bandmate, Oliver Wakeman. Was it the singer who persuaded the Wakeman offspring to come on board? Er, no...

“It was Michel who approached him. I had nothing whatsoever to do with it. What this proves is the high regard in which Michel is held in prog rock circles. He also has a strong relationship with Daryl, which is why he came on board.

“Having those people involved gave an extra shine to the album. These are great musicians who could provide that certain something we might not have got from regular members of the band. No disrespect, but when you’ve the opportunity to bring in these people, then it can only make the music stronger. That’s what they’ve done. Also, when you’ve got talents a little removed from the core of a project, they can see and hear things you’ll miss. This was certainly true of these guys. It’s just a shame we can’t take them out on tour with us.”

In fact, Mystery do now have a touring line-up, with David, St-Pere and Gagne joined by the returning Dupuis, plus Dean Baldwin (guitar/keyboards) and Francois Fournier (bass). And the hope is that the new line-up will get the chance to play sooner rather than later.

“There are no tour dates booked just yet. But the fact we’ve now put together this live line-up tells you that we are definitely gonna do this.”

In fact, David is confident that Mystery will be a lot more prolific in the future.

“I feel more part of the band than ever. The recording process for One Among The Living brought us all together. It felt so much more like a family than anything we’ve done before. Perhaps that’s why we’ve finally found our sound.

“I also believe that with Michel and I involved in other projects, we will always come back to this band refreshed and focused. Some people will take the opposite view. However, that’s not the case. Mystery are moving forward.”

Despite the group’s previously-unhurried discography, David is adamant there will be a new album from Mystery sooner rather than later.

“I guarantee that there won’t be another three year gap before the next one. We are so geared up now, and have a lot of ideas. That’s what made the new album work as well. Hardly anything was left over from previous sessions. It was almost all new, and new ideas always get everyone kicking and sparking. So, next time we record together, we’ll use the same approach.”

It’s been a long time coming, and there have been false starts along the way, but at last it appears Mystery are ready to step to the plate and show that they are spearheading a new movement in Canadian prog. One that might draw from the greats of the past, but is firmly heading into uncharted territory.

“Let me put it this way. I am confident that you’ll be hearing a lot more from Mystery – and it will be like nothing else you’ve ever heard. We’re right in the zone.”

Norwegian prog metal figureheads Enslaved have announced that they will release their latest album, Mið, through Nuclear Blast Records on October 30. The band have also shared a video for their new single, Solar Will, which features a guest appearance from Sami musician Johan Sara Jr.

Mið is an Old Norse word for ‘centre’, or ‘middle’, and is an album that sheds light on harmonies and dialogues embedded all around us: between the ways of the past, and how they can bring enlightenment to the present

"There have been sun cults as long as Magic Man has been around (at least)," explains guitarist and founding member Ivar Bjørnson. "The Sun is a nurturing and terrifying parent that can grant as well as obliterate life totally. Such a classic and awe-inspiring object of our worship and myths requires classic and awesome riffs, Bonham-esque drum grooves and blistering melodic flares celebrating its horrific glory. This is what that sounds like to me: Solar Will!"

“Solar Will explores archetypal conflicts, those that manifest in nature, the cosmos, mythology, and, above all, within the human mind," adds bassist, vocalist and fellow founding member Grutle Kjellson. "In this instance, the central struggle is expressed through one of the enduring rivalries found in Norse mythology, embodied by two important, though often somewhat overlooked, figures within the pantheon. Readers familiar with the Norse mythological tradition will likely recognise the identities rather instantly, yet I shall refrain from naming them, allowing each reader the opportunity to engage with and decipher the lyrics on their own.

"After all, perhaps this is one of the essential functions of lyric writing: to invite interpretation and cultivate a sense of wonder? The conclusion, or more precisely, the absence of one, suggests that, for human beings, chaos and dreams are at least as significant as the realities we perceive through our senses. Ultimately, the work advocates not for resolution, but for the acceptance, assimilation, and shaping of these often contradictory forces."

Mið is available as a CD jewelcase, a CD digipack (with bonus track and sticker) and as a gatefold vinyl LP(black, transparent blue, arctic blue pearl, blue/white/dark green/black marbled). You can see the new artwork and tracklisting below.

Pre-order Mið.

Enslaved: Mið
1. Non-Being
2. I Am Ice (featuring Johan Sara Jr)
3. Solar Will
4. Mountain
5. Spirit Helper (featuring Kevin Kicking Woman)
6. Parting
7. Tales of Trees
8. I Miðju

Bonfire night, 1973. The Who are 50 minutes into their set at Newcastle’s Odeon Cinema, the first gig of a three-night stand. They’re promoting Quadrophenia, the grand new opus written by Pete Townshend, but all is far from well. Audiences have been struggling to grasp the ambitious concept, leaving both Townshend and Roger Daltrey to explain the story between numbers. It’s been disrupting the flow, cramping The Who’s swashbuckling attack. And the backing tapes keep malfunctioning. As the band tear into 5:15, there’s no tape sync at all. It eventually kicks in, 15 seconds late. That does it. Townshend explodes.

He strides over to Who soundman Bob Pridden, grabs him by the neck and hauls him over the mixing desk towards the centre of the stage. Then Townshend smashes his guitar on the floor and sets about the sound board, clawing out clumps of wire and laying waste the pre-recorded tapes, before stalking off stage altogether. Much like the punters, his bandmates can only stare in silent disbelief, before the latter feel obligated to follow him into the wings. The stage curtain clunks down and an eerie quiet befalls the room. The Who are gone.

They’re back 20 minutes later, although there’s still a testy atmosphere. The Quadrophenia songs are abandoned, and the band start playing the old hits instead. Townshend clearly isn’t done. He berates the crowd for their inability to comprehend his new work, spits out a volley of four-letter words and finishes with a seismic version of My Generation, the climax of which sees him demolish another guitar – a Gibson Les Paul – and hurl an amp to the floor. Drummer Keith Moon makes similar wreckage of his kit, while Daltrey aims a boot at the microphone. Then they’re gone for good.

The audience roars its applause, but the local press scent blood. The Newcastle Evening Chronicle calls it “a ridiculous display of unwarranted violence” and “an extremely childish publicity stunt, with a potentially damaging effect on the thousands of youngsters who invariably follow their idols in all they do”.

The following day both Townshend and Moon appear on local TV show Look North to help quell the incident and confirm that the other two Newcastle gigs will still go ahead.

“Well, nobody asked for their money back, did they?” laughs Moon.

It was, in fairness, hardly unique behaviour. The Who’s formidable reputation was partly based on such wanton acts of violence against unsuspecting hardware, though the sudden assault on Pridden was altogether more extreme. This was different. Townshend’s tipping point was the result of sustained pressure and frustration.

Quadrophenia, arriving hard-at-heel after his aborted Lifehouse project, was supposed to be his defining moment of the 70s, a rock opera to out-Tommy anything that had gone before. “If Tommy is rock opera, Quadrophenia is grand rock opera,” says lifelong Townshend associate and Who biographer Richard Barnes. “If Tommy is tabloid, Quadrophenia is broadsheet. I think Pete moved The Who to another level with that record.”

But by the end of February ’74 The Who had stopped playing it entirely. “The whole thing was a disaster,” griped Townshend. It would be 22 years before they attempted it again.

Quadrophenia, likened by Townshend in 1973 to “a sort of musical Clockwork Orange”, was a deeply personal endeavour. Ostensibly about a young 60s mod at the crossroads of his adolescent life, it charts the spiritual yearning of main protagonist Jimmy Cooper through drugs, unrequited love, beachfront barneys, a string of useless jobs and unsympathetic parents.

The mod scene sours quickly, his best mate runs off with his girl, he trashes his beloved scooter and makes a break for Brighton in a desperate attempt to reconnect with the thrill and camaraderie of the mods-versus-rockers skirmishes. But the summer of ’65 is long gone. Consumed by despair, he rows out to sea to end it all, but has a sudden epiphany.

Quadrophenia the album is a record awash with metaphor – particularly the sea as both a destructive and redemptive force – and sprinkled with allusion to The Who’s own past. It is, in fact, the idealism of 60s youth culture refracted through the lens of the cynical 70s, by big, rich rock stars who’d lived through it. It’s as much about The Who as it is about Jimmy.

It’s a complex, vaultingly ambitious work that is echoed in the music itself. Surging guitars and big vocals are tempered by brass arrangements, semi-orchestral strings and intricate layers of synths and piano.

“At the time, Pete and I were writing to each other and I used to call him Tannhäuser because of Quadrophenia,” says Barnes. “Which was apt because it does sound really Wagnerian with those horns. You can imagine these big, fat ladies in helmets, riding Vespas. It’s a heavy, hard rock album but there are such delicate bits with violins and synthesisers. Pete has such a delicate touch. It’s like porcelain and reinforced concrete side by side.”

Rewind to the summer of 1972 and Townshend was in a dilemma. “I was worried about the band at the time,” he tells Classic Rock. “We were all bored with playing Tommy, and only played three songs from Who’s Next on stage. I wanted a Tommy replacement for our stage act. And the guys in the band were itchy, I think. I was definitely looking for a way to stroke the four eccentric egos of the guys in the band. We’d always been different, but by 1972 I felt I’d one last chance to do something that might hold us together and unify us in the eyes of our fans.”

The initial idea, floated by Townshend in the music press, was born out of a work called Rock Is Dead – Long Live Rock, which addressed The Who’s 60s roots. The as-yet-untitled Quadrophenia was, he said, designed to reflect the four distinct personalities within the band. But, as with Lifehouse – Townshend’s sci-fi fantasia about rock music’s ability to create a new kind of social utopia – it was less easily definable than that. He wanted to address the communal rapport between a band and its fans.

“Jimmy represented a special kind of pop-rock fan who demanded to encapsulate and reflect the members of the band he followed,” continues Townshend. “In this case the four members of The Who. So it was the reverse of what I was pitching in the music papers. In 1972/73 there were no mods, no ‘armies’ or ‘uniforms’ of any kind in the pop-rock audience, just big shirts with big collars, and haircuts from a Shakespeare play.

"Part of what I wanted to do was re-establish with our fans the principles they themselves had set up when we’d started. I think The Who had been servants of the audience in 1964/65, not the other way around. Our job was always to give our audience something they needed, not make them think we were stars.

"Inside The Who, Keith Moon was not just doing a ‘star’ thing, but taking it to extremes. He was behaving like a Saudi Prince. We all had our part to play. We’d lost perspective partly because our stage shows were so fucking intense. We felt inviolable… I think I felt a kinship with teenaged fans, but by 1972 I was 27 years old and maybe this was a last grab at writing my follow up to Tommy; my Catcher In The Rye.”

One of the central themes of Quadrophenia is the idea of joining a tribe or gang for the purposes of personal development, perhaps best expressed by the song I’m One. Townshend: “As a young man I needed, and wanted, to be part of a gang of young men. I’d grown up in a gang, one that started when I was a street kid in Acton when I was four years old, running wild when it was still safe to do so.

"What happens when you’re subsumed in a gang or collective of any kind is that you soon find the parts of you that don’t fit, that can’t be accommodated. For Jimmy – for all the piss-taking I got from the band about following the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba – what didn’t fit the mod gang he was in was his spiritual confusion, his lack of a sense of deep human purpose.”

In September ’72 Townshend had issued his first solo album, Who Came First, a devotional album dedicated to Meher Baba. Were there certain aspects of himself that couldn’t be accommodated in The Who? “It was mainly my interest in spiritual things, and artistic endeavours, that the band found hard to accommodate without taking the piss.

"Sadly, many – though not all – music critics were the same. They thought anyone who was in a band was necessarily a thick cunt who’d struck lucky, and should just shut up and play, make some money and fuck some girls, then crawl away and die and leave the analysis to them. No one in our team seemed to have any spiritual questions at all. They saw Meher Baba as a joke.”

The Who began recording Quadrophenia in early ’73. They’d recently bought an old church hall in Battersea, which they planned to strip down and convert into their own, state-of-the-70s recording studio and rehearsal room. But it still wasn’t ready, so they decamped to the mobile studio of good mate Ronnie Lane, then on the verge of leaving the Faces. Townshend singles out those early sessions as being particularly special, the band’s first major undertaking since Lifehouse and its resultant 1971 salvage operation, Who’s Next.

“With Lifehouse I really wanted a communally creative band, properly engaging with its audience, but I think it was all a bit too art school to work. Much is said about the sci-fi complexity of Lifehouse, its cumbersome narrative and the fact that I failed to explain it properly. Not so much is said about the fact that we’d become soft as a result of the success of Tommy, and then the unexpected windfall success of Who’s Next.

"The other guys in the band hadn’t had to do very much, creatively speaking, to make that happen – just support me during recording, and then do the road work to back it up. I felt really supported by the other guys, especially at the moment they first started to play my new stuff. Running through one of the first songs we recorded for Quadrophenia, I remember thinking that we’d never sounded better, or played with such conviction on unproved material. This was especially true of Roger. He sang like a raging bear. His Love Reign O’er Me will never be surpassed.”

Received wisdom has it that the rest of The Who didn’t quite get Quadrophenia to begin with, which Townshend concedes is “understandable” given that “it didn’t really land completely as a collection of songs until about three weeks prior to starting to record”. But perhaps the one member who took to the project most readily was bassist John Entwistle, who was given free rein to add some ravishing horn parts to the mix, most notably the pumping brass salvos on 5:15, the semi-orchestral flourishes on the title track and the eruptive climax to Love Reign O’er Me.

Townshend today describes Entwistle’s input as “Stunning, he was also wonderful to work with: meticulous, disciplined, funny and inspired. I loved it that he wrote out his brass parts on music manuscript paper like a proper composer. What he arranged and played on a whole variety of exotic brass instruments fit my own synthesiser and string arrangements perfectly.

"The Who members all had one great facility once we were making music: they listened. So many musicians and band members couldn’t do that. It’s the mark of a great musician, even if – like Keith Moon – he was a drummer who didn’t keep time. He listened very carefully, and what he played fit my songs perfectly.”

The initial recordings were to be produced by The Who’s co-manager, Kit Lambert, Townshend’s usual port of call for feedback on his creative works, though the dynamic of their relationship was by then in deep flux. A year earlier Daltrey had discovered what he saw as discrepancies in The Who’s bank accounts. By ’73, no doubt hastened by Lambert and fellow manager Chris Stamp’s rejection of his debut solo album, Daltrey brought in Bill Curbishley to oversee his affairs. Townshend’s more protracted shift of allegiance to Curbishley signalled the end of an era, though it was hardly a surprise to all parties.

“My strategy was always to run to Kit Lambert or Chris Stamp to fly new ideas,” Townshend explains. “By 1973 they had both lost interest in The Who to some extent. Kit had long-since left the stage as my songwriting mentor, but I was hoping he would co-produce. He turned out to be too distracted.”

Whether all this management hoo-ha informed the recording of Quadrophenia in any way is something Townshend rejects out of hand: “I don’t think the trying events around us informed the album. We were at the height of our powers as a business as well as a band. We could make studios appear out of thin air. What we didn’t have enough of was time, so the much-vaunted quadrophonic mix never happened. And neither did the quadrophonic stage act.”

Richard Barnes adds: “Who’s Next had moved them up in one way, as it was the first record not produced by Kit Lambert – it was Pete and Glyn Johns – and they’d got a new, clear sound. The other thing was that Kit started getting into hard drugs after Tommy, so he didn’t have that same influence.”

Quadrophenia featured cameos from Grease Band pianist Chris Stainton and actor John Curle (the voice of the newsreader), but otherwise it’s classic Who. First single 5:15, which soundtracks Jimmy’s barrelling train journey to Brighton, gobbling purple hearts on the way, was written while Townshend was was “killing time between appointments” in Oxford Street and Carnaby Street. “What I had was a studio track and a riff, the essential riff behind 5:15, which is a little like a Chuck Berry derivation. I stood in the street and wrote down phrases while watching people walking past. I did it again in 1976 with Street In The City for the Rough Mix album with Ronnie Lane.”

And what of Drowned and Love Reign O’er Me, two of the choicest moments The Who have ever pressed to vinyl?

“They’re two of my best songs,” Townshend agrees. “Drowned is wonderful to perform. They belong in Quadrophenia. The songs that have been most cathartic for me are probably the angrier ones. This kind of writing has always been, for me, an attempt to make the spiritual journey accessible as an idea, using watery metaphors. I explain in some detail in the [Quadrophenia reissue] liner notes how I came to write Love Reign O’er Me. It’s a kind of ‘scoop’, so I don’t want to spoil the surprise. I think Roger has dozens of fine moments, and his many live renditions of Love Reign O’er Me on recent tours have always blown me away.

“Barbra Streisand touched my cheek during the Kennedy Center Awards show [in 2008, where soul singer Bettye LaVette sang the tune] and asked me if I had ‘really written that song? It’s beautiful.’ Nice moment for me.”

The week of Quadrophenia’s release wasn’t quite as beatific though. At least one quarter of The Who seemed a little disgruntled.

“The record got delayed because there were certain problems with it,” recalls Barnes. “Roger used to complain that his voice had got lost in the mix. It was a bit of a dense, heavy mix, like an assault on the senses.”

In preparation for the album’s tour, the band were deep in rehearsals at Shepperton Studios. The simmering resentment between Daltrey and Townshend came to a head one night in late October. After a brief verbal spat, Townshend began throwing wayward punches, then pranged the singer with his guitar. Daltrey responded with a single uppercut and knocked him out cold.

“Roger punched me once,” offers Townshend today, “and I’m sure I asked for it. And he could have killed me, he had a hell of a punch. Luckily I just lost my memory for an hour or two. He was very sweet afterwards. Roger and I have had our spats, but he is really a good and loving man. I knew that then and I’m more aware of it now. But we were both under incredible strain. I’d arrived for a rehearsal four hours late, after preparing stage tapes. It’s all ancient history.”

Initial UK sales of Quadrophenia were hobbled by the vinyl shortage caused by the OPEC oil embargo, meaning that only a limited number of pressings made it into the shops before production had to be stopped. Many Who followers had to wait until the end of the tour, in November, before they could grab a copy. After which the album swiftly rose to No.2. Demand was heavy in the States, too, where it went platinum within 48 hours of release and was fended off the top spot only by Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.

Press reaction was ambiguous. Writing in Rolling Stone, Lenny Kaye praised Quadrophenia as “a beautifully performed and magnificently recorded essay of a British youth mentality in which [The Who] played no little part,” adding that “it might easily be said that The Who as a whole have never sounded better.” But he was less convinced bythe overall feel of the record, finding little evidence of telling contributions from Daltrey, Entwistle and Moon, and concluding that “on its own terms, Quadrophenia falls short of the mark”.

The NME called it a triumph, though “by no means unflawed”, noting that “some of the more extravagant production touches sound about as comfortable as marzipan icing on a half-ounce cheeseburger”. At the same time they suspected that, should the listener stick with it, “you might just find it the most rewarding musical experience of the year”.

Says Richard Barnes: “I think Pete’s at his happiest when he’s in his bunker with his tape recorder and his synthesiser, writing. That’s how I feel about Quadrophenia; it’s Pete playing with his toys. It’s like a solo Townshend project. Quadrophenia works because it’s just a wonderful piece of art, the power of the music is immense. But in many ways Quadrophenia was a failure. It was a critical success and it sold a lot, but it was one of those albums that was worthy. Everyone had it in their collection, but didn’t play it much.”

Perhaps it was the failure of the tour, with all its misfiring backing tapes and windy verbal intros. Or the reservations about the studio mix. Maybe even the relatively poor showing of its two singles – 5:15 just about dented the Top 20; Love Reign O’er Me didn’t trouble the scorers at all. Or maybe just plain weariness on Townshend’s part in the wake of such a Herculean project. Whatever the reasons, there didn’t seem a whole lotta love out there for Quadrophenia in 1973.

Fast forward to the summer of 1996. Quadrophenia has finally been remixed, with both Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend involved, and remastered on CD. The sound is sharper, clearer, the nuances of Townshend’s more intricate passages teased out in much greater relief against the bigger, more abrasively Who-like songs. Technology has finally caught up with Townshend’s original vision. It’s enough for the band to try out Quadrophenia live again.

The first show is a highly theatrical, all-star hootenanny in Hyde Park, with giant video screens, and various guests taking key roles in the narrative – Phil Daniels (reprising his 1979 film role as Jimmy), David Gilmour, Ade Edmondson, Stephen Fry, Gary Glitter and, as news anchor, Trevor McDonald. It proves a huge success, enough for The Who to take Quadrophenia out on an extensive tour across the US, before returning to the UK for a handful of homecoming shows before Christmas and swinging over to Europe.

Quadrophenia is the late bloomer in The Who’s back catalogue. A record about the 60s, recorded in the proggy fug of the 70s. Even given its time-specific, niche-culture context, it feels oddly significant today. They’re songs that cut deep into the spiritual malaise; big, sweeping epics to get lost in or shake a fist to. Songs that have outrun much of The Who’s better known tunes from the era, echoing through the years with the same raw buzz as Jimmy’s bloody Vespa.

The Who even reprised Quadrophenia at the Royal Albert Hall in aid of the Teenage Cancer Trust, this time with special guests Eddie Vedder and Kasabian’s Tom Meighan. “I loved it,” says Townshend. “I suppose there was a bit of me that enjoyed it because it was such a grand celebration of the music in such a fabulous venue. Roger had total control of that show. He had demanded it when I asked him to perform it with me. I thought he did a fantastic job as a director.”

The definitive version of the album – Quadrophenia: The Director’s Cut, a five-disc box with a bushel of previously unheard demos and acres of memorabilia, overseen by Townshend – was released in 2011, and The Who toured Quadrophenia again, without resorting to violence, in 2012/13.

So how has his relationship to this boldest of bold endeavours changed over the years?

“I’ve always liked it and been proud of it,” says its creator, “but it failed to provide The Who with an alternative 70-minute rock-opera stage act to replace Tommy. I only started working on it in order to achieve that, so for a long time I was unwilling to talk about it much. It was there as an album if anyone wanted to hear it, but the big picture had never happened. In 1996 and ’97 I finally got it up in concert the way I had thought it would work in 1973. Roger was a great creative ally in making it work as an on-stage drama.

"Since then, nothing can dampen my enthusiasm for it, or my gratitude that we at least got a great album made. We had a great team.”

This original version of this feature appeared in Classic Rock 165, in
December 2011.

“It’s a man’s world,” Joni Mitchell told interviewer Elio Iannacci in 2014. “Men wrote most of the songs for women and they were mostly tales of seduction. I wrote my own songs. That ended that.”

Arguably the most influential female singer-songwriter of our time, Joni Mitchell not only redefined women’s roles in rock and pop, but she also set the standard for others to follow.

Her poetic lyrics are the equal of Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen in their prime. On a musical level, she blossomed from a coffee-house folkie into a roving experimentalist, weaving sophisticated song cycles from jazz, blues, pop and world music. And then there’s her voice, a soprano supple enough to trace the agonies and rhapsodies of human emotion, and most everything in between.

Mitchell’s interest in the arts developed during her teenage years in Saskatoon, Canada, where she began to paint and write poetry. A Pete Seeger songbook introduced her to the possibilities of guitar, leading to an open-tuning style. Having married, given birth, divorced and moved to the US, her reputation as a gifted songwriter grew apace.

She signed to Reprise Records and cut her 1968 debut album, Song To A Seagull. The real lift-off moment came two years later when third album Ladies Of The Canyon – which included the epochal Woodstock and her first hit single, Big Yellow Taxi – became an international success.

Mitchell’s golden years spanned the 70s. In a run of impeccable studio albums, she brought a candour and complexity to her work that ranged from the stark autobiography of Blue and the funky exoticism of The Hissing Of Summer Lawns to the spacious Hejira and the free-flowing jazz textures of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.

Such high standards took a dip during the following decade, as Mitchell grappled with electronica and the demands of new technology. The 90s saw a resurgence, and she released a handful of well-received albums before announcing her retirement in 2002. She returned to the studio for 2007’s Shine, after which she disappeared again.

Sadly, in 2015 she suffered a brain aneurysm. Her rehabilitation has been steady. And while it’s unlikely that we’ll ever hear new music from Joni Mitchell again, there’s still so much to savour, including an emotional return to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022 in the company of Brandi Carlile, Wynonna Judd, Marcus Mumford and more. The set was released as a live album, Joni Mitchell at Newport, the following year.

...and one to avoid

In 2017, some Steven Wilson fans could have been forgiven if they misunderstood his statement that his album To The Bone was a pop record rather than a prog one. But if they gave him a chance to explain – as he did to Prog – his argument made more sense than it might have seemed.

Steven Wilson wants you to know that his new album, To The Bone, is a pop album. Even to someone unschooled in prog, it doesn’t sound much like a pop record. Instead it sounds like an artful modern rock work with some pop touches. It’s proggy a lot of the time – but those who fly the prog banner need to be warned.

“I know ‘pop’ is a very pejorative term,” he says, sitting in the conservatory of his Hertfordshire home. “Particularly when you’re talking with the prog audience. ‘Pop’ is the sort of word they run screaming from. But I think of pop in the sense that Kate Bush is pop. Or The Beatles are pop. Or ABBA are pop. I’m not talking about the modern, very conservative pop scene – I’m talking about pop in the broad sense.”

If you know anything about Wilson you’ll know he doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as prog. It’s not that he’s ashamed of the genre – you don’t set about remixing the King Crimson catalogue, or make the music he does, if you feel that way. It’s more that he recognises a grim reality: prog brings with it a set of associations in the wider public mind. Prog is male; it’s po-faced; it values technical excellence above melody; it’s self-indulgent; it’s best left undisturbed in its bedsit.

That’s all rubbish, Wilson accepts, and it masks the fact that a lot of music which few would consider prog is actually perfectly prog; but because it doesn’t get lumbered with the label, it can reach a wider audience.

He explains: “If you listen to a band like Joy Division, for example, Closer is closer to progressive rock than punk. The weighty lyrical subject matter about the human condition; the use of Mellotrons; the portentous, conceptual side of it; even the Peter Saville artwork – very pretentious, very humourless. It’s closer to In The Court Of The Crimson King than it is to The Damned.

“In the UK, things are put on one side of the hip divide or the other. My music does sound a bit more old-fashioned than Radiohead or Sigur Rós. I do wear my love of people like Jeff Lynne and Yes a little bit more on my sleeve than those guys do. But at the same time, I do hear those things in the music of Radiohead and Sigur Rós and Muse. It’s frustrating to me that it’s overlooked in their music but not in my music.”

As soon as people suggested Radiohead were prog, they took care to say they hated the genre. “Yeah, and I’ve always thought that was incredibly disingenuous of them. But, actually, I have to acknowledge that perhaps it was very wise.”

It’s not that Wilson doesn’t love or value prog fans. He’s very grateful for everything you’ve done for him. He just wishes others liked his music too. “Most people who consider themselves music lovers have had the opportunity to decide whether they like Coldplay or not, and whether they like Radiohead or not. The frustration is that they haven’t had the chance to decide whether or not they like my music.” And that’s because once you get called prog, you’re never going to get on the radio, into most of the music magazines, or into the newspapers.

One reason people don’t call Radiohead, Muse and Sigur Rós prog is that they always took care to look like indie bands. Wilson: “I look like a nerd, which probably doesn’t help. If I’d been wiser, I probably could have gone about cultivating my image in a different way.”

He was probably always destined to be a nerd. “My dad was an electronic engineer and he used to build me things. He would have to invent them, because in the 80s you couldn’t just download a circuit diagram. He built me a little four-track recorder, so at 12, 13 years old I was experimenting with multitracking; and he built me a sequencer.

“Except my dad wasn’t a musician, so he would always get something a little bit wrong. The sequencer was a nine-step sequencer. A musician would have known that most music is in four, so he’d have built a four-step or eight-step sequencer. He built me a nine-step sequencer because that was the number of relays he could afford.

“Maybe that’s why I became so interested in strange time signatures – everything I wrote with the sequencer had to be in three or nine, which are not common time signatures. With the multitrack machine he couldn’t figure out how to get the erase head to work, so everything I did had to be a first take. Maybe that’s why I became interested in the idea of lo-fi and the role of chance in music.”

Rather than doing what most kids do – picking up an instrument, finding some mates who’ve got instruments, bashing out cover versions in someone’s bedroom until before playing in a local youth club – Wilson was learning to be a producer. “I wanted to hold a record in my hand and say, ‘This is something I made.’ My first ambitions were to be in the studio all the time, and my dad – amazingly – facilitated that from an early age.”

Alongside that was a voracious interest in music – not just the prog giants, but the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, Neil Young, Elton John, ABBA, Can, Tangerine Dream, ELO, Tubular Bells, The Dark Side Of The Moon.

“But at the same time – and I’ve always struggled to explain this – I was fascinated by dark music. I was a very pretentious, pompous teenager, readings things like Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony and listening to Throbbing Gristle’s The Second Annual Report. Maybe it’s because I came from this very happy, loving family that I was fascinated by these things, which were alien to me. I guess that’s part of the magic of pop music – presenting a world you’d never want to be a part of.”

He grew up with a sense that music was a journey rather than a destination, and mourns the loss of a concept of ‘pop’ that incorporates everything, rather than something that’s narrowly defined by the fashions of radio playlists. We discuss the wonder of BBC4’s repeats of Top Of The Pops, which – by simply reflecting what happened to be in the charts at any given time, rather than ‘curating’ a view of what music should be – offer a fairly dizzying idea of 80s pop. You might get a terrible novelty record, some absurdly ambitious piece of new pop, a heavy metal epic and a disco hit all thrown through the screen, one after the other, not differentiated.

“The 80s get a bad rep,” Wilson says, “but it’s wonderfully mad when you see The Smiths alongside The Tweets on the same episode of Top Of The Pops, or Status Quo next to Echo And The Bunnymen. It’s all become so homogenised.”

So when he says To The Bone is a pop record, he doesn’t mean he’s trying to compete with Ed Sheeran; he means he’s trying to make a record that captures the spirit of adventure he remembers from some of the big acts of his teens. Not a lowest common denominator, but a higher plane, of pop.

“I was completely besotted by artists like Kate Bush, Tears For Fears, Talk Talk, Prince, Depeche Mode, and what Peter Gabriel was doing in the 80s. What I loved about those records was that they were very accessible – you could enjoy them for the melodies – but at the same time, if you chose to engage with them at a deeper level, there were great lyrics about quite deep subject matter, and very ambitious, cinematic production, with great musicianship. And they were outside genre classification.

“So this is the first time I’ve really focused on my pop sensibility, stripping away some of the most conceptual elements and some of the more technical muso aspects, and just concentrating on the art of writing big, epic, ambitious pop music.”

You might be preparing yourself for Wilson’s fifth solo album to be a bundle of entirely unrelated, utterly flippant three-minute songs. That’s not what To The Bone is. While it might not be as obsessed with the darkness as its predecessor, Hand.Cannot.Erase., or as unconcerned with commercial possibility as previous iterations of Wilson’s career – Bass Communion, Blackfield, Continuum, Incredible Expanding Mindfuck, No-Man, Porcupine Tree, Storm Corrosion – it’s a weighty album, dealing with what has become the weightiest theme of all in the contemporary world.

“It starts with this black American schoolteacher who’s a very good friend of mine, Jasmine, talking about the nature of truth and how truth has become a flexible notion,” he says. “Truth is something that’s filtered through everyone’s agenda, whether it’s your race, your religion, your politics. All the songs on the record are about truth and about the way people have different truths, whether it’s the religious fundamentalist or the terrorist or the politician.

“In the simplest sense, there are songs about how two people in a relationship can have a completely different truth about that relationship; a different perspective. What we call ‘truth’ is nothing of the sort a lot of the time. We have a perspective, and that becomes our truth. Truth, in the true sense of the word, is an absolute singular reality. But it seems to me you can never get to that singular absolute reality.”

His fascination with truth is a result of what has happened since Wilson wrote Hand.Cannot.Erase.. He had thought that record offered a bleak enough view of the world, “but since then we’ve had Brexit, we’ve had Donald Trump, we’ve had the terrorists come right to our very doorstep, we’ve had Bataclan, we’ve had Manchester. I wouldn’t say it would have been irresponsible not to write about those things, but it would have been strange if I hadn’t touched upon them.”

He thinks pop’s escapist artists must have been challenged by what has happened in the world – when 22 people are murdered at the end of a pop concert, how can it not be? “This world has now come to them, and it’s affecting their young fans. Can they continue to completely pretend it’s not happening? It seems to me that we’ve forgotten that a lot of pop music came out of anger – and you could argue that was when it was at its best.”

But there’s sentiment there, too. Wilson often invited his heroes to recreate their roles for him – like getting Alan Parsons to serve as engineer on The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories) – and while he would doubtless argue it’s about getting the best person for the job, it’s hard not to see it as wish fulfilment too.

There’s another returning hero this time. “Do you know those old Talk Talk and The The records from the 80s? Remember the harmonica? I tracked down the guy who was on all those records, Mark Feltham. It’s one of the first sounds you hear on the record. It’s such an amazing sound. No one had looked at him for 20 years. It’s the Tarantino thing: ‘I don’t care if John Travolta’s out of fashion – I remember he was great, and I’m going to bring him back and make him hip again.’”

He considers that for a moment. “I don’t know if I’m making these people hip again. Probably not. But as soon as he started playing in the studio, people around were almost crying. It’s such an amazing sound.”

The sensible money would be against To The Bone being the album that makes Wilson into a mainstream star. But his exclusion from that environment baffles him. At one point we have a 10-minute discussion on why I never commissioned an interview with him when I was music editor of The Guardian, despite the paper’s writers giving him good reviews. (Short answer: ‘bloke who’s made good records makes another good record’ isn’t much of a story for people who’ve never heard of him.)

But what I don’t understand is why it bothers him. He lives in a beautiful house. He sells out big theatres. His audience loves him. He gets to make the music he wants, without interference. In the end, he accepts, it boils down to something simple. “I have a big ego, as most people that stand up in front of an audience on a stage do. You have to have a big ego. I would like my music to have some place in history. I would like it to have some immortality. And the more significant it is to the more people, the happier I’ll be.

“Maybe it’s self-validation. People look at me and say, ‘He’s made music. He’s not compromised. He’s got a good fanbase and he sells lots of records.’ I’m not saying I feel like a failure – but I still don’t feel self-validation to the extent I’d like to. And yes, I look at people like Thom Yorke and I think: ‘You fucker!’”

Wilson isn’t bitter. He’s just devoted so much of his life to thinking about music, and the music industry, that he can’t quite see the wood for the trees. It’s easy for an outsider to point to the 629 albums recorded under 327 identities, to the concept albums and experiments, to the privacy he protects, and say: ‘Dude! You want to be a household name, and get in all the music mags? Just make one album every two years and tell people how unhappy you were making it, and how drunk you got every night to cope.’

But if he did that, he wouldn’t be Steven Wilson. And what would be the point of that?

Suffice to say, 2026 has been an... eventful year. Wars, AI, wildfires - there's been plenty dominating the headlines, but thankfully there's also been a whole heap of brilliant new releases to sink our teeth into.

There's still a little way to go until we hit the big end of year lists, but we've decided to look back on some of the best metal albums this year has gifted us so far. From cutting edge black metal (seriously, that genre is on a tear this year) to long-awaited comebacks from Warning, Poison The Well and Neurosis, we've looked at both the underground and the mainstream to offer up a selection of some of the finest things metal has to offer in 2026.

A.A. Williams – Solstice (Reigning Phoenix)

London’s Robert Smith-endorsed singer/songwriter loves to explore different shades of black. Where her 2020 debut, Forever Blue, was moody and dynamic, follow-up As The Moon Rests was explosive and heavy, and Solstice sat somewhere in the middle. On Little By Little, Williams’ gentle drums and keys were abruptly overwhelmed by blasts of electric guitar. Meanwhile, the lyrics were reliably bleak and introspective: ‘In the stillness I have become tormented by words unspoken,’ she sang on Hold It Together. A classy, dark and vulnerable exorcism. Matt Mills

A Forest Of Stars – Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface (Prophecy)

Stack overflow In Corpse Pile Interface just might be the most adventurous black metal album of 2026. The Yorkshire band's sixth outing, A Forest Of Stars utilise everything from the elegiac violins of My Dying Bride to the despairing, towers-come-tumbling blasts of Trelldom into an epic 73-minutes that also touches on folk, prog and classical. It's a gorgeous sonic journey that'll leave you weary and itching to start all over again and well worth the eight-year wait. Rich Hobson

At The Gates – The Ghost Of A Future Dead (Century Media)

The melodeath luminaries’ eighth album was a mighty epitaph to late frontman Tomas Lindberg. Featuring vocals he recorded ahead of his cancer treatment – plus a title, cover art and tracklisting that he approved before his death – The Ghost Of A Future Dead was a reverent swansong, laden with cataclysmic yet catchy tracks. The Fever Mask and In Dark Distortion were top-shelf At The Gates achievements musically and lyrically, as Lindberg revisited his long-standing penchant for existential themes. It’s unclear whether this’ll be ATG’s final offering, but if it is, what a way to go. Matt Mills

Converge – Love Is Not Enough (Epitaph)

Converge’s first standalone album since 2017 clocked in at a svelte 31 minutes but contained all of the rage, excitement and despair associated with the metalcore greats. Where Distract And Divide and To Feel Something unloaded the pre-requisite hardcore beatdowns, We Were Never The Same was an adrenaline jolt thanks to its tapping guitar notes. The highlight, however, was Make Me Forget You, its latter half embittered and devastating thanks to Jacob Bannon’s wails and Kurt Ballou’s gnarled playing. Matt Mills

Cryptic Shift – Cryogenically Frozen (Metal Blade)

Oh, you thought last time was a lot? When Leeds’ Cryptic Shift debuted with 2020’s Visitations From Enceladus, the scene was bowled over by their winding and celestial approach to prog-thrash metal. Turns out, no one had seen anything yet. This February’s follow-up was almost twice as long and made good use of every second, containing more riffs than most bands make over the course of a career. The half-hour Stratocumulus Evergaol and 20-minute title track may have seemed self-indulgent on paper, but laced with their psychedelic interludes, each was an odyssey worth taking. Matt Mills

Dimmu Borgir – Grand Serpent Rising (Nuclear Blast)

Dimmu Borgir albums are so infrequent that the arrival of any new release is always worthy of mention. Hails to the depths then, that Grand Serpent Rising might well be the best thing the Norwegians have done in 20 years, focusing less on their symphonic overtures to create something explosive and apocalyptic without losing the grandeur that made them stand out so much in the first place. Rich Hobson

Dymna Lotva – Vyraj (Prophecy)

Dymna Lotva have been through a lot. Decried as "extremists" in their home country of Belarus, the post-black metal group fled to Poland to continue the good fight without fear of being arrested. There is a clear sense of fury and liberation at the heart of Vyraj, the band still using Belarusian folklore and historical accounts as a means of personal expression, vocalist Nokt Aeon venting fury, despair and defiance in explosive whirlwinds. From black metal to folk and doom (including a guest appearance from former My Dying Bride frontman Aaron Stainthorpe), this record utilises an impressively diverse palette to craft something truly vivid and unique. Rich Hobson

Elder – Through Zero (Stickman)

Elder don’t make albums as much as they build universes. Through Zero was another absorbing work from the Massachusetts rockers, emphasising the riffier end of their repertoire across songs that either neared or broke the 10-minute mark. Sigil To Ruin was a masterclass in tension and release, not to mention a powerful launchpad for Nick DiSalvo’s clean vocals, before Capture/Release interrupted its spacy synths with a tumbling riff. By the time of acoustic closer Blighted Age, we weren’t ready to escape their heady cosmos. Matt Mills

Evanescence – Sanctuary (Columbia)

After staging something of a comeback with 2021's The Bitter Pill - their first album of original material in a decade - Evanescence are reclaiming their crown as one of alt. metal's brightest forces on Sanctuary. Teamed up with Jordan Fish, the ex-BMTH man brings a contemporary edge and sleek production flourishes that build on Evanescence's best elements without feeling like a massive departure from who they are. The result is vibrant, punchy and, particularly in the likes of Who Will Will You Follow and Afterlife, properly anthemic, worthy of a band who can comfortably play arenas and are long overdue a Download Festival headline shot. Rich Hobson

Final Gasp – New Day Symptoms (Relapse)

Boisterous, muscular hardcore meets shimmering, emotive goth on the second record from Boston's Final Gasp. More based in thuggish beatdowns than fellow goth-core mashers Unto Others, New Day Symptoms has some serious (vampire) fangs, its riffs at times teetering on the edge of extreme metal menace without ever running away from the gothic core, sounding powerful and dancable both. If you've ever wondered what The Crow would sound like as an album, this is it. Rich Hobson

Growth – Under The Under (Wild Thing)

Coming on like an army of mechanoids glitching to death in a sprawl of spasming limbs and crunched gears, Growth go right for the jugular on Under The Under. The Aussie tech death metallers' second album, Under... takes the best things from Australia's flourishing extreme and prog metal scenes and fuses them together into something wild and unpredictable, the band as likely to burst into angular, growling nastiness as they are to drop a surprise melody. Rich Hobson

Guilt Trip – Armour Of Angels (Roadrunner)

The 'metalcore' tag has surely never applied more than on Guilt Trip's third record. Fusing the hungry, squalling riffs of Burn My Eyes-era Machine Head with sweaty, violent hardcore (think Madball or Cro-Mags), sounding like a proper collision of the worlds without sacrificing either side's best elements. It's no major reinvention of the genre; rather, Armour Of Angels is a shining example of where metalcore first emerged from, turning its nose up on pop-baiting choruses or melodies to just go right for the throat. Rich Hobson

Hällas – Panorama (Aventyr)

For decades, bands who looked up to the bluster of 70s prog have been derided as silly. The difference between those other revivalists and Hällas is that Hällas know they’re silly – and, on Panorama, they do all they can to remind you of that. “I still remember the taste of apples,” singer/bassist Tommy Alexandersson declared with laughable seriousness on Above The Continuum. The songs were all loaded with over-the-top vocals and keys, but they were also as catchy as the flu in nursery school. Checkmate, naysayers! Matt Mills

Hulder – Verbolgen (Season Of Mist)

2026 has felt like a bumper year for black metal. The return of both Mayhem and Dimmu Borgir has served the old guard well, while this list is already resplendent with emerging BM talent. You can add Hulder to the list of newcomers you should most definitely check out if you've missed them thus far, the Washington duo somehow managing to balance dense ferocity and epic, warship-rowing melody with their third record, Verbolgen, sounding like they belong somewhere between a medieval torture chamber and a pagan sacrifice ritual. Rich Hobson

Immolation – Descent (Nuclear Blast)

Sometimes reliability can be a crutch. As gratifying as a consistent run of albums can be, there's always a danger that some bands will languish in their own ruts, where it becomes difficult to differentiate the highs - or lows - of a given record. Then there's Immolation. Now onto their twelfth studio album, the New Yorkers aren't reinventing any wheels on Descent, but also aren't being left to rot, crafting ten tracks of exemplar old school death metal. If it ain't broke... Rich Hobson

Karnivool – In Verses (Cymatic)

Plenty can change over the course of 13 years, but on In Verses, Karnivool proved that they were still the tip of the Aussie prog metal spear. Singles Drone and Aozora were the kind of dense, knotty anthems that made them standouts during the late 2000s, and Ghost flaunted Ian Kenny’s ever-elegant vocal talents. The band also lent even harder on their emotional side, starting with Conversations and Reanimation (featuring guitar great Guthrie Govan) and culminating with bagpipe skyscraper Salva. Overall, another masterstroke. Matt Mills

Khemmis – Khemmis (Nuclear Blast)

It’s great when metal breaks the mould, but sometimes, it’s just as fun to see a band revel in the genre as it is and invite the listener to do the same. That’s what Khemmis did on their self-titled album. Rather than stay set in their doom metal ways, the Americans explored the best of doom, power, death and black metal, delivering a compelling combo. Invocation Of The Dreamer, Beneath The Scythe and Carrion King were the kind of songs you’d put on while suiting up to save a village from a fire-spewing dragon. Matt Mills

Lamb Of God – Into Oblivion (Epic/Century Media)

Lamb Of God’s last two albums were good-but-not-great displays, suggesting that their muscular take on groove metal was beginning to atrophy. But then Into Oblivion landed like a 10-count knockout. Opening with the symphonic melodrama of the title track, it announced that the Virginians had found focus anew, and the rest of the tracklist refused to let up. From the industrial-tinged Sepsis to thrash metal rager St Catherine’s Wheel, this was their best stuff in at least a decade – and possibly way, way longer than that. Matt Mills

Loathe – A Stranger To You (SharpTone)

If there’s one thing Loathe can never be accused of, it’s rushing things. The Liverpudlians meticulously self-produced their third album across five years and, along the way, cancelled tours so that they could be in the studio. Expectations were sky-high but A Stranger To You still excelled, expanding on their non-conformist approach to metalcore. Even though we could highlight individual tracks – Fortress Down, Revenant and Gifted Every Strength all rule – it was best consumed as a whole, weaving between shoegaze, metal and electronica with a rare level of skill. Matt Mills

Mallavora – What If Better Never Comes? (Church Road)

On the most promising debut album of 2026 so far, Bristol unit Mallavora introduced an alt-metal sound somewhere between System Of A Down, Lowen and Spiritbox. Songs such as Lilith & Esther and Sick were quickly arresting, enhanced by their fresh lyrical perspective on society. Two of the band’s members, including singer Jess Douek, live with chronic illnesses, so they used that as a lens to examine both their own experiences and the sicknesses they perceived in the world around them. Essential stuff. Matt Mills

Neurosis – An Undying Love For A Burning World (Neurot)

March 20 was the best day of the year for post-metal fans. Not only did genre innovators Neurosis return after a seven-year hiatus, but they announced they’d replaced abusive ex-singer Scott Kelly with Isis’ Aaron Turner and surprise-released their 12th album. That An Undying Love… was fucking incredible was the icing on the cake. The band both resurrected their distinct, widescreen sludge and added new layers, such as the metronome-breaking thrash of Untethered. A decade on from their previous record, they hadn’t missed a step. Matt Mills

Papangu – Celestial (Deck)

One of the most eclectic new bands in the game, Papangu blend the folk genres of their native South America (ciranda, forró, bossa nova) with prog rock, metal and funk. Their third album was their smoothest brew yet, endlessly listenable as it snaked between artsy rhythms and vibrant keyboards. To make it even better, the band recorded, mixed and mastered the whole thing without a computer to take a stand against AI’s presence in music. Excellent music with an excellent goal. Matt Mills

Poison The Well – Peace In Place (SharpTone)

One of metalcore's early innovators, Poison The Well hadn't released anything in 17 years before Peace In Place arrived in March. Rather than trying to catch up with the kids, the Floridian mob came out with something left-field and classic, chucking up comparisons to Cave In or Dillinger Escape Plan as they twisted the metalcore sound into something anthemic without ever feeling polished. Rich Hobson

Protest The Hero – Within (Self-Released)

Protest The Hero have one gear and it’s FUCKING GO! On the follow-up to 2020’s Palimpsest, the Canadians broke into another stampede of hyper-technical guitar work and lightspeed post-hardcore. Frontman Rody Walker remained in unhinged form, especially as he dished out his death growls on opener Mouthpiece. It was the shortest album of the band’s career, clocking in at just 35 minutes, but it may not be the end of the story. If some fans are to be believed, a second half is going to drop sooner rather than later. Whether or not that happens, Within remains a complete and scorching piece of work. Matt Mills

Skindred – You Got This (Earache)

After over 20 years as one of Britain's best-loved - if often underappreciated - cult bands, Skindred finally got their dues with You Got This. The band's first number one record - though predecessor Smile came close - it captures everything that's so infectiously brilliant about the Welsh ragga-metallers, with massive party-starters (You Got This, Can I Get A) and ragers (This Is The Sound, Born Fe Dis) alike to prove there's no one quite like them - and definitely nobody who does it better. Rich Hobson

Slift – Fantasia (Sub Pop)

Gone were the 12-minute compositions and extended synth sections. For album four, Toulouse’s space rockers penned material designed to cement their status as one of the best live bands on the circuit. Fantasia’s songs were heavy and immediate, as felt through the Mastodon-like athletics of Day Of Execution and the hulking grooves of the title track. The trio will headline their biggest-ever European tour at the end of the year; given the absolute intensity on display here, we’d recommend some earplugs! Matt Mills

Spirit Adrift – Infinite Illumination (20 Buck Spin)

By the start of this year, Spirit Adrift leader, singer and guitarist Nate Garrett had grown sick of the music industry, especially touring, so he decided to end his career on his own terms. Infinite Illumination was surprise-released in April, offering fans one last fix of doom metal majesty. The opening title track, which rose from acoustic guitars to NWOBHM-like leads, and the booming I Am Sustained were career highlights, hammering home just what we’re going to miss about this Arizona band. Matt Mills

Urne – Setting Fire To The Sky (Spinefarm)

Across each of their three albums to date, Urne have evolved in sound and scope. From the massive, Metallica riffs of 2021's Serpent & Spirit, to 2023's proggier A Feast On Sorrow, they've once again redrawn their own boundaries with Setting Fire To The Sky, finding renewed extremity whilst also introducing stronger vocal melodies than ever before.R Resolutely in their own lane, Urne combine influences into something entirely new, echoes of bands like Mastodon - with Troy Sanders even guesting on Harken The Waves - not overshadowing the fact this is one of Britain's best-kept secrets. Rich Hobson

Warning – Rituals Of Shame (Relapse)

Neurosis might've swept the board for 2026's most surprising comeback record, but Warning put up a good fight. 20 years since the release of their doom-defining Watching From A Distance, Patrick Walker and co. have reconvened over some of the most beautiful, heartbreaking songs ever put to record. So basicaly, Warning doing what they do best. Rich Hobson

Worm – Necropalace (Century Media)

Worm might have originated in Florida, but their sound feels decidedly indebted to the mouldering castles of Europe. The black metal band's first album for Century Media, Necropalace is a step up in just about every way, atmospheric and sweepingly powerful, it feels as close to black metal's Transylvania and undeath-obssesed roots as anything that's come in the past 40 years, cinematic in scope and utterly annihilating to the senses. Rich Hobson

Irish sensations Fontaines D.C. have announced details of their fifth album, Dopamine Chamber. The follow-up to 2024's Romance, it'll arrive via XL Recordings on October 24.

"The album itself is a dopamine chamber,” says frontman Grian Chatten. "You step inside, and we test these different mind- or mood-altering pieces of music on you.

"I think Romance was maybe 60 per cent human and 40 per cent corrupted by automation, and a loss of feeling. This one feels more like 60 per cent corrupted – the mask is wearing the face a little more.

"I felt it would be more powerful to leave the hope out and reflect the ugliness honestly. This one needed to feel more like a catastrophic warning.

“There’s a poignant sense of us being on the brink of some other kind of form of humanity, or non-humanity."

"Our albums have always questioned a sense of place,” adds bassist Conor Deegan. "First Dublin, then being away from Dublin, and then trying to find the romance elsewhere. On this record, the question became: where do you escape to?

The band have also released the first single from the album, the atmospheric Marianne. A video, directed by Dave Marsh, who's previously worked with the likes of Doja Cat, Snoop Dogg, Coldplay, Drake and Ed Sheeran, is on the way.

Fontaines D.C. have several shows lined up in Europe and the US, including the UK's Reading and Leeds festivals. Full dates below.

Fontaines D.C. 2026 dates

Aug 18: Lausanne Les Docks, Switzerland
Aug 20: Sankt Polten FM4 Frequency, Austria
Aug 28: Reading Festival, UK
Aug 29: Leeds Festival, UK
Aug 30: Stradbally Hall Electric Picnic, Ireland

Sep 18: Atlanta Shaky Knees, GA
Sep 20: Asbury Park Sea.Hear.Now, NJ
Sep 27: Dana Point Ohana Festival, CA

Since joining Nightwish full-time in 2013, Floor Jansen has become the face of symphonic metal. She’s not just led the Finnish theatrics for three albums, but launched a solo career in her own right (starting with 2023 album Paragon and continuing with this summer’s single, Run) and collaborated with Ayreon and her ex-bandmate, Marko Hietala. In 2023, Hammer’s sister mag Classic Rock sat the singer down to discover the music which shaped her, from the first album she ever heard to her guilty pleasure and her cult hero.

The first music I remember hearing

I’m not one of those people who have a great memory for childhood things, even though I had a great childhood. But the first band that comes to mind is The Beatles; my Dad used to play a lot of The Beatles, especially on the weekends, on a Sunday. I remember the song Honey Pie. I could not understand it as a child. It’s not great, but it’s definitely memorable!

The first song I performed live

When I was about thirteen or fourteen I joined a high-school musical, Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. So it wasn’t one song, it was that musical. I shared the role of the narrator with two other girls. After that I was sold – that’s what I wanted to do. I like that [musical], but musicals are often a bit too sweet for my tastes, even back then. The Phantom Of The Opera, Jekyll & Hyde, those are a little darker.

The guitar hero

I play in a band with him: that’s Emppu [Vuorinen, Nightwish guitarist]. He is an amazing guitar player, but he doesn’t need to fill every gap in the song with meaningless notes. He really keeps the atmosphere [of the songs]. What he plays in Sleeping Sun is beautiful.

The singer

She falls completely out of the spectrum of rock and metal, but if there’s one singer that endlessly amazes me with her sound it’s Celine Dion. I find her music absolutely cheese-bombs, but that’s too bad, because I love her voice. You can feel what she’s singing.

The songwriter

Tuomas [Holopainen, Nightwish]. I don’t know anybody who can write like him. He has been writing music for twenty-five years, had three different singers in his band, and still Nightwish is one of the biggest bands out there. That says something about how good the songs are. I have a special love for Ghost Love Score which is a super-weird song, it’s ten minutes long, but for some reason, it speaks to so many people.

The greatest album of all time

It’s so coloured in time. I’m 42, so what I thought was the best at 16 [won’t be the same now]. I can never answer that question.

My guilty pleasure

I’ll see if there’s anything I listen to that people might think is weird… One of my band members loves nineties disco, and that is so far away from what we do, but I don’t have [anything like] that. I do like to listen to film music when I read books. Usually instrumental. The music depends on what kind of book it is, because you still connect it together. I was listening to the music from Inception when I read Steven King’s Dark Tower series. There are parts of the book that really connect to parts of the music.

The best record I’ve made

You put so much love and energy into every song, that the moment you release the album, that’s the best thing you’ve ever done. It always feels that way because you put everything you’ve learned, all the skills you have, everything you are into your latest work. So for me that would be Paragon, because it’s the latest thing I did.

The worst record I’ve made

Probably the first [Prison Of Desire by After Forever]. I was 18 when I recorded it, so we didn’t know anything about writing, about recording, about singing. But your first is your first. And that also makes it very, very special.

The song that makes me cry

Most music makes me cry! My emotions are very close to the surface. One song is Heartless, from Evergrey. Just some things in his lyrics that are expressed very beautifully.

The cult hero

Anneke van Giersbergen. When I heard [The Gathering’s] Strange Machines on the radio, and then went to see a concert, for me she was like an absolute role model. To sing like that in a metal band, she made me want to do that too. And I loved the way that she did it, her sound and performance and just being this fierce woman among the men.

The best cover version

During the pandemic I started doing cover songs, and some of my favourites I put on YouTube. That was my only connection to the outside world. I have a young daughter, and it’s really hard to get around [the film] Frozen. So I did Let It Go. It’s fun to sing. I wanted to give it a mature sound, a metal twist.

The song I want played at my funeral

I haven’t thought of it yet, to be honest. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. I just went through cancer, so I’ve just been thinking more about surviving.

Originally published in 2023. Floor’s new solo single, Run, is now streaming.

When vocalist Roye Albrighton died in 2016, Nektar’s future looked uncertain – then in 2020 a line-up featuring original members and aliumni released new album The Other Side. Co-founder Derek ‘Mo’ Moore told Prog about the record, and what really happened with the 'other' Nektar.

“We started putting it together about a year ago and the first rehearsal was fantastic,” says bass guitarist and vocalist Derek ‘Mo’ Moore of the new version of Nektar. “We just clicked again. It was like going back 40 years.”

The bass guitarist and vocalist’s enthusiasm for the reformed US-based band, who have just released a new album, The Other Side, is tangible. He was one of their founder members, playing with Nektar from 1969 in their progressive space rock heyday through to their dissolution in 1978. Since then, with shifting line-ups, Nektar have had various periods of activity and disbandment. Moore last played with them in 2002.

Things have recently become a bit more complicated following the death in 2016 of lead vocalist and guitarist Roye Albrighton, who had featured in the majority of the band’s line-ups from 1969 onwards. It seemed that they had reached the end of the line, but then in December 2018 a new version of Nektar announced the release Megalomania, with an online statement that read: “the baton has been passed [to keyboard player Klaus Henatsch] as musical lead, producer and head of the band.”

As there’s nothing about that album on the website now, we can all be forgiven for being a little confused. As it turned out, Megalomania was actually released under the name New Nektar. Moore’s Nektar, meanwhile, features drummer Ron Howden, the only constant in all line-ups since their inception. Moore explains the situation, and how the two variants came to be.

“When Roye died, Howden was left holding the bag. And Klaus Henatsch, who’s been a sideman for the band [since 2007], said to Ron, ‘Now I’m in charge and I’m going to call the shots on the production and what we do.’ And Ron said, ‘Well, I’m the original guy here and I’m not going to do that.’ So he left and when he came back to the States he said, ‘Will you help me get a band together?’ and I said, ‘Sure.’ We then reached out to [guitarist and vocalist] Ryche Chlanda, who played with us in 1978.”

The line-up also features Randy Dembo, who played bass with Nektar in the early 2000s – now also on bass pedals and 12-string – and keyboard player Kendall Scott from Chlanda’s band Flying Dreams. “We had him come down to the studio and I knew after a few notes that he was going to fit,” says Moore.

They also approached lyricist and lightshow man Mick Brockett, who first joined in January 1970. “Nektar was a music and light theatre. The music was enhanced by the lightshow – it told the story – so it was a concept rather than a band,” says Moore. “But that got lost over the last 30 years or so and I brought Mick back because I wanted to have that same feel that we had in the beginning.”

Much of The Other Side was recorded live in the studio and consequently it sounds fresh and full of energy. It feels like it’s informed by all stages of the band’s career, from acid prog to hard rock to more melodic near-pop, but it clearly nods back to their 70s sound. In fact, most of it dates back to unused material from 1978, but these works-in-progress have been extensively rewritten by the new line-up, including new musical sections, ideas from jams and new lyrics.

When asked if it was difficult working without Albrighton, Moore replies: “We feel that Roye was there with us.” Also, most of the music originated from a time when Albrighton had briefly left the group, but in an affectionate tribute, The Devil’s Door – which was played live but never recorded – begins with his guitar introduction from a reel-to-reel recording of a show from 1974.

Going back to their 1971 debut, Journey To The Centre Of The Eye – which follows the story of an astronaut abducted by aliens who then receives their knowledge – Nektar’s most defining work has had a conceptual basis. The Other Side was prompted by the death of Albrighton and their live soundman Vinny Schmid and deals with themes of loss, longing and the division between life and death. And typical of classic Nektar, the title track extends to 18 minutes.

“SkyWriter is a story about a guy whose significant other/wife/girlfriend, dies and he is up in the sky writing letters to her, hoping that she can read it, so every song has a connection to the other side,” says Moore.

“If you listen to the double album in the order that we have it you get a story. If you change the order around you get a different story. The idea is to use your imagination on the album. We’ve given you the themes. The other side is where Roye and Vinny now reside, and lots and lots of friends. It’s something that’s inevitable for all of us and we wanted to take you on that musical trip. To my mind this album would have been a great follow-up to Recycled [from 1975]. It’s got a great feel to it.”

Like many English musicians in the 60s, the group that were to become Nektar – then The Upsetters – had gone over to Germany to play the American military bases.

“Then the guitarist left and Roye had been jamming with Ron when they were in Hamburg, and we offered him to come with us and we clicked from day one,” Moore recalls. “The first gig we played, we’d never performed together before and we jammed the whole night. It was wonderful.”

Nektar made Germany their home and occupied a unique position as an English
band in the thick of the emergent krautrock scene. Their lengthier excursions were not dissimilar to those of German groups such as Amon Düül II. Does Moore think that those bands influenced Nektar?

“I wouldn’t say ‘influenced’ but we know them all,” he responds. “Amon Düül have
been friends of ours for years and a lot of other German bands, like Karthago and Guru Guru. We used to play festivals with them all of the time. Everybody had their own thing going. The beauty about Germany was they were just sucking up anything new, they weren’t interested in pop music, they were just interested in new music, so we were right in there.”

Although Nektar made quite a name for themselves in their adoptive country, from a UK perspective they were the odd band out. British hairies were aware of them, but it was difficult to get a handle on them as they didn’t play as extensively in the UK and didn’t get much coverage in the music press, which only added to the enigma.

“We headlined a festival in Düsseldorf in 1973 and everyone and their mother were on the bill -– Gentle Giant and all kinds of people – and they were all saying, ‘Who the hell is this band who are headlining?’” Moore recalls. “It was strange; we were an English band but we were living out in Germany.”

Given the era, the band’s spacey music, spectacular lightshow and the title of their 1972 album, A Tab In The Ocean – with its mind-bending cover art – were any psychedelic drugs involved in the writing of their music?

“I think all of them,” says Moore, laughing. “We were most definitely doing psychedelic stuff back then. It was an awesome scene, it really was, but we got through it okay!”

But did all that actually help them creatively?

“It might have done, but if you don’t have the creativity to start with it’s not going to do anything,” Moore says. “You can enhance what you have and it might give you other ideas, but you can’t enhance what you don’t have. We would jam for 10 hours straight and then pick out pieces – that piece would go nicely over here. We wrote a lot of music. Now we’re just doing drugs for blood pressure and cholesterol.”

When Nektar moved from Germany it was over to the USA, where Moore still resides, and for a brief period they had significant success there, with their 1973 album Remember The Future hitting number 19 in the Billboard charts, Down To Earth (1974) reaching number 32 and Recycled (1975) reaching number 89.

Down To Earth was a concept album about the circus with the group augmented by a brass section, PP Arnold on backing vocals and Robert Calvert playing the role of the ringmaster. The songs were shorter now and more accessible, but it was still pretty weird and not what one might associate with the taste of your stereotypical American punter. Can Moore enlighten us as to why they achieved this success?

“Remember The Future was huge over here. I think a lot of it was that FM radio played the hell out of it,” he explains. “In St Louis they were playing it on rotation and when we went to play there the first time we sold out three shows at the Ambassador Theater – 3,000 people a night.”

While the venues aren’t as big this time around, Nektar are currently touring in the US and have sold out shows in St Louis again. But things are set to be less straightforward in Europe where New Nektar are now also calling themselves Nektar. The situation is a close reflection of the case of Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, who made a successful complaint to the Intellectual Property Office after former promoter Bob Carruthers’ company had registered their name.

“We are going to come to Europe,” Moore asserts. “We’ve got a little problem with the other band who registered the damned name and are trying to stop us from going to Germany, which is not fun, but we’re trying to deal with that now.

“They’re playing in Germany, which is confusing the hell out of the fans. They were playing as New Nektar and put the album [Megalomania] out as New Nektar, then their manager went and registered the name. We’re spending money on lawyers right now. How the German patent office didn’t look into what they were registering I have no idea.”

But Moore is feeling positive about Nektar. The bass guitarist hadn’t played at all since Nektar reunited to play at the 2002 NEARfest and he’d been running a construction company, from which he has retired. And now he’s rejoined a career trajectory he couldn’t have imagined back at the group’s birth in 1969.

“It’s a trip,” he says. “I didn’t expect to be doing it again but when I did, I had a vision of the band and when we started playing it just grew. And the album turned out so well, we had to go on tour with it. We had no option.”

Released in April 1974, Okie is the third studio album by American singer-songwriter J.J. Cale. Produced by Audie Ashworth, the 12-track record was assembled across various recording locations, including three Nashville facilities – Bradley's Barn, Columbia Studio B and Woodland Sound Studios – in addition to Cale's own home setup in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Clocking in at less than half an hour, the LP features Cale's signature laid-back blend of blues, country, and rock. Notably, Okie marks the first instance where Cale utilised vocal layering – a technique he implemented to compensate for his perceived shortcomings as a singer by double-tracking his vocals to lock in the pitch.

The album sustained Cale's understated recording career following his 1972 release, Really, and reinforced the idea that even if he didn't sell albums by the bucketload, his songs might end up in the hands of those who might: I Got the Same Old Blues was covered by Eric Clapton, Freddie King, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bobby Bland, Bryan Ferry and Captain Beefheart, while Cajun Moon was later interpreted Poco, Herbie Mann, and Randy Crawford.

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

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Other albums released in April 1974

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

What they said...

"Cale moves toward country and gospel on some songs here, but since those are two of his primary influences, the movement is slight. And longtime producer Audie Ashworth attempts to place more emphasis on Cale's vocals on some songs by double-tracking them and pushing them up in the mix. But much of this is still low-key and bluesy in what was becoming Cale's patented style." (AllMusic)

"For J.J., this is adventurous stuff – I Got the Same Old Blues states his world view (you don't have to listen, just read the title), Starbound adapts his style to some (awful) space pop, and The Old Man And Me introduces a character whom he isn't making it with (at least he doesn't mention it)." (Robert Christgau)

"Cale's excellence as a studio musician is undoubted, but his 'solo' efforts have been lacking something – inspiration, I think. This collection is little more than a mish-mash, a dozen songs in at least half as many styles, tied together only by Cale's harsh vocals. A bit short ." (Tom Hull)

What you said...

Mike Canoe: The older I get, the more appreciation I have for albums that keep it short. But J.J. Cale's Okie may actually be too short. With twelve songs crammed into 28 minutes, most of the songs are over just as I'm getting into the groove. All the same, I enjoyed Okie. Love the soft funk of Crying, Rock and Roll Records, and Cajun Moon, the sparkling guitar of I'll Be There (If You Ever Want Me), the chooglin' rhythms of Anyway the Wind Blows and Everlovin' Woman. I just wish they were a little longer. Because we live in a world spoiled for choice, I probably would never have gotten around to listening to J.J. Cale on my own. Gratitude to CRAOTW for expanding my musical horizons yet again.

Evan Sanders: As has come up in a few other comments, I indeed could raise my hand to the question "who has never heard a JJ Cale album". And now that I have, as well as spent a couple of days listening to more in his catalogue, I feel like I am hearing the blueprints for many blues rock and Southern rock numbers. By itself, Okie is pleasant background music, not annoying, and then I realised how familiar some of the songs sounded based on how they were done by the likes of Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, and more. As a songwriter, JJ Cale deserves ongoing admiration, and it's ok to recognise that his creations sound best when interpreted by others.

Gary Claydon: Even by JJ Cale's standards, Okie is laid back almost to the point of soporific, so much so that every time I pressed play my stereo fell asleep. Not for long, though. As well as being the soul of wit, brevity is also a friend to the casual listener at times, and Okie certainly doesn't outstay its welcome at a pleasant if somewhat unexciting half-hour's worth. 6/10.

Philip Qvist: I would say that JJ Cale was in the enviable position of being able to record and perform in near anonymity, while writing songs that were picked up by artists who turned them into big hits, which not only secured a comfortable life for himself, but also gave him the financial freedom to do his own thing in the studio. Eric Clapton, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Randy Crawford and Santana all turned his songs such as After Midnight, Cajun Moon and Call Me The Breeze into big hits, while JJ Cale continued to row his own boat.

So what else do I know about one Mr John Welden Cale, who passed away 13 years ago? Well, he was a pretty laid-back performer; he was married to Christine Lakeland, who contributed to many of his later albums as a singer, musician and occasional songwriter, and apart from the above-mentioned numbers, his other well-known songs include Crazy Mama, Sensitive Kind and Don't Cry, Sister.

Apart from the various JJ Cale compilations, I have listened to the likes of Shades and Grasshopper, but Okie is definitely a new one to me, although I was familiar with the aforementioned Cajun Moon. It's a pretty laid-back album, no surprises there, but at just 28 minutes long, the album's brevity is its biggest advantage. There is no chance of you getting bored here.

The covers I'll Be There and Precious Memories, along with I Got The Same Old Blues and Crying, were my other standout tracks. Okie gets a 7 from me. It's not essential, but it is still well worth a listen.

Ken Doyle: Classic. There are better songs on other albums, but Okie is my favourite JJ album. Perfect laid-back record that does not dull over decades of returning to this exquisite slice of chilled tunes. Strange that if I described JJ in terms of country blues through a reefer lens, then I’d not be attracted to it, but JJ is different and works for me. 9 out of ten or higher maybe.

Chris Elliott: Chilled doesn't even begin to describe this record. At first listen, it seemed anonymous - but it grows on you very quickly. It's spare - it's definitely laid back, but somehow there's that little spark that just can't be ignored.

Lazy sunny days under a tree or with your feet in the river... this is just perfect.

Adam Ranger: A wonderful change of pace.

Listening to JJ Cale is like lying in your favourite armchair being stroked by a velvet glove. Very chilled and very relaxing.

He was never as big or well known as the artists who covered his great songs, but he was OK with that. Those successful covers gave him financial security to do his thing.

For me, this is not the best of JJ Cale albums; that goes to Naturally, Troubador or 5. But Cryin', Cajun Moon and I Got The Same Old Blues are essential JJ Cale songs. The rest of the album is a nice chilled listen that never really gets me interested like other albums. That said, at 29 minutes you have no time to get bored.

Greg Schwepe: I would wager a very, very large sum of money that for those who wrote reviews this week, this might be the first time you ever listened to an album of J.J. Cale performing his own songs. And for those reading online, you still may have never listened to an album of J.J. Cale performing his own songs.

But, all of you who wrote a review or are reading, I bet you can name enough J.J. Cale songs performed by other artists that it would take two hands to count them all. Am I right?

Yes, Mr Cale seems to be one of those songwriters who happened to make albums, but none were nearly as popular as the ones where one of his songs appeared on. And until I bought The Road To Escondido, which featured Cale and Eric Clapton, I had yet to hear him actually perform his own songs.

Cale’s style is basic, laid-back, easygoing grooves that come at you with no frills. But they keep you so hooked, you could listen to the same songs on an eight-hour road trip and not get bored.

My favourite cuts on Okie are Cajun Moon, Rock And Roll Records, and I Got The Same Old Blues. I will say, while I became a fan of Cale’s music, I do think that Okie is not as good as 5. It just doesn’t have as much oomph to it. Maybe a little flat in the production side of things? Good songs, but they don’t jump out like the ones on 5.

7 out of 10 on this one for me. I was glad I finally listened to him performing his own music. Totally love his style, but this would not be my go-to album.

John Davidson: I had never heard a JJ Cale album before this week. Or if I did, I have forgotten it. And that's the problem. While the songs may indeed be good, the arrangements here are so laid back they make almost no impact at all. It's pleasant enough, but nothing about this made me prick up my ears and demand more.

Final score: 7.27 (33 votes cast, total score 240)

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A prog legend’s daughter and The Clash’s former bassist aren’t the most obvious collaborators. But in 2023 Galen Ayers and Paul Simonon released Can We Do Tomorrow Another Day? which featured a laidback Mediterranean vibe reminiscent of Galen’s late father, Kevin.

Produced by Tony Visconti and featuring guest spots from Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz) and others, the album had its roots in a Mallorcan fishing village, where Simonon stayed during lockdown. Just before its launch the pair told Prog its story.

How did the collaboration come about?

Galen Ayers: After the hard Covid lockdown, Paul was just coming back to London from Spain and I was coming back from Greece. We’d both been writing songs. We started chatting and realised we were in the same place. The fun thing, I think, is this third space that opens up in any good collaboration, because you’re being pushed in ways that you wouldn’t necessarily go if you were just alone.

Paul Simonon: It was quite intense in a way, because you open up completely. We both agreed from the beginning that we should be totally honest with each other. That seemed to be the best way to move forward: going by gut instinct.

So is Mallorca a key place for both of you, creatively?

GA: Sure. I grew up there with my dad, I lived there with my stepfather and my mum and I went to school there. I was practically a Spanish girl and spoke the local dialect, Mallorquin.

PS: The record really started off there, after I’d gone to Mallorca to paint. I had a guitar with me as well, so it was an alternative way of being creative. It’s the same thing – the element of thought and feeling and expression. And I’ve always been open to European music. Jacques Dutronc and people like that. My dad used to play things like Francoise Hardy and Jacques Brel.

But you wanted to be a painter rather than a musician, right?

PS: Yeah. I got to art college, met Mick Jones [Clash co-founder] and somehow ended up playing bass. Mick said, “You’re a bit like Stuart Sutcliffe.” I went, “Who’s he?” He said, “The one that was in The Beatles. He couldn’t play bass either, but he was a good artist.” So that was sort of my inspiration in the very beginning.

Was it always going to be a musician’s life for you, Galen?

GA: No. I rebelled against it. At first I was always singing and I toured a bit with my dad. But then I saw the human cost of the life and I didn’t want that. I was quite a strong academic – I have two masters – and I was adamant to find a different path. But eventually it just came naturally that, as a writer, adding music is another form of expression. Now you have a whole other layer of emotion.

Was prog ever on your radar, Paul?

PS: My brother used to be into Yes and things like that, but it just didn’t speak to me. It didn’t represent anything that I felt. They knew too many chords, that’s the problem! Galen and I are really from two different worlds

GA: But we did find some middle ground. You enjoyed the early Syd Barrett albums I played you.

PS: Yeah – it’s like your dad’s stuff.

GA: It’s more song-based. When I started getting interested in songwriting there were progressives in my house at all times.

Didn’t Daevid Allen used to be your babysitter, Galen?

GA: They all were! I went to see King Crimson a few years back and met Robert Fripp. I said, “I’m sure you were our babysitter at some point.” He goes, “Well, you didn’t look like that!” Sometimes I dread it when I go to these get-togethers of like-minded people, because it’s either, “Your dad owes me money!” or “Your dad slept with my wife!” or something. I’m like, “It’s not my fault! I didn’t do anything!” But it’s always said with a smile, y’know? He was well-loved. I think Kevin was just way too sensitive to be a business person. There was this burning fire, with no compromise.

What kind of things did he teach you?

GA: He wasn’t very fatherly in terms of giving advice. But he wrote this beautiful letter to me, where he likened being a songwriter or an artist to being a tightrope walker. You just have to live a life where you don’t have a safety net. If you get scared or stop, you fall; so you just push forward.

PS: I love the story Galen told me about him. There was a guitar on the floor and he just shoved it over towards Galen and said: “There you go, you’re on your own now.” I think that says quite a lot. That’s a great attitude!

GA: Kevin was unconventional in terms of presents. On my 21st birthday he was playing his J200 Gibson that Jimi Hendrix gave him. It’s the guitar I’d grown up with, a beautiful-sounding guitar. He just put it in the case, closed it, kicked it softly across the floor and his exact words were: “Take over, kid!”

Flamenco, tango, disappearing people and a Red Hot Chili Pepper? Those unlikely ingredients combine on the heaviest album yet from Tarja Turunen. Finland’s symphonic prog metal queen tells Prog about swimming away from the shore, finally getting to know her former Nightwish bandmate Marko Hietala, and writing without fear on Frisson Noir.

“I want to bring back the riffs,” says Tarja Turunen. In that case, mission accomplished. Frisson Noir is the heaviest release yet from the Finnish soprano, whose return to riffage was born from the desire to replicate the energy of her live performances in the studio.

“When I perform live with my guys, my band sounds heavy,” she says. “I have a big voice, so I want them to sound heavy to support me. I feel comfortable in that wall of sound. I’ve been missing that sound.”

It’s been seven years since Turunen’s last foray into prog metal with In The Raw. After self producing that album, she wanted someone who could build that wall of sound she hears onstage. The right man for the job was Neal Avron, whose production and mixing credits include Fall Out Boy, Linkin Park and Serj Tankian.

“It was the best decision ever,” says Turunen. “Neal did an amazing job. It was challenging for him to work with a symphonic orchestra and choir; all these symphonic songs, progressive songs, but he loved it.”

Turunen’s symphonic and progressive proclivities are fully displayed on the first single, the 10-minute epic At Sea. “When I’m writing the songs I’m not really looking at the timer: I’m really letting myself go nowadays, which is a very beautiful feeling,” she says.

Pushing her label to release the longest song first was a gamble that paid off.“The fans really sat down to listen, which people do not do nowadays. We do not have the patience any more to listen or pay attention. It’s like everything is fed to us. The whole world, we miss so much because we don’t take the time, so I felt like I wanted to give my fans an experience, let’s call it, to feel a bit.”

As the title implies, At Sea was inspired an environment where Turunen, a keen scuba diver, can leave her worries behind. “It’s a majestic, powerful, eternal, incredible thing. I feel like I’m somehow connected with it,” says the singer, who lives near the coast in Marbella.

“I feel I need it, and I miss it when I’m gone. In At Sea, the story is about leaving the safety of the shore and facing the storm without knowing the outcome – whether you’ll survive or not – but nevertheless you go for it. I wanted to make people think, even though the risks might be horrifying, you should still take that leap. It’s a sign of the internal strength that we all have. We just need to find it. I feel like I’m like the song itself; I put it out without knowing the outcome.”

The full progressive scope of Frisson Noir can be appreciated in the array of guest performers, from Cradle Of Filth’s Dani Filth on I Don’t Care to Apocalyptica, who bring their strings to Tango. “We Finns love tango,” Turunen says. “I remember, in my youth, dancing tango with my dad at summer parties; it’s a very important part of Finnish culture.”

She invited viral shamisen sensation Sayo Komada to play on The Trace Outlives, a song inspired by jōhatsu, the Japanese word that describes people who choose to vanish from their established lives, often due to a sense of shame. “Some organisations help people disappear,” Turunen says. “It caught my attention; I wanted to write about the effects when something like this happens, and the emotions involved.

“I wanted to find something from Japan to include in the song, then I discovered the shamisen, which is and incredible instrument – it’s like a percussive guitar. Komasa is insanely talented, playing heavy metal with the shamisen in Japan. It was beautiful that she took part.”

Anemoia – meaning nostalgia for a time or place that one has never experienced – showcases the playing of flamenco guitarist Julián Bedmar.“Who the hell uses flamenco guitars in a metal album?” Turunen asks. “I do! The fact is, why not?”

While Sayo Komada was halfway round the world, Bedmar was much closer to home. “I found him 10 minutes from my place here. I sent him the piano demo and he played insanely beautiful guitar over it. Why flamenco? This is my 10th year in Spain; my family found a beautiful home here, people that we love and care for. Flamenco is a huge cultural aspect of Andalucia, and I wanted to say ‘thank you.’”

Against The Odds is a song a decade in the making. It was originally in contention for 2016’s The Shadow Self, an album that features Chad Smith guesting on drums. He was brought into the sessions by bassist Kevin Chown, his fellow funkster in Chad Smith’s Bombastic Meatbats.

“Back then I felt, ‘Hm, it’s not the time for this song,’” says Turunen. “When I write a song on piano, I start producing it, I send it to my musicians, they come with their input; the song changes and then we mix it. Then we go to the live performances and the song is changing all the time. My emotions also change – so the song lives; it evolves naturally.

“During the years since The Shadow Self I’ve grown. I’ve moved around, met beautiful people. Everything in my art is about my life, where I am, how I feel. I found that song and I feel it now. Why not then? There must have been a reason; but now it feels like ‘Yeah, let’s go!’”

Leap Of Faith reunites Turunen with fellow Nightwish alumnus Marko Hietala for the second time, after they duetted on Hietala’s song Left On Mars last year. She says collaborating has presented the chance “to get to know him for the first time ever. He’s not the same guy he was; neither am I. We are somewhere else now in our lives, and it’s been really nice to reconnect.” They’ve toured together, “supporting each other like never before, I mean, seriously.”

Frisson Noir is an album of grand drama, rich colours and textures, unafraid to take risks emotionally and stylistically. For Turunen – who studied at The Sibelius Academy in Finland and Germany’s Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe – the journey has been about embracing the freedom to follow her instincts and realise her vision.

“That’s what I’ve been struggling with: to free my mind when it comes to compositions,” she says. “I’ve learned so much. finally I feel it’s happening; that I’m becoming free with my music; it’s a feeling I don’t need to be afraid of. There are no mistakes I can make here.

“I hope I can come up with something great in the future, but for now I’m just happy with the album. Let’s see what people think – whether they like it or hate it. But I’m happy with everything.”

Frisson Noir is on sale now.

In 1973, with their music already labelled as ‘what The Beatles might have done if they hadn’t split up,’ cheeky Bristol prog band Stackridge found themselves in a studio with their production hero George Martin. In 2024 we asked: were they about to lose their heads for The Man In The Bowler Hat?

Rising from the ashes of the Goon Show-inspired Griptyte Thynne and morphing from Stackridge Lemon to just Stackridge, by 1973 the knockabout Bristol pop-proggers had racked up some serious milestones in four years of existence.

Initially comprised of Andrew Cresswell-Davis (sometimes credited as Andy Davis) on guitar, keyboards and vocals; James Warren on guitar and vocals; James ‘Crun’ Walter on bass (Crun was also a Goons name); Michael ‘Mutter’ Slater on flute and vocals; Mike Evans on violin; and Billy ‘Sparkle’ Bent on drums, the band members had met in the clubs and bars of Bristol, such as Acker Bilk’s Old Granary and The Dug Out.

The players’ chemistry went from performing pop and blues covers to original songs infused with a Bonzo Dog Band playfulness and eclecticism, taking in classical music, tea dance and music hall, rock, pop, folk and anything else that took their fancy culturally, created with humour and heart. They soon positioned themselves as a slapstick alternative to the popular rock du jour.

“We drew from every imaginable source,” James Warren tells Prog. “It was a weird mixture of Beatles, Frank Zappa and The Incredible String Band, and a healthy doze of musical theatre and humour.

“We were determined to not be denim-clad like Free, Status Quo or Black Sabbath,” Mutter Slater says. “We wore waistcoats, grey flannels and braces. James wore slippers.”

Stackridge opened and closed the first Glastonbury Festival in 1970, recorded two well-received albums on MCA (1971’s Stackridge and 1972’s Friendliness), toured with Wishbone Ash and Renaissance, appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test, and recorded a Radio 1 session for John Peel. After playing more than 300 shows, they’d garnered a battalion of enthusiastic and rather nutty fans, known for bringing props to gigs to join in with numbers that required participation, such as Marzo Plod with its rhubarb-thrashing, or dustbin lids for Four Poster Bed (Let There Be Lids).

Following the Cockney-Edwardiana dance-craze single Do The Stanley, a UK tour saw them supported by Camel, and their next big achievement was just over the hump. As avid Beatles and Goon Show fans, it was almost too much for the fluctuating five-, six- or seven-piece: the recording of album number three, The Man In The Bowler Hat, would be with The Goons’ label manager and fifth Beatle himself, George Martin.

Stackridge’s creative life was almost ‘easy’ by today’s standards: most band members and their roadie Pete Donovan shared a flat in Clifton, Bristol, living on a shoestring (and the dole). Later, as they got more popular, three nights a week they had digs in Bayswater, London, secured by their dedicated agent-turned-manager Mike Tobin. Each day was filled with writing, playing gigs and recording the means to their modest ends.

“I think back and wonder how the hell we ever managed to stay under the same roof for a year or two because we were incredibly different people, but we had a fun Monty Python-ish sort of time,” says Warren.

Promoting Friendliness, the band were frequently in the capital, or playing nearby towns. George Martin’s sons Greg and Alexis were often in the audience. “They loved us,” says Warren. “We’d see them at gigs and get chatting, and around the same time our manager Mike was offered a job with George Martin’s AIR Enterprises, a band agency and producers’ agency.”

Tobin was an effective businessman with a good ear and had been successful at Bristol’s Plastic Dog agency and London’s John Sherry Enterprises. He didn’t directly deal with Martin, but he was in the perfect location to approach him with an idea.

“Because George was coming into the office regularly, Mike got friendly with him,” Warren says. “One day he had the temerity to say, ‘Greg and Alexis have been coming to my band’s gigs and they absolutely love them. Would you be interested in listening to some demos they’ve done for their next album?’

“George agreed, and he obviously much liked what he heard, because – to our utter astonishment and amazement – he agreed to record and produce an album. It was a total dream. Being the huge Beatles fans that we were, it just didn’t seem possible that we’d somehow join that sort of world.”

In preparation for the sessions, Stackridge were invited to Martin’s place in Paddington, and most of the band – Warren, Slater, Walter and Evans, but not Cresswell-Davis, who had married – were relocated to Stansfield Road, Stockwell (the street where David Bowie was born). “And two girls from the Bayswater flat moved in, too,” laughs Warren.

“We spent about a week or two going to George’s. We had to plan all the tracks that we were interested in recording. George would cogitate a bit, going, ‘We could do this or that and that would work quite nicely,’ and so on. He was earmarking songs that he could do some orchestral arrangements for, and then a big production number on.”

“We were a bit starstruck and didn’t know how meeting George would go,” says Slater, “but he’s an avuncular man and one of his gifts was putting you at ease.”

With a title inspired by Magritte’s surrealist painting – a man in a bowler hat isn’t on the cover, but there’s a young woman in some sort of titfer, wearing an apron – the album tracks were as wide-ranging in style as in the past two records. Each member was encouraged to come up with musical ideas, and much lyric writing was done by a partnership of Warren, Jim Walter and Mutter Slater, which would occur “late at night, after coming back from gigs, over copious cups of tea and bowls of muesli,” says Warren – or “the burning of the midnight cornflakes,” as Slater puts it.

These compositions would be credited to the charmingly named ‘Smegmakovitch,’ while whole group co-writes went under ‘Wabadaw Sleeve,’ an anagram of letters from the members’ names.

The band had 10 days for recording and two for mixing at AIR Studios, which was then right in the centre of the West End, in Oxford Circus. “George was away quite a lot as he was working with Mahavishnu Orchestra or Jeff Beck, and he’d be flying to New York for meetings,” says Warren. “We had Geoff Emerick and Bill Price engineering the album, and these extra musicians that George brought in for the orchestral parts of the album, and that was really exciting.”

Opener Fundamentally Yours has Martin on keys and was “a lovely tune by Andy Davis,” says Warren. It’s followed by the nostalgic paean to village life Pinafore Days, written by Slater, who was now composing on piano as well as flute. Pinafore Days was also the title of the North American version of the album.

“On Stackridge I just did flute parts,” he says. “But I really liked what everyone else was doing and knew I had to up my game to have a song accepted. By the third album I was one of the major contributors.”

The power-poptastic The Last Plimsoll is a standout, with gangsterish lyrics. “Because of the music we thought the lyric should have a dark underbelly,” says Warren. “But we always tried to not be too literal and wanted to introduce strange, stream-of-consciousness phrases into the songs, too.”

To The Sun And Moon was written by Slater using a poem by his friend Deno, from his hometown of Yeovil. Abbey Road-esque, Martin’s orchestral hand is strong here, and the track finishes with Spanish guitar that leads into a Latin-flavoured, violin-powered The Road To Venezuela.

Slater recalls Martin’s aid in the studio with his track The Galloping Gaucho. “We started on the first chord and bashed our way through! George said, ‘I think we can make this more interesting. Let’s have a Hammond organ and a triangle on the intro; we’ll build it from there.’ He taught us about dynamics and properly using the range of instruments in the band.”

Warren’s ideas surfaced in the gentle “ecological plea” Humiliation and the McCartney-esque Dangerous Bacon. “Dangerous Bacon was a Smegmakovitch tour-de-force, named by Jim who would say that meat-eating wasn’t just bad for animals but for the eater, too.” It featured Andy Mackay on sax as Roxy Music were playing in AIR at the same time. “George or Geoff set that up – we didn’t get to know them,” says Warren.

Cresswell-Davis and his friend Graham Smith – from his time playing in bands in Weston-super-Mare – came up with folky hymn The Indifferent Hedgehog, with Martin on piano. Then comes the Slater-led group finale, God Speed The Plough. Mutter had noticed the phrase while leafing through a magazine in a hotel in Shropshire; it belonged to some verse next to an illustration of a mug of cider. “George obviously thought, ‘Here’s something I can get my teeth into,’ and came up with this fabulous orchestration,” says Warren.

“I was there for that overdub!” laughs Slater. “Watching George work with a group of string players... the mutual respect was tangible. It was done in two, three takes. Very impressive.”

With the recording finished, a political situation threw a bin lid in the works: the OPEC oil crisis – where the resources for manufacturing vinyl quadrupled in price and export was prohibited to some territories – meant the western record industry ground to a halt. The release of The Man In The Bowler Hat was delayed until February 1974, by which point the personality differences meant a different Stackridge line-up would tour the record; and to some members its release came as a bit of a shock. “We had a new manager and factions emerged,” says Warren.

“I got fed up and went back to Yeovil and got a job as a petrol pump attendant,” says Slater. Each week he got the Melody Maker, reading it from cover to cover. “One day I’m sat in the station with my feet up ’cos there’s not much to do, and I see The Man In The Bowler Hat is at No.23 in the chart! I was living at my parents, with no phone. The last I’d heard of it was at a playback in AIR studio.”

Although the studio experience had been exceptional and his childhood dream of being in a band had been realised with Stackridge, Slater was disillusioned. The band would dissolve after 1976’s Mr Mick, reviving briefly for 1999’s very creditable Something For The Weekend.

However, Stackridge did reunite from 2006 to 2015, and their catalogue is beloved by many. The Rhubarb Thrashers Club lives on – on Facebook and certain forums – with some of our favourite acts – Big Big Train, Schnauser, Steve Hogarth – being Stackridge devotees.

For Warren, the record lived up to his expectations and presented new opportunities. “We learned the possibilities of what the studio can offer. You can create magic there, but you have to pay attention to details,” he says.

“We took that on board with the first self-titled album by The Korgis, formed by myself and Andy Davis in 1979. We thought, ‘Let’s follow Buggles’ example and be a really good studio band, and not tour.’ Part of that came from The Man In The Bowler Hat.”

Steve Earle has never been just a country singer. Throughout his life has read like a rock’n’roll parable: the bacchanalian rebel with a taste for booze, bad drugs and run-ins with the law.

From his rural Texas childhood through a career in Nashville (and now New York City), Earle has survived six tumultuous marriages, heroin and crack addiction, jail, rehab and near-death. He’s also produced a stream of genre-defying records – welding honky-tonk to rockabilly, bluegrass to punk and, as on 2007’s Washington Square Serenade, country to trip-hop.

He’s also a novelist, playwright, DJ, political activist and, with his role as recovering drug addict Waylon in HBO’s The Wire, a TV actor. “I didn’t have to act,” Earle quipped.

Earle began playing guitar at 11. By 14, he’d left home for Houston, where he met like-minded rebel Townes Van Zandt, another hard-living songwriter. Earle later called him “a real good teacher and a real bad role model.”

Earle landed in Nashville in the early 70s, taking blue-collar jobs in the day and playing bass with Guy Clark at night. After years of aborted record deals, MCA picked up the free-spirited 30-year-old in 1985.

His sensational debut Guitar Town marked him down as a workingman’s troubadour à la Bruce Springsteen / John Mellencamp. 1988’s anthemic Copperhead Road was an international success, yet Earle was already heavily into a self-destructive lifestyle.

By 1994, he was arrested for drug possession and landed a jail sentence. Post-rehab, he returned stronger than ever. Both the all-acoustic Train A Comin’ and I Feel Alright were raw, thrilling albums that sounded, literally, like a man reborn. Earle’s gift for rousing narratives and driving rock’n’roll, tempered by artful ballads, were fully to the fore on 1997’s El Corazon, a record that also captured his catch-all appeal.

Recent years have found him railing against the death penalty, attacking America’s “war on terror” and calling for a tolerant new kind of patriotism. The resulting albums, particularly Jerusalem and The Revolution Starts…Now, are as impassioned as anything he’s ever done.

He's also paid tributes to fallen friends: 2009's Townes celebrated his old buddy Townes Van Zandt, while 2019's Guy did the same for former boss Guy Clark. In January 2021 he released J.T., a collection of songs written by his late son, Justin Townes Earle, and followed it a year later with Jerry Jeff, celebrating the music of folk singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker.

His art, it seems, still lives in extremis. “I’m into pain and joy,” he once said, “and the in-between doesn’t interest me.”

...and one to avoid

Roxy Music have shared a previously unreleased 1971 demo of Grey Lagoons as they announce a new Deluxe Edition reissue of their 1973 second album, For Your Pleasure.

The band will release a four-disc Super Deluxe Edition of the album, as well as a 2LP (black vinyl and blue pearl vinyl as a D2C Exclusive), 2CD, Digital, Blu-Ray and Dolby ATMOS, available through UMR/Island EMI on November 6.

The Super Deluxe Edition includes the original album, singles and instrumentals; unheard songwriting demos, rehearsals and live sessions; TV and live performances from 1972–1973; plus a 116-page book with new essays and rare photography, while the two-disc set features the original album plus AIR Studios outtakes, singles and BBC sessions, presented in a hardcover digibook with a new essay and unseen images.

The vinyl versions feature the original album plus AIR Studios outtakes on 140g vinyl in a gatefold sleeve, while the Blu-ray features Steven Wilson's 5.1 mixes alongside Atmos and stereo mixes of the album and Pyjamarama, plus instrumentals and extra content

“It was a good pressure," singer Bryan Ferry recalls of the era. "Realising, now there’s an audience to write for. An intelligent audience. I felt a responsibility for the work that I hadn’t for the first album, certainly with regard to the lyrics. There was a hunger in the whole band to do more: a very strong urge to get back into a recording studio and make a better record than the first one. Nick de Ville had a cottage in Derbyshire, and offered to let me have it for a few days. So I went up there with the sole purpose of writing songs. I had this great little Renault 4, and I filled the car with stuff: keyboards, a guitar, an amp, tape recorders, pads of paper and pens.

"I remember driving up in this crammed car with its very interesting gear stick. The cottage was quite remote, out in the Derbyshire Dales – I had to call in to some local farmer to get the key, then on up a track – and very basic. I must have taken provisions, because I couldn’t cook, but I was full of energy. I was completely alone out there, and just really focused on writing this stuff. I remember sheets of paper all over the floor, working on things like In Every Dream Home A Heartache and Editions Of You. Those few days in that cottage were crucial to the making of For Your Pleasure.”

The Super Deluxe Edition also premieres two additional unheard recordings of the song, Grey Lagoons - Air Studios Outtake and Grey Lagoons - Live at Montreux, April 1973 as well as two accompanying BBC performance clips.

Pre-order For Your Pleasure.

Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure

3CD+DVD Super Deluxe

CD1 – The Album
1. Do The Strand
2. Beauty Queen
3. Strictly Confidential
4. Editions Of You
5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache
6. The Bogus Man
7. Grey Lagoons
8. For Your Pleasure

CD2 – Demos, rehearsals & studio outtakes
1. Pyjamarama - guitar & vocal
2. Do The Strand - piano & vocal
3 . Beauty Queen - tremolo piano
4. Beauty Queen - electric piano
5. Beauty Queen - piano & vocal
6. Strictly Confidential (segue into)
7. Editions Of You - electric piano
8. In Every Dream Home A Heartache - farfisa & guitar
9.In Every Dream Home A Heartache - tremolo guitar
10. For Your Pleasure - electric piano
11. Pyjamarama - Rehearsal 1973
12. Bogus Man - Rehearsal 1973
13. Grey Lagoons - 1971 Demo (Original title The Bogus Man Part 2)
14. Pyjamarama - AIR Studios outtake
15. Beauty Queen - AIR Studios outtake
16. Strictly Confidential - AIR Studios outtakes
17. Editions Of You - AIR Studios outtake
18. The Bogus Man - AIR Studios outtake
19. Grey Lagoons - AIR Studios outtake
20. For Your Pleasure - Eno tapes

CD3 – Live sessions, singles & instrumentals

Live Sessions
1. Grey Lagoons – BBC Paris Theatre (London) August 1972 (first live performance)
2.For Your Pleasure – Peel Sessions November 1972
3.Do The Strand – Peel Sessions March 1973
4.Editions Of You - Peel Sessions March 1973
5.Pyjamarama - Peel Sessions March 1973
6.In Every Dream Home A Heartache - Peel Sessions March 1973
7.Pyjamarama A side single
8. The Pride And The Pain B side single
9. Do The Strand (instrumental)
10. Beauty Queen (instrumental)
11. Strictly Confidential (instrumental)
12. Editions Of You (instrumental)
13. In Every Dream Home A Heartache (instrumental)
14. The Bogus Man (instrumental)
15. Grey Lagoons (instrumental)
16. For Your Pleasure (instrumental)

DVD – TV & live performances
1. Pyjamarama – Top of the Pops (lost tape)
2. For Your Pleasure – Full House November 1972
3. Grey Lagoons – Full House November 1972
4. Do The Strand – Old Grey Whistle Test April 1973
5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache - Old Grey Whistle Test April 1973
6. Do The Strand – Live at Montreux April 1973
7. Grey Lagoons - Live at Montreux April 1973
8. Beauty Queen - Live at Montreux April 1973
9. The Bogus Man- Live at Montreux April 1973
10. In Every Dream Home A Heartache- Live at Montreux April 1973
11. Editions Of You- Live at Montreux April 1973
12. Do The Strand – Musikladen 1973
13. Editions Of You – Musikladen 1973
14. In Every Dream Home A Heartache – Musikladen 1973

2CD Deluxe
Disc 1
1. Do The Strand
2. Beauty Queen
3. Strictly Confidential
4. Editions Of You
5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache
6. The Bogus Man
7. Grey Lagoons
8. For Your Pleasure

Disc 2
1 .Pyjamarama - AIR studios outtake     
2.Beauty Queen - AIR studios outtake  
3.Strictly Confidential - AIR studios outtake     
4.Editions Of You - AIR studios outtake     
5.Bogus Man - AIR studios outtake     
6.Grey Lagoons - AIR studios outtake  
7.For Your Pleasure - Eno Tapes 
8.Pyjamarama - 2026 remaster
9.The Pride and the Pain
10. Grey Lagoons - BBC Paris Theatre, London, August 1972
11. Pyjamarama - Peel Sessions March 1973   
12. Do The Strand - Peel Sessions March 1973 
13. Editions Of You - Peel Sessions March 1973     
14. For Your Pleasure - Peel Sessions Nov 1972   

2LP Black Vinyl + 2LP Blue Pearl Vinyl (D2C Exclusive)
Side A
1. Do The Strand
2. Beauty Queen
3. Strictly Confidential
4. Editions Of You
5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache

Side B
1. The Bogus Man
2. Grey Lagoons
3. For Your Pleasure

Side C
1. Pyjamarama - AIR Studios outtake
2. Beauty Queen - AIR Studios outtake
3. Strictly Confidential - AIR Studios outtakes
4. Editions Of You - AIR Studios outtake

Side D
1. The Bogus Man - AIR Studios outtake
2. Grey Lagoons - AIR Studios outtake
3. For Your Pleasure - Eno tapes

Slipknot’s former producer has revealed why he recorded the Iowan nu metal nine-piece’s second album with a broken back.

Ross Robinson, who worked with the band on their landmark 1999 self-titled debut, returned for 2001’s Iowa but broke his back in a motocross accident midway through production. He took only one day off before resuming his duties.

In the new issue of Metal Hammer, Robinson, 59, is asked why he continued and didn’t relinquish his role on Iowa to another producer. He explains that his injury reminded the members of their raw metal roots and early determination.

“No, that’d be impossible,” he answers. “It was actually really good for the record because the guys were being taken out in Hollywood, hanging out with all these big stars and shit. When I broke my back and showed up anyway, it put a very next-level diligence into those guys.

“Joey [Jordison, then-drummer] said to me later, ‘It was the greatest thing that ever happened to us.’ It was really tough – I’d get home and just lie there watching The Big Lebowski until I passed out. I was in so much pain, but I’d get to the studio and it’d be, ‘Let’s get it the fuck on!’”

Elsewhere in the interview, Robinson is asked what the toughest part of recording Iowa was. He surprisingly doesn’t say it was recording with a broken back, instead mentioning the vocal overdub process and how it drew out personal demons within the band.

“Vocal overdubs could be tough,” he says. “The bar was set so high with the band slamming together – when you’re that extreme, it gets difficult, especially when you’re on your own and trying to get back into the zone. There was a lot going on with Corey [Taylor, vocals] at the time too – he’d be going out pretty much every night and had this little fanbase of people he hung out with.

“Weirdly, the easiest one to get in the zone was when Sid’s [Wilson, turntables] grandfather passed away, and I’d asked him to do some overdubs for the background of People = Shit. He was so distraught, sad, hurt and was just crying. I was like, ‘You’re doing backgrounds today’ and he nailed it.”

Slipknot released Iowa on August 28, 2001, and consolidated the commercial success of their debut. It topped the UK album chart and reached number three in the US. It has since been certified Platinum in both markets, as well as in Canada.

Despite Iowa’s critical and commercial success, the band were in disarray during its production and release, burnt out by touring and using substances.

Singer Taylor told Loudwire in 2015: “We fought every cliche leading up to getting signed, going out and playing shows, and then, all of a sudden, we had everything: double-Platinum album, we were one of the biggest metal bands in the world, we were headlining because nobody wanted us to open for them. We were making a hugely, hugely anticipated album, so we just started getting fucked up.”

Due to these issues, Slipknot went on hiatus in 2002. They returned in 2004 with their third album, Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses, which charted number two in the US and later also went Platinum.

Slipknot are currently recording their as-yet-unannounced eighth studio album. Guitarist Jim Root recently revealed that they’ve been tracking with Faith No More producer Matt Wallace, with more than 50 song ideas stockpiled.

TMZ reported earlier this month that turntablist Wilson had left the lineup after 28 years, but the band have yet to comment on the matter.

Read the full interview with Robinson in the new Hammer, which you can order now and get delivered directly to your door.

June 28, 2002, was one of the most emotional nights in Rush’s long and illustrious history. The band were kicking off the tour in support of their 17th studio album, Vapor Trails, at the Meadows Music Centre in Hartford, Connecticut. Vapor Trails was the Canadians’ first since 1996’s Test For Echo; this show was their first live appearance in over five years.

The build-up of emotion was intrinsically tied to the reasons for their lengthy absence. On August 10, 1997, drummer Neil Peart’s teenage daughter, Selena Taylor, had been killed in a car crash. Less than a year later, on June 20, 1998, his wife Jackie succumbed to cancer. Devastated by this double tragedy, Peart effectively quit music. “Consider me retired,” he told Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. He underlined his point by embarking on an 14-month, 60,000-mile North American solo road trip on his BMW R1100GS motorbike.

“As the years went by, both Geddy and I thought it was unlikely that we would be working together as Rush,” admitted Alex Lifeson in 2002. “I felt that we had a terrific run, this wonderful experience that’s very unique even in the rock world, and if that’s the way it’s going to end, then I have to accept it and move on.”

Yet here Rush were once again. Peart’s re-emergence from solitude and grief had sparked the band’s own resurrection. And it wasn’t just onstage that emotions ran high. Some members of the audience were in tears before the show had even started, while an ovation greeted the mere unveiling of Peart’s mammoth drumkit.

The 29-song setlist that night mixed up classics such as Tom Sawyer, The Spirit Of Radio, Distant Early Warning and By-Tor And The Snow Dog with more recent tracks, including several from Vapor Trails. To add to the poignancy of the occasion, their 1993 song Between Sun & Moon was dedicated to The Who bassist John Entwistle, one of Geddy Lee’s idols, who had died the previous day.

As grand finale Working Man crashed to a close, several thousand people found themselves caught up in the significance of the moment. “I remember looking out at the audience and there were people crying,” Alex Lifeson told Vinay Menon, author of Rush: An Oral History. “It was so emotional. I guess it was their chance to purge some of their emotions.”

However the audience felt, it was nothing compared to what was going through the minds of the three men up onstage. For Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart, this was more than just a comeback gig – it was an act of healing. The rebirth of Rush was truly underway.

Rush hit the 1990s with renewed intent. The ‘keyboard phase’ that had alienated many of their older fans during the past decade was receding in the rear view mirror. If 1991’s Roll The Bones was hardly a return to the grandiose prog epics of old, it at least presented Rush as something approaching the power trio they were at heart.

Still, Roll The Bones hadn’t been an unalloyed triumph in the eyes of the band that made it. “[The songs] sounded much tougher live than in the studio,” Alex Lifeson told M.E.A.T magazine in 1993.

Rush’s gradual drift back to basics mirrored that of the broader music scene. The grunge movement that exploded at the start of the decade had flipped the superficial gloss of the 80s for grit and intensity. Lee, Lifeson and Peart weren’t unaware of the changes happening.

“We were loving that whole energy from Seattle and the Northwest,” Lee told Vinay Menon. “That pushed us in a different direction. That made us want to be a rock band again.”

After two albums with producer Rupert Hine, the band brought back Peter Collins to work on what would become Counterparts – ironic, given that the Englishman had been involved on 1985‘s synthesiser-heavy Power Windows and the equally slick Hold Your Fire two years later. But Rush were determined to dial the electronics right back this time irrespective of who was sitting at the studio console.

“When Alex and I started writing this record, we kind of looked at these mountains of synthesizers that were being brought into the writing room, and we kinda had this reaction; it was almost like an allergic reaction: ‘I think it’s time maybe we stepped back from this stuff,’” said Geddy Lee in 1993. “So, we went back to a more simpler, basic way of writing, which meant just guitar, bass, vocals, and drums.”

Counterparts was released on October 19, 1993. While it wasn’t a ‘grunge’ record, it was certainly a creditable modern rock record, one that acknowledged the new musical landscape without embarrassing itself trying by to pretend it was something it wasn’t. Even longtime art director Hugh Syme’s cover image - a seemingly simple diagram of a nut and bolt set in a wide blue frame – was pared down in comparison to some of the heavy duty symbolism of previous works.

The approach worked. Counterparts hit No. 2 in the US, the band’s highest-ever chart position (only Pearl Jam’s record-breaking second album, Vs, released the same week, sold more). They even notched up their very first No.1 song with Stick It Out, which reached the top spot on the Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart.

The band carried the stripped down approach of Counterparts into their 16th album, Test For Echo, released three years later. Geddy Lee had used the interim period to spend time with his newborn daughter, Alex Lifeson released a solo album, Victor, which doubled down on the more direct, rock-orientated approach of Counterparts, and Neil Peart published a book, The Masked Rider, about a bicycle trip he took around Africa in 1988, and spent a few years re-learning how to play the drums in completely different manner, taking lessons from jazz great Freddie Gruber.

For all that, Test For Echo was a relative letdown. Lyrically, it was as watertight and conceptually thought-provoking as any past Rush album. “It’s about the numbing process that happens when we are exposed to great tragedies and then we’re exposed to moments of hilarity,” said Geddy Lee of the record’s over-arching theme. “I feel that that’s the condition of contemporary man now – when we read the paper or when we watch TV, we’re not sure if we’re supposed to laugh.”

But musically, it was the sound of a band on simmer rather than bubbling away at full heat. “Test for Echo was a strange record in a sense,” Lee later told Vinay Menon. “It doesn’t really have a defined direction. I kind of felt like we were a bit burnt creatively. It was a creative low time for us.”

Still, Test For Echo was another commercial success. The accompanying tour lasted nine months, and even found the band playing the song 2112 in its entirety mid-set for the first and last time in their career. They may have dropped the pace a notch or two since the heady days of the 70s and 80s, but their path remained as steady and straight as it ever was. And then tragedy struck, and suddenly the lights went out on Rush’s future.

On the morning of August 10, 1997, just a few weeks after the Test For Echo tour ended, Neil Peart saw a police car pulling into the driveway of his house in rural Quebec. The officers were there to deliver some terrible news to the drummer and his wife, Jackie Taylor. Their 19-year-old daughter, Selena, had been killed in a single-car traffic accident while driving back to college in Toronto.

Their daughter’s death hit Peart and Jackie hard. Their friends rallied around them. “I just felt so hollow,” Alex Lifeson later recalled. “Neil’s daughter was 19 when she was killed and it just broke everybody’s heart to such an extent that nothing seemed beautiful anymore.”

The loss inevitably impacted on those in Rush’s inner circle: Alex Lifeson later said he didn’t pick up a guitar for a year. But there was more tragedy to come. In January 1998, during an extended stay in London, Jackie was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She died on June 20 that year. “I had no reason to carry on,” wrote Peart in his cathartic 2002 memoir Ghost Rider: Travels On The Healing Road. “I had no interest in life, work or the world beyond.”

He told Lee and Lifeson that he was done with Rush, and with music. Lost and grieving, he had no idea what he would do. Then he remembered something his wife had told him while she was ill: “Oh, you’ll just go travelling on your motorcycle.” So that’s what Neil Peart did.

For 14 months, he rode the length and breadth of North and Central America on his BMW motorbike, from chilly Alaska to blazing Mexico, “lost in my own sorrows.” He travelled alone, stopping off at diners and gas stations, observing the people he encountered yet largely unrecognised by them. Music – his own and other people’s – was the last thing on his mind.

He met up with his bandmates occasionally, though mostly he stayed in touch via postcard. Lee and Lifeson knew him well enough to give him space. Neither had any expectations that Rush would reconvene. “The longer it went, the more I believed that we would not get back together,” Lee told the Mercury News in 2002. “I just thought it was a place that he was not going to be able to go back to emotionally. Neil obviously was not quite the man he used to be.’’

It was Rush’s longtime photographer, Andrew MacNaughton, who played a key role in nudging Peart back onto the road to happiness and, ultimately, reuniting Rush

“Andrew was determined to find a ‘match’ for this crusty old widower,” wrote Peart on his blog in 2012, shortly after MacNaughton’s death at the age of 47. The photographer sent the drummer Polaroids of a photo assistant he had been working with named Carrie Nuttall. “I was reluctant, gruffly telling him, ‘Not interested.’” recalled Peart.

But something about the “pretty, dark-haired girl” hooked Peart’s attention. When he next visited Los Angeles on his motorbike, MacNaughton arranged a double date so the pair could meet. They hit it off. By the end of 1999, Peart and Nuttall had embarked on a relationship. Within a year, they were married.

Lee and Lifeson were elated that their friend had found happiness once more. “He fell in love and saw that there was beauty in the world,” Lifeson told The Costa Times. “He started to rebuild his life based on that.”

It was Nuttall, too, who steered Peart back towards music. “She didn’t know anything about the band,” Lifeson told Rush: An Oral History author Vinay Menon. “But one day she said to Neil, ‘It’s my understanding that you are a really good drummer and you had this long career and you’re about to throw that away at a time when you need that more than anything.”

Something shifted in Peart. He contacted his bandmates. As Alex Lifeson put it: “He came to us and said, ‘I’d like to try it. I don’t know if I can do it, but I’d like to try.’”

Work began in January 2001 on the album that even Rush themselves weren’t sure would ever happen. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson hadn’t been idle during the latter part of their band’s enforced absence. The pair contributed a rock version of Canadian national anthem O Canada to the 1999 movie South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, while Lee released a solo album, 2000‘s My Favourite Headache, and Lifeson composed music for TV ads and collaborated with hard rockers 3 Doors Down on three tracks from their second album, Away From The Sun.

But this reunion was something else entirely. Not only was it freighted with heavy emotion, but the three men at the centre of it had to recalibrate their relationship as musician after so many years of not playing together.

“It was a very delicate beginning for all of us,” Lifeson told The Costa Times in 2002. “We kind of needed to find our place, our positions. The first couple of weeks we spent really just talking, hanging out and getting to know each other again. But once we did, it settled in, in a way that was far beyond anything that we’d done in the past.”

Still, Rush resisted the urge to plunge headlong into the creative process, preferring tentative steps. The seeds of the songs emerged from Lee and Lifeson jams, which they passed on to Peart to work out his drum parts. It was time consuming and laborious, but then it had to be.

“The first two months I don’t think we wrote anything that we were really crazy about,” said Lifeson. “We took a break for a week, then came back in and had sudden clarity. We knew what was working and what wasn’t. From that moment on, things started to come together. The record really took on a life of its own at that point.”

The writing and recording process took 14 months – significantly longer than any previous Rush album. This was a decision made out of both choice and necessity. “It required patience,” said Lee. “I felt that I didn’t want to come back after all that and put out something that wasn’t as strong as it could possibly be. I thought it was time for us to be as intimate as we could be with our music, just go with our guts.’’

Despite the lengthy gap, Vapor Trails continued the musical trajectory that began with Counterparts and Test For Echo. Where those albums pared back the keyboards that had defined Rush‘s sound during the 80s, this time they dispensed with them completely.

“Leaving the keyboards off this record was very important to me, and Geddy was open to that because he knew that I’d often worried about their presence in the band,” said Alex Lifeson, who had felt notably sidelined at points during the late 1980s.

Vapor Trails was released on May 14, 2002. Taken as a whole, it was a good Rush album but not a truly great one, partly let down by an uncharacteristically flat mix from the band and co-producer Paul Northfield. Still, One Little Victory, Earthshine and the moving Ghost Rider sat comfortably in the top tier of late-period Rush songs, the latter finding Peart detailing his literal and emotional journey in the wake of the tragedies of the previous decade.

Yet, it was easily the most significant album Rush had made since 2112 – if only because that brought these friends back together as a unit, healing their pain through music. Tellingly, at 13 tracks and 67 minutes, Vapor Trails was their longest album to date. It was as if a dam had burst and all the emotion and music that had built up over the past few years had been released.

That the album opened with a brief but instantly recognisable Neil Peart drum barrage wasn’t accidental. This was notice, as if anyone needed it, that The Professor was back where he belonged. And with him, so were Rush.

The Vapor Trails tour which began with that night of high emotion in Hartford, Connecticut lasted five months - moderate by previous epic standards, but wholly understandable given the circumstances leading up to it. It concluded with three huge shows in South America – the first time Rush had visited the continent. Equally notably, it featured a trio of industrial-sized Maytag washing machines onstage behind the band, which a roadie periodically fed with Canadian dollars.

The washing machines were more than just an amusing and surreal stage prop. They showed that the events of recent years hadn’t dented Rush’s sense of humour or joy in the music they made.

That joy was never more evident than in their next project, 2004’s Feedback covers EP. This was Rush saluting the legends who had inspired them when they were starting out all those years ago: The Who, Cream, The Yardbirds, Buffalo Springfield, Love.

“It was short and sweet and it came up quickly,” Geddy Lee told Classic Rock. “We’ve always talked about throwing cover songs into our shows for fun, but we’ve never really followed through on it. Then a friend of mine suggested that if we weren’t going to do a [proper, all-new studio] album then maybe this was a good way we could pay tribute to our past.”

After the trials of the late 90s and the careful labours involved in making Vapor Trails, Feedback felt like a sigh of relief. The darkest period in Rush’s career was over. Now it was time to turn the page and begin the final chapter.

Easily the biggest album in heavy metal history, Metallica’s fifth, self-titled release (AKA the Black Album) is surrounded by monumental stats. It reached number one in nine different countries. It’s since been certified 16 times Platinum in the US. And – today, exactly 35 years after it came out – upwards of 30 million people have it in their record collection.

However, the golden number right now is 12. That’s how many songs Metallica needed to go from the momentous thrash metal stars they were on …And Justice For All to bona fide, stadium-cramming immortals. Below is the story of every single one of them. From Enter Sandman to The Struggle Within, here’s your track-by-track guide to the monolithic Black Album.

Enter Sandman

One of Metallica’s greatest all-time anthems, Enter Sandman showcases producer Bob Rock’s influence with simpler, impactful lyrics, aligning with James Hetfield’s throaty vocal style. Kirk Hammett’s riff, inspired by Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love, became the backbone of the song. “I tried to write the heaviest thing I could think of,” said Kirk. Initially written about crib death, the theme was broadened, at Bob and Lars Ulrich’s suggestion, to describe a child’s nightmarish torments while sleeping.

Sad But True

Bob’s reluctance to work in L.A. dissolved upon hearing this song’s rough demo. “I could see his eyes light up,” said Lars Ulrich in Mick Wall’s Enter Night: A Biography Of Metallica. The band recorded the hefty track live in the studio, generating a raw, coursing energy and backbreaking heaviness by tuning their guitars one step lower. The resulting, seismic riff quickly found eternal life, pumping up fans in sports arenas for more than 30 years now.

Holier Than Thou

A broadside against moral hypocrisy, this blistering sleeper track quickly became a band favourite during the Black Album sessions – so much so that Rock nominated it to be lead single. Lars’ pick prevailed, however, and Enter Sandman got the nod. In Paul Brannigan’s Birth School Metallica Death, Vol. 1, Bob concedes, “Every time I see the band, they always say the same thing: ‘Holier Than Thou, huh?’ They'll never let me live it down.”

The Unforgiven

His vocal style inspired by Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game, James based The Unforgiven’s lyrics on his tumultuous childhood. After Kirk ran through several attempts at a fitting solo, Bob chastised him for not living up to a recent “guitarist of the year” award. Kirk responded with a fresh solo on the spot: a single, masterful take that appears in the final version. Unforgiven soared to number 10 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart in 1991.

Wherever I May Roam

Released as a single in October 1992, this anthemic paean to life on the road represents Metallica’s commitment to writing more concise, radio-friendly songs. James plays the iconic intro on a Coral: an electric guitar that mimics the sound of a sitar. Enhancing the song’s exotic feel, Jason Newsted contributed to the ambience with a 12-string Hamer Mandocello, blending captivating Eastern sounds with pulverising metal grooves that made this standout instantly memorable.

Don’t Tread On Me

A contrast to the anti-war sentiments of 1988’s One, Don’t Tread On Me incited scathing criticism from some fans, who viewed it as a jingoistic celebration of US military force. James later denied the song was political, saying, “We never labelled ourselves as an anti-war band. Anti-this or pro-anything.” Despite that defence, the frontman later dismissed the track as “probably not one of my favourite songs musically” during a 2001 Playboy interview.

Through The Never

For this mid-tempo punch about exploring the dimensions of the human mind, Bob had James try playing his parts on a host of vintage amps, before agreeing that the frontman’s standard rig was the best option. In his book, Metallica: All The Songs, Benoît Clerc quotes James as saying: “We sure as hell weren’t making Led Zeppelin I.” The band later named their 2013 concert film, Metallica: Through The Never, after this track.

Nothing Else Matters

James never envisioned this emotive power ballad as a Metallica track. Speaking to Classic Rock, he rhetorically asked, “What was it about not wanting to write a love song? That’s pretty easy. It’s a huge sign of weakness. You’re in Metallica. This is hardcore. What the fuck are you doing?” But, at the Black Album’s 1991 release party at Madison Square Garden, James noted, with palpable relief: “People were really into it, which was pretty amazing.”

Of Wolf And Man

Of Wolf And Man’s title was inspired by John Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men, but Bob found the concept of writing about a big dog borderline absurd. As the producer delved deeper into James’ vision, though, he saw that the track’s essence celebrated humanity’s primal connection with nature. Initially, the riff, written by Kirk, was inverted: James and Lars suggested that he flip the parts around, which is what everyone now hears in the final mix.

The God That Failed

On The God That Failed, James channels his deep-seated grief and resentment over his mother’s death into powerful lyrics and crushing fretwork. He attributes the tragedy to her Christian Science faith, which prioritised spiritual healing over medical treatment. The piledriving riffs and swaggering tempo amplify that emotional intensity, and the sound effect of James cocking a hunting rifle in the final verse only underscores his violent opposition to Christian Science ideas in his adulthood.

My Friend Of Misery

A significant moment for Jason: this track earned him a rare songwriting credit. Although originally intended to be an instrumental, James and Lars added vocals as they developed the initial bass riff into a full-fledged track. Nonetheless, Jason’s pride in this song endured well beyond his Metallica departure. Speaking to Billboard in 2016, the bassist said, “That was a moment where those guys kind of bowed and said, ‘Here you go, man, put your song on there.’”

The Struggle Within

Played live only 20 times, this closing track explored James’ waning creative energy in Metallica’s final days in the studio. Its inclusion on the Black Album unleashed not just a powerful sound, showcasing Kirk’s enduring love of the wah pedal, but a raw, introspective glimpse into Metallica’s singer/guitarist’s fraying psyche at the time. “I’m no psychiatrist, but it’s right there,” he has since said, speaking to the anger coursing through the song.

In 2010, producer Youth (aka Martin Glover of Killing Joke) connected David Gilmour with The Orb, and result was the album Metallic Spheres – which was rebooted in 2023 as Metallic Spheres In Colour. Youth told Prog how it all came about, and couldn’t hide his enthusiasm over the idea of a live show, featuring the Pink Floyd guitarist.