When Bill Bruford’s former tech Pete Roth asked the prog veteran to play jazz for fun, no one realised it would bring the veteran prog drummer out of retirement. In 2024 the Pete Roth Trio started taking themselves seriously – but as the band leader tells Prog, they’re still aiming to have fun above anything else.

Growing up in a small town near Baden-Baden in Germany, with his grandparents playing as enthusiastic amateurs and his father having enjoyed a semi-professional career as a younger man, Pete Roth was constantly surrounded by harmony. Having dallied with piano, sax, accordion and other instruments, he decided to learn guitar.

He worked after-school jobs and bought his first guitar as an 11-year-old in December 1991. His teacher introduced him to the music of Joe Satriani and Steve Vai, and soon his horizons widened further into jazz, where players including Pat Martino, George Benson and Joe Pass exerted their influence.

In 2011 Roth released his first album, Meridian, followed by Circus In The Sky three years later. However, it’s fair to say that, lauded as a young talent in the jazz world, most Prog readers didn’t know of his work until he joined forces with Bill Bruford.

Marking the influential drummer’s return to headline performance after a 13-year hiatus, as well as his first appearance on an album new material in 19 years, Group Chat by The Pete Roth Trio showcases Bruford, Roth and bassist Mike Pratt’s ability to walk the tightrope between composition and improvisation. “The secret,” Roth says, “is that we’re a band of equals and we have each others’ backs.”

How did you meet up with Bill Bruford?

I’d moved over to the UK and was studying at Guildford, where Bill was teaching. Before that I’d been his drum tech for a number of years, so we already had a nice friendship. In 2022 we began playing together, just for the love of the music, jamming along to our favourite jazz standards and coming up with material just for playing and rehearsing.

There was really no band at this point, and no idea we’d play publicly. That didn’t happen until 2024 when we started doing a few small gigs that were local to us – again, just for fun.

What made the trio more of a going concern?

By 2025 we were doing more and more gigs, so we had to make a decision: either we needed to step out of the situation entirely and return to not necessarily facing the public, or take the trio seriously and make the necessary commitment.

That commitment included playing at 2026’s Cruise To The Edge, where you were on the bill that included Marillion, Big Big Train and other prog luminaries. What was that experience like?

I have to make a confession: I’ve not really grown up with prog, nor do I know much about it – so Bill was filling me in about who was who. I’m a huge fan of Adrian Belew, who I knew from his work with Zappa; and of course I was aware of his King Crimson history. Adrian’s band was spectacular. I loved it. Although I don’t know too much about prog, I love good music.

How did you guys go down with such hardcore prog fans?

I think we were the outliers, doing something entirely different to anybody else on the ship, so there was a danger of people feeling a bit short-changed. But actually we had the exact opposite experience. – when we played, people took to it so easily. We were really happy. We did two shows; I think the audience wasn’t quite sure what to make of the first. But then they all came for the second, and it was just a party. It was amazing.

Is being labelled a jazz act a help or a hindrance?

I think calling us a jazz trio is a poor description. We all come from different influences. Bill has a rock background, but he also has a love of be-bop. Mike falls into the funkier side of things, and there are all kinds of things in my playing.

Group Chat, sourced from live performances, was a while in the making. Why was it important for it to be a live album?

We were adamant that we weren’t going to record a studio album. Live is what we do. Our band is built on individual trust, spontaneity, interaction, and total improvisation in some places. We’re talking about building things from absolutely nothing onstage, in many cases every night in a slightly different fashion. Obviously we have certain frameworks; I think improvisation also needs corners and boundaries.

Does it bother you that a large part of the audience is in the room for Bill?

A lot of people say, “We came for Bill, but we stayed for the trio,” and that’s very encouraging to hear. There’s no point in denying that Bill is a giant in our world. But the thing is,he never says anything like, “I’m 77, I’ve made 91 records, I’m in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.”

When we’re in the room together, it’s as three equals. He could very much put his foot down and tell us all what we should be doing because it’s his name that’s selling the tickets – but he doesn’t do that at all.

The reason it’s called the Pete Roth Trio is simply that when we started, Bill didn’t want to be all the way to the front, doing all the admin and all the boring stuff that you have to deal with again. He wanted to be that kid who just loves playing the drum kit, and that really works for all of us.

Group Chat is on sale now.

A local politician has called for Marilyn Manson to be removed from the lineup at Slipknot's London show next July.

Manson is due to appear on a bill that also includes rising deathcore heavyweights Lorna Shore and metalcore veterans Hatebreed at Wembley Stadium on July 3, the opening night of Slipknot's 2027 (sic)est stadium tour.

However, Councillor Anton Georgiou – leader of the Liberal Democrat Group at Brent Council, where the stadium is located – has called for the venue to reconsider Manson's booking as the singer faces allegations from multiple women accusing him of sexual misconduct (he denies any wrongdoing).

"We cannot keep saying that tackling violence against women and girls is everyone’s business and then fail to ask difficult questions when it really matters," says Cllr Georgiou. "It’s disappointing that the council has not spoken out publicly about this.

"The allegations against Marilyn Manson are serious, and while he denies wrongdoing, Wembley Stadium needs to explain what consideration was given to them before this booking was confirmed. It also needs to consider the message this sends to survivors of abuse."

In response, a spokesman for Brent Council said, "Decisions about who performs at Wembley Stadium are ultimately a matter for the venue and event organisers, rather than Brent Council, which has no direct control over commercial bookings.

"That does not diminish our commitment to tackling violence against women and girls, which has no place in Brent. We are crystal clear about our values, and that is why we devote significant time, resources and effort to preventing abuse, supporting survivors and making our borough safer."

For their part, Wembley Stadium have explained that support acts are chosen by the promoter and headliner, and are in talks with the promoter (Live Nation) regarding the performance.

In the wake of the controversy surrounding Manson's booking, Spilknot guitarist Jim Root took to social media to claim that the decision had nothing to do with him.

"I concentrate on writing and being a guitarist, so forgive my ignorance about who we do shows with," he wrote. "There are other people with much bigger brains than I that coordinate all that, and I honestly don’t keep up with new bands or new music."

Manson's appearances on Slipknot's 2027 tour (he is also scheduled to perform at four South American shows) will be some of his most high-profile performances since several sexual assault and abuse allegations were made against him in 2020.

Manson is currently scheduled to stand trial in November 2027 as part of a sexual assault and battery lawsuit involving his former assistant, Ashley Walters. Manson has categorically denied any wrongdoing in relation to all allegations.

Alice Cooper looks back at his influence on extreme metal in the new issue of Metal Hammer, explaining that he sees such genres as death metal as continuations of traditional hard rock values.

The godfather of shock rock, responsible for such hits as I’m Eighteen and School’s Out, adds that it’s “great” he played a part in shaping the grandstanding of future figures in heavier music.

“Death metal is still hard rock,” Cooper asserts. “It’s still guitar-driven hard rock, with a different attitude. It was really just bands… not necessarily living that lifestyle, but doing what I was doing – playing characters up there. I think that’s great.”

The singer, who became a born-against Christian in the early 80s, adds that the Satanic themes often prevalent in death metal imagery don’t offend him: “Being a Christian, people would say, ‘What about these death metal bands who are anti this or that?’ I’d go, ‘Hey, they’re yelling at God. I think he can take it.’”

Multiple death metal artists have paid tribute to Alice Cooper or covered his material. Finnish stars Children Of Bodom included a cover of Cooper’s song Bed Of Nails on their 2004 EP Trashed, Lost And Strungout. Similarly, Chuck Schuldiner, the late Death founder often called the “godfather” of the genre, repeatedly stated that his favourite band was Kiss, whose theatrical, face-painted presentation was inspired by Cooper.

Death metal has influenced some of the artists in Cooper’s camp. Last year, his longtime lead guitar player, Nita Strauss, said that Gothenburg melodic death metal act In Flames were her personal “Beatles”.

“In Flames is, you know, the band that I always list as my favorite band,” she told Guitar World, “and when I was growing up and getting into heavy music, I was always really drawn by these sort of inversions and chords that Swedish melodic death metal bands used.”

Read the full interview with Cooper in the new issue of Metal Hammer, which also features an in-depth celebration of late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, 40 years after his death. Order your copy now and have it delivered directly to your door.

Triggerfinger are massive in mainland Europe, once replacing Foo Fighters at Pinkpop without a squeak of protest. While their UK footprint doesn’t quite measure up, Ruben Block (vocals/guitar) and Mario Goossens (drums) could yet cross over, with sixth album Tarmac evoking a continental Queens Of The Stone Age.

Some musicians compare releasing an album to giving birth. Is that your experience?

Mario Goossens: Actually, it is, because you live with it for such a long time. We started writing Tarmac in 2023. You become so attached to it. It’s addictive. Then suddenly it’s not yours any more. It’s out there in the world, and everyone has an opinion about it.

What’s the significance of the title?

Ruben Block: This album is not a one-trick pony. We write about life, the joyous and tragic events. Taking care of your parents and them passing away. Having kids of your own who start finding their way in life. That’s why we thought Tarmac was a good title. It’s both a landing place and a place to depart from.

What’s the number-one rule on the Triggerfinger tour bus?

MG: Don’t have a shit. But that’s the rule on every tour bus.

Ever broken it?

MG: We didn’t, but we had a band member before who probably did.

RB: Breaking rules was his number-one goal when he got up in the morning.

That was your late bassist Paul Van Bruystegem. Can we ask what happened to him?

RB: Paul was someone who lived very intensely. He was a big guy, so he could take more of everything than a regular person. He could take six or seven instead of one. He lived at two hundred miles an hour, and it was pretty exciting to be in his slipstream. But he basically used everything up, starting with his own body.

His death last year must have hit you hard.

MG: Of course. But he chose it. Even when he quit the band – before he got really ill – he told us: “I’m gonna go for it, even if it costs me two years of my life.” So what could we say?

You don’t like to name Triggerfinger’s influences. Why is that?

RB: Because I usually don’t know where it comes from. And I don’t want to know. You listen to music, watch movies, read books or articles, you put all of it in your backpack. It’s also a bit dangerous to start by saying let’s make a song like Bowie, or Howlin’ Wolf. It would demotivate me right away, because that music is so great.

A number of people say your music sounds like sex.

RB: Well there are worse things that music can do to you.

What did you learn from opening for the Rolling Stones?

RB: I was amazed at how light they played. They started the show and Charlie’s playing was so light and bouncy, and Mick’s shoulders are moving… It was amazing to hear how groovy it all is. Even the loudest bands we like, they also have the roll, y’know? Even if you listen to the early Slayer records, it’s frickin’ groovy stuff, man. So that’s what we go for.

Tarmac is released on September 18 via Sony Music/Hufter.

Lamb Of God frontman Randy Blythe has confirmed he has deleted his social media accounts, telling internet trolls "you don't exist."

The vocalist says online criticism of him or his band is no longer a concern since he came off of all major social media platforms.

He only communicates with fans online via his Substack, which requires a paid subscription.

Asked by The Break Down With Nath & Johnny how he feels when people post negative comments online, Blythe says: "They can't, because I deleted my social media.

"Bad news for you guys. You don't exist. I'm not on social media.

"I have a Substack, but only paid subscribers can comment. Beause if you're gonna insult me, you gotta pay me. And then I'm gonna still block you.

"But you're still paying me. Pay me, motherf***er. This is a business."

Meanwhile, Lamb Of God have released pro-shot footage of them performing the track Blunt Force Blues during their headline slot at Bloodstock festival in the UK in August.

Metal Hammer's review of the set says the band's live energy and performance levels "set the bar for live metal" music.

Lamb Of God released their latest album Into Oblivion earlier this year.

Lamb of God live dates 2026/2027

Oct 30: Headbangers Boat, Miami, FL
Dec 05: Knotfest, Mexico City, Mexico

Jan 16: Manchester AO Arena, UK
Jan 17: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Jan 19: Dublin 3Arena, Ireland
Jan 22: BP Pulse Arena, Birmingham, UK
Jan 23: London The O2, UK
Jan 26: Dusseldorf PSD Arena, Germany
Jan 27: Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
Jan 29: Lodz Atlas Arena, Poland
Jan 31: Budapest Barba Negra, Hungary
Feb 02: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Feb 04: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
Feb 06: Luxembourg Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
Feb 07: Amsterdam AFAS Arena, Netherlands
Feb 08: Brussels Vorst National, Belgium
Feb 10: Paris Accor Arena, France
Feb 12: Zurich Hallenstadion, Switzerland
Feb 14: Vienna Arte Hotel Wien Stadthalle, Austria
Feb 16: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Feb 17: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Feb 19: Fornebu Unity Arena, Norway
Feb 20: Stockholm Avicci Arena, Sweden
Feb 22: Helsinki Veikkaus Arena Parkhallen, Finland
Jul 25: Soldier Field, Chicago, IL

Getdown Services are enjoying one of those drastic upward surges that rarely happens to new bands. In the past year they’ve toured Australia, New Zealand and America, appeared on Later… With Jools Holland and been booked for two headline nights at London’s Roundhouse. Harry Styles and Harry Hill are both fans. It’s a long way from the youth centres, skittles alleys and village fêtes of their early gigging years in and around Minehead.

“We’ve crammed it in this year,” guitar-playing half Josh Law says. “It’s only July and we’ve spanned continents. We’re like migratory birds.”

“But much, much less beautiful…” co-conspirator/old friend Ben Sadler deadpans.

That self-aware humour (the duo's Bandcamp page proclaims them to be "Britain's Best Band") is key to Getdown Services’ appeal, combined with biting, socially alert lyrics that invite comparisons to Sleaford Mods and Beastie Boys. But it’s not all snark and beats. They’re audibly rockers at heart, in love with the likes of AC/DC, The White Stripes and T.Rex (so many of Law’s guitar parts are pure Bolan). By turns funny and heartbreaking, acerbic and tender, their new LP Massive Champion reflects it all.

“We get away with ripping T.Rex off far too much,” Law says, grinning. “But the Sleadford Mods comparisons, I think that happens because of the way we do it live – it’s a laptop and two English guys swearing.”

Law and Sadler met in middle school, where they played bass and drums in a band with another singer, covering the likes of Blur, White Stripes and Kasabian. Realising the chemistry between them, the pair left to do their own thing. Six years of small gigs, different names and generally feeling out of place followed. Bruised, albeit enthused, they got day jobs and left music for weekends.

“Josh played banjo in a folk trio, I played drums in an indie band,” Sadler says. “But we’d been so crushed by our experience of being absolute freaks when we were younger, we weren’t so arsed about trying to do it properly again for a while.”

Covid changed that. Suddenly with time to spare, they restarted and rebranded, free of the pressure to be successful that marred their teens. In time they toured extensively, prioritising overlooked towns. Things escalated.

For now they’re keeping the guitars ’n’ laptop gig set-up (initially a means to create full sounds on the cheap), filling stages with livewire presence and DIY anthems about real life, everyday insecurities, even love. Music that makes ‘lo-fi’ feel huge.

“We’ve had to think about whether we’re going to go that way,” Josh says, “or are we going to fill the stage with more people or equipment. But there’s something to be said for less is more.”

Massive Champion is out now via Breakfast Records. Getdown Services tour the UK in November and December. For dates, visit Seated.

English artist Bobbie Dazzle – aka Siân Greenaway – is on a mission to revive the evocative sounds and vibes of the glam rock era. But the singer and flautist is also steeped in prog, as she explains.

“I was taught the flute at school, but at 10 years old I hated being told it had to be played in a clean, pristine way. So I stopped playing what felt like a stupid instrument and forgot all about it.

After I’d left school I stumbled across Jethro Tull, which in turn led me to discover the Dutch band Focus. I watched a live clip of their song Hocus Pocus on YouTube, and I was surprised to see Thijs van Leer pick up a flute and proceed to do all of the things I’d been told not to – but within the context of progressive rock.

He used the flute as a percussive instrument and made all of these weird sounds, pulling crazy faces; he looked like an absolute madman. But the best thing of all was that Thijs was having fun with the flute. I just thought, ‘Wow!!’

I rescued my flute from where I’d left it and the first song I tried to play was House Of The King [Focus’ 1970 debut single]. I was surprised how much muscle memory helped. It’s become my go-to song with the flute – whenever I warm up, it’s always to House Of The King.

I like to listen to Focus on shuffle because each of their albums tells a different story. But if you pushed me for my favourite I’d say In And Out Of Focus (originally released as Focus Plays Focus) because House Of The King is on that one.

I’ve yet to see the band live – I need to set that right because Thijs still plays lengthy tours, even at the age of 78. Big respect for that.

After falling in love with Focus I discovered Genesis, and Traffic, and it opened a whole new door to progressive rock for me. I already knew about Heart, but I didn’t know Ann Wilson was a fantastic flautist – she can rip out a solo just as well as Ian Anderson.

I’m considered a glam rock artist, but I also see myself as a prog one. I don’t think the two genres live too far away from each other. Both have lots of layers. I’m very proud of my attempt to bring glam into the prog world.”

Bobbie Dazzle’s second album, Star Power, is on sale now.

Metallica have released official footage of the band performing ...And Justice for All on the opening night of their Life Burns Faster residency at Sphere in Las Vegas.

The nine-minute epic is the title track of the 1988 album, the band's fourth LP and their first following the death of bassist Cliff Burton a few years earlier.

It was recorded on October 1 and marked the first time they had played the song live in 12 years.

They have also released footage of their performance of The Call of Ktulu from the same night.

Both clips can be viewed below.

Metallica are performing 24 dates at the revolutionary Vegas venue, split between October and November of this year and January, February and March of 2027.

The residency has wowed thousands of fans, but has also been mired in controversy after frontman James Hetfield seemed to criticise artists who use their platforms to make political statements.

That led ex-Pink Floyd man Roger Waters to call Hetfield a "complete prick" with "an IQ of about three".

Metallica live dates 2026/2027

Oct 17: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 22: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 24: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 29: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Oct 31: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Nov 05: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Nov 07: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Nov 19: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 21: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Jan 28: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Jan 30: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 04: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 06: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 18: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 20: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 25: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Feb 27: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Mar 04: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Mar 06: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Mar 11: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
Mar 13: Las Vegas Sphere, NV
May 08: Vancouver BC Place, BC
May 13: San Diego Snapdragon Stadium, CA
May 18: El Paso Sun Bowl Stadium, TX
May 22: San Antonio Alamodome, TX
May 26: Fayetteville Razorback Stadium, AR
May 29: Kansas City Arrowhead Stadium, MO
Jun 02: Raleigh Carter-Finley Stadium, NC
Jun 05: Indianapolis Lucas Oil Stadium, IN
Jun 08: Buffalo Highmark Stadium, NY
Jun 12: Madison Camp Randall Stadium, WI
Jun 15: Cleveland Huntington Bank Field, OH
Jun 19: Salt Lake City Rice-Eccles Stadium, UT

Back in 2006, this writer took a little-known Mexican acoustic duo busking in Camden Town for a guitar magazine feature. Even without a licence, Rodrigo Sánchez and Gabriela Quintero couldn’t get arrested (although they did make a solid £58).

It’s fair to say the pair have moved up in the world since then, with their six-album catalogue, Grammys, soundtrack work for Pirates Of The Caribbean, and even a private audience for a US President (not the current one, obviously).

Now, as Rodrigo Y Gabriela release back-to-basics seventh album OurHome – its quicksilver lead lines and thundering guitar-body percussion hinting at their longtime thrash-metal fandom – Sánchez can’t help acknowledging that “it’s been quite a journey”.

You’ve said this latest album came from a difficult creative period. What happened?

Rodrigo Sánchez: We worked on this album for over two years, and it started out with a different set of tunes. We went to LA, worked with this amazing, very famous producer. But we did some demos, and it was like: “No, this is not it.” We took everything back, had to apologise to the producer and say: “These are not the songs, man.”

What got you back on track?

RS: When we came back to our studio, our beloved kitty, Pelusa, passed. Next day, I wrote something for her, just this simple melody on acoustic guitar. That song became the title track for OurHome. That started it all.

Gabriela Quintero: The last album was all backing tracks and electric guitars. But when we lost Pelusa, and Rod came with that melody, for me it was like her saying: “Stop fucking around. Go back to your acoustic guitars, be real, and go for it.”

How did you come to record in Japan?

RS: Back in the day, we’d talk to musicians that had been to Japan, and they either loved it or hated it. We happened to love it. So I said to our label: “What if we record in Japan?”

GQ: It was breaking our own rules, but also the industry-standard rule that you have to go to Los Angeles or New York. We said let’s do something entirely different. We love the sakura trees. We went to the sumo. We saw the thousand-year-old temples. When we go to Japan, we touch that place within us that I call the ‘nectar’.

What’s the significance of the album title?

GQ: As a species, we live in chaotic times, politically, ecologically, emotionally, morally. So that title is a way to say: “This is our fucking home,” y’know? I believe human beings are like robots sometimes. We repeat the same patterns of injustice. The song Somos Como Tu means ‘We are like you’. It’s a compassion, empathic thing. To me, the plants, trees and animals are screaming that too. We all need to behave with our planet and community. We all need to help people in trouble, to take a little action every day. The album cover is a photo we took in Melbourne. It’s a building where refugees live, from all over the world.

You’re a well-travelled band.

RS: The other day someone asked how many countries we’ve played, and I counted fifty.

GQ: The weirdest gig was at this tiny church in the Welsh mountains. It was freezing. We were playing up at the altar [with our eyes closed], having a moment of peace. Then we realised the lady in charge of the church was stood in front of us with a tray of tea.

What’s the most money you ever made in one day from busking?

RS: Sometimes we’d play for forty minutes in Dublin and get a hundred pounds. Back then there were only ten buskers on Grafton Street and we were like a family. I remember one time there was a bunch of Irish kids who played trad music, and after their turn they threw all their money into our fucking case. How nice is that?

GQ: But I remember one guy in a wheelchair. He was really fast, and as he went by he robbed us – scooped a bunch of coins out of our case.

Police around the world can be assholes, y’know? The Irish police were cool with us. But when we were busking in Copenhagen, there was this Danish police chief. He was so strict. He didn’t want us to sell CDs or bring amplifiers. So we got this homeless guy to help us. He was always drunk, and he was like: “Fuck the police. You guys can play now, he’s not here.” Then he’d say: “Here he comes!” and we’d pack everything up.

Was it a good move for the two of you to end your romantic relationship in 2012?

RS: I think it was. Now, we’re very good friends.

GQ: We’re more like brother and sister.

Playing at the White House in 2010 must have been a thrill?

GQ: That was insane. We’d just done a big tour, and we were destroyed, because we’d played seventy shows, no days off. Then our management got the call. Originally we thought we’d just be background music. But we were frisked by the Men In Black and brought into this room full of photographers. And there were Barack and Michelle Obama saying: “Oh, Rodrigo and Gabriela!” and hugging us. It felt like some cheesy dream.

What’s your advice on getting from the street to stadiums?

RS: It’s a different world for musicians now. It’s difficult to see so many people playing music on your phone and not compare yourself. So don’t do that. I know it’s hard for young people to turn their phones off, not to look at screens and to really focus on your craft, but that’s my true advice. Just do what you really feel and don’t look at anybody else. Don’t even listen. Stop listening to other people’s music. Just do what you have in your heart.

Did England deserve to beat Mexico in the World Cup?

RS: Yeah, we don’t care too much.

GQ: You’re forgiven. Sports isn’t on my radar at all.

OurHome is out now via ATO Records.

Ever since Anthony Phillips left Genesis in 1970, he’s been viewed by some as an also-ran in prog history – but that view is wrong. After facing illness, heartbreak and stage fright, all of which contributed to his departure, he rebuilt his musical career and became the creator of many cross-genre albums, along with gaining a reputation as a leading light in production music. In 2024 he looked back with Prog. Here we take up his story just as Anon, his band with Mike Rutherford, had played a riotous gig at Charterhouse school alongside The Garden Wall, featuring fellow pupils Peter Gabriel and Tony Banks.

Everything changed after that – the two groups eventually coalesced and the genesis of Genesis was in the air.

We made a demo where I wrote all the crap songs and Pete and Tony wrote the good ones. Pete only came along at Tony’s insistence. I didn’t know Pete could sing – he’d just lent us his drums at the time. We ended up signing to Decca!

And that didn’t particularly work out…

It’s a good thing it wasn’t successful, or we’d have never developed our distinctive style. One day, I heard this golden sound of a 12-string coming from the glade at Charterhouse. That was it – I had to get a 12-string, and I started writing in a different way.

On the one hand, we were writing unoriginal blues stuff like Going Out To Get You, and on the other we had this experimentation that we didn’t really recognise; we were just mucking around thinking it was rather lovely.

It’s only in retrospect I realised we weren’t really influenced by anybody else. I suppose the closest thing was the interplay between Simon Nicol and Richard Thompson in Fairport, but they were very much six-string, a little bit more folky. Whereas we were into weird chords.

The summer of 1969 was tumultuous for you, was it not?

I’d been dumped by Lucy Burge, the love of my life. We’d recorded From Genesis To Revelation, and Jonathan King had mixed the backing track to mono and added the strings. It was released in March – and the whole thing sounded limp. It seemed my whole world had come to an end.

Being run down causes illness, and I contracted glandular fever quite badly, but I managed to work hard and get decent A-Levels. Genesis didn’t really know what to do; whether to go on.

You then decamped to Christmas Cottage in Dorking and spent the rest of 1969 rehearsing and writing.

We worked so hard and it paid off – but we sort of frayed at the edges.

To be in that cottage during the same period as In The Court Of The Crimson King and Monty Python must have been incredible.

The impact of Crimson, especially on us, was huge in terms of sonics and how it was planned out. I later worked with Mike Giles, and he told me how the music was all planned before they recorded it. They went to America too soon, and that was it. We were rehearsing the day of their Hyde Park concert and missed it.

Peter Gabriel often seemed isolated during rehearsals, didn’t he?

I always felt a bit sorry for Pete; we would gang up on him. He would have this incredible perception all the time. It was almost too much – one in three ideas would be really good, but they wouldn’t stop coming. When we were ganging up against Pete, Tony was at the forefront.

That pecking order was a famous thing in Genesis, wasn’t it?

Tony was always friendly with me. But in a competitive situation, it was the only time I’d ever seen him anything other than friendly. He’s terribly competitive. Mike told me once they were playing tennis, and said the vibes coming from the other side of the net were so bad that he just gave the game away.

They say Paul McCartney was replaced with Billy Shears – I sometimes think that Peter was replaced as well. He used to sit there like an old woman, and then explode into this psychedelic thing. Because of two 12-strings trying to keep retuning that took forever onstage, Pete was forced to do something, and so he started slipping into this persona, which wasn’t the shy, sweet, slightly inarticulate Pete – he switched into this messianic character looking into the far distance. If we’d not had two 12-strings, would he ever have started telling all those stories? We’ll never know…

You played with some incredible people in your short time on tour with Genesis.

I would love to be able to tell you about meeting Nick Drake or David Bowie... we just passed backstage at best. Mott The Hoople were incredibly supportive, though. Ginger Baker wasn’t very pleasant.

Your departure was a momentous time for the group – the only time they truly came close to throwing in the towel.

Glandular fever had been awful. I was incredibly ill. But we were young and kept driving forward. I then got bronchial pneumonia, took a couple of weeks off, came back and recorded Trespass, and went back on the road. When it came to solos, I was turning down – I’d just lost my nerve. I was basically, fundamentally scared. I was also being advised by medical people to leave. We were dossing down on floors. Glandular fever can affect your nervous system. I can’t be sure, but I think the two were linked.

What happened during the seven years when nothing was officially released?

I was a lost soul after I left the group. I had a place at Kent University to read philosophy. I remember they sent me a Bertrand Russell book – my idea of philosophy was sitting smoking joints and discussing life; then suddenly there’s all this scientific stuff. I’m a stranger to science. I panicked and switched to history.

My nervous system had taken such a caning, in a sense, I was having a quasi-nervous breakdown. The idea of going to university seemed completely terrifying.

You went back to music school?

I deferred university for a year, and then I heard Sibelius for the first time, and that opened a new world for me. I knew that I had to read music. I had to catch up on stuff that other people would have done at the age of 13. I studied part-time at Guildhall [School Of Music And Drama in London], studying harmony, counterpoint and orchestration.

And teaching followed?

I started teaching classical guitar from 1972 onwards. I asked for a poster to be put up in a music shop, and they put ‘Ex-Genesis’ and people thought it said ‘Ex-Genius’! I taught at Peper Harow [a therapeutic community for troubled adolescents in Godalming] from 1975.

I was also teaching at Reed’s School in Cobham. I was still teaching one day a week at Peper Harow as late as the recording of Sides [in 1979]. I was teaching the day Ray Cooper came in and did his overdubs. I’ve still never met him!

From the day in 1978 that he released his debut album For You, on which he wrote and produced every song, played every instrument, and sang every melody and harmony, it was evident that Prince was a special, singular talent. But ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons has a crystal clear memory of the moment that he realised that the multi-talented Minneapolis-born superstar was also a guitar hero for a new generation.

That epiphany came on the evening of March 15, 2004, when Prince joined Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne, Dhani Harrison and more to honour Harrison's father George at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. Three-and-a-half minutes into the all-star band's tribute performance of The Beatles' While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Prince stepped up to play a guitar solo: three minutes later, when he finished playing, jaws were on the floor.

"He just burned it up," Tom Petty later recalled. "You could feel the electricity of, Something really big’s going down here."

Petty wasn't the only one blown away by Prince's performance.

Recalling that night in an archive interview with legendary broadcaster Dan Rather on AXS TV, Billy Gibbons said, "I had become a fan of Prince. I admired his showmanship, I considered him a world class entertainer. It was only until he appeared with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame closing jam session, when he picked up a guitar and tore it up, lit the stage on fire with his technical dexterity [that I recognised] Prince to be that accomplished as a guitarist. A great dancer, a great singer, a great composer [and] I knew he held a guitar, but I didn't really see him play it much.

"And that one appearance at the close of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction awards really caught me off guard," the Houston-born guitarist continued, "and I I started listening intently."

Not long after that memorable night, Gibbons was in New York himself, seeking out a post-show meal in Manhattan after discovering that his usual late night haunt in the Meatpacking District was closed for renovations. After arriving at the shuttered restaurant, the guitarist noticed that a bar across the street was loud and lively, and decided that he'd call in there instead.

"No sooner had I crossed the threshold," he told Rather, "than a large guy came up and tapped me on the shoulder. He said, 'Somebody wants to speak to you.' And I said, Okay. And he pointed, and sitting in this little horseshoe banquette all alone, there sat Prince.

"I took a seat," Gibbons continues, "and he said, 'Yeah, sit down.' He said, 'I just would like to talk guitar.' And I said, Well, you've come to the right place. And I said, Now knowing you as a guitarist, which I had not known before, let's peel the onion. And we sat for a good two hours talking about how to do this,and how to do that."

Gibbons recalls that his conversation with Prince carried on until around 5am, and at its conclusion, he asked the younger musician if he would teach him how to play the guitar intro to his classic 1984 single When Doves Cry.

He said, 'I fell into it by accident'," Gibbons says. "He said, 'I haven't been able to play it like that ever since... Let's go learn it."

"Prince," Gibbons concludes, "was a prince."

Glenn Hughes says that he is recovering well after undergoing a 10 hour open heart surgery operation.

The Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Black Country Communion, Trapeze legend, who recently announced that he was retiring from touring, informed his social media followers that he has just returned home after an eight-day stay in a Los Angeles hospital.

"This past year, I’ve had some health issues," Hughes, now 75, said in August when announcing his retirement from the road. "The results from numerous MRIs, CT scans, and an echocardiogram have alerted my medical team that I need another open-heart surgery. I really have no option and no choice, as health is my number one priority. Grateful to have been chosen with a life full with the gift of music. Thank you for walking beside me."

The vocalist/bassist's latest social media posts outlines the details of his hospital treatment.

"Now Home," he writes, "after an 8 day stay, and a 10 hour open heart surgery operation, called aortic valve replacement, exactly the same procedure I had done in 2013, at UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center, Westwood, LA.

"My doctor, Dr Richard Shemin, head, cardiac, and professor of UCLA, really took care of me with his remarkable staff.

"Each day as I move forward, I am getting my energy back.

"There is only love in my life. There are no mistakes.

"Everything is in its right place. Never believe that there is something wrong in your life. You are where you’re supposed to be. Going through those experiences that are necessary for you right now.

"When you become angry at yourself, because you don’t like the experiences that you are going through, you are hindering your growth. Rather be grateful, & thankful, for every experience that you’re going through.

"Even though it may appear to be terrible in your life, be thankful for this experience, for the experience is not what you think it is, in your finite mind.

"There is a greater purpose to it.

"All is well..."

The Cannock-born star released his most recent solo album, Chosen, last year.

On October 16, 2025, Ace Frehley died after suffering a brain bleed following a fall. It was the second of two tumbles Ace had at his studio as he worked on a new album. He was airlifted to hospital and placed on a ventilator, but passed away several hours later in Morristown, New Jersey. He was 74 years old.

Frehley had two spells with New York-based glam titans Kiss, firstly from their foundation in 1973 until a messy exit circa the Creatures Of The Night album in 1982. He was part of a 1996 reunion of the original line-up, and remained on board for a further six years.

Completely self-taught as a guitarist, Frehley’s style and persona were a massive influence on subsequent generations of rock musicians. On December 7, 2025, when Kiss received Kennedy Center Honors, Frehley was only the third person to receive the honour posthumously.

The guitarist’s relationship with fellow original Kiss members Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley was never an easy one. Frehley liked to have a good time, which often led to butting of heads with teetotal bass player Simmons and rhythm guitarist Stanley, who largely partied in moderation. He was something of a square peg in a round hole, but that’s what made his contribution to Kiss so vital.

All the same, even after Ace belatedly found sobriety in 2006 the pair continued to keep him at arm’s length. And while Simmons insisted that Frehley and co-founding drummer Peter Criss were both invited to attend the band’s final hometown send-off in December 2023, joining them on stage was never going to fly.

Frehley was a hugely talented musician, but he could be his own worst enemy – promoting the solo record that would prove to be his last, 10,000 Volts, he boasted, “My new album is going to make Paul Stanley look like an imbecile”.

From Frehley’s perspective, he had endured a lifetime of humiliation and belittlement from the group’s leaders, and in the autumn of his life he just wouldn’t take it any more.

“In the last few months Paul put me down pretty badly,” Ace told Classic Rock’s Dave Everley. “He even told [shock-jock] Howard Stern that if me and Peter got up on stage with them at Madison Square Garden, you might as well call the band Piss instead of Kiss.”

It was a cheap shot, to be sure, and knowing what Classic Rock does of Stanley, in the cold light of day he probably regretted saying it. But for Frehley this was just another brick in the wall between him and his former partners.

“That [comment] got to me. We ended up having some words,” Ace sighed during the same interview. “But I’m really done with the tit-for-tat.”

In the grand scheme of things, the spat might be dismissed as brotherly rough and tumble, and a full reconnection took place during the final hours of Frehley’s life.

“We are devastated by the passing of Ace Frehley,” said a statement from Simmons and Stanley. “He is and will always be a part of Kiss’s legacy.”

It continued: “In his last moments, we were fortunate enough to have been able to surround him with loving, caring, peaceful words, thoughts, prayers and intentions as he left this earth.

“We cherish all of his finest memories, his laughter, and celebrate his strengths and kindness that he bestowed upon others. The magnitude of his passing is of epic proportions and beyond comprehension. Reflecting on all of his incredible life achievements, Ace’s memory will continue to live on forever!”

The youngest of three children, Paul Daniel Frehley was born in a middle-class area of the Bronx, one of the five boroughs of New York City. The Frehley family lived together in a onebedroom apartment, with Paul and a brother sleeping on a bunk bed in their parents’ bedroom, his sister sleeping on the living-room couch. Money was tight, but there was a lot of love – and music. Everything changed when his dad handed 16-year-old Paul his first instrument.

“It was a cheap, twenty-five-dollar Japanese guitar,” Frehley told to Classic Rock. “Once I hit the E-chord with the volume all the way up on the amp, it was love at first sight; or first hearing or whatever you want to call it.”

While journeying through his earliest bands, Frehley dropped out of high school, and trouble with the NY police was never too far away. “I’d been arrested probably half a dozen times before I was in Kiss,” Ace admitted. “I learned the hard way, but I think it’s helped me in life. You’ve gotta have street smarts to survive.”

It was an advert placed in the Village Voice newspaper that led Frehley to the fledgling Kiss. On January 3, 1973, he famously turned up for his audition wearing mismatched sneakers, but his playing got him the gig.

When the band decided to take on individual stage identities and paint their faces for live shows, Stanley the Starman, Simmons the Demon and Criss the Catman, Frehley’s fascination with science fiction brought him the moniker Space Ace. To make things more fascinating still, Kiss subsequently went to extreme lengths to avoid being photographed without make-up.

Although Kiss’s gonzoid stage show – which involved colourful costumes, and enough pyrotechnics to blow up the Chase Manhattan Bank – brought them cult acclaim, their early records were not successful. A make-or-break last throw of the dice, the double gatefold concert set Alive! not only rescued their career but also began the process of fast-tracking them towards superstardom.

Frehley was loved for his occasional lead vocal tracks like Shock Me, and also for playing a guitar that doubled as a rocket launcher.

At their height of their fame the four band members simultaneously recorded solo albums, all released on September 18, 1978. Debate over their relative merits still rages. But, thanks largely to the cover of the English glitter-rock combo Hello’s hit New York Groove, up against the stylistically diverse releases from Simmons and Criss, Frehley’s Eddie Kramer-produced record sold the best.

“I expected that,” Ace wrote in his 2011 memoir No Regrets. “My goal was to make a really solid, guitar-based album, and I did. Mine outsold the other three albums and produced a top-twenty single.”

Frehley didn’t hold back in criticising Simmons’s album, which included cameos from Donna Summer, Cher and Helen Reddy.

“Helen Reddy? Really Gene? What the fuck?” Ace wrote in his book. “With Gene it was always about making money, advancing and expanding the brand. It was never about art. Never about music.”

Wildly differing responses to the solo records ensured that within Kiss nothing was quite the same again. As the 1980s dawned, drummer Peter Criss was voted out of the line-up, ensuring that Gene and Paul inevitably won any vote over direction. The band cut their hair and changed costumes for the ambitious but dismally received conceptual set Music From ‘The Elder’. An uncomfortable Ace took a back seat, many of his solos rejected.

By the next album, Creatures Of The Night, Kiss were back on track. Their record deal had been re-negotiated, and each member was $20 million richer. Unfortunately, Frehley was ever more self-destructive. “I had lost interest in the band,” he wrote in No Regrets. “My days passed in a blur of drinking and drugging. I knew that if I didn’t leave the group I was going to die.”

Having almost killed himself when he crashed a Porsche, in scenes reminiscent of Smokey And The Bandit, a sky-high Ace was also pursued by cops in his DeLorean for an hour at speeds of up to 90mph, crashing into several other vehicles. The incident inspired a great song called Rock Soldiers for his next project, Frehley’s Comet, but at that point in his life Ace wasn’t in the right shape to be a band leader.

In 1996, with their own career dipping after an era without make-up, even though highly cautious over the probability of the pair’s demons returning, Simmons and Stanley invited Frehley and Criss back on board. Things started encouragingly. The tour was a box-office smash, but Ace and Peter had little to do with a comeback set. This worked in their favour – for the most part Kiss’s Psycho Circus album wasn’t very good.

When flying between cities on tour, Frehley admitted to hollowing out prescribed medication tablets and refilling them with cocaine. Clearly, things couldn’t last. And when Ace arrived with minutes to spare before a gig, tour manager Tommy Thayer was ready in a Spaceman outfit to take the stage in his place. Kiss had a Plan B, in case of disaster.

Upon completion of their 2001 itinerary, during which Criss had walked away due to ‘contract details’, Kiss installed Thayer as a full-time guitarist, and Frehley was solo again. Perhaps with some justification – previously, during the make-up era, new Kiss band members such as Vinnie Vincent and Eric Carr had been assigned fresh images – it stuck in Ace’s throat that Thayer had a costume the same as his own, and identical make-up.

He found gallows humour in the situation. In a 2008 interview, when a writer pointed out that former Black N’ Blue man Thayer had once played in a Kiss tribute act, Frehley quipped: “He still is”. In another similar conversation, he said: “Paul and Gene have two impostors on stage with them.”

Following several unsuccessful attempts, sobriety changed Frehley’s life completely. “My [AA] sponsor told me: ‘You had to make those mistakes to get to where you are today, and he was right,’” Ace told Classic Rock.

With a clear head and a good woman in his life, Ace entered a fertile era, releasing five albums in a decade.

“I love to write songs, I love to record,” Ace told Classic Rock in 2024. “My fiancée’s got me on a strict diet of organic foods. She’s got me working out, lifting weights and doing push-ups. I’m down to a hundred and seventy-five pounds. I’ve never felt better in my life.”

Certainly, unlike Kiss, at this point retirement was not on his mind.

“I don’t give it any thought,” Frehley insisted. “I will go on till the wheels fall off. Even if I end up in a wheelchair, I can still write songs.”

With typical laser-focused business savvy, Kiss used the second of their farewell New York shows to introduce a new AI-based future for themselves, although Ace saw neither logic nor appeal in turning himself into an avatar.

“That’s not what I’m all about,” he said. “I’m about amps, guitars, singing. As long as I can sing and write and play guitar, the sky’s the limit. I could have two more albums in me. I could have five more. As long as it’s fun, I’ll keep doing it.”

Anthrax’s founding rhythm guitarist Scott Ian has reflected on the thrash metal stars’ chaotic tour with Pantera in 1997 and ’98.

Talking exclusively in the brand-new issue of Metal Hammer, the 62-year-old says he truly “learned how to drink” while on the road with guitarist Dimebag Darrell and the boys, for whom nu metal outfit Coal Chamber opened.

He also recalls a particularly wild story where he was sick after an intense night, only for Dimebag to be waiting outside the toilet with even more alcohol.

“We did a tour with Pantera and it was fucking chaos,” says Ian. “I would ride on Dimebag and Vinnie’s [Paul, drummer and Dimebag’s brother] bus sometimes, which seemed like a good idea when you were getting on it at 3am. And then it’s seven in the morning and they’ve been watching the same live Kiss videos for four hours.”

The guitarist continues: “I learned how to drink on that tour. One night I ran to the bathroom and threw up. I opened the bathroom door and Darrell’s standing there with a shot waiting for me. ‘Dude, I just threw up.’ He looks at me and goes, ‘What are you talking about, Baldini? Now you just have more room.’”

Dimebag, who was fatally shot aged 38 during a show by he and Paul’s post-Pantera band Damageplan in 2004, was a legendary drinker to the point that he had his own signature beverage called the Black Tooth Grin, named after a Megadeth lyric. Machine Head frontman and friend Robb Flynn recalled in 2022 that Dimebag once got so drunk at a show that he smashed up one of Flynn’s guitars, yet he still went on to play perfectly.

Flynn told YouTuber Ola Englund: “He picks up my guitar, and he goes – headstock first – right into the fucking ground. And I was like, ‘Dude!’ I was fucking pissed!

“And that dude gets out there – and literally plays a fucking flawless show. Just every fucking note, every lead… dude doesn’t miss a note. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I never would have believed [it].”

Anthrax collaborated with Dimebag on multiple occasions, getting him to contribute guest guitar solos across three of their studio albums: Fueled and King Size on 1995’s Stomp 442, Inside Out and Born Again Idiot on 1998’s Vol. 8: The Threat Is Real, and Strap It On and Cadillac Rock Box on 2003’s We’ve Come For You All.

The veteran New York thrashers released their long-awaited new album Cursum Perficio via Nuclear Blast last month. Parts were recorded at Studio 606, the California recording space owned by Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl. The band have no upcoming tour dates announced but recently played a run of shows supporting Iron Maiden.

Read the full interview with Anthrax, conducted by Grohl, in the new Hammer. The issue also features an in-depth celebration of late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, 40 years after his death. Order your copy now and have it delivered directly to your door.

Iron Maiden have announced a surprise return to North America in 2027, taking in arena shows and festival appearances, including a headline set at the Sonic Temple Art + Music Festival.

Steve Harris says, “As many of our fans know, Maiden were planning on taking a break from live performances in 2027, but we’ve been enjoying this last leg in the USA and Canada so much that we all had a chat and decided we should take the show to parts we missed, particularly the North West and South East. It just seems fair to our many fans there who have given us tremendous support for so many years. We can’t get everywhere but we can try!

"Also, we have always enjoyed playing the many great festivals that are in Europe," he adds, "and wanted to experience a couple more in the USA which we will do at the end of the tour in Columbus [Sonic Temple] and Maryland [Boardwalk Rock]. At festivals you are not just playing to your own fans so it’s always a challenge and we all love a challenge!”

Manager Manager Rod Smallwood adds, “The first leg was terrific, huge sell-out crowds of all ages spanning multi-generations, some of the biggest shows we have ever played in North America with rave fan and media reactions, and just a great all round vibe and camaraderie from our fans, including in our Eddie’s Dive Bars everywhere. And I know as I go to every one of them! In fact it was so good we just have to come back and play some places we missed and bring Eddie’s Dive Bars with us!

“It is amazing that even after all these years we played to many more people per show than ever before and headlined our first stadium shows in the USA. We have been selling out arenas in all parts of North America since 1983 - bar a short period in the 90s – and the band’s following here continues to grow despite an almost total lack of mainstream radio support and never even having a track reach the Billboard Hot 100! For that we have to thank our amazing fans, and it proves that word of mouth still means a lot. We look forward to seeing you all again next Spring”.

Iron Maiden Run For Your Lives North American Tour 2027

Apr 14: Tacoma Dome, WA
Apr 16: Vancouver Rogers Arena, Canada
Apr 18: Portland Moda Center, OR
Apr 20: Wheatland Toyota Amphitheatre, CA
Apr 22: Chula Vista North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre, CA
Apr 24: San Bernardino Glen Helen Amphitheater, CA
Apr 26: Phoenix Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre, AZ
Apr 28: Dallas Dos Equis Pavilion, TX

May 01: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
May 02: West Palm Beach iTHINK Financial Amphitheatre, FL
May 05 Atlanta Lakewood Amphitheatre, GA
May 07: Raleigh Coastal Credit Union Music Park at Walnut Creek, NC
May 09: Hartford The Meadows Music Theatre, CT
May 11: Belmont Park UBS Arena, NY
May 14: Sonic Temple, OH
May 16: Boardwalk Rock, MD

Bullet For My Valentine will support on all arena shows.

Steve Harris' band will headline Sonic Temple on Friday, May 14. The festival will also feature performances from A Perfect Circle, Primus, Clutch, Sleeping With Sirens, Crowbar, Escape The Fate, Saosin, and hundreds more acts yet to be announced.

The 2027 weekender is scheduled to take place from May 13 to May 16 at the Historic Crew Stadium in Columbus, Ohio.

PeelingFlesh, Emmure, Showing Teeth, Imminence and Vana have also been announced to play at what has become one of the blue riband events in the global rock and metal calendar.

The full schedule will be announced next week.

Single day passes, weekend passes and VIP packages for 2027's Sonic Temple Art + Music Festival are on-sale now, here.

The 2026 edition of Sonic Temple featured My Chemical Romance, Shinedown, Bring Me The Horizon and Tool as the headline acts. The sold out event was attended by a record crowd of over 184,000 fans across the weekend.

Architects frontman Sam Carter has released a lengthy and emotional statement responding to comments online that have criticised his recent live performances. In the statement, posted via Sam's personal social media accounts, the singer acknowledges that he has struggled with his voice at certain points on stage this year, revealing that he has suffered serious anxiety issues as a result of the negative and even abusive responses his performances have received.

"It's time for me to be honest here, and it's not going to be easy, as it's something I've worked tirelessly at over the last year," he says in a post titled 'Time for some honesty'. "My anxiety and constant focus on my voice has gotten me to a place where the joy of performing has been taken away from me.

"I got to a place where, whenever I go to scream the voice inside my head stops me from being able to do the job that I've done for the last 20 or so years.

"Now, this isn't something that I started. It's been the online discourse around my voice and the constant judgment that have ultimately led me down a tunnel that I've struggled to get out of."

Sam goes on to point to a particular moment this year where things began to escalate.

"It got really loud after Rock am Ring, where I had a really tough day trying out a new technique in front of 90-odd thousand people.," he continues "The more I tried, the crueler the comments over the summer got and it led me to a place where I was physically and emotionally shot. My performance anxiety had gotten out of control and I wasn't able to enjoy anything about the band or being onstage."

Sam credits David Benites from Extreme Vocal Academy for helping him work on his vocal issues, as well as his bandmates and wife for their support over what has evidently been a very challenging year.

"The comments and the judgment have got too much," he adds. "I'm a human being trying my hardest up there and some things aren't going to be perfect. I'm in therapy every week and on medication to help my anxiety. Trust me when I say there isn't a stone I haven't left unturned.

"I dreamt of having a 'Sam's Back' moment, but that's not real life. And maybe this is actually my moment to come back to a life where I'm not thinking about this shit every waking moment."

Architects will head out on tour across Europe and the UK as support to nu metal legends Korn this month, and Sam pledges to do his best to overcome his struggles.

"On this tour with Korn, I'm going to scream the words from a place of passion and determination," he promises. "Ultimately, I want to get back to a place where I'm having fun with my friends onstage. It's not going to be perfect, but I'm not, so that's that."

He finishes with a moving final sentiment: "Be kind. You never know what someone is truly going through."

Architects' latest single Machine was released last month. The full list of their imminent dates with Korn is below.

Korn European and UK tour dates 2026 (with Architects and Youth Code)

Oct 18 Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle
Oct 19 Munich, DE, Olympiahalle
Oct 21 Cologne, DE, Lanxess Arena
Oct 23 Paris, FR, Accor Arena
Oct 26 Leeds, UK, First Direct Arena
Oct 28 Birmingham, UK, Utilita Arena Birmingham
Oct 30 Newcastle, UK, Utilita Arena Newcastle
Oct 31 Manchester, UK, AO Arena
Nov 2 Dublin, IE, 3Arena
Nov 4 London, UK, The O2
Nov 8 Amsterdam, NL, Ziggo Dome
Nov 9 Antwerp, BE, AFAS Dome
Nov 11 Hamburg, DE, Barclays Arena
Nov 13 Hanover, DE, ZAG Arena
Nov 14 Berlin, DE, Uber Arena
Nov 16 Prague, CZ, O2 Arena Prague
Nov 17 Krakow, PL, Tauron Arena
Nov 19 Vienna, AT, Wiener Stadhalle
Nov 21 Milan, IT, Unipol Forum

Paul McCartney has admitted that it can be difficult, as a music industry legend, to get sincere and honest feedback from collaborators.

The Beatles legend discussed the topic in conversation with US comedian, actor and podcaster Amy Poehler on her Good Hang with Amy Poehler podcast.

McCartney prefaced his comments by talking about how, in The Beatles, the band members close relationships with one another helped foster total honesty when it came to discussing creative matters.

"The good thing was we we grew up together, so there was like a family aspect," he tells Poehler. "Me and George [Harrison] went to the same school, and John [Lennon] went to the art college next door. And it took years for us to kind of get any fame, so we were out in Hamburg, schlepping around, playing at not very nice little clubs. We enjoyed it, because we were young kids in Hamburg.

"When you know each other that well, and you've been together that long, it does become like a family. So then that finds its way into your writing and your work, you know, that I can tell what he's thinking or I can tell him that I didn't like that line, or he can tell me that sucks. so that's very good, as you know, for for writing."

The host then suggests to McCartney that, as an creative artists attains a degree of success, sometimes people are afraid to give you real feedback.

"Yeah, that's a danger now," McCartney agrees. "People all say to me when I'm working with a producer, they say, 'Does he tell you if it's no good?' And I'm not sure, maybe he doesn't. [Laughts] I think you find people who will tell you and stuff, but it must be hard for them. Because you you've got such a reputation."

McCartney's most recent album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, released in May, was produced by Andrew Watt, who has also worked with The Rolling Stones, Elton John and Ozzy Osbourne over the past decade.

"I am the luckiest fucker to be in the room with people who changed my life before I ever met them," Watt told The Telegraph earlier this year, saying that he "literally" had to ask McCartney to slap him to prove that working with him wasn't just a dream.

"As a child, I knew every Beatles song, I studied every Beatles chord – I couldn’t really fathom that a Beatle was about to be in my kitchen," he admitted. "I needed a slap, right?"

After working together, McCartney revealed that Watt could be "a bit pushy" in the studio.

"I was not shy!" Watt agreed when speaking with The Telegraph. "I had to get up in the morning, look in the mirror, say, OK, I am going to let go of the fear even if I feel like an absolute moron telling Paul McCartney what I think about making records, because otherwise he could just do it all himself."

And it's not like McCartney himself isn't in awe of some of his own heroes. When Amy Poehler asks the star if there's anyone that he would wish to collaborate with, McCartney replies, "Ummm, no. I asked this question and I always think Bob Dylan. But I'm too nervous. to ring him up!"

Watch the interview in. full below.

Trivium frontman Matt Heafy has opened up on the day he momentarily quit the band last year. Speaking exclusively to Metal Hammer, Matt explains that a combination of issues within the band itself led him to a breaking point that saw him seriously consider turning his back on Trivium after more than 25 years.

"[Our] chemistry starts falling apart a little bit," he explains. "Not from one person, not from me, but it's just the sum of its parts. Things aren't going right. Quiet explosion. I'm tracking guitars. I stand up. I leave. I call [my wife] Ashley. I'm like, 'I'm done with this fucking band. I can't do this shit anymore. It's 26, 27 years of this shit that just keeps happening.'"

At that point, midway through 2025, Trivium had just wrapped up a celebratory North American tour honouring 20 years of breakthrough album Ascendancy, but those problems were threatening to send things rattling off course.

"[I was] at the Hangar [a converted hanger Trivium now use as a rehearsal and writing space]. I just start driving home, get home, turn my phone off. Like, 'I'm not going [back] in.' And then Ashley lets the dust settle, and she's like, 'You're not quitting the band. You can't quit the band. You're part of this band. You've got to figure this out. Go back to the studio.'"

After some consideration, Matt quickly reversed his decision to quit, but the issues within Trivium persisted, eventually leading to drummer Alex Bent leaving the band that October. While Matt won't be drawn to air any - as he puts it - "dirty laundry", he remains adamant that Bent's departure was the best thing for the band in the long term.

"Sometimes, when there's a change, when your favourite married couple gets divorced, you break up with your girlfriend, you get fired from your job, you fire someone from your company, sometimes things have to happen for the survival of the 'whole', or the 'whole' will not survive any more," he says. "[Trivium] would have been gone. It would have been done. We made the correction, and now we are tighter live than we've ever been."

Trivium recently announced that their brand new studio album Crown In The Grave will be landing on November 20. The band team up with Swedish melodeath legends In Flames for a tour that will hit North America this winter with support from Orbit Culture, Fit For An Autopsy and Frozen Soul, before the two bands head across Europe in spring 2027 with Paleface Swiss and Vola.

Read more from Hammer's interview with Matt Heafy in next month's issue of Metal Hammer.

Thanks to a ‘plan’ sketched hastily on a napkin by Nigel Tufnel, Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge-themed stage props were famously under-egged, their replica structures a laughable 18 inches high. When Pink Floyd toured their 1979 masterpiece The Wall, though, the staging and production impressed. Clearly no ‘back of a fag packet’ conception, it involved rigorous input from designer Jonathan Park and architect Mark Fisher. The scale of it all was daunting, vast.

Roger Waters’ exacting vision required a 33-feet-high, 260-feet-wide barrier/wall to be erected gradually during each show. This was a metaphor, he said, for our psychological defences; for the ultimately problematic shield we put between ourselves and the big bad world. But Waters’ desire to build an actual wall between himself and Floyd’s audience was real and had been seeded years earlier.

Never a huge fan of touring, Waters found his distaste for it grew after the huge success of The Dark Side Of The Moon. Gone were the days of playing Interstellar Overdrive to the in-crowd in the shadowy, intimate surrounds of London’s UFO Club. Post-Dark Side, Floyd were a household name, playing to massive audiences in huge stadiums. There was no shortage of loons shouting out during the quiet bits, proving that they, too, had ‘always been mad’. Consequently, Waters began to view the gigging experience as analogous to competitive sport; warfare, even.

“It just became more and more oppressive”, he told Sylvie Simmons in 1999. “Those places weren’t built for music. They were built for sporting events, and it’s not unnatural to experience a ritualisation of war, because that’s all sport is. What was going through my mind - my whole body - was an enormous sense of frustration, a feeling of: ‘What are we all doing here? What’s the point?’ The answer that kept clanging back monotonously was: cash and ego. That’s all this is about.”

Having first bought a country pile in Horsham in Sussex, then a grander Georgian mansion in the picturesque village of Kimbridge in Hampshire, Waters was no more immune to the trappings of success than his bandmates. Status and wealth didn’t seem to satisfy him, though. Instead he seemed a rather joyless kind of rock star who made an art form of being a curmudgeon.

Waters’ beef with corporate greed and the whole rock’n’roll circus had come to a head at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium on July 6, 1977. It was the final date of Pink Floyd’s Animals In The Flesh tour, and they played to 78,000 people that night. Miffed at a potential stage invader who was screaming at him to play Careful With That Axe, Eugene, Waters spat on - or at least at - the overzealous fan. He later re-enacted the moment in fairly graphic detail for Floyd biographer Mark Blake during an interview at London’s Mayfair hotel in 2017.

Was the structure that dominated the stage on The Wall tour designed to keep fans out, then? Or was it to fence Waters’ anger in? Either way, it was a bold piece of theatre that took ingenuity and manpower to construct and knock down.

Still, as dress rehearsals got under way in January 1980 at the MGM film lot in Culver City, Los Angeles there were concerns about the barrier’s efficacy, not least from David Gilmour, whom Waters had charged with putting the band through its paces while he fine-tuned the visuals: “Obviously, when someone says: ‘We’re going to build this fucking great wall across the front of the stage, and we’re going to be playing behind it, and the audience are going to be in front, looking at it’, you go: ‘Hang on a minute - I’m not sure I want to be part of that audience,’” Gilmour recalled.

Gerald Scarfe - the satirist leading the team transforming the cartoons he’d drawn for The Wall’s sleeve into giant puppet grotesques and stunning animated projections that would make the live show a multimedia extravaganza – was of the same mind regarding Waters’ on-stage barricade. “Everyone, including [The Wall album’s producer] Bob Ezrin said to Roger: ‘You can’t invite the fans into Earls Court and then shut them out,’” Scarfe remembered.

In the end, Waters was persuaded to allow a few peepholes in the gradually materialising wall. That way, perhaps Floyd fans wouldn’t feel as alienated as he did. Through missing bricks, the singer could be spied in a mock-up seedy motel room during Nobody Home’s bleak portrayal of an isolated rock star’s drug-addled unravelling. An armchair sourced from West Hollywood’s Tropicana Inn, as frequented by Jim Morrison, Led Zeppelin and the like, lent the on-stage tableau veracity.

In essence, though, Waters wasn’t for turning, and brokered few compromises. He even ruled out any kind of encore once the wall was toppled during performances of the album’s penultimate song, The Trial. He felt The Wall album, tour and feature film marked the likely high-water mark of his creative agency and opportunity, so he was determined to do it his way.

“Being a purist, Roger didn’t want a medley of old favourites at the end,” Gerald Scarfe told me in 2009. “I think he saw The Wall concerts as being a bit like an opera, a piece that had a clear beginning and a definite end. Encores would have diluted that.”

On The Wall, Waters’ cathartic, sometimes emotionally raw songs (witness Don’t Leave Me Now) addressed themes even more personal than usual for him. Rooted in his own childhood trauma and feelings of rock-star estrangement, but inhabited by Pink, the concept record’s key protagonist and anti-hero, they had a key tragedy at their core, namely Waters losing his father when he was just five months old.

Eric Fletcher Waters had been a second lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers, and was killed in Aprilia, Italy in 1944 at the Battle Of Anzio. The resulting pain his son carried with him never diminished. Instead it increased, becoming an all-consuming spur.

Respectful of this truth, but wary of The Wall becoming suffocated by it, Bob Ezrin and others around Waters advised him to make its themes more universal. Thus the album grew to explore madness, authoritarianism, substance abuse, lust, paranoia, child-parent bonds and more. Darkly relatable, The Wall had axes to grind; causes to get behind; a whole casebook of dents to the psyche. No wonder it went on to sell more than 30 million copies.

Waters’ artistic vision was hugely impressive, then, but participating in it came at a growing cost for his bandmates and other key collaborators. While making the double album that was primarily his baby, Waters snuffed out perceived power grabs and dictated the terms of engagement. He had long since seen himself as Pink Floyd’s de facto leader. And given that he was writing much more material than his bandmates at a time when the group’s tax affairs were such that they really needed to earn, why shouldn’t he?

“Roger’s attitude was: ‘It’s my record and I’ve let the rest of you play on it,’” Bob Ezrin told Blake in Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story Of Pink Floyd. “With everything that was going on financially with the band, he was the one standing there with what he saw as a satchel full of pound notes.”

Further asserting himself, Waters even dished out badges celebrating the fact that Ezrin would receive a lower royalty rate for his work on The Wall than the band. Reading ‘NOPE’, shorthand for No Points Ezrin, these badges were daft, but also slightly cruel, the stuff of schadenfreude.

Ezrin later recalled that Waters’ behaviour reminded him of being bullied at school in his native Toronto. Quite the indictment, given that Waters’ lyric for The Happiest Days Of Our Lives railed against his own childhood weaknesses being exposed by bullying teachers. Perhaps The Wall’s pain-infused bricks never crumbled. Perhaps they just got passed down the line.

Floyd’s keyboard player Rick Wright also fell foul of Waters’ realpolitik during the making of The Wall, and the ramifications for the tour were significant. How Wright came to be sacked by Waters, taking part in the live shows only as a kind of glorified session player, takes unravelling.

Even while making the previous album, 1977’s Animals, tensions had arisen between the pair. “Roger started rejecting what I came up with,” Wright told Sylvie Simmons. “It was partly my fault because I didn’t push my material. Or I was too lazy to write anything. My personal life wasn’t happy; my marriage was breaking up.”

By Waters’ account, he and Wright’s relationship soured further as their US record company Columbia’s delivery deadline for The Wall pressed. While the band vacationed in August 1979 (separate destinations, natch), Waters asked Floyd manager Steve O’Rourke to contact Wright and impress upon him that it was now imperative that he haste back to LA’s Cherokee Studios to finish his keyboard parts if Floyd were to deliver The Wall on time.

Additionally, Columbia were dangling a carrot: Floyd would receive an extra royalty percentage point if they met the deadline. But Wright, now moving towards divorce from his first wife, Juliette Gale, was enjoying rare, sacred time with his kids. To him, Waters’ demand to return to the studio a week early seemed pig-headed.

“[O’Rourke] found Rick in Greece, and Rick’s message was: ‘Tell Roger to fuck off,’” Waters said. “So I gave him an ultimatum to do as he was told and finish the record, keep [his] full share [of the recording royalties] and leave quietly afterwards, or I’d see him in court. He very wisely accepted the former proposal.”

Blake’s book also includes David Gilmour and Nick Mason’s reactions to Wright’s dismissal. These help explain why tensions were running especially high as Pink Floyd completed The Wall and began preparing to tour.

“I called [Roger] from a phone box in Chapelizod, just outside Dublin,” Gilmour recalled. “I said: ‘You can’t do that. [Rick’s] been in the band all the way along. If you don’t like it, your choice is to leave. It isn’t to throw someone out… You’re letting this get very personal, aren’t you?’ I won’t quote what Roger said,” Gilmour added, pointedly.

In truth, the guitarist also felt that Wright’s commitment wasn’t what it had been, but he considered the keyboard player’s position in Floyd “sacrosanct”, and clarified his views once they were all back in Los Angeles.

“Rick said: ‘Do you still want me in the band?’ I said, ‘Not particularly, because you’re not doing anything, but I’ll support your right to be in it till the end.’”

“He [Wright] had been forced to hang around, really, not doing anything for months,” Nick Mason told Prog’s Daryl Easlea in 2019. “So he had gone stir-crazy and just said: ‘No, I am not giving up my summer holidays.”

Wright also contested the claim that he had told Waters to fuck off. But ultimately, all concerned were outflanked by Waters.

“Roger carried out a brilliant campaign to get what he wanted by a certain amount of cajoling and threatening,” said Mason. “Looking back, I should have stuck up for Rick, but I utterly failed to do so and aligned myself with the forces of safety.”

In May 2022, the Swedish group ABBA’s pioneering, avatar-enabled virtual residency ABBA Voyage opened at London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Had the technology been available in 1980, Pink Floyd’s singer and bassist might have utilised it too. “Roger told me he dreamed of having a surrogate band play gigs so he could avoid the tedium of long tours and play golf instead,” Gerald Scarfe recalled. Eighteen holes while the group played on? Even Waters knew this was a pigs-might-fly scenario. Yet his surrogate band fantasy became a reality during key moments of The Wall live shows.

Additional musicians and backing vocalists were required to aid the core Floyd quartet bringing the LP’s sometimes complex music to stage. These included guitarist Snowy White, then moonlighting from Thin Lizzy, sometime Status Quo bassist Andy Bown, plus drummer John ‘Willie’ Wilson and keyboard player Peter Wood, both of whom had played with folk-rock band Sullivan Brothers & Quiver.

Between them, these four wore specially moulded latex masks in the images of Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason during concert opener In The Flesh. “I had been around Pink Floyd for years,” recalled Wilson, a long-term pal of Gilmour’s, “but it was very weird wearing a mask of Nick Mason’s face.”

Naturally, when the real Pink Floyd appeared it was a coup de théâtre: as In The Flesh closed, a model of a Stuka dive bomber crashed into the stage, then the surrogate band froze, the real Floyd stood up, and the crowd realised they’d been hoodwinked. Today, fan-shot YouTube spoilers would have sunk the surrogate set-piece after the opening night, but in 1980 it retained its element of surprise for a little longer.

Nonetheless, some details of the show had been leaked. Bob Ezrin explained how, while he was going through a divorce and fighting for custody of his children, a journalist friend had teased information from him about the performances while he was not at his best, and leaked the story to Billboard. The magazine’s spoiler article appeared before the opening night. Consequently, Waters/Ezrin relations were ruined, albeit temporarily.

“Roger went nuclear and had me banned from seeing the show,” the producer recalled. But when the production reached Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, New York in February 24, Ezrin’s cachet there was such that he was able to gain admittance anyway: “I went backstage at the interval, and I think Roger hid in the dressing room.”

Initially, Pink Floyd played a seven-night run at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena after three weeks of intensive rehearsals.

Surrogate band member Andy Bown recalled: “I remember [Floyd manager] Steve O’Rourke saying: ‘I hope this fucking works, Andy, because we’re two-point-eight million dollars down the pan already.”

“It was the gigantic scale that was so terrifying,” Scarfe remembered. “The whole Roman circus of it. But I just had to generate the ideas - someone else had to work out how things would actually happen technically, architecturally or mechanically.”

Things happening included the 49-foot-high incarnation of Waters’ psychotic Scottish schoolteacher during Another Brick In The Wall Part 2, while the 500lb, 35-feet high inflatable mother who arrived during the song of the same name was another grotesque. In Waters and Scarfe’s world, unlike that of a certain Kate Bush song, mother did not stand for comfort. Rather, the maternal bond was portrayed as suffocating and controlling, a poisonous thing.

Clearly, The Wall live was all risk, a deliberate detonation of normal audience/performer conventions. Or as Prog’s Daryl Easlea put it, “a mere 31 [dates] in four cities that fundamentally reshaped the concept of the stadium concert”. Adding to the slap in the face that was the wall’s part obfuscation of the band, Waters arranged for the shows to be introduced by warm-up MCs whose job was to rile the crowd with some creative trolling. Who said prog had learned nothing from punk?

One of these MCs, sometime Saturday Night Live comedian Gary Yudman, recalled the script Waters showed him by way of instruction prior to Floyd’s five-night stand at the Nassau Coliseum: “It said: ‘The MC comes out and talks to the crowd and gets them so pissed off…' Then Roger said to me: ‘I want this, Gary. Can you make them angry? Can you do it?’”

There was tension and bile galore during Floyd’s performances of The Wall, but also moments of extraordinary poignancy. For example, who could fail to be moved by Scarfe’s animation sequence for Goodbye Blue Sky? Especially as the voices of backing vocalists Jon Joyce, Stan Farber, Jim Haas and Joe Chemay merged in Beach Boys-style harmonies as the darkly compelling images played out.

“Whenever I give a talk about my work,” Scarfe said in 2009, “those images I used for Goodbye Blue Sky come up. In many ways they explain my childhood experiences of the war as well as Roger’s. Roger and David’s music was incredibly inspiring, because the song is sort of this sad counterpoint to (There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs Of Dover. Goodbye Blue Sky is about the ones that didn’t make it back, who of course included Roger’s father.”

Talking to journalist Phil Sutcliffe in 1995, Rick Wright aired mixed feelings about The Wall tour - although not because he was bitter about being demoted to hired hand.

“We were hidden half the time,” he recalled. “While you were playing, you had lots of roadies running around, putting things up, taking things down. It felt very impersonal.

“I was quite prepared to swallow my pride to go out and play with Dave and Nick,” he added. “Strangely there wasn’t any animosity on stage. I think it’s the nature of my character - I accept what’s happened and make the best of it.”

Elsewhere, when Wright was asked why he agreed to do the tour given Waters’ shenanigans, he responded with admirable honesty. “Maybe I couldn’t handle the idea of just standing up and saying: ‘Right, that’s it. Bye bye.’ I thought if I’m going to leave, at least I know I’ve got another month or so to carry on working - possibly with the hope that things might change.”

Things didn’t change, of course. Waters stuck to his guns, and Gilmour and Mason bent to his will - for now, anyway. But Wright had the last laugh. No longer an official member of Pink Floyd after Waters’ manoeuvring, he wasn’t personally responsible for the hefty financial losses (some $600,000, Waters later said) that The Wall tour incurred. Wright was on $5,000 a show, and recalled “making a little money”.

Meanwhile, Gilmour - very much responsible for the musical, rather than theatrical side of the shows - recalled them being “terrific”, although with some reservations. “I enjoyed them thoroughly, but as they went along I became more aware of the restrictions imposed by something that was so choreographed,” he told Sylvie Simmons.

But there was one piece of choreography that Gilmour wouldn’t have missed for the world. During Comfortably Numb, he sang the song’s choruses and delivered its magnificent guitar solo atop the wall. No matter that he was perched precariously on a flight case that his guitar tech Phil Taylor was holding in place on top of a hydraulic lift platform, from the audience’s perspective the guitarist appeared to be floating in mid-air, much more rock god than Humpty Dumpty.

Gilmour’s elevated platform had a safety rail, which is why Floyd’s road crew dubbed it ‘Dave’s pulpit.’ Dispensing his bluesy benediction, and enjoying crowds and a vantage point not dissimilar to that popes must experience looking out on St. Peter’s Square, Gilmour felt the buzz. “It was a fantastic moment,” he recalled. “Every night there’d be this sort of gasp as the audience looked up and saw me.”

Comfortably Numb was Gilmour’s chance to shine; the equivalent of that bit in Simon & Garfunkel’s famed free show in NYC’s Central Park where Art Garfunkel steps forward to sing Bridge Over Troubled Water, and its writer Paul Simon must play second fiddle.

There were grave tensions between Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, and there were grave tensions in Floyd. Beneath the surface lay a hotbed of resentment. The band’s middle-class, very English reserve papered over the cracks, but the fissures were there all right, complex and far-reaching, festering away. Waters recalled backstage being “pretty separatist. Separate trailers, none facing each other, with all our little camps. The atmosphere was awful, but the show was so important that I don’t think that affected me at all,” he claimed.

Was that really true, though? If you read that last quote again you can almost smell the cement; almost hear Waters slot another brick of his defensive wall into place. Credit is due, though, regarding Pink Floyd’s frontman’s adherence to one of The Wall tour’s key principles.

At the end of February 1980, after the Los Angeles and New York dates, promoter Larry Maggid offered Floyd a cool $1 million (four million in today’s money) to stage the show at Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium. The vast space’s capacity was around 102,000 - about 85,000 more than Waters considered desirable or defensible at the time. Waters flatly declined Maggid’s offer, and explained his rationale to his bandmates.

“I said to the others: ‘You’ve all read my explanation of what The Wall is about,’” he told journalist Chris Salewicz. “‘It’s three years since we did that last stadium, and I saw then that I would never do one again. The Wall was entirely sparked by how awful that was and how I didn’t feel the public or the band got anything out of it that was worthwhile. And that’s why we’ve produced this show for arenas, and I ain’t fucking going.’”

Waters also inferred that his bandmates had considered playing the JFK Stadium show without him: “There was a lot of talk about whether Andy Bown could sing my parts, but in the end they bottled out.”

“I immediately said yes and would have been delighted to do it,” Bown told Mark Blake, seemingly confirming that such a conversation had taken place.

Unsurprisingly, though, Gilmour’s take on Maggid-gate was very different. “Going on tour without Roger never got beyond a band fantasy/joke,” he said. “We never seriously considered doing The Wall without Roger.”

All the same, the very idea that touring without Waters was a fantasy his bandmates and supporting cast enjoyed seemed like a dig, Gilmour’s attempt to take Waters down a peg. However you looked at it, the ground was shifting, the power dynamics that governed Floyd’s activities in flux.

By the time Waters, by then solo, performed The Wall in Berlin in 1990, moreover, vast crowds no longer seemed to concern him. Still, commemorating the recent historic fall of the actual Berlin Wall, performing where it once stood, in front of an estimated 400,000 people, was a pretty good reason to cut loose and break your own rules. Especially as the concert’s esteemed special guests included Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison and Scorpions.

At the end of February 1980, the original Floyd-performed version of The Wall took an extended hiatus after the first 12 dates in Los Angeles and New York. That April, Run Like Hell became the last ever Waters/Gilmour co-write to be released as a single, although nobody knew it at the time.

Spring also saw the group return to the UK after a year in various overseas locations as tax exiles. A voluminous shipment of props and state-of-the-art audio-visual tech for The Wall tour came with them, as did the show’s 80-strong production crew. It was time for rehearsals at Shepperton film studios to begin for a six-night run at London’s Earls Court.

Rick Wright’s demotion to hired hand had not yet been made public, but in a candid interview with Newsweek Waters aired Floyd’s dirty laundry. “We have been pretending we’re all jolly good chaps together, but that hasn’t been true in seven years,” he carped. “I make the decisions. We pretended it was a democracy for a long time, but this album was the big own-up.”

Fortunately, Floyd’s music was still special enough to drown out the white noise of internal bickering. For fans, including future Prog writer Daryl Easlea, then 14, the shows at Earls Court that August were mind-blowing, a near religious experience. “I knew my life would never again be the same again,” he wrote some 40 years later.

Just post-punk, Pink Floyd and their latest elaborate concept album were still being pilloried in the press, The Wall’s music deemed a snorefest. Unsurprisingly, the record’s attendant live spectacular - the very antithesis of punk’s no-frills music and staging - didn’t get an easy ride either, certainly not from Melody Maker.

“If Roger Waters had hung around much longer, I’d have been down the front with a trowel and a bowl of cement, helping the bugger brick himself up,” wrote Allan Jones, reviewing an Earls Court show on August 8. Later in the run, Waters took revenge from the stage, calling Jones “a stupid shit”. No slight against Floyd’s frontman went unnoticed. No battle, it seemed, was too small for him.

As the year played out, Floyd’s four members busied themselves with other projects. Gilmour and his first wife Ginger moved to Hookend Manor in Oxfordshire with their children Alice and Clare. Wright licked his wounds. Mason finished his solo album Nick Mason’s Fictitious Sports. Waters turned his attention to the movie version of The Wall that would be directed by Alan Parker and released in 1982.

First though, came further live performances of The Wall. In February 1981 Floyd played an eight-night run at Westfalenhallen in Dortmund, Germany, then in June a final five-night stand back at Earls Court. The London shows were filmed with a view to using some of the footage in The Wall film, but the footage was ultimately deemed unsuitable and canned.

In his afterword for his 2025 book Pink Floyd Shine On: The Definitive Oral History, Mark Blake characterises the group’s infighting thus: “If Pink Floyd were a family wedding, Nick Mason would be the toastmaster and the other two would be sat at opposite ends of the top table, complaining about each other to anyone who’ll listen.”

Keyboard player Rick Wright had sadly passed away due to lung cancer in 2008, so the “other two” were of course Waters and Gilmour. Warring stakeholders at the nub of Floyd’s creative flow, the pair somehow made one more Pink Floyd album together. But The Wall album and tour’s tensions had shook the band’s foundations, and that album, 1983’s The Final Cut, was deeply flawed, and a Waters solo record in all but name. He and Gilmour argued about its political stance. Gilmour thought several songs sub-standard, not good enough to release. Rick Wright didn’t play on the record, and Nick Mason had a restricted role, as much mediator as musician.

“We’d been arguing since 1974, for god’s sake,” Waters told Sylvie Simmons, talking about The Final Cut in 1999. “Too long. At a certain point you have to say this is not working, the point has come to break up.”

Waters was the instigator, and shortly after he left Pink Floyd in 1985 he began a legal battle with his former bandmates regarding their continued use of the name Pink Floyd and Pink Floyd material. Once more unto the breach…

Back in June 1981, when the original tour of The Wall ended at Earls Court, no one knew that it would be the last time Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason would perform on stage together for 24 years. But hell eventually froze over – for one night only. Appearing as Pink Floyd at the Live 8 benefit in Hyde Park, London on July 2, 2005, the four men seemed fully aware of the moment’s significance, Waters at times grinning broadly.

For a blissful 23 minutes, walls came tumbling down as they played Breathe (In The Air), Money, Wish You Were Here, Comfortably Numb… and no encores, then or since.

With special thanks to Mark Blake for material from his books Pink Floyd: Shine On – The Definitive Oral History, and Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story Of Pink Floyd. See markrblake.com for details.

Irish rock legends U2 will embark on a world tour in 2027. The Carnaval De Luz Presents: The Greatest Show On Earth world tour will kick off in late February in Mexico City before South American dates in Brazil and Argentina, with dates in North America and Europe still to be announced.

Beck will support U2 at the Latin American shows, and a series of ticket presales begins on Monday (October 19) at 10am local time. The general sale kicks off the following Friday (October 23) at the same time. Full dates below.

"'The Greatest Show on Earth'? Now that's a throwdown," say the band. "It's a dare, to ourselves as much as anyone, to try and have the best night of anybody's life. A bit of showman, a bit of shaman, a riot of colour, unreasonable guitar, bass and drums, and tunes you can hold onto. Because if people are gonna show up, we certainly are."

U2 have also released a new single, The Greatest Show On Earth, co-written by U2 guitarist The Edge with Brian Eno, who worked on the band's albums The Unforgettable Fire (1984), The Joshua Tree (1987) and Achtung Baby (1991). The song is the third single to be taken from U2's upcoming 16th album. Carnaval de Luz, which will be released on November 15.

The video for the single was filmed in the Californian desert and directed by Anton Corbijn, who took the iconic band photos on the cover of The Joshua Tree, and has since directed videos for U2 singles One, Please and Electrical Storm.

Carnaval de Luz, the follow-up to 2023's Songs Of Surrender will be released on November 15, and is available to pre-order now. Deluxe editions will include physical copies of the digital EPs U2 released earlier this year, Days Of Ash and Easter Lily. Customers placing orders at the UK store will receive a ticket pre-sale code for UK dates, which are expected to be announced shortly.

U2: Carnaval De Luz Presents: The Greatest Show On Earth world tour 2027

Feb 23: Mexico City Estadio GNP Seguros, Mexico
Feb 26: Mexico City Estadio GNP Seguros, Mexico
Mar 10: São Paulo Estádio MorumBIS, Brazil
Mar 12: São Paulo Estádio MorumBIS, Brazil
Mar 23: Buenos Aires Estadio River Plate, Argentina
Mar 25: Buenos Aires Estadio River Plate, Argentina

Find U2 tickets.

The Pretty Reckless vocalist Taylor Momsen has spoken about the challenges she faces when singing her hero Chris Cornell's songs with Soundgarden.

Momsen cites the Seattle grunge legends as one of the bands who changed her life, and in a new interview with YouTube star Rick Beato she admits that she was "elated" when she was told that her band had been offered the opportunity to support Soundgarden on their 2017 US tour.

"Every time I listen to a Soundgarden record, I discover something new inside of it," she tells the podcast host. "There's certain music where it feels like the artist is speaking for you, or to you, in a way that you maybe don't know how to communicate yourself, and Soundgarden has always done that for me."

Understandably, Momsen says she was "devastated" by Chris Cornell's death by suicide on that 2017 King Animal tour. Subsequently, she has honoured Cornell's life and music by performing with Soundgarden's three surviving members on a number of occasions.

In January 2019, Momsen sang three songs - Rusty Cage, Drawing Flies and Loud Love - at the star-studded I Am The Highway memorial concert in Los Angeles, and in 2022, she joined members of Soundgarden, Foo Fighters and Nirvana's Krist Novoselic to sing The Day I Tried To Live and Black Hole Sun at the Los Angeles staging of the Taylor Hawkins tribute concert.

She also sang with the band at their induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2025, and more recently, on September 9 this year, joined the trio, and Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready, for a half-time show performance at the Seattle Seahawks season-opening game against the New England Patriots.

"Every time we've done this, it's been pressure," Momsen admits, before going on to say that, performing with the group at their RARHOF induction, that pressure was mixed with "love and excitement and pride".

"I was coming from a perspective and a place of just, like, pure and utter joy for them," she says. "Every time they ask me to sing with them it's an honour."

"Individually they're all the greatest musicians in the world," she continues, "and then you put them together and it creates this unparalleled sound."

Finding a place within this sound, Momsen admits, is a challenge in itself.

"Matt [Cameron] always cracks me up," she tells Beato, "because he goes, 'But you're a huge fan, so you know these songs.' And I go, Yes, I know them, but knowing them and then removing the vocal, and doing them and accomplishing them are two very different things."

"Everyone thinks it's the notes and it's like, no, it's the fucking time signatures. Soundgarden, it sounds like it's just flowing when you're listening, you don't even realise they've changed it until you remove something, and have to actually do it, and then you go, Wait a second. What the fuck just happened?"

Watch the interview in full below.

Ex-Pink Floyd bassist/vocalist Roger Waters has delivered a fiery rant against James Hetfield, after the Metallica frontman seemingly told an audience at The Sphere that his band did not want to sway listeners with political statements.

The heavy metal singer/guitarist, 63, continues to face backlash after saying at Las Vegas’ multimedia venue on Saturday (October 10), “Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their bullshit.”

Though it remains unclear to whom Hetfield was referencing, the comment came a few weeks after Macklemore was removed from a tour supporting Ed Sheeran for saying “Free Palestine” onstage.

Earlier this week, Waters, 83, appeared on a new episode of the podcast The Katie Halper Show, where the host, an American left-wing commentator, guided the musician through some of Metallica’s past politically conscious lyrics, including those on 1986’s Disposable Heroes and 1988’s …And Justice For All.

Halper then showed Waters an interview Hetfield gave in 2007, around their performance at the climate change charity concert Live Earth, where he said “politics drive me crazy”.

She went on to revisit the time in 2008 when Hetfield reacted to Metallica’s music being played during the US torture of Iraqi prisoners (he explained in a separate interview that he was partially “bummed” about it and didn’t want the band “being attached to some political statement”).

After this whistle-stop tour of Hetfield’s political history, Waters is asked for his reaction. “He’s just showing that he’s a complete prick,” he states. “He’s got an IQ of about three, and why we’re talking about him, I don’t even know, because he’s a nobody. He may have a few hundred million dollars or whatever, but he’s a prick.”

Waters then goes a step further and blasts Hetfield’s musical ability, stating his belief that the frontman is “no musician”: “I heard them playing acoustic instruments and it was appalling.” Rolling Stone named Metallica’s Fade To Black, where Hetfield plays an acoustic guitar, as the 35th-best metal song of all time in 2023.

Hetfield isn’t the only heavy metal figure for whom Waters has had harsh words. Following the death of Ozzy Osbourne in July 2025, the bassist said that he “couldn’t give a fuck” about the Black Sabbath singer. Ozzy’s son Jack told Waters “fuck you” via social media and the Osbournes briefly released a shirt mocking Waters. During an interview with Piers Morgan in January, Waters doubled down, asking, “Do I have to like every rock group that ever was or people who bite the heads off bats?”

Metallica have yet to respond to the controversy around Hetfield’s words at The Sphere. The band will take the stage at the venue once again tonight (October 15) and conclude their residency there in March.

Metal Hammer has approached Metallica’s representatives for comment on Waters’ word.

When Spandau Ballet guitarist Gary Kemp became a founding member of Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets, he proved himself a lifelong member of the prog club. But in 2019 he revealed that, across the entire spectrum of musical genres he’d encountered, King Crimson mastermind Robert Fripp was his guiding light.

My introduction to Robert Fripp would have been with In The Court Of The Crimson King and 21st Century Schizoid Man. All the sixth-formers had that album, as did my cousin. For me as a kid it was extraordinary – it allowed me to think outside of the pop box. It was so diverse, unfathomable; I couldn’t get in there. I couldn’t see through its intricacies. But it had such a great rock energy, and it showed me that there was so much more to music than I thought.

That first Crimson album is the beginning of prog rock. We all knew here was something intricate beginning to happen, and that the middle classes were being satiated musically with early Pink Floyd. Here was something a little more difficult – a little more intellectual.

Rock music had been a very working-class folk music. Fripp grabbed that and took it to darker, even further-out places on the edges of the universe, mixing it with jazz and with classical. He was taking the psychedelia of Floyd, the Syd Barrett stuff, playing around with loops and tapes.

Pete Townshend told me that when he’d gone to Pink Floyd’s very first gig at UFO, Syd had Echorecs on stage with him, getting this double tape loop going, which is what Fripp ended up doing with Brian Eno.

Robert Fripp has never stayed in this snooty University Challenge area of music, where no one else is ever allowed to come in. He’s never turned his nose up at anything that was going on in the other music worlds. He’s been totally willing – probably with the influence of Eno – to come into pop, but never to bend for it, to say: “I’ll give you a straight blues riff on this one.”

He has always brought his beauty and his wonderfully intricate sound into other pop genres. Obviously I fell in love with “Heroes” by David Bowie, and that wonderful sustaining guitar that he’s very famous for; and Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) later on.

Fripp turned up the weird. His playing has an exotic, erotic quality; that sustained drone that we associate with Eastern music but also with old British folk music and the hurdy-gurdy. This beautiful, ambient, abstract guitar playing, using odd tunings and tape delays that became a sound that everyone craved in the 70s.

It bounced out of the wonderful solo on Eno’s Baby’s On Fire or that wonderful first side of ambience from [Fripp & Eno’s] No Pussyfooting. Then he went as pop as you can get, playing on Blondie’s Parallel Lines and that wonderful solo album he produced for Daryl Hall, Sacred Songs. Here’s a very interesting, strange, leftfield man, who doesn’t mind marrying himself to pop music. I mean, he literally did that with Toyah!

I’m slightly afraid of him. There are certain musicians in the world that we’re all afraid of, and I think Fripp’s one of them. I don’t think I’d ever have the nerve to introduce myself to him, and I’m sure he’s never heard of Spandau Ballet.

He’s never been afraid to challenge himself and challenge music in general. He’s the godfather of prog rock – but he also helped psychedelia become progressive rock; and he helped glam become ambient with his work with Eno and Bowie.

He brought Bowie, a glam pop star, into a darker, stranger landscape. Everything was on a slightly higher plane. We were out of reality here; we weren’t singing about waking up that morning and his baby was gone. Bowie’s lyrics were matched by Fripp’s strangeness on guitar.

I don’t know all of his catalogue intimately, because it’s so vast and pretty much all encompassing. But if I had to pick my favourite Robert Fripp song ever it would be Starless from Red. That melody he falls upon – no matter how many times I listen – it’s always heartbreaking. It’s always full of yearning; an absolutely gorgeous riff.

On October 15, 2026 it was announced that Nightwish had parted ways with vocalist Floor Jansen after 13 years. In statements released by both Floor and the group, they described the split as "a mutual decision". At the time of writing, both parties and unavailable for comment.

Earlier this summer Hammer flew out to Finland to spend time with founder Tuomas Holopainen in the band's birthplace of Kitee to discuss 30 years of Nightwish history and what the future might look like.

On June 16, 2023, Nightwish played the best gig of their lives. That’s how founder and keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen sees it, anyway. Looking out at a sold-out crowd at Kitee’s Rantakenttä baseball stadium, he recognised more faces than usual – friends, cousins, siblings, fans who’d travelled across the world. This was the first time Nightwish had played in their hometown in almost 20 years and, for Tuomas, it felt like he’d come full circle.

“When we got onstage, I could almost see the studio building where we’d recorded our very first demo,” he says now. “I remembered being there almost 30 years before, now I’m playing to 11,000 people. I still get shivers just thinking about it. What a journey!”

Several songs from the Kitee gig appear on a new live compilation, The Greatest 30 Years On Earth, released in December to coincide with Nightwish’s 30th anniversary. Since forming in this small rural town in 1996, the band have risen to become their country’s biggest musical export and one of the defining groups of the 21st century, doing more than anyone to shape the modern symphonic metal movement.

Despite everything he’s achieved, Tuomas still lives here in Kitee. He isn’t just its most famous son, he’s its biggest cheerleader. So much so that he’s agreed to give Hammer a tour of his birthplace. It’s clear that Tuomas Holopainen loves Kitee. And Kitee loves Tuomas Holopainen back.

“What brings you here?” asks the taxi driver who collects us from the local train station. We’re here to write a piece about Nightwish, we explain.

“Ah, you’ll be seeing Tuomas then,” she says. “Tell him I said hello.”

“I know her,” Tuomas says with a chuckle, when we meet him for our tour the next day. “I mean, there’s, like, three taxi drivers out here. It’s a small town.”

To understand just how remarkable Nightwish’s rise has been, you first have to understand just how remote Kitee is. A four-hour-plus train ride away from Helsinki, civilisation drops away and we’re treated to the sights of Finland’s rugged wilderness. Trees. Trees. More trees. A lake. More trees.

With a population of fewer than 10,000 and one main road, Kitee is more like a glorified waystation than a town in the traditional sense. But Tuomas insists he’s never been tempted to up sticks for the bright lights of the big city.

“Never,” he says proudly. “I’ve always been a country boy. I just love this town because I know everybody and everybody knows me, so I get this peace and solitude. It’s a safe haven.”

It’s appropriate that he’s acting as our tour guide today. One of his first jobs as a teenager was showing people around the local Lutheran church. His grandfather served as pastor there before Tuomas was born, and the Nightwish man can trace his mother’s family line back to 16th-century religious reformist Martin Luther himself. The young Tuomas preferred fantasy novels and movies to scripture, and he still holds the fantastical close to his heart today. The otherwise unassuming car he picks us up in for our tour of the town is nicknamed ‘Gryffindor’. “The licence plate says ‘GRF’,” he says sheepishly, adding that there’s a large Harry Potter flag in the boot.

Encouraged into music by his mother, he learned piano and later played clarinet and the saxophone in his school’s classical and jazz groups. It was there that he met future Nightwish guitarist Emppu Vuorinen and singer Tarja Turunen. On July 6, 1996, when he was 19, Tuomas invited the pair to his parents’ cabin on an island in nearby Lake Pyhäjärvi to create a new band. Sitting around a campfire, he shared songs he’d written while doing his national service in the Finnish army. It was the moment Nightwish were born.

“In the guestbook, you can find the inscription saying that a band had formed that day,” Tuomas says. “It doesn’t say ‘Nightwish’, but it says we were there.”

He bought the island home from his parents a few years ago, and goes there a few times a year to write lyrics.

“There’s no electricity or running water, it’s very primal,” he says. “That’s why I like it. It’s very solitary and peaceful. There’s something about being on an island – you can’t just walk away.”

Kitee was once the moonshine capital of Finland, famous for its illicit hooch. Today, one of its biggest attractions is the permanent Nightwish exhibition, opened in 2020 to celebrate the band. Inside sits 30 years’ worth of memorabilia. The exhibition doesn’t just tell the story of the band, it charts Tuomas’s own journey too.

In one room, we spot a photo showing him with neat short hair and a crisp white shirt, looking every inch the nerdy schoolboy. This was before he took a destiny-changing student exchange trip to the US, where he was taken to a Metallica gig. Soon after returning to Finland, he joined local goth/doom band Dismal Silence.

“I loved it immediately,” he says. “Being with your mates, playing every night and arranging your own songs. That all happened in the fall of 1993. Ever since, I’ve been in bands: Dismal Silence, then Darkwoods My Betrothed, Nattvindens Gråt and then Nightwish.”

Nattvindens Gråt gave Tuomas his first experience of touring, when they supported Dutch goth-metal band Wish in the summer of 1996.

“We played in Hamburg and there was literally one guy there,” says Tuomas. “He left after two songs. We did 10 shows in 10 days, and the biggest attendance at any of those shows was 70 people.”

Just up the road from the Nightwish exhibition, and directly opposite the baseball stadium, sits the studio where Nightwish recorded their first four albums. It also served as a hangout for Tuomas and his friends, and anyone else who wanted to come along.

“The amount of cigarettes and booze consumed here must be astronomical,” he says.

The studio was also where Nightwish played their first ever show, on New Year’s Eve 1997. Their debut album, Angels Fall First, had been released a couple of months earlier and reached No.5 in the Finnish charts. After being offered the chance to go on tour, the band decided to test the water with a hometown show.

“I was so scared I thought I was going to die,” Tuomas admits. “I think I vomited before the show. I’d played shows before, but I was just the keyboardist in those bands, I wasn’t responsible for those songs. Nightwish was my baby, I was like, ‘I can’t fucking do this!’”

As it turned out, they could. Playing for 30 minutes in front of 250 people, the band had a blast.

“We got so drunk that none of us made it home,” Tuomas recalls. “We all slept on the floor side-by-side.”

In early 1998, the band went out on their first full tour, playing with fellow Finns Children Of Bodom. “We clicked immediately,” Tuomas recalls. “I became friends with Alexi [Laiho, late CoB frontman] right away. Four years later we went to Disneyland Florida with him. We were just two kids who loved the same things – music and Disney theme parks. We were close right up until he died.”

The success of Angels Fall First made it clear to Tuomas that it was decision time for Nightwish: they had to dedicate everything to the band or risk it falling apart.

“I spoke to Tarja and Emppu about what ambitions they had,” he recalls. “It was like, ‘Let’s see how this goes for a few years. See how far we can get.’ We got pretty far.”

The band’s second album, 1998’s Oceanborn, was another step up. The track Sacrament Of Wilderness gave the band their first No.1 single in Finland. Tuomas had taken a job as a supply teacher, and was at work when he found out it had topped the charts.

“I was calling everybody else up to share the news,” he says. “It was up against Madonna and Guns N’ Roses!”

The band got their first No.1 album with 2000’s Wishmaster. The same year, they ill-advisedly took part in a competition to become Finland’s entry in the international cheese-fest the Eurovision Song Contest, coming third (“Entirely my idea, everyone else was against it,” concedes Tuomas). More successful was their very first tour of Latin America.

“The response was like we were the Rolling Stones,” Tuomas says. “It felt great to see people going crazy over stuff I’d created in my parents’ house.”

When Tuomas was young, he used to play baseball at Rantakenttä. He still loves the sport, but admits he had to hang up his mitt because he “wasn’t a team player”. When we point out there are at least a couple of people who’ve left Nightwish’s ranks who might agree, he laughs it off.

For all the successes the band have enjoyed, things haven’t always been sunny. In 2001, just as they were picking up serious steam, tensions rose with then-bassist Sami Vänskä to the point where Tuomas seriously considered ending the band altogether.

“Sami’s heart just wasn’t in it anymore,” Tuomas says. “We’re still friends now and there’s no bad blood, but we realised that to stay friends he needed to leave. Then Marko [Hietala, bassist and co-vocalist] joined, of course.”

Four years later, there was even more turbulence. The band’s 2004 album, Once, had kicked things to another level for them, not least in the UK and America. But problems were brewing with Tarja Turunen.

“I loved the first half of the Once [Upon A] Tour,” Tuomas says. “Then all hell broke loose in 2005, which was the darkest period of the band.”

He’s referring, of course, to the night of October 21, 2005, when, immediately after the final show of the Once Upon A Tour in Helsinki, the band delivered a letter to Tarja accusing her of putting her solo career above Nightwish and telling her she was fired from the band. After the letter was published online, an ugly media storm broke out. Even the country’s then-Prime Minister was asked to comment on the split in Parliament.

“We get blamed for what happened, for good reason,” says Tuomas. “But there was no future for us together. We were just operating in survival mode and plagued by these dark thoughts. We got completely butchered in the media – it was like we were these evil neanderthals who’d hurt our wonderful ex-singer. I got some really interesting letters, let’s put it that way.”

Tarja and Tuomas have exchanged a few emails in recent years, but Tuomas says that’s as close as they’re likely to get to repairing their relationship.

“It was a divorce, and an ugly one at that, so I think we have our own lives now,” he says. “Someone did say to me if we got Tarja and Marko [Hietala, who left in 2020] back in, we could tour just South America for a year straight. That’s not gonna happen.”

After Tarja’s dismissal, Nightwish found a replacement in Anette Olzon, who joined the band in May 2007. According to Tuomas, she was one of 2,200 candidates who applied for the job.

“We’d already recorded [the music for] the album [2007’s Dark Passion Play], so it was a bit like, ‘The deadline is approaching,’” he says. “None of the 2,200 candidates was immediately spot-on, but Anette was the best of what we had. Her voice was so refreshing to all of us, we loved her interpretations of the songs.”

The split with Tarja didn’t halt Nightwish’s rise. Dark Passion Play and 2011’s Imaginaerum continued their hot streak, with the latter giving them their first US Top 30 album. Memorably, they played in China for the first time in 2008. Tuomas says the authorities banned them from throwing plectrums into the audience in case fans stood up during the show.

But more upheaval came in 2012 when Anette left the band in controversial circumstances midway through a US tour. She had publicly voiced her displeasure at being temporarily replaced by Arch Enemy’s Alissa White-Gluz and Elize Ryd of Amaranthe at a gig in Denver when she was too ill to perform. Anette subsequently contested that she’d been fired because she was pregnant and could not tour extensively – something the band denied.

Tuomas won’t go into specifics today, but does hint at some regrets about the period.

“It’s so easy to think, ‘We must strike while the iron is hot’, but you have to know your limits,” Tuomas says now. “When Anette joined the band, we started the Dark Passion Play tour, which lasted for two years and 250 shows. We did four American tours on that record alone, just constant touring, and the result is what it was. A silly thing to do.”

We stop for lunch at a local pizzeria, where we’re greeted by a massive portrait of the band from the Once era. With his long dark hair and gothic clothes, the Tuomas in the painting looks like he’s trying to be Peter Steele.

“Back then I was obsessed with darkness,” he says, looking at the picture with mild embarrassment. “I grew out of it, I’ve changed a lot, personality-wise.”

Certainly, the last decade or so seems to have been more stable for Nightwish, at least when it comes to singers. Former After Forever singer Floor Jansen replaced Anette Olzon as interim vocalist for the remaining dates on the Imaginaerum tour, before joining as a full-time member in 2013.

The eventual departure of longtime drummer Jukka Nevalainen in 2019 after stepping away from touring five years earlier was amicable (he would ultimately be replaced by Kai Hahto). But Nightwish’s world was rocked once more in the midst of the pandemic, when Marko Hietala dropped a bombshell and announced that he was leaving, citing mental health issues.

“I was gutted,” Tuomas says. “We all knew he’d got his problems with depression. But he called me in December [2020] just saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I’m too sick – I need to do something else.’ My initial reaction was laughter – surely it wasn’t happening again. I called Emppu, and he said, ‘Maybe we should quit.’ I agreed.”

However, getting new bassist Jukka Koskinen onboard was a turning point. “Sure enough, everything worked. The sun started to shine again. That’s what this band does: it keeps surviving,” he says, adding that he and Marko are still on good terms.

Even then, the drama wasn’t over. Floor Jansen was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022 (her treatment was, thankfully, successful). The following year, a shock announcement that the band wouldn’t be touring “for the foreseeable future” set alarm bells ringing among fans.

As we speak, that memorable hometown show at Kitee’s baseball stadium was their last-but-one gig. Reflecting on the decision today, Tuomas insists that it was critical to the band’s survival – he was burned out and concerned about his wellbeing.

“I reached a point where I felt that I couldn’t do it anymore,” he explains. “There’s so much shit that goes on when you’re on tour and I’m slightly traumatised. I told the band they could go on without me, but they wouldn’t have it. Other members of the band said, ‘No, we need a break.’ If we’d continued as we were, people were gonna die.”

Being off the road hasn’t hurt their career. 2024’s Yesterwynde continued their chart-topping streak in Finland and gave them their second UK Top 20 album following 2015’s grandiose Endless Forms Most Beautiful.

“Nightwish has always been more than the sum of its parts,” Tuomas says bullishly. “I honestly think at this point, if any member – including myself – left, the rest of them could continue. Any of us. Because we have evidence enough that this band can work with any combo.”

Tuomas’s home sits a little way out of Kitee itself. From the outside at least, it exudes a very fitting Addams Family vibe, as well as an air of solitude that seems to suit a man who values his privacy. A jetty juts out on the serene water of a lake. Tuomas often relaxes in his sauna before sitting on the jetty to write lyrics and reflect. He’s had plenty of time to do the latter recently.

“That’s why we’re on a break right now,” he says. “We’ve been in the same job for 30 years – we can take a vacation. I love having the time to read, and take a long walk. But I also don’t want to do that for the rest of my life.”

He’s getting itchy feet. In July, he played a few Finnish shows with Auri, the folk project he formed with his wife, Johanna Kurkela, and Nightwish multi-instrumentalist/ co-vocalist Troy Donockley. Tuomas is also working on his second solo album, with plans to record the final parts later this year. After that, he’s planning to properly start work on the next Nightwish album.

“I got my health back, I feel more inspired than ever – proof of that is that I’ve already got six new Nightwish songs done,” he says. “Every time I sit in front of my keyboard, I’m like, ‘Ah yeah this is great! Just wait till everyone hears this.’ It’s exhilarating. Next year is too early to be going back on tour. The year after, possibly? I want to do another album before any live shows, and that’s definitely happening. We’ve already reserved things for that next year.”

The upcoming The Greatest 30 Years On Earth compilation is both proof that rumours of Nightwish’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, and a celebration of the ongoing legacy of the band Tuomas formed in this tiny town all those years ago that has defined his life ever since.

“This stuff will live on for 100 years after I’m dead,” he says. “I wouldn’t have met my wife without Nightwish. It’s brought all the best and worst things into my life, but the good far exceeds the bad.”

The 30 Greatest Years On Earth is out December 11 via Nuclear Blast.

Diamond Rowe, guitarist of Atlanta, Georgia nu metal four-piece Tetrarch, got to tick off one hell of a bucketlister on Sunday night (October 11), as she was invited to perform in front of 70,000 people at her hometown football stadium.

Taking to the pitch at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium ahead of the NFL Sunday night football game between the Atlanta Falcons and Baltimore Ravens, Diamond played a special rendition of hallmark Metallica anthem Enter Sandman, providing a perfect full circle moment for the guitarist, who not only grew up in the city, but actually watched Metallica themselves play that very same stadium on their M72 world tour only last year.

"What’s pretty crazy is that the NFL / Falcons contacted me about it out of the blue," Diamond tells Hammer. "Apparently they heard about me and the band last year and had been trying to find the perfect game to have me out for. It’s crazy that they settled on a Sunday Night Football game but I was so honoured. I’m also the first artist that the Falcons have allowed to walk out of the players tunnel, which is even sicker!

"Considering they built that stadium after I moved to LA, I have only ever been in it one other time and that was to see Metallica," she continues. "Being invited to come back and play in that same stadium full of 70,000 people and being able to pay homage to Metallica - the band that started it all for me - is just an insane full circle moment. I will forever be thankful to the NFL and Falcons for asking me to be a part of something so special."

Watch footage of Diamond's performance below.

Sadly for Diamond's fellow Atlantans, the Falcons were unable to overcome the Ravens, falling behind in overtime to suffer defeat with a final score of 30-23 in Baltimore's favour.

Regardless, Diamond will now be focusing on Tetrarch's next steps, with the band aiming to have a brand new studio album out in 2027.

"We actually go back into the studio in two weeks to work on some new music," she reveals. "Everything is sounding killer! We're hoping to have something new out for everyone soon, but other than that, we'll do as much touring as we can in 2027. We have a lot of cool announcements coming in the coming weeks."

Nightwish and their longtime lead singer Floor Jansen have parted ways.

The Finnish symphonic metal band confirmed their Dutch vocalist’s departure earlier today (Tuesday, October 15), offering minimal detail but saying that the split was a mutual decision. They also confirm that they will enter the studio to record their 11th album next year.

They write: “Nightwish and Floor Jansen part ways.

“After careful consideration, we have, in mutual agreement, decided to part ways. This decision is necessary and important to us and our future ambitions. Thus, we will now pursue those goals in our own separate ways. We wish each other nothing but the very best on our respective artistic journeys.

“For you, dear listener, and indeed for us, this marks the end of a truly great voyage.

“Nightwish will continue. We will move forward and enter the studio in 2027 to record a new album.

“As we celebrate 30 years of Nightwish, we couldn’t be more excited about our music and our future.”

Jansen adds in her own statement: “Endings create new beginnings, and even though it was a hard decision to make, I believe there is a bright musical journey ahead of me.

”I invite you to follow along on this path, as you were with me in all the great years before. Thank you for your support through the rollercoasters of life.

“My solo career will now get all of my attention and gives my new upcoming album Hytress (out 2027) and the tour all space to grow. Hope to meet you on the road again in a near and happy future.”

Jansen joined Nightwish in 2012, replacing Anete Olzen. She sang on three albums with the band: 2015’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful, 2020’s Human II Nature and 2024’s Yesterwynde.

Nightwish have been on live hiatus since 2023, but keyboardist/songwriter Tuomas Holopainen told Hammer earlier this year that he had six songs written for their upcoming album. Whether Jansen contributed to the writing sessions remains to be seen.

Jansen launched her solo career in 2023 and Hytress, her second album, will drop in January.

Blondie will release a new album, High Noon, next year.

The group's 12th studio album, High Noon is their first collection of new music in nine years, following on from 2017's Pollinator. The group's final album with late drummer Clem Burke, High Noon was recorded in New York with The Paper Chase frontman/producer John Congleton [St. Vincent, The Killers], who also produced Pollinator, and will be released on February 26 via BMG.

"This album is classic Blondie," says vocalist Debbie Harry, "an amalgamation of all our different influences and eras into something new. This music feels grounded in the present, shaped by who we are and how we're living now."

“It’s been a long, strange ride, and somehow here we are with another Blondie album,” adds guitarist Chris Stein. "I’m not sure what the fuck I’m supposed to say at this point, except that we're incredibly grateful for all your support over the years."

The tracklist for the album is:

1. Spectral Eyes
2. Heartbreak Kid
3. Come Back Home
4. Tambo Tambo
5. Man Who Had No Face
6. The End
7. Little Metal Drummer
8. Sleepwalking
9. Whistle Into The Wind
10. Antifreeze
11. East of Eden
12. Bad Underwear
13. Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time

High Noon is introduced by its opening track and first single Spectral Eyes, written by former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, who also plays guitar on the song.

Elsewhere on the album, Sleepwalking is a song written by Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock, while Little Metal Drummer was originally recorded by Blondie co-founding keyboardist Jimmy Destri for his debut solo album, 1981's Heart On A Wall.

High Noon will be available on black vinyl and CD, with a limited-edition crystal clear ecovinyl available at select retailers. The official Blondie stores will also offer an exclusive limited-edition red vinyl and cassette, along with merchandise bundles.

The album can be pre-ordered now.

In the wake of US rapper Macklemore's controversial removal from Ed Sheeran's stadium tour following an onstage speech highlighting the plight of Palestinians affected by the conflict in Gaza, many musicians have felt obliged to make their own positions clear.

For some, this has meant declaring their own shows agenda-free zones, where political and social issues are never discussed onstage. And earlier this week, Metallica's James Hetfield went viral for seeming to suggest that his band were mere entertainers, and that politics would play no part in their shows.

"Unless you live in Vegas, you've come a long way to spend some time with Metallica," he told the crowd at the fourth of Metallica's Life Burns Faster shows at Sphere in Las Vegas. "We're grateful for that - your travels, the money you spend, the time it took. Thanks for coming to celebrate with us."

"And I just gotta say, Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their bullshit, OK? We are here, no bullshit. We're here to forget about all the outside shit, OK?"

Now, a similar clip of Mötley Crüe's Nikki Sixx has gone viral.

"It does not matter to Mötley Crüe if you’re a Republican. It does not matter to Mötley Crüe if you’re a Democrat," Sixx says. "It doesn't matter if you’re gay or if you’re straight or if you’re going right down the fucking centre of the lane of life cause we’re all in this together. Can we agree?"

It's not clear when the clip was filmed, but Crüe finished their Return of the Carnival of Sins tour last month, and he delivered an almost identical speech in Charlotte, NC, in August.

"It doesn't really matter if you're a Republican or a Democrat, or if you're gay or if you're straight," Sixx told the crowd at the Truliant Amphitheater. "It really doesn't matter to us. All that really matters to us is that we're all here together. Can we just start unifying the fucking world together? Can we do that?"

Sixx has said in the past that artists should be free to say whatever they like on social media as long as they keep their shows politics-free, while Crüe drummer Tommy Lee frequently uses X and other platforms to voice his opposition to US President Donald Trump.

“We have our beliefs, and inside of our own camp it’s not 100% all one way or another," Sixx told NME in 2016. "We don’t really feel it’s necessarily something you want to stop in the middle of a rock show and say.”

"I’ve been quite vocal on my socials – I’m also very sarcastic most of the time, so I think people know where I stand, but, in America especially, we’re very divided. To have a fan feel that they have to choose their music because of the person they voted for, that is not fair to the music."

Sixx's sentiments were echoed by Rolling Stones' frontman Mick Jagger in July, during an episode of The New York Times’ podcast, The Interview.

"The bottom line is that my job in the live music world is to [make sure] people that come have the best time they possibly can," he said. "And for two hours, forget all their problems and the problems of the world, their mortgages and whatever. Just so they can have the best time.

"Your job is to make them go more apeshit," he continued. "You don’t want to lecture them."

Iron Maiden's Steve Harris has announced that his British Lion side project will play six shows at the historic Cart & Horses pub in Stratford, East London, this Christmas.

The band's residency will begin on December 13, with support from Albion, the band built around current Jethro Tull guitarist Jack Clark and former Tull guitarist Joe Parrish-James. Tickets are priced at £38.50 and are available now.

“We’re really happy to be coming back to the Cart & Horses for six nights in December," says Harris. "We’ve had some fantastic shows there over the years, and it’s always great to get back to such an important venue for Iron Maiden’s history. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone there!”

British Lion played five festive shows at the Cart & Horses in 2025, and four times the previous year, while Iron Maiden played dozens of dates at the now 120-capacity venue between 1976 and 1978, earning it the nickname "The birthplace of Iron Maiden."

"Actually, it was really good," Harris told Brave Words in 2012, recalling the band's first show at the venue in June 1976. "We just pulled in as many people as we could, family and friends, and there were a few regulars in anyway. I don’t like leaving things to chance, so I put a few posters up, and it ended up being pretty rammed out.

"There was a bit of a comfort zone for us to operate in, with it being packed out – it always makes it a lot easier. If you’re playing to a near-empty place, that makes it next to impossible."

British Lion: 2026 Tour Dates

Dec 13: London Cart & Horses, UK
Dec 14: London Cart & Horses, UK
Dec 15: London Cart & Horses, UK
Dec 16: London Cart & Horses, UK
Dec 17: London Cart & Horses, UK
Dec 18: London Cart & Horses, UK

They say you never forget your first time. And the broad smile that creases Myles Kennedy’s ruggedly handsome face as fragmented recollections of a red-letter day coalesce and come into focus rather telegraphs his subsequent admission that he treasures the memory as a transformative moment in his life. A practised, unhurried storyteller, he leans forward to sketch out the scene with broad strokes. It’s 1984, and in Spokane, Washington, Alter Bridge’s future frontman – at this point a 14-year-old schoolboy – is set to perform in front of an audience for the first time.

“My friends and I had formed an ‘air’ band, and we’d told everyone that we were going to play a gig without any instruments,” Kennedy explains. “We set up in the church pianist’s basement, and our parents thought it was going to be really cute, so everyone was like: ‘Let’s go downstairs and watch the kids play!’”

At the appointed hour, Kennedy’s step-father, a minister in the Methodist church, invited his congregation to join him for a very special musical performance. Descending into the basement, the unsuspecting churchgoers were greeted by a demonic cacophony that Satan himself might have considered ‘a bit much’ when selecting his walk-on music for Judgement Day.

The passing of time has done nothing to dull Kennedy’s gleeful memory of what happened next, as he watched familiar smiling faces darken in confusion, horror and disgust.

“What they didn’t realise was that our set-list featured only full-on metal,” he explains. “Shout At The Devil, Screaming For Vengeance, Iron Maiden… It took literally two songs to clear the entire room. It was wonderful.”

To his eternal credit, pastor Kennedy took the prank in good humour, and sustained only minor damage to his reputation in the local community. Known simply as Glenn to the two boys he raised as his own following the untimely death of their father Richard Bass, his laid-back, supportive approach to parenting will forever make him a “hero” in the eyes of Myles Kennedy. But when, during a family camping trip the following year, the teenager raised the prospect of a second ‘air band’ performance, the minister, mindful of the boy’s growing obsession with the music of Van Halen, Def Leppard and Led Zeppelin, proposed he take on a new challenge.

“I remember he was building a fire, but he stopped, turned around to look at me, and said: ‘Son, why don’t you learn how to play for real?’” Kennedy recalls. “From that moment, my life had a purpose.”

“And fast forward almost forty years,” he says, raising his hands, palms outstretched, like a magician who’s just pulled off a particularly mesmerising illusion, “here we are.”

As fabulously succinct as this first-hand account of Kennedy’s musical journey is, we’d be doing Alter Bridge’s 52-year-old frontman a grave disservice by wrapping up the story at this point. Because when he proclaims the epic title track of his band’s new album Pawns & Kings “a battle-cry for the underdog”, urging ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down’, this is not the empty posturing of a performative rock’n’roll entertainer, but a heart-felt sentiment born of lived experience, wisdom gained from years of hurt, frustration and disappointment chasing his dreams.

When a disillusioned, burnt out, bruised and weary Kennedy tried to quit the music business 20 years ago after recording a second album with the Mayfield Four – records a trusted friend later admitting to feeling “uncomfortable” listening to, given Kennedy’s compulsion to lay bare unvarnished truths – it was an act of self-sabotage as much as self-care, a decision that went against every fibre of his being.

“It’s a brutal business, brutal,” he admits. “But no matter how bad my heart would break, I just couldn’t stop. I kept getting back on the horse, like a dumb-ass. I told myself the dream was over many, many, many times, but I couldn’t let go, because I understood the power of music. So finally I walked away [laughs]. And that didn’t work out either!”

This, obviously, is a little joke. Today, in the bar of an upscale West London hotel, Kennedy and the man who fucked up his early retirement plan, his co-pilot in Alter Bridge, bullet-headed 48-year-old guitarist Mark Tremonti, will hold court until darkness falls, for a steady procession of print, online and broadcast media journalists eager to learn the stories behind Pawns & Kings, the band’s seventh studio album, released in October on Berlin-based label Napalm Records.

A little subdued and slow to spark following a decidedly less than restful, jet-lag-impacted first night in the UK, the pair, both clad head to toe in regulation black, are nonetheless attentive, gracious and professionally charming in their early-afternoon interactions with each representative of the media, as per their reputations as two of rock’s ‘good guys’.

“You got me at a good time,” Kennedy says with a gentle smile as he settles himself on a sofa, the first of the pair to do so. “I’m so tired that I’ll just blurt out everything, and get myself in trouble.”

We both know this won’t happen. In truth, if we’re laying our cards on the table here, almost everyone involved in today’s polite and polished promotional dance – Kennedy, Tremonti, Alter Bridge’s long-time manager Tim, hovering discreetly at all times, their UK PR team, and all but the most green, fresh-faced media reps – knows that the two musicians don’t really need to be here today.

Alter Bridge are not, and never will be, rent-a-quote press darlings. And given the loyalty of their impressively dedicated fan base, the commercial success of Pawns & Kings, in the UK at least, will fluctuate only by small margins irrespective of the weight, reach or range of whatever pre-release promo activity is listed on today’s schedule. Which isn’t to say that Tremonti is being anything but entirely sincere when he says that days such as today play a pivotal role in raising awareness of Alter Bridge’s follow-up to 2019’s Walk The Sky.

“We want to make the most of this record,” he states, “as the last one got destroyed by covid, touring-wise.”

One can’t help feeling that he and Kennedy could spend every allotted minute of their media ‘face time’ on anything they wanted to and Pawns & Kings would still debut in the UK Top 10, just as each of the four studio albums they released in the last decade – 2010’s AB III (chart peak No.9), 2013’s Fortress (No.6), 2016’s The Last Hero (No.3) and the aforementioned Walk The Sky (No.4) – did. Because this is the standard level at which the Florida-based quartet, arguably the most reliable and trusted blue-chip, arena-filling hard rock act on the circuit, now operate.

Factor in projected sales of more than 90,000 tickets for the band’s winter British and Irish tour (which commenced on December 5 at Nottingham’s 10,000-capacity Motorpoint Arena, and wound up a week later at London’s 20,000-capacity O2 Arena) and it’s clear that in the eighteenth year of their career Alter Bridge are A Big Fucking Deal.

And yet the traditional peripheral indicators that accompany this level of success are almost entirely absent here. There are no paparazzi skulking near the hotel’s revolving doors, no Alter Bridge loyalists camped in the shrubbery in the hope of grabbing selfies to get Instagram fanpages popping, no hotel residents interrupting our conversation to ask for an autograph.

As the hotel bar fills up, fellow guests curious as to the duo’s identity might peg the long-haired Kennedy as a ‘creative’, a painter perhaps, or a photographer, or imagine the tattoo-and piercings-free Tremonti to be here for an interview for a security job or evening bar shifts. This anonymity, in these surroundings at least, is a sweet spot that suits Kennedy, Tremonti and their absent bandmates Brian Marshall and Scott Phillips just fine, thank you very much.

“Do I want world domination with Alter Bridge?” Myles Kennedy asks aloud. “Thanks, but no. Because I see the complications that it brings into people’s worlds. This is the best place for us to be.

“My brother and I sometimes talk about this, actually. He’ll say to me: ‘Do you realise how lucky you are? You can go anywhere, eat anywhere, shop anywhere, without being recognised or getting bothered, and then you can go play music to an arena full of people. You have the best of both worlds!’

“For me, this altitude is a beautiful place in which to fly,” he says, smiling again. “And honestly, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

At an unspecified point in his late 20s/early 30s, a time when even fewer people knew his face or his name, Kennedy woke up to the realisation that like-minded souls in his orbit were “disappearing”.

“Losing friends to addiction was a real wake-up call for me,” he reflects, his gratitude evident. “It came at a time when I was starting to change, hanging out with the wrong crowd, falling into those rock’n’roll clichés. Playing music, from my first band Bittersweet onwards, I discovered that all those temptations laid bare in [infamous book that detailed Led Zeppelin’s excess all areas] Hammer Of The Gods were freely available even if you weren’t in Led Zeppelin. Luckily, before darkness descended I met the woman who would become my wife, and changed my ways, telling myself let’s not go down that road. But in different circumstances? Sure, I could have fallen for all that craziness.”

With the practised caution of a seasoned world traveller anticipating regular border checks in his near future, when asked to declare which specific ‘recreational’ vices might have impacted hardest upon his health and happiness during his deepest immersion in rock’n’roll cliches, Kennedy smiles, shrugs and says: “I plead the Fifth [Amendment] on that.”

It’s no secret that the Seattle rock scene of the early-to-mid-90s was awash with heroin; Mother Love Bone’s Andrew Wood and Alice In Chains’ Layne Staley just two of its high-profile casualties. And while Spokane’s less-celebrated artistic community never succumbed wholesale to its dark, intoxicating ‘glamour’, as a younger man Kennedy wasn’t blind to the ready availability, and indeed allure, of certain illegal narcotics.

“There were drugs around,” he acknowledges, “and for me there was an experimental phase with that. But I definitely realised that this would be something that would most definitely get in the way of me being creative. What I saw with drugs was people being fooled into believing they were being more creative than they were. When I was lucid, I’d watch that, and think: ‘You’re fooling yourself.’ I never imagined drugs would bring out the best in me.

“Which is not to say that I don’t understand their use. The other day, my wife, who’s a massive Depeche Mode fan, watched the concert documentary [101] they shot in the late eighties as they were travelling across America. At one point, [frontman] Dave Gahan was asked if he was happy. And he replied saying something to the effect of: ‘Yeah. But I was also happy when I was working at a grocery store.’ The pressure of being a frontman every night can be so overwhelming. And then it makes total sense why some guys get hooked on drugs and alcohol, or face the mental health issues that arise from this lifestyle. It’s a tricky dance if you don’t want to end up another rock’n’roll statistic.”

Mark Tremonti knows this as well as anyone. As a beaten-down Myles Kennedy was pulling the plug on The Mayfield Four, Tremonti, was wrestling with an altogether different, although no less brutal, Big Life Decision: whether or not to walk away from America’s then-biggest rock band, Creed, which he’s poured his heart and soul into for the best part of 10 years.

Creed’s phenomenal success had already far outstripped the most outlandish, fantastical dreams the teenage Tremonti ever entertained while honing his guitar chops beneath the Metallica and Slayer and Iron Maiden posters on his bedroom walls.

Remarkable, then, that revised in 2022 Creed’s sales figures in the US alone are almost incomprehensible: between 1997 and their break-up in 2004, the Tallahassee, Florida band sold 28 million albums, and their second and third – 1999’s Human Clay and 2001’s Weathered – both debuted at No.1 on the Billboard 200 chart.

By 2002, however, the relationship between Tremonti and Creed vocalist Scott Stapp was so damaged, in part due to Stapp’s escalating issues with alcohol abuse and cocaine addiction, that the guitarist couldn’t stand a single second in Stapp’s company. Even now there’s anger in Tremonti’s voice when he revisits memories of a dream turned sour.

“I’ve had jobs that were shit,” he says, “terrible jobs that I hated showing up for, but this was different. When you have this passion you’ve had your whole life, and you achieve the kind of huge success you always dreamt of, but you have this factor that’s tearing it apart, that’s destroying your whole life, it’s the most heart-wrenching, terrible thing. And I resented it. As a kid I could not imagine being in a successful band that was not fun to be in.

"But it got to the point where every other week Scott Phillips was quitting and I was begging him to stay, or I was quitting and he was begging me to stay. And then one day we both wanted to quit, and that was it. We had to think about what would really make us happy: making another platinum record with a band you hated being a part of, or being an artist and chasing new dreams. We felt we’d earned the right to be happy.”

Level headed, good humoured and personable, Tremonti comes across as a thoroughly decent human being, with an inner steel underpinning a calm, composed character. You sense he’d make a good brother-in-law, and you’d definitely want him on your side in a fight.

It perhaps surprising, then, to hear him say that he still feels like an outsider – not wholly comfortable in either rock’n’roll circles or ‘normal’ life. “I don’t think I’m some cool badass, and I’d feel like a pretentious asshole calling myself a rock star.”

At his lowest ebb, he wasn’t about to let Scott Stapp destroy his dreams, so he went in search of a singer who was the exact opposite of his egotistic, arrogant, confrontational former bandmate, personality-wise. Which is when he approached “the nicest guy we knew” with an offer to start a new band, to take a leap of faith without knowing where it might take them.

As a kid, growing up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the guitarist was taught by his parents to fear only one thing: the city six blocks from their family home, just down Alter Road.

“I was constantly told: ‘Do not cross that street!” Tremonti recalls. “Where we lived was a vision of suburbia, whereas Detroit, to my parents, was drugs, crime, depravity, danger. It was not nice, it was not safe. Growing up, Alter Road, to me, represented the unknown. And in walking away from Creed, from everything we knew, we had to cross into the unknown again. So that was the start of Alter Bridge.”

Tremonti and Kennedy use the same word to describe how they view music: the word ‘magic’. But no one waved a magic wand to lift Alter Bridge into the elevated realm in which they exist in 2022 – a fact that the hard-working Tremonti, now with 17 albums to his name, is quick to stress.

“Alter Bridge has been a fight from day one,” he says. “Everything we’ve achieved with this band, we’ve earned it. We had a lot of proving to do, a lot of negative energy to overcome.”

For Kennedy, by his own admission, some of that negativity came from within. Growing up on a farm, shovelling horse shit as he listened to the greatest rock albums of the 70s and 80s, he knew he could never be a golden god like Robert Plant, a showman like Freddie Mercury, a fearless boundary breaker like David Bowie.

And when he first heard David Lee Roth, still the archetype for rock’n’roll frontmen, singing Van Halen’s take on The Kinks classic You Really Got Me, he was rendered speechless: “I remember thinking: ‘Wow! It sounds like he’s having sex in outer space.’”

And while Seattle’s grunge explosion offered reassurance that rock music could be made by guys who looked, thought and lived like Kennedy did, a part of him always felt that he had to be more than Myles Kennedy, bigger than Myles Kennedy, louder than Myles Kennedy in order to make it. “I was watching a rock’n’roll documentary recently where a music writer said something, referring to frontmen and that larger-than-life rock-star persona, which really stuck with me. He said: ‘People don’t pay to see the humble bumble.’ And I get that. That kind of swagger is entertaining and compelling, and I love to watch people who have it.”

Now, when he looks back on his early years with Alter Bridge, Kennedy remembers an uncertain, anxious introvert trying to pull off a decent impression of a rock star.

“I tried and I tried, but I could never quite find that persona,” he says. “And looking back, it’s embarrassing. I felt like an imposter, and I felt like people knew it too, like they were looking at me thinking: ‘This guy is bullshitting me.’ They maybe didn’t believe in me as a rock star, because I didn’t believe in me either.”

Kennedy remembers the exact point at which he gave up pretending to be someone else, and embraced, and started to rather like, who he is. And once again the catalyst for change came after a conversation with his step-father Glenn, backstage after a 2014 show with his side hustle, fronting Slash & The Conspirators.

“We were opening for Aerosmith,” he recalls, “and it was one of the first shows I played with Slash in front of my parents, so I was kinda operating with that rock guy persona. Then after the show I’m hanging out, and my step-dad pulled me aside and said: ‘You know, just don’t forget who you are.’ And man, that was an important moment for me. Because at that point I realised: ‘You know what, I’m just gonna be me up there, and if people like it, great, if they don’t that’s fine too. And since I started doing that, I finally felt comfortable in my skin.”

It’s at this point that I suggest, perhaps a little rudely, that when the name Alter Bridge is raised in music industry circles, the words “such lovely, genuine guys…” is often followed by a pause, an embarrassed shuffle of feet, a lowering of the voice, and a somewhat apologetic “…but kinda boring”.

To their credit, on hearing this, Kennedy and Tremonti both laugh out loud.

“Look,” says Kennedy, “I totally get that. And if I didn’t know me and didn’t have to live in my shoes, I’d probably say the same thing. But for people that do embrace what we do, I think that’s part of the allure: that we are more – for lack of a better word – pedestrian, that we don’t have that swagger. But to pretend to be anything other than who we are would take so much energy, would be so exhausting day after day.”

“If you want to make it in music, you better have a thick skin, because people aren’t slow to tell you what they think of you,” Tremonti says with a shrug that suggests he’s not losing sleep about anyone’s perception of him or his band. “We are who we are.”

The guitarist is silent for a moment, perhaps considering whether or not to share a story that cuts to the heart of why Alter Bridge is important to him, and why this band and their music is important to so many others. In the end, he takes the plunge. He recalls a meet-and-greet session with fans, when a young couple shuffled forward, both crying, overcome with emotion.

“Meet-and-greets aren’t the best situations in which to have a proper conversation,” he admits, “and it was a little awkward for all of us. But we talked, and they relaxed a little, and then they pulled out a photograph. They told me that they’d lost a child, and showed me the photo, which showed the child’s gravestone, which featured our lyrics.

"That’s the power that music can have in someone’s life. So it’s important to me that what we do is real. When people have our lyrics tattooed on their skin, or in that case, carved in stone, you don’t want to betray their trust in you, and turn into a clown.”

“When this is all over, and I look back on what Alter Bridge was, I’ll be able to tell my grandkids that we stayed true to ourselves,” Tremonti concludes. “We didn’t put on costumes, we didn’t fake it; we fought, and we survived. And we made music that was honest, and that mattered, to us and to our fans. Whatever happens with this album, and however our lives unfold from this point on, that will be enough for me.”

Taylor Momsen has spoken about her unfortunate and dangerous brushes with members of the animal kingdom during The Pretty Reckless' support tour with AC/DC.

Earlier this year, the 33-year-old singer spoke to Metal Hammer about being bitten by a bat while performing onstage with her band at the Estadio La Cartuja on May 29, 2024, joking that "It was a very cute bat, though."

Now, in a new interview with YouTube personality Rick Beato, The Pretty Reckless vocalist has spoken about her even more alarming encounter with a venomous brown recluse spider in Mexico earlier this year.

Prior to her band's performance at Estadio GNP Seguros in Mexico City on April 7, Momsen was bitten on her lower right leg.

"So it wouldn’t be an AC/DC tour if I didn’t get bit…" she later joked on Instagram. "This time a massive spider decided to take a chunk out of me and its venom did a number on my system so had to have the wonderful doctors in Mexico come and deliver quite the shot before the show last night… add it to the list! Spider woman? Batgirl? WTF."

In another post, the singer displayed the marks on her leg, and wrote, "Poisonous spiders are NO BUENO 🕷️🕷️but the show must go on."

As she reveals to Rick Beato though, there was nothing funny about the spider bite, as much as she bravely played it down at the time, and that she was initially misdiagnosed as simply having an allergic reaction.

"I ended up, the last night of the tour in Mexico City in the hospital, hooked up to IVs with the strongest antibiotics you can possibly get getting pumped through my system, with the hospital telling me I cannot leave and they had to admit me for 5 days, or I was going to lose my leg," she told the podcast host. "To which I turned to the doctor and I said, Doc, I got a show in a few hours, so I need a plan B. And he goes, 'You're not gonna make that show.' And I said, "Doc, how do I make this clear to you? I'm leaving this hospital, and I would really like to keep my leg, so I need a plan B. Don't recommend that.... that spider was just actively trying to kill me."

Watch Momsen's full interview with Rick Beato below.

Pavlov's Dog frontman David Surkamp has died, aged 73, the band have announced.

The band's current violin and mandolin player Abbie Steiling paid tribute to Surkamp on behalf of the current line-up on their Facebook page, saying, "It is with the heaviest of hearts that we share the unexpected passing of our creative force, lead singer, and dear friend, David Surkamp, on October 13.

"David leaves behind a legacy of endless creativity, unmistakable artistry, and a body of music that has touched lives across generations and around the world. But anyone who knew and loved him knows that his legacy reaches far beyond the songs. David had a profoundly poetic spirit and a romantic heart that found its way into every note, every lyric, and every performance. His music was deeply emotive, reaching straight into the hearts of listeners, giving voice to longing, to love, to beauty, and to the bittersweet ache of it all.

"He always allowed the musicians around him to shine in their strengths, generous with the spotlight and appreciative of what each brought to the music. No matter what life held for him, he came alive onstage. Even on his hardest days, when the lights came up and the count-off began, he was a consummate performer. If he was playing music, it was a great day.

"As we grapple with the magnitude and shock of this loss, we take comfort in the incredible community that surrounded him: his family, his wonderfully enduring friendships, and the global family brought together through Pavlov’s Dog and the music he gave to the world.

"David's heart held so much love for his wife Sara, and we hope he has found peace with the love he has missed so dearly.

"There are no words sufficient for a loss of this magnitude. We are heartbroken. We are grateful. We will carry David, his music, and the memories created with us always. Our deepest condolences are with Saylor, Evan, and the Surkamp family, as well as the Pavlov's Dog family as we walk together through this difficult time of grief."

Pavlov's Dog evolved out of High On A Small Hill, which Surkamp formed in 1971, aged 19, with bassist Rick Stockton and two other high school friends.

“I remember hearing those foghorns at the start of 21st Century Schizoid Man – that was it for me," he told Prog in 2016. "I loved Fairport Convention, too – they were probably my favourite band."

They released their debut album, Pampered Menial, in 1975, a mix of prog and melodic hard rock produced by Sandy Pearlman and Murray Krugman, who'd both worked with Blue Öyster Cult. Surkamp's distinctive vocals, which he once described as “a choirboy on speed” made sure the band were noticed. A second album, At The Sound Of The Bell, was released in 1976, but a year later the band disbanded.

Surkamp went on to work with former Fairport Convention musician Ian Matthews in Hi-Fi and also as a journalist, but Pavlov's Dog reformed in 1990, recording Lost in America before things stalled again.

They reformed again in 2005, this time with Sukramp's wife Sara on vocals and guitar, and were still a going concern. They released three more new studio albums, Echo And Boo in 2010, Prodigal Dreamer in 2018 and Wanderlust in 2025, along with a career-spanning box set, Pavlov's Dog Essential Recordings 1974-2018 in 2024.

Original band member Siegfried Carver died in 2009, multi-instrumentalist Doug Rayburn in 2012, bassist Rick Stockton in 2015 and keyboardist David Hamilton and Sara Surkamp passed last year.

The Rolling Stones have announced the forthcoming release of an expanded deluxe edition of their current album Foreign Tongues, featuring five new songs from the studio sessions which birthed the record.

Foreign Tongues, Loose Lips will be released on November 27 by Polydor/Universal Music.

The new collection features five recordings from the creative period surrounding Foreign Tongues: Where There's A Will, Who You Callin' Crazy (featuring jazz saxophonist Courtney Pine), Human Tide, Bad Luck Hideaway, a duet vocal by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards also featuring Charlie Watts, and She Still Comes Around.

In a Facebook post, the new songs were described as "blues, country and that unmistakable rhythm and Stones sound that we know you love!"

Bad Luck Hideaway was previously released as a bonus track on the iTunes exclusive edition of Foreign Tongues, and was recently shared on digital platforms as the B-side to current Stones single Mr. Charm.

The grammatically-challenging Who You Callin' Crazy will be digitally released on Friday, October 16.

Produced by Andrew Watt (Ozzy Osbourne, Paul McCartney, Pearl Jam), the original version of Foreign Tongues, the band's 25th British studio album, was released on July 10 this year. The Classic Rock magazine review of the record noted, "Despite an ultimately wearing, overbearing Watt production job, Foreign Tongues duly delivers as a pretty good Stones album."

The 14-track collection followed the band's acclaimed, Grammy Award-winning Hackney Diamonds album, which emerged in 2023.

Foreign Tongues, Loose Lips will be available as a standalone vinyl edition, a deluxe 2CD edition, and across digital formats.

The standalone vinyl edition features all five Loose Lips recordings on LP, alongside a CD of the original Foreign Tongues album. The 2CD edition includes the original 14-track Foreign Tongues album on CD1 and the five Loose Lips recordings on CD2.

In 2017, marking Jethro Tull’s 50th anniversary, Prog asked former members Mick Abrahams, Clive Bunker, Jeffrey Hammond, Peter John Vettese and Tony Iommi about their memories of being in Ian Anderson”s band.

Mick Abrahams (guitar, 1967-1968)

Best thing about being in Tull?

They used to let me sit in the front of the van when we were on the road.

Funniest moment?

Walking around Woolworth’s one day with Ian. We were both trying lampshades on our heads. Ian looked beautiful and I didn’t. An assistant came up to me and said, ‘Are you mad?’ So I replied, ‘He is, but I’m not. Now get us a mirror so we can see which lampshade looks best as a hat.’ And she got us a mirror!”

Favourite Tull album you played on?

This Was.

Clive Bunker (drums, 1967-1971)

Funniest moment?

Our set in America got longer and longer, and Ian’s flute solo would also get increasingly stretched out. Our tour manager, Eric Brooks, would bring out a card table and two chairs, and set it up behind Ian when he went into his solo. Martin Barre and I would sit down and play cards. Eric then came up with a pot of tea for us.

All this was going on while Ian played, and he had no clue what was happening. This went on for a couple of gigs, with Ian puzzled as to why the audience was laughing as he played. Then one night he turned round and saw us. But fortunately he thought it was hilarious!

Favourite Tull album you didn’t play on?

Roots To Branches.

Jeffrey Hammond (bass, 1971-1975)

Best thing about being in Tull?

Having the good fortune and privilege to play a small part in their journey. But unquestionably the camaraderie between us at that time was what I value the most.

Worst thing about being in Tull?

Having to share a bed one night with John Evan in an overbooked hotel in Vienna!

Favourite Tull album you played on?

Thick As A Brick.

Peter-John Vettese (keyboards, 1982-1989)

Best thing about being in Tull?

It has to be dealing with Ian Anderson. From the time I joined the band, we had a gentleman’s agreement that he would ensure I always got publishing royalties for anything I had contributed to Tull songs. He told me this even before I knew what publishing was. And to this day he has kept his word. His influence on me, and his kindness, has probably been more than I deserve. His moral and ethical compass is unquestioned.

Favourite Tull album you played on?

That’ll be The Broadsword And The Beast, which is a good transitional album from where the band were to where we wanted to go.

Tony Iommi (guitar, 1968)

Best thing about being in Tull?

Ian had great discipline, and was very professional in how he went about things. He put me on the right road and when I went back to Brum, I made sure Black Sabbath became a lot more organised in everything we did.

Favourite Tull album?

This Was. It made me think about wanting to join the band.

Judas Priest bassist Ian Hill has opened up on his decision to step away from the band. Hill had announced his retirement from the heavy metal legends last week, due to an ongoing battle with arthritis that forced the band to play without him for the first time in their 56-year history last month in London.

In a new interview with Ukrainian YouTuber Metal Pilgrim, apparently conducted the day after the announcement of Hill's retirement, the bassist discusses the difficulties he's faced.

"The last couple of tours have been a bit of a struggle," Hill admits. "This trouble with basically my shoulder and my thumb, a great big lump on my thumb which is all arthritis. I've been struggling with that for the past couple of tours or so, you know. And it doesn't go away, unfortunately, and it's one of those things that just gets worse as time goes by. I almost retired at the end of the last tour."

He goes on to explain how Priest's tour plans for 2026 came about, starting with an eventually scrapped plan to tour with Iron Maiden in America which eventually turned into festival appearances at Bloodstock and Wacken and a string of tour dates across Europe. Hill played his final gig with the band in Belgium, on September 18, though does confirm in the interview that he had been planning to retire regardless after the tour finale at Hammersmith.

"We did six shows in eight days," Hill says of his final tour. "That was running up to Brussels, so that's when the tendon snapped. Because we were averaging maybe a day on, a day off, day on, day off, so the crew could get to the next gig and what have you. And, of course, it was recovering on the days off. Obviously, I wasn't doing anything, so it recovered.

"And then, of course, you go on stage and you aggravate it all over again. But then it was sort of, like I say, six shows in eight days, and I'd never had time to recover. And right before the encores on the Brussels show, I just felt a snap and a real sharp, searing pain, and I thought, 'That's it. That's the end of it.' For the encores, I had to actually get my elbow and rest it on my stomach and pull the bass back so I could get down to the bottom of the neck."

"It's easing off a lot now," he shares. "I can sort of lift it and do things that I couldn't do immediately after that. I mean, I couldn't move it at all. From the elbow down, everything was fine. It worked a treat, but I just could not move my shoulder. And that's why I had to miss the London show. I physically could not play the bass.'"

Although Hill has officially retired from the band - with Uriah Heep bassist Dave Rimmer confirmed to be replacing him - he confirmed that he had already recorded his parts for Judas Priest's forthcoming 20th studio album, something he reiterates in the new interview.

Although a band named 'Judas Priest' formed in Birmingham in 1969 featuring original vocalist Al Atkins, the band never recorded material and had disbanded by 1970. Priest as the world knows them came together in late 1970 out of a group originally called "Freight" who changed their name when Atkins joined. Hill has played on every Judas Priest album over the last 56 years. Although he has retired, he hasn't ruled out occasional appearances with the group.

"I'm not gonna be a stranger," he tells Metal Pilgrim. "Every now and again, I'll show up and just go stand on the sound desk and really see what it sounds like. I'll probably be knocked out, because everything's happening behind you. You can't see a thing. You're concentrating what you're playing and the audience, and then every now and then you turn around and see what's going on."

Judas Priest have already announced a string of festival appearances for summer 2027. For the full list of upcoming dates, visit their official website. Watch the full Metal Pilgrim interview with Ian Hill below.

America's Got Talent 2026 winner Nene Royal fullfiled one of her dreams last night, October 13, when she appeared onstage in Singapore with her favourite band, Avenged Sevenfold.

Royal, the 16-year-old Thai star who won the world's best known talent contest after dazzling judges and TV viewers with fiery covers of The White Stripes Seven Nation Army and Linkin Park's. The Emptiness Machine, was a late addition to the support bill for Avenged Sevenfold's show at the Singapore Indoor Stadium, and entertained the crowd with her covers of Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun, Muse's Hysteria, and Rage Against The Machine's Killing In The Name, among others.

Royal was then invited to join A7X onstage to guest on Bat Country and Unholy Confessions.

When Royal spoke to Metal Hammer last month, she admitted that she was both excited and scared at the prospect of playing with her heroes at the 12,000-capacity venue.

Explaining how she landed the gig, the vocalist/guitarist from Phuket said, "The managers in Singapore text me: ‘Oh, I hear you wanna play with Avenged Sevenfold?’ I was like, Yeah! They said, ‘Well, Avenged Sevenfold want you to support them.’ They asked me, ‘Do you wanna do it?’, and I was like, Yeah! Dreams come true. Incredible."

Watch the teenage sensation guest with her favourite band below.

US TV talent shows have thrown up a number of artists who have gone on to enjoy successful careers, including Kelly Clarkson, who triumphed on the very first season of American Idol, metal-loving country star Carrie Underwood, who won the show in 2005, Adam Lambert (runner up in the eighth season of American Idol in 2009), and Daughtry (fronted by Chris Daughtry, a finalist on American Idol in 2006).

Eric Clapton has announced four 2027 shows at his traditional second home, London's Royal Albert Hall. The guitarist will play the 5000-capacity venue on May 20, 21, 23 and 24, preceded by a one-off date at Birmingham's BP Pulse Live on May 17.

A fan club presale will begin tomorrow (October 15), followed by the general sale on Friday via Bookings Direct.

Clapton continues to make history at the Royal Albert Hall, where he first performed as a member of The Yardbirds in December 1964. His next shows at the venue were Cream's famous "Farewell" dates in 1968, and the band returned to the same stage for their reunion in 2005.

It's as a solo artist that Clapton has made his biggest impression on the venue, and our ropey arithmetic tells us that Clapton's final night at the Hall next year will be his 220th. This run includes numerous residencies, including the run of shows in 1990 and 1991 that resulted in the 24 Nights box set.

"It’s a very comfortable, homey place for me," Clapton told the BBC in 1990. "I tend to think of it as mine. It’s got a very genteel, sophisticated and yet comfortable atmosphere."

Last month, Clapton curated his Crossroads Guitar Festival at the Moody Center in Austin, Texas, appearing alongside the likes of Joe Bonamassa, Gary Clark Jr., Billy Gibbons, Buddy Guy, Taj Mahal, John Mayer, the Tedeschi Tracks Band and many more. Footage of the shows is available to watch online for a limited time.

Eric Clapton: 2027 live dates

May 17: Birmingham BP Pulse Live
May 20: London Royal Albert Hall
May 21: London Royal Albert Hall
May 23: London Royal Albert Hall
May 23: London Royal Albert Hall

Find Eric Clapton tickets.

In 2009 Genesis re-released their live back catalogue in a box set. To mark the occasion Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks told Prog about their onstage highs and lows.

Genesis have returned to the public eye as they release their new box set, entitled Live 1973-2007. It comprises their recorded live output, lovingly remastered and re-presented in 5.1 surround sound. It’s for good reason.

“Throughout our career we were mainly a touring band,” says Mike Rutherford. “We had hit singles towards the end and radio presence, but really I would say our career was based on our live performances. Live audiences, rather than record sales or how we’re doing in the charts, have always been our strength.”

It’s clear the band enjoyed hitting the road again with their reunion tour in 2007. “We just thought, let’s enjoy ourselves – which wasn’t very hard,” says Rutherford. Although it was somewhat more taxing for Tony Banks, who took a lead in role in overseeing the rehearsals and musical direction.

“The whole operation took about a year,” says the keyboardist. “With rehearsing, it took a long time to get back into the swing of playing some of that material, especially the earlier and more complex stuff. But a lot of it was also about the instruments – the sounds I was using from the early 90s, we weren’t really using any more. So that tour posed the question: how do you use modern instruments to recreate the old sounds? That was quite fun – the new instruments are really good.”

Of course, it wasn’t always that way. They had to start somewhere, and the pair remember their first gig. “Not counting a friend’s party, it was at Brunel University in London,” says Rutherford. “We’d been rehearsing in a cottage in a circle, so when we got the venue we were like, ‘How do we set up?’ It hadn’t occurred to us!”

That wasn’t the only problem. “We got onstage and had no idea how to structure a set,” says Banks. “But we did a few songs and an encore and the crowd seemed to like it. It was fun, even though we didn’t know what to do at all. It was very nerve-racking at the time.”

“It was all our own stuff, though,” adds Rutherford. “Songs like Going Out To Get You, which was never recorded [although it has been bootlegged]. I remember the night – but I can’t remember the rest of the set!”

Rutherford does recall his favourite venue – the setting for Live At The Rainbow, 1973, one of the most sought-after elements of the box set. “The Rainbow Theatre in London was a great venue; and it came at the start of two tours. 1973 was the first time we had a big production, and the second, in 1978, was our first gig as a three-piece with Phil up front and Chester Thompson drumming.

“We really had that special moment then. We were being challenged without Peter, and it’s amazing what change does. It brings energy, sometimes. Obviously we didn’t want Peter to leave – but when he did the band rallied round and found a new strength.”

Banks agrees about the 1973 Rainbow gig. “There was a very visual element to the show. It was all coming together and it took us to another level, I think.” Probably that was something to do with Gabriel’s increasingly self-confident, if eccentric, stage presence and between-song banter.

But as we all know, it wasn’t to last. Fans may feel that Genesis lost something on record after Gabriel’s departure, but Rutherford and Banks are united in naming their favourite live era – and it was long after their original frontman had gone.

“I can’t think of anything bad about Invisible Touch,” says Rutherford. “It was one of those enjoyable year-long tours. My family came out to Australia, and there’s something nice about touring the States in the summer. I suppose it applied to our entire live career, but if I felt rough, got a cold or wasn’t well, I rose to the occasion at the gig and felt great afterwards. It’s the reason for being there. I enjoyed the camaraderie too. We had a lot of laughs, always.”

“Domino has always been an exciting song to play live,” Banks adds. “It’s not one of the things you hear on the radio. It’s kind of a live classic and lends itself to a lot of visual interpretation. We’ve always done a big number on that with screens and lights. It always tends to come near the end of the show when everyone’s gathered momentum, so you can relax a little bit. The complicated stuff like Afterglow and In The Cage is out of the way.

“Although it’s quite exciting playing the complex stuff, there have always been lots of keyboard bits that were tough to play. It was exciting to get through it all, but sometimes you don’t know whether you’re going to get through it. We’re a live group – the only tapes we use are rhythm machines. Everything else is played live.I think it’s fun to see people actually doing the job.”

It was a long slog to reach the scale of Invisible Touch style tours, especially in the face of the punk scene in the late 70s. But some countries were always good to Genesis. “In the early days Italy was the only country that liked us!” says Banks. “Germany has been very strong for us and the States always make a lot of noise. One of my own favourites was the Montreal Forum, where the noise was so loud you couldn’t hear yourself playing.

“We played a lot of stadiums over the years, but we also played the Marquee, Montreux jazz clubs… that’s when you have to get things right and be spot on – and to get it right is really nice.”

Naturally, it didn’t always go to plan: “My worst gig was at Drury Lane in 1974,” Banks continues. “We were doing five nights or something like that, and I needed a grand piano but I only had an electric piano on stage. It didn’t have as many octaves on it, so I had to adapt. One night it was going along quite well – I’m thinking, ‘I’m quite enjoying this’ – but I forgot to drop the octave, so my hand was off the keyboard and I had no sound at all!

“I thought, ‘Shit!’ and ground to a halt, threw my hands in the hair, and everyone looked at me. But Phil counted ‘three… four.…’ and we went into the song proper. My father was in the audience and had earplugs in; he thought I was taking a bow and was very proud!”

Even now, Banks struggles to describe what makes the perfect gig; you sense that the perfectionist in him makes him feel that he he’s never experienced such a moment. “Often the combination of playing well onstage and getting a reaction from the crowd don’t come together,” he says. “You’ve got to appreciate that when an audience comes to see a show, they’re probably already converted – they know quite a bit of the music, want to see the group, and want to have a good time. If there are a few gaps in the performance, they can probably fill those in.”

These days, downloads and CD sales generare very little income for musicians, while live gigs can rake in a fortune. “Gigs weren’t a way to make money, not for us,” says Rutherford. “We tended to do big, hopefully incredibly interesting stage productions, which cost a lot of money. When we did a tour we simply couldn’t get the figures wrong.

“But ticket prices were nothing, really, whereas nowadays they’re huge. I like the genuine reaction from an audience, when between the band and the crowd there’s a real contact. It’s really not about cash.”

Banks agrees: “Live shows were a promotional tool in the earlier days. We were losing money on tour. When the live shows got massive they did make a profit – although we lost money on the Calling All Stations tour in 1997. We were prudent on the road from the start but it still took at least 10 years to break even. The records were what financed the whole operation; they brought in the money.

“With our last tour our brief to the manager was that we wanted to do it and we wanted to make a bit of money. Originally we didn’t think we were going to do big shows at all – we thought we’d play Earls Court size places.”

Genesis almost certainly don’t need the money, but it’s understandable they didn’t want to tarnish their legacy. The 5.1 box set is a series of snapshots that capture a live band at work. “I think if you have the right set-up, surround sound certainly helps recreate the live ambience,” Banks says. “In the studio you can be a little more gimmicky, move the vocals around, whereas live you tend to keep things a little straighter. But 5.1 becomes a more natural way of hearing it.”

That said, Banks agrees that no amount of technology can make up for actually being there. “I think the albums are the only legacy you have. With the live concerts, nothing can capture the performance. Anyone who’s seen us at any gig will have their own opinion about that. Although it was exciting on stage, I was always into the actual composition, which is best represented on the studio albums.”

Six decades into a long, loud, louche career as a legendary rock’n’roll playboy, Roger Taylor is in wistfully nostalgic mood. Speaking to Classic Rock from his holiday retreat in sunny France, the 77-year-old drummer, singer, songwriter and one-man band admits he’s had a lazy morning so far, playing Scrabble on his computer. This brings back bittersweet memories of his classic Queen days, when he and Freddie Mercury would engage in epic Scrabble battles during downtime in the studio.

“Fred was very good at it, actually,” Taylor muses. “I always liked a bit of Scrabble. It’s not about words, it’s about points.” Quite so. Like most things in life.

Scrabble addiction aside, Taylor once claimed he and Mercury were the “naughty ones” in Queen, sharing a flat and a rowdy party lifestyle in the band’s early days. Does he miss their sex, drugs and rock’n’roll antics today? “Yeah, I do, really,” he sighs. “Because I couldn’t really get up to it all now. Too old. I think it would kill me.”

And yet, against all odds, Queen have kept themselves very much alive since Mercury’s death in 1991, carving out a phenomenally successful new career phase. They are currently in semidormant mode but, as Taylor will later reveal, they have multiple projects on the horizon.

Meanwhile, the band’s most prolific member has been writing and recording his seventh solo album, Violence Insane In A Beautiful World, the follow-up to his warmly received 2021 album Outsiders. By turns sunny and sombre, and shot through with world-weary wisdom, this is one of Taylor’s most musically and emotionally mature non-Queen collections to date. Indeed, it may well be his best so far.

Bookending the album with two different versions, the key track Beautiful World moves from joy to horror as it zooms in on a human race facing possible annihilation through war, political division and ecological disaster.

“It is basically from the viewpoint of somebody outside the Earth looking at it and thinking it’s a great place,” Taylor explains, “then on closer inspection they find rather a lot of bad stuff going on. We seem to be on some course of destruction, or self-destruction.”

Taylor seems oddly cheerful for a man who believes a genuine apocalypse is lurking just around the corner. “There have been, I think, four extinction-level events before,” he says solemnly.

So humankind is heading for another one?

“I think it’s inevitable, don’t you?”

All the same, there is a cautiously hopeful message running through the song’s cheeky lyrical refrain: ‘Don’t fuck it up’. This is not just Taylor’s self-help advice to his fellow humans, but also a smart slogan to live by generally.

“Yeah, don’t fuck it up,” he says, laughing. “Exactly. I mean, you’re gonna fuck up some things, but, yeah, it is a good general watchword.”

How many times has Taylor himself come close to fucking up?

“Well, we all make mistakes, don’t we?” he says. “But I have five children and they’re basically lovely… when they behave. So yeah, I think of myself as a very lucky person.”

Taylor’s inspired choice of musical guest on three key tracks on his new album is South Africa’s Ndlovu Youth Choir. The group earned global fame on TV talent shows, but Taylor discovered them last year via their glorious Zulu-language reworking of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, which they describe as “what the song might have sounded like if Freddie Mercury’s musical journey had never left Africa, the continent of his birth”. Officially endorsed by Queen, this mighty translation even has an accompanying flamboyant video that pays sly homage to the band’s iconic 1976 original.

“They are fantastic,” Taylor gushes. “They just totally blew me away when I saw their video for Bohemian Rhapsody. A lot of it is in Zulu, and their own unique take on that song, which has been done so much. I thought it was fabulous. Even the costumes were fantastic. And boy, do they sing beautifully.”

Classic Rock suggests that Taylor should enlist the Ndlovu Youth Choir to record more Zulu-language versions of Queen songs, starting with the obvious choice: his I’m In Love With My Car. For a brief moment he appears to take this ludicrous proposition seriously. “No, I couldn’t see that,” he says, frowning. “That’s entirely from a rock’n’roll perspective.”

Chump, another track on the album, is a thinly veiled attack on the USA’s current president. A thematic sequel to Gangsters Are Running This World on Outsiders, withering rant Chump grew partly out of Queen’s decade-long series of legal battles with Donald Trump’s team over his unauthorised use of the band’s We Are The Champions and We Will Rock You in campaign rallies and videos.

Taylor admits he has never been a party-political animal, and can not imagine endorsing any candidate.

“No, I instinctively don’t trust any politicians," he explains. “The ones I’ve come across usually seem to be incredibly self-obsessed. Like anybody else, their naked ambition seems to shine through. Obviously there are some good ones, I just can’t think of any right now.”

Taylor’s solo albums have always included bolder political statements than Queen, who reportedly made a group pact never to let politics colour their music.

“That’s absolutely true,” Taylor says. “When you’re in a band, there are four characters, all with slightly different opinions. So we never really wanted to be overtly political at all. We looked upon ourselves as entertainers, hopefully bringing a modicum of joy and entertainment into people’s lives. We didn’t want to lecture them too much.”

Alongside all this apocalyptic angst and scathing social commentary, Violence Insane In A Beautiful World also contains some of Taylor’s most tender, personal songs to date. What Really Matters is a heart-tugging paean to the importance of kindness, I See You Now an achingly sweet long-term love letter to his wife Sarina. It seems this grizzled rock’n’roll playboy is a soppy old romantic at heart. “Sometimes,” he says with a chuckle. “Sometimes, yeah.”

The album’s sole cover version is a raw, stripped-down version of John Lennon’s Jealous Guy, which Taylor first performed on Later With Jools Holland in 2024.

“I never met John, to my great regret,” Taylor says. “But I’ve always loved that song. I found it so delicately moving, so open-hearted. He was wonderful. I was a huge fan of John Lennon, everything about him, just his voice and his bravery and his brilliant musical ability. I kept it as simple as I possibly could, just a piano.”

Taylor’s last solo album, Outsiders, was a top-three hit in Britain, his highest ever placing for a non-Queen release. All the same, he feels his day job with one of rock’s biggest-selling bands of all time has mostly been more a burden than blessing when it comes to side projects.

“It certainly doesn’t help being in a big band,” he argues. “People automatically think: ‘Oh, he’s the drummer in that band, what’s he doing by himself?’ So I don’t think it helps at all. I mean, look at the Stones. Their solo efforts really haven’t done a lot. They need that magical ingredient of the band to be taken seriously. I don’t think being in Queen has ever helped my solo efforts. If anything it might have even been a negative factor.”

Almost 60 years ago, Roger Taylor faced a life-changing decision. The future Queen drummer found himself at a career-defining crossroads. In 1967 he left the family home in Cornwall to study dentistry in London. Before long he would switch courses, meet Brian May, and help launch a planet-conquering pomp-rock supergroup. But with the full benefit of hindsight, the key question is: did he make the right choice? His contribution to the pantheon of rock is assured, of course. But he is also, let’s be frank, a sad loss to dentistry. Where did it all go wrong, Roger?

“No, no!” He replies, laughing. “It’s dentistry’s gain that I never became one! What a horrible job. You’re battling decay. I never wanted to be a dentist, somebody just told me they made a lot of money. I really wanted to get to London to join a band, or to make a band. That was all I wanted to do.”

Six decades and nine lifetimes later, amazingly, Queen are not only still going but are thriving. In their heyday they sold 300 million albums, conquered stadiums across the globe, played a legendary set at Live Aid, and weathered multiple changes in fickle pop fashion, including the punk wars of the late 70s, which failed resoundingly in their threat to replace the older generation of glam-rock dinosaurs.

Indeed, as it happens, Taylor was a Sex Pistols fan. “I really loved the Pistols album,” he says. “Great producer, mate of mine, Chris Thomas. Because we were in the same studio for a while in 1976-77, somewhere around there. They were doing their first album, and it was dreadful at first until Chris came in and made a great record.”

During this shared studio time, Taylor witnessed the infamous exchange between Sid Vicious and Freddie Mercury which has passed into rock folklore: “Sid put his head in the studio and said: ‘Hello, Freddie, are we bringing ballet to the masses?’ And Freddie said something like: ‘Oh, Mister Ferocious, we’re doing our best here...’”

Taylor actually has positive memories of the young John Lydon: “John was alright, actually. He was quite a character. We got on quite well. It’s just that Sid Vicious was such a dick.”

Fast forward another 15 years, and Queen somehow survived their biggest blow yet, the death of Freddie Mercury, a tragic rupture which would have finished off most bands. That was followed soon after by the departure of bass player John Deacon, who was devastated by Mercury’s loss, and felt the remaining trio could not continue without their flamboyant frontman.

Taylor insists there was never a personal falling out with Deacon, but admits they no longer communicate. “John is a real recluse,” he says. “I think he speaks to our lawyers and our accountant and that’s it. I really don’t know what John is doing now. He’s probably sitting in a room somewhere, counting his money.”

Speaking of money, the last decade has proved staggeringly lucrative for Queen. Their careerspanning film Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) became the most successful music biopic of all time, raking in more than £600 million. Indeed, it was beaten only this year, by the billion-dollar Michael Jackson blockbuster Michael. Both films were produced by Graham King, who sent Taylor a sympathy message when their box-office record was toppled.

When Taylor spoke to Classic Rock in 2021, he was scathing about Sacha Baron Cohen, who was initially cast as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, but later replaced by Rami Malek. The Queen drummer dismissed the Ali G comedian as too tall, too pushy and a bad actor who would have been “shit” in the role. People mellow over time, of course, so it’s refreshing to hear that Taylor’s opinion of Cohen remains bracingly sour.

“Yeah, I stand by that,” he says. “I didn’t want a subversive comedian playing my best friend Freddie. He really wanted it to be dark, and pretty scuzzy. We wanted to make great entertainment; that was all it was. But it worked out great. I’m thrilled with the success of the film.”

In the time since the drummer’s last solo album was released, Queen have also concluded their Rhapsody tour with Adam Lambert, a five-year global extravaganza which finally ended in February 2024. Taylor claims Lambert is “on a slightly different path” than Queen these days, so is their partnership over?

“I wouldn’t close the door, no,” he says. “We were with him for ten years, out touring with Adam. It was very, very successful and very satisfying. I really enjoyed working with him. He’s a very unselfish performer, and boy can he sing. He’s got the most amazing natural gift. And he never tried to be Freddie.”

Taylor and May even tried recording new Queen material with Lambert, but he admits that has now been shelved. “We never really finished anything with Adam, which is to my regret, because I am a huge admirer of his voice. I think we could have done good stuff, but he’s doing lots of other things, and it didn’t really work out in the end.”

Last year, in yet another record-breaking mega-deal, Queen sold their back catalogue rights to Sony for a reported £1 billion. The terms exclude live performance and certain territories, but May and Taylor are now essentially signed to the Sony/Columbia label.

“We’re very happy to be there,” Taylor says. "We actually knew ‘Mister Sony’ in the old days, Akio Morita. He used to come along with his family to our shows in Tokyo, so it’s a sort of a final coming round again in a way. And so far we’ve found them very charming people to get on with.”

If that widely reported billion-pound figure is even close to accurate, it dwarfs recent catalogue sales by Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Neil Young and Michael Jackson. Taylor says the Sony deal “might be the best idea I ever had”, but he is coy about sharing the exact price tag. “No I don’t wanna tell you the number,” he says, grinning. “I don’t want to embarrass any other acts.”

On a more personal note, Taylor speaks fondly of old friends and musical comrades who have passed away in recent years, including Jeff Beck and Taylor Hawkins. On picking up his OBE in 2022, he dedicated the award to the Foo Fighters drummer. Hawkins was not just a friend, but also godfather to Taylor’s son Rufus, who currently plays drums in The Darkness. “We loved one another,” he says of Hawkins. “I love the Foos, actually. Not quite the same without Taylor.”

This autumn, Taylor completed a modestly scaled UK tour around Violence Insane In A Beautiful World. But Queen also have some fresh schemes brewing, starting this month with a digitally restored cinema and DVD release of their classic 1986 concert film Hungarian Rhapsody: Live In Budapest, one of Freddie Mercury’s final live performances.

Teasingly, Taylor hints that he and May have been in the studio touching up some old recordings, and are also planning some kind of live performance, but he is vague on details. Unconfirmed rumours have already begun circulating about a run of Queen shows at the hi-tech Sphere in Las Vegas, which would see them following in the footsteps of U2, Eagles and Metallica.

Taylor remains tight-lipped, claiming the final plans are still unclear, but something typically grandiose and Queen-sized is clearly in the works.

“Oh yeah, most certainly,” he says. “We’ve got some ideas for some kind of spectacular shows. It’s very difficult, there’s so much computing power needed these days and programming stuff. But Brian and I talk about it quite a lot. So yeah, it probably won’t be the last the world hears of us.”

Queen are rock’s great survivors. Brian May is playing guitar again following heart surgery and a stroke, and Taylor is still writing and recording despite creeping arthritis in his hands. Both he and May are now in their late seventies and could easily be enjoying a luxurious retirement by now, playing endless games of Scrabble inside their own gold-plated pyramid. And yet both are still working, still making new music, still touring. Slowing down, maybe, but not stopping.

“Brian will say the same thing,” Taylor says. “We do it because we love it, and really, this is what we do. Also the idea of retirement is horrific. I’m just gonna sit here and not do much and rot away till I die? No thanks. I find when you’re working, you get fired up, it gives you a reason to get up, you know? Although I got up pretty late today. I don’t do it very quickly these days. It takes a while for an album to assimilate itself. But yeah, I’m very pleased to still be doing it.”

Violence Insane In A Beautiful World is out now via Columbia. Read more about Queen in Classic Rock's latest issue, out now

Steve Hackett has announced a North American tour. The former Genesis man, who completed a short run of Best Of Genesis & Solo Gems dates in Florida earlier this year before embarking on the annual Cruise to the Edge, resumed the tour in the UK earlier this month.

The new run of dates will kick off on April 10 at the Centre Stage Theater in Atlanta, GA, and finish on May 6 at the Palais Montcalm in Québec, QC. Ticket presales begin today (October 14), with the general sale kicking off on Friday. Full dates below.

"I'll be bringing this thrilling new show out in 2027 to celebrate the very best of Genesis, including the biggest fan favourites, as well as solo classics," says Hackett. "To kick off, we'll hit the East Coast to the Midwest in April. Get your tickets early... it will be a blast!"

Hackett, who will also perform on Cruise To The Edge in 2027 alongside Kansas, Asia, Big Big Train and others, will rerelease his 2012 album Genesis Revisited II on vinyl next month.

The album, which features contributions from John Wetton, Neal Morse, Steven Wilson, Jakko Jakszyk, Nic Kershaw, Mikael Åkerfeldt and others, includes versions of many Genesis classics, including Supper’s Ready, The Musical Box and The Return of the Giant Hogweed. It's available to pre-order now.

Steve Hackett: Best Of Genesis & Solo Gems tour

Oct 14: Birmingham Symphony Hall
Oct 16: Nottingham Royal Concert Hall
Oct 18: Glasgow Royal Concert Hall
Oct 20: Manchester Bridgewater Hall
Oct 21: Gateshead Glasshouse
Oct 23: York Barbican
Oct 24: Liverpool Philharmonic
Oct 26: London Royal Albert Hall

Nov 12: Turin Teatro Colosseo, Italy
Nov 13: Legnano Cinema Teatro Galleria, Italy
Nov 14: Bassano del Grappa Palabassano, Italy
Nov 16: Florence Teatro Cartiere Carrara, Italy
Nov 17: Rome Teatro Brancaccio, Italy

Feb 05: Fletching Trading Boundaries, UK
Feb 06: Fletching Trading Boundaries, UK
Feb 07: Fletching Trading Boundaries, UK

Apr 10: Atlanta Center Stage Theater, GA
Apr 13: Washington Warner Theatre, DC
Apr 15: Collingswood Scottish Rite Auditorium, NJ
Apr 16: Collingswood Scottish Rite Auditorium, NJ
Apr 17: Lansdowne Theater, PA
Apr 19: Ridgefield Playhouse, CT
Apr 20: Ridgefield Playhouse, CT
Apr 21: New York The Town Hall, NY
Apr 23: Albany The Egg, Hart Theatre, NY
Apr 24: Boston Berklee Performance Center, MA
Apr 27: Akron Goodyear Theater, OH
Apr 28: Buffalo UB Center for the Arts, NY
Apr 29: Ithaca State Theatre of Ithaca, NY
May 01: Toronto Massey Hall, ON
May 02: Ottawa Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Ottawa, ON
May 04: Montréal Théâtre St-Denis, QC
May 06: Québec Palais Montcalm, QC

Find Steve Hackett tickets.

Led Zeppelin might be famously reluctant to licence their music to Hollywood, but Jimmy Page has made an exception for the new Narnia movie, and it's a biggie: Stairway To Heaven.

The 1971 classic, which originally appeared on the band's fourth album, has found a new home as the heavily remixed soundtrack to the trailer for Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, the Netflix adaptation of the first story in C.S. Lewis's Chronicles Of Narnia series, which hits the big screen in February.

Typically, a modern Hollywood trailer makes music sound galactic in scale, and this is no exception, with Robert Plant's vocals isolated and drenched in reverb, and Jimmy Page's iconic solo clattering in with more force than ever before.

"I had the privilege of meeting [film director] Greta Gerwig, a powerhouse in the world of cinema," says Page. "She is a switched-on creative, as seen by way of Little Women, Lady Bird and Barbie, and the soon-to-be-released Narnia movie.

"I am thrilled that she chose Stairway To Heaven in the trailer for her film."

According to a report in Variety, Gerwig wrote to Page and Plant to seek permission to use Stairway To Heaven in the movie, and showed them an early cut.

"It’s an epic song, and narratively, about a spiritual journey, a path of fake idols and wrong roads you can go down. It made sense to introduce the world," says Gerwig. "I was so moved that they allowed me to use this song. They saw the heart and story of the film."

Previously, requests to use Stairway To Heaven on Wayne's World and Almost Famous were turned down by Led Zeppelin.

Meanwhile, recent movies to have benefitted from the band's more relaxed attitude towards licensing include Argo (2012) and The Big Short (2015), which both used When The Levee Breaks, Thor: Ragnarok (Immigrant Song, 2017) and The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth (Black Dog, 2026).

Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker has admitted that he was shocked when his wife Kourtney Kardashian first suggested that they get together romantically having been friends for over a decade.

The pair began dating in 2021 and got married in 2022, holding ceremonies in California and in Italy. The punk rock star and the socialite were introduced by Kardashian's younger sister Kim - who Barker described as "fucking hot" when they first met in 2006 - and were friends for years before Kourtney suggested in a text that perhaps they should become more than just friends.

"I was like, what?" Barker admits in a new interview with The Times newspaper. "I had to look at my phone four times. I thought, there’s no way! I’d left any thoughts of us ever being anything more."

Asked what exactly the text said, Barker recalls, "I had offered a mutual guy friend some dating advice. I was like, just have fun hooking up with girls. Think of it like a sport. Don’t try to get emotionally invested with everyone. Try to find your bearings.

"And then Kourtney texted something like, ‘Why don’t you teach me how to find my bearings?’ I’m like, oh my gosh. And I was scared because I thought, I can’t mess this up, I can’t mess this up."

"When we first met," he reflects, "I was obviously tattooed from head to toe and in a band. I think that’s why I felt so comfortable being Kourtney’s friend because we were such opposites. I was like, oh, I can think she’s cute or attractive or a great mom [Kardashian has three children with her husband of nine years Scott Disick, the pair divorcing in 2015] because we’re so different."

"I looked like I would be different than I am. But she saw the person inside and slowly we became really good friends."

Following their marriage, Barker and Kardashian appeared together the reality show 'Til Death Do Us Part Kourtney & Travis.

Barker's own documentary, Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear premiered on Disney+ earlier this year.

Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan has shot down the idea of ever retiring, even after suffering a hip injury on tour this summer and undergoing surgery.

Talking exclusively to Metal Hammer, the American prog metal singer, 62, says that he wants to follow in the footsteps of veteran the Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, who’s stated in interviews that he never wants to hang up his instrument.

“I’m with the Stones on that one,” Keenan tells us. “On tour with [alt-rock supergroup] A Perfect Circle this last summer, we’d do our walk, find a coffee shop and do two miles there, two miles back or whatever. I woke up one morning and my hip decided not to work. I could not walk, like, ‘What the fuck?’ Ice wasn’t working, heat, nothing.”

Keenan adds that he “had to basically limp through the rest of the tour, then get on the phone to my doctors back here [in the US], because by Christmas I’ll have been in 18 different countries with three different bands, having played 28 shows”.

Keenan had his hip replaced in August. It was the second time he’d had the procedure, his first hip replacement having been in June 2015. The singer admits that “if I can’t get this hip sorted, I don’t know what will happen”, but promisingly adds, “It should be healed in time to do those shows by Christmas.”

He continues: “[Live performance is] my world – not doing those shows is not an option. Retirement is not a fucking option. Work the problem, figure out what you’ve gotta do and get back to work.”

Keenan first revealed that he injured his hip in an Instagram post in August, where he shared a picture of himself in hospital after surgery. He wrote that “out of nowhere” his left hip “just decided to not work”. He added that cancelling upcoming plans with Tool and A Perfect Circle, plus his avant-rock project Puscifer, was out of the question: “People have purchased tickets and booked travel and lodging, most of which is probably non-refundable.”

Keenan returned to the stage just 25 days after his surgery, playing Riot Fest in Chicago with Tool on September 19. He performed with a cane and, due to adverse weather conditions, the set started and ended early.

Keenan will return to the road with Puscifer later this month, kicking off a European tour at Annexet in Stockholm, Sweden on October 25. The singer will then do double duty on a Central and South American tour, fronting Puscifer and A Perfect Circle for separate sets at each stop. The tour kicks off on November 25 at Estadio Fray Nano in Mexico City.

Meanwhile, according to drummer Danny Carey, Tool are working on a new album with a tentative 2027 release date. Carey told the Spiral Out Network in February that the band also hope to perform at Las Vegas multimedia venue The Sphere, following in the footsteps of Metallica, who are currently hosting their own residency there from October to March.

Sharon Osbourne has revealed that doctors warned her, her husband and her family that playing Black Sabbath's Back To The Beginning show could kill Ozzy, but that he insisted he wanted to perform.

The revelation comes in an emotional exclusive interview with Rolling Stone.

Announced in early 2025, Back To The Beginning was put together as Ozzy Osbourne's final bow, following his retirement from touring in 2023 due to Parkinson’s disease and other health issues. The show was held on July 5, 2025, at Villa Park, Brmingham, a short distance from where the singer grew up in Aston, and featured a who's who of heavy metal - including Metallica, Slayer, Guns N' Roses, Mastodon, Tool, Gojira and more - paying their respects to Ozzy and Black Sabbath.

In her interview with Rolling Stone, Sharon Osbourne says that Ozzy was advised not to perform.

"He was in hospital in America before he left," she says. "We moved back to England, and we had a whole new team of doctors. His new doctors didn’t want to take doctor’s notes from America. They wanted to make their own assessment on him. He was in hospital for a week in England.

"After he came out of hospital, they asked for a meeting, and they came to our house. We had six different doctors and, like, a quarterback, because there were all of these specialists for the heart, for Parkinson’s, for his lungs, because of all the different things that were wrong with him.

"They advised us not to do the show," she admits. "They said it would kill him. We were all together and Ozzy said, 'It’s not an option. It’s what I want.' He said, 'I know I’m dying. If I miss a few months of my life, I want to go this way. This is what I want.' It was his wishes and we went through it. He said to me, 'Another six months, what’s it going to do for me?'

"He was very, very emotional," Osbourne admits. "But you know what? It was beautiful too. It was amazing. How lucky was he to go out that way? I say he went out like a Viking."

Read the interview in full at RollingStone.com

A documentary about the gig, Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back To The Beginning, will get a global cinema release on October 28, for a limited time. Sharon Osbourne says that every artist who performed will appear in the film.

“There’s never been anything like that that’s happened in the history of rock and roll,” says Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello, who was musical director of the show and helped pull the bill together. “There’s never been a precedent for a show like this… [Black Sabbath] gets to play their final show basically in the Ground Zero of where they created heavy metal.”

Black Sabbath legend Tony Iommi has admitted that the death of his bandmate Ozzy Osbourne has made him reflect on his own mortality.

In a new interview with The Telegraph, the guitarist is asked whether his friend's death has served to remind him of his own mortality, to which he responds, “Yes, it does. A lot.

"I’ve had a few friends go now," he says, "and you think: Blimey, hang on, I’m 78, how much longer? You do. [Queen guitarist] Brian May and myself have this conversation. He’s more dismal than me. Bloody hell."

In the interview, Iommi also recalls his final conversation with Osbourne, on July 21 last year, the day before the singer died.

“Ozzy said, ‘I’m really tired. I’m absolutely shattered," Iommi recalls. "I said, Well, it’s been a tough few weeks. You’re bound to be."

The guitarist remembers telling his friend to take it easy and get some rest.

"He went, ‘Yeah, I’ll try to do that.’ And that was it. Then I heard the next day that he’d gone. And that was... weird."

"He was a part of my life for 60 years. I do miss him."

Recently, producer Andrew Watt claimed that Iommi, Osbourne and Geezer Butler wanted to make one more album with the group's original line-up in the early 2020s, but that the idea never got off the ground because drummer Bill Ward couldn't commit to the idea. Iommi's recollection of this is somewhat different.

"I’d met Andrew Watt when he was producing Ozzy," Iommi recalled to Classic Rock. “He was very keen and a bit too excited. He also didn’t know what it was like working with the original Sabbath, working with Bill. Also, we’d done 13, and I didn’t like the idea of: ‘Now here's another album'."

Iommi is set to release a solo album, From the Dark on October 23 on BMG. The guitarist has previewed the album with the release of singles World Alone and Stormwatcher.

In 2023, the readers of Total Guitar voted Queen's Brian May the Greatest Rock Guitarist Of All Time. One year earlier, those same readers voted May's solo on Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody the Greatest Guitar Solo Of All Time. Naturally, May was honoured by both accolades, but during an interview with Total Guitar editor Chris Bird, May actually nominated a different Queen solo as his personal favourite: his solo on the band's 1974 single Killer Queen from their classic album Sheer Heart Attack

“Killer Queen has always been a favourite of mine," May told Bird. "It was something a bit more complex, an adventure in putting guitar harmonies into the solo. It was quite a step into the unknown, that solo, and it has a melody that I put in there which doesn’t appear anywhere else in the song, so in a sense they’re quite comparable, that and Bohemian Rhapsody.“

Reflecting upon what characterises a definitive Brian May solo, the guitarist mused "I suppose it’s the ones that become orchestras."

"My dream was to use the guitar as an orchestra instrument, and I was lucky enough to make the dream come true," he explained. "The Killer Queen solo was the first time I really managed to get the harmony thing across, and all those harmonies move about, they’re not just following each other parallel – they all interact like a small jazz band would do... it worked out so nice. I would probably put that forward as the one that perhaps I would want people to remember me by."

Unprompted, in the same interview, May also revealed to Bird his favourite guitar solo of all time.

“It’s [Eric] Clapton, Key To Love, from John Mayall’s Blue Breakers album," he said. "It’s the hottest burning high-passion piece I’ve ever heard in my life – still to this day. I just love it. It totally rips, and I’ll never get over that. That’s one of my great inspirations.

"He burned in that solo! The whole track revolves around that solo. Every time I put it on, I’m just waiting... John Mayall’s great, but you’re waiting for that moment when Eric rips out and suddenly he’s whacking into those top notes. It’s incredible. Absolutely spine-chilling."

In 2021, Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello was instrumental in getting Randy Rhoads into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, eventually inducting the late Ozzy Osbourne guitarist via the Musical Excellence Award.

As part of the celebrations, the Hall of Fame launched an exhibit showcasing items associated with the inductees, including an Ampeg Dan Armstrong guitar used by Dave Grohl, a purple embroidered suit worn by Todd Rundgren, and the red lace dress worn by Tina Turner during the making of the video for her 1984 track, Private Dancer.

Pride of place, however, went to the iconic Flying V-inspired Jackson Concorde guitar designed and played by Rhoads. And now Morello has spoken about his encounter with the historic instrument.

"His sister, who’s lovely, is very protective of all the stuff," Morello tells Classic Rock. "It’s sealed away somewhere in a secret vault, and no one knows where it is. I’d asked her if I could see it, and she said: 'Nobody sees it.' You gotta respect that.

"But then she texts me one day and says: 'Randy’s guitar is on its way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and it’s going to be at my house this afternoon if you’d like to come by and see it.' But I was away on tour, so I couldn’t go.

"Cut to about a year later, and she texts me saying the guitar is at her house that afternoon, on its way back from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and now would I like to go see it? His mom didn’t want anyone else to ever play it again, but I got to hold it.

"That was pretty emotional for me. The crazy thing was that the leather guitar strap still smelled of cigarette smoke. He was performing up until the day he died, so the strap had smoke from 1982 left in it."

The full Tom Morello feature, in which he talks about encounters with Lemmy, Gene Simmons, Vince Vaughan, Jack Black, Joan Baez, Neil Young and others, is available in the new issue of Classic Rock.

You couldn’t buy blues records where we grew up in the suburbs, but me and Pete [Quaife, The Kinks’ original bass player], used to go to the West End, down Berwick Street and around Soho. One day, we came across Dobells, which was really a jazz shop, but they had a blues section we used to forage through and we found some great things in there.

I remember discovering albums by Sleepy John Estes and Sonny Boy Williamson and going home and playing them, that was really exciting. Both became big influences, too.

It wasn’t just the blues guitar that appealed to us though; the blues harp playing also influenced the band. People such as Little Walter were incredible and inspiring. We used to try to play all kinds of blues things and my brother Ray played blues harp as well, so we did some Sonny Boy Williamson stuff and Slim Harpo.

On one of our early B-sides, I Took My Baby Home, Ray plays a harp solo part. We also covered Slim Harpo’s I Got Love If You Want It and it was a real rave-up. My brother-in-law Mike played jazz guitar and he taught me a lot about music. He introduced me to Django Reinhardt and Earl Scruggs. He showed me a film of Big Bill Broonzy in 1956 playing in a club in Paris. There’s a scene where a woman knocks an ashtray off the piano and Broonzy stops playing. That tension and atmosphere was great. I always remember that.

Lazy Lester - I'm A Lover Not A Fighter

I loved everything about that song and still love it today. In a little corner in Dobells record shop, there was a section for compilations. You’d get a track by Lazy Lester and a track by Slim Harpo and we would buy these albums and play the shit out of them. I’m A Lover Not A Fighter was on an album called Authentic R&B and The Kinks covered it on our first album. I played a gig recently at The Magic Bag in Detroit. Lazy Lester played there, too. I told them they’d got to look after him and he turned out to be a big fan of mine, which I didn’t know. It made me feel really emotional when I found that out, because this guy helped me start my own career.

John Lee Hooker - Boom Boom

Boom Boom was the first song we heard by John Lee Hooker. It was a really huge influence. He had a perfect blues groove. It was more than blues, it had a rock feel, it was a bit raggedy and twangy and had something else added to it. John Lee Hooker had a great voice, he looked great, he was great!

Howlin’ Wolf - Smokestack Lightning

This was a really important record for us and it had that great riff. We changed it around a bit when we covered it live. He said it was inspired by watching the trains go by at night and we did a track on The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society called Last Of The Steam Powered Trains, which adapted it.

Davey Graham - Cocaine

I had his album Folk, Blues & Beyond and I played it a lot. Cocaine had that kind of innocent feel and Davey Graham sang in an English accent and that was important. You didn’t hear that much. He was based in English folk but he incorporated blues and Eastern styles and used interesting tunings. I got to know him later and we became good friends.

Chuck Berry - Sweet Little Sixteen

When I saw Chuck Berry play Sweet Little Sixteen in Jazz On A Summer’s Day [documentary of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival] it blew me away. He was fantastic. It was one of those times in your life where you think “I want to do that.” He was playing with old jazz players and they were taking the piss a bit in the background but he knew what he was doing. He was a forerunner of all electric rock’n’roll.

Sleepy John Estes - Milk Cow Blues

Sleepy John’s style was laidback and his records were full of atmosphere. The Kinks’ version of Milk Cow Blues was based on Sleepy John’s but we changed it, we altered the arrangement and put in a rave-up.

Big Bill Broonzy - Black, Brown And White

He played boogie and changed it into a guitar shuffle. Arthur Smith did Guitar Boogie Shuffle but Broonzy was doing it on tracks such as Hey Hey. There was one song me and Ray really liked called Get Back [Black, Brown And White]. It was about guys queuing up for jobs on the waterfront and it goes: ‘If you was white, you’s alright, if you was brown, stick around, but if you’s black, oh brother, get back, get back, get back.’

Ray wrote a song years later called Get Back In Line [on Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround Part One] that was influenced by that Big Bill Broonzy song. Growing up in a working-class family and having uncles who worked on the railways relates to that Rock Island Line environment. Lonnie Donegan brought that influence too.

The YardbIrds – Heart Full Of Soul

When Jeff Beck joined The Yardbirds we became good buddies and drinking mates. To me, Jeff was a much more colourful person [than Eric Clapton] and I always rated his playing. Heart Full Of Soul has a great riff and the guitar is leading the song. Jeff was really ahead of his time with what he was doing on The Yardbirds’ records.

Ricky Nelson - Hello Mary Lou

I really liked Ricky Nelson’s vocals, but I was also drawn to James Burton’s guitar playing – that solo on Hello Mary Lou I still think is one of the best rock’n’roll guitar solos ever. It’s kind of bendy, bluesy and country.

Ricky Nelson was an all-American kid with that sweet voice but I was desperate for the guitar work on his songs, all that great guitar picking. James Burton was great at picking out those solos and melody lines that fitted the song and it made me realise that playing the guitar is as much about what you do and add to a song as it is about just playing. It taught me about how guitar fits with other instruments.

The Ventures - Walk Don’t Run

The Ventures were important because the rhythm guitarist played barre chords which were really handy because you didn’t have to worry about the minors, sixths and sevenths and so on.

We never had much time to record in the early days of The Kinks and, if you listen to Till The End Of The Day, I’ve got a C major mixed up with a D minor but we didn’t have time to fix it. Minors and majors, if they are in the wrong place, clash. On You Really Got Me and a lot of the early stuff when I thought about doing barre chords it freed up my ability to go through lots of different chords and experiment with various structures.

Chet Atkins - Trambone

Chet Atkins had an album called Teensville that I liked and he did a track called Trambone that had a country-based melody that was a big influence. He used the country picking style of playing. It was important to us because the picking and bending of notes was all part of the learning process.

Dave Davies was speaking with Jon Harrington. This feature originally appeared in The Blues #19, published in February 2015.

Shotgun Messiah began as Kingpin before relocating to Hollywood and changing their name. With their flamboyant fusion of melodic rock and sleazy glam they sold almost half a million copies of 1989’s self-titled debut, then imploded two years later. Now, lead singer Zinny J Zan and guitarist Harry Cody are back with a new collaboration and an album, Beautiful ‘N Damned.

Zinny, why did you leave Shotgun Messiah in 1990? And Harry, how did the band break up three years later?

Zinny Zan: It wasn’t my choice to leave. There were differences back then, so I went back to Sweden and Harry and Tim [Sköld, bassist, who became the new frontman] carried on.

Harry Cody: Relativity put out [third album] Violent New Breed and then immediately dropped us. I still consider Violent New Breed as the best Shotgun Messiah album, so we felt completely dispirited.

Violent New Breed had a bold, industrial sound. There are still traces of that in Zan/Cody, but for the most part Beautiful ‘N Damned is a hard rock album.

Cody: It is, and that’s by design. It’s where we’ve made our bread and butter in the past, but also there’s cellos and choirs and all sorts of things all over it.

Frontiers Records often engineer seemingly unlikely reunions. Is this another example of that?

Zan: Not at all. We made the album on the hush-hush before seeking labels to put it out. There were a few that were interested. Frontiers was the best of them all.

When it came to making the album, how did it feel to be in a room together again?

Cody: In fact the entire album was made via the internet from separate parts of the globe. We didn’t actually meet again until I flew over for the Sweden Rock gig [June 2026], our first meeting since 1990.

Were there any issues to iron out?

Cody: Time had ironed out most of the issues. It was like seeing your long-lost brother again. After thirty-five years the spark was still there.

Why didn’t you bring in Tim Sköld and call the project Shotgun Messiah?

Cody: As an entity, Shotgun Messiah still exists. That is myself and Tim. We have most of an album recorded, but that’s on hold because Tim rejoined Marilyn Manson’s band as its bassist. We’ll have to see what happens there.

Do you hear any Shotgun Messiah in much contemporary music?

Cody: There’s a lot of validation. I wouldn’t have guessed it, but at Sweden Rock the guitarist from Clawfinger [Bård Torstensen] said he was a huge fan. I hear it in Hardcore Superstar. I hear it in Crashdїet. I’d like to think that we’ve helped shape that sound a little bit.

Tell us about that gig at Sweden Rock, thirty-six years after the last one.

Zan: Harry and I haven’t played together in Sweden since 1988, though I had done Sweden Rock with a couple of other bands.

Cody: It felt so natural. Stepping out on stage, it was a great feeling.

Will Zan/Cody play in the UK?

Zan: We would love to go there. Absolutely.

Cody: If any promoters feel like whipping out their big wallet, we’re all ears.

Beautiful ‘N Damned is out now via Frontiers Records.

In a North London photo studio, surrounded by an army of charmingly sycophantic stylists in tight white T-shirts and low slung jeans, the country's last great rock star is making an exhibition of himself.

Dropping his trousers to his ankles, Brian Molko tucks his cock between his legs, and sashays over to the studio's full-length mirror to check out the black triangle of pubes covering his newly-created 'front bottom'. As the studio stereo, tuned to London radio station XFM, blasts out the Chemical Brothers 1999 single Let Forever Be, Placebo's frontman begins parodying the lyrics delivered by Oasis' Noel Gallagher, the song's guest vocalist, and croons, "How does it feel like, to take it up the arse?"

He knows damn well that this little snapshot will make it into this article.

"The intelligent artist," he observes archly in that unmistakably shrill nasal whine, "is one who understands that he's manipulated by the media and manipulates the media right back."

Since Placebo lit up the British music scene in the summer of 1996 with the release of their brilliant self-titled debut album, their charismatic, ever quotable and extremely self aware vocalist has always been a journalist's dream, a pocket-sized 21st century boy blending Iggy Pop's appetite for self-destruction, his friend David Bowie's flamboyant androgyny and Jim Morrison's messianic self-belief. When he talked about his band leaving a "trail of blood and spunk" across three continents, this was textbook rock star behaviour.

"It's important to have rock stars," he says with a mischievous smile while sipping a cocktail in a Camden bar, flanked by his loyal lieutenants Stefan Olsdal (bass) and Steve Hewitt (drums). "You're supposed to look up onstage and see something fantastical which makes you want to be a freak. Rock was never meant to be normal, but so much of what passes for rock music these days you could play to your granny.

"I remember Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode saying, 'Being a rock star is dangerous, hard work' and he's right. You need to take a break from time to time to sellotape your brain cells together. For a while we became cartoon characters and we needed to become normal people again. You need to be able to get back to normality so that when the time is right you can be a proper rock star again.

"But rock 'n' roll isn't what it used to be," he sighs. "Rock stars don't have much money now, and since AIDS the partying isn't as insane..."

This is the Brian Molko we know and love/hate (delete according to taste): mouthy, flashy, slightly conceited and more than a little melodramatic.

In the couple of hours we spend in Placebo's company today, their frontman adheres faithfully to the 'Rock Star 101' rulebook as dictated by his illustrious forefathers. He is by turns patronising (when he mentions that Haemoglobin, one of the tracks on the trio's forthcoming album Black Market Music, is his band's version of jazz singer Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit, he adds, "not that that will mean anything to your readers"), paranoid (when he talks about the inevitability of a Placebo backlash on the new album) and precious (when musing on Placebo's accessibility, he states "we're not mass appeal yet, hopefully we're still irritating").

He's a consummate pro when it comes to name dropping, peppering his conversations with, "Bowie/Bono/Michael Stipe once said to me..." asides. And he's only too aware of his pin-up status too. When the band's press officer says, "You must get your pick of girls", Molko flashes a rapacious smile and replies: "Yeah but not just girls."

That said, today Molko is also careful to avoid coming across as just another cliche, resolutely refusing to go into gory detail about past hedonism, not least because he's pissed off that certain media outlets have been suggesting that he's been dabbling with heroin again.

"People want me to be fucked-up and strung out, taking it to Kurt Cobain levels," he spits. "That drug entered my life and left my life a long time ago. We did everything in our first couple of years and got it out of our systems so now we can concentrate on the important stuff.

"We wouldn't be this way is we were fucked-up on drugs. We're not drug addicts and we do not have habits of any kind. This band gets me off more that any drug. The thought that we'll be going to Moscow soon is more exciting to me than the thought of doing a gram of charlie [cocaine]. This band gives me me lust for life."

It turns out that, the Brian Molko who sits before us today is more interested in discussing politics and social activism than personal vices.

"There's so much to get angry about." he chirps, with the vigour of the politically re-awakened. "I mean, socialism barely exists any more in this country, but homophobia is still very much alive. The world is still fucked-up.

"The May Day riots and anti-capitalist riots happened while we were in the studio , and that fired us up too. You opened up the papers and saw that green mohican painted on Winston Churchill's statue and it was brilliant. I would have loved to have gone down to the police station where the guy who did that was held, bailed him out and shook him by the hand and said, 'Well done motherfucker'. That was so inspiring."

Is fucking the system still part of the Placebo ethos?

"Yeah, because the system is inherently fucked, so you have to keep fucking it," Steve Hewitt says. "You can't get complacent."

"That's why Bono, Bowie and Stipe are such significant characters," agrees Molko. "They've never ever got complacent and they keep doing the radical, right thing."

For the record, the politics of Chairman Molko are as follows: Old Labour was better then New Labour, the Millennium Dome is a waste of money; funding the foreign wars is bad, politicians are all the same, the Royal family should be abolished and Buckingham Palace turned into a homeless shelter.

"It's just refreshing to see people getting politicised again," he enthuses. "You can only push people so far before they start reacting and smashing shit up. Finally people are taking to the streets again and it's good to see."

That's easy for you to say as a wealthy pop star. You're not slogging it out in a factory.

"Oi, i used to work in a fucking factory," Steve Hewitt interjects indignantly.

"Okay, so I'm not working in a factory," Molko admits. "But surely it's better that people in the public eye actually have a conscience."

Of course. So what's stopping you painting another mohican on that statue of Winston Churchill tonight?

"We have to go rehearse."

That's a rubbish excuse.

"Yeah, it is. But at least we're responsible people."

October 9 will see the release of what Brian Molko calls his band's "beautiful bouncing hermaphrodite baby", aka Black Market Music. Recorded in London with Paul Corkett, who engineered Without You I'm Nothing, Molko describes the forthcoming album as "harder, darker, rockier and more energetic" than anything his band has done before.

"It's still dark and it's a distillation of everything that we've done before," he beams. "Our first album was a learning experience and our second was a bit of an 'us and them' situation with our producer Steve Osborne, but this time everything flowed smoothly and we're totally happy with the results. Our sonic spice has got larger."

So if Placebo was your 'hedonistic' album, and Without You I'm Nothing was the 'comedown' album, what's Placebo album number three?

"It's anger and energy," he states. "It's the final part of our trilogy. The next album might be real departure. We want to be legendary, but we're into longevity rather then going for the crash-and-burn career. We're not contemplating suicide, we're not developing habits with a capital 'H', we want to still be making significant music in 10 years time. When you strip away all the bullshit, our longevity will be down to our music rather than all the myths that surround us."

The album's first single from Placebo album is Taste In Men, a swaggering , beats-heavy anthem which owes as much to the Chemical Brothers it does to longtime Placebo faves Sonic Youth and The Stooges.

"It's showing that we're not pussying out," Molko says plainly. "Last time around the first single was Pure Morning when people were expecting another Nancy Boy, and this is another statement of intent that's saying, We're going to fuck with your heads again."

Our time with Placebo is now up. After leaving the table to go to the bathroom I return to find the trio sporting dumb grins.

"Have you got enough from us?" Molko enquires thoughtfully.

Yes, thanks, all good. However, as I lift my dictaphone I notice that the interview cassette is now missing.

Brian?

The singer cracks up laughing and produces said cassette from behind his back.

"We just wanted to fuck with you," he cackles. "I could just imagine you on the phone tomorrow begging for another interview."

"But be nice," he says as the trio bid farewell. "It's only £50 to have a journalist's legs done..."

An alternate version of this article appeared in Kerrang! magazine issue 811, in July 2000.