If you've been reading the news lately, you’re likely aware that the state of music fandom is not looking great. Fake hype campaigns, bot farm swarms, manufactured beef for clout – it’s all a little grim.

“Everything right now is very much ‘consume, consume, consume,’” says Colby Horton, drummer for nu metalcore ragers Headwreck. “I think you’re noticing everyone is kind of tired of these fake personas and people glorifying lifestyles to a point that seems unreachable and unobtainable.”

To buck this dire trend, the Brisbane quartet believe they have the remedy: Reject the machine and embrace the meat.

“I think the secret sauce is being our genuine selves,” explains guitarist and angel-piped clean vocalist Jamo Benadie. “We don’t have to try too hard to be funny, we don’t have to try too hard to be serious or cool; we can just do what we want to do.”

“I think that’s where we really strive for a more human kind of connection,” Colby adds. “It’s almost like the ‘branding’ of Headwreck can’t necessarily go wrong, because Headwreck is just us. You can’t overthink anything, because it’s just you being you.”

Attitude Adjustment, the group’s latest EP, landed at No.43 on Australia’s ARIA album chart. They just wrapped up a sold-out East Coast run back in April followed by a coveted support slot for Paledusk alongside Knosis and Greyhaven across the UK and Europe, including a spot at Download festival. Evidently, it’s all coming up Headwreck.

“It’s very weird,” Colby admits, reflecting on the band’s meteoric rise over the last 12 months. “We used to be like, ‘How do we get big? How do we play bigger shows? How do we go on tours?’ Now we’re actually living the dream that we’ve been trying to chase for over 10 years. It’s all very, very surreal.”

Attitude Adjustment is out now via Ditto Music.

Sounds Like: Nu metalcore kids rocking breakdowns in a video arcade
For Fans Of: Alpha Wolf, Silly Goose, Ocean Grove

English rockers Squeeze have cancelled their show this evening (September 3, EDT) after a tragic incident in the parking lot of the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna, VA.

"Squeeze are deeply saddened and shocked by an incident that occurred at the venue earlier today, which resulted in the loss of a life," say the band. "After discussions with the venue and the relevant authorities, the decision was made to cancel this evening’s performance.

"We will work with the promoter and venue regarding the possibility of rescheduling the show and will communicate further information to ticket holders as soon as it is available. Our thoughts remain with everyone affected by this tragic event."

According to a report on FOX 5, a worker was crushed when the supporting apparatus on the tour bus he was working under collapsed. The victim was pronounced dead at the scene. It has not been made clear whether the bus was the one Squeeze were travelling in or another vehicle.

The next show on Squeeze's Tried, Tested, and Trixies tour is at the Rose Music Center at The Heights in Huber Heights, OH. Full dates below.

Squeeze: Tried, Tested, and Trixies tour 2026-27

Sep 04: Huber Heights Rose Music Center at The Heights, OH
Sep 06: Highland Park Ravinia Festival, IL
Sep 08: Greenwood Village Fiddler's Green Amphitheatre, CO
Sep 09: Salt Lake City Capitol Theatre, UT
Sep 11: Redmond Marymoor Park Concerts, WA
Sep 12: Vancouver Queen Elizabeth Theatre, BC
Sep 13: Portland Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, OR
Sep 15: San Francisco The Warfield, CA
Sep 16: Las Vegas Encore Theater at Wynn Las Vegas, NV
Sep 18: Placer County The Venue At Thunder Valley, CA
Sep 19: Los Angeles Hollywood Bowl, CA
Sep 20: Chandler The Showroom at Wild Horse Pass, AZ
Sep 22: San Antonio Majestic Theatre, TX
Sep 23: Grand Prairie Texas Trust CU Theatre, TX
Sep 25: Maryland Heights Saint Louis Music Park, MO
Sep 26: Louisville Kentucky Exposition Center, KY
Sep 27: Detroit Masonic Temple Theatre, MI

Nov 12: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Nov 13: Blackpool Opera Housel, UK
Nov 14: Nottingham Motorpoint Arena, UK
Nov 16: Newcastle Upon Tyne O2 City Hall, UK
Nov 17: Stockton-on-tees Globe, UK
Nov 19: Hull Connexin Live, UK
Nov 20: Leeds First Direct Bank Arena, UK
Nov 21: Liverpool M&S Bank Arena Liverpool, UK
Nov 23: Manchester O2 Apollo Manchester, UK
Nov 26: London The O2, UK
Nov 27: Cardiff Utilita Arena Cardiff, UK
Nov 28: Birmingham Utilita Arena Birmingham, UK
Nov 30: Swansea uilding Society Arena, UK
Dec 01: Plymouth Arena, UK
Dec 03: Portsmouth Guildhall, UK
Dec 04: Bournemouth International Centre, UK
Dec 05: Brighton The Brighton Centre, UK

Apr 08: Minato City Ex Theater Roppongi, Japan
Apr 09: Osaka Club Qyuattro, Japan
Apr 13: Auckland Powerstation, New Zealand
Apr 14: Wellington meow NUI, New Zealand
Apr 16: Brisbane The Fortitude Music Hall, Australia
Apr 17: Newtown Enmore Theatre, Australia
Apr 19: St Kilda Palais Theatre, Australia
Apr 20: Hindmarsh The Gov, Australia
Apr 22: Perth The Astor Theatre, Australia

Find Squeeze tickets.

Former Turnstile guitarist Brady Ebert has been ordered to undergo a competency evaluation to determine if he has the mental capacity to understand the attempted first and second-degree murder charges against him.

The charges arose after Ebert, 34, was arrested in April for allegedly driving his car at William Yates, Turnstile frontman Brendan Yates' 79-year-old father.

Montgomery County Police were called to a property in Silver Spring, Maryland on April 1 and found William Yates in the front yard with "trauma to his lower extremities."

In court, Ebert has insisted that he "did not commit a crime" and says that “every part of the police report is a lie", according to a report in The Baltimore Banner.

During a status hearing in Montgomery County Circuit Court, Ebert’s attorney, Mark Sobel, said that he has "significant concerns regarding competency", but Ebert insists that he is "perfectly competent".

According to the newspaper, the former Turnstile guitarist says that he is going to fire his own attorney, and has promised to press legal charges against the police, prosecutors and defence attorneys in his case.

In February, Brady was fired from his most recent band, The S.E.T. (The Self Evident Truth), after writing a social media post accusing Turnstile of bandwagon-jumping on liberal political issues, and also financial mismanagement, during his time in the band.

The guitarist also claimed that his former bandmates were falsely seeking to secure a restraining order against him.

Ebert parted ways with Turnstile in August 2022.

Following his arrest, Turnstile issued a statement to Rolling Stone, which read: "Turnstile cut ties with Brady Ebert in 2022 in response to a consistent pattern of harmful behavior affecting himself, the band, and the community.

"After exhausting every available resource to support his access to help and recovery, a boundary ultimately had to be set when healthy communication was no longer possible and he began threatening violence.

"In the years since, his baseless tirades have continued in public. We never addressed it. We chose to protect his privacy and the circumstances around his departure, even when he did nothing to be deserving of that protection. Over the past few months, his threats only escalated further. … We have no language left for Brady."

"Is it all over for 'The Best New Band In Britain'?"

This was the question that greeted everyone who picked up the July 30, 1994 issue of UK music magazine Melody Maker.

The band in question was Suede, hailed as The Best New Band In Britain on the cover of the same publication's April 25, 1992 issue, two weeks ahead of the release of their debut single The Drowners.

The band had been featured in the magazine only once before, reviewed by the magazine's editor Steve Sutherland when sharing a bill at north London venue the Powerhaus with fellow indie rock hopefuls Ludicrous Lollipops, Blind Mr Jones, Jacob's Mouse and Wonky Alice. It's fair to say that Sutherland was significantly more impressed by the London quartet - fronted by flamboyant vocalist Brett Anderson and gifted guitarist Bernard Butler - than by the other four acts on the line-up.

"This is the premier prima donna band we've been praying for," he gushed. "The sons of Bowie's camp little brothers, Suede are already the future all the rest will be forced to reckon with. Their demo tape is better than any album likely to be released this year."

"The Drowners is Hamlet in a tutu," he added for good measure.

We don't know what he meant by that, but a memorable line, to be fair.

It's also fair to say that Suede delivered on the hype. Their self-titled debut album, released on March 29, 1993, became the fastest-selling debut album in the UK in almost a decade, debuted at number one on the UK albums chart, and won the 1993 Mercury Music Prize. As if that were not enough, the album would, in time, be heralded as the foundation stone for a whole new scene, BritPop.

Expectations then were sky high for the Londoners' second album, Dog Man Star. But on May 25, 1994, three months into the recording of the album at Master Rock studios, Bernard Butler took a two day break to get married, without inviting any of his bandmates, which didn't bode well. Butler returned to the Kilburn recording facility 48 hours later, packed up his guitars, and drove away, exiting the group without a word of farewell to his bandmates.

Somewhat ironically, the band's final release with Butler in the band, was a non-album single titled Stay Together.

"Suede have not split up and have no intention of doing so," a defiant statement from their PR announced, confirming Butler's exit, while insisting that the release of their second album would not be impacted.

"If anything, Suede are going to become closer over this," the band's manager Charlie Charlton told NME. "They were a unit, and that hasn't been totally destroyed —one element has been lost but it will be replaced by another... It was in everybody's best interests that Bernard left, there were no musical differences, it was all personal."

In the summer of 1994, when Suede's management placed adverts in Britain's 'inkie' music papers seeking a replacement for Butler, 17-year-old A-Level student Richard Oakes, at the time playing around Dorset with his own band The Electric Daffodils, was on his school holidays.

"I saw this news story in the music papers about Suede losing a member, and that if anyone wanted to audition they should send a picture, a fluffy toy and a tape to this address," Oakes told Guitar magazine. "So I did. The tape had a few Suede songs I'd demo'd when I should have been doing my homework, and a couple of TED songs. I included this ridiculously arrogant letter - 'I am the greatest living guitar prodigy and I'm only 14!' I was 17 at the time, but there you go..."

This white lie didn't ruin Oakes' application, and in September '94, following a three-song audition, he was announced as the group's new guitarist.

"He can play like the devil," Brett Anderson promised fans. "He's going to blow our heads off."

As wonderful as the opportunity was for Suede's new teenage guitarist, his excitement at landing the gig was somewhat tempered by the fact that he would be destined to spend his first 18 months in the band replicating guitar parts onstage written by someone else. Understandably, when it came time for Suede to write and record their third album, Oakes was bursting with ideas, energy and enthusiasm.

"To be at Wessex Studios in Highbury, where some of my favourite music has been recorded, working on music of my own… that was far more of a 'Wow' moment than any gig we had done up to that point," Oakes told Guitar World earlier this year. "I was still only just 18, and it was difficult to take in everything that was happening to me in 1994, but that recording session sticks in my head as the first time I realized the magnitude of the opportunity that had been offered to me."

According to Oakes, the plan for Suede album three was to make a "much harder, more direct, more stompy, more swanky" record than Dog Man Star, which he reckoned was "all a bit dark, really."

"We wanted a record so 'pop' that it could almost be a Greatest Hits," Anderson told Select magazine.

"Part of the sound was dictated by the way Richard plays guitar," bassist Mat Osman told Guitar magazine. "He's got this really economical, direct style which fitted perfectly with Brett wanting to write in a more simple way. We wanted to make this sound like a debut album. This album is distilled Suede. And if you don't like us, you're going to fucking hate this!"

Released on July 29, 1996, Trash was chosen as the first single previewing the record. The previous month, during the 1996 UEFA European Football Championship, every day life in England was soundtracked by Three Lions, a nation-unifying football anthem written by comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner and Ian Broudie from The Lightning Seeds: Trash, meanwhile, was a celebration of outsiders, the misfits, freaks and deviants that the average English football hooligan would have happily beaten to a pulp.

"Oh maybe, maybe it's the clothes we wear," sang Anderson. "The tasteless bracelets and the dye in our hair... But we're trash, you and me. We're the litter on the breeze."

"It's managed to distil all the things I've been trying to say since I started writing songs in Suede," Anderson told NME. "It's the whole thing about looking at the stars from the gutter that I've always talked about. We're trash, what people would call nobodies...

"I like the way it's got a double meaning. It could be almost a history of people's opinions about Suede, but at the same time it's about just two lovers - me and someone else. I’ve got to say that I'm very proud of it."

The single peaked at number three in the UK charts, and would become Suede's best-selling single ever. It was a perfect taster for the album, titled Coming Up, which emerged on September 2, '96, to largely positive reviews.

"Coming Up is their defiant reminder of what made Suede so special," the Daily Telegraph commented."If Dog Man Star was Diamond Dogs, then this is Suede's Ziggy Stardust – extravagant, steeped in glam and unashamedly poppy."

The album debuted at number one in the UK, and sold 300,000 copies within four months. Future singles Beautiful Ones, Saturday Night, Lazy and Filmstar would all follow Trash into the UK Top 10. Suede were emphatically back, and the lingering ghost of Bernard Butler had been firmly exorcised.

"He has a tendency, I think, to try and make me look small," reflected Richard Oakes, who had been the object of much of Butler's post-Suede disdain. "He's probably jealous. When he hears Coming Up, he certainly will be."

"You’re at your most creative in a band if you’ve got something to kick against and Coming Up was us doing that," says Oakes today. "It was like, 'No, we’re not done. Just you watch'."

"I felt we had achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve with Coming Up," Oakes tells Guitar World. "None of us had any idea it would be such a success, but we were so much on the same page during that period that it almost didn’t matter. Almost."

Reflecting on how the commercial success of the album broadened Suede's appeal far beyond their original 'outsider' fan base, keyboardist Neil Codling noted, "Melody is a way to burrow into people’s brains. You need an ear worm, and then you can corrupt people. And that was always part of what Brett was trying to do. He’s trying to poison the mainstream."

One of Suede's most vocal and high profile supporters, David Bowie, approved of their swaggering return, and predicted that it wouldn't be long before Brett Anderson's band would be firmly established at the forefront of British guitar rock.

"The poor things are bound to be an institution by the year 2000," he said knowingly. Not for the first time in his life, his future-gazing would prove to uncannily accurate.

The Darkness will play a tiny London club show on September 17 to launch their forthcoming 'best of' compilation album Crock Of Hits.

Justin Hawkins' band will play the Moth Club in east London on September 17. The club has a capacity of just 300, whereas the band's next scheduled appearance in London after this, on their forthcoming 'The Best Of...' tour, will be staged at the 20,000-capacity O2 Arena.

Tickets for the show at the Moth Club will go on sale here tomorrow, September 4, at 10am.

The band will promote their forthcoming Crock Of Hits compilation with an arena tour in December.

Regarding the tour Justin Hawkins says, “The very bestest of The Darkness! Imagine yourself, luxuriating in the warm sonic and visual embrace of the best ever Darkness songs, played by the best ever Darkness band, in the best ever rock music venues of mainland Great Britain!

"You will float with us on the soft whoopee cushion of undulating rock tones, swim with us in the warm seas of loquacious balladry, jump with us in the heady miasma of pop rock, and also do the head bang with us in the electrical thundery storm of HEVY METUL… Roll up, roll up - the Darkness Carnival is coming to town!"

The Darkness will be joined on these dates by American country rock band Brothers Osborne, and fellow Lowestoft rockers A.

The Darkness 'The Best of...' UK tour 2026

Dec 08: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Dec 09: Leeds First Direct Bank Arena, UK
Dec 11: Manchester AO Arena, UK
Dec 12: Birmingham Utilita Arena, UK
Dec 13: Cardiff Utilita Arena, UK
Dec 15: Brighton The Brighton Centre, UK
Dec 16: London The O2, UK

An official tracklist for The Darkness' Crock Of Hits collection has not yet been unveiled.

Fontaines D.C. have announced plans to play their biggest ever headline shows in the UK and Ireland next summer.

Having just headlined Reading and Leeds festival, the Dublin quintet will play two stadium shows and three huge outdoor shows in the UK in June/July next year, and also play two massive homecoming shows in Ireland at the 80,000-capacity Slane Castle.

The dates are:

Jun 26: Slane Castle, Ireland
Jun 27: Slane Castle, Ireland
Jun 29: Cardiff Blackweir Fields, UK

Jul 01: Newcastle St. James' Park, UK
Jul 03: Manchester Heaton Park, UK
Jul 06: Glasgow Green, UK
Jul 09: London Stadium, UK

Support at the UK shows will come from London rapper Little Simz and Swedish punks Viagra Boys. Tickets will go on sale here on September 10.

The Dubliners will be following in the footsteps of fellow Irishmen Thin Lizzy and U2 in playing the iconic County Meath venue. Slane Castle has also hosted gigs by Bruce Springsteen, Queen, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Metallica and more. Tickets are on sale here.

Special guests at Slane will be Hayley Williams, Damien Dempsey and Madra Salach.

The Irish band recently announced details of their fifth album, Dopamine Chamber. The follow-up to 2024's Romance, it'll arrive via XL Recordings on October 16.

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

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

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

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

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

Roger Daltrey has spoken about the difficulties The Who have experienced with the drummers they've used since Keith Moon died in 1978.

"It's never been the same since Keith died," Daltrey tells Joann Butler, in an interview with Life Minute TV. "I can't pretend it has. We were firing on all cylinders. We could throw anything out there and make something of it. That kind of disappeared when Keith died."

Moon was replaced by former Faces drummer Kenney Jones, who played with the band for a decade, before Simon Phillips took his place for the band's US tour in 1989. Zak Starkey joined in 1996, and remained until his protracted dismissal last year. The Who's 2025 American Farewell Tour was completed with American drummer Scott Devours behind the kit.

"We tried Kenny Jones, who is a great drummer, but a straight drummer just does not work with The Who," says Daltrey. It just does not work. But Zak Starkey, he's not Keith Moon, but he comes very close."

Last week Daltrey told his audience at a solo show at the Encore Theater in Las Vegas that The Who had been rehearsing, with Starkey rejoining the lineup.

"We love Zak," says Daltrey. "We do love Zak. Sometimes the road doesn't love Zak. It gets on top of him, so it becomes difficult, but we love him."

"We did the rehearsal to see if we can possibly do shows next year, still hit the notes, still get the drive. Who music demands an incredible amount of drive, and without that, it would be like Herman's Hermits without Herman."

Daltrey is currently on his A Great Night Out tour in the US - full dates below.

Roger Daltrey: A Great Night Out Tour

Sep 04: Santa Rosa Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, CA
Sep 05: Reno Grand Theatre @ The Grand Sierra Resort, NV
Sep 09: Nashville Ryman Auditorium, TN
Sep 11: New Buffalo Four Winds Casino, MI
Sep 12: New Lenox Performing Arts Pavilion, IL
Sep 15: Milwaukee The Riverside Theater, WI
Sep 17: Lewiston Artpark, NY
Sep 20: West Springfield The Big E, MA
Sep 22: Port Chester The Capitol Theatre, NY
Sep 24: Washington The Theater at MGM National Harbor, DC
Sep 25: Bensalem Parx Xcite Center, PA
Sep 27: New York The Town Hall, NY
Sep 29: Medford The Chevalier Theatre, MA
Oct 02: Brookville Tilles Center for the Performing Arts, NY
Oct 03: Selbyville Freeman Arts Center, DE

Nov 21: São Paulo Parque Ibirapuera, Brazil

Find Roger Daltrey tickets.

NWOBHM veterans Saxon have announced a new album. Gods Of Thunder – the follow-up to 2024's Hell, Fire and Damnation – will be released via Silver Lining Music on January 22, and the undoubtedly epic title track is released as a single today.

"Gods Of Thunder is a mighty tale of Celtic mythology, packed with the spirit and power of true heavy metal,” says frontman Biff Byford. "Turn it up and bang your head!"

The album was produced by Byford and mixed by longtime collaborator Andy Sneap, who has worked on every Saxon album since 2013's Sacrifice. It's also the second Saxon album to feature Diamond Head guitarist Brian Tatler, who initially joined the band as a touring guitarist in 2023.

"We had great fun making this album," says Biff. "This is gonna be one to beat!"

Gods Of Thunder will be available in a variety of physical editions and is available to pre-order now. Saxon tour the UK and Ireland in February, with further international shows to be announced. Full dates below.

Saxon: Gods Of Thunder tour

Feb 13: Wolverhampton Civic Hall, UK
Feb 14: Glasgow O2 Academy, UK
Feb 16: Belfast Telegraph Building, UK
Feb 17: Dublin 3Olympia Theatre, Ireland
Feb 19: Manchester O2 Apollo, UK
Feb 20: Newcastle O2 City Hall, UK
Feb 21: Sheffield City Hall, UK
Feb 23: Cardiff The Great Hall, UK
Feb 24: Bristol Beacon, UK
Feb 25: Southampton O2 Guildhall, UK
Feb 27: London Eventim Apollo, UK

Find Saxon tickets.

Forty years on from his death in 1986, a new, eight-CD Phil Lynott anthology is to be released. The Story Of My Life includes the Thin Lizzy mainman's solo albums Solo in Soho and The Philip Lynott Album, the previously unreleased album Fatalistic Attitude, and several discs of rare and unheard tracks.

The first track to emerge from the collection is Can’t Get Away, a track that's been widely bootlegged but never officially released. It was recorded with Huey Lewis, whose band Clover supported Thin Lizzy on their Johnny The Fox tour in 1976. Lewis also appears on the classic Live And Dangerous album, playing harmonica on Baby Drives Me Crazy.

Other musicians appearing on Can’t Get Away include Laurence Archer, guitarist with Lynott's post-Lizzy band Grand Slam, and Chris Hayes, guitarist with Lewis's band The News.

Fatalistic Attitude was originally scheduled for release in January 1982, but Vertigo Records considered the collection of songs to be too dark, and the album was significantly rejigged before being released as The Philip Lynott Album in September the same year. Lynott's personal acetate of the original album, which now resides in a private collection, was used as the source material for the new version, which will be available as a standalone vinyl album in addition to the anthology.

Among the rare and previously unreleased tracks are demos from Grand Slam alongside collaborations with former Lizzy guitarist Gary Moore, Northern Irish singer-songwriter Paul Brady and R&B singer Junior Giscombe, plus rehearsal recordings for Lynott’s 1982 solo tour. Full tracklist below.

The Story Of My Life has been compiled by Thin Lizzy expert Nick Sharp, who worked on the band's mammoth Rock Legends box set as well as the recent anniversary reissues of the band's albums. Classic Rock writer Mark Blake supplies the sleeve notes.

The Story Of My Life will be released on October 30 and is available to pre-order now.

Philip Lynott: The Story Of My Life tracklist

Disc One: Solo In Soho
1. Dear Miss Lonely Hearts
2. King's Call
3. A Child's Lullaby
4. Tattoo (Giving It All Up For Love)
5. Solo In Soho
6. Girls
7. Yellow Pearl - First Version
8. Ode To A Black Man
9. Jamaican Rum
10. Talk In '79

Disc Two: Fatalistic Attitude (Alternate Album)
1. Somebody Else's Dream - Fatalistic Attitude Version
2. Little Bit Of Water - Fatalistic Attitude Version
3. Gino - Fatalistic Attitude Version
4. Don't Talk About Me Baby - Fatalistic Attitude Version
5. Hate - Fatalistic Attitude Version
6. Fatalistic Attitude - Fatalistic Attitude Version
7. The Man's A Fool - Fatalistic Attitude Version
8. Ode To Liberty (The Protest Song) - Fatalistic Attitude Version
9. Cathleen - Fatalistic Attitude Version
10. Growing Up - Fatalistic Attitude Version
11. Old Town - Fatalistic Attitude Version

Disc Three: The Philip Lynott Album
1. Fatalistic Attitude
2. The Man's A Fool
3. Old Town
4. Cathleen
5. Growing Up
6. Together - Album Version
7. Little Bit Of Water
8. Ode To Liberty (The Protest Song)
9. Gino
10. Don't Talk About Me Baby

Disc Four: Non-Album Mixes, B-Sides & Official Rarities
1. Yellow Pearl - 7" Remix Edit
2. Yellow Pearl - 12" Remix
3. Yellow Pearl - 7" Remix 2
4. Yellow Pearl - TOTP Theme
5. Together - 7" Remix Edit
6. Together - 12" Dance Mix
7. Somebody Else's Dream
8. Beat Of The Drum
9. The Lady Loves To Dance - 7" Version
10. The Lady Loves To Dance - 12" Version
11. Nineteen - 7" Mix
12. Nineteen - Extended Version
13. Nineteen - Dub Mix
14. Nineteen - Extended Dub Mix

Disc Five: Non-Album Mixes, B-Sides & Official Rarities
1. Parisienne Walkways
2. Spanish Guitar
3. Don't Believe A Word
4. Tennessee Stud
5. Please Don't Leave Me - Original Version
6. A Tribute To Sandy Denny
7. Out In The Fields
8. Military Man
9. Still In Love With You
10. Stop Messin' Around - Live From The Ulster Hall, Belfast, UK / 18th December 1984
11. Parisienne Walkways - Live From The Ulster Hall, Belfast, UK / 18th December 1984
12. Out In The Fields - Live From The Manchester Apollo, UK / 23rd September 1985

Disc Six: Demos
1. Reggae 2 - Demo
2. Tattoo - Ruff Mix
3. Ode To A Black Man - Diff Mix And Vocals
4. Jamaican Rum - Rough Mix
5. Something's Going On - Demo
6. Parisienne Walkways - Demo
7. Bad Is Bad - Demo
8. The Story Of My Life - Demo
9. Catholic Charm - Monitor Mix
10. Dirty Old Town - Monitor Mix
11. Sweet Samantha - Demo
12. The Man's A Fool - Monitor Mix
13. Don't Talk About Me Baby - Monitor Mix
14. For Always - Demo
15. Mystery Aka I Hear You Call - With Vocal / Rough Mix

Disc Seven: Demos
1. Together - Paul Brady Version
2. Together - New Bass And Synths
3. Beat Of The Drum - Extended
4. Someone's Out To Get Ya - Demo
5. I've Heard Lately - Demo
6. Blue Parris - Demo
7. I Don't Need This - Demo (Grand Slam)
8. Crazy - Demo (Grand Slam)
9. Hot And Spicy - Demo (Grand Slam)
10. Dedication - Demo (Grand Slam)
11. Harlem - Demo (Grand Slam)
12. Can't Get Away - Demo
13. I'm Still Alive - Demo
14. One Wish - Demo

Disc Eight: Solo Band Rehearsals 1982
1. Yellow Pearl - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
2. Together - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
3. Kings Call - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
4. The Man's A Fool - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982 / Version 1
5. Dear Miss Lonely Hearts - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
6. Tattoo - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
7. Girls - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
8. Solo In Soho - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
9. Old Town - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
10. Growing Up - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
11. The Man's A Fool - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982 / Version 2
12. Fatalistic Attitude - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982

New York indie rock trio Yeah Yeah Yeahs have announced details of their new live album Hidden in Pieces Live at the Royal Albert Hall, which was recorded in London in June 2025.

The album – their first since 2022's Cool it Down – is available to stream through their Bandcamp page, with physical versions to follow via Secretly Canadian on October 23.

A 22-minute film by director Barnaby Clay, titled Hidden in Pieces, can be viewed on the Criterion Channel until September 24.

“I wanted to create a film that not only captured the live performance but also felt close to the spirit of what the band was going for with their shows," says Clay. "Something delicate and dream-like, like a precious memory, timeless, emotionally charged and shrouded in mystery.”

Check out the short trailer below.

"Hidden in Pieces Live at the Royal Albert Hall was born out of a need to commune with our band and fan family in 2025, after the election," writes vocalist Karen O. "In the past, YYYs haven’t often chosen when to be back at it and out there, it often chooses us. It, being the times. We turn to live music when we need that specific quality of depth and light to see us through the times.

"We worked on these arrangements in February of ‘25 at Sonic Ranch in an impossibly small window of time," she continues. "Imaad Wasif and our string arranger Jherek Bischoff dove straight into the deep end with us as we arranged almost 24 songs for a quartet and acoustic instrumentation in less than a week. The stakes were high, the Royal Albert Hall was the 3rd play of the tour, most of this record is live from the hall. It was our first time performing there and the hype leading up to it was overwhelming, but ladies and gentlemen we believe the hype now we’ve done it.

"All the shows we performed on this small tour were extraordinarily vulnerable," she adds. "We hope that translates."

You can pre-order the vinyl and CD editions through the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Bandcamp page.

The 1970s were when rock grew up. 70s bands like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Black Sabbath and Blue Öyster Cult bestrode the globe like musical colossi, selling records by the million, elevating popular music to another level, and setting the template for anyone who subsequently picked up a guitar or screamed into a hairbrush in front of a mirror.

But there were plenty of bands who never had the impact they deserved, who never got to travel by private jet or soundcheck in a stadium. Here are ten great bands who missed out.

Highway Robbery

From San Francisco, this trio only released one album, 1972’s For Love Or Money, but it still stands as a startling bridge between the heavy psychedelia of the late 60s and the more earthy power that streaked through the early 70s. It certainly nodded towards the Black Sabbath end of the spectrum, but had its own charm and niche.

Michael Stevens was a considerably gifted guitarist, and you can hear shades of what Ronnie Montrose would go on to do a couple of years later on the debut Montrose album. And drummer Don Francisco was blessed with a voice that echoed Ian Gillan. The band split up after being dropped by RCA .

Third World War

This early 70s British band are regarded by some as the first to combine the skills of proto metal with the aggression of punk. Their two albums, 1971’s self-titled debut and 72’s Third World War II, bristled with agitating left wing lyricism and brutally exposed riffs. The core of the band were songwriters Terry Stamp (vocals/rhythm guitar) and Jim Avery (bass).

The band fell apart while recording the second album, as it became obvious their musical and philosophical aspirations were not going to give them sustainable commercial impact. But listening to the records now, it’s clear they were ahead of the game.

Granicus

From Cleveland, Ohio, this band put out one album. Self-titled, it was issued in 1973, before the band faded away. However, it is now rightly regarded as a landmark album, because while it definitely had a lot of influences from the progressive and psychedelic worlds of the previous decade, there was definitely a huge step forward, with a style that would become the blueprint for American hard rock later on the 70s.

You can hear the edgy energy on Bad Talk and Cleveland Ohio. But lack of impact led to them splitting up. A second album, Thieves, Liars And Traitors, came out in 2010, culled from recordings made in 1974, and the band have since reunited.

P2O5

A German band who combine psychedelia and heaviness with a confident swagger. Formed in 1970, and taking their name from the chemical formula for phosphorous pentoxide, the four had a progressive bent, plus mystical tendencies. But you can also hear elements of what would later develop into both the doom and stoner genres. In that sense, they were certainly ahead of their time. Their standout album was the 1978 debut Vivat Progessio – Pereat Mundus, where all the strands that make up the P2O5 sound coalesce into a heavy mould, with Wolfgang Berkhard’s Hammond Organ sound right at the epicentre.

Ginbae

From Yokohama in Japan (but not to be confused with another band called Yokohama Ginbae!), this lot’s legacy is an astonishing 1976 self-titled, five song album. Released on the Sea Side label, this takes influences from Purple, Sabbath and Thin Lizzy, mixing them together to create a gripping style that dips towards doom, yet also has a strong hard rock structure.

Some of Shirashi’s vocals are reminiscent of Ian Gillan taking on Rob Halford; he can also soar with the aplomb of an oriental Glenn Hughes. And Shinyunsuke Nakamura guitar playing is an overpowering technical blur. This is the band’s sole album, but a real 70s metal masterclass.

McOil

A German band who were formed in Ochsenhausen during 1976, McOil only recorded one album, 1979’s All Our Hopes. The band put out the album themselves, as they were unable to get a deal. There’s certainly an strong element of krautrock in the sound, but it is altogether heavier. Karl Wild’s guitar work was powerful and surging, complementing the neat keyboard refrains from Doris Tischmann. What McOil do well is balance a desire to be progressive against a primitive metallic momentum. The band, albeit with a different line-up, recorded a second album before splitting up, but this remains unreleased.

Phantom’s Divine Comedy

In 1974, this lot released debut album Phantom’s Divine Comedy Part 1, and it sparked rumours that Jim Morrison was actually fronting a mysterious new band. Yes, the Lizard King had officially died three years earlier, but there were some who refused to believed this, and so the story spread. The band’s label, Capitol, capitalised on this, until there was a threat of legal action. At which point the album and band disappeared. A shame, because while you can hear The Doors inference, there’s some fine mid 70s metal wig out moments. At times, it sounds like Blue Cheer meets Budgie.

Survivor

No, not the Eye Of The Tiger lot. This band came from Louisiana, and sounded like a cross between UFO and Thin Lizzy, with daubs of doom. And vocalist Brian Clark had some of those Rob Halford chops. They only released one album, 1979’s All Your Pretty Moves, but this is a gem. There are guitar harmonies here which would grace a Lizzy record, while there are also some hefty nods towards the early Rainbow years. And Delicate Adversary could be Molly Hatchet gone insane. Some of this band went on to form Christian metallers Philadelphia, but if you love The Godz, you’ll enjoy this.

Night Sun

A German band who were very much on the heavier end of the prog metal spectrum, Night Sun only got to make a single album, 1972’s Mournin’. You can hear the threads of so many different styles here, such as thrash, doom and stoner, and Night Sun were definitely pioneers. The combination of Walter Girchgessner’s guitar pyrotechnics and Knut Rossler’s organ was stylish, capable of veering from outright mania through pomp and sophisticated progression.

Night Sun, though, never achieved much traction with this album, and they split up the following year. But time has given Mournin’ a welcome cachet. It’s a musical feast.

Zarpo

They have a name that sounds like a forgotten Marx brother, but this is a long running Spanish band. They sing in their native tongue only, which might explain why Zarpo have remained hidden in the shadows since their inception in 1977. But while only those fluent in Spanish will understand what vocalist Vincent Feijóo is on about, there’s no doubting the passion and power of the music. Heavily influenced by Sabbath and Judas Priest, they have released more than a dozen records in their career. The best of these is the 1978 debut Los Cuatro Jinetes Del Apocalpsis.

This feature was originally published in 2016.

In a scene where bands increasingly write in clichés, Love Rarely’s authenticity cuts through like razor wire. Hailing from Leeds and combining math rock with elements of djent, gospel and hardcore, right from their inception, this quintet vowed that their music would always be authentic.

“Shared generational trauma was the only thing that was ever going to come out of us, really,” explains guitarist and vocalist Lew Taylor. “Otherwise, you’re just writing love songs.”

Across 12 tracks, debut album Pain Travels bravely unpacks Love Rarely’s experiences of growing up in volatile households, unflinchingly navigating the complexities of living under the shadow of addiction. But you probably won’t parse this underlying darkness on first listen.

Album opener Will confidently veers from djent-ridden groove to hip-shaking R’n’B with joyous abandon, the interplay between Lew’s soulful croon and lead vocalist CJ Levitt’s anguished cries taking the listener on a thrillingly unpredictable sonic journey.

“Music always was seen as a coping mechanism - or escape - from that sort of chaos,” says guitarist Dan Dewsnap.

After heading out on a nine-date UK tour with The Callous Daoboys and turning heads at 2000trees, their singular sound has swiftly found an audience. It’s a reaction that this five-piece are still trying to wrap their heads around.

“We’re from a time where you do a band for 10 years and don’t really get anywhere,” says Lew. “In my old band, we got to a point where we’d get enough money to cover fuel, and that was it. But we came to do Love Rarely anyway, because we simply had to write this music… we just never thought that people would be that bothered.”

“I really didn’t think it was possible to even break through without having a rich dad,” adds CJ.

Pain Travels is out now via Big Scary Monsters.

SOUNDS LIKE: Your rawest emotions dancing like no one’s watching
FOR FANS OF: Sweet Pill, The Callous Daoboys, Dance Gavin Dance

Celebrate the release of Motionless In White’s new album Decades with Metal Hammer! We’ve teamed up with the US metalcore hellraisers for a bundle containing our latest issue with an exclusive cover, plus a red double-vinyl copy of Decades not available from any other UK stockist. Pre-order yours now while stocks last!

Inside the new Hammer, singer and sole constant member Chris Motionless tells us everything about the new album. He also goes deep into his band’s 20-year-long climb to the top of their genre, which will hit new heights when they headline Bloodstock Open Air in Derbyshire next August.

“I ground myself to the bone for this record,” Chris tells us. “I was going into these toxic cycles of workaholism and just burnt myself out. It took a little bit of my passion away, because it felt like a job for the first time, so I definitely wanted to walk away and come back to it. That’s part of why it took so long.”

Elsewhere, we talk to Atlanta prog metal greats Mastodon about their latest album Marrow Deep: their first slice of new music since the departure of founding guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds and his death aged 51 last summer.

“I was immediately shocked and saddened,” says bassist/singer Troy Sanders. “But unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised. I don’t mean that in any distasteful manner, whatsoever. I’ve done everything I could as a friend and as a bandmate over the years. I don’t know what else I could’ve done, so I’m kind of forced to just let go.”

“I wasn’t surprised that it happened, but I was shocked,” adds guitarist Bill Kelliher. “I just didn’t think it was going to happen like that.”

We also go inside Ghost’s massive new concert movie, 2 Big To Rig. Tobias Forge tells us about how they captured the epic Skeletour stage show, the unfortunate incident that nearly derailed it, and his “extracurricular” future plans.

Meanwhile, seven years on from his throat cancer diagnosis, Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine revisits his journey in an exclusive interview and an extract from his new book, In My Darkest Hour.

Green Lung take us on a tour of London’s graveyards and occult hotspots, Halestorm power couple Lzzy Hale and Joe Hottinger tackle your questions about love, keytars and… killer farts?! And Snot explain why they’re back in the studio, almost 30 years after the tragic death of frontman Lynn Strait.

Sleep Theory’s Cullen Moore shares his soulful playlist, Mudvayne/Hellyeah veteran Chad Gray delivers the lessons he learned from hanging out with a young Slipknot and meeting James Hetfield, and Godsmack give us the inside story of their blockbuster anthem, I Stand Alone. Plus, we meet Decessus, the Chilean death metal band led by a beauty queen.

All this, along with Eddfest, Metallica, Bring Me The Horizon, Sigh, Rory, System Of A Down, Acid Bath, Duff McKagan and much, much more.

Only in the new issue of Metal Hammer, available to pre-order now with a Motionless In White cover and Decades vinyl!

Mastodon have looked back on the stressful but ultimately rewarding experience of playing Black Sabbath’s final show Back To The Beginning in July 2025.

The Atlanta heavy metal band opened the all-day extravaganza at Villa Park stadium in Birmingham on July 5, followed by sets from Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Tool and more before Sabbath and singer Ozzy Osbourne’s solo band headlined. It was Osbourne’s last time onstage before he died of a heart attack 17 days later, aged 76.

In a new appearance on Amoeba Records’ What’s In My Bag? video series, singer/bassist Troy Sanders picks Osbourne’s 1980 solo debut Blizzard Of Ozz as one of his chosen records, saying, “We’ve all been fascinated by Ozzy and Black Sabbath our whole lives, especially this last year, after playing the final Sabbath show a year ago, and then Ozzy’s passing.”

He adds: “We played Crazy Train before every live show we’ve done over the past year. We just cannot thank Sabbath and Ozzy himself enough for creating the genre that we now call home. So, Ozzy forever, this is a no-brainer. Thank you, my friend.”

When asked what it was like playing Back To The Beginning, Sanders answers: “Unfathomable. Nerve-wracking. Equal amounts extreme anxiety and unbelievable pleasure.”

Guitarist Bill Kelliher adds: “There was a lot of tension and anxiety until we played first, and then it was like, ‘Yay! This rules. We did it!’”

“We didn’t screw up!” says drummer/vocalist Brann Dailor. “We played Supernaut and we nailed it, I think, and then we played for 15 minutes, and then I was in the audience with a beer. I enjoyed the rest of the show until Ozzy came up, and then everybody started bawling and hugging and crying. It was really, really incredible and probably my favourite musical experience of my life.”

Mastodon played a three-song set, opening with the originals Black Tongue and Blood And Thunder before playing Supernaut with Gojira’s Mario Duplantier, Tool’s Danny Carey and Slipknot’s Eloy Casagrande handling extra percussion.

Dailor looked back on Back To The Beginning during a Metal Hammer interview in August 2025. “As soon as he hit the stage, everything changed,” he recalled. “As long as he sat there, it didn’t matter if he didn’t sing a note, because everyone was doing it for him. It was a beautiful thing to be a part of, everyone weeping and hugging. The Mr Crowley intro came on and everybody was just done.”

Mastodon, who formed in 2000 and won the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance with their single Sultan’s Curse, have a long history with Sabbath. Talking to The Guardian last month, Dailor said, “The first time I ever met [guitarist] Tony Iommi, he came into the dressing room and he was like, ‘Oh, Mastodon! Me and Geez [bassist Geezer Butler] were listening to you guys on the bus last night.’”

Butler performs a bass solo on the band’s new album, Marrow Deep, which came out last week. It was their first studio album without founding guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds, who parted ways with the band in March 2025 and died in a motorcycle accident, aged 51, the following August.

Gallows appear to be preparing to announce something in the coming weeks, if their recent online activity is anything to go by.

Around six weeks ago, the band blacked out their profile pictures across their social media accounts and added an Openstage link for fans to sign up for future news.

Keen-eyed fans suggested that this surreptitious activity was connected to a possible anniversary reissue of their debut album Orchestra of Wolves, which was originally released on September 25, 2006, through In at the Deep End Records. It was re-released the following summer via Epitaph.

After signing a £1 million deal with Warner Bros., the quintet released Grey Britain in 2009 before being dropped the following year. Vocalist Frank Carter quit the band two years later due to "creative differences" and played his last show with them on July 23, 2011, at London's ULU.

Carter quickly unveiled his new band, Pure Love, formed with former The Hope Conspiracy and Suicide File guitarist Jim Carroll, while Gallows continued with Alexisonfire's Wade MacNeil as their new vocalist.

The following year, Gallows released their self-titled album year through their own label, Venn Records. After their fourth album, 2015's Desolation Sounds, the band's activity gradually ceased.

Carter is currently part of the Sex Pistols reunion and touring the US from September 11 until October 18, with a run of UK shows taking place in December.

On September 1, a video featuring footage of the band's last show in London with Carter was posted, featuring a voiceover of the vocalist describing how fans repeatedly ask him when Gallows will reunite.

"In 2011, I quit the band," says Carter. "We couldn't meet on what we were doing creatively. People still ask me when I'm gonna join them, all the fucking time. Once a week, some c**t will message me. If I did it again, it would be more."

Maybe the singer's phone is about to get hot very soon. The plot thickens.

Former Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg has opened up about the therapy he sought after being fired from the Iowan nu metal nine-piece in November 2023.

Talking on a new podcast hosted by mental health non-profit HeartSupport, the 35-year-old, son of longtime Bruce Springsteen And The E-Street Band drummer Max Weinberg, says that he felt like a “tangled ball of rusted barbed wire” before seeking out a therapist in his adopted hometown of Nashville “towards the end of 2023, beginning of 2024”.

He explains (via Blabbermouth) that he needed “the expertise that I didn’t have for sure, the know-how, the ability to see life on a trajectory that brought some or that maybe quelled some anxieties and frustrations or that challenge or whatever and live a more peaceful, happy life”.

He eventually saw the therapist of a good friend of his who married Weinberg to his wife Chloe in 2020, “and it finally felt like an unlocking of a door, like a door that I’d tried many keys trying to open and it just wouldn’t”.

The drummer continues to seek therapy once a week, saying that it helps him process “events and life circumstances that are difficult to process”, including becoming a new parent. He and Chloe welcomed a baby girl in June.

“When life doesn't make sense, when life is difficult to process, you feel like you’re the crazy one,” Weinberg continues. “And it’s an ongoing process. There’s also other beautiful things that one can find challenging, like becoming a parent for the first time, which I just did a couple months ago.”

He adds: “I’m OK with not being the person who just naturally has all the answers, and I sometimes need to reach out to my community, to someone I trust, to help me get through a challenging moment so I can – whatever it is – sit with my thoughts more easily, I can process event information more thoroughly and maybe with a greater degree of ease. Not like it’s a solution to everything, ’cause it doesn’t solve anything in life, but it at least eases the process through getting to the next moment.”

Weinberg joined Slipknot in 2013 – replacing late founding drummer Joey Jordison, who died in July 2021 aged 46 – and drummed on three albums during his 10-year tenure: 2014’s .5: The Gray Chapter, 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind and 2022’s The End, So Far. The band announced his dismissal on November 5; Weinberg issued his own statement six days later, saying he was “blindsided” by the news.

On November 14, Weinberg underwent surgery to repair a torn labrum on his left hip and “shave down” a misshapen part of his femur. He said that the procedure followed “three years of careful planning”.

Weinberg first revealed that he was in therapy in July 2024, when he told the One Life One Chance With Toby Morse podcast that he wanted to process “the last 10 years” of his life.

Slipknot replaced Weinberg with former Sepultura drummer Eloy Casagrande. Weinberg joined thrashers Suicidal Tendencies in 2024, replacing Greyson Nekrutman, who joined Sepultura to replace Casagrande. Weinberg left Suicidal earlier this year and now plays in hardcore/death metal unit Fuming Mouth. He made his recording debut with the band on July’s album The Ringing Bell.

George Young and Harry Vanda couldn’t make the show, so they sent trusted Albert Music executive Fifa Riccobono to see AC/DC’s new singer. The venue was Sydney’s Rockdale Masonic Hall, packed to the walls with curious fans wondering how the former singer from Fraternity would fit into this loud young band with the schoolboy guitarist. Then Bon Scott walked on stage.

“He came out with a tooth missing, wearing this skin-tight satin one-piece outfit,” Riccobono recalled. “I remember thinking: ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’”

It was not a promising start to his first gig with the band. Bon didn’t even know all the words yet, he was still learning the songs. But as the set unfolded, something happened.

“You couldn’t take your eyes off him because he was so charismatic,” Riccobono continued. That was the part that caught the exec off guard. At that stage in his life, she thought Bon was crude. The image certainly didn’t help. Yet the longer she watched, the more obvious it became that Bon possessed something you couldn’t teach. There was no sense that he was auditioning for the role. No feeling that he needed to prove himself. “It felt like he’d always been there.”

After the show, Riccobono went backstage expecting more of the same. Instead, Bon completely disarmed her. “He was so charming, friendly and welcoming that I walked away with a completely different opinion.”

The next day, she reported back to George Young and Harry Vanda, AC/DC’s mentors and producers. “I told them he fit.”

That night marked the beginning of a friendship that would last until the very end. Over the years, Riccobono came to understand the contradiction at the heart of Bon Scott. The man who often looked like a pirate could be remarkably thoughtful. The guy known for his one-liners and mischief never forgot the people who helped him.

Bon respected Malcolm and Angus Young enormously, but he also brought something different to AC/DC. He had already spent years paying his dues in other bands, learning lessons the younger musicians had yet to encounter. “He’d tell the younger guys: ‘Don’t do what I do,’ because he was a bit of a character.”

The two friends occasionally clashed. During one argument, Riccobono had finally had enough and walked out of the room. “When I came back my desk was covered in flowers. That’s who Bon was.”

Then there was the Scotch. One day, Riccobono was driving Bon back to his hotel after he’d purchased an incredibly expensive bottle. Bon offered her a drink. She refused. “I said: ‘No way. We’re not opening that unless it’s a special occasion.’” Bon’s response captured his outlook on life better than any lyric ever could: “You’re here. I’m here. That’s a special occasion.”

For all the stories about excess and chaos, those are the moments that stayed with the people who knew him best. Riccobono remembers the postcards. The letters. The phone calls asking for help on behalf of friends who had fallen on hard times. How he remained loyal to people long after success gave him every excuse not to. “He never forgot the people who had helped him.”

Only a few days before Bon died, the phone rang again. He’d been spending time with Malcolm and Angus. The band were preparing for their next chapter, and Bon could barely contain his excitement. He kept talking about the new songs, the new riffs, and how eager he was to get back into the studio. Then George and Harry walked into Riccobono’s office with the news: Bon was gone. “I remember thinking: ‘No. I just spoke to him.’”

Riccobono remembers something else: a man who could walk into a room looking completely wrong for the job, and then somehow make it impossible to imagine anyone else doing it.

On April 2, United States Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth asked General Randy George to stand down from his role as Army Chief of Staff, with no public explanation given for the decision.

It has now emerged that the Army's top-ranking general was reportedly forced into early retirement after Hegseth wanted George to shelve an investigation into a military helicopter flyby that took place on March 28 near Kid Rock's Nashville mansion, which the singer calls the Southern White House.

Two Apache helicopters from the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade at Fort Campbell flew past Rock's sprawling property. The musician posted a video of the flyby with the caption: "God Bless America and all those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to defend her."

The two pilots were suspended while an investigation was launched into whether they had breached safety rules, only for the pair to be quickly reinstated by Hegseth.

The United States Secretary of Defense commented on the decision via X, writing: "Thank you @KidRock. @USArmy pilots' suspension LIFTED. No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots."

According to The Washington Post, the Army Chief of Staff told colleagues he "felt it was important to follow typical protocol and determine whether any safety regulations had been violated." He was driven from his role shortly after.

On April 28, both Rock and Hegseth drew criticism as they enjoyed a US military helicopter ride as part of America’s 250th birthday celebrations.

"Joined my friend @KidRock — and some of our great @USArmy Apache pilots — for a ride this morning. (More to come on that!)" wrote Hegseth. "Kid Rock is a patriot and huge supporter of our troops. The War Department is wasting no time celebrating America’s 250th — home of the free because of the brave."

Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan shared his support for George, whom he studied alongside at the prestigious West Point Military Academy.

"As you can imagine most of my classmates at West Point Prep were there with a singular mission – to be a West Point graduate and serve in our military," wrote Keenan. "Focus, drive, a plan, and zero compromise. I, on the other hand, was one of the few with doubts and inner conflict.

"So when my heart spoke louder than the outside influencers and I declined my appointment to West Point, most of those around me saw it as a huge mistake. But a handful were very supportive. They knew me well enough to respect that decision. One of those supportive classmates was my Cross Country teammate, Randy George.

"Randy went on to be a four-star general and Chief of Staff for the U.S. Army," he continues. "He was approaching his 40th year of service. I can’t even imagine how disappointed and upset he must feel for having been “asked” to retire early. So I’m just here to return that favor of support. We’re here for you, Randy. Might be time for a beer or three. See you soon."

Punk rock all-stars Fake Names have unveiled the video for Until It’s Normal, the first taster of their upcoming third studio album Punk Ruins, out October 23 through Epitaph.

Fake Names features vocalist Dennis Lyxzén (Refused, INVSN, The [International] Noise Conspiracy), guitarists Brian Baker (Minor Threat, Bad Religion, Dag Nasty) and Michael Hampton (S.O.A., Embrace, One Last Wish), bassist Johnny Temple (Girls Against Boys, Soulside), and new drummer Mario Rubalcaba (Rocket From The Crypt, OFF!).

Punk Ruins was recorded at the late Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, and was produced by Matthew Barnhart (Superchunk, Bob Mould). As Brian Baker explains, the five-piece were not messing about when it came to making their third full-length. Dennis Lyxzén, for example, tracked all of his vocals in one day.

“We recorded 12 songs in five days, and all of them are on the album,” says the guitarist. “One of the advantages of us all working at home is there's plenty of time to figure out what you're going to do. I know what the guitar solo is going to be because I've already done it at home and sent it to Michael to tweak it. It’s not as hard as you think.”

Check out the lyric video for Until It's Normal below.

The track listing for Punk Ruins is:

1. Until It’s Normal
2. Good Old Days
3. Punk Ruins
4. Cover The Distance
5. What I Tell Myself
6. Diamond Buzz
7. Language Lost
8. Beautiful Scars
9. If You Could See Me Today
10. The Little Wonders
11. Scream
12. Paradise

The band have scheduled a series of European shows for the beginning of 2027. They will play:

Jan 26: Stage Umeå, Umeå, Sweden
Jan 28: Glazart, Paris, France
Jan 29: Club Volta, Cologne, Germany
Jan 30: Backstage, Munich, Germany
Feb 01: Legend Club, Milan, Italy
Feb 02: Kino Siska, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Feb 03: Arena, Vienna, Austria
Feb 05: Knust, Hamburg, Germany
Feb 06: Lido, Berlin, Germany
Feb 07: Underworld, London, UK

Breakdowns are the heart of a great many metal genres. Why? Because they’re always barbaric as all hell when they hit. Few things sonically strike like a moment of quiet followed by every instrument firing at full force, and these are the 10 times that such sections of a song blasted us most ruthlessly. From Metallica to Gojira, these are the most malevolent of all the breakdowns in heavy metal history.

Metallica – Creeping Death (Ride The Lightning, 1984)

Ride The Lightning saw Metallica start to shed their thrash metal skin and, in the process, mastermind some of the heaviest music ever. For Whom The Bell Tolls and The Call Of Ktulu are bona fide boot-stompers, while Creeping Death boasts a neck-snapping breakdown. Although guitarist Kirk Hammett originally wrote that “Die by my hand!” section for his first band Exodus, the Four Horsemen wielded it with much more malicious intent.

Lamb Of God – Laid To Rest (Ashes Of The Wake, 2004)

“See who gives a fuck!” With that one clarion call, every single person at a Lamb Of God show goes apeshit, and who can blame them? The moment heralds Laid To Rest’s transformation from a fast-fingered metal anthem to pure, animalistic groove. The breakdown opened the Ashes Of The Wake album with such an adrenaline shot that no one was shocked when it became the band’s breakthrough release.

Slayer – Raining Blood (Reign In Blood, 1986)

Most discussions of Raining Blood revolve around that formidable opening, where cracking thunder gives way to one of metal’s most iconic riffs. However, the latter half of Slayer’s signature song is carried by that breakdown, which bypasses rational thought and catches you straight in the “fat riff and simple drumbeat”-loving part of your brain. When Kerry King adds that melodic lead on top halfway through, it grows even more badass.

Gojira – Flying Whales (From Mars To Sirius, 2005)

It’s one thing when an audience goes wild, but when a breakdown also makes the band playing it lose their minds, that’s the sign of something truly special. Such is the case with Flying Whales, which drives the members of Gojira rabid, running around all over the show, when it strikes its crescendo. The Morbid Angel pick-scrapes only reaffirm the unholy level of heaviness being tapped into by this modern death metal classic.

Machine Head – Davidian (Burn My Eyes, 1994)

Davidian is nasty throughout. From Robb Flynn’s roars to the pinch harmonics and squealing guitar solo, there’s no give in its upfront groove metal assault. This makes it stunning when, at its conclusion, Machine Head somehow reach even further frontiers of sonic destruction. An outward breath from Flynn incites a no-nonsense chugathon, and the violence that plays during the video is pretty accurate as to what happens when this moment hits at live shows, too.

Trivium – Pull Harder On The Strings Of Your Martyr (Ascendancy, 2005)

A lot of breakdowns either don’t feature vocals or take a minute to rebuild back up to them. Pull Harder On The Strings Of Your Martyr doesn’t have time for that shit. When the beat drops after this Ascendancy single’s second chorus, singer/guitarist Matt Heafy immediately starts snarling, only punctuating the sheer, bollock-popping savagery of the whole thing. It’s a big reason why this is Trivium’s most-played song by far.

Meshuggah – Demiurge (Koloss, 2012)

Picking the best Meshuggah breakdown borders on the impossible, but we’ve gone with Demiurge because… holy fuck! It’s just perfect. From the intense build-up to that moment of brief silence, then the crash of guitars and drums and that hellacious melody, it’s a section of heavy metal artistry worthy of the Louvre. If breakdowns were taught in schools, this would be an essential text on every single student’s curriculum.

Cannibal Corpse – Hammer Smashed Face (Tomb Of The Mutilated, 1992)

As much as people like to talk about the growls, neck and windmilling of Corpsegrinder, bassist Alex Webster and drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz have always been the unsung powerhouses of Cannibal Corpse. And Hammer Smashed Face proves it. The death metal mainstay slides into its breakdown as smoothly as butter, yet it still gets heads instinctively banging. It’s the most brutal part of a song crammed with seismic shifts in speed.

Sepultura – Dead Embryonic Cells (Arise, 1991)

Sepultura were already kings of thrash by 1991 (as evidenced by major-label breakthrough Beneath The Remains), and on Arise they began to foresee greater things. While maintaining the Brazilians’ speed metal core, the album dabbled in industrial soundscapes, and Dead Embryonic Cells shovelled in buttloads of groove. The entire thing’s punishing but, before you hear the stomping drums and open E-strings towards the end, we’d recommend taking out some insurance on your neck.

Converge – Eagles Become Vultures (You Fail Me, 2004)

No discussion of imposing breakdowns would be complete without casting an eye to the pioneering New England metalcore scene, and we’re anointing Converge as its representatives. The Massachusetts wildmen always had a technical-yet-incensed take on their genre, as proven by Eagles Become Vultures’ ending. When the song’s rampage of noise slows to a section of hefty riffing and atypical drumming, it’s just primal enough for you to understand that craniums need to move pronto.

Symphonic metal six-piece Epica have announced a special 25th-anniversary show at London’s Royal Albert Hall, where they’ll be joined by a choir and orchestra.

The Dutch band will play the famous Italianate venue on October 6, 2027, as part of their on-again-off-again Symphonic Synergy format, which debuted with performances in Amsterdam and Mexico City in September and December 2024. The show will be part of a larger, yet-to-be-announced world tour.

Tickets go on general sale on Friday, September 4, at 10am UK time.

The band comment: “Playing the legendary Royal Albert Hall in London for the first time, surrounded by a full orchestra and choir, will be an absolutely magical experience. Hearing our music come alive in a way it is supposed to sound, on such an iconic stage, will be a moment we’ll remember forever – come and be a part of it!”

Epica are currently touring to promote their 2025 album Aspiral and will play in Asia later this month. The run of six shows commences at the Liquidroom in Tokyo on September 14 and concludes at the Modern Sky Lab in Shanghai on September 22.

The band’s 25th-anniversary celebrations will kick off in January with three shows at the Royal Theatre Carre in Amsterdam. All three dates are sold out. They’ll then play across Latin America in March, supported by Italian symphonic death metal maestros Fleshgod Apocalypse. At time of publication, the Royal Albert Hall date is the only show on Epica’s slate set to feature an orchestra and choir.

Guitarist/vocalist Mark Jansen founded Epica in 2002, shortly after leaving After Forever, which featured future Nightwish frontwoman Floor Jansen (no relation). Singer Simone Simons, Mark’s then-partner, and keyboardist Coen Janssen joined in the same year. The three are the only people to have performed on every Epica album. The band have sold more than one million albums worldwide.

Simons looked back on Epica’s formation during a 2023 interview with Metal Hammer, revealing that she didn’t initially want to join the lineup.

“I knew Mark [Jansen, guitars/vocals] because I was in a relationship with him back in the day,” she recalled. “He started a new band [after leaving After Forever] pretty quickly, but because I was his girlfriend, at first I didn’t want to join. I helped them search for a singer.

“I thought I should do it by the book – finish high school and then go explore the world with a metal band. But when they asked me if I wanted to [sing for them], I thought, ‘OK, let’s just give it a go.’ And here we are, 20 years later!”

She also said that she rehearsed with a black metal band before joining the symphonic group: “They were in my hometown and my friend’s boyfriend was playing in that band, so that’s why we went, but I was way too shy to sing along. Epica was my true first band.”

Epica previously celebrated their 20th anniversary with a sold-out show at Poppodium 013 in Tilburg, Netherlands, on September 3, 2022. They performed a small set of rarities and an After Forever cover under their short-lived original name, Sahara Dust, to open the gig.

The 1980s brought new elements to Jethro Tull’s music. Following on from Ian Anderson’s would-be solo album A, and The Broadsword And The Beast’s folk-synth hybrid, came a more solid electronic sound. The recently reissued Under Wraps and Anderson’s true solo debut, Walk Into Light, harnessed the latest technology and the talents of new keyboardist Peter-John Vettese. Anderson takes Prog on a journey through their creation.

Where does Jethro Tull end and Ian Anderson begin? The longtime leader of the British prog institution was forced to ponder that question at the turn of the 1980s, when his eagerness to explore new creative pastures had him to put the band he’d led for 12 years on hold.

But his plans to release a solo album, leaning into digital technology and exploring more contemporary lyrical themes, were compromised when his label insisted A should be released under the Tull name. With his old bandmates (except long-serving guitarist foil Martin Barre) left out in the cold – a changing of the guard that seemed partly triggered by the passing of bassist John Glascock – Anderson accepted up the label’s suggestion, and a new era for Tull took shape.

It was a rebirth reinforced by the introduction of plugged-in young synth maestro Peter-John Vettese, who replaced A’s “guest” Eddie Jobson for 1982’s The Broadsword And The Beast. The pull of the Vettese’s new sounds was too strong for Anderson to resist. “It was a new era,” he says, “It was the beginning, really, of programmable drum machines, sequencers; things which were fast becoming more sophisticated tools.”

The incorporation of electronica was met, for the most part, with approval – possibly because the potent set of songs came woven into a traditionally Tull-like tapestry of folk-rock compositions, dressed in the kind of fantasy-leaning and faintly medieval imagery that are never going to scare the horses in prog’s heartland.

But for his next career move, Anderson stepped into a more modernist aesthetic. And this time, crucially, he had a partner in crime. Vettese had been credited with “additional material” on Broadsword – now he was also providing the chance to explore new sonic territory. In doing so on a solo album, Anderson could partly step out from under the weight of expectation that the Tull name brought with it.

“It seemed like a challenge to either embrace new electronic sounds and see what it might do for me, or just ignore it completely and stay in an analogue world with my head in the sand,” Anderson recalls ahead of Walk Into Light’s imminent reissue in remixed form, as part of an expanded overhaul of the Tull album that followed it, 1984’s Under Wraps.

“It was a step into the unknown,” he says. “So it helped that Peter and I sat down to work together on Walk Into Light. The technology was new to him too, and he was very excited by it all.”

Working in partnership with another songwriter was also uncharted territory for Anderson. “I never really worked with anybody at all in a compositional sense. There had been little elements of music that invented by Dee Palmer and Martin Barre on albums like Songs From The Wood, but in terms of collaborating on the essential identity of songs, I’d not really worked with anybody.

“There were many examples on that record of sketchy ideas that I had in terms of melody, and of course, I wrote all the lyrics. But [Vettese] would come up with a lot of little musical ideas, and I would say, ‘Oh, that’s good. Maybe we can put that here, and I can build something on there.’”

Possibilities opened further up with the completion of a studio in a barn adjoining the Anderson’s home in Buckinghamshire. The juxtaposition of home comforts and new technology are arguably reflected on the album, which sometimes seems to blend apparently contradictory concerns within the same song: “What I found reassuring was bringing together what was then advanced technology with more traditional songwriting styles and subject matter.”

Take the search for human connections within a technology-driven future on User-Friendly. “I wanted to take the term that was being applied to computer science and apply it to a human relationship,” he explains of this pulsing vignette, graced with sparkling synth trills from Vettese as he implores, ‘On dusty terminals, finger me lightly, do/And QWERTY is the name of love, printed on the VDU.’

That wouldn’t be the only time this ever-playful wordsmith resorted to double entendres, even if the piano-led domestic sketch Toad In The Hole is about yearning for home comforts ‘when I come in from the cold.’ Elsewhere, while the art-pop of Black And White Television and Looking For Eden yearn for some humanity in an uncaring modern world, Trains equates earlier technological advances with nostalgia, reflecting the passions of a man who has made no secret of his love of railways. “I’m [train enthusiast and ex-MP] Michael Portillo with a flute,” Anderson says. “I still use the train whenever it’s practically possible.”

That leans into other themes that would continue into his next songwriting project: the wanderlust-fuelled romance of travel, as well as the unsettling realities of Cold War Europe. Both inform the techno lament of A Different Germany, as Anderson admits of that then-divided nation, he’s ‘afraid to know you now’.

Walk Into Light’s exploration of a markedly more contemporary style didn’t reap commercial rewards – the album only reached No.78 in the UK and didn’t breach the Billboard Top 200 in the US. Anderson was not to be discouraged, and his creative partnership with Vettese continued to bear fruit as he turned his attention to the next Tull album.

Even the supernatural couldn’t put them off, as Anderson explains when recalling how Vettese took up residence in his home around this time. “Part of the deal was that he could use my studio when I wasn’t in it, to work on his own ideas and noodle away, learning more about the technology of recording and producing, which is what he went on to do after he left Jethro Tull.

“He was living in my attic, but he wasn’t very happy up there. It was a 16th-century manor house that had been built over the remains of a nunnery that was razed following the Reformation. There were reputed to be supernatural goings-on.

“A predecessor, an au pair lady, had slept in that room, and she would keep the light on all night. Peter was pretty terrified. And even I noticed a couple of weird things happening in the studio. I can recall going in there having left everything set up from the night before, and I walked in to find all the faders had been moved and knobs turned, despite the studio being locked and alarmed. Somebody – something – had moved everything…”

You can embrace the future, but the past might be hard to shake off, as Anderson would find when presenting his next work to Tull fans. As he invited his band to join Vettese at the haunted house to start work on what would become Under Wraps, spirits were high in the camp.

In the sleeve notes of the new reissue, his bandmates recall high jinx. “We used to play asymmetric hedge tennis,” bassist Dave Pegg recalls. “It was always Martin and me – the Brummies – against Peter and Ian. And we used to let them win, of course! You couldn’t see over the top of the hedge; it was two or three foot taller than we were. The other two would go on the other side and we head like a shuttlecock kind of thing. You never knew where it was coming from. It was absolutely hilarious!”

Anderson is keen to stress that Under Wraps was by no means another solo outing in all but name. “It was very much the work of a four-piece band,” he says. All the same, the Anderson-Vettese partnership added touches that didn’t all date well, – stuttering pitch-shifted samples, squeaks of synth punctuation and silvery electronica. In many ways, though, they suited the lyrical subjects, once again very much Anderson’s realm.

The breathless pace of the title track (or at least the first of two versions of it on the album), alongside stop-start drama and thriller-movie soundtracks elsewhere, suit the espionage theme heard later on the surveillance mystery of Tundra and Later, That Same Evening, wherein the narrator follows a romantic/intelligence quarry, accompanied by an alluringly moody electro-pop soundtrack.

Those narratives reside in a fictional world of intrigue that Anderson had long been fascinated by: “As a young adult I read the James Bond books, and they stayed with me until I found more serious writers, particularly John le Carré, whose first major success with The Spy Who Came In From The Cold was a seminal moment in my reading of that genre.”

It was a hot topic, too, as the Cold War between East and West was at its height, and fear of conflict warming up – with nuclear weapons at the forefront – was widespread. “It seemed a very real threat,” Anderson recalls. “And I mean, you could argue that threat is now right back with us again, in the hands of Mr Putin and other wannabe nuclear operators. But espionage at that point was still rather analogue, whereas these days it’s largely digital, aided by technological warfare. Also, at that point, I was living not far away from Strike Command, jointly operated by the British and the Americans in a huge, tunnelled-out labyrinth under a chalk hill on the outskirts of High Wycombe.

“So we were about six or seven miles away from a dirty nuclear weapon. If they’d gone for a ground burst, which would have had a better chance of penetrating, it would’ve kicked up thousands of tons of nuclear waste. We always had many cans of gasoline, and two or three vehicles, ready to flee to more friendly shores on the west coast of Scotland or somewhere. I wasn’t a prepper, as they call them these days, but it formed a little part of my peripheral thinking about survival for myself and my family.”

Other lyrical concerns on the album include the Thatcherite world of conspicuous consumption, as gently mocked on opening track Lap Of Luxury. Not that Anderson was entirely averse to everything that was happening socio-politically at that time.

“I was aiming to somewhat lampoon the nouveau riche and the very materialistic world after Thatcher’s revolution in politics, because there’s no doubt it was a huge change. And it was one that, in many ways, did bring much of the country together with a sense of national pride, a sense of national optimism, after the very messy previous years where Labour dug a hole for everybody economically, and we lived in the mid-70s through those terrible strikes and energy crises.

“The song was looking at people who could get rich relatively quickly with the benefits of a material world and the gifts that it would seem to shower on individuals. But the aspirations in the song are modest. It says, ‘Buy me a Datsun or Toyota.’ I wasn’t singing about Rolls Royces or Jaguars. But for certain people, just to have a nice Japanese car would’ve been, like, ‘Wow – this is something really to aspire to.’”

Proggy elements are unquetionably present underneath the modernist sheen of Under Wraps, such as the juddering bass drums on Saboteur and Nobody’s Car’s itchy time signatures – but for many Tull fans, the band had stepped too far out of their designated musical box. It’s a reaction that Anderson looks back on with a resigned shrug. “Where did people feel we should be? Maybe in a kind of wooded glade with squirrels and friendly little animals popping up. That’s actually how we start the live show at the moment, with a video of a forest with flute playing in the background, which I suppose is our dig at the stereotypical Jethro Tull kind of world.

“But maybe we went too far in one direction before – with A Passion Play, for instance; and with Under Wraps, it was another step too far for some of the fanbase. We just have to accept that you can’t please all of the people all of the time. But it wasn’t really that radical. Certainly not as big a step as Bob Dylan took when he went electric.”

How did he experience the dissent at the time? Any cries of “Judas!” from prog purists? “Not that I experienced first-hand, but we were not in the era of social media. Back then, it was a few people muttering under their breath on their way out of a venue, or a withering review, perhaps. These days there would be a huge outcry – jeers and hoots and catcalls, albeit from the safe distance of a computer keyboard.”

One element that many listeners found alienating was the relatively tinny production, with the synthetic-sounding drum machine percussion a prominent bugbear. With a series of Tull back catalogue reissues continuing, Anderson harboured plans to look into a radical overhaul of the sound, with talk of a live drummer replacing those divisive electronic beats. “We did do a little experimenting along those lines,” he admits, “but it would’ve been an enormous job.

“I talked to our drummer, Scott Hammond, about doing it, and he really didn’t like the idea of having to sit and learn all that material, transcribing it all in order to recreate the essence of the drum components, which are a very integral part of those songs’ arrangement. It would have involved many, many weeks of work, and it would have been very expensive. And the record company were not, I think, of a mind to be spending that much money.”

A happy compromise was found, however, without any more sticks picked up. “Bruce Soord remixed the original drum samples, and that seemed a much better way of arriving at a real drum sound, so I said, ‘I prefer this approach.’ So he applied that to all the tracks and we ended up with, I think, a very good hybrid of analogue tape and modern technology.”

There’s no doubt that the update by The Pineapple Thief man – who also overhauled Walk Into Light – beefs up the sound. But ultimately the trump card of Under Wraps is its songwriting; once 21st-century ears get used to the 80s production quirks, that’s what endures. Oh, and some very tidy playing, which particularly impressed Anderson when old demos were dug out during the remix process.

“I was so enthused when I heard some of the rough mixes [Tull historian] Don Needham uncovered, and when I heard Bruce’s mixes, I sent them off to Martin Barre and Dave Pegg and said, ‘Hey, remember this?’ It was a sharp reminder of the musicality and the ideas that we all had. Martin Barre’s performance on Under Wraps is certainly one of his best performances overall on a Jethro Tull album. And Dave Pegg, too, when you listen to his bass lines and the accuracy of his playing. Bear in mind that this was music that they found perhaps a little tortuous and complex, particularly Dave, because it’s about as far away from Fairport Convention and his background in folk music as you could get.”

If the album got a lukewarm reception from some fans on its release, the response to the material when played live was more positive – perhaps because a concert environment meant any alienating stylistic dressing was less evident. The band’s September 9 set from London’s Hammersmith Odeon, released as a live album in 1990, is included in expanded form in the new box set. Five songs from the album were played that night (although only three were recorded), and, in typical Tull style, the stage set was arranged around the album’s theme: in this case, the inclusion of shadows and murky goings-on were combined with the band’s trademark humour, albeit in a manner no one would get away with today.

As Anderson explains in the new package’s sleeve notes: “At the end of the second or third song, a naked woman would jump out of her paper packaging and run across the stage in strobe lighting so that you couldn’t really see her properly. Audience members would say after the show that they thought they saw a naked lady, but they weren’t really sure because of the strobe lighting.” Different times, of course.

“There are two reasons you couldn’t do it today,” he adds. “First because it would be politically incorrect, and second you have to give warnings about using flashing lights. So it was a product of its 1984 time, never to be repeated. Not one of our finest moments, in retrospect…”

He acknowledges that Under Wraps as a whole may also carry the hallmarks of a bygone era; but he still retains an affection for it, and all the more so having revisited it. “I’ve always said that the strength of the album – both in its original and remix forms – is that all the musicians were at the top of their game. And everybody felt very much involved together as a band – it was all hands on deck at the mixing stage. Going back to these reawakened some rich memories. It’s still, in my view, great stuff.”

Under Wraps: The Unwrapped Edition and Walk Into Light (The Bruce Soord 2026 Remix) are on sale now.

Rush have added more shows to their triumphant Fifty Something tour. Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Anika Nilles have added extra dates in Houston (October 1), St. Louis (October 21), Cincinnati (October 23) and Pittsburgh (November 15), and seem to be coping with the stress of touring better than some predicted.

“When we initially booked this tour, we didn’t know how well we would hold up to the rigours of the road," say the band. "So we played it safe with lots of days off to recover. But life is nothing if not surprising, and we’re doing fine and having a blast, so why not try to hit a few more of the cities that have always treated us so well?”

The tour, which kicked off in Los Angeles in June at the Kia Forum – the scene of Rush's final show with late drummer Neil Peart in 2015 – is currently scheduled to end in April next year after a run of shows in Europe.

While the trio have booked a series of dates in South America in the New Year, no plans have been announced for Japan (where Rush have played just four shows, on the Grace Under Pressure tour in 1984) or in Australia and New Zealand, two countries they've never visited.

Ticklets for the new dates will go on sale on Friday, Sept. 4 at 10am local time. Presales begin on September 1 at the same time. Full dates below.

Rush: Fifty Something remaining tour dates 2026

Sep 02: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 04: Montreal Bell Centre, QC
Sep 12: Boston TD Garden, MA
Sep 14: Boston TD Garden, MA
Sep 17: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 19: Cleveland Rocket Arena, OH
Sep 23: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Sep 25: San Antonio Frost Bank Center, TX
Oct 01: Houston Toyota Center, TX
Oct 05: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 07: Denver Ball Arena, CO
Oct 10: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 12: Seattle Climate Pledge Arena, WA
Oct 15: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 17: San Jose SAP Center, CA
Oct 21: St. Louis Enterprise Center, MO
Oct 23: Cincinatti Heritage Bank Center, OH
Oct 25: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 27: Washington Capital One Arena, D.C.
Oct 30: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 01: Uncasville Mohegan Sun Arena, CT
Nov 05: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 07: Hollywood Hard Rock Live, FL
Nov 09: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 11: Tampa Benchmark International Arena, FL
Nov 15: Pittsburgh PPG Paints Arena, PA
Nov 20: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 22: Charlotte Spectrum Center, NC
Nov 25: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Nov 27: Atlanta State Farm Arena, GA
Dec 01: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 03: Glendale Desert Diamond Arena, AZ
Dec 10: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 12: Edmonton Rogers Place, AB
Dec 15: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC
Dec 17: Vancouver Rogers Arena, BC

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2027

Jan 15: Buenos Aires Movistar Arena, Argentina
Jan 22: Curitiba Arena da Baixada, Brazil
Jan 24: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 26: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 30: Rio de Janeiro Estádio Olímpico Nilton Santos. Brazil
Feb 01: Belo Horizonte Estádio Mineirão, Brazil
Feb 04: Brasília Arena BRB Mané Garrincha, Brazil
Feb 19: Paris La Défense Arena, France
Feb 21: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Feb 23: Amstersam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Feb 25: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Feb 28: Cologne Lanxess Arena, Germany
Mar 02: Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
Mar 04: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
Mar 08: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 10: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 12: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 14: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 16: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 18: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 21: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 27: Kraków Arena Kraków, Poland
Mar 30: Milan Unipol Dome, Italy
Apr 01: Basel St. Jakobshalle Basel, Switzerland
Apr 04: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Apr 06: Oslo Unity Arena, Norway
Apr 08: Stockholm Avicii Arena, Sweden
Apr 10: Helsinki Veikkaus Arena, Finland

Find Rush tickets.

Blending the pub-rock spirit of Australia with the political fire and intensity of their Greek upbringing, Frenzee are an all-sibling band shaped by family.

“I mean, our eating habits are Greek,” they say. “But our love for the pub is definitely Australian.”

Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna coined the famous rally cry ‘Girls to the front!’, and this is something Frenzee are pushing at their shows. Crowd surfing, all-girl-encouraged mosh pits and total chaos exist side by side. Reading Hanna’s autobiography, frontwoman Apollonia Xylouris was inspired.

“We want everyone involved,” she explains from Crete. “It’s a safe environment to rock the fuck out. Women are always pushed to the side. All you need is everyone to be having a good time. Just not being a dickhead, basically.”

Growing up between Melbourne and Crete, they discovered Bikini Kill, AC/DC and The Prodigy via their mum’s record collection. From there, Frenzee evolved as a punk, metal, rock, riot grrrl-inspired band.

Brothers Nikos (drums) and Adonis (guitar) first picked up instruments thanks to their Aussie mum and Greek Dad musician parents, and unknowingly trained for Frenzee’s stamina-burning shows through marathon eight-hour gigs in their traditional Greek folk band.

But don’t think there’s anything chilled about Frenzee. Moving away from their trad folk roots, you’ll hear ample traces of Lemmy in their DNA, while Apollonia channels the confrontational electricity of Kathleen Hanna and Keith Flint. Running off “red wine, darts and very high acid reflux” – which seems to be the Frenzee modus operandi – their identity informs everything they do, combining the loose, humoured spirit of Australia with the emotional intensity and political frustration of Greece.

“The ‘ragey’ aspect of Frenzee would be the Greek side of us,” they explain, “because there’s a lot of anger built around all the politics here. Everything that’s wrong with Greece is right in front of your eyes.”

Yet both cultures share a similar spirit, built around community, resilience and gathering at a bar. It’s that duality that’s become the unique fingerprint that Frenzee stickily leave on everything they touch – it’s on their self-titled EP and first LP What’s Wrong With Me (a third release is being mastered as we speak).

Armed with distortion, fury and acid reflux, Frenzee are proving that punk’s most important traditions aren’t just preserved in history books; they’re kept alive in sweaty rooms full of people who are ready to make a difference. And it’s known that well-behaved women seldom make history. “[Frenzee] is an outburst of adrenaline,” Apollonia concludes. “It’s a boost of energy, you know? Makes people leave jaded up.”

For Frenzee updates, visit frenzee.bandcamp.com.

Mastodon's Brann Dailor says a shared obsession with an 80s movie saw him run up an $800 phone bill texting quotes from the film to late Slipknot drummer Joey Jordison.

Dailor loved 1986 crime drama River's Edge – partly because it featured Slayer on the soundtrack and followed a "bunch of metalheads with no future".

Mastodon's new album Marrow Deep features a sample from the film on the track Poisonous Weapons.

When Mastodon and Slipknot were on the The Unholy Alliance tour together in the mid-2000s, Dailor struck up a firm friendship with fellow drummer Jordison.

And when Jordison casually dropped a line from the film in conversation, Dailor immediately followed up with the next line from the movie – beginning a playful back-and-forth that would cost him a small fortune.

Dailor tells Full Metal Jackie: "I memorised that whole movie. It's one of my favourite movies of all time. It had Slayer in the soundtrack and just seemed it was a bunch of metalheads but with no future.

"And when I first met Joey Jordison, when we were on tour with Slipknot and Slayer over in Europe, I saw this little guy watching us soundcheck, and I had never seen Joey's actual face before.

"But I was like, 'I think that's Joey.' Then when we got done soundcheck and I went over to him. We made very fast friends.

"You could see across the street, like past the buses and the trucks, the loading dock door was open and there was like six cop cars over there with their lights on.

"And he looked over and he said, 'Somebody fuckin' parked.' Now that's a line from The River's Edge, and I did the next line.

"I said 'duck down, goddammit. You wanna get yourself caught?'

"So me and Joey became best friends in that moment."

The pair eventually sent so many mobile text messages to each other quoting the film, that it cost Dailor $800.

He adds: "I got home at the end of that tour and I had a $800 phone bill. My wife at the time said 'is this because you were texting River's Edge quotes back and forth with Joey?'

"And I was like, 'yeah.I'm sorry. But I can't let Joey know, I can't let him think that I don't know what the next line is.'

"It'd be like 3 in the morning. We're on different buses. We're in Germany somewhere, and he's like, 'somebody fuckin' parked', you know."

River's Edge was released in 1986 and stars Crispin Glover, Keanu Reeves, Ione Skye and Dennis Hopper.

Joey Jordison died in 2022 at the age of 46.

An array of stars from the punk rock world joined forces at the weekend to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the release of The Ramones' self-titled debut album.

Green Day frontman Bill Joe Armstrong, Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, Rancid mainman Tim Armstrong and CJ Ramone performed as a supergroup called The Cretin Family at the official Ramones 50th Anniversary Tribute at Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Sunday, August 30.

And they welcomed a string of special guests including Billy Idol, The Linda Lindas and musician/comedian Fred Armisen to the stage as they performed The Ramones' hits.

Video of the performances can be viewed below.

On the influence The Ramones had on him, Tim Armstrong says: "From the moment I first heard The Ramones, music was never the same. They are my favourite band of all time!"

Billie Joe Armstrong adds: "The spirit of The Ramones is alive in every backyard punk show, punk club and festival. Generation after generation of cretins and weirdos become Ramones lovers.

"Kids are influenced by the Ramones and they don't even know it yet."

And Travis Barker says: "The Ramones are the blueprint. Punk rock wouldn't be what it is today without them. I'm honoured to celebrate 50 years of one of the greatest bands ever."

The Ramones' debut album was released in 1976 and had a seismic impact on the punk scene which was in its infancy in the UK.

Generation X bassist Tony James says: "When that album came out, all the English bands tripled speed overnight. Before The Ramones, bands might sound like the MC5, but punk rock is totally down to the Ramones."

Marillion’s revolutionary crowdfunding campaign, which they ran to fund their 2001 Anoraknophobia album, came after they’d been dropped by their major label in 1995. The prog icons are credited with building the pledge model, which exploded across the industry until the collapse of PledgeMusic in 2017.

By that time Marilion – who’d released F.E.A.R. with the defunct platform a year earlier – had moved on. Looking back in 2016, singer Steve Hogarth recalled just how far they’d come after making the great escape, and inspiring other artists to do the same.

“The major labels are not doing it because they love you. If they’re really honest, they’re not even doing it because they’re excited about the music.

They’re excited about the new Coldplay album because they can hear there’s a hit that’s going straight on the radio, and it’s worth a million quid. I’m talking here about the people who work on the top floor, not the people who work in the offices.

Another thing I learned – which really shocked me – was that the people in the offices actually had no kind of clue about what kind of deal you’re on, what your royalty payments are like, whether you’re getting one per cent or 90 per cent of an album. They just assume that all the artists are paid really well for what they do, and all get rich.

I remember speaking to a girl there and telling her what we earned and her jaw hit the floor. She had no idea. So there are only four people in these major labels, in the business affairs department, who have any clue what the artists are being paid.

Back in those days, I don’t think we felt directly pressured to change the music. The way they would exert their influence was, they would bring a producer in and they would whisper in his ear.

The phone would ring and it would be, “Is there this and is there that? Have you made sure there’s enough of that?” That way, they didn’t have to come to us as artists and say, “Can you sing it a bit more like that and is there enough chorus?” —because they were whispering at the producer.

The label would always insist on appointing a producer because he was their control system: who knows what the fuck you can do with artists, but you can whisper in a producer’s ear.

Thankfully, that was a long time ago.”

In 35 years with AFI, Davey Havok has seen a whole lot more than just a thousand dazzling outfits in the mirror. From witnessing the Cali punk feeding frenzy of the 90s to becoming one of the 21st century’s great goth icons and brushing right up against the ceiling of the mainstream, he’s endured some of the most drastic turnovers in the industry that alternative music has ever seen.

Ahead of their first UK shows in nine years supporting last year’s none-more-black Silver Bleeds The Black Sun…, we catch up with dark punk’s prince to reflect on the journey so far.

ANSWER THE CALL OF THE MACABRE

“I was born in 1975, so when I was a kid, punks and death rockers were at the malls, Kiss Meets The Phantom Of The Park was on TV, and I was enamoured of the look and wanted to know more about it. I was fascinated by the ‘other’ and motifs of the underdog and what was considered to be horrific or grotesque. Why that is fundamentally, I can’t say, but I was raised Catholic and that oppression really informed my desire to reclaim my identity as a kid.”

BE AWARE OF PEOPLE’S INTENTIONS

“After Green Day broke, it really changed everything in a way punk hadn’t seen since the Sex Pistols, and it caused similar problems. After we signed to [The Offspring frontman] Dexter Holland’s Nitro Records for Very Proud Of Ya, someone made the mistake of sending the promo posters to [legendary California punk venue] Gilman Street. When we came there someone had taken all of those posters and made a big dollar sign on the ceiling!

Ethically we didn’t have a problem with people signing to bigger labels, and many bands from our scene learned that the indies were often more corrupt than the majors.”

VISUAL SELF-EXPRESSION IS A POWERFUL TOOL

“In being analytical about my looks – which I eventually started to do because people talked to me about it – I began to realise how much my look is contextual. The way I look now is very much a reaction to the current epoch that we live in, where I feel that the world is surreal and everything is an uncanny bastardisation of something familiar.

If you look at Decemberunderground, me being drawn to white and pink eyeshadow and pops of colour was a response to shiny, happy-sounding bands having adopted more sombre looks. I think self-expression through style can be very powerful.”

VEGAN STRAIGHT EDGE IS MORE THAN A LABEL

“I discovered straight edge when I was 15. I was involved in this music but I didn’t understand the self-destructive side of it, and I couldn’t believe it when I heard Minor Threat. It was what I was thinking about.

Through the straight edge scene I was educated on animal rights, but I saw a lot of people using veganism as an identity rather than because it was the right thing to do. I was hesitant to go vegan because it was so trendy, but there was no way to consume animals and not be participating in the torture and murder of them, so I have been for 28 years now. It’s something I wish I had participated in since I was conscious.”

WE LOVE THE EMBRACE OF METAL

“If anyone who listens to metal appreciates what we do, I’m very touched, because I feel that metal in its purest state is one of the few genuine subcultures that still exists. We do not make anything that sounds too metal, so to have appeal to that community really means a lot to me.

Neurosis are one of the greatest bands ever, I used to go see them playing at Gilman Street, and if we’re counting hair metal I am in on that! My father and I went to see Def Leppard last year, and those three part harmonies are fucking high. Some of the best riffs ever written are on Pyromania.”

LET THE MOMENT TAKE YOU

“Steel Panther used to be called Metal Shop and would have a party in Hollywood every Monday night. They were entirely a cover band but were in character and would do skits the entire time where the band-members would fight and break up. It created this really bizarre revivalist hair metal scene that was both tongue-in-cheek yet totally sincere.

If you were a musician you’d inevitably find yourself being brought up onstage, and I would frequently go and sing Live Wire by Mötley Crüe or Talk Dirty To Me by Poison with them.”

KNOW WHAT TO TURN DOWN

“The writing of Decemberunderground was a miserable period. We had signed to Dreamworks, but they sold it to Interscope. Bummer.

Our A&R guy was hellbent on trying to get [Interscope boss] Jimmy Iovine – who had expressly claimed in the press that rock is dead – to pay attention to AFI, and so it was suggested that we collab with Jimmy’s great love at the time, which was 50 Cent. I have nothing against 50 Cent, but what does that even mean?!

Even worse was this was the era when ringtones were the new technology craze. I love this man and I still see him once a month at the least, but this motherfucker says to me, ‘What if you were to be the first band to write a ringtone album?’”

GRIT YOUR TEETH THROUGH THE TRENDS

“[When the emo boom of the 2000s happened] we couldn’t relate to that at all, but unfortunately the press pointed out that we wore make-up like these guys who wore make-up so we must be like them.

That term was bizarre, because of course the first incarnation of emo was referring to often very aggressive post-hardcore. These bands sounded nothing like Rites Of Spring or Mohinder, and I’d imagine these bands also didn’t like identifying with that term. There were only a couple types of guitar music on the radio, and we had louder, more aggressive guitar than what was going on with the New York dance rock scene, but we also certainly weren’t coming from pop punk. We probably did have more in common with 50 Cent!”

LET EVENTS PLAY IN YOUR FAVOUR

“When Girl’s Not Grey came out as a single and made it to the Top 10 [of Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart], that was unbelievable. We were then gonna go with Bleed Black as the second single ’cos it had bigger hooks, but KROQ picked up and started playing The Leaving Song Pt. II, which was a much heavier song, and our manager told us, ‘We can’t tell them to stop!’ I’m screaming on that song and it’s not an obvious single, but if you’d said to us that it had that potential… Then why not? That’s fun!”

HITS AREN’T WRITTEN, THEY’RE MADE

“It breaks my heart that Miss Murder will always represent us, and that I will die and someone will look up AFI and Miss Murder is what they’re gonna find. I don’t dislike Miss Murder, it’s a pretty good song! But never, even when we wrote it, did I think that it was the greatest song. I even voted to not put it on the record, but that experience really proved to me that it was all about marketing, because everything after Decemberunderground is better than Decemberunderground.

I have campaigned to keep it off the setlist and recently succeeded. When we play a festival or when we’re playing a city where we feel we have a few more passive fans, we’re gonna play it, and I don’t mind it, but I do enjoy the optics of removing it from the set.”

APPROPRIATE FOOTWEAR IS IMPORTANT

“I went to see the Circle Jerks and my plan was to test out this sneakerboot that I was gonna possibly wear onstage and see if they can survive the aggression. Fashion and veganism and function for my behaviour onstage rarely meet. During the Adolescents, I’m down there slamming and I look down and the heel from my shoe is just gone.

I limp upstairs with two halves of my shoe, and I’m crying to the promoter that my plan was to also dance for the Circle Jerks and now I couldn’t. The promoter lent me his shoes! That’s community, right there, and I sent him AFI socks as thanks.”

PHYSICAL COMMUNITY IS THE REALEST THING

“We’re living in a very surreal world that rates content over substance. It’s something we saw coming and did nothing to stop and now we’re living in a world of disconnection. The post-human element of existence is now actually veering into the true dystopias that were written about in the 50s and 60s.

It’s a horrifying, desolate reality, where participation in any sort of true human experience is at an unprecedented low for the species. All I can do is create, as this desperate act that acts as a flare.”

Silver Bleeds The Black Sun is out now via Run For Cover

Trevor Horn’s career began at a time when music producers’ names were barely recognised. But with a passion for good music and a desire to share, the Buggles co-founder became one of the most celebrated studio stars of the 80s and 90s – and never abandoned his passion for prog. He looked back on his career so far in 2019.

What was it like to work with Genesis on the The Carpet Crawlers 1999, their reworking of the 1975 song with the classic-era line-up including Peter Gabriel?

What fun!

Were they all in the studio for it?

The four of them – not Phil Collins. I had to go to Switzerland to record him. Phil’s the loveliest man. The first time I went over, he played the drums, and then he did his backing vocals. After his first take I said to him, “I don’t suppose you’ve ever thought of going solo?”

It was a pleasure; they had great manners. Peter’s the slightly crazy one while Tony Banks is the core of the group. A Trick Of The Tail is one of my favourite all time albums. I love Los Endos; I crank that up while I’m washing the dishes. And Ripples is my favourite singalong track, when it hits the big high note.

One of the first records you made in LA was Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells II.

It was the first time I’d heard of a ‘two’ album. I liked Tubular Bells, although it wasn’t my favourite album of Mike’s – that’s Incantations. I used to play it in the car, especially the Hiawatha section.

Mike was cool. He rented a house in Beverly Hills and we made most of it there. It was when the riots were happening. He was playing everything, so he was totally in control.

There was a section, the bit where the “strolling player” [Alan Rickman] talks. It was 48-track and we’d been working on it for two weeks; I thought we were nearly there. When I came in [one morning] people were looking at me; they told me that Mike, who’d just gone to bed, had changed the bit.

He’d wiped it. It was changed forever – there was no undo button. I was in shock. It was the only time it’s ever happened to me in 40 years.

What did you say when he woke up?

Mike asked what I thought and I told him it would take me a little time as I’d kind of liked the other one!

I was always encouraging him to give the guitar lots of love – he’s an amazing, extraordinary player, the way he comes up with the tunes. He has names for all of the sounds.

The way you’ve able to smuggle prog into the charts is great. Probably the absolute zenith was the title track of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome.

Oh, it was absolutely prog! I was trying to do a long track for the simple reason that I found tracks like Yes’ Gates Of Delirium and Close To The Edge were just great when you were driving. They were instrumental pieces of music with songs in that seemed to go somewhere. In the 70s, those songs had given me such pleasure. I wanted to see if I could do it.

I think Pleasuredome stands up still; it’s entertaining. What really strikes me when I hear it is what a brilliant engineer Steve Lipson is. I think that’s some of the best mixed stuff I have ever heard – it’s extraordinary.

You’ve kept in with Yes, reworking Fly From Here and aligning yourself with Steve Howe’s version of the group onstage at the London Palladium last year.

I’m very fond of Steve; he’s really worked hard to keep the whole thing going. He’s been doing that for 10, 15 years now, and I have to admire him for it. I think they’re really good. It will never be the same – it’s different, but it has the same excitement.

Are you able rise above factions?

That’s what I always try to do. I was talking with Trevor Rabin just yesterday on the phone and we’re going to get together when I get back to LA. I don’t have beef with anybody.

New episodes of Toyah Willcox and Robert Fripp's much-loved series of Sunday Lunch performances are increasingly thin on the ground, so we're delighted to report that a fresh edition emerged this weekend.

In what we believe to be only the third new performance released in 2026 – most weeks, the couple share a video from their extensive archive – the Fripp-Willcox kitchen is once again filled with joie de vivre as the King Crimson man and his bubbly bride embark on a typically ragged cover of the 1968 Rolling Stones classic Jumpin' Jack Flash.

"Yes, it's a toothless, bearded hag!" bellows Fripp at the climax. "With Toyah and Robert's Sunday Lunch."

"Who's the hag?" asks Toyah.

This week, it was announced that Toyah will receive an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Worcester next month.

“I am thrilled to receive an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Worcester," she says. "I have constantly strived to push boundaries in an unpredictable industry, and if my life can inspire, guide and help those who are about to do the same, then my 50 years in show business mean even more to me today. This honour will be a highlight of my life, and I am grateful to all who have made it possible. I very much look forward to the day I receive it."

Meanwhile, 11 King Crimson live shows – recorded in 2000 in Japan as the band promoted their 12th album The ConstruKction of Light – have been made available to download via the band's partnership with streaming platform nugs. The shows were originally available from the band's DGM Live website in 2016.

Former Skid Row singer Sebastian Bach has played his first show with Twisted Sister. Bach was announced as Dee Snider's replacement back in March, when Snider was obliged to retire from live performance on doctor's orders.

Twisted Sister – billed as Bent Brother – gave Bach his debut at the 2500-capacity Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, New Jersey, on Saturday night, a warm-up for the band's previously announced appearance at the Borealis Theatre in Palmer, Alaska, on September 4. The show was the band's first at the Starland since a 2015 performance honouring late Twisted Sister drummer A.J. Pero.

At the climax of a 17-song set that included two Skid Row songs – I Remember You and Youth Gone Wild – the band played the classic We're Not Gonna Take It. A fan-shot video of the performance is embedded below.

"When I sing Twisted Sister music, I’m like a steamroller," Bach told Classic Rock earlier this year. "I’m a beast. I’m out of control."

"The question was not whether Sebastian could do this; I knew that he could," added guitarist Jay Jay French. "He was phenomenal."

Since announcing an initial four-show schedule of September dates, the revamped Twisted Sister lineup has confirmed a series of shows in the final quarter of the year. Full dates below.

Twisted Sister – Starland Ballroom setlist

What You Don't Know (Sure Can Hurt You)
You Can't Stop Rock 'n' Roll
We're Gonna Make It
Shoot 'Em Down
Tear It Loose
Destroyer
The Kids Are Back
Like A Knife in the Back
Ride To Live, Live To Ride
Under The Blade
The Beast
Burn In Hell
The Price
I Remember You
I Wanna Rock
Youth Gone Wild
We're Not Gonna Take It

Twisted Sister feat. Sebastian Bach: Twisted Forever, Forever Twisted tour dates

Sep 04: Palmer Borealis Theatre, AK
Sep 06: Salem L.B. Day Amphitheater, OR
Sep 12: Choctaw Grand Theater Durant, OK
Sep 27: Puyallup Washington State Fair, WA
Oct 02: West Springfield The Big E, MA
Oct 08: Niagara Falls OLG Stage at Fallsview Casino, ON
Oct 10: Windsor The Colosseum at Caesars Windsor, ON
Oct 18: Gary Hard Rock Casino Northern Indiana, IN
Nov 12: Bristol Hard Rock Live Bristol, VA
Nov 14: Charles Town The Event Center at Hollywood Casino, WV
Dec 11: St. Petersburg Fergs Pavilion, FL

Find Twisted Sister tickets.

Original Slipknot singer Anders Colsefni says he has no regrets over not being the voice that made them one of the biggest bands in the world.

Colsefni was the lead vocalist on Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat – considered the secret debut album that started Slipknot’s ascent.

But it was when he was replaced by Corey Taylor that the Iowa group exploded onto the scene with their self-titled debut album.

Colsefni has remained friends with Taylor and he has performed the Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat songs live over the years with Taylor's support.

Discussing his departure from Slipknot and the rapid rise that followed, Colsenfi tells The Phase Remains The Same: "I'm a death metal singer by heart, and they had the opportunity to go on and do what they're doing now.

"They were able to do some radio songs. Nothing I would do was gonna get on a radio. I already knew that.

"While it ended up crushing my spirit for a little while, I was able to realise that I'm just one of a long line of original singers that weren't the ones that actually made the band famous.

"And it took a little while, but I was fine with it. And I'm certainly fine with it now. I don't have any regrets.

"I only did what I could do based on what was going on at the time. And if it took bringing in a different singer to get a local band that I was part of out and make such an impact on history, I'm totally down with that."

While he is still performing, Colsefni also works a regular job and is happy doing so.

He adds: "I'm not living the rock and roll lifestyle like all of them. I still have to work 40 to 60 hours a week and do all that normal stuff and try to fit my music afterwards, but that's what most people do.

"The majority of the musicians out there, that's what they're doing. It's only a select few that actually get the golden cup in their hand."

Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson took aim at US President Donald Trump's 'Lake America' antics as the metal giants opened their Run For Your Lives Tour in Toronto, Canada, on Saturday night.

Trump is in an ongoing trade war with his northern neighbours and has been delivering a series of jibes, including saying he would make Canada the "51st State" of the US.

And after Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from trade talks this week, claiming the US negotiators had tried to move the goalposts at the last minute, Trump predictably did not take it well.

In an orchestrated media conference in the Oval Office this week, Trump crossed out the name of Lake Ontario on a map using a marker pen, and wrote "Lake America" in its place. He previously renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf Of America.

Dickinson has joined a string of people in pouring scorn on Trump's stunt, telling the sold out audience at Toronto's Scotiabank Arena on Saturday night: "How long has it been since we have been to Toronto? Too long, too long. And in Canada, in fact.

"We got here, we crossed Lake Ontario, we will be crossing the Gulf of Mexico.

"It is a ridiculous state of the world."

Trump's stunt has drawn ridicule and anger from Canada and beyond. Carney responded by saying that no matter what the US calls it, Canadians will know it as "Lake Ontario – then, now and always."

Ontario's top-ranking politician, Premier Doug Ford, also hit back, comparing Trump's stunt to a sketch from Saturday Night Live.

Lake Ontario is the smallest of the five Great Lakes of North America and sits between the Canadian province of Ontario to the north and the US state of New York to the south. Toronto is the capital city of Ontario.

Iron Maiden North American tour 2026 remaining dates

Aug 30: Toronto, ON - Scotiabank Arena *
Sep 03: Montréal, QC - Parc Jean-Drapeau *^
Sep 05: Harrison, NJ - Sports Illustrated Stadium *^
Sep 09: Boston, MA - TD Garden *
Sep 11: Bristow, VA - Jiffy Lube Live *
Sep 12: Charlotte, NC - PNC Music Pavilion *
Sep 15: Hershey, PA - Hersheypark Stadium *
Sep 17: Louisville, KY - Louder Than Life Festival
Sep 19: Shakopee, MN - Mystic Lake Amphitheater *
Sep 22: Chicago, IL - Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre *
Sep 25: Los Angeles, CA - BMO Stadium *^
Sep 29: San Antonio, TX – Alamodome *^

* Megadeth supporting
^ Anthrax supporting

"There are only two kinds of music: good music and the other kind," wrote Duke Ellington in a 1962 essay. Metal didn't even exist then – imagine that – and six decades on, it would be interesting to find out what the jazz legend would think of metal off-shoots like cybergrind and funeral doom.

In an attempt to make sense of the continually sprawling world of metal and all its subgenres, here's a comprehensive list of some umbrella terms that may have passed you by.

Atmospheric Black Metal

If the sound of eternal torment recorded on a battered cassette player wasn't atmospheric enough, this frostbitten subgenre reimagines the black metal blueprint and adds swathes of dense ambient layers to the mix, replacing verses about Gamle Erik with screeching vocals about nature and general melancholy.

Notable bands: Wolves in the Throne Room, Drudkh, None

Blackened Crust

Marrying the relentless hectoring of crust punk and the relentless sonic pummel of black metal, blackened crust combines anti-establishment lyrics with raw power. Imagine Old Scratch writing a strong letter to his local council, then screaming it over the most unforgiving wall of sound.

Notable bands: Martyrdöd, Dödsrit

Cybergrind

This offshoot of grindcore delivers short blasts of glitchy noise over a frantic drum machine, creating time signatures the average human mind could scarcely comprehend. Bear in mind, there is no suitable time to put a cybergrind album on, other than when you're cornered by robot gangs in a dystopian city war.

Notable bands: Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Genghis Tron

Drone Doom

Slow and low, that is the tempo. Drone doom is the preserve of the patient, with its proponents playing resonant riffs which move at a glacial pace and shake the calcium from your bones. Guttural screams optional.

Notable bands: Sunn O))), Khanate

Electronicore

Here's a mix of the deliberate chug of metalcore and the world of electronic dance music. In fact, electronicore's reach is vast, with heavy bands mixing wobbly synths, sub-bass, and pop sensibilities. On paper, it should wind up metal purists, but the genre's irresistible charm goes a long way at outdoor festivals. Exceptionally good at helping indoor cycling enthusiasts 'dig deep' or whatever during a Peloton session.

Notable bands: Electric Callboy, Enter Shikari

Funeral Doom

Amateurs may describe this genre as simply slow and repetitive, but they'd be wrong. It's doom, but with the added vibe of a winter burial on the outskirts of a desolate industrial town.

Notable bands: Bell Witch, Ahab

Goregrind

An overwhelming and disturbing amalgam of grindcore, death metal, and the sort of imagery that you'd find on the now-defunct Rotten website, goregrind is the most abrasive of all metal. Unless you count gorenoise, which is an elitist subgenre for people who think goregrind is 'soft'.

Notable bands: Carcass, Repulsion

Heavy Negative Wizard Metal

Australian artist Bob Nekrasov's solo project, Rebel Wizard, is an unholy blend of power metal, black metal, and New Wave of British Heavy Metal. All the metal, basically. He calls it an “anarchic alchemical process of outsider energies respecting the power of traditional triumphant metal into a unique sound to smash out the coerced gloom and banality of our times.”

Notable bands: Rebel Wizard

Industrial Black Metal

It's the frosty sound of black metal with all the percussive charm of a foundry. Lovely stuff.

Notable bands: Mysticum, Blut Aus Nord

Jazz Metal

In 1958, legendary jazz pianist Thelonious Monk said: “Where’s jazz going? I don’t know. Maybe it’s going to hell.”

Almost seven decades later, we can safely say the genre is firmly in the big pit of hot punishment, taking the genre's swing and improvisational techniques and marrying them to heavy, distorted riffs, the raspy honk of a sax, or a squeaky trumpet parp. Nice.

Notable bands: Shining, Naked City

Kawaii Metal

Named after the Japanese word for 'cute', kawaii metal effortlessly blends catchy J-pop with propulsive, aggressive riffs. Metal purists scoffed when Babymetal first arrived in 2010, but the Tokyo-based band took the genre worldwide and introduced their unique take on metal to a whole new audience.

Notable bands: Babymetal, Hanabie

Medieval Metal

If you've got a mate who says stuff like 'my liege' and bows, there's a massive chance they'll be into this music. If they're not, they're a time-traveler. It's metal for people who yearn for the hand-cranked riffs of a hurdy-gurdy, the painful wheeze of the dudelsack, or even the dull thud of a frame drum. If that sounds appealing, then there's a whole world of minstrel music waiting for you.

Notable bands: In Extremo, Saltatio Mortis

Nintendocore

Thanks to 8-bit computer processors, early console users could enjoy a handful of beeps which soundtracked their games. Nintendocore takes those technologically primitive noises and combines them with rock and metal. HORSE the Band frontman Nathan Winneke is responsible for this particular genre's name: “It amused us to say that the keyboards in our songs sounded like a Nintendo game. So we said we were 'Nintendocore'. And now it’s stupid.”

Notable bands: HORSE the Band, Powerglove

Pornogrind

Remember our evocative description of goregrind earlier on? Well, if you swap out the lyrical obsession with disease and death for pornography, then you've got yourself a whole new take on extreme metal. It's cock rock, but not as we know it.

Notable bands: Cock and Ball Torture, Anal Blast

Red And Black Anarchist Metal

Red and Black Anarchist Metal, or RABM, is black metal with left-leaning lyrics that opposes everything National Socialist Black Metal stands for.

Notable bands: Dawn Ray'd

Symphonic Black Metal

Doing away with the genre's embedded nihilism and general mischief, here we have a focus on gothic and fantasy themes, while adding lush, sweeping strings and crisp production to produce an altogether epic take on black metal. Tuxedos not included.

Notable bands: Cradle of Filth, Dimmu Borgir

Tech Death

With a name that sounds like some sort of a computer calamity, this subgenre takes death metal's blueprint and adds a sweep-picking virtuosic element to its complex chaos.

Notable bands: Death, Archspire

Unblack Metal

This subgenre has all the hallmarks of traditional black metal – shrieked vocals, cold washes of tremolo-picked guitar, and monotone, Olde English font logos. But here's the twist: it's performed by Christian musicians. Horde, one of the genre's leading bands, are from the frostbitten forests of, um, Australia. Their album Hellig Usvart is the Christian black metal equivalent of Darkthrone's A Blaze in the Northern Sky.

Notable bands: Horde, Crimson Moonlight

War Metal

While some purists call this subgenre bestial black metal, war metal is basically sonic hostility. While we're extremely lucky not to have been caught in an actual war zone, we can only imagine it sounds like this.

Notable bands: Blasphemy, Archgoat

Yodel Metal

Metal was forever tainted by this viral guff that combined Alpine singing with heavy riffs. While it's not strictly a genre, we've heard it and now you must too. We could lump Korpiklaani in with this section for including traditional Sámi singing, which sounds a bit like yodelling to the untrained ear.

Notable bands: The Institute of Quackology (sort of)

Zombiecore

We're on the last letter of the alphabet. There's a ton of thrash bands obsessed with and inspired by horror films. Take Washington thrashers The Accüsed, who pioneered splattercore, or Leeds' Send More Paramedics, who named themselves after some dialogue in The Return of the Living Dead and dressed up like zombies.

Notable bands: The Accüsed, Send More Paramedics

In terms of bizarre musical ideas, indie for metal fans is right up there. But the healing process between the tribes might just have been given a kickstart in Belgium of all places.

“Yeah, indie for metalheads, you heard me right,” laughs Ronker vocalist and guitarist Jasper De Petter. “You could almost say that we’re the Arctic Monkeys trying to play Slayer.”

Let’s back up a minute. Formed during lockdown in 2020 when the members were feeling the frustrations of not being able to tour with their various bands, Ronker were initially nothing more than an outlet to shake off the grim reality of being trapped indoors.

“We all come from a world of post-rock and melancholic indie,” Jasper tells us. “During lockdown, I just couldn’t get my head around the situation, so when we got in a room, we started to play that music, but it came out with so much frustration and anger it was just like…”

Indie fans playing metal? “Exactly.”

Having realised that they were getting more from their new side-project than they were their other bands, Ronker became the members’ number one concern. Superb second album Respect the Hustle, I Won’t Be Your Dog Forever comes on like Every Time I Die fist-fighting Franz Ferdinand with Idles as the special guest referee. It’s a weird mix, with Jasper happily describing Ronker as “heavy, cathartic music”. He also credits his sobriety as a big reason for his band’s sound.

“I used to write fucked-up,” he shrugs. “But I wrote this last album sober. I learned a lot about songwriting and opening up – it focuses your mind, it made me more pointed, more blunt. Which, I believe, in turn makes it heavier.”

Whatever the genre, making it heavier is always an approach we approve of. Welcome, boys.

Respect The Hustle, I Won't Be Your Dog Forever is out now via Labelman.

Sounds Like: Idles refereeing a cage-match between Arctic Monkeys and Slayer
For Fans Of: Idles, Refused, The Chariot

Brian May first saw Eddie Van Halen play live on October 30, 1978. The American guitarist’s eponymous band were supporting a flagging Black Sabbath at the Circus Krone, a former circus venue in Munich, Germany on a tour that has since passed into legend as a hard rock changing of the guard.

May had been invited to the show by his friend, Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi. He knew next to nothing about the opening band; information wasn’t easy to come by in those pre-internet times, and his attention was focused on Queen anyway.

“I got there early, thinking:, ‘I wonder who these Van Halen people are? I wonder what they’re like?’” the recently knighted Queen guitarist says now. “I sat there watching them and my jaw just dropped. Watching Ed was like watching Jimi Hendrix for the first time. I was awestruck.”

Afterwards, May went backstage to say hello to Iommi. Eddie Van Halen was there too, and the two men struck up a conversation. “We just hit it off,” says May. “It felt like an easy friendship.”

The pair stayed in touch. Every so often one or the other would bring up the idea of jamming. “We’d say: ‘Oh, we should really get together,’ but it never happened,” says May.

Except it did happen, albeit five years after they first met. And when these two superstar guitarists did finally come together in an LA recording studio, in April 1983, it wasn’t for a high-profile, high-stakes supergroup. Instead it was for a three-track mini-album whose lead song was a version of the closing theme to a kids’ TV puppet show.

“It was a step into the unknown for me,” May says of the mini-album, titled Star Fleet Project after its lead track, Star Fleet. “But it was a chance to have some fun, play with guys I knew and liked, and finally have the opportunity to play with Ed.”

Forty years after its original release, the Star Fleet Project mini-album has been reissued as a lavish, out-take-packed box set. It’s an outlier in May’s back catalogue – not as familiar or successful as the albums he made with Queen, nor as fully fleshed out as the two hard-rock solo albums he released in the 90s. But, free of the pressures and expectations that came with his regular band, it’s the sound of a man having fun in the studio with his friends. As May writes in the sleeve notes of the reissue: “Those sessions are still there in my head, glowing like a warm beacon of joy in a period which for me was heading into uncertainty and darkness.”

If anyone can take credit for seeding the idea of Star Fleet Project in May’s head, it’s his son, James. James May was four years old when a new children’s sci-fi show featuring Gerry Anderson-style marionettes began airing on Saturday mornings on ITV in late 1982. Originally broadcast in Japan under the title X-Bomber, it had been dubbed into English and retitled Star Fleet for Western audiences. The repackaged show’s propulsive, synth-powered opening and closing theme were composed, and in the case of the latter, sung, by British composer and songwriter Paul Bliss.

“We used to get up every Saturday morning really early to watch the next episode together,” says May. “It was all very exciting to see what happened. And I enjoyed it as much as he did. I heard the signature tune and I thought: ‘Hmm, I like that. Maybe I could do something with it.’”

Queen were between albums at that point – “We’d made a conscious decision to lay off for a while,” says May – and the guitarist decided to make the most of his down time by heading out to Los Angeles.

“There’s something about LA where I feel more able to get out into the world,” he says. “I tend to be quite reclusive in England, it takes a lot to get me out. But in LA I wake up in the morning and think, ‘Who can I call? What should I do today?’”

It was on one of those days, in the spring of 1983, that he decided he should round up a few friends and go into the studio and have some fun. He knew just the people: REO Speedwagon drummer Alan Gratzer, former Rod Stewart/Jeff Beck bassist Phil Chen, and Queen’s touring keyboard player Fred Mandel. And then there was Eddie Van Halen.

“I immediately thought about Ed: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually get in there and play together?’” says May.

The admiration May felt for Eddie was mutual. Van Halen had told him his band were covering Now I’m Here as far back as 1974, long before Queen made their big US breakthrough.

“He pointed out little bits in their arrangements which were inspired by things we’d done,” says May. One of those things was the ‘tapping’ technique which had become Eddie’s signature. “He said: ‘Well, you did that on [Queen’s 1977 album track] It’s Late.’ I said: ‘Yeah, I only played with the idea because I’d seen this guy in Texas doing it.’ I’d done it in the most rudimentary form, then I’d moved on to something else. Whereas Ed basically made the guitar a new instrument.”

May didn’t have to give the idea of heading into the studio for a couple of days the hard sell to any of them, least of all Eddie. “I just got on the phone, and they all said: ‘Tell us what you want, we’ll be there, let’s go and have some fun.’ Explaining what it was came after.”

The idea of doing his version of the theme to his son’s favourite TV show was still kicking around his head. Aware that the other musicians wouldn’t have a clue what Star Fleet was, he made a rough demo and sent it to them.

“A very rough demo,” he says with a laugh. “It was just me singing into a tape machine and imitating guitars and drums. Phil and Ed came round to my little house in LA and we sat there going through it and kicking ideas around. It was just a great feeling from the beginning: ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’ It was like stepping into a place we’d never been.’”

This hastily convened collective gathered at the Record Plant Studios in Hollywood on April 21 for the first day of their two-day session. With them was engineer Mike Beiriger, who had worked with Cheap Trick, among others, although May would be credited as producer. Queen sessions could be intense, competitive and sometimes fractious. It was clear from the start that these were different.

“We were hyped up, it wasn’t like being in the studio with your regular band,” says May. “At one point, Alan finished one of the takes and said: ‘This is so much fun, this is going to be like cheating on your wife.’ I don’t think he ever cheated on his wife, but that sums up the feeling. It was exhilarating. It felt like an illicit liaison.”

The plan was to keep it simple: no individual tracking, none of the analysis or debate that went into a Queen or Van Halen record, just five musicians playing off each other. “It was a total band recording session,” says May. “We were all there, plugged in, playing at the same time during every take.”

May’s version of the Star Fleet theme was the main focus. With vocals from May (‘Send a message out across the sky, alien raiders just passed Gemini’), it stayed true to the TV show theme that inspired it, although the original version was a jumping-off point. Here, it ran to eight minutes, the two guitarists pushed on by admiration rather than competition. May has a vivid recollection of what it felt like to play alongside Eddie Van Halen: “It was like going down a really challenging ski run. I was very much conscious of his talent and his incredible aura. But to hear the two guitars together was a blast. Not the same, by any means, but we locked together very easily.”

May had another song he wanted to record, a seven-minute blues number titled Let Me Out. The blues wasn’t an obvious part of Queen’s arsenal, although they’d dabbled on songs such as 1974 B-side See What A Fool I’ve Been and ZZ Top-esque News Of The World album track Sleeping On The Sidewalk. But the style was certainly part of May’s own musical DNA.

“It had always been there with me,” he says of the influence of the blues. “I think it was different for Freddie. He didn’t feel the blues. He felt rock’n’roll, he felt Elvis and Little Richard, but he didn’t feel Muddy Waters. He did feel Aretha Franklin, though, to the bottom of his heart. I think Freddie wanted to be Aretha Franklin.”

Let Me Out wasn’t as pre-planned as the album’s main track. May remembers singing it to the rest of them in the studio. “Once you get the hang of it, there’s really not that much to the song,” he told them. “It’s all in the feeling.”

Van Halen’s presence on Let Me Out isn’t as prominent as it is on the Star Fleet theme. “You can hear that he’s not particularly au fait with the song,’ says May. “He plays a few little bits as it goes along, chucking in a couple of notes. He’s waiting for the moment where he’s going to pitch in and try some licks.”

The musical theme continued on the mini-album’s final track, a spontaneous 13-minute blues workout that saw the two guitarists trading the kind of licks they’d grown up listening to years before. Its title was a dead giveaway: Blues Breaker (Dedicated To E.C.), a reference to John Mayall’s groundbreaking 60s blues-rock collective and their one-time star guitarist Eric Clapton.

“There’s all sorts of differences between the way Eric runs his life and the way I run mine, but he’ll always be my hero,” says May. “Every time I hear Key To Love [from 1966’s Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, aka The Beano Album] I get chills up my spine. That’s why I do what I do, because Eric did that.

It wasn’t just May that Clapton influenced. “I remember Ed saying: ‘I haven’t played like this for a while. It’s how I started off playing. I wanted to play like Eric before I started all this tapping stuff.’”

May has a hazy memory of sending the finished song to the man who inspired it. “I think I did send it to Eric, but I never heard back,” says May. “He probably hated it, but that doesn’t matter to me.”

Overdubs on all three tracks were kept to a minimum. Chief among these was the run both guitarists played on Star Fleet. “We’d tried it during the takes but it always went wrong, more due to my mistakes than anything else,” says May. “We decided to put it in afterwards so not to distract ourselves any further.”

And so two of the pre-eminent guitarists of the era sat facing each other in the control room, instruments plugged in. “When the moment came we both went for the run,” May remembers. “It’s probably my favourite moment of the session.”

Brian May first saw Eddie Van Halen play live on October 30, 1978. The American guitarist’s eponymous band were supporting a flagging Black Sabbath at the Circus Krone, a former circus venue in Munich, Germany on a tour that has since passed into legend as a hard rock changing of the guard.

May had been invited to the show by his friend, Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi. He knew next to nothing about the opening band; information wasn’t easy to come by in those pre-internet times, and his attention was focused on Queen anyway.

“I got there early, thinking:, ‘I wonder who these Van Halen people are? I wonder what they’re like?’” the recently knighted Queen guitarist says now. “I sat there watching them and my jaw just dropped. Watching Ed was like watching Jimi Hendrix for the first time. I was awestruck.”

Afterwards, May went backstage to say hello to Iommi. Eddie Van Halen was there too, and the two men struck up a conversation. “We just hit it off,” says May. “It felt like an easy friendship.”

The pair stayed in touch. Every so often one or the other would bring up the idea of jamming. “We’d say: ‘Oh, we should really get together,’ but it never happened,” says May.

Except it did happen, albeit five years after they first met. And when these two superstar guitarists did finally come together in an LA recording studio, in April 1983, it wasn’t for a high-profile, high-stakes supergroup. Instead it was for a three-track mini-album whose lead song was a version of the closing theme to a kids’ TV puppet show.

“It was a step into the unknown for me,” May says of the mini-album, titled Star Fleet Project after its lead track, Star Fleet. “But it was a chance to have some fun, play with guys I knew and liked, and finally have the opportunity to play with Ed.”

Forty years after its original release, the Star Fleet Project mini-album has been reissued as a lavish, out-take-packed box set. It’s an outlier in May’s back catalogue – not as familiar or successful as the albums he made with Queen, nor as fully fleshed out as the two hard-rock solo albums he released in the 90s. But, free of the pressures and expectations that came with his regular band, it’s the sound of a man having fun in the studio with his friends. As May writes in the sleeve notes of the reissue: “Those sessions are still there in my head, glowing like a warm beacon of joy in a period which for me was heading into uncertainty and darkness.”

If anyone can take credit for seeding the idea of Star Fleet Project in May’s head, it’s his son, James. James May was four years old when a new children’s sci-fi show featuring Gerry Anderson-style marionettes began airing on Saturday mornings on ITV in late 1982. Originally broadcast in Japan under the title X-Bomber, it had been dubbed into English and retitled Star Fleet for Western audiences. The repackaged show’s propulsive, synth-powered opening and closing theme were composed, and in the case of the latter, sung, by British composer and songwriter Paul Bliss.

“We used to get up every Saturday morning really early to watch the next episode together,” says May. “It was all very exciting to see what happened. And I enjoyed it as much as he did. I heard the signature tune and I thought: ‘Hmm, I like that. Maybe I could do something with it.’”

Queen were between albums at that point – “We’d made a conscious decision to lay off for a while,” says May – and the guitarist decided to make the most of his down time by heading out to Los Angeles.

“There’s something about LA where I feel more able to get out into the world,” he says. “I tend to be quite reclusive in England, it takes a lot to get me out. But in LA I wake up in the morning and think, ‘Who can I call? What should I do today?’”

It was on one of those days, in the spring of 1983, that he decided he should round up a few friends and go into the studio and have some fun. He knew just the people: REO Speedwagon drummer Alan Gratzer, former Rod Stewart/Jeff Beck bassist Phil Chen, and Queen’s touring keyboard player Fred Mandel. And then there was Eddie Van Halen.

“I immediately thought about Ed: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could actually get in there and play together?’” says May.

The admiration May felt for the guitarist was mutual. Van Halen had told him his band were covering Now I’m Here as far back as 1974, long before Queen made their big US breakthrough.

“He pointed out little bits in their arrangements which were inspired by things we’d done,” says May. One of those things was the ‘tapping’ technique which had become Van Halen’s signature. “He said: ‘Well, you did that on [Queen’s 1977 album track] It’s Late.’ I said: ‘Yeah, I only played with the idea because I’d seen this guy in Texas doing it.’ I’d done it in the most rudimentary form, then I’d moved on to something else. Whereas Ed basically made the guitar a new instrument.”

May didn’t have to give the idea of heading into the studio for a couple of days the hard sell to any of them, least of all Eddie. “I just got on the phone, and they all said: ‘Tell us what you want, we’ll be there, let’s go and have some fun.’ Explaining what it was came after.”

The idea of doing his version of the theme to his son’s favourite TV show was still kicking around his head. Aware that the other musicians wouldn’t have a clue what Star Fleet was, he made a rough demo and sent it to them.

“A very rough demo,” he says with a laugh. “It was just me singing into a tape machine and imitating guitars and drums. Phil and Ed came round to my little house in LA and we sat there going through it and kicking ideas around. It was just a great feeling from the beginning: ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’ It was like stepping into a place we’d never been.’”

This hastily convened collective gathered at the Record Plant Studios in Hollywood on April 21 for the first day of their two-day session. With them was engineer Mike Beiriger, who had worked with Cheap Trick, among others, although May would be credited as producer. Queen sessions could be intense, competitive and sometimes fractious. It was clear from the start that these were different.

“We were hyped up, it wasn’t like being in the studio with your regular band,” says May. “At one point, Alan finished one of the takes and said: ‘This is so much fun, this is going to be like cheating on your wife.’ I don’t think he ever cheated on his wife, but that sums up the feeling. It was exhilarating. It felt like an illicit liaison.”

The plan was to keep it simple: no individual tracking, none of the analysis or debate that went into a Queen or Van Halen record, just five musicians playing off each other. “It was a total band recording session,” says May. “We were all there, plugged in, playing at the same time during every take.”

May’s version of the Star Fleet theme was the main focus. With vocals from May (‘Send a message out across the sky, alien raiders just passed Gemini’), it stayed true to the TV show theme that inspired it, although the original version was a jumping-off point. Here, it ran to eight minutes, the two guitarists pushed on by admiration rather than competition. May has a vivid recollection of what it felt like to play alongside Eddie Van Halen: “It was like going down a really challenging ski run. I was very much conscious of his talent and his incredible aura. But to hear the two guitars together was a blast. Not the same, by any means, but we locked together very easily.”

May had another song he wanted to record, a seven-minute blues number titled Let Me Out. The blues wasn’t an obvious part of Queen’s arsenal, although they’d dabbled on songs such as 1974 B-side See What A Fool I’ve Been and ZZ Top-esque News Of The World album track Sleeping On The Sidewalk. But the style was certainly part of May’s own musical DNA.

“It had always been there with me,” he says of the influence of the blues. “I think it was different for Freddie. He didn’t feel the blues. He felt rock’n’roll, he felt Elvis and Little Richard, but he didn’t feel Muddy Waters. He did feel Aretha Franklin, though, to the bottom of his heart. I think Freddie wanted to be Aretha Franklin.”

Let Me Out wasn’t as pre-planned as the album’s main track. May remembers singing it to the rest of them in the studio. “Once you get the hang of it, there’s really not that much to the song,” he told them. “It’s all in the feeling.”

Van Halen’s presence on Let Me Out isn’t as prominent as it is on the Star Fleet theme. “You can hear that he’s not particularly au fait with the song,’ says May. “He plays a few little bits as it goes along, chucking in a couple of notes. He’s waiting for the moment where he’s going to pitch in and try some licks.”

The musical theme continued on the mini-album’s final track, a spontaneous 13-minute blues workout that saw the two guitarists trading the kind of licks they’d grown up listening to years before. Its title was a dead giveaway: Blues Breaker (Dedicated To E.C.), a reference to John Mayall’s groundbreaking 60s blues-rock collective and their one-time star guitarist Eric Clapton.

“There’s all sorts of differences between the way Eric runs his life and the way I run mine, but he’ll always be my hero,” says May. “Every time I hear Key To Love [from 1966’s Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, aka The Beano Album] I get chills up my spine. That’s why I do what I do, because Eric did that.

It wasn’t just May that Clapton influenced. “I remember Ed saying: ‘I haven’t played like this for a while. It’s how I started off playing. I wanted to play like Eric before I started all this tapping stuff.’”

May has a hazy memory of sending the finished song to the man who inspired it. “I think I did send it to Eric, but I never heard back,” says May. “He probably hated it, but that doesn’t matter to me.”

Overdubs on all three tracks were kept to a minimum. Chief among these was the run both guitarists played on Star Fleet. “We’d tried it during the takes but it always went wrong, more due to my mistakes than anything else,” says May. “We decided to put it in afterwards so not to distract ourselves any further.”

And so two of the pre-eminent guitarists of the era sat facing each other in the control room, instruments plugged in. “When the moment came we both went for the run,” May remembers. “It’s probably my favourite moment of the session.”

May had no plans to release the tracks the group had recorded. “But then when I’d got back to London and messed around with it and done mixes with [Queen producer] Mack, I just thought it would be a real shame if people didn’t hear it,” he says. (Queen bandmate Roger Taylor would add backing vocals to the chorus of Star Fleet.)

He called the other musicians. How would they feel if the tracks came out? “They were all up for it,” he says. “I made sure they all made some money out of it – which nobody asked for.”

The Star Fleet Project mini-album, credited to Brian May + Friends, was released on October 31, 1983. It peaked at No.35 in the UK. A heavily edited version of the lead track, fared less well as a single, falling outside the Top 50. Perhaps people were less interested in either May or Van Halen outside of the context of their respective bands, or maybe the idea of two of the most venerated rock stars on the planet teaming up for a song inspired by a kids’ TV theme was just too strange a concept. But chart positions weren’t really the point – this was about a group of musicians having fun.

The Star Fleet session turned out to be a one-off. After it was finished, everyone involved went back to their main bands. May returned to Queen, who released The Works, the following year, while Eddie Van Halen soon began work on the album that would become Van Halen’s 1984.

“We stayed in contact to a degree,” May says of his friendship with Eddie. “There was one particular time when I disgraced myself by falling over in a hotel bathroom because I wasn’t used to drinking at the rate he was drinking at. But we never played together again.”

There’s a sweet moment at the very end of Blues Breaker, the final song on the original mini-album, where the tape captures a snippet of conversation after the band have stopped playing. May can be heard saying: “I wish I’d done this more often in my life.” If it sounded heartfelt at the time, the death of Eddie in 2020 (and bassist Phil Chen the following year) casts it in a more poignant light today.

“I really wish I had done it more often,” says May. “I wish it more now than I did then. I wish I’d made those phone calls more often. Especially when you lose somebody, you think: ‘There were times when I could have picked up the phone.’ Life just takes you off in different directions.”

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 316 (June 2023)

Few modern metal bands are as volatile as Five Finger Death Punch. The Las Vegas five-piece have had their share of ups and downs over the years, many of them revolving around combustible frontman Ivan Moody.

The singer, who is now sober after struggling with alcohol addiction over the years, has admitted that he performed drunk in the past. Moody had an infamous onstage meltdown in 2015 in Memphis, Tennessee in 2015, prompting the rest of the band to walk offstage and abandon the show. Another incident the following year saw a seemingly inebriated and emotional Moody apologising to the crowd for a sub-par performance at a show in Worcester, Massachusetts, blaming his issues on his mother’s illness.

More recently, the singer admitted to tensions with 5FDP guitarist and founder Zoltan Bathory over the controversial ‘anti-mask’ video for 2020’s Covid-era single Living The Dream, directed by Bathory. “I called [Zoltan], like, ‘You implemented your own platform into Five Finger Death Punch, and now I’m gonna have to answer for it, because I’m the singer,’” Moody told Metal Hammer in 2022, adding: “I love Zoltan to death, that’s his opinion, but it won’t ever be done with my name on it again.”

In an in-depth interview in the new issue of Metal Hammer, Bathory addresses the relationship between the two men. Asked if the turbulence within 5FDP – who recently released their tenth studio album Legacy – has ever made him consider ending the band or firing Moody, the guitarist admits that he could sometimes “kill” his bandmate, but they remain “brothers” despite it all.

“Never,” says Zoltan, on the question of splitting the band. “Because I always respected that Ivan is the middle finger of this generation – a hand grenade with a loose spring. That’s who he is. I always looked at that as amazing: he’s uncorruptible. I could tell him, ‘Ivan, you’ll lose a million dollars if you don’t feel like doing these shows’, and he’d say, ‘Fuck off, I don’t care. I don’t give a shit.’ So he’s hard to manage, but I could, because I respected that he’s as punk rock as punk rock can get.

“Sometimes I want to kill him,” the guitarist continues. “Sometimes I’m making plans, thinking about what supplies I need, where I hide the body. But then I’m like, ‘Man, then I don’t have a singer who can do all these things.’ So you stay with the fantasy. And I’m pretty sure he’s plotting, too – ‘If I could just tie some dynamite to his backpack…’ We’re brothers, but we understand who we are and how to work together, and what’s worth fighting about and what isn’t.”

Bathory talks about any regrets he may have had over the band’s 20-plus year career. “Maybe the stress of it. I always worked 150%,” he tells Hammer. “People imagine a rock band is stripper poles and disco balls and mountains of whatever drug is your choice. I like the business aspect, because it's all strategy. But at the same time, it takes time. If I hadn't stressed, maybe it would've worked out anyway. But then again, it's a butterfly effect. Would I change anything? Absolutely not. I wouldn't be me; I wouldn't be here.”

Read the full interview with Zoltan in the new issue of Metal Hammer, on sale now. Order it here and have it delivered straight to your door.

It’s January 1980 and Aerosmith are playing Reefer Head Woman from their new Night In The Ruts album at the Civic Centre in Maine. It’s a sold-out show, but singer Steven Tyler doesn’t care.

Frustrated at having no cocaine to counteract the intoxicating effects of all the booze he’s swallowed since waking – rounded off by two double martinis gulped minutes before taking the stage – he gives up and pretends to pass out. Throwing himself to the stage he fakes a seizure, twitching his leg to make it look authentic.

Such is his level of chemical dependency and alcoholic intoxication, this is the best idea he can come up with to avoid the indignity of playing a gig just plain old-fashioned drunk.

To this point in the tour Aerosmith have just about been getting away with it. Though with guitarist Joe Perry no longer in the band – replaced by JP-lookalike Jimmy Crespo – they are a shadow of their former selves. They’ve played shows where the singer has frequently forgotten his lines, and, when not at the mic has just sat on the drum riser, too unsteady to stand, much less move about.

Tonight it’s worse. The band stop playing, and Tyler is carried from the stage, a faker and a fuck-up.

Elsewhere in early 1980, Perry is touring with his original Joe Perry Project. The guitarist had left Aerosmith the previous year, midway through recording A Night In The Ruts, the “dysfunctional depression” that was crippling Aerosmith forcing him out of his own band. But now his new outfit faces ruin because singer Ralph Morman has turned into an out-of-control drunk.

“One night he showed up in a wild state of inebriation,” Perry recalls in his autobiography Rocks. “I hauled off and decked him.”

There’s an irony to his complaints. Perry was not in good shape himself: a barely functioning drunk addicted to snorting heroin. Career-wise, The Joe Perry Project’s Let The Music Do The Talking album had been well reviewed, but was poorly promoted by Columbia and wasn’t troubling the charts. The gigs, though good, were small-scale. This was a problem – because Aerosmith’s co-manager David Krebs had not long since told Joe he personally owed $180,000 in room service charges and helpfully suggested that a solo album might be a good way to pay the bill.

For Aerosmith and for Joe Perry, however, things are going to get worse before they get any better.

The 1980s began less than four years after Aerosmith’s fourth album Rocks had shipped platinum upon release, rising to No.3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Hindsight suggests that Rocks, the multi-platinum follow-up to the multi-platinum Toys In The Attic, was where the ‘first career’ of Aerosmith peaked. Afterwards, their decline and fall would be as marked and meteoric as their rise had been.

After Tyler’s fake seizure, Aerosmith cancelled a week’s worth of dates – thereby falling a little further – then resumed and limped on to the end of the tour, and more drink- and drug-induced lethargy. When they reconvened, work on a proposed next album was painfully slow. Then that faltering progress all but ground to a halt after Tyler badly injured himself in a motorcycle crash. Silently but inevitably, poverty crept up and was soon crippling them all.

Bassist Tom Hamilton: “For two years, the album we were working on – Rock In A Hard Pace – was always two months away. It was hard times, we [Tom and his wife Terri] sold our house and moved into a condo…”

Drummer Joey Kramer: “It was rough. There was no money. I was on the balls of my ass. I spent everything I had… until, finally, nothing.”

Guitarist Brad Whitford: “No money, no income, all my savings going to alimony and mortgages. Sold my guitars… sold my house…”

Eventually Whitford could stand it no more, and quit. Aerosmith were down to just three original members, Tyler plus the rhythm section of Hamilton and Kramer.

As Perry’s marriage to fellow drug addict Elyssa continued to falter and debts mounted, he released the second Project album, I’ve Got The Rock’N’Rolls Again (featuring new vocalist Charlie Farren) in 1981. Whitford, meanwhile, hooked up with Ted Nugent’s singer Derek St Holmes to release the eponymous Whitford-St Holmes the same year. They toured briefly, but their record didn’t sell well.

On the recommendation of producer Jack Douglas, Aerosmith recruited Rick Dufay to play on Whitford’s side of the stage. It seemed like a good idea at the time, even though Dufay boasted to the singer that he had escaped from a “loony bin” having jumped out of a window and broken his legs…

The older, wiser and sober Tyler now reckons Dufay was “out of his mind”. Back then, though, the singer barely cared.

When the tour ended he “got deeper and deeper into drugs”, hanging out with and scoring heroin off his friend Richie Supa (with whom he’d co-written a live favourite called Chip Away The Stone). Somehow, stoned and hallucinating, he eventually managed to write enough lyrics to finish Rock In A Hard Place in time for release in August 1982. Good in parts, but a long way from former glories, it wasn’t a record that suggested the epic amount of time spent on it had been a wise investment. A Gold sales award – ending a string of Platinum hits for Aerosmith – and a Billboard chart peak of No.32 confirmed this.

Eventually, Tyler admitted to himself he needed help. He first tried detoxing at the Good Samaritan Hospital in New York in 1983 but, as he admitted in his 2011 biography Does The Noise In My Head Bother You?: “One of the reasons I wanted to go to Good Samaritan was that I heard they did
tests on heroin… I thought: ‘Can I be one of the guinea pigs?’”

By then, Aerosmith’s Krebs was hiring psychiatrists to meet Tyler and report back with their thoughts. Domestically, Tyler’s fights with his wife of 12 years, Cyrinda, had turned physical and violent. Once, as she prepared to drive off, he jumped on her car and smashed the windscreen.

Tyler: “Cocaine insanity! She got out of the car and a violent, uncontrollable fight erupted. We were punching and scratching, and we fell over and rolled on the ground…”

For Perry, domestic life was no sweeter. Elyssa continued to spend money extravagantly, as if he were still a member of the 70s Aerosmith.

He recalled: “I was on the verge of losing my house. I was fucked up from drinking. I thought I was at the bottom, but every day that bottom kept getting deeper and darker.”

Sometimes, though,, rock bottom can become a solid foundation on which to build a new life.

That new life – or “second career” as the five original, once-again-Platinum-selling members of Aerosmith are wont to describe it – was still a way up the road.

Perry was taking any gigs he could to earn cash – sometimes supporting the likes of Heart and the J Geils Band, always travelling in a van and staying in cheap hotels to keep costs low. Back home, he took the life-changing decision to walk out on Elyssa, after six-and-a-half years together – but paid a heavy price in the battle for access to their infant son Adrian.

He was happy to play with the Project, but the debts he faced weren’t going away. One good thing was happening in the guitarist’s life, though. He had hooked up with a new manager, Tim Collins, who became “the only steady force in my life”.

The deal was sealed after Perry tested Collins’ commitment by emptying a drawer in which he kept his unopened mail: mostly bills, IRS claims and foreclosure notices threatening repossession of his home, but also some unsigned death threats (presumably from drug dealers he owed money) and royalty cheques worth thousands of dollars. Collins took them away in a grocery bag and came back a week later offering to pay off “a big portion” of the guitarist’s debts, no strings attached.

Asked why, Collins simply reasoned: “I figure I need to do this to win your trust. I believe in your talent. I believe your best years are ahead of you. I want to manage you.”

One of his first moves was to negotiate Perry out of his deal with Columbia and get him a new one with MCA. Perry disbanded the old Project and hired a new one (fronted by singer Cowboy Mach Bell) on smaller salaries to record their third album, Once A Rocker, Always A Rocker, in 1983. It wasn’t as good as the first two, but the band got to open for ZZ Top on some of their US Eliminator tour. The headline gigs they were playing, though, Perry says, “were getting smaller and smaller”.

He did persuade Whitford to join the line-up, however, and the rhythm guitarist stayed for a month. Kramer later played drums at a few dates, too. Much more significantly, though, Perry was about to meet his soulmate, who was discovered when the Project were about to make a video for their last chance at a hit, a song called Black Velvet Pants.

Perry: “Tim Collins had a bunch of books sent over by talent agencies, I thumbed through half-heartedly until I came to a picture that stopped me in my tracks – a headshot of a beautiful blonde called Billie Montgomery. There was a look in her eyes that got to me, heart and soul. I had to meet her.”

When he did meet her, it was love at first sight. And their relationship would endure long after the video shoot had wrapped, to this day.

Aerosmith, meanwhile, were in trouble. They were playing bigger venues than the Project but, as Tyler has admitted, the tour for Rock In A Hard Place was “a disaster”.

Tyler: “By 1983 I had no money and no future except getting further into the pit. Back in 1976, when I read stories about guys who lost everything and blew a million bucks snorting all they had, I used to say: ‘That’ll never happen to me.’ But in the end, I blew $20 million.”

In addition, he came to admit that he was missing his buddy: “During the years that Joe and I were broken up I realised I wasn’t half the musician I thought I was without him.”

The two had kept in touch, though.

Perry: “I’d occasionally call Steven, or he’d call me… ‘How’re things going?’ Great, I’d lie. How about you? ‘Great!’ he’d lie… The bullshit flew thick and fast.”

Tyler: “I went to see the Joe Perry Project perform at the Bottom Line, then Joe came to the Worcester Centrum in the spring of 1983 to see an Aerosmith concert. We did a few lines of heroin in the dressing room – just for old times’ sake…”

The heroin took its toll on Tyler, who collapsed on stage in front of 14,000 people… and although it had been Tyler’s wife Cyrinda who supplied the drug, Perry took the blame.

“It’s just like the old days, Joe,” Tom Hamilton told him angrily. “You’re no good for this band. Look what you did! Why don’t you just stay the fuck away from us?”

Yet the idea of a reunion persisted.

In early 1984, Tyler and Perry met with Tim Collins and, despite some initial friction, Tyler – by then living in a hotel on $20 a day – agreed the original line-up should get together for a meeting at the only place available: Tom Hamilton’s house.

Perry: “If you want to put it on the IQ meter, Tom is a really smart guy, but I think he had just been more conservative with his money and watched what was going on. Also, he didn’t have to go through a divorce. He’s the one who’s been married the longest among us.

“Any professional who has to go through a divorce, the finances are going to take a real hit. It’s one of those things in life, it isn’t peculiar to rock’n’roll. If you’re making a lot of money, they take a lot of money.”

Once it became apparent that Joe would only rejoin the band on the condition it cut all ties with Leber-Krebs Management and joined him with Tim Collins, they set about discussing a way forward and naming a scapegoat for all their problems. They settled on David Krebs.

Perry: “The main influence that the drugs will have had was that we were partying too much and didn’t notice the kind of money we were spending or take care of the decisions we were making – I don’t think we could have spent that much on drugs! And it’s not like we all had three houses and 16 Maseratis. We all had one house and a couple of nice cars, and that was it.

“I look back and just think we were taken advantage of, maybe in some quasi-illegal ways. You just have to do the numbers in your head: all those years we were selling out so many arenas, so many times. So to sit there and be told that the band’s kitty was empty, I mean – did they do something illegal? I don’t think so. We couldn’t prove anything. Was it immoral? Yeah!

“They weren’t taking care of us in terms of taxes and things like that. I should have been more on top of it but that was my own naïveté. There was a lot of money there, just lying on the table, and people took it because they could. That is the story. I can’t prove anything – but I was constantly asking for accountings and things like that, but it was kinda tough to get the rest of the band to lock up.”

While the reunion idea was left hanging, a third party was about to plant a crucial seed. Alice Cooper was looking for a new guitarist, and his manager Shep Gordon called Collins to sound out JP. Seeing no long-term future for the Project, Perry jumped at the chance and went to Gordon’s county pile to meet and jam with Alice. The next day, while Alice played golf, Perry called Tyler to gloat.

At the time Tyler pretended not to care but deep down he was incensed. His book suggests he remembers the incident differently to Perry, but says that he later called him back. “Are you seriously going to be his guitar player? What the fuck?” the singer wrote. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard! Just stop. The shit’s over. Why don’t you just come back with Aerosmith?”

Well, since Tyler had asked so nicely, how could Joe refuse? Within months, the Toxic Twins would reunite and the crazy train would be back on the rails.

Additional quotes: Rocks: My Life In And Out Of Aerosmith by Joe Perry, Does The Noise In My Head Bother You? by Steven Tyler and Walk This Way – The Authorised Biography Of Aerosmith by Stephen Davis.

Anika Nilles has been pulling onstage pranks on Geddy Lee and and Alex Lifeson during Rush's hugely successful Fifty Something reunion tour.

Her antics show that she is unfazed at having to step into the shoes of the late, great Neil Peart who died of glioblastoma in 2020 at the age of 67.

Nilles' latest onstage stunt came as they were wrapping up a performance of Working Man at Little Caesar's Arena in Detroit, Michigan, on Wednesday night.

As shown in the video below, Lee and Lifeson are waiting for her signal to strike the final chord of the song when she grabs a bag of chips and has a quick snack before offering the bag to the guitarist and bassist.

They decline and she puts down the bag and quickly plays her part in an attempt to catch them off guard. But the seasoned pros aren't put off and nail the timing.

The prank led one fan to quip in the video comments that Nilles is "all that and a bag of chips."

Nilles has been pulling similar pranks throughout the tour and a compilation of her best efforts can also be viewed below.

The German drummer, who previously worked with Jeff Beck, came under a lot of scrutiny when it was announced that she would take on the role.

Peart was ranked among the greatest drummers on the planet and Nilles was a relative unknown before being asked to perform with Rush.

She recently told Classic Rock she discussed Peart's thoughts on music when she met Lee and Lifeson for the first time in Canada.

She said: "I had a few songs prepared before I flew over, and we played those. But during the session we also talked a lot about Neil – about his view on music and drumming.

"We spoke a great deal about the feel of the songs. The most important point is simply to capture the feeling – that it feels right for the two of them to play their music again.

"And ultimately it will feel right for the fans as well. We talked about that a lot. The first session was really about getting to know each other and seeing how we function together."

Rush: Fifty Something remaining tour dates 2026

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

Rush: Fifty Something tour dates 2027

Jan 15: Buenos Aires Movistar Arena, Argentina
Jan 22: Curitiba Arena da Baixada, Brazil
Jan 24: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 26: São Paulo Allianz Parque, Brazil
Jan 30: Rio de Janeiro Estádio Olímpico Nilton Santos. Brazil
Feb 01: Belo Horizonte Estádio Mineirão, Brazil
Feb 04: Brasília Arena BRB Mané Garrincha, Brazil
Feb 19: Paris La Défense Arena, France
Feb 21: Berlin Uber Arena, Germany
Feb 23: Amstersam Ziggo Dome, Netherlands
Feb 25: Munich Olympiahalle, Germany
Feb 28: Cologne Lanxess Arena, Germany
Mar 02: Hamburg Barclays Arena, Germany
Mar 04: Stuttgart Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, Germany
Mar 08: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 10: Glasgow OVO Hydro, UK
Mar 12: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 14: Manchester Co-op Live, UK
Mar 16: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 18: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 21: London O2 Arena, UK
Mar 27: Kraków Arena Kraków, Poland
Mar 30: Milan Unipol Dome, Italy
Apr 01: Basel St. Jakobshalle Basel, Switzerland
Apr 04: Copenhagen Royal Arena, Denmark
Apr 06: Oslo Unity Arena, Norway
Apr 08: Stockholm Avicii Arena, Sweden
Apr 10: Helsinki Veikkaus Arena, Finland

Zak Starkey is back with The Who after last year's in-again-out-again saga which saw him fired, re-hired and fired again.

The drummer confirmed he was working with Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend again in a social media post, not long after Daltrey told an audience in Las Vegas the same thing.

Daltrey was performing a solo show at the Encore Theater in Vegas on Wednesday night when he revealed The Who had been rehearsing with Starkey and that it "sounded great", according to the Las Vegas Journal-Review.

In a post on Threads the next day, Starkey wrote: "Nice one Rog. Looking forward to tearing it up with The Who again.

"The rehearsal was great. I don’t think we’ve ever rehearsed as tough as that. Usually we drink tea and talk about what time we’re going home!"

Starkey had been part of The Who since 1996 when he was fired by the band in April of 2025, before being reinstated just a few days later. But the following month, he was out once again just weeks after the band had announced a North American farewell tour which wrapped up in September.

The first sacking was thought to be sparked by an incident during the band's performance at a Teenage Cancer Trust benefit show at London's Royal Albert Hall.

Zak said the band were playing The Song is Over when, Daltrey came in a bar too early and took it out on the drummer.

It appears the relationship has now been mended and that The Who will perform live again soon.

Their 2025 American dates were billed as The Song Is Over farewell tour, but Daltrey and Townshend admitted they likely weren't ready to retire the band.

On November 5, 2021, Nita Strauss was in Las Vegas for a very special performance. The Los Angeles-born guitarist, who made her name in Alice Cooper's band, had been booked to play World Boxing Organization (WBO) super featherweight world champion Mikaela Mayer to the ring for her title unification fight against IBF champion Maiva Hamadouche.

"I know that Mikaela-walking-on-stage face, and I can't wait to see it up close in person again," Strauss said in a press release promoting the fight at The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas. "It's going to be a great, great feeling to look across a stage at her again."

On the surface, this may have read like a stock quote talking up a corporate booking, but that wasn't the case at all. Strauss first met Mayer in 2003, when the future world boxing champion was just 12-and-a-half. A fan of Black Sabbath, Tool and System of Down, Mayer had been playing bass in her bedroom for over a year and was seeking to join a band : Strauss, fellow guitarist Tina St. Claire, and drummer Kirsten Schluter had three-quarters of a group, but no bassist.

"They said: ‘We need a bass player, can you meet us at the mall?’," Mayer told The Guardian's legendary boxing writer Donald McRae in 2022. "I was beyond my years and I looked the part in my black top with light brown hair and black tips and all my piercings. Even though they were older than me, they were like: ‘Okay, this girl likes our kind of music...'"

Mayer was in, and Lia-Fail, LA's newest metal band, was born.

The quartet played their first show at the legendary Whisky A Go-Go in. Hollywood in September 2003. The following summer they embarked upon their first tour, with Mayer's dad Mark acting as tour manager and unofficial chaperone for the teenagers. And then in 2005, the group entered a Battle Of The Bands contest in LA with a unique opportunity for the winning act.

"The prize was to play four or five shows on the Warped Tour," Nita Strauss told Metal Hammer earlier this year. "So, in our infinite wisdom, we thought, ‘Well, we’re already borrowing a van and trailer – we should go on and do our own tour.’

So they did: 15 show across 13 states.

"It was rough," Strauss recalled. "We made no money, we were hungry and thirsty and tired. Two of the girls were old enough to drive, so they took turns while the other two of us navigated. We had no crew members, it was just four girls slugging it out on the road. We were eating food from gas stations, cramming into hotel rooms, outrunning tornados…”

The headliners on 2005's Warped Tour were Avenged Sevenfold, Fall Out Boy, Dropkick Murphy's, and My Chemical Romance. Lia-Fail played one of the small side stages, as did an emerging emo-punk called Paramore.

"It was difficult," Strauss recalled, "but it’s still the most fun experience I’ve ever had."

"It takes a lot of balls for a group of kids, girls no less, to roll into a new town with people you've never met and go give the performance of your life, hungry and cold and tired every night, to people you've never seen before and are never going to see again," Strauss told ESPN.

The tour would be the high point of Lia-Fail's career: following their second US tour, Mayer quit... and went off the rails.

"One of my horrible first boyfriends was giving me problems about being away," she explained to The Guardian, "such a stupid teenage thing. I broke up with him shortly after that, thank God. Then I had my party phase. From about 15½ to 17 I put my dad through hell, wouldn’t come home for weeks at a time... I was rebellious, like: ‘I’m going to my boyfriend’s house to hang out, smoke pot, do whatever I want.’ I got kicked out of my original high school and ended up in a school where all the bad kids go. That’s when I found boxing and had this epiphany: ‘I don’t want to continue on this pointless path. I want to be successful, I want to be good at something',"

And she was. Mayer won a bronze medal at the 2012 World Championships and fought for the US at the 2016 Olympics. The following year she turned professional, and on Halloween night three years later, she became the WBO female super-featherweight world champion. Last year, she was was named Sports Illustrated's Female Fighter of the Year.

Not a bad second life for a failed rock star.

Tonight, August 29, WBA and WBC super welterweight world champion Mayer will fight Britain's WBO super welterweight world champion Chantelle Cameron over 10 rounds in Birmingham, with all three world titles going to the winner. No prizes for guessing who Nita Strauss will be cheering on.

"This girl and I have been through the fire and in the trenches of DIY touring together," Strauss said of her former bandmate in 2018. "I’m proud as hell of her continuing to kick ass!"

When David Bowie parted company with legendary long-standing guitarist Reeves Gabrels in 1999, he picked up the phone to ask Helmet's Page Hamilton to join his band for his Hours world tour.

In order to impress his new boss, guitar prodigy Hamilton practiced for 16 hours a day, learning 30 songs including Cracked Actor, Rebel Rebel and Changes. For that phone call meant more to the Portand-born musician than Bowie could possibly have known.

“Reeves, who’s been a friend of mine for many many years, was going through a very difficult time in his life and he and Bowie parted ways after 13 years,” Hamilton recalled in a 2016 interview with Louder. “Bowie knew Helmet – we had met two years earlier at a festival in Germany – I met him and he was like, 'Helmet? I love Helmet!' And I started laughing, like, Yeah… right. Right! And he says, 'We go way back!'

“He was just a really gracious human being,” Hamilton continued. “Just so nice for a guy that has changed so many people’s lives and influenced so many musicians. In Germany, I tried to get him to talk about Ziggy Stardust when he jumped off speakers and broke his leg. He was wearing just his underwear as he was in the middle of a costume change, and I’m like, So what happened? What happened? And he smiled and said, ‘Oh God… I don’t remember much from back then.’

“He liked me, and when he later called, I had just left my wife. It was one of the worst times in my life. I was crashing on my manager’s couch and I had got back to the apartment at four in the afternoon. I’d met some chick, been to an after-hours Budweiser pool hall… it was pathetic. I was a pathetic mess.”

“And I’ve said this before, but he pulled me out of a real shitty time,” the guitarist admitted. “He might have saved my life. Because I would have continued – I’d gone out with my buddy Erik Sanko from Skeleton Key and Lounge Lizards who said, 'We’ve been out for 38 nights in a row.' And I was saying, Alright! Let’s make it 39! And I’m talking until after sunrise. So it’s amazing that in that state of mind I could have learned thirty David Bowie songs and gone out and played them.

“He didn’t know how I was living before I got the call, he didn’t know that I was going through a divorce. But Coco, the super-great lady who was with David said to me: ‘You know, David’s been very happy since he’s been sober.’ At the time he’d been sober for 12 years. I was like, Yeah… but I’m of Scottish, Irish, Welsh descent with German and Native American in me. I have all the drinking genes. It’s probably not happening for me. But my tribute to David Bowie would be to say: He’s not like you and me.”

On the day that they released a remixes album featuring 'reimagined' takes on songs from last summer's Never Enough by artists as diverse as Elton John, jazz-influenced Mancunian electronic producer and DJ Floating Points, death metal stalwarts Dying Fetus and their O.G. Baltimore hardcore bros Angel Du$t, it feels entirely apposite that Turnstile are playing the closing weekend of London's All Points East festival on an eclectic bill, headlined by the bold and brilliant Californian rapper Tyler, the Creator, leaning heavily into alt. hip-hop and EDM.

Given that they've spent a portion of their summer playing special guests to Deftones in mainland Europe, it would, presumably, have been an easy win for the quintet to have lobbied for a late evening slot at last weekend's APE Presents Outbreak festival in this same park, instead of performing today alongside the likes of Clipse, Sexyy Red, BB Trickz and Ravyn Lenae. But Turnstile didn't get to where they are today by staying in their lane, or adhering to tried and trusted industry templates. Know any other hardcore bands with the chutzpah, wit and humanity to walk onstage at a festival to the sound of Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers duetting on Islands In The Stream, and have their audience singing along in delight? No, no, you don't.

With that said, if you saw Turnstile headlining Outbreak festival here last summer, you can probably guess with some confidence which songs made the cut when the quintet had to trim 2025's 75 minute set-list down to tonight's hour on stage, with choice cuts from Glow On and Never Enough - Blackout, Holiday, Mystery, Birds, Dull, I Care - given equal weighting. You might even have a feeling of déjà vu when, just like last summer, the roaming cameras onstage pick out a fan holding aloft a retro rotary telephone in the rain during Dull, as frontman Brendan Yates sings, "Deep in the night, I'm waiting for the call." But the inclusion of a cover of The Stone Roses' I Wanna Be Adored is another inspired little deviation from orthodoxy.

The truth is that, whatever they choose to do right now, Turnstile can do no wrong. And if tonight feels like a genuine victory lap in front of a partisan audience who cheer their every move, you can't say that they haven't earned it. At one point Yates talks about the UK feeling like“a second home" for the band, humbly adding"Thank you for always making it feel like home" to warm cheers. This sense of mutual respect makes for a wonderful feel good vibe throughout, and a genuine sense that the bouncing pit is a safe space for all.

After a joyous T.L.C. (Turnstile Love Connection), with their allotted hour complete, Turnstile exit the site's West Stage with several thousand curious newcomers to the party now fully welcomed, integrated and converted. Gig by gig, year on year, this band are building not just a community, but a legacy, and it's a wondrous experience to be part of. Thank You (Falettinus Be Arse Elves Agin).

“It's about escaping,” said Noel Gallagher in 1994, speaking ahead of the release of Oasis' debut record Definitely Maybe.

But really, it's about so much more than that.

One of the defining cultural documents of the '90s, the Manchester quintet’s ferociously optimistic and thrillingly self-possessed debut album is a snapshot of what it means to be young, fearless and fiercely convinced of one’s own capacity to transcend the mundane and mediocre. Last summer, as the reunited Gallagher brothers reclaimed their mantle as The People's Champions on the most euphoric tour of the 21st century to date, their 23-song setlist featured no fewer than six selections from the record, their swagger and snap utterly undiminished.

Written in the wake of the Conservative party securing a fourth consecutive general election victory in the UK, at its core Definitely Maybe is an album about working class pride, anger, ambition and defiance.

Though it was rarely identified as such upon its release, being bracketed alongside inferior Britpop albums with which it shared precious little DNA - "I'd hear Blur or Pulp or Suede on the radio and think, Fuck these idiots" Noel Gallagher admitted in 2023 - it’s a punk rock album at heart, a collection of dole queue anthems which thrust two upraised fingers in the faces of a firmly entrenched establishment doing its level best to break the spirit and solidarity of working class communities from Burnage to Belfast. And as such, it’s the most fearless collection of attitudinal rock n’ roll to emerge from Britain since the Sex Pistols' incendiary debut Never Mind The Bollocks. In fact, in a 2023 interview with UK music magazine Mojo, Noel Gallagher, who wrote every song on the record, explicitly linked the two albums, boldly describing Definitely Maybe as “the last great punk album.”

“We were a punk band with Beatles melodies,” Gallagher stated. “We had no effects, barely any equipment, just loads of attitude, 12 cans of Red Stripe and ambition. If you listen to that and Never Mind The Bollocks, they’re quite similar. That album was about the angst of being a teenager in 1977. Fast forward to 1994 and Definitely Maybe is about the glory of being a teenager. It’s being down the park with a ghetto blaster distilled... There’s no bullshit on it. It’s an honest snapshot of working-class lads trying to make it. It’s about shagging birds, taking drugs, drinking and the glory of all of that."

From its unapologetically nicked opening T. Rex riff, Definitely Maybe is Oasis’ own great rock ‘n’ roll swindle, an album which shamelessly pilfers and re-appropriates some of the most familiar riffs, rhythms and themes from rock n’ roll history while looking the listener square in the eyes and asking ‘So. Fucking. What?’

“Look at you now, you’re all in my hands tonight” sneers the then 21-year-old Liam Gallagher at the end of the strutting Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, a self-fulfilling prophecy the younger Gallagher brother later quite correctly identified as “the most arrogant song ever”.

Even the cocksure Gallagher boys would concede that Definitely Maybe is not a flawless collection… though if 'The Chief' had swapped out Digsy’s Dinner and Married With Children for contemporaneous B-sides Fade Away and Half The World Away it’d be as close to perfection as makes no difference.

As ubiquitous as pub jukebox mainstays Shakermaker and Supersonic might still be, their vitality and verve is wholly undiminished by over-familiarity, while Gallagher junior’s stretched vowels on the opening lines of Cigarettes & Alcohol remain an undeniable rock ‘n’ roll moment.

With its rallying call to the “outcast” and the “underclass”, the Stooges-inspired Bring It On Down, dusted down and sounding immense on the Live '25 tour, is the album’s most overtly punk (and political) four minutes. Slide Away consists purely of choruses, each more uplifting than its predecessor, while the six minute Columbia, with its roots in Acid House jams and Ecstasy-fuelled mischief-making, is a blissful tangle of over-driven guitars and wide-eyed euphoria.

Best of all though is Live Forever, arguably Noel Gallagher’s defining song. Written as a response to (erroneous) ‘inkie’ music paper reports that Kurt Cobain was considering naming Nirvana’s third album I Hate Myself And I Want To Die, it’s the Oasis credo writ large, a surge of ‘Fuck you’ positivity and bullish self-belief standing as a grand secular hymn for the dreamers and schemers. Critics have often sneered at Oasis’ nursery rhyme lyrics, but Gallagher – like his nemesis Cobain – intuitively understood that there’s a beauty in simplicity, and Live Forever remains one of his most pure, perfect compositions.

On September 4, 1994, Definitely Maybe debuted at Number 1 on the UK album charts. That evening, Oasis played Belfast for the first time, receiving the news of their triumph as they sat backstage in the Limelight venue’s tiny dressing room. This writer was present that night, and recalls the Manchester band being greeted with an ovation which far exceeded the customary greeting for visiting bands, a reception which spoke of a shared belief that their chart success was a victory for ‘us’ over ‘them’. Even at their most cocaine-bloated and indulgent, Oasis managed to retain that sense of connection, as is being emphatically demonstrated in every sold-out stadium they visit this summer.

It's easy to see why Definitely Maybe is connecting with a new influx of Gen Z fans. It's a record about possibility, and hope, and growing up without giving in, whatever shit is thrown at you. Only Noel and Liam truly know how long Oasis' second act will last, but their first album will forever remain an impossibly thrilling declaration of independence and intent.

Celebrations for what would have been the 80th birthday of Syd Barrett, the late Pink Floyd co-founder and solo maverick, will take place in October, with proceeds raised going to mental health charities. Barrett, who died in 2006, aged 60, quit Floyd in April 1968. After the release of two solo albums, he walked away from the industry, seeing out the rest of his days as a recluse.

With the full support of the Barrett family, Syd’s legacy is honoured with a live concert in Cambridge, an all-star tribute album and an exhibition. As well as Cambridge being his home city, Barrett’s last known live performance took place at the Corn Exchange there on February 24, 1972.

The tribute show – featuring Kula Shaker, Soft Machine, Men On The Border, Diana Silveira & The Psychedelic Circus, Radhika and Pünk Floyd, with additional surprise guests set to be announced – takes place at the same venue on October 10, which is World Mental Health Day.

“Eighty years after his birth, Syd Barrett’s influence remains as powerful as ever,” says co-organiser Neil Jones. “It’s especially fitting that this celebration takes place in Cambridge, the city at the heart of his story.”

The album, Clowns And Jugglers: The Songs Of Syd Barrett, scheduled for release the previous day on coloured vinyl and CD, stars an array of heavy-hitters and stylistically related acts including Pink Floyd, David Gilmour, Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets, Soft Machine, and Robyn Hitchcock. Curated by Mark Wilkinson (designer of sleeve art for Marillion, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest), Syd’s nephew Ian Barrett and Gonzo record label boss Rob Ayling, most of the tracks were recorded specially for the project.

“It isn’t just a bunch of oldies,” Wilkinson says. “Some of the best tracks are by the younger artists – I love what Rosalie Cunningham has done with Lucifer Sam, from [Floyd’s debut] Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.”

The inclusion of Terrapin, from Syd’s solo debut The Macap Laughs, by Mancunians Henge, was down to Ian Barrett. “Henge are an incredible band,” he enthuses. “For me they are one of the highlights of it all.”

The project has taken more than a year of planning, helped by several twists of fate. It effectively began when Wilkinson exhibited a portrait of Syd at the Bloodstock Festival and happened to have a conversation with Syd’s nephew Mark Barrett. Talk of an album led to the show at the Corn Exchange, and then the exhibition, which turns the spotlight on Barrett’s life, art and cultural impact. Running from October 3-9 at the Cambridge OpenSpace arts venue, with a further display on October 10-11 at The Cambridge Guildhall, it showcases original paintings and sketches by Syd, alongside prints of larger works.

All of the above confirms that 20 years after Barrett’s passing, his legacy remains as strong as ever. “People still care because Syd was completely unique and always adventurous,” says Wilkinson. “I can’t praise his lyrics enough – they were incredible. You can see where Bowie and Bolan took some of their ideas from.

“[Noted journalist] Nick Kent wrote that as an artist Syd emerged from the womb fully formed,” he continues. “There was no lead-in period, it was bang! And he was doing it all straight away. That’s what we are celebrating here.”

“From a family perspective, we are still slightly amazed that people are as interested as they are,” comments Syd’s nephew Ian Barrett. “After he died I kind of expected it to fade away slightly, but I’m realising that it probably won’t happen. The fascination is as strong as it ever was.”

Mental health is a strong part of the narrative that runs through the project’s several strands. It’s a subject that people are far more comfortable talking about than they used to be.

“It helps that there are names for these conditions now,” says Ian Barrett. “People can get treatment for it. There’s less of a stigma and hopefully things will get better still in the future. We are raising money as well, so that’s another positive.”

Ian still has strong memories of his uncle, specifically the year in the 80s that Syd spent Christmas with the family in Luton.

“He came over from Cambridge, and he seemed pretty normal, really,” he recalls. “I didn’t realise what he had done, because nobody talked about his fame. I couldn’t really understand how he fitted into the Pink Floyd story, because in a sense he didn’t.”

In the internet age, and thanks to the 2023 film Have You Got It Yet?, Ian believes that a lot of past myths and falsehoods about Syd have now been corrected.

“I hope so,” he says. “Rob Chapman’s book [A Very Irregular Head] took some of that stuff apart. The old stories about Mandrax and being locked in cupboards have all been discounted.

“Nobody is trying to deny that some strange things happened, and it was certainly a mysterious time,” he continues, “but I think people no longer believe in that stuff and hopefully they can focus on what’s important – the creativity he achieved in such a short career. And then he quit. The quitting was the important part. Nobody could understand that when he said that he was stopping, he meant it.”

Ian is prepared to offer hope that more of Syd’s work could be found and brought out of the archives in the future.

“Everyone’s looking around for it, and it’s possible there might still be some left to discover,” he says cautiously. “I’m pretty sure there will be something further, but these things don’t happen quickly.”

Asked to speculate what his uncle Syd might have made of the celebrations surrounding his 80th birthday, had he lived to experience it, Ian is adamant.

“Syd would have been pleased with it all, I think, especially because there is art involved,” he explains. “Personally, I think of him as an artist that ended up in music. Fundamentally, he wanted to be an artist, but he happened to play guitar too well and it all blossomed out of control. I think he just wanted to paint, really.”

Tickets for A Tribute to Syd Barrett - Official 80th Anniversary Celebrations are sold out.

In 2007, Queens of the Stone Age played 115 shows to promote their fifth studio album, Era Vulgaris.

They played clubs, theatres, arenas and festival dates over the course of the year, but one event in particular stands out – an intimate show 2300 feet under the surface of the earth.

The date was November 20, 2007. They'd played Löwensaal in Nuremberg the night before, a venue which holds around 1500 people and doesn't necessitate the need for safety equipment for fans and performers alike.

"We were tired of the same old concert experience, so management got us some interesting ones – a castle, a church, and old slaughterhouse," said the band's former sound engineer Patrick 'Hutch' Hutchinson in an interview with Heil Sound. "We played an old salt mine in Germany."

Their label Interscope Records held a contest to give away 300 tickets to fans to see the band play the Erlebnisbergwerk Glückauf in Sondershausen. It would take around a day to transport the equipment down into the cavernous venue and allow it to acclimate to the surroundings. The fans, who looked like Fraggle Rock's Doozers in their matching yellow hard hats and hi-vis jackets, were met with their own logistical challenges when navigating their way to the bottom of the facility.

“I play rock n’ roll to have that classic moment and you never know when something like that is coming," said Josh Homme. "But this had classic written all over it from the word ‘go’, you know? We were looking for something good to do that was off-kilter and bizarre, somewhere to play that would be very special."

“What I like is that there’s so much hard work done in here," he added of the cavernous room. "This place exists from hard work. It’s nice to throw a bit of a party here too, celebrating miners... and I don’t mean young kids.”

Ba-dum-tss. The band played a stripped-down show, opting to change up their set list for the special occasion.

"This place was so psychedelic," remembers Patrick. "The excavation machines left spiral patterns everywhere. The idea was to play a semi-acoustic set – it quickly turned a lot heavier with everyone getting excited.

"My mind got the better of me after being a half-mile closer to the centre of the earth. Maybe we shouldn’t be rocking out. What if we cause some seismic destruction?

"An epic rock 'n' roll death – what a way to go," he added. "Looking around we saw the giant machines and quickly realised these things eat rock and spit it out. We weren’t going to cause a cave-in making rock; these machines ate rock and they were bigger than all of us and our gear combined."

Their 14-song set featured songs from Era Vulgaris, as well as some, ahem, deep cuts for the event and covers of Billy Idol's White Wedding and Tom Waits' Goin' Out West.

“Playing semi-acoustic is great for us and the songs translate," explains Josh. "We did do some rehearsals as we felt this place was so unique we should do songs that we never play or quite often don’t play, and we were changing them up until last night and it involved rewriting stuff. You know how Elvis would do those medleys of like, five songs? It’s just like that, except it’s not fat and in a jumpsuit.”

The set was filmed for future release. A teaser trailer was released in early 2008 followed by interviews and a clip of Make It Wit Chu, but footage of the full show remains "locked in a vault" somewhere in Germany.

Following the performance, the frontman and guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen joked about the next unusual venue they could play.

“Our next record is going to be called Hot Lava, so we feel we need to play a volcano," said Josh. "I think we’re officially the most underground rock band in the world.”

It's a good job no one mentioned that Finnish metallers Agonizer had played 4169 feet underground at the Pyhäsalmi Mine in Pyhäjärvi, Finland just a few months previously. But still, it's an impressive feat.

Almost two decades later, the band would make music history of their own by becoming the first band to officially perform deep in the Catacombs of Paris on July 8, 2024.

Maybe that volcano show isn't too far away.

The lazy, hazy summer of 1990: Every day was warm and woozy. Or so it seems now. LA rocked, and so did London. Guns N’ Roses were number one, permanently; Mötley Crüe were number two; the rest were duking it out for position. Rock was out of the ghetto; even dudes like Run DMC and Public Enemy thought so. They were hooking up, connecting, remixing.

Wanton record companies had more money than sense. They signed anything with hair and a pulse. Hundreds of albums came out every week – great ones, okay ones, funny ones, disastrous ones, dirty and dumb ones. The scene fed on itself. Everything was hot, everything was sunny, everything was beautiful.

Right into this wide open space dropped Burning Tree – great name, taken from the street sign outside the guitarist’s girlfriend’s house. Classic line-up: the power trio. Cool concept: a retro-rock take on trippy metal. They had the look, but they’d cut their hair and gone shopping in 1966. They had the muso chops, but they subjugated them for the benefit of their songs.

They had the chance to fall in line, but they preferred to make their own way. Burning Tree was a singular record in a time of general conformity. It stood out, but got itself swamped by the tide. It left a legacy, though: the guitarist and singer in Burning Tree was Marc Ford, who would go on to join the Robinson brothers in the Black Crowes.

The album was released as part of the Epic label’s Epic Rock series – essentially an excuse to throw a bunch of crap against the wall to see what stuck. Nine albums were released on the same day, but Epic ended up cannibalising their own marketing budget. None of the bands made videos, and the stunt failed. Only Suicidal Tendencies' Lights... Camera... Revolution! was a commercial success, and Burning Tree was lost.

Perhaps Burning Tree wasn’t quite immediate enough in a time when subtlety was often swamped by straightforwardness. The record took a while to tune up, to get going; the eponymous opener was woolly and indistinct, probably their worst song; Wigs, Blues And High-Heeled Shoes was a woozy wig-out, and Fly On was a clunker. But they imparted the Burning Tree vibe well enough. This was rock from a desert climate, blurred and soft-edged in the heat haze.

Mistreated Lover was the album’s first great song, with barely the momentum to move above its semi-spoken beginnings before its shimmering chorus; Playing In The Wind might have come off Cream’s Disraeli Gears; Turtle should have been the last tune at an all-night party.

But what made the record rare and worthy were Crush and Baker’s Song. The former could have been remixed by PM Dawn; it’s a lyric about the seductions of being in a band set to a tune that should have filled stadiums. When the band sang – and they all sang – the hip little ‘nah nah nahs’ at the end, all felt right with the world.

Baker’s Song, though, is the tune the Black Crowes might have covered. A doomy tale (‘Worried me none/that the river rolled by my loaded gun’), it nonetheless had the epic sweep of all truly great songs; you could hum it forever.

Marc Ford got his due in the Crowes, and joined Rich Robinson's The Magpie Salute when the Crowes were on hiatus. Drummer Doni Gray played in the Chris Robinson Brotherhood during the same period, and bassist Mark Dutton recorded with Izzy Stradlin before hooking up with LA Guns, and joined the Black Crowes in 2025.

Sporadic reunion shows have taken place in the decades since Burning Tree's 1992 breakup, and a studio reunion in all but name occurred when the three musicians worked together on Ford's 2007 solo album Weary And Wired.

A second Burning Tree record might have been special, but such is the band’s timeless sound that the first wouldn't sound out of place if it were released today. It's that good.

In 2019 Jinjer lead vocalist Tatiana Shmailyuk explained how her discovery of Opeth helped her develop her performance voice and paint gloomy, dark images

“I discovered Opeth in around 2003 when I was 16 or 17. A friend of mine gave me a mix CD with a bunch of different bands on, and that’s when I first heard Damnation. I fell in love with it and I’ve been a huge fan ever since.

It’s my favourite album of theirs. Oh my God, it’s so atmospheric! And Mikael Åkerfeldt’s voice is so soothing – I’d never heard a male metal vocalist sing so clean before, but when he growled, it was the deepest shit I’d ever heard.

He’s also a wonderful composer; he really hits the jackpot. Mikael’s vocals have definitely inspired me to growl as deep as I can, but I try not to imitate other performers as I prefer to do my own thing.

I love all the songs on Damnation, but the one I like the most is Death Whispered A Lullaby [written by Steven Wilson]. I have goosebumps just talking about it!

I appreciate listening to the album all the way through, as one long song, and that’s how I used to listen to it when I was painting. I used to do these very gloomy and dark paintings, and Opeth’s music really inspired my creativity.

I found their 2016 album, Sorceress, very relaxing too. It’s an album that needs time to really appreciate and understand it. I like to have it on when I go to sleep. I find it very soothing – but I miss his growling!

Discovering Opeth was a revelation to me. At the time I was listening to mostly nu metal and alternative music, then through Opeth I discovered progressive metal. Tool came next, then Anathema, Porcupine Tree and Katatonia. I really like Soen and Riverside now as well.

The first time I got to see Opeth live was actually this summer. We were both playing at Rock The Coast Festival in Spain and I was lucky enough to be able to watch them from the side of the stage. I was singing along and it was so cool.

I didn’t go up to Mikael afterwards though. I don’t think he needs to hear what I think about his music. I would probably have been too paralysed with fear to talk to him anyway, because he’s my hero!”

Rewind 35 years to 1991, the high-water mark of grunge. In a provincial outpost of Our Price, something makes me reach past the album featuring the baby’s tadger to the purple one with the human maypole. As it turns out, a good choice.

I loved Ten back then, and a quarter-century later, that righteous anger and jaw-breaking riffage holds a magic that Pearl Jam have never quite matched. I could be happily marooned with any one of these 11 songs, but if you’re putting a gun to my head, here’s how they stack up for me.

11. Deep

I put up with Deep back in the day, mostly because I couldn’t afford a Discman, and my Walkman’s fast-forward button usually chewed the tape. In the iPod era, though, my knee-jerk response to that fruity opening flourish is to move along. The stalking, wah-drenched groove and pummelling beat is decent enough, but on an album of such riches, ‘decent’ brings up the rear.

10. Porch

It was a live highlight, of course, with Eddie Vedder using the instrumental break to straddle the gantry, swan-dive into the crowd and generally give Pearl Jam’s tour management the cold sweats. On the album, though, I’ve mostly sucked the juice out of this two-chord thrasher.

9. Garden

That eerie intro riff was required learning for the bedroom guitarists of the nineties, and the way the bass slopes in beneath Vedder’s shamanic moan is a moment of malevolent genius. But by the time Garden wraps up, I’m ready.

8. Release

In a flash of rehearsal-room serendipity, Ten’s slow-burn finale was born when Vedder improvised his vocal over Stone Gossard’s shimmering riff. It’s the perfect sun-setter on Ten’s tempestuous tracklisting, but, honestly, I could have done without the Master/Slave instrumental reprise tacked on the end.

7. Why Go

Sandwiched between big-hitters Alive and Black, Why Go was kinda overlooked at the time, and that’s probably why its furiosity still sounds so fresh. Vedder’s spitting-mad vocal was sparked by a news story about a teenager sectioned for minor drugs offences, but it’s Jeff Ament who deserves the backslaps, for both writing and driving the song on twelve-string bass.

6. Oceans

A musicologist might argue there isn’t much meat on this two-minute vignette (even Gossard admits “it’s just two fingers that come on and off to create the whole thing”). Still, for me, Oceans is a work of strange, glowering beauty, and gave Ten’s first indication that Pearl Jam could shift gears. “We thought it was important to pick the weirder moments,” noted Ament, “because we wanted to be able to explore those areas further down the line.”

5. Alive

What’s that you say? Alive should be in pole position, and I’m a towering arsehole with shit for ears? Well, maybe. The trouble is, I’ve heard Pearl Jam’s signature tune too many times now: that riff has been blunted by ubiquity, to the point where it’s practically the alt-rock Layla. But if I imagine myself unjaded, hearing it for the first time, then, yes, Alive is obviously a stone-cold classic, from Gossard’s stadium-ready intro lick to Mike McCready’s spring-heeled solo (which he admits, incidentally, that he stole from KISS’s She).

4. Even Flow

Pearl Jam themselves seem to have a problem with Even Flow, generally agreeing that they flogged the spark out the original demo with too many takes (“Not sure why we didn’t use that one,” said original drummer Dave Krusen, “but I know it felt better”). For everyone else, the version that made it onto Ten was a belter, driven by that muscular-yet-snake-hipped riff, and managing to sing about homelessness without getting up your nose.

3. Jeremy

When Texas teenager Jeremy Wade Delle shot himself in front of his classmates on January 8th, 1991, the seed was planted for what remains arguably Vedder’s most powerful lyric. The blood-spattered MTV video was sensationalist, but the song is deathless, from Ament’s opening chimed harmonics to the bereft outro. Strange to think that Jeremy almost didn’t make the cut for Ten, the band struggling to balance the dynamics. “But this was an instance,” remembered Ament, “when persistence paid off.”

2. Black

Epic apparently badgered the band to release Black as the fourth single from Ten, but the lineup dug in their heels, helping the song to its enduring fan-favourite status. It’s a bit of an odd one, Black, alternating between rock’s most jaunty verse and most gut-wrenching chorus, but when Vedder delivers the devastating pay-off – “I know you’ll be a star in somebody else’s sky, but why can’t it be mine?” – you’ll feel a cold shiver of recognition. Stunning.

1. Once

During the false start of the Master/Slave instrumental – which burbles away pointlessly for the opening forty seconds of Ten – it was only natural to start fishing for your receipt. Then a key turns in the ignition and Ten’s whip-crack opening salvo leaves the blocks, Vedder in character as a vengeful maniac with pedal to the floor and “sixteen-gauge buried under my clothes”. A song to make your neck bristle and your fists bunch, it announced Pearl Jam as a band to treasure, right out of the blocks.

Pearl Jam - How Death Brought Ten To Life

In 2013 guitar maestro Joe Satriani told Prog about his passion for Jethro Tull, which has remained despite a “very strange” dramatic experience when he played alongside Ian Anderson’s band at a festival.

“I have great memories of listening to early Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer – Keith Emerson’s compositional brilliance is unbelievable – and King Crimson too. Their stuff came from another world.

On my last tour I’d play those records backstage almost every night; I drove the guys crazy! To me and my friends they all belonged together somehow, and they were to be celebrated.

Jethro Tull was one of the first concerts I ever saw as a young kid. It was at the Westbury Music Fair in New York, a theatre-in-the-round where the stage would rotate slowly.

You’ve got to imagine how exotic someone like Ian Anderson was to a kid growing up in New York back in the early 70s! When people pulled into town it was an event, and Tull had quite the act going.

Every single person in the band played like no-one else. They were touring their third album, Benefit (1970), and they were the essence of early progressive rock: they used odd time signatures; there was instrument switching. And unusual instruments too – flute and mandolin, and the sound of the bass guitar was different.

Ian was brilliant in how he’d write and arrange those songs and get those guys to play, and Martin Barre really brought the rock to the band. Of course they progressed to Thick As A Brick, but for me Stand Up was a truly brilliant record. It fused elements of jazz and rock, and it was engineered by the wonderful Andy Johns.

A New Day Yesterday has that really cool rotating guitar sound, which Andy told me he got by swinging a microphone in the air while Martin was playing. Reasons For Waiting is a particularly beautiful, powerful song – the metre of it, the strings, the subtle arrangement.

Years later, I wound up on the bill with them at a very strange rock festival in Malaysia, where I got escorted offstage by police with automatic weapons. Long story! Back at the hotel we had dinner together, and it was very special for me.

Ian is a hero of mine – he’s such a brilliant musician. I still listen to those records to this day.”